Running.
Running away.
Grady and I had fled Union City the night the Hyhborn appeared in the orphanage, stowing away on one of the stagecoaches headed out of the Lowlands. I’d been convinced that we’d escaped. And it was kind of funny in a sad, somewhat disturbing way to think back on how scared I’d been that night— so afraid that the Hyhborn would discover that I was different and take me. Hurt me. Or even kill me. To this day, I didn’t know why I’d been so afraid of that. Hyhborn had no interest in lice-infested orphans. Not even one whose intuition alerted them to another’s intentions or allowed them to see the future.
But after that night, all we’d done was run and run, and if Archwood were to fall, we would return to that life once more, and I . . . My hand trembled. That terrified me more than anything— even more than spiders and other creepy, crawly things. Even thinking of it made me feel as if my lungs were decompressing and I was on the verge of losing the ability to breathe.
I would do anything to make sure that didn’t happen. That neither Grady nor I had to go back to surviving all those “not”s.
But as I moved on to Iris’s tail, an all-too-familiar itchy, suffocating feeling of loneliness settled over me like a coarse blanket. There were far more important things to be worried about at the moment, but there were few feelings worse than loneliness. Or maybe there actually weren’t any, and loneliness was the worst, because it was pervasive, hard to shake, even when you weren’t alone, and it worked overtime to convince you that contentment and joy were possible.
But that was a lie.
When you truly spent most of your time alone? When you had to? And not because you wanted to? There was no joy to be found. That was my future. For however long that might be. But the future wouldn’t be any different— whether I was here or elsewhere.
That loneliness would remain.
The darkness of my thoughts haunted me as I used a brush on Iris’s coat. I blew out an aggravated breath. I needed to think of something else—
Listen.
My body suddenly froze. Frowning, I turned and scanned the shadowed aisle of the stables, hearing only the sounds of the other horses and Gerold’s faint snores. My hand tightened on the brush as an acute sense of awareness washed over me. It wasn’t a chill of unease. This was different. The pressure between my shoulders was something else entirely. An intuition that I followed, wherever it led. Or more accurately, it was a demand.
Curious, I walked out of the stall, letting my intuition guide me. I’d learned long ago that I’d get little rest if I actually managed to ignore it, which I was rarely capable of doing.
I walked toward the back of the barn, where the doors were cracked, my steps quiet. Just as I went to push the door open, I heard voices.
“Did you get him?” The muffled words traveled through the wood. The voice sounded familiar. “And you’re sure he’s not one from Primvera you mistook?”
My breath caught. If the “he” they spoke of could’ve been mistaken as someone from Primvera, then they spoke of a Hyhborn and likely a Deminyen, as they didn’t live in lowborn cities but resided in their Courts.
“Because how do you think I knew what he was in the first place? I saw him and I remembered what he was supposed to look like,” another voice answered, and this one I recognized immediately due to his unique, gravelly tone. A guard who went by Mickie, but I knew his actual name was Matthew Laske, and he was . . . well, bad news. He was one of the guards who eagerly aided Hymel when it came to collecting rent. “He’s the one Muriel had us waiting for. I’m sure, Finn.”
Another of Claude’s guards. A young man with dark hair who always smiled whenever I saw him, and it was a nice smile.
I knew I shouldn’t eavesdrop; rarely did anything good come from that. But that’s what I did, because pressure had settled in the space between my shoulder blades and had begun to tingle. I crossed the foot or two to the shared wall and leaned against it. Unsure of why I was compelled to do so or what my intuition was picking up on, I obeyed the urge and listened.
“And on top of him being a spittin’ image of what Muriel said, if he was from Primvera, I doubt he’d be slinkin’ around the Twin Barrels,” Mickie continued, referencing one of the bawdy taverns in Archwood. I’d been there a time or two with Naomi. It was not a place I’d think a Hyhborn would normally spend time in. “Anyway, I took him to Jac’s barn.”
“Are you shittin’ me?” Finn demanded. “You took that thing to his barn? When Jac is off getting sucked and fucked every way from Sunday?”