“Yeah, well, right back at you!” Konstantin shouted.
The waitress came over, interrupting our heated conversation, and set down in front of me the iced tea I’d ordered. She stood with her hand on her hip, eyeing us both with suspicion. Before, she’d looked at me with concern despite her weariness, but with my bad dye job and Konstantin’s agitation, it had to be obvious we were on the run.
“Is everything okay here?” she asked, her eyes flitting back and forth between the two of us.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” Konstantin replied curtly without looking at her.
“Well, you better keep your voices down, before you start upsetting the customers,” she said with a slight Southern drawl, and she slowly turned and walked away.
Konstantin waited until after she had gone to the other end of the diner before speaking. “And I tried to save Linnea.” He sat up straighter, indignant. “I did save her, actually. Without my intervention, she’d most likely be dead.”
From what Linnea had told me, that sounded true enough. Since I couldn’t argue with Konstantin, I turned the stool away from him and focused on my iced tea.
He sighed, then he leaned toward me, and in a voice just above a whisper he said, “I know what you’re going through. Four years ago, I was almost exactly where you are. I know how frightening and lonely it feels when the kingdom turns against you.”
I took a drink from my tea and didn’t say anything, so he went on. “You and I have been on opposite sides for a while, and I’ve made a lot of wrong choices. But I’m trying to make up for them, and . . . now I’m alone, and you’re alone. So I thought we could be alone together.”
He leaned back away from me. “But I won’t force this. If you wanna go through this all alone, then be my guest. Take on the world by yourself. I won’t fight you.” He reached into his pocket and tossed a few dollars on the counter. “The drink’s on me.”
I heard the stool creak as he got up, but I didn’t look back. Not until I heard the door chime did I turn to watch him walking out the door, into the bright spring day. In a few more seconds he’d be gone, and I’d have no way to contact him or find out what he knew.
So even though I wasn’t sure exactly how this friendship thing would play out, or even if this wasn’t some kind of trick, I knew what I had to do. I cursed under my breath, and then I jumped off the stool and ran out after Konstantin.
TWO
tracking
Where are we going?” I asked. It might have been a better question to ask before I’d gotten in the black Mustang with Konstantin, but I hadn’t wanted him to leave without me. And did it really matter where we were going? I had no place to be. No place to call home.
“I don’t know.” He glanced in the rearview mirror, watching the diner disappear behind us as he sped down the highway. “Do you have somewhere in mind?”
I shook my head. “No.” Then I looked over at him. “But we should find someplace where we can really talk.”
“How about a motel?” he suggested, and when I scowled at him, he laughed. “If I was going to murder you, I would’ve done it already, and if I was just looking to get laid, believe me when I say there are easier ways to do it than this.”
“Why don’t you come out with it right now? I think a talk is long overdue.”
He smirked. “You sound so menacing.”
I looked out the window, watching the lush greenery as we sped by it. Even with me moving all over as a tracker, it was always jarring to go from the harsh cold of Doldastam to the bright warmth of anywhere else. Home was so far away, and this felt like a whole other world.
“How did you find me?” I asked, still watching the full ash trees that lined the side of the road.
“It was actually quite simple,” he said, and I looked back at him. He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a blond lock of hair held together with a thread.
Hesitantly, I took it from him. It was a pale golden color, with a subtle wave to it—exactly how my hair looked before I destroyed it with the bad dye job. This was my hair.
And all the pieces suddenly fell together. How Konstantin had been able to find me no matter where I was, like the hotel room in Calgary, or outside of Storvatten when I’d captured him. Even when he’d visited me in the lysa before.
Konstantin had been a Kanin tracker, from a long line of trackers, and thanks to his strong bloodline, he’d had a powerful affinity for it. Like many trackers, he had the ability to imprint onto a changeling if he had something from them—a lock of hair usually worked best.
It turned the changeling into a kind of homing beacon. Konstantin couldn’t read minds, but he could sense extreme emotions in the trackee that meant they were in trouble. The recent events in Doldastam, along with my general fear and anxiety the last few days, would’ve turned me into a megawatt searchlight.