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SERAPHINA
I ran until the fence post was out of sight, then I left the road entirely, slithered down a bank of wet leaves, and folded myself into a hollow log with my face pressed into damp rot.
Boots crunched on gravel above me within two minutes.
"She came this way," said a gruff voice. "They always put them out at the painted post."
"How long?"
"Half an hour, maybe less, the truck passed us going back up."
"You sure she is carrying it?"
"Thin, dark hair, gray bag, white stone on a silver chain." A second man, younger, spat into the leaves near enough that I heard it land. "Kells does not pay for maybes."
"What happens to the stone?"
"We hand it over and we get the rest of the money."
"And the girl?"
A pause, and then a laugh with no shape to it.
"He said he does not mind what condition she arrives in."
I pressed the pendant flat against my breastbone with my whole palm and breathed through my mouth, shallow and slow, the way you breathe when there is smoke, and I did not move one finger.
The boots went past, up the bank, away along the road.
When the sound had thinned to nothing, I crawled out with leaves in my hair and my hands shaking so hard that I had to sit down on the slope. There was a long red scrape down my forearm and I did not remember getting it.
"All right," I whispered. "All right, Seraphina, get up."
I walked west through the trees for two hours, keeping the sun over my right shoulder, and when I found a creek I drank from it on my knees until my stomach ached. Then I sat on a flat rock and took the phone out of the bag.
It woke with a buzz that rattled my hand.
Eleven missed calls. Every one of them from Alaric.
My throat closed so hard it hurt. I read the list twice, as though the number might change if I looked at it properly, and then a message slid down from the top of the screen.
It was from my mother.
Alaric knows everything now. He says it is best you go quietly and asks that you do not contact him. Please obey this. Be safe, my darling.
I read it four times. The creek went on talking to itself over the stones as if nothing had happened anywhere in the world.
"He knows," I said out loud. "And he asked me not to contact him."
But he had called eleven times.
"He called to tell me himself, and then she told me first."
Or he had called before he heard, and she had sent this to make certain I never found out which.
I did not know. That was the whole of it. I was sitting on a rock in a forest with a stolen name and a hunted neck, and the one thing I could not do was tell which of the two people I loved had decided to throw me away.
"He asked for Isadora," I whispered. "In the dark, he said her name, and I took the night anyway, and now he knows it was me."
My hand went over my mouth, and the sound that came out of me was not a word and not quite crying.
That was the thought that finished me. Not the hall. Not the cane. Not the howling. The thought that he had woken up, understood what had happened in that dark room, and felt sick.
The phone buzzed again in my hand.
Alaric calling.
I stared at his name. My thumb hovered over the green circle for so long that the screen dimmed, and brightened, and dimmed.
If he said it was best I go quietly, I would come apart on this rock and not get up again. If he said anything else, I would not believe him, because my mother's message was already inside me, doing its work.
The call rang out.
I held the power button until the screen went black, and I put the dead phone in the bottom of the bag under the shirts, and I stood up.
By late afternoon I reached a two lane human highway where a rusted bus shelter leaned against a wire fence, and a timetable with half its numbers scratched off promised a bus to Glenhaven at four.
It came at ten past. The driver did not look at me. I paid for the last seat at the back with the crumpled notes from my purse, and I put my forehead on the cold window and watched the mountain shrink behind the trees until it was a gray shape, and then a smudge, and then nothing.
Nobody on that bus knew what I was. That was the first good hour of the day.
I was almost asleep when a smell slid into my nose.
Old smoke, cheap leather, wet dog, and something sour underneath it.
Wolf.
My eyes came open. A man in a gray flat cap had taken the seat across the aisle, with a folded newspaper on his knee that he was not reading. He was looking at my collar, where the chain had slipped out while I slept, and the pale stone sat against my skin in plain view.
I pulled my coat closed. It was far too late.
"That is a lovely thing," he said pleasantly.
"Thank you."
"My wife would like a stone like that."
"It was a gift."
"Was it now." He smiled, friendly as a shopkeeper, and I saw the thin silver band on his smallest finger, and the shape stamped into it, which I had last seen on Damon's hand at the Moon Ball. "Moonridge put you out, did they, little rogue?"
My skin went cold from the scalp down.
"I do not know what you mean."
"No," he agreed. "Of course you do not."
He folded his newspaper in half, and in half again, and laid it on the empty seat beside him, taking his time about it, and then he settled back and looked out of the window at the passing fields like a man with nowhere in particular to be.
"Long ride to Glenhaven," he said. "We get off at the same stop, you and I."
