Chapter 9
NINE
The second day was worse.
Kalo had apparently decided that if he was going to be forced to travel with a vampire, he might as well get some entertainment out of it. Which meant an endless stream of questions and observations about Nadi, each one more pointed than the last.
“Did she tell you about the first time she tried to learn to fight with knives?” Kalo called back as they navigated a particularly narrow passage. The walls pressed close on either side, slick with moisture and alive with crawling things that Nadi preferred not to examine too closely.
“I don’t believe she has,” Raziel replied, sounding far too pleased.
“Cut herself so badly her mother had to carry her to the healers. Blood everywhere. She was maybe ten summers.”
“Fascinating. And yet she’s quite proficient now. Natural talent, or did she simply practice until she stopped bleeding?”
“Stubbornness, mostly.” Kalo’s voice carried a hint of grudging respect. “Girl never knew when to quit.”
“That, I have noticed.” Raziel’s gaze found Nadi’s through the gloom. “It’s one of her more infuriating qualities.”
“You know I’m right here?” Nadi snapped. “I can hear both of you.”
“We’re aware, little fish.” Kalo didn’t even bother to look back.
“Keenly aware,” Raziel agreed.
She was going to kill them both.
She was absolutely going to kill them both.
Slowly.
And show them precisely how good she was with knives now.
The tunnel widened ahead, opening into a larger cavern with a ceiling so high it disappeared into darkness. Stalactites hung down like the teeth of some enormous beast, water dripping from their tips in a constant, echoing rhythm.
“Tell me,” Raziel said, his voice carrying easily in the open space, “what did young Nadi dream of becoming? Before the revenge, I mean. Before everything.”
Kalo actually slowed his chancha to consider the question.
“A healer, I think. Or maybe a storyteller. She used to collect the old tales. Knew them all by heart. Would drive the other children insane with how she would gather them up and tell them stories over and over again. Yimi and Kassa in particular would always tell her to shut up.”
Nadi’s throat tightened. She had forgotten that. Forgotten the hours spent at Grandmother Iltani’s feet, learning the ancient stories of the fae. The creation myths. The hero tales. The warnings about vampires and the surface world.
She remembered all the other children’s names suddenly in a flash. Names she’d entirely forgotten until right then and there. Yimi. Kassa. Urnog. Taj. Asta. They were all humans—they were likely long, long dead now. From old age or… otherwise, she was certain.
“A storyteller.” Raziel’s voice was thoughtful. “I can see that, actually. She has a way with words when she chooses to use them. Usually to cuss me out.”
“She had a good voice for it.” Kalo’s tone softened slightly. “Used to tell stories to the younger children around the fires. They all loved her. And oh, you should hear her sing!”
“Really? Hm. Maybe I should get her drunk some night.”
“Stop!” Nadi’s voice came out rough. “Both of you. Just… stop.”
Kalo finally turned to look at her, and something flickered in his silver eyes. Guilt, maybe. Or pity. Neither one sat well with her.
“I’m sorry, little fish.” He didn’t sound sorry at all. “I didn’t realize the past was such a sensitive subject.”
“The past is dead.” She urged her chancha forward, pushing past both of them. “Just like everyone in it. So fucking stop. Your game isn’t funny.”
She didn’t look back to see their reactions. Didn’t want to see whatever knowing looks they exchanged. She just focused on the path ahead, on the rhythm of the chancha’s six legs against the stone, on anything other than the memories clawing at the inside of her chest.
Behind her, she heard Raziel say something to Kalo in a low voice. Heard Kalo’s responding chuckle, though there was less cruelty in it than before.
They were bonding.
Over her.
Wonderful.
They made camp again as the vines dimmed, in a small hollow carved into the cavern wall. This time, Nadi took first watch, desperate for some time away from both Kalo and Raziel.
She sat at the edge of the hollow, her back against the cool stone, watching the purple light fade to something deeper and darker. The sounds of the Wild surrounded her—clicks and chirps and the occasional distant rumble of something large moving through the tunnels.
Home, some part of her whispered.
Not anymore, another part replied.
She heard footsteps behind her and didn’t need to turn to know who it was. The tread was too heavy to be Kalo, too deliberate to be anything but intentional.
“You should be resting,” she said as Raziel settled down beside her.
“I don’t need as much rest as you do.” He stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. “Benefits of being dead, I suppose.”
“You’re not dead.”
“Am I not?” His voice was light, but there was something beneath it that made her turn to look at him. In the dim glow, his features were shadowed, unreadable. “Raziel Nostrom certainly is. You heard what I said in the Grove. What remains is only the Serpent.”
“That’s dramatic even for you.”
He huffed a quiet laugh. “Perhaps. But it felt true at the time. It still feels true.” He turned his head to look at her, and his crimson eyes caught what little light remained. “I am not the man I was when we first met, Nadi. I’m not even the man I was when they put me in that coffin.”
“Then who are you?”
“I’m still figuring that out.” A pause. “But I know I’m yours. That hasn’t changed. That won’t change.”
She wanted to believe him. Moons above, she wanted to believe him so badly it hurt.
“Kalo thinks I’m a fool,” she said instead.
“Kalo thinks everyone is a fool.” Raziel shrugged. “He’s not entirely wrong. We’re all fools, in our own ways. Him included.”
“He’s not wrong about me, though. About us.” She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. A defensive posture she couldn’t seem to stop herself from taking. “I did leave everything behind. Everyone. For revenge that he doesn’t think was worth it.”
“Was it worth it to you, though? When you killed my mother, did it feel good?”
She thought about Volencia, dead at her hands. Thought about all the years of planning and scheming and pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Thought about what she’d lost along the way.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I thought it would feel like victory. Like closure. But it just feels…”
“Empty?”
“Unfinished.” She rested her chin on her knees. “There’s still Mael. And Lana. And Lilivra. The job isn’t done.”
“And when it is?” Raziel’s voice was soft. “What then, little murderer? What happens to you when there’s no one left to kill?”
It was the question she’d been avoiding since the coffin. Since she’d dragged him from the depths and committed herself to this path once and for all.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “I’ve never let myself think that far ahead.”
“Then perhaps it’s time to start.”
She turned to look at him, and found him watching her with an intensity that made her breath catch. “What do you want, Raziel? After it all? Assuming we survive?”
“The world. And you.” The word was simple. Direct. “I want you. Whatever form that takes. Whatever future we can carve out of the ruins of everything we’ve destroyed.”
“That’s not much of a plan.”
“No.” He reached out and took her hand, his fingers cold against her skin. “But it’s a start.”
She didn’t pull away.
By the time they set out on the third day, Nadi had almost convinced herself she could survive the rest of the journey without committing murder.
She was wrong.
“What was her favorite food as a child?” Raziel asked, his chancha falling into step beside Kalo’s.
“Candied hela’na. A type of fruit,” Kalo replied without hesitation. “She used to trade anything she could get her hands on for them.”
“I hate you both,” Nadi announced to no one in particular.
“Did she have any pets?” Raziel continued, ignoring her completely. “You said she wanted a hebek as one. But did she have others?”
“A kit’ra—one of those small, fuzzy crawling bugs.
She named it Fang, which was ridiculous because it didn’t have any fangs.
Always wanting to be scarier than she was, our Nadi.
” Kalo’s voice held a note of fondness that made Nadi’s chest ache.
“Fang lived for about six years before something ate it.”
“Something ate her pet?” Raziel sounded genuinely horrified.
“Welcome to the Wild, vuampi.” Kalo shrugged. “Everything eats everything down here.”
“Barbaric.”
“Says the creature who drinks blood to survive.”
Raziel considered this. “Point goes to the fae.”
“Are you two going to do this the entire way?” Nadi asked.
“Probably,” Kalo admitted.
“Almost certainly,” Raziel agreed.
“Great.” She urged her chancha ahead again. “Just wonderful.”
But despite her irritation—and it was genuine, bone-deep irritation—she couldn’t help but notice that the tension between the three of them had shifted. It was still there, still sharp and dangerous, but underneath it was something else. Something that almost resembled understanding.
Raziel was asking questions, yes. Probing at wounds she’d thought long scarred over. But he wasn’t doing it to hurt her. He was doing it because he wanted to understand. To know the person she’d been before revenge had consumed her.
And Kalo…
Kalo was answering because, despite everything, he still remembered that person. Still cared about her, even if that caring was tangled up in years of resentment and abandonment.
It was complicated.
Everything was always complicated.
The tunnels began to change as they traveled deeper into territory Nadi recognized from her childhood.
The vines still grew here, but they were sparse this close to the surface—their purple glow dimmer.
She could smell salt on the air, and something else—the distinctive metallic tang of the underground rivers that fed into the great underground sea.
“We’re close,” Kalo announced, his voice dropping to something more serious. “The dockyards are through the next set of caverns. But we should approach carefully. The Iltanis who remain here… they may not welcome us.”
“They’re just as likely to greet us with bullets as anything else,” Nadi sighed. “I still think this is a death wish.”
“I think we’ll be fine.” Kalo smirked and fixed a stare at Raziel. “They’re all humans.”
Raziel chuckled. “Ah. Right. Yes.”
Nadi groaned. “No, Raziel.”
“I don’t intend to kill them.” He lifted his hands in a show of harmlessness. “I will simply ensure that we do not come out of this riddled with bullet holes.”
Right. Sure. Everything would be fine. “I guess we have no choice.”
The final stretch of tunnel opened up before them, and Nadi caught her first glimpse in decades of the dockyards that she had not seen since she was a child.
She remembered the bustling warehouses along the waterside, the constant movement of boxes in and out and in and out.
The laughter as she’d chase or be chased by the other kids.
She remembered Luciento shouting at her not to get tangled up in the nets when she’d go diving for “lost treasures” off the docks. She was always inventing stories about made-up monsters or sunken ships whose fortunes had washed up where she could find them. It’d all been bunk, of course.
Except for one day, when she had seen a silver sparkling glimpse of something lying on the surface. She had been beyond giddy with elation when she’d come back up with a jeweled pocket watch.
It wasn’t until she was an adult that she realized Luciento had probably thrown it into the water just to give her something to find.
The memory slipped into her ribcage like one of her knives.
The cavern was massive—so vast that the far walls disappeared into shadow and mist. Great pillars of stone rose from the floor to the ceiling, natural formations that had been carved and shaped over centuries into something functional.
Bridges and walkways connected them at various heights, forming a complex web of paths and platforms. All cobbled together from whatever they could find and salvage from the world above and below, like everything else the fae owned.
And below, stretching out like liquid obsidian, was the underground sea.
Ships floated at anchor—some the wooden vessels of the surface world, and the rare few were organic things grown from the same living wood as the wagons.
Their hulls gleamed with bioluminescence, and their sails were woven from spider-silk and treated vine fiber.
Docks jutted out into the water at irregular intervals, some crowded with activity, others standing empty and abandoned.
Time was once that there were more of the living boats than not. But now, like rot, like mold, the rusted metal and wooden structures had overtaken the fae ones.
Nadi felt tears prick at her eyes and blinked them back furiously.
“This is where your clan settled, originally?” Raziel’s voice was hushed, and when she glanced at him, she saw something like wonder on his face. “Fascinating.”
“The Iltanis were always traders and sea-borne fae.” Kalo had stopped his chancha at the tunnel’s mouth, waiting for them to catch up. His expression was carefully neutral. “In a way, Nadi was always born to be their leader.”
Taking a breath, she held it, and let it out in a long, weary groan. “This is going to be terrible.”
“Yes. It is,” Kalo agreed. “We are going to probably die the moment they see us and before your vampire can even get a word out edgewise.”
“What an inspiring speech,” Raziel observed. “I am so very moved.”
“Shut up,” Kalo spat.
Nadi looked out at the dockyards—at the ships and the bridges and the figures moving in the distance. At what remained of her people, her clan, her birthright.
She took a deep breath.
Fuck it. No time like the present to die, she supposed. “Let’s go.”
Together, they dismounted their chancha, and tied them off. They would have to descend into the dockyard cavern and whatever awaited them below on foot.
To meet what remained of her family…
What could go wrong?