Chapter 7 7

Wren

"I look like a lamp," I informed the hallway mirror, with total conviction.

"You look like a goddess," Zara corrected, adjusting the strap of my silver top for the fourth time. "Hold still, you are wriggling."

"I am not wriggling, I am panicking in a very small and dignified way."

"Panic less, sparkle more." She stepped back, squinted, and crouched to tug the hem of the black skirt a half inch lower. "There. Perfect. If anyone tells you otherwise, I will have them deported."

"You cannot deport people from their own country."

"I can try. I have an excellent lawyer."

I turned sideways and studied the girl in the glass. The skirt was shorter than anything I owned, the boots were Zara's and fit me far better than I wanted to admit, and my hair, for once, had fallen in loose dark waves over my shoulders instead of exploding.

"I do not look like me," I whispered.

"You look like you with the lights turned on," Zara replied, kissing my cheek and leaving a faint smear of lip gloss.

Footsteps crossed the hall behind us, and I felt the temperature in the house change. After nine years in the same orbit as Kai Ashworth-Vane, I had developed a kind of weather sense, and the moment he entered a room my skin knew it, the way a sailor knows a storm is coming. I did not turn around, and I kept my eyes on the mirror.

"You are not leaving the house dressed like that," Kai announced.

Zara spun on her heel and glared at him. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me." He stood in the kitchen doorway with a fresh bag of frozen peas against his nose and his two black eyes narrowed to slits. In a faded gray hoodie, he looked like a very grumpy, very expensive raccoon. "It is a hockey town on a Monday night. It is full of idiots."

"It is a concert," Zara murmured, "and we are two adults."

"It is cold."

"We have coats."

"And it is late."

"It is seven in the evening."

"It will be late when you come back."

"Kai, I swear, if you say one more word about our outfits, I will tell Mum you were seen in a nightclub with a cheerleader and eleven tequila shots."

"I was not in a nightclub."

"Then it was a hot tub. Same principle." She looped her arm through mine. "Wren, tell him he is being medieval."

"You are being medieval," I told him.

"I am being practical," he answered. His good eye found me and stayed there a beat too long. "That skirt is very short."

"It is a perfectly respectable skirt."

"It is the length of a respectable ruler."

"I look like a lamp," I reminded him, "but a very confident lamp."

His mouth twitched, barely, and he turned it into a wince and pressed the peas harder against his face. "Be home by midnight."

"You are not my brother," I told him.

I had never once spoken that way to him in public. In nine years of garden parties I had lowered my eyes, swallowed my words and carried the trays, and the sentence landed in the hallway between us like a dropped plate.

"No," Kai replied quietly, after a long moment. "Thankfully, I would never be so unlucky."

Zara coughed into her fist, which I suspected was a swallowed laugh, and dragged me toward the front door before either of us could say anything else.

"Midnight!" he called after us.

"We heard you!" Zara sang back. "Have a lovely evening with your nose!"

The door slammed, and we stood on the pavement in the evening cold, clinging to each other and shaking with laughter.

"You told him he is not your brother," she wheezed.

"Wren Sokolov. You have never in your life."

"I do not know what came over me."

"I do. It was the lamp."

The arena was a river of light and noise. We joined a queue that snaked around two corners, surrounded by girls in glitter and boys in leather jackets and one very serious man holding a placard that read IRIS FOR PRESIDENT.

Zara bought two overpriced lemonades, and we shuffled through security and down a long tunnel into a vast dark bowl full of screaming people.

"It is enormous," I breathed, tilting my head back to see the rafters.

"It is a religious experience," Zara replied, towing me down the steps. "Wait until she starts."

Our seats were close to the front, and a girl with butterfly clips in her hair was weeping quietly beside us, and her boyfriend was patting her shoulder and looking deeply embarrassed. High overhead a drum began to beat, and the entire building seemed to inhale.

"Zara," I whispered.

"Yes?"

"What if I cannot do this?"

"Do what?"

"Enjoy myself." I waved a helpless hand at the arena. "I do not know how. I will stand here worrying about the train home and my dissertation and whether I locked the flat."

"You are in New York. You have no flat."

"You see, this is exactly the sort of thing I do."

She took my face between her hands, and her dark eyes were very steady. "Listen to me. For three hours you are not the girl who carries trays, you are not the scholarship student, and you are not even Wren. You are a person with her arms in the air. That is the entire job description."

"That sounds easy."

"It is the hardest thing in the world," she noted, and the lights went out.

The first note hit like a wave, and the whole building shook. Iris Starr strode onto the stage in a gold jacket that blazed under the spotlights, her voice rolling out huge and warm and shimmering, and ten thousand people screamed so loudly that I felt it in my teeth.

I screamed too, and I did not decide to. It simply came up out of me, a raw wild sound, and Zara seized my hands and we jumped, and for three whole songs I forgot everything.

I forgot the garden parties, and I forgot the cheerleader in the dining room and the stinging look on Kai's face and the way he had whispered my name like it cost him something. I was just a pair of arms and a throat and a heartbeat, and it was the freest I had ever felt.

Halfway through the fourth song a group of boys pushed in behind us, loud and sweaty and clearly drunk. One of them bumped my shoulder and leaned far too close to my ear.

"Nice outfit," he shouted. "You here alone?"

"No," I shouted back.

"You should dance with us!"

"No, thank you!"

"Come on, do not be shy!"

Zara stepped between us before I could blink, with one raised eyebrow and a look of such cold imperial disdain that the boy actually retreated a step. "She refused," she informed him, in the clipped voice of a woman whose family had owned a county for six hundred years. "Go and be a nuisance somewhere else."

He muttered something unflattering and melted into the crowd.

"I love you," I yelled over the music.

"I know," she yelled back. "I am wonderful."

The song changed, and it was my favorite, the slow one with the bright aching chorus that I had played on repeat for six months. Iris stood at the edge of the stage and sang it straight to the crowd with one hand pressed over her heart, and I tilted my head up and let my eyes fill and let the whole thing wash over me.

"This is what it feels like," Zara shouted into my ear, grinning with her whole face, "to take up space!"

I opened my mouth to answer, but the chorus broke over us, and I only laughed.

Between songs, while Iris tuned her guitar and the crowd roared, Zara leaned close and spoke into my hair. "I wish you could always feel like this."

"I never feel like this."

"That is exactly the point."

A lump rose in my throat so fast that I had to swallow. "I would like to," I admitted, in a very small voice. "I would like to feel like this more often."

"Then you will," Zara declared, with the unshakable faith of a girl who had never doubted herself for one second in her entire life. "Starting now."

By the final encore we were hoarse, sweaty and delirious. We stumbled out into the crush of the exit, clutching each other and giggling at nothing, and lost track of time completely. It was only at the curb that I checked my phone and felt the first cold touch of dread.

"Zara," I whispered. "It is a quarter to one."

"It cannot be."

"It is a quarter to one in the morning."

"We agreed on midnight."

"Kai agreed on midnight."

"We agreed on nothing, we were abducted by the power of music." She waved her hand airily at the road. "Wait here, I will find a cab."

It took twenty minutes, and the cab smelled faintly of onions. My phone buzzed against my thigh as we pulled away, and I glanced down at a message from an unknown number.

Home by midnight.

I typed back with my thumbs, hard, and I am not a child.

The answer arrived almost instantly on the glowing screen. You are an hour late.

A slow realization crawled up my spine, and I had never given this person my number, and there was only one place he could have found it. I turned my head and glared at Zara, who became suddenly fascinated by the passing streetlights.

"Did you give him my number?" I demanded.

"It was an emergency."

"It was a concert."

"He asked nicely."

"He does not know how to ask nicely."

"He used the word please," Zara replied, wounded. "Twice."

The cab turned onto Kai's street, and my irritation melted into something stranger as the streetlamps slid over the brick houses. At the end of the road a car sat under a lamp with its engine running, and a pale shape sat behind the wheel.

"Is that a stalker?" Zara asked, craning her neck.

"I think so," I whispered, and my stomach twisted, though I did not yet know why.

The cab pulled up alongside it, and I saw the bruised cheek first, and the taped nose, and the swollen eyes narrowed in the glow of the dashboard. Then the window slid down, and cold air poured in, and I understood everything.

"What on earth are you doing?" I asked.

"Waiting."

"For what?"

"For you," Kai told me gravely, with a face so completely unbothered that I almost believed him.

"It is one o'clock in the morning."

"I know what time it is."

"You told us midnight."

"I did." His eyes found mine through two windows and a gap of cold air. "And you are an hour late."

"We were at a concert," Zara sang, climbing out with her heels in her hand. "We lost track of time. Do stop looking at us as if we have been to war."

"I was just in the neighborhood," Kai muttered, after a long silence. It was the worst excuse I had ever heard in my life, and he was wearing the same gray hoodie he had left the house in six hours earlier.