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"Hazel."
River's voice seemed to come from much farther away than the driver's seat.
"Your hands are glowing."
Gold moved beneath the skin of my forearms, faint as a bruise and moving slow. It reminded me of the glow beneath a banked coal before somebody decided whether to breathe life into it.
"Yeah," I said, looking down at the tin beneath my hands. "I know." With a sigh I closed my eyes and leaned back. "Let's go somewhere where I can sleep, please. I'm so tired."
Thursday came gray and bitter, with wind off the lake that found its way through every layer I put on.
I wore the only clean shirt left in my bag and Stella's sneakers because my boots were ruined. My feet weren't doing much better, and I had officially exhausted my concern over what a room full of High Priests might think about my footwear. River wore black, which seemed appropriate enough that neither of us mentioned it.
There wasn't much of a plan to discuss on the drive and we had both decided, separately and without discussing it, that the kiss was never going to be mentioned. We had a summons, a Council vote at eleven, a wax seal that had made attendance decidedly nonoptional, and a battered cash box wedged beneath the passenger seat containing a photograph of my parents and a letter that had quietly dismantled half of what I believed about my birth. The ancient piece of paper the Fae had warned me about was tucked inside my bra.
I felt spectacularly prepared.
The Gatekeeper's Coven stood on a corner off Euclid and looked like a bank that had taken artistic liberties. Black stone rose beneath the glass dome over the ritual floor, three keys picked out in blood red above the double doors. The twin flames flanking the steps burned seven feet high, as they had since before my grandmother was born, and I walked between them without either one so much as flickering.
They'd rebuilt the east wing. Again.
The newer stone was still a shade lighter than the rest, leaving a scar up the side of the building where I'd taken it apart.
Nice to be remembered.
I expected Danika to make me come to her. Preferably up a staircase and into a room where she had the higher chair and enough witnesses to turn breathing into a political statement.
Instead, she was waiting just inside the doors.
That unsettled me more than any audience would have.
Danika Byrne stood alone beside the coat rack in a floor-length gray dress, her hair loose around her shoulders. In twenty-six years, I could count on one hand the number of times I'd seen it down.
"Walk with me," she said.
"The vote's at eleven."
"The vote is at eleven. It's twenty past nine." She turned toward the corridor without waiting to see if I followed. "You'll want to hear this sitting down, and after eleven o'clock it will be far too late to be useful."
Nothing good had ever followed a sentence containing you'll want to hear this sitting down.
River fell into step beside me.
Danika's office was at the end of the long hallway I'd spent most of my childhood thinking looked like an intestine. The same black marble covered the walls, and the same blue candle flames burned without giving off heat. Someone had installed a new door since I'd last been down there. Considering my history with the building, I decided not to mention it.
Danika sat behind her desk. I remained standing.
My book lay on the desk between us, still wrapped in the same pillowcase, and neither of us looked at it.
"You've been to West Forty-Fourth."
Everything inside me tightened. "How would you know?"
"Because Erie Property Group has managed that building for nineteen years, and their receptionist has been on my payroll for nine of them."
Bryce.
Of fucking course.
