A City of Smoke and Demons (The Daughters of Lilith, #1)

Chapter 1

Whether it was a body laid out before her, or the magic that flowed through her veins, Analise Delarosa’s life was ruled by the hand of death.

If only death could have cut her a bit of slack.

Morning sunlight poured through the window and the soot-smeared ceiling of her room swam into focus. Groaning, Analise rolled over, relieved to find the other side of the bed empty. She hadn’t liked him, whoever he was. He asked too many questions.

Wincing, she dragged herself from under the covers, scooping her robe from the floor and picking her way to the window.

Her second-storey room in the lodging house was small, cheap and messy.

In the street, people went about their business, and in the distance, chimneys from the factories pumped smoke and steam into the air.

It was the same view she’d had from the bell tower in the convent.

Then, the city had been a mystery, wrapped in fog and filled with people.

Analise shifted her gaze to the other side of the cobbled street.

There was no sign of her stalker and she sighed with relief.

More often than she liked, he’d be watching her window.

She should alert the authorities, or at least tell Lira and Jack, but what would she tell them?

The man never approached her, or even tried to speak to her. The Gendarme would laugh in her face.

As the sun resumed its place behind the clouds, Analise nibbled on a piece of stale bread while she surveyed the mess that was her life.

Dirty dishes littered every available surface—she didn’t cook, or clean.

She had hours before work, so she burrowed back into bed, hoping for a few hours of dreamless sleep.

But, without the whiskey, she had the dead in her ears, ghosts in her eyes and a desperate hunger to be rid of them both.

Analise woke as dusk fell over the world.

She changed her clothes and headed out, fog curling like a cat around her ankles.

She preferred the city at night, when the shadows were thick.

London was a world of red brick and a skyline permanently snared in smog.

In the early morning, fog from the river would roll through the streets, and that grey blanket would linger in the darkest of places long after the sun was high.

The city was a melting pot of cultures and people crammed into five hundred square miles of space.

Chinatown, the skin market, the Church, and the convent.

From the outside, London was something out of a dream.

But beneath the grand facade was a mud and soot slicked slum that half of the city ignored, and the other half lived in.

Without having much say in it, Analise had chosen the slum.

As she walked, the shadows clung to her clothes and hair. Magic pricked her fingers, so she tucked her hands into her pockets.

Until the King decided their magic wasn’t needed, death witches had guided souls to the other side, maintaining the balance between the real world and the supernatural one.

People lived, they died, they were welcomed into God’s garden.

Science could determine how a person died.

The college had a steady supply of bodies to study.

Human beings, according to science, were nothing more than sophisticated animals.

But science could not deal with the soul. Without the death witches, London was a city filled with spirits.

Five years ago, the Crown ordered all death witches to be registered.

Analise read enough old notices to understand what those women were ordered to do.

Add their names to a list and allow their flesh to be branded as a sign of what they carried in their veins.

Most fled the city or went into hiding. Those who didn’t were tracked down by the Unseen and never heard from again.

Analise used to study the faces of women she passed in the street, wondering if they were like her.

She passed girls on the way to the skin market on Blackcoln Road, their painted faces proud.

Gangs of bored teenagers lingered in the mouths of alleys, and a group of ragged children chased each other around the legs of tired-looking women returning from the factories.

One way or another, all these people found their way to Analise, who washed their faces with more tenderness than most had been shown during their waking lives.

Her amulet, tucked beneath her blouse, beat against her chest in time with her footsteps.

The metal triangle was worn by every man, woman, and child in London.

The topmost point symbolised God; the points either side were for the heavens and the earth, the living, and the dead.

Hell and the Devil had no place in the amulet, for it was He and his demons it was designed to protect everyone from.

Analise had not worn the amulet while she lived in the convent – everyone knew that the supernatural could not cross Holy ground.

With a last glance around for her Familiar, Analise turned towards the morgue tucked away at the end of an alley. People didn’t like to look death in the face, even though they claimed to understand it. It didn’t matter who someone had been in life – in death, nothing divided them.

The mortician, Morgan, greeted Analise warmly. She had worked for him for three years and like her, the large man with the bowler hat and well-cared for moustache preferred the company of the dead.

‘They’re quiet, see?’ he once said when she’d been asking too many questions.

From then on, Analise avoided questions, lest he start asking some of his own, like why a young woman preferred the dead over the living.

Sometimes, Analise wondered if she’d chosen this job because it was near her lodging house, or if she’d chosen her room so she could have this job.

The answer to that was simple – what else could she do?

Morgan had a body on the trolley, which meant he’d already done most of the work. Regardless of how people died, the smell was always the same—slightly sweet, like decomposing vegetation. Then there were the emotions stamped on the faces: pain, regret, surprise.

‘He’s a bit of a mess, love,’ Morgan warned.

Analise lifted the sheet, and frowned at the bruises and broken skin. ‘What happened?’

Morgan shrugged. ‘The Gendarme dropped him off this morning. No identification. Seems he met with a carriage.’

Analise shivered at the mention of the Gendarme. ‘His chest is crushed,’ she commented. ‘It must have run him over.’

‘Clean him up as best you can,’ was all Morgan said, and left her to it.

The morgue was small, consisting of a polished metal slab, trolley, the cold boxes for storing bodies, and a bench covered in jars, bottles of oils and toxic chemicals for embalming.

Morgan had a small desk in one corner. There were no windows, only flickering lamps mounted on the walls, and the light was always dim.

At first, Analise had worn gloves, like she did in the convent, terrified of her magic. The fear faded, but she still didn’t know how to shield her mind from the stream of babble that rose from dead flesh whenever she touched it.

Working here was a risk, but Analise had remained undetected by the Unseen.

All other magic was accepted by the Crown because it was magic they could use to their benefit.

It was embedded in everyday life, helping keep the lights on and the water flowing, kept houses warm—in the homes of the wealthy, at least. Magic came with a cost that most people could not afford.

Magic was used to generate the heat and steam that powered the factories along the riverbank. Most work in the textiles and ceramic mills was completed by human hands, and the city rang with the rhythmic clang of blacksmiths shops.

It was all regulated, controlled magic. But death could not be controlled, no matter what the Crown believed.

Analise needed to focus. This was the only opportunity she got to do this.

The raw power of her magic sat like a tormented thing inside her and she needed to let it out.

It wasn’t painful, but irritating, like an itch she desperately wanted to scratch.

What she could do in the morgue was only a small thing, but it brought her some relief.

She placed her hands on the dead man’s forehead and was pulled into a memory.

A shadowed street, rain-slicked stones, footsteps, sharp and steady.

Then, a shape in the darkness … twisted and wrong and …

clawed. Panic that filled the blood, the frenzied urge to flee.

Looking over his shoulder as he ran, the clatter of hooves on cobblestones, the distressed whinny of a horse and then, blackness.

It rained two nights ago. Analise stared down at the dead man.

He’d been terrified enough to fling himself onto a busy street without looking.

And the source of his fear—nostrils flared above a gaping maw, steam rising from slick black skin and eyes like burning coals.

She swallowed, pushing away another memory.

This wasn't the first time she’d seen that creature in the mind of the dead.

Magic tingling in her fingers, Analise fetched a bucket and cloth and started wiping down the body.

When bodies came in, they were stiff, the limbs not relaxing for another thirty hours.

Blood would drain from the skin and collect in the lower vessels, leaving it colourless.

Fluid would leech from the body and decomposition would set in not long after, but most bodies would be burning or buried before then.

The collectors preferred to handle the bodies while they were still pliable.

The man’s arms and torso were covered in purple bruises already fading to yellow around the edges, like decaying flowers.

He was young, handsome in his death, yet there were lines around his eyes and bracketing his mouth that told her his life hadn’t been an easy one.

It wasn’t surprising the man didn't have identification.

In this part of the city, people died all the time with no one to miss them.

There would be no mourning relatives coming for him, and no relatives meant no funeral.

He would burn, his body slid into the great, magically powered incinerators along with the collected garbage for the week.

Analise struggled to roll the man onto his side so she could clean his back.

There was a strange mark on his shoulder blade, almost hidden by bruises.

Frowning, she set the cloth aside and turned to the nearest cold box.

Carefully, she slid the body it contained out and pulled the white sheet free.

A woman, middle-aged, perhaps, her throat slit and, when Analise turned her, a mark on her shoulder.

The flesh was raised, a puckered skull branded onto the skin.

She heard Morgan’s voice in her ear.

‘It doesn’t matter, Analise. Not our business. Clean him up, girl. Show him respect.’

She gently put the woman away, then finished washing the other body, checking for any other distinguishing marks or tattoos in case someone came looking long after he was ash on the breeze.

Once his skin was gleaming, she wrapped him in a muslin sheet and wheeled the trolley to the cold boxes.

Transferring a body from trolley to box wasn’t easy.

Analise was short and not overly strong, but the man was slender and didn’t weigh much.

She was able to shift him to where he'd stay until the collectors came.

Analise tidied up the room, wondering about the dead and their mysterious brands, and about what she’d seen in the darkness of the man’s mind.

By the time she left the morgue, she was already thinking about the wine she’d left on the floor in her room.

Without it, she was a child again, a slave to sleepless nights filled with fear of what would unfold behind the eyes of a newly awoken death witch who couldn’t control what she was.