Page 14 of Loreblood

I jolted awake with a gasp. Something wasonme.

Scooting back until my skull painfully hit the alley wall, I stared across the way. The grayskin was gone. My eyes veered down, over myself . . . to find the man’s dark cloak blanketed over me.

My brow furrowed in confusion.Did he . . . leave me this? To keep me warm?

The morning was bright and sunny as slants of sunlight wafted into the alley, stealing my shadowy hideout.

More shadows emerged from the street. With the furrow in my brow deepening, I glanced up to see five figures standing over me.

“Well, well, well, look who finally decided to get a clue.”

The voice was familiar. The tall figure was silhouetted by the sun behind him. To his left and right, boys snickered.

“You know this one?” asked one of the others.

The young man standing over me crouched, his face forming in the darkness with a grin as he planted his palms on his knees. “Sure do. Funny seeing you here, Sister Seph.”

My breath hitched. “Baylen.”

My former Brother had grown strong and tall in the years since I’d last seen him as a child. His dashing face, his hair a greasy mop over his forehead—he wore his hair long now. He had sprouted up like a pole, easily a foot and a half taller than when I’d last seen him.

He didn’t tower over me, however.

“You’ve grown, Seph,” he said in a deeper voice than I was used to. He was leading me away from the alley, holding my hand and threading our fingers together like we were long-lost lovers and not former Truehearts from the same sect.

“So have you, Bay,” I pointed out with a small smile, watching his eyes as he took in my form from heel to head.

Though I was still young, only thirteen or fourteen summers by my estimation, I had certainly grown taller, wider at the hips, and stronger in our time apart. Morewomanlyas one crude alms-giver had once noted out loud, from exactly zero prompting from me.

“Where are you taking me?” I scrunched my brow against the sun, scanning the roads, which were starting to get busier for the morning. I laughed at myself. “I’m following you around blindly, as usual. I’ve already followed blindly my entire life. I’m done doing that.”

He gave me a crooked smile. I noticed a small scar on his chin when he faced me, and the slight stubble trying to hide it—the stubble of a boy who was pretending to be a man. “What got you out of the House, Sister?”

Clamping my jaw, I bowed my head. “Something I saw,” I said, leaving it at that.

Baylen didn’t pry. He hummed to himself. “Sorry to hear it. You should have left when I did.”

“Had to make my own decision and see for myself, I suppose.”

A hard bite came to his voice, filled with spite. “You mean you didn’t see it when they lashed you across the back ten times? I’m assuming the lesions still rest on you, scarring your pretty body like they do mine.”

I sighed and nodded, trying to ignore the fact he had called my body “pretty.”

“Some people take longer to learn than others,” I drawled.

“Got that right.”

We walked in silence. He hadn’t answered my question about where he was taking me.

Eventually, we came to a ramshackle den of negligence and decrepitude. Hovels sat against one another like dingy excuses for houses, with worn wood and broken fixtures. The road was packed with homeless sewerboys and guttergirls sitting outside their broken hovels and dwellings. The place stank of shit, rotten food, and spoiled water.

It stretched like this for no less than three street corners, far as I could see. I realized we were not far from the southern dumping grounds.

Wrinkling my nose against the stench, I said, “Whatisthis place, Bay?”

“Somewhere the Bronzes never come to look,” he explained, as if that answered everything. My first question was going to be,Why do you need to hide from the law, Brother?

“It’s home,” he said. “For now. Not much, I know.”