CHAPTER 19 EZZO
EZZO
In hindsight, the mistake I made was trusting a Shade.
Again.
With Akari weak from the blood loss and barely able to stand, we didn’t stray far from the laundry hall—or from the plan I’d made with Raya.
Just go to the nearest inn. That way, if the future won’t show me where you are, I’ll know where to look, she’d said, right before we phased back into the cellar.
So that’s exactly what I did.
I led us to the inn at the top of the street, a middling but clean establishment where I traded one of Alara’s charms for a room and a couple of hot meals—both of which I gave Akari. Hells, I even offered to play lookout if she wanted to phase into the shadows and regain her strength.
Which she did.
Much faster than I expected.
And the moment she shed the effects of the iron, her patience for sharing space with a half breed dropped from “barely there” to “no longer exists”.
Where’s Raya? When she first barked that question at me, I told her the same thing I did in the cellar: Raya’s job was to distract the Meridian and she’ll double back to find us the second she gives him the slip.
But as the minutes ticked by, that answer stopped placating Akari’s anger and her questions began to grow teeth.
Why is it taking so long?
When will she get here?
What if the future’s refusing to show her the inn?
That’s when—in my exasperation—I made my second mistake of the day: I told her the future seems plenty happy to send Raya visions when they somehow involve me.
It was the wrong thing to say.
And it’s the reason I find myself pinned to the wall by an angry flash of Orange magic, an invisible noose tightening around my neck.
“Akari—stop, I—I told you where she is.” My protest is a feeble gasping of air, stifled by color and cut through with fear.
Of all the ways I could have died during this rescue, this is by far the dumbest, but it’s also the most likely to succeed.
Because there is no fighting Akari’s power; if I can’t talk her out of strangling me, death is where this tantrum leads.
“Stop lying to me! If that was true, she’d already be here!”
Black spots start dancing at the edge of my vision, my lungs screaming—no, begging—for reprieve.
“Did you hurt her, huh? Is she dead?” Akari only intensifies her grip. “Damn it, half breed, tell me what you did!”
“I didn’t—I’m—she’s not—”
“Kiri—no!” The door suddenly bursts open, a very alive Raya barreling her way in. “Let him go!”
Yes, please, let me go. I never thought I’d be happy to see a Shade, nor that the relief I’d feel at seeing her would extend beyond her ability to save my skin.
“No. Not until he stops lying about what he—” Akari trails off abruptly, her mind slowly catching up to who she’s seeing. “Oh my Gods, Ray!” In an instant, she’s crossed the room to pull Raya into a tight hug, though her hold on the magic doesn’t give an inch. “I thought he killed you.”
“No such luck, I’m afraid,” Raya says. “But you do have to stop killing him.”
“Why? He’s a Hue. Isn’t this what we—?”
“It’s a long story.” Raya’s quick to cut her off. “Just please, let him go.”
“Fine.”
As the noose finally slackens, I gasp and fall to my knees.
“But I suggest you talk fast.”
*
“Of all the stupid, reckless, self-destructive things you could do.” Akari paces her anger up and down the tiny room, though—thankfully—it’s no longer directed solely at me. “You promised me you wouldn’t do this, Ray. You promised me you wouldn’t ask an open question.”
“I know, Kiri, I—”
“No, uh-uh, you don’t get to Kiri me right now. How the hells did you even manage it?” Her hands rake bruising tracks through her hair from scalp to tip. “Saleen’s spell should have stopped you doing anything that irresponsible for days.”
“Killen.” Raya’s reply is another unfamiliar name. “I asked him to accelerate off the compulsion.”
“I’m sorry—Killen?” At that, Akari only grows more irate. “Your ex-boyfriend who hates you, Killen? That’s who you chose to tell?”
From what I can gather, it sounds as though Akari went to great lengths to stop Raya from risking her magic, only for Raya to go to even greater lengths to do it anyway, and that between them, they managed to involve half the school.
“No, I didn’t tell Killen, exactly.” Raya’s eyes stay glued to her feet. “He sort of just . . . guessed when he caught me looking up fate-touched magic in the archives the next day.”
“Oh, well, in that case, it’s definitely not a problem.” Akari throws both arms up in frustration. “I’m sure he didn’t go straight to Professor Lyons the second we left!”
“Erm . . . is that really the most important thing?” I ask, cutting into their inane argument. Because given what we watched the Meridian do, to her, only an hour ago, their standing at the Academy should be skirting the bottom of the list.
“No, you’re right.” Akari rounds on me with a vengeance. “The most important thing is why she’s working with a half breed.”
“We prefer Hues, if you don’t mind.” I bristle. Or, you know, just about anything else.
“I do mind, actually—since just getting caught in this room with you would be enough to end our futures.”
“Hey, I’ve been offering to leave since the last bell,” I remind her. But every time I tried, a flash of Orange would pin me to the chair, or seal the door shut, or take another bite of my air, and she can shimmer where I can’t so there was absolutely no point in phasing.
“But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Kiri,” Raya says, stepping between us like a shield. “Our future is already at risk—that’s what the open vision showed me.”
“You have no idea what that vision showed you!” Akari’s temper is growing thin. “You said it yourself, Ray: it was too abstract and it didn’t make any sense. It isn’t possible.”
“Except it is possible,” Raya insists. “Ezzo lived through something similar last year. Go ahead, ask him.”
I’m pretty sure I’d die of shock if she did.
“I don’t need to ask the half breed anything!”
Yup, there it is.
“If there was a threat to all magic, someone—your parents, for example, or . . . I don’t know, the entire seers’ guild—would have seen it!”
“Unless they didn’t,” Raya tells her, the words laden with plea. “I think the open question allowed me to see a future they can’t. And I know how crazy that sounds, okay? But what if the guild has accidentally shut out our ability to see this kind of risk?”
“Colors help me, you’re as bad as he is,” Akari mutters, shooting me a scathing look. “We would have felt the effects of a Gray-wide catastrophe. Seeing isn’t the only way to see.”
“No, you wouldn’t have, actually.” The way she’s railing at Raya—like she’s right and we’re a couple of stupid kids—irks me enough to wade back in.
Raya just saved her life, for fuck’s sake.
She took on a man of unknown power without blinking; she could have died doing it—hells, I was starting to worry she had died, and not just because of what that would have meant for me.
In distracting the Divine Meridian, Raya did something braver than most passive Shades ever will—the very least Akari could do is shut up for a second and listen.
“The power drain started in Isitar, and for months, the effects were localized,” I say, spelling the point clear. “They didn’t reach you because we stopped the shadows from collapsing. You’d have only felt something if we’d allowed the Church to win.”
“Well, isn’t that convenient? You have zero proof and we’re supposed to just believe you.”
What is impossible, on the other hand, is arguing with someone who refuses to hear.
“What you believe doesn’t change what happened.” I sigh, lacing my voice with indifference. “And after what the Meridian did to you and that typic, I think we can all agree that something is happening here.”
“Come on, Kiri, you saw what he’s doing with the blood,” Raya adds, chipping away at her friend’s resolve bit by bit. “You were there, on that awful table, and I know it scared you just as much as it scared me.”
Judging by the violent shiver that rakes Akari, I’d venture it scared her more than she’s willing to admit. That she’d prefer to keep masking the nightmare with fury, bury the fear.
“But that’s the part that makes even less sense than the rest of it.”
With a long exhale, the fight in her finally yields. “Doesn’t he realize the typics have already tried messing with our blood in every conceivable way? Eating it, drinking it, transfusing it . . . none of it works. You can’t assume a Shade’s color.”
On that, she is right; this is hardly the first time someone’s had this bright idea.
The typics have spent their entire history trying to get at our magics; it was one of their favorite pastimes for hundreds of years.
The only reason it doesn’t happen anymore is because it always, always fails—and there’s so much literature attesting to that fact that they simply resolved to hate us, instead, chose to align themselves with religion.
So the Meridian is either laughably oblivious, or after something else.
“What if it’s not about assuming your color . . .” I come at the problem a different way. “What Raya and I saw wasn’t a typic using magic, it was a typic in the Gray—and then after she’d shattered, the Meridian said, ‘how long did this one last?’, like keeping her there was the point.”
“And the room of shards we found suggests he’s done this before,” Raya adds, catching up to my thinking. “To a whole bunch of typics—probably at least as many as the kids that have gone missing.”
“That’s far more than the Shades he’s killed.” Akari’s arms cross with a challenge. “There were dozens of missing kids on those flyers, but so far, he’s only bled about ten Shades.”
Ten Shades? That number is so much higher than I expected. How has the Council turned a blind eye to so many deaths? Why are they just standing idly by while the Meridian gives the typics exactly what they’ve always craved: public displays of violence against magic?