“I don’t have any current offenses,” I said. “Let alone priors. I’m not doing anything wrong. I just don’t think it’s right for you to harass helpless old women.”

“This punk,” lady cop said, and came at me fast.

“Shit,” I whispered, closing my eyes and bracing myself for the inevitable assault.

Instead, an explosion rocked the street.

I opened my eyes to see two of the cops running down the street. One was on his radio. Flames swirled up from a scorched hole in the side of a building around the corner.

“What about this guy?” asked the woman, lingering with her hand in the air in front of me, like she was aching to get in one last punch.

“Don’t be an idiot,” short cop said.

Then they were gone. I breathed a sigh of relief. Exhaustion washed over me. I needed to be in bed beneath the bridge.

“You’re welcome,” called a voice from a doorway across the street.

I squinted into the shadows. “Who’s there?”

He strolled into the street with a smile on his face and his hands full of lightning. A single bolt spun in a beautiful sphere, dozens of strands of it intricately coiled together. It was beautiful—almost as perfect as his face, which looked like summer even though summer was gone.

“Hi, Niv,” I said. “I take it that’s your handiwork burning a hole in that building over there?”

“Hey, Solomon. You looked like you could use a bit of help.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He clasped his hands together and the lightning shrank down to nothing. I felt so happy to see him, and I hated how happy I felt.

Niv was the personal bodyguard for my best friend, Ash. Yes, that Ash—the Refugee Princess, living in hiding in the very same city where her mother was queen.

Niv’s job was to move her from safe house to safe house. Because Ash was an othersider, and the queen’s advisers assured her that if the bigoted citizens of Darkside ever found out that her daughter was part of that hated and feared community of so-called criminals and parasites, there’d be a full-scale uprising.

So Ash and Niv were on the run, in the city she’d rule one day. If she lived long enough—and the city didn’t tear itself apart before then.

“Cops have been getting even crazier lately,” he said. He smelled like burning sage—a clear, cleansing smell.

I’ve never trusted him. I don’t know why. Maybe because he’s so beautiful? Pretty people can’t be relied upon. They have too many options.

“Can’t you talk to her mother about that?” I asked.

“You know as well as I do that the police are a law unto themselves. They don’t even listen to the queen.”

“She could fire the commissioner, hire somebody who isn’t such a bigot.”