Steel's Edge (The Edge 4)

“I’m just resting,” Jack told him through clenched teeth.

“You’re done,” George said.

They were at an impasse. Jack wouldn’t admit defeat, and George, despite all his anger, wouldn’t dislocate his brother’s arm. He took a step forward to break them up, but Charlotte beat him to it.

She walked across the gym and crouched by the two teens. “That’s enough, George.” She gently put one hand on his fingers, gripping his brother’s arm. “I have something very important to tell both of you, and it won’t wait.”

“Is it good news?” Jack ground out.

Profound sadness reflected on Charlotte’s face. “No. It isn’t.”

George released Jack’s arm. The boys rolled to their feet.

“Come,” she said, linking one arm with George, the other with Jack, and led them both back into the room.

SIX

“MY name is Charlotte.” Dear Goddess, there were no right words. Charlotte took a deep breath. “Your grandmother might have mentioned me.”

“You rent our house,” Jack said.

“Yes.” She nodded.

George leaned forward. “Something happened to Grandmother.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” she answered anyway. “I’m a healer. Richard was injured and running away from slavers. He’d reached East Laporte and lost consciousness. Someone found him and brought him to me so I could mend his wounds.” She swallowed. “Your grandmother and I were very close. She was always kind to me. She was my friend.”

The words stuck in her throat. She forced them out, each sound cutting her from the inside. “She was with me when Kenny brought Richard to us. There was also another young woman and her sister with us at the time.”

Her chest felt heavy. An ache set in, rolling around her heart like a ball of lead. Both George and Jack were looking at her, and she couldn’t look away. Her voice sounded strange to her.

“I healed Richard. He had lost a lot of blood, so I left to buy some. While I was gone . . .”

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

“The slavers burned the house and murdered one of the young women and your grandmother,” Richard said. “Éléonore is dead.”

She saw the precise moment when the meaning of the words sank into George. He took a small step back. His face jerked, and his shoulders slumped forward, as if he had been stabbed and wanted to curl into a ball to protect the wound.

“No,” Jack said. “There are ward stones around the house. There are fucking rocks around the house! Nobody can get in.”

George’s eyes blazed with white. The glow built, spilling like tears of lightning onto his cheeks. He chanted something savage under his breath. She felt the magic swell around him. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck rose. So much power. So much power. It built on itself, like an avalanche.

“Stop!” she called. “George, no . . .”

The magic crested and broke. White light shot out of his eyes and mouth, shining from within him out of his every pore, setting his skin aglow. Éléonore had told her the boy was a necromancer. She’d said nothing about this.

His feet left the ground. He hung suspended a foot in the empty air. His magic smashed into Charlotte like a blast wave. She gasped and saw him through the lens of her own power. He glowed like a radiant beacon of light, his magic focused into a beam, searching the darkness.

His ghostly voice echoed through her mind.

“Mémère. Mémère, it’s me. Answer me. Please answer. Please, Mémère.”

The desperation in his words flooded her. The tears heated her eyes. He was reaching far, past the edge of the Weird, past the boundary. It was impossible, but he was doing it.

“Please, Mémère. I love you so much. Please answer.”

That voice, suffused with so much love and hope, pulled tears out of her. Hot moisture wet her cheeks. Someone put his arms around her, and she realized it was Richard. He steadied her. She knew she had to pull away, but she needed the warmth of his arms, the link to another human being, because she was adrift in the sea of George’s anguish, and it was tearing her apart.

“Mémère . . .” George’s ghostly voice pleaded.

The darkness didn’t answer.

“Please don’t leave me.

“Please . . .”

His glow dimmed. The magic let go, and George fell, dropping into a crouch. His legs gave way, and he sat clumsily on the boards.

“She’s gone,” he said, his voice so young.

She slipped away from Richard, onto the floor, and hugged him. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Jack’s skin tore open. A wild tumble of muscle and skin spilled out, and a huge lynx landed on the floor. The big cat snarled and ran out the door.

Richard jumped to his feet. “I’ll watch over him.” He took off after the lynx.

George stared at the floor, his gaze dull. No words would fix it. Nothing she said would make any difference, so she sat next to him and held him. It was all she could do.

* * *

RICHARD ran out the door. The boardwalk was empty. He’d paused for a precious second to grab a set of spare clothes from Barlo, and now Jack was gone. Changelings like Jack weren’t exactly welcome in society. Their minds worked differently from normal people’s. They had trouble understanding human relationships and rules of behavior, but they felt every slight deeply, and it often drove them to violence. The Dukedom of Louisiana murdered them at birth, while Adrianglia treated them as its dirty secret, turning them into soldiers in its prisonlike military schools.

Jack hadn’t been given up to the realm at birth, like most of his kind. He grew up in a loving family, which made allowances for his nature. Kelena wouldn’t be so kind. If he was spotted and identified, someone would try to kill him.

Richard turned, scanning the buildings. The boy was fast, especially on four legs, and wasn’t thinking clearly. Lynxes were tree cats; they pounced on their prey from the branches above. He would want to be someplace high, where he could be alone.

The warehouse across the canal was too low. The distant high-rises of the Business District were too far away and too populated. Where could he have gone?

To the right, the tall, pale tower of the nearest Kelena’s Tooth scraped the sky. Tall and isolated. A perfect hiding spot.

Richard jogged through the tangled labyrinth of the Cauldron, along the boardwalks to the edge of the water, then continued past it along the docks stretching into the ocean. The day was overcast, and the water mirrored the gray sky.

He had experienced plenty of loss in his life. His mother was the first to go, dead at twenty-eight of an aneurysm. He remembered the way she had looked in the coffin, a pale, bloodless imitation of herself. He’d wondered for an absurd moment if someone had replaced her with a doll. His father was next. Marissa. Then Aunt Murid and Erian . . .

He wished he could’ve spared George and Jack the same fate. Once again he was watching children suffer and unable to do anything about it.

The last dock ended. In the distance, waves broke against Kelena’s Teeth, splashing against the stone bases of the towers. The tide was low, and crests of sand surfaced here and there. Richard took a chance and jumped. The water came to his knees.

He waded through to the nearest stretch of sand, heading toward the closest tower. A trail of paw prints pockmarked the sand. Cat footsteps, no claws. The trail led to the tower.

Kelena’s Teeth had keepers, who monitored the weather and activated magical defenses when storms came. They stood watch in shifts inside the towers. Richard broke into a run, moving at full speed, devouring the sand in long strides.

Ahead, a stone block slid aside in the tower wall, about twenty feet above the water. More stones slid from the walls, winding in a spiral around the tower, leading down. A man ran out, his eyes wild, and sprinted down the newly formed stairs.

Richard reached the tower. Finally.

The keeper splashed through the water toward him. “There’s a changeling in the tower!”

Richard reached into his pants and pulled out a half doubloon. “There is no changeling.”

“I saw him!” The older man waved his arms. “A huge cat as big as a horse!”

A horse was pushing it. A pony at best. Richard took the man’s hand, put the coin into it, and looked into his eyes. “There is no changeling,” he repeated slowly.

Understanding dawned in the man’s eyes. “I didn’t see anything.”

“That’s right. I’ll need to borrow your tower for a few minutes, then I’ll leave, and it will be safe for you to go in.”

Richard started up the stairs.

“If he breaks anything, you’ll pay for it!” the keeper yelled. “And don’t touch anything either!”

Richard clambered up the stones that formed the stairs and ducked into the entrance. It was amazing how quickly fear subsided when gold became involved.

A spiral staircase wound about the stone inner core of the tower, illuminated by the light from many windows. He climbed the steps, higher and higher, until he saw a gaping door at the end of the stairway.

A raw, pain-filled sound came from upstairs. It wasn’t a feline snarl or any other sound one would expect a lynx to make. Halfway between a howl and a cry, gut-wrenching and brutal, it vibrated through the air. If Richard had hackles, they would’ve risen in response.

Richard sat down. There was no need to go in. The boy required privacy.

Another cry followed, wordless and filled with grief and guilt.

Richard leaned his back against the wall. Jack and he, they were both men, and men had unspoken rules.

Many years had passed since his father died, and for many of these years his aunt Murid had taken care of him and Kaldar. He was almost an adult when she took him in, but he remembered how much it hurt. He felt abandoned, terrified, guilty for not being there, but the only emotion the rules allowed him to display was anger, and so he raged like a lunatic. Aunt Murid handled his pointless fury with the same expertise she’d handled Kaldar’s obsessive stealing. Both of them had gone out of their way to do dumb shit just to remind themselves they were alive. But even in their darkest moments, both of them knew they were loved. They had a home. It wasn’t the same as the one before, but they were grateful for it.