Poison's Kiss (Poison's Kiss #1)(31)

He turns to leave and then stops. “Wait. I almost forgot.” He pulls something from his pocket and drops it into my palm. “I brought this for you,” he tells me. “It’s a cricket.”

And it is—a cricket just smaller than the length of my palm carved out of silky, dark wood. Every detail is perfect, from the tiny wings and slender antennae all the way down to the folded legs poised for jumping. This must have taken him hours of work, maybe days. No one has ever given me a gift before, and I can’t stop staring at it.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“I love it.”

Deven leans forward and brushes my cheek with the pad of his thumb. “I couldn’t work out how to carve a sunset, and a star seemed too ordinary.” You like nighttime. On the day I was supposed to kill him, he was memorizing the things that I love.

“Thank you,” I tell him. My voice is thick with emotion and I feel like something inside me has cracked open and I’ll never be able to close it up again. “I can’t…I don’t know how to repay you.”

He grins and presses another kiss on my forehead. “You’ll think of something,” he teases. “Good night, Marinda.”

“Good night,” I say. And it was. It was a perfect night. Yesterday I told Iyla that I wasn’t in love with Deven.

I think I lied.





Deven needs one more dose of poison, but I haven’t seen him in two days. Mani and I have searched everywhere—the park, the market, the café where he bought us lunch—but Deven seems to have vanished. I try to tell myself that he’s just busy, that he isn’t lying on the side of the street somewhere writhing in pain from the poison I’ve given him. But red-hot worry snakes through my veins and coils tightly around my middle. I run my thumb along the back of the silky-smooth wooden cricket in my pocket. This may be all I have left of him. Mani and I are running out of places to search.

Now my final bit of hope bleeds away as Mani and I stare at the CLOSED sign dangling in the window of the bookshop. I hoped that Japa would be able to tell me where to find Deven, where he lives. But the darkened windows feel like a bad omen. “Japa never closes the shop,” I tell Mani. The worry in my stomach rears up and strikes with sharp fangs. What if he’s by Deven’s bedside? Or worse, at his graveside? But Mani’s not paying attention to me. His gaze is fixed on a boy not much older than himself sitting in a booth across the street. A sign hangs above his head that says WISDOM FOR SALE. PRICES VARY.

“He’s on the wrong street,” I say. “That kind of foolishness only works in the market.”

Mani looks up at me like I’ve offended him. “Maybe he can help us,” he says. His expression is so earnest. He wants to find Deven as much as I do, but throwing away money will do us no good.

I soften my tone. “I don’t think so, monkey. You can’t buy wisdom.”

“Of course you can,” he says. He motions toward the shop. “What about books?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

I put my arm around his shoulders. “Well, for one thing, most books aren’t written by ten-year-olds.”

Mani glares at me and moves so that my arm falls away from him. “Children aren’t stupid,” he says.

“That’s not what I meant…,” but I don’t get to finish because he turns his back on me and marches across the street toward the booth.

“Mani!” I call, but he doesn’t turn and so I hurry to follow him. I catch up just as he’s dropping a handful of coins into the boy’s palm. The boy counts the money before he places it in a leather pouch fastened to his waist. He looks up at the sky and taps a quill against his cheek. His fingertips are stained with black ink and there’s a dark smudge across his cheek. I open my mouth to speak, but Mani gives me a look so withering that I snap my jaw shut. The boy drops his gaze and levels both Mani and me with a long stare. Then he nods once like he’s satisfied with his assessment of us. He dips his quill in the inkpot beside him and scribbles on a piece of parchment. His tongue pokes out of the side of his mouth as he writes, and it makes him look even younger. He sets the quill down and blows on the ink. Mani is bouncing on his toes, and his hands are laced together in front of him like he’s restraining himself from snatching the wisdom from the boy’s fingers. Finally the boy rolls the parchment into a loose cylinder and hands it to Mani.

We walk a few steps away before Mani unfurls it. As he reads, his brow furrows and he chews on his bottom lip. He hands me the parchment. Written in a script that belies the boy’s age is this: Suspicion is the only defense against betrayal. My blood runs cold. I whirl to face Mani.

“What did you tell that boy?”

His face is twisted in confusion. “What?”

“Before I came up behind you, what did you say to him?”

“Nothing,” Mani says. “I just said I wanted to buy some wisdom.”

“Why would he write this?” I shake the parchment in front of Mani’s face. He takes a step back and I realize I’m scaring him. I pull in a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, hugging him to my side. “It doesn’t matter.” But the words on the page have rattled me, and I walk back to the stall where the boy is still sitting, a look of absolute calm on his face.