The Masked City Read Online Free PDF Page B

chest. She sighed, and walked around the desk - nowhere near as graceful as he was, nothing like as elegant, just a mortal human - to take his hands. They were thin and hot in her grasp, his long fingers curling around hers. ‘Kai, don’t you understand that I am saying all this because I don’t want to lose you? You are my friend. You are the person who I trust to watch my back, to fight werewolves for me. To dangle me out of zeppelins. To stand by with a hammer when I’m staking vampires. I don’t know what might make your family take you away. I don’t want to give them an
excuse
.’
    ‘Do you mean that?’ He rose to his feet and looked down into her face, his hands tight on hers. ‘Do you promise that you mean that?’
    It would be so easy just to say
yes
and let go of common sense, to slide her hands up to his shoulders and hold him against her. She had been spending months now trying to avoid this sort of thought, this sort of situation. ‘I give you my word that I don’t want to lose you,’ she said. ‘You’re my apprentice. You’re my ally. You’re my
friend
. Can’t you believe me?’
    Yes. And stop asking for more, before I do something I might regret.
    ‘I want to.’ His voice was rough. ‘It’s just that - Irene, I’m afraid.’
    ‘The mugging? If you don’t feel safe—’
    ‘Not that!’ He very nearly sneered at the idea, and it cooled a little of the heat between them, like a sudden touch of fresh air. ‘Not of danger. Not for myself. It’s … everything.’ His eloquence and his grace of speech had deserted him. ‘You. Vale. The Library. Everything. I’ve never disobeyed my honoured father before, never challenged the authority of my elders. What am I to do if they tell me to leave you?’
    Irene would have liked to give him some sort of reassurance, but she didn’t have any easy answers. She didn’t even have any complicated ones. She could only return the clasp of his hands. ‘We’ll find a solution,’ she said firmly. ‘There has to be a way. Even if I have to steal examples of poetry from a hundred worlds, to convince them that you’re on a valid postgraduate study course. There
will
be a way.’
    She wasn’t going to lose him.
    There was a cracking noise from the next room, like pebbles on glass. At the same moment Irene felt a strike against the wards that she’d placed on their lodgings, a thunderclap in her metaphysical hearing. It wasn’t significant enough to bring the wards down, but it was a firm, carefully placed blow, not an ignorant blaze of power. And it was definitely tainted with chaos. Someone was knocking, and they wanted in.
    The noise had come from Kai’s bedroom. A dozen unpleasant possibilities ran through Irene’s mind, most of them connected with last night’s attack.
    ‘What?’ Kai released her, ran to the door and slammed it open. ‘Who dares?’
    His room was surprisingly tidy - a bulging wardrobe, a bare floor, a small table and an equally small shrine with a twist of incense. The large bow window on the other side of the room was intact, but a dramatic figure stood on the other side of it, his cane raised to beat against the glass. His cloak and jacket fluttered in a wind that certainly hadn’t been blowing earlier, and his silver hair cascaded down over his shoulders. A lambent glitter sparkled in his eyes.
    ‘Kai,’ Irene said, with great patience, ‘why is Lord Silver standing on your windowsill?’

CHAPTER THREE

    ‘Let me in!’ Silver smashed his cane against the glass. It rebounded with the same cracking noise they had heard earlier, leaving the glass untouched. Fortunately, Irene and Kai’s wish to collect a critical mass of books meant this apartment could support a Library-style ward. And such things were anathema to the Fae. Though it was taking her a regular effort to maintain it, at moments like this it was totally worth it.
    ‘Certainly not!’ Irene pushed in front of Kai. ‘Lord Silver, how dare you behave