Kaldar squeezed the stem. A whisper of magic shivered through the air. The metal panels of the stem rose, revealing the insides of tiny, fine gears in a dozen of shades. The circular bands rose, turning slowly. A faint glow coalesced above them. Kaldar leaned closer and said, pronouncing the words with crisp exactness, “Adriana. Fountain.”
The glow snapped into a ghostly three-dimensional image of a cobbled square with some sort of ruin in the center that might have been a fountain at some point but now was mostly a heap of broken marble. Flesh-colored remains dotted the scene. Alex’s handiwork. He must’ve teleported out, and someone held on to him half a second too long.
The Hand didn’t get their goods, which meant they would be hunting both her father and Alex. And her. Her heart skipped a beat.
“Is my father dead?” Audrey asked. Her voice came out flat. She wished she would’ve felt worry or fear. Something. But she felt nothing at all. A better daughter should’ve wondered if she shouldn’t have left them alone, but she wasn’t that daughter. You reap what you sow, Dad.
“I don’t know,” Kaldar said. “If he is, he lived long enough to deliver your brother to the rehab center and pay for it, which means he found another buyer.”
“I have no idea who that would be.” Audrey shrugged. “My involvement ended in Jacksonville.”
“He didn’t contact you?” Kaldar peered at her face. “Shouldn’t you get some reward for this venture?”
“Ha! My reward was that I would be left alone to live my nice life, which you’ve ruined.”
“Oh no, darling,” Kaldar shook his head. “You ruined your own life when you took that job. Every Edger knows to keep the hell away from the Hand. This was a high-risk/ low-reward heist. There are much easier ways of getting money. Were you born yesterday?”
Just who does he think he is? “I’m not your darling. It was a family matter.”
“When family insists on being stupid, you steer them away from it. It’s not that difficult.”
“You don’t know me.” Audrey crossed her arms. “You don’t know my father. Don’t come here and tell me how to live my life. You can’t steer Seamus Callahan. You can only bargain with him.”
He leaned back. “So the two of you did strike a bargain. He got forty thousand dollars. What did you get?”
“I got to never see my family again.”
Kaldar frowned. “Come again?”
“I got to be cut off. Left in peace. I want nothing to do with them or with their stupid schemes. I don’t have parents, and they don’t have a daughter. That was my condition.”
Kaldar reeled back a little. She could almost feel gears turning behind that pretty face.
“I’ve met your brother. If anyone should be cast off, it should be him.”
“That’s not how it works in our family. He is the heir, the pride and joy, who carries on the family name. I’m his younger sister.” And she wasn’t bitter about it. Not at all. “Anyway, my life is none of your business. Did you have any more questions about the heist? If not, you should go now. My patience is all worn down.”
The moment he was out the door, she’d grab Ling and bail.
“I need to find out who bought the box.”
“No clue.”
“Where can I find your father?”
“No clue, either.”
“Audrey, I really need your help.” Kaldar smiled at her. Now there was a work of art. If she were just a girl and he were just a man, and they met at a party, that smile would’ve guaranteed him a date. The man was hot. There was no doubt. But right now, all it would get him was a solid punch in those even teeth.
Audrey laughed. “Aren’t you sweet? Tell me, do girls usually throw their panties at you when you do that?”
He grinned wider, and she glimpsed the funny evil spark in his eyes. “Do men throw money when you do your little Southern belle?”
Pot calling the kettle black. “Men enjoy my ‘sweet tea’ Southern. Nobody here is enjoying that stupid grin on your ugly mug.”
“Ugly.”
“Hideous.”
The kids snickered.
“You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.” The Mirror agent sat straighter. “Do you know what you’ve stolen?”
“It wasn’t my job, and I wasn’t paid to know.” She waited for a jab. No good thief ever did a heist without knowing every detail, especially what and why. “We were paid to obtain the box and deliver it to the buyer.”
He didn’t say anything.
“The box had four seals on it, anyway,” she said.
“Did you look in the box, Audrey?”
“I said it had four seals on it.”
He just waited. Oh, for Christ’s sake. “Of course I looked in the box.”
He leaned to his gadget, whispered something, and nodded. “Did it look something like this?”
A pair of ghostly metal bracelets appeared above the table. At first glance they looked silver, but where silver leaned toward a gray shade, this metal blushed with warm tones of peach and pale pink. The wider part of each bracelet bent and flowed, thin and wide, like a ribbon. A smooth border tipped the edges, which otherwise would’ve been too sharp. At the other end, tiny pebbles of metal encrusted the narrow edge of each bracelet, seeded so close together, sometimes on top of each other, almost like barnacles on the bottom of the ship. The two bracelets together were an elegant piece of jewelry, unique and beautiful. She would wear them in an instant, with a flowing gown of pure white. But it was just jewelry. A hunk of metal, yet the Hand, the Mirror, and the Claws were after it, and now, curiosity was killing her. She had to know why.
“Yes, that’s what we stole,” Audrey said. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
“It’s a portable Gorleanean diffuser,” Kaldar said.
“What is that?”
The blond boy, George, stirred. The kids had been so quiet, she had almost forgotten he and his brother were there at all. “A Gorleanean diffuser functions like a magic battery,” the boy said. “You can charge it with a blast of magic, like flash, for example. It holds the magic for a while, but it starts leaking the charge into the environment right away. Also, they’re huge. The size of a house.”
“Not anymore.” Kaldar nodded at the bracelets. “These hold only a very small amount of magic.”
“What’s the purpose of having one?” George leaned closer and peered at the bracelets. “Some sort of last resort in battle, when you overflash? To keep from dying?”
Kaldar drew his hand over his face. “You are too bright for your own good. That was the original plan, yes.”
Audrey stared at the bracelets. She’d heard about flashing so much magic that your body gave out. But she had always thought that you simply passed out. “I never heard of people dying from flashing out.”
“Our sister almost did,” Jack said.
“You said it was the original plan?” George asked. “What is it used for now?”
“It holds just enough magic to help an augmented being cross through the boundary,” Kaldar said.
The room was suddenly quiet. Audrey caught her breath. The Edge had two boundaries: the first with the Weird and the second with the Broken. The boundaries barred the passage between the worlds. If you didn’t have enough magic, you couldn’t cross from the Broken into the Edge without help. If you had too much magic, the crossing from the Weird into the Edge would leave you convulsing in pain. The threshold to leave the Edge and enter an opposing world was even higher. Most magic heavyweights couldn’t make it into the Broken. The crossing killed them. And if people stayed too long out of their own world, the way back disappeared forever. The Edgers who moved to the Broken permanently lost their magic after a while. Some of them couldn’t even see the Edge anymore.
George cleared his throat. “So does this mean that someone with strong magic, like a Hand agent, can cross into the Broken with these?”
“That’s exactly what it means,” Kaldar sai
d.
Audrey put her fist against her mouth, thinking. No wonder the Hand wanted them. If they manufactured enough of these, they could send their goons into the Edge and into the Broken. The boundary had always shielded the Edgers from harm. Their magic was weaker than that of people in the Weird. If any magic-wielding creature could just pop back and forth, it was all over. Her imagination served up the Hand’s agents trotting across the boundary, all spikes and tentacles and poisoned needles on twisted human bodies . . . Jesus Christ.
She sat down. She didn’t know too much about the Hand or the Mirror and their politics, but she knew that both the Dukedom of Louisiana and Adrianglia were large and strong, while the Edge was tiny and defenseless.
“If the Hand obtains this . . .” Kaldar started.
She held up her hand. “Now you listen to me. This isn’t my problem. I didn’t make the thing, I didn’t know what it was when I stole it, and I don’t give a damn what the hell it does now. If you think I’ll fall over myself in a rush to fight the Hand for it, you’re crazy. Do you know what they’re capable of?”
All mirth had vanished from Kaldar’s face. Only grim determination remained. “The Hand took two-thirds of my family from me. I watched people I loved being slaughtered. I will do everything in my power to make the Hand pay. And if it means I have to knock you down and walk over you to get to them, I will.”
He wasn’t kidding. A slight touch of insanity flared in his eyes. Audrey felt a pang of the familiar fear.
“Don’t sugarcoat it,” she told him.
“I won’t. The Hand will keep looking for the diffusers until they find them. I will find them first, and I need you to help me. If you do it willingly, the terms will be better for everyone.”
“And if not, what? You will make me?”
“If I have to.”
Fear squirmed through her. She clamped it down. “So there is no real difference between the Mirror and the Hand, is there?”
Kaldar held her gaze. “There is a woman in Adrianglia. Her name is Lady Nancy Virai. She isn’t the most patient woman in the world, and some find her methods frightening. If I were to drag your ass over to her, she would extract the information from you. But if you told her everything you knew, you would likely walk away on your own two legs. If I delivered you to the Hand, they would get the same information out of you as well. Then they would rape you and torture you for the fun of it. If you were lucky, they would kill you afterward. But most likely they would wring every drop of pain from you and simply wait for you to die. Most of them aren’t human anymore. They drink agony like fine wine. Run if you want—the Hand will find you. Sooner or later, your brother or your father will sell you out again, they will catch your scent, and you’ll wake up with monsters standing over you. You have contacts in the Edge. Ask any of them if I’m lying.”
Run if you want . . . Yeah, right. His eyes told her that she wouldn’t get very far. He had no intention of letting her go. Just like before, when she was a child, technically she was given a choice, but practically things had been decided without her.
“It’s not my mess,” she told him.
“You stole the stupid things. You made this mess; you’re in it up to your eyeballs.”
“No.”
“Audrey, weigh the odds.”
She had. Audrey looked away. Her gaze snagged on the book of Greek myths she had been reading yesterday. Like Odysseus, she was stuck between Scylla and Charybdis: the Hand on one side and the Mirror on the other. Each would swallow her without a moment’s hesitation.
She liked her place. It wasn’t much, but it was so cozy and comfortable. She liked her old couch and reading her books with Ling curled by her feet. She just wanted to be left alone. That was all.
“You may not like my ugly mug,” Kaldar said, “but as corny as it sounds, I am your best hope for survival. I’ve fought them, I’ve killed them, and I will do it again.”
This had gone from bad to the end of the world in a hurry. “And if I help you?” Audrey asked.
“I can’t promise that you will survive. But I promise that I will do everything I can to protect you, and if we succeed, the Mirror will see to it that you won’t have to fear the Hand again.”
“Is that code for ‘the Mirror will kill me’?”
“No. It’s code for they will do for you what they’ve done for my family. They will give you enough funds and space anywhere within Adrianglia to make a brand-new start in comfort.”
He really did think she was born yesterday.
Her family finally screwed up so badly, they put the whole Edge at risk, and she was the one who had made it happen. She could deal with it, or she could walk away and be known as the girl who destroyed the Edge. It stretched like a ribbon from ocean to ocean, all across the continent. How many people lived in the Edge? It had to be thousands. Thieves and swindlers and conmen. Her people and their children. All at risk because of Seamus Callahan’s greed and her daddy issues.
Audrey raised her head. “I will help you find where Seamus unloaded the diffusers. That’s all. The moment you know your next target, I am out. Do we understand each other?”
Kaldar smiled, and this time his smile was savage. “Perfectly.”
SIX
AUDREY had a conscience. She was good at hiding her motivation, but Kaldar had practiced reading people for way too long to miss the subtle tightness in the corners of her mouth, the eyebrows creeping together, and the glimpse of sadness in her eyes. She felt guilty. Probably even ashamed, although of her own involvement or of her family’s stupidity, he couldn’t tell.
Kaldar pondered it, turning it over in his mind. Conscience was a virtue he tried very hard to avoid. True, there were things that were just not done: injuring a child, forcing a woman, torturing a dog. But beyond those basic rules, everything else was just a cumbersome guideline he strived to ignore. He supposed it made him amoral, and he was fine with that.
His world was clearly divided: on one side was the family. Family was everything. It was a shelter in the storm. A place where he would be welcome no matter what he’d done or would do. On the other side lay the rest of the world, like a ripe plum, ready for plucking. Between them ran the line of demarcation. When he crossed it to the family’s side, he was a devoted brother, cousin, and uncle. When he crossed it to the other side, he became a villain.
The heist was the Callahan family’s responsibility. Audrey was a Callahan, and she had stepped up to take it—that he understood. He would’ve done the same. But considering how much she loathed her family, he would’ve thought self-preservation would be a much stronger motivation for her. He’d misread her, and now it bugged him.
Audrey was a puzzle. He quietly examined the place, cataloging her possessions. A solid fridge, dented but clean. Same with the stove. Worn but plush furniture. The chair under Jack sported a very neatly sewn seam where something had torn the upholstery. He bet on the raccoon.
The three windows he could see were narrow, and each one had a heavy-duty shutter, lockable from the inside. A functional dagger hung on the wall between the kitchen cabinets. A small bow waited unstrung on the shelf above the plates, and below it a pair of yellow work boots, streaked with mud, sat on the floor.
Her three bookcases held an assortment of books, all well handled and shopworn. A dozen plastic horses each about six inches long sat on one of the shelves. A few had wings, and at least one sported a horn. On the top shelves, tucked away from raccoon paws, lived a collection of stuffed animals: a pink kitten, a panda, a frog with a yellow helmet marked with a star, a wolf. Daggers and stuffed frogs.
Her decorations made no sense: a blanket in a bright Southwestern style that clashed with everything, a Star Wars movie poster, some sort of potted flower, a scented candle, and a tomahawk. She was like a little magpie: if it struck her fancy, she brought it home.
He’d seen this before, in Cerise’s husband, William. Kaldar’s cousin Cerise was practically his sister, which made the c
hangeling wolf his brother-in-law. The man was a trained, savage killer. He killed with no doubt or remorse and suffered no pangs of conscience after the deed was done. And then he went home and played with toys. His childhood had been pure shit. William had essentially grown up in a prison, barely disguised as a school. It was the fear of that same prison that had driven Jack to stow away on Kaldar’s wyvern.
This house, with its sturdy walls, weapons, and fluffy pink kittens, didn’t belong to an infantile, child-like woman. It belonged to an adult battered by life. She had survived it all, and now she was trying to recapture the childhood she’d never had.
Someone had hurt Audrey, and it had left lasting scars. Kaldar looked at her again. She was golden, not just pretty, but funny and vivid, like a ray of sunshine in the room. There was something good about Audrey, and at least some of it was real. Most women he’d come across in the Edge families that were down on their luck were like haggard dogs: bitter, vicious, devoid of any joy. But she was like a summer day.
What sort of twisted bastard would hurt her so much that she decided to live alone in the woods, in a house with foot-thick stone walls? This was her haven and her shelter. Pulling her out of this place would be next to impossible. Why, in fact it would be a challenge. And Kaldar loved challenges. They kept his life from being boring.
The way she sat now, leaning forward frowning, biting her pink bottom lip, her shirt dipping to reveal a hint of her cleavage . . . He wondered idly if he could get her to bend over a little farther . . .
“Just what are you staring at, exactly?”
Kaldar snapped back to reality. “You. You’ve been thinking hard for the last five minutes. It’s not good for you to strain your pretty little head like that. I’m waiting for the steam to shoot out of your ears to relieve the pressure on your brain.”
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