Tell the Wind and Fire(57)

“I don’t have to, do I?” I asked. “You won’t let go. You’re too keen to save your own skin.”

Carwyn gave me a dark look, all doppelganger with nothing of Ethan in his face, and it was like seeing a white curtain lifted so a horror could grin out at you through the glass. He did not let go of my hand, and I did not let go either.

“You can’t see us,” Carwyn murmured, and my rings blazed bright, reflected in his black eyes. I sent dazzling thoughts streaming through the room, around the rebels and the rich alike.

I moved forward, and we almost walked into a woman holding a knife.

“Has anyone seen the Golden One?” she called out, then squinted in my direction.

They kept calling for the Golden One, but they didn’t want me. They didn’t even recognize me when they saw me. My name was nothing more than a rallying cry.

Carwyn came nose to nose with her and whispered, “You can’t see us,” in her face. “You can’t see us,” he continued, voice soft but insistent. It seemed to wind, sinuous as a snake, around the senses. I reached out and touched her arm with my glowing hand.

She blinked, hesitated, and lowered the knife. Her gaze refocused over Carwyn’s shoulder, on a different victim.

I pulled Carwyn through the crowd as we went whispering and burning and unseen. I did not go for the doors. I went for the walls where the Light guards had hung up their swords in a glittering array, as a symbol of how safe we all were.

One of the guards had almost made it. He was lying in a heap by the wall, a human being turned into an obstacle. There was a sword in his hand he had never gotten to use. I knelt down and slid his sword from the lax curve of his fingers. I could only look at the man’s slack, surprised face, at his blank eyes with the party lights still glittering in them, for a moment. Then I turned my face away from him and closed my fingers tighter around the hilt of his weapon. The power from my rings sent bright sparks skittering down the blade.

I got to my feet.

The hem of my dress touched my ankles, and it was wet and warm with blood. I had not been able to rise unstained, but I had risen up with a way to fight.

Some of the sans-merci might have known how Light and Dark practitioners could work together, so we had to get out of there, and fast. We had to get out of sight while our advantage lasted. I began to walk toward a door that did not lead out but I thought might lead away. I shoved into the next room and found more chaos. In the brightly lit room, there were people lying dead and others being herded like animals. I saw one woman cringing in front of a blade, her silk dress torn and bloodied, and her carefully made-up face stained with tears and twisted with terror. The glossy fa?ade of the Light world had cracked, and beneath the gloss everyone was just as frightened and just as easily hurt as me.

Carwyn held on to my hand so hard that it felt as though my rings were being pressed into the bone, the light of them burning through our locked fingers.

“Give me that,” Carwyn demanded, taking a break from whispering, and he nodded toward my sword.

I snorted. “Give me a break.”

A brief look of anger crossed Carwyn’s face, and I braced myself in case he tried to seize the weapon. He did not. Instead he lifted his other hand, the one holding the champagne bottle, as we passed a flight of marble stairs. He hit the bottle sharply against one marble step, and it broke into jagged halves. He swung his new weapon from his hand, its glass teeth catching the light, and smiled.

“Guess it’s lucky boys from the Dark know how to improvise.”

There was no time to answer him or to question how effective his weapon might be. I certainly had no intention of giving up my own.

“You can’t see us,” I murmured, and Carwyn chanted with me.

“You can’t see us.”

We were almost at the door.

Someone knocked into me, heavily, and the light streaming from my rings died in my surprise. It was Jim Stryker, and there was blood on his white shirt. His eyes were so wide, they looked round, white showing all around the brown irises, and he looked like a terrified animal or a beseeching child.

He did not look at me. He looked at Carwyn, reaching out a hand, and said, “Ethan.”

He was Ethan’s cousin, and Ethan loved him.

Carwyn’s hand did not relax its grip on mine. Carwyn did not react in any way. I glanced at his face and found it cold and unmoved. He looked back at me, and not at Jim at all.

I ripped my eyes away from the doppelganger and back to Jim.

“Come on, quickly,” I said. “You need to come with—”

One of the party guests, a man with his suit jacket ripped off to reveal a rough knot of black and scarlet tied on his upper arm, turned and sank his knife savagely into Jim’s back. Jim never even saw him.

Jim coughed, a brief, startled burst of blood. His eyes did not leave Carwyn. He died looking so surprised, and so scared.

He fell forward onto his face, and my hands shook. For a moment, I could not move forward, and yet I could not let my hands drop the sword. I was not horrified enough, not humane enough, to try to help him. But I was not quite selfish enough to leave him. I stared down at Jim for a terrible, trembling moment.

“Come on,” Carwyn ordered under his breath, and he used his hold on my hand to tug me forward. He resumed his chant: “You can’t see us.”

I swallowed, lit my rings, and stepped over Jim’s body. Carwyn and I ran headlong through the door.