Chapter Three Zephyra #2
An agonized curse flees her lips, and she stares down at her hand. At the blood pooling around the blade impaled in her wrist. Eos shrieks. She rushes to her sister’s side and falls to her knees. Tears water in her gaze.
“Don’t,” Vesper commands. “Don’t cry for me. Do not transform.”
If Eos cries, if merrow saltwater tears trickle down her cheeks, she’ll be doomed.
But we’re already doomed. This isn’t like the ruby necklaces, and this isn’t like the sewers either. This is life or death, and I—I’ve never been part of this team anyway. Stavros picks up Vesper’s injured arm, glaring at me with a sudden rage. The hammer quakes in his fist.
“What the shit was that?” asks the older guard from the staircase. He sounds near; he’s going to reach us first. “Did you hear someone?”
I turn away from Vesper, away from Eos and Stavros, and run up the stairs.
Sure enough, four bulky guards descend the staircase in a single-file line, their heavy boots thudding on the sandstone and the hilts of their spears clanging against the gold of their armor. They gasp, yell, when they see me barreling toward them. But I can’t stop. I have to flee.
“Halt!” the older man commands, gray eyes visible through the visor of a bulky helmet.
“Is that a—” another begins.
“Fucking girl?” the one in the back finishes.
Near feral with fear, I attack the older man first. Spinning around, I kick out at his chest plate and send him tumbling to the floor.
Two more reach out to grab me, colliding with me at once, but I duck away before they can touch me.
Their helmets crash together. A horrible, earsplitting sound.
It dazes them enough that I can steal a sword from one and smash the hilt into the other’s back.
He bowls over, careening forward and taking his friend with him.
My chest rises and falls with adrenaline, my skin mottled red. I don’t stop to think or breathe. I can only move. The last snatches me by the hair, but it doesn’t hurt. Not as his fist tangles with my blonde locks. Not as he yanks with all his might.
Not as the wig falls to the floor and my real pink hair spills in waves over my shoulders, down my lower back.
I seethe, raising the stolen sword in hand. He glances quickly at the hair in his possession, at the cheap, artificial locks, before releasing it. His gaze narrows on my face.
“Merrow,” he curses. “Mermaid.” He unsheathes his sword with renewed purpose. “You will pay for what those demons did. You will suffer—”
I swing my sword. It connects somewhere between his helmet and his shoulder plates. Bone crunches. Tendons snap. The silver doesn’t cut all the way through his neck, however; it lodges in his spine.
No one will make me suffer again.
I don’t bother pushing his body over the edge.
I allow physics to do the work for me. He stumbles, and then I’m gone.
Vesper and Stavros have a chance against the rest. I’ve injured the guards, I tell myself.
Given my team a head start. Vesper’s wound will hurt, but she can overcome it.
I hope they make it out. I hope they survive. But I don’t stop to be sure. I can’t.
Run fast.
And I do. Legs aching. Lungs burning. Skin alive and aflame. Wind whips past me, around me, as I catapult outside, into the temple. Then down the stairs. Flying, soaring.
Free.
Midnight alleys bustle with the worst of Crestfall: salt dealers, rumrunners, thieves’ guilds, rival gangs.
Criminals of every nefarious background huddle in small clusters, parasites that leech onto the weathered buildings of old aristocracy, sucking their luxuries dry in the darkness when the king’s soldiers are thinnest and corrupt guards watch over these streets.
Though the Ador Palace glitters like a tiara near the shorewall, most of its once-bejeweled surroundings have fallen into disrepair.
Chipped and dull, if not outright shattered.
While the nobility fuck and drink their lives away, the commoners are either surviving in ramshackle hovels, often starving and plague ridden, or murdering one another in the streets.
There isn’t much the people here wouldn’t do for money.
Six months in Mortia’s capital has taught me to spot the permanent ink engraved on the hands and necks of killers, has taught me to notice the difference between a shallow cough and a bloody rasp.
Six months, and I’ve learned exactly who to avoid in this goddess-forsaken place. Almost all are here. Now.
I tuck my pink hair into the collar of my long-sleeve tunic and force my way through a crowd gathered around a game of dice.
The players sit on the dirty ground, scarlet trickling from their lips as Mortem’s Claim takes hold.
They roll twelve-sided dice while others pass bets and meager coppers back and forth.
No one worries about contracting the plague.
That’s just another fact of life here. Like forgoing breakfast, walking barefoot through broken glass, and being assaulted by the king’s guard—commoners do not survive long. And that’s probably for the best.
It certainly works out better for me. Merrow are immune to the plague. And everyone here can be bought.
Sliding past the futile game, I step over two bodies—sleeping?
dead?—and continue to the end of the alley, where a rotting four-story building has begun to sink into the earth.
Two men stand in front of the large iron door.
Their fat fists grip matching spears, the hilts engraved the same as the door knocker: with the gnarled face of a lion, one scar slashed through its left eye.
“I want Magnus,” I say without any preamble. There’s no fucking time for it. I need to get off this continent before it ensnares me.
The men don’t bother to glance at me, however.
They also don’t bother to respond. Fucking brutes.
Panic still stings my chest, as if I’ve been struck by lightning and the residual zaps are pumping my heart faster, faster.
I don’t have time. With a snarl, I dig through my tool belt and pull out the moonstone bracelet.
It dazzles in the night air, the starlight above reflecting off the iridescent gemstones.
That certainly catches their attention. Hungry gazes snag on the jewelry, and I swear one of them starts to drool.
“Magnus.” I ache to snatch one of their spears, to steal any weapon at all. Being here isn’t necessarily safer than the tomb; the predators are just camouflaged. They could still pounce at any moment. “Now.”
“Zephyra,” a slow drawl echoes behind me. “That’s a new hair color on you.”
I whirl around, and the leader of the Leones gang lounges against a wall across the street.
Magnus kicks off it, prowling toward me with a half smirk permanently etched onto his strong face.
His left eye sparkles green, but the right is fully black—and struck through from brow to cheek with a puckering, jagged scar.
I’ve delivered goods to Magnus before. He pays better than anyone else, and he doesn’t ask questions.
“Yeah, well…” I tuck an errant strand behind my ear. “I was looking for a change, and I heard pink is all the rage for summer.”
He chuckles under his breath, entirely humorless.
“You’d implicate us in treason if the wrong guard found you here.
Constane’s been hosting mass executions every morning in the city square for anyone who even brushes shoulders with merrow.
Pretty little thing like you, I’m not certain you’d make it until dawn. ”
I swallow down bile at the thought of Vesper, Eos, and Stavros fighting for their lives in that tomb. I couldn’t have saved them. I barely managed to escape myself. And this wretched guilt I feel—it’ll only get me killed.
“Good thing I’m not a merrow, then,” I hiss, challenging him with narrowed eyes to call for a guard, to have me arrested.
Magnus is just as hungry as everyone else; there’s no way he passes on loot this expensive.
My blood boils, but I can’t outright attack him.
Magnus controls half the city. Rumor has it that the Leones gang tripled under his leadership, and eradicated three others within the span of his first week.
Magnus gets a good price because he’s terrifying.
Still, I keep my expression neutral. If I show even a hint of fear, he’ll know he has the power.
And if he has the power, I won’t get more than a couple of silvers.
“You want this or not? I don’t have all night.”
Magnus glances between my hair and the bracelet, his hand moving to the dagger in his pocket.
I track the movement like a hawk. If needed, I’ll run again.
I’m smaller and faster than Magnus’s crew.
I’ve spent months and months mapping this city, the hidden corners, the secret passages, the sewer system. I can get away if I must.
I can.
After a second, he removes a hand from his pocket and reaches out, as if to snatch my upper arm and drag me farther into the dark. I dart away before he can grab me, baring my teeth on a snarl. “Don’t.”
He curses, low and dark, but he runs a hand through his slicked-back hair rather than attempt to touch me again.
“Why the fuck are you flaunting noble jewels in the middle of Crestfall, Zephyra? Any one of these scoundrels would slice you head to tail to get their hands on that. You’re putting several targets on our heads.
I wouldn’t have helped you at all if I’d known you were a—”
I don’t let him finish. “You didn’t help me. I helped you.”
He glares at me. I stare back at him, raising my brows in wait. “You’ve got seconds before I walk up the street and ask the Scars instead.”