If there was a God, Mithrus Christ would strike the Strep down. For a moment she was lost in the fantasy—Mithrus descending from iron-colored clouds, book and whip in hand, pointing at the Strep. For the crime of being evil, you are condemned to . . .
That was a problem. Ellie couldn’t think of any afterworld dire enough. Better to plan her next cred-grab. If she did it subtly enough, the Strep didn’t notice a few credits missing from her purse here and there.
There was always Southking Street, too. Even an unlicensed charmer could always make some cash on the sly there, but with her Potential still unsettled, she had to take half price for anything, because of the higher risk of Twist or side effect. Then there was the danger of being caught, though the jack gangs that extorted protection money from anyone vulnerable enough were a bigger headache.
If she could just stay afloat a little longer, work a little harder, she could survive the Strep. Maybe even escape early.
“Marguerite!” the Strep cooed, and Ellie returned to herself with a jolt. “Little sister, how are you?”
Oh, hell. She sized up the girl in a swift glance.
Chubby, her hair a lank mass and her dark gaze half-dead, the Strep’s sister clutched a battered cardboard suitcase and flinched as the train let out another sonorous whistle. She looked as disheveled as anyone who had just come off a sealed train would, though there were damp traces on her round cheeks as if she’d washed—or had been crying. Her eyes were red too; cinder-laden recycled air wasn’t good for anyone’s tender tissues. She didn’t even have a hat and veil, just a plaid skirt and dingy kneesocks, a sloppy peach-colored boatneck sweater that could have done a lot for her if it wasn’t so baggy and dingy, and sensible, scuffed, unpolished shoes.
She looked like a refugee, or a poor country cousin. A kolkhoz girl, with no shimmer of Potential at all. How could she have absolutely none when the Strep was so high-powered? It wasn’t fair.
Ruby would call her a fashion disaster, and Cami would simply shake her head slightly, the compassion in her blue eyes somehow painful because it was so acute.
“Is that all you have?” Laurissa was clucking as if someone was grading her on a Motherly Façade of the Year performance. “Poor dear. Was it bad?”
The girl flinched. “Not bad.” Even her voice was colorless. She didn’t seem to notice Ellie, watching the Strep the way a mouse will helplessly watch an uninterested—but still very close—snake.
Maybe she knows?
But the girl actually dropped her suitcase and threw her arms around Laurissa, who, amazingly, didn’t smack her for creasing the Auberme suit and the freshly ironed, very stylish Tak Kerak canvas trench coat. Ellie’s gorge rose, and she hastily looked away.
“BOOYEAH!” someone yelled, and a blur of motion burst from one of the train’s further hatches. “NEW HAAAAAAAAVEN!”
What the hell?
It was a boy, Ellie’s age or a little older. He was in an unfamiliar prep school uniform, his striped tie askew and toffee-golden hair sticking up anyhow. Three running strides and he was met by a pair of adults—a beaming mother with dark eyes and a father in a suit, both charmers with a haze-cloud of Potential around them, reacting uneasily as the train settled again.
She recognized him, of course. How could she not?
Avery Fletcher. Mother and father both born into charm-clans, and Dad had knocked back beers with Mr. Fletcher once or twice at the Charmer’s Ball or during other get-togethers. Since the Strep had a Sigil and Ellie had Potential, they attended those sorts of things.
At least, while Dad was in town they did. When he wasn’t, the Strep had gone alone.
Mrs. Fletcher had her arms around the boy. The surprise for Ellie was seeing how he’d grown. When she’d moved to New Haven he’d been a weedy little jerk, and she’d known him peripherally for years.
Ruby would like him now. Cute enough. But arrogant. Ellie sighed. She still remembered the sandpit, Avery throwing handfuls of it at her, and her own despair as she tried to avoid them. He’d been, what, twelve? Thirteen?
A gnarl-skinned redcap, its cheeks flushed and its too-long arms corded with muscle, brought luggage along the platform on a wheeled cart. It hopped a little, as if the platform burned—of course, redcaps were changelings, and the fey on them would make them uncomfortable around cold true-iron. Still, they didn’t Twist, and this was a good job to have.
Fletcher’s luggage was part of what the redcap was hauling. The boy surfaced from the hug, his father ruffled his hair, and Avery glanced across the platform like he could feel her gaze. Heat rose up Ellie’s neck, staining her cheeks, and she looked away.
The Strep still had her arms around Marguerite, who had gone pale but nodded eagerly. The naked hope on her round face was almost too much, and Ellie hastily looked away again. Her gaze settled on the train, and she counted the charm-symbols crackling against the black pitted metal, trying to unravel what each one did.
“Hey! Sinder!” Yelling again, across the platform. “Ellen! Hey!”
Oh God. She pretended not to hear, staring at the blurring charm-symbols, keeping the Strep in her peripheral vision. Her stomach ached, and the Strep’s head came up. She beckoned, and Ellie trudged obediently across the platform, ignoring Avery’s last cry.
Talking to him would only cause trouble. How had he remembered her name?
“A friend of yours?” Laurissa inquired, sweetly. Her eyes had narrowed, and her mouth was tight. She studied the boy and his parents speculatively.
“Huh?” Ellie played dumb, hunching her shoulders. “Oh, Fletcher? I saw him at a couple charming events. Hi. I’m Ellie.”
The wan, moonfaced sister offered one moist paw. “Rita,” she whispered. “Marguerite.”
Ellie dredged up a smile. “How do you do, Rita.” Did she grow up with the Strep around? That would explain a lot. But she’s so young.
Whatever the girl would have said next was lost in the train’s blasting whistle, and Laurissa hurried them away with sharp heel-clipping steps, glancing back occasionally at the Fletchers with that same odd expression. For a moment Ellie lost herself in another fantasy—true-iron suddenly smoking and scorching the Strep as she screamed, her spite and rage exposed for all to see.
Ellie’s back ran with gooseflesh and she slowed, glancing sidelong. Avery Fletcher stood near his luggage, his father picking up two suitcases, the duffel bag slung over Avery’s shoulder. His mother tipped the redcap with a flutter of paper credits. Avery was smiling, his dark eyes merry and warm.
Looking directly at her, for some reason. Or maybe at Laurissa.
She put her head down against the cinder-laden breeze and hurried after the Strep.
THREE
FROZEN WATER’S COBALT WEIGHT, THE COLD BITING fingers and toes, its claws trickling up arms and legs, a trail of pain before numbness sets in. She floats, somehow a part of the ice, undulating along its deep glow. Not sunshine, the light comes from inside somehow, and the freeze is a harsh friend.
It traces up her veins, and soon it will reach her torso. When it has risen past her belly, up her arms and past her shoulders, it will spread inward through the arches of her ribs. When it touches her lungs she will not breathe, and afterward, it will close, almost gently, around her beating heart.
Everything . . . will stop.
These are the most dangerous dreams, because it is so tempting to just let go, let the ice creep, until it is too far along to be halted. Then it will be out of her hands.
No.
As always, there is a shimmer above her. The same smell, of rotting green and cold metal; the warmth in her nose was blood. Floor wax and the back-and-forth motions as she worked, the squares of pale sunlight on the orphanage floor. Someday she would be rescued. Maybe her mother would even come back, golden hair shining, and—
Well, even a slave had dreams.
Wake up. Not severe, but warning. There was a stinging all over her, vicious little nips of pain, and a trembling glimme
r in the darkness as she sank. Fingers in her hair now, and a scalp-spike of pain as she was pulled.
She didn’t want to wake up. The ice was up to her shoulders now, and her legs were inanimate. So easy to just slip under. So tempting. The wax swirled in a circle, her knees aching and her hands chapped and stinging, loose as seaweed in the cold flow.
The ice was everywhere. She should be numb. Why did it hurt?
The sting became a howl of fury, and she finally began to struggle. Not for the surface and for air, but for the ice, chasing the numbness as it retreated, a false friend after all.
Ellie lunged upright, sweat tingling in her scrapes, her hair stuck to her forehead and the faint aqueous light from her mother’s ring picking out the grain of rough wood.
This tiny roundish room had a low ceiling; a beam was right over the place Ellie had chosen for her sleeping bag. She had to be careful or she’d bonk her head right on it and add another contusion to her collection. If she had a credit for each one she could escape tomorrow, and a thin rancid giggle at the thought caught in her throat.
Her breathing slowed. She clutched at the blanket she’d filched from the upstairs linen closet and let her racing pulse slowly wind down. Let the brain tune itself to a formless hum, let the body sort itself out. Disconnecting was easy, once you had the hang of it.
When Mom was alive, she’d rock Ellie to sleep after black drowning dreams; night terrors were common for charmer-children. Now Ellie found herself swaying slightly, and the quite natural thought that she could maybe disconnect long enough and deep enough to stop breathing was actually comforting.
Another sharp crackle, and the ring stung her. She inhaled. It was like a Sister’s popcharm against the knuckles—not hard enough to really hurt, but it got your attention for sure.
The girl—Rita—now had the bedroom that used to be Ellie’s. Oh no, she doesn’t mind, she’s happy to be taught how to share, the Strep had said, calmly gleeful. It didn’t matter—Ellie’d taken one look at the stifling, beribboned, pink-laced tomb across from the master bedroom, where Laurissa wanted her to sleep, and privately decided fuck that noise. It wasn’t any great trick to sneak up here to her refuge, the most forgotten space in the whole four-towered pile of stone that was one of the larger houses on Perrault Street. Especially since the few staff they had weren’t enough to keep the whole pile gleaming the way it used to.
Just after the news about Dad came, Ellie had thrashed out of a nightmare in the middle of the night to find a ghost of the Strep’s choking Noixame cologne hanging in the darkness with the smoky burning cedar breath of anger, smoldering instead of raging flame. Maybe Laurissa had been in her room, or maybe it was just a warning.
Either way, she’d locked her bedroom door and brought up things to this little space by dribs and drabs. A hideaway, a safe spot. Preparation was a girl’s best friend, and all that.
Now she blinked, taking stock, her arms around her knees.
A funny little misshapen trapdoor with a bar securely snugged in its brackets, yes. A sloping floor, covered with dust and the marks of her footsteps and dragged things, yes. The chair she’d filched from the smaller dining room, a sleeping bag, a faint gleam from the high, narrow, crooked window. Yes, yes, by God and Mithrus, yes.
There was even a small pile of things that didn’t go bad—crackers, wax-sealed cheese, apples that would be mealy but fine enough to eat as long as they were left under a sealcharm, and another charm laid to discourage mice from finding her little trove.
It was bad enough being up here without rodents, for chrissake.
There was even a neat pile of paper credits inside an openwork silver box that used to stand on Dad’s desk in the library. A stack of old heavy-sleeved records, too, all she’d been able to save. The two prized Hellward vinyl discs were given pride of place, and Screamin’ Jack’s familiar face glared at her from the cover of The Devil Don’t Need None.
Dad had sometimes played those, scratchy and warm, while Ellie did homework and her mother worked thread-fine charmfiber into her tapestries. Mom had been a charmweaver, and her eye for color had come down to Ellie, or so Dad always told her.
Maybe the ring was responsible for the sudden ease with which Ellie was charming everything nowadays. It wasn’t unheard of, Mom used to say it was an heirloom. From where, though, Ellie had never thought to ask.
Now it was too late.
Her fingers and toes were all pins and needles, and her teeth threatened to chatter. The warming-charm had worn off the sleeping bag. She was looking at waking up every few hours to refresh it against the damp chill from the stone walls burrowing past the bag’s thin screen. Or maybe she had to run the risk of stealing a blanket or two.
The room that used to be hers was blue. A sea room, a sky room; Dad had let her pick every shade and tone.
Mom’s favorite color. Just like the pool in the back used to be, beyond the rose garden. It was dead-dark and still now, and traceries of algae had begun at its edges. The landscapers who came out were only supposed to bother with the front of the house, what people would see when they peered through the scrollwork of the iron gate. The rose garden was shaggy and ill-kempt now; it was amazing how things could start to look ragged in so short a time.
Ellie put her head down on her scabbed knees. The ring was dark and dead again, and it was awful dark in here despite the reflected cityshine through the high crooked window. She would have to figure out some other light source unless she wanted to charm something to hold a glow, and anything that produced light would be a snap for the Strep to find.
There was a silver lining. The velvet darkness meant nothing and nobody could see her, and the ring’s stone was dark. Danger past. And finally, resting her aching head, her arms locked around her knees so tight the bruises—old yellowgreen, blue and deep, or blackreddish new—wept in tiny little groan-voices of their own, she could cry.
FOUR
FRENCH CLASS WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME. AND NOT from a braincramp either. Just from sheer fucking boredom.
Even the dust hung motionless in the air, shafts of liquid gold sunshine braving Juno’s charm-latticed windows to fall in orderly diamonds on the mellow-glowing wooden floor scuffed by who knew how many feet. Sister Mary Brefoil droned on about participles and turned the mellifluousness of French into murdered poetry, robbed of all its breath and fire by her flat delivery.
Ruby was openly nodding, keeping conscious in fits and starts. Cami kept giving Ellie little sideways looks, maybe because Ell had been quieter than usual.
Quiet as Cami herself used to be before the stutter broke. At least Ellie had been useful during that little escapade, using a High Adelton location-charm to track Cami into the darkness under New Haven.
Afterward, Nico Vultusino had put the fear of Mithrus into the Strep for a little while. It faded, of course, and then there was double hell to pay. Still, that little bit of breathing room had been just fine by Ell.
She’d earned it, too. The High Adelton was almost a fey charm, and it was also one you weren’t supposed to attempt until years after your Potential settled. The risk of Twisting was there, of course, but the bigger risk was your ability to charm getting eaten by uncontrolled loops in the charm’s structure, especially if the thing or person you wanted to find was hedged around with safeguards.
It was powerful, though, and it was one of the few that worked through stone, water, and air. The risk, to Ellie, had been ultimately acceptable.
Nobody knew what charm she’d used, but Nico had given her one of his long considering looks, moss-green eyes narrowed. Not much got past him, even if he was brain-soft when Cami was around. It was a good thing he had one little weak point, actually, because otherwise he’d be scarier than even Family had any right to be.
The memory sent an internal shiver through her. You sure you can find her, Sinder? As if she was one of his Family boys, fanged and bright-eyed, with their uncanny stillness and their taste for blood.
I
can, she’d said, firmly enough that nobody had argued. It hadn’t even been difficult.
That was scary in its own way, wasn’t it? How easy some things were. Just like slipping underwater.
Now Cami scrawled on a piece of notebook paper, slid it over to her with a practiced motion when Sister Mary turned to the board. Chalk squeaked, and Ellie looked down.
You haven’t been sleeping.
Ellie tried not to wince. Trust Cami to notice. Ruby would keep going on blithely assuming everything was grand until disaster loomed, but Cami actually thought about things. That was good, because otherwise Ruby would have been even more of a holy terror. Cami probably didn’t know how much she moderated their shared redhead.
Ellie waited until Sister Mary took a breath and launched into another droning spiel, then drew a smiley face with two decided slashes for eyes and a shaky arc for a mouth. Copacetic, she scrawled, and next to Cami’s careful almost-calligraphic letters her own looked shabby.
Run-down. Second-hand. Rubbed through. Just like everything else about her these days. Except the ring, but at Juno its stone was merely blue, pretty and quiescent. If it had charm on it, the school’s defenses would have reacted, right? She shouldn’t be worrying about whether or not it was helping her keep up with Laurissa’s demands.
Of course, every well-done charm was met with a scream and a Stupid little whore! As well as a slap or a vicious pinch. It never ended. Stand up, don’t slouch. Look at you, can’t you even clean a floor right? You’re so useless. Never worked a day in your miserable little life . . .
Thinking about the constant venom made her dizzy, and she gripped the edge of their shared desk. Cami’s fingers drummed once, silently, on the scarred wooden surface. Fine, that little movement said, but I’m still worried.
There were things Ellie could have written, but none of them could possibly be construed as helpful. Instead, she took a deep breath and settled inside her skin, the subconscious thump as centering clicked into place familiar and comforting.