Christian himself, but Alysia was curious as to what the other guilds were saying. Two years earlier, the guild leaders had feared that Christian and Alysia would take over, enough to put a lot of money into trying to stop them.
“He has Challenged twice here. He won Frost but has not won Crimson. I doubt he will bother to try again, now that Sahara has returned.”
“What does that have to do with Christian?”
Yasmin, whose gaze seemed perpetually downcast, looked up. “Gossip is not my area of expertise. I nd it useful to discuss who is in charge, not who is sleeping with whom.” She must have seen something on Alysia’s face, because she added, “You were gone two years, Alysia. None of us know if you will run away again. How much trust do you expect?”
“Sahara was gone much longer,” Alysia pointed out.
“If one has the patience to deal with a spoiled child, a positive relationship with Sahara kuloka Kral is considered a good investment.”
Was that how Christian saw it?
Was that why he had installed the cubs—and possibly Sahara herself—in his house while
Alysia was busy being abducted and tortured?
“I need to know about the contract for my capture,” she said.
“I have that information,” Yasmin said. “Kral has not o cially canceled the contract yet, but our guild leader has marked it as expired, now that Princess Kitty has returned. I do not know if it is still active in Frost or Onyx.”
Most members of Crimson wouldn’t have access to information from Frost or Onyx. To use Ben’s term, few people in Bruja “multiclassed,” learning the skills necessary to succeed in more than one of the guilds. Christian would know, but Christian wasn’t answering any of the phone numbers she had for him.
It didn’t take Alysia long to nd someone who knew the next phone number she could try, one she had never called before but that she suspected might get her in touch with
Christian.
Of course, if he did answer the phone, she might need to kill him.
Literally or figuratively, she wasn’t sure.
CHAPTER 20
THE SHRILL, PERCUSSIVE ring yanked Sarik from her sleep. Disoriented, at rst she just stared at the phone on the nightstand.
Christian put a hand on her shoulder and shoved her down on her face so he could reach over her, answer the phone, and bark, “Hello?” He was met with silence, and after a second hello, he hung up.
“Congratulations,” he said, rolling away from Sarik and o the bed. “You’ve been back six hours and you’re already getting crank calls.”
“Wonderful,” she grumbled. She tried again to sit up, and her head spun. She pressed her palms against her closed eyes, trying to ght the inexplicable pressure that seemed to have pooled in the sockets beneath. The sensation was vaguely reminiscent of the time her father had broken her nose and cheekbone.
“You’re ne,” Christian said. “If you want, I’ll buy you breakfast. Or dinner. Whatever meal this is.”
“What?” She slapped his hand away when he o ered it, because she realized exactly why she felt like utter crap. “You
“You’re not hurt, just tired. If you had ever had a head cold in your life, you would have felt worse. Just be glad shapeshifters can’t get the flu.”
Her stomach twisted at the mere mention of food, but she felt miserable enough to ask, “Will food help?”
“Yes.”
“Great. You’re driving, and buying.”
As she stood up, she caught sight of herself in the large vanity mirror. The buttercup-
yellow cashmere cardigan that Jason had given her for her birthday had been utterly destroyed by her father’s claws. The charcoal-gray wool dress pants were in a similarly stained and rumpled state. She had lost her bone hair-sticks before she had even reached the hospital, and her hair was falling around her face.
“I would like to be able to say I would recognize you anywhere,” Christian said as she stared at herself, feeling lost, “but if I had seen you unexpectedly at SingleEarth, I might have walked right by you with nothing more than a vague sense of familiarity.”
“That was the point.” She started to twist her hair back but then stopped as she realized there wasn’t any kind of elastic nearby. Sahara had worn her hair down, wild around her face.
“You changed your coloring. The way you walk. Your accent. You even changed your
“And like any good Onyx boy, you use all your senses,” she replied.
She went to the closet and was met by the scent of leather polish. Like most Mistari, she wore primarily materials produced by animals. As Sarik, that meant materials like silk, cashmere, and wool. As Sahara, it had mostly meant patent leather, which addressed the angry-sixteen-year-old-mercenary-brat image and doubled somewhat more practically as armor.
Most Mistari, especially in a group like SingleEarth, had trouble shapeshifting if they wore so much as a polyester scarf or a metal button on their pants. Few could change shape at all with any metal on them, which was why royal-blood Mistari tended to prominently display jewelry as marks of their rank, like the armbands Jeht wore; it meant they were strong enough to tolerate it.
There were steel grommets on Sahara’s vest, and the belt she wore low on her hips above her leather jeans was made of twisted white, yellow, and rose gold. In her ears, she wore sixteen white-gold hoops, eight on each side. Christian helped her as she struggled to slip each of them into place with trembling hands. The holes had become smaller since she had left, but they had been made by a firestone needle. They would never completely heal.
She couldn’t immediately change the fact that she had highlighted her hair until it was an unextraordinary medium brown, but otherwise the costume was complete once she had slipped on boots with metal stiletto heels she had previously used to kill someone.
“That’s a little more familiar,” Christian said.
“And you’re ever the gentleman for staring while I changed,” she replied sarcastically.
“What would Alysia think?”
“Contrary to rumors,” Christian answered, “Alysia and I are certainly more than ‘just friends,’ but we were never romantically or physically involved. What would your vampire think?”
She flinched. “What do you know about Jason?”
“Is he the vampire you ran off with while Alysia and I were fighting Maya’s entire nest?”
“You were there?”
“I went after you but got there just in time to see you head out the back while I was ghting. The vamp with you was bleeding, limping so badly that it was obvious you were the only thing holding him up. He couldn’t have made you go anywhere against your will.
Then I found Cori, and I knew why you had gone. I gured if you needed time away, that should be your choice, so I didn’t tell Kral I had seen you there. I just told him that I had run into someone from Frost who had already taken down a lot of the nest.”
The “someone from Frost” would have been Alysia, of course, but that wasn’t the mystery.
“You never told Kral?” she asked.
“It was none of his business.”
