Adrian Darling's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Adrian walked until the sky began to gray. The ring on his finger felt heavier with every step. He needed names, deeds, a forwarding address — anything to find where she had gone. But the records sat behind tall white doors that opened only in daylight, and he could not cross that threshold without burning. He stopped beneath a low roof and whistled once. A black bird dropped from the eaves and landed on his wrist. He tied a small note to its leg with shaking fingers. "The sale paper. Her name. Anything," he whispered. The bird blinked its yellow eye and lifted into the pale air, gliding toward the gothic spires across the rooftops. Adrian spent the long day pressed inside a shuttered room, listening to his own pulse. He thought of her laugh and could not hear it anymore. He thought of her eyes and saw only gray. When dusk finally bled across the sky, he ran to the meeting spot behind the library wall, where a hired mortal had been told to leave whatever could be taken. The papers were there. A heap of them, weighted under a stone — deeds, ledger pages, a torn buyer's slip. Adrian dropped to his knees and read. A name. A town three days east. He pressed the slip against the ring and closed his eyes. He had her trail now. But three days east meant three nights of hunger on the road, and he had not fed in weeks.