Chapter 3 — The Feast of Beasts (2)

“Serena,” Kael said flatly. “We’re eating.”

“I know. The crows are always so proud of their little corpses.” She turned to me, and her amber eyes were smiling in a way that wasn't a smile at all. “Lila. May I call you Lila? Of course I may. I hear you’re the new sensation. The Handler who tamed the Wolf King. Tell me, darling — how does it feel, knowing your entire life now belongs to a beast who’s already buried a dozen like you?”

The table went silent.

Kael’s hand, on the table, curled.

“A dozen?” I said, before he could speak, because I was not a diplomat and I was not going to let a fox who probably moisturizes with lies out-sass me at my own debut. “That’s a lot of funerals. You must know the caterers personally.”

Her eyes flickered. Sharpened.

“Funny,” she said. “That’s what the last one said. Before she stopped being funny. Before she stopped being anything at all.”

I felt the bond surge — Kael’s rage, hot and immediate, roaring toward the surface — and my own power rose to meet it, the way it had in the Hollow, and I realized I was doing it again: reaching for him without meaning to, calming him without being asked, because my stupid body thought his storm was my job.

“That’s enough,” I said — to both of them, to myself, to the whole ridiculous night — and I put my hand on Kael’s fist, right there at the table, in front of every clan lord and the fox who hated me.

The rage in him went quiet.

Not pushed down. Quiet. Like a hand on a held breath.

Serena’s eyes went wide.

She looked at my hand on his fist. She looked at his face — at the Wolf King, the terror of the Hollow, sitting still as stone because a human girl had her palm on his knuckles. And something ugly moved behind her amber eyes.

“Well,” she said, and her voice was silk over a blade. “Aren’t you special.”

“I am,” I said, and I didn’t let go of his hand. “That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? For everyone who wanted me to be ordinary.”

The fox left at the same speed she'd arrived — a storm with a destination. And the table stayed quiet until a waiter arrived with dessert, at which point Kael looked down at my hand on his fist, and said, in a voice I’d never heard from him:

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” I said. “I did it anyway. Try not to make it weird.”

He didn’t say anything. But his hand turned over, under mine — just once, just a moment — and his fingers closed around my palm, warm and rough and steady, and neither of us acknowledged it.

We ate dessert holding hands under the table like we were sixteen.

Which, given that one of us was a thousand-year-old monster and the other was a girl who calmed riots with her fingertips, was possibly the most normal thing either of us had ever done.

The were-crow found me during the lull.

He was small and greasy and nervous, with feathers in places feathers should not be, and he materialized beside my elbow with the air of a man who owed money to everyone.

“Handler. Handler. It’s me. Corvin. I’m a messenger — one of the crows — I did your catering, you ate my Remembrance, you said it was delicious, you’re my favorite human, please don’t let the Wolf King eat me, I have a wife and seventeen chicks and a mortgage —”

“Corvin,” I said. “Breathe.”

He breathed. Then he leaned in, conspiratorially, and the smell of him (slightly fishy, mostly terrified) filled my nostrils.

“I got a message for you,” he whispered. “From the old one. The one in the dark. He says — he says to tell you the last Handler had your hands. The same blood. The same — the same everything. And he says the Wolf King knew it, and he let her die anyway, and if you don’t run, you’ll be next.”

My blood went cold.

“The old one,” I repeated. “Who’s the old one?”

Corvin looked around wildly, like the walls had ears — and in this city, they probably did. “The one the Wolf King locked away. His — his uncle. The one who was king before him. He’s the one who knows the secrets. He’s the one who —”

“Corvin.”

The voice came from behind me like a glacier cracking.

Kael.

He’d appeared at my shoulder, silent as smoke, and the look on his face — directed at the small, greasy, terrified were-crow — was the look of a man deciding whether a bird was worth the trouble of cleaning feathers out of his penthouse.

Corvin made a sound like a kettle. “Wolf King. Your Majesty. I was just — I was just telling the Handler how much I loved her outfit —”

“Go,” Kael said.

Corvin went. He left so fast he left a feather behind.

I stood there, in the middle of the feast, the bond humming between us, and I looked at the monster who had knelt for me in the street — the man who worried about the catering, who held my hand under the table, who had lied to me about the girl who died screaming.

“The last Handler,” I said. “Serena said she died. The crow said you knew her. That she had my hands, my blood, my everything.” My voice was steady, which was a lie, but it was my lie and I was keeping it. “How many of us have there been, Kael?”

He didn’t answer.

“How many girls with my hands have you watched die?”

The feast went on around us — the music, the laughter, the clan lords pretending not to watch the Wolf King and the Handler having their first argument in public. And Kael stood there, a thousand years tall, and said nothing.

Finally, he spoke.

“Come with me,” he said. “There’s something you should see. It’s not a story I can tell you over dessert.”

He led me out of the opera house, out of the feast, through the back corridors into the old dressing rooms — the ones that still smelled of dust and burned velvet. And at the end of a corridor that shouldn’t have been as long as it was, he opened a door that shouldn’t have existed.

Inside: a room with no windows, no furniture, and a single wall of carved stone, covered in names.

Dozens of them. Carved by hand, deep and furious, some of them so old the stone had worn smooth around the letters.