Chapter Thirty

CHAPTER THIRTY

The past will always have its last word.

—Eroccan proverb

Ten minutes and a handful of Bastian’s gold later, Lore, the Presque Mort, and the Sun Prince stood right at the outside edge of the hay-bale ring and waited for her opponent to arrive.

“I know the point is to lose,” Bastian said, wrapping white linen around her knuckles. “But do at least try to give them a show. I doubt anyone will approach you about cargo running if you go down at the first punch.”

“I’ll do my best.” She was too nervous for wit.

Next to her, Gabe stood glowering, jaw set tight enough to bristle his reddish beard stubble. “I don’t like this.”

“I’m not exactly thrilled myself.” Lore bounced on her knees, nervous energy imploring her to move. “Shockingly, I’m not very good at fistfights.”

Bastian stopped wrapping and arched a brow. “You were a poison runner, yet you weren’t good at fistfights? What were you good at?”

She bared her teeth. “Running.”

“Brawling doesn’t take much skill,” Gabe said. “Survival instinct takes over. And you have that in spades.”

“Debatable,” Bastian muttered. Gabe and Lore both pretended not to hear him.

A moment, then Gabe sighed, as if finally resigning himself to what was about to happen. “Aim for the kneecaps.”

“Ah, yes.” Bastian tied off the linen on her hands. “The kneecaps are the eyes of the legs.”

They both stared at him. Then Gabe shrugged. “That’s actually pretty good advice.”

“Excellent help, the both of you.” Lore worked her fingers back and forth, fighting down the numbing anxiety tingling along her spine.

On the other side of the ring, the crowd parted. A girl with coppery hair in long braids and an expression like she’d smelled spoiled milk hopped over the hay bales and stood on the other side, hip cocked, arms crossed. She came in an inch or two shorter than Lore, but had a similar rounded, muscular frame.

“Well, that’s terrible form,” Bastian muttered. “Her knuckles aren’t even wrapped.”

“I don’t think she needs them.” Lore eyed the other girl’s hands—a mess of bruises and swollen joints, the signs of a seasoned fighter.

She clenched her own into tight fists. Her pulse beat through them, as if they were external hearts.

The bearded referee stepped into the center of the ring. “Last call for bets!”

“If they find out I lost on purpose, we’ll be chased out of the city with pitchforks,” Lore said.

“Then you’d better make it look like you didn’t lose on purpose,” Gabe replied.

At the crook of the bearded man’s finger, Lore stepped forward, Gabe and Bastian’s last words of tentative encouragement drowned out by the rush of blood in her ears. Her opponent approached, giving Lore an up-and-down glance that finished in a sneer.

It made Lore very irritated that she had to lose.

“Bets are in,” the referee called. “Let’s see which one of you can send the other to your own personal hell first, ladies!”

Hoots and catcalls echoed through the harbor street. Lore paused, waiting for the official sign they were supposed to start.

It came with a fist in her gut.

The red-haired girl swept out her foot while Lore was still hunched over her aching stomach, but Lore saw it coming and jumped out of the way. Her opponent, disturbingly unperturbed, smacked an open palm across Lore’s ear with her opposite hand, and Lore stumbled to her knees, ears ringing.

“At least get one hit in!” Bastian’s voice, yelling from the sidelines.

“I’m trying,” Lore gritted out. She looked up—the other girl stalked slowly across the ring, a feral smile on her face, the cheers of the crowd encouraging her to take her time with an obviously weaker opponent. Lore heaved in deep breaths as she drew closer, willing her stomach to expand, pushing the pain in her head to the edges. She shifted her aching body—ass on the ground, legs bent before her, hands braced behind. A halfhearted struggle made it look like she was trying to get up and failing, which only sharpened the redhead’s smile.

The girl finally came close enough to touch, though Lore didn’t lash out, not yet. She cocked her head and looked down at Lore the way one might look at a petulant child. “I would offer you the chance to yield, but I need the practice.” Her fist closed, pulled back.

Lore’s seated position put her at eye level with the other girl’s stomach. Perfect.

Leg rising, leaning back on her hands, a quick look to make sure she aimed correctly, all in the span of a second. Lore kicked at the other girl’s kneecap, and it sent her sprawling backward with a hoarse cry of pain.

“The eyes of the legs,” Lore muttered, and heaved herself up from the ground.

The crowd cheered, their loyalties changeable as the weather. Bastian whooped, but Gabe looked worried. He wanted her to yield, she could see it in his eyes, but she didn’t think her opponent would give her the opportunity, especially not now.

Losing big it was, then. Lore winced preemptively.

“You’ll pay for that.” The other girl shook her leg out, barely limping, though agony shone in the rictus of her mouth as she ran forward.

“Yes, I suppose I will,” Lore sighed.

“Break it up!”

The shouts came from the streets back toward the city, accompanied by the sounds of boots on cobblestones. The cheers of the crowd turned to shouts of surprise.

“Bloodcoats! Clear out!”

The hay ring was abandoned; spectators and waiting fighters alike turned tail and hauled ass, disappearing into alleyways as a group of bloodcoats surged into the street, bayonets catching the orange glow of the streetlights. It made them look like spears of flame.

The girl Lore had been fighting cursed, turning to run on her sore leg. She didn’t give Lore a second glance. Revenge came long down the list of priorities when escaping the Burnt Isles was number one.

A hand on her arm, steering her forward. Gabe. “Let’s go. This was a dead end.”

They ran with the crowd up the streets, the sounds of capture and occasional gunfire spurring them on from behind, until Bastian darted out of an alley’s narrow mouth. “Over here!”

Gabe didn’t break his stride as he turned, steering them both into the relative safety of the dark. Lore leaned against the wall, arms crossed over her stomach. It still hurt from getting punched, and the impromptu run hadn’t helped.

“We need to go back to the Citadel before this gets out of hand.” Bastian stood right inside the lip of the alley, shadow cutting across his face as he peered out into the street. A group of bloodcoats ran by, and he pressed against the wall, disappearing into dark. “We’ll come back tomorrow—”

“Absolutely not.” Gabriel loomed in the center of the dank alleyway, voice stony, expression stonier. “This was a stupid plan from the start.”

Bastian looked back over his shoulder, the streetlights catching the gleam of his teeth. Lore recalled the last time she was in an alley with the Sun Prince, how he’d changed so quickly from layabout royal to something sharp-edged and angry.

“Do you have a better plan?” he asked, his voice a match for Gabriel’s blade-tones.

“There has to be one,” Gabe replied. “We can talk to—”

“That’s not going to work,” Lore said softly. “You know it’s not, Gabe. The only way we can find out who’s doing the hiring is to find them ourselves.” She gestured to the mouth of the alley. “A raid happening tonight is a sign. We’re on the right track, and someone knew we were coming.”

Gabe turned on her, one blue eye blazing through his domino mask. “You don’t know how dangerous it is to keep doing this. To keep coming here—”

“I’m from here.” She managed to straighten, despite the pain in her middle, and glare up at him. “Has it occurred to you that you might be taking your role as protector a bit too far?”

She hadn’t planned to say it, didn’t know what shape her anger and fear and irritation would take until the words were forged and thrown. All three of them froze, staring, knowing that this was a door opening onto something much bigger than they had time to deal with right now.

Gabe took a step forward, blue eye glittering. “Would you rather I throw you to the wolves over and over to further my own plans?” He didn’t look at Bastian, but he didn’t have to. The accusation was an arrow, and its target was obvious.

Bastian’s gaze weighed heavy on Lore’s shoulders. He knew what she was, where she’d come from, that she could survive a few wolves. He knew that if she were made of glass, she’d have shattered long ago.

Gabe didn’t know all those details like Bastian did.

Maybe it was time to fix that.

Lore took a deep breath. “Gabe, there’s something—”

But she was interrupted by a shape flying from the shadows and knocking her backward.

Her already-aching stomach felt like it was catching fire as her skull cracked against the dirty wall. Through the high-pitched ring in her ears, she heard Gabe shout, heard the sound of fists meeting flesh, a snarl that could only be Bastian.

The blow to the head made her vision blurry, but Lore pried her eyes open.

“You didn’t learn your lesson, huh?” There was something familiar about the voice; she’d heard it before. But there was an almost desiccated quality to it, now, as if the throat she’d heard it from the first time had been scoured out. “Doesn’t matter you’re a prince. Doesn’t matter you’re a lady. I need more money, and I know you fuckers have it.”

Lore’s vision stopped swimming gradually, making sense of the figure blocking the gas lamp’s light. He looked far worse than he had before—his large frame sagged, like he lacked the strength to hold it up, and lines of gray rock crisscrossed where his veins should be—but she recognized him. Milo, the bruiser who’d tried to shake Bastian down for more than his bet the last time they’d come to the ring.

Gabe was crumpled against the dirty brick, conscious but dazed, dark purple spreading over his temple. The handle of Bastian’s dagger stuck out of Milo’s shoulder, but the man didn’t seem to feel it at all. His veins were so full of stone, it was a miracle the blade struck through his skin at all. The man had dosed himself halfway to a revenant.

Bastian slumped in the center of the alley, arms crossed over his middle. Milo had landed a knife-blow, too. Crimson seeped through Bastian’s shirt, night-black in the dim light, pattering softly to the trash-strewn ground.

Milo turned the bloody knife in his hand. “Don’t care who you are,” he murmured in that stony, graveled voice. An unsound smile lifted his lips, slowly, his eyes unfocused and glassy with a euphoric poison high. “This time, you die.”

Time slowed. Something crystallized in Lore’s mind, fully formed, instinct she knew how to follow.

“Move,” she said to Bastian, her voice somehow strong despite her aching stomach and ringing head.

Whatever deep knowledge she followed, it seemed he knew it, too. Bastian pressed his hand harder against his middle and stumbled down the alley in the opposite direction, as far away from Lore and Milo as he could get, much faster than he should be able to run with a stomach wound.

Milo moved to follow, but Lore was faster. With Bastian farther away, Mortem was simple to call. It came easily, flowing from the stone walls, the trash piled in the corners, the cold steel of the dagger that was even now slicing through the air toward her.

It was stronger than it ever had been, a wave that should’ve overwhelmed her senses. But Lore took the power, and took it with ease.

Hands stretching out, vision graying as she held her breath and dropped into the place where death was visible, death was a tool. Lore channeled Mortem through her body, veins blackening and eyes going opaque, heart going still in her chest for one beat.

Almost without thinking, she took all that death and pushed it out toward Milo.

Weaving death felt like taking in air, like an intrinsic part of her that had just been waiting to bloom. Before, she’d done this without thinking, her born ability making such a careful thing easy. But now, she paid attention and reveled in just what she could do.

Lore spun the Mortem like thread, knitting it around the man like a shroud. Like the roses in the garden, merely cased in stone, merely frozen. Just enough for stasis, just enough to stop him, because she didn’t have any other choice.

See how easily you take to it, daughter of the dark?

The voice was faint, but it was enough to break Lore’s concentration. She shook her head and opened her eyes.

Milo was stone. The tip of the knife glinted mere inches from her throat. She expected his face to be frozen in a snarl, but instead, the expression he wore was open-mouthed terror.

“You…” Gabe gaped, his daze shaken off, hands opening and closing on empty air as he pushed himself up from the ground. “You shouldn’t have…”

“What else would you propose she have done, Remaut?” Bastian, striding up from the end of the alley. His shirt was bloodstained, but he didn’t clutch at it anymore, and he didn’t walk like a wounded man. “Waltz with him?”

Gabe didn’t respond. He leaned against the wall and stared at the statue Lore had made of a living, breathing human being.

Milo. He’d been a person, with a name and a job, even if that job was extorting bets on illegal boxing matches. A person she’d turned to stone. Was he still aware, somewhere in all that? Did it hurt?

She shook her head. She didn’t want to know.

Lore didn’t look at Gabe. She knew his expression now would be so much worse than it had been the day of the Mortem leak, and she couldn’t take it, couldn’t face it, not when there was so much else to do.

“How’s your gut?” she asked Bastian, her voice thin and shaking.

He glanced down like he’d forgotten, frowned at his bloody shirt. “Fine,” he said. “Must’ve just been a scratch.”

It’d been more than that. At least, Lore thought it had been. But when he raised his shirt, the skin was unblemished, marred only by a scrim of dried blood.

A hand on her shoulder—Bastian, gently moving her away from the outstretched knife in Milo’s stone hand. His fingers slid to the back of her neck, into her hair; his thumb brushed her cheek, then dropped, and he stepped away.

“Right,” he said, with a decisive nod. “Well. We can’t leave him here, and I assume you aren’t up to changing him back just yet?”

“If we can.” Gabe’s voice was quiet, hoarse. “If we can change him back.”

“Either way, we’ll have to move him.” A rickety cart slouched against the wall on the other end of the alley; Bastian went and tugged on one of the handles. The cart moved, though the squeaking was awful. “But to where, I have no idea.”

“I do,” Lore said. Her lips felt numb. “I know where we can take him.”

There was a moment of slight panic as Bastian and Gabe conferred on how to tip the stone man over into the cart—and whether the cart could even hold the weight, decrepit as it was; Milo wasn’t a small man even when he was flesh—but in the end, the Mortem-made statue was easier to move than it looked.

Gabe and Bastian heaved together on a count of three, and the man fell into the cart, the bottom of it cushioned with trash that Lore gathered from the alleyway. Bastian stood back, eyes wide. “That was much easier than I anticipated.”

“It’s not solid stone,” Gabe said. Then, with a shake of his head, “He isn’t, I mean.”

Not solid stone, just a living person knit into a shroud of death. Lore felt sick. Gabe didn’t look at her.

Gabe covered the stone figure with more trash, then he and Bastian manned the cart while Lore crept to the mouth of the alley, looking both ways. “Clear,” she murmured, “but we have to move fast.”

“Yes, I imagine this would be difficult to explain away.” Bastian hauled the front of the cart up behind her. Gabe stayed at the back, keeping it steady. She wondered if he’d chosen that position because it was farthest away from her.

Slowly, Lore moved out of the alley, Bastian and Gabe and their uncanny cargo following. She remembered the route, rounding the turns and taking the shortcuts without any conscious thought needed. For ten years, Val’s crew had worked out of the same warehouse, and she remembered how to get there even though part of her wished she could forget.

She hadn’t wanted to get them involved. Even today, when it’d become clear that answers might be found nearer to her poison-running past than her falsely noble present, Lore hadn’t wanted to go to Val and Mari, had wanted to keep them as far from all this as possible. Both to keep them safe, and because the idea of seeing them pried at a very precise wound in her heart, like pushing on a bruise.

But there was really no choice now.

Fog hung low over the street, thickening the closer they drew to the harbor. The full moon reflected on the black water, visible in the distance as a glimmering expanse not unlike the sky above it.

Looking at the moon made her think of the upcoming eclipse, the ball on her twenty-fourth birthday.

The warehouse was a long, dark block of a building, with virtually nothing to distinguish it from the other long, dark blocks of buildings around it, and intentionally left to look abandoned. The roof sagged in the middle. The gutters were full of dried gull shit. Water marks bloomed over the rough wooden paneling of the outer walls.

Most of the other buildings were actually empty, a haven for revenants looking for someplace to sleep off their latest fix, or for a quiet place to finally die after ossifying themselves into too-long lives. Val never kicked anyone out of the empty warehouses, but she’d send in people to look for bodies occasionally. Especially in the warmer months, when the little flesh they had left started to stink. They burned the corpses they found, didn’t bother trying to figure out next of kin to contact. If someone was crawling down to die in the empty warehouses by the harbor, they didn’t have anyone looking for them, and probably didn’t care much about reaching the Shining Realm. Not many people out here did.

“Where, exactly, are we going?” Bastian barely sounded out of breath. When she looked back at him, the muscles of his shoulders were tense against the blood-stiff fabric of his shirt. It only drew attention to his corded arms, the well-formed plane of his chest.

She looked away. “Poison runner den.” No sense dithering over it.

“Oh, excellent,” Bastian said. “I’ve never been to one.”

Behind him, Gabe was still silent.

The streets around the warehouse were empty, which was typical. Val made her crew stagger times they were seen near the headquarters so as not to draw attention. It must just be force of habit now. Val had her papers, she was officially sanctioned by Church and Crown. Turning Lore over to Anton had bought her a veil of legitimacy.

Streetlights were far behind them, now, and the only illumination was the round moon, the scattering of stars. It made the building loom like an executioner’s block.

Lore paused before the door, nerves writhing around her middle. But she had a mostly stone man to hide until she figured out how to change him back, and this was the only place she could think to do it.

So she knocked. A familiar pattern, ingrained in her since she was thirteen. Two sharp raps, then two more with a four-second pause between them, and a final drag of her knuckles.

It opened immediately. “Gods dead and dying, what took—” Mari’s rich alto voice faltered as her willowy form filled the door. Her eyes widened. “Lore?”

Her lip wobbled, despite herself. “Hi, Mari.”