Page 30 of The Dagger and the Flame
‘But then how can I taunt you?’ she crowed. She hadn’t expected it to be this easy. Or enjoyable. She turned, searching for another shadow. She found one and pounced, her cloak reappearing and then vanishing as the darkness engulfed her once more. She laughed again. ‘Maybe I’ll make an expert thief after all.’
‘It’s just a shame about those tiny hands,’ he said, turning to follow her voice.
She took off her glove and flung it at him.
He caught it easily. ‘Breach!’
She waggled her fingers at him. He lunged to catch her, but she hopped again, folding herself into a shadow on the wall. The darkness tickled her skin, welcoming her. A laugh bubbled out of Sera, the sound so strange and carefree, she hardly recognized it. It was followed by a twist of guilt. How could she laugh after what had happened to Mama? The underworld had claimed her, and now here Sera was, dancing inside it, playing with Shade like it hadn’t torn her life apart. Killed her mother.
But no – Mama had told her to come here if something bad happened. She had told Sera it was the only place she would be safe. The better Sera hid, the better she could protect herself. The better she could sneak, and pounce. It would take more than a vial of Shade to take down a Dagger at the height of his power. She needed to be quick, stealthy. She needed to be a good Cloak. Otherwise, how could she sneak up on Dufort?
Sera pushed her guilt away, folding herself into darkness and distraction. As she hopped from one shadow to the next, playing cat and mouse with Theo, she realized she didn’t want the game to end. Once it did, the spell would be broken.
All too soon, they were interrupted by an urgent knocking at the door. It swung open to reveal Valerie’s ashen face. ‘There’s been an incident,’ she said, in a strangled voice.
Theo stiffened, the game forgotten. ‘What is it?’
Val’s bottom lip trembled, and Sera saw her eyes were filled with tears. Her careful composure had fallen away, revealing the girl trembling beneath. There was a commotion in the hallway behind her, raised voices and hurried scuffling.
‘It’s Griffin. They found him down by the harbour.’
Theo followed Val out into the hallway.
Sera stumbled out of the shadows, untying the cloak at her neck. She let it pool on the floor as she scurried after them.
Out in the hallway, a group of Cloaks were carrying a body towards the other room in the basement. Sera rose to her tiptoes, straining to see over Theo’s shoulder, and caught a glimpse of Griffin’s greying skin. His eyes were black as ink. His lips too.
A Dagger’s kill.
Theo muttered a slew of swearwords. ‘What the hell are they playing at?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Val in a hollow voice. ‘They’ve declared war.’
Sera stumbled back into the cloakroom, trying to catch her breath. She picked her cloak off the floor and held it to her chest. As its magic brushed against her skin, she thought of Mama lying in their farmhouse, just as grey. Just as dead. A familiar heat rushed through her, the red wave of her rage scorching the fear from her bones.
Monsters, all of them. Twisted, hateful bastards. She moved her gaze from the door to the wardrobe that hid the black metal safe, to the cloaks in the wardrobes and the drawers that held every kind of weapon imaginable. She would not cower. She would not be afraid. If Dufort wanted a war, he could have it.
Chapter 9Seraphine
Days passed achingly slowly in House Armand, while the Order of Cloaks tried to come to terms with Griffin’s sudden death, and how it had happened without a word of explanation from Dufort and his assassins.
For a Dagger to kill a Cloak unprovoked broke an age-old truce that was already on shaky ground. But now it was clear the Daggers had gone rogue, which meant no one in Fantome was safe.
Then there were the rumours, though they were surely too strange to be true. And yet, as whispers of monster sightings circulated, the entire city ground to a halt, merchants closing their shops long before sunset, while children were locked inside their homes, their sticky hands pressed against foggy windows as they watched the world fall still.
Sera laughed off the rumours with Bibi and Val, but in quiet moments when she didn’t have to pretend, her thoughts turned to the monster she had glimpsed that night last year in her back garden – the rabid thing that had burst from Fig’s little body, pulling the darkness around it like a shroud. She could still hear its howl in her mind. ThisthingMama had made. There and gone, in a spark of light.
Could it somehow be related to what was happening now? Or was fear stoking her paranoia?
Sera wondered if the rumours had made their way to the plains, to the people she had left behind. She thought often of the burnt shell of her farmhouse… the burnt shell of her life. She wondered whether she should write to Lorenzo, to let him know she was safe… to ask why he hadn’t come to look for her at the one place he knew she’d be. But something always seemed to stop her.
More and more, she wanted to return to the plains to find out why Mama had been killed, to untangle what she had been doing while Sera slept in those dark hours between midnight and dawn, when she sat half-slumped and murmuring at her workbench, as though brewing something still deadlier than the black poison that kept them afloat.
But that visit would have to wait. Madame Mercure had placed a moratorium on all official Cloak activity while she investigated what exactly was going on in Fantome. And so, for the two weeks following Griffin’s murder, nobody dared to venture outside.
Sera made sure her time at House Armand was not wasted. The moratorium afforded her a chance to better acquaintherself with Theo, who, as the resident Shadowsmith, was a most useful – and not at all unpleasant – person to befriend. She had quickly come to learn that the artificer kept unusual hours at House Armand, staying up for days at a time whenever he was working on some new innovation, often falling asleep at his workbench or on the couch in the rec room, or once, in his bowl of porridge at breakfast.
That spark inside him – of ingenuity and curiosity – reminded Sera of her mother, and she found that she liked being around him, even when he was half asleep or daydreaming.
