Chapter Seven

Rebel sank lower in the darkness, hiding, as the shadows of the Institute encircled her. She pressed into the rug beneath her, hugging her beloved book against her ribs like a living thing. The book she turned to in times of sadness and fear, the leather cover soft from years of being held. A volume of poems and quotes. She could recite them from memory, having read it from cover to cover, even when she’d been too young to understand. The words had imprinted themselves on her heart like a prayer. “I fear no fate. I fear no fate,” she whispered it again and again, along with a wish.

Only when Rebel recognized her hiding place did she realize she was dreaming.

She hadn’t been able to squeeze beneath her book bed since age ten. The many books worked as a platform, keeping the mattress off the floor. It became her fortress, where she’d hidden to block out the world. Where the monsters under here became less scary than the real ones. Her childhood wasn’t stored in photos, but in dreams, in stories, in corners of a dark room, and venomous words. In the good dreams, her heart was healed, her cup runneth over.

This, however, wasn’t one of those.

This dream was a usual one, and as it untangled before her, she knew how it would play out. It was part memory, part nightmare. The thump of footsteps would sound, the creak of the door would open, the smell of mothballs would surface, and a hand would reach for her. Soon Madame Gramone would seize Rebel by the hair, drag her out, and press raptor fingers into her skin, sinking them into her chest to pull out her heart.

But this time when the hand came—the dream altered.

The walls of her room bent outward, dark faces appeared in the carpet pattern beneath her, and the floor disintegrated, until night surrounded her. Snow crunched beneath her feet, but they weren’t her feet, and then she gazed up into her mother’s eyes. The woman cradled Rebel’s smallness in a blanket, hurrying down a street between banks of winter white. “I’ll come for you again, my little starbright.” Her mother crooned, holding Rebel tight as the woman’s voice fluttered around her, singing.

When the blazing sun is gone. When there’s nothing he shines upon,

Then you show your little light. Twinkle, twinkle, through the night…

Without warning, her mother’s form went soft at the edges, giving way to a blinding light and blurring into a new image. The sky lowered above Rebel as she ran down a tunnel, then the image melted again, and she was up in the air. The dream clouds in the fake sky began to drip into darkness, and her surroundings changed once more. Rebel stood on the edge of a roof, clenching her blackened heart within her hands. A figure floated above her, silhouetted in a cloud of fire. As the figure reached out, arms extending to her heart, a voice whispered in Rebel’s ear. Wake up, it said.

Wake…

Up…

“Stop moving, Faddi.” The voice held a richness to it like a purr.

Warmth pressed against Rebel’s face, and she felt delicate fingers probe her brow. Felt a bed beneath her. Wetness on her shoulder. Once she pried her sore eyes open, they landed on a wonderful vision.

Outside the window, the sky had blushed to pink as if kissed by the sun, casting fragments of light across Anjeline’s face. It trickled over the dark locks spilling over her shoulders, framing her face. As Anjeline turned her head this way and that, gazing down at Rebel, those fire-like eyes seemed to play tricks on everything around her.

Bells tolled outside, awakening her senses.

When Rebel gazed down at herself, she flinched. Her bloody shirt had been ripped half off her chest. She glanced up in horror. “What are you…”

Anjeline snorted. “Oh, please. I didn’t ravish you in your sleep,” she said, but didn’t miss the way Rebel’s gaze traveled to her lips. “Your wound will get infected if not cleaned.” She lifted a cloth stained a disturbing shade of crimson. A strange-looking bowl sat beside her, full of strong-smelling medicinal fluid.

“How did we… How did you…” She expected Anjeline to tell her none of it was real, that her heart condition was playing with her mind. However, she’d also be imagining the fiery being sitting beside her.

“You left the top off.” Anjeline gestured to the vase still clenched in Rebel’s hands. “And you’ve been rubbing it in your sleep.”

When Rebel had slunk back into the Institute last night, the last of her heart strength from escaping the lycanthrope’s den had ebbed away, and she’d passed out onto her rickety bed, the vase clenched in her arms.

“Though, your residence is tinier than the vessel. Never seen anyone hoard stories like a camel stores water.” Anjeline wrinkled her nose at the bedroom, the trinkets which occupied it, and the galore of books.

Despite Rebel’s gloom of a room, it was the closest thing she had to a home. Tiny jade elephants set upon her bookshelf alongside binoculars, throwing stars, and switchblades mixed within a sea of stolen Cadbury Fruit & Nut candies. All of which was nothing compared to the books living on every available surface as if they had sprouted from the wood floor.

Now with the benefit of hindsight, Rebel realized these weren’t mere fictional stories. They just might be literal. She shifted upright and stared at her shoulder. The long gashes. The wound tingled, reminding her it wasn’t a dream, and a horrible vision flashed through her mind. Her body contorting. Sprouting fur. Armored bone unfolding along her spine. Claws ripping through her fingernails.

As if reading her thoughts, Anjeline said, “Your Steelworld likes its tales. A lycanthrope scratch won’t transform you into a beast.”

Good to know. Rebel released a breath.

Fingers reached toward her shoulder again, but she jolted back. Anjeline lifted her hands as though she were trying to calm an uncontrollable bull. “Do you prefer having your lifeblood leak out?”

Finally, Rebel took stock of herself and every inch of her complained. Her slashed shoulder hung limp. Her lips were dry and swollen. Even her teeth throbbed. Her jacket, with three gashes torn on the left sleeve, now hung on the bed. Thanks to the garment, her wound wasn’t as severe as it could’ve been. All because of her heart. For that recklessness, she’d been captured and almost killed. She clutched her arms around herself, for all the good it did. Her body shook with shock, unable to believe what had happened. She gripped the vase, stroking it with a thumb as if it were the arm of some great beast warming her.

“Stop it,” Anjeline snapped.

Rebel paused. “What?”

“Stop rubbing it. You’ve been doing it all night. I can feel it.”

“You…feel it? So, if I do this…” She ran her fingers over the symbols of the vase, as though caressing the spine of an animal.

Anjeline shivered, irritation clouding her eyes. “I swear to the Creator, I’ll scorch you if you don’t quit. And stay still if you want your shoulder bandaged.” In a swirl of smoke, a translucent fabric materialized in her hand. She leaned closer, wrapping gauze over Rebel’s shoulder.

The touch felt thermal.

Rebel must have had quite the bump on the head to let someone this close. Maybe the jinni exuded special pheromones to make anyone around her docile enough to manipulate, aware of every minute detail of her warming skin, from her nose to the soft bow of her lips…

She flushed, suddenly conscious of Anjeline atop her bed. Never had a girl slept in her room, or on her bed, much less. Gramone’s rules. Not a girl, she reminded herself, wondering how old the jinni was and if she were above such mundane things as needing a bath. “At least now I can look at you without wanting to check my vision,” she mumbled.

Anjeline caught her gaze. “Euyunek latifa.”

“Do you have a translation book?”

Her lips twitched into almost a grin. “Is it so difficult for you to believe your life-form isn’t the most intelligent? Those lycanthropes, and many other beings, walk about just as you.”

“In the real world?”

She huffed. “Real world? Are you naive enough to think this is the only one? There are hidden cities pressing into a long line of secret realities. London’s the magic capital, where both Sidhe Courts reside. But you humans are too consumed with your mundane lives to notice magical beings, and they like it that way.”

Rebel remembered stories about such beings, creatures assaulting travelers at night and carrying them through the air. “And those wolves?”

“They are the leaders of the Night Guard. They roam your world carrying out deeds for the Moon Court Prince.”

“So that’s who they were talking about.” Rebel tried wrapping her head around all the things her books vaguely implied. “Moon Court equals murderous, then?”

“They are made up of the unblessed Sidhe. They are to dark what the Sun Court is to light. They abhor humans simply because they’re human.”

“You mean, like you, Jinn?”

A mighty scowl came Rebel’s way.

“Jinn are not Sidhe. We are more influential than you could imagine.” A fearless gleam entered Anjeline’s eyes. In the soft light of the room, she looked even more dangerous at bay. Her beauty seemed unfair to Rebel. Stunning to the point of being…well, unearthly. Like a light you couldn’t contain.

More influential indeed.

“Secondly, if I hated humans, would I have made a contract with one?”

“When you keep calling me human like it’s a bad thing, I have to wonder,” Rebel said. Still, there was something in the way Anjeline looked at her, a glance of curiousness maybe, hidden underneath the hard veil of suspicion.

Anjeline persisted with the bandage, moving close enough that tendrils of her hair spilled into Rebel’s lap. Good lord. She smelled exquisite. Like fire and wind, and lilies of the valley, and something else, something Rebel’s guttersnipe nose had never had the pleasure of smelling. Her chest went hot, and her heart gave a little quiver. “Couldn’t you”—Rebel gestured to her shoulder—“magic the wound away?”

A sigh escaped Anjeline’s lips. “The bindings restrain my full power, only unleashing it when I’m forced to grant wishmongers their desire.”

“You just conjured a bandage,” she pointed out.

“Certain mundane things, I can still manage.” Anjeline waved her cuffed wrist. “An apple. Light. Warmth. Things that use little of my magic and are no help to me. No weapons. Nothing that can alter my imprisonment. Besides casting wishes, I can’t do much else, other than producing gauze for an annoying—”

A tremor ripped through Rebel’s chest. She doubled over in pain, startling Anjeline, and scrambled for her satchel on the floor. Her hands shook as she fished through it, popped open her medicine bottle, and swallowed a pill. Little by little, her muscles relaxed, but the dizziness appeared as it always did after a jolt. That one was bad. Probably left over from the wolf threat, when her heart had felt like it would pound itself into a million pieces.

Anjeline kept her eyes, gleaming, and as lovely as a bonfire, on Rebel. They traveled from shaky hands to the bottle and back again. “You’re a thief and a hophead?”

There were countless things Rebel would’ve liked to say in response. “If it’s your intention to get to know me, you’re doing it wrong. I thieve because it’s what I’m good at, because I need to. It doesn’t make me who I…” She stopped and rubbed her temple where pain crept in like the dawn outside. Bright and sharp.

A few seconds passed before Anjeline asked, “Are you all right?”

The question surprised Rebel. She couldn’t remember being asked such a simple thing. Anjeline’s voice was gentle, and even a bit sweet. A voice that could calm a thunderstorm. “I’m…fine,” she replied.

“‘Fine’ in your language must be much different from mine.”

Rebel shrugged her good shoulder. “It means I’m human. If you have a heartbeat, you have a problem.”

For a moment, Anjeline’s gaze roamed over her. She knew she looked damaged, and in the window’s reflection, she caught a glimpse of how damaged. Tangled hair shaded her eyes where raccoon circles lay underneath. Her face, smeared with grime and dried blood, resembled a creature of the night. Feeling exposed, Rebel met her gaze and scowled.

An amused snorting sound came from Anjeline. “Oh, just stop. You’re the least terrifying human I’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing,” she said, and her features softened. “There are other mundane things I can conjure. And for you to survive our search, you’re going to need nourishment.”

On cue, Rebel’s stomach replied in a grumble.

Of all the reactions Anjeline could have had, her quiet, little laugh came as a surprise. The sound was gold. It filled Rebel’s room and bit into her lungs, making her insides do wonderful and terrible things. “Hungry?” Anjeline asked.

Rebel nodded, cheeks flushed. “Like a wolf.”