by Kaylin Lee
I stood awkwardly in the entryway, not sure how to get past them to the stairs and hoping we could avoid more, painful conversations. I’d put on a clean Sentinels uniform to replace the disgusting silver dress, but I still needed a bath. And sleep.
“We forgive you, Bri.” Ella approached me slowly, like I was a wild animal she was afraid would flee at any sudden movement. “And now we know it was the curse, not you. I’m just sorry we didn’t try to break it sooner—sorry you suffered alone for so long.”
I tried not to flinch when her hand settled tentatively on my shoulder. My skin was healed from the burns, but it seemed my brain didn’t quite believe it. I opened my mouth to answer her, but my throat was too tight to speak.
“Go rest,” Ella said softly. “I’ll bring you a plate of food. And …” She drew me into a gentle hug, then released me and stepped back. “We’re glad you’re home, no matter what is coming next.”
~
When I got out of the washroom, there was a tray piled with sweets sitting on the floor outside my bedroom. Ella must have spent all morning baking.
I picked up the tray and took it into my room, then sat on my bed and lifted a thin cookie with shimmery, violet frosting to my lips. My eyes flickered shut at the pleasure of its sweet, buttery flavor.
Sweet crumbs lingered on my tongue as I dressed in a simple nightgown and got into bed, but the comfort didn’t last. How could I have been awakened so suddenly, only to lose my parents, lose it all?
My clean, wet hair pressed against my cheek as I settled onto my stale, old pillow. It was hard to believe I’d just been in my bedroom a few weeks earlier. I felt like a different person now. A dead one, waiting for the rest of the continent to join me.
A thick, numbing sleep was about to take hold when I heard a terrified scream come from downstairs.
“Bri! Help, Bri!”
Was that Ella? Alba?
I lurched out of bed, my head still pounding from the headache that had begun earlier, and I stumbled through my doorway to the top of the stairs. I paused and grabbed the railing for balance as the stairs seemed to waver. “What is it?” I called. “What’s wrong?”
“Alba, I’m so scared.” I’d never heard Ella whimper like that. Not since the Crimson Blight—
I shot down the stairs and found my sisters standing bleary-eyed in the kitchen, surrounded by piles of pale dust on every surface. “What’s going on?”
Alba’s normally rosy cheeks were intensely red, and she sagged against Ella. “There’s something outside,” she rasped weakly. “Something in the air. It came in through the windows …” She gestured to the white, lifeless piles of dust on the kitchen’s every surface, to what I realized, with a slow horror, had once been Ella’s baking.
“Alba …” Ella clutched her belly, her dark hair a wild mess around her face. “I can’t feel the baby move.”
“Is this it?” A tear traced its way down Alba’s face, leaving a track in the fine, white dust that covered her cheek. “Is it happening—the end they promised?”
Chapter 23
I sucked in a breath, every nerve in my body firing with a sudden intensity.
The white, powdery wind from Elektra’s statue. It was here, right here in our kitchen. Covering my sisters. Draining our lives, threatening Ella’s baby—
“Get away from the windows.” I yanked Ella out of the kitchen, then spun in the hallway, panicked thoughts rushing through me. “Get to the closet, now! Alba, you too!”
They stumbled arm in arm toward the closet that held Dad’s Sentinels gear, tripping over each other in their haste.
I followed, my pulse racing. If the storm was still a fortnight away from full strength, how bad would it be then? And how tortuous would our final days be?
“Wait—” I grabbed a clean, dust-free jacket from the closet. “Wipe down your clothes and skin first. You’re both covered in the dust, and that could be what’s draining you. And Alba, whatever you can do for Ella’s baby … do it.”
They wiped themselves down, and then squished themselves into the closet beside a chaotic collection of Dad’s worn, black gear.
Alba pressed her hands to Ella’s belly, golden light pouring from her in an uneven rush. “He’s alive,” she said after a moment. “I’m healing him now.”
Grateful tears streamed down Ella’s cheeks. Her gaze flickered toward me. “What will you do?” she whispered tiredly.
“Seal the house.” I couldn’t think beyond that.
I shut the closet door on my sisters and raced through the villa, shutting the windows as hard as I could and shoving cleaning rags and clothes against the edges of each window to provide an additional barrier against the powder outside.
My headache throbbed at my temples. The sound of wind whistling outside grew heavier, more piercing. I paused in the front hallway, my arms full of rags I planned to stuff against the crack under the front door. What was that noise? I could just barely hear someone shouting over the wind. Was someone caught outside in this nightmare? I couldn’t imagine what the storm would do to someone left outside without shelter.
I wrapped the cleaning cloths around my face and hands, leaving a small gap around my eyes, then wrapped a towel over my shoulders like a cloak and approached the door. Wind whistled under the crack in the front door. I glanced behind me. My sisters were safe in the closet. I couldn’t knowingly leave someone outside to suffer.
I opened the door a crack and slipped outside. The storm pummeled me with stinging wind. I squinted down the street in front of the villa.
A man struggled toward me, wrapped in cloth on his hands and face like me, but covered with white powder. He pulled another man with him, dragging his limp form toward our villa. The man he carried seemed barely conscious, his face and hands bare, his skin fully exposed to the storm.
I jogged toward them, keeping my head bent down against the wind.
“Found him on the ground a block from here,” the covered man yelled over the wind. “Help me get him inside!”
I drew closer. The man was supporting Ella’s husband Weslan. I used the cloth on my hands to brush the powder from Weslan’s face, exposing red, blistered skin. “Let’s go.” I bent and lifted Weslan’s other arm over my shoulders, then hauled him toward the villa.
The three of us fell across the threshold in a pile. The covered man slammed the door, then ripped off the cloths over his face and torso, brushing the powder from his clothes as fast as he could.
I followed suit, pausing when I realized I recognized him. “You’re Alba’s Badlander.”
“Where is she?” His question came out in an anxious-sounding growl.
“She’s safe. I put her and Ella in the closet, to keep them away from the powder.” I finished wiping dust off Weslan’s face as the Badlander grunted approvingly. “Weslan? Can you hear me?”
His eyelids flickered. “Ella …” he whispered. “The baby.”
“She’s here. They’re both safe.” I bit my lip. How long would the house last in this storm? “Safe for now, at least. “Alba healed them. I’ll go get her to heal you.”
“No.” He opened his eyes and speared me with a desperate look. “She needs to save her magic. Whatever’s in the air makes it impossible to restore it once you’ve used it. Learned that the hard way.”
I nodded. “Just rest, then,” I said, leaning back on my heels. I stared at Weslan’s red, blistered face and pushed his powder-covered hair away from his forehead with a towel. I wanted to fling the door open and scream into the wind, to curse the Masters for all they’d stolen and would steal. “We should get him as far from the door as we can.”
The Badlander knelt by Weslan and gripped his torso. “This what you were talking about when we left the crater? The wind?”
“Yes.”
“Can we beat it?”
Just hours earlier, I’d told Raven emphatically that we could not. Now, all I could think of was Ella and Alba huddled in the closet, checking on
a tiny heartbeat, dependent on a few walls and Alba’s dwindling supply of magic to protect them from the storm.
“We’ll beat it or die trying,” I finally answered.
The Badlander cracked a humorless smile, appraising me for a moment. “Thought you’d say that.”
I lifted Weslan’s feet, and then there was a rumbling noise outside the front door, followed by an earsplitting horn. Weslan stirred but didn’t open his eyes again.
We set Weslan down in unison and stood. The honk came again. Someone was outside.
“Stay here,” the Badlander said grimly. He grabbed the towels from the pile by the door, shook them gingerly, and wrapped his face, neck, and hands again. Then he slipped out the front door.
When the door opened again, the Badlander’s eyes were crinkling with humor between the folds of the towel around his face. “Time to bundle everyone up, Briar Rose,” he said. “Looks like we’ve got a ride to the palace.”
Chapter 24
Princess Belle drove like a maniac through the abandoned, powder-coated streets of the Royal Precinct.
I clutched the seat of the fomewagon as she accelerated around a corner, certain the tires on my side of the vehicle had lifted off the ground. The fomewagon was borrowed from the palace guard’s fleet and had to weigh as much as a small villa, so that was saying something.
“Stop worrying, Briar Rose,” she commanded from the front seat. “We’ll be there soon enough.”
“I can’t believe the prince let you come pick us up.” Ella huddled in the passenger seat beside Belle, Weslan on the floor of the fomewagon between them. She clutched his wrapped hand and had yet to look away from her husband’s motionless face.
Belle spun the wheel to the left. There was a crunch of metal on metal and a jolt as we swiped the side of yet another parked fomecoach, but she didn’t even flinch. “It’s not as though he had a choice.” I could hear the smile in her voice, even in our frantic flight. “I sent him to pick up my sisters, and the guards are off sweeping the city for anyone we can find. It seems thick stone walls like ours do best at keeping the storm out.”
I squeezed the seat as the palace gates came into view and Belle showed no sign of slowing.
“By the way, Bri,” she called over her shoulder as she barreled through the gates. “My husband has decided not to accept your resignation.”
Alba nudged me with her foot from the other side of the fomewagon, where she’d been curled in the Badlander’s arms, engaged in a whispered, rushed conversation I was glad I couldn’t overhear. “You resigned from the Sentinels?” She frowned at me from between the cloths wrapped around her face.
“I guess it didn’t stick,” I mumbled into the scarf around my face. I was saved from any further discussion when Belle slammed on the breaks, sending us careening to a spine-jarring halt behind a collection of dust-coated, empty fomewagons in front of the palace entrance.
I helped the Badlander carry Weslan out of the fomewagon as Belle and Alba supported Ella into the palace.
The storm shrieked at our backs. We made it to the top of the stairs. Someone cracked open the front door and hurried us inside, where we finally set Weslan down on the floor beside Ella.
Dust-coated people were everywhere—shouting, crying, or sickly and silent.
“Wipe off!” A harassed looking palace guard tossed a pile of clean towels at our group, which the Badlander caught with a swipe of his arm. “Get all the dust off! Those already drained must go to the sick bay.”
Belle waved her arm at another guard. “One for the sick bay over here,” she ordered. “Quickly, now!”
He rushed toward us with a rolling stretcher as we wiped everyone in the group free of powder. When we were as dust-free as we could manage, we helped the guard lift Weslan’s unconscious form onto the stretcher.
Ella and Belle followed him down the corridor, their arms clasped at the elbow, their hurried steps matching pace almost perfectly. From behind, with their dark hair and petite forms, they looked nearly like twins.
I watched them go, rubbing at my temples and using the towel to get the last of the powder out of my hair. I’d never been more grateful that our stepsister’s best friend was the infamously stubborn Princess of Asylia.
“This is Si, by the way,” Alba said tiredly, drawing my attention away from Ella’s retreating form. Alba was across the hallway from me, back in the Badlander’s arms.
The Badlander—Si—nodded to me. “Heard a lot about you.”
Somehow a laugh slipped out of my parched throat. “Like how I’ve spent the past five years as a cursed traitor?” I collected our dusty towels off the floor and added them to a mounting pile of used towels by the closed palace door. “Or how I served as bait, so the Masters could entrap three dozen Sentinels, including my own parents?”
Alba pursed her lips. “Other things, actually,” she said with uncharacteristic sharpness. “Don’t talk like that, Bri.”
“It’s the truth.” I looked away, conveniently distracted by a commotion further down the hall.
Tavar was shoving his way through the crowded hallway, his expression thunderous. Corbin rushed in his wake, yelling something I couldn’t make out over the noisy, crowded entryway.
I tugged the end of my braid over my shoulder as I watched him come closer, my stomach churning with a nervousness I couldn’t explain.
He was still ten feet away when he noticed me. He stopped short and didn’t budge when Corbin ran into him. Tavar met my eyes without speaking, but his furrowed brows relaxed as though he was relieved.
Corbin gripped his shoulder and said something in his ear, but Tavar shook off his hand and approached me alone.
“Bri … you’re safe.”
I nodded, swallowing hard. “We got a ride to the palace. You? And … Silvio?” My voice quieted on the name of his grandfather. What if he hadn’t made it?
“I was with him when the storm hit. Palace guards swept the River Quarter and brought us both here for shelter.” He rubbed his neck. “They took me straight to the old Sentinels’ headquarters entrance. Wouldn’t let me back outside to—”
“Alba! Bri!” Princess Belle had reappeared. She cocked her head and put her hands on her hips. “You’re staying with my sisters. Follow me, girls.” She looked from Tavar to Si, then smirked. “You two are bunking with the Sentinels. Sorry, gentlemen.”
Chapter 25
We followed Belle to the small, basement room where Alba and I had stayed so many years earlier when we’d been taken into protective custody. Cole’s wife, Kaia, sat on a narrow bed there, a tiny infant at her breast. Even with dusty hair and dark circles under her eyes, she was so beautiful, it almost hurt to look at her.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Belle said quietly from the doorway. “Jade is out letting the children run the hallways, but they’ll be back in soon. Ella will join you later. She’s with Weslan now. I know it’s not much, but it’s as far from the storm as we could get you. The powder won’t reach you in here.” Belle rubbed her temple. “The Procus compounds took in citizens, too. Between the palace and the stone villas, we should have enough shelter for everyone in the city.” She sagged against the door frame. “I just hope everyone makes it inside soon. The storm’s getting worse by the moment.”
Alba thanked her and waited until she’d left before darting out again, no doubt to search for Si.
Four additional beds had been crammed into the room and piled haphazardly with a collection of blankets and pillows, and there were two small bedrolls on the floor by Kaia’s bed. I sat on the bed at the far end of the room as quietly as I could, hoping not to disturb her.
It didn’t work.
Kaia opened her eyes and watched me as I removed my boots, taking care not to let any of the dust on them get onto my skin.
“Hello, Bri,” she murmured when I finished.
I could barely meet her eyes. “Hello.” My voice came out a whisper. The lump in my throat felt as big as a boulder.
“I’m sorry about Cole,” I forced myself to say. “I…” I pressed my lips together and shook my head. “Just sorry.”
A soft smile touched her lips. “Come here, please.”
I stood and crossed the room, the floorboards cold on my bare feet.
“Will you hold him for a moment?” She held up the tiny, red-faced infant. His eyes were shut, his little cheeks puffy and his lips pursed, his brows in a frown like even the baby was disappointed in me.
I shook my head. “I shouldn’t—”
The next thing I knew, the infant was wiggling in my arms. “Just hold his head carefully,” Kaia said, adjusting him in the crook of my arm. “His name is Jacob.” She released him and sagged against the wall, her shoulders relaxing.
“Has Cole met him?”
She nodded. “He was born the day before they left for the mission to rescue you,” she said. “Cole was with me during the birth. Daddy’s voice was the first this little man heard once he stopped crying, wasn’t it?” She reached up and brushed her son’s cheek with her fingers, then dropped her hand and glanced at me. “Cole was devastated when he learned what had happened to you, Bri. We all were. But him and your dad, especially.”
I swallowed. “Why?”
“Why? You were their responsibility! It’s their job to keep the city safe from the Masters, and you were the crown jewel of the Sentinels.”
Now that was just nonsense. “No, I—”
“You were. Of course you were. Your dad never stopped boasting about their toughest recruit. I know you two didn’t talk much, but he was so proud of you, Bri. When he and Cole found out the Masters had been tormenting you for years, and they’d never known, never even guessed …” Her brow crinkled as she shook her head. “They’d failed you, Bri. We all had. They would have done anything to make it right.”
