Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 136009 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136009 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Clover wished they could have gone out before it got dark to avoid the curfew, but they were too recognizable. The last thing they wanted was for Isa to find them again after her betrayal.
Islay pointed out a guard patrol on the edges of the valley. As soon as they passed, the four of them slipped into the shadows of the Dregs on the north side of Kinkadia. They were on high alert, but it was hard not to feel like they were finally home. Kinkadia was separated into sections—Draco Mountain to the east, the wealthiest mansions in Row before that, the mercantile district in Central, Artisan Village to the south, the nouveau riche on the Riverfront, and the Dregs to the north and west, where primarily humans and half-Fae scraped by. The Dregs also famously had Dozan Rook’s Wastes, where Clover had been a card dealer. Except that was long gone, bombed during the Red Masks’ raids for its association with Kerrigan. Her heart was a little heavy at that thought.
The RFA had relocated twice to keep their people safe in the weeks following the raids. But unless they’d moved again recently, Clover knew exactly where to find them.
It was another hour of dodging patrols before Clover stopped them in front of a hidden cellar door. She knocked on it twice and said the password. The doors were wrenched open, and Thea’s face appeared before her, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Clover!” she gasped, pulling her into a fierce hug. “You’re alive. The news…” She trailed off as she looked past Hadrian to the two new faces before her. “You have explaining to do.”
“These are drifters, Islay and Ruen. They’re on our side,” Clover said quickly.
“Well, come in at once,” Thea said. Everyone shuffled forward, and Thea grasped Clover’s arm. “Kerrigan?”
“Safe.”
Thea breathed a sigh of relief. “Good. And Darby?”
“Safe as well and with Kerrigan.”
“I’m glad.” She put her hand to her heart. “I feared the worst when you didn’t come back and just now, you showing up without them.”
“Isa betrayed us.”
Thea blinked rapidly as she hurried them into a small room with refreshments. “She did not.”
Clover furrowed her brow. “No, she was the one who knew our plans.”
“Isa has been magically collared before the entire Red Mask council,” Thea hissed. “Her crime was not delivering Kerrigan, but you and I both know that it must be because he discovered her duplicity.”
“And he didn’t kill her?” Hadrian asked in shock. “If he knew, he’d kill her.”
“I’m not sure, but the accounts I got were that she fought against it. No one believed the reasoning, and I don’t either. She was working with us. He had to have found out.”
Clover wasn’t sure what to make of any of that or what a magical collar even did. Knowing the Father, it wasn’t anything good. But that was for another time.
“There’s a lot to fill you in on,” Clover told her.
“And where do Islay and Ruen and the other drifters fit into this?”
Islay threaded her fingers through her human lover’s. “We want the same thing that you do, so perhaps it is time that we do not move on. Perhaps it is time that we fight back.”
Thea’s smile broadened. “Now you’re talking.”
“And as for that,” Clover said, “I’ve had a breakthrough.”
“Your father’s amulet?” Thea asked.
Clover flipped it over three times as she murmured under her breath. Then with a draw from the amulet, she pulled fire out of thin air.
Thea’s eyes widened in shock and appreciation. “We’re going to change the world.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Training
Wynter snorted as Kerrigan fell on her face in the training space. “Brother, this is beyond her.”
Kerrigan came up to her elbows and spit out the bits of hair that had fallen into her mouth. “I can do it.”
Fordham sighed. “Maybe we should go back to running five miles in the morning to clear your mind.”
“I hate you,” she muttered.
“That right?” he asked with a sexy smirk that made her knees wobble.
Kerrigan grasped her practice sword and slowly returned to her feet. She had agreed to shadow training with Fordham. Wynter had gleefully—maybe a little too gleefully—agreed to watch and give instruction on form. Apparently, that meant ridiculing Kerrigan for not picking it up, even though they both claimed that they’d learned how to do it over decades.
“I could call the shadows just fine in battle,” she reminded him.
“You were going to dissolve into nothingness if you tried to execute a jump,” Wynter said. “That’s why I barreled in like I did.”
“And here I just thought you were a show-off.”
Wynter shrugged. “And?”
“Run me through it again,” Kerrigan said.
She lifted the practice sword, centering herself in Ravendin’s twelve paces. It was always best to go back to the basics in footwork when she was learning something new. That’d helped her in the gladiator ring back in Domara. Sure, she’d learned the Andine footwork from Constantine, but she could only do that with the hours upon hours of training inside the Society keeping her quick and nimble. To learn what Fordham was teaching her, a combination of magic and swordplay, she’d need the same.