Chapter 3. The Death List (2)

She cried for the six-year-old girl who had been told be strong, be still, be grateful — and who had grown up believing that strength was armor, when it was really just sugar, and underneath the sugar was an entire world waiting for her to turn twenty-one and burn herself down to keep their peace.She cried until her eyes were swollen and the page was wrinkled in her fist. She cried for herself, too, which she had not expected — for the girl in braids who had spent six years being told to be brave, and fourteen more years being brave, and who had only just found out that bravery was the thing they were harvesting.Then she wiped her face, folded the page carefully, put it inside her jacket, and stood up.Four thirty in the morning. Lynn pushed open the library's side door, stepped into the fog —and found five people waiting for her.Black clothes. Silver-gray masks. At the center of each mask, a blood-red bat crest. They stood under the streetlight like statues that had crawled out of the ground, and the one in front spoke in a voice like a saw blade."The anchor has left its cage. Conclave orders: capture alive. Do not damage the core."Lynn's gold light snapped to her fingers. She knew, with the clarity of a person who has done the math, that she could not fight five adult blood kin. She had been awake for three days. Her power came and went like a faucet with a loose handle.But she had her sister's page against her chest, and somehow, that made her not afraid."Your Conclave," she said, and her voice came out cold and clear, "have anything to do with my sister's death?"The leader did not answer. He raised his hand. Five shadows lunged at her —and every streetlight on the block went out at once.The dark came down like a hand. Lynn heard wet sounds, and bone sounds, and screams that were too short to finish. She blinked, and the lights came back, and the five blood kin were on the ground, each with a blade of dark light through the chest, dissolving into ash.Behind her, a voice said, with deep, theatrical exhaustion: "Five minions at four in the morning. No overtime. Villains are so stingy these days."Lynn turned. Kael Voss leaned against a pillar, black coat moving in a wind that didn't exist, turning a bloodstained silver mask in one hand like a man who had just come from a very disappointing club."You followed me," she said."I protect my investment." He dropped the mask. "You're a signed contract, tenant girl.""The contract doesn't say anything about —""Page thirty-eight, line four, supplementary clause: the landlord is obligated to ensure the property is not chewed through by dark-domain hounds. Your life is part of the floor."Lynn opened her mouth to argue, and stopped.Because she could see it. On the left side of his coat, a dark patch was spreading — his own blood.

The leader had gotten a blade in before he died, silver-edged, catching Kael across the ribs. The wound was deep, and the silver around its edges had gone black with poison."You're hurt," she said, and took a step toward him before she could think about it."It's nothing.""Don't move."She did not plan what happened next. Her hand came up, and the gold light — for the first time since this whole nightmare began — did not attack. It reached, gently, uncertainly, and settled over the wound like water finding sand.Holy light on vampire flesh. The Covenant had a thousand years of doctrine about exactly this. It should have hissed. It should have burned him down to ash where he stood.The light sank into the wound like it was coming home. The gash knitted. The poison leached out in black threads. The color came back to his face — from translucent white to merely very pale.They both stared at her hand."Holy light," Lynn said, and her voice was very small. "It doesn't… burn you?"Kael looked at the healed wound. Then at her. The silence stretched so long the streetlight flickered twice."Interesting," he said, and his voice was hoarse."This is wrong." Lynn's hands were shaking. "The Covenant says guardian light purifies all darkness. A blood kin touching it dies. Why — why are you different?"Kael looked at her for a long moment. "Maybe," he said, very quietly, "the rules were wrong from the start."Footsteps in the distance. The Covenant's night patrol, doing its rounds.Kael's hand closed around her wrist. The dark opened under their feet like a door, and Lynn fell through it — cold, weightless, one heartbeat of nothing — and landed on the carpet of her own living room, with Kael half-collapsed beside her.They lay there, breathing, side by side, staring at her ceiling."I found the records," Lynn said, to the ceiling. "Every guardian. Martyr. Exhausted. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. My sister died three days before her records say she died. There's a page in her handwriting. She says a man told her the truth, and they took her four days later."Kael was silent.Lynn turned her head to look at him. His profile was sharp against the window light, and his face told her nothing."Who are you?" she asked. "Why do you know my sister? Why doesn't my light burn you? Why does the heir of the Shadowblood make pancakes for a guardian he met two days ago?"Kael closed his eyes. The silence was long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer.Then he said: "You were six. You lost your front tooth in the cemetery behind St. Agnes's. You sat under the crooked tree and cried so hard the whole garden could hear you."Lynn's breath stopped."A little boy in black clothes came by. He gave you a rose. A black one. You told him you wanted a Band-Aid, not a flower. He said he didn't have a Band-Aid, but he could shield you from blood for the rest of your life.

You told him he was scary, threw the rose at his face, and ran."He opened his eyes and looked at her."That little boy has been waiting fourteen years to collect that tooth's debt."Lynn stared at him. At this man who had lived for nearly a century, heir to a throne of monsters, standing in her living room with the blood of five assassins drying on his coat, looking at her with something patient and ancient and almost unbearably soft.She thought of the page in her jacket. I didn't get to ask his name. They came for me before I could."So you — you've been watching me. Protecting me. Because —""Because nothing." He said it quietly, with a finality that closed the subject like a door. "You guard the world. I guard you. That's all."The room was very quiet. The moonlight pooled on the carpet between them, on the exact distance that was too close and not close enough. Lynn's eyes burned, and one traitor tear escaped and hit her knee. She turned her head away, fast, to hide it.He didn't say anything. He simply reached over, and took the wrinkled page she was still clutching — her sister's last words — and folded it, carefully, and put it back in her jacket pocket."Your name's on the list too," he said. "Either run. Or trust me."Lynn stared at the ceiling for a long, long time."What if," she said, at last, "I pick neither?"Kael looked at her. And very slowly, the corner of his mouth curved — the first real smile she had seen from him, small and crooked and entirely human."Then I'll tear up the list."She laughed. It came out half a sob. He didn't look away, and she didn't, and outside the window the fog rolled past the moon, and somewhere in the city a rift breathed.That night, Lynn dreamed of a crooked tree, a black rose, and a boy with red eyes who said: I'll shield you from blood for the rest of your life.When she woke, her phone was glowing on the nightstand.Five oh seven AM. Unknown number."Blueberry pancakes. Microwave thirty seconds. From today, you're mine to manage. —K"Lynn stared at it for a long moment. Then she typed, with one thumb, still half-asleep:"Pancakes are yours to manage. I manage myself."The reply came before she could put the phone down."Deal. You manage yourself. Your business is mine to manage."She looked at the words until her eyes went blurry. Then she turned her face into the pillow, and said, muffled, with great feeling: "Psycho."And then she smiled.