Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,84

of a rough hand, slapping quick and fierce across her cheek.

“There’s an inn right up here. The Jondrette. They’re sympathetic to our kind.” He turned to wink at her. “You know, us crocs. We can hide out there until the commotion dies down.”

An inn?

And just as the thought entered her mind, she saw it. Straight ahead. A ramshackle two-story building that sat sagging and crooked in the mud.

Every droplet of blood in Alouette’s body seemed to pool down to her toes. She knew this place. She knew it in every part of her. She knew its tall rusting walls and how it towered above the shacks and hovels below. She remembered the overhang from the roof where a swing had once hung. A lone wooden broom was propped against the wall outside the entrance, and suddenly Alouette felt the sting of old blisters in her palms.

It was all coming back to her now. The memories, like shards of glass, slipping and sliding back together into something almost whole. Working for measly scraps of bread and small helpings of stew. Sleeping under a small table where the feet of strangers would kick against her and the drip of sticky weed wine would trickle through the slats. Scrubbing and sweeping and hauling reeds from the misty boglands for their foul-smelling homemade wine.

Her life with the Renards.

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, and it was only then that she realized she’d stopped walking. Her eyes fluttered open. Gabriel was a few paces ahead of her, his face perfectly framed between the posts of the inn’s front porch. The low light danced across his cheeks, and suddenly, Alouette was struck with another sense of familiarity. For a moment, she swore she’d seen his face before.

She followed behind Gabriel as he scurried up to the inn and yanked hard on the door. The moment it opened, Alouette felt like she’d been punched.

Tables and chairs had been swept aside, and every square-mètre of the inn was jammed with people. Their pulsating, pent-up energy was palpable in the air.

“Is it always like this?” Alouette asked.

She could read the answer on Gabriel’s stunned face. “I have no idea what’s going on.”

At the back of the room, a fierce-eyed woman dressed entirely in red stood on top of the bar, wielding a glowing blue laser. Beside her, a young girl squirmed and kicked as the flickering device moved closer to the inside of her wrist.

“Sols!” Alouette cried out. “What is she—”

But the words caught in her throat as she spotted a man pushing his way through the crowd, heading for the front corner of the inn. His hair was dark and wavy. His stature tall and achingly familiar. Her heart skipped.

Marcellus?

She instantly shook the thought away. It was ridiculous. And impossible. It couldn’t be him. What would he be doing here at this hour? In this middle of this commotion?

But for some reason, she couldn’t tear her eyes off him.

There was something about the way he walked. With both purpose and hesitation. She took a step closer, tracking the young man as he approached a towering stack of furniture in the corner of the inn. He ripped a piece of fabric from his threadbare coat and inserted it between two legs of a chair. But it wasn’t until he struck the match that she knew, for sure, it was him.

Suddenly, she wasn’t inside the Jondrette. She was back in the Forest Verdure, sitting beside a warm fire. With his eyes dancing across from her. Those eyes that now danced in the flame of the tiny match.

Alouette gasped with realization as her gaze darted back to the bar where the woman with the laser was mere centimètres away from searing that girl’s skin.

He’s causing a diversion.

Marcellus held the fire to the cloth, and before Alouette could blink, the world exploded into flames. They shot out the windows of the inn, breaking effortlessly through the thick plastique. They rippled across the Jondrette floor like lava from a First World volcano.

Alouette staggered backward, smashing into Gabriel.

“What the fric?” he cried, staring wide-eyed at the blaze. “Is that …”

“Fire!” Alouette bellowed, expelling every gramme of oxygen in her already-burning lungs.

Screams broke out around the inn. Flames licked up the walls like giant, glowing tongues, and smoke billowed everywhere in choking waves. Alouette searched frantically for Marcellus, but she couldn’t see him anywhere. The smoke was already too thick. She charged headlong toward the flames only to be pulled back a split second later by