Page 8 of Shadows of Perl

Cameras raise and I groan. Elopheus is probably rolling over in his grave hearing this warped version of history. Red Ball Cap and I meet eyes, and I bite down my annoyance, hoping my scorn hasn’t given me away. I grab my phone and take a picture of the windows, trying my best to appear impressed.

Outside, the sky flickers an odd orange, then purple, before flashing bright white.

My brother comes to mind unbidden for some reason. He is a traitor in more ways than one. First, he tries to shatter the Sphere, then he runs off with…her. Red Ball Cap breaks from the edge of the crowd, clears a roped-off area, and disappears down a stairway. I shove thoughts of Yagrin away and follow him.

The basement is silent and dim, but light streams in from the ground-level windows overhead. “Into the basement,” I whisper into my phone, but the signal flickers. The beat of Red Ball Cap’s footsteps quickens as it grows fainter. I follow him deeper into the bowels of the museum, when I turn down a familiar dead-end corridor packed with storage crates and Restricted Area signage. The last time I was here was the evening before my Cotillion. Yani and the rest of my Perl peers threw me a surprise celebration in this palace of magical history. The Dragunhead had to sign off on the approval, and security was strict. The others spent the night drowning themselves in dancing, drinking, and hanging from the ripped ceilings. But I spent it down here, in a secret library, home to a legendary collection of magical texts, at the end of this corridor.

I speed up. The inner workings of the Sphere, original writings from Dysiis—the founding father of toushana—dangerous information that should have never been left behind with only a doorless stone room to conceal it.

When the target reaches the end of the corridor, he presses his hands against the walls. I hide around a corner, stealing a glimpse at him. Shadows bleed from his palms and the brick blackens, disintegrating beneath his touch. He destroys enough of the wall to step through.

Once he’s inside, I hurry to the opening he’s just created and look inside. Thousands of texts cover every inch of wall. A single candle with a tiny wick burns on a table. He isn’t working alone. Someone else was here. He grabs the light and rushes to the shelves. His fingers trail several spines before pulling a book off a shelf. But he quickly closes it and moves to another. He parts the next one, flipping furiously. When he tears a page out, my heart seizes in my chest. I step over the crumbled opening and join him inside.

“I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to stick to the rooms along the tour.”

His pulse picks up. He wears a bit of jewelry. He has no visible tattoo marks.

“Those guides are always so boring, don’t you think?” His hand holding the torn page moves to his pocket. I close the distance between us.

“The rules are the rules. Stealing pages from ancient texts is also probably a no-go.”

“I’ve never been much for the rules.” His palm opens and shadows seep through his skin, spooling in his fist. Not rippling through the air as toushana does for me and my brethren. His seems to appear in his palm out of nowhere. I blink, hard, but tighten my fists, glaring at his magic to discern for certain if the magic is indeed coming from inside him. He hesitates, clumsily pulling at the toushana, and my certainty abandons me. As he fumbles with it, I command the chill of death to my hands and dark magic rushes to me in an instant. He reaches for me, but I’m faster. My hand hooks around the base of his skull. Before he has a chance to react, my wrist pushes against his windpipe. The black dancing on his fingertips dissolves, leaving a nasty bruise behind.

“What’s happening, please, I can’t feel my—” His body straightens like a board in my grip as the Dragun choke takes him.

“Do you have any idea how not smart it is to call on toushana when you don’t know how to control it?” I tighten my grip; his eyes widen. “Right now, toushana is moving into you at such a high rate, it feels like freezing water is replacing your blood. Like you’re slowly being turned to ice. Soon you’ll pass out from a lack of oxygen to your brain. Then your heart will give out. Unless you tell me very quickly who ordered you here.” I loosen my grip to free up his tongue.

“Like I said,” he chokes out. “I’m not much for rules.”

“I—” Suddenly my heart twinges, stuttering in my chest. For a moment I can’t breathe. Confusion clenches my brow as anger burns deep in my belly, swelling and strong. The feeling, its place and intensity, nudges me with unfamiliarity.

It’s not mine.

It’s hers.

Quell.

Heat roils through me, my own frustration rising as the image of her freckled skin, head of long curls, brown eyes, somehow both fiery and tender, form in my memory. I wait for some visual of her location, but it doesn’t come. The trace I have on her has not shown me her location since she bound to toushana. Binding to dark magic destroyed that part of the tracer magic.

A rocky ache turns deep in my chest. My grip tightens on my captive.

Her name sits on my tongue. Her face lingers in my mind. The way her nose would crinkle when she was uncomfortable. The way she’d hide her laughs when we first met, as if she hadn’t given herself permission to feel things like that freely. That changed drastically. As if part of her came alive at Chateau Soleil right in front of me. I remember the last time I saw her, when I truly saw her, when the glimpses of her desperate determination finally made sense. She is a raging storm when she wants something: forceful, unyielding, uncontainable. She would not be possessed by anyone or anything. That Quell is whose anger I feel now, and a tangle of emotions wrestles in my chest.

My feelings for her can’t be real. She played a game with me, using me to get better at magic, concealing her secret the entire time. The look in her eyes when I pleaded with her to not bind with toushana and seal her fate deepens the throbbing ache. I confessed that I loved her—and she turned her back on me. A feeling of revulsion rises so viscerally in my throat that I try to gather it in my mouth to spit it out.

She was right under my nose! What she did at House of Marionne’s Cotillion, and what she’s done with her toushana, makes a mockery of this Order.

When I find her, she’s dead.

Not by my orders. By my hand.

I force myself back to the present, waiting for Quell’s anger to pass, separating it from my own frustration. When it dissolves, my insides uncinch.

Then my chest pangs again.

This time with frigid fear. My arm trembles and nervousness thrashes in my stomach. I close my eyes and suddenly Yagrin’s harried face appears: the trace I put on my brother, working like a trace is supposed to. Behind him is a stretch of rocky grassland and an ocean.

She’s angry.

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