Drav scowled back at her, his tankard forgotten. “Lass, you’re liable to get yourself killed at that rate. If he’s gone, then it’s probably for a reason you want nothing to do with. The lad stuck his nose into Forgebrand business more often than he should have. It was mostly humanitarian, but you never know how the Uphill might react to someone like him taking any kind of interest in the folks down here.”

  “My brother was working with Forgebrand?” Kess asked.

  Draven gave a little shrug.

  “Nothing to do with my department, I’m afraid, but when someone from Uphill takes interest in us, people notice. More often than not, it’s bad news. From what I remember, your brother took an interest in food preservation—nothing to write home about.”

  Kess stared at her empty bowl, thinking. Oliver’s interests were varied and rather eccentric, but he rarely did anything without a reason. And Oliver had never expressed much interest in humanitarian causes before. He was a man so lost in books and research that he often forgot the very people he researched about. Whatever he’d been Downhill for, it hadn’t been what he’d told Forgebrand.

  “So Downhill is a dead end then,” Kess said, thinking aloud. “Draven, what if I had a way into the Uphill? A way to mingle with university people, Fulminancers—people Uphill who might be able to point me in the right direction.”

  “You’d be willing to do that, lass?”

  Kess stared into her tea. Just days ago, she’d been unwilling to even associate with the Fulminant. Now she was considering becoming Fulminant. It was all too much, too fast. And yet she could see no other way forward to Oliver.

  “It’s worse than that,” she said quietly. “I have a way in, but the condition is that I…surround myself with it, in a manner of speaking.” Kess looked away to avoid Draven’s eyes. She hated lying to him, but her denial of her own Fulminancy extended far into her social circle. Only Oliver knew of it, and even then, Kess wondered if she should have told him at all. “One of Oliver’s colleagues agreed to help me,” she continued. “But he’s rather…obsessed with it all, Draven. And well, I left all that behind years ago. Is it wise to go charging back in?”

  When Kess looked up, Draven sat calmly, his thick frame taking up most of the small couch across from her. His eyes twinkled in a knowing sort of way, and Kess felt an even deeper twinge of guilt at lying to this man, who’d practically been a father to her. Still, could she tell him everything? About her Fulminancy? About her previous life? If it was too much of a burden for her to bear, what would it do to Draven?

  I’ll tell him eventually, she thought. But not today. I’ll tell him when things calm down and we can sit down without worrying about missing family members and a city whispering of rebellion. It seemed like the right decision, but it was also selfish at its core; Kess didn’t know when she might see Draven again, and she didn’t want to ruin the night by discussing the darker moments of her life she’d rather forget.

  When the silence stretched on too long, Kess continued. “Drav, I...I shouldn’t have come, but if I take this step forward, I don’t think I’ll be able to come back here.” She paused, then risked a quiet, unsure question she’d only ever ask Draven. “What should I do?”

  “Kess.” Drav’s voice was thoughtful. Kess risked a look at him, and he held her eyes. “Lass, as much as I’d love to keep you out of trouble, there are some things too important to keep you locked up here. Life is about risk,” he said, smiling slightly. “The only question is, will the risk be worth it?”

  Kess scowled. “I—I don’t know,” she said. Maybe this was a fool’s errand. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to reach Oliver in time. Only one thing crystallized in her muddied thoughts—she couldn’t sit still and do nothing.

  “Well, none of us ever know, lass. That’s the issue,” he said, laughing. “If we knew what every corner had in store, I imagine we’d have easier times of it, no?” Kess smiled in spite of herself.

  “What if the right decision is just to do nothing? How would I know?” she asked suddenly. “Maybe I should just go home, let the Witchblades sort it out. People disappear Downhill all the time.“ Kess said the words, but they left a bitter sort of taste in her mind. The rest of the Downhill did deal with disappearances in the way she’d described, but it was more than Kess’s dislike for the Witchblades that gave her pause; Kess wasn’t certain she had it in her to spend each day waiting, hoping that news would come of her brother. She had to do something, even if those actions seemed useless and meandering. Drav scratched at his beard thoughtfully.

  “I think that’s the wrong question to ask,” he said. “The right one, I think, is if you could live with yourself if you did nothing.”

  Kess already knew the answer to that.

  “Lass, at least stay the night. What you’ve got going on under that cloak is no joke, and I’d like to avoid finding you a block away, passed out on the street.”

  Kess wanted to argue, and indeed she’d meant to retreat either back to Rowan’s manor or somewhere else entirely, but sleep was already tugging at her, heavy and insistent. Drav was right—rushing out with no rest was a fool’s errand. “I’ll stay,” she said. “Thank you for the meal.”

  “Anytime, lass.” There was a pause, and then Draven spoke again. “Kess.” His voice was thoughtful, and Kess looked up. Draven was well into his fifties, but the way he looked at her now, Kess marveled at how much hope she saw in the man’s eyes. Indeed, instead of being beaten down by a life that couldn’t have been easy, Draven insistently held onto a shred of hope that others had lost. Kess saw that hope in his eyes, somehow, when he looked at her. She tried not to squirm uncomfortably.

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  “Lass, promise me something,” he said, his eyes now serious and solemn. “Promise me you won’t give up.”

  “I’ve never given up.”

  “Aye, lass, you’re tenacious when you want to be, but this one is different.” He looked above her head to the tiny window, where oddly, Kess saw a flash of lightning reflected in his eyes—an early Lightstorm, perhaps. “A storm’s coming, lass. That storm will try to make you something you’re not—to break you and shape you into a woman you can’t be.” He leaned over the table and took her hand, gently. “When that storm washes away everything, don’t let it take away who you are.”

  Kess simply scowled at him, confused. “Drav, what’s gotten into—“

  Still solemn, Drav placed something in her hands, wrapping her fingers around it tightly. “Don’t lose this,” he said, and got to his feet. “Get some sleep. You look like the ghost of Mariel you’re always so ready to tell me about.” He turned, passing the other couch, his back to Kess. Horrifyingly, at that moment, Kess felt just a tiny tendril of Fulminancy weave its way down her arm. She shook at it, and it disappeared, but Draven paused and gazed at her again, his eyes knowing.

  “Lass, one more thing.”

  She tilted her head questioningly.

  “Learn to control it.”

  Kess started. “How did you know?” Draven let out a small laugh, and Kess wasn’t entirely sure she’d hidden her Fulminancy in time, as his eyes drifted to her arm.

  “You spend enough time here—I’d be blind not to notice. Out there you put on a good face, but here you let your guard down. I’ve seen little sparks like that for the last few years. At first I thought they were a trick of the eyes, but then you started winning those matches against Fulminant fighters that Mattes put you up to.” He shrugged. “Seemed too big of a coincidence to me. Maybe you weren’t harnessing those powers, but even latent Fulminancy can make you faster and stronger, to a certain extent.”

  Well, there went that secret, Kess thought, sighing. She’d been so careful, and yet, perhaps it was nearly impossible to hide it around someone she spent so much time with—particularly someone like Draven, who noticed just about everything.

  “I’m not learning anything,” she said, folding her arms. “I don’t even want to fight again if they give me an advantage.” The idea that Kess’s success in the ring might have less to do with her skill and more to do with her Fulminancy made her downright nauseated—unless that was the blood loss. What was she now, if not a successful Bloodcrawler? A cheating Fulminant fighter? “Is this some new Forgebrand thing?” Kess asked. “Some sort of…” She waved her hands. “…encourage young Fulminancers to become like Mariel or some such nonsense?”

  Drav merely tilted his head and pursed his lips in a wry little smile. “No, lass.” Then his smile faded, and he looked at her a little sadly. “It’s not about them. It’s about you. It’ll burn you up inside.” He looked her over, and his frown deepened. “It already is, though you haven’t taken notice yet. You’ve got to learn to control them—if not for yourself, then for the people around you.”

  “I—“ Kess hesitated, her eyes on the table. “Drav, I can’t. Not again.”

  “Lass, I’m not about to ask you to divulge your past,” he said. “If we’re not born down here, we come down here to forget. But whatever happened, I can’t think of a worse way to deal with it than bottling it up. At that point, the powers become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  Kess shook her head, her stomach churning. “I can’t control them,” she whispered. “I’m a monster.”

  Draven laughed. “You’re no more a monster than the rest of the Uphill,” he said. “But if you don’t figure them out, you won’t last much longer down here.” His voice turned grave. “The Witchblades have gotten more and more aggressive. How long until you slip? If you’re not fighting, you struggle to keep them pushed down, don’t you?”

  Kess nodded.

  “Well, it’s hard to fight when everyone knows your name and thinks you’re Fulminant. You’d have a better time fighting Uphill where they don’t know you near as well. You’re on borrowed time, lass.”

  He sighed and eyed the window above her head again. “And somehow I don’t think that brother of yours is going to be easy to get to.” He nodded towards her. “You’ll need everything you’ve got to get him out.” With that, he disappeared back into the rest of the house, leaving Kess alone with her thoughts.

  Her thoughts weren’t necessarily friendly ones. It’s just clouding like that man to leave me with a riddle and nothing concrete, she thought. Of course a storm was coming—it always stormed here. It was Hillcrest for Fanas’s sake.

  Kess opened her hand to a warming piece of metal, a thick, beautifully crafted ring with a fire opal glittering in the center. It wasn’t Drav’s wedding ring, but the other ring he wore on his hand. She had never seen him take it off in the years she’d known him. It was oddly familiar, somehow, its gold and opals reminiscent of the locket she kept around her own neck, or the two stuffed deep in her bag, a dark reminder of that night so long ago.

  It was too big to keep on her hand, and too ostentatious to boot, so Kess slid it onto the chain with her locket, wincing at the feel of the metal against her skin as thunder rumbled overhead. Metal was death in Hillcrest, but some things were too important to leave behind.

  Kess curled up on the couch, too exhausted to haul herself to one of the guest rooms down the hall, yet too thoughtful to fall asleep just yet.

  Learn to control it. It was such a simple statement—a solution to a problem years in the making. And yet Kess couldn’t learn control. What came naturally to other Fulminancers had eluded her for years. She’d tried, hadn’t she? She’d done everything asked of her, only…

  How much of what she did was tempered by a thick veneer of fear? How much did she hold back and withdraw from her power, even when she tried to use it? Her first use of Fulminancy had been such an explosive event she’d destroyed an entire lake house in the mountains. After that, was it possible that she was simply too afraid of it to progress naturally?

  She realized, with a sinking feeling, that she’d never touched Fulminancy normally after that first time—even on that night so long ago. She reached for that well of power in the same way that one might reach for a hot pan, only to fling it across the room and ignite the entire house in the process.

  And yet, what other option did she have, when Fulminancy produced such disastrous outcomes? Maybe she did need help. And maybe this Rowan could provide it.

  Though the idea made her sick, perhaps it was time to try something new. She would try to make a tentative deal with Rowan, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to touch her Fulminancy ever again. Rowan, at least, might be able to help her find answers about her brother, which was her priority anyway.

  If he could convince her to use her Fulminancy and not blow the entire city to pieces, well then, so much the better.

  She was asleep minutes later, though she didn’t miss the gentle touch of a blanket being thrown over her body much later.

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