Free Altered by Gennifer Albin Page B

gown trails behind her. Despite its high neckline, only sheer mesh covers her skin, and across it a snarling dragon breathes fire. The embroidery is elegant and lends an exotic air to her entrance. Her hair nests on top of her head and tendrils curl down against her neck. When she turns, I stifle a gasp. Her cosmetics are less tasteful than the ones she wore in Arras. Her skin is painted milky white, her cheekbones rouged deep pink, and her lips drawn into a tiny red heart, but her toffee eyes are the same, even with the petite peacock feathers that dance at the ends of her lashes.
    Valery.
    “Darling, you’re late for lunch.” Kincaid’s tone is simpering, and I get the impression he’s putting on a show.
    I meet Jost’s eyes and then Erik’s, and I know we’re debating the same question. Do we say something or pretend not to recognize her?
    In the end, Valery chooses for us. “You can’t rush perfection,” she simpers back, and the whole act is quite sickening. “That’s something Adelice knows.”
    “Then you’ve met our delightful new friends,” Kincaid cries in his giddy, childlike way. “Tell me how!”
    “I was Adelice’s aesthetician at the Coventry before I sought sanctuary with you,” she says.
    I can’t keep the words from tumbling out. “I thought you were dead.”
    “Thought or hoped?” The venom she displayed to me in our last conversation before she disappeared from the Coventry drips from her words, but she smiles brightly to cover it. We had been friends once, but Valery disappeared before either of us had come to grips with the suicide of Enora, my mentor and Valery’s lover. “Loricel aided my escape, and Kincaid granted me safe passage.”
    “Any enemy of the Guild is a friend of mine, and how fortunate I am to make such a lovely friend.” He draws Valery’s hand up to his mouth, and I see a flash of her red fingernails. Instantly I’m reminded of a moment I witnessed in the hall of the High Tower. Her red fingernails on Enora’s back.
    “But you’re—” I choke the last word back. If Loricel had managed to help her escape, why did she lead me to believe Valery was dead? It isn’t my place to bring up the past, not before I’ve had a private moment to talk to Valery about her change of … heart.
    Valery arches a perfectly shaped eyebrow at me, a challenge. “Forgive me, Adelice. We parted under trying circumstances.”
    “There’s nothing to forgive,” I murmur. “If I had known you were alive, I would have tried to help you.”
    “Others helped me,” Valery tells us. “Earth is far from the ideal hiding place, as I’m sure you’re discovering, but Loricel made a compelling argument.”
    “Which was?” Erik asks.
    “Run or be ripped. Not much of a choice. I might have done it years ago if I’d known about Kincaid. He immediately opened his home to me.”
    “I had not thought I could love again until Valery entered my life,” Kincaid says, raising her hand to his lips again.
    My head is starting to spin and I stare down at my plate, wondering if food might help me digest this news, but I discover it’s gone, stripped away by the valet while I was distracted. My fingers reach for a lock of loose hair and I twist it nervously. Valery and Kincaid can’t have known each other more than a few days. It doesn’t make sense.
    “My dear, your arm,” Kincaid says.
    Without the jacket I left in the drawing room, the burns I suffered from the falling aeroship debris are evident. They’ve healed into rough scabs that are more unsightly than painful. I shrug it off, flashing a smile at Dante, whose eyes narrow.
    “An accident,” I assure Kincaid.
    “They look like chemical burns,” Dante says. It’s an innocuous comment, but he’s already accused me of bringing down the aeroship our first day on Earth and I know he’s tallying this as further evidence.
    “I insist that one of my men take a look at it. Don’t let your time in the Icebox fool you,”