Time warped around us. Motion became a dizzying whirl. For one brief moment, the threads dragged me backward.
I immediately altered my attack. I dropped to my haunches and struck.
I think I was as shocked as Ninu when my knife sank into his stomach. Red bubbled up around the blade. His hand lifted to grab mine. I let go of the handle and twisted out of reach.
His fingers replaced mine around the handle. He regarded me with the same air of approval that Mason had after I’d managed to hit him.
So. Not his descendant then. Drek!
I had stabbed him, but was this enough to win? I shifted my weight, considering another attack.
“Good job,” he said. “You’re a fast learn—” He stopped. His eyes lowered to the knife.
With a quizzical tilt to his head, he pulled the knife free. Blood rushed from the open wound, blossoming across his shirt like one of Irra’s roses.
In his hand, beneath the fresh coat of red, the blade glowed. He dropped it. Instead of falling, the knife hovered in the air. I watched, stupefied, as the blood on the blade thinned, then disappeared, as if the glowing metal had absorbed it. Light encased the weapon. I had to squint to look at it.
Avan called my name, but I couldn’t look away. The shape of the knife changed, elongating into a staff and then flashing brightly as a curved blade materialized at one end, translucent and shimmery like starlight. When the light receded, I realized it was a scythe.
I reached out tentatively, then flinched when it flew away.
There was a muffled smack as the staff hit its owner’s palm. Both Ninu and I looked at Kalla in confusion. Kalla rested her weapon against the floor and traced a glossy fingernail along her alabaster cheek. Her features shifted. Her eyes grew larger, chin sharper, red lips plumper. Her hair spilled down her shoulders in a tumble of white waves.
“You,” I said, backing up. The memory of her reeled through me—a nervous and pale young woman, half dressed, her thin arms offering me a battered knife and a map. “You’re from the Raging Bull.”
Ninu sank to his knees, his bloodied hand pressed against his stomach. Then his gaze lifted to meet mine.
“I wanted my life back,” he said. “It wasn’t a great life. But it was mine.” He closed his eyes.
Kalla twirled the scythe in her hand, and it vanished in a flare of light. She didn’t look at her brother.
“The Infinite are incapable of killing one another directly,” she told me, brushing her long hair over her pale shoulder.
“Your knife—”
“My scythe,” she corrected me. “I am the second oldest of the Infinite. My weapon can kill anything.”
“But why?” I asked, inching toward Avan and Reev. Avan looked as bewildered as I felt, but Reev hadn’t reacted in any way to seeing his Kahl stabbed. “You’re Ninu’s right hand. Why would you help me?”
Death smiled. “Time has ever been my ally.”
CHAPTER 38
I SKIRTED AROUND Ninu’s body, now sprawled on the floor, and rushed to Avan.
“Are you—?” I cut myself off. It was an idiotic question. Of course he wasn’t okay. “I’m sorry.”
He gave me a rueful smile. “Why are you apologizing?”
His hand came up, fingers grazing my sore jaw. You’d think I would be used to getting punched by now, but the pain felt new each time. I leaned into his touch. I didn’t know what any of this meant, but I prayed Kalla was on our side.
Reev looked around, his eyes slow to focus. Then he hissed in his breath, reaching back to claw at his collar as if it pained him.
“Reev, stop,” I said, tugging at his hand.
Kalla’s heels clicked against the floor as she circled Ninu. He lay on his stomach, face angled away from me. No sentinels appeared to carry him away.
“Ninu held ultimate control over the collars,” she said. “Without him, Reev will recover shortly, although Ninu’s mark should be removed from the collar as a precaution.”
Relief made my body sag. I squeezed Reev’s hand.
Kalla cocked her head, a sudden awareness in her eyes. I searched the room. I felt it, too. The threads, the current, time itself—had stopped. The view from the window revealed the smoke from distant chimney pipes caught in still-frame, like a picture, and Grays fixed in place like figurines amid a miniature cityscape. The entire city, everything outside this room, had been frozen.
“Congratulations, Kai,” someone said. “You’ve liberated Ninurta.”
The voice was worse than Ninu’s, not because it burrowed beneath my skin but because I knew, deep down, that it was familiar. I knew it the way I knew the threads that currently snared the city like a giant spider’s web, inescapable even by me because, while I could manipulate them, he had woven the threads and designed their pattern.
The air in the room quivered, and then a man was standing next to Kalla. It wasn’t his presence that surprised me. It was the fact that I had felt him coming. Avan clasped my shoulder. I reached up to rest my hand over his.
“This is Kronos,” Kalla said. “Although I don’t think an introduction is really necessary.”
He didn’t look like anyone I remembered. But then I saw his eyes: watery blue like the icicles that formed on the tree branches in winter. He smiled. I didn’t smile back.
Any sense of relief I had before disappeared. I brushed away Avan’s hand and released Reev’s. My body tensed, waiting.
He extended his arm, the black folds of his cloak rustling in a current that only he and I could see. Kalla touched her fingers to his raised forearm, a simple but familiar gesture.
“You have questions,” she said to me. “But the answers have always been there. Ninu assumed that when R-22 disappeared, Irra had taken him for his hollows. So how did Ninu find Reev again?”
“The energy drive,” I said warily.
“And who do you think told Reev about the energy drive? Who decided to hold it there, practically on top of the Labyrinth?”
My mind ran through the possibilities. “But you couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have predicted that I would be attacked, that I would need to—”
I saw the face of the woman who’d attacked me that day in the alley. White skin, black-streaked Mohawk, and bright-red lips, the only splash of color against her pale features.
I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me again. “It was all you,” I breathed.
“You’re softhearted, Kai. I knew you wouldn’t leave me to die in that alley. And I made sure that the tax notice was delivered directly to Reev.”
I cupped my head in my hands. The attack; the energy drive; tricking Reev’s boss in order to send me to the Rider, the only person with the means of sneaking me into the White Court. So I could—
“You did all this,” I said, looking between Kalla and Kronos. “Why? To get me here to kill Ninu? How did you know who Reev was anyway? That he and I—”
“You know the answer to that,” Kronos said.
When he moved, his hair—as long as my own—rippled like water, its color shifting, liquid strands in constant motion. As with the rest of the Infinite, I couldn’t pinpoint his age. He was at once young and wizened. Looking at him was like trying to focus on stones resting in the riverbed beneath the swaying waves.
“Who am I?” he asked.
With absolute certainty, I said, “My father.”
Someone grabbed my wrist. I started, backing away only to realize it was Reev.
When our eyes met, I could see it was really him. A brief rush of joy filled me. “Reev.”
He opened his mouth, but Kronos cut him off.
“Welcome back, Reev.” He looked at me. “His final mission before his purification had been against me—Ninu needed his full force of sentinels to invade my palace. But I’d known at once that Reev was different from the others. His connection to Ninu had already begun to fray. I read into his past, his desire for freedom, and I granted it. In exchange, I’d left him a most precious charge.”