by Jayne Faith
Waving a hand dismissively, I stiffened my spine and tried to look more alive. “I’m fine, really.”
He let out a short laugh. “You’re about to topple over. I don’t want to have to trudge along waiting for your dragging feet. I’m not giving you a choice. Up you go.”
He passed me the clamshell and scooped me up into his arms, and in truth I was too weak and tired to resist.
The walk back to town was a blur as I nodded off several times, lulled by the quick rhythm of his steps and steady breathing. I faded in and out, some part of my brain noting the distinct smells of the dump and the Harbor, and the change in the sound of Lorenzo’s footfalls against asphalt as he made his way through the city.
More than once, concern about Hunters rose in my mind. I’d tried to stay awake for the part of the trek where we’d left the shackled ring of the Demon Lord’s men earlier, but either Lorenzo took a different route or I lost consciousness and missed it. Either way, I didn’t really come to until the motion of his gait halted.
“Home sweet home, witch.” Lorenzo was slightly out of breath, though much less so than a man who burned through as many cigarettes as he did should have been.
I was still holding the clamshell. I’d been cradling it against my stomach the entire walk. He carefully set me on my feet, his hand on my back to steady me for a moment.
I held out the clamshell. My blood slicking the inside of it had dulled as it dried. I sighed heavily as he took the shell from me. “First challenge down, right?” I said, giving him as much of a smile as I could muster.
“First challenge down,” he agreed. He pivoted, casting his eyes upward. His gaze locked on the dark spire of the Watchtower, and he lifted his free hand to flip it his middle finger, and then he added a few more colorful curses for good measure.
I snorted. “Gee, how do you really feel?” I turned to trudge up to the front door of the Royal, searching for my key card in a pocket.
“We’re going to obliterate that ugly black thorn in my side,” Lorenzo crowed softly. “It’ll be like the Watchtower never existed, and then I’ll be able to get the hell out of this farking place.”
I stopped and faced him in time to see him dancing a little jig, the clamshell held carefully aloft in one hand.
“Wait, what did you say?” I asked.
“You’re gonna get me outta here,” he singsonged, waggling his hips and looking truly ridiculous.
“No, the part about obliterating the Watchtower,” I said impatiently. I reached for the bar on the door, resting my hand on it in part to keep myself upright.
He snorted. “Duh. If we break the curse—when we break the curse—we’ll obliterate the Watchtower and everyone inside.”
My chest clenched. “Everyone will die? All of the witches and Hunters in there?”
“And anyone in that House of Light down below,” he said with a tone of complete unconcern.
“But they’re all innocent!” I said vehemently. “We can’t kill a bunch of innocent people.”
Armand was in there. At least I hoped he was still alive. And my mother—no, there was no chance she still lived in the House of Light. But all of the witches who’d been captured . . .all the warlocks brainwashed and forced to serve the Demon Lord as Hunters. How could I possibly murder so many innocents?
Lorenzo blew air out through his pursed lips and shook his head dismissively. “Everything has a price. Keep your eyes on the prize, woman! We can break the curse.”
“This isn’t right,” I said, my mood dark. “But I don’t have the energy to argue with you right now. Keep that venom safe.”
I dragged myself inside and up to the flat, where I let myself into a room of sleeping girls. I tiptoed through them back to the closet where my bed was and collapsed on my cot, too exhausted to do more than remove my shoes.
When I awoke the next morning, my dress was dried to the wound on my shoulder, my hair was a stiff, salty mess, and every muscle in my body screamed in protest when I moved.
Holding back a moan, I pulled a sweater over my dress so the girls wouldn’t see the blood. I finger-combed my hair up into a bun and secured it with a spare shoelace. My eyes felt like someone had poured a teaspoon of sand in each one, and the depth of my fatigue made me wonder if I would have been better off just staying awake the entire night. The tiny bit of sleep I’d gotten had seemed to only make me feel more achingly tired.
But I inhaled a strong breath through my nose and tried to relax my face, and then slid the door back. All of the girls except Chelle were up and dressed and moving about the flat as they got ready for school.
I called good morning to them, and then knelt next to Chelle. “Not up to school today?”
She sighed deeply, and the end of her breath turned into a ragged cough. “Maybe I could go at lunch?”
I nodded, and eased her back down to her bed. My insides clenched. She hated to miss school. If she was staying home, it meant she was worse than yesterday.
The girls eyed me, standing there in my dress from the previous day.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Karen said. “We were starting to get a little worried. Did something happen last night?”
“Nothing to be concerned about,” I said, trying to think of some excuse for being gone nearly the whole night. “I had a last-minute offer of work, so I had to jump on it.”
Once in a great while Peter tended bar at private parties, and he usually offered me some extra hours to help him. The hours were long, but the money was good so I always accepted. I truly wished I’d actually had a job the previous night. Chelle was going to need more medicine soon. Preferably something stronger, which would of course be more expensive.
I briefly wondered if the sea serpent might help me bring in more exotic delicacies from the sea that I could sell in the market. Something to look into later, perhaps. Memories from the previous night swirled through my mind like a bizarre fever dream. Had I really stood on the tongue of a giant sea snake, trying to dislodge a spear from the roof of its mouth?
The throbbing on the back of my left shoulder confirmed that some sort of adventure had indeed taken place. I wasn’t quite ready to think about the part where I’d died from sea serpent venom and an actual angel had revived me. The mind could only process so much insanity at once.
The girls, minus Chelle, finished their morning preparations and went down to breakfast, and I went into the flat’s small bathroom to get cleaned up for the day. I had to wet the back of my dress to get it to peel off the scratches left by the serpent’s teeth. Why hadn’t Lorenzo fixed the gash? Considering he had saved me from death, healing my wound shouldn’t have caused him any additional strain. I cursed his name under my breath as I tried to ignore the stinging when the water of the shower hit the deep scratch.
After bathing, dressing the wound, and pulling on fresh clothes, I almost felt human again. Chelle was asleep when I slipped from the flat. Needing coffee more urgently than I needed food, I skipped the dining room and headed to the Lead Feather, already anticipating the welcome bump of caffeine.
I half expected Lorenzo to be there already a couple of shots into his day’s drink, or to waltz into the bar at some point that morning, but he never appeared.
Just as the lunch crowd began to pick up, however, Amy rushed in. Her golden hair frizzed around her head in a corona, somehow emphasizing the urgent look on her face. She paused just inside the doorway, squinting as she probably had to allow her eyes to adjust to the lower light of the pub. I waved and she hurried over to the bar where I stood waiting for Peter to finish filling my tray with drinks.
“I need to speak to you alone.” She glanced at Peter. “I’m sorry, but it’s an emergency. It won’t take long.”
He tipped his head toward the back. “You can use my office.”
I shot him a grateful smile as Amy clutched my forearm and practically dragged me back past the kitchen. Once we were in Peter’s office and the door was closed, she whirled aroun
d to face me. I’d never seen her so worked up. My pulse raced with apprehension.
“They’ve broken a Hunter free,” she said. “They’ve cured him.”
I frowned, not following at all. “What are you talking about? Who’s ‘they’?”
She stepped forward and grabbed both of my hands, her eyes wide. “Victoria, the Underground found a spell that will reverse the Demon Lord’s control of a Hunter. It restored him to who he was before, memories and everything.”
I blinked several times, not sure I’d heard right.
“Do you see what this means?” she whispered. “We can take them back. All those men brainwashed by the Demon Lord. We can free them. And if the Demon Lord has no Hunters to find witches for him, then he begins to lose control. He’ll lose his hold on us.”
I barely heard anything she said after the possibility of freeing the Hunters. Some part of my mind recognized the larger implication, but all I could think of was Armand and the day he’d been captured and taken away. The day my future with him had been stolen from me. The moment I’d never fully recovered from.
“Who?” I whispered back. “Who did they free?”
She shook her head. “Not Armand. Someone older, it sounded like. A man who used to live in our building. I wasn’t told his name.”
Armand had lived half a mile away in a tenement building. He’d shared a flat with his younger brother, Dane. They’d both been taken by the Watchtower, Dane first when he was only seventeen.
I let out a tiny noise from the back of my throat as the smallest pinpoint of hope lit in my chest. It was minute, just a speck, really. But it was enough to nearly make my knees buckle.
Armand. If he were still alive in the Watchtower—and that was a profound if that I knew I shouldn’t even let myself consider—now there was a chance he might be saved.
“The Underground meets tonight,” she whispered. “Come to Erlich’s at seven thirty.”
Chapter 13
THE REST OF my shift passed in a surreal blur of fatigue mixed with heady anticipation that alternated with skepticism. I managed to keep all the orders straight through my distraction only because of years of experience waiting tables at the Lead Feather.
All the while, my mind whirled. Could it really be true? Had the Underground actually found a way to reverse the Demon Lord’s hold on the Hunters?
That evening, Amy and I hurried through dinner and then I sent the girls up to the flat to finish their homework. She and I left the Royal for the brewery. Despite our excitement, we kept to a leisurely pace and spoke only of inconsequential things so as not to draw attention.
Erlich let us inside the brewery, snapping the dead bolt into place as soon as the door closed. His eyes gleamed.
“Go on back,” he said. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.”
Giving in to our anticipation, Amy and I rushed past the brewing room to the tasting room at the back of the shop. It was already crowded with many more people than usually attended Underground meetings, and excited conversation buzzed in the air.
I spotted Henrietta, the leader of our Underground enclave. Next to her stood a tall man who looked familiar, though I didn’t recall the gray peppering his dark hair and the deepened lines around his eyes.
I grasped Amy’s arm as the man’s name came back from my memory.
“It’s Eduardo,” I said. “He was taken into the Watchtower around the time the Hunters got my mother.”
Still a young man in my mind, Eduardo was a handful of years older than my mother, who would have turned fifty this past year. I couldn’t stop staring at him, watching as he conversed with the people crowded around him. His face was animated, so unlike the limited expressions of the Hunters, whose faces seemed only able to display a narrow range of emotions like anger or irritation. A small shudder passed through me as I recalled Gerard, the Hunter who’d threatened to come looking for me.
Looking at Eduardo now, even without speaking to him myself, there was no doubt in my mind that he’d been fully restored to himself. There was no way a Hunter could fake what I was seeing now. That was the one blessing of the brainwashing—it turned Hunters into simple-minded men whose thoughts and intentions were usually obvious.
My throat swelled as I thought of Armand and imagined him smiling as Eduardo was now. I could hear Armand’s laugh in my mind, see the old spark in his eyes.
“You should go ask him,” Amy said.
I turned to her in question.
“Ask him if Armand is still in the Watchtower. Breaking the spell didn’t erase Eduardo’s memory. I heard that he remembers everything from his time as a Hunter.”
I nodded and tried to swallow the lump in my throat. I squared my shoulders, but hesitated. What if Eduardo said Armand was dead?
Before I could thread through the crowd to the former Hunter, Henrietta climbed up on a step stool and called the meeting to order. Eduardo stood next to her.
“It’s that time, everyone!” the buxom witch called above the din of the gathering. She waited a moment for the group to settle.
“Miraculous day, isn’t it?” she asked, and several in the crowd responded with cheers and laughter. A few wiped tears away as they gazed at Eduardo and probably thought of the loved ones they’d lost to the Watchtower.
Her smile radiated, and many faces shone. The sense of wonder and excitement was so thick it was almost a physical sensation. But not every face was joyful. Here and there, I spotted expressions of sober tension.
“It seems like a dream, but it’s very real,” Henrietta said after the noise died down again. “Eduardo was captured by the Watchtower twenty years ago, but now he’s free. I’m sure many of you are wondering how it happened. The warlocks of the Underground have been working on a reversal spell in secret for years. Decades, actually. More than once in the past, they thought they had the solution. But when it was tested on Hunters, it didn’t work.” Her expression sobered.
I’d heard rumors of these failures, and the consequences were sometimes ugly.
“But now, the warlocks have found a spell that works,” she continued.
“Isn’t the Watchtower going to wonder what happened to him?” a man called from across the room. “Won’t they get suspicious? How can he ever safely show his face in public?”
“Yeah,” a witch chimed in. “The spell is wonderful, but now what? We can’t just go around The Colony freeing Hunters. The Demon Lord isn’t an idiot. He’s going to notice when men start disappearing from his ranks. And who will decide which Hunters will be freed first?”
Others began to talk, expressing similar sentiments or calling out ideas. I glanced at Amy, and she widened her eyes and leaned over to speak in my ear.
“Leave it to a bunch of witches and warlocks to make things complicated,” she said wryly.
A smile flitted over my lips, but I couldn’t help thinking—this was complicated. And dangerous. But now I had a concrete reason to try to persuade Lorenzo to find another way to break the curse. One that wouldn’t kill everyone in the Watchtower.
If the Underground knew about Lorenzo and our plan to break the curse, maybe we could all work together somehow. I needed someone who could think through all of it with me. My eyes slid to Amy again, and I made up my mind to tell her everything. I also needed to speak to someone higher up in the Underground.
Henrietta raised her arms. “Quiet down!” she shouted over the noise. “We want to hear everyone’s thoughts, but we need to be orderly about it. First, know that the Underground leadership has already taken steps to fake Eduardo’s death. A corpse similar in stature to Eduardo has been procured from the morgue, dressed in his uniform, and left in a place to make it look as if he drowned.”
There were a few murmurs, and some hands flew to lips.
She lifted a palm. “A little grisly, yes, but the leadership believes this necessary. As for next steps, they’ve worked out a strategy, and they’re going to move very quickly. You’ll be called upon very soon
to take part in the revolt that will bring down the Watchtower. I know this is sudden, but swift action is necessary. Now, raise your hand if you have something to say and you can speak one at a time. If you have personal questions for Eduardo, save those for later. Let’s stick to bigger-picture discussion for now.”
My pulse bumped as reality began to set in. Things were already in motion, but the Underground was making a mistake. They couldn’t move against the Watchtower with only the spell to reclaim Hunters. It wasn’t enough. We had to break the curse.
Hands shot up around the room. I raised mine, too. Henrietta was scanning the room, and when her eyes came to rest on me, slight surprise lifted her brows.
“Victoria?” she said, giving me the floor.
Everyone shifted, swinging their attention my way. I licked my dry lips.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “Unless we break the curse of the Watchtower, this will be nothing more than a failed revolt.”
Her expression shifted into vague amusement. A few people actually let out short laughs.
“This is the best hope we’ve ever had. Without the Hunters, the Demon Lord will lose his power,” she said. Her attention was already moving on to someone else.
“No, it’s not enough.” I took a few steps toward where she stood so I could speak more clearly to the entire room. “Even killing the Demon Lord won’t bring down the Watchtower. A witch killed his father, the original Lord and a full-blooded demon at that, and it wasn’t enough. That’s because she didn’t break the curse. This spell to reclaim the Hunters won’t break the curse, either. It will be nothing more than a blip in The Colony’s history that will probably result in many citizen deaths. But I assure you, it won’t bring down the Watchtower.”
People were listening, but I knew by the uncertainty painted on the expressions around the room that I hadn’t convinced them.
“Please,” I said, turning to look up at Henrietta. “I must talk to the leadership before they instigate a rebellion that’s sure to fail.”