Read Online Brightly (Flicker #2) by Kaye Thornbrugh - Free Book Online Page A

of the summer. Maybe even longer. We’d have to shut down Flicker completely.” He looked to Alice. “Would Conall give you that kind of leave?”
    She shrugged. “If I explained the situation, sure. Even if I didn’t tell him why I needed time off, he’d probably give it to me, anyway. He knows I wouldn’t ask if it were just something frivolous.”
    “And you guys…” Lee began, glancing toward Nasser and Jason.
    Nodding wearily, Nasser said, “We’d have to use most of the money we’ve saved toward rent a few months in advance, so we don’t come back to find someone else living in our apartment. We’d lose plenty of business in the meantime, too.”
    “For what?” Jason bemoaned. “A stack of papers with Nem and Morgan’s writing? Some kind of twisted grades on how well we learned magic?”
    “And our true names,” Alice said quietly. “Plus everything else we don’t know, everything they never told us. Haven’t you ever wondered?”
    “Wondered what?”
    “Why they picked us, for one thing. And…” She lowered her gaze a little, looking almost self-conscious. “Well, you and Nasser know your names and where you come from, but not all of us do. That’s worth something. To me, anyway.”
    Alice’s gaze moved to Filo, who was still turning the bottle in his hands. At length, he set the bottle down and pressed his palms against the table.
    “I’ve lived this long without my name,” he said, not quite looking at any of them. “I don’t need it. I don’t want it. But I also don’t like the idea of them having it. It doesn’t belong to them. Besides…”
    “What choice do we really have?” Nasser finished.
    “Exactly. If we help them, then they’ll leave us alone, and never speak our names to another soul. We can make sure of that. Now that’s something.”
    “How?” Lee asked.
    “A geis ,” Filo said simply.
    “It’s a kind of magical contract,” Alice explained. “It’s usually some kind of prohibition, something that a person is forbidden to do, either by magic or their own sense of obligation. Breaking a geis will cause something bad to happen.”
    “Like what?” Lee asked.
    Filo looked at her. “Have you ever heard of Cúchulainn?”
    “No.”
    “He was a hero from Irish mythology who had two conflicting geasa set upon him. The first was that he could never refuse any food offered to him by a woman. The second was that he could never eat the meat of a dog. One day, he met an old woman on the road who offered him dog meat. He couldn’t comply with one geis without breaking the other.”
    “What happened to him?” Lee asked.
    “He died.”
    She grimaced. “Immediately?”
    Filo shrugged. “Eventually. Breaking the geasa weakened him, and he died in battle.”
    “Well, do you think you can convince those three to let you put a geis on them? One that keeps them from sharing any of our information?”
    “Any of our information,” Filo corrected. “They don’t have anything on you, Lee.”
    “It’s all the same to me,” she said with a shrug. “We’re in this mess together.”
    That earned her a small smile. “Anyway,” Filo said, “if they’re really that desperate, yes, I think we could get them to agree to a geis . I can’t say how effective it would be. That’s heavy magic, and I don’t think any of us have ever tried anything like it.”
    “We have some time to work on that part,” Nasser said. “I doubt they’d agree to it until after the job is done, just like they probably won’t give us the files until then.”
    “Can’t blame them,” Alice said. “We’d do it the same way.”
    “So we’re doing this on the honor system?” Lee frowned.
    “Looks that way,” Filo sighed. “For now.”
    Nasser looked around the table, from face to face. “We’re all agreed them? Hands up if you want to give it a go.”
    His was the first hand up. One by one, the rest of them followed suit: Lee, then Alice, then Jason. Filo stared down at the