City of Spells (Into the Crooked Place #2) - Alexandra Christo Page 0,98

asked.

They were in the city outskirts, where only those who had lived in Creije forever—whose families had been born and died there—or those who had come for a dream and found desolation roamed.

Well, them and Tavia.

Tavia, who fled to the outskirts and as far from High Town and the busker dormitories as she could, to hold her morality close and keep Wesley at a distance. Neither of which had really worked, in Saxony’s opinion.

Her old flat was just a few streets away and Saxony recalled the many times they had both stumbled back there, drunk as the fire-gates, and she’d spent the night dozing on Tavia’s sofa and trying to drown out the sound of her snoring in the other room.

“Which way?” Saxony asked again.

She didn’t ask because she didn’t know, but because it seemed necessary to try to fill the mourning silence.

“The alley behind the amity precinct,” Wesley finally said.

Saxony almost sighed in the relief his voice brought. He didn’t sound broken, but then again, Wesley was an expert at hiding anything he didn’t want people to see, especially when those things were as complicated as emotions.

“It’s the closest shelter before we hit the bridge,” Wesley said.

He looked to Tavia.

“Got the little explosive eggs ready?”

She patted her backpack, which held six of Nolan’s Star Eggs.

“Check,” Tavia said. “Ready to go boom.”

Saxony looked to Karam. “Got your fists ready?” she asked.

“Check,” Karam said, with a narrow smile.

They swerved through the streets together, jumping from shadow to shadow like ghosts, moving between the various Crafters and buskers, or even the Loj-infected. Tourists, once wide-eyed, who were now far more empty-eyed. Who had been forced into battle, or gotten trapped in the city during the fight and been found and forced to drink the Loj elixir. Their eyes like ash and their necks marked like cattle.

Saxony and the others navigated through them so easily that it made her realize how much she had not only grown to love Creije, but to know it.

Like the back of my hand, Wesley had said.

Like mine, too, she thought now.

Returning to Rishiya and the Uncharted Forest felt like returning home after so long in Creije, but now returning to Creije after so long in Rishiya, that felt like home too.

Another side of Saxony: the side that held on to her brother so tightly.

She pushed herself up against a wall, back to the brick, and walked step by step in the pieces of the path that the moonlight didn’t quite touch.

Up ahead, there was music coming from the amity precinct.

A group of seven guards sat outside on old wooden chairs, clapping and laughing in low, cold tones. They had a music box on the ground by their feet, enchanted to play the kind of beat Saxony had only ever heard at the Crook when the drinks started to dry up and the sun was readying to rise.

“Look at him move,” one of the amityguards said. “We’ve got ourselves quite a show, haven’t we, lads?”

It was only then that Saxony noticed one of the seven guards was not a guard at all, but a man. A civilian. Dressed in what looked like nightwear, with long brown hair down to his shoulders and bruises swatched everywhere across his milky skin.

He was dancing madly, erratically. In a way that could only be charmed.

The guards clapped and cheered him on and the man, who sobbed and winced while he moved in beat with the music, kept going.

Saxony looked to his feet. Bare and bleeding.

She flinched and it was almost as though that action jolted the spell because the man suddenly collapsed onto the street.

Beside Saxony, Wesley let out a breath.

Straightened his cuff links.

Relaxed his tightened jaw.

He had broken the magic somehow. Cast a spell in the time it took for Saxony to blink and assess the situation. She hadn’t even heard him utter the words or felt his power travel through the air.

Wesley’s magic was like a ghost, roaming through the world undetected, seen only when it wanted to be. After so long lost, it had gotten quite good at hiding.

One of the guards jumped to his feet, knocking over the chair he had been lounging on so that it clattered to the ground. The noise would have once vanished in the musicality of Creije, but with the eerie silence that now blanketed the streets, it seemed as loud as a gunshot.

“Who said you could stop?” the guard spat.

The dancing man looked up at him from the ground, lips trembling. They