Chapter 22 Entering and Almost Breaking #2
“Oh, Katarina, I am sorry,” he breathed into her ear. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”
She sighed and shook her head, listening for the echo of voices downstairs.
“But I don’t know how you handle the exhilaration!”
“Quiet,” she stressed and crept closer to the open railing.
“Did you see who delivered it?” a voice that could only be Tarzul’s floated up from below.
“I assume a drayk,” said Zaiya with a lilt Kat was surprised to hear. “Why, do you think a demon could have brought it himself?”
“That’s not what…I mean, were there any other…or, uh, anything suspicious?” the councilman stuttered.
“Well, I did smell qapian droppings and there were kerra melon seeds by the door…”
“She’s stalling well,” Kat whispered, glancing over her shoulder to see Azrion was right there, the heat of his breath falling over her face. She gripped the railing and felt the softness of his hand brushing hers as he leaned out into the empty stairwell.
“Zaiya is usually quite curt, but it seems she can do anything for Elliran.” His gaze shifted to meet Kat’s.
She would have been caught if she’d let herself stare for much longer, lost in the look he was giving her, something like admiration, though that couldn’t be right.
Again, she slipped away, creeping through the light with her back to the wall. Azrion followed, his careful steps comical as he glared at his surroundings like they would be at fault if a noise dared to erupt.
They passed an extraneous bedchamber and finally reached the office. A massive window opposite the door let in the faintest twinkle of starlight. She squinted about for an alternative, and then a light burst into life beside her.
“Az,” she hissed, throwing herself over the glow and consequently his hands.
In the dim purple light leftover, his face fell.
“Actually, this is helpful. Just keep it low, all right?”
His grin reappeared, and he released the light into the room’s center.
A lilac cast fell over shelves littered with knickknacks and books losing their bindings, a stylized painting of some demon that had to be a relative of Tarzul’s hung in a gaudy gold frame, and flanking the door was a set of statues that looked like featherless drayks.
“Well, he’s got abysmal taste, that’s for certain.”
Kat stifled a giggle and went to the desk.
Behind it was a high-backed chair and right in the seat what could only be the satchel.
She committed the way the strap hung over the chair’s arm to memory before flipping the bag open and pulling out its contents.
“Damn it,” she whispered as Azrion came to stand close beside her. “It’s just a ledger.”
He reached over her shoulder and flipped a page, the heat off him radiating into her back as they both bent over the book. “Most ledgers aren’t really supposed to leave council chambers.”
“Great, so we can get him on forgetfulness.”
“He’s a Horn, Kat,” Azrion leaned closer and inspected the next page, and Kat felt ill seeing her name there listed with the other humans, the costs for keeping them, and to whom the funds were going.
“One of the highest-ranking officials in Heck shouldn’t just forget a thing like this.
And look, everything is written in here multiple times, but it’s not… well, it doesn’t add up, does it?”
Kat ran her finger down the numbers on the page.
Her mind couldn’t parse out the order they were written in, but there was a second column that did the math correctly, and a third that…
“Oh, this sneaky fucker is skimming coin away from the city. So much coin.” Kat had seen enough cooked books to know exactly what they were looking at—it was either brilliant or idiotic, but some of the best embezzlers kept a private ledger that tracked every fake coin alongside every real one.
It kept things straight, but not secret, not if someone like her found it.
She slammed the ledger shut and squeezed it to her chest. “This doesn’t tell us where Elli is, but it implicates Tarzul in wrongdoing and—”
“We can’t just take it.” Azrion held up both hands, that illicitly excited demon suddenly gone.
“Why not?” She squeezed it harder. “We can just bring it to the council and—”
“We don’t know who on the council we can trust. They’re very powerful, Kat.”
She bit her lip but nodded. He was right, but he was a little wrong too because there was at least one person who worked in Heck’s bureaucracy that she had absolute trust in.
She laid the book flat again, flipped to an early page, and tore it out.
“He won’t miss this. Or this”—she tore another, and Azrion flinched—“And I think I’ll take this one too. ”
“Tell me there’s a method to this,” Azrion pleaded.
“Not really, but there’s math on these pages, and I know a human who can do magic with the right math.”
“You know a human who can do magic?”
“Not exactly, but close enough. But this doesn’t really help us find Elliran, just a motive.
If she knew what Tarzul was doing…” Kat shuddered, folding up the parchment and stuffing the book back into the satchel exactly as she’d found it.
She couldn’t think that something horrible had happened to Elli, only that they were trying to find her.
Kat pulled open the desk drawer and started rifling.
“Look for anything that might help but put back everything exactly how you found it.”
Gods, Tarzul was boring. If it weren’t for the embezzlement thing, she might have thought him the perfect citizen of Heck based on the innards of his office.
There wasn’t even anything tangentially interesting, no love letters, no diaries, not even a knickknack that was borderline salacious.
Kat found a few animals from the human world amongst the statuettes on the shelves, and maybe there was something in the fact they were all the most aggressive and deadly ones—lions and wolves and nary a rabbit or sparrow amongst them—but Azrion told her that wasn’t unheard of.
Human relics were considered exotic, and Tarzul’s aesthetic screamed the need for anything unique.
“Now wait just a…” Azrion turned over the statuette of a bear she’d handed him to show her carvings on its stomach
“An artist’s signature?”
He held the markings in the lilac light. “It almost looks like a rune. These are water symbols.”
She snatched another creature with six arms and pincers from the shelves. It had no extra etchings.
“Try the otsoran.”
Kat pointed randomly at the others.
Azrion reached over her head and plucked what she could only assume was an otsoran off the shelf. It was similar enough to the bear, but distinctly different too, and on its underside a second set of markings.
“What do these mean?”
“They just look like reflecting symbols. Water workers use them sometimes, but these are unfinished.”
“Here.” She snatched a quill and a spare piece of parchment from Tarzul’s desk and urged him to quickly copy down the markings.
He did, but not without comment that he couldn’t see how they would help.
Just as they were arguing over how to replace them on the shelves—Kat was of course precise, but Azrion thought they looked better at a jauntier angle—there was a sound.
Azrion acted fast, killing his light and plunging them into darkness.
“As I was saying, thank you!” Zaiya’s voice rose above the din. “I just want to find her, that’s all.”
“She’s leaving,” they said to each other, and even in the pitch dark Kat could see the glint of fear on Azrion’s face.
They hurried to the landing then froze, listening to the front door open and close.
Heavy footsteps immediately began up the stairs, and they would surely be seen if they stayed in his office, so Kat grabbed Azrion by the shirt and pulled him into the extraneous bedchamber.
He moved to close the door, but she stopped him with a tight hand on his wrist—everything had to stay how it had been.
He froze under her touch, and the two tucked themselves into the crevice behind the half-open door.
“…blathering idiot,” Tarzul’s voice carried through the open hall. “Sending another letter…so messy…just like his magic.”
Azrion straightened next to Kat, ears pricking at the word.
His mouth opened, and Kat covered it tightly.
There they stood unmoving as the demon shuffled down the hall grumbling to himself, and then there was the slam of a door.
Kat looked first, hand still in place over Azrion’s fangs.
The bathing chamber was closed, but of course their way out was now blocked.
Kat held up two fingers to Azrion, wiggled them between the two, pointed toward the bathing chamber, shook her head, pointed downward, nodded, and then raised her eyebrows to request confirmation the demon understood.
When she eased her hand away from his mouth, he was grinning from one side, and his eyelids had gone all bedchamber-y. “I mean, the timing isn’t ideal, darling, but I would be lying if I said this wasn’t absolutely arousing, so if you’re asking—”
“We have to sneak out the front door,” she hissed, perhaps angrier that she couldn’t indulge than the fact he didn’t understand, and pulled him behind her as she ran.
They weren’t particularly quiet going down the stairs, but Tarzul’s singing baritone filled the hall as water began to run. Hopefully, he wouldn’t notice the window left wide open or the funny angle his soap might have moved into.
Azrion continued toward the front door, but Kat rounded the stairs and skidded, pulling him alongside her. “The lights,” she whispered, noting the glow through the door’s glass.
They stumbled into a kitchen where Azrion pointed out the “dreadful pattern” on Tarzul’s plates as they fled.
Kat spied a back door and burst through it, ducking into the shadows of the garden and dragging the demon along.
She kept running until the eaves of Tarzul’s house were lost in the darkness and collapsed into the shadows of a small copse of trees.
“And we survived.” Azrion fell to the grass beside her panting.
Kat knew she was alive, but it felt like she was much closer to death, heart pounding, breath short. That had been idiotic and harrowing and risky and…and maybe a little exhilarating.
She rolled her head in the grass, and Azrion was already staring at her, his chest heaving, but there was that look again. “Fuck it,” she hissed, and rolled herself atop him to smother him with kisses.
Azrion responded better than she’d hoped, arms and legs wrapping around her, hips thrusting, tongue exploring. It didn’t matter if either could breathe, only that they could smash their faces together and live because they had survived, and gods, she would give anything to shed her clothes and—
“Ew, gross, my eyes!”
Kat threw herself off of Azrion and scrambled to her feet. Despite her words, Zaiya was smirking.
“Well, good job everyone,” Kat said as she wiped invisible grass off her pants.
Azrion stretched his arms overhead, still laying out on the ground. “Very good job, I’d say.”