“I don’t know—” I started, and he edged an arm up around Keen’s ears and shouted, “Then figure it out!”
I tugged at the rope lashing us together, but it refused to slip any farther. With a sigh of frustration, I felt around the inside of Casper’s coat. He twitched away at first, but he understood as soon as my fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife on his belt. I pulled it out, yelled, “Hold her!” and slit the slender cord with one upward thrust.
Keen squealed as her body jerked downward, but Casper caught her up. I quickly handed myself down, crawling along his body until my arms were wrapped around his knees and my skirts were free and billowing upward. The trees were mere seconds away as I aimed for a sturdy-looking branch and braced myself for impact.
My boots struck wood, the shock reverberating throughout my body. I tried to buffer Casper and Keen with my arms and save them the worst of the hit. They knocked me sideways, and my heels skidded off the bark, and we were falling again, Keen’s scream heavy in my ears. I fell into a trunk sideways, smashed in by Casper, and then we all tumbled downward in a confusing, bruising jumble of parachute strings, leather, and limbs.
I hit the ground first. Someone’s foot found my head, and I slumped over gratefully into the dew-wet pine scree. It was an old forest with a thick floor of needles, and I sank in, breathing the sharp sap and rich black dirt. It wasn’t my home, but it was close enough.
Groaning and grunting, Casper and Keen rolled off my aching, battered body. Keen bolted off into the forest, her parachute unopened on her back, calling “Bathroom!” over her shoulder. Casper and I were tangled together, my parachute caught in the trees and his flopped low on the ground. He gently unwound my fingers from the knife I still held, forgotten, in a white-knuckle grip. Thank Aztarte I hadn’t cut anyone on the way down.
But wait. I smelled it. Casper’s blood, on the knife and beading a small slash in the thigh of his pants. I leaned toward him, avid, mouth open, already imagining the hot press of it on my tongue. Fear always made me hungry afterward.
“Ahna.” The words were loaded with exhaustion and warning.
“I only need a little.” I swallowed, feeling desperate. “You’re already losing the blood. You might as well put it to good use.”
He flopped onto his back, slicing the parachute off his chest. “Fine. I don’t care anymore. No teeth.”
Still caught by my chute, I had enough room to kneel and shift his leather coat aside, settling my mouth over the slice in his breeches. It wasn’t bad or deep, just a graze. But blood was blood, and I gently pressed the wound open and ran my tongue along it. He twitched and moaned, and I savored the strange taste of his blood. At first, the smell had repelled me, but now it called to me, an acquired taste.
“Jesus Christ on the cross!” Keen shouted.
She stood, half behind a tree, her face frozen in disgust and hatred and her shirt speckled with vomit.
“Enough of the act, Keen,” Casper said tiredly without sitting up. “You know very well how things are headed for me, even if you try to ignore it. This isn’t the most horrible thing you’ve seen this week, and it’s bound to get a lot worse. She needs to eat if we’re going to get her home.”
“Screw getting her home! Screw things getting worse! I don’t even know why we’re doing this. It’s a suicide mission. You’ve lasted this long. Don’t give in now.”
“You’re out of line.” He rubbed his eyes in that way he had, when he was tired of thinking. “Nobody made you come along. I gave you a choice, and you made it.”
She stomped, but her foot just sank into the needles. “I didn’t think you were serious. I didn’t think you’d actually see it through. I didn’t think you’d let her . . . let her drink from you like a fricking Renfield!”
“This ain’t a movie, kid. This is life or death. She’s not Dracula; she’s just a lost girl. We’ve still got to get through the forest, into Minks, and onto a train. If letting Ahna drink from an already open wound will give us a leg up, I’ll take it.”
She looked at my hands pressing around his thigh, and we all suddenly noticed the effect it was having on his body. I jerked back. He sat up and flipped his coat over his lap, but she was already stomping into the forest, muttering to herself, her breath hitching.
“You like it, you asshole. You’re just like the rest of them. You effing like it!”
I sat back on my heels and wiped my lips on the back of my hand. His blood didn’t drive me to a frenzy, but seeing it and smelling it had temporarily clouded my judgment. I was mortified, not that I had drunk from him but that I had done so from such a tender, personal place on his body.
“I didn’t mean to . . .” I trailed off. There was no good way to end that sentence.
Casper scooted back, settling against a tree trunk. The morning sun backlit him, limning his hair like liquid gold. “Can you keep a secret?”
It was the last thing I had imagined him saying, and I managed to shrug. “Whom would I tell? You know my secret, and you’ve kept it well enough.”
“Keen and I aren’t from Almanica.” He took a deep breath and gazed into the branches overhead. “We’re Strangers, and we’re from America, which is like Almanica in another world.”
I snorted and shook my head. “Did you hit your head on the way down? That’s not a secret; it’s a myth.”
He smiled, all dimples and madness. “Let’s look at the facts. I know things you can’t know. I can play songs you’ve never heard of, things way more complicated than anything I could ever compose.” He held out his arm and rolled up the sleeve to show me the black mark I remembered on his forearm. A raven holding a key.
“I have a tattoo. You ever seen a Pinky who would let a needle pierce his skin again and again and then walk around with an open wound for a week? Did you know what I was talking about with Teddy and Keen? This is not the world I was born in, darlin’, and it ain’t been kind to me.”
I stared at the mark on his arm. It was true—I’d never seen anything like it except in pictures of Bludmen from exotic lands. When he held out his earlobe and wiggled it back and forth, showing a tiny hole, I just shook my head.
“Why are you telling me this?” I finally asked.
“Because I need you to understand Keen. She’s a Stranger, too. I found her in London, living on the streets, eating trash and bludrats and singing for coins. She’s got a decent enough voice, but she didn’t remember all the words to ‘Yellow Submarine,’ so I started singing, too. I took her under my wing. I was already in a downward spiral by then, but I hid my life from her. I had gotten too deep into the bludwine, but no one ever told me that it would take me over, drive me mad. I kept her safe and fed but always held her at arm’s length, because I knew one day I’d either die or get bludded. I’m realizing now that I did her a disservice. I never really saw her as she was; I just saw a helpless kid from my homeland. And now she’s doing what all teenagers do in America—she’s rebelling.”
“That’s what teenagers do in Freesia, too,” I said, cocking my head as I studied him. There were certain things about him that had always seemed foreign and exotic. The shade of his skin, the shape of his face. His strange accent, which he was using now instead of the cultured, clipped tones of Sangland. Could he really be from another world? Of course, I’d heard stories of Strangers, who supposedly showed up out of nowhere, naked and helpless. But they weren’t as common in Freesia as they were in Sangland, and I’d never actually seen one. What Strangers were to us, unicorns were to them—charming tales that were nothing like the reality, apparently.
“So she’s rebelling. So she doesn’t like me. So what?”
“It’s not just you. It’s me. I’ve mostly kept it from her, the fact that I’m a halfblud and starting to suffer from it. I’ve hidden the bludwine, kept her from following me when I went to Darkside to buy vials of blud or have my own drawn in exchange. Whenever I’ve been close to going into a rage, I’ve locked myself in my room and gotten d
runk. Only now that we’ve been forced into that tiny cabin on the ship and since she talked to the other girls on the Maybuck has she realized what it means.”
“What does it mean?”
“You know what it means. You heard Cora. It means that soon I’ll either have to be bludded or go mad.”
I snorted and flicked my fingers. “And that’s so bad?”
“Imagine it. You wake up naked in another world where everything is different. You’re just a kid, you’re scared, you’re almost eaten by giant red rats. You manage to cobble together a life on the streets, just this side of starvation, and then a rich and glamorous countryman takes you under his wing, becomes your only attachment to the life you loved. And then that person grows distant, dangerous, unpredictable. Starts making bad decisions, choices that feel like betrayals. What does that kid have in the entire world but me? And again and again, I’ve chosen blud over her, shoved her aside, given her the bare minimum.”
He drove a fist into the soft ground. When he knocked his hat back and ran a hand through his hair, he left clods of dirt and leaf mold among the sweat-streaked copper.
“And now?” My voice trembled.
“In my daydreams, she found a place in your magnificent castle. She had her own room, fine clothes, healthy food. I made her so happy that she didn’t need me anymore. And that’s the worst betrayal of all.”
“Wanting to take care of someone, wanting the best for them, isn’t a betrayal.”
He was across the space in seconds, so close I could see his eyes jumping madly. “Ahna, I don’t want the best for her. I want the best for me.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“I owe her. Don’t you see? She’s my responsibility. I don’t know how to keep her safe without giving up my own needs, and I’m no longer willing to make that trade.” He reached into his coat and pulled out the feather I’d found in the box under his bed. It felt like a lifetime ago, and the princess scrabbling cheerfully and viciously for a stranger’s treasures had been invariably altered.
“This feather. It fell off a turban. A fortune-teller’s turban in a caravan. She was a Stranger, too, and I thought I loved her. I thought she was going to save me.”
“And she betrayed you.”
“She chose a Bludman over me, took the fortune she saw when she held his hand. I know there was something more than what she told me. I saw her face, and I know she held something back.” He stroked the feather back and forth over my hand as if painting a secret message there. “ ‘Your loss will be your salvation,’ she told me. Well, I lost her, and it didn’t save me. I lost my riches and fame, and it didn’t save me. So what’s the next loss? Keen? My humanity? My mind?” He stared straight into my eyes, and I swallowed at his bald desperation. “Is it you?”
I looked down, taking the feather from him and twirling it back and forth between my fingers. “My mother once told me that fortune-tellers see what they want to see and tell what they want to tell.” I watched the feather, considering how very carefully I had to choose my next words. “I was always told that the fortune I chose for myself was the truest one.”
“And what fortune did you choose after that?”
“That I wouldn’t be forced into doing anything ever again.”
“Yet here you are. Are we all just victims, then, Ahna? Just puppets?”
I stood and shook my head defiantly, letting pine bits flutter to the earth. “Only if we allow ourselves to become so. I choose to meet life as a powerful conquerer. Nothing will ever take command of me again.”
“But what if—”
A scream cut through the woods, silencing us both.
22
Casper was up and running beside me faster than I would have expected him to move. He must have been right about becoming more like a Bludman and less like a Pinky. After a few short steps, the strings of my chute trapped me like a spider in a web, and I howled in animal frustration, ripping through the heavy lines with my teeth and pounding through the trees in Casper’s wake.
The forest was thick and heavy, old and cold. I dashed through the branches, flinging them out of my way in pieces when necessary. I threw out my senses but didn’t hear Keen. The scream—it hadn’t actually sounded like her. The scent of bludbears clung to the earth and trees, but that was expected. This part of the country was known for the shaggy monsters, which grew large and lazy on bludlemmings and the foolish pioneers perpetually tromping into the woods, expecting to make new Pinky cities outside the harsh blud rule of Minks and Muscovy. But bludbears weren’t the problem. Something else was wrong. The forest was too quiet.
Another scream echoed through the air, and I put on a burst of speed as I recognized its source. I had to hurry, before they lured her closer.
Scrabbling under branches and past fans of sharp green needles, I let the beast go free, abandoning all pretense of royalty. In a fierce gallop, I caught up with Casper and pulled ahead, my nose aimed straight for Keen.
We burst into a small clearing, the sort of green-lit hollow my mother had called a fairy dun. Keen stood there, a look of wonder and joy on her face. Her hand stretched out toward a magnificent peacock, a male in full splendor. His tail was set wide, shivering back and forth and throwing sunlight off the vibrant feathers. His head cocked to the side as he danced closer to her, and she laughed.
Looking beyond her into the forest, I saw what I feared: the red spark of an eye.
“Drag her into the underbrush,” I whispered to Casper. “Have your knife ready.”
“What?”
But I had already launched myself across the clearing, darting past Keen and diving into the shadows of the forest. The creature had already seen me and wheeled to escape, but I dug my talons into its flanks and ripped a gash in the dingy white fur of its rump.
Fear for Keen melted into fierce joy. I had always loved unicorn blood.
The beast bucked, trying to throw me off and keep me from tearing the wound bigger. Without weapons or hunting partners, I couldn’t take it down, but I held on as long as I could. I would teach this creature to tangle with virgins.
As I lapped up as much blood as I could, feeling it shift into my throat like sunshine, the unicorn snorted and squealed, its hooves knocking against the ground and trees as it tried to fight me off. Somewhere far away, the peacock screamed again and again, warning the unicorn that danger was near. Its pure call finally ended in a gurgle and silence, the scavenger dying before its master.
Spinning on two hooves, the unicorn tried to skewer me, but I dodged its gnarled horn easily and leaped away, sliding behind a thick tree. I licked my lips, sated, as the unicorn blew air through its lips and galloped off into the forest. Its blood spread through me, leaving me warm and satisfied like nothing else.
“Ahna!” Casper called, his voice high and frantic.
“I’m here!” I struggled to compose myself and tried not to skip on my way back to the clearing.
I saw Keen first; she was trembling, eyes huge, with rips down her sleeves. Her arms were wrapped around her skinny middle as she breathed through her nose like a spooked bludmare. The peacock lay battered and bloody on the ground, and Casper soon appeared from between the trees with a dead pirate’s machete in his hand. He dropped it when he saw me.
“Ahna. Thank God. Are you hurt?” He rushed to take my shoulders in firm hands as he checked me up and down. With unicorn blood in my belly, it was hard not to giggle at his unnecessary concern.
“I saw it,” Keen said, barely an awed whisper. “The unicorn.”
Casper gazed down at me in confusion. “A unicorn?”
I shrugged. “He won’t be back. Let’s go.”
“So they’re real?” Keen breathed.
I snorted. “They’re just animals. Big, bloodthirsty monsters. But animals. Welcome to my world.” Seeing their dropped jaws and the mist of magic still swirling in Keen’s eyes, I sighed. “Unicorns aren’t magical and beautiful. They’re just predatory horses th
at have horns and love to eat virgins.” Casper pointed at the peacock carcass and raised his eyebrows, and I nodded. “Unicorns and peacocks work together. The peacocks are bludded scavengers that scout for prey. While the peacock dances, the unicorn is sneaking up behind you to run you through with his horn. And then they gorge and drag your carcass home to their harems.”
“This place,” Keen said slowly, shaking her head, “is wack.”
Casper knelt to run a finger along the peacock’s sharp beak.
“Jesus. It’s like one big tooth.”
I grinned. “They’re the only bludded birds in all of Sang, and they originate in Freesia. The Mad Tsar bludded them centuries ago, and they escaped the Ice Palace and managed to breed in the wild. No one knows the source of their partnership with the unicorns. An elegant friendship, don’t you think?”
I reached down to pluck a plume from the dead peacock’s tail and stuck it through the band of Casper’s hat. It didn’t escape me that we’d dropped his old feather in the forest when we heard the peacock’s scream. A jay called, and another bird answered, and then the forest finally came back to life, with the unicorn out of range.
“I can’t believe I was almost eaten by a unicorn,” Keen muttered. She shook her head as if the magic had finally fled, and her hands went to her pockets. “Donatello! He’s gone.”
She fell to her knees and rustled through the leaf litter, and Casper gave me a pained look.
“That gold ball she’s always playing with. It’s . . . the only thing she really cares about, but she won’t tell me why.”
“I’m right here, asshole, and I’m not deaf. I’m not leaving until we find him.”
I spun slowly in a circle, breathing deep until I caught a scent that stood out from the ancient greenery and earth. I followed the metallic tang and dug around in the forest floor near the peacock until I found it—the brass sphere I’d seen Keen playing with again and again. I turned, holding it out to her, and her face lit up with that brilliant smile.
“Donatello!” She snatched it from me and nuzzled it.
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