Chapter 4 · The House of Teeth (2)

We were in the backseat of a cab, moving, and I was shaking, and the cold thing in my chest was throbbing like a toothache, and I looked at Kael, and I said:

"We're going to need to talk about this."

"Yes."

"Like, a lot."

"Yes."

"Also." I looked down at myself. I was still wearing my apron. I had a coffee stain on my hip. My hands were scraped. I had not packed anything. "I left my phone on the kitchen counter."

Kael closed his eyes.

He opened them.

He said, very carefully, "Lynn. We may have bigger problems than your phone."

"I also left my leftover takeout. The cold pizza. I was going to eat that for breakfast."

"The pizza —"

"It was a very good pizza, Kael. I paid nine dollars for it."

He stared at me.

Then he laughed. He laughed like I had punched him in the chest. He laughed until he was bent over, forehead against the back of the front seat, shoulders shaking, and the gold went out of his eyes, and he looked — for the first time all night — like a man who had not slept in a hundred years and was finally starting to understand that the world was not going to end in the next sixty seconds.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at the pizza. I'm laughing at —" He waved a hand at the whole situation. "At you. At this. At the fact that the Keeper of the Shroud just watched her apartment get torn apart by demons and the first thing she mourns is leftover pizza."

"It was *pepperoni.*"

"I will buy you every pizza in the world. I will buy you a city that makes pizza. I will —" He stopped. He looked at me, and the laughter died in his throat, and he reached across the seat and took my hand, and his palm was warm and his fingers were shaking. "Lynn. I need you to listen to me. What you did tonight — that was the first time you did it on purpose. That was the first time you chose the ember."

"I noticed. It was very energetic. It also hurt. My chest feels like I swallowed a lighter."

"That's the seal. It's not used to being opened." He looked out the window. The city was moving past us, streetlights and rain and the normal Harrowgate night, and for a second he looked like he was saying goodbye to it. "We can't go back."

"I gathered."

"Not the apartment. Not the café. Not Harrowgate." He turned back to me. "They know you're here now. They tasted you. Every shadow thing within a hundred miles is going to be able to smell you by morning."

"Smell me."

"You're a lighthouse, Lynn. You've always been a lighthouse. You just turned the light on."

I stared at him.

I thought about Mr. Ashworth, wiping down a frozen coffee cup. I thought about Mrs. Kowalski closing her door. I thought about Mia, open-mouthed in the café. I thought about my lease, my couch, my cold pizza, my security deposit, my whole entire very normal life, which I had apparently traded for a road trip with a man whose eyes turned gold.

"Where are we going, then?" I said.

"North." He said it like it was obvious. "Out of the city. Away from the Shroud's thinnest places. There's a road — there's a place, where the mortal world and the other side almost touch. It's safe. It's neutral. No one from either side can reach us there, not yet. We lay low. We figure out how to wake you up without breaking you."

"And after that?"

"After that," he said, "I'm going to tell you the truth. All of it. The hundred years. The woman you were. The war. The —" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "The reason I couldn't let you die again."

The cab hit a pothole. The streetlight swept across his face.

He looked old.

Not the thirty-something handsome old he'd been playing. *Old.* The kind of old that lives in bones. The kind of old that has watched empires rise and fall and still has to wake up in the morning.

"Kael."

"Yeah."

"I'm just a regular human, mind your own business." I said it automatically. I'd said it a hundred times. I said it when the bus was late, when a guy wouldn't take a hint, when my professor wanted me to stay after class. "I say that a lot. It's my thing."

"I know."

"Tonight, though." I looked out the window. The rain was coming back. "Tonight, I don't think I get to say that anymore."

He didn't answer. He just held my hand.

The cab took us north, out of Harrowgate, past the city limits sign, past the last 24-hour gas station, past the world I had known for twenty-two years. I watched it all go. I watched the neon signs thin out, the streetlights space out, the rain get colder.

Somewhere behind us, my apartment was still burning. Somewhere behind us, Mr. Ashworth was probably standing in the ruins of the Hollow Bean, wiping porcelain off the counter, with that old, patient, knowing smile.

I hoped he was okay.

I hoped Mrs. Kowalski's baking competition was still going.

I hoped the pizza was at least cremated respectfully.

The cold thing in my chest settled. It didn't go away — it never went away — but it stopped burning, and it stopped throbbing, and it sat down in my ribs like a traveler who has finally found a road that goes somewhere.

We had a long drive ahead of us.

I had a lot of questions.

I had a feeling, deep down, that by the time we got answers, I was going to wish I'd stayed behind and minded my own business.