Chapter Thirty-One

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The bonds of family are sacred, but they are not always bound in blood.

—Myroshan proverb

The inside of the warehouse completely belied the shabbiness of the outside. The floors were well swept, the ceilings high and built up with multiple layers of wood and tin to keep the deliberate disrepair of the roof from affecting the interior. Cots lined the walls, some made and some not—most of the crew didn’t live here, and Val and Mari had a small apartment above their office, but they kept beds just in case someone needed a place to stay. To the right, the open office door spilled golden light into the dim, cast from a gas lamp at the edge of the desk. The lamp was Mari’s prized possession. It’d been a gift from Val for their anniversary, when Mari couldn’t stand to do their accounting by candlelight anymore.

A few boxes were stacked in the shadows at the back of the space, proof that a drop would happen in the next few days. Val didn’t keep poison here unless she had to.

Mari stood in front of the office door, arms crossed, staring at Gabe and Bastian and the cart behind them with an unreadable expression as Lore rattled off their story. Lore kept to the truth, mostly, though she didn’t tell Mari why they were at the docks in the first place. She wanted to, though. Seeing one of her mothers had made the pain of Val’s betrayal fall away; Lore felt like a child again, eager to spill everything to one of her surrogate parents and let them fix it.

She also kept Gabe and Bastian’s identities out of the story. Telling Mari that the Sun Prince of Auverraine and one of the Presque Mort were in her warehouse was sure to fly like a dead bird.

When Lore finally dropped into silence, Mari nodded slowly, mulling the story over with her lips pressed to a thin line. “So,” she said, dark eyes wary, “you want us to keep a dead person—”

“Not dead.” It was the first time Gabe had spoken since the alley, and it startled Lore nearly as much as it did Mari. Next to him, Bastian stayed quiet, arms crossed and eyes thoughtful. They both still wore their masks, though Lore had taken hers off, and it had the disconcerting effect of making them look nearly like the same person from the corner of her eye.

“A not dead person,” Mari conceded, “in our warehouse until you can figure out how to fix them.”

“It won’t be long,” Lore said. Her voice had the same almost wheedling edge it’d carried when she was a child, begging for something she wanted. “In fact, I’m going to try in just a minute or two.”

She felt Gabe’s gaze snap to the back of her neck, raising gooseflesh. Lore bristled. Leaving Milo in this state was bad, trying to fix him was bad—she wasn’t going to please Gabe, no matter what she did, and she wished she didn’t care.

“We just needed a place to bring him,” she finished quietly. “We couldn’t leave him in the alley.”

“No, I suppose you couldn’t.” Mari sighed, reaching up to tighten the knot holding her silky scarf in place over her the twisted lengths of her hair, making the sea-glass beads at the ends clink. They must’ve caught her right before she went to bed. “Fine. He can stay.”

“Hopefully not for long.” Lore turned and looked at the stone man in the cart. The trash they’d piled on top of him had shifted, uncovering Milo’s terror-stricken face.

Mari glanced at the cart. She arched a brow at Lore.

“Give me just a second, and I’ll fix him,” Lore said. “I just needed… I just needed privacy.”

Privacy, and a place she felt comfortable. Lore hadn’t realized just how tightly she’d held herself until the tension bled out, a drop at a time. Despite everything, this warehouse still felt like home, and gods she missed it. Being here filled a hollow in her chest she wasn’t aware of carving out.

“You can have it.” Mari glanced toward the door. “Val should be here soon.”

The hollow emptied again. Lore gnawed on her lip. “Will that be a problem?”

“I don’t think so, to be honest.” Mari looked her in the eye, something softening in her face. Sadness and resignation shaped her mouth. “She was between a rock and a hard place, Lore. The Priest Exalted didn’t give her any choice. It was you, or the whole crew swung.”

Behind her, Gabe stiffened.

“Swung?” she repeated quietly. Val said it’d been a choice between her or the crew, but Lore thought that meant prison time, fines, maybe the Burnt Isles…

“Death for us all,” Mari whispered. She chewed the corner of her lip. “He wanted you, mouse. Badly.”

She thought of that first day after Horse, when Anton told her the Church had been watching since she was thirteen, since she first raised Cedric from the dead. Watching, keeping tabs, letting her live a life she thought was free until the rope finally pulled taut.

They’d waited until she got older. Until her power over Mortem had matured, grown. Because it had—the stone man in the cart was proof. She wouldn’t have been capable of something like this weeks ago, as if her time in the Citadel had somehow strengthened her ability.

Her time in the Citadel, and the slow march toward her twenty-fourth birthday.

Instinctually, her eyes darted to Bastian, seeking some kind of strength from the Sun Prince. She didn’t realize Gabe had stepped away, far enough into the warehouse to be out of earshot, until he crossed behind Bastian, pacing like a caged animal. The Presque Mort looked back once, his gaze cutting between her and the other man, before turning away again.

A knock at the door. The same pattern Lore had used. Mari went to open it.

Val stood on the other side.

“Sorry, love, I was…” Val trailed off, mouth staying open and no words coming out, eyes round as she stared at Lore.

“Mouse,” she said, and then she rushed forward.

Lore didn’t know what to expect. By the wall, Bastian looked ready for a fight—shoulders loose, fists curled.

But Val threw her arms around Lore and hugged her tight.

Of the hugs they’d shared, it was the longest. Though there’d only been three before this, all carefully cataloged in Lore’s mind, so maybe that wasn’t a fair metric—Mari was the softer one, the mother more likely to give comfort. Still, after the initial moment of being frozen in shock, Lore returned the embrace just as tightly, her anger forgotten in the familiar scent of Val’s hair, the familiar rasp of her shirt against her cheek.

“Oh, mouse.” Val’s voice was choked and hoarse. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

Lore didn’t respond. She tucked her chin, burying her face in Val’s shoulder, and hoped the older woman didn’t feel the warm salt seeping through her work shirt.

Lore didn’t let herself really cry, though. That was a dam she couldn’t strike just yet; there wasn’t time.

She had a better hold on herself when they broke apart, tears drained away, chin steady. “I understand why you did it,” Lore said softly. “I know he’d been watching since… since Cedric. And Mari said he threatened to hang the whole crew.”

Val’s eyes were tired. She nodded and ran a hand over the scarf holding her pale hair in place. “He made it sound like it’d be good for you, too. Living in the Citadel, where your… your condition could be better understood. He made it sound like they’d teach you about it.”

Lore shifted uncomfortably. It pained her, to hear that Anton had used the promise of teaching her to make Val agree. It made her wonder how often Val had wanted to help and just not known how.

The old poison runner’s sinewy arms shook as she placed her hands on Lore’s shoulders. “If I’d known they were tracking you, I would’ve protected you,” she murmured. “I hope you can believe that.”

“I believe you,” Lore murmured. And it was true. “I’m sorry I brought this all down on you, Val.”

“Don’t.” Her mother gave her an impatient little shake. “This isn’t your fault. None of it. I’m just glad you’re here, and you’re fine.”

“Not that fine,” Mari said. “What with the man in the cart turned to stone, and all.”

Val’s eyes widened. “Pardon?”

“It’s a long story,” Lore sighed.

“Save it, if you want.” Val had finally noticed Gabe and Bastian. The grizzled poison runner eyed them both warily, one hand dropping from Lore’s shoulder to hover over the leather holster on her hip. Val always had a pistol. “I’m more interested in the not-stone men currently in my warehouse.”

Lore opened her mouth, trying to run together cover stories, but she needn’t have bothered. Of course Bastian beat her to the punch.

“Blaise,” Bastian lied, with a bow. “And my surly friend is Jean-Baptiste.”

Gabe’s jaw flexed at the flowery false name Bastian had given him. It was almost a relief to see annoyance spike across his face, something different from cold detachment and simmering anger.

“And the two of you know Lore how?”

Bastian didn’t falter at all beneath Val’s shrewd eye. “We’ve been helping her in the Citadel,” he said, skirting close to the truth without revealing it. Then, with a wry smile, “Us outsiders have to stick together, my lady.”

“Don’t my lady me.” Val’s eyes swung from Bastian to Lore, calculating. “If Lore trusts you, so will I. But something easily given is easily taken away, and if you put so much as a toe out of line, I will cut it off.”

“We wouldn’t dream of it,” Bastian replied. “All appendages will stay exactly where you want them.”

Val gave him a curt nod, apparently placated. “Now,” she said, crossing her arms. “What are you planning to do about the stone fellow?”

The complete lack of a plan shook out something like this: Bastian, ever the charmer, chattered mindlessly as he and Gabe lifted the strangely light stone man from the cart and propped him against the wall. Lore caught snatches of shipping talk, questions about whether Mari and Val ever frequented the boxing ring—the answer was a resounding no—and comments on the excellent camouflage they’d constructed for the warehouse, but she was only half listening. All her concentration was on Milo, the human being she’d knit death around, and how she could unravel it.

Ifshe could unravel it.

“Will he remember?” she asked Gabe quietly. “When he’s… un-stoned?”

His answer came low, and chilly as the wind soughing off the sea. “In the few times this has happened before,” he said, with a deliberate tone that said he highly disapproved of every single time, “the victim hasn’t remembered much from the last few hours before they were attacked. He likely won’t recall seeing us at all.”

Victim. Attack.Deliberate choices of language. Lore’s shoulders hunched.

Gabe’s fingers flexed in and out of fists, an unreadable look in his one visible eye. “So how do you want to do this?”

She’d hoped he would have an idea, but that must’ve been a bridge too far. Lore swallowed, bending her hands back and forth in preparation for pins and needles. “I guess the same way I fixed the corpse in the vaults,” she said finally. “Just try to… reverse it.”

He nodded, one hard jerk of his chin. “I’ll help.”

It didn’t sound like an offer of assistance, though. It sounded more like an order. Like he didn’t trust her to do it on her own. And even though Lore didn’t really trust herself, either, it still felt like salt in a cut.

Bastian noticed the tension hovering between them, so thick it was nearly visible, and herded Val and Mari back toward the office, still talking. Val looked irritated, Mari bemused. Still, both of them seemed to sense that this was something done better without an audience, and let Bastian lead them away.

Good. She didn’t want them to watch this.

Banishing thoughts of her childhood and her surrogate mothers, Lore turned to Milo and his terrified stone eyes. “All right,” she murmured. “Here we go.”

Tentatively, she stretched out her hands. She felt the air displace next to her as Gabe did the same. A breath into two sets of lungs, taken and held, dropping them into the space where Mortem and Spiritum became tangible.

Lore’s senses flooded with death immediately. This wasn’t like with Horse, a natural expansion of Mortem as the body died, a widening corona of darkness. The entropy surrounding Milo was thick as tar, a conundrum of nothingness made nearly solid by its sheer mass. The contradiction of it made Lore’s mind slippery.

She gritted her teeth. This wasn’t about thinking—the two times she’d done this, it’d been on pure instinct. It was about feeling.

Her eyes stayed open, her vision graying out into the black-and-white that showed life and death in stark contrasts. The man before her was all in black, a nimbus of blazing dark outlining his form. Dark threads spun from her fingers, thin filaments like spiderwebs, connecting her to the Mortem she’d channeled into his body, the shell of it she’d spun.

But at his center was colorless light, a kernel of life untouched. He could be saved.

To turn living matter to stone, she’d knit death into the cells, like a cocoon around a butterfly. Lore could sense the places where that death waited now, delicately entwined with life, separated by the thinnest membrane. Two sides of one coin, unable to exist without the other. Strengthening one strengthened them both.

She thought of the Law of Opposites.

“Can you see where the Mortem starts?” She looked at Gabe. His one eye was opaque, his veins tarry, his extremities necrotic. The skin of his lips had shrunk, revealing more of his teeth, making it look like he snarled.

Monstrous, just like her.

“I can,” he said, quiet and matter-of-fact.

“Let’s unravel it, then. Slowly.”

Deft work, careful work. Hands still outstretched, Lore twitched her finger, and the dark filament attached to it quivered. Slowly, she swiveled her finger as if she were winding thread back onto a spool. The Mortem spun away from the assassin, back toward her. Her lungs felt emptied, her heart growing still and dull as she channeled it through herself, then directed the threads toward the stone floor, funneling death back into already-dead matter. The floor here was thick enough to take it without getting too brittle.

Gabe did the same beside her, silently, and with markedly fewer threads. Together they unspooled death from the man before them, unraveling Mortem to free the kernel of light still within.

The whole time, Lore expected the disembodied voice, the murmurings that sounded both like her and wholly different. But none came.

It should’ve been reassuring. It wasn’t.

When all the death was gone and the light in Milo’s center sluggishly radiated outward to the rest of him, Lore dropped her hands, gasping in air. Her heart tithed its beat; more painful than usual, a lurching thump that rattled her rib cage. She grimaced, pressed still-necrotic fingers to her chest. Slowly, her monotone vision faded to normal colors, and she faced what they’d done.

Milo looked normal again. Markedly healthier than before, even. His skin glowed pinkish; veins that had been solid charcoal faded to a smoky gray, all the way back to blue in some places. His limbs were limp, and the dagger fell from his hand with a soft clink.

His eyes had closed, at some point. His mouth, too. He looked like he was asleep.

Gabe stepped forward, licked the side of his finger, held it beneath the still man’s nostrils. “He’s breathing.”

Relief made her knees go watery. “So we fixed him?”

Gabe turned, not meeting her eyes, and started toward the office. Bastian’s arms cut swaths of shadow through the lamp-glow, telling some story or other, and Mari’s tinkling laughter seeped from the crack beneath the door. He didn’t answer.

Milo showed no signs of waking up, not even when Gabe and Bastian heaved him up by his arms and legs and carried him out of the warehouse. Mari had suggested letting him stay in one of the cots, but Val refused. “He’s poison-addled, and there’s plenty here to steal,” she retorted, and said that there was a warehouse down the alley where people often went to sleep off too much drink. “If he remembers anything, hopefully he’ll think it’s a hallucination. Gods know he’s familiar with them.”

Grumbling, Gabe and Bastian lugged the man’s deadweight over the rough cobblestones, their breaths pluming in the air. Their boots on the street and the huff of exertion harmonized with the gentle sound of the tide coming in, distant bells on ship prows.

Val led them down the narrow lanes, approaching a dark warehouse and gently pushing open the door. It creaked, but if the sound woke anyone inside, they didn’t protest. Bastian and Gabe settled Milo on the floor, then left quickly, soundlessly. He didn’t stir.

“You’re a sneaky lot,” Val commented once they were all outside. “Have either of you considered poison running?”

Gabe looked stricken, but Bastian shrugged. “Not as such, no, but never say never. Although my current schedule wouldn’t allow for it.”

“That’s a shame.” Mari shook her head. “Our crew is dwindling rapidly these days.”

“Arrests?” Lore asked quietly. Val’s operation might be newly legal, but bloodcoats had been known to arrest anyone they didn’t like the look of.

“If only it were that simple.” A laugh huffed from Mari’s mouth, twisting into the air like smoke. “Our most loyal are still around—everyone you’d know, mouse, don’t worry—but the newer folks keep getting lured away.” She tightened the knot on her headscarf again, lips twisting wryly. “I guess getting paid enough to cover your rent for a year with one night of work is a hard bargain to pass up.”

The words registered with all three of them at the same time. Bastian’s eyes widened. Gabe’s lips went flat. Lore’s pulse thumped in her wrists. “You know about the cargo movements?”

“Cargo,” Val said derisively. “It’s contraband, has to be. No one pays that amount of money to move anything legal.”

“Oh, it’s absolutely not legal.” Mari snorted. “Phillip let some of the details slip when he came by to quit, and you’d think he’d signed his own execution warrant when he realized. I had to promise up and down for nearly an hour that I wouldn’t tell anyone before he’d go.”

“Do you have any information about where they move it to?” Gabe sounded like he was conducting an interrogation. Lore scowled at him. He paid no mind. “Or anything about who is actually doing the hiring?”

Val gave him an icy glance. “I believe Mari just said she promised a friend not to disclose anything.”

The skin on Lore’s shoulders prickled. The last thing she needed was for Gabe to goad Val into a fight. She was certain Gabe would lose.

Bastian apparently thought the same thing. “Of course we would never want someone to go back on a promise,” he interjected with a smile. “I apologize for my friend’s impertinence.”

If looks could light someone on fire, the glance Gabe shot Bastian would’ve left him in cinders.

Mari crossed her arms, thoughtfully chewed her lip. “This is information you need, though, isn’t it?” she asked Lore softly. “For whatever they’re having you do up at the Citadel. Which means it’s more than just hauling contraband.”

“Yes,” Lore said. She’d never been able to lie to Mari. She saw through to the core of things, even when you tried to hide them.

Her mothers’ eyes flickered toward each other. “Can you tell us anything, Lore?” Mari asked softly.

She wanted to. She wanted to let all of it go—the bodies, the lies, the esoteric mysteries she knew had to fit in somewhere, and the specter of war hanging over it all—but knowledge could be a noose.

They could stop it. She and Bastian, and Gabe, if he’d still work with them after this. No need to make Val and Mari panic. No need to get them mixed up in this any more than she had to, at least until there was no other choice.

“No,” Lore murmured. “I’m sorry, but no.”

Beside her, Bastian’s hand tensed, rose the slightest bit into the air. Like he’d lay it on her arm. But he didn’t.

“That’s fine, mouse,” Val said. “We understand.”

Mari nodded, a determined bob of her chin. “I don’t know much,” she said. “But just the little bit that Phillip told me was enough to make him nearly wet his pants, so I need to know you’ll be careful. All of you.”

“Of course,” Bastian murmured. Gabe nodded. Lore did, too.

“All I know,” Mari said with a sigh, “is that whatever they’re moving, they’re taking it to the catacombs. Deep in the catacombs. All the way under the Citadel.”