Chapter Three Zephyra
CHAPTER THREE
ZEPHYRA
Unfortunately, running is easier said than done.
For one, Eos still isn’t moving. She trembles beside her sister now, whimpering softly on each exhale while Vesper rubs warmth back into her arms and Stavros stares at the charred remnants of his gunpowder scorched into the floor.
They all seem to be in shock—that, and Vesper’s foot is still bleeding.
I don’t even know if she can stand, let alone run.
All the while, footsteps tread near and heavy overhead.
The guards are closing in, and even if they didn’t hear the explosion, they’ll definitely hear my heartbeat.
It’s thunderous, counting each precious second we linger here, exposed and vulnerable.
It won’t take them long to open the latch.
To find us, corner us, and haul us off to prison—or execute us on sight.
To put it lightly, we are, indeed, fucked.
“You didn’t happen to stash more gunpowder in your pockets, did you?” I ask Stavros desperately.
Though he cannot manage to shake his head, the answer is written plainly in his scowl. We’ve lost our deadliest weapon, and all we have left is one another.
Fat lot of good that will do us.
Deep, muffled voices echo above, and my heart pounds louder still. I feel as if I might vomit.
“There are four guards. There are four of us.” Vesper glances at me, her brows drawing closer, her face tightening with doubt as she glances down at her bloody foot. “We can take them.”
“You should try saying that without it sounding like a question.”
“We cannot make boom,” Stavros says dejectedly. He offers a hammer from his belt. “But we can bash their skulls in.”
Four guards who have four swords, whips, who knows what else.
Even if Stavros has a hammer, and Vesper has a knife, and Eos and I share a dagger, we are sorely lacking in weaponry.
But saying that won’t help, won’t change the situation, so I roll back my shoulders and crack my neck, hoping I appear as if my stomach isn’t roiling like the sea.
Because I can’t just stand here waiting to be filleted.
Eight years. I was locked up for eight years without a single fucking hope. Not a flicker, not a tendril—nothing. Eight years of pain that seemed endless, that spun round and round like an hourglass forced to tip itself upside down the second the sand ran out.
I will not go back there.
Not for anyone. Not for anything.
“We need to leave. Now.”
“This was meant to be easy.” Vesper clutches her knife and struggles to her feet with Eos’s help. She leads her little sister out of the broken tomb, toward the stairs. The only entrance. The only exit. I fall into step behind them. “Getting in was supposed to be the hard part, not getting out.”
“We will drag the guards under if they open the latch.” Stavros studies the ceiling, watching dust fall like glitter from the sandstone with each of the guards’ steps.
“Vesper, you slit their throats. I will bash their skulls into the ground. We flee after that. We can head toward Mortia’s eastern wall, trade some of our loot for safe passage into Lucia.
The others will not realize what happened until morning, when the new guards come to relieve these ones. ”
My stomach churns further as the guards’ voices grow louder, but I don’t speak. Can’t speak. My ears roar with the rush of blood, of panic, of fear. I press a hand to my chest, willing my pulse to calm, but it’s no use. Not for anyone, I remind myself. Not for anything.
“If we’re not fast enough?” Vesper strokes her sister’s hair, still hobbling toward the exit.
Eos’s gaze darts around us for somewhere to hide.
There is nowhere to hide, however, except in the wreckage of the open tomb behind us—and that will be the first place the guards look. “If we aren’t strong enough?”
I stare at her as Stavros considers her words, and through the panic, an idea begins to take shape in my mind. Silver hair. Merrow.
“When is the last time you touched the sea?” I ask her hastily. “When is the last time you transfo—”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Vesper hisses. Her touch falls from Eos, and her grip on her knife tightens. “Don’t say it unless you wish to die first.”
My eyes narrow.
In all our months of working together, Vesper has never threatened me like this—serious and unflinching.
I’ve never pissed her off enough to force it.
But this isn’t an ordinary job, robbing storefronts and stalls within the dirty confines of a gang-ridden city.
This is a temple. This is one of the king’s properties.
This is fucking days after sirens slaughtered their way through his palace.
“When?” I demand, moving closer. She may very well be our only hope. “If there’s a chance you could take them, could be strong enough to use whatever powers you have—”
“I don’t have any,” she snaps. Eos whimpers again, and Vesper drags her closer.
With an arm around her sister’s shoulders, Vesper lowers her voice, even as the guards above raise theirs.
“It’s been years, okay? Years. And I have no want or need to return to the sea.
So I don’t have any powers, or any strength, and we have no way to fix that right now. Forget it, Zephyra.”
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
“Wh-what about you?” Eos asks, her lips trembling. She peers up at me with wide, fearful eyes. She looks younger now than ever before. “Can you… help?”
Instinct screams for me to steal my dagger from her, to run it through her chest and kill her for the accusation. The same instinct that had Vesper nearly biting my head off. However, this is Eos—I would never, could never, do that to her. “No, Eos. I can’t.”
“Then we’re screwed,” Vesper says.
“No, no,” Stavros argues, not caring one bit about the forbidden revelation happening right under his nose. “We smash them. We grind their bones into pulp.”
“What is your problem, Stavros? Why are you so goddess-damned violent?” Frustration claws up my throat as the walls seem to close in on us. It feels as if the room is shrinking, as if air is running thin. I suck in a breath, but it hardly fills my lungs.
Stavros blinks at me. His expression remains oddly serene, his brown eyes still soft, the skin around them creased with fine wrinkles.
“My mother beat my father to death with a dustpan for threatening to abuse her children. She had us mop up his brain when it splattered the kitchen. That was the first time I saw the inside of a human body.” He shrugs. “It was not so scary.”
“Fucking goddess above,” Vesper whispers.
Eos claps a hand to her mouth as if she might puke or laugh or scream—I can’t tell. I can’t discern anything save for the rapid beat of my heart.
“She bought me my first satchel of gunpowder.” His gaze waters with fondness. “Taught me how to make boom.”
“Ah.” I study him for a moment, seeing him in a whole new light—and not because he’s lit his last match. Because it’s a sad story. A watercolor of a traumatic past. And none of that matters now, not my past or his or Vesper’s, when we might very well be hanged.
The latch opens slowly, and a tendril of firelight spills through the ceiling, onto the stairs. We glance at one another, each of us, though it’s Vesper who holds my gaze. Who nods once as she steadies her knife, ignoring her injured foot.
And in that split second, I see it all play out in my mind: Vesper charging the guards with Stavros following.
Eos hesitating behind them. Vesper losing her footing, falling, her scream ending abruptly on the guards’ spears.
Stavros and his hammer dropping next, leaving me to defend a helpless Eos.
I see her blood on my hands. I see my own blood too—I see it spilling in that prison of pure darkness, hear his delighted laughter in my ears.
No.
I shake my head desperately, searching for another way out.
It’s too late, however; Vesper spins around to charge the guards before the latch gives way, only hesitating long enough to shove Eos back into the darkness.
Eos doesn’t argue. She doesn’t try to prove herself anymore.
She can’t fight, and Vesper—Vesper is emotional.
She’s afraid. If not for herself, then for her family, and Stavros is…
well, he is many things, but I’m not certain he can beat four guards on his own without his explosives.
And then—
I blink rapidly, trying to clear my vision, trying to eradicate the darkness, trying to blow out the candle of terror burning in my mind, but I can’t. I can’t, and we’re going to die. Clutching my tool belt of treasure, I edge backward a step. Not for anyone. Not for anything.
“—sick of midnight duty. Every time we come down here, it’s always rats,” one of the guards grumbles. He sounds older, his voice wan with exhaustion.
“Yeah, so we’ll stick ’em with our spears and get gone,” another answers.
“Back to the boring, fucking procedurals,” a third says.
We already defeated one repulsive monster, but the odds of defeating four more?
The walls have stopped closing in. They’ve fallen away completely.
We are standing in the open, trapped in this fucking tomb, without a way out.
We’re just standing here while four of the king’s savage guard corner us.
We aren’t cats chasing our prey through the street; we’re the fucking mice.
“Run to your bedroom, Zephyra. Run fast. I so love a chase.”
Something hot, sharp, presses into my lower back. It draws blood.
The memory rears up inside me, painful as that fucking knife, when Vesper darts forward. Before I can think it through, I move with her. After her. The latch opens. The guards clomp down the steps. And I shove Vesper with all the strength I can muster, sending her toppling to the floor.
She lands wrong. She lands on her knife.