All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [301]
She flipped to the other page and saw: FIONA POST.
Only Louis ever had the ability to render her speechless—but this, even for him, was going too far. Audrey, however, found her voice. “How did you get these? You shouldn’t have even been able to enter Altium—”
Louis waved her concerns away. Yes, yes. Technicalities and details. That pesky Pactum Pax Immortalis. I shouldn’t be able to touch anything that belongs to the League.” He slapped his hand across the page in utter defiance of the centuries-old treaty.
“Unless one of us gave it to you,” Audrey whispered. “Unless you had help.”
“Before you ask how and who,” Louis replied, “allow me my little secrets for a while yet. Without an air of mystery, I fear I would as bland as all those other dull Immortals in your life.”
Audrey knew prying information out of Louis when he was being difficult would be harder than wrestling the ocean. But what Immortal in their right mind would have helped Louis? And the more important question: Why?
She returned her attention to the documents and pulled off her opera gloves. She had an opportunity. She slid her finger down the center of the pages—then across—and then made two diagonal marks with her fingernail.
The pages shuddered, sparked with magic, and flowered into a thousand shreds of confetti.
Audrey brushed the trash off the table.
“Well,” Louis said, raising an eyebrow, “that should keep Fiona and Eliot safe from the League—at least until the Council can come to consensus again. Which should that take what? A month? All summer?”
“Perhaps,” Audrey murmured.
Would Lucia wait that long? Had the League ever taken action without its bureaucratic processes?
“Does that then satisfy your need to tend to our children first?” he asked.
“No. It delays the danger; it does not eliminate it.”
Louis sighed. “The world in which our children live will always be filled with danger. We cannot eliminate it, and it would be foolish to try.”
Audrey considered this . . . but said nothing.
“There is one more thing we might do, however,” Louis whispered and looked about. “We can gather support, in secret, for the coming war. Not for one side or the other, but for them.”
Louis would not mention such a thing unless he had already taken action. “You will not be able to keep that secret for long.”
“No,” he admitted. “The best secrets are the ones least kept.”
“When they find out—both families—we will have to take bold, bloody action. Will you be ready for that?”
“It gives me chills of pleasure when you speak thusly,” Louis purred.
He reached for her hand again, but she moved away before he could distract her.
Audrey opened her clutch. “I have a gift for you as well,” she said.
“Oh?” Louis said and looked surprised for once in his life.
She wasn’t sure she should do this. It would be as dangerous as slipping Cerberus from his leash . . . or arming a nuclear device. But all her second-guessing couldn’t stop her now; this already been decided—not with her head, but with her newly awakened emotions.
Audrey took out a battered enveloped, so worn the paper was fuzzy and it almost fell apart at her touch.
“Eliot left this with a note explaining how you gave it to him before the final battle in the Poppy Lands. I . . . I was moved.”
She gingerly removed the contents: bits of bank statements and torn dollar bills and old restaurant receipts and post-it notes and tissues—all of it had been meticulously taped back together into a proper heart shape.
Audrey set the thing on the table between them, took Louis’s hand, and set it upon the battered token.
His smile went slack with astonishment as he beheld it. “What have you done?” he whispered.
She patted his hand. “I give you your heart back, Louis, healed and whole.”
He gazed at the paper heart, tracing its rough edges, speechless for the first time .
“I’m sorry,” she said, uncomfortable with his silence. “I am so good at cutting things . . . not so good, though, at patching them together. It was the best I could do.”
Louis met her eyes. “You realize,