Chapter 31: Back they recoil’d, afraid at first, and call’d me Sin[. – II, 759-760
“I don’t smell a thing!”
Ezra sighs, but starts sprinting down a nearby alley. A beat later and Tally is following right behind.
“How can you smell them and I can’t?” she calls after him.
“Because I can find Lane Laube in a hall of mirrors reeking of death,” he thinks, but doesn’t say.
The truth is, he doesn’t know how Lane’s masking fails for only him.
That’s not even right.
He knows they’re masking. Can sense they’re attempting to disappear. They don’t smell the same. But Ezra has their scent anyway. Distantly, he wonders if Perenelle might know how this works.
Lane had disappeared so suddenly that no one had any hope of following them directly. So, Ezra had let them go for the moment, turning his attention to Tally and getting her calm and reassured. Turns out, the only thing for it is him taking her to find Lane and them all tracking Nihira together. He’d conceded without much persuading, not caring, for the moment, how visible his feelings for Lane might appear.