Page 5 of The Darkening (The Darkening)

Chapter 2

There are three kinds of knocks that we get at Amma’s Home for the Cursed.

The banging on the door isn’t the first kind, the knock of someone who needs a place to stay. Nor is it the second kind, the knock of someone who needs a little food to get through the night.

This door-rattling knock is the third kind. The knock of someone out for blood.

My voice is small. “Pa?”

He’s gone as pale as his face can get. Amma snaps her fingers, gesturing for him to hide.

“Coming!” Amma calls, shuffling toward the door, her cane thudding with every step. With a glance from her, the stormtouched hurry to their beds and dive under the covers.

Pa lets himself down into the dark of the secret room, then pauses, peering up at me. “Vesper,” Pa hisses, “come here.”

I press a finger to my lips and stoop to shut the trapdoor for him. A slow, cold certainty sits like a stone in my stomach.

This is my fault.

I can’t let Amma handle it alone. Pa holds my gaze as I seal him into the tiny room. The back of my neck prickles as I throw the rugover the trapdoor, knowing that his dark eyes watch me through the floorboards.

Another three booming knocks.BANG BANG BANG.

Fifteen steps take me out of the kitchen, past the stormtouched, to Amma’s side. All eyes are on the front door.

Amma turns the last lock, and the door opens a crack. Gloved fingers wrap around the edge of the door and shove it wide open. I catch the edge of the door before it can hit Amma and step in front of her, even as a chill runs down my spine.

Blood-red leather. Cloaks made of a thousand and one feathers. The Wardana.

There are three of them. One so unusually pale and cruel-lipped that he could be sculpted from ice. Another who’s all slinky charm and good looks: a graceful, loose-limbed walk, tousled dark hair, a twinkle like captured sunlight in his golden eyes.

But the one in the middle is the one that stops me dead. His is a face familiar to anyone who has held a brass coin. A face with no weaknesses, a strong nose and a stronger jaw, smooth cheeks without a hint of softness, without a single leftover drop of baby fat, though he only has a few years on my seventeen.

Dalca Zabulon Illusora, the Regia’s son, who will one day take her crown and have inked upon his skin the same golden full-body ikon that now marks hers. Who will one day inherit the only power that can protect us all from the Storm, a power that becomes weaker every generation.

He looks down at me with cruel eyes like shards of the sky. “Won’t you invite us in?”

I don’t move from the doorway. I find a smile and paste it on my lips, though words freeze in my throat. They may call themselves protectorsof the city, but they’re not here to protect us. All my admiration sinks into icy fear, now that their bravery and power is turned upon me.

Dalca stares, waiting. His height blocks out the street and the Storm behind him. I’m so close I can see the circular ikons etched into the red leather of his uniform, each one a mark of power. Seeing so many ikons so densely packed—and on hisclothes,no less—is a cold reminder that ikonomancy belongs to the powerful. I have to scrape and borrow and trade to learn the shape of a single ikon, while he likely has ikonomancers draw them to tie his bootlaces or to warm his bath, or has them etched into the leather above his heart to repel the Storm’s wet from sinking into his clothes and chilling his princely skin. If I could just memorize that ikon, I’d never again have to rub stinking wax into the threads of my coat.

My eyes fall to the knives at his waist. Ikons cover the handles, drawn in ink the color of old blood. They’re complex ikons, ones I’ll never get a chance to learn. But, for the first time in my life, my curiosity grows quiet. I don’t want to be made to discover what those ikons do.

“Storm take me, you’ve struck her stupid.” The pale one rolls his eyes, stepping forward as if he’s going to force me aside. His white hair shimmers with color, reflecting the world around him. Pink where his hair meets the red of his Wardana leathers, dark silver against the black of his thousand-and-one-feather cloak, and a warm gold where the light from inside reaches him. It’s clearly ikonomancy, and it’s beautiful. A waste on such a sour-tempered boy.

“Move,” he growls.

“Yes, of course.” But I don’t budge an inch, my heart pounding as my hands sweat. “What is it you want?”

Amma’s cane raps my anklebone. A reminder to be cautious, to be unthreatening. I soften my voice, dropping my gaze. “It’s just, the stormtouched, they can get easily upset...”

From behind me comes a theatrical moan of pain. That’s a voice I know. Jem, my closest friend amongst the stormtouched, lets out another throaty groan. It hangs in the silence for a heartbeat, then a couple of the others follow her lead. I bite back a wince, but miraculously their charade works.

The pale Wardana pulls back, belatedly taking in the sign over the door.AMMA’SHOME FOR THECURSED.His face gains a pinched, disgusted look. “You sure about this?”

“He has to be on this street.” Dalca stares over my shoulder and into the house. “Go inside, Casvian.”

Casvian, the pale one, sighs and steps so close his boots touch my shoes. I take an instinctive step back, and he shoves the rest of the way in.