Prologue A Man With No Name #4
Right as the knife sank in, the victim’s eyes opened.
He and the man locked gazes for a single second before a gush of hot blood spurted out of the wound.
It splattered across the assassin’s face, and he had to blink just to keep it out of his eyes.
He unceremoniously spat it out of his mouth and it slicked his arms and chest. The man grumbled at the gore but stopped when he found his victim’s face again.
It was clear now, with all the parts where they should be.
They stared at each other, and although the man didn’t know who this not-inconsequential victim was, he seemed to know him.
In fact, there was extra warmth in his face.
In his last moments, he gave an eye-crinkling smile, like they were old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years.
That smile stayed, even when his eyes dulled.
The assassin had to lever the knife out of his victim’s chest, each yank resulting in another little spurt of blood. When he finally wrenched it free, he took a big breath, dreading digging out that heart.
Not because of the desecrating of a corpse. Mostly because his eyes weren’t what they used to be.
In response, Magic brought a candle to the gash in the victim’s body to light the man’s work. Against his better judgment, he mumbled, “Thank you.”
“Welcome!”
There were clumps of something in his hair when he finally cut through the ribs. He was going to need three baths just to wash the blood out of his crevices. Did this heart know how hard it was to find baths in this world?
“You are funny in your head.”
“Stop reading my thoughts,” the man said, peeling back just enough flesh to get his blade through the last big bits of tissue.
He put the dagger in his teeth and dug out a smaller one to work in the crevices.
“We went through this. No reading my thoughts. No sniffing me. No calling me your brilliant little boy.” Just as he laid down those rules, he finally freed the heart of its flesh prison.
The man lifted the organ out of his victim’s chest. It was too heavy. Fine, the victim was large, but this heart… It was triple the normal size. This was no glamour; the stranger’s heart was the size of a baby.
The man slid the small dagger back into his belt and took the first one from his teeth.
Magic bellowed a deep, happy note when he began to flay the organ—only, instead of tubes and flesh, the man found a normal-sized heart, hot and twitching, nested inside of the larger one.
Curiosity was practically banging down the door of his mind, but Magic’s screaming song screeched louder than his thoughts, so he just thrust the heart out at its buyer and said, “Here’s your snack. Mirror and wife and shirt, please.”
The man sighed. He dropped the heart of hearts on the corpse’s belly and forced himself to stop thinking about how the animal pelt started to groan.
A soft wind opened the door of the room’s closet, and there—the single article of clothing on the rack—was his green shirt. A bit frilly, but green nonetheless. And on the desk was a rather fine mirror that had not been there before.
After the man stuffed both items in his bag in the cleanest way possible, he looked up to the rafters, eyebrow quirked.
“You did not say when you wanted to see her,” Magic said.
The man’s chest panged. Of course it was too good to be true.
“Oh, stop pouting. You shall find your wife just as you first met her.”
The man didn’t know what that meant, but arguing with Magic about an unfair transaction was the fastest way to lose an arm. Instead, he packed up his anger and threw his leg out the window, ready to get out of this place.
“Thank you, Favorite. You have done us all a favor.”
The man huffed and said, “Well, I won’t be doing it again,” then slid out of the window and jumped to the ground below. His knees sang, but then he remembered that he didn’t just drop four stories. He wondered how sore he was going to be in the morning.
The man took the slightly brighter alley by the inn to a part of the city that was well-kept and clean. He dug through his pocket to look at that signet ring. Fine, he was broke, but that wasn’t the only reason he’d snagged this hunk of gold. The ring would tell him who he’d just murdered.
But the second the man tried to squint at the ring under the light of a lantern, his foot caught in a rose vine.
He tripped into a puddle of something too thick to be water and too black to be blood, and the ring flew from his hand.
The man looked up just in time to see it roll off the curb and drop down a drain.
The man picked himself up and shook the rose vine off his ankle, then adjusted the bag on his shoulder, only to hear the tinkling of shattered glass.
The man didn’t have to look. That mirror was shattered, and the ooze he’d fallen into had definitely soaked through his bag. The shirt was ruined. He felt fire rise in his throat, but what had he been expecting?
A nauseatingly pleased giggle tinkled above him.
The man muttered something vile and promised never to go to Amaris ever a-fucking-gain.