House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(20)

He fumbles with his collar before he realizes he has no neck tie to knot. He lowers his hands and hides them in his jacket pockets. “He really did know, I just told him the details.”

“Are you an idiot?”

Jannik frowns.

“Before, everything anyone said was speculation – now you’ve handed House Guyin a sword to stick into our backs.”

“They won’t turn on you,” he begins, staring past me, down the now-empty stairs. “They’re like us; we’re their only friends in MallenIve.”

“They are nothing like us.” And they are not our friends, I want to say, but the truth is they are the closest we’ve come to friendship in this blasted city. “Don’t think you can trust them.” I certainly don’t, not when it seems that Isidro has his manicured little claws in Jannik. No wonder Harun is a mess.

“Why not?” The question seems innocent, but for all his flaws, Jannik merely plays at being naive. It’s a careful disguise he wears, and he uses it because it saves him from looking too invested, or revealing too much about how he really feels. He’s not stupid.

“Don’t pretend,” I say to him. “Circumstance isn’t a fertile ground for intimacy.” You like him? I don’t ask. How – how could you like him? Isidro is all those things I have learned not to trust, a trapped and beautiful thing, one looking for someone to blame for their own inadequacies. They don’t understand love – only how to use other people to get what they think they want. Then again, that may be the very thing Jannik likes about him. Perhaps he believes he can save Isidro.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” Jannik steps closer to me. “They are the ones who shouldn’t trust us.”

“Why’s that?” It’s ridiculous. I certainly have no plans to go and drag Harun further down into the mud. If anything, it’s we who could give them some glimmer of respectability.

He blinks. “You really don’t know?”

I shake my head. “Humour me, pretend I’m a fool.”

“Don’t make it too easy for me,” Jannik says, but he’s smiling crookedly, and I sigh in exasperation. “Because they managed without us. They were shunned and friendless.”

“Don’t make me pity them. That’s not going to work.”

“Of course it is. I know you.” He edges down to the next step, so that we are separated from each other by only silk, and a spider’s thread of air. “And now here we come, still fresh from Pelimburg, still interesting, still untainted, and we extend our hand.”

I hold his gaze. My back aches; the shoulders stiff.

“They have more to lose,” he ends, with a small, lopsided shrug.

“Isidro hates you,” I say after a while. There, let him mull on that.

“And you.”

“Maybe he just hates everyone.”

Jannik eases past me, and takes a few more steps downward then he looks back up. “We should go.”

Flustered, I brush my hands down my skirts, feeling sweaty-palmed and ill, although I’ve no idea why. “Yes. I expect Harun will be wondering why we’re taking so long–”

“No, I mean we should go from MallenIve.” There is such longing in his voice, running soft and slippery beneath it like kelp under the silk-tops of waves. It is the kind of longing that tangles in your legs and drowns you.

“Back ho – back to Pelimburg? But why – we can’t.” And damn him for making me want all over again. I miss the smell of sea air, the calling of the mews on the cliff-side.

“This city is sick, and it infects everyone in it. We stay here and we become like them.”

I could pretend I don’t know what he means but I’ve felt it too, the insidious way MallenIve breathes her disease into every living thing here. It’s so potent I can smell it – like scriv and rot – citrus combined with the reek of the filthy refuse heaps growing at her borders. I brush off his distress, and bury my own. “You’re being overly dramatic. Besides, we can’t go back.”

He sighs. “No. I suppose not.”

We have sins to atone for.

“Harun isn’t going to help us,” I say, thinking of the names on my paper, useless now.

“Whatever made you think that he would?” Jannik closes his eyes and slumps back against the one solid wall of the staircase. “Forget about this, Felicita, please. It’s not something for you and I to get involved in.”

“Give me a reason why not.”

He cracks open one eye, and waits for me to work it out myself.

“I don’t care any more if we draw attention to our House, if these MallenIve idiots don’t invite us – me – to their stupid parties–”

“It’s not about that.”

“What then – are you scared of them?” As soon as the words have bolted out my mouth, so casual and yet so damning, I feel myself flush.

“Yes,” Jannik says. “Now, we really should leave.”

For a moment, I don’t follow him. The vampire they found was mutilated, tortured. I picture Jannik’s arms ending in stumps at the wrist and his skin flayed, leaving only the meat and white skull. His fear flickers against my face like the wing of a startled bird.