by KC Kingmaker
I flicked my sword to the side, letting the rain wash off the gore.
Bastio’s body crumpled to the ground.
“Sweet fuck!” a man wailed, dropping his knife in the mud. He turned and ran into the night, the first to react.
“He k-k-killed Bastio!” another said, realization dawning on him as he looked down at the surprised face of his leader’s decapitated head. Speckled with rain and mud, the wide eyes stared unseeingly at the sky.
The other three fled the scene wailing and screaming about murder.
I sighed and sheathed my sword, glancing down at the dead man with a frown.
Yes, I suppose I’d overreacted a bit.
But these cretins needed to be taught a lesson that they clearly weren’t being taught in this shithole town.
And who better to teach it than the son of Dante Firesworn?
IT WASN’T DIFFICULT to pick up on the trail of the silver-haired woman. She hadn’t gone far.
I kept my distance and let her be, curiosity nagging at me when she burst into a home that clearly wasn’t hers.
Was she some kind of criminal, then? Just letting herself in because a door was unlocked?
I snorted at the thought, shaking my head.
No, not my silver-haired vision.
When she made it outside minutes later and her shorter friend joined her to cheer her up, I stayed in the darkness of an alley as they walked by, but heard her clearly enough.
Then I realized what she did—what her entire charade at the tavern was about.
And my admiration for her grew.
In this dark world, full of evil and grief, she went out of her way to give less fortunate women a better life. Probably because she’d had a tough one herself.
Yes, this was a woman I could get to know.
This was a worthy one.
My mind screamed: Gah, don’t get distracted, Coalt! You have a mission!
But suddenly I didn’t feel so guilty about killing poor Bastio. Not if it meant protecting the purity of this woman’s mission.
4
Levia
I was bone-tired and groggy by the time Blythe and I made it to the refuge.
It wasn’t too far from Jervus’ tavern, located in the most impoverished district of Belfue. The refuge’s location worked because it was in this section of town where the women needed me most.
The poor district attracted the most savage people, as if it was the wives’ fault the men were destitute and not their overlords’ fault. Whether it was desperation or just the lawlessness here—men knowing they could be barbarians without repercussions—it brought out the worst in the townsfolk.
I desperately wanted to relocate the shelter to a nicer part of town, if not a different town altogether, because all of Belfue was rather bad. If I could relocate, I could turn my shelter into a sanctuary in truth.
In order to do that, though, I needed money. And Oblyx Scraps were hard to come by.
Oblyx was a rare mineral. We exchanged the scraps and shavings of it as currency. I’d heard legends that dragonkind used entire sheets of Oblyx to craft their resplendent armor, but I had to roll my eyes at the myth. That idea was so outside my realm of reality it had to be a cruel joke.
All of us Unscaled citizens of the world would be lucky to avoid our dragon overlords our entire lives.
Dragons did not have a good reputation here. The scaled shifters were arrogant and oppressive. They had their own royal Houses and courts that collectively made up the Dragon Dominion, and we were basically the ants beneath their boots.
Nearly every time I thought of money, or my lack of it, my thoughts naturally gravitated to the dragon shifters, which in turn caused my blood to boil.
The fucking audacity of those people—whoever they were, wherever they lived in their fancy castles. The pompous bastards sucked the resources out of our world, Caan, and controlled it all while the rest of us suffered in anguish.
There were reasons towns like Belfue existed and why we wallowed in squalor.
If I ever met a real dragon or dragoness, I’d spit in his or her face.
“Levy, you all right?” Blythe asked beside me, her hand settling on my shoulder. She gave me a light squeeze and I turned to her, no doubt looking a bit surprised.
We’d been standing in front of the door to the shelter for a few minutes as the rain continued to beat down on us.
Sometimes being outside in the elements gave me the only moments of respite in my entire day, so I seized the opportunity when I could, even if my thoughts were dark.
“Sorry, still a bit drunk,” I told my friend.
She grinned slyly and patted me on the back. “Good. You’ll need the numbed senses.”
I returned the smile.
“Ready for the grand entrance?” she asked.
She pushed open the door. Before we were two paces into the crumbly wooden structure feet were thudding on the rickety floorboards, female voices raised with excitement coming from all directions.
It was like a battlefield. A gushing, rosy, screeching battlefield.
“Oh girls, girls, Sister Blythe and Levia are back!” Zia yelled, bringing a tidal wave of excited children behind her. The teenager’s hair was an absolute mess, standing on ends on one side while the other was partly braided.
She ran into the main hallway holding two young girls’ hands, with two more younglings behind her.
Not only were we a shelter for battered women, but also the children of those women. When ladies agreed to bring their lives over to us, they brought their whole lives over to us—minus a single male element, of course.
I cocked my head as I gave the fresh-faced teen a confused look.
She smiled shyly, her face flushing with embarrassment. “I let the girls practice their hair,” she explained.
“Oh, you little monsters!” Blythe said cheerily, crouching to sweep two of the kids into a hug. She gave the best hugs of anyone at the shelter. “You can’t use Sister Zia as a canvas for your mad experiments!”
“But Blythey, she said it was okay!” a giggling girl said as Blythe lifted and perched her on her hip like a hamper.
“Oh, is that so, Beamy?” Blythe said, wandering off down the hall. Other kids approached me with wide-eyed wonder. Blythe called out over her shoulder, “Come now, kids, let Levia have some space. She’s had a hard night.”
She winked at me and I narrowed my eyes, but it did the trick: the younglings gravitated toward Blythe and trailed her like a puppy down the hall.
“I believe you had a hard night!” I yelled.
Blythe snorted and threw her head back. “Oh, sister, my night was definitely not hard. I’d say it was rather soft!” She shot me a sly glance and a half-smile. “Though I have a mind to head back out on the town.”
The children snickered, not knowing what on Merlog’s mucky planet we were talking about, but enjoying the banter nonetheless.
I barked a laugh. “You promiscuous succubus, you!” I replied, but she was already gone. I was fairly certain the younglings didn’t know what either of those words meant.
Blythe and I had made a pact very early on that, whenever we were around the kids, we’d try our best to put on a façade of happiness. They needed some cheer in their lives. So even if we were feeling rotten, we tried to keep their spirits lifted.
Lead by example and all that.
I was left alone with Zia in the hallway. Around seventeen summers old, she’d lost both of her parents young, gotten into a nasty relationship with an older man, and bore a child when she herself was little more than a child. Eventually Zia escaped here with the whelp, who was now one of the ones following Blythe.
Even through the trauma, Zia was a kind spirit. Rail-thin, beautiful, and more concerned with the kids’ health than her own, she was basically the shelter’s babysitter when Blythe and I were gone.
I took my muddy boots off at the door.
“You look worn, Levy,” she said, taking my h
and.
She dragged me into another room where two older women were seated, eating soup.
“Almost had another one, Zia,” I said, shaking my head. “Was so damn close, I thought we had her.”
“You gave her a map?” an old gray-haired lady at the table asked, looking up from her soup. Her wrinkled face creased with concern as she studied me. “Oh my, Levia, you look waterlogged.”
“In case you couldn’t tell, Alondra, it’s pouring outside.” I gestured vaguely at the wooden structure around us, which was leaking water terribly. “And inside, I see.”
“Sit, sit,” the other woman at the table said. Seren was a no-nonsense, middle-aged widow. No one dared to ask how Seren became a widow, but we all had our own ideas after the gruesome stories she told of her abusive husband.
The only semblance of a hierarchy here was that Blythe and I were the “enforcers,” protectors, and gatherers. We brought the women here, by any means. Even if it meant posturing as a whore, conning a drunk man, and drunkenly trying to coax a woman to come with us.
Alondra, the eldest here by far, was basically the headmistress and spokeswoman. She made the rules—though people following said rules was another story. Seren was her second-in-command and the likely heir to the queendom once Alondra passed, which probably wasn’t too far off.
It was harsh to say, but realistic, and we dealt with realism here. People simply didn’t last long in Belfue, and the fact Alondra had made it this far was uncanny. Perhaps fae magic was keeping her alive in that old bag of bones.
“To answer your question,” I said to Alondra as I stumbled onto a seat across from her, “yes, I gave the woman a map here.”
The jutting bones of her shoulders rose and fell. “Then that’s all you can do, honey.”
I frowned and slurped up some watery soup Zia had placed in front of me. Then I wiped a forearm over my lips. “I wish I could do more.”
“You already do enough,” Alondra said, her eyes shrinking into a bed of wrinkles when she smiled.
“Besides,” Seren said, “we have nearly twenty women here already, Levia. We can hardly fit any more under this roof.”
“And that’s if the roof doesn’t fall down on us first,” Alondra added, looking around at the multiple leaks coming in.
As if on cue, Zia started running around to place bowls under the leaks, squeaking when water dripped on her.
“I know, I know,” I said, annoyed at their common sense. I flapped my wooden spoon toward the old lady. “But I have an idea on how to fix that.”
“What, the roof?” Seren asked.
“No,” I said with a chuckle. I spread my arms out wide. “The whole thing. This!”
“Ah, dear, always with such big dreams,” Alondra said, a fond look twisting her features. I felt a bit patronized by it, to be honest, like I was just a silly girl. She was good at making “big dreams” sound like a bad thing. She wasn’t insulting, per se, but just . . . old. She’d seen it all.
“Alondra, I’m serious this time,” I assured her. “This next job will have a lot of Scraps coming in. I guarantee it.”
“A lot of Scraps?” Seren said, leaning forward. “Sounds dangerous.” Her eyes glinted, and I could tell she wanted to be part of it.
I appreciated Seren’s adventurous spirit, but she was too important here. Plus, she had no experience doing, uh, dangerous things—other than maybe or maybe not murdering her husband.
“Probably,” I said with a shrug. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
Alondra sighed. “Levia—”
“Please.” I raised a tired hand. I didn’t need a lecture right now. I needed a warm bath, which I knew was going to be impossible. At least the soup helped.
“This shelter won’t survive without you or Blythe, honey,” Alondra said. “You know it.”
“Yes, me or Blythe,” I replied a bit fussily. “As long as one of us is here, we’ll be fine. But I’m tired of living in this shithole in the Belfue backwater.”
“Ooh, someone said a bad word,” a voice trailed into the kitchen. Blythe marched in and immediately started rummaging around the cabinets. “I put the kids to sleep,” she announced absentmindedly. “They’re already snoring.”
Seren scoffed. “Gah, I’ll never know how you do that.”
“Especially dressed like that,” Alondra added.
Blythe stood, turned to the old woman, and put her hands on her hips. “Like what, Alondra?”
My eyes darted from my best friend to the headmistress. They had a bit of a tug-of-war relationship.
“Like a slut,” Alondra said simply.
I let out a guffaw.
“Alondra!” Seren chided. “I believe we call them ladies of the evening.” She turned to Blythe and looked her up and down. “But yes, why are you dressed . . . like that?”
Blythe folded her arms over her substantial chest, no doubt feeling a bit examined. “I was playing a part, Seren. It’s a disguise.”
Seren opened her mouth to say more, but Blythe cut her off with a raised hand. “Please. You’re not my mother, Seren. Neither are you, Alondra. I was trying to help Levia.”
She passed the baton to me, and all eyes swiveled my way. I blinked. “Uh, and she did marvelously!”
Blythe took a bow. “Thank you.”
“Well, do you really want the kids seeing you like that?” Alondra asked with a frown, jutting her chin toward Blythe’s flimsy dress—complete with leg slits and a plunging neckline.
Blythe shrugged. “Well, I’m going back out, so I figured it didn’t make sense to change.”
With that, she abruptly left the kitchen, probably coming to the decision right then and there. I couldn’t blame her.
But I chased after her anyway, rising from my seat and rushing down the hall.
“Wait, Blythe, come on!” I yelled. “It’s freezing and torrential outside. Plus, we have a big—”
A loud knock at the front door cut me off before we were halfway down the hall.
Blythe and I shared concerned looks.
“—day . . . tomorrow?” I finished.
Reaching behind me, I grabbed the dagger tucked sideways above the small of my back. The cold handle felt reassuring in my palm.
I didn’t draw it as I slowly approached the door, Blythe a step behind me.
“Yes, hello?” I said sternly.
We never got visitors, unless—
My heart leaped to my throat.
It’s Pearl Chornlotter!
I reached for the doorknob without thinking.
“Wait, Lev!” Blythe rasped.
The door flew open and a large man stood there, wearing a chainshirt and helmet, his hand resting on the pommel of a shortsword at his hip. Behind him were two more grisly-looking men.
Town guards.
I instinctively took a step back.
The man frowned down at me.
Men weren’t welcome here, by rule.
“Y-Yes?” I said, and I hated how I stuttered in the face of this bastard.
“We’re going door to door, Vera,” the man said gruffly, though not unpleasantly. Perhaps my innate ire was misplaced. “Curfew’s enacted the rest of the night. No one’s to leave their lodgings.”
I tilted my head. “Why?”
“There’s been a murder nearby. We’re scouring the town for the killer.”
My heart thundered. “What—who?”
A helpless sinking feeling clawed at my stomach, because I thought I already knew—
No, not Pearl . . . please . . .
“We don’t have the identity of the man, yet. Killed outside Jervus’ tavern.”
“Decapitated,” one of the guards behind him said with an excited nod, as if trying to scare us even more. He earned a scowl from his commanding officer and shrank back.
I was hardly listening. My heartbeat slowly resumed its normal pace. “The victim was male, then?”
The guard furrowed his brow like I was dense. “Do you kn
ow another kind of man?”
“Right,” I answered, nodding profusely. “Thank you for the information, Vero.”
The guard grunted. “Stay safe. And stay inside.”
When they left, I slammed the door behind them and leaned my forehead against it.
Blythe’s comforting hand fell on the back of my neck, sending a warm wave of relief down my spine.
“Come on, hun,” she said softly. “Guess I won’t be going out again. Like you said, we’ve got a big day tomorrow. Let’s get some rest.”
I nodded and took a deep breath.
She said, “You thought it was Pearl, huh?”
I turned and she wrapped her arms around me in a tight embrace.
When we pulled apart, her eyebrows were arched. “Who do you think the killer is?”
A flash of Jervus’ tavern swirled through my mind: dark hood, huge body, warm desire, fiery eyes—
“I have an idea . . .” I said vaguely, trailing away as I stared off into nothingness.
She studied my face, looking up at me with squinted eyes, and then they widened.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “The slab of perfection.”
5
Levia
The next morning started off as a glorious one. The night’s rain had left a crisp aftertaste in the air and a huge red sun beamed down on Belfue to signal the start of summer.
For a moment, waking up and stretching on my hard cot, I nearly forgot my troubles and the plans I had for the day.
Blythe and I had a job to look into, commissioned by the head bureaucrat of the town himself, Chief Garnu.
While rescuing damaged and ailing women from their dreary lives was the thing I took most pride in doing, it didn’t keep the refuge running.
Some might say playing rescuer was simply a “hobby” of mine, though I felt a bond with these women that was much more than superficial.
But in order to keep the place running, I had to earn Scraps. And to do that, I’d become quite an esteemed bounty hunter in Belfue. More of a treasure seeker, really. Whatever needed finding, I was your girl. Usually it was trinkets or family heirlooms; garments lost to an ex-spouse; sometimes even people.