Page 7

Chapter seven

A Captive Audience

M y scream followed me into the next world, a realm of brightest orange.

“Get her out of here,” Lark hissed before my body even hit the cobblestones.

Rook obeyed, pulling me upward, bodily, and dragging me away from the crowd.

Crowd.

I blinked once, twice. There was, in fact, a crowd of onlookers surrounding the swirling black mass that Lark was now closing with far more ease than he had before, simply snapping it up and walking away, his black coat trailing behind him despite the uncommon heat.

Heat.

I blinked again. I was sweating, I realized, under my turtleneck. It was hot here, so hot that it was nearly suffocating. The people who had stopped to watch had moved on now, merging back onto the busy streets in their clothes of varying shades of orange, made mostly of sheer gauze and light linens so that all the parts of their bodies that weren’t considered private were exposed. Men’s bare chests glistened beneath orange mesh shirts or bare legs poked out from beneath linen shorts. Women wore pants of gauze, billowing around their bare legs, thickening at the top so that nothing above their upper thighs could be seen. They wore no shirts at all. Just bright orange brassieres or bandeaus.

They rushed in and out of buildings, also painted varying shades of orange and garnished at the top with amber and fire opal. The streets were an orange clay brick, stacked meticulously and worn down to smoothness over the years. Everyone was walking. Everyone was moving, going somewhere. No one was paying attention to the mortal being dragged away by two Fae in deep black tunics.

“Let me go,” I yelped, lashing out at my captor, landing a kick to Rook’s calf.

He hissed in a breath but kept me firmly in his grip.

I looked back at Lark who was following us, his dark eyes scanning street after street as we passed. They were becoming less and less busy, I realized. He was taking me out of this city. He was taking me somewhere we couldn’t be seen.

“What have you done?” I barked at him over my shoulder. “You weren’t supposed to bring me here. I’m not supposed to be here.”

“That makes three of us,” Rook muttered.

My gaze snapped back to him.

“Let me go,” I begged him in a whisper. “Please, Rook.”

His jaw twitched, the only indication that I might have actually gotten to him.

“Even if we did,” he murmured, his voice low, “where would you go? What would you do?”

I went limp in his arms. I stopped kicking, stopped fighting. I just paled. Because he was right. Even if I broke free of my comrades turned captors, I was still stuck in the Immortal Plane, surrounded by ethereal beings of ferocious volatility. Any of them could shred me to pieces with a single thought. I was a rabbit and I had just walked into a wolf’s den. Well, I hadn’t walked in myself, had I?

I glared over my shoulder.

“I thought we were friends,” I snapped, putting all the venom and vitriol in my voice that I could. “I thought I could trust you.”

“Unwise,” Lark said simply.

My lip curled, my fists clenched, and I got a little bit of that fight back. I wrenched hard and whirled on him. Rook reined me in, my having gone as far as I had only because I had caught him off guard, but not before I could gnash my teeth at Lark, my face only inches from his.

“I’ll kill you,” I spat. “I swear it.”

“Before you go making promises you can’t possibly hope to keep,” he drawled easily, unfazed entirely by my empty threat, “you may want to hear what I have to say first.”

I blinked and Rook was pulling me through a doorway. It was dark here. We were in an alley off one of the major streets. Inside the door was a set of copper stairs, the closest metal to orange they could find, I supposed. They pulled me up those stairs and through a door at the top into a modest apartment. Lark snapped his fingers and little bulbs of floating light flared to life all throughout it.

Rook deposited me onto an orange leather couch and strode to stand beside it, arms crossed in front of him, chin up, eyes straight ahead. Like a soldier would stand, I realized, like a man awaiting his leader’s command. I pulled my glare from Rook to Lark, putting all of my hate and anger into that stare as I met his dark eyes.

“They were going to kill you,” he said after a moment.

“You don’t know that,” I snapped.

“Yes, I do. And, more importantly, you do too.”

I did not respond. I just glared at him, gritting my teeth. I could feel the anger radiating off of him as well, the indignation that I would dare to risk my life in such a way.

“Why did you stay there?” he asked. “You’re only half mortal. You found the door and yet you left it untouched. You chose to stay there with them. Why?”

I said nothing so he sat slowly onto an armchair across from me, also orange. Everything was orange. The rug, the wallpaper, the cabinets and shelves. Everything. Different patterns and shades but still, it was practically nauseating, this city’s commitment to the theme.

“Why would I want to return to the people who abandoned me?” I asked and couldn’t help but notice how Rook tensed at that. Still, I maintained my glare on Lark.

“You never wondered why they did?” Lark asked, genuine curiosity in his tone, a curiosity that I did not have the patience for. “Why no one came searching for you in the mortal realm? Why they left you behind with that crackpot uncle—”

“Don’t you dare speak of him that way.”

Lark paused, watching me closely.

“In all this time you’ve been running around closing up the rifts, did you ever stop to think about why they were appearing in the first place?” he asked.

“Of course I did,” I spat, insulted. “I’m an academic. It’s an intriguing situation. But I examined it based on what I knew. They didn’t follow the patterns typical of black holes. They did not exhibit any of the signs of other astrological—”

“You did not assess the rifts with the entirety of your knowledge, Ren. If you had, you would have considered an alternate explanation outside of the realm of science. Your colleague did.”

I bristled, reeling back as if he had struck me.

“Are you saying that Wyn Kendrick did a better job at evaluating the rifts than I did?” I asked, stunned.

“Yes,” Lark answered, growing irate with my affront. “And he started out with far less information than you.”

I went completely still, my mind utterly emptied as though my brain itself had ceased functioning. There was a ringing in my ears as I came to terms with what this powerful Fae was suggesting. I had prided myself, my entire life, on my relentless search for knowledge, on my scholastic achievements and academic research, while actively ignoring the single most significant discovery in all of human history. I’d been given this information at birth and I had hidden it because I had been asked to but I had not tried to investigate on my own either, to examine myself and that half of me which I had spent nearly sixty nears pretending did not exist.

“They would have killed you,” he repeated. “Your chosen people.”

I saw red. Roaring in frustration, I lunged for him. He was there, sitting primly on that armchair, one leg crossed lazily over the other, and then he wasn’t and my nails were tearing into upholstery rather than his smug face. I whirled to find him standing beside Rook, brow raised in warning.

“Now, now, now,” he chided with the click of his tongue, “we weren’t finished talking.”

“I am,” I snapped and stormed toward the door.

He didn’t stop me, though we both knew he could. He let me walk away, let me take those steps back down to the street and stomp down that alley.

“You won’t be welcome here,” he called out from the door through which I had just exited.

I balled my hands into fists and clenched them so tight that my nails cut bloody half moon shapes into my palms. But I hesitated in the shadows, not yet ready to step into the street beyond, because I knew he was right. Like it or not, I was a mortal in the immortal plane. They wouldn’t want me here. They would chase me out. Or worse.

I blinked out at that passing sea of orange, people hastening somewhere, not even looking my way. Not yet.

I looked down at my outfit. Black coat over a black turtleneck, tight black pants, thick black boots. They had dressed me like them, in their color. No orange. Not a drop.

“I never wanted to force you,” Lark spoke again and his voice was a whisper against my ear, his warm breath on my neck sending shivers through me. “But we ran out of time and, I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not the most patient man.”

I turned my head slightly to the side, looked up into those dark eyes only inches from mine, chest heaving.

“I won’t drag you back to that apartment,” he promised and my shoulders relaxed slightly, knowing that I wasn’t in immediate danger, not from him. “I won’t capture you like some wild beast. It’s your choice. It will always be your choice.”

My breathing hitched, my expression softened.

“You never had a choice before,” he said. “You were placed in the mortal realm and that’s where you lived for sixty years. Give this place a chance. Give us a chance. And then decide. I’ll take you back the moment you say you want to go.”

“You said it yourself,” I muttered, staring out at the Fae passing in the streets beyond. “I’m not welcome here.”

“You will be with us. They won’t dare to touch you if you’re with us.”

I turned to him, tilting my head to the side.

“Why not?” I asked. “Who are you?”

Lark set his jaw, frowning as he turned out to the masses passing us by without a second glance.

“I’m going to go back and Rook and I are going to have a nice dinner while we await our visitor,” he told me, ignoring my question. “You’re welcome to join us. You’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you wish. I will answer your questions. But for now, have dinner with us.”

He held out an arm and I stared at it with trepidation.

“I am your friend, Ren,” he said then, his voice soft now too as he leaned closed to me, eyes firmly on mine. “But don’t trust me yet. Let me earn it.”

I stared at him for a moment, considering, but in the end I took him by the arm and walked back to the apartment where Rook was waiting, even allowing a small smile of relief when I returned.