Tell the Wind and Fire(30)

“I don’t want this,” I said into his shirt. “I don’t want us to be frightened. I want things to be the way they always are between us. I want everything to be normal.”

Normal for me was keeping secrets. What was one more?

“All right,” Ethan murmured. “Whatever you want.”



There was an amazing sofa in Ethan’s apartment, deep and soft as a cloud, and the color of excellent cream, the kind of sofa that meant price was not an issue and neither was the sofa owners cleaning it themselves. Six people could lie on that sofa like a bed.

That evening it was just me and Ethan, curled together and snuggled into the sofa cushions.

“I would love you without the fabulous luxuries,” I informed him. “But they help.”

“So what you’re saying is that if I get fat, you’ll keep me around for the sofa.”

“You have a personal trainer because you’re so afraid of losing your svelte figure,” I pointed out. “But if you start balding prematurely, I’ll consider keeping you around for the sofa.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

I levered myself up on one elbow, looking down into Ethan’s face, soft with laughter and tenderness. The commercials buzzed along on television, little jingles and bursts of color, drawing into the news of the day, and everything seemed normal and safe.

“Besides,” I said, laying kisses from his jaw to his mouth, feeling him smile under my lips. “I bet all your money could buy a truly awesome toupee.”

I remembered an old poem that went, What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten . . . but I had not forgotten. There had only ever been Ethan.

The other one didn’t count.

I had almost lost Ethan, a handful of days ago. It reminded me that it was a privilege to be close like this, the skin of his stomach under the flat of my palm, the curl of his smile against my mouth.

“You’re such a romantic,” Ethan mumbled.

“You have no idea.” I kissed him again, my hair a curtain all around us, his mouth opening in a warm, easy slide under mine, and then a cough sounded like a door slamming, and I bit down on Ethan’s lip.

“Ow!” said Ethan, and I reared back and stared around wildly.

Jim Stryker, Ethan’s cousin, was standing in the doorway.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, with one of his stupid grins. “You were just getting your PDA all over the good sofa.”

“Oh, as opposed to the extremely private stuff you were doing on it with Suzy at your birthday party.”

“Come on, Lucie, be reasonable. I was drunk.” Jim grinned again. He had thick lips, a thick bridge to his nose, gel turning his hair into a solid mass. Other people thought he was handsome, but he’d always looked like an overblown version of Ethan to me. “I wouldn’t do anything like that sober. Unless you’re finally willing to drop Ethan and try a real man.”

“I’ll do it!” I declared. “Now, tell me more about this real man. Will you take me to him? Because I haven’t seen anyone like that lately.”

In some ways, Jim was restful to be around, since he took everything any girl said to him as flirting. Occasionally he looked confused by something I said, but the whale of his self-esteem always ended up making short work of the plankton of doubt.

It occurred to me that if Ethan’s doppelganger had acted like Jim, I wouldn’t have felt any urges to sympathy, and I certainly wouldn’t have taken off his collar. Carwyn might have been soulless, but at least he wasn’t an idiot.

I couldn’t think about that right at that moment, and I certainly couldn’t be such a nervous wreck that I was jumping at the least little noise. I rolled my eyes at Jim and reached for Ethan’s hand.

Ethan jerked away from me, and I stared at him. He was sitting bolt upright, suddenly tense, his jaw held tight. I felt my heart trip in my chest, felt the lurch and the chill, like a little kid stumbling over her own feet into a freezing-cold puddle.

“What,” I said, my voice trembling. “What—what is it?”

“Guys, look at this,” Ethan said, voice and body strained as if the television were going to attack him.

We both turned our attention to the television. I had been tuning out the drone of the reporter’s voice, but now I looked at the shimmering Light magic projected against the wall, resolving in my sight until the voice and the picture came clear.

“. . . violent disturbance within the walls of the Dark city, during which six Light guards lost their lives,” said the newscaster’s voice, flat and noncommittal, turning the words into boring nonsense. I wondered if that was why these people were hired, because they could make disaster sound dull and give people the distance they needed from it.

The feed from the camera was grainy, showing footage taken at night on someone’s phone. But I could see enough of the entrance gate: it was just outside Green-Wood Cemetery.

I could recognize it even though it looked different. The whole scene was painted gray by night, and in the street itself were streaks and dark stains, still shining fresh. The rough, irregular stones of the street had dammed flowing blood into small dark pools.

The camera followed the path through the gate and into a scene of chaos.

It looked as if lightning had struck every tree. They were ripped to splinters and shards of wood, cast over the grass like the remnants of a shipwreck, and amid the wood were the iron cages.