Page 11 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

I fumble a cigarette out of the pack and manage to light it with one hand, taking a long drag of smoke.

Escape.For a while, I tried it constantly. Every job Lyrian sent me out on was another opportunity to run.

Lyrian, mykeeper.I’ve never come up with another term for him. The strangely thin man with white-blond hair who took me in after my parents died. Not that I remember them.

Smoking is just another form of protest. It’s not that I like it. It’s just something that calms my nerves and pisses Lyrian off. That is all my so-called life has ever been about really—trying to escape and piss him off.

Hunts like these that Lyrian sends me out on are the only hints of freedom I have left. The only freedom I have ever known. Because I’m nothing but a prisoner.

It’s my specialgiftas Lyrian calls it—my strange ability to track people down, no matter where they are hiding—that makes him keep me, I know. Thisgifthe forces me to use to find people for him, for his dark purposes.

And I let her escape.

I fucked up again.

Lyrian is bad. So bad, in so many ways, that his aura is a solid, dark, black wall. Nothing I’ve ever seen before. Seeing auras is, well, anothertalentof mine. I learned early on that other people can’t read the same energy fields, or see the aura’s colors unraveling over a person’s very being. Every sentiment wavering there, in the periphery of their bodies. Every thought and craving, ranging from innocent blue to the deepest, thickest gray.

Gods, my punishment will be bad.

Another panic attack stirs and threatens to rise. To consume me and leave me crushed.

I can’t. Not now. Not here.

I fight it, trying to push it down and into the void inside me. Later.Later I can cry and cower somewhere, curl up on the floor of my room until my body rids itself of even the last remnant of adrenaline.But not now. I can’t afford it.I need to get through this. I need to go on, or I know, deep down, that Lyrian will make my already hellish life even worse.

He is the kind of man who, if he ever learns about my attacks, will only make me suffer more. He hates nothing more than weakness. I’ve certainly learned that the hard way.

I clutch the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles turn white. I need to get out; I need to get away from him before I totally loseit. Sometimes it already feels like I have lost it—as if I’m standing on the threshold of a total collapse. The panic attacks so heavy and unrelenting that they go on for hours, crippling me in every sense.

I try to breathe against them. Against my right ribs while I recite my mantra.

You will have a life one day. A real life. Maybe a house on the beach, and sunshine, somewhere far away. A dog maybe. You’ll find a way to escape.

I keep telling myself those things, over and over and over. It’s the only thing I have left. The only thing I ever had—hope.

I ignore the car in the rearview mirror. The bloodhounds’ stern, hungry faces. I try to think of anything that is not related to Lyrian… that is not what awaits me once I arrive back at his property.

David. I always think of David in my darkest hours, and my heart aches.

An ordinary name for an ordinary boy. Handsome and kind, his aura unusually bright. A farmer’s son. Blond. Blue eyes.

I met him in the bookshop in thattownwhere Lyrian let me go when I was still a teenager. David also liked to read. We became something like friends, if I ever had one. Then a little bit more.

A boy I one day found tortured and unconscious, handcuffed to the very same steel table and chair I’d been shackled to so many times.

That was years ago, but the picture of David there—unconscious, head lolling, eyes swollen, lips cracked, multiple ribs broken—has burned itself into my memory.

Lyrian didn’t kill him that day, but the message was clear: never get close to anybody again.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder what has become of him, of the brash but kind sixteen-year-old boy who would now be twenty-two, like me. I wonder whether he ever recovered from what Lyrian did to him. Wonder whether he still lives here or left town like everyone else halfway sane, to get a real life in a real city. Maybe he went to university to become the surgeon he dreamed of being. I wonder how he spends his evenings. Whether he has friends withwhom he goes to bars and clubs and cafés. Not that I know anything about such a life.

I sometimes wonder whether he still thinks about me from time to time.

Probably not.

In those dark moments, I allow myself to imagine how I would have turned out if I’d been allowed to beyoungand relatively unburdened. Whether I would go to clubs and parties. Have friends of my own. Who would I be? What would I be like?

A dangerous thing to think.

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