The Shattered Dark (28 page)

“It’s nothing. Here. This one’s empty.” I open a door that’s two rooms down from mine.
It’s bigger than where I stay, more luxurious, too. A freestanding desk and sofa are
arranged on the left side of the room. Two beds with silver, wrinkleless blankets
are on the right. In between them is an open doorway to a bathroom. It’s dark in here,
though. Only the light from the hallway allows me to make out the furniture.

“Trev, could you…?”

He mumbles as he enters the room. It doesn’t take more than five seconds for him to
send his magic into the sconced orbs. They glow a soft blue, lighting up the room.

“Thanks,” I tell him. “If you’ll do the same in Lee’s room.”

“I’m staying here,” Lee says, walking inside.

“The hell you are.” Paige crosses her arms. Trev mumbles something under his breath,
then moves down the hall to the next room, leaving me to sort this out.

“There are two beds,” Lee continues. “I think I can manage to not touch you.”

“I don’t want to breathe the same air as you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Paige,” he says. “These fae aren’t your friends.”

“You said the same thing about Tylan.”

“And I was right about him,” he says, his voice rising. “He lied about McKenzie being
a prisoner.”

“Who’s Tylan?” I interject before they take each other’s heads off.

“He’s the first fae I met,” she says. “After this asshole injected me with the serum,
I went by your place just to make sure there wasn’t any truth to his crazy talk about
faeries.”

“Fae,” Lee corrects, taking off his cloak as if he actually thinks he’s going to stay
here.

Paige rolls her eyes, and continues, “I was going to file a police report, but when
I was about to leave, Tylan fissured into your living room. He told me you needed
help.”

The way she says his name makes me think she likes him. Not in a romantic way but
in the same way she likes all of her guy friends.

“My living room?” I ask, thinking he could be the ward-maker who booby-trapped her
purse. “So what happened at your apartment? It looked like there was a fight there.”

She juts her chin out in Lee’s direction. “Him. He didn’t ask if I wanted to be injected.
He just did it.”

“I get it, Paige,” he says. “You hate me. You’ll never forgive me.”

She turns on him. Paige angry is a scary sight. She’s a
good foot shorter than Lee, but she gets right in his face and very loudly lists every
reason he has no right to expect her to forgive him. I don’t blame her. If I knew
nothing of the fae and someone injected me with something claiming it would let me
see them, I’d be pissed off, too. But something makes me think there’s more to this.
Sure, they appear to hate each other, but the way they’re staring each other down
makes me think they’re seconds away from a kiss, not from clawing each other’s faces
off. So, I focus on the ceiling, all but whistling, until I hear Paige say, “What
are your daddy’s orders now? That’s who’s been texting you, right? He told you to
murder your brother. What are you supposed to do afterward?”

His dad has been texting him?

“Shut up, Paige,” Lee says.

Could he possibly still have his cell phone on him? We had to make a mad dash to the
gate. After we fissured here, I so brilliantly ordered the fae not to touch him or
Paige. Neither one of them have been searched.

“Give it to me,” I order.

Lee’s face hardens.

Paige sits on the edge of one of the beds, wrinkling the cover. “He won’t let anyone
touch it.”

“Give it to me,” I say again.

“I don’t have it,” he lies.

I meet Paige’s gaze. I doubt I can get his cell away from him on my own, but with
her help…

She knows what I’m asking. “Go for it.”

Now that I’m looking for the phone, I see the bulge in his left front pocket. My ribs
aren’t going to love what I’m about to do, but I reach for it.

As expected, he grabs my wrist. “I said I don’t have it.”

I brace myself then ram my shoulder into him. It takes him by surprise. He staggers
backward and loses his balance when he hits the bed.

My ribs scream as I fall on top of him, but I get my hand in his pocket as he tries
to fling me off. He’s too careful about it, though. He has the opportunity to hit
me, and doesn’t take
it. Kudos to him, having trouble hitting a woman, but I knee him in the side. He grunts,
then grabs ahold of both my arms. That’s when Paige darts in and gets his phone.

“Damn it, Paige.” He releases me to go for her, but she tosses the phone over his
head.

I catch it, then backpedal until I’m in the hallway.

“What’s the problem?” Trev demands, drawn by the scuffling.

“Keep him back,” I order. The phone is damp from Lee’s fall into the Thames. I’m afraid
it might not work, but the screen turns on. Drawing in slow, shallow breaths, I bring
up Lee’s text messages. I have to blink back tears to see the screen. My damn ribs
hurt
.

Trev scowls at the phone, but keeps both humans from leaving the room. A quick glance
tells me Lee’s given up the fight. Good. I can take my time reading.

It pays off. We don’t need to send Naito back to Earth. His father—who does indeed
want his brother to kill him—has a place in Boulder, Colorado. And I think I can make
it easy for us to get it. I key in a text message. Lee doesn’t use any capitalization
or punctuation when he types—it’s extremely annoying—but I force myself to leave out
the commas and periods for authenticity’s sake. I just need one more thing, a picture
to attach.

“Where are you going?” Trev asks, as I walk away, holding my side.

“I’m going to go get Naito to play dead.”

I
FIND NAITO
in his room, flipping through a
jaedric
-bound sketchbook. He closes it when I enter. It looks nothing like the Earth-made
sketchbook Lorn gave me in Nashville—the one filled with drawings of Kelia—but it
reminds me of it just the same. I’m supposed to give it back to Naito. Problem is,
it’s still tucked into the pocket of the cloak Aren made me take off in Rhigh. Aren
fissured out with it when he told me to count to thirty. Presumably, that’s when he
talked to Daron, the illusionist who created the fake lightning storm. Maybe it’s
with him.

I’m not about to mention the sketchbook until I have it in my hand, so instead I ask
what Naito’s reading when he closes the book. He says it’s a collection of notes he’s
taken on the vigilantes, their names and where they’ve been seen before. I tell him
about Lee and Nakano’s texts and about Boulder, and when I explain my plan, Naito
agrees to it with only a grunt. I actually expected him to protest more, but I guess
he doesn’t care because he’ll still be going back to Earth. He still thinks he’ll
have a chance to kill his father. Of course, I don’t tell him what my prewritten text
says. I wrote that the fae are burying Naito in Cleveland, Georgia. It’s kind of a
random location, but that’s where the rebels had one of their safe houses. Nakano
went all the way to Germany
to kill fae before. I’m hoping he’ll want to do the same now and will leave his compound
in Boulder.

That’s what Naito calls it—a compound. He says it’s an abandoned ski resort, but it
sounds like a military outpost. Nakano’s probably made it into one. He has the weapons,
equipment, and camo to supply half an army. Add to that the fact that he and his people
are extremely good at killing fae, and I’m a little worried about what we’ll find
there.

But we need to get to the serum and the research, so I slice open a
roguia
, a fruit with thick, bloodred juice, and squeeze it over Naito’s neck and chest.
The picture I take with the phone comes out grainy and perfect—he really does look
dead—and I just need to tell Lena and the others my plan, then have a fae fissure
me to Earth so I can send the text and picture.

I stop by my room first, though. I have to wash the human girl’s blood off my skin.

I strip off my shoes, my clothes, the belt holding my dagger. The bath I take is cold—they
always are unless I have a fae heat the water for me—but I don’t linger long, just
long enough to scrub away the bloodstains. I can’t scrub away the guilt, though. The
fae’s war has affected my world too much this last month. The girl in the club and
the Sighted humans next door to it weren’t the first deaths. A little over two weeks
ago, three humans died when King Atroth’s fae attacked a neighborhood near Vancouver.
The neighborhood was home to a group of
tor’um
who sheltered the rebels. They were sane fae, born without the ability to use enough
magic to fissure, but they were shunned by almost everyone else in the Realm. They
moved to my world to start new lives in a place where they would be accepted. Only
a Sighted human would know they were different. They weren’t harming anyone, but then
Atroth attacked. He didn’t care who was caught in the cross fire. The war used to
be almost completely limited to the Realm. It’s not that way anymore.

I step out of the tub and dry off, taking care not to put any pressure on the side
where my ribs are an angry purple. My favorite pair of jeans is still lying on top
of my chest of drawers. I slip into them, nearly sigh at their perfect fit. The
best option for a shirt is a long tunic. It’s white and dips low in the front, but
with the jeans, it doesn’t look too foreign. Besides, I plan to only be in my world
a few minutes, just long enough to text Naito’s father.

I stick Lee’s cell phone into my pocket, then head to the throne room. Aren and Kyol
are both there. So are Taber and a relatively large number of Kyol’s top swordsmen.
I’m halfway to the dais at the other end of the room when I notice the latter are
surrounding a fae.

No, they’re surrounding a
tor’um
. The
tor’um
. The one who mistook me for Paige back in Spier. The one who almost became Atroth’s
sword-master. She’s standing there with her wrists shackled in front of her, rocking
back and forth, heel to toe, heel to toe. Her long hair is pulled back into a ponytail,
then into a tight brown braid that drapes over her shoulder.

As if sensing my presence, Aren turns toward me, and I swear his face pales. That’s
when I notice he’s outside the group of fae. Like, way outside of it.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

Aren’s eyes close in a long blink. When he opens them, he looks at the
tor’um
, then back at me. “I’m sorry, McKenzie.”

There’s so much regret in his voice that I would have to be an idiot not to put the
pieces together. I freeze before I reach the group, and the stabbing pain in my side
dulls to a distant ache when I realize that Aren did this. Aren turned this fae
tor’um
.

When I first saw the woman back in Spier, Kyol told me she was made
tor’um
years ago. I assumed Aren had nothing to do with it because he wasn’t fighting King
Atroth then. I didn’t know about his history with Thrain.

It’s easier to ignore Aren’s past when I’m not directly confronted with it, but seeing
what he’s done right in front of me and knowing that this woman isn’t the only person
whose life he’s ruined makes me feel sick.

“McKenzie,” Lena breaks into my thoughts. “I thought you’d be with your friend.”

The
tor’um
turns to see who Lena is talking to, and when she spots me, her face lights up.

“There you are!” she exclaims. She takes a step toward
me, then stops. Her brow wrinkles in confusion and, in a completely different, almost
disappointed tone, she says, “There you aren’t.”

She’s looking for Paige, I realize, but the only thing I can think of to say is, “Why
is she here?”

“She was found skipping outside the wall,” Lena says. She turns back to the
tor’um
, her gaze taking the woman in head to toe. “Clearly, she wanted to be caught.”

“Clearly!” the
tor’um
chimes in.

“Why did you want to be caught, Brene?”
Kyol asks in Fae. His voice is low, but gentle, and I get the impression that this
Brene is someone he admired, someone he’s saddened to see in this state.

She looks like a child concentrating when she frowns. She even has a slight pout to
her lips.
“I was looking for something.”

“Were you looking for me?”
I try, thinking maybe the remnants sent her to find Paige. Aren did this to her,
not me, and I know this is unreasonable, but I feel like I owe the
tor’um
, like I’m obligated to help her because I’m involved with the fae who ruined her
life.

Brene squints at me, and I wonder if my pronunciation is off. Then, it’s like she’s
looking through me. I glance over my shoulder, but no one is there. When I focus on
her again, she shakes her head then tilts her head up to peer at the ceiling. Her
demeanor feels off, more off than it was a second ago, at least. I think we might
be losing her.

“Brene?” I try using her name. Maybe it will help her refocus.