A few feet above, another tinted window had a pale face behind it, staring at me through the rounded glass. The woman’s mouth hung slightly open as she gawked, her eyes holding a fear-tinged excitement, like she couldn’t believe what she was looking at, and was a little scared, but in a fun way.
I kept my own expression still with an effort as I turned around and rushed my steps to catch up with my aunt.
There had to be a logical explanation for this.
There just had to be.
4
Lighter
We were almost all the way across that enormous, stone room, when a shock of white hair, and riveting metallic irises caught a corner of my eye. I turned my head swiftly, as if pulled by a magnetic force. I tried to find that glimpse again, stopping on every blond head and light-colored set of eyes, but whatever I’d seen, it had winked out of view.
Even just that brief, likely-imagined glimpse was enough to to send my heart racing in my chest, my thoughts spiraling.
The boy.
Very few things stood out about my parents’ deaths as much as the boy I’d seen at the Underground station that day. That platinum-haired, metallic-eyed boy showed up in my dreams every other night since, still dressed like a fae princeling, his bow-shaped mouth agape as he stared at me, too. Everything about him, how he looked, his facial expressions, had been burned into me somehow, more than any other detail of that day.
I remembered him so clearly.
He’d stood there, by the Underground station’s wall, maybe a few years older than me. I’d been looking at him before my mother’s scream, fascinated by his white-blond hair, his gold eyes, his strange clothes, the green, velvet-looking pants, soft-skin boots, dark cape, a diamond and gold pin at his throat. His eyes had shone from the alcove by the wall, a fierce, metallic gold. They’d glinted even through the dust and green smoke swirling through the air, blocking the sunlight in the mouth of the London Underground station.
His face had contorted in what looked like pain as he’d stared from me to my parents, to the robed figures scattered throughout the crowd. He’d looked shocked, confused, terrified?
I jerked my mind back to the present.
I looked around as I sped my steps after my aunt.
That boy made sense here. His clothing hadn’t been so dissimilar to what I saw around me now. His gold eyes?they almost made sense, too, as I looked around at the faces and eyes staring back at me here.
I scanned obsessively through them, looking for something that told me it was him, that I’d glimpsed someone wholookedlike him, at least. Of course, he wouldn’t be a boy now. He’d be an adult, maybe a little older than me. But that was crazy, wasn’t it? Assuming he’d ever been real, what were the odds he’d be in this same building?
No, that was definitely crazy.
I kept my mouth firmly shut as I paced my aunt’s steps.
I didn’t stop looking at every glimpse of blond hair until we turned down a new, smaller corridor, this one lit with round, glowing, ceiling orbs and teeming with people.
We passed wooden doors on either side with round handles in the center. Those fist-sized, fiery creatures zipped past usgoing both directions, darting like birds on leathery wings. Most of the regular-sized people clutched briefcases or bags, armfuls of books and parchments, cups of coffee and backpack-like satchels. All appeared to be in a great hurry, just like they had in the cavernous, atrium-style space we’d just left.
Our group finally stopped in front of one of the painted doors. An aid trailing the two leaders stepped forward and swiftly opened it.
Horace, with the mutton-chop sideburns, turned to Ankha.
“You’re aware, surely, that you cannot go inside.”
I glanced at my aunt, whose expression showed she very muchhadn’tknown that.
“She’s had no preparation,” Ankha clipped, a sour look on her face. “None. She has absolutely no idea what she is, what her mother was, what she’s doing here?”
The man’s sideburns didn’t disguise his satisfied smirk.
“Of course,” he said smugly. “Anything less would mean you’d broken the law, which I never, for one instant, thought you’d do, Ankha.”
“She won’t know what is expected of her,” my aunt snapped. “She’ll have no idea how?”
“She’ll figure it out.” Horace gave me a wink, and about the least sincere smile I’d ever gotten from an older man, and that was saying something. “She looks like a bright, attentive lass. I’m sure she can follow direction.”
