Chapter 23

Madame Strings’s heady musk clings to me, making my skin itch more than it usually does. Making me want to scrub it with a dry loofah until I scrape away the sensation, though I doubt it would help.

This sensation—this filthy itch—goes all the way to my fucking marrow.

Now that I’m here, choking on her scent, I realize I’ve spent so long living in my own filth I’d forgotten how it feels to breathe fresh air … but it’s hard to justify a different existence when every beat of my fucked-up heart feels stolen.

Undeserved.

Swallowing the nausea clawing up my throat, I look down at Madame Strings’s hand resting upon my naked thigh. Her head is on my chest, lashes spread across the apples of her cheeks, lips slightly parted as she breathes soft and slow. The gray paint on her creamy skin is smeared all over her plump curves. The same gray paint that’s now on my hands. My body.

Tainting my fucking soul.

Saliva gathers beneath my tongue, and I battle the urge to vomit.

She groans in her sleep, rolling, long ropes of golden hair fanned to one side as she settles on her front, nuzzling into the gray sheets. She splits her legs, back arched, like even in her sleep the Candescence is still wisping through her system, telling her greedy body she wants more.

I wonder how old she really is. How long she’s been bolstering her eternal youth and beauty with thorns plucked from my people.

Probably a while, based on the way she fucks.

She mumbles as if she’s going to wake, then settles into a steady rhythm of deep, even breaths. I would be relieved if I could feel anything at all, but my mind’s a graveyard littered with the bones of too many people I knew and loved.

Lost.

If a krah swooped down and shat on me now, I’d probably fucking welcome it.

I sit up, drag my hand down my face, then look past the floaty curtains shrouding the bed and the swirls of incense smogging the air, scanning the room that’s lost its beat. Men and women are passed out in tangled piles or draped across the rugs, the furniture. Wherever their most recent surge of candy-induced pleasure landed them.

Easing off the bed, I locate my pants and pull them up, not bothering to find my top or the robe I came here in. Stepping over a man who fell asleep with his cock in his hand, I swipe a bottle of spirits off a low stone table, tipping it over the fluffy rug as I make for the fireplace.

I grab a metal poker, another gush of nausea rearing up my throat. I splash more spirits about the room, over chaises, floor pillows, and up the side of the bed, take a single saluting sip, then drop the empty bottle and kick over a bowl of blazing oil, its contents sloshing across the floor.

Leaching toward the plush rug.

Not bothering to glance over my shoulder, I grab another bottle of spirits and make for the door, a violent roar blasting to life as catastrophic heat singes my shoulders and the back of my bare head.

I barely feel the burn.

I pull the doors shut behind me, threading the metal poker through the handles and sealing the reek of frying flesh inside. Closing myself off to the fisted bangs on the stone. The cries for help.

The blood-curdling wails.

Thick, white smoke billows from beneath like an upside-down waterfall, freckled with little sparks of iridescent shine that sow a seed of determination deep inside my gut.

The doors begin to shake …

“Gleish nam vel arft tha ke, astan da. Gleish nam vel arft tha ke,” I murmur, then give the smoke and the screams my back. “Gleish tes ta vaka nam vel arft tha ke.”

There’s an eerie silence about the temple as I move through cold, lofty corridors like a ghost chasing its next haunt, following the path I gouged in my mind when Brother Beryll brought me this way earlier. The path I pictured myself walking over and over again while I was deep in that woman and my own self-hatred, feeling nothing but what my body was telling me to feel.

What she was telling me to feel.

Fine evanescent dust shimmers in the shafts of moonlight spearing through holes in the ceiling, making my gums ache as I catch sight of a lone guard pacing back and forth before the door to the production room.

I set my bottle on the ground, step up behind the large man, grip his head, and rip it sideways, a guttural crack echoing through the silence.

His body thumps to the floor at my feet.

Seeing my reflection in his sightless stare, I snarl, unbuckle his sheath, and drape it across my chest. I pull out the short, gold-tipped spear that feels foreign in my fist, frowning, weighing it.

Guess it’s not the time to be picky.

I stash the man behind a column, retrieve my bottle, and ease into the silent room packed with long trestle tables, heavy dust settled upon the tops like a sprinkling of sparkly snow. Frowning, I notice footprints in the powder coating the floor.

I set the bottle on a table and, softening my footfalls, follow the shuffled tracks to the back storage room, peeking past the door that’s cracked a smidge.

Brother Beryll is hunched over near the shelves of thorns, the firelight from a flaming torch casting his gray robe in shades of orange and black. My brow lifts as he uncorks a jar, pockets two thorns from the small stash, then plucks up another and repeats the process. Like a greedy, foul-smelling rat.

Now I don’t like him even more.

“Yoo-hoo,” I say, shoving the door wide.

He leaps so far into the air, he smacks the back of his head against the shelf, rubbing the hurt while he straightens, looking at me. His eyes bulge, mouth falling open, stare slashing from my bare chest to the spear in my fist.

“Y-you …”

“Yes,” I mutter, twisting the ring from my finger and pocketing it. My fake skin loosens its tight grip, like cool water spilled across my flesh—not that it makes me feel any less filthy.“Me.”

All the color leaches from Brother Beryll’s face, and he stumbles back, flattening against the shelves.

I advance.

His panicked gaze scrawls across my disgusting scars, and I wonder if he feels sorry for me. If he’s scared, or remorseful, or if he just sees me as a fucking animal that slipped out of its cage.

“I— I didn’t …”

“Don’t bother,” I bite out, upper lip peeling back. I slam my stolen spear through his chest, cleaving it between his ribs, shredding his heart. Blood bubbles from his gaping mouth, and he crumples to the floor. “It won’t save you.”

My pulse roars in my ears while I watch the light leave his eyes, hoping it will make me feel better.

Disappointed when it doesn’t.

Clearing my throat, I stuff the spear in its sheath and snatch a large-handled basket off the floor. I drag my arm along the shelves, sweeping the jars of thorns and ground Candescence into the basket’s hollow. Taking every last ounce into the production room, along with Brother Beryll’s torch, I uncork each jar and sprinkle the contents upon the wooden trestle tables—a pretty, morbid offering to the only God I worship. The only God who has the power to bring justice to this fucked-up, unbalanced world.

Death.

I crack the bottle of spirits, splash it upon the tables, then use the flaming torch to ignite all three. Color and light explodes, violent heat scalding my knuckles as I back toward the door slower than I should.

“Gleish nam vel arft tha ke, astan da. Gleish nam vel arft tha ke,” I rasp, then clamp my teeth down on the promise.

I will find you, brothers.

I will find you.