Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
MORGANA
I ’d left work thirty minutes before Isaac was done, sitting on the edge of a nearby roof, feet dangling off the ledge as I stared down at the morgue. The moon was high, clouds swallowing what little light bled through the vast darkness.
I watched Isaac walk down the street, his white jacket replaced with a proper black tailcoat. His top hat was lopsided, and when he stepped in a deep puddle, a curse echoed into the air far too loud for a gentleman of his status. He wasn’t wealthy, but anyone would be fortunate to have a caller such as him.
If things were different, perhaps I would have entertained it. That just wasn’t in the cards.
My lips quivered into a smile, only looking away when he turned the corner and continued on his way home. Eventually, the oil lanterns nearest the morgue windows suffocated and darkness enveloped the plain building. I stood and moved to descend the side of the building, hugging the shadows as I watched the lead Mortuary Arbiter lock the door and disappear down the street. This side of the kingdom was rarely busy, lacking that revelry of taverns and debauchery closer to Rivereast Plains, but I’d be caught if I was not careful. Part of me wondered if Siren was worth it, in the end—and a larger part of me wondered if the other night had been a setup meant to doom me.
But it’d been months of hand-feeding each other information more times than I could count. If he thought Francis, maimed and murdered by Aster, had information, then I would make use of the silence. I would give this one last shot—and if it didn’t go my way, I’d be thrown in a cell to rot for my treason.
So I crossed the street and took out my lockpick. With minimal effort, the door clicked open, and I slid into the dark corridors. I knew the arcanists worked later than the rest of us. There was always one stationed through the night to play catch-up and work on the bodies before they rotted to disrepair.
It was like art, almost. Morbid, vile art. I respected them for it, but tonight, I’d abuse their power. My feet were like delicate feathers against the smooth floors, my shadow tailing me with each passing lamp bolted into the wall. I’d lost my mask during the confrontation with Aster—but this wasn’t the sort of mission I’d come back from, mask or no.
Pain rocked through my chest. There were few ways I could get out of this without having to leave town. The thought of abandoning Thena and Isaac wrecked me, but it was the same sort of reality I had to accept long before meeting them. Ever since I left home with Galen, we swore to live a life that put neither ourselves, nor the people we came to care for, in danger like our parents did.
Tonight, I would either leave as the only living witness, or I’d escape in flame and fury like a phoenix seeking its power.
I passed the morgue that confined Isaac and myself together during the daytime, venturing deeper into the halls before turning the corner and coming face to face with a set of metal double doors. The soft, amber glow of light bled through the opening underneath, and when my hands wrapped around the cool handle, I let out a breath.
There are only two ways out of this.
I breached through, slithering behind the slender frame of a blonde arcanist. She stilled as the edge of my blade pressed against her neck. I could feel her heart race, her breath hitch. It brought forth the subtlest pang of regret—however fleeting it may be. These were no fighters. They were healers. Healers trapped to do the bidding of a rotten, faceless crown.
I had never seen an arcanist in person. Not so close at least. She smelled sweet, like daylilies on a spring day—fully bloomed and awaiting rain. If it weren’t for the white veins raised on her skin, I wouldn’t have guessed she had any magic in her at all.
Her blood glowed brighter than the moon. Pure, unadulterated light glistening from the pores of her fingers.
“You’re going to find Subject 5124 and bring him back for me, alright?” I said, lowering my voice at a foul attempt of trickery. “And you will do so quickly if you wish to keep your head.”
When the arcanist made an attempt at turning her head, I pressed the blade hard enough to draw blood. She hissed and flinched before keeping so still, so straight, I wondered if it hurt. She lifted one of her glistening hands to point at the subject she’d been working on silently.
“They’ll have to wait.”
“M-madam…”
“I don’t believe I need to tell you again.”
She sighed violently through her nose before curling that pointed finger into her palm. “Okay, 5124 is over there.”
My eyes followed the silent command of her other hand, pointed to one of the rolling metal beds pushed near the wall. I gulped, trying to blink past the nerves as I gently pressed my palm into her back and urged her forward.
“Go on then. No sense letting him rot.” As soon as the arcanist took a step forward, I quickly added, “And don’t bother turning around, lest you want a blade between the eyes.”
Instead of fear—the sound of her heart thumping between stolen breaths—she laughed. Low, and slow, but quiet enough that I could have so easily missed it. I narrowed my glare, watching her delicate footwork push closer to the row of corpses. There was nothing keeping the bodies cold, but I suppose there didn’t need to be. They were going to be brought back, after all.
Swiftly moving around the body she’d been working on, my eyes flicked to the sight of a naked woman’s half-decayed corpse. Nausea crawled up my throat. One of the eyes was darting side to side, a scowl carved into her face as if she was in pain. From her chin down, however, her body was this sick shade of blue with black rot coloring her veins. I shouldn’t have stared longer than a second—no, I shouldn’t have looked at all. I couldn’t help it.
“Oh, gods,” I said between a choked gag, bringing my wrist up to cover my mouth. When I forced my attention back on the arcanist, she wasn’t facing Francis DeBurne’s body. She was facing me, wide-eyed with a parted mouth.
I wasted no time—she knew my face, therefore she knew too much.
Names were inconsequential when all she needed to remember was the color of my hair, face, and eyes. It’d take minutes to find out that I, a woman who just held a blade to her throat, was in the same guard as her.
The arcanist turned to mist, if but for a moment, as I slashed my blade through the air where her neck should be. I heard her feet settle on the ground behind me, so I rammed my shoulder backward. Her arm collided with a metal rolling tray of medical supplies as she fell. Thin scalpels and blades clattered onto the floor near her and I panicked—my heart thumped so loudly in my chest that I felt like it was going to bleed off my tongue.
I straddled the arcanist and pinned her wrist to the ground, those slender fingers clawing and stretching for the small blades that could so easily slice my throat. Pressing my blade into the center of her neck once more, I leaned forward and hissed at her to stop struggling. The unfortunate thing was, I didn’t like killing. It was merely a consequence of getting into the business of getting answers behind my brother’s disappearance.
For Galen, I’d slaughter cities, but I didn’t find joy in it. In fact, each time the arcanist thrashed her legs or spat up at me, my heart shattered a little more. I just wanted her to stop struggling. To stop fighting and just do what I asked. That was too easy though, and rarely did people choose the easy way out.
“Stop struggling, ” I pleaded. Beads of blood dripped around the edge of my blade, and flashes of the banquet flooded my mind. I shook them away. I wasn’t Francis DeBurne. This was different. “If you stop struggling and do as I say, we can both walk out of this!”
The arcanist hummed, and at first, I thought it was in agreement, but a low tune dripped off her tongue, spoken in a language unfamiliar to me. It was powerful, reverberating through her chest despite the gentle quiet to it. The magic in her fingertips pulled the metal scalpels like a magnet, and before I could lift my blade to silence her, she blew out the last note of the song and a wave of energy sent me flying. My back collided into the stone wall, the bones in my spine and head cracking like I’d just been shattered into a million pieces.
I cried out. I cried so loudly that it echoed in the sterile room. My body slid limply on the floor, my weapon somewhere out of reach as I struggled to right myself. I wasn’t sure if my vision had failed or if I could no longer open my eyes, but I clutched onto each groove of the floor to pull myself up.
“M-o-r-g-a-n-a,” Galen’s voice swirled around in the darkness behind my eyes, the sick reverie consuming my dwindling focus. Every letter was like a song, sweeter than that which the arcanist blew at me. “Your name is written in the stars. Look it!”
I wept at the subtle memory, fleeting and vague and wretched. The arcanist pressed her boot into my shoulder and forced me on my back once more. “What do you want to do with subject 5421?”
“My name is not written in the stars,” a younger, more-naive version of myself sang back at Galen . “That is far too kind a fate.”
He lifted his finger, adorned with the latest gift from our father—an obnoxious, haughty ring with symbols etched into the golden band. “This ugly ring right here proves otherwise.”
Her knees were digging into my side, and when that metal scalpel pressed against my cheek and sliced, I hissed. My entire body was starting to convulse, but I had no fight left in me. Not without my vision at least.
That man, Aster . He’d warned me that spies lost their eyes. Was this his sick way of keeping his word? At deciding our agreement was void? I was choking on the darkness now, as if it had the ability to suffocate me from the inside out.
“Ga… Gale… he knows?—”
Another slice across my unmarked cheek, as if she was growing tired of my raspy, weak voice. I thrashed, trying to get her weight off me. My legs were trembling so hard against the stone floor I thought they might break.
“Speak, now—my magic can do far more than bring back the dead.”
“Galen! Francis knew… Francis could have known G-Galen Kyllingham,” I said between my choking cries.
“Galen?”
The tone in her voice was not of confusion. No, I could see it on her face, with or without sight. The name was a curled frown across her face, tears of anger after a long fight, wrath neither spoken nor acted upon.
“Galen Kyllingham?” she repeated, this time the ghost of a whisper against her tongue. “What do you want with him?”
“Do you know what Mama used to tell me before Papa came home from the tavern? ” Galen said, pointing back to the stars that I narrowly ignored. “She used to say, ‘Don’t let your stars fade. Even in a sea of ruin, they are a guiding light.’ If that’s not you, Morgana, I don’t know what is.”
My bottom lip quivered, and the tears that spilled down my cheek stung the bleeding gashes she’d lined my cheeks with. “I just want my brother?—”
“Holy hells,” the arcanist said, all but crying on the words. The metal blade clattered next to my ear, and for a moment I thought I’d just talked my way out of a dark, hopeless death. That my ruined memories and broken sobs had saved my life.
I was even about to thank her for her mercy.
But mercy was far too sweet a thing. No, not as her hands wrapped around my neck so hard I was certain it’d break. I immediately choked on the darkness once more, Galen’s voice circling around my head over and over.
Only the reveries had faded into something I didn’t remember. It wasn’t quite so sweet, so kind. Galen’s voice was an omen: “Let your star fade, M-O-R-G-A-N-A .”
I found her wrists and pulled at them, doing anything I could to alleviate the pressure and let air break through to my lungs. The waves of death and darkness were unforgiving. Relentless, torturous uncertainty that I wasn’t sure was real. Another tune faded into the blackness of my mind—one that begged me to call after it.
It was a tongue unknown to me. It was toxic on my lips, like poison to whiskey. I choked on the words that were said for me and guided through my vocal cords with the gentle hand of an executioner. Ragged breaths—my final ragged breaths—muffled the lyrical spell until they were no louder than whispers.
But with each syllable, the midnight behind my eyes faded to ashy charcoal, then to transparent embers that swirled around my line of sight like speckled threads of fate. The arcanist was frowning so hard that harsh lines formed in her face, so true that the tears almost made me sympathize.
That song did more than save my sight. It awakened something in my heart, akin to that of desperation and death. With my final, whistling breath, the unfamiliar words bristled the air like feathers plucked from a dove mid-flight. Shadows engulfed the room. They swirled around the arcanist with the intent of a viper, squeezing and squeezing until she was forced to let off my neck. Hands of monsters and men and everything in between sizzled against her skin. When she tried to scream, they gagged her.
And like the rot in the veins of those corpses, her body hollowed from the outside in. Death ravaged her. My eyes rolled into the back of my head as I felt her death—the final thunderous beats of her heart before it shattered her chest bone and ceased.
She fell next to me, those impassioned eyes now nothing more than dull, colorless pits that slowly blackened. With each blink, my peripheral narrowed until I accepted uncertain slumber. Poised with shadows and plagued by fear, there was only one thing resounding within the confines of my mind: a beating heart that was mine to take.