Chapter 4
Chapter four
The wind is stale, as all winds are in this world. Edged with pollution and swollen with despair, the breeze sweeps up my coat and cools the blood staining my hands as I stare down at the man sobbing at my feet with vague distaste.
For a brief moment, I consider leaving him alive. He’s already given me the information I need—the information I’ve scoured the blasted mainland in search of for over nine months. But as I watch his crimson blood leak from his wounds onto the dirty sidewalk, I decide I’d like to see more of it.
Leaning down, I inhale the sharp iron scent. It settles something of the jagged ache inside me, but the satiation is fleeting as I’ve found most things to be in the wake of my banishment.
The man gulps air like the breaths will be his last. Snot bubbles at his nose. His thinning hair is sweat-slicked to his forehead, his clothes rumpled and torn. In contrast, my own dark suit is crisp, his blood contained only to my hands.
“Please, please…” he begs.
I nearly smile. Nearly, because nothing in this world gives me pleasure enough to actually smile.
But the scent of his fear and the sight of his blood gives me something—and something is better than the nothingness I’ve lived with since I left Letum.
Even now, when I’ve finally found what I need, there is no victory.
There’s only the same ruthless determination that’s driven me for months, beating in time with my heart.
“Mmm,” I hum, drinking in his fear. I may not have my outward magic in this world, but death still pools in my heart and seethes through my veins, its wants no less ravening here than they were as the King of Carrion.
I was born what I am. It is only less obvious in a world as mundane as this one.
Worlds without magic have always been easier to blend into; to bury the dark hungers beneath a bland facade.
It is no wonder no one ever saw Willa for what she truly is when everyone is so eager to believe in normalcy; to cling to their safe ideals.
“Please let me go…Please,” the man sobs.
I frown, disgust roiling up my throat at his disarray.
“Where were those manners a few minutes ago? I was kind enough to inform you I am not a patient man, but because you had a gun, you decided to waste my time. Tell me,” I muse with patient curiosity.
“Why do guns give you mainlanders such a false sense of security?”
The man gapes at me like a codfish, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly as I lean in close enough to see the sweat beading along his hairline. “Have none of you learned the pleasure of someone’s blood spilling over your hands?”
Before he can stop sobbing long enough to form a response, I slice my knife deftly across his throat.
More blood spills, the deep scarlet pooling in the pockmarked concrete.
I watch it for a few prolonged moments, the man’s gasps becoming more desperate before finally falling silent.
Removing a handkerchief from my breast pocket, I wipe my hands as best as I can, tossing the soiled rag atop his chest before ducking out of the alley without a backward glance.
Eleven fucking months. That’s how long I’ve been stranded here. Free from the pain of my magic and the burden of the anchor, but still just as trapped as ever. Unable to move between worlds, nor to move beyond the ghosts of my mistakes.
They surround me in this world.
And though my body has filled out, my strength rivaling what it was all those centuries ago when Sam and I chased horizon after horizon, I find no comfort in it. My eyes are a clear cerulean, and yet, I avoid them in every mirror and reflection.
For all of it is a reminder that while I am here, the Aeternalis is in Letum.
No one on the street pays me any mind as I emerge from the alley to join the meandering crowd on the sidewalk.
I pull leather gloves over my stained fingers, a force of both habit and the chilled winter air.
It is nearly midnight, the silver light of the moon hidden behind towering buildings of brick and stone, blanketing the streets in thick shadows.
If I was king of this world, I would have designed it so the moon was visible from every window, but even before the plague, most places on the mainland were built for efficiency rather than beauty. I was born in one of them.
Though in the year since my banishment, I have traveled to almost every corner of this world and found signs of new life in each one to give me hope that someday, art will return.
The resurgence of the connection between Letum and the mainland has been slow but steady, reminiscent of the regrowth of a forest after a wildfire.
New sprouts rising through the wreckage; pockets of life speckled throughout a barren wasteland.
This street was populated only by routine military patrols when I first arrived, but now it is punctuated by families, their quiet laughter peppering the air even at this late hour.
Their joy lingers in the dismal light, as parents reunite with children they thought lost forever to the Amelioration camps.
My chest feel is tight as I reach my building, turning away from their happiness. It isn’t for me to enjoy.
I climb up the steps to the seventh floor, fishing the key from my pocket. I haven’t even turned the lock when the expected shuffle of small feet sounds from the other end of the hallway.
“Morning, Niko,” Zenni calls.
“It’s the middle of the night, you little menace,” I reply, clicking the lock open before turning toward her with a wink.
I’d been living in this apartment for a little more than a week when Zenni was released from the nearest camp, and she’s been lurking in the hallway ever since. Her black curls bounce in time with her steps as she dances toward me, her unencumbered joy digging beneath my ribs.
“Where have you been all day?” she prods, gazing at me with the frank assessment only acceptable in children. Her eyes widen, snagging on my chest. I follow her gaze to find a miniscule speck of blood near the button of my crisp white shirt.
My mouth thins and I turn back toward the door with a sigh. A shame. I loved this shirt. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” I ask, ignoring her question.
Zenni ignores mine in return, instead, peering hopefully at my pockets. “Did you bring me a treat?”
“Devilish rapscallions such as yourself don’t deserve treats,” I reply, even as I reach into the pocket of my coat. With a light laugh, I toss her a few of the brightly colored candies I’d bought only a few hours before I sliced a man’s throat and left him to bleed at my feet.
“You talk so weird, Niko.” She plops herself down on the floor in the middle of the hallway, hardly waiting to remove the entire wrapper before she’s stuffed the treat into her mouth. “What in the world is a rapscallion?”
“You are.” I wiggle my brow. “And so am I, which is why we’re such dear friends.”
She giggles, and I allow myself a moment to enjoy her happiness.
And not only because I like making her happy, but because touching Zenni’s joy is touching something of Willa’s.
Every ring of children’s laughter; every smile; every game of chase and dream of something wild—it all belongs to her.
And though I have no claim to any of it, I hoard every small piece.
Willa may have banished me from her kingdom and heart, but that hasn’t stopped me from chasing the pain of remembering. I lived with pain for so long—it is hard to feel anything but numb without it.
“Why do you have such a weird look on your face?” Zenni asks, unwrapping another sweet and tossing the brightly covered foil to the floor.
“If you call me weird one more time, I’m going to develop a complex.”
Zenni guffaws with her mouth full. “Your ego’s too big for a complex.”
“You’ve got me there, little ruffian.”
My palms stick to the inside of my gloves, and sudden exhaustion washes over me.
It’s been a long night—a long fucking year—and as much progress as I made today, the hardest part is yet to come.
I run my thumb absently over the bloodstain on my shirt, an unexpected solemnity expanding in my chest as I watch Zenni munch happily on her candy.
After tonight, I won’t be seeing her again.
There are not many things I will miss from this world, but she is one of them.
And perhaps its simple sentimentality that has me reaching for something of her to take with me, or perhaps it’s something far worse: a complicated offering for the queen I have loved and hated in equal measure.
“Zenni, now that you’ve been healed—” My tongue trips over the word. “—what do you dream?”
An adult would think the question mad, but Zenni only wrinkles her nose as she considers. I’m not sure what I expect her to say—if, maybe, there’s some desperate part of me that thinks she’ll describe the island that was mine for so long—but her answer is far better.
“Everything.”
Simple. Complicated. And so beautiful.
I wish Willa could hear it. And I wish I didn’t wish that at all.
“Do you have time for a story?” she asks, her wide brown eyes expectant.
I smile wistfully. “Not tonight, I’m afraid.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“Of course.”
I slip into the apartment, leaving her to the quickly disappearing pile of candies.
When I found this place, the air had been stale and unused. Months later, it remains so, as the apartment has never been a home, only a transient stop of ghosts passing through. I’ve felt like one such specter, nearly as empty as the rooms I haunt.
Without bothering to remove my boots, I stroll through the living room to the bedroom.
Willa’s bedroom is as bare as the rest of the apartment—there is no art on the walls, no clothes in the drawers, no books on the shelves.
The woman didn’t even own more than one pillow, her bed utilitarian and lumpy.
In her determination to never go back to a prison, she’d unintentionally created one of her own.
While I’d done the same with the Lunaedon, I’d at least had the good sense to allow myself the comfort of silk sheets.
I grab the pillow, digging through the scratchy cotton case until my fingers find metal. The bracelet is cold in my palm, and when I tuck it safely into my pocket, I feel more settled than I have in months.
I tracked down Willa’s apartment for two reasons, the first being the seeping gunshot wound I’d garnered after encountering my brother and the Aeternalis.
It had been a practical place to recover as Willa had done a thorough job of erasing her every connection to it.
As far as anyone in this world knows, this apartment doesn’t exist.
The second reason was far more sentimental—I wanted to be somewhere Willa once was.
I scaled the fire escape and climbed through the kitchen window, bleeding and desperate for some comfort of her.
All I’d found was her scent long faded, and nothing here that spoke of her at all beyond a ratty duffle bag of clothes tucked into a closet and a few weapons hidden in various crevices.
Nothing in this apartment— nothing in this entire damn world—feels like Willa. It only feels empty.
So, when I turn to walk out of here for the last time, I find it as easy to leave as it had been to arrive.
Outside, it’s begun to drizzle, drenching the morose grays and browns of the city.
My boots squelch unpleasantly as I trail through Willa’s neighborhood and into the next.
All the time I’ve spent searching the expanse of this blasted world, the answer was only a few blocks over.
If I wasn’t so jaded, I might laugh at the cruel twist of fate.
Military vehicles race past, some leaving the nearest camp to go out on patrol while others arrive with the unsound locked safely inside. While children like Zenni have begun to dream and heal, the adults have not rebounded so quickly.
It isn’t a surprise. Children have always been more resilient, more hopeful, while adults remain mired in their past.
Half-hour later, I arrive in front of a decrepit brownstone.
It sits two stories high, crafted of the same square edges and nondescript brick as everything else on the mainland.
The front door hangs slightly askew on the hinges, the windows at either side of it plastered over with yellowed newspaper.
I step up the sagging porch stairs gingerly, my heartbeat ratcheting higher in my chest, an unfamiliar heat flooding my veins.
It takes me a protracted moment to recognize it for what it is: adrenaline. The thrill of victory now so close, I can nearly taste it. After so many months of emptiness, it is a flare in my chest as I examine the peeling red paint and half-rotted wood of the door.
The last barrier to taking back what’s mine.
Mouth dry, I raise my hand to knock.
A few seconds later, the door cracks open only wide enough to reveal a russet pair of eyes narrowed in the same shrewd suspicion as the day we met centuries ago. They run from my booted feet upward, flaring wide when they finally lock on mine.
The woman gasps, quickly shoving herself against the door in an attempt to slam it back shut. The hinges squeal, and a cruel smile draws over my face as I plant my hand on the rotting wood, forcing it open wider.
“Is that any way to greet such a dear, old friend?” I drawl. “Wendy.”