Page 42 of Kiss of Smoke

Now I understood. I still felt the full, crushing horror of it all, but at least I could look at it without losing my stomach. It had become background noise.

But I didn’t want it to be background noise. There was no reason for that man to die; I would’ve gladly handed him over to Robin if he was one of the Unstained Souls, but I doubted one of the Souls would’ve been running in terror like that.

He was just a man who’d gotten trapped here, in a place no mortal belonged.

I rubbed the moonstone ring on my finger, lost in thought, then strapped the knife Gwyn had given me to my thigh, and left my room.

It was time to have a war room conference, and finally do something to stop them.

Voices emanated from down the hall, and I followed them to Robin’s room. Surprisingly, the vault door was wide open, and I caught a glimpse of Jack’s pale form within.

I stepped in, ducking as a pixie zoomed past with a box perched on his head, and looked up into the vast chaos that Robin kept secret. I knew from my last visit here that touching most things was an absolute no-go, but my fingers still itched to poke at the first glittery thing I saw.

Gwyn saw me first, holding out an arm. I tucked myself in the warm embrace of it, looking up at Robin, who was twenty feet above us on a ladder.

“What are we doing here?” I asked pleasantly, somehow managing not to sound like a complete zombie.

“This is the group meeting you wanted,” Sisse said. She had made herself at home on Jack’s shoulder, wrapping his collar around herself.

Robin slid down the ladder, with a twine-wrapped box in hand. “Grayfog has been researching what the Unstained Souls might be using, and they’re definitely armed with our magical artifacts. His team has been scouring similar cases, and they’ve recently discovered evidence that the tombs of Queen Aine, Queen Mab, and Morgan le Faye have been looted. The burial goods were stolen.”

He dropped the box on a wooden table nearby and began untying the twine. We all gathered around him curiously.

It was a good theory. The great queens of history had been buried with vast treasures, according to legend, so…if I were a human looking for magical Fae artifacts, where would I go?

To their tombs, of course.

They were supposed to be enormously difficult to find, but I supposed some enterprising—or hate-driven—humans could’ve accomplished it.

“There are no written records of what exactly the queens were buried with,” Robin continued, breaking the box open, “But we can assume they were objects of great power.”

We all looked in. The box was filled with an assortment of jewelry, and the moonstone ring seemed to tighten on my finger, as though afraid I’d drop it in the box and replace it.

I stroked the ring reassuringly as Robin lifted a silver amulet out and examined it intently.

“Invisibility, I believe,” he said, and turned to us. “We’ll be arming Grayfog’s team as well. We’re going into the Undercity to search and destroy, and with these we’ll be on more than equal footing.”

I nodded as Jack began helping him, sorting through the objects according to their design, but I quickly lost interest.

The Gentry were able to touch an object and understand what the magic on it meant, but that was power beyond me. All I would feel would be the faint hum of magic with no idea of what it actually did.

As they picked through, occasionally pocketing choices of their own, I wandered a little further into the vault of chaos.

Several pixies muttered at me under their breath, and one even snapped, “Don’t eventhinkabout touching anything,” as she buzzed past my ear.

I shrugged at her, wandering further still and rounding a large spinning wheel with a basket of gold lying next to it.

Robin had said search and destroy, and I should’ve been a little more…excited.

Maybe nothappy, because killing would never be second nature to me, but I was ready to put a rest to things and bring peace to Avilion once more.

It just felt wrong to phrase it that way, even though the Unstained Souls likely felt exactly the same about us. After all, their manifesto used words like ‘exterminate’ and ‘eradicate’.

I turned a corner, lost in my thoughts, and came to a dead end in a corridor of shelves.

“Blessed Branches, how much does Robin have stuffed in here?” I wondered aloud in exasperation, looking up at the shelves that reached the high ceiling.

There were yet more knives and assorted weapons, and then even innocuous things, such as a small chunk of nondescript granite with a massive warning label posted around it and a silver spoon in a similar state.

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