“I’m alone.”
“They attack me every time I leave.” She folded her arms in an attempt to hide the scars. “At your order, I presume.”
A month and a half had passed since the siege, October to late November. The cold was creeping into the streets and robbing the city of life. The last time she’d seen Prince Rennar, he’d asked her to be his princess. What did he see as he looked at her now? Still a princess? Or just a messy-haired girl, barefoot and barefaced, with stains on her robe and clumsy blue stitches in her arm?
At least he was barefoot too.
And there was that look in his eyes. That fog.
His brows pinched together as his gaze fell to the wound on her arm, repaired so hastily with the wrong kind of spell, and his lips parted. “You’re hurt . . .” He took a step forward.
“Stay back!”
He stopped. “Your arms. Your neck. I didn’t realize the crows would hurt you.” She gave a harsh laugh, but he shook his head. “I didn’t. I promise.” He was distracted by something and caught off guard by her wounds. “I hadn’t thought . . . for us it’s so simple to heal ourselves. Blood and wounds are nothing. To get a Goblin’s attention, I’d just as soon pluck out one of his eyes as call his name—and he’d only shrug and put it back in. I hadn’t thought that my crows would really hurt you.”
If only she had her Faustine jacket. If only she could hide her scars with the quilted red silk and the mythical creature’s embroidered feathers and claws.
“Let me fix your scars. I can help.”
She jerked back. “Like you helped my friends?”
“Your friends are safe with me.”
“Even Hunter Black?”
Prince Rennar reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small, round mother-of-pearl-backed mirror that bristled with enchantment. “See for yourself.”
She scoffed. “You’re fou if you think I’ll reach through the protection spell.”
He gave an arrogant sigh but set down the mirror and took a few steps back. Her heart pounded. It could still be a trap. But if Hunter Black was alive . . .
She took a quick step forward, grabbed the mirror, and darted back. Her breathing was rapid. Rennar hadn’t moved. Cautiously, she looked into the mirror. It didn’t reflect her face. Instead, she saw three cages within its round silver frame. One held a mouse; one held a cat; and in the last one, there was a wolf with careful stitches across its throat, stitches that could only have been made by a hand highly skilled at magical healing. The hand of a prince.
Her heart leaped.
Hunter Black was alive.
She was so fixated on the animals in the mirror that she didn’t notice Rennar had stepped closer until he said, “Things have changed, Anouk.”
Her heart shot to her throat. Her fingers curled around the mirror. She narrowed her eyes at his feet, which were just inches from the protection spell. Wary didn’t begin to describe how she felt. And yet there was a tremble in his voice. A haunted cast to his eyes. His face was perfect, of course. The skin smooth and taut. But she had lived in the house of a witch long enough that she could see beyond perfection. His skin had an odd sheen to it. It looked too fresh, too new. She’d seen that sheen on Mada Vittora every time the witch had healed herself after battles with other witches. Mada Vittora had remade torn skin, reformed broken bones, and replaced missing fingers, but she couldn’t hide that sheen. Judging from the extensive repair work Rennar had done on himself, he must have been shredded nearly to the bone.
She glanced back at the front window. Viggo and the Goblins had mashed their faces against the glass to get a better view. She turned around and stepped down the front steps slowly, chin held high, until she and Rennar were one step apart on either side of the protection spell.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
He looked surprised that she could see beyond his magic. He brushed at a glossy patch of skin that began beneath one ear and ran down the side of his neck. The skin was smoother than the rest of him, as though that patch had taken effort to repair. “London. London happened.”
She blinked in surprise. “London?”
It might as well have been another world.
“While you and I were distracting each other in Montélimar, the Royals in London went silent. First Prince Maxim, then Lady Imogen, now everyone within the Court of Isles. I went to investigate. They’ve all vanished.” He touched his throat again, flinching at some dark memory.
She made a show of raising a careless shoulder. “My problems are here, in Paris. My problem is with you. Why should I care about the Court of Isles?”
“Because as much as you hate me, as cruel as we’ve been to each other, even as much as you worry for the fate of your friends, all of that pales in the light of what I’ve just seen.”
That tremble returned to his voice. It was caused by more than fear. Beneath his perfect hair and perfect face, he was traumatized.
She narrowed her eyes. “You have two minutes before I slam this door.”
“They closed the city,” he said in a rush. “The Coven of Oxford. The same witches who evicted your Goblin friends. They put up border spells to prevent any living magical thing from passing into or out of London.”
“You seem to have made it out in one piece.”
He barked a laugh before the look in his eyes turned nasty. “Two pieces, as a matter of fact. They cast the spell as I was crossing into the elevator portal. Have you ever seen a person cut down the middle? I can’t say I’ve quite experienced such pain. It wasn’t easy to put myself back together again.” He touched that odd sheen running down his neck again.
She stared at him in disbelief. “They cut you in half?”
He dismissed that with a flick of his fingers. “The important thing is, most of me ended up on the right side of the elevator, back in Paris. But the things I saw, Anouk. Surely you’ve noticed the increase in technology over the past few weeks. The city is crawling with it. Every Pretty in Paris has his head bowed over some new device and another one beeping in his pocket.”
Anouk looked back at their Goblin audience fogging up the window. Little Beau had joined them, his wet nose against the glass. For weeks she’d been sitting at that window, watching for a break in the crows. She’d heard the usual dinging of bicycle bells and scuffing of shoes through autumn leaves, but more and more often, she’d also heard the chatter of mobile-phone conversations. Podcasts. Teenagers tapping away on tablets. The whir of the drones that photographers used to capture the city from above.
“I suppose so, yes. Mobile phones, that kind of thing?”
“Oh, far more than that. The witches have unleashed technologies that the Haute agreed should remain undiscovered. Advanced cloning. Macro-robotics. Time relativity. That’s just to name a few. Magic and technology do not mix well, as I’m sure you know. The Coven witches knew this too. They anticipated that a sharp spike in technology would throw the magic in London into chaos and that they could use the distraction to steal power from the Court of Isles. But they haven’t been able to reel back in the chaos they unleashed. Playing with relativity has splintered pockets of the city into time loops. Cloned toads are raining from the sky. Advanced optics caused a glitch that created two moons. All the coal waste from the robotics industry is making black rainbows.”