Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

PIPER

“We have to get out of here,” Piper hissed.

“Obviously,” Lyre replied, invisible in the darkness. “I’d prefer not to end up in a warehouse somewhere with a dirty sack over my head.”

Piper gritted her teeth. “They think we helped steal the Sahar Stone.”

“Oh, is it stolen? How do you know that?”

It hadn’t actually been stolen—but it was missing. Because she had it.

“Calder said ‘they’ took the Sahar,” Ash revealed unexpectedly.

Piper blinked. Calder had said that, hadn’t he? But he couldn’t have witnessed the Sahar’s theft when the Sahar hadn’t been in the meeting room.

Still, whatever Calder had meant, it worked in her favor.

“Exactly,” she said. “The Sahar was stolen, and we’re going to take the blame. Don’t you realize what that means?”

“Sure.” Lyre’s voice was full of dry nonchalance. “As soon as it gets out to the daemon community that we might have the Sahar, every greedy bastard in the three realms will hunt us down and flay the flesh from our bones in the hope of claiming its power for themselves.”

She grimaced at that colorful imagery. “ So ,” she said emphatically, “we should escape. Like, right now.”

She needed to get out of this van and away from the prefects before anyone got the idea of stripping the prisoners of their belongings. Once they found the Sahar Stone on her, it was game over.

“Do you have a plan for escaping?” Lyre asked, still sounding infuriatingly unbothered.

Piper jangled her handcuffs. “Get out of the van and run like hell?”

Lyre’s sigh fluttered through the pitch-black interior. A pinprick of golden light appeared, illuminating the palm of his hand and casting a soft glow over the barren interior and plexiglass wall that separated the driver’s compartment. He was sitting cross-legged, and with a jolt, she realized his wrists were handcuff-free.

“When—I mean, how…” She trailed off, not sure what question to ask first.

Lyre shrugged. “Everyone always assumes incubi are useless, but not even putting a magic-dampening collar on me? It’s kind of insulting.”

Raising his light spell a little higher, he glanced to his right. Piper followed his gaze and stiffened with a thrill of fear when her eyes found Ash’s silhouette in the darkness, only the faintest glimmer of golden light catching on his hair. Even sitting with his arms bent behind him, he loomed like a living shadow.

“Need some help?” Lyre asked him.

Ash made a scoffing noise. He flexed his shoulders, and the chain between his handcuffs rattled as it pulled taut. The muscles in his arms bunched with strength.

Pop .

He relaxed his arms and pulled his hands in front of him. The broken chain hung from his bent cuffs.

Piper stared. “How did you do that?”

“With effort.” He shook his wrists, a few trickles of blood running down his skin where the metal had cut him, then raised both hands to grip the collar around his neck.

No way. He might be freakishly strong and capable of snapping metal links, but he couldn’t break that solid steel ring with brute force… could he?

He didn’t wrench at the collar. He simply held it, his eyes closed. The air grew hot and dense around him, and with a hissing crackle, the collar crumbled to dust. Piper’s jaw unhinged, her face slack with disbelief. Had he used magic to break a magic-dampening collar? How was that possible?

“Aside from escaping the van,” Lyre said conversationally, “what’s the larger plan? Fleeing the scene of a crime won’t convince anyone we didn’t steal the Sahar.”

She tried to come up with an answer that didn’t involve the words “Sahar Stone” and “in my shirt.”

“The only way anyone will believe we aren’t the thieves,” Ash said, “is if the real thieves are caught red-handed. We can deal with that problem once we’re away from the prefects.”

Piper nodded eagerly. “Any ideas on how to get out of this stupid van?”

Ash tilted his head toward the rear doors as though listening to something. Lyre extinguished his minuscule light spell.

A soft click, then a clunk. One of the doors cracked open. Ash nudged it a few more inches, and a pair of golden eyes appeared in the gap—Ash’s dragonet. A set of keys hung from her mouth.

Ash slipped out the door, and with jangling handcuffs, Piper scooted hastily after him—and promptly collided with his back. He’d stopped in the van’s shadow, his dragonet curled over his shoulders like a cat and her mane ruffled with self-importance.

Lyre squeezed out of the van to join them. A dozen yards away, the Consulate was lit up like a party house, light spilling from the windows, broken wall, and choronzon-smashed front doors. Dark figures moved in and out of the destroyed front entrance.

Ash rounded the corner of the van into the deeper shadows on its far side. Piper took one last longing look at the Consulate and followed him, Lyre on her heels. Ash peeked into the passenger window, then opened the door and gestured for Piper to get in.

Breathing fast, she crawled onto the stained fabric seat, keeping below the windows. Lyre squished in beside her, pushing her hip uncomfortably into the padded armrest. Ash shut the door with barely a sound and vanished from the window.

A few seconds later, the driver’s door opened and Ash slid into the seat. The key was in the ignition the next second. The engine started with a cough of protest. He shifted the vehicle into gear, and with more restraint than Piper could have managed, let the van roll forward. No one looked twice at the slowly passing van.

Only when Ash turned off the Consulate’s long drive and onto the cracked pavement of the highway did he put his foot down. The engine roared, and he switched off the vehicle’s lights. The road and bordering trees vanished in the darkness.

Piper stared at her handcuffs so she didn’t have to look at the invisible road whipping beneath the van. She assumed Ash could see well enough to navigate, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch. Lyre propped his elbow on the door, saying nothing, his nonchalant humor snuffed by the gravity of their escape.

The silence pressed in on the cab, and Piper couldn’t bring herself to break it. She didn’t want to ask Ash where they were going in case he said he didn’t know.

Now that they’d escaped, the prefects would be doubly certain that she, Lyre, and Ash had been involved in the explosion, murdered all those daemon delegates, and stolen the Sahar Stone. Once news of the Sahar’s presence in the city and subsequent disappearance spread, prefects would become the least of Piper’s worries. There was nowhere safe to go.

And the fact she had the Sahar only made it worse.

Pinpricks of light grew visible against the black sky, giving shape to Brinford’s skyscrapers. Some structures were lit with dozens of glowing windows. Some were dark, scarcely visible in the night. And some were crumbling skeletons with gaping holes revealed by the hazy light pollution.

Piper pressed her hands to her thighs as the van passed the gated, guarded entrance to the suburb where she attended high school. The guardhouses were brightly lit, the security personnel slightly more reputable than the city prefects.

Beyond the suburb, crumbling commercial buildings took over. Ash slowed his reckless speed as the van’s tires bumped over pits, cracks, and holes in the road. The bones of broken-down vehicles dissolved into rust in front of boarded-up businesses. Half the streetlamps were bent, broken, or missing, and of the ones still standing, only a third cast a sickly yellow beam down onto the dilapidated street.

Stray dogs scuttled along the trash-littered sidewalk, and the occasional shape of a person could be glimpsed in the patchy light. Daemons, most likely. Humans stayed home and locked their doors after dark.

There were better areas in Brinford, and ones that were much worse. Most cities were like this: half empty and slowly collapsing, with a few havens of almost functional societies that were zealously guarded by their inhabitants or by the city prefects or, rarely, by both.

The world had been like this for the past seventy years, irreparably changed by the bombs, biological warfare, and weapons of mass destruction that had nearly wiped humanity out of existence. Her history lessons weren’t clear about what had started the war. Mankind had only bothered to remember what had ended it.

Piper surreptitiously glanced at Ash, with a reddish-purple sheen to his dark hair and strength that could snap a handcuff chain, then at Lyre, with his pale blond hair and arresting amber eyes, who’d escaped his handcuffs without Piper even noticing.

Those feats were mere party tricks compared to what daemons could do when they let loose.

She, Ash, and Lyre had ended up in this mess together, united by their common goal of survival. But she couldn’t let her guard down. If they knew she had the Sahar Stone—no, if Ash knew, he would kill her, take the Sahar, and head straight back to his home realm: the Underworld.

Which meant when push came to shove, she was completely on her own.