Chapter 28
By now, the sun has set behind the park’s western wall of skyscrapers, casting the camp in eerie twilight.
I move like a silent hummingbird, flitting from tent to tent, leaning around stakes and ropes to ensure each grassy corridor is empty.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for.
Confirmation? Evidence that I’m not throwing my life away for false promises?
I glance through the flaps of every tent I pass. Take stock of their insides. Of the ones that look like homes and the ones that look like storage and the ones that look like strategy.
Strategy. Maps and scrolls and logs. Anything that might contain research into the Lightbearer. Instructions, perhaps, as to how I should die.
Just when twilight turns to night, I come upon a larger tent out of which deep baritone voices drift.
I think I recognize the king’s among them.
This must be the main strategy tent. I dart around back, avoiding the bright light streaming out of the tent’s opening.
I’ll have to hide until the group disperses.
Maybe behind that cluster of trees over—
A hand covers my mouth, an arm wrapping around my chest and jerking me backward.
I try to scream, but the elf’s long fingers hold my lips firmly together.
I lift up one leg and am about to kick backward when my attacker whispers, “It’s me, Kallister.
” I freeze at the sound of his voice. “Quit struggling or the entire camp will hear you.”
I bite one of his fingers.
Daerios pulls his hand back, hissing with pain, and I whirl to face him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I whisper.
“Saving your life,” he says. Then, before I can argue further, he wraps one hand around my wrist and, for the second time that day, the world goes black.
The first thing I see when I wake up is Daerios’s face. Handsome, sculpted, cheekbones like twin mountain peaks. I want to punch them.
But I’m too groggy. “You elves really need to stop doing that,” I croak.
“Sorry.” And he does look sorry, the evil prick. “I knew it was the only way I could get you to come.”
“Come where?”
“To our secret hideout,” says a familiar voice in the far corner.
I jerk up to a seated position to find, with a powerful wave of relief, Cara. Seated in an armchair. With Berendir perched on the arm.
Wait a minute… Cara is in league with the elves?
Every ounce of warmth I feel at seeing her drains instantly from my body. Cara is with Berendir. She’s always with Berendir. And, as my roommate, she has perfect access to watch me for signs of light. Of course she’s in on it. The only question is—
“Why?” I ask. “Why are you helping them?”
Cara squints at me in the way she does when I ask her something stupid, like what an Application Programming Interface is. “Why am I helping them save my closest friend? Gee, maybe because I love her?”
“Wait.” I blink. “Save me?”
“Duh.” Cara gestures to the surrounding space. “Look around, kiddo.”
I do. I’m lying on the couch of a modern apartment with dark wood floors and panoramic windows.
Daerios is seated at the end of the couch.
Cara is in the armchair, feet up on a massive, cubical coffee table.
Outside, lights twinkle across the sky; we appear to be high up, looking out on a landscape of skyscrapers.
“Don’t tell me.” My eyes cut to Daerios. “Another one of yours?”
“Actually, no.” He stands from the couch and walks over to the open kitchen across the room, rounding the white marble counter and bending over to rummage in one of the cabinets. “This is L?th’s place.”
L?th. The youngest elf prince. Yesterday, I would have been pleased to be here; L?th always struck me as the kindest of the bunch. But today—
“So what?”
“So, we’re rescuing you from your own idiotic deal with the devil.” Cara crosses her legs and leans back in the armchair. “Obviously.”
My eyes flick to Daerios, who has pulled out a tea kettle and is filling it from the sink. “He delivered me right to his father’s front door,” I say. “Why would he want to save me?”
“I’m right here, you know.” Daerios sets the kettle on the stove. “You don’t have to speak of me in the third person.”
“She can speak of you in whatever tense she wants,” Cara throws over her shoulder. Then, under her breath, “Lying prick.”
Berendir covers a grin.
Daerios, with his superhuman hearing, catches Cara’s insult. He spins from the burner to glare at us. “Why am I the lying prick? Is no one going to acknowledge the fact that Quinn was lying to me, too? That she was spying on us, prying through our secrets, using me to get answers?”
Sighing, Cara starts to push herself up from the armchair. “Sounds like you two need time alone to settle this marital spat. Ber and I will just—”
“No.” I cut her off. “I don’t want to be alone with him.”
Over by the counter, Daerios stills. A strange expression crosses his face—a slight crinkle of the forehead, eyes pinched shut—but it passes quickly. When he speaks, his voice is firm. “Likewise.”
“Oh-kayyy.” Cara lowers herself slowly back into the chair. “Back to the matter at hand. Daer, how long do you think we have before your father figures out where we are?”
Daerios opens and closes one fist atop the counter.
Tension seems to ebb from his body as he straightens and says, “The King does not know that L?th owns this property. No one knows—except me. And that was only because L?th dragged my ass out of a fistfight in a club a few years ago and put me up here.”
“Shocker,” I say flatly. “To return to my earlier question: Why bring me here? Why rescue me from that camp, when you’re the one who brought me there in the first place?”
“It was not me who brought you to that camp,” says Daerios. “Those were Saechon’s orders.”
“But you didn’t fight him.”
“How could you know that? You weren’t even conscious.”
“Which you stood by and allowed to happen!” I yell, then internally shake myself for doing so. I don’t want to feel this much emotion toward Daerios; when it comes to him, I want to be as empty as I was the year after I lost Dad and Michael.
I close my eyes, taking a deep breath. “Look,” I say, opening them again and looking right at the prince.
“We don’t need to fight about this. It doesn’t matter anymore.
You’ve shown me who you really are, and I’m not going to forget it any time soon.
” I see a flash of something in Daerios’s face, but have no desire to parse out what it is.
“What I don’t understand is why you would disobey a direct order from your father. Your king.”
I expect another nothing excuse from him. Or perhaps a deflection.
What I don’t expect is for the prince to look away from me, locking eyes with Berendir for a brief moment. The two elves hold a short, silent conversation. Daerios looks away first, but to my surprise, he isn’t the one to speak. Berendir is.
“Daer’s relationship with his father is complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
Berendir glances at the prince again. “Let’s just say that their ideologies are not exactly aligned. And have not been for many, many decades.”
“Their ideologies?” I repeat.
“My dad is a prick,” Daerios says flatly. “That’s what Ber is getting at.”
Berendir mutters, “You said it, not me.”
“But my relationship to my father isn’t relevant here. What is relevant is that the title to this apartment isn’t even in L?th’s real name. Father would have to search every building in Manhattan to find us.” Daerios pauses, considering. “I would say we have a week.”
“A week?” I swing my legs over the edge of the couch and hunch forward. “This is your big rescue plan? To give me an extra week of life? Splendid. Well done, Your Highness.”
Daerios shutters his eyes, inhaling through his nose. “That is not my plan.” When his eyes reopen, they’ve hardened. His lips pull into a humorless smile. “We’re going to rescue your brother and save Elaerion, Kallister. And we’re going to do it all without you needing to die.”