Chapter 4
I can’t decide if I’d prefer to run or scream. Maybe both. Both sound excellent right about now, but my feet are rooted to the floor, and although my lips part, no sound comes out. My eyes refuse to tear themselves away from the lines of dark magic on his chest.
‘Get out.’ Astin stands between us, every inch of him tense, but Benedict makes no attempt to come closer. He inhales loudly, almost greedily, and I realise he’s scenting our – or rather my – fear and relishing in it.
He does, at least, appear to be mild-mannered enough to be awaiting permission before he attacks.
That has to be a good sign. And there aren’t that many lines rippling along his chest, meaning he doesn’t have a huge reserve of magic stored inside him.
He isn’t going around stealing emotions and hexing people all day every day.
Perhaps he doesn’t want to be like this at all.
‘This isn’t necessary,’ I say, attempting a watery smile. ‘We can find another way.’ I’m giving you a chance not to be the villain everyone thinks you are. Take it.
‘You’re welcome to pay in full, of course,’ Benedict says.
His tone remains cordial, but his fingers flex as though they’re already imagining grabbing my arm.
He glances around at the peeling paint on the walls, along with the bucket placed in the far corner to catch a drip, and smirks.
‘But, alas, I suspect you cannot. I’m proposing a simple trade.
I’ll pay your debts in exchange for . . .
oh, let’s say, one visit a month, for the next year.
You’ll sit in this charming armchair here –’ his upper lip curls as he runs a finger over the faded fabric – ‘and I’ll take what I need. ’
‘Never.’ My flesh crawls at the idea of him touching me, like spiders are skittering over my skin. Astin shifts to the balls of his feet, ready to spring.
‘Come on now. I promise I’ll do my best not to leave a hex behind,’ Benedict coaxes.
Someone else might believe him, but I know how hard it is to stop once you’ve started.
When I was eight, I nearly hexed my cousin because her excitement at her new doll was delicious, like sugar and sherbet.
When my nails dug into her arm, her joy immediately turned to fear, the taste becoming acidic, but I didn’t stop, couldn’t stop.
Mum dragged me away just in time, kicking and screaming and desperate for more, black shadows and yellow sparks spurting from my fingers, hopelessly out of control.
Once I’d calmed down, Mum rolled up my blouse, and the grey line on my stomach confirmed what I was.
The magic within me. I vowed there and then I’d never touch someone again.
Those accidental shadows Mum saw me conjure in the apothecary thankfully used up the small amount of magic I had, the line marking me a danger immediately disappeared, and I’ve been pretending to be safe ever since.
It didn’t stop that side of the family moving far, far away. Although they kept my secret, we’ve never seen them since. Another reason my parents can’t stand to look at me.
‘I told you to get out,’ Astin says in a low voice.
‘Of course. Hand over the twenty thousand coins you owe, and I’ll be on my way.’
A whimper escapes my throat. Twenty thousand. I haven’t spent that much. I can’t have. Selling all the furniture in the building wouldn’t amount to that.
Astin steps forward. ‘Last chance.’
His voice is deep and dangerous, like the rumble of a growl in a wolf’s throat, but it does little to dissipate my panic.
What’s a gardener going to do against a Souleater – beat him over the head with a shovel?
Besides, he’s not currently in possession of a shovel if he did want to do some head-hitting before Benedict –
A small ball of black flame erupts in the Souleater’s hands.
Before Benedict goes and does something like that.
Heat blazes through the room. It’s a real fire for all intents and purposes, but smoke spits from the ball, leaking tendrils of shadow and dark magic, revealing its true nature.
It’s corrupted and awful, just like whatever emotions he channelled to create it.
One of the lines of magic on his chest fades ever so slightly as the magic depletes.
My knees wobble and my eyes leak wet, salty tears as I stare and stare at the flame, knowing it’s hopeless, knowing I’m about to end up either dead or hexed, and I’m not sure which is worse.
‘Come along.’ Benedict pats the chair with his fire-free hand.
Astin, despite my gripping his shirt in an attempt to haul him back, closes the distance between them, ignoring the threat of fire and issuing his own threat instead. ‘Or I could kill you.’
‘Astin,’ I hiss. ‘What are you doing?’
He ignores my perfectly legitimate question, too wrapped up in his show of bravado to remember we’ve both faced a Souleater before and lost, and dives towards the hearth, faster than I’ve ever seen him move.
He plucks the poker from the pot and sweeps it in an arc over his head.
My lips part. I’ve never seen him do that with a garden implement before.
Benedict cocks his head, as though recalculating the situation, and then the fire in his hand swells, and swells, until it’s the size of his head. Undeterred, Astin twirls his poker. I don’t understand his confidence. All I want to do is crawl into a hole and wish this whole situation away.
Astin lunges. Benedict’s surprisingly quick, dodging the poker and flinging the flame from his palm. The fire surges upwards in a blur of crackling black and grey before plummeting towards Astin, who barely sidesteps in time. My armchair erupts like the Laevothe bonfire.
Shit. Shit.
Sweat drips down my face as the pair of them circle one another.
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Benedict says. This statement is somewhat contradicted by the way he licks his lips. ‘All this determination to kill me would be such a feast, you know. If you wanted to help the girl, you could give yourself to me instead.’
Astin’s knuckles whiten around the poker. ‘I’m not doing this for her.’
Charming.
But I can’t bring myself to be offended, not as a strange numbness settles over me.
My chair is on fire. My gardener thinks he’s some kind of swordsman.
I owe twenty thousand gold coins to a treasury who don’t pay any attention to the kind of person they’re employing – or worse, they know and don’t care, so long as he gets them the results they need.
If humans will happily use a bit of lust powder or a magic potion, who’s to say they won’t employ a Souleater to do their dirty work too?
It doesn’t matter either way, because I can’t do anything about any of it without becoming as terrible and dangerous as Benedict.
A flick of Benedict’s wrist has the bottles behind the bar flying towards my head, carried by a wind of shadow.
They splinter into pieces as they shoot through the air; thousands of tiny glass darts that are impossible to avoid.
Liquid sprays everywhere. I drop into a crouch, covering my head with my hands, shrieking as the glass pricks my exposed skin like the beaks of a thousand angry birds.
‘Daisy!’ Astin’s voice sounds distant, but I’m not sure if it’s the roar of my beloved chair going up in smoke or my own heartbeat drowning him out.
My vision swims with tears, but within me desire stirs.
Benedict’s right – Astin’s determination is palpable.
Most of the time, his emotions are hard to read, almost muted, but the pieces I can sense are always tumbling, ever-changing, like he’s unable to settle on one thing.
Now though, his smell is fixed. Solid. Steel and iron.
It’s overwhelming. I want it. I want it.
I dig my nails into my palms.
Benedict stands above me, and with a wave of his arm, a wall of pulsing shadow splits the room in two, stretching from wall to wall and rising up to the ceiling, separating us from Astin.
He paces on the other side, nothing but a vague shape among the dark, prodding, pounding, punching at the shadows, searching for a weakness.
I tremble. It’s happening all over again.
I’m about to be attacked by a Souleater and I’ve nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, the cloaks hanging above me as useless as a broken shield.
Benedict places his hand on my shoulder, his nail scratching the side of my neck, readying himself to sink it into me.
A crack of light catches my eye. A gap in the wall of shadow. Benedict’s distracted, his concentration lost as his nail pierces skin. I barely feel the sting. The wall wavers.
That gap widens further and Astin flies through, shoulder first, launching himself at Benedict and slamming into his side, throwing him off-kilter and sending him sprawling to the floor.
His head hits the stone with a sickening crunch.
Nausea churns in my belly, not just at the noise, but at the look of pure, unadulterated hatred on Astin’s face.
It doesn’t come close to any expression I’ve seen on him before. It’s one I never want to see again.
Black smoke splutters from Benedict’s hands, but he’s dazed, struggling to move, let alone produce magic.
My pulse rages in my ears. Astin places the point of the poker directly above Benedict’s heart, and I don’t want to watch what happens next, but my eyes refuse to tear themselves away.
The lines on Benedict’s chest jerk. Astin leans forward, muscles trembling.
The hard expression on his face doesn’t change when he says, ‘You shouldn’t have touched her. ’
He slams the poker all the way in.
Benedict spasms. Flails. I let out a choked gasp at the same time he draws his last, his body going still, his hand landing limply at his side. The remaining lines of magic on his body stop writhing and fade to nothing, like they were never there at all, turning him from monster to man.
A man my gardener just killed.
I blink several times, in case I’m having some kind of strange and all-too-realistic nightmare.
Astin, not paying any heed to Benedict, busies himself pouring water over my armchair – something about the magic of the flames means they haven’t spread, but the chair itself is as blackened as our hexmarks.
Smoke clogs my throat. I go to move out of the way, only to realise I’m moving towards Benedict, towards his corpse.
Hexes, I can’t be on the floor with the body.
I squeak, trying to stand, but my legs quiver and give way.
My back slides down the length of the wall.
I settle for whimpering and crawling in the opposite direction, until I reach the relative safety of the staircase and am able to hide by the banisters.
‘Astin,’ I say faintly. ‘What just happened?’
‘I saved you. You’re welcome.’ He shrugs, nudging the corpse with his toe, as though inspecting it for signs of life. I’m not sure why he needs to. Benedict appears extremely dead to me. ‘At least this one was easy.’
‘Oh, good, so long as this one was easy,’ I splutter, choking down a laugh, because what does he mean this one? My voice is high-pitched when I ask, ‘How many more have there been?’
Ignoring the question, he heads to the broom cupboard and pulls out a mop and bucket. ‘We need to clean this up.’
‘No,’ I try again. ‘I need you to tell me what happened.’
‘You were in the room with me. What do you think happened?’
‘I think you killed someone, and you don’t care!
’ The feeling I’ve entered some parallel dream dimension returns, along with the sensation I’m staring at a stranger.
A stranger with Astin’s face, except none of the pieces fit right.
The strong jawline is there, but beneath the scattering of dark stubble lies the bruise that wasn’t there yesterday.
His nose is slightly crooked, and I don’t know why.
Dark circles lie beneath eyes the colour of a stormy sea, because the man doesn’t sleep.
What does he do when he’s not asleep?
‘I gave him the option to leave. He didn’t take it.
’ His voice is so flat. Unfeeling. I flinch.
My lower lip wobbles. His face softens at the sight, but it does nothing to bridge the chasm between us that Benedict’s body represents.
I can’t believe we’ve gone from arguing over whether we should give couples one key or two, to debating what constitutes a rational response to a Souleater entering your inn.
He crouches to my level and is a little gentler when he says, ‘I’ll take care of the body, okay? I can bury it out the back with the rest of them. Can you manage mopping the floor? We don’t want any surprise guests arriving and seeing . . . this.’
Guests. Guests. I like the sound of those.
I’ll make everything lovely for my guests, and we can pretend none of this happened.
Once I’ve wiped away the bloodstains, I’ll cover that patch of floor with a nice rug so I never have to look at it again, before finding two guests in need of love to replace the memories of today with something better.
It’s only once Astin’s hauled Benedict upright and draped him over his shoulder, a move so practised it’s like he’s performed it ten times over, that his words sink in.
‘Wait.’ My brain scrambles to make sense of what it heard. ‘You said bury him with the rest of them. Plural. Did you . . . I mean, have you . . .’
I can’t get the question out of my mouth, not with the stone sinking in my belly answering it for me.
He has.
My inn is playing host to a graveyard of – hexes, I don’t know if it’s just Souleaters or if Astin is going around burying bodies left, right and centre.
Who is this man?
He clears his throat. ‘Clean the floor, Dais. We’ll talk after.’
With that, he resumes carrying the body outside, leaving me to clear up the mess left behind, a reminder that no matter what I do or where I try to hide, death always finds a way to follow.