Page 52 of Fire to the Stars

“Can’t slay dragons on an empty stomach.”

“Later.”

She waves the mouthful in front of my eyes. I try to read around it. The more I avoid, the more she leans against me. I’ve seen enough of her tricks to know she’s challenging me, and she won’t stop until someone wins. Even Lucy thinks it’s a game. She abandons another attempt at Claire’s bread bowl to jump on my notes and roll belly-up.

Second rule of dragon hunting: Establish limits and keep the target within them.

“Fine,” I relent, grabbing Claire’s wrist. I bite the piece right out of her fingers.

Heat spreads through my face immediately.

Stupid.Stupid.Logically it made sense to disarm her, in a way, but I didn’t establish a limit. I crossed my own professional boundary.

What other rule could I have employed?Rule three: Anticipate the target’s patterns and counter accordingly? I don’t know what I’m doing. The rules blur when I’m with her. It takes everything in me to keep chewing, eyes down, and not to smack myself in the face from humiliation. Noctu end me. I wish I could throw myself back into the Tordou River.

I clear my throat and reach for a new page to memorize. “Happy? I have work to do.”

Claire’s hand finds my cheek.

Everything stills. The teasing smile is gone from her lips. We’re nose to nose, so close I can smell fresh bread on her breath and count the freckles on her cheeks. Her brown eyes lower—as if she’s looking at my mouth.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

Claire freezes, wide eyes locking onto mine. I turn away. It’s my fault for instigating this, but—

“This isn’t professional,” I say.

Her hand slides away from my cheek. Confidence returns to her demeanor as she tosses her hair over her shoulder. “I noticed you shaved. It’s adorable.”

Claire takes her soup to the window and sits on the sill, gazing out at the city as she eats. It’s a five-story drop. She’s unfazed, zero sense of danger. Something tells me she doesn’t value her life much.

“I get it, you know,” she says. “You wouldn’t have anything to do with a thief if you could help it.”

I straighten, unsure what the right words are for this. “That’s not why I—”

“I know. I got carried away.” She rips a chunk of bread and scoops another mouthful of soup. I can’t tell if the waver in her voice is real or if it’s because her mouth is full. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

I’ve never been astute with my emotions, let alone other people’s. But I don’t need to be an expert to understand that Claire, for all her shamelessness and entitlement, feels guilty for her sins,too.

My brother may defend your species, but I see you for what you are: self-anointed gods. You would be wise to remember that you are made of stardust, and to stardust I can return you.

—Words of warning from Noctu to the Immortals

Translated fromThe Tale of Stars (L’Histoire des Étoiles), Part II: The Book of Dark Days

Chapter Seventeen

Claire

In a slice of moonlight between the curtains, I sit awake in bed and prop Abel’s journal against my blanket-covered thighs. Fingers clenched around the edges, my thumbnail digs into the name on the bottom corner. The meager light gives the gold-stamped letters a glow, soft as fireflies.

ABEL ESTELLIO

If I could, I would go back to the lobby and put myself in a separate room with a single bed and space to breathe, away from Abel and the ghostly dragon skull he propped against the wall. Alone, I could remind myself that it’s safer to live under different names in different places, making marks out of men who deserve a little dose of misfortune. Here, I’m forced to listen to the soft breathing of a boy about whom I cannot, for the life of me, determine whether he is my savior or my doom.

Abel Estellio: slayer of dragons, friend to girls with blood on their hands.

If he can overlook a throat slit by a human hand, can’t he overlook an unwitting dragon?