Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(35)

When the boy stepped closer, Finn held her breath. He was only a step or two away from her and had no idea.

He drummed his fingers on the table, then he paused, his eyes narrowing. Finn followed his gaze. He was staring at the marks she’d made on the table. Finn took a step back. Through the thin cloak, her hip grazed the edge of the table. The pesos in her pocket chimed.

His eyes snapped up, his shadow stilling in suspicion like a dog at the sound of unknown footsteps. Finn held still and willed her heart to stop hammering in her chest. It wasn’t as if he could see her. He would decide he’d imagined a noise and move on. It’d be fine.

He reached out and nearly skimmed her nose with his fingertips. Then he dropped his hand and breathed sharply through his nose, clearly chiding himself for thinking someone was there.

That was close.

But then he looked back at the table and suspicion etched itself onto his face once more. His eyes locked on where she was standing. This time he squinted, focusing, as if that would help. She wanted to snort and tell him not to give himself a nosebleed. His gold eyes widened, and his hand shot forward, quick as a cobra, to grip her by the arm.

“What the hell are you doing here?”





12


The Prince, the Thief, and the Drunk


“Are you following me?” Alfie asked as the somehow-invisible arm struggled in his grip.

He could see magic flowing through her. It was that same shifting wine red that he’d seen at the cambió game. “Who are you?” he demanded. “I can see you—answer me!”

The answer he got was a punch to the jaw. The girl wrenched her arm from his grip. Alfie lunged forward and grabbed her around her middle, holding her so that her back was pressed to his chest. She bucked against him.

“You heard me! Who are you? Take off the invisibility enchantment you’ve got on.”

The girl threw away her elbow, hitting him in the face. He lurched back, his hands clamping over his sore nose. His eyes focused, he watched her figure, outlined in that familiar red magic, make a mad dash for the door.

Alfie locked his eyes on her red silhouette. “Paralizar!”

She froze. He could see the magic reverberating through her, buzzing with anger like a kicked beehive. Her shadow still surged around her, snapping at him like a threatened dog. This magic wouldn’t hold long. He needed to act fast.

Alfie held her by the arm. When he raised his other hand it brushed against a hood he couldn’t see. It fell off her head and she appeared before him, no longer invisible. She was frozen, her body leaning forward, a hand reaching for the doorknob. He knew her immediately—the dark eyes, the curly hair that fell just below her shoulders, the snarl that curved her lips. His propio hadn’t been wrong. This really was the girl in the dragon mask, the one with the shifting red magic.

Alfie brushed his hand along her arm again and felt the fabric of whatever she was wearing that he couldn’t see. His fingers skimmed a patchwork of feather-light scales, and he gasped. His father had let him hold it only a few times, but he would never mistake the feel of it for anything else. Vanishing cloaks were too rare to be owned by a common thief; this had to be the one kept in the palace vault. She’d stolen the single most treasured item in the entire palace, maybe the entire kingdom.

How had she done it? Had she changed her face into a guard’s and sauntered in?

Then something else clicked in his mind, the journal of faces that she’d dropped. Of course he’d seen one of them on a wanted poster. The sketches in her journal were of the faces she’d worn while committing crimes.

He looked at her pointedly. “I am going to unfreeze you and you are not going to run. If you run, I will freeze you again and have you thrown in the dungeons, entiendes?”

She couldn’t answer, but Alfie watched the magic thrumming through her slow and calm.

Alfie let his magic fall away. The girl’s arm dropped. She paused for a long moment, seeming to think of what to say. Then she shrugged, as if giving up the search for a clever retort.

“I’m here to steal this cloak.” He must’ve looked confused at her honesty because she walked back to the table, sat on it, and crossed her arms. “I’m leveling with you. I’m tired. It’s been a hell of a week, and I came in here through a maldito pig. I don’t have the energy to lie.”

Alfie wondered if “coming in through a pig” was some form of slang he had yet to hear.

“You do know what that cloak is, don’t you? Vanishing cloaks are extremely rare, but this one is not just any cloak. It’s—”

“Sí, I know.” She shot him a silencing look, the heat of her gaze a visual swear. “The cloak passed from king to king. The cloak that sparked a rebellion. The cloak that bought us our freedom. Not all of us have to sit at a polished desk to learn things.”

“And you still want to take it? You’re not at all concerned with what it means to people?”

“No,” she said without pause. Alfie cocked his head at her. He didn’t want to feel refreshed by how little she cared about the legacy, the weight of history, as his parents called it. But he was. Sore jaw aside, he was.

“I need it to get a job done,” she said. She raised her arm and regarded the cloak thoughtfully. “And it’d be useful to have in my line of work.”