The Shadow Thieves

by Alexandra Ott

  Jiavar offers to fly me all the way home, but I don’t really want anyone in the Guild (Shadow or otherwise) besides Beck to know where Ronan lives. Plus I’d prefer a bumping, jolting sleigh ride over a terrifying, plummeting thilastri any day. Unfortunately, it turns out there aren’t many sleighs operating at this time of night, so I end up trudging home through the snow, shivering in the cold.

  I sneak back into the apartment, which is still dark. There’s one problem I didn’t anticipate—my boots are caked with snow, so I can’t just throw them back into my wardrobe. I end up running hot water in the kitchen and rinsing the boots off, attacking the particularly stubborn clumps of ice with kitchen utensils until they fall into the sink. Then I dry the now-clean boots off with towels and put them back where they belong in my wardrobe before climbing, finally, into bed.

  Not nearly enough hours pass before Mari wakes me, dawn filtering through the frosted window. “Rise and shine!” she says brightly.

  Ugh. Of course she’s a morning person. Cheerfulness at this hour of the day ought to be outlawed.

  “Uhhh,” I moan, throwing a blanket over my head.

  Mari gives me a gentle poke. “I hear Ronan’s making hot chocolate.”

  I perk up. “Did someone say chocolate?”

  “Better get it while it’s hot!”

  I toss the blanket aside, blinking in the sudden light. “You should really lead with that next time.”

  “Noted,” she says, smiling. Despite her cheerfulness, she looks tired—dark circles rest under her eyes. She must have an early shift at work today, to be up and visiting us already.

  I sit up slowly, yawning. “Better get up before Ronan drinks it all, I guess.”

  I rush into the kitchen, where Ronan is indeed pouring hot chocolate into colorful chipped mugs. “Just in time,” he says. “How was your night? Sleep okay?”

  “Just great,” I lie. “But it’s way too early in the morning right now, so I’m going to need an extra-big mug.”

  “One extra-big mug coming up.”

  Ronan, Mari, and I eat breakfast together; then they both finish getting ready for work. As soon as they leave, I go into my room and bundle up in my coat again. It’s times like these that I really start to miss Azeland. I never had to complete this hour-long bundling process just to go outside. This is going to get really annoying by the end of winter.

  Now properly attired, I exit the apartment. I made sure to leave a note in case Mari or Ronan comes over to check on me or something, though, of course, it doesn’t say where I’m going.

  I decide to check our secret messaging place in the park first, just in case Beck left me a note last night after returning from the Night Market. But the tree trunk is empty, so I leave the park and head for the hill.

  Trudging through the woods is much harder in the snow. Tree branches hang lower, their limbs weighed down with ice, and I’m constantly tripped up by the bushes and undergrowth now buried under the snow. Beck and Rosalia must be covering their tracks somehow when they come up here; I don’t see a single footprint. The whole hilltop is an unbroken blanket of snow, disturbed only by the glimmering crystalline trees.

  At long last, I reach the chapel. It’s clear that someone has been shoveling snowdrifts away from the front doors, but they’ve done it very carefully, piling the snow in natural-looking mounds along the walls so that it looks like the wind just made drifts. If I didn’t know they were here, I never would suspect.

  I push open the chapel doors and step inside. The center of the room is empty, but a fire burns in the grate. “Beck?” I call.

  “Hey,” he says from somewhere above me. I turn around. He climbs down from the choir loft, brushing messy hair from his eyes. “How’s it going, Allicat?”

  “Fine,” I say, ignoring the weird little flip my stomach does when he calls me that. “No one noticed that I snuck out last night. You get back all right?”

  “Yep.”

  “What was it you were doing with Keene before we met up? You never told me how that went.”

  “Not bad.” He moves over to the fire and retrieves a bowl of oatmeal that was warming in front of it. “They didn’t have me doing anything important. Mostly I just stood lookout outside a building while these guys went in to steal stuff. I tried to get some info out of them, but they wouldn’t budge. The Night Market was more productive.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call that productive. We didn’t find the coin. Or even narrow down where it might be.”

  “But we learned who’s fencing for the Shadows. That’s info I can take to the king. I can’t believe the Treasury turned.” Beck raises the bowl to his lips and slurps some of the oatmeal out.

  “Ew,” I say, wrinkling my nose. “Remind me to bring you a spoon later.”

  He ignores me. “Did you see anything when we separated? Anyplace they might be hiding the coin?”

  “Are you kidding? I saw a million places they could be hiding the coin.”

  “Hmm.” Beck frowns, tapping one finger against the rim of his bowl.

  “But honestly, I’m not sure it’s at the Night Market anyway. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t the Shadows keep it? Like, wouldn’t the leader of the Shadows have the coin on them at all times, instead of entrusting it to anyone else?”

  Beck nods. “Good point.”

  “But that’s just it,” I say, pacing in front of the fire. “We don’t even know who the leader of the Shadows is. It could be that woman who was at the house, but we don’t know for sure. All this spying, and we’ve got nothing. We’re no better off than when we started.”

  “Actually, that’s not quite true.” Beck grins. “I did get one useful piece of information out of Keene. Apparently they’re having a really big meeting soon, one so important and secretive that everyone’s buzzing about it. They’re saying the leader of the Shadows is going to speak at this meeting. I’m not sure if new recruits are supposed to show, but I figure we should talk our way in. We definitely need to be there. To see who the leader is.”

  “Right,” I say. “So when you say ‘soon,’ how soon are we talking?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I sigh. “Didn’t we just have a Shadows meeting? Why now?”

  “Don’t ask me. I didn’t plan it.” Beck takes another slurp of oatmeal.

  “If you were the one running this operation, everything would be so much more efficient. No time wasted with lots of meetings, no complicated recruitment processes, just simple, straightforward plans.”

  He lowers the oatmeal bowl. “Was that actually a compliment?”

  “Of course not. Note that I didn’t say they’d be good plans. They would be reckless, dangerous plans bound to go wrong every step of the way. But there would be plans. Outlines. Maps. Lots of maps.”

  “What’s wrong with maps?”

  “And lists and charts and schedules and—”

  “And if you were the one running the Shadows,” he interrupts, “there’d be no plans at all. You’d just point people in a general direction and say, ‘Go here. Steal this. Figure it out.’ ”

  “Hey, improvising is much better than relying on some stupid plan that’s useless the minute something goes wrong. Besides, I’ll have you know that I’m very good at coming up with strategies. How do you think I’ve been sneaking away from my brother to do all this Shadows stuff?”

  Beck snorts. “I think you’ve been totally making it up as you go along and hoping you don’t get caught.”

  That might be a little more accurate than I’d care to admit, so I ignore it. “And speaking of sneaking away from my brother, I’m guessing this meeting is going to be at night again? So I don’t know how I’m going to get away this time. It’s not like I can play sick again or keep giving Ronan tea without raising suspicion.”

  Beck’s eyebrows rise, but he doesn’t even ask. “Actually, it isn’t at night this time. It’s at noon.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, at least. My brother wil
l be at work, so I won’t have to sneak out. Ronan isn’t exactly thrilled when I disappear.”

  “Really? What happened?”

  I sigh. “Nothing. We just had a fight last time I came home late without telling him where I was. It’s weird having adults care about where you are and stuff.”

  Something sad flicks across Beck’s face for a second. “Doesn’t sound that bad to me.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d hate it.”

  He shrugs. “If you say so.”

  He’s pretending not to care, but he obviously does, and it annoys me. He’s acting like I’m the spoiled rich kid all of a sudden, complaining about having a curfew. Which, admittedly, is exactly what I’m doing. But he wasn’t there. He doesn’t know hard it is for me, trying to be the good little sister that Ronan wants. It’s not like I found my family and everything is suddenly perfect and happy. No matter how hard I try, I’m mostly still Old Alli, the same girl who broke into the Atherton mansion with Beck all those months ago. Better suited to being a thief than being a lawyer’s sister.

  But I don’t know how to explain this in a way that he’d understand. The words are all tangled up in my mouth. “Whatever,” I say instead. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The front doors creak loudly, and both Beck and I jump. Rosalia walks in, dusting snow from her coat. Her cheeks are flushed red, but otherwise I could never tell she just hiked through the woods in several feet of snow. Her hair is still perfectly braided, not a strand out of place.

  “Rosco. You left tracks. You could’ve led anyone right to us,” she says by way of acknowledging my presence. She strides down the aisle until she reaches us, then stops to warm her gloved hands in front of the fire. “I have news,” she says, looking at Beck.

  “Where have you been?” I ask.

  She continues looking at Beck as if I haven’t spoken. “The new steward just issued a batch of assignments, and several people have been called to a meeting with the king himself tomorrow. You and me included.”

  Beck frowns. “Are you sure?”

  Rosalia glares. “Of course I’m sure. I asked a couple of friends to keep me informed. They’ve been sneaking my family messages from within the Guild. Apparently everyone thinks the king is planning something big. It’s been a while since he called this many people to a meeting all at once.”

  “It must be about the Shadows,” Beck says.

  “Exactly.”

  Beck leans back against the side of the nearest pew, frowning. “Are you planning to go?”

  She turns away from the fire, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “I think I will. I don’t want the king to think my family has deserted—he’ll send people after us, and it will be harder to hide. I’ll just have to be prepared for any Shadows I might encounter.”

  “Prepared?” I ask.

  Rosalia looks at me for the first time, and something fierce glimmers in her eyes. She doesn’t elaborate, but she doesn’t have to. I remember the way she held a knife to my throat. She means that kind of prepared.

  “Are you going?” I ask Beck, even though I already know what his answer will be.

  “Of course,” he says, just like I knew he would. “I’m sure the king wants information about what we’ve been doing.”

  “Which is a problem, because we don’t have any,” I point out. “We’re no closer to finding the coin than we were when we started, we still don’t know who the leader of the Shadows is or how to find them—”

  “Did you see my brother?” Rosalia interrupts. She’s trying not to look worried, but I’m getting better at seeing through her cool exterior. She’s very worried.

  “He wasn’t at the meeting,” I say. “And I didn’t see him at the Night Market, either. Did you find out anything, Beck?”

  “No,” he says. “I tried to ask Keene, but he wasn’t very helpful.”

  I sigh. “So we have zero information about anything.”

  Beck straightens up abruptly, sending a poof of dust flying into the air. “But we will,” he says. “There’s that meeting tomorrow, remember?” He turns to Rosalia. “When do we have to be back at the Guild?”

  “Tomorrow at two,” she says.

  “It’ll be tight, but we can make it. Could you have someone arrange for a thilastri to meet us?”

  She purses her lips, considering. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Beck nods. “It’s settled, then. Alli and I will go to the Shadows meeting tomorrow and learn everything we can, and maybe we can even look around the hideout for where they’ve hidden the coin. Afterward, I’ll meet you, Rosalia, and we’ll fly to the Guild to meet the king, and I can tell him everything we’ve found out. And give him the coin, if we find it.”

  Something tells me none of this will be that simple. “And if we don’t find it? Or figure anything else out?”

  “We already know more than you think,” he says. “We know where their hideout is. We know who some of their members are. We know more about how they operate. And we know of at least a few vendors at the Night Market who are fencing for the Shadows. I’m sure the king will want to know about all of that.”

  “It’s still not much to go on without knowing who the leader is.”

  “Well, then we’d better make sure to find out tomorrow.” Beck has that familiar determined look on his face, the one that means he’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants. It’s the look that I used to find admirable, until I realized just how far he’s willing to go. Now it makes me nervous.

  Rosalia sniffs. “None of that will mean anything without the coin. The king must have it to preserve the legitimacy of his claim to power.”

  “Not to mention whatever magic powers it grants him, right?” I say.

  “There’s little evidence it does anything of the sort. It’s a symbol of power, not a magic token,” says Rosalia.

  “If it’s only a symbol, then why does the king need it back so badly?” I argue.

  Rosalia gives me a very serious stare. “Don’t be so quick to underestimate symbols. They have a power all their own.”

  I open my mouth to argue some more, but Beck raises a hand. “Regardless,” he says pointedly, “I think we can all agree that the coin is important, and finding it should be our top priority.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “She doesn’t know it isn’t magic,” I grumble. “And anyway, the coin isn’t my top priority. Finding out who put my brother’s name on that list is.”

  “But if we find the coin, then the Shadows will be defeated, and it won’t matter who put his name there,” Beck says.

  Rosalia frowns. “Rosco, are you sure your brother isn’t involved with the Guild somehow? Or involved in something criminal? It doesn’t make sense that his name would be there for no reason.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Ronan is, like, the most boring person on the planet. He spends all day at his law office or studying his books. He doesn’t even have the time to be involved in anything.” But even as I say it, I get this weird twisty feeling in my chest. I haven’t lived with Ronan for very long. How well do I really know him? Could he be hiding something that I don’t know about?

  “Could just be because he’s a lawyer,” Beck says. “Maybe he helped put one of the Shadows in prison once, or one of their friends.”

  Rosalia nods, as if that makes sense. But it doesn’t, because Ronan told me he only handles business law. He doesn’t put thieves in prison. But I don’t say that out loud. I feel like I need to defend Ronan from their suspicion, even if I’m starting to feel suspicious myself.

  “Or it could be because of his girlfriend,” I say instead. “Maybe she arrested one of the Shadows once or something.”

  “But then why wouldn’t her name be on the list instead of his?” Beck asks.

  Rosalia shakes her head. “Could be a revenge thing. They want to threaten the protector by going after her boyfriend. That could be it.”

  That does make more sense, and I feel a little bit better. Maybe it’s not
about Ronan after all. Maybe he hasn’t done anything wrong.

  “But really,” Rosalia continues, “it doesn’t matter. Beck’s right. If we find the coin and stop the Shadows, then you won’t have to worry about the list at all. Finding the coin should be our focus.”

  “So,” Beck says, “what can we do at the meeting tomorrow to make sure we get a chance to look for it?”

  “I don’t know. They kept us under pretty careful watch last time. We weren’t exactly allowed to go exploring.”

  “Right, but there will be more people at this meeting, I think. That means more distractions to take advantage of.”

  “Or more people to potentially catch us,” I say.

  Beck starts pacing in front of the fireplace, his footsteps echoing against the stone floor. He’s in full planning mode now, and nothing will snap him out of it. “Maybe we should get there a bit early? They’ll still be getting things set up, lots of people will still be arriving, plenty of movement back and forth . . . maybe no one would question us if they saw us walking around.”

  “Or maybe they’d decide to stab us with sharp pointy objects.”

  Rosalia stares thoughtfully into the fire. “Perhaps if you claimed to be looking for Mead?” she suggests. “He’d likely cover for you if asked.”

  Beck runs a hand through his hair, mussing it up even more. “Good idea.”

  “Terrible idea,” I say. “How do we know for sure he’d go along with it? None of us knows what Mead will actually do at any given time. His first priority is always saving his own skin.”

  “Yes, but what’s his second priority?” Rosalia says, a hint of something wry in her voice. I’d say it was amusement, if Rosalia were capable of being amused.

  “Does he have one?” I say.

  Rosalia gives me a meaningful glance and tilts her head, very slightly, in Beck’s direction.

  Rosalia knows what I know—that if there’s anyone Mead seems to care about other than himself, it’s Beck.

  “So you think he’d lie for us,” I say to her, putting emphasis on “us” so she’ll know I really just mean Beck.

  She nods. “Unless it directly contradicts his first priority of helping himself, I don’t see why not.”