Chapter 2
Two
Emmy gaped at the man on the other side. Dark tangles of greasy hair. Sun-starved skin as pale as her own. Youthful features
but haggard, as if he’d already lived one hundred miserable lives.
He was a fellow prisoner, one who’d just killed two guards in hardly as many seconds, yet he was not even out of breath. More
alarming, there was a sharpness to the gaze that held Emmy’s, one that betrayed far more than a natural curiosity. He took
in her tattered ball gown, her frail figure, the filth that marred her once pretty face—and he laughed.
Emmy crept backward across her cell, not letting the madman out of her sight. His laughter died as abruptly as it began, and
he rattled her door as if testing its strength.
“If you come in here,” she rasped, her heart in her throat, “I will tear off your limbs.”
He tilted his head, a hawk contemplating a mouse. “Don’t you want me to free you?”
Free. Even if he could open her door, there was something disturbing about his stare. Something not unlike her old alley cat after
it had snagged a rat, carrying its corpse for days, not putting it down to eat or even sleep. Monomaniacal, Papa had called it. Singularly obsessed.
That was how the madman looked at her now. As though he’d found a prized rat.
He shook the door once more, the locks clanging against their iron restraints, and Emmy covered her ears. If he’d killed two charmed guards so easily, she did not stand a chance against him, no matter how well Jimmy Li had taught her to punch.
His lips curved. “You’re that debutante, aren’t you? The fraud.”
“I’m no fraud,” Emmy snarled.
“I was at your ball. You claimed to transform things, making gold from . . .” He waved a dismissive hand. “Something.”
His silky voice was relaxed and casual, despite the bodies behind him.
“Very well,” he sighed, rising to his feet. “You’d only slow me down.”
As the slot slammed shut, Emmy stiffened, her indecision rooting her in place. He had no reason to help her. He’d just as
soon kill her, if given the chance. But that cursed word sprouted roots in her mind: free.
“Wait,” she rasped, her heart hammering against its cage.
But he was gone.
Emmy scrambled to her pass-through window. “Wait!”
He reappeared far too quickly, a slow smile spreading across his gaunt cheeks.
Free, free, free, she nearly begged, the sudden burst of hope dizzying. “She keeps the keys in her left pocket.” Emmy motioned to the lifeless
female guard.
“And what will you do for me?”
She glared at him. “You offered to free me.”
With a furtive glance down the hall, he rose to his feet.
“I can make gold,” Emmy called after him.
He shrugged as he strolled away.
Emmy racked her brain for something, anything to turn him around. “I can transform a guard to look like you. No one will know
you’ve escaped.”
He slowed to a stop, glancing over his shoulder. “You can do that?”
“Of course.” The lie rolled off her tongue easily, though panic followed closely behind.
Papa had been the one who excelled at transforming human cells, but he’d used his magic only to heal people, not to alter their appearance.
Though he’d been Emmy’s mentor, her specialty was transforming nonliving things, like buttons or— What did it matter? Her magic was gone.
The madman knelt beside the female guard’s limp form, searching her pockets.
Treacherous, agonizing hope coursed through Emmy as he returned with the loop of keys. Metal scraped metal as he tried the
first one in her lock. No luck.
Open, she pleaded as he tried the next key. Her lungs ceased working, her heart ceased beating.
Open. Another key jangled against the lock. If a guard heard it, or if this other prisoner decided Emmy wasn’t worth the effort,
she would be stuck in this cell forever—
The click echoed through her cell. Her door ground open.
Pushing past the other prisoner, Emmy rushed into the hall until her entire body was outside the cell. Not far enough. She
lunged toward the stairs, but he caught her wet sleeve. She could have struggled, but she froze, hating the feel of his fingers
against her emaciated bicep. Still, better that he thought her compliant. For now.
“Make him look like me.” He glanced down the dark hall, frowning. “Quickly.”
Her face must have betrayed her panic, because he thrust something at her.
Emmy shook free and backed away, pressing against the wall so that she could see him and the corridor doors at the same time.
“Take it.” With a quick glance down the hall, he held out a strange metallic coin. “The Society blocked your power, didn’t
they? This will free it.”
Emmy’s magic was not blocked; it was gone. And any minute now, she’d be discovered out of her cell with two dead guards at her feet.
Hand still outstretched, he stepped toward her.
She pressed deeper against the wall, ready to bolt.
But he continued to stalk closer. Like Emmy, he wore bedraggled formal wear—a tuxedo, in his case, with torn coattails that
fluttered in the cool draught—but unlike Emmy, he moved as though he’d been born wearing a silk tie and tailored pants. That
was the confidence he oozed, despite his crumpled attire: the surety of the rich.
There was little Emmy trusted less than the rich.
Still, his confidence could be a weakness. He could underestimate her. And if she was discovered by the guards, his affinity
for swift violence might come in handy.
With trembling fingers, Emmy plucked the coin from his palm, his skin shockingly warm. As she closed her fingers around the
strange metal, the air chilled, ever so slightly.
A glutton for disappointment, Emmy reached for her power, but nothing happened. And of course it didn’t. Ever since that cursed
ball, she had not felt magic’s ethereal mist.
And if this madman realized it, he’d snap her neck, too.
With an exasperated noise, he snatched the coin. “Step back.”
“What are you going to do?”
He rubbed his thumb over his fingers, and a single black flame erupted from his hand.
Emmy gaped at the sudden magic. He’d conjured it more easily than Papa. More easily than even her, and she’d been the fastest of all the debutantes at that ball—by several seconds.
Moving quickly, he dragged the female guard into Emmy’s cell and the male one into his, the door of which was nothing but melted metal.
He raised his arms, and gray-black flames spread over the female guard, licking at her face until her skin was a patchwork of charred skin and ivory bone.
With a dark smile, he spread his hands, and the black flames climbed the walls that had trapped Emmy for two long years.
Shards of stone burst from the ceiling she’d memorized, crashing to the floor.
His flames were straight out of hell, as black as night and deliciously destructive.
Swallowing the strange urge to laugh, Emmy watched her prison cell burn.
Every guard in Grimsbane Tower had to hear the commotion.
Shouting something over the inferno of flames and falling stone, the other prisoner sprinted down the hall, his coattails
fluttering in his wake.
Madman or not, with magic like that, he was Emmy’s best chance of escape.
Lifting her torn skirts, she ran after him.