On the Edge

a shield. It would’ve knocked away one bolt or ten.”

“Oh. Well, thank you for the tip! Now I know how you did it.”

They looked at each other.

“Just how precise are you?” he asked.

She gave him a sly Edger smile. “Do you have a doubloon on you?”

He reached into his pocket and produced a coin.

“I’ll make you a deal. You throw it in the air, and if I hit it with my flash, it’s mine.”

Declan looked at the doubloon. It was slightly larger than a quarter from the Broken. He tossed it high above his head. The doubloon spun in the air, catching the sunlight, shining like a bright spark . . . and fell into the grass stung by a thin white whip of her flash.

Declan swore.

She grinned, plucked the still-hot coin from the grass, blew on it, and showed it to him, taunting him a little. “Groceries for two weeks. A pleasure doing business with you.”

“I’ve only met one person who could do that,” he said. “She was a flash-sniper in our unit. How can you do this with no proper training?”

“Did you study flashing?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the best weapon available, and I wanted to be good at it. And everybody in my family was good with it. I was a noble, and I had to uphold the honor of our name.”

“I had a much better motivation than you,” she said. “When I was thirteen, my mother’s parents died in a house fire. Grandpa Danilo always smoked like a chimney. The whole house was covered with cigarette butts, and one night he’d smoked one too many. Nobody got out alive, not even my grandparents’ cat. Their death broke my mother. She just kind of died right then, but her body kept on living. She started sleeping around and didn’t stop. She’d have anybody who’d have her. Married, blind, crippled, crazy, she didn’t care. She said it made her feel alive.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It must’ve been very painful for you.”

“It wasn’t fun. People called my mother a slut to my face. Leanne, who lent you the clothes? She used to chase me around the school, chanting ‘whore’s bitch.’ She’d written it on my locker once in big letters. You were the son of a nobleman, handsome, wealthy, probably well liked. Poor little rich boy. I was the daughter of a whore, penniless, ugly, and despised. I had a lot of motivation to flash well. I wanted to ram my flash down the world’s throat to show everyone that I was worth something.”

“How did it work out for you?”

“Not so well,” she admitted. “But now playing with my flash is a habit. I taught myself a lot of fun tricks.”

“Aha.” Declan pointed to the tree. “Double slicer.”

The magic slashed from him in two even streams, running low through the grass, and collided in a brilliant explosion at the tree. He had used a mere fraction of his power, just to show her the move. Declan had better control than she had thought.

“Don’t be upset if you can’t do it right away,” he said. “It takes a bit of pra—”

He clamped his mouth shut with a click as she sent two identical streams of magic into the tree.

“Oh my . . .” she murmured innocently.

“Ball lightning.” A sphere of magic ignited over his shoulder and smashed into the tree in a shower of sparks.

She hadn’t seen that one before, but she had practiced making spirals for years—mostly because she thought they looked neat—and a sphere was just a folded spiral. The trick would be to snap it with a spin, the way he had done. She concentrated and watched in satisfaction as a white ball formed over her shoulder. It was a bit lopsided and it didn’t spin as well as his, but she was able to send it flying into the bark.

Declan shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

“It’s killing you that you can’t stump me, isn’t it?” Rose grinned. She never got to show off. To have him here as her audience was satisfying beyond words. She’d managed to impress a blueblood from the Weird. An earl and ex-soldier. It didn’t get better than that.

Declan planted his feet into the grass and concentrated. His eyes shone. A ghostly breeze stirred his hair. A crisp line of white burst from his back to rise two feet above his head. The top of the magic line curved down, stretching all the way to the grass in a white half arch, and began to circle him, drawing a perfect ring in the dirt.

Wow.

“Ataman’s defense,” he said, letting it die.

Rose tried it. She had no problems creating the straight upward line, but as she tried to bend it down, it struck at the grass under a sharp angle, not curved gently the way Declan’s had.

Declan smiled.

“Let me see it again, please.”

He reconstructed the arch. “It took me a year of constant practice to learn how to do this.”

Rose watched the arch go around him. Turn. Turn. Turn. Like a whip. Turn. “Give me a few minutes.”

“You have time.” He sat in the grass.

“Are you just going to sit there and watch me?”

“Yes. Watching pretty peasant girls is what we poor little rich boys do best.”

“Peasant?”

He shrugged. “You started the name-calling.”

She snorted and went to work. It was harder than it looked, and for the first few minutes the sight of him on the grass distracted her. He looked like a painting with his strong body, long lean legs, and absurdly handsome face. There was humor in his green eyes, and when their gazes met by chance, he winked at her. She nearly singed herself with her own flash. But soon, she sank into the task, and Declan and the rest of the world faded.

Sometime later Declan stirred on the grass. “Do you want me to tell you how it’s done?”

“No!”

He grinned.

She struggled with it for another half hour, until it dawned on her to put a spin into the line. At first it merely sagged, but the harder she pushed, the lower it curved, until finally her line of white arched down gracefully and spun about her, like an obedient pet.

She turned, thrilled, and saw him striding across the lawn to her. He paused and ducked under the spinning line of her flash. He was so close, they practically touched. She let the flash die.

“That’s incredible,” he said quietly.

“It’s not that incredible,” she said.

“It took me a year to learn it.”

“I practiced a lot more than you.”

“I can see that.”

She glanced at his face, and all thoughts scattered from her head. She saw admiration and respect in his eyes, an acknowledgment one would give an equal. They looked at each other. Slowly his eyes darkened to deeper green. The way he looked at her made her want to take the half step to close the small distance between them, open her mouth, and let him kiss her. She could almost feel his lips on hers. Like playing with fire. Rose moistened her bottom lip, biting it a little to get rid of the phantom kiss, and saw Declan’s gaze snag on her mouth.

Oh no. No, no, no. Bad idea.

He took a step forward, his hand reaching for her. Rose sidestepped.

“Thank you. It means a lot to me, coming from someone like you. I think we better dig a grave for that thing. The stench is killing me.”

She headed to the back of the house for a shovel.

“Rose,” he called. His voice was deep and touched with a hint of command. She pretended not to hear him and hid behind the shed.

She’d done precisely the same thing for which she had berated Georgie during lunch. Declan had won the first