Their dance was a drunken whirl, and the music from outside was a blare that covered Cami’s footsteps as she darted aside, taking shelter behind a long row of canister-trees and higher-backed couches. They would be dazzled from the sudden darkness too, and it looked like they were in a world all their own.
Her cheeks scalded. The inebriated pair fell on a low shrouded couch, and dust rose thick around them. Cami’s breath jolted in her throat. Neither noticed her ghosting past; they were knotted together and murmuring with thick smacking sounds, and Mocia—she was Wild, there was no doubt about it—moaned as her cousin’s fangs scraped her throat. Was he going to Borrow from her?
Her mother is not going to be happy with that. It was a sane thought, a comforting thought, and Cami clung to it as she hurried along, her skirts pulled up and the Vultusina’s ring waking again with a ripple.
The door was closing, its slice of golden light and noise narrowing, but Cami ducked through just in time. The noise burst through her head, the clanging chimes of the capriccine—had she missed the other dances?
“There you are.” Nico appeared out of the crowd. “Mithrus, Cami, what happened to you?”
She couldn’t quite remember, her head full of buzzing noise and her bones cold. Ice under her skin and muscles, chilling her from the core out, and it was difficult to think. “H-home.” She could barely force the word out. “I. W-want. T-t-t-to g-g-g-g-go—”
“You’re covered in it.” He was a rock in the middle of the crowd, and she clung to his arm. He’d had more, it was obvious from the burning red pinpricks in his pupils and the way he too-carefully tipped his head back, avoiding the smell from her dress. “Did someone throw something? What the hell?”
“H-home,” she kept repeating, but he wanted to stay with the Cinghiale boys and drink a bit more. In the end he handed her into the limousine and Chauncey drove her silently through Dead Harvest night, and when she woke Nonus Souls morning, Nico had already left for Hannibal.
Pierrot did not follow the Moon, after all.
THIRTEEN
THE MONTH OF NONUS WAS SERE AND COLD, DRY AND achingly bright. Icy flakes began falling a week after the Festival’s orgy of candy and parties; Cami almost shuddered every time she had to walk outside. Ruby drove her home with mind-numbing incaution every day. Stevens, dry and sticklike, was looking particularly gray. Marya wore layers of fine thin spidery black, her long fine hair scraped back and her usually apple-blooming cheeks pale. Trigger and his security teams were unseen, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there—a prowler was chased away the first night it snowed, a Twisted beast found just at the edge of the property another night.
It was a sign that it was going to be a hard winter, Trig remarked, if things were so desperate to try even a Family estate’s boundary.
The snow kept falling, and the plows and harnessed titons came out. Slump-shouldered, massive gray Twisted things, the titons were chained every winter, dragging plows along, their tiny yellow eyes alive with charmlight and their horny knuckles scraping the icy concrete. They ate bones and offal, as well as gravel and lumber with their broad flat black teeth, and were mostly docile if kept fed. They were trapped out in the Wastes between cities and provinces by teams of jack bounty hunters, and kept in pens on the edge of every city’s blighted core. Rumor had it they were sometimes pitted against minotaurs in the cages, and the betting was fierce.
Nico would probably know. But he would never tell her.
“Mithrus be careful!” Ellie shrieked, grabbing at the dash. The radio reeled off names—it was the three-thirty newscast, and two more charmer girls had vanished last night, one right from her own bedroom. No suspects, the announcer said, as Ellie let out a short jolting scream.
Cami just held on grimly as tires spun, the car sliding. Ruby yelled a cheerful obscenity, goosed the accelerator, and steered into it. Tire chains and silvery octopus-leg catchcharms gripping again, ice crackling on the window as Cami, wedged uncomfortably in the glossy black Semprena’s tiny concession to a backseat, found her lips moving silently.
Praying, she had decided, would not hurt.
“It’s just snow!” Ruby crowed, and shot them through a yellow light with half a second to spare. The newscast crackled through the speakers.
—brings the total toll of disappearances to seventeen. The mayor’s office had no comment, but Captain Ventrue of the New Haven Police Department—
Titons reared, their horns stabbing empty air, a plow behind them creaking as the zooming little car startled the giants, and Ellie and Cami screamed at the same time, in oddly perfect harmony. Their cries swallowed the end of the ’cast and the Red Twists came on, the bassline of “Born Charmed Enough” thumping the windows and rattling Cami’s teeth.
Driving with Ruby was always an adventure, but it was better than the small, cushioned but stifling buses Juno used to take less fortunate girls straight to their doors. Private schools did not like losing their students, and if there wasn’t a transporter or two on file you had to use a bus. Walking home in New Haven was risky—in other words, it was only for the public school kids.
Like Tor, Cami thought, and squeezed her eyes shut.
She’d seen him around the house, of course. Things weren’t quite upside down with Papa gone, but they were definitely not the same. Some of the maids had been let go, Marya piqued about something or another they did wrong or didn’t do right. Chauncey had caught the head groundskeeper “intoxicated, Miss Cami,” and asked her if he should be fired.
Like she knew. But with Papa gone, Marya sulking, and Nico off at Hannibal, she was the only one to ask. N-n-no, she’d told him. N-not unl-less it h-h-happens ag-g-gain.
And he had nodded, looking profoundly relieved, and walked away whistling as if he’d heard it from Papa’s mouth. She squirmed at the memory.
She’d even turned Ruby down when it was time to skip and head to Southking again. And Rube was not happy over that.
Stop being a foot-dragger, Cami. Mithrus, you’re turning into an old lady overnight. Being engaged makes your brain soft.
Missing Nico was never pleasant. And before he left, he’d been odd. Treating her like . . . what, exactly?
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.