Page 16 of Queen of Darkness
“You found him?”
“Eventually. It’s a bit of a long story. We had to break him out of the queen’s clutches. Turns out I’m like him. A hybrid. So, now the queen wants me dead.”
“I heard about the Blood Letter.”
“Yeah,” I said. Fred wasn’t being very chatty. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“All right. Well, I still owe you a thanks. Can I get you another drink?”
Fred waved it off. “I was just doing my job.”
I frowned at him. “That wasn’t a job. You volunteered to be chased by those things.”
He shrugged. “Sure, it was. It’s in my contract to Aaron.”
“You people and your contracts,” I said, wondering why they were so obsessed with the things. “What’s so important about them? Aaron is always going on about them, too.”
Saying his name brought flashes of pain to my stomach. I missed him. His solid presence and his awareness of this new world I was slowly discovering. A world that did not like what I was.
“Where is he?” Fred asked, ignoring my question.
“Seguin,” I said. “We, um, had a bit of a fight. A disagreement, really.”
Fred perked up slightly, worry filling his normally flat eyes. “Over what?”
I opened my mouth to say but hesitated as I was reminded of all the other patrons. “There are probably too many ears here for that,” I said instead.
Following my train of thought, Fred nodded. “Okay, then, let’s go back to Seguin and talk about it. It should be safe to move now.”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I need to lay low somewhere else for a bit. Figure some things out.”
Fred grinned. “Well, how about that. Sounds like you came to the right person.”
“Maybe,” I said, wincing. “But there’s one problem.”
“Which is?”
“Elenia won’t let me leave here alive. She has the exits watched, and the ones I can take are apparently well-guarded.”
“She can’t have them all guarded,” Fred said. “Together, we can take more exits than you could survive alone.”
“There’ll still be someone watching for her,” I pointed out, wondering how Fred’s presence would open more doors.
Fred’s face creased into a frown. “Good point. We need to convince her we’ve gone elsewhere. Which means finding her watchers here and dealing with them. I’ve already marked one. We just need to find the second.”
I nodded, my spirits feeling buoyed. Maybe I wasn’t as alone as I thought.
“So,” I asked, hunching over the table, “what do we do?”
Chapter Ten
Simply walking up to Elenia’s lookouts and breaking their necks was out of the equation. Even for Fred. Since we couldn’t enlist the Broker’s help—
“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up a hand. “I might have an idea.”
“You do?”
