Shadow City

by Francesca Flores

  Her gaze turned north when she cut through an alley. Bautix wouldn’t wait much longer before attacking the rest of the city.

  As she kept walking, she caught the stench of the river on the air, as well as the copper scent of blood. Slowing, she strained her ears and heard fighting from a nearby road. The dull sound of a punch, someone stumbling in a puddle, the clash of metal on metal.

  She slid through an alley to the next street, holding her breath as she took in the fight.

  With blood splattered on his clothes, Kohl faced four men. Two bodies already lay in the mud, and even without much light, Aina could make out the Jackal tattoos on their forearms.

  One of the remaining Jackals was close enough for Kohl to grab; he cracked the man’s neck, but instead of letting him crumble, held him up as a shield when one of the other men shot at him. He then tossed the body to the side and delivered a punch to the jaw of the man who’d been stupid enough to shoot at him from close range.

  Daggers slid into each of Kohl’s hands. He struck at the men to either side of him, and blood flowed from their necks a moment later. The final Jackal, the one Kohl had punched in the jaw, now faced Kohl with his own blade drawn. Kohl tossed his own weapons to the mud and backed the man into the wall of the nearest home. The man’s blade touched Kohl’s chest, but fear flashed in his eyes.

  “Blood King, I don’t know anything, I—”

  “That much is obvious.” Kohl grabbed the man’s wrist and with one push, forced the man’s blade up into his own throat. The man’s eyes widened as he choked on his blood. Kohl watched and waited until the man went still, then let him drop.

  A moment of silence passed where the only sound was the rain beating against the dirt roads and corrugated metal roofs around them.

  “I know you’re there, Aina,” Kohl said then, and Aina stepped into the road.

  She took in the bodies around her as she walked up to Kohl, a thousand thoughts flickering through her mind. Plenty of bold people had tried to corner Kohl in dark alleys and didn’t live long enough to regret it, but she doubted that was the case here. These men had been scared and tried to fight for their lives but failed. She suspected, with a twinge of unease, that he’d cornered them instead.

  “They’re all useless,” he said, bending to pick up his daggers. “None of them know a thing.”

  He straightened and finally met her eyes. Her breath caught at the devastation she saw there; he must know about the Dom. He’d taken it out on these grunts who had probably only become Jackals a week ago and knew nothing of Bautix’s plans. All of Kohl’s lessons on how to be a Blade flashed through her thoughts. They killed with discretion, focusing on their target and no one else. Only people who tried to kill them, got in the way of their target, or saw them and might rat them out were liable to be killed as well. Blades felt nothing. A killing spree blinded by rage was not in their repertoire.

  But right now, it was hard to care. A brief surge of justice swept through her. She’d been right to come here; he wanted Bautix dead as much as she did.

  “We need to talk,” she said, then turned south.

  A few minutes later, they reached the southern river docks. Raindrops smacked against the black surface of the water, louder down here than up above. Examining the houses, she spotted a wooden one painted green and on a raised foundation—it was probably the best constructed house anywhere this far south. A light was visible through the front window. Kohl nodded and led the way, pulling a key from his pocket.

  She glanced once more in the direction of the Dom. Some wildly hopeful part of her wondered if the rain had stopped the fire in time to salvage anything, but before she could let that hope grow too strong, Kohl opened the door and gestured for her to enter.

  14

  Aina stepped into Kohl’s new home. Everything was wooden, the floor and walls and all the furniture, except for a sofa in the middle of the room. There was also a small table and chairs, and a basic kitchen. A few doors led off to other rooms, and the whole place was lit with candles rather than the electric lights Kohl had favored in the Dom. She supposed he didn’t have anyone to impress here. The candles gave off a warm glow, making the house feel rather comfortable. Annoyance prickled through her at the thought. He didn’t deserve this when the Dom was gone.

  A moment of silence passed as they both moved toward the sofa. His shoulders were still tensed like he was about to break something.

  “Kohl,” she finally said, and they faced each other at the same time. “They burned it down.”

  His eyes drew her in, turmoil reflecting in the blue depths like a storm on the ocean. He held his jaw so tightly, she thought he’d break his teeth.

  The Dom was destroyed.

  The only home they’d both had after their parents died and they were left alone in the world.

  At that point, she was convinced no one knew her better.

  She placed her hand on the sofa and it rested between them—she didn’t think much of it, just silently decreased the space between them.

  Memories flooded her mind: standing at Kohl’s side in the armory and wishing he’d take her hand right before he threatened her; punching her in the face and taking all her money, and then saying it was because he cared for her.

  As if building a shield around her heart, she tucked away the memories, the emotions, and hid them in the back of her mind. They weren’t that bad, really, and should only belong to her weaker, past self. None of it would help her beat Bautix or stand up to Kohl once this partnership ended. Being hurt by the past was a waste of time.

  “It had to have been him,” Kohl said, one hand curling into a fist above his knee. His eyes took on that steel-hard glare she knew meant he was imagining killing someone slowly. “I’m going to gut that man alive.”

  She nodded in silent agreement, then leaned back on the sofa, her eyes trailing to the wooden walls, half in shadow and half in candlelight. If the fire had happened here, the house would be gone in seconds.

  “Where are you going to sleep tonight, Aina?” Kohl asked. “Where are the others going to sleep?”

  “They have somewhere, and I’m not tired,” she said, though her eyes felt raw and her limbs heavy. How could she sleep when Bautix was still alive?

  “Me either,” he said, standing. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Without another word, he vanished into a side room. She looked around again, noticing a few doors in the back of the house. For the Stacks, it was rather large, and she wondered who this place had belonged to. Years ago, fishing had been one of the biggest industries for the country, before the water got too polluted from factory waste and no one wanted to eat the fish there anymore. Perhaps this had belonged to someone in the industry.

  One ajar door showed the edge of a bed covered in only sheets. It was far too hot in the summer, and especially humid down by the river, to need anything more. Wiping sweat from under her eye and pulling her hair into a higher ponytail, she stood and peered into the other rooms.

  One, where Kohl sat sharpening knives, was a smaller version of the armory at the Dom. Her stomach twisted at the thought. All those weapons had cost hundreds of thousands of kors, and now they were gone.

  The last door was mostly closed, but Kohl had said to make herself comfortable, so she pushed it open and walked inside. Lighting two candles on a chest of drawers, she took in the room and suddenly felt wide awake.

  Before Kohl owned it, it might have been another bedroom or maybe a study. But now there were two small cauldrons on a low table with burners, and several shelves of ingredients in glass jars—powders, liquids, roots, herbs. It wasn’t as well stocked as the poison room at the Dom had been, but close enough.

  Walking over, she opened a few of the jars, breathing in herbal and floral scents, her knowledge coming to life. Then she remembered the poison Bautix’s men had used at the factory the other day—Kohl’s brew.

  If there was anything they were equals at apart from stabbing people,
it was poison brewing. Without knowing the ingredients he’d used and not wanting to ask him for help, she couldn’t create an exact replica, but she could make something similar. Not wanting to sleep yet and see the fire repeat itself in her dreams, she set to work creating that poison and making a few she used regularly in her darts.

  She was glad she’d come here, to see Kohl’s own hatred of Bautix, his resolve to fight back—it fueled her own. But it also reminded her that he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, no matter who he hurt in the process.

  As she set up the ingredients for the poisons she would make, she recalled a night with Kohl in the city’s only cemetery, behind the mansions of Amethyst Hill.

  Cool mist had swept over the cemetery, past simple tombstones and grand mausoleums. Fall had arrived, and the muddy ground was strewn with gold, scarlet, and umber foliage that crunched under her boots as she followed Kohl.

  They’d stopped in the middle of a row, and after a few minutes of silent shivering, she did what Kohl usually discouraged and asked a question.

  “Why did you bring me out here?”

  Her voice seemed too loud that evening. The outskirts of Kosín were much quieter, the air much cleaner and calmer than within the city. Her gaze trailed toward the mansions at a short distance and a scowl took over her face. Through the windows, she saw a fireplace blazing in one, multicolored lights strung in another, the edge of a bed draped in wool blankets.

  He nodded at a tombstone, but said nothing. She noted, then, how his hands had curled into fists and how his blue eyes seemed a deeper sapphire than usual. His shoulders had slightly tensed up like they always did right before punching someone in the jaw.

  She took an involuntary step backward, cursing herself for her fear, but she couldn’t help the small paranoia rising through her—was this going to be her grave? Had she done something wrong and he’d brought her here to kill her?

  In the four years she’d so far lived at the Dom with Kohl, she’d seen him kill two other employees—one for disloyalty and the other for incompetence. Her eyes flicked south, toward where the diamond mines were settled beyond the forest. Had he discovered her secret; her small dose of freedom? Her heart pounded a staccato rhythm in her chest.

  Then she shook away the fear. It was stupid. Someone was already buried in this grave. And besides that, she wouldn’t get a tombstone like this one. She would be thrown in the mass graves south, where her parents’ bones were piled somewhere along with the rest of the corpses whose estates couldn’t afford a more private plot of land.

  “You remember I told you about my old boss?” Kohl finally said, his voice low but whip-sharp in the silence. “He’s buried here.”

  Frowning, Aina stepped closer, pulling from her memory what he’d told her of his old boss—how the man had taken Kohl into his gang, the Vultures, in the years before the civil war with the promise that he’d help him break his parents out of prison. He’d lied and gotten Kohl arrested instead. By the time Kohl had managed to break out of the prison, his boss had been caught and killed while trying to smuggle himself out of the city.

  “How did he get one of these fancy graves?”

  Kohl tilted his head toward her and, with a smile that made her heart flip, said, “Money. You see, if you’re a rich criminal, this city treats you the same as if you were an upstanding official who’d never broken a law in his life.”

  She let out a small scoff, then resisted the urge to kick the tombstone. That would definitely hurt her more than it.

  “Sometimes I wonder, is there a limit to how terrible they’ll let me be?” Kohl continued in a musing tone. “If I kidnap their loved ones for ransom, if I ruin their businesses, if I kill Steels walking down the street … will they still treat me like a king based on the kors in my bank accounts?”

  She smirked. “Even the Steels call you the Blood King. They might fear you, but they still think of you as royalty.”

  He laughed a little, his hands now hanging casually at his sides. As usual, he wore no gloves and seemed unperturbed by the cold. Remembering she was wearing mittens, she slipped them off and tucked them in her jacket pocket. She wasn’t like the Steels who needed every comfort and luxury.

  “I want to test the limits of this city, see how much greed they have and how heartless they are. At what point will they stop respecting me out of fear and start despising me as a monster? At what point will I force them to admit that they have more morals than I do?”

  She bit her lip, not quite knowing what to say to that. Instead, she cleared her throat and said, in a voice that rang out, something she thought he might approve of. “Once you test their limits, get a mausoleum here.” She nodded at the tombstone of his old boss. “Build it over his grave.”

  He didn’t laugh this time, but his eyes had glinted with amusement. Then he said, “You’re more like me than you know.”

  Inside Kohl’s wooden house, Aina gathered ingredients for the poison. Now she could better understand why he’d asked her those questions in that graveyard one cool, autumn evening. He’d wanted her to reassure him that he had no morals, that all his work was methodical and selfish. He hated any bit of mercy that crept into his actions—how he gave homes and jobs to orphans, how he’d spared her as a child when he could have killed her, how he’d had an opportunity to shoot her in the Tower last month but hadn’t. Her mere survival meant, to him, that he wasn’t as strong as he made himself out to be.

  Once this partnership with him ended with Bautix’s death, Kohl would come for her and control of the tradehouses again, and she’d have to be prepared, no matter how connected to him she’d briefly felt tonight. The longer it took them to truly face each other, the more brutal he would be when the time finally came—and the more vicious she’d have to be in return.

  She lit a fire under a clay pot, and as she waited for it to heat up, she noticed the label of a glass jar near the back of his shelf of ingredients. The text in Milano had caught her eye. Gently lifting the jar, she gasped when she saw the full name: la orquídea reclusa. Kohl’s stores weren’t as sparsely stocked as she’d thought.

  The purple flower that grew near the northern mountains of Mil Cimas resembled a common moth orchid, but the petals were a deep shade of purple and the center bloodred. While the petals themselves could be eaten, the seeds and stems were deadly. Her mother had warned her about it when she was younger and they picked flowers in the fields east of the city, even though they wouldn’t find the orchid here, all the way in Sumerand. But she’d seen it among the ingredients at the Dom, and now here.

  The scrape of metal on metal from the other room assured her Kohl was still awake. Wind and rain beat against the walls of the house. Vines climbing along the window from outside cast shadows along her copper skin.

  She pushed away the memory of the girl she’d been in the cemetery that day years ago, trying so hard to please him and be a good employee who believed every word he said, thinking she owed him her life just because he’d given her a place to live.

  That girl was worthless and was no longer a part of her. That girl would never manage to kill him.

  Once the fire was hot enough, she began mixing ingredients, preparing her usual poison darts that could kill or paralyze her target, as well as making her new poison with the orchid. It was a liquid that could be drunk or inhaled—taken in a very small dose, it would make anyone who ingested it or inhaled its fumes take ill, but a little more and they would die within twenty minutes.

  When she finished, she poured what she’d brewed into a round, glass vial and corked it.

  The satisfaction that swept through her was nearly intoxicating. There was something empowering in weakening or killing someone without ever touching them. Like an invisible hand reaching out from her and delivering the blow. It was strength and cowardice at once, but as long as it got the job done, she didn’t quite care.

  Lifting the vial, she stared at the liquids swirling together as the poison settled. She�
�d have to test it before making any more.

  She might be a monster who found joy in creating murderous poisons, but she preferred to be intoxicated by the powerful feeling this gave her rather than by things that robbed her of power, like glue, or Kohl.

  Maybe she would use it on him.

  The sound of Kohl’s knives scraping against each other had stopped. With quiet footsteps, she left the room with the poisons, tucking her new mixes into the pouch tied to her belt.

  The door to the other room was still ajar, and instead of sharpening his knives, Kohl sat cleaning his guns, without a trace of exhaustion on his features.

  She sat on the sofa again, propping her head up with her hand, and waited. But he didn’t come back out. The only sounds were his quiet breaths, the river flowing by outside, and the dull beat of rain and wind against the windows. Her eyes slid shut in moments.

  When she woke the next morning, her neck stiff, it was to the sound of clattering in the kitchen in front of her. Her dreams of flames and shadows licking the circle of trees that had collapsed around her faded away. Kohl came in from the kitchen then, carrying a bowl of porridge toward her.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “When do you sleep?”

  “When do you eat?” he asked, shoving the bowl and a spoon into her hands before going to get his own.

  “I went out last night and got information from a few Jackals,” he said after a few minutes, and she briefly wondered if these Jackals were still breathing. “Arin Fayes has invited the Sentinel for drinks on his boat today. And he plans to hide a few Jackals on the boat as well.”

  She jolted upright, her thoughts racing. Bautix’s next move was now, mere hours after attacking the Dom.

  “Are they going to kill the Sentinel? Before Bautix’s weapon shipment even gets here?” She stood, checking her weapons and adjusting the pouch at her waist that contained the poisons. Her fingers grazed the vial of the new poison she’d made last night, and she kept it close to the front of the pouch as she zipped it closed.