The Midnight Watch

Chapter 25

Shhh just pretend you didn't realise how late this was. I have a very good reason.

School.

Yeah, it started again. Bane of my existence :'( I have zero free time.

Now that there weren't any bars between us, Nate could have taken the blade from me in a heartbeat. I knew it. He certainly knew it. But we both pretended we didn't.

"Sav, you need to stop-"

"Shut up," I hissed, overcutting his words. "Shut up and start walking. Don't make me say it again."

A memory flashed before my eyes. That evening in the forest, when my teeth had touched his throat. It may have been for the blood debt, but no one ever forgets being so vulnerable to another person. I knew that submission still resonated in him, as it did in me.

Nate shut up and started walking.

I sheathed the blade in my harness, deciding it was safe to let him move on his own. Ben and Alex flanked me, Becky fell in behind us and the Llewellyn guard kept the Rochester in place. We should have gotten clean away.

But as I passed Noah Wynhold, the murderer whom we had caught, he spotted Nate. The Shadowcat was conspicuous enough on his own - tall, dark and imposing. The Wynhold family was sworn to House Davengard, so he didn't open his mouth, just frowned.

That would have been fine, if his blonde cellmate hadn't noticed Noah's reaction. He looked up sharply and started shouting at the top of his lungs, "He's escaping! The Shadowcat's escaping!"

And how did he know that we weren't doing anything official? I wondered. From the cell they couldn't see the restrained guard, or anything except our Moon Guard uniforms. One glance the Rochester guard solved that puzzle. He was frozen in a mentally vacant sort of way, mind-linking someone who wasn't at knifepoint. Someone who could safely raise the alarm.

"Ben, shut him up," I suggested, throwing him the key and hoping it was a skeleton.

"Kill him?" he asked sceptically.

I stopped in my tracks and Nate halted too. Even the mention of killing someone was startling. I wanted to save my friend, but I wasn't prepared to leave bodies in my wake to accomplish that. "No. Gosh no. Just knock him out."

For some reason - probably because this whole breakout was my idea - I had ended up in charge. It was horrible. So horrible, in fact, that I was half tempted to start listening to Nate or mind-link Kai for orders. Because I was a follower, not a leader, and I was going to get us all killed.

Ben slipped into the cell, only to back out just as quickly. Other prisoners were taking up the shout, and we couldn't silence all of them. And I had no doubt that the Rochester guard was mind-linking everyone he could find in the courtyard outside.

I grabbed Nate's collar and yanked him closer to whisper, "Forget your selfless bullshit for a minute. Just tell me what you would do if you actually wanted to escape."

"Move quickly," he said tersely. "Let them raise the alarm - they can panic all they like while we get away. And prioritise getting these damn chains off."

"That's not possible." To stop escape attempts, those keys were kept in the common room above us. Which, at this hour, would be full of off-duty guards. We were as likely to steal them as we were to fly out of Evarlin on broomsticks. "Can you fight with them on?"

Nate rolled his eyes. "Of course. But I can't shift."

It was true that during the day, the guard were stuck in human form, while the Shadowcats suffered no such limitation. If we loosed a shifted Nate into Evarlin, escaping would be laughably easy. Pity Niamh and Brylan hadn't stuck around.