Chapter Five
“Your dagger.” Reyes walked over to the table against the wall, snatched up a small drying cloth, and wiped her blood from his hands.
Solana watched him through a haze of phantom pain.
He had healed her again and again, so there was nothing currently wrong with her, but the memory of metal searing flesh and magic mending sinew was not so easily forgotten, and the chains attached to her arms and legs shivered in the quiet.
“The stone in the hilt is himaya, did you know?”
The switch in conversation took a moment for her to register. Himaya was just another rumor to them in the callejon, another thing that separated the inner city from the outer cities, the rich from the poor, the privileged from the forgotten.
“Using himaya without a certificate of ownership is illegal.” When Reyes came back to her side, her dagger was in his hands, his blood-crusted fingers tracing over the carvings in the hilt and the face of the largest scarlet stone. “Did you steal it?”
“No,” Solana said tersely, but her quivering chin gave away the fear that began to bubble in her chest. Her body expected the hurt, waited for the punishment with clenched muscles.
Before she knew it, she was giving him information he hadn’t asked for.
Anything to avoid more of this special brand of torture. “It belonged to my father.”
Reyes hummed and placed the tip against her forearm. “And who was your father?”
Gritting her teeth, Solana said, “I don’t know.”
In response to her lie, Reyes dragged the blade through the thin flesh there.
Solana couldn’t help the whimper that escaped, or the gasp of relief when he pulled the blade away.
She didn’t bother to look down—it would have only made it worse.
Instead, she stared at the dark stone ceiling and imagined all the ways she could kill him, let her loathing strengthen her for whatever was to come.
“This is muki poison that we’ve harvested for research purposes.” He held the vial in front of her face, forcing her to acknowledge it. “All it takes is a scratch from their teeth or talons to kill, but with an antidote, that could change. People could have more of a chance at survival.”
Solana scoffed. “Only if they can afford it, right?” There was no hiding the quake in her words, or the way her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She was so godsdamned thirsty, so unspeakably tired. Of pain, of fighting, of barely living.
There were hundreds like her in Qhilli. People that could barely afford to feed themselves.
People that were sick and dying and couldn’t afford what little care was available to them.
People who would give all they had for the chance to save their loved ones from the fate of muki poisoning.
If they created an antidote, the possibility would be there, but would it become just another myth like a Medallion?
All thoughts fled when she heard a pop like a bottle being uncorked. “What are you doing?” she asked, the words frantic even to her own ears.
“I’m testing a theory,” he said, and then Solana watched in terror as Reyes poured the sludgy black liquid over the slice on her forearm.
At first, there was nothing but the burn of torn skin, and then it hit her all at once.
A deluge of blazing agony that seeped into her blood and spread far and wide.
Solana couldn’t get in enough air through her nose, but she knew if she opened her mouth, she would scream and scream until her voice abandoned her.
There was no way to describe the pain, to convince herself that she wasn’t dying, that demon poison alone could not kill her, even if it felt like it might.
In her mind, she saw herself tearing free from her shackles and using her own dagger to saw her arm off at the elbow, stopping the spread of poison before it reached her heart.
And then she saw herself turning that dagger onto Reyes, severing his throat with one smooth arc, bathing the room in both of their blood.
Was this how her mother had felt while the poison consumed her mind and body?
There was pressure on her arm. Solana looked down through watery eyes to see Reyes’s hands covering the wound, his long fingers digging into her flesh.
She could feel the tendrils of his gift rooting and prodding, inspecting the parts of her that weren’t meant to be exposed, an icy touch that both soothed and seared.
“Incredible,” Reyes whispered. All at once, his touch and his magic disappeared. He stepped away and stared at her as if she was a marvel of indescribable existence. “It has no effect on you whatsoever. It’s as if your blood absorbs it as its own.”
“Lucky me,” Solana croaked.
“You don’t understand. This could change everything. Your blood could be the answer.”
Solana finally gave in and closed her eyes. “Guess that means you really do need me alive.”
And then she gladly lost the fight against the encroaching dark.
But even in her dreams, she wasn’t free of pain.
She was seven years old and she was standing in the middle of a street, chaos surrounding her as bodies rushed past, blurs of colors and conversation, panic and preparation.
They avoided her as if she weren’t there. An invisible pillar in a sea of ruin.
Across the way, the sea of bodies parted around another obstruction, but they were too many and she was too small to see above. She could only catch glimpses of a dark figure, a hand reached out, a flash of their mouth moving, a whispered word carried to her on a knife-sharp breeze.
Ususi.
Solana tried to run, but her feet were rooted to the spot. She tried to scream, but her voice was sucked away by the wind. She could only watch as the figure disappeared, nothing but tendrils of smoke and ash left behind.
When she woke, her dream dissipating like muki in the light, she was no longer lying on her back chained to the table.
Thank the sun. But her arms felt heavy still, and when she tried to lift one to push the hair out of her eyes, she found herself unable to move.
In fact, both of her arms and legs were restrained, tied to a chair in the corner of the same room she had been in for gods knew how long.
And Reyes sat across from her, his long legs stretched out in front of him as if to highlight his freedom and her lack of.
“Ah, you’re awake,” he said, shifting so that his elbows were on his thighs, his hands clasped lightly between them. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d gone too far.”
Solana gave him a baleful smile. “I doubt you’ve ever wondered that a day in your life.”
Reyes’s eyes tightened. It was the only sign of emotion she’d seen him give. “A few more questions, and then we can be done. Will you cooperate?”
There was no blade in his hands, no weapon that she could see. He looked relaxed, and because she was a foolish woman, she relaxed, too. “I’ve been cooperating this entire time.”
“That’s debatable. You haven’t told me the truth about the blade, your father, those demons—sorry, muki—you killed.”
He was trying to connect with her, using the term they used for their returned dead in the callejon. Too bad she still had no idea what he wanted her to say. “I killed them. What more is there to say? Do you want to know exactly how I did it? Play-by-play? It all started when—”
“Oh, I saw it all happen. I was watching your every move, which is how I saw you give a command, and the muki obeyed.”
Solana blinked at him. “Do you think,” she said between deep breaths, “that if I could command demons, I would be living the life that I live?”
“See, that’s what I don’t understand.” Reyes leaned closer, the gray of his eyes glinting like the blade he had held against her skin in the low, warm light.
“You’re the Queen of the Callejon, the famed Demon Slayer of Supay, and yet you slink through the shadows.
Your fee is embarrassing, your sword work is sloppy, even if it is efficient, and you have an ancient dagger with himaya of a color that no one has seen before.
So, who do you work for? Who has you on a leash? ”
“Nobody,” she said through gritted teeth. “My only motivation is money. That’s why I kill demons. I answer to no one but myself.”
Reyes leaned back, disappointment limning his eyes as they darted between hers, searching and weighing. Whatever he found left him wanting. “Then you’re even more of a coward than I thought.”
Solana batted her lashes at him. “Aw, you think about me?”
He gave no reaction to that. “You said the dagger belonged to your father. Where did he get it from?”
“I don’t know,” Solana answered truthfully. “My mother only told me it was his and gave it to me right before she died.”
“Convenient.”
“Yes, having dead parents is very convenient. There is no one to question all your life choices.”
“Hence, the demon hunting.” Reyes crossed one leg over the other and then his arms over his chest and leaned back, entirely at ease. “Surely, there are more desirable professions to choose from.”
Solana scoffed. “It was either hunter or courtesan, and at least with hunting, I don’t have to deal with incompetent or egotistical men.” She gave him a pointed look. “Usually.”
There was a time when she had truly considered approaching one specific pleasure house.
Sex had always been easy for her, a way to dissociate from life and grief and allow herself to feel good.
It was emotionless, transactional. Though it seemed like it might be, demon dispatching was not.
But she wanted the easy things in her life to stay that way.
Even if she had eventually ruined that as well, just as she seemed to everything else.