Page 44 of Kiss of Smoke

“Briallen.” Robin’s stern voice interrupted my churning thoughts. “Youmustremember.”

He gripped my shoulders, and I opened my eyes, staring straight into his.

“It’s what the Ghosthand has been using, isn’t it?” I asked, feeling distant. “It’s how he steals souls.”

Where? Where, where,where?

“It has to be.” Gwyn looked at the thing grimly. “Even the Wild Hunt doesn’t use them. We spirit souls back to King Arawn’s court, not keep them for ourselves. It explains why their souls were already gone.”

I drew in deep breaths. Swirling orbs of ghostlight, dancing behind glass panels…I hadn’t seen it in the Undercity, neither in Calder’s home nor in Brightkin’s hideaway…it wasn’t in Annwyn…

My nails dug into my palms, leaving marks.

The swirling orbs, glowing pale blue over a mess…over a unicorn horn, over jars and bottles.

I wanted to throw up. The world seemed to spin around me on its axis.

Nothe. It was howshestole souls.

“When Gwyn was poisoned,” I whispered, my lips feeling numb. “When I went to get medicine for him.”

Robin straightened up, his fingers so tight on my shoulders I knew they’d leave bruises.

“I saw it in Carabosse’s house.”

16

I foundmyself with a pile of jewelry stuffed in my hands before I was herded out of the vault and into Robin’s house.

I went numbly, walking on wooden legs.

Carabosse? The same woman who had stitched me up countless times, who had fed me medicines and opened her door for me at all hours, no matter how inconvenient to her, and had let me sleep in her house?

My brain simply refused to connect the pieces. She couldn’t be one of the Unstained Souls, much less the Ghosthand.

She was cranky as hell, but her soul wasgood.

I absently wrapped a silver chain around my wrist as Robin dialed a number. He held the phone to his ear, and didn’t so much as greet whoever he was calling before he said, “Meet me in the safehouse now.”

Then he hung up, sliding the phone back in his pocket and slipping a large ring set with a ruby on his finger.

“You should have this one,” Gwyn said to Jack, giving him a cuff bracelet inlaid with tiny diamonds that sparkled like frost. “Then we’re going for the weapons. I don’t want these puny little guns you have—give me the big shit.”

I realized I’d sat down on Robin’s bed without realizing it, and was just staring at them instead of dividing up the protective artifacts. Their voices seemed to come from a hundred miles away, drifting through water.

Jack noticed first, reaching out to me.

“Briallen?” he asked, cupping my face in his hands and forcing me to look at him.

I struggled to summon the words. “It can’t be true.”

An unreadable look crossed Jack’s face, and I saw Gwyn and Robin exchange a glance behind his back.

“Perhaps….there is a chance it is not.”

“You don’t think so,” I said despondently. “You believe she’s the Ghosthand.”

How many times had she been awake when I’d come calling at her house, fresh off a Ghosthand crime scene?

---