“As if I’m not,” I said. “Anyway, he’s a nice guy. Sure, he doesn’t like humans, but I’ve never seen him hurt one. Whenever he’s mentioned a Society terrorist attack, it’s always been in a matter-of-fact way, like what they did is simply part of the past. And he’s been good to me. I’d be in Society prison if it weren’t for him, and he’s been more welcoming to me than anyone else in this world.” Something made me add, “He likes me.”
“I’m sure he does.”
“Can you please cut the sarcasm? I’m trying to tell you that Orion might give me some valuable information. The IBI wants me to spy. He’s my best source.”
“You can find other sources.”
“I’m working on it.” I frowned. “I really don’t see what your problem is.”
“It’s just”—he ran a hand through his hair—“you’re talking about using someone, and that’s not an easy thing to do. I don’t think you’ve ever done that before—use someone. Your friends—Lily, Raphael, Jims—”
I flinched, the pain of missing them was so sharp.
“I’ve seen how you are with people,” Conn said. “Your friendships are true. You value people, and when they value you, you’re true to them. That’s a gift. I don’t want to see you throw it away.”
“Hey, I’m not spying for the IBI because I enjoy it.”
“I know,” Conn said. “But be careful,” he repeated. “Especially if Orion has feelings for you.”
I looked at Conn and decided I wasn’t crazy about the turn this conversation was taking. So I changed it. “You were right about something. Sort of. Shades don’t really need food.” I explained what Orion had told me about ghosting, and how it could shut down hunger, pain, even aging.
Conn stared.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said.
“I don’t think you do.”
“You’re thinking about how different we are. You, a human. Me, the Shade.”
“Actually … I think we have a lot in common. Though”—he smiled a little—“it’s true that I can’t live hundreds of years.”
“So not worth it. What’s the point in living that long if you can’t do anything? Paint. Sleep. Ride a bike. Pet a dog.” And kiss, I thought. Hurriedly, I added, “And food. Let’s not forget about eating.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Not technically, but I’d sell my soul to a minor demon for a candy bar.”
“Tell me what you miss. What would you eat right now, if you could have anything? I mean, besides blueberry pancakes smothered with butter and maple syrup.”
I glanced at him. That was what I had ordered at the diner the day we skipped class. “Chocolate-covered espresso beans,” I said. “Veggie pad thai with lots of lime and crunchy peanuts. Pink apples. Fortune cookies. Roasted brussels sprouts with cracked pepper and rock salt…” I couldn’t stop myself. I kept listing what I craved, watching Conn’s face relax as if we were eating delicious things instead of merely talking about them. As I studied him, I couldn’t help noticing how his features were lean and sharp but almost perfect. In fact (purely from an artist’s perspective), they were handsome because they weren’t perfect.
Conn looked noble. And treacherous, because the way he looked had nothing to do with who he really was.
But I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that one feature that was off center. His one flaw. That broken nose. I glanced at his hands with their old nicks and cuts, and remembered Conn holding the X-Acto knife in my bedroom back home. I remembered him ramming into my attacker’s side. And something made sense. “You got that”—I pointed—“fighting, didn’t you?”
“This?” Startled, he touched the bridge of his nose. “No. I got it sleepwalking.”
“You sleepwalk?” This was unlike Conn. He always seemed so in control.
“I used to, when I was little. One night I walked straight into a wall.” He looked at me. “It was a long time ago.”
“You don’t sleepwalk anymore?”
“No.” There was a flicker of a rueful smile. “Now I just don’t sleep.” His eyes were blue and hooded and sad.
After that, I got the details about our next meeting and left.
The last thing I wanted was to feel sorry for Conn McCrea.
28
Training with Orion was intense and increasingly pointless. But he never gave up. He was certain that I only needed the right incentive to ghost, and alternated between getting bossy and playing the role of head cheerleader for Team Darcy. Frankly, I preferred it when he was bossy. I found myself making excuses to sneak away from the practice room. More often than not, I ended up in the Archives.
It was about a week after my meeting with Conn at the library, and since then I’d been stocking up on art supplies. The Archives had tons of them. Paper, colored pencils, primer, brushes. At first, Savannah grumbled at me from behind her desk, but one day she asked, “What are you doing with all that?”
“Nothing yet,” I told her. Then I looked at her. “Would you help me?”
That’s how I ended up painting Savannah’s portrait.
“You’re using an awful lot of color,” she said as I dabbed a brush on the heavy paper fixed to an easel.
“That’s why it’s called watercolors. Water. Color.”
She stood and stepped around her desk to peer over my shoulder. “You’ve put yellow on my cheek. My skin is not yellow.”
I waved her away. “You’re not supposed to do that. No looking. You said you’d wait until I finished.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. I’m on the Council. And I voted against you, remember that.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I remember. I remember because you remind me every single time I see you.”
Savannah wasn’t paying attention to what I’d said. She kept staring at the portrait. “And blue. You’ve put blue in my hair.”
“It’s not finished,” I snapped. “I guess you think I should be painting you with India ink on rice paper. Well, you’re not just shades of black and white, and neither am I. Do you think a cloud is white? If you do, you’ve been underground too long, because it isn’t. It’s lilac and charcoal and rose and tangerine. When the light strikes your hair, it casts a blue shadow. When it falls on your face, there’s yellow.”
“Don’t get huffy.” She returned to her seat. “I don’t know why you want to paint me anyway.”
I rinsed my brush in a cup of water and looked at the delicate wrinkles edging her eyes like lace. “Because you’re beautiful.”
“Now I know you’re a liar and a fake.”
“Believe what you want,” I said coolly. “I’m telling you what I see.”
For a while there was no other sound than the liquid whisper of my brush across paper, and as I painted, I thought about how the truth can sometimes sound like a lie because we’re too afraid to believe it.
“Do I…” I tried again: “Do I remind you of anyone?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do I look like anyone you know?”
“Darcy, you’re a Shade. You look like everyone I know.” She looked at me, and her wrinkles deepened with a frown. “Ah. I see. You’re asking if I know who your family is. Well, I don’t.”
“Maybe if you thought about it—”
“I have.”
“Oh.” My brush wavered, and a drip of purple went exactly where it shouldn’t. I bit my lip.
“Everyone has.” Savannah’s voice was not unkind. “There has been a lot of talk about it.”
“And?” I painted a curl of sheer black.
Savannah shrugged. “Silt thinks you belong to the wandering Shades, those who live in other parts of the country. He’s probably right. That would explain why no one’s stepped forward to claim you as family.”
“Who’s Silt?”
“He voted for you. Just barely, I might add.”
The serious-eyed man. The one who had told Orion he was blind.
Savannah said, “It was the argument
that you might help the Society by passing as human that convinced Silt. Now, Loam, on the other hand, was for you the moment you walloped him with … what was that metal thing?”
“A bed slat.”
“Loam’s all muscle, no brain. He kept calling you ‘spirited,’ said you were a ‘true fighter,’ which may be correct, but it hardly makes you less dangerous to the Society.”
“And Meridian?”
“Oh, she and Loam are as thick as thieves. They lead the faction that wants the Society armed and on the offensive against humans. But Meridian’s strategic. Even if she liked you—which, I believe, she rather does—she wouldn’t hesitate to lock you up or even have you executed if she thought it served her purposes. But she chose your side the moment Orion stepped forward to defend you.”
“Why is that?”
“As I said, she serves her goals by any means. In this case”—Savannah’s mouth turned disdainful—“her goal was to make her son happy.”
I lowered my brush. “Meridian is Orion’s mother?”
“And he’s a fool for you. Come, don’t look so surprised.”
I rubbed the bristles of the brush inside a little tub of periwinkle. “I’m not, I guess. But it’s strange to hear some things said out loud.”
Savannah gave a hmph of agreement.
Now that she’d said it, I couldn’t help feeling a pleased flutter, yet it didn’t heal my bruised heart or make me less wary to risk it again. “I don’t understand why you’re telling me so much, Savannah. You think I’m a security risk. Why are you even talking to me?”
“You are a security risk,” she said. “But you’re an interesting one. Anyway, I’m not telling you anything you couldn’t figure out on your own.”
“There are some things about the Society I never would have guessed. Like the freaky way we age—or don’t age. What if my parents are really old? Or were. Like more than a hundred years old. And they left the Sanctuary a long time ago and wandered around this world by themselves. Then they had me, and somehow lost me. And maybe nobody here recognizes who I am because they’re too young to have ever known my parents.”
Savannah raised her brows. “Except maybe an old lady like me?”
I glanced at her.
“Zephyr’s been around longer than I have,” she said. “As Council leader she has access to a lot of confidential information. Why don’t you ask her?”
“Yes, and why don’t I play with a vat of vipers while I’m at it.”
Savannah gave me a wry smile. “I’m sorry, Darcy. You don’t look like anyone in particular, and you look like you could belong to anyone. And there have never been any reports of someone losing or abandoning a little girl.”
What about a dead girl? I wanted to ask, but had no way of explaining such a weird question. “Not even in 1997?”
Savannah’s fingers wrapped around her glasses chain. “1997.” Her voice was halting. “1997 was a bad year.”
“It disgusts me,” I said in a low voice before I could stop myself. “Ravenswood. God knows how many other attacks. How many other murders. When I think too hard about what Shades have done, you all disgust me.”
Savannah’s hand snapped the glasses chain, and the beads struck the floor. Neither of us bent to pick them up. We sat there, frozen, as I stared in shock at the beads bouncing and rolling around like my stupid, stupid words. I’d probably destroyed any kind feelings Savannah had for me. I was probably about to get thrust right back into Society prison.
Savannah stooped to sweep some beads into the palm of her hand. “You know better than to say such things out loud,” she told me. Then she straightened, returned to her desk, opened her catalogue of the Archives, and began writing.
I was dismissed.
* * *
“WE’RE GETTING NOWHERE,” Orion was forced to admit when I met him the next day in the practice room.
“Yeah.” I sighed in a way that I hoped sounded sad and not bored.
He leaned against the frame of one of the open windows that overlooked the Great Hall. “When you ghosted before, how did you feel?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t you remember?”
“Memory and I aren’t exactly best friends.”
“I have a theory.” He rested a knuckle against his lips and studied me over the top of his fist. “When you ghosted before, it was to save yourself, and there wasn’t enough time for you to think about what you were doing while you were doing it. True?”
“More or less.”
“So we need to risk your life, yet do so in a way that lets you really think about how to save it.”
“Oh no.” I backed away.
“Go on.” He tilted his head toward the open window. “Jump.”
“Unh-uh. No way.”
“Why not? I promise not to catch you.”
“Why not? Because you belong in a straitjacket. Because we need to book you a padded cell. Because I’m chicken.”
“Well, little chicken”—he grabbed me—“it’s time to fly.”
He threw me out the window.
29
I tumbled through the air, too terrified to scream or do anything other than try to guess when I’d hit bottom and which body part would be the first to go crunch. Probably my spine. Or my skull? Either way, I was dead dead dead.
Then I remembered how pleased Orion’s face had been when he’d chucked me out the window, and I decided I needed to pull it together and ghost. And survive.
So that I could strangle him.
The walls whizzed past. My hands blurred with speed.
Your heart, I told myself. Stop it. But it was rocketing in my chest, too fierce to ignore, and I knew that I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t deny my own body piece by piece. Not even to save it.
So how had I survived Marsha’s knife? What had I done?
Nothing.
When I’d vanished, it had been purely by instinct, the way I knew how thin or thick my paintbrush should be, and how hard to press my pencil when I sketched. I didn’t think when I painted. It was a release. I never chose where my brush went. I let my desire lead me, sweep across the paper, nudge into the corners, plunge down in strong, hard lines. I just let myself go.
The stone floor rushed toward my face. I didn’t close my eyes. I thought of nothing at all.
And fell through the floor.
I flew through someone’s bedroom, where someone who was brushing her hair before a mirror frowned to see a shadow spill from her ceiling. “Privacy, please!” she shouted.
Then I fell through her floor.
And down, and down, until Orion appeared below me with a gleeful smile on his face. And suddenly I felt gleeful, too, because I had done it, and was no longer afraid of what I could do. I dropped straight into his arms and felt my weight hit hard against his bones.
“Brilliant!” He held me close. “You were brilliant!”
“I know!” I laughed, giddy.
He kissed me.
Now that I had my heart back it hummed in my chest. But each moment seemed to expand, grow slower and longer as I kissed him back, and when time dragged to a stop I realized that I was giddy only because I had triumphed over something, and not because of Orion.
Kissing Orion was like drinking IBI water. It only made me long for something else.
I pulled away and struggled to my feet.
“Darcy?” Orion murmured.
I could see his face clearly. Dreamy, inky eyes. A full, sensual, satisfied mouth. His body was relaxed against mine. He looked blissful.
After nearly killing me.
I remembered my plans to strangle him.
I shoved him. “You defenestrated me!”
Orion looked confused. “No, I didn’t. I threw you out the window.”
“That’s what ‘defenestrate’ means, you idiot!”
“Darcy, you’re not really mad.” He peeked at me. “Are you? Because you were breathtaking. I admit what I did was a drastic measure.”
He spread his hands innocently. “But it worked.”
I took a deep breath. Lectured myself about the dangers of yelling at my only ally. Tried to squelch the tiny thought that the person I really wanted to strangle was Conn, whose kiss had been a curse.
“Yeah,” I told Orion. “I guess it did work.”
“So you’re not mad.”
“I’ll get over it. Let’s risk my life again.”
* * *
FALLING FROM GREAT HEIGHTS. Knives. A pot of acid flung across the room. Playing dodge ball in heavy traffic. The only thing we didn’t try was fire.
Over the next few days I mastered my shadow, which proved to be far easier than keeping Orion at arm’s length. “Business first,” I always told him.
He grinned the first time I said it. “Pleasure later, then,” he replied. But later was always later than that for me, and he grew sullen. I knew that I could change that, could heal the insecurity that shape-shifted Orion from a sly jester into someone who pouted. He pouted sexily and looked very kissable. Really, he was very everything. But he wasn’t for me. In the midst of the lies I had to tell and secrets I had to keep and secrets I had to unearth, it felt important to be true to myself.
I wondered … would Conn take back that kiss if he could?
This was one of those positively demonic questions that made me want to tear my brain in half. There was no good answer. Both yes and no hurt too much to consider, so I locked the windows and doors and skylights of my mind and told thoughts like this to go far, far away.
I ghosted around town, nipping into the Swedish bakeries to steal plate-sized cinnamon rolls with gooey centers so dark with brown spice that my tongue tingled. Theft was easy, as long as what I stole was small enough to vanish along with me.
I snuck into people’s homes and watched kids throw crayons at one another. Dads stirred spaghetti sauce while Moms deplored the state of the public school system. And nobody watched TV. It didn’t exist in this world. Shocking, right?
I took the ways I knew to go between the Sanctuary and the city: the tunnel entrances hidden by gravestones and mausoleums. Sure, I could have ghosted my way through the layers of earth above the Sanctuary. But I wasn’t that confident in my abilities, and I dreaded the thought of getting stuck along the way. Being buried alive wasn’t high on my list of fun-filled activities.
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