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“Everything go OK?” Laurel asked as she ducked in, keeping her voice low.

  “If by OK you mean uneventful, then yes,” Tamani replied, looking down at her with a warmth in his eyes that she hadn’t seen since they captured Yuki. She wondered what Tamani and Chelsea had talked about and if there was any way to request they talk about it more often.

  “I guess that’s OK,” Laurel replied, dropping her backpack on the floor. But she knew they were all hoping something would happen. It had now been almost eight hours since they’d first captured Yuki. It felt too long – and Klea did not have a reputation for tardiness.

  Chelsea was sitting in a chair near Tamani, looking tired – still in her rumpled dress – but sporting a smile. Tamani had lost his bow tie, shoes, and jacket – though because of Yuki, not his gloves – and his shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest. The two of them looked like they had been at an all-night party rather than sentry duty.

  The sound of running water reached her ears and Laurel realised Shar must be taking a shower. Six months ago such mundane, human-like behaviour from the captain might have made her smile. Instead, every moment she spent eyeing the door to Tamani’s room ratcheted up the tension in her neck and shoulders. How could she face him again, knowing what he had done to her mother?

  “I’ll stay with you when he comes out,” Tamani said, his breath tickling her ear. She hadn’t even noticed he’d stepped so close.

  Laurel shook her head. “You need sleep too.”

  “I dozed here and there. Trust me,” he said, his fingers soft on her shoulders, “I’m fine.”

  “OK,” Laurel whispered, feeling inordinately better that he would be with her.

  They both turned as Shar emerged from the bedroom, his hair still damp. He paused when he saw Laurel but met her gaze evenly before she lost her nerve and looked down at the floor.

  “Anything happen in the past five minutes?” Shar asked, placing his hands on his hips as he stepped into the front room of the apartment.

  “Not a thing,” Tamani said, mirroring Shar’s posture. Laurel suppressed a smile at how reflexively – and likely unconsciously – Tamani emulated his mentor.

  Shar turned and looked at Yuki with a strangely neutral expression. Laurel wasn’t sure how to read him at all. At times he seemed practically emotionless. She knew there was more to him than that – Tamani had told her stories, stories that made the both of them laugh to tears. But the faerie now observing his prisoner – so focused, so unaffected – made her question how anyone could get close to him.

  “How much longer do we wait?” Tamani asked. “I’m starting to wonder if we were right the first time; that Yuki is nothing more than a distraction and Klea is letting her sit while she does . . . whatever it is she’s planning to do.”

  “Unless Klea’s plans threaten the gate, or Laurel, they are of no concern to us. We have Laurel under constant guard, and to truly threaten the gate, Klea needs her,” Shar said, pointing – almost accusingly – at Yuki. “So until she comes to retrieve Yuki, we can assume the gate is safe. As safe as it ever is,” he amended. “Our place is here, doing just what we’re doing now.”

  “Do you think we should tell Jamison?” Laurel asked.

  “No,” Tamani and Shar said in unison.

  Yuki looked up at them with a strange, focused expression.

  “Why?” Laurel insisted. “It seems like he, of all fae, should know.”

  “Come with me,” Shar said, turning back toward the apartment’s lone bedroom. “Watch the Bender for a few minutes, please, Tam.”

  Laurel’s throat tightened. She felt the soft fabric of Tamani’s glove as his hand slipped into hers.

  “I’ll come stand in the doorway if it’ll make you feel better,” he whispered.

  But Laurel shook her head, swallowing her anger as best she could. “I’m okay,” she said, willing it to be true. “He’s still the same Shar he’s always been, right?”

  Tamani nodded and squeezed her hand before letting it slide from his fingers.

  “I’m going to go,” Chelsea said wearily, before Laurel could follow Shar.

  “Thanks,” Laurel said, hugging her friend. “The house is unlocked.” One bonus of having so many sentries surrounding her house was that Laurel never bothered to lock her doors anymore. “Try not to wake my parents. Trust me; you don’t want to have to explain all this to them.” She swallowed. The inevitable explanation would be her task, soon enough.

  Chelsea nodded, stifled a yawn, and headed out the front door; Tamani bolted and chained it behind her.

  Laurel walked into Tamani’s bedroom, not bothering to flip on the light. The sun was halfway over the horizon now, casting a purplish glow through the curtainless window. It illuminated a sparse room where a single wooden chair draped with various articles of clothing sat beside a double bed with a mussed blanket on it. Laurel stared; it was Tamani’s bed. It was strange to think that this was the first time she had seen it. The first time she had been in his room at all.

  “Please close the door.”

  Laurel did, meeting Tamani’s eyes for an instant before the door shut between them.

  “We can’t tell the other sentries what we’ve learned about Yuki, and we cannot go to Jamison,” Shar said. He stood with his face close to hers, his arms crossed over his chest and his voice barely loud enough for her to hear. “For several reasons, but the main one is that we can’t risk going anywhere near the gate. The only thing standing between Yuki and Avalon is that she does not know its exact location. As soon as she does, everything is over.”

  “But Klea worked with Barnes. She must have. She’s got to know where the land is already.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Shar said brusquely. “Short of cutting down that entire forest, the only hope she and Yuki have of accessing the gate is if they know its precise location and how it’s disguised.”

  “But we could send someone. Aaron, or Silve, or—”

  “And if they’re followed? That could be the reason Klea has waited this long to rescue her protégée. She could be waiting for us to go for help.”

  “And what if she never shows up?” Laurel snapped. “We can’t keep Yuki chained to that chair forever, Shar!”

  Shar drew back.

  “Sorry,” Laurel muttered. She hadn’t meant to speak so sharply.

  “No, it’s fine,” Shar said, sounding bemused. “You’re right. But it may not matter. As far as I’m concerned, the only way this ends well is if we keep Yuki as far from the gate as possible.”

  “So we just sit round?”

  “We’ve come to a fork in the branch. Right now, all we have is one Winter faerie and a lot of strong suspicions. Say we go to Avalon. Assuming Klea doesn’t know where the gate is, we might lead her to it. If she does know, she may have set traps along our path. Either way, we stand to lose a lot more than we stand to gain. And even if we make it to Avalon safely, what then? How will you feel if Queen Marion orders us to execute Yuki?”

  Laurel swallowed.

  “Believe it or not, that’s probably the best we could hope for,” Shar said grimly. “Our other choice is to wait here,” he continued. “The circle will hold as long as it’s unbroken, but make no mistake, it is a fragile thing. One wrong step and Yuki is unleashed on us all. The only way to guarantee our safety is to put a knife in Yuki right now.”

  “What? No!” Laurel couldn’t keep the panic from her voice.

  “You’re starting to see the problem,” Shar said, his voice just a touch softer. “Yuki is clearly dangerous, but I don’t think she’s done anything worthy of death. Not yet, anyway. But no matter what we do, at some point it will almost certainly come down to us, or her. The only hope I have is that Klea does need Yuki, and that she will come to rescue her. And if we can just last long enough – if we can find some way to neutralise Klea here—”

  “Then we confirm our suspicions, the gate stays safe, and nobody has to die,” Laurel finished in a near monotone. She d
idn’t like it, but she didn’t have any better ideas. They were only three faeries and two humans trying to stand against Klea and whatever forces she had at her disposal. What would they face? A dozen trolls? A hundred? More faeries?

  “Do you understand now?”

  Laurel nodded, half wishing she didn’t. She had to grudgingly admit that Shar’s plan was, in all likelihood, the best one. For now. Without a word, she turned and left the room, Shar close behind.

  “So . . . how does this work?” she asked, surveying the apartment and trying her best not to look directly at Yuki.

  “We just sit. Or stand. Whatever you want,” Tamani said. “Shar and I watch the door and the windows. I try to ask her questions, but that generally goes nowhere.” He shrugged, the gesture seeming to be directed at Shar more than Laurel. “It’s pretty boring, to tell the truth.”

  Yuki snorted, but none of them acknowledged her.

  An electronic ding! sounded from Tamani’s bedroom, followed by a murmured exclamation from Shar.

  “Beastly, frost-blighted—”

  Laurel smirked; Shar detested mobile phones, and every time one went off, he swore at it. Quite creatively, most of the time. His dark mutterings were swallowed by the bedroom as he went to retrieve his “human trinket” from where he had almost certainly accidentally-misplaced-it-on-purpose.

  A knock sounded at the door and Tamani sprang to his feet. “Chelsea probably forgot her keys again.”

  Shar stepped out of the bedroom carrying his phone. “It says Silve’s name. What does “text two” mean?”

  Tamani pressed his eye to the peephole.

  “It means you have two messages—” Laurel began.

  But Shar’s wide eyes were fixed on the back window of the apartment. “Don’t!” he shouted, turning back to Tamani.

  With a crack of gunfire, the door exploded.

  The blast threw Tamani to the floor and shattered the security chain with a metallic zing. As Laurel spun from the stinging spray of debris, she saw the back of the apartment burst apart. Window glass and drywall skittered across the floor as the most massive troll Laurel had ever seen came crashing through – a lower troll, like the one she’d seen chained in Barnes’s hideout. The misshapen, pale monstrosity thrashed about in an attempt to dislodge Aaron, who clung to the knives he’d embedded in its shoulders. The struggling pair rolled further into the kitchen, disappearing from sight.

  As she turned back to Tamani, Laurel was horrified to see a bouquet of roses arcing through the air from the front door, shedding crimson petals like drops of blood as it floated almost leisurely toward Yuki’s prison. The instant stretched to eternity as Laurel realised that in about half a second the roses were going to breach the salt circle, Yuki was going to be free, and if Shar was to be believed, there was a good chance she would kill them all.

  A diamond-bladed knife cut through the air, pinning the paper-wrapped bouquet to the wall not an arm’s length from the salt barrier that was keeping them all alive. Shar was already pulling another blade from a sheath at his waist as Yuki screamed in frustration and Laurel turned to the wrecked front door and the figure framed in it.

  “Callista!” Shar exclaimed as Klea raised her face into the light.

  A shadow of recognition passed over Klea’s face and she looked at Shar, though her guns were pointed squarely at Tamani and Laurel. “Captain! Serendipitous.”

  “I watched you die fifty years ago,” Shar said, disbelief heavy in his words. And then, “You’re Klea.”

  “Shar!” Aaron stumbled in from the kitchen, flecked with debris and covered in troll blood. His left arm hung limp at his side. “There’s more on the way; we tried to hold them back—”

  Horror froze his features as his eyes lit on Yuki’s rumpled blossom. “Goddess of Earth and Sky. Is that—?”

  But the troll lunged at him from behind, and the two went crashing through another wall.

  “I told you to cut that damn thing off,” Klea snapped at Yuki. The gun in Klea’s hand shook – almost certainly with anger rather than fear – but Laurel didn’t dare move. “Now look what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  Klea raised a defensive hand as Shar whipped another knife through the air. The blade knocked away one of her guns with a clang, but she turned the other at Shar and fired. Its sharp retort echoed in Laurel’s ears and Shar staggered back, clutching his shoulder and slumping against the wall.

  Seizing the moment, Tamani sprang at Klea, but she sidestepped his lunge and caught his wrist in her free hand, flipping him in the air and slamming him to the floor.

  “Tam!” Shar’s voice was strained as he struggled to stand.

  But Tamani was already back on his feet, a long silver knife in his hand; Laurel hadn’t even seen him draw it. Klea lunged at him with liquid speed, her movements so graceful they might have been a dance. She wove through Tamani’s swipes untouched, then whipped the butt of her pistol across his face, leaving a ragged gash along his cheek. She landed another blow against his wrist and Tamani’s knife seemed to leap into her hand as if of its own volition.

  Tamani retreated two steps, evading most of Klea’s jabs, but with nothing to parry her blows his shirt was soon a mess of ribbons, wet with sap from the shallow cuts accumulating on his arms and chest.

  As Laurel looked for an opportunity to dive for Klea’s dropped gun, something at the corner of her vision fluttered on ruby wings. With a sick twisting in her core she realised a petal had fallen from the skewered bouquet – drifting like a – feather, its circuitous route was a ballet of twists and twirls in the breeze that wafted through the apartment. In moments it would enter the circle and then, under Yuki’s power, the soft, innocent bit of flower would become a deadly weapon.

  And Laurel was too far away – she’d never reach it in time.

  “Shar!” she called, but he was between Klea and Tamani, wielding a chair as an improvised shield.

  “Get her out of here!” Shar shouted, a kick from Klea twisting the chair from his grip. ’Now!”

  The world spun before Laurel’s eyes as Tamani’s arm clenched around her waist – rolling her straight to the destroyed wall – and then they were falling. A scream escaped her lips but was cut off as they hit the ground and the air was pushed out of her chest. They tumbled together along the ground and when they came to a stop, for a moment it was all Laurel could do to look up breathlessly at the hole Aaron’s troll had made in the wall, three metres above them.

  “Come on,” Tamani said, pulling Laurel to her feet before her head had completely stopped spinning. She followed him almost blindly, her hand tight in his as he wound around the back of the apartment building.

  They paused when the squeal of splintering wood filled the air, accompanied by a sudden rush of wind. “Circle’s broken,” Tamani growled. The sound continued as they rounded the corner of the building, where Tamani immediately back-stepped, flattening Laurel against the wall. “It’s crawling with trolls out front,” he whispered, his mouth so close to her ear his lips brushed her skin. “We can’t get to my car; we’re going to have to run. You ready?”

  Laurel nodded, the sound of snarling trolls reaching her ears over the deafening storm of splintering wood. Tamani gripped her hand tighter and pulled her along with him. She tried to look back, but Tamani stopped her with a finger on her chin and pointed her gaze forwards again. “Don’t,” he said softly, sprinting across the open ground, slowing only slightly once they reached the relative safety of the trees.

  “Will Shar be all right?” Laurel asked, her voice shaking as they ran through woods. Tamani was loping ungracefully, helping her along with one hand, the other clutched at his side.

  “He’ll handle Klea,” said Tamani. “We need to get you to safety.”

  “Why did he call her Callista?” Laurel asked through heaving breaths. Nothing that had happened in the last few minutes made any sense to her.

  “That’s the name he knew her by,” Tamani answered. “Call
ista’s practically a legend among sentries. She was an Academy-trained Mixer. Exiled before you even sprouted. She was supposed to have died in a fire. On Shar’s watch, back in Japan.”

  “But she faked it?”

  “Apparently. Must have done a good job, too. Shar was thorough.”

  “What was she exiled for?” Laurel gasped.

  Tamani’s words were shaky as he picked his way through the trees and Laurel struggled to catch them. “Shar once told me she experimented with unnatural magic, faerie poisons . . . botanical weapons, basically.”

  Hadn’t Katya told her, two summers ago, about a faerie who had taken things too far? It must be her – Laurel’s stomach knotted at the thought of an Academy-trained Mixer who created poisons so evil she’d been exiled for it. Klea was scary enough without magic.

  They ran silently for a few minutes, finally finding the faint path Laurel knew Tamani must have taken a hundred times over the last few months.

  “Are you sure he’ll be OK?” Laurel asked.

  Tamani hesitated. “Shar is . . . a master Enticer. Like the Pied Piper I told you about a few weeks ago. He can control humans from a distance, and his control is far greater than most Ticers. Way better than mine,” he added quietly. “He – he can use them. To help him fight her.”

  “So he’s going to . . . control them?” Laurel asked, not quite understanding.

  “Let’s just say that fighting Shar in a building full of humans is a very, very bad idea.”

  Sacrifices, Laurel realised. Human barriers to lie in Klea’s path, or soldiers attacking against their will. She swallowed and tried not to dwell on that, concentrating on not tripping as Tamani continued to run almost too fast for her to keep up.

  Soon she started recognising the trees – they were nearing the back of her house. As he ran into the yard Tamani let out a high-pitched, warbling whistle. Aaron’s second-in-command, a tall, dark-skinned faerie named Silve, came bursting from the tree line.

  “Tam, they’re everywhere!”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Tamani replied, gasping for air.