“No losses,” Naito answers, but his face is dark when his gaze locks on Lee, who’s still asleep. Naito walks to the couch, then smacks his brother on the head. “Wake up.”
Lee’s body jerks, but he doesn’t open his eyes.
Naito grabs a fistful of his bloodstained shirt and yanks him off the cushions. Lee moves again, this time more alert than before, but I don’t think he realizes where he is or what’s going on until Naito slams him against the wall. I wince when I hear something metallic jiggle in my neighbor’s apartment.
“Is Caelar working with the false-blood?” Naito demands, inches from Lee’s face.
“What?” Lee grabs at Naito’s hands.
“Is Caelar working with the false-blood!”
“I don’t know,” Lee says, trying to shove his brother away. Naito has my complete attention now, too. If he’s implying what I think he is, this could be majorly bad news.
“Why was he in Bardur?” He slams Lee against the wall again.
“I don’t fucking know!” Lee yells. This time, he twists out of Naito’s grasp.
“Hey!” I step between them before this fight gets louder. “If one of my neighbors calls the cops, I’m screwed.” I nod toward Lee. “He says he hasn’t talked to the remnants.”
“And you suddenly believe everything he says?” Naito demands.
“Of course not,” I say, but Naito still looks like he’s about to kill his brother. I completely understand the sentiment, but I seriously do not need a dead body in here.
“What happened in Bardur?” Aren asks. He’s leaning against my breakfast table now, looking relaxed and unruffled. Someone could tell him an army just fissured behind him, and he’d shrug it off and come up with a crazy plan to counter the hiccup.
“Nimael was there,” Naito says, some of the tension finally draining from his muscles. “So was Caelar. They were meeting in a silver-protected warehouse in the middle of the city.”
“Who’s Nimael?” I ask.
“We think he’s the false-blood’s second-in-command,” Aren tells me. I meet his eyes, uneasiness churning in my stomach. A month ago, Lena was worried about Caelar finding a Descendant who could rival her bloodline. If he presented an alternative ruler to the high nobles, they might have considered that fae over her. But Caelar never found someone willing to rule, and he lost so many fae in his last-ditch effort to retake the palace that he and the remnants aren’t as much of a threat now as they were before.
But if he joins forces with a false-blood . . .
I glance at Kyol. He knows Caelar well. They were colleagues back when the king was alive, and Kyol respects him. He’s always said Caelar wouldn’t support a false-blood. Does he still believe that? Neither the life-bond nor Kyol’s expression gives any indication of how he feels.
I turn back to Aren. “You think Nimael is the second-in-command or you know he is?”
Sosch hops up onto the breakfast table.
“If he’s not his second,” Aren says, sliding his hand over the kimki’s back, “he’s close to it. He’ll be able to give us information on the false-blood.” He looks at Naito. “I take it you weren’t able to capture him?”
Naito shakes his head. “He double fissured. I didn’t pinpoint his location accurately enough.”
The last part is said with more than a hint of aggravation in his voice. It’s directed at himself, I think, but I can’t help feeling responsible on some level. If I’d been there, chances are, Lena’s fae would have caught Nimael before he was able to open a second fissure and escape. The maps I draw when I read the shadows are incredibly accurate. That’s why Aren risked abducting me from my college campus a few months ago—the rebels almost never escaped when I was there to track them. Fae who are physically fit can fissure over and over again as long as they don’t move more than twenty or thirty feet from their original location, but if they fissure farther away than that, it takes them almost a minute to recover enough to disappear into the In-Between again. That’s plenty of time for the fae who see my maps to fissure to their location and capture or kill them.
“Nimael knows we’re after him now.” Kyol’s level voice cuts into my thoughts.
“He’ll go underground,” Aren agrees. “Fortunately, that means we still have a chance.” He hops off my table. “I’ll find him again.”
I’ll read his shadows for you. I press my lips together to hold the words back. I’m not available to help. I have a job, and I’m supposed to like the normal life I’m building for myself. I don’t need to screw it up further by shadow-reading again.
But then, I’ve never been able to turn my back on the people I care about either.
“It will probably take me a few days to learn anything,” Aren says to Naito. “You should get some rest.”
Naito nods, then turns to me, and asks, “Where’s Glazunov?”
Glazunov. Right. One catastrophe at a time.
“My bedroom,” I say, giving Lee one last pissed-off glare before I walk to the door and open it for Naito. He strides past me, straight to the bed, then draws a dagger from its sheath on his right hip. Glazunov is still awake and furious, but Naito doesn’t waste a second. He grips his dagger high up on the hilt then slams the pommel into Glazunov’s temple. The vigilante head whips to the left, then he lies there, completely still.
I really need to learn the trick to knocking someone out like that.
“You have a car I can borrow?” Naito asks, using the dagger to cut through the duct tape binding the vigilante’s wrists and ankles to my bed.
My jaw clenches. Naito needs to drive Glazunov to a gate so that the vigilante can survive fissuring to the Realm, but I don’t want him in my car. If he wakes up and catches someone’s attention, the license plate will lead back to me. Again, the last thing I need is cops knocking on my door.
“We can take my car,” Lee offers from just behind me.
Naito slices through the last of the duct tape, then looks up. His nostrils flare slightly, and the grip he has on his dagger’s hilt makes his knuckles turn white. The gate is only fifteen minutes from my apartment, but I’m not sure Naito and Lee can make it that far without someone ending up dead.
Naito shoves his dagger back into its sheath.
“Help me get him out of here,” he says.
I let out a breath, then move out of Lee’s way. When I do, a familiar, tingling sensation moves across my skin. I step back into the living room, but the fissure has already closed. It was Aren’s fissure.
I bite the inside of my cheek while the shadows his fissure left behind twist through my vision. My hands itch to draw them out. If I had a pen and paper, I could pinpoint where he’s gone. Without it, all I know is that he’s in the Realm. I don’t know whether to be hurt or pissed off. I know he has things to do back in Corrist, responsibilities that he can’t put off, but he needs to . . . He needs to get over the life-bond and talk to me.
I wrench my gaze away from the shadows when Naito and Lee drag Glazunov out of my bedroom. The vigilante is slung between them, one of his arms thrown over each of their shoulders and his head lolling with each step they take. To me, he looks half-dead. To my neighbors, I hope he looks passed-out drunk.