Brightly (Flicker #2) (68 page)

“You didn’t go with him?” Lee had assumed that Jason would see his brother off.

Jason shook his head. “He didn’t want me to. I don’t even know exactly where he met her. Somewhere within walking distance, obviously, but he didn’t say where. I just know he didn’t want Amelia knowing where we live.”

“Well—” Lee shifted awkwardly. “I should get going. Thank you for letting me know.”

“You’re all wet,” Jason observed, apparently noticing for the first time.

“It’s raining,” Lee said plainly.

“Are you catching the bus?”

“There won’t be another bus through here for a while. I’m just going to walk.”

He frowned. “You can’t walk back in this weather.”

“Sure I can. I won’t melt.”

“Do you want to come in?” Jason asked, almost timidly. “At least until it stops raining?”

Lee paused. As she looked up at Jason, she wondered if maybe he didn’t want to be alone right now any more than she did. “Yeah,” she said, managing a little smile. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

Alice had drawn the gauzy curtains, leaving her room at Sandpiper in blue-gray semidarkness. The air smelled faintly, pleasantly, of herbs. While she was in the other room, changing out of her rain-soaked clothes, Filo peered at the photos stuck to the wall beside her bed. Everyone was smiling. It looked unnatural. Nobody smiled that much. Whenever Lee took a picture, she always told Filo to smile, and sometimes he did, even though he’d never understood her need to preserve every moment as perfectly, impossibly happy. It felt like lying.

When Alice returned, she’d changed into a loose-fitting T-shirt and faded jean shorts. She padded across the room on bare feet and climbed onto her bed. Wordlessly, Filo pulled off his boots and lay down, too, facing away from her.

It felt good to lie still. Saying goodbye to Nasser had bled everything out of him. At some point, he would have to gather himself up and return to Flicker, but not just yet. He could stay a little while longer, in the dimness and the quiet.

“I miss him,” Alice said, her voice soft and low, barely disturbing the silence. “It’s been two hours, and I miss him.”

“He’s better off now,” Filo told her, as firmly as he could manage. “He’ll be okay.”

“But you still feel bad.” It wasn’t a question.

Filo hesitated. He’d gotten what he wanted, but it still hurt, like biting down on a broken tooth. Normally, he wouldn’t acknowledge that. But because it was her, only because it was her, he admitted, “Yeah. I still feel bad.”

“Do you think we made a mistake?” Alice whispered. “Is that why?”

“No. No, I just…” He took a short breath. “I don’t think I can do this again.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you left—you and Nasser and Jason—” Filo’s voice dropped even lower. He was suddenly glad she couldn’t see his face. “That was everything. Everything I had. I can’t do it. I can’t lose everything again.”

It had almost killed him the last time, but he didn’t have the words to tell her. Every day, he’d slipped a little further. He struggled with sleeping and eating. He was always cold. At night, he would lie awake, feeling like he’d been split open. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to live alone.

In time, he started to feel different—not
better
, but different. It still hurt all the time, but he found that he could bear the pain better, push it down deeper. He could live with it. He forced himself to eat, to sleep enough that he could focus during the day, and it was hard, the hardest thing he’d ever done, but he managed.

But he didn’t know how he’d done it. He had no idea where he’d found the strength, and he didn’t think he could find it a second time.

“Filo,” Alice said. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving.”

“You did before,” he heard himself say, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

The mattress creaked as she shifted, and he felt his body tense. They’d never really talked about her leaving, nor about what happened during her time away. Filo told himself it was better to leave it alone, because he tended to ruin things when he opened his mouth.

After the mess with Byrony last fall, he’d been so grateful just to have Alice back in his life that he’d thought he could shoulder through the mountains of things left unsaid and pretend nothing ever happened. But sometimes he got stuck.

He felt words rising in his chest:
Alice, I missed you so much. Alice, you hurt me when you left. Alice, you’re the most important thing in my life and I won’t make it if I lose you again.
But he pushed all of that down, deep, where it couldn’t cut anyone but him.

“I was never far,” she whispered at last. “I’m never far from you. Don’t you know?” One of her hands clutched at his arm helplessly, and he felt his eyes start to burn. She didn’t know it, but she was pressing on a bruise. “Filo, I always—”

But she didn’t finish. Instead, her grip relaxed and she eased closer, until he felt the light press of her chest against his back. Her knees slotted behind his. It was easy, familiar, like their bodies were meant to fit together this way.

He could fall asleep like this. He wanted to. He always slept better when she was near, and it had been so long since he woke up feeling all right that he’d almost forgotten how it felt not to be exhausted.

“I looked at my file,” Alice said. “I didn’t read all of it. I don’t think I’m ready for all of it. But… I looked.”

“What did you see?” Filo asked. When he rolled over, their knees and chests brushed.

At first, she was silent. Then she slid one of her arms between them and offered her hand, like they were meeting for the first time. Softly, she said, “My name’s Maud.”

He stared down at her outstretched hand for a moment before clasping it. His hand was big enough, or hers small enough, that he could easily cover hers entirely.

As Filo studied Alice’s face, he thought of how he had never known a time without her—at least, not before Otherworld, not before the dreams and the file mixed everything up in his head. Wisps of memory hovered just out of reach, memories of a time
before
, and he didn’t know what to do with them, whether to hold on or let go.

In the end, he just squeezed her hand a little tighter and said, “William.”

He had never said it aloud before. He braced himself without meaning to, waiting for something bad to happen. But nothing did.

Alice looked thoughtful. “You don’t look like a William to me.”

“What do I look like, then?”

The dim light turned her eyes a shade darker, but they were the same soft hazel eyes he knew. A wobbly smile touched her mouth. She was still holding his hand. “You look like you.”

The rain came down steadily, hissing against the pavement as Lee, Filo, Alice and Jason hurried down the sidewalk toward Flicker. It was almost ten o’clock at night, and the street was empty of cars. Everything beyond the yellow glow of the streetlights was rain-slicked darkness.

Filo walked a little faster as they approached the shop. Lee knew the rain bothered him; all that running water wreaked havoc on his magic, and he tended to get sick when rainy weather persisted for several days. Still, he’d agreed to come out with them for a late dinner at Ladders tonight, just to do something normal. Nasser left four days ago, and Lee knew as well as anyone that they all needed to breathe a little, to center themselves on something other than the gaping hole in their lives where Nasser used to be.

“Excuse me!” called a female voice, as Filo unlocked the front door and Lee closed her umbrella. “Excuse me!”

Two people trotted down the otherwise empty sidewalk, a man and a woman, both wearing coats and sturdy boots. The woman waved one arm over her head.

Filo sighed heavily. He held the door open and let Alice, Lee and Jason duck into the shop while he turned to the strangers. The man was big and broad, maybe thirty-five, with a face that was all stern angles. He was clean-shaven, and his dark blond hair was cropped close.

Standing beside him, the woman looked smaller than she really was. Rainwater beaded in her dark hair, which was swept up into a tidy bun. She looked young, somewhere in her mid-twenties. In this light, her dark brown eyes looked almost black.

“The shop’s closed,” Filo said. “Come back when it’s not raining.”

When he stepped inside and let the door fall shut, the woman’s hand shot out to hold it open. “But you’re Filo Shine, right?” she asked hopefully. “You run this shop? You’re the person we should talk to?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, a little impatiently. “But, as I said, we’re
closed
. No consultations. You’ll have to come back another day.”

“No need,” said the man, before he grabbed Filo’s shoulder and pushed him farther into the shop, following him inside. The woman was close on his heels; she kicked the door closed behind her.

Filo’s hands shot up immediately, blue flame blooming from his skin, paler and weaker than what he could’ve conjured in clear weather. Smoothly, the man drew something from under his coat: a pair of wooden sticks, slightly longer than his forearms, each with a perpendicular handle jutting from the shaft at about a third of the way down its length.

They looked something like nightsticks, Lee thought, made from dark reddish wood and with small runes winding around the shafts. He wielded one stick in each hand, the long part of the shafts resting against his forearms.

Too quickly for Filo to react, the man thrust the short ends of the sticks forward, striking Filo’s elbows hard enough that Lee heard the sharp crack of wood on bone. The blue flames sputtered out as Filo’s arms jerked, and in that moment, the man seized Filo by the shoulders, spun him around and slammed him against the wall.

“What the hell—” Jason started, as he, Alice and Lee all moved forward at once.

“Get back!” the woman shouted at them, sternly flinging out one hand. “This is a Guild investigation. You will not interfere.”

Instantly, Filo stopped struggling. He turned his head toward Lee, Jason and Alice. There was a hectic blue light in his eyes, but Lee saw him mouth,
“It’s okay. Don’t be stupid.”

Lee’s mouth fell open. Alice and Jason had frozen, looking conflicted. Back on Siren Island, Amelia had warned them to cooperate with the Guild—but she hadn’t said it would be like this. Lee’s hands had started to shake, like her body was telling her to do something, but she didn’t know what to do without making it even worse.

“Dillon,” the man growled, nodding toward the woman as he wrenched Filo’s arms behind his back. “Cuffs.”

The woman, Dillon, slipped a pair of handcuffs from her belt and snapped them onto Filo’s wrists. The moment the cuffs were on, Filo paled visibly. He slumped against the wall, looking as if he were having a hard time holding himself up.

“Filo Shine,” Dillon intoned, “by the authority of the Guild, you are hereby under arrest for—”

A low creaking noise made everyone stiffen. Filo seemed to realize what was happening a split second before everyone else: His eyes widened and his head whipped around, looking to the front of the shop.

“
Out of the way, right now,”
Filo said quickly, in Old Faerie. Lee, Jason and Alice all scrambled backward.

Frowning, Dillon followed Filo’s gaze. Her hand twitched toward her belt and her eyes flicked to her partner. “Blackwell, there’s something—”

The carousel dragon shuddered, its indigo scales rippling as it leaped down from its place in front of the window. It moved wildly and erratically, and it was much more powerful than Lee had thought: As it tore across the shop, the dragon overturned a table and knocked over one of the smaller cases, sending rows of glass jars and bottles crashing onto the floor.

In a moment, the dragon had wedged itself between Filo and the strangers, sending Dillon sprawling. Blackwell raised his sticks again, this time flipping them around by the handles so the long ends thrust forward, like extensions of his arms.

The dragon slid between Filo and Blackwell, its long body shivering with agitation, its lips curled back in a soundless snarl. When it reared up like a snake, jaws snapping, Blackwell struck at its face, knocking its head aside.

Blackwell and the dragon circled each other. His sticks were raised defensively, but when the creature shot forward again, it managed to surge under his guard and sink its teeth into his forearm. As Blackwell brought the other stick down, the dragon released him and danced backward, ribbons of blood trailing from its muzzle.

Dillon had climbed to her feet. Her palms were red; she’d thrown her hands out to catch herself when the dragon knocked her into the mess of broken glass. The dragon whipped toward her, its tail lashing hard. When it sprang, Dillon pivoted easily, avoiding its teeth.

She turned her body aside again at the second strike, this time drawing her own rune-covered sticks from her belt as the dragon rounded on her. As she swept the tools down, the dragon billowed out of the way and scrabbled around her, forcing Dillon to whirl around to keep it from getting behind her back. Its claws left pale gouges in the wooden floor.