Chapter 33
There are so many things in this world that I never knew about until I left the hospital.
I’d discovered that gods existed. That magic was real and spectacular, and that it could be abused like anything else humans got their hands on.
But of all those miracles, all those new things I’d discovered over the past few weeks, the simple pleasure of waking up in my lover’s arms was the best of them, hands down.
“You’re awake.”
I felt Nin’s murmured words beneath my cheek as I lay on his chest like a happy sea lion sunning on a beach.
He’d piled several dustcovers onto us a few hours ago and added wood to the fire, but there were only crackling embers left now.
Dim light streamed through the window. “Is it dawn yet?” I asked, voice broken and thick.
“The sun is coming up,” he answered hoarsely, curling his arm around my back. “Snow is no longer falling.”
“And we’re going to just lie here all day and let the world burn down, right?”
“Sadly no, and it is already the biggest regret of my existence.”
I knew what that meant: time to get up and track Lavina. We’d discussed it at length last night on this very floor. It was the least memorable thing we did. “Ugh. My bones feel like they’ve been taken apart and put back together wrong.”
“Mmm, and me as well,” he murmured.
But duty called, and neither of us would ignore it.
We somehow untangled ourselves and tested the dampness of our hung-up clothing to find most of it crisply dried by the previous night’s fires.
And after a little effort, we managed to dress—if only for the driving need to find a chamber pot.
Nin went outside to check on the mare, and after I briefly washed myself with water pumped from the kitchen sink, I put myself back together as best I could.
And as I tied on the apron over my dress, I glanced out a window that looked over the back lawn.
Nothing but white. On the lawn, the limbs of tree branches. The outbuilding roofs. It glittered in the rising sun, blanketing everything, making the world seem fresh and new.
Until I spotted a pair of dark shapes.
They dashed across the white of the lawn, leaving a path behind.
It was those awful hounds, Kokki and Peppi.
“Nin!” I shouted.
The door slammed, and footfalls rushed toward me. “What is it?”
“There! Look! The hounds—they’re headed toward the woods.”
Nin cursed and took off, shouting, “Stay here!”
I would do no such thing. I grabbed my wool coat, turning up my nose briefly at the smoky smell, and pulled it on as I raced to follow Nin across the back lawn.
He was already gone—disappeared. No tracks.
Was he moving in that fast way he liked to move, stepping through time and space?
Logically I knew this was possible, but my heart was panicked that I couldn’t see him.
“You’re not leaving me here,” I complained, racing into the snow after him.
In seconds, I was bogged down with snow up to my calves, cussing both my short legs and the skirts that had just dried but were now getting wet and frozen all over again.
The hounds’ tracks were clear, so I followed them, trudging through the deep snow and breathing like a freight train. Everything was sore. I cursed Nin for that because he wasn’t around to answer, and I kept going until I spotted the end of the tracks.
A cabin sat at the edge of a forest of banded white birch trees.
Perhaps it housed servants, or maybe it was a quiet place for the land’s owner to escape to.
Whatever it was, it had a big front porch, and underneath that roof, the front door stood open and the hounds were barking from somewhere inside.
Outside, though, a hairy animal lay unmoving in a snowdrift. I cautiously approached and peered into the drift—and immediately jumped back.
It was a dead goat. One of Lavina’s cursed herd.
This can’t be good. I didn’t know how it had died, but I wanted nothing to do with it. My only concern at the moment was Nin, so I raced up the porch steps and entered the cabin.
Nin stood in the center of a large living room. The hounds barked at him. A trail of blood led to a cast-iron potbelly stove. Next to it, lying on the floor, back propped against the wall, was Lavina in Charles Voss’s body.
“Peppi, Kokki,” she said weakly. “Stop barking, you monsters.”
Nin glanced in their direction, and they both cowered, tucking tails.
“Prince of Mourning,” Lavina said. “No one wants you here, not even the dogs.”
“My undead wolves back home are better behaved,” he said.
“I suppose I’ll be seeing them soon enough,” she replied, coughing up blood into her hand. There was a wound on her stomach that seemed to be the source of most of the blood surrounding her.
“What happened here?” I asked, stepping further into the room.
“Failure, that’s what happened,” she said, sharp eyes on mine. “If I could’ve just made it a couple more weeks…”
“But you didn’t,” Nin said simply.
“Thanks to your scheming brother. Are all men alike, my prince, even in the Nightlands? They cheat and lie and try to keep me down. They make maddening rules to cling to power.”
Disturbingly, at least to me, Lavina sounded a little like my own mother. I’d heard all this bitterness before. “Is that why you killed your own husband?” I asked.
“The law of the land says men are important, women are not. As Agnes Voss, I couldn’t inherit Riverbend unless all the Voss men were dead—even a long-lost male cousin had more rights than she did.”
“So you became the male to inherit,” Nin said. “This is about money?”
“This is about safety and power,” she shouted. “This is about the fact that I’ve taken care of Vincent for too many years, and I was tired of playing housewife.”
We both stared at her as the dogs settled down near her feet.
“But it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Because I failed. This body is dying, and I cannot move into another one for two weeks. I doubt I will last that long.”
I doubted she would last the night. “Let me try to bandage you,” I told her. “Witch or not, you are still my patient.”
“Always kind. Always trying to help,” she said, coughing. “You cannot help me, Nurse. Kesh made sure I’d experience a very slow death.”
Nin’s head tilted in that way it did when he was puzzled. “Kesh did this?”
“We had a bargain. He came to claim what I’d promised him.” Lavina pulled aside Charles Voss’s brocaded dressing gown to show us her bloodied neck. It took me a few moments to realize that the opal pendant I’d once seen there was missing.
But Nin knew. His face was a mask of calm fury. “Kesh has my pendant.”
Lavina nodded. “Our bargain. He’d teach me a spell to permanently hide me from your father, and I would get him what he wanted.”
“Nin’s pendant? Why?” I asked.
“Because I cannot go home without it,” Nin said in a low voice. “I am more human without it. I am… mortal.”
And Kesh meant to kill him like Chaos had killed Death.
“Tell me where he went,” Nin said, “and I will make your death quick.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, my lord,” she said, coughing several times. “Kesh wants you to come. He left me here to deliver the message. Meet him at the old church north of here. He’s waiting for you.”
The lines of Nin’s body became rigid. “I will strike you down for lying to me,” he told her.
“I know it’s not in your nature to take souls,” she said.
“But you don’t need to worry, I’m not lying.
And whatever you’re planning to do to me, go ahead and try.
I don’t believe in death, you see. I’ve spent decades defying it, even when it seemed impossible.
That’s what I will keep doing, somehow, someway. So do your worst, my lord.”
Nin stared at her for a moment, then said, “You may not believe in Death, but he believes in you. And he hasn’t forgotten your debts. I’ll be seeing you, Lavina Vermeer, Witch of Amsterdam.”
Without sparing another glance at Lavina, Nin whipped around and stalked toward me. “Come, Molly.”
“You can’t go to Kesh,” I told him. “It’s a trap!”
“I know that,” he said. “But I won’t cower. I need to go now, and I don’t have time to take the mare. I don’t want to leave you, but I also don’t want to make you sick again—”
He wanted to use his powers to move swiftly. I spared a glance at Lavina and the hounds, but I’d already made up my mind. I wouldn’t leave him.
“Fine. Do it,” I said, bracing myself. “If you’re going to do it, then just—”
Without a word, he wrapped me in his long arms and whisked me away.