The Chase
Page 6
Wishes she could allow herself to be loved, if only she believed she deserved it.
I let out a small groan at that, promptly sucking in a mouthful of water. I’d forgotten I was underwater; I’d forgotten about the witch hunters snarling above me, thrusting me with their weapons that pierce and puncture. I leak black blood from wounds I don’t feel. What I can feel is the presence of the nymphs, heavy and dragging, their voices at once sonorous and soothing, lulling me to stay there, stay underwater, stay with them for the rest of my days.
But then her voice cuts through theirs, scratchy and rough and tremulous, and I hear it as if she were standing beside me, shouting.
Get up. Kill them. Run.
I get a burst of energy and leap from the water.
The ginger and the blond, they startle and scatter, thrashing through the tangled moss and weeds. The dark one, he’s not as quick, and I’ve latched on to him, my fingers wrapped around his heavily muscled leg. I yank—I barely have to try—and he’s beside me. Thrashing, pummeling me with weapons and with words, fighting back even though he knows he’s not got a chance, knowing that his protection, as pitiful as it was, deserted him.
Then his head is between my hands, and with a savage twist and a crack his neck is broken and he’s dead, sinking slowly beneath the surface. The surface, which is now glowing with magic and light. The nymphs begin to converge. Ripples turn to waves, which then crest and crash and I’m knocked backward, scrabbling for a hand- or foothold, anything to keep me from being dragged under.
Their song breaches the air. Horrible and haunting, it’s all I can hear; it’s all I can feel, the way it threads inside, like chains that wrap around muscle and bone to slow me down, to make me forget the danger I’m in, to make me not care. With just yards to go before I’m free, I turn to see how close they are. I shouldn’t have. Because the moment I turn is the moment one of them rises from the surface.
A single nymph, surrounded by others, though I can’t make them out through the light shining around her. She’s beautiful, easily the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Limbs long and pale and sinewy. Seafoam eyes. Hair like moonlight, face like sunshine, she glides toward me, clothed—if you could call it that—with a single strip of cloth tied around her waist. I can’t look away; I have to look away.
“Fancy you bein’ here,” she drawls. “I heard you coming, did you know? Your thoughts are so loud and so… colorful.” She throws me an exaggerated wink, an expression so like my own that I flinch. This is what they do, nymphs. They talk to you in your language, using words and gestures you know and are comfortable with, all to fool you into thinking that they’re not predators and that you are safe.
You’re not.
“You killed him.” She glances at the dark boy, facedown and bobbing in the weeds, arms and legs splayed, hand still clutched around the hilt of a black, bloodied blade.
“I did,” I manage to reply.
“You’re going to be in trouble,” she singsongs, “when he finds out. Blackwell, of course. He won’t take to one of his—what do you call them? Yes, wolves—being put down.” The nymph grins. She’s picking through my head, the same way I do to others, an unfortunate trait shared by all elemental immortals.
“Yes. It’s something that occurred to me.”
The nymph doesn’t respond, not right away. But when she does it’s not with words but with looks: her flaxen, straight hair turning to ringlets of red, seafoam eyes into emerald, a clear face to a freckled one, a strip of pale cloth for a tunic of black, altering her appearance to look like Fifer.
“He’ll find you, you know.” The nymph’s high, melodic voice has turned thin and raspy, just like hers. “And he’ll kill you. I don’t want him to hurt you, Schuyler.”
The sight of her before me in this swamp—even though I know it’s not her—is so arresting I can only shake my head.
“You’ve thought about it. Quitting stealing. Living an honest life. Haven’t you?” The nymph in Fifer’s skin, conveying Fifer’s thoughts, continues. “That’s why you didn’t give me the pin. The one you lifted from the bureau of that city house you ransacked, ivy for faithfulness, emerald because it matched my eyes—”
I find my voice again. “Stop.”
“You wanted to, but you thought better of it. Because you don’t want to honor me with something you came by dishonorably. But you also can’t honor me if you’re dead.”
“Stop.”
The red and the green and the gravel are gone, and it’s just her again, the nymph, gliding toward me.
“You need to find that sword,” she continues. “No chance on skipping the country now. You need it to bargain for your life once Blackwell finds out you killed his man.”
I shake my head, even as I know she’s right. The only chance I have of atoning for murder is to bring Blackwell that sword. He doesn’t give a damn about his witch hunters, not as anything other than weapons, but were I to bring him an even better one…
“What if I said I knew where the sword was?” The nymph’s words jerk me out of my thoughts.
“Then I would be suspicious.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe you know where it is any more than I do.”
The nymph smiles. “And what do you know? Naught but what the poem told you.”
The poem.
I slap my hands to my trouser pockets. Fish out a now-sodden piece of parchment, black ink illegible, not that it was intelligible to begin with. But it was my only clue and now it’s gone.
Shit.
“Don’t fret,” the nymph says. “There was no more for it to tell you, besides what you already sorted on your own.”
“What, the rubbish about the emeralds and water?” I say. “I made that up.”
“It led you here, didn’t it?”
“Are you telling me the sword is nearby?” The thrill of the hunt, the find, what I love about stealing and what I hate myself for loving, pulls me to my feet.
The nymph laughs. “It’s nowhere close. You really aren’t a scholar, are you?” Again, she winks. “But I could lead you to it.”
I turn from her face, from her near-blinding beauty, and think. While it’s possible they know where it is—nymphs have an uncanny sense for magic and for hidden things—why would they want to help me find it? They’re not exactly altruistic.
“What do you want?” I say finally. “You lot never do anything without a price attached.” That’s another unfortunate trait revenants share with nymphs.
“Her,” the nymph says. “Fifer. The one you continue agonizing over. I want to meet her. See who this human is that occupies so much of your inhuman thoughts.”
“Not a chance,” I say. “I’d never get her out here anyway. Not willingly. She’s not stupid.”
“If you want the sword, that is the price,” she replies. “We just want to see her, and to see her with you. That is all. We don’t even need to speak to her.” The nymph’s face shines with barely repressed glee.
Nymphs, for all they pride themselves on being otherworldly, have somewhat of an obsession with humans, especially human women. They don’t understand emotion, they don’t understand love, they don’t understand that someone would die for someone else. To see humans interact, to watch and to listen to human thoughts, it is as good as any play for them.
It could be harmless. A simple enough price to pay for the location of the sword. Even so, I pick apart her words, looking for the traps and the lies and the bullshit, trying to see into all the ways they could possibly harm Fifer.
“And if I refuse?”
The nymph morphs again, not into Fifer but into someone far more terrifying: tall, richly dressed, crafty coal-dark eyes full of menace and amusement.
“You can’t really think you have a choice.”
A thread of fear, the same one I felt sitting before him in the depths of Greenwich Tower, winds through me again. I go still.
“Bring her to the Winter
’s Night party. It’s where you met her, is it not?” The nymph changes back into herself again, but now instead of beauty all I see is danger. “Bring her there, and I will tell you where to find the Azoth.”
“Winter’s Night?” I say. “That’s in three months. How d’you expect me to hold off Blackwell for that long? I’m supposed to bring him the sword now.”
“But you weren’t going to, were you?” She taps her forehead, another of my gestures, and smiles. “You had no intention of it. Having to wait three months changes nothing.”
“She’ll never agree to this.” I say this more to myself than to the nymph.
“Then you have three months to figure out how to get her there,” the nymph says. “And three months to be on your best behavior lest you ruin the whole thing.”
I begin to back away. Slow, slogging steps through the marsh. I need to leave before anger compels me to do something worse than what I’ve already done, involving Fifer in this mess.
Behind her the water begins to froth, churning swells of foam and moss and mud, and a legion of women rise from the surface, just enough for me to see their faces, not beautiful this time but terrible, with yellow, snakelike eyes and silt-dripped hair and lips bared over razor-sharp teeth. Without the magic and the deception, what nymphs really look like.
I scamper backward, up onto the bank where I slip on a patch of moss, fall to the ground, and scuttle away on my hands and feet, away from the water and away from them. But then they’re gone, sinking beneath the surface to leave the air silent and dark, me uncertain and apprehensive.
I pick my way back to where the witch hunters left their things before entering the water, wholly unsurprised to see their bags still there, strewn along the ground. The two I didn’t kill, Caleb and Linus, didn’t bother to come back for them before scampering off to Upminster to tell Blackwell everything I’ve done. I pick through each one and find a few coins, a knife, some matches. The temptation to nick it all is overwhelming. I’m a thief: It’s what I do. But as the nymph so helpfully reminded me, perhaps that’s no longer what I want to be.
I leave everything behind.
The sun is well past set, a cloudless night and the sky full of a thousand stars. I trek around the Salthouse Marshes until I hit solid land, then plod my way northwest, on the long walk toward Harrow. Until the time comes to see the nymphs again and for them to lead me to that sword, I need refuge and I need it quickly. Harrow is as good a place as any, better, actually, as it’s the one place Blackwell and his men can’t find me. They will certainly be looking. And it’s the closest thing to a home I’ve got these days.
Discounting, of course, the real reason I’m going back.
I’m going there to see her, and I don’t know what will happen when I do. What I will tell her about the things I’ve done. What she’ll think of it, and of me. If I should tell her I meant to keep her out of it but somehow made her a part of it. I reach for her thoughts and it’s easy now, they’re offered freely to me, but I treat them gently, as if they were gifts. I know now that is just what they are.
I hope he’s not hurt. I hope he’s not in danger. I hope he’s not in over his head.
I hope he comes back for his coat.
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About the Author
Virginia Boecker recently spent four years in London obsessing over English medieval history. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, and spends her days writing, reading, running, and chasing around her two children and a dog named George. In addition to English kings, nine-day queens, and Protestant princesses, her other obsessions include The Smiths, art museums, champagne, and ChapStick. You can visit Virginia online at virginiaboecker.com or on Twitter @virgboecker.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Chapter 1: Fifer
Chapter 2: Schuyler
Chapter 3: Fifer
Chapter 4: Schuyler
Chapter 5: Fifer
Chapter 6: Schuyler
Chapter 7: Fifer
Chapter 8: Schuyler
About the Author
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Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Virginia Boecker
Cover ivy © sevenke/Shutterstock.com; sword © sergey856/Shutterstock.com; swirls © UpicL/Shutterstock.com
Cover lettering/type by Kid-ethic
Cover design by Karina Granda
Cover © 2016 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10104
lb-teens.com
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
First ebook edition: August 2016
ISBN 978-0-316-50203-0
E3-20160714-JV-PC