Tell the Wind and Fire(35)

“I’ll do it!” I declared. “Now, tell me more about this real man. Will you take me to him? Because I haven’t seen anyone like that lately.”

In some ways, Jim was restful to be around, since he took everything any girl said to him as flirting. Occasionally he looked confused by something I said, but the whale of his self-esteem always ended up making short work of the plankton of doubt.

It occurred to me that if Ethan’s doppelganger had acted like Jim, I wouldn’t have felt any urges to sympathy, and I certainly wouldn’t have taken off his collar. Carwyn might have been soulless, but at least he wasn’t an idiot.

I couldn’t think about that right at that moment, and I certainly couldn’t be such a nervous wreck that I was jumping at the least little noise. I rolled my eyes at Jim and reached for Ethan’s hand.

Ethan jerked away from me, and I stared at him. He was sitting bolt upright, suddenly tense, his jaw held tight. I felt my heart trip in my chest, felt the lurch and the chill, like a little kid stumbling over her own feet into a freezing-cold puddle.

“What,” I said, my voice trembling. “What—what is it?”

“Guys, look at this,” Ethan said, voice and body strained as if the television were going to attack him.

We both turned our attention to the television. I had been tuning out the drone of the reporter’s voice, but now I looked at the shimmering Light magic projected against the wall, resolving in my sight until the voice and the picture came clear.

“. . . violent disturbance within the walls of the Dark city, during which six Light guards lost their lives,” said the newscaster’s voice, flat and noncommittal, turning the words into boring nonsense. I wondered if that was why these people were hired, because they could make disaster sound dull and give people the distance they needed from it.

The feed from the camera was grainy, showing footage taken at night on someone’s phone. But I could see enough of the entrance gate: it was just outside Green-Wood Cemetery.

I could recognize it even though it looked different. The whole scene was painted gray by night, and in the street itself were streaks and dark stains, still shining fresh. The rough, irregular stones of the street had dammed flowing blood into small dark pools.

The camera followed the path through the gate and into a scene of chaos.

It looked as if lightning had struck every tree. They were ripped to splinters and shards of wood, cast over the grass like the remnants of a shipwreck, and amid the wood were the iron cages.

Some of the cages had bodies still huddled in them. Some of the bodies were skeletons, left in place as a warning to others not to cross the Light. Some of them might have died last night, died of terror at the idea of freedom.

Some of the cages lay twisted and empty, the black iron melted, the cage doors gaping open.

The cages were down. Nobody would ever be strung up like my father had been, ever again. They were the symbols of the Light’s power, the awful threat of the Light’s worst punishment.

Nobody had ever dared attack the cages before.

I remembered that guy at the club who had told me we might have something to celebrate soon. Was this what he had meant? Had somebody planned this?

Why had he thought I would know?

A shrill sound of laughter rang out, and the camera zoomed back up the hill, through the gates, to the bloodstained street.

There were people there, and one side of my brain just said, Yes, normal people. That’s what people look like, and the other side of my mind, the side accustomed to the Light, said that they were gaunt scarecrows. Food had to be brought in past the walls, and the Dark city was never given quite enough. I’d been overwhelmed by the lunatic abundance of food in the Light city when I’d first arrived, but I hadn’t realized how used I had become to the Light citizens, smug and sleek as housecats.

There were people laughing, dancing, people openly wearing the black and scarlet of the sans-merci. Dark magicians were on their knees, doing spells with the spilled blood. Ethan and Jim would not be able to differentiate between Dark magicians—one would look the same as another to them—but I could see from the edges of their clothes under their dark robes that they were not among the Dark magicians who served the Light Council. They would not have been permitted to drain people often. They were holding more magic in their hands now than they had ever before touched in their lives.

My own hands were twisted together in my lap. They felt colder than my rings, shivering flesh under a weight of metal. My Aunt Leila, whom I loved and who was the one person I knew I could count on, was a Dark magician. I had only ever felt sorry for them, known that they suffered for something that was not their fault, and that they were starved of their power because people feared it.