51. Syneca
Syneca
Learn one spell you will never use. It's the held breath that makes the others fear what you could be hiding.
“I’m just saying, they complain about your long baths and then we’re stuck waiting for them forever,” Pip said, lying on Timber’s back, staring at the grimmie flying lazy circles around the living room.
Pip had given it a tiny rolled parchment to carry, though she had to leave it on the counter because he wouldn’t take it from her hands. She’d pouted about it for hours.
Which was the only thing happening in the house, because Calder had taken Ramiel back to the Underworld a few times, waiting there with him, and Dez and Silas were writing the book to get to Aventh Gate.
The only productive thing I’d managed was creating a charm that would let Timber out of the house on his own free will, harvested some of the dried herbs from an abandoned garden Pip had found, and began the task of churning out Life Runes to be freely distributed as we could.
“Do you think the king is going to try to kill us immediately, or is he going to drag it out. Torture us. Take our things away,” the sprite asked, rolling over on Timber who’d lifted his head, huffed at the nonsense, and laid right back down, careful not to touch her with his long, curved horns.
“If I had to guess, I’d assume fear is going to make him more compliant than he’d like to be. He won’t know the Phoenix has walked in until it’s too late. We have a plan, remember?”
“Yeah, but he’s a king. His crown makes him powerful too.”
She opened her mouth again, but stopped because footsteps finally filled the hall.
Silas came around the corner first, and I hated that my brain did what it always did, registered him before anything else, the dress shirt unbuttoned at the top, sleeves rolled high enough to see the veins in his arms as he adjusted the fold, the line of his jaw, the absolute unfairness of how he looked when he was simply walking into a room.
His eyes dipped to the yellow on my collar and all I could do was look away.
For some reason it didn’t feel as triumphant today.
In fact, I was beginning to hate yellow too.
Dez and Ramiel flanked him, both carrying that dark, handsome demon energy that likely got them what they wanted more times than it hadn’t. The three of them together were genuinely an unreasonable amount of attractiveness for one house.
Pip sat up on Timber’s back with wide eyes.
Ramiel tilted his head, a dark lock of his long hair falling forward. “A crown doesn’t make you untouchable. It just tells bigger monsters where to aim.”
The front door opened and Calder came through dripping rain and irritation in equal measure, brushing his shoulders off like a man who had reached his limit with the weather.
“I don’t know how anyone lives here willingly.” He looked up and found all of us standing there in various states of readiness. Something shifted in his expression. “Time to go?”
“The book?” Silas asked, glancing at Dez.
“Ready.” Dez patted his coat.
“How’s your power?”
“I’m fine.”
I looked at Dez. He returned my stare like he knew what I was thinking and was asking me not to say it. If it came down to it, he could Take from me. Silas didn’t even acknowledge the exchange.
Everyone moved toward the coat rack, but Silas paused and looked at Pip. “You can stay. If you want. No one would think less of it.”
Pip drew back from him like she’d been insulted. “Absolutely not.”
He nodded once, accepting it, and reached for his coat.
Dez crouched beside Timber, scratching carefully behind one curved horn. The cinderhowl’s yellow eyes closed halfway. “Watch the house. We’re counting on you.”
Timber huffed.
Content, the demon stood and set an open book on the floor.
“When we get to the other side, we’ll be in a closet in a lost and found emporium.
We found it yesterday. It’s a strange place in Aventh Gate where objects appear and disappear for no reason, so the book won’t raise any questions.
Getting into the city isn’t the problem.
It’s the mountain stronghold behind the Gate.
We’ll leave the emporium and set the plan into motion after. ”
Pip raised a brow, one of her buns plopping to the side as she tilted her head. “What if the book disappears in the shop?”
“We stuck it in the cleaner’s closet. Half the brooms in there had grown roots through the floorboards. That part isn’t touched. Pretty sure.”
She giggled nervously. “You couldn’t have found a library?”
“Too big of a chance to be taken.”
“Okay,” Pip said, shaking her head, “But if we end up in that creepy lady’s cottage again, or worse, dungeons, I’m blaming you.”
With the flip of a page, we were once again falling through Dez’s magic.
We spilled into the dusty broom closet in a heap, Silas directly below me, unable to hide the stricken look on his face. I lingered, letting the others untangle from each other while I stared.
“Syneca,” he said, voice strained as his breath ghosted across my cheek. “Would you mind moving your left knee?”
I gasped and scrambled backward, refusing to look at him as we clambered into the emporium.
Lost things crowded every surface. A coat with only one sleeve hung from a hook, the empty side shifting faintly as if an invisible arm still occupied it.
Books sat in careful rows beneath glass domes, waiting for readers that had never come back.
A music box on a shelf quietly played three notes over and over, clearly having forgotten the rest of the song.
Something pale floated in a cloudy jar near my shoulder, darting toward the glass whenever I looked at it and going perfectly still the moment I glanced away.
Small handwritten tags dangled from objects in looping ink: Found beneath East Bridge.
Recovered from a train that no longer exists. Owner unknown.
We moved through the crowded space quickly enough, stepping into a level of cold I hadn’t been prepared for.
Nor had I been prepared for the new floating wanted banners.
Because I watched myself disappear, and Pip materialize in the ink instead.
Then Calder. Then Silas, as a griffin, scowling out over the people that passed by paying them no mind.
They’d been here long enough they’d gotten used to them. And there were so, so many.
Ramiel stepped forward without a word. Magic rolled off him in a quiet wave, reshaping everyone’s features, shifting colors, settling over the group like a second skin.
The disguise washed over us like cold water, and then Aventh Gate opened up in front of me, and I understood why no one had ever found a way in.
It wasn’t a city. It was a machine that had been built to look like one.
The streets ran in perfect lines up the throat of the mountain, every road climbing toward the same place, the stronghold above us, carved straight into the black rock, its windows lit a sickly amber that never seemed to flicker.
Nothing in Aventh Gate wandered. People moved in currents, heads down, papers clutched to chests, and at every corner a figure in gray stood with a ledger and a stamp, stopping some, waving others through, writing everything down.
There were no beggars. No buskers. No music but the music box behind us in the emporium, already swallowed by the door.
“It’s so clean,” Pip whispered from somewhere near my elbow, and she didn’t mean it as a compliment.
We tucked in between two close buildings so as not to be seen until we were ready.
Still, we watched. A bell rang somewhere up the mountain, and every person on the street stopped where they stood.
Just stopped, mid-stride, mid-breath, and waited.
A gray figure walked a line of them, checking wrists, checking palms, comparing each one against the ledger.
When he reached an old man near the fountain, he paused.
Looked at the ledger. Looked at the man.
Two more gray figures appeared from nowhere, the way they must have been trained to.
They took the old man without a word. He didn’t fight.
That was the part that turned my stomach, he didn’t even look surprised.
He folded his hands behind his back before they asked, like he’d rehearsed it, like everyone here had rehearsed it, and let himself be walked up the hill toward the stronghold and whatever the Gate decided he was good for.
The bell rang again. The street started moving like nothing had happened.
“They don’t track things here,” Calder said lowly, water still dripping off him despite the disguise Ramiel had layered over his face. “They track people.”
“They track everything.” Silas’s voice was flat, controlled, the voice he used when he was holding something violent very still.
His eyes hadn’t left the spot where the old man had been standing.
“That’s the regime. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is private.
You exist in the ledger or you don’t exist, and the moment your line stops being useful, they close it. ”
I pulled my hood lower over a face that wasn’t mine and made myself breathe.
“There,” Ramiel murmured.
I followed his gaze.
Two of them stood at the mouth of an alley across the square, apart from the gray ledger-men, apart from everyone.
Hunters. I knew them before I could have said how, the way the crowd bent around them without seeming to, the wide berth, the bone-and-iron charms strung at their belts, the specific stillness of men who were never the ones being checked.
One had a scar that pulled his mouth crooked.
The other wore his hood back, bored, picking at his teeth with a knife while the city flinched past him.
“It’ll be them,” Ramiel said. “Don’t stare.”