The small sound of the bolt turning might as well have been a warning shot.
“You know,” he went on, “I hoped you would come.”
Lila frowned. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said. “I never forget a face, but since I can’t see yours … have we met?”
The man continued his slow advance. “No,” he said. “We have not been introduced. But you’re no longer as anonymous as you once were, Delilah Bard.”
He flexed his hands, scarred knuckles going white as he said her name, and Lila reflexively reached for her power. Not the air in the room, or the candles on the wall, but the bones inside his body, to halt his progress, to make him stop.
She pulled on that magic—and felt nothing.
No flutter, no promise, no sense of a will warring with her own. She reached then for the wooden floor, for the air, tried to spark a flame inside her hand. Nothing.
Warded. The room was warded.
“I hope you weren’t planning to rely on magic.”
She imagined the man’s mouth drawing into a grim smile behind his onyx mask as he said it. Lila forced herself to match that imagined smirk.
“Believe it or not,” she said, drawing a blade, “I have other tricks.”
“Is that so?” He continued forward, close enough now that Lila would have to either attack, or step back. And she wasn’t about to step back. “Show me,” he said, but Lila was already moving.
She leapt onto the desk and over it, slicing down toward the man’s mask. He raised his arm, and the blade came down on that instead, steel ringing against steel as it cut the coat, only to hit an armored plate. His other fist swung toward her head, but Lila was already twisting out of the way, slicing the blade along his side.
She felt it bite through cloth and skin, but the man didn’t recoil. He didn’t even flinch. He simply turned, with shocking speed, and, before Lila could lunge back out of his reach again, he struck her, hard, across the face. Hard enough to crack the mask, which fell away. Hard enough to fill her mouth with blood. She rolled back and rose again, but her ears were ringing and her good eye blurred, and for a terrible second, she couldn’t see, her attacker nothing but a vague shape coming toward her.
It didn’t escape her notice that he hadn’t drawn a weapon, and that he held his hands as if they were the only ones he needed. This was a man experienced in hurting others.
“Well?” he asked. “Already out of tricks?”
Lila’s fingers tightened on the knives, searching his clothes, the way they fell, trying to find the points that weren’t armored. The man, meanwhile, turned his head, and studied the clock on the wall instead of her.
As if she weren’t even a threat.
Lila was offended, but the disrespect gave her the opening she needed, and she took it, springing toward him, angling the dagger toward his throat.
At the last moment, the masked face turned back toward her. At the same time, his hand came up, and caught the knife by the blade, wrenching it forward.
Lila should have let go.
Afterward, she would play the fight back in her head, over and over, and every time, she would regret that moment. She should have let go, but she didn’t, and when the man pulled the blade forward, he pulled her too, off-balance, and as he did, his other palm came to rest against the side of her head, and slammed it down into the wooden desk.
And everything went black.
IV
Two horses tore across the bridge.
They bore no royal markings, but anyone with a passing knowledge could tell they were bred well. Their coats were lush—one grey, the other white—and their hooves glinted as they galloped, as if they had been shod in gold.
Of course, Alucard had not bothered to tell Kell where they were going, only that it was on the coin.
“What coin?” Kell had demanded, swinging his leg over the grey mount the guards had brought him.
Alucard had let out an exasperated sigh. “From the dead thief, on Maris’s ship,” he’d said, as if that answered everything. “It gave the time and place, where the Hand would meet.”
Kell bristled—he did not know which bothered him more, that Lila had not told him about the coin, or that she had told Alucard instead.
“You knew she would go,” he’d snapped as Alucard had mounted the white horse and taken the reins. “You knew, and you said nothing.”
“I was distracted,” answered Alucard. “And I haven’t been a sailor for seven years. I have bigger concerns than the phase of the moon.”