Chapter 10
Torin
Kit is gone.
Jack and I search up and down in his apartment and then all the way down to the shop below, but there’s no sign of him.
I can’t get that smell out of my oversensitive nose. Blood and rot mixed with something herbal I can’t place.
Jack knows it, though. He’s been sickly pale ever since we first scented it, wandering around like a ghost with a bad attitude. Usually, he talks my damn ear off, but not today.
“Anything?” I grunt as I slide into a chair at the kitchen table.
“The chains have faint traces of sorcery,” he replies. “And this thing has some kind of magic to it, too.” He holds up the gold cylinder we found on the kitchen table, etched all over with unrecognisable sigils.
Everything else looks normal, even though there’s a gnawing feeling in my gut that we’re missing something.
“We need to ask around,” Jack says with a sigh.
Tricky, when neither of us speaks more than a handful of words in the local language. Kit’s lived here long enough that we should have tried harder to learn. I don’t know why we haven’t.
Well, I know why I never bothered. I’d avoid speaking to anyone outside of our crew if I could help it. And sometimes even they’re exhausting. Even Jack knackers me out with his talking, and he’s closer than a brother to me.
I’m slumped in my chair, mind working through the possibilities of what might’ve happened with Kit, when the air changes. The hair on the back of my neck prickles, my spines threatening to make an appearance.
“Someone’s here.”
We climb to our feet and head to the stairwell, glaring down at the intruders.
A man, a woman and an ogress stand at the bottom of the stairs, gaping up at us.
Not the start of a joke, however much it might sound like one.
“You.” The woman climbs the bottom step, her eyes locked firmly on me. “You’re the pirate from Captain Finch’s office yesterday.”
My eyebrows shoot up of their own accord as I growl, “I’m the what now?”
“I don’t think they like the ‘p’ word,” the ogress says in a carrying whisper.
But the woman seems entirely unbothered, tossing her shock of hair behind her shoulders.
“All right then, you’re the man from the perfectly respectable and not at all cursed ship I saw yesterday on Kit’s scrying glass.
” She climbs the rest of the stairs, peering past us like she’s looking for someone.
“Where’s Kit? What happened to his door?”
“He’s not here,” Jack replies.
“What’s it to you?” I add.
She rubs at her chest, gazing around before unknowingly retracing mine and Jack’s path through the apartment.
“Kit’s my mate,” she replies quietly, eyeing the cylinder on the table and reaching out as if to touch it, before snatching her hand away.
Jack and I share a startled look before turning back to her. “He’s your what?”
“Since when?”
“It’s pretty recent,” she replies. “We’re supposed to be coming on the ship with you today.
Or me and Aster are, anyway. Frannie’s going to mind the shop while we’re gone.
” Her tone is absent, and it feels like most of her attention is focused on the rest of the room, peering around like she’s looking for something.
“He didn’t leave a note to say where he’s gone? ”
“Nothing in here,” the ogress calls from the living room. “Want me to check the shop? See if he left a note down there?”
I startle at the sound of her voice, ignoring Jack’s knowing smirk. Somehow, I forgot anyone else was here at all.
Reva. That’s the woman’s name. I remember Cap speaking to her a few times before over the scrying glass.
“We already checked down in the shop. There was nothing.”
Reva continues on, prowling through the apartment. She crouches by the kitchen table, inspecting the weird gold cylinder again. “This was different yesterday. Unopened.”
The man reaches out and runs his hand over her arm, and she turns to him, eyebrows shooting up. “It feels different how?” she asks him.
He doesn’t say a word in response, but she nods anyway.
“The magic’s gone. The curse, you mean?”
The guy nods, and she lets out a little ‘huh’.
“Are you a telepath?” Jack asks. He’s been remarkably restrained so far, barely speaking even though I can tell he’s fit to burst with questions.
“No.” She swallows, and my eyes catch on the movement of her neck. It’s remarkably delicate-looking for someone with that much hair. Surely it must weigh her down.
“He must have broken the curse on this thing last night.” She hefts the cylinder in her palm. “Where is he?”
“Well, the window in his bedroom was open,” Jack tells her, causing them all to charge off into the next room.
Jack and I follow more slowly as Reva pulls to a halt in the doorway, sniffing the air with a wrinkled nose.
“What does it smell of? Something rotted. Wrong.”
Interesting. No human nose should have been able to sense that.
The man touches her arm again, and she turns toward him. “Say that again.”
Jack snorts. “As far as I know, he hasn’t said a word since we’ve been here.”
Reva ignores him, her face going pale. My feet carry me forward before I can help it, as though I’m going to catch her if she falls. But the silent guy beside her is there first, his arm around her back.
“Sorcery.”
She drops to her knees so suddenly I think she’s fainted after all. But she’s scrabbling around on the floor, looking under the bed and then the wardrobe.
“Frannie.” Her voice sounds reedy and panicked. “That box from yesterday. We need to find the box.”
Jack shoots me another look, which I answer with a shrug. Here’s hoping something will start to make sense soon.
But this woman claims to be Kit’s mate. And now that I look at her again, I’ve seen her a few times before in passing over the scrying glass.
It also seems like this lot speaks Yarrovian, which is one advantage over the two of us. If we’re going to find out if anyone knows where Kit has got to, we’re going to need to ask around.
The three of them set to searching every inch of the bedroom, pulling out drawers and checking behind the panel in the bathroom next door.
“It’s not here. Why isn’t it here?”
“Maybe Kit took it somewhere for safekeeping, and he’s on his way back now.”
“I can’t...” Reva shakes her head, cutting herself off. “He wouldn’t. That box was cursed. Why would he take it away? He knows how important it is and that I’d want to take it with me onto the ship.”
The ogress wraps her arm around her, almost entirely shielding her from view. “It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
“If Kit’s your mate, can’t you tell where he is?” Jack asks.
Reva pops her head up. “No,” she mutters, tapping her fingertips just above her breast. “It doesn’t seem to work like that.
I can feel him and tell he’s still alive, but that’s about it.
” She pauses, brow furrowing. “Although it would explain the weird feeling I’ve had since we left, like something isn’t right. ”
“Maybe he’s hiding out somewhere if he had a visit from the sorcerers,” the ogress suggests, striding to the window and peering out. “Someone must have seen him after we left. These buildings are close enough to know everyone’s business.”
They don’t spare either me or Jack a glance as they hasten out the door. We share a bemused look before lumbering off in their wake.
By the time we’ve made our way downstairs and out the door, one is already speaking to Kit’s neighbour across the street while the other is talking to whoever lives next door.
Jack and I scout around the perimeter of the shop.
My nose does a lot of the heavy lifting, and after scouring every inch of space outside, it pays off.
There’s another droplet of blood on the ground outside Kit’s window and a thin piece of patterned material in a heap in the dirt.
Reva and the ogress return from their questioning, and as soon as Reva sees the dirtied material in my hand, her face pales even further. “It’s from his robe,” she murmurs. “He was wearing it all yesterday.”
“It stinks of blood and sorcery.” I growl. “Did the neighbours see or hear anything?”
The ogress rubs at her brow, frowning. “The one I spoke to spent most of the time moaning about being woken up last night, but it had nothing to do with Kit. Some kid has a flying sofa, and he’s a menace with it.”
“Clive... Horton, I think it was.” Reva nods. “We saw him yesterday, nearly took our heads off. The people I spoke to didn’t see a thing, and they haven’t seen Kit.”
“Ree, can you ask Aster how the sorcerers travel? Is it via a magic air bubble or like a four-wheeled vehicle that’s fueled entirely by thoughts?”
Reva pauses for a moment and reaches out to the silent guy. The two of them have another silent conversation before she turns back to the rest of us. “He says they scurry about like rats in the night, taking whatever means are available to them.”
“Some kind of private transport then. I suppose that leaves the road or sea.”
“Kit’s terrible on boats, especially small ones,” Jack says.
“Should we check the harbour, anyway? See if anyone had their boat stolen?”
“There is one more alternative,” Reva says before pointing upwards. “Sky.” She sets off down the street, calling over her shoulder, “I know where Clive’s garage is.”
She leads the way at a fast clip, with the rest of us following. There’s someone yelling and the sound of smashing and clattering. I’m hit once again with the smell of rot and blood that’s now horribly familiar. It’s stronger here than even in Kit’s bedroom.
The garage door is wide open, and there’s a young lad tearing the place apart, throwing cans and tools against the wall.
Reva pulls to a halt, and I step in front of her. “That’s Clive,” she mutters.
“He looks unstable. What’s he saying?”
“Jealous. Poisonous. Oafs. Wouldn’t understand innovation if it smacked them in the face,” she repeats, meeting my eye. The strangest sensation jolts me, and I have to jerk my head away.
“Someone stole his flying sofa,” Reva adds.
There’s another thin trail of blood on the hard floor. Blood that smells just like the tattered and dirty tie from Kit’s robe that’s still clutched in my hand.
“They were here.”
“And now he’s gone. On a flying sofa, by the sounds of things.”
The words land like iron stakes in the ground.
“He can’t have gone far, right? Not on a damn flying sofa that crashed on the street yesterday.”
Jack lets out a strangled sound from the back of his throat, shrinking right in front of us in the middle of the pavement.
His clothes go floppy, landing in a heap.
The pile twitches slightly, and the black head of a raven pops out of the pile of clothing, leaping into the air where it hovers in front of me.
“I’ll see what I can find,” the raven says in Jack’s voice right as he flutters away.
Leaving me alone to face a wall of confused faces and a bunch of questions I don’t want to answer.