The Black Knife by Jodi Meadows

Author:Jodi Meadows
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

WE DIDN’T HAVE to go far before we were out of any search radius.

The Indigo Order would find the spilled firefly. The dead Nightmares and guards. The manufacturing and storage facilities. Everything would be cleared away and explained without mention of a vigilante and rogue bodyguard.

When we slowed to a limping walk, I took as many painkillers as James would allow.

“Now what?” James asked. “After you recover, I mean. Your shoulder is going to take some time.”

He was definitely right about the shoulder. The rib, too.

“There are a lot more problems in Skyvale than just Hensley,” I said at last. “A lot more than just the Nightmare gang.”

And the Nightmare gang wasn’t even gone, just cut in half. It seemed unlikely we’d ever truly be rid of them, but if I kept pressure on them, maybe they wouldn’t be so powerful anymore.

“Does that mean you have to be the one to do something about it?” James checked around a corner on the border of Greenstone and Thornton, but the way was clear. It was both late and early enough that most people in the market district were sleeping. “You’re going to be king one day. Can’t you take action from that post?”

I shrugged with my good shoulder and stepped into the shadows of rich, well-tended buildings. The scent of baking bread pushed through the streets, warm and normal. “There are so many corrupted officials in the city. I don’t trust them to stop shine-makers and flashers. Not yet. I’ll root out other people who worked for Hensley, and those like him. I’ll make sure I can trust the people policing the streets. But trusting them doesn’t mean I won’t want to keep an eye on them—the kind of eye they wouldn’t expect.”

“You’re going to spy on your own police force?”

“If you want to call it that, yes.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

I grinned. “It was.”

“Shut up. So what are you going to be called?” James eyed me askance. “Right now I’ve heard people refer to you as the black-mask vigilante, which, I’m sorry, is stupid. But it’s better than the Saint Fade Christopher burglar.”

“I didn’t steal anything, either. Technically everything in the palace is mine—or will be, one day.”

James rolled his eyes. “Pick a name. I have a few people in the city I can pass on a little bit of gossip to. If I happen to slip the vigilante’s name . . .”

They’d spread it to everyone else. Instant reputation, if we worked this right.

I paused and lifted my face to the sky, sucking in a deep breath—as deep as I could without aggravating every injury I’d taken on in the last week. I’d very nearly been skewered by the black-handled knife I’d—

Well, the knife was gone now. No sense in brooding over where it had come from. But what Hensley had nearly done to me was important. What I’d survived was important.

But was there a name in there? Something to reclaim, or something to own. Something to remind me why I was doing this.

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