“What’s this?” he grunted.
Shelby could see that his hands were chapped and red from the cold as they tugged roughly on the horses’ reins to slow them. The rail-thin animals neighed, coming to a stop just short of Miles’s bright blue baseball cap.
“No, no, no,” Shelby muttered under her breath. Miles’s face had gone pale.
The man shimmied fatly off the bench, his boots landing in the thick mud. He walked toward Miles’s hat, bent down with another grunt, and swooped it up in the blink of an eye.
Shelby heard Miles swallow hard.
A quick swipe against the man’s already filthy trousers and the cap was halfway clean. Without a word, he turned and mounted the cart’s bench again, tucking the hat inside the tarp behind him.
Shelby looked down at herself and her green hoodie. She tried to imagine this man’s reaction if she were to pop out from behind a tree wearing weird clothes from the future and try to take back his prize. It was not a calming idea.
In the time it had taken Shelby to chicken out, the man had tugged on the reins; the cart started rolling to town again, and his song entered its twelfth off-key round.
Another thing Shelby had screwed up. “Oh, Miles. I’m sorry.”
“Now we definitely have to follow him,” Miles said, a little desperate.
“Really?” Shelby asked. “It’s just a hat.”
But then she looked at Miles. She still wasn’t used to seeing his face. The cheeks Shelby used to think of as babyish seemed stronger, more angular, and his irises were speckled with a new intensity. She could tell by his crestfallen expression that it definitely wasn’t “just a hat” to him. Whether it held special memories or was simply a good-luck talisman, she didn’t know. But she would do anything to get that look off his face.
“Okay,” she blurted out. “Let’s go get it.”
Before Shelby knew what was happening, Miles had slipped his hand through hers. It felt strong and assured and a little impulsive—and then he tugged her toward the road. “Come on!” She resisted for an instant, but then her eyes accidentally locked with Miles’s, and they were super-crazy blue, and Shelby felt a wave of exhilaration kick in.
Then they were running down a snow-dotted medieval road, moving past crop fields that were dead for the winter, covered in a sleek sheet of white that draped the trees and spotted the dirt road. They were heading toward a walled city with towering black spires and a narrow, moated entry. Hand in hand, pink-cheeked, chapped-lipped, laughing for no reason Shelby could ever have put into words—laughing so hard she nearly forgot what they were about to do. But then, when Miles called out, “Jump!”—something snapped into place and she did.
For a moment, it almost felt like she was flying.
A knotty log formed the back ledge of the cart, barely wide enough to balance on. Their feet skimmed it, landing there by sheer, graceless luck—
For a moment. Then the cart hit a rut and rattled fiercely, and Miles’s foot slipped and Shelby lost her grip on the canvas tarp. Her fingers slipped and her body flailed and she and Miles were flung backward, sailing downward, into the mud.
Splash.
Shelby grunted. Her rib cage throbbed. She wiped the cold mud from her eyes and spat out a mouthful of the dingy stuff. She looked up at the cart growing smaller in the distance. Miles’s hat was gone.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
He wiped his face with the hem of his T-shirt. “Yeah. You?” When she nodded, he grinned. “Do Francesca’s face if she found out where we were right now.” Miles’s command sounded cheerful, but Shelby knew that inside he was gutted.
Still, she would play along. Shelby loved to impersonate their stately Shoreline teacher. She rolled out of the puddle, propped herself on her elbows, stuck out her chest, and pinched up her nose. “And I suppose you’re going to deny that you were purposely attempting to disgrace Shoreline’s legacy? I’m absolutely loath to imagine what the faaancypants board of directors will say. And have I mentioned that I broke a nail on an Announcer’s edge trying to track you two down—”
“Now, now, Frankie.” Miles helped Shelby up from the mud as he deepened his voice to do his best impersonation of Steven, Francesca’s slightly more relaxed demon husband. “Let’s not be too hard on the Nephilim. A single semester of scrubbing toilets really should teach them their lesson. After all, their mistake began with noble intentions.”
Noble intentions. Finding Luce.
Shelby swallowed, feeling a somberness settle over her. They’d been a team, the three of them. Teams stuck together.
“We didn’t give up on her,” Miles said softly. “You heard what Daniel said. He is the only one who can find her.”
“You think he’s found her yet?”
“I hope so. He said he would. But—”
“But what?” Shelby asked.
Miles paused. “Luce was pretty mad when she left everyone in the backyard. I hope that whenever Daniel finds her, she forgives him.”
Shelby stared at mud-slicked Miles, knowing how much he had—at one point—truly cared about Luce. Admittedly, Shelby hadn’t ever felt that way about anyone. In fact, she was legendary for choosing the absolute worst guys to date. Phil? Come on! If she hadn’t fallen for him, the Outcasts wouldn’t have tracked Luce down and she wouldn’t have had to jump through the Announcer, and Miles and Shelby wouldn’t be stuck here right now. Covered in mud.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was: Shelby was amazed that Miles wasn’t more bitter about seeing Luce in mega-love with someone else. But he wasn’t. That was Miles.
“She’ll forgive him,” Shelby finally said. “If someone loved me enough to dive through multiple millennia just to find me, I’d get over myself.”
“Oh, that’s all it would take?” Miles elbowed her.
On impulse, she swatted his stomach with the back of her hand. It was the way she and her mom teased each other, like best friends or something. But Shelby was usually a lot more reserved with people outside her nuclear family. Weird.
“Hey.” Miles interrupted her thoughts. “Right now you and I need to focus on getting to town, finding an angel who can help us, and making our way home.”
And getting that hat in the meantime, Shelby added inside her head as she and Miles broke into a jog, following the cart toward the city.
The tavern stood about a mile outside the city walls, the lone establishment in a large field. It was a small wooden structure with a swinging sign of weathered wood, and big barrels of ale lined up against its walls.
Shelby and Miles had jogged past hundreds of trees stripped of their leaves by the cold, and melting patches of muddy snow on the pocked, winding road to the city. There really wasn’t all that much to see. In fact, they had even lost sight of the cart after Shelby got a stitch in her side and had to slow down, but now, serendipitously, they spotted it parked outside the tavern.
“That’s our guy,” Shelby said under her breath. “He probably stopped in for a drink. Sucker. We’ll just snatch the hat back and be on our way.”
Miles nodded, but as they slipped around the back of the cart, Shelby spotted the man in the fur vest inside the doorway, and her heart sank. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he held Miles’s hat in his hands and was showing it off to the innkeeper as proudly as if it were a rare gem.
“Oh,” Miles said, disappointed. Then he straightened his shoulders. “You know what, I’ll get another one. You can buy them everywhere in California.”
“Mmmm, right.” Shelby swatted the canvas tarp of the man’s wagon in frustration. The force of her blow sent a corner billowing up. For just a second, she caught a glimpse of a heap of boxes inside.
“Hmm.” She snaked her head under the tarp.
Underneath, it was cold and a little fetid, crammed with odds and ends. There were wooden cages filled with sleeping speckled hens, heavy sacks of feed, a burlap bag of mismatched iron tools, and loads of wooden boxes. She tried the lid of one of the boxes, but it wouldn’t budge.
“What are you doing?” Miles asked.
Shelby gave a crooked smile. “Having an idea.” Reaching for something that looked like a small crowbar in the sack of tools, she pried open the lid of the closest box. “That’s a bingo.”
“Shelby?”
“If we’re going into town, these clothes might make the wrong statement.” She flicked the pocket of her green hoodie for effect. “Don’t you think?”
Back under the tarp she found some simple garments, which looked faded and worn, probably outgrown by the driver’s family back home. She tossed little gems out at Miles, who scrambled to catch everything.
Soon, he held a long, pale-green linen gown with bell sleeves and an embroidered golden strip running down its center, a pair of lemon-yellow stockings, and a bonnet that looked sort of like a nun’s wimple, made of taupe linen.
“But what are you going to wear?” Miles joked.
Shelby had to rummage through a half dozen more boxes full of rags, bent nails, and smooth stones before she found anything that would work for Miles. Finally, she pulled out a simple blue robe made of stiff, coarse wool. It would keep him warm against this buffeting wind; it was long enough to cover his Nikes; and for some reason it occurred to Shelby that the color was perfect for his eyes.
Shelby unzipped her green hoodie and slung it over the back of the cart. Goose bumps rose on her bare arms as she tugged the billowing dress over her jeans and tank top.
Miles still looked reluctant. “I feel weird stealing stuff that guy was probably taking into town to sell,” he whispered.
“Karma, Miles. He stole your hat.”
“No, he found my hat. What if he’s got a family to support?”
Shelby whistled under her breath. “You’d never make it a day on Skid Row, kid”—she shrugged—“unless you had me there to look after you. Look, compromise, we’ll repay something else to the cosmos. My sweater …” She chucked the green hoodie into the box. “Who knows? Maybe hoodies will be all the rage next season in the anatomy theaters, or whatever they do for fun around here.”
Miles held the taupe bonnet above Shelby’s head. But it wouldn’t fit over her ponytail, so he tugged on the elastic band. Her blond hair tumbled down her shoulders. Now she felt self-conscious. Her hair was a complete beast. She never wore it down. But Miles’s eyes lit up as he placed the bonnet on her head.
“M’lady.” He gallantly held out his hand. “Might I have the pleasure of accompanying you into this fair city?”
If Luce had been here, back when all three of them were still just good friends and things were a little less complicated, Shelby would have known just how to joke back. Luce would have put on her sweet, demure damsel-in-distress voice and called Miles her knight in shining armor or some crap like that, to which Shelby could have added something sarcastic, and then everyone would have burst out laughing, and the weird tension Shelby felt across her shoulders, the tightness in her chest—it would have gone away. Everything would have felt normal, whole.