Chapter 58 Crossfire
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Crossfire
The Bloodmoons—both women, one spire-thin and dark-haired, one a buxom blond—shot cold smiles at Apoth Zamorin, meant to intimidate, to intimate, without crossing into overt threat.
As discreetly as she could, Auria stuffed her transcription quill and parchment back into her satchel, trying desperately to think her way out of the situation.
She couldn’t arrest the Bloodmoons. It wasn’t inherently unlawful for them to be here, and besides, it wasn’t her case.
Nor could she leave Ila here to be killed, which she almost certainly would be.
She had to get Apoth Zamorin out of danger—without triggering a curse-off. Yet Bloodmoons would not let the Apoth walk out of here alive, arm in arm with the Silvercloaks, knowing she would be offered protection to testify against them.
Nissa’s hand twitched on her wand, her thoughts and calculations likely mirroring Auria’s own. Ferrow’s palm went to his own side, though he didn’t look directly at the Bloodmoons. The shopkeeper seemed to have frozen solid.
Auria cleared her arid throat. “Apoth Zamorin, perhaps you’d prefer to come down to Silvercloak headquarters to tell us more about your niece’s mail fraud. It sounds like quite the strange situation.”
A lie spun from thin air, a reason for the shopkeeper to be talking to the detectives other than implicating the two criminal organizations threatening her life.
Of course, the Bloodmoons might have had means of listening long before they entered the shop, in which case…
Apoth Zamorin shook her head. “No, it’s alright. I’ve told you everything I know. Hopefully that’s enough.”
“Apoth Zamorin, please, come with us. We won’t let any harm befall you.”
The Bloodmoons drew their wands, and Auria thought her bowels might empty from the terror.
The apothecary’s tears flowed silently and furiously. “Leave me be.”
I can’t leave you be, Auria screamed internally. They’ll kill you for what you’ve just told us.
“Detective Marriosan,” Nissa muttered. “The Apoth has told us everything she knows. It’s time to go.”
No.
Auria searched the old woman’s face, the warm hazel eyes, the kindliness to her smile, and she saw her own grandfather: Papa Marriosan, the gelatier, the life of the party, the head of their family, one of her very favorite people in the world. Slain by Bloodmoons, as Apoth Zamorin would be too.
She couldn’t let them keep doing this.
Relar Zamorin would be shattered the same way she was shattered.
Perhaps she could fire effigias curses at the Bloodmoons while Nissa got the apothecary out alive. If only she could communicate subliminally with Nissa, get her to assist with the extraction, maybe then—
“Marriosan,” Nissa hissed, striding toward the door.
Panic towered inside Auria. Turning her desperate gaze back to the apothecary, she whispered, “Apoth Zamorin, please…”
But the shopkeeper simply shook her head, resigned to her fate. Trembling, sobbing, but resigned.
Why wouldn’t the old woman at least try to escape with her life?
Almost as soon as she asked the internal question, she answered it.
The apothecary wouldn’t want Auria and Nissa to perish in the crossfire. It was a hallmark of the old, the way they threw themselves upon the sword to protect the young. She saw it time and time again on the streetwatch.
As she made her final decision, she felt the touch of Papa Marriosan’s broad hand on her shoulder, smelled sweet citrus and pistachio and rich caramel gelato, and mourned so suddenly and gravely that it rendered her hollow.
That hollowness propelled her to the door.
Past the Bloodmoons, past Filan Ferrow, and onto the street.
But not before she slid the listening bracelet off her wrist and into an open sack of tea leaves.
Outside, she was surprised to find the sun was shining, the thin blanket of snow already melting.
It seemed impossible for the capital to be washed in warm gold when such horror nestled in every corner.
Nissa rested a palm on the back of Auria’s arm, gently ushering her down the street and around the corner, out of sight of Etherstone’s.
“The Whitewings have the apothecary hunting out spinebark?” Nissa leaned back against the creamstone wall of a quaint milliners’ while she sparked up an achullah. “Hells. That’s even more addictive than nightpoppy.”
But Auria could barely think about spinebark, about the gang war, about the case.
She could only think of Apoth Zamorin. “I left my bracelet in there to record whatever happens next. It doesn’t give us ears right now, but it’ll capture…
whatever happens next.” Her eyes stung, and she let out an involuntary choking sob. “We left her there to die, Nissa.”
“There was no other option.” Nissa’s tone was softer than usual, but still coarse with achullah smoke. “We didn’t have the evidence to make an arrest. You tried to get her out of there, and it was admirable, but if she refused, what could we do?”
A velvine strolled down the street, stopped by Auria’s heel, and brushed up against her calves.
She’d always attracted the beasts, for some reason.
The black-furred, purple-eyed cat leapt from the snow-dusted cobbles onto Auria’s shoulders, purring soft breath over the bare skin of her throat—right where the kingpin’s blade had sliced three shallow cuts.
Pleasure rolled into Auria’s well despite the devastation of the situation.
“It isn’t right. We should have been able to stop it.”
Nissa pressed her mouth into a flat line, smoke billowing from her nostrils. “We did what was lawful.”
“Really? You’re trying to make a dig about—”
“No, Marriosan.” Auria’s surname sounded like a whip-crack from Nissa’s forked tongue. “Not everything out of my mouth is a personal attack. We followed the rules. You worship at the altar of rules. Surely that brings you some comfort.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Auria retorted, disturbed to find that it was true. “And I’m surprised that you, the great bender of rules, were content to simply walk away.”
Nissa rested the back of her head against the wall, tilting her face toward the sun and closing her eyes.
The kohl on her eyelids was smudged from a long night.
“If I’d been working alone, I would’ve killed the Bloodmoons.
Claimed self-defense. But you were there, and I didn’t want you to have to lie to cover my back again. ”
Auria stared at her colleague, processing the audacity. It went against the oaths they swore both upon entering the Silvercloak Academy and graduating from it. “You would’ve killed them?”
A shrug, almost petulant. “Better them dead than the Apoth.”
Auria physically recoiled. Such a statement was both unlawful and wrong.
Wasn’t it?
From nowhere, her mother Lulí’s voice drifted through her mind.
It is believed that only those of great honor, those whose goodness runs all the way to the bone, are made dragonborn.
Perhaps the dragons had a different moral code. Perhaps they served a greater good, not a rigid set of rules. Perhaps they recognized that ruthlessness, that savagery, that willingness to sacrifice and avenge, in Nissa.
A small part of Auria—a very, very small part—thought that maybe her dragonblooded colleague had a point.
If Auria had to decide whom she’d rather perish in the next quarter hour, it would not be the innocent Apoth.
And yet her choices, her fervent belief in the law, would likely lead to a different outcome.
She found herself openly crying, legs shaking so violently she was moments from crumpling. “I once overheard my mother worrying that I was ‘too sensitive to be a detective.’ I think maybe she was right.”
Nissa saw the second Auria fell and caught her.
Muscled bronze arms steadied Auria, and she folded into the goldeneyed mage she had once despised.
Auria’s face pressed against the ridge of Nissa’s shoulder—she was a few inches taller than the Eqoran—and she wept over the lapel of Nissa’s cloak, their torsos pressed together, Nissa’s heartbeat remarkably steady compared to the frantic cantering of Auria’s.
“I think your sensitivity is what makes you a great detective,” Nissa murmured into Auria’s hair, not exactly cradling her, but just…
holding her. Steadying her body, her spirit.
There was no softness in her tone; she spoke matter-of-factly, as though reporting a plain truth.
“If every detective were like you, this city would be a far better place.”
Some small, childlike wound in Auria smoothed over at the words. They stood like that for a few moments, and it did not feel strange or unnatural. Just warm, safe. Anchoring. Eventually Auria’s sobbing slowed, her legs grew more solid, the pressing nature of the situation re-dawning on her.
“Why do you smell so good, by the way?” Nissa muttered, as though irritated that this were the case.
The shock of the question wrenched loose a laugh, of all things.
Auria pulled away, sniffing and wiping her slick cheeks and nose on her cloak sleeve.
“I love perfume—my preferred form of pleasure. I wear a new scent every day to keep them fresh, potent enough to fill my well. Last night I chose varouli and fyrr from a perfumier in Marayat.”
Nissa smiled, and it was slightly unsettling, like seeing an alleycat tap dance.
“Reminds me of home.” She cleared her throat a little awkwardly.
“Anyway, if the Apoth is killed…it will be a terrible, terrible thing.” She took a deep, tormented drag on the joint, which she’d somehow kept lit during their embrace.
“But your detective’s instincts were right to leave the bracelet.
Her death will be evidence, whether against Filan Ferrow of the Whitewings or the two Bloodmoons.
It might finally secure some arrests, give you grounds to raid the drophouse on Fallow Grange. ”
“I know,” Auria replied miserably. “But people’s lives are worth more than evidence.”
Nissa sighed. “You don’t want to leave, do you?”
“No. I don’t.”
Nissa dropped her achullah to the cobbles and snuffed it out with the heel of her boot.
Auria couldn’t even bring herself to lecture about littering.
“I spotted a back entrance I could slip through without alerting them to my presence—if you want me to see what’s going on.
To step in if they move to hurt Apoth Zamorin. ”
Auria blinked at her in astonishment. “You’re deferring to me on this?”
“The Whitewings were your case before they were mine. I’m following your lead.”
“But it’s not just the Whitewings, is it?
It’s the Bloodmoons too. They both have the Zamorins in their fists.
And we’ve been ordered not to work the Bloodmoons.
The lawful thing to do would be obey that command.
To simply listen and gather evidence against the Whitewings.
Hand it over to our superiors who have the authority to act. ”
Nissa shrugged. “Your call.”
Judge Nercan’s words echoed in Auria’s mind; his acknowledgment, even as a highly esteemed honorary of the court, that sometimes lawful and right do not overlap. His argument in favor of the latter.
She thought, once more, of the old woman’s hazel eyes, and of her grandfather.
Auria nodded once, resolute. “Go. I’ll watch the front. And if either the Whitewings or the Bloodmoons attempt to harm the Apoth—do what you must.”