Chapter 18
Elysia plummeted. Needles and branches scratched and broke against her body, slowing but not stopping her descent.
Until all at once, she crashed against an invisible barrier.
Bouncing lightly, her body finally settled against the mesh.
She allowed herself a few breaths to reorient herself and ensure nothing had been broken before heaving herself into a sitting position.
The mesh net swayed with her movement, causing her stomach to lurch once again.
Elysia exhaled harshly. Maspan is a masochist if this is how he always enters his home.
Coming onto her hands and knees, she crawled in the direction of a concrete terrace.
No longer at the highest level of the forest, she guessed they were halfway down to the forest floor.
She chanced a glance below, and panic surged through her, leaving her stuck and panting.
Despite being able to feel the mesh netting below her, all she could see was air and the straight drop to the ground.
The discrepancy between the visual and tactile information left her panicked with black spots dancing in the corners of her eyes.
Gripping the netting until it cut against her fingers, she forced her eyes shut. Feel the net, just feel the net. Eyes still closed, she inched along even as her body begged her to remain glued to one spot until Maspan inevitably found her and killed her.
Thank the gods she hadn’t screamed. If she was lucky, security wouldn’t come running, and she was far enough down that she doubted they could see her through the pines.
Cool, damp concrete let her know she’d reached the landing, and she damn near whimpered as she pulled herself onto its solid surface.
Crawling ahead, she planted herself against a curved wooden door set into the arch of a stone cottage.
Breathing rapidly, she pressed her cold fingers to her face trying to regain some semblance of control.
Spine adhered to the door, she kept her hands on the surrounding concrete arch as she slid back up to standing.
The world swayed, but Elysia pivoted on her bare feet to look at the door instead of the giant free fall in front of her before her panic could resume.
A quick test of the door handle confirmed what she had assumed.
Locked. Pulling up her dress, she grabbed a thin instrument tucked beside one of her knives and set to work.
The familiar work of picking a lock soothed the last remnants of the terrible shaking, buzz still present in her limbs after falling like a brick from The Lights.
Soon enough the door swung open, and with her mind clear and satisfaction warming her chest, Elysia entered the stone cottage.
It was a funny thing—but she had missed this part of herself.
Maybe it wasn’t a skill to boast about, but she’d been trained by the best, and getting in and out of buildings, hunting for information—it truly was what she felt most at home, most like herself, doing.
Quiet confidence hummed inside her. The last few weeks had been a nightmare of incessant, tumultuous, life-changing revelations.
She had no idea how to complete a death voyage or emotionally process the expectation of becoming the partner to a death god.
But picking a lock? Breaking and entering? She could do that just fine.
She scanned the room, thinking of the man who had raised her and trained her to be fierce instead of helpless. Who had given her the skills and grit to back up her mischievous gifts. She owed him more than she knew how to say, and tonight she honored that.
Elysia glided to the office, careful not to disturb anything as she slipped through the small home.
Her magic was silent now. Not a sound or tug to be had as she rifled through his desk, cabinets, and papers.
Elysia slammed a packet of papers down onto the desk, trying to force her magic into guiding her again.
But silent it remained as the clock on his wall ticked, reminding her that her time could run out at any moment.
Her heart picked up as she crept through the dark, refusing to admit what she already knew.
The plans were not here yet.
Her magic had delivered her to where she needed to be, but she couldn’t just manifest the plans out of thin air. She was going to have to hide and wait. Unsurprisingly, Maspan’s home was sparse with not so much as a closet in the office for her to hide in.
Gods above and below. She was going to hate this.
Elysia shoved open the office window and stuck her head out.
No impossibly slippery and soot-covered Kavian roof could have ever prepared her for this.
Pulling her head back inside, she danced in place, shaking her hands out.
I can do this. I have to do this. She was still standing there, putting off the inevitable, when a key caught in the front door.
Shit.
Elysia threw herself out the window, hanging off the roof as she weaseled the window back shut. The last dangling bit of her was just disappearing out of sight onto the roof when voices grew louder. The cold metal was frozen with ice and snow, leaving her with damn near nothing to hang onto.
Hands and feet steadily turning numb, Elysia considered the tree branches around her. If her hands grew so frozen they couldn’t grip, her safest bet was to launch herself at a tree and hope for the best.
Voices carried out through the bare crack she had left in the window, recognition startling her to the point her body jerked.
Elysia scrambled to gain purchase as she slid toward the edge.
Bare feet catching against the sharp metal edge of the roof, she scooted her ass back up.
Her feet were already painfully numb, and she knew they were going to be a bloody mess before the night was over.
As if her feet weren’t already scarred enough.
Elysia gripped the roof tighter this time as she listened and waited to hear the voices again. Because if her ears didn’t deceive her, then she was about to unleash her holy wrath.
Familiar, addictive anger coiled tighter and tighter in her chest. Hot and heady, she wanted to fly in through the window and kick her beloved sister in the cunt. The woman had expanded to Bellia?
Elysia growled silently, her frozen fingers flexing against the roof.
At least she wouldn’t feel it when she punched her sister in the fucking face.
And if Gage knew about this, she’d chop his balls off.
It was one thing to supply weapons, it was another to send her overly confident and underprepared sister into danger.
And after she was done with Gage, she’d kill Beatriz for getting her friends involved in this shit.
Leashing her anger, she listened, taking in the details of Beatriz's new game plans.
She called it twenty-one. A game of magical roulette where every spin was a gamble.
Spot seventeen promised a beauty elixir that erased every line and blemish, but slot nineteen would fix the contestant with a body-wide green rash that smelled like fish.
Each spin completed offered the contestant more money, but they had to reach certain spins to keep their cash.
Make it to spin five and keep ten thousand.
Make it to spin eleven and get twenty thousand, but only spin nine?
Back to ten thousand. The grand prize for completing all twenty-one spins was a hundred thousand in Bellian currency.
The closer you got to winning, the more dangerous the game became, and considering the contestants had to sign a waiver allowing for death and injury, the stakes were certainly high.
Beatriz finished her spiel by reminding Maspan that the game would be updated monthly, keeping the prizes fresh and the game new.
Elysia wanted to bang her head against the roof. How in the realms was her sister producing this kind of design in Kava? The kingdom where even if you had magic it didn’t work correctly.
Beatriz wrapped up her presentation, and Elysia could practically feel her sister’s smug certainty all the way up on the roof. Everything about her closing remarks screamed she knew this was a done deal.
But there was that second voice again.
Yes, she was going to kill her sister for getting Remy involved.
If her sister wanted to run her harebrained magical black market in a city where it could get her executed, that was her choice. But Remy Peraldine was better than Beatriz’s bullshit, and it boiled Elysia’s blood to think Beatriz had somehow bullied her into helping with this mess.
Yet it was Remy’s voice that rang out smooth as silk, finessing the finer details of the deal. Soothing Maspan’s jagged complaints as if she could just run her manicured fingers over their edges and dissipate them into the evening air.
Elysia began to struggle to hold on to the roof, blood dripping from her frozen bare feet.
She cringed as she watched the dark red droplets bead and fall, hoping against hope that they didn’t splatter against the window.
Straining to listen over the wind to the now quiet murmurs, Remy reviewed numbers while Maspan gave grunts of affirmation.
What her sister didn’t realize was that dealing with Maspan was less roulette and more certain death.
If they had bothered to study their mark, then they would have known this was a man who had dealt far longer in blood and broken bones than he had sky-high clubs, and he hadn’t gotten to where he was now without relying on old skills.
The wind shrieked through the trees now, and the eerie sense of foreboding pulling on her navel grew stronger than Elysia could bear.
That man didn’t have any intention of paying for something he could simply take, and she wasn’t about to let her sister and oldest friend die in the middle of the godsforsaken Endless Forest over the dumbest game she’d ever heard of in her life.