Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,98

look like yours?

He kept his voice low so it didn’t carry, but he could tell from the slight shift in the set of Taya’s shoulders that she had heard him and was thinking about her answer. Strange how little some things could change over the years. He had a hard time thinking of her as his sister; he didn’t remember their early years together as well as she did. He knew this was painful to her, but there was nothing he could do about it. But then occasionally there were moments like these when he had a flash of feeling like he was looking in a mirror.

“Not necessarily,” she said, and with his brain spinning in double-time anxiety the closer they got to the mansion, it took him a moment to realize she was responding to his question about animal forms. “Not that I saw. It has more to do with you as an individual. You can’t guess what someone’s shape will be until it comes upon them.”

And what if it never does, he wanted to ask, but let it drop. Maybe once they found the bangle and restored the last piece of his soul, he would find out. Maybe it was just that one missing piece, that one empty space, and then it would be there—his true form, his Solarian form.

Maybe those moments would go away. Moments when he felt a yawning gulf of anger and emptiness threatening to swallow his heart.

The trees around them were alive with sound—birdsong, the wind whispering through branches, all the small forest noises Nahteran was used to by now. Yet, the closer they got to the Reynolds mansion—glimpses of blinding glass occasionally flashing through the trees—the more these subsided. In their place, Nahteran could hear the hum of a generator somewhere. One of the traders, interrogated with truth serum, had said that Reynolds operated off the grid—like Havenfall, keeping her place of business secret from the rest of the world. But where the point of Havenfall’s secrecy was protection, hers was profit.

There was something else too that was strange, disconcerting. Something else floating toward them.

Music. Classical music, to be exact. It was distant, tinny. Clearly played out of a speaker. But there was a discordant, repetitive note woven through it. A screech—

“An alarm,” Taya muttered.

Cold seeped through Nahteran’s body. Had they been seen? He stepped closer to Taya, his muscles tensing and his limbs automatically going into a fighting stance. Taya stared intently at the bank of trees, head cocked and mouth flattened into a tight line.

But there was no other sound. Nothing approaching. Nahteran wasn’t sure how long they stood there—thirty seconds, a minute, two—but the sound stayed constant: the ornate, fussy music shot through with the insistent squawk of the alarm.

Eventually, Taya took a step forward, and Nahteran followed, his blood rushing in his ears. They got to the edge of the trees and looked out over the unnatural, golf-course-like lawn. Immediately something presented itself as wrong: the number of cars on the gleaming, circular black driveway. There were several, and they were not the sleek things that Nahteran had expected based on the rest of the place. Parked on the asphalt were rugged black SUVs and one motorcycle—not like Taya’s but a huge, hulking one, seemingly meant to intimidate. It didn’t square with what the traders had said about Janna Reynolds: a cold, ruthless woman who liked to use her money and power to collect beautiful things.

That, and the front door was open. Standing half open, unattended, giving way to a glimpse of an immaculate living space, all stone and glass.

“Maybe she’s with buyers,” Taya said.

“She’s not supposed to be, not today.” The thought made sweat start to prickle his hands. He had run over everything in his head a thousand times. Under the influence of truth serum, the trader they had in custody at Havenfall had told them about a deal that was supposed to go down later this week—Reynolds planned to sell hundreds of soul-silver objects for somewhere north of a million dollars. Before that could happen, Marcus, Sal, and volunteers from Havenfall would break in and capture Janna Reynolds and reclaim her vault of silver. But whatever she’d already sold was most likely lost to them. Whit had said that Reynolds didn’t keep records of her buyers. With her, enough money bought you total anonymity. If this deal went down before Marcus and the others arrived to stop it, the Solarian souls trapped in the objects could