His neck craned. He talked faster. “Why would I help him? You know how he left me. What I’ve endured since.”
Larsa had none of it. “I know you’re a liar and a selfish coward who can’t be trusted.”
Considine’s eyes widened by little more than a hair, but the surprise was there. His mouth worked, as if fighting to swallow a bite of bad meat. It took him a moment, but when he spoke again his voice was cold. “You were there. You saw the ashes.”
Tashan.
She held his eyes, looking for the lie. “Why should I believe that one, out of all your pets, mattered?”
He didn’t have an immediate response. “I don’t know.” He managed to shrug a hair higher. “I don’t know if we get to pick the ones that do.”
She looked like she was already regretting it, but she pulled the dagger away. “You can get through.” She nodded at the grating.
His lip curled, but he didn’t push her. He nodded. “I can.”
“Can you find him?”
“It’ll be a maze down there. Even if he did pass through, he wouldn’t have left a trail.” He turned his nose away from the rusty bars.
“He did. I can feel the chill from his passage, but it’s already fading. You can track him the same way if you put your magic to it.”
“Through a sewer?” His pursed lips wrestled one another. Larsa’s face was steel. “You’re going to owe me for this.”
“I didn’t stab you.” Her nail clicked on her dagger’s tiny skull, emphasizing how quickly that could change.
“Hardly a favor.”
She rolled her eyes, but nodded.
“Vris is getting fat off mosquitoes in the courtyard. He won’t be hard to spot. Once he starts circling, follow him. He’ll be able to tell where I’m headed.” Considine didn’t wait for Larsa’s nod. His fog circled the grating like water in a drain, then was gone.
Finding the bat was easy enough. Following it through the Ardis night seemed next to impossible.
Before I could complain, Larsa was off at a run. I chased after, trusting in senses I certainly didn’t possess to lead us. Not that she was much easier to follow. Even with her eyes locked on the fluttering thing, she still outpaced me. I struggled to keep up, but didn’t bother to call out. I knew she wouldn’t slow.
The opera’s courtyard was empty except for shadows cast by struggling braziers. Either the vagrant army only bivouacked at the theater’s rear, or it followed its master into the dark. I didn’t waste the time to finding out. We were through the opera’s gates and into the empty streets before any of Rivascis’s slaves made themselves known.
Only a faint night mist wandered the streets. If anyone else strolled Ardis’s avenues in the earliest hours of morning, they knew subtler—and likely safer—routes than we. Vris led us east, unsurprisingly toward the abandoned district called White Corner. As we neared, the blocks huddled together, tightening in sloppy, uneven shapes. Larsa slowed to a jog, struggling either to follow the bat between mismatched roofs or to split her attention with the increasing number of cluttered alleys. Gradually, I managed to catch up with her.
“I saw Tashan,” Larsa said as I came alongside, her eyes remaining fixed on the empty black sky. “How’d it happen?”
I tried to keep the panting from my voice. “One of Rivascis’s cronies. A monster disguised as a woman.”
Though it was hard to tell while running, I think she nodded. “The thing in the basement?”
“Yeah.”
“Your work?” She spared a quick glance.
“Yeah.” I said matter-of-factly.
Larsa maybe nodded again.
Almost an entire block passed before she went on. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
I’d never heard her apologize. I suspected she didn’t often, and probably wasn’t practiced at it. The trace of guilt was obvious in her voice. I tried not to make it worse. “You couldn’t have known what Rivascis had planned.”
“I could have. I knew what he was. I shouldn’t have run off.”
Something rote came to mind, something about the goddess and everyone having their time. I had counseled enough survivors to recognize the vague “would’ves, should’ves” of those who went on living. But Larsa sounded as though she were stating pure fact. Maybe she should have known.
“Then you owe Rivascis.” I didn’t meet her look when her head turned. “Probably we both do. This isn’t just your revenge anymore.”
She didn’t say anything, but that time I was sure she nodded.
White wings swept low across the cluttered street. We both ran on into the slum.
The sickly bat circled a tavern crushed between two larger buildings. The two-story wreck looked like the keystone of the entire block, being the smallest structure but also the only one sound enough to stand on its own. A stained signboard shaped as a coffin bore the name “The Boneyard.” A salaciously alert, wood-grain skeleton sat upright in the coffin, staring down and grinning with too many teeth. Unhinged doors stood jammed into a heap of garbage and wooden wreckage spilling through the entrance. The place looked empty, but I supposed that made sense.
I stared at the heap of street junk blocking the way in. “We’ll have to make some noise to get through.”
Larsa’s hat bobbed. “Likely the point.”
“Worth trying to find—”
“He’s got nowhere else to go.” Mounting the junk heap, she gave one of the doors her heel. It shuddered. A few more solid kicks and it cracked, toppling through a gap tall enough to crouch through.
It was completely dark inside. Larsa didn’t wait for me to relight the lantern. She drew her dagger and disappeared from the misty street.
It took a moment to rouse the lantern flame back to life, but when I did, the light seemed small and useless. Fortunately, I wouldn’t need it much longer. Already the barest hint of color was creeping into the sky. Morning wasn’t far off. I just hoped I’d get to see it.
Holding the lantern high, I clambered over the waist-high junk pile and followed Larsa inside.
I worried about making too much noise when the cold floorboards squealed beneath my boots. Less so when Considine’s body crashed down from above, a silver blade skewering his neck.
47
WHAT THE GRAVE WON’T HOLD
LARSA
It wasn’t just a tavern. The Boneyard was a box house, something akin to a bar, a brothel, and—true to Rivascis’s form—a theater. Vampires were all predictable in their own ways. More than once I’d wondered if imagination was a trait of the living, if new ideas could take in dead ground. In any case, Rivascis never abandoned what he was in life, refusing to venture far from the stage.
Not that this wreck at all compared to the Royal Opera. The Boneyard’s day was years past. Waves of looters had hollowed out the taproom, leaving little more than the raised stage. The platform abutted a bar that could have served as a promenade. Hollow personal boxes lined the walls, once offering lounge seating for those seeking more discreet performances. Yet despite the stripped furnishings, no looters had been daring enough to risk the half-collapsed catwalk dangling in the theater’s middle space.
Miles of ropes ensnared rickety slat walkways; tangled cords gripped sandbag clusters mid-fall. Among them dangled cockeyed curtains, iron trapezes, even a pair of coffinlike dancing cages—heavy-handed callbacks to the morbid house name. The full extent of the deathtrap’s convolution faded into shadowed rafters, but it shifted and groaned like an animal left to starve in a snare.
Rope twangs and clattering chains preceded what I expected to be a crashing metal landslide. Leaping back, I narrowly avoided Jadain following a weak light through the door. The body struck with a meaty slap—a body in a torn red vest. The twin to the dagger in my hand fully pierced his neck, its point bloodlessly emerging from the opposite side.
I’d expected to have more of a hunt ahead of me than this.
Tugging the dagger free, I expected Considine to dissolve i
nto fog and blow away somewhere safe—he’d be aware of dawn’s approach even more than I. But he didn’t. Once extracted, the blade’s magic should have released his full suite of vampiric tricks. Still, he didn’t so much as smirk. He might as well been a corpse … more a corpse.
“See what you can do.” I tossed Jadain the winged dagger. “And if you need to, use this. It won’t stop Rivascis, but it will slow him down.”
She nodded, already dropping to Considine’s side.
I leapt the body, snared a chain dangling almost to the floor, and climbed. Rivascis had that dagger when he fled the opera. He was up there.
Hand over hand, I swung up, alert for the sounds of bending metal or tangled scaffolds tearing loose. Whatever the chain was attached to slid, giving a lazy metallic yowl, but it held. At its top, I found myself at the center of the web of damp rope and rotting boards. The dark didn’t hide much from me, but countless slack ropes and stray timbers obscured dangling shapes. It was like I’d slipped into the wreckage of some hovering shipwreck. I pulled myself onto an angled length of catwalk, a small island amid the knotwork maze.
“So whose slave are you really?” Rivascis’s voice drifted from nowhere in particular. “I recognize your mother’s daggers. Did she convince you that you’re not one of us? That there’s a place for you in the light—among the living?”
The catwalk creaked as I inched down its length. He was speaking, which meant he had to be solid. Keep talking.
“There’s not, you know. They’ll never understand. You’ll always be their monster.”
“She didn’t convince me of anything.”
“Then you’re really nothing more than a slave. I assume Luvick’s—you couldn’t honestly consider Diauden master.”
I swung off the catwalk, pulling myself toward another island of knotted chains. “You’re so concerned about my employers. I’ve got plenty of my own reasons to want you dead.”
“You’ve imagined enough.”
“Did I imagine all those years under Caliphas?”
“Dear,” he pandered. “We only met yesterday—never before. Anything you expected of me, anything you think I owe you, you’ve concocted for yourself. I’ve done nothing but heal your wounds and tell you the truth.”
“You killed Tashan. You tried to kill Miss Kindler.” I tested the strength of a tangle of sandbags. Two slipped free, falling soundlessly then bursting upon the bar below with heavy sawdust thuds.
“The slave of your master’s dog and a woman you also only met yesterday. I’d never have expected such a sensitive soul to bloom in Luvick’s charge.”
I sucked my teeth and slid past the sandbags onto a thick beam. Past it hung more thick ropes, off-kilter lights, and one of the coffin-shaped cages. The cage was closed, but wasn’t empty. Inside, almost as tall as the cage itself, was a plain box, a pauper’s casket.
Rivascis’s casket.
His ultimate retreat. He hadn’t hidden it underground, where the light couldn’t reach and where a hunter might expect. He’d hidden high, someplace pursuers wouldn’t think to check and where, if they did, they might break their necks trying to navigate.
Three slow, chiding clicks sounded through the rafters.
“Kindler didn’t try to use me as part of some twisted revenge parade. If I’m a romantic, I’m taking after you.” I grabbed a chain supporting an iron chandelier and, giving it a cautious tug, swung onto it, closer to the coffin.
The light fixture dropped. My stomach lurched, my breath bursting out in a sound of wordless shock. The floor rushed up.
The iron snapped and swung, throwing me to my knees atop the chandelier’s mismatched arms. I grabbed the suddenly taught chain at its center. Forcing my eyes away from the floor, I looked up into the rigging for a safer place.
Rivascis reached from behind the angled strut I’d just stepped from, one hand holding the chandelier’s rusty chain beneath a broken link. The entire contraption, with me on it, dangled from his grip.
The feather pattern on the dagger’s grip dug into my palm. He was so close.
He stared down. “Careful.”
I stood cautiously. Kneeling, he extended his free hand down to me. “I knew it would be dangerous to be my child. I know that doesn’t make up for what you’ve suffered.”
I took his hand and he lifted me up. The chandelier dropped away, its crash shattering metal far stronger than bone.
“Perhaps I can find a way to make up for those years. Perhaps together—”
Still suspended dozens of feet above the stage, I lunged, jamming the bird-skull dagger into his chest.
He didn’t drop me. Despite the surprise, then wrath that cracked his stony expression, he didn’t let me fall. His grip tightened and I expected to hear my wrist crumble, yet he didn’t lash out. The dagger might have pierced his heart, but even with its magic, it wasn’t a stake. It wouldn’t paralyze him, just lock him in one shape.
He spoke calmly, eyes darkening. “I warned him, warned Siervage, that servants would be less troublesome than children.”
I sneered, reaching for one of Kindler’s stakes even as I snapped some retort. But my mouth refused to open. My jaw was numb, my tongue dead. Still his eyes darkened, growing unfathomably deep. They looked like a sea on a moonless night, a vast body in which no light could survive. Those dark waters slipped the banks of his eyes, surging on the tide of a will that defied even death.
It crashed over me, and I began to drown.
48
AN ENEMY’S ENEMY
JADAIN
I almost screamed when Larsa fell. My heart lurched, and when a white claw caught her wrist, it didn’t return to its place.
I looked for an answer in the corpse sprawled in splinters in front of me. Considine was dead. I just couldn’t be sure of how dead. His wounds had knitted closed, but he hadn’t moved. He wasn’t ashes. If he were truly dead, I was fairly certain that age and decay would have caught up with his body, leaving nothing but a heap of stale salts.
That hadn’t happened, and that was my conundrum.
I knew how to reduce him to that, how to burn the blasphemous life out of him. The prayers to do it were at the forefront of my thoughts. The memory of his emerald eyes crushing me against the back of my own mind was also at hand. I’d burned him with the goddess’s light once and he fled. If I burned him again, he wouldn’t have time to escape.
Larsa kicked in Rivascis’s grip, finding nothing but open air beneath.
“Damn it.” A healing prayer leapt to mind, but I pushed it aside. The blessing of life wasn’t want the vampire needed; it would only sear him. Even after all I’d seen, the thought of calling the goddess’s death-dealing touch still sickened me. I refused to call upon her to pervert life, to make the unnatural flourish, even for such a dire cause. So the wicked riddle shouted through my head: how do you bring death to the dead?
Blood.
He lay there, mouth slightly agape, thin fangs barely exposed. Could he have just overexerted himself? Could he just need a few drops …?
If I couldn’t bring the goddess to him through my prayers, maybe I could restore him myself. I brought Larsa’s dagger to my wrist and took a deep breath.
“No need for all that now.” Considine gave the barest smirk, his eyes still closed.
In relief, I slapped his chest with my damp palm. “Are you all right?”
He feigned a gasp. Mossy eyes peeled open and he wiggled his fingers. “Well enough, considering my father just stabbed me and broke parts I’d forgotten I had.” He gave an earnest pout. “I’m starting to think I’m not the favorite child.”
“Larsa is up there with him right now. She needs help.”
He followed my eyes, arching to look back over his own forehead. He rocked with his small nod. “Seems like it.”
My eyes bulged. “She needs your help!”
He drew out an unmotivated hum.
“She’s your sister! You have to help her.”
It
sounded like his shrug creaked. “I say that, but—you know—not by blood.”
I gaped. He really wasn’t going to do anything. “Even if so—please.”
“Sorry, just don’t see the odds in it.” He sat up on his elbows. “Better that we get out of here—the city, I mean—before Rivascis wakes up from the nap he’s about to take.”
Larsa’s body had gone rigid. I couldn’t see her face or the monster that held her in the shadows.
I jammed the silver dagger into Considine’s leg. The goddess’s blessed spiral was in his face before he could complain. “I could burn you right now. Help her!”
Hissing, he recoiled. I was too close, though, and the dagger’s magic did indeed seem to be slowing him down. He jerked his face away. I considered forcing my amulet against his cheek, burning the Lady’s mark into his alabaster skin.
“Considine. Please.” I pulled the painful symbol back.
“Desperate!” Turning back, he bared his fangs in a smile. “I’m impressed. Fine, fine, get off me.”
I leaned back, giving him space, pulling the dagger free at the same time.
He twisted, looking up at Larsa and the catwalk above. “You’re going to owe me for this.”
I nodded.
For a moment I thought he was talking to me in another language. The rhythmic noises he muttered sounded older than words, arcane syllables utterly different from my prayers. An oily shape congealed between his hands. His fingertips caressed it, molding it into a globe. With a rush of light and heat, the conjured shape ignited, and in the next instant exploded forth. The ball of flames streaked like a comet, burning back shadows as it careened directly at Larsa.
This time I did scream.
49
BLOODLETTING
LARSA
Every muscle numb, every thought suffocating beneath the crush of Rivascis’s will, I barely noticed the noise and burning light suddenly filling the rafters. Rivascis looked past me, then everything blurred.
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