Aelwyn pushed up her sleeves, hiked up her skirts, and ran after the little criminal, pushing gentlemen to the side and stepping on ladies' toes. Her face flushed with anger and embarrassment. Had she looked that much like a rube? Like such an easy mark?
It shamed her to think she had been robbed the minute she set foot in London. Her aunt had cautioned her, had ordered the driver to see her safely into the palace, and Aelwyn had only her stubbornness to blame.
She saw the boy ahead of her— he was about to turn the corner— and once he did, she knew he would be lost, her valuables gone forever if she did not act. There was no other recourse. She had to do it.
The boy had given her no choice. She stopped running and forced her heartbeat to slow, her breath to steady. She closed her eyes and focused. She had seen him for the briefest moment when he'd offered her a bite. She touched stone she wore around her neck—obsidian, deep as midnight—and called up his face in her memory.
His grubby little face; the face of a young street beggar, a naughty boy with shifty colt blue eyes; and an operative of a local syndicate, working for a Fagin who was sure to be lurking somewhere, taking whatever he stole and string him along with pittance. She concentrated and called her memory of his eyes, and looked through them into his soul.
Aelwyn would not have been able to do this to just anybody, but the boy was young and poor, untrained and uneducated. Children from good families were taught how to protect one's soul from a mage. But the little thief had not had the privilege of learning how to hide his soul from the world, to disguise its nature,; and so she had been able to see into his very essence, into the spirit that made him who he was. As she looks into that deep abyss, a clam settled upon her.
The name of his soul came to her mind in a whisper.
Bradai, she called. To me.
She opened her eyes. Just as she commanded, a thin gray column of smoke, shimmering in the afternoon light, came streaking towards her. She reached in the afternoon light, came streaking towards her. She reached out and caught it with her fist. It was small and cold and shivering. His soul.
No one noticed the little boy frozen in his tracks in the shadows, his mouth agape, his foot hovering above the sidewalk in midstep, a large ladies' valise toward him, holding his soul in the palm of her hand.she looked right into his eyes, which were blank now; dead. He did not know what had happened to him; did not understand what had taken hold of his very essence and frozen him into place.
She plucked her bag from him and slapped him, hard, on the cheeks. His soul trembled in her gasps, wriggling—gasping for air, fro breath—for release. Aelwyn sighed. He hadn't deserved this. It was wrenching to perform an extraction on small a child. He was only a little boy, a desperate, hungry street urchin, and his gang leader probably wouldn't have even known what to do with the treasure he carried. Most likely he would have tossed the jars of tonics and herbs into the garbage, broken the crystal glass, and sold the stones for a tenth of what they were worth. She turned away. When she was a few blocks safely past, she released her grasp on him and let his soul back into his body.