Chapter Seventeen
ENZO
I forge into the Brig hallway, shouldering a pack of supplies I just stole from several hardware stores downtown. Soren and Jade materialize on either side of me, shaking beach sand off their boots.
“You’d better clean that up.” I shoot them a mock scowl and gesture with my elbow at the mess. “I may be a degenerate, but I refuse to live in filth.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” Jade says with a snort and a bow. “I wouldn’t dream of desecrating your royal floors.”
“Your Majesty,” I say with a grin. “I like the way that sounds. Soren? Call me that from now on.”
“Absolutely not.” Soren deadpans.
We set off down the hall toward the treasury to stow our spoils. As we pass Lola’s room, a telltale squeaking pierces the air, and I slow my pace.
The pulleys in her aerial apparatus riggings have needed to be oiled for a few weeks now. She must be practicing, though it’s only nine in the morning, a time considered practically midnight by most of my team.
“Hey.” I hand my bags to Jade. “Put this away for me, would you? We’ll meet up in the common area in a minute.”
They both nod and disappear down the hall, leaving me alone in front of Lola’s door.
Inside, the pulley continues to squeak, and a moment later, a dull thud echoes through the wall followed by a muttered curse. Lola’s frustration sparks inside me. Seems she’s working on something difficult today. Perhaps a drop. She hates those.
I press my palm to the door until it clicks open a crack. She hangs upside down, the bottom curve of the hoop against her lower back, her rear creating a shelf that keeps her extended legs braced on the other side of the apparatus from her torso like an inverted star.
Grimacing, she bends her knees so she can grip each ankle, and then, with a tiny shriek, she pulls her knees together and juts her hips forward so her rear slides over the front of the hoop.
It looks like she’s meant to land in the pits of her knees, but her hands slip off her ankles, and she slams into the mat beneath with a gasp.
“Piece of garbage,” she growls at the hoop twirling innocently above her, and she waves a crude gesture at it.
I smile, leaning against the doorway. I hope it’s enough for her. The studio we’ve built. The tattoo on her arm. The life I’ve tried to give her.
“Enz?” Lola catches sight of me as she gets to her feet.
I waggle my fingers. “Hi there, Lettuce.”
“You need something?” She rubs loose chalk along her palms, and the white dust catches in her calluses.
“I just heard the rigging going. Wanted to say hello.”
“The job went off without a hitch?”
“Come on.” I spread my hands. “I’m a professional. Do you even need to ask?”
With a laugh, she hoists herself back up onto the hoop, and I marvel at how fluidly she moves despite the fact that she picked up this hobby a matter of months ago.
“You probably need rest, right?” I say as she maneuvers into the same upside-down position, bending her knees and grasping her ankles once more. “You’re typically asleep at this hour.”
“What I need,” she says through gritted teeth, squeezing her eyes shut, “is to stop being so damn afraid of gravity.”
As if to punctuate her words, she shrieks as she drops into the pits of her knees, once again losing her grip on her ankles, her legs swinging through the hoop so she lands on her shoulders, feet slapping down an instant later.
She groans, curling her arms over her face. “It’s all in my head,” she grumbles. “If I could just stop being so afraid of falling and lean into the move, trust my knees to catch me instead of panic-flailing when I fall . . .”
“That looks incredibly painful.”
She rolls over, grinning. “Want to see something?”
“Depends . . .” I cross my arms. “I’m about to eat, so if it’s something gross . . .”
She rolls her pant legs up, then turns around. The backs of her knees are mottled in bruises at various stages of healing—some brown, some blue, some dark purple.
I let out a low whistle. “You call this fun?”
“It is fun.”
“Be honest, Lymph node. You’re a bit of a masochist.”
She gives me a facetious look, then snatches up the bag of chalk at her feet and tosses it at my face. I catch it an instant before it smacks my nose, but the dust gets in my eyes anyway.
“I’ll be in the kitchen in a bit,” she says, grasping the hoop and twirling on one foot, second leg extended to a point until she can use the momentum to swing her body upward. “I want to try this a few more times.”
“Don’t die.” I toss the chalk back to its place next to her crash mat and slip into the hallway, easing the door shut behind me before striding to the kitchen.
Fatigue eats at me as I plunk into a chair next to where Arden is reading a newspaper and nursing a steaming mug of tea.
“You look like shit,” he says with barely a glance my way.
“Why, thank you.” I open my mouth to spout off some funny quip, but my eyes catch on something odd in the corner. It looks like one of Septavia’s tentacles crawling straight out of the wall.
That can’t be right . . . I left her out in the ocean, the way I do most times when I come to the Brig—she’s made her home in the coral growing inside the hull of the ship that serves as the Brig’s entrance.
But the tentacle curls toward me, lengthening as it creeps across the floor, suckerless and undulating.
“Um . . . Arden? Do you know what that is?” I ask.
He sets down the paper, then catches sight of it and leaps onto his chair. “What the depths?”
“Good morning,” Isla says, flipping a long black braid over her shoulder as she enters, then freezing as her eyes land on a second tentacle of shadow twisting out from another wall.
Alarm bells clang in my ears. “Don’t move.” I pull a pistol from my belt and slide a bullet into the chamber.
A ribbon of smoke coils down from the ceiling. I point the pistol and pull the trigger, but the bullet passes through and lodges in the stone.
“What’s going on?” Jade runs in, Soren hot on her heels. Several dozen more undulating coils of shadow writhe into sight from every direction, knotting into a mass as tall as I am in the center of the room.
We all back away slowly until our spines hit the wall, none of us blinking as the tentacles mist together, ebbing and flowing as though they’re breathing.
I aim at it uselessly with my pistol as fear slicks cold under my skin.
The smoke braids itself into a head, shoulders, arms . . . The instant before her face materializes, I know who she is. I lower my weapon as the darkness evaporates, leaving her in its wake.
“Nocturne,” I breathe, my voice cracking because of course it does. Cheeks burning, I clear my throat. “I mean . . . ,” I try again, pitching my voice lower. “Nocturne.”
“Hello, Lorenzo.” Her ghostly lilt raises goose bumps on my flesh.
“I’m so sorry about the other night. I shouldn’t have—”
“I’m not here for apologies.” Her tone is a faraway storm. “I’m here to invite you to a game.”
“A game?” I repeat like a damned fool.
She raises her hand, and tiny tendrils of smoke curl around her fingers, fashioning themselves into a piece of white parchment, which she then holds out for me to take.
Shoving the pistol into my belt, I approach, keeping my eyes on her face as it mists to and fro.
And there, I see it again. Though her features are indistinct, the outline of her jaw and the curve of her nose match those of my memories of Lenora, the priestess who once dined with my family and swept into my father’s parish like she was a goddess herself.
But how? And why?
I take the parchment. I saw flyers just like it all over the city tonight falling out of newspaper stands and stuffed into jacket pockets, but I figured it was some kind of advertisement.
It’s a letter. From her.
I scan the words quickly, excitement thrumming through me.
“A game,” I repeat again as I lift my gaze to Nocturne’s, handing the invitation to Soren, who reads with the rest of the Tentacles clustered around him. “Why do you want me to compete?”
“You’re the Thief,” she replies, as though that explains everything. “Think what they’ll say.”
The way she emphasizes “they” doesn’t seem to mean the city or even the world. It’s like she means something grander, something bigger than people. Perhaps history? Perhaps the stars themselves or the demons of the sea?
“You don’t strike me as one to care what anyone thinks of you,” I say, throat dry.
“And you,” she murmurs, “don’t strike me as one to cower in the face of a challenge.”
“I see what you’re doing.” I point a finger at her. “You’re trying to flatter me. I’ll have you know that I am very receptive to flattery.”
“So I hear.”
“This prize,” I continue with a wink. “One magical favor. What are the possibilities?”
She lets out a coy laugh. “I’m sure you’ve done your research.”
Warmth prickles in my cheeks with a sudden awareness of how desperate I must have appeared last night. I hold my jaw, keep my gaze steady. “Many believe you to be the spawn of the goddess of obscurity. But what can you do with such darkness besides”—I quirk a brow— “make it dark?”
The tendrils of smoke curl, moving her closer to me, and she grasps my left hand with fingers like frostbite.
My voratium rings glow sharp in contrast to her shadows.
She raises her other hand and taps her fingertip to the ring on my thumb.
The soullight within extinguishes, its color leeching out until it’s dark as pitch.
“Hey,” I say, “I just refilled that . . .”
But she continues as though she hasn’t heard me, tapping the three rings stacked on my first finger. Each one darkens immediately.
I stare, the protests dying in my throat as she makes her way from finger to finger until all twenty rings are empty. Then she raises her gaze to mine.
“You are full of moonlight.” Her voice is a shadow’s exhale. “I can choke it out.”
My fingers curl instinctively around hers. “You can . . . get rid of my curse?” It comes out a desperate, wretched gasp.
Her hand disintegrates. Then her wrists. Then her forearms. “If you win my game.”
Panic, terror, and desperate hope war within me, keeping me rooted to the spot as the rest of her arms mist away. The smoke at her feet braids up her body, swallowing her into night.
“Consider, Lorenzo,” she whispers. “You will not get another chance like this.”
Ebony envelops her. Lightning crackles within, and the clouds evaporate.
Nocturne is gone.
“Boss . . . ?” Arden says, his voice no more than a croak.
“Go get Lola,” I say. “Get her now.”