There’s a way to manifest insignificance: Stand on top of the world.
On the balcony at the top of the Old Roaring Tower, less than twenty-four hours before the Festival of Night, Arthie unzipped the maintenance uniform that had gotten her through the guarded entrance and tossed it aside, readjusting the cuffs of her shirt and smoothing out her trousers. Jin had only winked when Arthie asked how he had managed to swipe it.
Far below, the city lay awake even this late, gaslights glowing like abandoned wishes. People turned in circles until they found an eternal home of dirt—or a pair of fangs. Buildings tumbled in chaotic disarray, balustrades like sentinels, stone carved upon stone, ending where the sea spilled into the mist far beyond or emptied into the River Tamesis, winding through half of Ettenia. Wind whipped at her hair, ruffling the panels of her suit jacket and tugging at the laces of her shoes.
The moonlight bathed half of her in white, the other half in stark shadow. Fitting, for what she was. Half here and now, the other half lost at sea. Ravaged by an ache that could never be dulled.
Please, the ripping wind seemed to beg. Please, please, please.
Below her the clock ticked on, counting through the second hour. A bird took flight from a nest on the number nine, and she shivered as the tower’s pulse became her own. It was a mechanical heartbeat that measured life in seconds, counting time the way mortals rarely did.
Tell me, do you remember what it’s like to live?
Those words had pierced her skin and burrowed under her muscles, settling into her bones. Just like the boy who had spoken them.
And there, in the indiscernible silence, she heard it: the low draw of a breath.
Arthie spun. A figure was silhouetted behind her. She sprang forward and shoved him against the brick wall, finger dropping to the trigger of her pistol. He broke her hold and reversed their positions within a single strike of the clock.
He tilted his head, locks of white falling across his right eye. “Your aggression grows increasingly violent.”
There was a reason for that aggression: the fact that he was in her head before he appeared behind her. The fact that she couldn’t stop thinking of him and how he’d held her, touched her, looked at her.
How she planned on getting him killed.
“Let go of me,” Arthie said quietly. Her arm was caged beneath his, his knee pressed between hers, locking her in place. Her body itched to lean closer, to brush against him. A current was shooting through her veins. She was angry, that was it. There was no possibility of the low, silken thrum of his voice having any other effect on her.
“Or else?” he asked, slipping closer until the tip of his nose almost touched hers. His smile was the edge of a knife, and she was ready to bleed. He smelled like smoke and wood and spice, a mystery twined with enchantment. “You’re in no position to make threats, Casimir.”
The night gusted between them. She drew her lip between her teeth.
Was it the shift of the moon, or did his eyes darken? Was it the clock that thrummed down her body, or was it something else? Arthie let herself linger in the heat flooding through her limbs, feeling powerful when his gaze dropped to her mouth.
She shoved him off her, immediately curling her fists against the feel of his skin beneath his clothes, the solidity of his chest. It wasn’t hard to conjure the image of him at his apartment, his torso bare, skin glistening with stray drops of water. He had discarded his robes today in favor of a linen shirt in royal blue that fit snug across his shoulders with billowy pants slung low. He looked even more bare without his kitten curled on his shoulder.
Arthie rounded to the other side of the balcony, biting her tongue to force herself back to her senses.
“What are you doing here?” Arthie studied him, the smooth mask of indifference, the bow of his lips that made her skin prickle—there. The quick twitch of his eye every few heartbeats. A ruptured peace, an unsettled heart. Strangely, it eased something inside of her, made her less hostile.
Which wasn’t a good thing.
“I thought it would be smart to survey the Athereum from above,” he replied. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”
She wondered if he’d used his rank as a captain to get inside or if he’d scaled the tower itself. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was the latter.
“Oh, because I’m not smart?” she asked.
He started to protest before he caught sight of her teasing smirk and laughed, rich and warm, and she latched on to the sound as if it were the sequence to a vault.
He studied her with something like respect, throwing her off-kilter once again. Nothing about Laith slotted into place, and perhaps that was why she found herself thinking about him again and again. Puzzling him out, trying to decipher the secrets that lurked behind the tenebrous dark of his eyes.
“How did you find such confidence?” he asked.
“Finding it suggests I had no part in its making.” When she had. She’d fed it into her veins, nurtured it from stilted first steps to a wizened stalk.
The Athereum spanned across the tower’s shadow, the wall carving a white perimeter, narrow and slick. The establishment dripped decadence, from the details carved into the stone to the roof glinting like duvin ripe for the taking. Vampires lingered in the garden, aglow with the light from inside, their conversations as low as they would be in Spindrift.
Closer to Arthie and Laith, a guard paced in the dormer balcony cut into the Athereum roof. Half of his platform extended out of the Athereum, giving him a view of the gardens, and she could see the other half, a mezzanine that extended farther inside, where Matteo said he surveyed the entrance.
“Now there’s a guard who doesn’t slack off,” Laith said.
A glint of metal hung from the guard’s waist beside a spool of silver.
Arthie gestured to it. “We’ll have to take him out with his own weapon.”
Athereum guards were equipped with barbed wire and specially designed guns that fired without a sound. They were meant for vampires. The bullets dissolved shortly after contact and unleashed a toxin that would knock one out for a good ten minutes—and a human indefinitely.
She nodded at the gates, where two guards monitored the crowd gliding in and out. “We’ll pilfer a gun from one of them and shoot the dormer guard. That gives us ten minutes. Once Flick gets into the Athereum and inserts our identifiers, you’ll follow, scale the interior wall, and secure him with his own coil of barbed wire before the toxin wears out.”
“Barbed wire,” Laith deadpanned. “What good will that do?”
“Wrap it tightly enough and it will keep him immobilized and quiet until the shift change comes looking for him the next morning. They move, they bleed. He opens his mouth, it cuts into his lips. Vampires might be powerful, but the bullet drains them, and they won’t risk bleeding dry. Vampires can’t produce blood.”
“And how do you know all this?” he asked.
“I listen. Spindrift was designed to pacify, and people like to talk when they feel safe,” Arthie said. “I would—”
“Shh,” Laith cut her off.
Footsteps. They echoed behind the clockface. Voices called to one another. The tower guards. She had known her maintenance ruse wouldn’t last, but with Laith here she’d overstayed.
The balcony was one flat bed of stone corralled by a balustrade, and there was no place to hide. They couldn’t jump without breaking their necks or make the climb down before they were spotted.
Laith gave her his hand.
“What?” Arthie asked.
“You don’t have to trust me.”
“I don’t.”
The doorknob rattled. The auction was less than a day away. She didn’t have time to take chances. She had prepared too much to let it fall apart.
She took his hand as the door flung open. “You’re ludicrous.”
“You would know,” he said with a quick grin, and swung her over the ledge of the clock tower balcony. The world toppled. She was hurtling through the air, a shout cramming into her throat.
She was held aloft by nothing but Laith’s arm around her middle until he dropped them both into the nook of a narrow window, just beside the curve of the first hour.
Arthie bristled. “Was there—”
“Hush,” he cut her off again, clearly enjoying himself. Him and his flowers and his white kitten and those wretched flecks above his brow.
The narrow nook, Arthie belatedly realized, really was very narrow.
He brought his fingers to the small of her back, then leaned into the star-studded sky and peered up to the balcony.
The guards’ voices echoed, but Arthie couldn’t hear them. Not with her body pressed against his and the breadth of his shoulders engulfing her. Not with the hammer of his heart inches from her ear so she could count each beat.
“They won’t find us here,” Laith murmured, pulling back into the shadow of the nook, and his pulse quickened like horses beneath a whip, a vein thrumming at his neck. Fissures of amber shimmered in his irises. “This is the part where you thank me.”
“If I ever do, you’ll know that something is very wrong,” she replied, fighting to remain in control of herself.
The rumble of his responding hmm echoed down to her toes. He was studying her, and Arthie had the sinking realization that he knew exactly how he was affecting her. Why else did a smirk lift the side of his mouth when he leaned even closer?
Quick as a shot, his thumb brushed the swell of her lower lip, leaving fire in its wake, and she thought she felt the hand at the small of her back tug her closer. She thought she allowed it.
“What are you doing?”
She told herself she asked because she needed to know. There was no other reason why she sought out the sound of his voice when every space in her mind was already allotted for, each one working through a task, a job, mulling White Roaring’s secrets.
“What are we doing, Arthie?” he murmured with half a groan, and the night lit a fever in his eyes.
She didn’t know why his use of the word we made her shiver. She wondered what she had to do to hear that barely restrained hint of a groan again.
“Is it mayhem or desire?” he asked, slowly sliding his hands up her arms.
It was both. It was something kindred. For Arthie, one was often synonymous with the other, but right now, she couldn’t breathe. Every inch of her wanted to throw herself at him, every inch of her wanted to put as much distance as possible between them.
Up above, the door to the balcony slammed closed.
Soon, she told herself. She’d retrieve that ledger and be done with him. Be done with this. And if any part of her did not look forward to the fact, she buried it deep.