Chapter 21 Toran
Toran
An uneven scraping sound bounced off the warehouse walls.
“You hear that, right?” Toran asked.
Beside him, Nes’s lips were pursed as if ready for him to taste. Part of him still wanted to bend over and take them between his, to see if they were as supple as they looked, but he made himself draw back.
He glanced toward the darkest shadows in the distillery and the set of steps leading down to the cellar.
“It’s probably a rat or animal of some sort.” Nes pulled away, squinting into the dark.
“That’s no animal.”
She lifted a brow. “Are you an expert on animal noises now?”
“Yes. Be quiet.”
She blinked at him. “If it’s not an animal, then what is it?”
He put a finger to her lips. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m trying to listen.”
He strained his ears to hear in between the soft whistle of the wind and the swirl of muted footsteps out on the street.
The sounds came closer, a scratch of wood on wood, a soft grunt.
He stepped in front of Nes and drew his sword, ignoring the way she glared at him as his blade slid against its sheath.
“Now who doesn’t understand the word quiet?” she hissed.
“Do you not understand that whatever is over there is headed straight for us?” he countered. “You have no weapon, so it’s best I be prepared.”
She huffed. “Is that something you learned training to be the Crown?”
His muscles itched for movement, and he shifted his stance, irritation worming its way through his body. “No, that’s just common sense. Something you seem to be lacking.”
“I have plenty of common sense,” she snapped.
At least one of them did. He was beginning to wonder if he’d abandoned common sense altogether.
Were it not for this thing advancing on them, he would have kissed her.
And even with the annoyance he was feeling toward her, he still wanted to.
He’d most certainly left his common sense back at the castle with Quint.
“Life is just far more interesting when you don’t use it.” She smirked at him as if she could read his mind and the desire lingering in his lips.
The sounds—as consistent as hiccups—grew closer. Whatever was coming was alive, just barely. He raised his sword toward the sounds, his grip steady and strong. The hilt felt warm in his hands in spite of the winter chill.
Despite her words, he saw the way Nes angled her feet, leaning into her toes, and how she shifted slightly to her right, readying herself to bolt.
From the black of the basement, a figure emerged. Tall and thin, their skin and features were unclear, as if they’d been smudged with darkness.
Everything was still. And then it was a whirl of motion as the figure burst from the shadows. Their attacker barreled forward like a mudslide, no trajectory, no care for what lay in its path. Nes dodged, skidding to her right and scurrying up the nearest support beam.
“That’s your plan?” Toran yelled. There was no need for quiet now. “Run away?”
From the widest of the rafters overhead, Nes called down, “As you so graciously pointed out, I have no weapon. You do. Feel free to use it!”
He grumbled but swung his sword in warning when the figure advanced on him. Despite the low light, he was certain it was a man. But there was something in the way he walked, a gait so uneven and askew that Toran sensed he was missing something.
“Stop where you are,” he ordered the man. He could practically hear Nes’s eye roll above him.
The man didn’t stop. Toran flicked his sword, just as he’d done back in the Guard’s Pub, slashing a shallow cut across the man’s forehead. The cut puckered, the flesh splitting easily, but no blood escaped the wound. The man stumbled forward, and Toran took a step back.
“What are you doing?”
He ignored Nes and snatched a discarded lantern from the ground as he retreated. He struck a match and lit it, holding it up so the light shone on their attacker’s face.
The stare that met his was as blank as a new moon.
Gravity had dragged the pupils down so only the whites were visible between the slits that were the man’s eyelids.
And beneath his face, the man was gaunt—hip bones sticking so far out it looked like his skin might split open, his ribs as pronounced as the black keys on a piano.
The man didn’t look alive. Didn’t move like the living. But he still moved. It shouldn’t have been possible.
Magic. Toran’s gut roiled at the thought of the Witch reanimating corpses.
He swung his sword again, harder and faster this time, in an attack that would kill any normal person. But he needn’t have worried about killing. Not when it was already dead.
His blade cut into the corpse’s torso, slicing through decaying flesh without a whisper of protest. The tip of his sword embedded within the thing’s stomach, and when he pulled it free, a horrible squelching sound filled the distillery.
Bits of organs and entrails hung from the wound. But the body did not slow.
Its head lifted. And he could have sworn the body looked at him through those glassy, milk-filled spheres.
“What are you doing?” Nes demanded again. “Cut off its head!”
She made a good point. Surely without a head the thing couldn’t continue forward. He held his sword ready. Above him, crouched among the rafters, Nes waited. When the body advanced again, he swung for its exposed neck.
Arms of mangled skin moved with a speed he thought impossible for a corpse. Dead hands caught his blade, the tiny bones still intact beneath ruined skin, and halted his strike. He stood frozen, shock cascading down his whole body.
Now, when it tilted its head so hazy eyes met his, he was sure it wasn’t just looking at him. It was seeing him. But what inside was still capable of seeing? There was no bringing back the dead. It was the only thing he knew with absolute certainty to be true.
A shape flew down from the rafters, dark cloth billowing behind her solid form like great wings before she crashed on top of the corpse. A fierce wildness glowed in Nes’s eyes.
His sword came free and the corpse fell, hitting the ground at the same time Nes plunged a fist through the thing’s back.
He’d seen dead bodies, had seen plenty of people kill and be killed, body parts he hadn’t known existed laid out for the world to see. But this…
Nes was brutal. One hand held down the corpse’s head, crushing its face to the cement floor, while her knees pinned the exposed arms and her other hand dug around inside the body’s chest cavity.
The thing struggled beneath her, but even with the impossible strength he’d felt when it had grabbed his sword, Nes showed no strain.
The back skin flapped and moved like bubbling pudding under her ministrations, and Toran swallowed down a gag.
Still, he watched as Nes rifled through the thing’s insides—unable to look away as she skirted rib bones and snapped veins.
The body beneath her shuddered once before Nes yanked her arm from its chest. It took him a second to recognize her hand within the mess and what she held in it. Her fingers were coated and sticky with congealed blood and thin strings that had once been veins. In her palm lay the heart.
It was so small compared to the remains underneath her. And frozen. Crusted over with a layer of crimson crystal shards that blinked back at him with a strange sort of menace in the lantern light.
Nes pushed up from her knees, dirt and bits of decaying flesh falling from the smooth fabric of her pant legs.
“This,” she said, holding the hard, blackened heart out to him like a peace offering, “was my plan.”
When he didn’t take it, she tilted her wrist, letting it drop to the ground. And as he watched the heart fall, he was reminded of those vanishing eels—how you couldn’t see them until they drew blood.
He lifted Cavallis, the sword suddenly heavy in his hands, and sheathed it. He tried to avoid Nes’s victorious gaze, but the only other place to look was the dead body, and, frankly, he didn’t care to dwell on the rot.
“How did you know to go for the heart?”
Nes callously wiped her hands on the outside of her cloak. “I could fill a book with the things you don’t know about magic.”
When he didn’t respond, she sighed heavily and said, “Do you know what happens when someone consumes pure magic?”
“Of course I do. They die.”
“But do you know what happens before that? How the magic kills?”
He’d never considered how one would die from pure magic. He’d always assumed it was an instantaneous thing. Once the magic disappeared down your throat, boom, dead.
“Pure magic goes straight for the heart, and once there, it nestles deep where nothing can touch it. But people and magic aren’t compatible. So the body rejects the magic and will do anything to get it out.”
“Out? How?”
She shrugged. “I’ve seen plenty of people tear out their own heart.”
“So with the corpse here, you thought—” Toran shuddered.
She glanced at the body and nodded. “Magic resides in the heart. It seemed like a safe bet to detach it.”
His eyes found the discarded human heart. Once a life force, it had turned into a conduit. And now it was nothing more than something for the earth to swallow.
Nes’s words echoed in his head. Magic resides in the heart. His throat bobbed. The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. “You’ve done this before. Torn out hearts.”
She stared at him. “Yes” was all she said before she turned back to the corpse.
He’d heard the screams and the moans at night from the room he rented on the third floor of the Siren’s Hair.
Sometimes only a pillow pulled tight over his ears was enough to block them.
He’d assumed they were the calls of pleasure seekers or drunkards.
Now he wondered how many had come from the dying and how many were the cries of a person being ravaged by magic.
He looked to Nes—remembered her silent scream in the ocean. “What would you do,” he started, fingers tight around the hilt of his sword, “if you were the Witch?”