Chapter Five
ENZO
Lola’s heart beats double-time, and I can’t tell if it’s from fear or exhilaration.
“Speed up,” I growl at the taxi driver.
“Going the limit, sir,” comes the response.
Muttering curses, I peer through the window at the nightclubs flashing past. Could Lola and Jade be inside one of those? Maybe the elevated heart rate is nothing more than a result of some intense dancing. I chew my lip.
You can’t come running every time I have a feeling, Enz. Lola’s anger at my constant worrying during the Liar’s Dice Tournament is still sharp in my memory. I need a partner, not a nanny.
We’ve made so much progress, Lola and I, in the past few months. She trusts me, in large part due to the fact that I’ve given her a longer leash. I don’t come when she’s scared anymore. I try to make her feel like I trust her.
But after the run-in with her father’s henchmen earlier tonight, my anxiety seems to have reached a new high.
Am I going to ruin all the progress we’ve made because her pulse quickened?
“What the devil?” The cab driver slams on his brakes, his head-lights illuminating a pale figure cloaked in smoke pelting across the street in front of us.
My stomach drops.
Nocturne—the seaspawn woman I’ve been researching for weeks—is within my grasp.
Praying Lola’s heart rate is indeed elevated because of excitement at a nearby club, I shove away the sensation of her and toss a handful of plats at the cabbie. “Keep the change.”
“But, sir, let me pull over—” he tries to say, but I’m already going noncorporeal and launching myself through the door onto the side-walk behind Nocturne.
She darts away, and I sprint after her. “Nocturne!” I shout.
It’s as though she’s floating, her skirts trailing into shadows that crawl over the ground behind her. She’s a smudge in a misty mirror, a phantom cloaked in fog. Exactly as she’s been described in every single newspaper and magazine article I’ve read.
Hope and desperation claw through me, pump my legs faster. I reach instinctively for one of my rings, but I’m fresh out of the strength soullight that would increase my speed. I ran out halfway here, which is why I had to hail a cab.
Stars, she’s quick.
Adrenaline stings through my veins, but alongside it is a relief so palpable I can barely breathe. She’s real. And she’s just as fearsome and powerful as I hoped she would be.
The first time I heard whispers of her was only a month ago. Gossip in the streets, stories in the pubs. A new seaspawn, just like the Devious, people said. A magician of incomparable power with command over darkness like the goddess of night herself.
Until that point, I’d been grappling with the very real possibility that I would be cursed forever.
The moonshard was gone, and every single lead I’d spent the past five years chasing had turned out to be planted by my starsdamned brother.
Any clue I might find, I could not trust. My brother was still lying and determined to keep that shard to himself.
But with the appearance of Nocturne, I realized that the moon-shard Nic and I stole couldn’t possibly be the only one that ever existed. Perhaps Nocturne had made her own . . . which meant I could forge one, too.
Buzzing with the desperation of a new plan, I searched every library in the city, foraged through records and files and books for clues on how to make one. I slipped into churches and temples, shifting through their locked vault doors for their secrets.
It was at the Aetheran temple that I discovered the journals of Nell Lightsworn, the priestess who had created the moonshard that cursed us.
I stole those, stowed them in my room in the Brig, and pored over them by starlight.
She was a poetic woman whose notes were written in riddles and metaphors, which, though lovely, were difficult to parse.
It took weeks to settle on the exact methods she’d used, and weeks more to decode the markings on the diagrams.
I gathered my materials. Large amounts of raw, freshly mined, never-before-used voratium.
Lumenoring equipment. Telescopes. Mirrors.
As I gathered each piece of equipment with my Tentacles, hope tried to take root in my heart.
But I couldn’t let it. Hope like that, I’d found, razed flesh and sinew when it was ripped out, leaving a wound that never fully healed.
With the astral spectral diffuser my Tentacles and I stole from the University of Aethera earlier tonight, I finally have all the pieces I need. It was a close thing, though—when Lola came across another of Nell Lightsworn’s journals, I’d nearly choked.
I cannot let her learn of Nell, not yet. If she does, she might recognize Nell’s magic as one she has as well. And if Lola discovers she has power I kept from her, it doesn’t matter what I’ve done to win back her trust. I will lose her forever.
Besides, that journal wasn’t worth what it might have cost me with Lola; it doesn’t look like it has the answer either. Just more riddles and a few missing pages.
But if Nocturne has made her own moonshard, perhaps she could tell me. Perhaps she could help.
“Nocturne, please!” I shout. “I just want to speak to you!”
It’s as if she doesn’t hear me.
I launch forward, slamming her down into the pavement.
“So sorry about this,” I say, pressing my hand to the bare skin of her throat and drawing her strength soullight into one of my empty rings.
She screeches, trying to shove me away, but already her stamina is draining. Her jabs weaken.
“That’s better,” I say when her hands drop to the pavement at her sides, but before I can explain myself, shadows blast in from every direction.
Rippling phantoms made of night that crackle with thunder as they swipe for my throat with long, narrow fingers.
Their fists pummel me like blows, and I cry out, scrabbling backward.
Nocturne ripples into shadow as well, and I can no longer tell which apparition is her.
They swirl, dancing moths around a flame. Terror scratches up my spine and rattles my teeth.
“Nocturne . . .” I glance warily from shape to shape. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“You have an odd way of showing it, Thief.” Her voice comes from every side, smooth yet sharp.
“In my defense, I did apologize for that,” I say, holding up my hands. “I need your help.”
“I don’t help people,” comes her terse reply, a velvet echo in my ears.
“You make deals, though.”
“I’m not interested in making one with you.”
“Why not?” I study each shadow for a hint of the angle of her jaw or the slope of her shoulders.
“You know as well as I that deals with beings of starlight come with dangerous strings.”
I swing my fist at each shadow. A test. Only one of the shadows flinches ever so slightly, but I pretend I don’t notice.
“What could I do to change your mind?” I ask.
“There isn’t—” she begins, and I hurl myself at the apparition that flickered before.
She cries out as she hits the ground, and the smoke melts back into her face. She glares, trying to push my hands off her shoulders, but her grasp is still feeble.
“Please.” My voice quavers. “I just need to know how to seal a moonshard.”
She glares, and a prickle of recognition runs through me. I’ve never met her, yet there’s something about the curve of her jaw that feels . . . familiar. The furrow in her brow, her unblinking gaze.
The hairs on my arms rise.
She opens her mouth as though to speak, and hope claws up my throat, making it hard to breathe.
Then she says “No,” and darkness slams into me. A weight from all sides compressing every bone, every tendon, every cell.
It doesn’t feel the same as when my brother first cursed me to become the bodiless specter I was before I learned how to steal corporeality, but it’s similar enough that adrenaline sets me ablaze. My nerves vibrate. My eyes bulge. My lungs seize.
A scream tears through my teeth. “Nocturne!”
“Let go.” Her voice comes from somewhere far away.
But I can’t release her. Not here in the depths of the kind of terror that splinters bones.
Not when she’s the last shred of hope I have.