Chapter 40
The night lingered like a lover, its dark tendrils caressing the wind as it flowed in the wake of the woman’s perfume.
Citrus and pearl dust were her earthy scents, but sometimes, she smelled like the sea.
She was the salt and the froth. The gentle wave feathering over the rough sand.
She was moonlight bedding down on the water, waiting for her daybreak lover to come.
The wind liked the citrus and pearl dust scented woman very much. There was no one else who had a voice as sensuous as the ocean whispering in a seashell. There was no one else who was as soothing as a mercury lake and as tempestuous as a violent swell.
The boy was cloaked in his dark eclipse.
He stood in the shadow of the Smith fortress and watched the woman sneak past. She didn’t notice him, even though he only needed to lift his hand to touch her.
He held still, and when she stubbed her toe on the sidewalk curb, the boy’s mouth curved.
The wind traced his smile and whispered a question.
The boy nodded and then gestured for the wind to follow her.
The citrus and pearl dust scented woman glanced over her shoulder. Maybe she’d sensed the wind shifting the air. That was more likely than her noticing the boy.
“If someone is following me,” the woman said in a quiet seaside voice, “please know, if I find you, I will cut off your hands, skewer them on sticks, and use them to play the guitar. Badly.”
The wind huffed in outrage, but the boy scrunched his eyes closed, pressed his lips tight, and tried very hard not to laugh. He held his breath, his shoulders shaking. The wind flicked his reddening ears.
The woman waited, tapping her foot on the sidewalk. “Well?”
The boy didn’t answer. He remained hidden. The wind shoved him, and he shook his head and gestured again for the wind to follow her.
Well. The wind didn’t have hands, so the woman’s threat was air and nothing else. Besides, she’d never noticed the wind, and she wouldn’t now.
She wasn’t masked as the giant rude man, or even as one of the other men she’d been.
Instead, she was almost herself. Petite.
She only reached the boy’s shoulders, and he wasn’t nearly as tall as the solange-eyed one or even the trickster.
Fine-boned, but with the lush waves in her form that human beings enjoyed so much.
Her face was almost the same, except her eyes were blue instead of brown, her hair long and pale instead of black. All the same, it was her.
If the wind hadn’t realized, it would’ve known it by the heady throb of the boy’s pulse. He always had this lub dub lub dub beat when the woman was near.
She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes on the space where the boy was standing. Then she shook herself off like a cat after a rainstorm and turned toward the fortress.
“Go,” the boy whispered.
The woman twisted her hand and disappeared. The wind raced after her and grabbed the cuff of her shirt. When a pair of Smiths opened the front door, the woman ducked under their arms and snuck unseen into the fortress.
Only the all-seeing eye gave a quick blink at her entry, acknowledging the river of good flowing through her. The Smiths didn’t notice the eye’s blink nor the invisible woman.
The wind laughed. She’d timed her entry well. Every thirty minutes, a Smith or two left the mansion to walk the perimeter. It was a security measure that left a hole in their security.
The woman smiled to herself and hurried through the stone hall. The wind kept ahold of her shirtsleeve like a child holding its mother’s hand in a busy city. There were some Smiths awake, but she avoided them by tiptoeing along the perimeter of rooms and the edges of hallways.
She knew exactly where she was going.
When the musician had angrily asked, “Why are you going into the Smith stronghold? Why?” she’d replied coolly, “Because I said I would.”
“But it’s dangerous! Stealing the lyre? For a Ward? We have better things—”
“First, it’s not dangerous. I know exactly where it is and how to get it. Second, I gave my word. I don’t break my word, Raggie.”
“A Ward doesn’t know that.”
She’d lifted her hand to the necklace she wore. The musician’s eyes narrowed on her gesture.
She’d nodded. “He doesn’t. But I do.”
The musician’s jaw muscles had clenched. “Then I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
They’d stared at each other for a long moment. The wind knew a battle when it saw one. Finally, the musician had blown out a harsh breath, swore, and then turned and stalked away.
The musician was worried about his sister, but he didn’t need to be. The wind was there, and the boy too. Although, of course, the boy wasn’t coming into the Smiths’ home.
On the subway ride to Queens, he’d explained it to the wind. “You know I have to steer clear of the Smiths. If they kill me, it’s all over. If I kill them, it’s all over. It’s too risky for me to sneak into their home.”
The wind had moaned. It didn’t want to think about what would happen to the boy if he walked through the Smiths’ front door like the man had.
“You’ll help her when she goes for the lyre?” he’d asked.
Of course the wind would. It liked the woman. It liked her voice. It liked the thought of her strumming the lyre. The wind had reminded the boy it was the one who’d told him to save her during the Bard game.
The boy had laughed and grinned at the wind. It had blown steam onto the subway window, and the boy had traced a swirling circle in the fog, wiping away the condensation.
Now, the woman was tiptoeing up another flight of stairs, and when the battle-hardened brother sprinted past, a defibrillator in his hands, the woman flattened herself against the wall and held her breath until he’d passed and his footsteps had faded.
Finally, after climbing the zigzagging steps toward the hated rooftop, the woman veered down the hallway of the highest floor. It was quiet. Dark. Not even the wood floors dared to creak under the woman’s careful steps.
She paused at a wooden door and looked left, then right. The hallway was empty. There were no Smiths on this floor. The rooms were filled with weapons. That was how the Smiths were—every room that didn’t hold a person held weapons instead.
While weapons did have feelings—especially the ones that were named—there weren’t any feelings here.
The wind was glad. Sometimes, weapons shouted so loudly it was hard to block out their boasting, their thirst, or their wails.
The more blood-soaked a weapon was, the louder it shouted.
But this floor was quiet. It even smelled quiet, like a book that was closed.
The woman shuddered as she closed her hand over the cold brass knob.
The wind laced through her fingers.
She turned the handle and opened the door to reveal a long, narrow set of wooden stairs. Then, stepping inside, she closed herself and the wind into the dark of the Smiths’ attic.
* * *
There was something in the attic with them.
At first, the wind had thought the woman was the only being tiptoeing through the dark, but ever so slowly, like the creeping of frost covering a window, the wind had become aware of another presence.
It tinged the air with a pungent, decaying smell that held whiffs of bonfire.
Centuries ago, when millions of mummified animals were untombed, the living had used their petrified corpses as kindling.
The scent of resin-wrapped crocodiles, cats, and scarabs had hovered over cities for years.
The unearthed mummies weren’t only used in bonfires.
They were ground up and used in plaster, so the devotion of the dead was coated in the walls of thousands of homes.
They were stacked into ships and used as ballast. They were .
. . desecrated. But the pungent smell of their burning was what the wind remembered.
The thing in the attic smelled like death untombed, scarred by merciless fire.
The wind wrapped itself around the woman’s hand and shuddered against the throbbing of her pulse.
She crept through the shadows, visible again, her firefly lights floating above her.
Earlier, when she’d climbed the narrow, creaking stairs and stepped into the attic, she’d let out a stunned breath.
It was illusion. The ceiling was peaked, with dark wooden beams that looked like the charred bones of a behemoth’s picked-over carcass.
The attic appeared endless. After a long stretch, the rows of story-high wooden shelves disappeared.
The wind knew it was an optical illusion, like a dirt path hitting the vanishing point in a Renaissance painting, but all the same, it looked as if it went on for eternity.
The wind had nudged her thin wrist, and the woman had stiffened her shoulders and stepped into an aisle between a row of shelves.
The shelves were stacked with cobweb-covered boxes, trunks, and crates. The sort of useless, forgotten things that beings didn’t want to throw away but didn’t want to keep where they could be seen.
As soon as the woman had stepped into the aisle, the shelves had shifted and closed around her. She’d swung back around and gasped as the aisles moved. There was no way back, only forward.
So she’d lit her fireflies and cautiously crept down the narrow aisle. As soon as she turned a corner, the shelves shifted again, blocking the path backward.
She’d laughed to herself. It was a maze. An attic maze.
The boy loved mazes. He was a Ward after all, and Wards loved nothing more than traipsing through the mazes of their own minds or trapping someone else in a maze they could never escape.
But the woman wasn’t a Ward, and she wasn’t laughing anymore.
The shelves shifted again, spraying dust. The woman stepped through the motes and then looked behind her.
The smell was back. It reached through the shelves and bit at the dusty air.
Then the thing spoke.
The woman spun around, holding her hands high.