The Glass Arrow(80)

Her brows rise. “I’m as close as he’s going to get to one out here.”

My shoulders fall. I’m no doc, I know that. But when she says this it sounds like I didn’t help at all.

“So she’s the half-breed,” says Kyna, as if she’s settling something.

The word stings.

Kiran looks up at me then, but there’s no hint of the boy I know. His amber eyes are hard and uncaring, and they make me feel small.

“Yeah,” says Kiran. “She’s a half-breed.”

That piece of me that belonged to him is crushed in his fist and thrown aside.

I lift my chest and narrow my eyes. I stand strong so they can’t see how much it hurts to belong to no one. Because it shouldn’t hurt. No one owns me. Not before, not now. Not ever.

The girl in the boy’s clothes laughs cruelly.

“They snipped her da’s voicebox because of her ma,” she says. “And they sliced her ma’s face because of her da. That’s some love story.”

I look back at Lorcan, hoping this isn’t true, that he wasn’t the reason my ma was cut. And when I think of how I asked the same of Kiran it makes me a little light-headed.

“Time for you to move on, Aiyana,” Kiran says.

He might as well have slapped me across the face because that’s what his words feel like.

His friends are all watching me. Staring at me. The freak. The outcast.

Kyna approaches him and slips beneath his arm as though she always belonged there. She watches me curiously over her hunched shoulder. The joke’s on me, and she feels guilty. Well I don’t want her pity.

Kiran’s found his people, now I need to find mine.

“Yeah, all right,” I tell him. “You were just slowing me down anyway.”

Kiran’s face is expressionless, like it was so many nights in the solitary yard. I can’t stay any longer. I turn and walk back into the woods, soul sick that I will always remember him that way. With a face of stone.





CHAPTER 20

DAPHNE’S WAITING WITH THE horses. Her face is drawn tight, and even after just these couple days, her freckles are beginning to return. They make her look younger. She stands beside a fallen tree trunk, biting her nails and keeping her eyes on Lorcan.

“Is your Driver alive?” she asks.

“He’s not mine,” I say, still burning. “Why would you say that?” I untie Dell’s reins from the tree limb, knowing she’ll find her way the hundred paces back to him.

Daphne’s arms drop. “So he’s not coming?”

“No he’s not coming,” I snap. “We don’t need him.”

Lorcan lifts his brows at me, and I glare back.

“Is it true?” I ask him. There’s still a chance that he’ll say no, and maybe then at least one thing will be righted.

“Is what true?” interrupts Daphne.

Lorcan stands with one hand on the withers of the palomino, his stare deep enough to go right through me. I wish I had a shield so I could stop him from trying to read my mind. I don’t want him to wonder what I’m thinking. I don’t want him to know how I feel. I don’t want to know him at all.

He inhales slowly.

“Mine.” It’s just a breath. I doubt Daphne even hears him.

“Stop saying that!” I cover my eyes with the heels of my hands.

Kiran is gone; the second his people showed up he turned me loose like I wasn’t anything to him. And now Lorcan’s trying to claim me as kin. It’s like these men think I’m their property. It’s like they don’t know me at all.

A hand covers my shoulder. I shake it free, burning Lorcan with my glare.

“I’m not yours.” My voice is trembling. “You aren’t my family. You don’t even know what family is. You weren’t there when we were hungry. You weren’t there when she got sick.”

I lean closer, but he makes no attempt to back down.

“I couldn’t heal her!” I shove him, but he only rocks back on his heels. “Metea and me, we did everything we could, but it wasn’t enough. So I had to end it. I had to watch her die. I had to dig her grave. If you had been there you could have brought your Driver doc and saved her. But you weren’t. You let me kill her.”

My words are muffled into his jacket, and his wiry arms close like a vice around my shoulders. I lost my ma four years ago, but it feels fresh, like Lorcan just ripped that wound right back open. I hear a sound in his throat. Halfway between a choke and a sob. And I’m crying too. I want this nightmare to be over, but it just goes on and on.

“If I was yours you would have come for me at the Garden.” I push away from him, and he slumps forward like I’ve punched him in the gut.

“Where are they?” I demand. “Where is what’s left of my family?”

Very slowly he lifts his hand and points north.

“They wouldn’t have moved that way,” I say. “That’s the direction of Glasscaster.”

He nods somberly.

“You said they moved, not that they were taken!” My knees are feeling even weaker.

Lorcan shakes his head and points again towards the city.

Daphne moves behind me. “What if they weren’t captured?”