CHAPTER 27

Aegis played Sentinel the next day, and Lisa had tickets for that one too. She didn’t produce them until the morning of.

“Different arena,” she said, not quite meeting either of our eyes over breakfast. “Different guild. You don’t have to come.”

“Why wouldn’t we come?”

“No reason.” She was reaching for her coat. “Just checking.”

Lisa’s coat drew a look from the steward on the door. Then a second one that lasted longer than the first.

Nobody wears black to a match unless they came from somewhere that requires it.

The arena’s main hall ran wide and bright toward the seating bowl. Some pre-match walkthrough had both teams parading down it in their kit, working the crowd on the way to the players’ tunnel.

Standard, Lisa called it afterwards. The sort of moment broadcasters love and players put up with.

She went very still beside me, three names into the announcer’s warm-up chatter, before I had placed what she’d heard.

“You’ve family on that team,” I said. It stopped being a question somewhere in the middle of saying it.

“Two of them.” She didn’t look away from the approaching line of Sentinel jerseys. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice until it was over.”

“You could have said something before we walked in.”

“I could have. Then you’d have spent the whole day watching me instead of the guild.” She said it lightly, and not quite lightly enough. “I get so little of just watching the guild.”

One of them peeled off from the roster. Lightning still crackling faint along his knuckles, and no hurry in him anywhere.

“Well, well.” He looked Lisa up and down. “Still carrying that demonic little book about, are you. You creep.”

“Hello, Finn.”

“Don’t hello Finn me.” He had heard something and wanted us all to know he’d heard it. “I’m told you’re playing hunter now. With these two.”

He glanced at me and Nox and decided, visibly, that neither of us was worth a second look.

“Does the guild know what you actually are yet? Or are you letting them find that out the hard way.”

“They know plenty.”

“Do they.” He smiled. It didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes. “We’ll see how long that lasts.”

Behind him a few of his own teammates slowed without quite stopping. They had watched this before. They had opinions about it they weren’t going to say.

“Big man,” Nox said, without looking up from the programme. “Insulting someone’s book in public.”

Finn’s attention swung onto him for the first time.

“Nobody asked you.”

“Nobody had to.” Nox turned a page. “You volunteered for the whole performance.”

“Very funny. Is this one yours as well, Lis, or does he come with the other one?”

I felt my own mouth move before I had decided anything about opening it.

“She doesn’t come with anyone.”

The words arrived in my voice and somebody else’s cadence.

“And do be careful with the word demonic. There are those of us who take it as a compliment.”

Finn’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it said.” Azazel let that sit where it landed. “You’ve been speaking to your sister the way a small man speaks to the one person in the room who isn’t allowed to hit him. I’ve stood in courts full of that. It has never once impressed me.”

“Watch your mouth.”

“I generally do. It isn’t mine at present.” A small cold smile, unlike anything my face usually did. “I’m enjoying the loan a great deal. You’re making it remarkably easy.”

The lightning along Finn’s knuckles brightened. He was a full step closer now, close enough that Lisa’s hand came up flat against my chest without either of us discussing it.

Somewhere behind him one of his own teammates said his name under their breath. Half a warning.

“Finn.” A younger voice, quieter, cutting in before anything else could. “Leave it.”

He looked barely out of his teens. He had already stepped between Finn and the three of us, in full view of the entire Sentinel roster, like a man doing something he had done a hundred times in private and never once in public.

Beside me Lisa breathed out. It sounded like it had been waiting a while.

“Sam.”

Whatever had been sitting behind my eyes let go, and I was abruptly and completely myself again, blinking at a stranger’s lightning half a foot from my face.

“Hi, Lis.” Sam kept his body angled to hold Finn off, and didn’t look round to check whether it was working. “You’ve cut your hair.”

“Two years ago.”

“Right.” A beat. “It suits you.”

“You’ve got tall.”

“Everyone says that.” He glanced back at Finn, and something tired went through him. “He doesn’t mean all of it.”

“He means most of it.”

“Yeah.” Sam didn’t argue.

“I mean every word,” Finn said, already turning back to his own team, the lightning fading to a residual crackle. “Enjoy the match. Try not to embarrass the family any further than you already have.”

“You manage that without my help,” Lisa said, to his back.

He didn’t turn round. “Careful. That almost sounded like you.”

He rejoined the line without waiting for an answer, and the walkthrough swallowed him. His teammates fell into step like nothing had happened.

Sam stayed a moment longer.

“Alex says hello.”

“Does he.”

“No.” Sam looked at his own shoes. “I made that up. He doesn’t know I’m talking to you.”

Lisa didn’t say anything for a second.

“That’s worse, Sam.”

“I know. I thought about it the whole way over and it got worse the more I thought about it.” He shrugged, and the shrug was about nine years old. “I never believed the thing about the book.”

“You were seven.”

“I know how old I was.” He said it fast, like he’d been waiting for that exact answer and had decided in advance not to take it. “I still didn’t believe it.”

Lisa looked at him for the first time since he had stepped in.

“Go and play your match.”

“Yeah.” He backed off a step. “See you, Lis.”

He jogged to catch the tail of the walkthrough. Lisa watched him go, and something in her let go that had been holding since the lightning started.

“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning several different things.

“Don’t be. Neither of you did anything wrong.” She looked at me a beat longer than she needed to, and we started walking again, toward the tunnel that led to our own seats. “Though I’d like to know, at some point, exactly whose mouth that was.”

“Working on it myself.”

You are welcome, by the way.

He sounded entirely unrepentant about it.

I selected the mildest of the available replies. The others would have obliged your friend to explain a body.

We found our seats with the arena still filling in around us. Lisa didn’t say anything else until we had sat down.

“Alex is the one everyone actually talks about,” she said, watching the pitch instead of either of us. “Youngest officially recognised Ambrose mage in a century. Inherited Merlin’s own grimoire. Called a genius before he could walk unaided.”

“Finn spent his whole life being the brother who was only excellent. And I’m the sister who does something the family is ashamed of.” She turned one hand over. “So he had to find somebody smaller than Alex to win against.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“I didn’t say it was one.” She looked away from the pitch, for a second, at me. “I said it was a reason. There’s a difference.”

I found Jack in the third row of Aegis’s box before the first board reveal had settled.

The match went quiet around me for a second, the way a room does when the floor tilts without warning.

He looked older, and it suited him. Just older. The kind that comes from years rather than damage, grey coming in at the temples he had never had grey in before.

He was laughing at something one of his own hunters had said. Easy, unbothered, the same laugh I used to know from the other side of a desk.

Someone handed him a tablet partway through the first duel. Some note about the roster, or the schedule. He read it as he read everything, one hand already reaching for his phone before he had finished the sentence.

Eleven years of knowing him, and time hadn’t changed a single thing about how he did three things at once.

He never once looked toward our section. There was no reason he would have. Nothing about the man sitting three rows up from him would have told him anything at all.

I watched him for longer than I meant to.

Long enough that Lisa noticed and didn’t ask. Long enough that an old useless instinct kept expecting him to feel it. People are supposed to feel a hand on the shoulder, even through a coat.

He never did.

The board flickered through its reveals fast. No fixed order to any of it.

Finn drew Aegis’s mage first and took her apart. He found the gaps quicker than she could close them, and didn’t have the decency to look smug about it. Just efficient. Like beating her had never been in question.

Aegis’s knight drew Sentinel’s swordsman next and ground out a win on pure stubbornness after being put down twice. A small mercy. The crowd around us cheered it like it mattered more than it did.

Harper Lin took her bout clean against Sentinel’s fighter.

Diego Ruiz beat Sentinel’s rogue with something that looked more like an apology than a victory, wincing every time he landed a hit hard enough to matter.

The last reveal put Sentinel’s knight against Aegis’s rogue, and by then the match had decided itself.

Three duels to one. Sentinel’s roster was sharper across the board, and none of it was owed to Finn’s mouth.

I watched Jack’s face through most of it and never saw it change. Whatever he felt about losing, eleven years of practice had made sure nobody in that box would get to see it.

We left before the closing ceremony.

Nox hadn’t said much through any of it beyond the one line in the main hall. That wasn’t unusual for him. This silence had a different weight to it.

He told us on the walk back to the flat.

“I asked Gwen for leave,” he said. He didn’t stop, and he didn’t look at either of us. “Approved this morning. I’m going to Japan.”

“For how long?”

“However long it takes.” He had rehearsed that. More than once, and not only on the walk over.

“You asked her before today, then. Before Sentinel.”

“Last night. Straight after Walkyrie played Qilin.” Hands in his pockets, eyes somewhere past both of us. “I told her it was for the assessment. Training, somewhere that pushes past what I already know how to do.”

“And is that true?”

“Some of it.”

He looked at me then. There was something in his face I hadn’t seen on him before that day.

“I watched someone move like that in an arena and I couldn’t follow half of it. I don’t intend to spend the next ninety days being the one who couldn’t follow it.”

“The first assignment,” I said. “Next week.”

“You’ll manage without me.” No unkindness in it. Just certain. “Two of you is enough for a clear. It won’t be for the one after that.”

Lisa didn’t argue. Neither did I, in the end, though I turned it over the rest of the walk. A flat with one fewer person in it, before we had finished settling into the last one.

“When do you leave,” Lisa asked.

“Three days.”

“That’s fast.”

“It’s not fast enough.” He said it to the pavement more than to either of us, and neither of us asked him what he meant by it.

We walked the rest of the way without much else said.

Somewhere behind us an arena full of strangers was still filing out into the night, arguing about a match that had stopped mattering to any of the three of us the moment Nox opened his mouth.