Page 11 of Silver in the Bone

Cabell leaned into the hallway again. “No. Huh.”

“Huh, what?” I said.

“Weird his father wouldn’t take him,” Cabell said. “But I haven’t seen him around the library in weeks. Maybe he started at some new bougie boarding school?”

“I can only hope.” There was no chance in any hell Emrys would give up hunting for relics, even temporarily.

Endymion ignored the chatter of the Hollowers, his gaze concealed by the firelight reflecting off his thin-framed glasses.

Cabell put a comforting hand on my head and said, “Wait here. I’ll pull the job notices so you don’t have to deal with them.”

I reached for the supply bag Cabell had draped over his shoulder, relief threading through my whole body. “Thank you. I’ve run out of witty retorts for the day.”

I leaned against the cold stone wall, listening as the other Hollowers exuberantly greeted Cabell like a prodigal son. After they’d gotten over his edgy tattooed loner exterior, they’d embraced Cabell. His deep laugh and the trick of rapturous storytelling he’d learned from Nash almost outweighed his unfortunate association with the Lark family.

But every time he shuffled off for a show-and-tell or to meet one of them for drinks, I had to bite my tongue to keep from reminding him that they all still called us the Larcenies behind our backs.

Which might have offended me if it had actually been clever.

They didn’t respect him, and they sure as hell didn’t care whether he lived or died, either. They never had. When the two of us had needed their help as children, the guild’s so-called unity was nowhere to be found.

That was the first lesson Nash taught me—in life, people only looked out for themselves, and to survive, you had to do the same. At least the sorceresses were honest about it and didn’t go through the motions of pretending to care about anyone else.

Cabell hurried back toward me, holding up three job notices, all written in Librarian’s emerald-green ink. “A couple of good ones, I think.”

I took all three, studying the names of those requesting recovery work. Most seemed to be Cunningfolk. Good. We needed a break from sorceresses.

A fresh wave of gleeful hooting made me glance down the hall again.

Endymion was removing the protective wrappings of his find with agonizing slowness. Then, with the kind of dramatic flourish these people couldn’t resist, even when it meant manhandling priceless artifacts, he dropped the relic back onto the table. The thunder of the impact rolled through the library.

The massive book was leather-bound, its cover cracked with age and heat. The thick stack of pages, edged with silver, looked as if they’d spent the last few centuries attempting to escape. Only a heavy metal lock bearing the tree symbol of Avalon held it all together.

A pang of envy, one I resented the hell out of, sliced through me.

“The Immortality of Callwen ... ,” I said. A collection of the sorceress’s memories written in blood upon her death. While it was common practice for sorceresses to create them now, this was rumored to be the oldest of its kind.

The library cats, hidden in the upper shelves, hissed at the presence of the curses woven around the tome. The sound was like rain sizzling against a hot roof.

The other Hollowers pounded the tables with their fists. My pulse outran the raucous beat as I faced the All Ways door.

“All right,” I said, sliding our key into its knob. “Where to first?”

After hours of crisscrossing between Boston, Savannah, Salem, and St. Augustine, we’d struck out on all three jobs. Two had been completed by another Hollower from a different guild, and for the third, the client had been hoping to pay us with her extensive button collection.

The only thing left now was to close out the job we’d done for the Sorceress Madrigal.

“All I’m saying is that those pearl buttons were rather fetching,” Cabell continued, dodging the after-dinner crowds in New Orleans’s French Quarter.

“They were shaped like stars,” I said, my face scrunching.

“You’re right, I take back what I said,” Cabell answered. “They weren’t fetching, they were enchanting. I think they would look lovely on you—”

I knocked my shoulder into his, rolling my eyes. “Now I know what to get you for Christmas.”

“Uh-huh,” Cabell said, taking in the sight of the iron balconies above us. A thin moon illuminated New Orleans in all its colorful glory and seemed to hang lower than usual.

“Why don’t we live here?” He sighed happily.

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