The Thief (39 page)

My lip curls. I’m not here to chat. I’m
busy. I turn back to Hayley, but now Sakamoto is standing between
me and her.

He couldn’t have moved that fast. My gaze
zips between where he was and where he stands now.

“
Hayley’s no fun,” Sakamoto
says. “Not for you. Want to play with me instead?”

“
Get out of my way,” I say.
A rumble sounds deep in my chest.

“
Jul Graham is dead,” he
says.

What?
My head spins. The angry red pulse in my mind blanks to white.
He must be lying. He has to be.
My
friend.

“
What!” Hayley exclaims.
“How?”

“
Well, honestly I had no
idea what Simon wanted it for when he commissioned me to find the
Tailor’s Sword, but it seems pretty clear now,” he says,
offhand.

My eyes travel unbidden to
my overpale, pockmarked left arm.
My
friend.

The red pulse kicks back in, building
steadily.

“
Every day you walked
through these doors with the only thing that could kill her
strapped to your arm,” Kei says, amused. “Pretty heavy stuff. Her
being dead, I mean, but man, that bracer was pretty heavy
too.”

I roar and dive at him. Hayley runs away
into the night screaming.

I swipe at him, and he ducks, spinning under
my swing. How could he be so callous? Was this all really just some
source of entertainment to him? Never mind. I’m busy. My vision is
hazing red. When I paint the sidewalk with his insides he won’t
find it all so funny.

I leap at him and he falls to his back,
planting his feet in my ribs and launching me over him. I land in
an easy roll and spring back to my feet, ready for anything.

But he’s not there.

“
Let’s play a game,” comes
his voice. I can’t pinpoint it. It seems to come from the
trees.

“
Hide and seek, maybe,” he
says. I spin. This time it sounds like he’s behind me, towards the
forest. But I see nothing.

“
Or better
yet...”

I spin again, furious, desperate for
something to hit.

“
Tag,” he says, right into
my ear.

I swipe at him, but he’s already running,
and fast, into the woods. I let out a roar of frustration and tear
off after him.

Hemlock

“
No!” I screamed, hauling
myself up from the hole. I hadn’t seen him. He must have slid into
the room when I was focused on her. Up through the floor, maybe. In
through the window, maybe. Mirrormakers can change anything in this
tower. Sneaky little abomination. I should have killed him when I
had the chance.

“
I wonder if this has ever
been used on a Tailor before,” Simon sneered, twisting the sword
with a horrible squelching sound, combined with the crunch of
broken glass. Juliet’s eyes went glassy as she slumped over the
blade. He pulled it out, blood streaming, and she collapsed to the
floor in a red pool of glinting shards. She looked up at him, her
mouth gaping like a fish. He watched her life drain away,
expressionless. She wanted to say something, it was clear, but her
lungs were filling with blood.

“
You idiot!” I hissed,
moving toward her.

Simon pointed the Tailor’s Sword in my
direction, and I froze. “That’s one less weapon for you to
collect,” he said.

I backed away, hands up. My final chance for
vengeance was dying on the floor, but I wasn’t going to lose my
soul for her. “You don’t know what you’ve done,” I told Simon.

Her blood is sinking into the cracks in the
stone floor, the glittering bits of glass along with it. Does he
see the Tower devouring her life? Did he really hate her so much
that he would be this stupid?

“
Rhys!” Juliet shrieked at
last. A shockwave of power burst from her, rocking us both back. A
dark violet-black energy curled up from the floor around her body,
ghostly tendrils of power that sunk into her skin and vanished.
Blood burbled from her lips and she went still. Juliet Graham was
dead. The ever-present avarice I’d regained with my body gripped me
with full force.

“
That was mine!” I
roared.

The Tower rumbled beneath our feet. The
first look of confusion crossed Simon’s face. “You need earth for
an earthquake.”

Magic fizzled from the mirrors ringing the
room, tiny little ghosts of static filtering through the air.
Another shockwave rocked the Tower, and several of the mirrors
cracked.

I turned slowly, not quite prepared for the
source. Lightning crackled around the Ryan boy I’d bound. My vines
were dissolving into sand in front of my eyes. He was stock still,
his colorless eyes wide and frozen on Juliet’s lifeless form.

The ceiling burst. Hunks of glass skittered
across the floor. Some folded into sand. Some embedded themselves
against the floor and melded there. Crackles of electricity arced
out from him through the room, lighting the drapes of the bed on
fire.

“
Get out,” he
murmured.

He could have been his uncle. For a moment,
I felt actual fear, and backed away. I hadn’t expected this. He was
unproven, he shouldn’t have this much power...

“
Who the hell are you?”
Simon demanded, shifting his grip on the sword. But it wasn’t until
he stepped into Rhys’s line of sight, between him and Juliet, that
Rhys reacted.

“
GET OUT!” he
howled.

A violent wind ripped through the room,
rocketing in through the window. It whipped both Simon and I
against the walls but left Rhys and Juliet untouched. The glass
debris in the room whirled; I held up my arms to shield myself from
the razor-sharp fragments.

“
Know your exit, rookie,” I
said, inclining my head toward one of the standing mirrors. Simon
could activate it and we could escape the grief-stricken boy. The
last time I’d seen someone this berserk, he’d destroyed the entire
city of San Francisco. But that had been a Wolf. Mirrormakers were
something else entirely.

Simon hesitated, but Rhys was gaining focus,
and his focus was on Simon and the sword still dripping his
girlfriend’s blood.

“
YOU,” the boy roared.
Lightning crackled and glass whirled around him.

With no further hesitation, Simon pressed
his hand to the mirror. The surface shimmered and he jumped
through. I dove after him, uncaring of the destination.

I rolled across a dusty wood floor, with
moonlight filtering through a hole in the roof overhead. Stacks of
old boxes and rows of bottles were scattered around. The
lumbermill? It connected to the storeroom of the old lumbermill? I
looked back at the mirror I’d exited from. Static arced from the
frame like grasping fingers. Eyes wide, Simon picked up the closest
thing, a broken chair, and hurled it at the mirror. The crash
resounded through the mill and into the forest. The broken glass
twitched on the ground for a moment, as if animated, but as the
static dispersed they fell still. Silence ruled again. Simon took a
steadying breath, pushing his hair back from his face. So he was at
least intelligent enough to fear the boy’s raw power. I wondered
which of them was stronger. Time would tell, I supposed.

Simon reached for the iron sword he’d set
aside, but it had vanished. He spun, turning on me, but I held up
my hands innocently.

“
You stole it once already,”
he stated.

I hesitated. I remembered stealing it from
the Tailor household, but I didn’t remember why. I shook off the
confusion. “And I’d do it again,” I said, “but you don’t have to be
the Thief to steal.”

“
Who said I’m stealing?”
said a voice from up in the rafters. “It’s more like borrowing. But
permanent.”

We both looked up; an Asian boy was perched
on the edge of the hole in the roof, turning the sword over in his
hands. He was a student at the school - one of Umino’s minions, if
I remembered right. When I thought of the school, my mind felt
hazy, like large parts were blanked out.

“
We had a deal, Kei!” Simon
yelled up at him.

“
You got what you wanted out
of it,” the boy said, looking with interest at the blood coating
the blade. “It doesn’t belong to you, anyway.”

“
What could you possibly
want with it?” Simon demanded.

“
What does a scarecrow need
with a brain, or a tin man with a heart?” Kei postulated. “Ciao.”
He vanished with a little salute, taking the sword with
him.

Simon looked at me across the room. His
expression changed as he realized he was alone with me, and without
the only weapon in the world that could do me permanent harm. The
shards of the broken mirror rose to twirl around him in a
protective barrier. “So,” he said. “You want to do this now?”

I smiled at him. “Do you even know who I
am?”

“
Hemlock,” Simon stated.
“I’ve been researching mirrors and the Afterlands for fifteen
years. Give me some credit.”

“
So you’re aware you’ll
lose.”

The shards whirled faster, in time with
Simon’s breath speeding up. Hybridize lines as disparate as the
Grimms and the Ryans and you were bound to get some awkward
results. He had the power and neuroses of a Ryan and the
single-mindedness of a Grimm. And the bullheadedness of both. Too
complicated to keep in play.

I smirked as he backed away. No one would
mourn this one. What would be easiest? Strangle him? Poison?

“
She said you’d do it,” he
said. “She said you’d kill me just to remove the complication.”
Fear oozed from his pores.

Of course that was why Simon
had taken my mirror. To find
her
. It could locate anyone, speak
with anyone, and there was only one person he’d ever been that
devoted to.

I frowned. How dare she try
to anticipate my moves! She thinks she can get in my head?
That
child
?

“
And how is Kyra? Oh wait,
I’ll ask her myself,” I said, sliding my hand inside my jacket to
retrieve the handmirror. “Show me Kyra Harman,” I told
it.

The surface wavered, but then reverted to
normal reflection. Access denied.

“
What did you do to it?” I
snapped at him.

“
Insurance,” he said,
licking his lips nervously. “It only works for me now. If you kill
me, that mirror is useless.”

“
You really think,” I said,
advancing on him, “that I value this object so highly that I would
drag your miserable hide around with it?”

He swallowed.

I smiled, and tucked the
mirror back into my jacket. “You had better hope that it remains
valuable.” I grabbed Simon’s wrist and said, “
Proxima.
” His glass shards sliced
lines across my face and forearm but they were little more than
annoyances. My skin knit back together before blood could even ooze
out.

Simon jerked as a thorny green design
wrapped around his skin. “You chained me?” he exclaimed.

“
To me,” I affirmed. “As if
I trust you to follow me around otherwise. You have a leeway of a
mile. Don’t make me shorten it. Now come on, we’re leaving town
before the cavalry arrives.”

An odd feeling of wrongness overtook me for
a brief moment, the ragged edges of the hole in my memory rubbing
raw. I recalled the primary side effect of returning from a body
switch. Something was missing in my head, something I’d left behind
when I left Gohei’s form. I’d known this would happen, that I would
be giving up part of myself, but I had no idea what that part
was.

Camille

The forest swallows me whole, and I welcome
it. Had I thought of this place as alien? No. This is home. My
vision adjusts to the darkness, and my hearing sharpens. Everything
would be perfect, if I could only smell him.

I skid to a halt in a small clearing,
frustration getting the better of me.

“
Coward!” I yell at the
trees. “Show yourself!”

I hear only the wind in the
boughs and the blood in my own veins. The silence is too much. I
wrench a thick branch off of a nearby tree and hurl it away. Still
dissatisfied, I wrap my arms around the tree trunk and twist. With
a loud crack, it comes apart, crashing to the forest floor. A
distant part of me registers the action as being far off the scale
of my abilities, but right now I’m only angry that it wasn’t
him
I twisted in
half.

“
You miss me that much?” He
materializes out of dark whorls among the fallen branches, grin
first like the Cheshire Cat. “I ran a quick errand.” Sakamoto holds
up a sword. It seems to fold in on itself, curling into an object
that he tosses in the air. I’d know that iron cylinder anywhere. My
right hand reflexively scratches at my left forearm. The blood that
Gabriel had reforged it to siphon off pumps fast through my
veins.

“
I changed my mind,” he
says, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked. “You’re no fun like
this. Your brain is completely gone. This isn’t even going to be
hard.”

I won’t let him distract me. “Who?” I roar.
“Who killed her?!” I lunge at him, and this time he stays solid,
twisting in my grip to bear me down to the ground. The wind goes
out of me as I hit the earth. Body pressed along mine, he snaps the
bracer over my arm, the internal lock sounding with a loud metal
click. Immediately I feel pricks in my skin, and I shriek, feeling
my power draining away. Furious, I throw Sakamoto so hard he flies
through the air. Just before he ought to splatter against a tree,
he disperses, reforming to stand at my feet.