Chapter 7
I’ve raced clear across the city, trying three different apothecaries. Two of them were already boarded up, and one of them was ransacked with nothing left inside.
With every running step I take, my anxiety worsens.
Above me, the boiling wound in the sky twists and thins, wringing out the last drips of daylight. The bell tolled a while ago, and I haven’t found a single thing to help my mother. I frantically search for another shop, but frustration and failure wrap around me like abrasive ropes.
I’m near the city center now—the fancier, more expensive part that used to boast manicured trees, bright white paint against elaborate faces of lumber, and sparkling clean roads veined between every building.
But it doesn’t look like that anymore.
The trees are eaten through and blackened, the once-tidy roads packed with heaps of dead Flies, the buildings bruised with the oily sheen of the Poison staining down every rooftop and left to scorch the walls.
Roaches have ascended too, somehow surviving the Poison, attracted to the decay.
Countless windows have been broken, doors kicked off the hinges as looters plunder the shops, their shouts echoing down the road.
In my panic, I forgot to grab my veillet, so my horns are on full display.
I must’ve dropped it when my mother had her first convulsion.
With the sun so near and the pollution burning away, my horns and hair glitter conspicuously.
People are noticing them. Noticing me. And people noticing me is never a good thing. Especially now.
I keep my head down, avoiding groups of fae, skirting around patrol as they try to keep order. The bell toll seems to have thinned some of the crowd, but not all. There’s a brutal tinge to the air like the city is ripe with tinder, just waiting for the first spark to catch.
And I’ve run out of time.
Failure swoops deep in my belly, and a sob shoulders past my panting breaths. I have to go back. I don’t dare stay out after sunfall ends. Not with the violence of the crowd. Not with patrol teeming in the streets.
Deflated, I turn to leave, but something across the street catches my eye. I go still, gaze catching on the swinging sign. I nearly missed it—it’s a tiny shop, sandwiched between two others, but Apothecary is painted in faded letters upon the sign.
I run over as fast as I can and rap my fist against the door—a door that isn’t boarded up, which fills me with burgeoning hope.
But nobody answers.
There’s a tiny window to the right, the shutters clamped tightly shut. I knock against the wood, trying to peer in through the gaps. “Please,” I call, my heart in my throat. “Is anyone there? I need to buy a tincture! It’s important!”
Shouts ring behind me and I swivel to see a fight has broken out in the street. Within seconds, patrol quickly descends, and I hunch to make myself smaller, try to obscure my horns while the sun dips lower.
Curfew is closing in.
I jerk around and hammer on the door again, knuckles trying to buckle the wood, my fraying hope tangling, but there’s still nothing. My heart drops right down into my stomach, and dismay fills my eyes.
There’s no one inside. I have to go back with nothing.
In weary defeat, my forehead thumps against the door.
What if my mother hasn’t stopped convulsing since I left?
What if she’s had a fourth, a fifth? What if she keeps having them and her body can’t take it and her heart gives out? What if she’s already—
My body suddenly lurches forward as the shop’s door yanks open. I pitch inward, barely catching myself before I fall on my face. I look up and see a fae woman glaring at me.
A couple of stars glaring back.
Tactful. Knows more than she says. Observant.
“What?” she seethes.
Blinking into focus, it takes a second for me to jolt into speech. “Please, I need medicine. My mother is sick . . .”
The woman’s lined face harbors hard edges at every wrinkle and a severe glare from dark eyes. “Look around,” she says, her voice scraping with grit. “The city has no water. No food. It’s just violence and death. I’m closed. No tincture can help your mother, or anyone else, for that matter.”
“Please,” I beg again. “I need a sleeping draught. She has fits, and they won’t stop. She could die.” My tongue thickens with the words, barely able to spit them out.
She scoffs. “You think I haven’t already been cleared out of all my liquids?”
Despair clamps around me. “You have nothing?”
The woman looks up to my horns and then down to my face, passing over my freckles with a frown. I brace myself, readying to be turned away for being a fiend. She looks over my shoulder, and I follow her gaze at patrol heading down the street in our direction.
A bursting sigh escapes her before she steps aside. “You shouldn’t be out here. It’s not safe. Especially not for fiends. Come inside before I change my mind.”
Surprise leaps in me. It’s not the first time a fae has been kind to me, or even neutral, but so many interactions I have are negative, so it takes me aback.
I hurry inside and she closes the door behind me, and I look around the dim, narrow space, noting that everything has indeed been cleared off the shelves. There are a few sprigs of herbs here and there, some empty bottles on the floor, and an overturned crate, but that’s about it.
“How much do you have?” she asks as she walks to the back of the shop and stops near the counter.
I hold up my last remaining coin.
Her eyes widen. “One coin? I thought you were reckless for being out, but now I know you’re just plain daft to only have a single coin to haggle with.”
“Please,” I say, my voice trembling and desperate. “It’s all I have left. I need something to help her. I’m begging you.”
As she watches my face, her teeth scrape together.
“Foolish fiend,” she mutters under her breath, but then she turns and bends down to shuffle through the shelves behind the counter.
“I have this,” she says tersely, before straightening up and smacking a bundle on the counter.
It looks like some kind of fruit peel, yellowed and wrinkled, and wrapped in a single bit of string. “Peel of a sunshade.”
A frown tugs at my brows. “Isn’t that poisonous?”
She shrugs. “It’ll knock her out.”
My lips press together in frustration. Outside, more shouts sound. “Don’t you have any velvane herb or pribokis? That’s what we usually use. I can mix it myself.”
“I do not. And not for a single coin, anyway. You’re lucky I have this.
” Her bony fingers close around the bundled peel.
When I still don’t move, she waves a wrinkled hand at me.
“Sunshade won’t do harm, so long as you mash it up finely.
Use just a pinch under the tongue. Take it or leave it, but either way, you need to go. ”
I release a tight breath, but this is my only option. I slap down my last coin on the counter. “I’ll take it.”
With a nod, she snatches up the coin, burrowing it down the front of her dress. “Best be off now, fiend.”
“Thank you,” I tell her, emotion clogging my chest. “Thank you for helping me.”
Because we both know some fae—most fae—wouldn’t.
She sniffs. “Go on and get home,” she says, but despite her stern tone, there’s a new softness in her eyes. Maybe borne from pity, but I appreciate it all the same.
Clutching the bundle, I hurry out and close the door of the apothecary behind me. As soon as I do, I hear the lock click into place. When I look up at the sky, my stomach instantly drops. The last sliver of the sun disappears past the horizon right before my eyes.
Oh no.
My hand tenses around the peel, and I quickly pivot. I need to run home. Right now.
With a nervous burst of speed, I start to race across the street, sidestepping others. I’m almost to the alleyway when a fist clamps down on the back of my tunic and I’m yanked to a violent stop. My hands scrabble at the grip, but the person knocks them away, sending my bundled sunshade flying.
“No!”
I whip my head up to see who has hold of me, and come face-to-face with a patrolman. Bone-chilling fear ices down my spine. With no helmet in sight, his sharp gray eyes lock on to mine, and a compacted constellation flares to life on the side of his bulbous nose.
Stubborn. Searches for the next step up. Cruel.
My panic lifts and mounts, on full display.
“Fiend,” he spits, eyeing my horns. His head turns to the horizon, and when he looks back at me again, his lips stretch in a chilling sneer. “Look at that. Seems sunfall is over. You’ve broken curfew.”
I shake my head, but the rest of me shakes too. “I-I lost track of time. The sun just set. If you let me go, I’ll get home quickly, I promise!”
His face is hard. Voice stony. “You broke the law. You’ve earned the punishment.”
“No, wait—please!”
Ignoring me, he starts to drag me away from the alley and down the street.
I stare at the peel on the ground, and my heart cracks when someone’s shoe crushes it beneath a hurried step before it disappears from my view completely.
I hear shouts, see more people running by, but I’m distracted by the fear coiling around me.
“Fucking pillagers,” the patrolman mutters under his breath.
“I’m not pillaging,” I say desperately, trying to wrench out of his grip to no avail. “And I didn’t mean to break curfew.”
“Quiet!” he barks.
“But there are others out too!” I argue, gesturing around. “Please, I was just trying to get medicine for—”
The hit lands right against my back.
It rips the breath from me and makes my torso fold forward, lungs stuttering from the blow. He continues to drag me while I’m dazed, my shoes scraping against the stone.
“What’s this, Klaus?” another patrolman calls to him as I heave in a breath.
“Fiend. Past curfew.”
“Well, hurry up. There’s some kind of issue.”
“Yeah. Be right there after I deal with this.”
He starts towing me up a set of steep stairs, my shins scraping against the rough steps as we go higher and higher. When I realize where he’s brought me, true horror takes hold.
It’s the punishment platform.
The stack of stairs is right in the middle of the street, leading to the platform above. It’s where they take criminals to be publicly punished, left chained to the post to deter others from breaking the law.
It’s vicious. Sickening. And I get shoved right onto it.
I fight and kick out my feet, trying to pull away . . .
But he’s so much stronger.
He slams my shoulder and the side of my face into the tall wooden post that’s at least forty feet high. There’s a chain attached to the very top of it.
A chain that leads to the iron collar that he snaps around my neck.
Terror seizes me.
I’m at least two stories up, high enough for any bystanders on the street to witness the harsh penalty of lawbreaking. But right now, no one is paying any attention to me. This patrolman doesn’t seem to care about making a spectacle.
Only a statement.
“No!” I scrabble at the iron collar clamped around my neck, but it won’t budge. The chain is just long enough for me to stand without being choked. There’s barely any give. “Please!”
His fingers delve into my hair, fisting right at the scalp and pulling painfully enough to make me screech. “If I was Govern, no Bane-blood would be allowed in this city,” he spouts.
When he lets me go, I turn my head just in time to see him pulling the whip from his belt, and the blood drains from my face.
No . . .
I’ve never been whipped before, but I have seen it happen to someone else who was being made an example of.
I can still remember the sound of his howls with each lash, the blood pouring from his wounds and dripping down the stairs of the platform.
I scurried away that day, unable to watch.
It’s another reason I’ve always been careful not to get in trouble, because I knew fiends always got punished worse for it. Punished worse for everything.
I draw in a breath to cry out, to apologize, to plead, but before I can do any of those things, the whip comes down.
And hits.
Iron-spiked leather bites into my back like the clamp of serrated teeth.
It’s an explosion of pain that steals all thoughts. All words. All breath.
Another snap of the whip is heard before it’s felt, the second slice of fire cutting across my back. I scream then, uncontrollably. Try to scramble away. But the collared chain won’t let me move more than a step.
A third blow lands, and a fourth, and by the fifth, it feels like he’s stripped me raw, decimated my skin, peeled it back from muscle and spine. With pitch-black fingernails, I try to claw at the post to brace myself, but it’s oiled and slick, too slippery to hold on to.
Tears scratch their way down my face, and my throat rips from my screams. I can’t get away. I’m trapped in savagery that he wields again and again.
My thoughts go murky, mind too snagged on the torment to process anything else.
Please end this. Please make him stop.
Another strike.
Blood spatters, dotting like rain.
My legs collapse out from under me, but my knees are unable to reach the ground. My head snaps up, chain pulling taut against my neck and making it hard to breathe.
I’ve never known such pain, and I think, surely, he’s going to kill me.
It’s all I can do to brace. To endure.
It takes long seconds to realize the whipping has stopped. Time has knotted to the lashings across my back, tangling me up.
The chain jangles, clanking in my echoing ears as the patrolman unravels it. More slack heaves out, and I land in a heap upon the ground, sucking in a lungful of breath, the collar no longer cutting into my windpipe. My eyes twist open in a dizzying pull.
The patrolman stands over me with contempt. “There’s your punishment, fiend.”
A wad of spit lands against my shredded skin, festering upon my burning back. Then he turns and descends the stairs of the platform, leaving me chained and suffering.
Spit crusts my lips, tears stain my cheeks, and blood coats my back while I lie in a broken heap. I pray for relief, for the agony to ebb, and maybe the Fates answer, because my consciousness blots out in battered darkness.
. . . A darkness so thick that it smothers my ears just as the entire city begins to scream.