Free The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi Page A

should have stood first. The patriarch of House Nyx stared down at him.
    Until now, he had only seen Hypnosat a distance. He knew the other boy’s skin, a deep umber like the rain-soaked bark of an oak tree. He knew the textured hair cropped close to his head. Even knew his strangely colored eyes, a blue so pale they looked like panes of frost. Hypnos was beautiful at a distance. Up close, he was just plain staggering. Enrique stumbled to his feet, hoping the other boy hadn’t noticed. When he lookedup, Hypnos’s eyes looked darker. The pupils blown out, as if he was trying to take in all of him too.
    “Had I known what pretty company you keep, I might have met with you sooner, S é verin,” said Hypnos, not taking his eyes off Enrique.
    S é verin let out a brittle laugh. “I doubt that. You’ve been a patriarch for two years, and you still have to run every inhale andexhale by the Order of Babel.I can’t imagine what they must make of your meeting with me. My understanding was that any Order member would be forbidden from speaking to me if they remembered my existence. Do they even know what you’re doing right now?”
    Hypnos raised one eyebrow. “Do you want them to?”
    S é verin didn’t answer, and Hypnos didn’t push it.
    “You requested a meeting,” said S é verin. “Why?”
    After all this time , Enrique thought.
    Hypnos grinned. “I wanted to meet my thieves.”
    “Well, you found us.”
    Hypnos made a tsk sound. “Now, now. I only did a little bit of the work. You did the rest.”
    Enrique shook off the dregs of the illusion. He took a step closer to S é verin. All his awareness shifted around the inflection of Hypnos’s words.
    “What do you mean?” he asked.
    “Lo! It speaks,” exclaimed Hypnos.He clapped his hands. “That fake compass you left me was a pretty decoy, but there was blood on it. And so I performed a little test … Whoever had stolen from me had bled all over my poor stone beastie. So, I added a bit of blood Forging to my letter to make sure that none but the thief could read it. I had my men deliver it to every person I could think of. Who, I wondered, would steal from me ? And why ? And then, of course, when I ran out of options, I sent it to you. The fancy hotelier with a reputation a little too spotless, who’s always a little too close to every theft of an Order object. So, you see,” he said, his expression suddenly quite serious, “I didn’t find you. You brought yourself to me.”
    Enrique squeezed his eyes shut. Too late, he remembered glimpsing S é verin’s letter.The curious expanse of blank page. No wonder he couldn’t read it.
    S é verin betrayed nothing. “Clever.”
    “One can always rely on a man’s hubris. I figured you wouldn’t share the letter.” Hypnos tilted his head. “How devastating for you. To let down your team and admit that you’d failed. Oh, don’t look at me like that, S é verin. The Order may not have looked in your direction all this time, but Ihave.”
    “I’m flattered you think I’m worth watching.”
    Hypnos winked. “With a face like that? I must not be the only one.”
    “What do you want, Hypnos?”
    “You know what I can do to you. I can have you arrested, executed, tarred and feathered, et cetera. There’s no point, really, in detailing it.” Hypnos paused to smile. “But I don’t want to do any of that. I’m actually quite an exceptional humanbeing, and, I fancy myself rather generous. So instead, I ask only two things. First, that you return the compass. Second, that you turn your acquisition skills to an object I’ve long desired. In return, I’ll give you what you want.”
    S é verin’s face had gone rigid, his mouth flattened to a line, his dark eyes nearly burning.
    Slowly, Hypnos raised his hand. His Babel Ring, a thin crescent moonthat spread across the middle of his hand, caught the light. From where Enrique stood, it looked like a scythe.
    “ Mon cher, you and I always had so much in