Chapter 3
I know thunder.
Thunder rumbles. Builds from a distance until it rolls overhead and cracks like a whip. This isn’t thunder.
At least, it isn’t normal thunder.
I jerk upright in bed, heart pounding as I blink away sleep, looking around my dark bedroom. My single window is boarded up, but I see a flash of light through the cloth-stuffed gaps.
That isn’t lightning.
I know lightning, and it isn’t red.
Just like thunder isn’t high-pitched and madly rapping, knocking against our sky and demanding entry.
A terrible feeling has the hair on my arms lifting, has my fingernails prickling.
I leap out of bed and yank on pants beneath my night shirt before I open my door. As soon as I enter the corridor, I see my aunt coming out of her bedroom holding a candlestick, her short hair askew and her expression worried.
“What is that?” I ask as we both head for the front room.
“I don’t know . . .”
I snatch up my face covering and gloves from the back of the sofa and hurriedly put them on. “I’m going to take a look.”
I grab the swatter before peeling open the front door while Aunt Lenna waits anxiously behind me.
Outside, Flies buzz, but it seems as if they too are distracted by the strange sounds and flashes.
They don’t try to rush in, and there aren’t nearly as many of them swarming around the door as usual.
Instead, they’re hovering on the ground.
And I can see why.
The sky is furious. It makes another shrill, battering sound.
“Get away from the door!”
My mother’s shout causes me to jerk backward, just as red light oozes from the spongy sky.
It burns so bright that I grimace, eyes squeezing shut.
When I try to look again, a snapping deluge suddenly unleashes from above.
An inky black sluice batters down, shattering against the ground like liquefied glass.
My mother slams the door shut, barely missing my nose. She grips my arm and pulls. “Get away from the door, the windows, everything!”
Overhead, the rain pelts down so hard I worry the roof will split. The three of us huddle in the center of the room. There’s one more magnificent red flash that I can see through the stuffed cloth of the windows, and another pounding trill.
Then, it all stops. So sudden that it’s a violent end. A crashing quiet.
“Stay here,” my mother says firmly before she goes to the door, pulling it open to peer out.
I wait, frozen, but then gasp in surprise when she walks out and shuts the door behind her. She’s outside. Uncovered.
“M?m!”
Racing across the room, I yank open the door, only to find my mother standing stock-still on our landing. Nothing swarms her, eating her alive. Nothing rains down on her either. The sky is no longer red, and the moon shines with a tilted grimace.
I step closer, and something beneath my shoes squelches. At that same moment, I realize the Flies aren’t hovering.
Because they’re all dead on the ground.
Up and down the street, people have popped out of their homes in their nightwear, looking as disheveled and shocked as I feel.
The entire street is littered with dead Flies, but that’s not all that stains the city.
Whatever just rained from the sky now dribbles down the sides of the buildings like drips of black ink.
I strain my ears, but for the first time in five months, I hear something.
Silence.
Not buzzing silence, but utter silence.
“Thank the Fates,” I whisper, a stunned smile stretching. “No more Flies!”
But my mother turns and grips my arms, and her expression does not share the same surprised delight as mine. My smile instantly drops as I realize that it’s actually not good that the Flies just dropped dead. Not at all.
My mother leans against me, her face pale, her body shaking. “Yes, but they’re dead because that was another Plague, Esti.”
My stomach twists fast enough to make me feel sick. I gnaw on the edge of my purple-smudged thumbnail as fear pumps through me. I look behind her, back to the street, just as someone starts screaming in the distance.
Dread drags up my throat.
“There’s only one thing that makes the sky flash red before black rain shatters onto the ground,” she says as my eyes drag back to her grim face. “Poison Plague.”
* * *
Our city is in upheaval.
Aunt Lenna and I are clustered within a mob. The street is packed with citizens, cobblestones and buildings all splattered with the Poison’s black stain. There are dead Flies up the street, piled as high as snow from a blizzard. City workers are still trying to sweep them all up and burn them away.
The Flies are dead, but if I had the choice, I’d bring them back.
Flies we can survive. Poison we cannot.
The red flashes came three nights ago, and when the black deluge rained down on us, it didn’t just kill the Flies, it killed everything caught in it.
Fortunately, with Plague curfew in place and with everyone having already sealed up their homes, the losses weren’t as bad as they could have been. Not nearly.
But it didn’t just kill every insect and animal and person caught in its path. It also Poisoned our water. Our river is now tainted, rushing into the festered sea just outside our city’s walls. All of it gone black and fetid. Utterly deadly.
And we’re now dying in droves.
Which is why I find myself standing with hundreds of others, joining the mob outside Lord Havlon’s manor. He reigns over our city. As Govern, he’s supposed to make Hamelyn prosperous and help keep the Plagues at bay. And yet he’s done nothing while we die.
The gathered crowd grows too big, too loud to ignore, forcing him to finally come out.
He’s four stories up, at the highest level of his manor, with members of our city patrol buckled up in their iron armor.
His form is rotund, belly belted at the front and tucked with a vest. His mustache is yellowed far more than his light hair, perhaps from all the amber mead he’s said to drink. Overall, he’s not much to look at.
Except for the bloodred color that stains the tips of his pointed ears.
It’s the one indicator. The single thing that tells us he survived what millions of other fae didn’t.
It’s the mark that he’s a Core fae.
Even now, when thousands are blaming him, he’s still set apart. Still looks down at us, while the polluted sky looks down at him. Their ears warn us of what they are. The tips stained with the molten red of the lava that melted right into them. A reminder of what they’re capable of.
They’re famous. They’re revered. They’re feared.
Because, unlike everyone else, they have incredible, unfathomable core power.
So Lord Havlon may not look like much, but he has the one thing that counts.
Magic.
The kind of magic that can beat back a Plague.
He can smother flame. Not just normal flames, but the magical, destructive blazes caused by the Fire Plague. A very useful power—which is why he became a Govern. At least our city will never burn to the ground and our corpses will never be left in ashen heaps.
Just Poisoned, apparently.
There are barely a hundred Core fae in the entire world of Brekon.
Many of them claimed territories after the crack.
They rule over large cities and outlier burgs, using their magic to keep the Plagues at bay.
But they’re also supposed to create alliances.
Request help from other Core when a territory is in need.
Lord Havlon hasn’t done that.
And watching him now as he sweats from his balcony and looks down at his angry people, I hate him all the more for it. But surely, surely, he’s going to do something now.
He has to.
“Citizens!” he calls, lifting his hands. People quiet down, ready to hear his plan. Desperate for aid. “Our waters are Plagued with Poison, our river and bay contaminated. But I have heard your cries for help!”
Relief spreads throughout the crowd, and my body is jostled within the sweaty, fearful throng. It feels strange to be uncovered after months of Flies, and even stranger to see everyone’s faces without the layers of fabric.
“Which is why we are working to dam up the river!” Havlon calls out. “To wait for rain to replenish it anew.”
What?
Aunt Lenna’s hand tightens around mine.
“And,” Havlon goes on, looking over the heads of a muttering crowd, “we have also gathered up all the stores of clean water from our city’s vaults! You can get your ration from city patrol’s station. The jars will cost just a bit of coin . . .”
Wait. Wait.
What?
My silent shock is the opposite reaction of the rest of the crowd.
Instead of seething silence, they explode.
Shouting. Cursing. Spitting threats and raving insults. People start throwing things up at him. Scraps of metal. Wooden boards. Rocks. A shoe that nearly hits him square in the head before his patrolmen yank him back within the manor.
The mob swarms as much as the Flies did.
Fury at our so-called leader soaks through the crowd like water. They surge ahead, ready to rip him to shreds even if they have to tear down his manor to get to him.
I don’t blame them.
Did he actually think announcing that we have to wait for rain to refill our river and that we have to buy water would be received well?
He’s supposed to tell us he’s spoken to another Core fae who will come in and help.
It’s one thing for him to wait out Flies—no one was surprised at that.
Since he doesn’t have allies, he’d have to use the city’s coffers to pay for aid, and we all know Havlon is nothing if not greedy over our collected taxes.
But there’s no waiting out Poison. There are a few Plagues that are a certain death sentence, and this is one of them.
He’s supposed to fix this.
Our weather is sporadic, and it’s the tail end of summer. Who knows when it will rain? And what then? We gather a bucketful—if we’re lucky—and when that’s gone within a day or two, we’ll be right back where we started.
At the cusp of death.
If he waits for rain, he won’t have anyone left to rule. Most of us will be dead within the week. And we’re trapped here, with the gates still sealed shut.
My ears throb with the shattering of a window as the mob attacks his manor. Some are trying to scale the walls, while patrolmen beat them down with whips or bludgeons.
I get knocked into as more people surge forward. Only Aunt Lenna’s firm grip keeps me from being torn away. I squeeze tight, hauling her closer to me. “We need to go,” I tell her. “Right now.”
She nods, and the two of us start to push our way through the crowd, going the opposite direction of the current. We shove and shoulder, ignoring the elbows and shouts. And as soon as we get out of the thickest of it, we start to run.
Because when the anger of the mob is either sated or stopped, all of those people will be doing exactly what we’re doing now.
Racing to the water before it’s gone.