Page 169 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
It paused its scurrying long enough to lift its antennas in my direction. I lowered my ear to hear its rasping answer better.
“What message do you need to send?”
Oh, thank God for my Wild Whispering power. I pressed my finger to the ground long enough for the ant to crawl ontomy palm, which I lifted to eye-level so that it wouldn’t miss a single sound. Then, after I’d described the specific smells of who I wanted to contact, I let out the words I never thought would leave my lips.
“Now. I need helpnow.”
I could almostfeelthe hive mind start to work, the red ant in my palm immediately sending out electrical signals to its nearest colonist. A tingling kind of energy zipped off my skin, and then it was gone.
“Thank you,” I told the ant. “Thank you.”
I deposited it gently back into the crack of the cobblestone before hurrying back downhill with my heartbeat pumping furiously in my mouth. How long would it take for the message to reach the other end of the island? How long would it take for them to come?
The smoke was actually thinning out by the time I made it back to the village square.
In the shadows of two smoldering buildings, I watched Garvis finally slice off the boar’s last brand, watched the boar crumple into the man he’d been. On the opposite end, Nara was covering Barberro’s body with her own, hissing at any monster who so much as looked his way.
Steeler himself was a whirlwind of wrath and glinting sword, his body moving in such a beautifully hypnotizing way that I had to remind myself to exhale. He’d already taken down three of the monsters by himself, their collapsed forms cowering against their own bloodstains on the cobblestone… but alive. They were alive.
Hewas alive. Not a single speck of blood on his skin was his own.
Just as I felt my mouth hook up in its first smile since the lighthouse, something else seemed to hook around my torso.
And tug me backward.
A single breath whooshed out of me at the sudden pressure, snagging Garvis’s attention. I’d barely managed to make contact with the confusion in his eyes that mirrored my own when that invisible hook reeled me around a corner, up an even narrower alleyway, out of sight.
It wasn’t until it had dragged me up against a dead-end slab of blackened brick that the pressure around my torso loosened. I gasped for air as a figure stepped into my field of view.
Kitterfol Lexington kept his hands casually clasped behind his back, his irises dancing with glee, as he strolled toward me.
I didn’t even have time to grab a new knife and hurl it. As soon as my fingers twitched toward my sheath, every single blade—the crescent one included—zipped out of their pockets and rose into the air, spinning inward to face me instead.
“The benefits of a second power,” Lexington said. His eyes never unstuck themselves from mine as he lifted his arm and his sleeve fell away to reveal the imprint hidden on that part of his skin.
I didn’t dare squirm or move an inch. Not with my own knives hovering in a cage around me, keeping my back firmly against the wall.
Object Summoning. Lexington’s second power was Object Summoning, and now past events were reshaping themselves in my mind.
That time he and I had gone soaring up and over the cliffs, back to the Testing Center, after Steeler had left me last year—I’d assumed it was another Summoner in the group doing the heavy lifting, but no, that had been Lexington. Just as it had been Lexington who’d cranked everyone’s heads away from us in the Wild Whisperer dining hall, not with Mind Manipulating as I’d suspected, but with the same magic my fathers had always treated with such tenderness and care. I should have known assoon as those Element Wielder doors had blasted open at the ball last night… not with the kick of a violent foot, but withthis.
This extra hidden power he kept tucked away.
This extra hidden power that might just defeat both of mine.
Lexington didn’t need to lift a finger or break a sweat to keep my knives airborne. In fact, he almost looked…contemplative. As if he had all the time in the world to stand and observe me like a monkey in a sharp, glinting cage.
“I wonder—how did you manage to lie to me?” he asked, the stringy braids in his hair falling to the side with a slight tilt of his head. “I began to suspect that you were, but still… I couldn’tsenseit in the way I can with everyone else. In fact, I begged Dyonisia to attack Hallow’s Perch instead of Cardina today, just because I had a suspicion and wanted to see if you would prove me right. Which, you did.” He gestured at me. “Throwing yourself into danger for the traitor you definitelydolove.”
I forced my voice to maintain a gritty level of fear rather than the boiling hatred that seared the inside of it instead.
“I didn’t lie to you.”
“Oh, none of that, girl.” Lexington waved a hand. “You and I both know you did. Were the pills even real? Or did Steeler plant another fabricated memory in your abysmal wasteland of a brain?”
The insult landed like the blunt edge of a sword to my gut. Abysmal wasteland. That’s what I was right now, wasn’t I? Empty and alone. My eyes were scampering over Lexington’s shoulder, desperate for a certain body to materialize behind him at any moment.
But Steeler and I… we weren’tvigates. He couldn’t intuitively sense my distress like Nara had sensed Barberro’s. And right now, he was still fighting monsters in the village square, his focus trained on the immediate threats before him.
