Twice Dead

by Caitlin Seal

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. Please take us to Ambassador Valn.”

  The black-haired guard grunted. “That’s better.” He jerked his head. His companions surrounded Lucia and Naya and escorted them outside. A black carriage with barred windows waited in the street. Naya could just see the silhouette of someone sitting inside. Another guard maybe? A shudder ran through her. If she got into that carriage, she didn’t think there’d be any getting out.

  Naya tensed as one of the guards inched closer. The sense of someone looming behind her brought back memories of the day she died. She could almost feel the prick of the dart in her neck and the terrifying numbness that had spread through her. Valn had claimed they’d dealt with her killer. But he’d never said who had done the deed. And hadn’t there been a note of accusation in her father’s voice when he asked about her death? The panic turned to anger as the truth hit her. Of course. Valn hadn’t just organized her resurrection. He’d had her killed.

  “Keep moving,” one of the guards said. A hand pressed against Naya’s back and something inside her snapped.

  She spun and shoved the guard hard in the chest. “Don’t touch me!”

  Aether flared through her bond, and with it came raw power. She dug her toes into the gaps between paving stones. She could feel the aether shifting inside her, changing. A rush of impossible strength surged down her arms, then through her hands to the guard’s chest. The guard’s eyes widened as he flew backward. The bones in Naya’s hand felt like someone had thrown them in a fire. But the sensation was somehow distant, like the pain belonged to someone else. Lucia screamed behind her.

  When Naya turned she saw two guards hauling Lucia into the carriage. Lucia kicked and writhed, but it was clear she was no match for her captors. Another guard stood between Naya and the carriage. The scrape of boots behind her told her that the one she’d knocked back was already trying to get up. Fear was building in the aether around them as people all along the street hurried to hide in shops and houses.

  Naya clenched her left hand into a fist, holding it close to her body as Celia had taught her. She feigned left, then ducked right, sliding past the guard before he could do more than swing clumsily with his club. Naya evaded the blow and reached out to drag the guards off Lucia.

  “Run!” Lucia shouted. She managed to kick one of her captors in the shin, and the man snarled a curse.

  Before Naya could reach Lucia, someone grabbed the back of her shirt and twisted hard. Her collar dug into her throat, and for an instant her body forgot that it didn’t need to breathe, forgot that she couldn’t actually choke. Her hands went to her neck as she stumbled backward. Before she could think of how to free herself, more hands were on her wrists. Naya tried to let them pass through her. Fingers slipped through her arm and someone shouted. Then the grip on her shirt tightened and ice shot through her wrist as a salma wood shackle snapped into place.

  “Get her other hand!”

  The world slowed around her. One of the guards hit Lucia hard with his club and she fell back into the carriage, dazed. The guard in front of Naya fumbled for a second set of shackles. Naya’s eyes met Lucia’s. The necromancer mouthed a single word. Run.

  Naya’s lips curled back from her teeth. The bones of her left hand flared hot even through the icy pain of the shackle. Her shirt tore and the pressure on her throat eased. Cold brushed her right hand but she jerked it back in time to avoid getting caught in a second shackle. She spun, coming face-to-face with the guard holding the shackle locked to her left wrist. His face had gone red with effort. Naya focused on her right hand, imagining the heat runes on the furnace in Lucia’s shop. Again she felt the aether inside her change. Her bones ached and warmth spread across her palm, blossoming until it felt like she was cupping a handful of molten glass. With a shout, Naya grabbed the arm of the guard holding her.

  The guard shrieked. The smell of charring meat rose off his skin. His grip on the shackle’s chain loosened as he flinched away. Naya pulled the shackle free and ran. Pain arched through her bones with every step, and ice crawled up her arm from where the shackle still dangled around her wrist. She heard the carriage door slam and risked a glance back. Two of the guards still ran behind her.

  Naya led the guards down a dead-end alley stacked with wooden crates. She scrambled up the crates, then leapt to grab the balcony of a nearby house. Her left hand slipped, the fingers rigid with cold and pain, but she managed to haul herself up. From there she climbed, fingertips scraping half-rotted wood and crumbling mortar, until she reached the slate roof. She heard the first creaks as the guards tried to climb after her, then a crash as the rain-wet crates collapsed under their weight. She spun, hoping to catch sight of Lucia. But the street in front of the shop was already empty. She could try following the carriage, but what would be the point? She couldn’t free Lucia by herself. Even if she somehow managed that, they’d be chased by half the city guard in no time. The men below her cursed as they disentangled themselves from the wood. One of them blew three sharp blasts on a whistle. Better to be gone before they found a way to follow.

  Naya picked a direction at random and started jumping along the roofs. She kept her head low, trying not to draw attention. When she could no longer sense anyone following, she slumped down on the roof of a house squashed between two taller neighbors. She pressed her back against the wall of one of those houses, where the long evening shadows would hide her. Despair pushed up her throat and made her eyes burn. She’d run, and now Valn had Lucia.

  The wood behind her was cool and solid, and a gentle breeze tickled her cheek, carrying with it the smells of the ocean. Her thoughts wandered, wanting to drift away from the pain and failure. Maybe if she closed her eyes, she could fade into the pulse of the city, let its beat wear her down until there was nothing left.

  No. She squeezed her left hand into a fist, concentrating on the pain. If she faded now, she’d be letting Valn win. Naya tugged at the shackle. One thick wooden cuff wrapped around her wrist, while the second dangled free on its metal chain. She tried to pry the cuff off but the latch was locked tight. She tried to force her wrist through the cuff, as she’d done with the salma wood plate in Delence’s door. But either the cuff was too sturdy or Naya was too exhausted from the fight to manage that trick.

  Naya glared at the cuff. She tucked her thumb down, trying to scrunch her fingers small enough to slip it off. The wood jabbed into her, refusing to budge. Naya let her head fall back against the wall.

  How had everything gone so horribly wrong? All she’d ever wanted was to become a merchant, to sail the world and make her father proud. Instead she’d become a spy for a man whose schemes she didn’t understand, her father wanted her dead, and the only people who might be willing to help her were those she used to think of as monsters.

  Lucia said Corten would help, but Naya wasn’t so sure about that. Just thinking about telling him the truth made her feel sick. She’d lied to him for weeks. He’d hate her, and he’d have every right to. Even if he didn’t try to turn her in on the spot, what could the two of them possibly do?

  Still, she had no one else to turn to. She needed to figure out what Valn meant to do with Lucia. And she needed to know the truth. Had her father sent her here not to help stop a war but to start one? Naya looked up, trying to get her bearings among the jumble of rooftops.

  That was when she saw the man standing on the other side of the roof.

  Naya and the stranger stared at each other across the shallowly slanted roof. The man’s expression was hard, and a wicked-looking knife gleamed in his right hand. Naya stood up. Why hadn’t she felt him sneaking up on her? She reached out to taste his aether, and shuddered. The man’s energy was rushing into the knife. She couldn’t feel his emotions. Both the blade and the hand gripping it seemed to warp and shimmer in the dying light. “What do you want?” Naya asked.

  “You should have accepted Ambassador Valn
’s invitation.” The man stepped forward. He was dressed like an ordinary laborer but moved with a predatory grace that suggested he was nothing of the sort. “It would have been easier that way.”

  “How did you find me?” Naya tried to take a step back but ended up pressed against the wall of the taller building behind her. She could try climbing to the next roof, but that would mean turning her back to him.

  “Your life belongs to us. You can’t hide,” the man said. He had a sharp nose, dark eyes, and a scar bisecting one cheek. Those eyes looked familiar. Naya recognized him with a start. He’d been the one driving the carriage the night of the kidnapping. “If there’s even a scrap of humanity left in you, then you know what you must do. Submit. We can make this easy, peaceful. There’s no need for more violence.”

  A snarl rose in Naya’s throat. “You people are the real monsters. Get away from me.”

  The man tightened his grip on the knife. “So that’s how it is.” His boots pounded against shingles as he closed the distance between them in three swift strides. Naya screamed at her legs to run, but her whole body felt weak and her eyes were drawn to the knife. Blue-white runes glowed across the blade as the man raised it to slash at her.

  Naya tried to grab the man’s arm, but he was faster. At the last second he twisted the blade to slice through her wrist, less than an inch from the network of fragile bones that held her bond. Pain—worse than anything she’d felt since dying—seared out from the cut. An inhuman shriek sent the man stumbling backward. It took Naya a long second to realize the sound was coming from her. Red mist flooded her vision. She stumbled, trying to put the rest of her body between her hand and the knife.

  What was going on? Aether seeped from her hand, the tips of her fingers going hazy despite the chilling influence of the salma wood. No normal knife should have been able to do that. The man’s eyes narrowed and he attacked again. Naya ducked sideways, feeling the terrifying presence of the wall behind her. The knife sliced the side of her shirt. The man smiled. He caught the dangling shackle, pinning her. Naya tried to gather heat in her hand, to strengthen her limbs as she had earlier. But the knife was eating the aether all around her, and the best she could manage was a weak flicker of warmth in her palm.

  The glowing runes crawled over the blade as the man’s aether poured into them. Those runes had to be the reason the knife could hurt her. If she could break them, maybe she could draw enough aether to get away. She gasped in as much as she could and tried to channel it toward the brightest rune on the knife. She imagined raw energy crashing into the runes like water. Break. The runes glowed brighter for an instant, then the hungry blade plunged into her chest.

  The pain stole her thoughts and her sight. The knife was ice inside her, and the ice was spreading. Claiming her. The blade twisted as the man pulled it back for a second blow. This shouldn’t be happening. He hadn’t touched her bones once, but somehow she could feel herself unraveling. Naya screamed again. She reached out, no longer thinking about maintaining her physical form. She pulled at the man’s aether. Most of it was going toward the knife, powering it even as her life drained into the blade. But the man was young and strong. The knife couldn’t eat up all his energy.

  Something glowed in the center of her darkened vision. A dense source of energy. Maybe enough to save her. Naya drew in a deep breath.

  This time it was her attacker’s turn to scream. Naya’s vision came back all at once. The stranger stood above her. He stumbled backward, eyes wide. Naya leaned against the wall, trying to control the burst of strange energy. It didn’t feel like any aether she’d ever pulled. It surged through her. It fought her, trying to tear its way back out even as it renewed her. She was no longer just Naya, clinging to the wall as death’s tides tried to drag her under. Now she was Marcus, staring down at the thing, the monster he’d come to kill. It was disgusting—a bluish-white glow that barely resembled a girl.

  He’d almost had it, but then something had gone wrong. His whole body burned. His grip on the knife was weakening. But the runes on the blade still glowed. He could still finish this. Finish it before the monster did.

  Naya fought free of the man’s confused thoughts. She concentrated on the energy, bending every fragment of her mind toward containing it. She heard the dark tides on the other side of death swelling around her, but she focused all her energy into the blade. This time the runes cracked. The air around the blade darkened, then twisted, reminding Naya of the portal Lucia had created for Jesla’s soul. The blade’s hungry draw faltered and Marcus’s fingers jerked. The knife clattered to the roof and slid away. Marcus reached up to claw at his chest. He stumbled, then collapsed.

  For just an instant Naya felt a terribly familiar burning in her own chest. Her vision darkened, then flashed with a collage of foreign memories. Marcus’s father teaching him how to ride a farm nag. Years later a tavern brawl gone wrong. Blood on his knife and guards with shackles and wicked grins. Valn smiling and offering his hand. Then dank city streets, and the feel of the dart tube as he aimed death at the neck of the girl walking down the alley. Naya screamed as the memories blurred and darkness swept away her thoughts.

  When her mind cleared and her vision returned, the last of the sunset’s glow was just fading from the western sky. The assassin lay unmoving on the roof in front of her as she dragged herself to her knees. Gasping in aether, she let her eyes wander up to the first dim stars appearing in the evening sky. She welcomed the pain humming through her body. It kept her from reaching out and checking the man’s aether. She didn’t want to confirm what his empty eyes already told her.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” she muttered. It didn’t make her feel any better. Her voice sounded more like wind than human words. Hearing it brought back the memory of how she’d looked in Marcus’s eyes. He was right. I am a monster. But this time fury smothered the old disgust at what she’d become.

  No. She’d seen the truth in Marcus’s memories. Valn had ordered him to kill her and he’d done it. He’d helped make her this way. And when his master decided he was done with her, Marcus hadn’t hesitated to try killing her a second time. Only this time she’d had the tools to fight back. Naya dragged herself to her feet, nearly falling right back down from the pain.

  She wasn’t sure how she made it off the roof and through the twisting streets to Corten’s shop. Every step hurt. The houses vanished and she was left in a fog of twisting aether. She couldn’t block out the flood of foreign sensations streaming through the aether. Even the grass and trees seemed a pressure against her pain-scorched body.

  With her thoughts clouded, the once-familiar streets became a labyrinth. It was Corten’s furnaces that finally drew her to safety. Among the shadow houses the three sets of runes shone like molten beacons. It took several tries before she could make her fingers solid enough to fumble the doorknob open. Naya heard the faint tinkle of the shop bell. Then the floor rushed up to meet her and blissful, painless darkness swallowed her.

  When Naya opened her eyes, she saw only gray light. She blinked, and the world came grudgingly back into focus. Corten was leaning over her, his eyebrows furrowed with concern. Naya drew in aether slowly. She was lying on a bed in a room with a white ceiling. An aether lamp shone in the far corner, and outside the window was darkness. She frowned, struggling to pull together tangled strings of thought and memory.

  “What happened?” she managed to whisper.

  The relief in Corten’s eyes made her chest ache. “I was going to ask you the same thing. When you stumbled in here, I thought for sure you were dying. You should be dead.”

  Her fuzzy thoughts sharpened and she remembered why she’d come. “I am dead.” Naya tried closing her eyes, then eased them open again. It didn’t seem to make any difference for the needle stabs spreading from her hand.

  “I mean really dead.”

  Naya sat up halfway, then flopped back down on the thin mattress wi
th a poorly suppressed moan. The chill was gone from her wrist. When she glanced down she saw the shackle lying discarded on the floor next to her bed. Corten followed her gaze. “I picked the lock,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “It took a while. I mean, I knew the theory, but I’m not very good at that sort of thing and all I had were some wires Matius uses for drawing details in glass, so…” He trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck.

  She wanted to ask why he knew anything at all about picking locks, but the shackle was a harsh reminder that she had bigger things to worry about. She glanced at the stuffed bookshelves and cluttered desk and realized she must be lying in Corten’s room. “I don’t remember coming here.”

  “You were barely conscious when I brought you upstairs. It’s not surprising you don’t remember it. That can happen if you put too much stress on your bones.”

  “How long have I been here?” Naya asked.

  Corten glanced at the clock on his desk. “About five hours.”

  Five hours? It had felt like only an instant. She didn’t have time to be lying around like this. Valn was probably still hunting her, and Lucia was trapped in his clutches, or dead. She forced herself to sit up.

  Corten put a hand on her arm. “You shouldn’t move more than you have to.”

  Naya shook her head. “I’ve already wasted too much time lying here. There’s something I have to do.”

  “What? Blue, what’s going on? What happened to you?” Naya squeezed her eyes shut. What happened? What happened is that I’ve been lying to you since I met you. I ignored all the things I should have seen because I wanted to believe my father was a good man. Thanks to me Lucia’s probably dead. And now I’m about to drag you into a mess I barely understand because I don’t know anyone else who will help me. It all felt like too much, so for the moment she decided to keep things simple. “I was attacked,” she said, not meeting Corten’s eyes.