By a Thread

by Nyna Queen

  “Do you want to take over the chewing for me as well?” Alex asked with sweet venom. “That way we’d proceed even faster.”

  An undertaker’s face after his days’ work would have been cheerful compared to the cold, withering gaze she got.

  “Excuse me for being a bit taut.” His voice was clipped and laced with a growl. “Just in case you’ve forgotten, I’d like to remind you that half the country is on our heels. While you’ve been depleting this store’s worth of pancakes”—Excuse me?—“the guardaí might be surrounding this place with sharpshooters as we speak. But please”—he raised his hands—“take your sweet time.”

  Alex glowered at him. He’d been a lot more likable when he’d sulked and stayed silent.

  “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m hungry!” she snapped, waving her fork at him and almost wishing he was close enough to accidentally poke. “My body needs refueling after using up all its energy reserves for battling that fucking backlash. Which, just by the way, wouldn’t have been necessary, if you hadn’t attacked me with your stupid magic!”

  His eyes flared. It was just a tiny flare, but she felt another wave of heat rolling against her skin. A warning. A reminder.

  “If I recall it correctly, you were the one jumping at me from the ceiling without any forewarning.”

  “You were sneaking up on us!” Alex retorted madly. “How could I possibly suspect that you were their bloody uncle!”

  “Well, how could I possibly suspect that a shaper was actually trying to protect them?”

  They stared at each other.

  Alex bared her teeth. “You were sneaking up on us,” she insisted. “What was I supposed to do? Ask for your credentials first?”

  Darken made a harsh gesture with his hand. “I certainly won’t apologize for trying to protect my niece and nephew!”

  Hah! “But you want me to apologize for the very same thing?”

  Darken’s eyes turned into glowing red pits. Alex grabbed the plate in front of her with both hands, her claws unsheathing, digging ten points into the wooden table surface—a pretty addition to the already existent scratches. The tension was growing so thick she wouldn’t have been surprised to see sparks in the air.

  She opened her mouth—and stiffened.

  Darken’s head snapped up, just a second after the tingle made her flesh crawl. A shiver went down her spine. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, mirroring thoughts flashing inside them.

  Magic! In the backyard!

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALEX was on her feet running for the back door before she could think, easing the knives out of sleeves as she ran, her true skin so close to the surface it almost shone through. Darken was only one step behind her, cursing viciously under his breath. She felt his magic rise around him, raw and violent and ready to be released.

  They pushed through the back door side by side, ready to strike, and slithered to a halt at the sight of—

  What the hell?

  The yard held a little rubber-floored playground with two swings, a slide, and a seesaw. And beside said seesaw …

  Alex’s mouth dropped open and she stared. Josy was hovering a foot above the ground, legs and arms twitching at awkward angles at her sides as if she was seized by spasms, while Max was rolling in the dirt, clawing at his face, which was strangely distorted: his nose was swollen to double size, his eyes puffy, the skin of his cheeks and around his mouth hanging down, pulling his lips into a grotesque slanting line.

  Ugh! Quite a sickening sight. Yet one she had seen before.

  Something inside her relaxed, as she realized what this was and that there was no real danger involved. She might even have laughed if Darken hadn’t looked so chillingly murderous beside her. His face was a mask of fury and she felt heat flowing of him, as he glided past her and toward the children, a rippling storm in black.

  Uh-oh, she so didn’t want to be in their shoes right now. It seemed like a wise idea to stay a little back.

  “What in the name of the Great Mother, do you think you are doing?” Darken asked with a quiet growl and both kids froze at the sudden sound of his voice.

  Josy gave a small yelp when the magical grip on her vanished and she landed hard on her backside. She moaned and rolled to her knees, staring daggers at her brother who was pawing at his deformed face.

  “Well?” Darken stopped in front of them and looked down with a threatening look on his face. They notably shrunk under his gaze.

  Josy opened her mouth. “I … we—”

  “Fe winxed mbe,” Max whined, his voice garbled by his distorted lips.

  “He jinxed me, too!” Josy cried, giving him the evil eye.

  “Enough!” Darken didn’t even raise his voice, but there was something so forbidding in his tone that both kids fell silent immediately.

  “People are looking for you, people who want to hurt you—they just showed your picture on the halfborn TV a minute ago”—so soft, like silk cords meant to strangle—“and still you have nothing better to do than to use magic in a halfborn area in the open street where you can be seen by everybody?”

  “But—fhe started ibd!” Max protested, pointing an accusing finger at his sister.

  “Just because he called me a snitch!”

  “Becauf wou are a fnich!”

  “I don’t care who started it, and I don’t care what this is all about.” Darken’s words were as crisp as if chiseled from a block of ice.

  “Car!” he snarled. “Now!”

  They stared at him for second and then almost stumbled over each other, trying to follow his order as quickly as possible.

  Ah, so that was the kind of tone you had to adopt for kids to obey without backtalk. Good to know.

  Sharing a glance with Darken, she followed the kids around the side of the diner to the new car that was parked in the little lot up front, while he went back inside to pay. Whatever the stakes, they couldn’t afford to be reported for skipping out on a tab.

  The new car was a small black mid-range sedan way above her pay-grade which she had “acquired” on Darken’s suggestion while he hid their old vehicle in some sordid car park before they had stopped at the diner. For all his moral assertions that virtuecrat of a trueborn hadn’t flinched once about another car theft. This time she’d even found a spare key in the glove box, so no hotwiring had been necessary.

  When she reached the car, Max and Josy were already in the backseat, properly belted in and ready as could be, keenly avoiding looking at each other. Only seconds later, Darken left the diner through its front door, his cold, impassive trueborn mask not quite able to hide the infuriated predator beneath.

  He walked over to her and wordlessly held out his hand. She dropped the car keys into it, almost expecting a smug side comment.

  None came. This, if nothing else, send her alarms blaring.

  When he started for the driver’s side, she moved, not exactly blocking his way, but stopping him enough so that he had to look into her face—and so she could get a good glance at his face, too.

  “The yard was hidden from the street. Do you really think this bit of magic might have been noticed by anyone?”

  They were only inches apart, those deep brown eyes threatening to pull her down into their spiraling, bottomless depths. Right now, despite the fire smoldering at their bottoms, there was something in them that deeply chilled her.

  “The more important question is, do we really want to stay and find out?”

  He brushed past her and got into the driver’s seat.

  Alex shivered and hastened to follow, suddenly desperate to get away from this place as fast as possible.

  TAKING the northwestern highway toward Holloway County/Gomorrha, Darken peered into the rearview mirror. The children sat in the backseat with hanging heads and guilty looks: two pictures of misery.

  Max’s face was slowly going down to normal size, but it would take another hour or so until no sign of the baloney jinx would be left. As for the
invisible marks of the dressing down he’d given them …

  Darken sighed inwardly, as he changed gears and took the fast lane. Driving a halfborn car had never posed much of a challenge to him. The challenge was in the backseat—and within himself.

  Seeing them like this made his chest ache. He liked their smiles, their laughter, their bickering even. But this was important, and he needed to make sure it sunk in—and if the price were a couple of tears and pouts, he would gladly pay it. Keeping them safe mattered more to him than anything else.

  If you really wanted to keep them safe, you would stay out of their lives.

  The tiny voice nicked at him with sharp, serrated teeth. His lips pressed into a hard line. It was the voice of the Order’s supervisors. The voice of the responsible high officials. The voice of the aristo blood royals that whispered around him whenever he had the audacity to make a public appearance with his family at a social outing.

  He knew what they said when they clucked together, shaking their heads in righteous indignation, all scandal and rage. He knew what they thought, but didn’t say, as long as he was in earshot—or better, in magic range.

  A forfeit wasn’t supposed to maintain such a close relationship with his blood family. It was something that simply wasn’t done.

  When claimed by the Order, most of his kind severed all ties that bound them to their former lives, including their families and friends.

  It was better like that for all involved parties. That was what the Order’s delegates said with sympathetic voices full of feigned understanding when they took a boy away from his home to be trained at one of the chapters. A clean cut, they said. Wasn’t it better to allow the loved ones to mourn the loss of their son once and go on with their life than putting them through the constant worry and fear for a message that would inevitably come one of these days?

  It is easier that way, they said. Really, what they meant was “easier for them.”

  And yet, there was some truth in their words, which made the poison even bitterer to swallow.

  Among the forfeits he knew, most had quit all former contacts, spending their lives—if they weren’t out in the field—in the isolated facilities of the Order, secluded from the society for which they posed such a threat.

  A forfeit’s life was one of service and solitude. It was part of their fate. And would have been part of his fate, too, if he hadn’t had the luck to be born into one of the richest and most influential of Arcadia’s royal elite families. More luck ever still to have the most stubborn elder brother in the human history of brotherhood. His brother, who simply refused to turn his back on him when he was claimed; who had dug in his heels and challenged everybody, from their parents up to the Prime’s representatives to grant him visitation rights; who had held him and coaxed him back to humanity when he was about to get lost in the red mist; who had always believed in the good in him, even when he had lost faith in himself.

  Since their family was important enough to cause serious trouble—and get away with it—and since they didn’t want this to create a stir, they finally agreed on a quiet concession: Darken was granted leave for special family celebrations and was allowed to spend the official summer holiday period each year on his family’s estate.

  It allowed him to grow up with a sense of community and society that most of his kind lacked, giving him the chance and the privilege to experience, if only for brief periods, how life could be outside the strict confines and discipline of the Order.

  Still today, in between his assignments, he moved between those two worlds more freely than any other forfeit he had ever met. And yet, today like then, each time was a dangerous gamble.

  He knew that they had been waiting—and still waited—for the day when he would do something unforgivable, so that they could point their fingers and remind the society that there were good reasons for the strict seclusion, using this to tighten the leash on the forfeit, which was already strangling them.

  Well, he had no intention of becoming their whipping boy. Not today. Not ever.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Darken,” Josy muttered miserably into the stretching silence.

  “I’mb forry,” Max echoed.

  “I-I really don’t know what got into me.” His niece looked like she’d just publicly embarrassed the entire family, including all their ancestors. “Jinxing Maxwell like that—it was immature and completely inappropriate.”

  Well, there was at least something he could set straight.

  “Don’t get me wrong, darling,” he told her with another fleeting look into the mirror. “The timing was absolutely inappropriate, but apart from that there is nothing wrong with jinxing an insufferable sibling who is getting in your hair.”

  Josy choked on the water bottle she’d taken up and needed Max to slap her on the back several times before recovering. Wiping her chin, she looked up at him from watering eyes. “Excuse me?”

  Darken kept a straight face. “You heard me right. Say Maxwell is calling you a know-it-all without any reason. What do you do? You jinx him.”

  “I do?” Josy asked, her eyes wide.

  “Absolutely. And Max—what if Josepha calls you a nuisance, and let’s say for the sake of the argument it is for once not true.” His nephew gave a protesting “ey,” while Josy snickered. “Can you jinx her?”

  Max forgot the jibe and beamed. “I could, couldn’t I?”

  “You bet. Despite everything critical that can be said about jinxing, it is a great way to train your magical reflexes. When your father and I were young, we kept jinxing each other all the time.”

  “Dad jinxed you?” Josy asked incredulously. “He would do something so … childish?”

  A lazy smile curved Darkens lips. “He tried to, at least. Sometimes we made a real sport out of it.”

  “A sport? You mean, like a game?” Max brow furrowed. “But how would you know who won?”

  “Well, of course, the one who got the worse punishment.”

  Max gaped. “But then it would be bad, you know, winning.”

  “Not at all. Seeing Steph’s pretty face all scrunched up like yours right now was usually absolutely worth it.”

  His nephew giggled, but Josy wrinkled her nose. “Grandmother would throw a fit if she’d hear you saying this. She’d say”—she fell into a nasal, scolding tone that was an uncanny imitation of his mother—“there is nothing that cannot be solved with carefully selected words. No need to debase oneself to a conduct more appropriate for a bunch of primitive baboons.”

  “She’d say that, wouldn’t she?”

  Darken’s eyes lost a little of their spark and he felt a chill, a sweet darkness washing through his veins, licking at the inside of his skin. A subliminal little warning.

  Yes, his mother had a talent to turn any kind of joy into a sin. He knew. Oh yes, he knew.

  Heloise Dubois-Marcrant was a woman of steel. A matriarch of the old school, who ruled her family with an iron fist. Dubois had always been a powerful name, a bloodline extending far into the past, priding itself of many strong magical talents, but she was the one that had led them to the very top, paving the way for Stephane’s political advancement. A rocky path littered with sacrifices, trading love and friendship against voices in a council and numbers on a bank account.

  Courting the edges of the trueborn elite for years, Darken had seen that game in all its vicious facets; the aspiring players and their inevitable fall from grace. It was a never-ending pursuit. A race to the top of a lonely mountain, that left you winded and empty, just to discover that behind it another mountain waited to be climbed.

  His mother was one of the many aspirants getting caught in the wheels of the great royal machinery, enticed by the sound of golden metal rattling in huge empty halls. This way of life had turned her cold, hard and bitter. The years had made her older but had failed to soften her. If anything, they had rusted the iron inside her, making her even more rigid.

  As the matriarch of the stronger-blooded side of
the family, Heloise had always played a big role in Maxwell’s and Josepha’s upbringing and education, but now with the pending election and his brother and his wife touring around most of the time campaigning, she was the one holding the reins—and the whip, Darken thought darkly.

  During the last couple of months, he had noticed that Josepha had withdrawn more and more into herself, like a snail shrinking back into her fragile shell, rarely laughing and hiding behind frills and etiquette. He hadn’t given it too much thought, putting it on the troubles of the teens and the lack of self-confidence that often went along with it, yet right now it made him wonder just how much of it was to be blamed on his mother and her sharp tongue. Josepha was a delicate soul, and it wouldn’t take much to destroy what little spine she possessed. He’d have to talk to his brother about it when they returned.

  Burying those thoughts for later, Darken tried to get some of the lightness back into his voice. “Well, your grandmother only says that because she’s always been a poor jinxer herself.”

  That provoked a round of side-splitting laughter from the back.

  The ache in his chest eased a little. That’s how he wanted to see them. He wanted them to be jolly and carefree; children like they were supposed to be.

  His own childhood had been taken from him when his “talent” was discovered, replaced by a strict regime of training, discipline, and punishment. It was those memories, memories of him and Stephane jinxing each other, of stealing strawberries in the summer and fishing in the ghost lakes when the sun hung low between the willow-trees, memories of laughter, of jokes, of another life and time, that he clung to in his darkest moments, when the bloody darkness ripped at his sanity and threatened to drown him.

  Knowing how it felt to be robbed of that precious gift, he wanted to spare his niece and nephew from this fate in any way he could. It was why, whenever he visited the family at the townhouse or the country estate he made an effort to leave the forfeit behind and turned into the uncle who would play all their games no matter how silly, who would bring them on adventures that would get their parents’ hair to stay on end if ever they learned about them and who would buy them that other ice cream that Grandmother just wouldn’t.