I plunge.
He swings his fist a moment before I strike. I can’t move fast enough. The tension inside me falls slack. He hits my arm and knocks my knife from my hand. It flings into the thinning mist and clatters onto the stones of the riverbed.
Shocked, I barely catch my fall on the ledge. My muscles cramp in protest. My surroundings dim. The energy shifts around me. My sixth sense is gone.
The shark tooth. Bastien’s accomplice has it.
“Sabine!” I cry again. My eyes burn. She’s the limp figure on the ground. She has to be.
I abandon all thoughts of my rite of passage. I won’t kill Bastien here and now. I’ll hunt him down later, even if it takes me a year. Then I’ll have his blood. “I’m coming, Sabine!” Be alive, be alive.
I move to jump from the parapet and onto the bridge, but Bastien grabs my arm. I gasp at his painful grip. I can’t break free. He isn’t such a weakling, after all.
“Let go of me,” I shout. I still have my ibex grace, which gives me strength in my legs. I kick him hard in the shin. He grimaces in pain, but doesn’t release me. “I need to help my friend. She’s innocent.”
“So you admit you’re not?” Bastien yanks me closer when I try to kick him again. He sets his knife at my throat. I swallow against its sharp edge. He can end my life at any moment.
This is all wrong. An amouré isn’t supposed to kill a Leurress. It’s never happened, not in all our long history.
I can’t believe it will happen to me.
Bastien’s breath is hot in my face. “None of you are innocent.”
9
Bastien
AILESSE DOESN’T CLOSE HER EYES as she anticipates death. She stares at me directly. Her body shakes as I hold her at knifepoint on the parapet, but she doesn’t blink. She’s afraid of this moment, but not what’s beyond it. Death. The afterlife. Everything I can’t imagine when I think of my father.
Don’t hesitate, Bastien.
“This is for Lucien Colbert.” My forearms flex. My heartbeat pounds through every space of my head. Ailesse’s umber eyes glisten.
“Bastien, stop her!” Jules’s shout echoes from the clearing mist of the riverbed. “It’s done!” Ailesse sucks in a sharp breath and staggers in my arms.
What does Jules mean? “I am!”
“Not her, the other one!”
Behind me, I hear the crunch of toppling rocks. I glance over my shoulder. A dark-haired girl in a green dress—the witness—climbs up the riverbank near the foot of the bridge. Blood streaks down her injured head.
“Sabine!” Ailesse’s voice clangs in my ears. She’s struggling to free herself—and almost succeeds while I’m distracted.
Sabine sees my knife at Ailesse’s neck. Her face twists with horror. “Let her go!” She bolts toward me.
I tense. She could have the strength of a bear, for all I know.
She races onto the bridge, but then her head sways to the side. She grips a post for support. Another rush of blood streams from her hairline.
“Sabine, stop!” Ailesse cries. “You can’t fight like this.”
“Neither can you.” Sabine’s stubborn voice wobbles.
“You’re not supposed to intervene.”
“I don’t care.”
“Please go!”
“I’m not leaving without you!”
“You can’t save me! Go warn my mother. Tell her the flute fell in the riverbed and . . .”
I stop listening. My attention snags on the moonlight reflecting off my blade. Ailesse’s neck tendons strain beneath its sharp edge. What am I waiting for—her to scream or act more afraid? This moment is supposed to be my ultimate victory. It will be. I can slit one Bone Crier’s throat, and then deal with the other.
I grind my teeth in determination, but my stomach churns.
Do it, Bastien!
“Bastien, the witness! She’s getting away!” Jules’s voice rings closer. She’s climbing up the riverbank, pursuing Sabine.
I jerk around in Sabine’s direction. She’s already off the bridge. She and Jules will cross paths at any moment. “You can grab her before I can!”
“Hurry!” Ailesse calls to her friend.
Thump, drag, thump. Jules clears the top of the riverbank. She’s limping.
Sabine tries to get past her, but Jules whips out her knife. Sabine shrieks as it slices across the side of her waist.
“No!” Ailesse wrestles against me. “Run, Sabine!”
Sabine barely dodges another swipe from Jules. Both girls are slow from their wounds.
Jules misses again. Sabine takes her opening and kicks Jules’s hurt leg. Jules cries out and clutches her knee.
Ailesse’s muscles tense. “Now’s your chance! Go, Sabine!”
Sabine shoots Ailesse a fierce look. “I’ll come back for you!” She whirls away, hurrying as fast as she can down the road to the forest. One of her hands presses to her bleeding head. The other holds the gash at her waist.
Jules struggles to stand upright again. “Bastien, we have to do something! She’ll go back and get the rest of her people. She told me they can track us with their magic.”
I shift, suddenly dizzy. “Marcel would have said if that were possible.”
“Marcel doesn’t know everything!” She stumbles after Sabine.
Marcel. He’s off the road and in the trees somewhere, on the lookout for Ailesse’s soulmate. But now I need him here. He can prove Jules wrong. I shout his name, but he doesn’t call back.
Ailesse’s upper lip curls. “None of you fathom how deeply this night will cost you.”
I draw my knife back a fraction from her throat, then check myself. What does she know? I’ve thought through my revenge countless times—through every possible scenario. If one of the Bone Criers happened to escape, we planned to kill the other and— “Leave her bones! The ones belonging to her.” I rattle Ailesse, and she almost falls off the parapet. Jules must have stolen her last bone, and Ailesse’s balance with it. “That’s how their magic works. If we don’t have them anymore, her people can’t find us.”
Sabine, who is ten feet from the border of the forest, freezes. Her pained eyes flash to Ailesse. Jules turns and considers me. I nod to show I’m serious. I’ll kill Ailesse, then hunt down her friend. But if Sabine manages to outrun me, we don’t have to worry.
Ailesse’s glare holds steady. “They’ll still find you.”
I snort. “Your people won’t stand a chance. I’ve lived on the streets of Dovré since I was a child. The best hideouts in the city and the places beneath it—they’re my territory.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she spits. “My famille doesn’t need my grace bones to track you. You and I are soul-bound. That’s enough.” She draws herself taller. Blood trickles down her neck from my blade. “You’re right that our magic lies in bones. I used them to summon you here. You came when you heard my song, and the gods let you because they chose you for me. Now your soul is mine in life and in death.” The mist rises behind her, clinging to her body. “If you kill me, you’ll die with me.”