Shadow City

by Francesca Flores

  By the time he returned with pliers and an apron cut into long strips, her anger still hadn’t abated.

  “I don’t need your help,” she spat out.

  “Really?” He smirked and raised an eyebrow. “Are you going to crawl across the street to Teo Matgan’s apartment for help?”

  “Like you sent your Jackals to ask me to help you?” She scoffed as he knelt and began to remove the bullet. As much as she hated the sight of him so close to her, she needed to get it out. To get her mind off it, she would keep him talking. “Was your master not watching tonight? Is that why you were able to sneak out of the kennel and meet me personally?”

  Without bothering to warn her, he pressed down hard on her wound with the fabric. She hissed at the pain and clenched her fists on the arms of the chair.

  “After everything that happened at the Tower, Bautix doesn’t keep me as close anymore,” Kohl said, a hint of bitterness in his voice. “I don’t even know where he is right now. I have a few Jackals who are on my side, but the rest are still his and they think they’re here on his job with me right now. I had to kill these two so they wouldn’t tell the others I made them let you go. As for the rest, do you really think I’ll let them survive the night?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him as he unfurled the makeshift bandages. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “If we’re going to work together, you should know the circumstances.”

  “I didn’t say we—”

  “Yes, you did, actually—or do you not value your friend’s life as much as I thought?” He tilted his head toward the rifle resting near the doors to the balcony.

  If she looked at Kohl’s face, she would want to punch him, so she shifted her focus to his hands. They began wrapping the bandages around her left calf, his fingers brushing against her skin with each rotation. With each touch, a shiver went through her, half with revulsion, half the old part of her that would have given anything for him to be this close to her. The tension she felt when he was near—that she knew he must feel too—came back in seconds, as if a month apart had done nothing to dampen it.

  She narrowed her eyes at him, recalling the moment she’d held a knife to his heart and he’d actually shown fear. That had been the real Kohl; she wouldn’t let him hide that now, no matter what deal he tried to make with her.

  “Bautix has given me busy work. Recruiting Jackals, keeping up petty crimes to distract the Diamond Guards, finding safe places for the additional men he’s hired to lay low.”

  “Additional men?” Aina asked.

  “The Jackals rounded up some of those prisoners you freed last month and gave them an ultimatum; work for Bautix and be free, or be delivered back to the Tower. He also has hired guns from Kaiyan. If they help him take Sumerand for himself, he will fund the coup they’re planning in their own country.” He paused and his words sunk in, Aina remembering the armed Kaiyanis men they’d seen in the Sacoren’s apartment building. “My job has been to make sure they don’t get caught. Bautix still trusts me a lot more than he trusts most of the people he employs, but nowhere near as much as before.”

  “Is that why you want to take him down? Because you’re not the favorite anymore?” she asked, drawing out the words to taunt him—but she couldn’t hide her own curiosity.

  “I am not his employee, Aina. We are two men who used to have similar goals of not getting in each other’s way, but things are different now. He wants the government and the military. I want the streets and the fear of the people; I want them to know my name before I kill them, without me needing to say a word. I want them to step aside the moment they see my shadow. I will take whatever opportunity I can to gain this power. You know that.” He tightened the bandages and then locked eyes with her, his gaze like shards of ice. “I’ve been working with Bautix since I was twelve—I know too much about his work. If he takes back the Tower for himself, he will try to destroy me. Right now, he needs my connections and I need his influence. But the minute one of us gets what we want”—he snapped his fingers—“our partnership will crack like kindling. My goal is to set it aflame before he does.”

  “And you think a partnership with me would work out any better?” she asked, unable to stop a laugh from escaping her lips.

  He tilted his head toward her so that moonlight illuminated half his face, and his dark brown hair fell into his eyes. One side of his lips tugged upward in a smirk. Then he nodded toward the balcony he’d been aiming the gun from—moments away from shooting Teo.

  “Why do you think I waited here instead of showing up at the Dom myself? Because I knew you were stubborn enough to try to run here and stop the assassination instead of simply agreeing to the terms my colleague gave you. And I wanted to watch that—see your face when you realized I was the sniper. You were willing to risk your friend’s life to spare your reputation. We’re more alike than you’ve ever admitted.”

  When he finished his sentence, she lifted her uninjured leg and kicked him in the face with her steel-toed boot.

  “We are not the same,” she said as he fell back.

  He clutched his nose—which looked to be broken—and tried to stop the stream of blood with the unused bits of apron. She allowed herself a smile at the sight. He reset the bone with a crunching sound, tossed the bloodied cloth on the ground, then stood and faced her. He looked like he was two seconds away from choking her.

  “You’re still mad I took the Dom and bested you in a fight.” She scoffed. “I know you want the Dom back, so what would make you want to work with me, of all people?”

  As Kohl took a step closer, Aina stood and shifted behind the chair to at least have something between them.

  Kohl placed his hands on the arms of the chair and leaned toward her, stopping when his face was only a few inches away from hers, but she didn’t react at all, nor wince from the dull pain in her leg. A year after he’d brought her to the Dom, he’d given her a hammer and told her to break the fingers of a grunt at another tradehouse caught stealing kors from the commission owed to Kohl. She’d flinched after doing it, so as a punishment, he’d broken one of her fingers later that day and promised to break another if she didn’t stop crying. She’d bit her tongue so hard it bled, if only to stop the tears.

  “You should be grateful, Aina,” he’d said, while placing her finger in a makeshift splint. “I train you harder than the others because I know you’ll be a great Blade if you learn one thing: Blades feel nothing.”

  He’d trained her to show nothing, and that was the only way to face him now. “You already know that humiliation can only make a person more ruthless.” His breath fell on her face, somehow cold even in the depths of summer. “More unashamed to do what needs to be done. Bautix will stop at nothing to get rid of you because you aren’t under his control. But even I can’t kill a man if I don’t know where he is—that’s where you come in. I’ll use my position to find his spies, informants, anyone he relies on, and you’ll kill them. If we can’t find his hiding place, we need to weaken him enough that he crawls out of it. You’re good with a knife, you’re good with poisons, you’re good at getting out of sticky situations. As far as the Dom, of course I want it back. But Bautix will come for both of us if we don’t kill him first. Once he’s out of the way, we can go back to fighting each other.”

  His words sank in, and the only sounds were their steady breaths and distant voices and footsteps from the street below. Images of the bodies found near the Dom, Bautix’s promise of revenge, how they’d nearly gotten locked in the warehouse filled with poison, and the growing forces of the Jackals every day that meant her employees could barely walk down the street without getting threatened. Fighting Kohl, Bautix, the Jackals, and the Thunder tradehouse all at once only left her vulnerable.

  She’d lose the tradehouses all on her own if she didn’t stop Bautix. Panic rushed through her, a rapid beating of her pulse that blended with Kohl’s next words.

  “You worked for me. You saw most of our clients w
ere from richer districts and that none of my employees grew up so privileged. I care about the people in the Stacks, just like you, and killing Bautix will help protect them all.” Kohl began to walk away, past her and toward the door, but stopped. They stood next to each other, facing in opposite directions, their shoulders nearly touching, and she wondered if she could do it—how fast she could break his neck or stab him in the heart, if he would defend himself this time, if there was a backup, if she’d made another mistake. Yet the other half of her wondered something else.

  Her desire to punish him for all he’d done would be difficult to quench. She didn’t know if she was ready for the emptiness that would follow simply stabbing him—the loss of purpose. By pretending to be on his side, she could draw out his pain.

  Kohl had been unable to turn his gun on her the night he’d killed her parents, because she’d reminded him of a childhood friend he’d killed by accident. He’d taken her to the Dom to assuage his guilt for killing her parents, yet the need to vanquish her and prove his own brutality to himself had never left him. But despite all his talk, she doubted he could ever bring himself to destroy his one remaining ounce of goodness.

  She would use that against him, twist it into a weapon, like he’d taken her fear and made her need him, and like he’d used Teo against her. She despised it, this flicker of light in such a despicable man. She would make him wish he were as brutal as she. Make him regret sparing her and show him she’d always been stronger than him. Test his resiliency, force him to fight that urge to kill her, and douse that spark of decency until nothing was left and he became the monster he so clearly wanted to be. And then, finally, she would kill him.

  Maybe she wasn’t like the Blood King at all.

  Maybe she was worse.

  “I’ll do it,” she said simply.

  A small, triumphant smile flickered at his lips for one moment, and something like relief flashed through his eyes.

  “I’ll get the information and you do the dirty work, just like old times,” Kohl said.

  Fighting the urge to kick him again, she said, “A smuggler from Kaiyan is bringing in a big weapons shipment soon, and sending in smaller ones ahead of time; Bautix’s killing all the middlemen as soon as they make the deliveries. We need to stop him from getting any more weapons.”

  “We also need to stop his allies. There’s a Diamond Guard traitor plotting entryways into the Tower, and I’ve had the Jackals pass notes to him, but I don’t know who it is.” He paused, and Aina remembered the note Tannis had shown her the night before. “Bautix covers his tracks well. I’ll ask Kerys if she knows anything else about it.”

  “Kerys?” Aina asked, raising an eyebrow. “The Jackal you sent to threaten me?”

  “Yes, that one. I’ll find out what I can. How about we meet at our old place in a few days?”

  She shook her head sharply. “I want this job done as soon as possible. We’ll meet tomorrow at noon with whatever you can get.”

  For a moment, he glared at her, not seeming to take kindly to her ordering him around. She stared him down as he considered. Eventually, he shrugged, his casual demeanor sliding back in place.

  “Tomorrow it is,” he said, retrieving the rifle he’d left near the balcony doors and then walking back toward her. “And if you need to reach me for anything, I’m staying in a house near the southern docks, painted green. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  “All right,” she said. “We have a deal, Kohl.”

  Kohl turned so he faced her profile and his shadow fell over her. A curious smile shifted onto his lips, one that made her stiffen and remember all the times he’d drawn her in before.

  “Do you remember one day, Aina, when you were eleven?” He spoke in a whisper, like revealing a secret. “It was the coldest winter this city had seen in either of our lifetimes. You woke up with a gift next to you. Do you still have that memory or did your addiction to glue rob you of it?”

  It came to her like a rush of cold air in the dead of night.

  She’d been stuck outside in the middle of winter. The snow glittered under the stars. Her shoes were filled with holes and were about to fall off. It had been a bitterly cold night, with dry wind chapping her lips and making her skin burn. It was one of those nights that she no longer cared about her life. If there was nowhere to lie down and be warm, then what was the point in anything at all?

  The next morning, she woke up on a fire escape. A pair of shoes sat next to her. Though most people pretended she was invisible, someone she’d never met had finally shown kindness without waiting to see if she would thank them or return the favor. They’d wanted her to survive another night. Seeing that gift had made her want to keep fighting, because if a stranger had seen the value of her life, then maybe she deserved more than choking on glue, starving, or freezing to death. She’d worn those shoes every day for a year before Kohl took her in and gave her a new pair.

  She drew in a shallow breath and turned to look at him.

  “If it wasn’t for me that winter,” Kohl said, his gaze searing into her as if he were trying to read her mind, “would you have gotten frostbite? Would you have even lasted long enough to pull yourself away from glue?” Without letting her answer, he said, “One day, you’re going to admit how much you need my help. I’ll be waiting for that moment.”

  8

  Once Kohl left, Aina only had to wait a moment until she heard the sound of several quick gunshots fired, each one making her grit her teeth. After a door below opened and shut with a creaking noise, she walked down the stairs, taking in each dead Jackal Kohl had left behind. Then she crossed the street and entered Teo’s apartment building with Kohl’s last words echoing in her mind: One day, you’re going to admit how much you need my help.

  She shook off the chill that came with those words and knocked on Teo’s door. Footsteps came a few moments later and the door swung open. Teo stood there in his nightclothes with a gun pointed at her.

  “Hello to you too,” she said, limping past him into the apartment.

  “Didn’t know who it would be,” Teo said, locking the door behind him and turning on the lights. “What happened to your leg?”

  Instead of replying immediately, she turned to take in his new, sparsely furnished apartment, even though she’d seen it a few times already. She didn’t know how to, or if she even should, explain what had happened—all she knew was that she’d needed to come see him. Her eyes flicked to the window, from where she could make out the balcony of the restaurant across the street. Kohl’s wicked smile as he’d pointed the gun at Teo’s window. Her shoulders tensed as she locked that image in her memory.

  “Kohl sent some Jackals to the Dom to threaten us,” she said, staring at the city lights through the window. “But he offered me a job. He wants to turn on Bautix and kill him, and wants my help.”

  “What did you say?” Teo asked quickly, and in his reflection, he wore the same worried look she’d seen countless times when she spoke to him of Kohl, the same concerned tone he used when he feared Kohl was hurting her.

  A bitter taste rose in the back of her throat, and she swallowed it down. This agreement wasn’t because she needed Kohl—it was how she would kill him and Bautix. But the more people who knew about her working with Kohl, the closer it would feel like going back to the past. She didn’t need anyone underestimating her in this. She turned back around to face Teo.

  “I told him I don’t need his help.” She brushed a loose strand of black hair behind her ears and avoided meeting Teo’s eyes. “But Bautix is becoming a real problem; you know he doesn’t want anyone in charge of the tradehouses who’s not aligned with him. Kohl still wants the tradehouses, but as long as Bautix is in the way, I’m not his priority.”

  “So, you want to go after Bautix? We could just let them kill each other.”

  Aina scoffed, and she didn’t have to fake what she said next, or the dread it made her feel. “For now. The Dom isn’t safe as long as Bautix is around.
Besides, Kohl may have killed my parents, but Bautix gave him the job.”

  Teo let out a sharp exhale. “And he’s the one who told the Diamond Guards to hunt you down last month, the one who got my mother killed.”

  A rush of anger flowed through her, and she fought the urge to run outside right now and find Bautix. There was plenty of reason to hate him just as much as, if not more than, Kohl—so why had she only been focused on Kohl?

  Her head spun and a sickened feeling built up inside. All the times he’d tricked and manipulated her had hurt, made her feel worthless and pathetic … but Bautix was the one behind these murders and ruining the city. Bautix was the one threatening her now. The thought came like a punch to the gut, raising questions of why every cruel word Kohl had ever said was imprinted on her mind; why it hurt so much when he’d never actually tried to kill her.

  Was I just too weak to stand up to it all?

  “Aina?” Teo asked. The circle of light from the ceiling lamp above gilded his brown skin, and his eyes were warm, making her want to go closer—farther from Kohl’s chill. “I’m in. Kohl can wait. Bautix had the Jackals leave that note for you, didn’t he? He might attack the Dom soon if we don’t stop him. He’s already terrorizing the south, and we know he’ll kill the Inosen too if it gets him ahead. I’m sick of Steels like him, using us all as scapegoats while they fight one another for power. He doesn’t expect any of us to fight back, but we’ll prove him wrong.”

  Her thoughts slowly came back into focus, and her voice was clearer than she expected it would be. “Let’s do it, then. We’ll show them we’re the real survivors in this city.”

  Their eyes met, and his blazed with that fire of revenge she knew so well. It drew her toward him, and she stopped inches before they touched. His breath caught as he looked down at her, but she didn’t move any closer. Not while she was hiding the truth from him, like Kohl had done to her so many times. She wouldn’t hurt Teo in the same way.

  She sat at Teo’s table as he made tea for them both, and tried not to let her eyes slide closed. As much as she wanted to get to work immediately, her body ached from the fighting and her race through the city to get here in time. She needed plenty of rest for tomorrow, when she would meet with Kohl again. And tomorrow night, she, Ryuu, and the Inosen would begin learning to use the Mothers’ magic as a weapon. The Mothers’ teachings had always said that life was precious. Her parents had fiercely believed that, but her mother had killed someone too—the first taking of a life that Aina had ever witnessed. She’d done it to protect them, to survive—something Aina understood all too well.