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“No,” Alastair answered. His voice was slow and soft. “It’s not.”
Fey’s head was spinning. There wasn’t enough air in the room suddenly. “Alastair, is there a drug that’s gold? Liquid gold, with,” she faltered. “With light swirling inside?”
“Fey,” he started.
“Just answer the fucking question.” Fey snarled at him.
Alastair swallowed. He knew the answer. Suspected she did too. And it meant something more to her than he could understand.
“No, Witchling. As far as I know—and, trust me, I would know—there’s no drug out there like you’re describing.”
She was going to vomit. Thoughts were tumbling through her head faster than she could keep up.
It wasn’t devil dust, what they’d found in the warehouse. Wasn’t a drug at all. Why had they thought that? Where had that information come from? And why were they sent to destroy it? What could be so dangerous that the Queen sent her Blades to get rid of it?
Something bigger was happening here, a puzzle she had only the vaguest idea of, too many pieces that she didn’t have yet.
Fey tossed the devil dust on the broken remnants of his desk.
“I have to go,” she said, yanking her pants from underneath the desk and pulling them on. She shrugged her sweater on, pulling it over her breasts.
“Wait, Fey—” Alastair started, but it was too late. She was already heading out the door.
And then she was gone.
Chapter 26
Joy stared at the wall, seeing nothing and saying nothing. Energy crackled in the air.
Finally, she took a long, deep breath. The air in the room moved with it, drawing in toward her, and back out again.
“It wasn’t a drug,” she said, finally.
Fey nodded. She sat on Joy’s bed, her arms wrapped around her knees, hugging her legs to herself. She’d come to Joy immediately upon returning to the palace. Lilith had been in the training gym and joined them, but Willow was fast asleep, spread out on her bed like a starfish. They’d agreed to let her rest.
“Then what was it?” Joy mused. “What could be so dangerous the Crown would send us to wipe it off the face of the earth?”
This was Joy’s process, Fey knew. This was how she connected the dots, how she stepped back to see the bigger picture. They were looking at a puzzle with too few pieces, but if anyone could see the pattern here, it was Joy.
“A weapon,” Lilith reasoned. She lounged in an armchair next to the fireplace. Her whetstone sat on her lap, but for once she wasn’t sharpening her blades. She was tense and still.
Joy nodded absently. “A weapon,” she repeated. “That would make sense. Something bad enough to scare the Crown. Something they didn’t want in the wrong hands. Something better off destroyed.”
“Why lie about it, though? Why tell us we were after some sort of drug?” Fey asked, unable to keep the resentment out of her voice.
“Did they lie?” Lilith challenged. “Where did you get the idea that it was drugs, anyway?”
You, not we, Fey noted and shot her sister an irritated look.
“Dameon,” Joy answered. “When he briefed us the night before. I don’t remember if he said it outright, not explicitly, but he implied it. Implied we were going after a big devil dust supplier.”
“Implied,” Lilith repeated. She threw her hands up. “Don’t shoot the messenger, but we can’t accuse our handler of lying just because he ‘implied’ something. Maybe we misunderstood.”
Joy pursed her lips together. “That’s possible. It’s also possible he misunderstood. Maybe he gave us the information he had available to him?” Joy let the words hang in the air for a moment before she added. “And it’s possible he deliberately misled us.”
“Why?” asked Lilith. “No, don’t give me that look, Fey, I’m being fucking serious, here. Why would he lie? Why would he even need to? We are the Queen’s assassins. She points us in a direction and sets us loose. We do what we’re told. He doesn’t even have to tell us anything. Dameon wouldn’t lie to us because he has no reason to. We’re not worth being lied to.”
Lilith huffed. “We’re attack dogs, like it or not. All of us. And you don’t have to tell an attack dog why they bite—only who.”
