Tell the Wind and Fire(50)

He glanced over his shoulder at me, as I stood with my hands empty, robbed of my prey.

“Coming, my love panther?”

I walked over to take his arm.

“Absolutely. We still need to continue our conversation.”

“Certainly,” Carwyn returned promptly. “I have promised my dear Uncle Mark and my even dearer cousin Jim that we’ll have dinner together tonight, but of course we’re all so close, there’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t say in front of them. Family’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

He looked at me, and the security guard looked at me too.

“You must come for dinner as well,” said Carwyn hospitably to his security detail as we stepped out into the hall. “The more the merrier. Don’t you agree, my strawberry of delight?”

I spoke through my teeth. “I’m afraid I have to go home to Penelope. I have to be there for her and Marie right now.”

“Oh, because one of your adopted family has disappeared into the Dark city, possibly never to return? Of course. How insensitive of me. Please forgive me. I will think of you fondly during every course at dinner, and twice during the cheese course.”

We walked through the halls and went down in the gold-plated elevator of Stryker Tower, me, the mocking copy of my darling, and the man who was preventing me from killing him. Carwyn kept up a cheerful monologue, mainly about what he was going to have for dinner.

We went out into the street. It was still morning, the sky a fine bright blue over tower tops winking in the sunshine.

“I’ll leave you here, tulip,” said Carwyn.

He bent down, Ethan’s face gilded by sunlight with darkness behind it, and his lips brushed my cheek as his hair brushed my forehead. I held on to his shirt and hoped it looked as if I was clinging.

“Is he alive?” I whispered. “Just tell me that.”

Carwyn’s kiss was gone as soon as it had landed, the place on my skin he had left it cold even before he leaned back. “If you behave yourself . . .” he whispered against my cheek.

He studied me in silence, as if he was considering something, then turned and walked away.

I stood looking after him. If anyone saw me watching, they would assume my motive was love, and, after all, they would be right.

The doppelganger and his guard proceeded down Sixth Avenue, past a pizza shop and a tailor’s, cars whizzing by with their windows becoming squares of captured light and then turning back to darkness.

Carwyn was far enough away that someone else might not have been able to see him perfectly, not been quite sure what he was doing. But I was sure.

He looked back over his shoulder and nodded, just once, just slightly.

Ethan was alive. Ethan would stay alive, if I did what Carwyn wanted.



I got through dinner with Penelope and Marie and Dad with the forced cheer and frequent smiles of the desperate. I had someone else to think of now, besides Jarvis. Ethan was just as surely gone.

I was certain Carwyn must be in league with the sans-merci, who had killed Ethan’s father, if he had not killed Ethan’s father himself. His taking Ethan’s place proved that. And his taking Ethan’s place meant the sans-merci had taken Ethan. If Carwyn had been telling the truth, they must have kidnapped Ethan and kept him alive for a reason.

If Ethan was alive, what were they planning to do with him? What did they want from him?





CHAPTER FOURTEEN



I went to school the next day. The teacher said Ethan Stryker claimed that he could not attend due to being suddenly overwhelmed by excessive grief for his father.

I tried to get through the day. I did not sit at the table with Jim Stryker, though he waved me over and seemed to expect it. I sat with my biology partner and a few other girls she knew. A couple of people who knew my home situation looked at me sympathetically, but nobody spoke to me about Jarvis.

There were still people talking about Ethan’s father. I heard his name whispered in the corridors, by the teachers, heard his name in the silences that fell over groups when I walked by. But mainly everyone was talking about what the sans-merci might do next—whispering about atrocities they had already committed—and gossiping about the ball Mark Stryker was throwing to welcome the new guards. One girl at my lunch table, whom I did not know very well, asked shyly if I thought I could get her tickets for the party.

Nobody was very interested in Charles Stryker himself anymore. One of the most powerful men in the city, one of the Strykers whose name was inscribed in gold across our skies. And he was gone, gone as surely as my mother was gone. The dead drift away from us, like reflections in moving water, hardly seen before they are lost.

I sat and ate my sandwich, and I told myself I would not allow Ethan to drift away.



I noticed, as the days wore on, that Carwyn was avoiding being alone with me.

Nobody else had any answers for me. Nobody knew what had happened, and I could not tell them. Telling them meant my head would be cut off and Ethan would be in even more danger than before.

I had to get answers from Carwyn. He had to know something: where the sans-merci were keeping Ethan, why they had taken him. He was the only possible source of information that I had. But he was being very careful not to give me the opportunity to ask any questions.

I went to dinner at his house more than once, and we ate with Mark and Jim at the table, and Carwyn would invite Jim to play video games with him afterward. He would always encourage me to stay, always include me in a conversation, always make a point of subtly taunting me, but he would not talk to me in private.