Ace of Shades (The Shadow Game #1)(75)

He removed the pistol he’d been carrying and handed it to Mansi. Duels were knives only. And, despite everything, if he did lose, he wanted Mansi to have it.

If he was being honest with himself, he didn’t think that he could beat a Phillips in a fight—Chez had to be three times faster than him. But it was damn hard to break a street oath. He’d be hurting. Maybe that was all the advantage Levi would need to win.

To win. A challenge was a duel to the death. So it was Chez or Levi. Only one of them would be walking out of Olde Town with their throat intact.

Levi pulled out his knife and moved into a fighting stance, but his legs trembled and his arms felt weak. He wasn’t supposed to die here, just another kid playing lord whom no one would remember.

Chez lunged forward. Levi dodged his knife but missed the punch he’d aimed at Chez’s shoulder. His third was all skin and no bones, quicker with a blade and, of course, fast as lightning.

Chez ran forward and sank his knife into Levi’s leg. Levi let out a scream and frantically jabbed his own blade as he fell, but he never made contact. Hot blood boiled out of his thigh. Chez kicked him in the side one, two, three times.

Besides the pain, all Levi could think of was how fast he’d gone down.

Four, five. His stomach flipped over, and he swallowed down a tide of vomit. If he was going to die, he wouldn’t die covered in his own sick. He should’ve probably been thinking about something more profound, but he didn’t have a family who would miss him or lovers who would weep. All he had was his dignity.

“Chez!” someone shouted. Levi’s heart was pounding too loudly to hear who it was. The nerves around the knife wound in his leg screamed, and his stomach ached all over. “Stop it!”

Chez kicked Levi again, this time in the head.

Everything darkened. His thoughts whirled around his brain like a funnel, and he wondered if maybe it was the ground spinning and spinning and spinning, sucking him inside the earth.

A few more screams. Then some grunts. A clatter. Footsteps. Levi couldn’t tell if it happened in a millisecond or in minutes, but then something pressed against his leg, and Levi stifled a scream.

The person bending over him was a shadow, but everything was a shadow in Olde Town. “Muck. Muck, this is really happening.” The person wrenched his hand away, and the pain in Levi’s leg lessened slightly. He could sense his aura, weightless and translucent. Jac. “Stay with me. You c-can’t die on me.”

Jac’s words spun, too.

Panicked hands found their way down Levi’s shirt, against his chest. A welcome warmth filled him, easing the pain, coaxing him back into lucidity.

His eyes widened. “No,” he moaned, swatting Jac away.

As the hands let go, so, too, did the warmth. Levi began to shiver. Only the cold and the pain remained, sharp enough to numb everything else. All his adrenaline, gone, and with it, his sense of feeling.

All his life, gone.

The ground caved in, and he hit bottom.





ENNE

Enne stood in the hallway of black and white doors, searching for the right one. She spun in a circle, looking for something familiar. The previous door she’d opened had been her memory of the last time she spoke to Lourdes, but she couldn’t remember which door it was. The hallway stretched endlessly in both directions, every inch of it the same.

She walked to a black door. Those belonged to her.

Inside, she heard thunder.

She opened it hesitantly and peeked into its darkness. Unlike her first visit to the hallway, when she had relived a memory, this time, she was a spectator.

She was in the basement of a home she didn’t recognize, and a storm raged outside. A young person clutched what looked like a three-year-old Enne in her arms. As a toddler, Enne’s hair had been curlier, her eyes less wide set. She was red in the face from crying, scared by the storm.

The person shushed her softly. “Loddie has you. Loddie has you.” That was the name Enne had called Lourdes when she was little.

But this person was surely too young to be Lourdes, Enne thought, even though it was clearly her. That evening, her long blond hair was tied at the nape of her neck and braided down to her waist. She wore fluid clothes, but they didn’t fit her properly—it was a time before Lourdes had tailored all her outfits. Otherwise, her women’s clothes were always too short, her men’s always hanging or tight in the wrong areas. If Enne had to guess, Lourdes was about eighteen in this memory.

Neither the child nor Lourdes took any notice of Enne standing there, so she sat down next to her mother, curled her legs to her chest and listened with them to the storm.

Eventually, the toddler stopped whimpering and fell asleep. Lourdes leaned her head back against the wall, her face weary. She winced with every new crack of thunder and, eventually, also began to cry.

It was strange to see Lourdes like this. There was something rawer about her. In all Enne’s memories, Lourdes had never cried. Apparently, she hadn’t always been so reserved.

Tell me what happened, Enne wanted to say. Tell me your story.

But, of course, her mother couldn’t hear her.

Enne didn’t leave until Lourdes fell asleep. Then she slipped out and through the next black door in the hallway, eager for more forgotten time spent with her mother.

Except in this scene, Enne was alone. She was sixteen years old, and she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. She crept across the upstairs hallway in her nightgown, an unused lantern at her side. Last time she’d attempted this, Lourdes had discovered her in the act, and it had devolved into a shouting match—one of the first they’d ever had. But Lourdes was on another one of her trips to New Reynes, and Enne was alone in the house, except for the staff.