“Your eye—” he started, but Lila waved her hand.
“Not now.” She rose. “Come on, we have to go.”
But Kell knew he was in no shape to go anywhere. His hands were broken and bruised, blood still running in ropes from his wrists. His head spun every time he moved, and when she tried to help him up, he only made it halfway to his feet before his body swayed and buckled again. He let out a strangled gasp of frustration.
“This isn’t a good look on you,” she said, pressing her fingers to a gash above her ankle. “Hold still, I’m going to patch you up.”
Kell’s eyes widened. “Wait,” he said, twitching back from her touch.
Lila’s mouth quirked. “Don’t you trust me?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” she said, pressing her bloody hand against his shoulder. “What’s the word, Kell?”
The room rocked as he shook his head. “Lila, I don’t—”
“What’s the fucking word?”
He swallowed and answered shakily. “Hasari. As Hasari.”
“All right,” she said, tightening her grip. “Ready?” And then, before he could answer, she cast the spell. “As Hasari.”
Nothing happened.
Kell’s eyes fluttered in relief, exhaustion, pain.
Lila frowned. “Did I do it ri—”
Light exploded between them, the force of the magic hurling them in opposite directions, like shrapnel from a blast.
Kell’s back hit the floor, and Lila’s thudded against the nearest wall.
He lay there, gasping, so dazed that for a second he couldn’t tell if it had actually worked. But then he flexed his fingers and felt the wreckage of his hands and wrists knitting back together, skin smooth and warm beneath the trails of blood, felt the air move freely in his lungs, the emptiness filled, the broken made whole. When he sat up, the room didn’t spin. His pulse pounded in his ears, but his blood was back inside his veins.
Lila was slumped at the base of the wall, rubbing the back of her head with a low groan.
“Fucking magic,” she muttered as he knelt beside her. At the sight of him intact, she flashed a triumphant smirk.
“Told you it would wor—”
Kell cut her off, taking her face in his stained hands and kissing her once, deeply, desperately. A kiss laced with blood and panic, pain and fear and relief. He didn’t ask her how she’d found him. Didn’t berate her for doing it, only said, “You are mad.”
She managed a small, exhausted smile. “You’re welcome.”
He helped her to her feet and retrieved his coat, which sat crumpled on the table where Holland—Osaron—had dropped it.
Again Lila scanned the room. “What happened, Kell? Who did this to you?”
“Holland.”
He saw the name land like a fist, imagined the images filling her mind, the same ones that had filled his when he found himself face-to-face with the new White London king and saw not a stranger at all, but a familiar foe. The Antari with the two-toned eyes, one emerald, the other black. The magician bound to serve the Dane twins. The one he’d slain and pushed into the abyss between worlds.
But Kell knew that Lila had another image in her mind: of the man who’d killed Barron and thrown the bloodstained watch at her feet as a taunt.
“Holland’s dead,” she said icily.
Kell shook his head. “No. He survived. He came back. He’s—”
Shouts sounded beyond the door.
Footsteps pounding on stone.
“Dammit,” snarled Lila, gaze flicking to the hall. “We really have to go.”
Kell spun toward the door, but she was a step ahead, a Red London lin in one bloody hand as she reached for his and brought her other down on the table.
“As—” she started.
Kell’s eyes went wide. “Wait, you can’t just—”
“—Travars.”
The guards burst in as the room dissolved, the floor gave way, and they were falling.
Down through one London and into another.
Kell braced himself, but the ground never caught them. It wasn’t there. The castle became the night, the walls and floor replaced by nothing but cold air, the red light of the river and the bustling streets and the steepled roofs reaching for them as they fell.
* * *
There were rules when it came to making doors.
The first—and, in Kell’s opinion, most important—was that you could either move between two places in the same world, or two worlds in the same place.
The same exact place.
Which was why it was so important to make sure that your feet were on the ground, and not on, say, the floor of a castle chamber two stories up, because chances were there would be no castle floor a world away.
Kell had tried to tell Lila this, but it was too late. The blood was already on her hand, the token already in her palm, and before he could get the words out, before he could say more than “don’t,” they were falling.
They plunged down through the floor, through the world, and through several feet of winter night, before hitting the slanted roof of a building. The tiles were half frozen, and they skidded down another few feet before finally catching themselves against the drain. Or rather—Kell caught himself. The metal beneath Lila’s boots buckled sharply, and she would have tumbled over the side if he hadn’t grabbed her wrist and hauled her back up onto the shingles beside him.