Blood & Flowers Read Online Free

because we’d never all sat down to put the jigsaw puzzle pieces together. We also knew that we worked with Floss and magic, and that not everyone made allowances for magic, no matter the context or the content.
    Lucia agreed that, yes, people found us. But even though she could read undercurrents better than almost anyone, she walked right through them, went over to the other side of the river, and added, “But we’d do better if word of mouth didn’t take so long.”
    â€œWe do just fine,” Tonio said, and there was a jaggy edge to his voice.
    Nicholas, who had been watching and listening, made the decision to side with Lucia. “She’s right, Tonio. I love the Outlaws, you know I do. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. But money does grease the wheels. Lately ours have been grinding.”
    This was Nicholas, remember. I love Nicholas, I think. I love Tonio, too, but it’s a very different thing. And extra money would be nice. I admit it—I live hanging on to one end of a very skinny shoestring. It’d be nice to be holding on to a rope instead. So I went with what looked like the winning side. “It’s not like money’s a bad thing.”
    Tonio stood up—stood up so fast that his chair scraped the floor and left a nasty scratch in its wake. He stood up with enough of a jerk that the table shimmied. Floss put her half-eaten slice of pizza down very gently and looked wary. But Lucia, even though she looked wretched, stuck to her original idea. “It’d just be nice,” she almost whispered, “to see a full house when we open instead of just before we close.”
    â€œAll right,” Tonio said, and his voice was calm. Too calm. Restrained. “Let me make sure that everyoneunderstands just what happens—now—and how it relates to what happened then.”
    Max shifted in his seat, uneasy. He looked like there might be a fire under his chair.
    â€œNow we put up flyers. Now people who want to find us do. Now word of mouth builds. More people come. By the time anyone who can cause trouble finds out where we are, we’re gone. This all works because the troublemakers are slow.
    â€œThen,” Tonio continued, in that same flat voice, “we named the place, the date, the time. Then we had bigger crowds. Then I got jailed for being a fey-loving rabble rouser and a magic user, a ‘friend of the enemy.’”
    The silence in the room was almost loud enough to drown out the noise of the rain.
    â€œI prefer now to then,” Tonio said at last, and he left, a half-eaten pizza slice still on his plate.
    Max got up to follow him. “Not one of your best performances, everyone,” he said over his shoulder.
    More silence. Then, “I still think—,” Lucia said in a tiny voice, but she was cut off by Floss.
    â€œDon’t. Don’t think.” This was Floss in her stevedore voice. When she uses it she’s never attempting kindness. Whoever else Floss sticks up for, Tonio is always at the top of her list. And since we all know she uses magic, comments about it, especially paired with the word “enemy,” make her understandably twitchy.
    Lucia never forgot coming here with Floss. That trip was her first point of entry into the Outlaws. She thought of Floss as her ally. When she heard that voice directed at her, she shriveled up like an unwatered plant.
    I saw it happen. I saw Floss see it happen, too. Relationships have never seemed to be one of Floss’s strong points. They fluster her. It makes me wonder just how things work in Faerie.
    Floss looked at Lucia, growled under her breath, and flickered out of the room. Lucia gulped on what sounded like a sob, shoved her chair back so hard it toppled, and disappeared in her turn, although she just went around a wall and into the kitchen. I could hear her slamming pots into the sink.
    Nicholas and I sat alone, the remains of the pizza mute witness to