Stealing Snow (27 page)

“Do you know who I am?” the man from the balcony asked, not bothering to stand up from his couch.

“Someone important,” I replied coyly.

The guy was some sort of dignitary and a definite creep. I could see it in the way he treated his people. I could see it in the way he took up space, as if he owned the air around him. Objectively, he was handsome. Chiseled jaw. Shiny black hair. Piercing eyes. But he was less attractive with every word and every move he made. He berated the bare-chested guy who
delivered a bottle filled with blue bubbly on ice. He leaned back on a sofa made of a pelt of pale-gray fur and stretched out his arms as if he were waiting for company. Namely me.

My mission was to distract him. But the idea of being any closer to him did not appeal to me.

“Aren’t you a pretty thing?” he said to me as I reached his couch.

Compliments didn’t come my way often. Even though I abhorred this man, I felt my cheeks flush at his words. I reminded myself that Rebecca Gershon would take the praise as a given. I raised my head haughtily and tossed the weight of my new, magically extended hair.

“Shall we take a walk?”

I pointed down to my ridiculously high heels, which weren’t the best for walking.

“I have something for that,” the creep said, fishing for a bottle of magic.

I shook my head.

“You’re not one of those Eluddites, I hope. You know, the kind who don’t use magic?”

I laughed as if he had said the funniest thing in Algid.

“Hardly … I just like to have all my senses. I don’t want to miss anything.”

“I think I’d like you for my collection,” the creep said, pointing to the girls in the snow globes.

Anger brewed in me. I thought about freezing the glass to free the girls suspended from the ceiling, but I knew I couldn’t or they’d fall to the ground.

Luckily, I didn’t have to do anything. The globes began to descend on their own, which annoyed the creep. He yelled something in the direction of his followers until I distracted him with a spill of my drink.

“Stupid girl. You’ll regret that,” he warned, making a grab for my wrist.

At that exact moment, Howl hit a piercing note that echoed through the place. Glasses began to shatter all at once. The thick glass of the globes cracked, too, and the girls pushed their way out like chicks from eggs. Everyone in the club began to scatter for the exits.

The creep opened his mouth to call for the bouncer, and I saw my opportunity.

“Stop right there,” I demanded.

The creep laughed, but then he stopped abruptly as the edges of his coat frosted over and the cloth hardened, stiff as a board.

It wasn’t exactly as I had planned. Everything could have gone terribly, terribly wrong. But like Margot had suggested, I focused my energy on the objects around the person instead of the person itself … and it worked! I had frozen the jacket instead of the jerk of a man inside it. And the terrified man didn’t dare move.

My confidence brimmed as I stepped away from him. I had used my frost to keep him in his place. For the first time, I had truly controlled my magic.

I grabbed the coin and showed it to him. It was against Robber Rules to show the mark what you stole from them. The
point was to get away clean. But that ship had sailed when Howl screamed.

The man laughed when he saw the coin. “Cinderella wants to go to the ball.”

“Nice doing business with you,” I said quietly. “If you scream, if you so much as move, then I will come back and freeze the rest of you.”

When I hit the door, Jagger was already beside me.

“Isn’t this the part where you tell me how great I did?” I said to Jagger as we raced out of the club.

But he was not smiling.

“You didn’t listen to my instructions.”

“I improvised.”

“Robber Rules…”

“Versus results? I got results.”

I could see the intense bit of a smile forming underneath the approbation as he retorted, “The idea is to get in and out without anyone knowing we’re here. Now, the King’s guard will be looking for us. For the girl with the power to freeze. He’s already on your trail. Now you’ve brought him a step closer to all of us.”

The hair on the back of my neck perked up. Jagger shivered as if he could feel the cold, too.

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Next time, think.”

“So there will be a next time?” I said to him.

He didn’t smile fully, but I could tell by the light in his eyes that he wanted to.

Two of the Robber girls met us outside the club. They were
carrying a snow-globe dancer. Her eyes were hollow. She was proof of my father’s wrongs.

“This is Cadence,” Jagger explained as her face morphed into someone new. She had short blue hair and a pretty, soft face that was stained with tears.

“She’s one of us.”

“I didn’t know it was a rescue,” I said.

The Robbers worked so hard to pretend they didn’t care. But it seemed every time a Robber Rule was broken it was so they could help one another.

“This was a robbery, like any other. Lucky break that Howl hit that high note,” Jagger downplayed, but his voice was laced with a hint of a smile.

The take for the night was the girl they were carrying out in their arms.

The bouncer let us pass, not recognizing the girl and her new face.

“Are you going to tell me how I screwed up this time?” Jagger said after we were safely back at the Claret.

“Not this time,” I said cheerfully. I had passed the test. I had actually completed my mission. I was one step closer to going home. So why wasn’t I more ecstatic?

The Robber girls had poured out their wares on the floor of the common room like the one Halloween before I went to Whittaker.

Queen Margot had smiled and nodded, but then turned away and looked at the forest, which was lavender today. Her expression was a somber one. Cadence wasn’t enough. The Duchess’s mirror was what she wanted now. And the other two pieces of the King’s mirror. But to what end? I had told myself I didn’t need to know the story of the Robber girls, of Margot, but the more I knew them, the more I wanted to know.

The girls abandoned their magic treasure and tended to
Cadence. Some took their vials and used them to restore her beauty. Others brought her food and clothing and whispered soothing words. Fathom inspected her like the scientist that she was. I looked away, feeling like I was spying on something private. Something that I was outside of.

“Is she going to be okay? What happened to her?” I asked Jagger.

“‘Okay’ is relative. Algid is not always kind,” he said vaguely.

Cadence’s color had returned. She didn’t have the same glow that the other girls had, but the sickly gray I’d seen under Dessa’s snow-globe strobe light was already gone.

“You killed it in there,” Jagger said brightly to me, raising his arms in a victory cheer.

Jagger’s shirt rose up, revealing something I hadn’t seen before. A long, jagged scar ran the length of his muscled torso. Was this the scar from my father?

“What happened to you? Why didn’t you tell me that King Lazar hurt you?” I demanded, changing the subject. But it was essentially the same one. They knew my story. I didn’t know theirs. I was a Robber in name only.

He opened his mouth to say something and hesitated.

“So help me, if you say Robber Rules, I will freeze you where you stand.”

Jagger’s voice was quiet but steady. “It’s mine, Snow. It may have been given to me by the King, but it’s mine to carry. And to talk about or not talk about.”

I took it in. He was right. He didn’t owe me his story because he knew mine. But it didn’t stop me from wanting to hear it.

“I liked freezing that guy. I saw what he was and I thought he deserved it. He scared those girls. I liked making him scared,” I blurted.

Jagger knew who I was, and I could actually tell him things that I could not say to Kai—or anyone else, really.

“I see what King Lazar did to you, and I want to scare him, too,” I said, meaning it.

Jagger hastily tucked his shirt in. I stopped him, wanting him to know that his scar wasn’t anything to be ashamed of or anything to cover up. Lazar was the one who should bear the shame. My hand was on the center of his chest. I had closed the gap between us.

“I want to scare him, too. For you,” he said.

He took a step closer and touched my scar with one hand, and he brushed my hair back with the other. He looked intently at me. So intently that I completely forgot about the scar and my father. I heard myself sharply inhale. All I wanted was to be with him.

“You still think that you kiss people and they go insane?”

“Something like that,” I countered. Bale wasn’t crazy because of me. But he was forever tied to me. He was kidnapped because of me. And on and on … I was danger. I was someone who could break things and people with a single touch.

“Maybe we should test it again…” Jagger leaned in toward me.

We were so close that I could feel the heat radiating from his body. All it would take was another inch for our lips to meet. When he closed his eyes, he looked so vulnerable. So beautiful.
I remembered who I was and what my kiss could do. What I could do. I pulled away in time.

We had been inching toward the kiss since we’d met and I’d stopped our momentum. I felt an ache in my chest for what we had missed. For a second, Jagger’s face fell, too. But he recovered with a smile.

“So you like me enough not to turn my heart to ice? I’m touched,” Jagger joked.

“It’s not funny,” I said, feeling anger at my edges. I had not frozen Kai, but I could have. His joke had come a little too close to the truth.

“You are not crazy, Snow. You were just lied to. You are not evil. You have magic. It’s not a curse. It’s a gift. I may be a liar, but I know this much is true.” Jagger said the words like he was absolving me of my guilt and my fear—just by telling me the truth I think I’d been waiting to hear my entire life.

When he leaned in again, I was not sure I could resist him.

He kissed me on the cheek. It was as close as I could let him get to me. But he made it no secret that he wanted to be closer.

Our next mission was the important one: stealing the King’s mirror piece from the Duchess. I’d never met this cousin and had agreed to rob her anyway. Aside from the King, she was my only other family in this world. And unlike the King, she had never done anything to me.

What will Queen Margot do when I bring back the Duchess’s piece of the mirror?
I wondered. It wasn’t worth anything without the other two pieces, according to the River Witch. I suspected she had a plan to get the other two pieces, but as long as it didn’t involve me, I didn’t really care. This was the last thing I needed to do before the Claret would help me free Bale and bring him home.

It was time. I found Margot in the Bottle Room.

She offered me a green vial. “It’s a new etiquette spell. It gives you instant manners. You’re going to need it where you’re going. The
Duchess is royalty, and even though you are in name, well … Let’s just say you could use some help in that department.”

I shook my head. She wasn’t wrong about my manners. But there was no way I was taking that vial.

“This heist won’t work unless you do exactly what I ask when I ask it,” she said.

“This heist won’t work unless you tell me everything.”

I had spent so much time in the dark that I didn’t want to go into this mission blind. I needed to know everything that would happen … that could possibly happen.

“You are a Robber now. We will go over the plan at length with the others tonight, but please ask away.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“I want you to help us get the mirror from the Duchess’s palace. It’s that simple. And that hard.”

“But who is she? Aside from my cousin.”

“She is very graceful. Her people love her.”

“And is she very evil?”

“From what I have heard, there is not an ounce of evil in the girl. Apparently, that trait skips a generation.” She laughed; I didn’t.

I wanted her to know I was serious. “If she’s not evil, then why would she keep the mirror for the King?”

“The Duchess is keeping it from the King. Not
for
him, we believe, but nobody really knows what her true motives are. This is a very dangerous thing since she lives by his mercy. The Duchess is your age, but in our land that is the marrying age. We are crashing the Penultimate Ball.”

“The Penultimate Ball?”

“It is the ball before the Last Ball. After this ball, the Duchess will have met every unmarried man in Algid. She must choose a husband, or her parents will be less than pleased.”

For the millionth time since I’d crossed the Tree, I realized that Algid was not like the fairy tales. My cousin, whoever she was, was being forced into her happily ever after.

“You will attend the ball. We will be with you every step of the way—except the last step, of course. You must find where she has hidden the mirror on your own. With a bit of luck, your magic will help you find it. Whatever happens, don’t get caught. We’ve already tried this once and failed.”