Tell the Wind and Fire(26)

We ran past the guards’ cars in the street, so fast that my eyes were stinging and the car lights looked like blurred streaks of red and blue painted on the black night. We ran down dark alleyways and fiercely bright city streets and through a park where there were cool shadows and fireflies and where I had to stop, head hanging between my legs, and suck air in desperately. We ran so fast that my legs were aching to the bones and my rings were actual weights on my hands, dragging them down to the earth.

And then we were standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, wind dealing my face a series of night-cold slaps, the granite and limestone towers starkly white. For a moment I felt as if we could run back into the Dark: for a moment the bridge looked like a way home.

Beyond the towers and the glittering cable lines that hung from them, web-like, as though the whole bridge were a giant spider’s castle, were the walls of the Dark city. Every Dark city had a wall built around it, even ours, which was separated from the Light city by a river. The walls were built with Light magic, and they would boil the blood of whoever tried to get over them. I remembered hearing the faint crackle of the bright walls near my home in the Dark, like the leaves of deadly trees in the wind.

I scarcely ever ventured this close to the edge of the Light.

It was a night of firsts.

“We made it,” I said, forcing the words out in a series of gasps.

“Yeah,” said Carwyn, still standing. He wasn’t winded: his voice sounded normal. It sounded pleasant and distant, like he was thinking of something else.

I straightened up, wobbly but unbelievably relieved to be safe, to have both of us safe. The water whispered soothing promises, and even though it looked deep and black, the ripples caught edges of silver. Carwyn’s face was serious until he saw me looking, when he showed me that ugly smile again.

“Thanks,” I said unsteadily, ignoring the smile.

“Oh, Lucie, you shouldn’t thank me yet,” said Carwyn. “You had no idea what you were getting into, did you?”

It was dark and cold, and I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to fight him to get the collar back on. But I would have to—that much was clear. I turned my face to look at the water one more time, to take a breath and grit my teeth. I felt the warmth of Carwyn’s body as he stepped in, but he didn’t grab me. He whispered to me instead, each word a puff of heat against my jaw.

“Someone should have warned you about me. Oh, wait,” said Carwyn. “I did.”

He didn’t grab me at all. He didn’t use Dark magic, which could cause pain even though it was not as strong as the Light. He just shoved me clear off Brooklyn Bridge.

I used the silver moonlight on the water, absorbing it into my rings, even during the long, shocked, shrieking tumble. I had barely hit the icy, disgusting water, which felt like chilled oil, when the river itself began forming steps up the wall for me to follow. I felt only an instant of black panic as the waters closed over me.

I wouldn’t let myself panic. I climbed doggedly up the steps, concentrating on them, refusing to let the river become liquid and flow away until I was back on the bridge. Once I was there, my clothes hung impossibly wet and heavy on me, trying to drag me down as if I could drown on dry land.

The night streets were, depending on where I looked, blazing with lights, or shadowy and still. I saw strangers’ faces passing me, a brief sympathetic glance, a wolf whistle from a car at the soaking-wet girl. No help was to be found anywhere: the city at night moved pitilessly on.

Carwyn, of course, was long gone.





CHAPTER SEVEN



I spent the next day viciously angry with myself for being so stupid.

I stayed home from school because Dad woke up a little at sea, not frantic anymore, but with the look of a child lost in a confusing world, and I knew it made him feel better to have me there. The pressing need for me to always be there—always with the right thing to say to Dad, ready to touch his hand reassuringly or stay a safe distance away so he did not feel crowded—let me not think about the disaster I had single-handedly created. I was tired from a long night, body worn from spent adrenaline and using too much magic, but his needs came first.

“I’m not a child!” he said once, and I swallowed and said, “Yes, of course,” and went to make him something he would like to eat.

I stroked his hair as he cried, for a long, wrenching half hour, and then he was quieter, listening to the stories I told. I tried to make them sound cheerful—all about Ethan and the holiday we’d had, and not how we had come home. I used the stories as comfort for myself as much as for my father, as if the gold curve of pears and leaves in the sunlight, the curve of Ethan’s mouth under mine as we lay together in the long grass, could be made bright enough to blot away all that had followed.

“I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” Dad said at last, his voice quiet and more even than it had been. He was so calm and reasonable sometimes, and then everything would go wrong. “It should be you causing trouble for me.”

I shuddered, thinking of what would happen to him if the trouble I had caused last night came back to us both. I kept stroking his hair, and the reflected light from my rings trembled against the wall.

“You’re no trouble at all,” I lied.

Eventually Dad went to sleep, exhausted from the outbursts, just before Marie came back from school. She dropped her school bag, with its weird pattern of monstrous half-pony, half-kitten creatures with Light-jeweled eyes, on the floor and danced in.