“You’re impossible,” she told him and slid the platter of burgers closer to him in spite of herself.
Georgie poked his burger with his fork and leaned over to Declan. “Her fried chicken is better,” he said.
“Georgie!” She glared at him in outrage. “Whose side are you on? You’re not supposed to tell him my fried chicken is good.”
Georgie blinked in confusion. “What am I supposed to say?”
“You’re supposed to tell him I’m a horrible cook, so he’ll go away and leave us alone.”
Declan made an odd noise that sounded somewhat like a strangled cough.
Georgie glanced at Declan. “He’ll never believe me. He likes your burgers.”
“You have to convince him. Be charming. Use your Edger wiles.”
Georgie furrowed his eyebrows in thought and looked at Declan. “Don’t eat her fried chicken. It tastes good, but she puts rat poison in it.”
The inscrutable mask on Declan’s face shattered. He leaned forward and laughed.
KNIFE. Knife, knife, knife.
Jack crawled through the grass like a fluffy caterpillar. He’d circled the clearing three times, studying the lure from all angles, until he finally determined the size of the loop. It lay in wait in the grass, ready to snag him the moment the knife was touched.
But the loop was long and narrow. He could jump over it. He knew he could.
Jack crouched in the grass, tight and ready from the ends of his white whiskers to the tip of his short tail. Jump, bite the knife, and spring the trap.
Sure, the lure would’ve caught any other beast, but Jack wasn’t a dumb beast. He was smart.
Jack exploded into flight. He sailed over the loop, air rushing past him, everything crystal clear and slow around him. The handle of the knife loomed before him. He bit it, the feel of its treated wood handle like honey in his mouth, and flew by, free and clear. The sapling sprang upright. The loop whistled past him. Safe!
A green net rushed at him from below. He tried to veer in midflight, but it caught him and clamped him tight. He scrambled in its soft folds, slicing at it with his claws. The knife slid from his mouth and fell through the mesh to the ground. A meow of despair broke from Jack. He bounced a couple of times in the knot of the net, suspended high above the ground like a kitten in a sack, and then the net was still.
THIRTEEN
A whispery rustling of leaves made Jack open his eyes. He unsheathed his claws and hissed.
Declan emerged from the undergrowth. He moved quietly and his eyes were different now: focused and dark. Hunter’s eyes. Jack tensed.
The blueblood approached the net and then stopped, looking up.
“Are you hurt?”
Jack hissed and spat, growling fighting noises.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Declan bent down, picked up the knife, wiped the handle on his sleeve, and sat on a mossy log.
“There is a great difference between a knife and a sword.”
He unsheathed the smaller sword he carried at his waist. The afternoon sun caught it, turning the blade into a beautiful long claw bright with reflected light.
“Swords are long and cumbersome. They are made to kill your opponent in battle from a distance.” He glanced at Jack with his scary green eyes. “Swords are not for you.”
He sheathed the sword and picked up the knife. “Knives are quick. Efficient. Quiet. There’s no such thing as a knife battle. When a knifemaster pulls out his blade, he doesn’t want to fight off his opponent. He means to kill him.”
Declan leapt off the log and struck at the empty air so quickly he became a blur.
“Rogues carry knives.”
The knife sliced and stabbed unseen opponents in a shimmering dance of steel. Jack watched, mesmerized. So quick.
“Thieves. Spies. Assassins. They carry knives.”
Declan tossed the blade into the air, caught it by the tip, and flipped the knife so the handle landed into his palm. “A knifemaster armed with a blade like this can go through a room full of soldiers. I’ve seen it happen.”
Jack wanted the knife so badly, even his tail itched for it.
Declan examined the blade. “A fighting knife like this can’t be stolen. But you could earn it.”
Jack pricked his ears.
“If you prove to me that you can be quick, efficient, and quiet.” Declan sat back on the log. “Two miles north from here, there is a trail of the beasts that chased you. They run fast along the ground and they can climb, but they’re slow in the trees. A forest cat can easily outrun them in the branches. If such a cat were to track them, quietly and patiently and find their lair . . .”
Jack growled and spat. He would fight them, he would . . .
“No fighting,” Declan said. “Sleek, stealthy, and silent. Like a knife sliding into a man in the darkness. Track the beasts. Find their lair. Don’t be seen. If you do this and show me where they are, you’ll earn the knife.”
He smiled. “But that’s an adventure for tomorrow. Right now we have to decide what to do with you. I caught you fair and square. Are you going to come quietly like a wise and patient predator, or will I have to carry you in the net, like a wild beast?”
ROSE sat in the attic, the enormous dusty Encyclopedia of the Weird spread open on her lap. The book was two feet tall, about a foot thick, and heavy as hell, and her thighs were sweaty and rapidly going numb in her jeans.
She had gone through the Bestiary but found nothing that had to do with the hounds. The Encyclopedia was her next best bet.
She turned the big page and adjusted her posture a bit. Her butt was going numb, too.
Adrianglia, Formal Forms of Address. She scanned down the ranks . . . Earl. Earl of “Domain Name.” Lord “Name.” She yawned and flipped back a page.
Earl—derivative of the Northland jarl. Equivalent to Count in Gaulic Empire. Landed noble above viscount but below marquis.
What was his name . . . Earl Carmine? Carmaine? Camarine. Yes, that was it. She turned the pages to the index and found Earl Camarine.
Earl Camarine: noble ruling Earldom of Camarine. Traditional domain of the Duke of the Southern Provinces. Most frequently used as a courtesy title.
“Courtesy title.” She wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but she got the gist of it. For all of his la-di-da manners, Declan wasn’t even a real earl. Rose snickered.
“Rose!” Georgie’s high-pitched voice shattered her thoughts.
“Coming!” She pushed the book off her lap and went down the ladder, dusting off her jeans. “Georgie, did you go outside?” She marched onto the porch. “Didn’t I tell you to stay inside?”
Declan stood in the yard. In his arms curled Jack. His eyes were shut. He growled softly in his sleep and kneaded Declan’s arm with his claws. Declan didn’t even wince. “I think he’s tuckered out. Where do you want him?”
The world reared and kicked her in the teeth. She took a moment to recover, and when she spoke, her voice was almost normal. “I’ll take him.”
Declan gently deposited Jack into her arms. “I’m sure it would hurt his feelings, but he makes a handsome kit.”
“You should’ve seen him when he was a baby,” Rose said through her shock. “Nothing but fuzz and ear tufts. Every minute was like a National Geographic Kodak moment.”
She took Jack inside and gently put him in his bed.
In an hour she served dinner. Jack slept through it. Afterward Georgie curled up to reread InuYasha, yet again, and Rose brewed a cup of tea and escaped onto the porch. Her solitude didn’t last.
Declan sat next to her on the steps. “Disappointed?”
His voice held no mocking, and she shrugged. “Yes. How did you do it?”
“I set four traps and baited the most obvious one with a knife he drooled over in my room.”
What did she expect? After all, Jack was only eight. It was a huge burden to put on him. She shouldn’t have done it in the first place. When she had pictured Declan tracking Jack through the
woods, the idea of him setting traps and lures had never entered her mind. “Boys and knives,” Rose murmured. “Irresistible attraction.”
“We never grow out of it.”
He certainly didn’t, considering how many swords and knives he dragged around with him. Dad’s entire room was full of blades.
In the soft light of the afternoon, Declan’s features gained a new tint. His eyes looked into the distance. He seemed to be wrestling with his thoughts. The harsh line of his mouth relaxed. His gaze lost its aggression. Sitting like this, he seemed almost approachable. The urge to touch him returned. It was natural, she told herself. He was so handsome, and she had no life. But just because she felt the irrational desire to kiss him didn’t mean she had to follow through with it.
The last time he let the blueblood persona slip, he was reasonable. Maybe if she told him a little more about them, he would understand and leave them in peace.
“You seem to like Jack,” she said carefully, testing the waters.
“He tried his best,” he said. “Tell me, why didn’t he change shapes when the hounds were after him on the lawn? The survival instinct should’ve driven him to become a lynx in the face of danger.”
Rose looked into her cup. “It might be different in the Weird, but when changelings shift in the Edge, it’s almost like a seizure. They fall down and convulse. It’s frightening, and it can last up to a minute. If he had changed shapes, the creatures would’ve torn him apart before he had a chance to finish. It took us a long time to teach him not to go cat every time he got scared. Did you see the bracelet he wears?”
“Yes.”
“I taught him that so long as the bracelet stays on, he knows not to change shapes. It’s not actually magic, or anything. Just conditioning.”
“That must’ve taken a lot of work.” His voice betrayed respect.
“It did.”
Declan hesitated, mulling something over. Something was clearly eating at him.
“In the Weird, the changeling children are segregated and taken to special schools until they become adults,” he said finally.
She glanced at him. “You exile children?”
Declan grimaced. “It’s not exactly like that. There are specialized trainers, who oversee their education . . .” He fell silent. “Yes,” he said with a measure of resignation. “We exile changeling children. It’s common wisdom that it’s better for them.”
“I can see how people would think that.”
His thick eyebrows crept up. “I didn’t expect you to agree with that.”
“Some changelings are born human. Jack was born a kitten. We knew something was wrong when he was in the womb, because my mother felt claws, and when Grandma did her spells, all the tests kept pointing to the forest. We couldn’t take my mother to the hospital, because my parents were afraid Jack would die without magic, and my dad had to pay a huge bribe to the midwife from the Broken, so we could get him the proper documents. When Jack was born, he wouldn’t nurse. My mother would pump her breast milk, and we had to feed it to him out of a bottle. It took him three days to change into a human, and when he finally did, he was still blind for almost a month. He looked odd as a baby. I thought he was deformed.”
She swallowed the last of her tea. “Even now, with Jack, it’s . . . it’s hard. He has moments when he stops understanding what’s being said. He hears the words and knows what they mean, but they just don’t penetrate. He doesn’t always comprehend why people react the way they do. And he fights like a maniac. Older kids are terrified of him. Every time my phone rings and it’s the school, I get panicky, because I always think he must’ve hurt someone. So yes, I can see how some people might find it too much. Ordinary human kids are hard enough as it is. Don’t get me wrong, I would never give Jack up. Never. They’d have to pry him from my dead fingers. But I always wonder, what if I’m doing things wrong?”
“He’s one of the most socialized changelings I have ever seen,” Declan said. “He goes to a regular school. He plays. He’s smart and can be reasoned with, and he shows empathy for other people. He talked about protecting George. I don’t think you understand how remarkable that is.”
She glanced at him. “He’s just a little boy, Declan. You talk like he isn’t human.”
Declan’s face looked haunted. “I have a friend,” he said. “We were soldiers together.”
Not only was he a blueblood, but he was also a soldier. An officer, no doubt. No wonder he thought ordering people around was the only way to communicate. “How long were you in the military?”
“Ten years,” Declan said.
“That’s a long time,” she said.
“I thought it was better suited to me than being a peer,” he said.
“Why?” she wondered.
“I wasn’t responsible for anyone but myself,” he said. “It was simple that way.”
So not an officer then. “Were you happy?”
“I was content,” Declan said. “I was good at killing, and I was praised and rewarded for doing it well. It felt like the right place for me at the time.”
“I thought you were all about balls and etiquette and womanizing,” she needled him.
The look she got back was deadly serious. “You have an odd view of the life of a peer. Mostly it’s work. Lots and lots of work and lots of responsibility. At that time in my life, I didn’t want it. I still don’t, but now I have no choice.”
His voice was bitter and hollow. Rose looked away, not sure what to do with herself. “Tell me about your friend.”
“He’s a changeling,” Declan said. “A predator like Jack. There are few paths a changeling can take in our society, especially if they aren’t born into a family of means. My friend was born poor. He was abandoned by his mother at birth and given to the Citadel, Adrianglia’s premier military school. Changelings born into wealthy families are taught a certain way so one day they can reenter society.”
“And your friend wasn’t?” she guessed.
Declan shook his head. “He was a ward of the realm, and the realm never meant for him to live with other people. They made him into a killer. He was raised to have no emotions, only strict control and strict punishment when he failed. He told me that he grew up in a bare room, twelve feet by ten feet, which he shared with another boy. He was allowed no personal possessions except his clothes, a toothbrush, a comb, and a towel.”
“That’s awful,” she said. “You can’t lock children up like that. Any children. Jack has to be able to run in the Wood, to play. Without it, he would—”
“Go insane,” Declan finished. “Or learn to survive and carry a lot of hate.”
“How could your friend become a soldier after this? He had to have been”—she searched for a right word and couldn’t find it—“not okay.”
“He fit right in,” Declan said. “We were in the Red Legion. We did the necessary things people don’t want to know about.”
“Black ops?” she asked. What do you know, Latoya proved right—he was one of those bug-eating, wilderness-surviving, take-out-terrorists-with-a-pinecone-and-bubble-gum types.
“Black sounds about right. We went where nobody else could go, and we were very good at killing everything we found there. We weren’t bound by treaties or conventions. In that type of unit, few things are certain. You rely on yourself and, if you’re lucky, on a man or woman next to you. I watched out for my friend, and he watched out for me. He saved my life a few times, and I repaid the favor. Neither of us counted who owed what to whom. I would’ve died for him if needed.”
“Why?”
“Because he would’ve done the same for me,” Declan said.
“Who did you fight?”
Declan shrugged. “The Kingdom of Gaul. The Spanish Empire. The FOGL.”
“What is the FOGL?”
Declan dragged his hand across his face as if trying to peel the memories off. “It’s a religious sect. Forces of Great Lucifer. Their prime directive is to establish dominion o
ver the entire world, and they go about it in pretty terrible ways. Adrianglia is full of refugees, from past conflicts and present. Some of them commit heinous crimes and require extraordinary measures to be neutralized. During one of these missions, things went wrong and my friend made the mistake of behaving like a human.”
“What happened?”
“There was a dam. A small band of criminals held it and its workers for ransom. They had attached a device to the dam supports and threatened to set off an explosion and drown the town below it. The dam was very old, almost labyrinthine, and everyone who knew its layout was inside, being held hostage. My friend went in because he was a changeling. He could rely on his sense of smell, and our superiors counted on his logic prevailing if he had to make a morally difficult choice. He was told that if the situation put the lives of the hostages against the security of the dam, he was to place greater importance on keeping the dam intact. If the dam had failed, the potential loss of life would be much greater than the deaths of the six people trapped inside.
“He tracked down the hostages, but the criminals had quarreled, and one of them set off the charges. My friend had a choice: he could go after the charges or he could save the hostages. He had what he called an attack of humanity and rescued the hostages. The dam burst, flooding the town. The flood didn’t result in any deaths, but the financial damages were staggering. He was court-martialed.”
“Why? For saving people?”
“For disobeying an order. He was sentenced to death.”
“But nobody was hurt!”
“It didn’t matter.” Declan’s face was merciless. “You see, they wanted to kill him not because he disobeyed the order but because he was a changeling who was judged unstable. They had turned him into a lethal killer, and they were happy to use him as long as he did exactly as told. But now they could no longer predict his actions.”
“They were going to put him down like an animal? What kind of country would do that?”
“He was a ward of the realm, and the realm was afraid of what he might do next. They didn’t want the responsibility of keeping the public safe from him.”
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