Chapter Six Abel #2
A shadow moves in the alleyway behind the church.
It seemingly peels away over the ground from its natural border in a slow, slinking motion that my eyes struggle to decipher—until it crosses into the firelight.
Beastly black paws. Triangular ears. Silver eyes.
Lolling pink tongue dripping with saliva and blood.
No. This can’t be what Hanna was trying to communicate.
I can’t be looking at a Gods-damned silverwolf.
Silverwolves were the first living species Noctu created, long before he wanted to destroy the realm. These creatures are so fearful of humans, they’re practically mythical.
They don’t attack people. They camouflage and run.
For a split second I’m convinced I’ve stepped back into ancient times, before the Dark Days, when silverwolves hadn’t yet learned to avoid humans.
But then the silverwolf shakes its body as if casting off water.
Hair by hair, the coat changes color into a muted gray, better blending it in with the ash-dusted cobblestones.
Thank Diu. It’s leaving.
A low growl curdles my confidence.
The masked figure rasps a command in the Old Tongue.
“Attaquez.”
The silverwolf and its master dash forward.
I can’t outrun them both. Which do I shoot?
The choice tears me in two. An animal is not its master, but a snap decision has me pulling the trigger on the faster silverwolf.
The crack of the lever echoes through the square.
Growls turn to whimpers. The bolt sinks into its flank at a shallow angle.
Not enough to kill it. Just enough to knock it on its side, too injured to pursue.
The masked figure closes the space between us in milliseconds.
I block with the crossbow. He smashes through it with the sickle. Moonmetal parts and splintered wood burst in my gloved hands. I draw two daggers and he swings again. Metal slides on metal. Deadlock. With his smiling mask so close to my face, I hear the ragged breaths trapped inside.
I blocked on sheer luck. Not once, but twice. Who will move next? Me? Him? There are no wing muscles to read. No fangs to watch. No sweeping tail to dodge. No animal simplicity. It’s all human intelligence behind this mask, and I don’t have the first clue how to fight it.
My left dagger slips. Half of my blocking power vanishes, and the sudden shift in weight costs me balance I can’t regain without help. “Lucy, bite!”
Lucy bites his ankle, but he kicks her off.
He leans more heavily against me and sinks his knee into my stomach.
Air bursts from my lungs. One moondagger falls from my grip.
He grabs me by the throat and shoves me down.
Lucy skitters away with a yip as I hit the ground back-first. The figure kicks my fallen dagger out of reach and pins a knee on the tendons in my wrist, forcing my fingers open until they drop my other weapon.
His hand squeezes my throat, closing off my air. Smoke-veiled stars vanish behind black spots. The blur of a silver mask and too-curled smile leans over me. That blood-smeared sickle nears my face, dripping Hanna du Fay’s blood onto my cheek.
A woman’s roar. A moondagger’s flash. A spray of blood below the figure’s mask, spurting from the carotid artery.
Air floods my lungs and the weight disappears.
I jolt upright and feel for my daggers, staring at a wild-looking Claire.
Fire and smoke bloom behind her. My attacker’s blood spatters her scarred face and chest and mats her glossy hair.
One of my moondaggers is clenched in her hand.
“You stole my dagger!” I shake priorities back into my head. “I told you to stay with the horses!”
“You’d be dead if I’d listened,” she snaps over the sparking collapse of a nearby store.
A wave of ash flutters her swallowtail coat and makes us cough.
Lucy gekkers and paces, panting at Claire’s arrival.
I’m still struggling to comprehend the scope of Claire’s criminal repertoire when I take her hand and let her help me stand.
She killed someone. She saved my life.
Criminal? Savior? Who is she?
“We have to go!” she shouts. “The fire will reach the horses!”
I run with her back the way we came. Lucy bounds after us. Over my shoulder, I glance at Hanna’s body. My shattered crossbow. Embers fall near Claire’s victim, dangerously close to the silver mask.
Ravinfort will be burned off the map. I can’t let the evidence burn with it.
I double back to the body and swipe the weapon. Remove the mask. Rosy-blond curls fall around a smooth, freckled face. Not a man. A woman, sweat-streaked with effort and sticky with ash. Blood gushes from her throat. She twitches, then stills. Her ice-blue eyes stare at nothing.
“Abel!” Claire grabs my arm, wild eyes desperate. But she’s not looking at me.
I follow her stare over my shoulder. Three, four, five more figures emerge from the shadows. Silverwolves growl and shake their black coats into a lifeless gray.
“Attaquez!” a figure shouts. His silverwolf lurches into a sprint.
We run for the burning bushes.
“Attaquez!” shouts another.
Lucy bolts ahead. Devours a short-lived path through the flames.
“ATTAQUEZ!”
I command Lucy to go left and then right, bruised throat aching as we duck and dodge falling branches.
Flames lick at our heels. Claire coughs and stumbles.
I catch her by the shoulders and pull her against me, shielding her head from a collapsing tree.
Forced to find an alternate route, the masked figures grow quieter.
Breathless, Claire and I help each other jump and skid down a rocky side slope.
Our boots hit cobblestone. Residential outskirts, a toppled ghost town. “Through those trees!” Claire gasps. I follow.
When we get to a small clearing, she stops short and covers her mouth in horror.
“Where are the horses?” I demand. Anger boils my already heated skin. “Claire, tell me you tied them so they couldn’t bolt!”
“I know how to tie a horse!” She runs a hand down sliced ropes, then rummages through a nearby bush. “They must’ve been cut loose.”
I clutch Micah’s skull, unable to run my hands through my hair. Even if we escape this, those saddlebags carried all our food. Our camping supplies. My pack. My spare weapons. Noctu end me. My journal. I nearly fall to my knees.
“I told you to watch my pack!” I roar. “Half of those things are irreplaceable!”
“I know!”
She throws something large and tan at me. It hits my chest with a thud. My arms grasp it tight when I realize what it is. My pack. She hid it in the bushes as a precaution. I’ve never been this relieved in my life.
Claire pushes bloody hair from her eyes. “You’re welcome,” she snaps.
Silverwolf howls break through the night. Shouts in the Old Tongue follow.
My relief cuts short. “We can’t outrun them,” I say.
“We can’t hide, either. The silverwolves will sniff us out.”
I adjust my grip on my daggers. “Find a tree to climb. I’ll fight them off.”
What am I saying? I can’t win this. But there’s no other choice.
“I know a way.” Claire pulls her hood over her scarred cheek, then lifts Lucy. She peers up the path and shifts on her feet as if working up the will to move. “Follow me.”
Claire darts onto the path, back toward Ravinfort.
I’m about to shout at her, ask what in the Gods’ names she’s thinking, when I spot the silverwolf pack flanked by their masters.
She sprints straight for them, me on her trail.
We’re clear of the trees. Out in the open.
But it’s too late to turn back. Just when her judgment can’t possibly get worse—when my judgment can’t get worse for trusting her—she darts right and leaps down the wooden steps of the first dock.
A boatless dock.
Alarm makes my stomach drop. She’s betting on the river rapids to sweep us to safety.
“Attaquez!” rasps a figure.
I leap onto the creaking dock. My calf narrowly escapes a silverwolf’s snapping jaws. Claire teeters on the dock’s ledge. “Hurry!” she shouts. Lucy yips in her arms.
Sounds crash together: barks and howls, Old Tongue commands, my pulse in my ears, boots pounding on wood.
Claire shifts Lucy to one arm and reaches for me with her free hand.
I rip off a glove and shove it down the front of my overcoat.
My grip needs to be as solid as possible.
Without stopping, I latch onto her wrist. She grabs mine. I suck in a lungful of air.
Together, we jump.
I plunge into the freezing water, jerked at the shoulder as Claire is first to be swept downstream. My overheated skin turns ice-cold. Water floods my ears and drowns out a silverwolf’s snarls and the sound of its claws skidding to a halt on the dock.
Claire’s grip on my wrist tightens. Her legs kick mine as we burst to the surface.
We’re thrashing, spitting water, only to choke on a new wave.
The current drags us out of the orange reflection on the river’s surface, farther from the flames, away from Ravinfort and around the cliffside bend.
Thick forests line the rocky shores. Lucy whimpers in the cold, her soaked coat dulling from gold to red-brown.
Claire holds her tight against her shoulder.
With both of her hands full, her chin is barely above water.
“Hold on to—” Water fills my mouth. I cough it up. I pull Claire, but the rapids keep us at arm’s length. I want to hold her by the waist to free one of her arms, but I can’t stay afloat. My muscles tighten from the cold and drain me of strength.
We take wave after wave. Starlight prickles the sky in the shape of that damned owl constellation. It watches me, veiled in smoke, passive to the killers who hunt us.
I pray. Help us, Diu.
A drop in the rapids dunks us under and yanks our hands apart. The last thing I feel is Claire’s nails scraping my palm before she slips into the depths beyond my reach.