Nameless

Like she was something new. Something strange. And he hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye. Just vanished like a Dead Harvest dream, and Marya had scolded Cami both for her own costume and for the shredded ruin of Nico’s.

He’d gone out with the youngbloods after all.

Think about something else.

Something had happened to her at the Stregare party, but it had vanished just like the nightmares, and all she could remember was the Borrowing Room and the dust choking her as Mocia and her clan-cousin writhed on the couch. A bolt of queasy heat went through Cami’s belly whenever she thought of it. Had Nico ever, with a Family girl . . .

Ruby shrieked, a wild joyful cry, and Ellie cursed with colorful inventiveness as the Red Twists harmonized about being born with flippers or fins. The car lifted as if it intended to fly.

Cami let herself think about Tor the garden boy instead.

He sometimes fetched things for Marya, carried things into the cellar, and the feywoman had started to ask for him. Not by his name, of course, she called him the Pike because he was long and dark.

Hearth-fey didn’t like big changes inside their domains. Marya was . . . upset.

And me? What am I?

Nothing but the pin holding the house up. A tired, shivering pin. If she was a Family girl, would it be easier?

That was another incredibly uncomfortable thought, one she did her best to shove away. The Semprena slowed, banking like a plane and gliding to a stop. Ruby twisted the volume dial down to merely “overwhelming” instead of “minotaur roar.”

“You can open your eyes now, Cami.” Ruby sighed. “That wasn’t even very fast.”

“Death by cardiac arrest, induced by vehicular shenanigans.” Ellie waited for a few seconds, unclicking her seatbelt. “There’s the Strep.”

Cami’s eyelids fluttered open. The world poured in, full of the peculiar flat blue-white of snowlight. The Sinder house on Perrault Street was a fantasy of four stone spires and a sort of grim medieval feel, not helped by the tall curlicue wrought-iron gates. Ruby’s Gran had a teeny, welcoming, very expensive cottage in Woodsdowne, but this was Perrault and the houses had serious, carnivorous faces. A tall line of firs frowned over the charm- smoothed stone wall enclosing the estate, and the glowing Sigil on the gates was a pair of high-heeled shoes.

The Strep was a famous charmer, after all.

Ellie’s dad was a lawyer specializing in inter-province negotiations, and gone an awful lot. At some point the Strep was probably going to get herself knocked up, probably by one of the boyfriends she brought in when Daddums was working late, and the hormonal shifts were going to make her even more of a pain in the ass for Ellie.

In one of the towers, a shadow moved across the golden glow of electric light. The Strep had a carefully fertilized mane of frosted-blonde hair, and it always sent a shiver down Cami’s back.

“Thanks for the ride,” Ellie said finally. “Babchat later?”

“But of course. Let Cami out, it’s her turn to pound on my dashboard.”

Great. But she wriggled out while Ellie held the door, then hugged her. “C-c- courage,” she whispered. “T-t-t-tis only the St-t-t-trep Monster.”

The tired old joke wrung a tired old laugh out of Ellie. Her dad had been gone for two days, to New Avalon up north at the edge of the province, for high-powered negotiations. Something about inter-province trade agreements, fighting over who would pay to send rail-repair crews out into the Waste.

The smudges under Ellie’s storm-gray eyes were getting awful dark. “Someday I’m gonna walk home and get kidnapped just to avoid her.” She tried to sound light, but there was a terrible flat ring to the words.

“D-d-d—” Stupid words. “Don’t,” she finally got out, her breath pluming in the cold air. The iron gate was opening, sensing Ellie’s nearness.

“Shut the damn door, it’s freezing!” Ruby yelled, but Cami waited, leaning on the car door until she saw Ellie trudge, slowly and safely, up the paved drive and heard the dull thud of the front door slam behind her. “Come on, Cami! She’s not gonna get snatched in her own driveway.”

You just never know. Some of the vanished weren’t charmers, just young mere- humans, but the entire city was on pins and needles now. Cami privately wondered how many people would be concerned if whoever was doing the snatching hadn’t started taking young charmers. None from Juno yet, but there were a couple girls gone from Hollow Hills. One had even disappeared between the Hills’ bus and her family’s front door, the snow scuffed as if a struggle had taken place and the branches of several nearby bushes broken.

The tabloids, for once, weren’t screaming about celebrity follies or Twists. Cami avoided reading them, but there was only so much you could ignore.

She dropped down into the front seat, pulled the door to, and took Ruby’s scolding all the way home with several nods, one or two uh-huhs, and five full minutes of cursing when Ruby opened up the Semprena on the straight shot of Grimmskel Boulevard. Remarkably, she didn’t stutter once while she was terrified.

Ruby told her it was a goddamn miracle, blew her a kiss, and the Semprena vanished toward the downward slope of the Hill before the large iron gate had finished scraping itself open.

Camille shivered, the wind nipping at her bare knees. The gate groaned, creaked, ice falling from its scrollwork and the charm-potential under the surface of the metal running blue with cold. The defenses here were old and thick, laid in with the stones when the Seven had first come to New Haven and added in layers with each successive generation. Papa had remarked once that the Family had been in New Haven before it was New, and once a long time ago, when talking to the wide, perpetually smiling Head of the Cinghiale, he had paused and looked into the distance.

I remember when we were hunted, before the Reeve made us citizens. We should all remember thus.

And Marcus Cinghiale had nodded, his own iron-gray hair slicked back and his bullet-eating grin turning cold. You are always cautious, old friend. We trust in that.

Neither of them had noticed Cami playing in the corner of Papa’s study, stacking wooden blocks.

She returned to the present when another gust of wind nipped at her knees, and the sound of cold air rushing over winter’s surfaces modulated into an eerie wail.

Almost like a wolf-cry. Or voices in a chorus, rising through a word that would explain . . . what?

For a bare millisecond she toyed with the idea of turning away and walking down into town. Going into the core’s diseased brightness, step by step, and seeing with her own eyes what the chaos-driven Potential in there would do to her. Would it make her a minotaur? Would she go running through the streets, bellowing, thick blankets of mutating Potential clinging to her body and her head swelling with bone and horn?

She was in-between, just like a jack. Not Family, not charmer-clan, not Woodsdowne clan, who knew if she was fully mere-human? Who would notice if she simply vanished? Would they say her name on the newscasts? Or would she be gone without a ripple?

Blank static filled her head, tugging at her fingers and toes. It formed words, spoken low and soft, so caressingly soft.

 . . . nobody. You are nothing.

“You gonna stand out here all day?” he said, quietly, and she jumped, letting out a thin shriek. Her schoolbag almost fell, she clutched at it and found Tor the garden boy watching her, leaning against the gate.

FOURTEEN

THE IRON MOVED RESTLESSLY, SENSING HER AND ALSO testing him. He was allowed to be there, true . . . but the gate didn’t like it, not the way it liked Family.

Not the way it liked her, either.