A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

4. Cauldron-Worshipping Death-Wielder

Chapter four

Cauldron-Worshipping Death-Wielder

T he monstrous creature sniffed the air once through the flat hole in the centre of its face that flared like a single nostril, and then it lunged at Jonah.

My terror never made it out of my throat.

As more debris shifted and clinked onto the ground in the wake of the beast, the strange man and his shining dagger moved with expert skill and preternatural grace. He crossed the room in a heartbeat, meeting the creature with the sharp end of his blade before it could sink its falcon-like claws into Jonah’s unmoving body.

A high, keening squeal perforated my eardrums as he drove the dagger into the beast’s side. The blade made a wet, bursting sound on impact like the creature’s body was a balloon skin of fat and juices stolen from past prey. He pulled the dagger back, spurting liquid I could only assume was blood as the creature stumbled along the ground.

Off-balance, it whirled on him.

Teeth pulled back, mouth closed and forked tongues wriggling in the air, it let out a seething hiss and settled back on its haunches. Its long, oval-shaped head tilted to the side, nostril flaring wildly, and I realised that it couldn’t see him.

Although it had appeared to be smiling directly at me, the teeth in its eyes must have rendered it blind. Instead, its forked tongues seemed to taste the air, and it moved following scent.

The man with the dagger held completely still, letting the creature calculate the distance between them with its other senses—and then he leapt to the side, out of its reach when it sprang forward.

Flying over Jonah’s body in a streak of depthless onyx, the creature was still midair when the man appeared behind it, a broadsword suddenly in hand. With breathtaking ease, he plunged the blade through its midriff, all the way down to the sword’s leather-bound hilt. He nailed it into the floor, right on top of the body I had stumbled over when I first arrived—which I quickly understood to be the corpse of a similar creature.

Silence blanketed the room.

I stared, biting down on my tongue as I considered whether it was really worth adding to the mess by throwing up the contents of my stomach to ease its sick, tight churning.

Those stunning golden eyes met mine, and the man broke out into a sinfully handsome grin as he braced one foot against the creature’s backside and pulled the sword from its rotten carcass. His blade came out dripping with dark blood that smelled of sewerage, which he promptly wiped off using the creature’s own cloak.

My stomach roiled, but I decided it was not worth contributing to the horror on the floor.

“What was that?” I whispered.

He glanced back at me, cleaning the sword once more for good measure, and sighed. “We call them caenim ,” he answered grimly. He studied the blade, sparkling silver in the light from the rising moon, before sheathing it at his side. “They’re the pets of something much worse.”

“Malum,” John grumbled at my back. I spun around to find him emerging from behind the armchair, brushing dust from his clothes. “Filthy bleedin’ things.”

John’s nonchalance—not to mention his very presence in the store so late at night, and with such peculiar company—diverted my attention from the nightmarish corpses lying in Dante’s entryway. Disbelieving, I shook my head at him and turned my attention back to his strange companion with an arsenal of highly illegal and obsolete weapons strapped to his waist.

“Who are you?”

His brows drew together, thinning the circles of gold in his eyes. “You can call me Wren,” he told me after a moment. “You?”

“I don’t think you’re in any position to ask questions.” I scowled at the beasts he had slaughtered, slumped over one another at his feet. The reek had miraculously disappeared as if it was coming from their consciousness rather than their bodies.

“No, please,” Wren scoffed, all traces of camaraderie lost. “By all means, Auralie, tell me again how thankful you are for me saving your life. ”

I didn’t know what it was—that he had asked when he already knew or that he knew my full name without ever having heard it—but something about his tone set my spine straightening, and so I glared at him before turning my eyes towards Jonah’s body.

He didn’t look good. He didn’t look…

I’d seen lifeless bodies before, though never with a fatal spinal injury or any other kind of twisted extremity, and my heart started to sink.

Wren followed my downcast gaze, but I couldn’t read his expression in the shadows.

“My life?” I repeated, quietly but not weakly. “What about him ? What did that thing do to him?”

Wren’s wide eyes floated back and forth between us a few times before he spoke. “Do I look like a neurosurgeon?” he asked.

Did he—

I groaned, spinning away from him. I had too many things to do that were far more important than coddling a beautiful man’s fragile ego.

John was standing by the window, surveying the empty street. Tears pricked at the inner corners of my eyes, but I blinked them away.

Focus. Stay calm. Breathe.

“I need to call an ambulance and someone to take you home,” I stated, my throat suddenly hot and thick. I took a careful step towards my boss.

He bristled. “Nae,” he snapped. “Dinnae make any calls. There’s still one monster out there, and the Oracle knows how many more to come. Ye need to go, Aura. Ye need to go.”

Shaking my head at him again, I fought against the urge to turn to Wren for support. I still had no idea how the two of them had ended up in the bookstore together, or how those things even existed .

“I told you before that I’d prefer not to have to take her with me, old man.” Wren strode past me without so much as a glance. “You get her out of here, and I’ll deal with the caenim and the portal.”

John retreated from the window, his dark eyes narrowing into slits. “Yer certain then?”

“Yes.”

“Aye.” A frantic glance towards me. He began wringing his hands and nodded. “Get on with it, then.”

Wren pivoted in slow motion, eyes glowing like the core of the sun. He moved towards me, each of his steps silent against the hardwood floor despite his size. It was not just the bodies behind me that stopped me from withdrawing as he approached, but that feeling from earlier, that smell of warmth and comfort.

“Here,” he said, in the gentlest tone I’d heard him use yet. He took a small leather pouch from his pocket and pulled open the drawstring to reveal a clump of sparkling silver powder within. He frowned slightly, gazing down at me in earnest. “I’ve got you.”

I blinked back at him, confused by the sudden change in his voice and attitude—right up until he hurled a pinch of powder straight into the middle of my face.

It had a sickeningly sweet odour and tickled my nose like pollen, gathering at the back of my throat as I coughed and spluttered to dispel the amount I’d already inhaled. Swinging my hand out wildly, I knocked it from his grip, sending the pouch careening to the floor in a puff of silver dust.

Wren let it fall.

He stared at me, open-mouthed and wide-eyed.

“What”—I gasped, bracing a hand against the wall—“is wrong with you?”

His irises burned down into a subtle copper glow as he gazed at me in wonderment, and then he reached out to brush his fingertips across my upper lip.

I jerked away from him at first, but Wren’s touch was magic. The moment his skin came into contact with mine, I felt his warmth all over my body, all the way down to the very centre of my being. It was new and old at the same time, like tasting a brand-new flavour of the only food you’d ever eaten in your whole entire life.

His fingers came away covered in silver powder, but the feeling—the connection—still lingered between us.

After examining the sheen on the pads of his fingers for a moment, he brushed them off on his shirt and replaced his fingers on my mouth. His thumb was so large that it caressed both of my lips and grazed the tip of my nose in one long, slow sweep. And then he repeated the process of clearing away the powder on his shirt before he dusted the last of it from the sides of my nose.

“Odd,” he remarked quietly, looking at me as if it was for the very first time. “The fae-lily should have knocked you out cold.”

And then, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a lake, it finally clicked.

“You were trying to drug me?”

Trance well and truly broken, I put both hands on his chest and shoved him away from me as hard as I could. He staggered backwards, but his pealing laughter made me think the unsteady steps were mostly for show.

“No,” he insisted with a chuckle, eyes burning as bright as a solar flare. “Well, okay, yes.”

Flabbergasted, I looked to John for backup but found that he was hobbling towards the back of the store—completely unaware, or maybe indifferent. Floorboards creaked beneath his steps, and then the light switch flicked into place as the lanterns hanging from the rafters ignited with a crackle and hum. I’d known it was dark, but my eyes had adjusted to the low luminosity of the streetlamp and fast-rising moon. The electric lights above were blinding, and I winced, angling my head towards the floor…

Where thick, malachite-coloured blood streaked with black was oozing out of the mangled, grey-skinned bodies below me.

Under the light, the caenim were even more atrocious to behold. Their skin was taut over their bones, giving their features horrifyingly sharp edges, and tufts of thinning white hair were visible poking out from beneath their hoods. Forked tongues hung limply from their eye sockets. Their two sets of teeth were indeed ground down into stumps and browned with age and—I gulped— diet .

Dante’s floor was slick with their blood from the entryway to the centre of the bookcases, where another dead caenim lay amongst a disarray of fallen novels. And above…

I made a horrified noise in the back of my throat and reached for something to steady myself, but my hands came up empty as I turned my gaze skyward. Another monster was slumped across the rafters, dripping the gunk of its lifeblood onto the shell of its companion collapsed between the aisles. One more was heaped behind the railing upstairs, a single clawed hand drooping over the side.

Six.

There were six of those monsters.

Five dead, and one at large.

My face must have twisted in shock because Wren stepped up to my side and bent his head to my ear. I stiffened at his proximity, at the inviting scents falling over me, into me, and around me.

“Like I said,” he murmured roughly, his soft breath tickling my nape. “You’re welcome.”

Angling my head to shoot him a glare, my train of thought stopped dead and derailed as I saw him in the full light for the very first time.

Human—but not.

At his full height, Wren truly towered over me. The top of my head barely reached his breastbone. He had mid-length, wild hair; the blond was as if someone had mixed sand in a pool of molten starlight. His complexion was glass-like in its perfection, his skin as warm as a sun-drenched desert, tawny beige in colour. His eyes, still glowing like liquefied gold, were almond-shaped and framed with impractically long lashes beneath two thick, angular brows that sat symmetrically on either side of his face.

My eyes followed the slope of his nose, built from the same polished marble as every other one of his features, down to the glittering stubble along his sharp jawline, and then his mouth—curved to one side in a self-indulgent smirk.

I pointedly looked away. And then I looked right back.

Perhaps I should have been afraid, but if I was, it was not provoked by the weapons he carried or the ethereal colour shifting in his eyes. It was his face that frightened me. The look he was giving me.

He was stupidly attractive. He was stupid… He was…

“I have a portal to destroy,” he announced at an unnecessarily loud volume, winking at me before spinning on his heels.

My hand shot out to snatch his wrist before I could think twice. I missed, and my fingers gripped onto his unnervingly large thumb. “Wait.” I swallowed the lump in my throat as he hesitated, then swung his head around to look at me. “Jonah.”

John, I had decided, was a lost cause. Short of swatting him over the head with a hardcover book and dragging him by his ankles through the pool of beast blood out of the store, I couldn’t help him. But maybe Jonah…

A thick brow rose. “Wren,” he corrected with no small amount of condescension.

My pupils flared. “No. Jonah .” I let go of his thumb and pointed at my friend, who hadn’t moved at all since he was thrown through the window.

Wren tilted his head to the side. “I am not a coroner, but he is dead.”

I knew that. I knew that, and yet the word hit me like a blow to the chest, impossibly heavy and painful.

John was clambering around in the office, opening drawers and slamming them shut while he swore in two different languages and continued to mutter nonsense, completely incognisant to who Jonah was or what had happened to him.

Bubbling hysteria began to curdle the blood in my veins. I clenched my fists and shoved it back.

This is on me. Everything is always on me.

Katie was heavily pregnant. Amelia was drunk. Trish couldn’t be involved. I didn’t have the slightest clue how to explain any of it to the police, and my sister…

Brynn would undoubtedly follow our mother out of the house if I asked her to come to the bookstore against my better judgement.

My heart sank beneath the sudden and dreadful weight.

Wren watched me, eyes flitting between my face and the body of my friend like he was waiting impatiently for the hysteria to kick in so he could try his luck on me with another dose of that silver drug.

“I have no one else to ask,” I admitted, shoulders slumping.

Wren took a deep breath, broad chest expanding to twice its size, and nodded once. He stalked around the remains of the caenim and heaved Jonah into his arms. Splinters of glass and wood clinked to the floor as he stepped around the counter, heading towards the back of the store where John was still making a lot of racket.

Arms locked around my waist to hold in any lingering threat of purging myself of my stomach’s contents, I followed Wren as he made his way into the reading nook.

Mercifully, that part of Dante’s had been left untouched. I had a lot of work to do out the front, between the aisles and upstairs, but my safe haven of peace prevailed. The reading nook—a cosy space at the back of the store, walled by bookshelves, with three desks lined up before three couches that were positioned around an antique coffee table.

Wren went to the couch against the far wall and lay Jonah’s body down, his head resting on the cushion I had smoothed over only an hour earlier. He positioned Jonah’s arms crossing his chest like they do in the movies and stretched out his legs before he adjusted his head to look like he was sleeping. When I saw the fluidity with which his head moved—as if his spine had been severed at the base of his neck—I flinched away.

The couch became a coffin before my blurry eyes.

But Jonah can’t be dead. Katie’s pregnant.

“There.” Wren flung his hand out towards the body of my friend dramatically. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“Help him.” I stumbled a step closer, my head drowning in tears that I refused to let fall. It was taking everything I had to hold them back. “Please.”

Wren gave me an incredulous look. “Woman,” he said roughly, matching my step with one of his own—twice the length of mine. “I am High Fae, not a cauldron-worshipping death-wielder. And that man,” he went on, pointing to the couch behind him, “is dead. Gone. Tonight’s tragedy, tomorrow’s news. And you’re lucky that it’s not you on that couch because—”

I slapped him across the face.

It happened so fast, I barely had time to register the thought before my arm came flying up and my palm connected with the edge of his cheek. His jawline and cheekbones were as hard and strong as appearances claimed—as hard as his chest had felt when I’d walked into him earlier—and took the blow like a caress.

But my hand…!

I yelped a curse, my skin stinging whilst my palm turned a nasty shade of red, and the tears finally overflowed.

Wren smirked down at me. “I am going to destroy that portal now, Auralie, and if you try to interrupt me again, I will toss you into another realm and seal you in there myself.”

With that, he stormed off. He left me to scrub the searing tears from my cheeks as I fell to my knees in the middle of the reading nook and handed myself over to a violent assault of spine-warping sobs. I sat there, bent over with my head between my knees until the fabric of reality buckled around me.

Then, silently, I wept and wept.