Chapter 17 Syneca #2
I pushed open my assigned door, needing space from Wickett’s constant presence, from the weight of eyes and expectations.
The room was exactly what I’d expected. A bed that looked like it had witnessed misery.
A desk scarred with old knife marks. One window, too small for escape but just large enough to remind me the outside existed.
Silas grew in size the moment I shut the door. He took up most of the floor space, and he fixed me with a look that could have peeled paint.
“You’re not my keeper, Silas. You’re alive, I’m alive. It’s fine. We’re all fine here.”
He took an ominous step toward me, those fucking eyes piercing.
“I know.” I said, shaking my head as I turned away, refusing to take him seriously. “I’ll tell you what. To make up for being reckless, the next time the Ripper pisses me off, you can eat him.”
A knock came at the door. Soft but deliberate. Calder.
I opened the door to see two sprites zip past, clutching scrolls marked with red wax. One nearly collided with Calder’s shoulder in its haste, squeaking an apology before vanishing down the corridor. Another followed seconds later, wings a blur.
“Busy day for messages,” I said.
Calder stepped inside, his eyes already sweeping the room. From his pocket, he produced a worn piece of charcoal and a folded paper—the kind of things he always carried for leaving messages in places words couldn’t be spoken.
He wrote quickly: Check for runes.
Of course. Privacy was a luxury the Magistrate wouldn’t grant. I moved to the wall beside the bed while Calder took the area near the window. We traced stone and mortar with careful efficiency, fingers searching for telltale grooves and unfamiliar marks.
I found one behind the old headboard, then moved to check the desk. My hands ran along its underside until I found it, small, delicate, carved with so much precision my mind stirred with professional appreciation.
I snapped my fingers to get Calder’s attention, then pointed at the rune and mimed writing in the air. His eyes widened with understanding.
He held up three fingers, then pointed around the room. He’d found three more.
Without ceremony, Silas stalked across the room, grabbed the transcription rune in his beak, and ripped it from the desk with a crack, sending splinters raining to the floor.
“Silentii,” I whispered, barely breathing the words.
Water coalesced around us, forming a sphere that shimmered like soap film. Inside it, sound wouldn’t penetrate the bubble. To anyone listening, they would only hear scrapes and scuffles of presence, but no words.
“That was a transcription rune,” I said once the bubble solidified. “Every word we spoke would have been written down somewhere. Probably in the Magistrate’s offices.”
“Good catch. I found three dampening runes. Behind the door, near the window, under that loose floorboard. Standard power suppression.”
“There’s one behind the headboard too. They really don’t want me getting ambitious in here.” I glanced at the hole Silas had left in the desk. “Though apparently they didn’t account for griffins.”
Si preened one wing with exaggerated dignity.
“We need to get to Eda Mire,” Calder said, returning to business.
“Now? They just housed us. Pretty sure leaving immediately violates several of the Magistrate’s unspoken rules.”
“If Vitoria’s still in the city, Eda Mire will know. I’ve been listening as often as I can. They’ve shut down the trains. Increased patrols on every wall. No ships in or out of the harbor.”
My stomach dropped. “They locked down everything?”
“Everything. I’m not sure how she’d get out if she wanted to.” He scraped a hand through his hair, a gesture that meant he was more worried than he’d admit. “The city’s become a cage.”
“What do we do when we find her?”
His eyes met mine, steady and certain. “That’s the other reason we need Eda Mire.”
The weight of what he wasn’t saying settled between us. We both knew what came next. What had to come next.
“It’s time to leave, Syn. All of us.”
“What about the binding?” I asked, watching the shimmer of our protective bubble. “If we don’t kill her in thirty days, we die instead. Did you know that would happen? Because I sure as hell didn’t.”
Calder’s expression darkened. “I’d hoped against it.
There was a story passed down about an assassination attempt in Solaire—old enough it must have been before the last Burning.
Venatori were selected then as well, charged with hunting someone important.
” He leaned against the wall, arms crossed.
“Don’t remember hearing about a Mortalis or the hunters dying if they failed.
But the target died, and the Venatori became legends. ”
“I don’t want to be a legend. I just want us to disappear.”
Calder studied me for a long moment with the look he got when he was reading between my words. “Disappear together, you mean. All three of us.”
“Obviously.”
“Good.” His voice was quiet but firm. “We get Vitoria, we run, we find somewhere they’ll never think to look.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“Nothing about this will be easy. Have you thought of anything useful?” His voice gentled, the way it did when he was trying to solve a problem without making me feel like a fool for not having the answer.
“Where Vitoria might hide? Why they would name her as the Phoenix? We both know she would have never left one of her daggers behind. But I don’t like the idea of the alternative.
If she was caught, set up to take the fall, and maybe already killed. ..”
“That’s not going to be the case at all.
This is the Magistrate. He’ll want everything done on a public platform.
You’ve seen it already. Pausing the championship games for the Mortalis was a deliberate move.
If he’s got her, she isn’t dead.” I sat on the bed’s edge, and Silas made himself smaller, spinning in no less than four circles before he laid down with a huff.
“He picked her because Katarina gave her up as a fire witch, but she never revealed our connection. She threatened it, sure, made it clear she could, but Wickett...” I swallowed the rest. “If Vitoria’s not with Eda Mire, she has to be with whomever she meets at night. The one who summons her.”
He nodded, smoothing his fingers over the pale scar on his temple as he looked out the tiny window. “Her family’s dead.”
“And she faked her own death at thirteen. There’s no record of her being alive.” I managed a bitter smile. “Bet the Magistrate loved discovering that little detail.”
Calder rubbed his jaw, thinking. “Could be some people in the Crook who’d help her. Smugglers, maybe. The kind who move bodies that need to stay lost.”
“She’d need money for that.”
“She’s been taking side jobs for months. I thought she was saving for better weapons.” He shook his head. “I should have paid more attention.”
“You’re not her keeper, Cal.”
“No, but I should have—” He stopped himself, that familiar guilt settling into the lines of his face. “We go tonight. After dark, when the guard changes.”
I nodded. We both knew the schedule, had memorized it years ago when knowing such things meant the difference between freedom and chains.
“Eda Mire’s going to have answers,” I said, though it sounded more like a prayer than certainty.
Grimora changed when the sun went down. Less hostile, maybe. Or just hostile in ways I understood better.
We kept to the narrow streets where runic lamplight didn’t reach, moving through shadows. Above, Silas circled, occasionally calling out in a way that meant ‘clear’ versus the sharper cry that meant ‘hide now’.
“Velaros.” My favorite deep, dense fog crashed through the streets surrounding us like an ocean wave.
Calder moved ahead of me, checking corners with the paranoia of someone who’d survived too long to ever be foolishly imprisoned.
The Crook wasn’t far, but hunters prowled in pairs, their boots striking cobblestones in rhythm.
We pressed ourselves into doorways, behind rain barrels, anywhere that offered cover as they passed.
“More patrols than usual,” Calder murmured once a pair had moved on.
“They’re scared.” I pulled my dark green hood lower. “A Phoenix on the loose? According to Wickett, they’ve been tearing this city apart looking for her.”
We turned down an alley that reeked of old fish.
The familiar stench of the Crook meant we were close to answers. Close to Eda Mire and whatever impossible solution she might offer.
A shadow moved at the alley’s end.
Calder’s hand found his blade as I held my breath. But the shadow resolved into a drunk shifter, stumbling past without even noticing us.
We waited another heartbeat before continuing.
The Gilded Pestle’s sign creaked in the wind, barely visible in the darkness. But the snake painted on it seemed to watch us approach, and warm light leaked from beneath the door. The store never closed, not really. Death didn’t keep business hours.
Calder knocked. Three taps, pause, two taps, pause, one.
“Shopping for something nice?”
Every muscle locked as Wickett stepped from the shadows into the moonlight, and my mind immediately clocked our likely violations: leaving without permission, a witch sneaking through the city after dark, approaching potential criminal establishments.
Three rules, probably more if he were creative with interpretation.
Out of nowhere, the image of Katarina’s blood spreading across grass flashed in my mind, and suddenly I realized I didn’t know how to act around him.
If I were the quiet subordinate I’d made myself be at work, he’d never believe it.
If I struck too hard, he’d get pissed. But one thing Wickett never seemed to play with was rule breaking.
He was unbending when it came to the law.
Still, he’d suspect far worse if I were suddenly demure.
“Well.” The word came out steadier than I felt, my mouth running on pure defensive instinct. “This is awkward. We were just discussing how much we missed your cheerful personality. Must have skipped the part on the clipboard that said we were prisoners.”
“How incredibly uncharacteristic of you, little red witch.”
“Come on, Wickett. It’s been days since the Oracle’s attack. Vitoria’s out there somewhere, and we’ve done absolutely nothing to find her.”
He moved closer, that predator’s grace making my skin prickle. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I think you’re more concerned with following daddy’s rules than actually accomplishing what we’re bound to do.” I stepped forward, closing the distance he’d begun to claim. “I’m tied to the same oath as you now. We have thirty days, or we’re all dead. So back the hell off and let us do our job.”
Wickett began circling, slow and deliberate, forcing Calder and me to turn in order to keep him in sight. “Your job? Your job is to hunt with the team. Not sneak off into the Crook at night like you’re planning some kind of—”
“Some kind of what?” Calder growled.
My voice was steady, but growing soft, exactly what it needed to be for him to hear me. “Escape? Rebel? Or maybe we’re just trying to talk to the one person in this city who might actually know where our target is.”
“You have no idea who runs this shop. What grace my father extends to the monster within is simply because she alone knows how to get the most valuable runes. But there’s a darker side to this little store—which will inevitably be shut down.
As soon as we can track down all her associates.
” He stopped directly in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact.
“You have no idea what you’re walking into. ”
“And you have no idea what I’m willing to do to find her.”
“Don’t I?” His eyes dropped to where water was unconsciously pooling at my feet, drawn by my anger. “You’re emotional. Reckless. You’ll get yourself killed before—”
Calder moved. “You kids let me know when you’re done bickering.” Without warning, he stalked past us both, his enormous frame cutting through our standoff. His boots struck the cobblestones with finality as he reached for the door handle.
I watched his shoulders go rigid. Saw his hand freeze on the worn wood. Heard the single word that stopped my heart as the door swung open far too easily.
“Fuck.”