Chapter 15 Nes #2
She flung open the door—the raucous noise of the ongoing brawls rushing her—and dragged Toran outside.
She didn’t stop until they were blocks away from the Siren’s Hair.
She paused at the marker between the Ditch and the Bark before yanking Toran into a narrow alcove.
She pressed him against a shoddily painted green door and out of sight.
“What the hell, Nes?”
She ignored him and pressed her palm to his lips.
She craned her neck around the corner, gaze sweeping the empty street.
It was too late for any of the blacksmiths and tradesmen in the Bark to be working, but that didn’t mean she and Toran were alone.
Phineas had spies everywhere, and yet she didn’t feel the eyes she had earlier.
She waited, a hand over Toran’s mouth as she strained her ears, listening for any sound that didn’t blend with the melody of the night.
Nothing.
She removed her hand from Toran’s mouth.
Toran pushed one shoulder forward then the other, like he was testing the boundaries of their confined space. Or maybe he was testing her.
No attachments. The reminder kept her body rigid.
“How long have you had that?” Though his breath was hot against her forehead, his voice was ice.
“We have a name now,” she said, her own tension rising like acid on her tongue. She welcomed it. The anger would hide the true reason her cheeks flushed.
“Answer the question. How long?”
“Since before the Drowning Square.” She pulled both coins from her pocket and held them up to his face. “What are they?”
He pushed her hand aside. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She clasped the metal in her fist. “Because I didn’t know you.”
“That’s a weak excuse, and you know it. You’re supposed to help me find the Witch, not hinder my search.”
“Damari.”
His chest rose and fell. “Fine. Damari. You should have told me.”
She let her fist fall. Only there was no room between them.
It dropped against him, to a spot just below his shoulder, his heavy breaths lifting it up and down.
Every sense in her body honed in on her fist, on the sensation of his chest beneath her hand.
She felt as if she were walking a tightrope.
Keeping her balance meant maintaining control. But one slip and she’d fall.
No attachments.
“I didn’t tell you,” she said, stopping herself from squeezing his shirt in her fist, “because I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
Under her hand, his breathing evened out. “Do you trust me now?”
She couldn’t answer that. Instead, she opened her hand. “What are they?”
Toran glanced down at the coins. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “if you tell me where you found them.”
She closed her fingers back over the metal. They were warm in her palm. He was warmer.
“Damari is a northern name.”
“Giving her a name won’t change her crimes,” Toran whispered.
“No, but it might explain them.”
Toran nodded, following her line of thought. “Hunting someone is all about where they’re going and where they’ve been.”
She lightly tapped his shoulder with her fist. “Tell me.”
“They’re guard IDs.”
She started. That had been the last thing she’d expected him to say. Her hand sprang open, the coins sliding between the lines in her palm. They stared down at them.
“Show me,” she breathed.
Toran turned his hand over so his palm cupped the back of her hand. His touch was gentle and intimate, and she was suddenly glad they were in this tight space together. Alone. So no one else could see the way this simple action of laying his hand against hers made her cheeks blaze with heat.
With his other hand, he flipped one of the coins over so both showed the side with the King’s face. He pointed to a spot on the coin.
“You see there? On the King’s collar?” he asked.
She brought her hand closer to her face. She squinted. “Are those numbers?”
“Yes,” he said. “They correspond to a member of the King’s Guard. We each get a coin with a unique number upon our graduation. When the four members of my legion died in Aeos, I brought two of the coins back to their families.”
“What of the other two?”
Shame flickered through the sorrow on his face. “I couldn’t get to them.”
She understood. Those bodies—his friends—and their coins were gone. There was nothing left for him to retrieve in Aeos.
His ring burned a hole in her other pocket.
The trust Toran must have needed to lend her something precious to him.
She reached for his hand, pulling it out from under her own, and dropped the coins into his palm.
Her fingers lingered in the dips between his knuckles.
It wasn’t the same sort of trust. But it was all she could offer.
She guided Toran’s fingers, curling her own overtop until he’d formed a fist around the coins. She could feel the rapid flutter of his pulse.
“Where did you get these coins?” Toran asked. “And please don’t tell me you stole them.”
She felt her lips twitch. “While I admit that is a valid question, Captain, I didn’t steal them. They were beside two of the bodies. I think she left them for us to find.”
Toran shook his head, his hair falling over his forehead. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would she go through the trouble of searching the pockets of the guards she killed for their coins only to leave them in the street once she found them?”
She thought of the pickpockets in the Ditch. “Why does anyone do anything? For money. These coins do look an awful lot like gadots.”
“You think the Witch is killing people just to rob them?”
Once said out loud, she knew it wasn’t true. The kills were too precise and too ritualistic for theft to be their motivation. If she were going to steal money from people, she wouldn’t choose guards as her marks.
“No,” she admitted. She recalled the night of Mikaud’s murder.
He’d still been alive when she came across the attack.
Damari had killed the three guards in front of her, then run.
She’d had no time to search each of their pockets.
A thought struck her. “You say each of their numbers corresponds to a guard.”
Toran nodded.
“So there must be some sort of registry with all the numbers and the guards’ names, right?”
“Of course. It’s kept in the castle.”
“Can you access it?”
“Why?”
She gestured the coins clutched in his fist. “What if those don’t belong to the guards she’s killed?”
“Then whose would they be?”
“I’m not sure. The only way we’re going to find out is if you get your hands on that registry.”
Toran opened his fist and stared down at the coins before snapping his fingers shut over them again. “I’ll match the numbers on the coins to names in the registry. Once we know whose they are, we can determine how the Witch came to possess them.”
“How Damari came to possess them,” she corrected. “She’s not an animal. She has a name. Now that we know it, we should use it.”
He frowned down at her. “You want to humanize the Witch; why?”
She puffed out her chest. “She’s human, isn’t she?”
“Some would argue no, she’s not. That the magic inside her negates any humanity.”
She reached down to her hip, fingers trailing the outline of the flask beneath her shirt.
“I’ve seen what magic does to people,” she said.
“I’ve seen it pervert them, and I’ve seen it tear them apart.
But even when tearing a person apart, that magic doesn’t change what they are.
They’re human, with or without it. Is it so hard to believe the same could be said of Damari?
That the magic might be separate from the girl? ”
Toran’s gaze was like a brawlhouse pit, deep and full of energy. She couldn’t help but fall in.
“You want to think of her as a girl?” he asked. “Even though she murdered Captain Mikaud?”
She hadn’t thought he knew about that. Another surprise from Toran. She swallowed, and he tracked the movement along her throat.
“Isn’t that what she is? A girl from the north?”
“A girl from the north,” he repeated. “With a grudge against Orlonea’s King’s Guard.”
When she met his gaze, it was easy to see they’d come to the same conclusion. “Do you know any guards who recently returned from up north?”
He grinned at her. “Just one.”
She grinned back. Magic or not, one thing was suddenly stunningly clear. Damari was a girl bent on revenge.