KANE
“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED BACK there?” I snapped at Mari as we hurtled toward the imposing wrought-iron gates that wrapped
around the manicured palace garden. Griffin snarled softly, hand still pressed to his gruesome wound. I waited for Arwen’s reprimand at my brusque tone.
In the split second that it didn’t arrive, I whipped my head around and my heart stopped.
The swarm of guards behind us were losing ground, and we were mere feet from the palace gate. But my chest constricted with each step. She hadn’t made it out.
“We have to go back,” I said, halting my feet. “Arwen—”
“We can’t get her like this,” Griffin rasped, leaning into a rectangular hedge. “We need our lighte. Or a convoy, at least.”
We never should’ve come without men. Ethera had insisted, always worried that our Fae nature gave us an advantage, and we’d been so desperate to please her. Ridiculous.
But the guards were drawing nearer—
And there were too many of them for us to best, powerless, injured, and saddled with a malfunctioning witch. Though it nearly killed me to admit it, he was right. We had to get out first and retrieve Arwen after. “Fine,” I barked. “Hurry.”
Mari’s feet slapped one after the other along the brick path until we reached the gates and hauled ourselves over them. Griffin first with a pained groan, then myself, then Mari, who we pulled down after us. On the other side, deposited into the heart of the capital city of Revue, we ran.
It was barely night and the sky was free of both stars and clouds. An empty, forlorn blue that did not match the urgency warring in my bones.
We rounded the nearest corner—heavy footfalls and horns still sounding behind us—and barreled down a narrow street. Swerving to avoid a neighing steed drawing a carriage, I led us through one more thin alley between two brick buildings.
Silence sounded in my ears, minus the clopping of hooves and our panting, haggard breaths. Above us, wet crepe dresses hung over an ornate teal balcony that mimicked latticework.
Griffin shoved two fingers down his throat and retched against the bricks. His back and arms had been carved with those phantom blades and he was dripping blood on the cobblestone from his ribs as he purged.
“That won’t work,” I breathed, but it didn’t stop him from gagging himself once more. “It’s already in your bloodstream.” We’d need Fae lighte to heal. Or time for the lilium to leave our bodies.
Mari spoke for the first time since we’d left Ethera’s parlor. “I’m sorry…” Her voice was small. “I thought…I’d been trying—”
“Later,” I said to her. “We need to get back in there and with some brute force before Ethera—” I wouldn’t finish the thought. I wouldn’t lose faith in Arwen, either. She was savvy, and skilled, and a full-blooded Fae, and… she’d be fine. Until we could reach her, she’d have to be fine. “How fast can we get back to Shadowhold?”
Mari ripped part of her skirt and used it to stanch the bleeding in Griffin’s ribs as he looked back toward the busy city center that surrounded Ethera’s sprawling urban palace. “Without our lighte?” He worked his jaw, weighing. “Twelve hours. Eleven, if the horses we steal are very fast.”
Fuck. We didn’t have enough time for that.
“A long shot, but—” Mari produced an ornate leather-bound book from her sack. Griffin’s brows rose weakly. “I took this from Ethera’s tree. It’s
the mate of the real ledger.”
My brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
Mari chewed her bottom lip. “When I saw the similar spine, I knew this one must be the twin Niclas had told us of. The one that contains the names of those who fought for the north, not the south. So I took it. This ledger has family names, home cities, known businesses and affiliates of every single person who fought for Ethera. If Aleksander and all his people helped her—”
“Then his name will be in there…” Griffin finished, massaging his bruised jaw.
My mind had begun to whirl. “If Aleksander is still in Rose like the rebel king told us, he’d be the closest Fae for miles.”
“I’ve read Blood Fae have all kinds of healing powers,” Mari said. “His fixing you both might be our fastest way to get Arwen out.”
She was right. Hemolichs could do a number of unpleasant but valuable tricks with blood, including removing toxins. If we convinced him to aid us, we’d be able to shift and fly back here far faster than if we traveled all the way to Shadowhold for aid. If anyone could help us now, and swiftly, it might actually be him. “Mari, you’re brilliant.”
The look on her rosy cheeks was one of meager redemption.
Griffin added, “It’s the least he could do, given how much he owes us.” Regardless of my disdain for him, we’d use Aleksander to free Arwen.
And then, I’d tear the deranged Scarlet Queen delicate limb from delicate fucking limb.
Mari was already prying open the ledger and searching for his name. “What’s Aleksander’s last name?” she asked.
I came to stand behind her. “Hale.”
“H, H, H…” Mari repeated, flipping through the pages.
“Nothing came up under A?” Griffin asked, hovering over her, eyes squinted at the fine print.
“No,” she said, leaning into his chest a bit. “Unfortunately not.”
Griffin froze with the contact and his face flushed. He stepped back from the witch in an instant and she nearly toppled over.
“Is it listed by last name?” I asked.
Mari remained silent, her cheeks now a matching pink before emitting a low, “Nope…”
And she was well past the A’s. Gods damn it.
I peered out to see nightfall cloak the city inch by inch. What was the best way to go about stealing a horse? Would I reveal myself as the king of Onyx, or would it be faster, and avoid time-wasting questions, to simply threaten—
“Go back,” Griffin said, voice low. “I know that name.”
I turned back and peered over the ledger, Mari squished between the two of us. “Which one?”
“Hearken Sadella,” Griffin said. “He owns the Neck Romancer.” “What’s that?” Mari asked.
“A theater in a seedy port town called Rotter’s End.” Griffin winced as he held Mari’s ripped skirt to the wound at his ribs. “Only an hour from here by horseback. A strange place…It’s in one of the most dangerous towns in northern Rose but caters to some of the kingdom’s highest-end clientele. Somewhere the rich can find decadence as well as anonymity. Quite the operation—prostitution, banned spirits and drugs, and apparently some mighty fine theater.”
When Mari made a face of surprise, Griffin added, “Kane and I hunted for the Blade of the Sun for five years. I know of every criminal operation in Evendell.”
I ran a hand down my face, attempting to maintain my waning patience. “How is that relevant to Aleksander?”
“I’m not sure…” Griffin admitted. “It was the only name I recognized.” He looked back down at the ledger and squinted again. “All the columns for Hearken Sadella’s known associates and locations have been left blank.”
I opened my mouth to respond. To tell them we were wasting time and needed to go abduct two horses immediately, but Mari’s gaze stopped me cold.
Her focused eyes, bottom lip caught between her teeth—
“Hearken Sadella…H-E-A— I need some parchment.”
I gestured to the snowy alleyway. “Afraid we’re all out.”
“Turn around,” she ordered Griffin, and my enormous bleeding, cold-as- ice commander whirled like a well-trained dog. Mari began to draw her pointed finger across his broad back as if she were writing something. He bristled with each movement of her tiny finger.
“It’s an anagram,” she whispered after a long moment, her voice a blend of awe and triumph.
Griffin spoke into the brick before him. “A what?”
“A word formed by rearranging the letters of another word. He was hiding from you, right?” she asked me. “When he first came to Evendell with all of his people? He likely fought under an alias and then adopted the pseudonym to live in anonymity. But he used all the letters of his real name. Aleksander Hale and Hearken Sadella.” She grinned, that fire back in her eyes. “One and the same.”
IT TURNED OUT THE EASIEST way to steal two horses was for Mari to distract a carriage owner who had stopped to fix his broken spoke, and for Griffin and me to free his horses and take off for Rotter’s End, swiping Mari from her conversation on our way. She insisted on leaving the man a satchel of coin, to which my commander grudgingly agreed.
Griffin had been right. The ride was less than an hour, as our horses were quick, and we arrived in Rotter’s End before the dilapidated clock tower in the town square rang seven. We’d made good time.
Still, the entire ride, steed racing at a bone-crunching gallop, my mind ached with the image of Arwen chained somewhere in Ethera’s palace. I’d filtered through every possible reason the queen might have wanted her. Her lighte, to trade her to Lazarus, to hurt me in some way. None of it made any real sense. Ethera knew my army could slaughter hers. She couldn’t withstand another war, not with the south of Rose already breathing down her neck.
I was still driving myself mad with the possibilities as a bistro somewhere pumped out the notes of a deep, brassy saxophone and patrons whooped and hollered. We’d arrived.
Rotter’s End reeked of booze. Not just the fresh liquor, but the smell of it once someone had failed to keep the stuff down. And it was oppressively dark—not many streetlamps or lanterns, and the few the town did have were dimmed or caked in frozen snow. One watering hole was growing boisterous with the coming night, but even that establishment near the riverbed was so encrusted in snow and dirt I couldn’t make out much.
And yet the shuttered-up windows and closed-down harbor, each knackered barn and splash of horse hooves through cold sludge, was illuminated by a vivid, glowing red. As if the rising moon had first been doused in fresh blood.
I searched for the source of the ruddy glow and found it swiftly.
“The Neck Romancer,” displayed in vibrant flashing lights of red and white and gold—either Aleksander’s lighte or quite the spell. The theater, shaped like a circus tent, with panels of striped fabric and flags at the top of each peak, presided over Rotter’s End like a harlequin on a palace throne.
As we approached, we found the doors barred off with long planks of wood. A lone fish-eyed man sat on a repurposed barstool, bundled in a fur hat and coat, his eyes on a weathered novel grasped between cracked leather gloves.
“We don’t open until nightfall,” he said, before we’d even reached him.
Mari gestured wildly at the cerulean blue dusk all around us. “That’s now!”
The doorman didn’t lift an eye. “No, wench. It ain’t.” “Listen,” I said, voice low. “We—”
“I’m not saying it again,” the doorman grunted. Finally his eyes found mine. They held the will of a human bull.
My body prickled and instant fatigue flooded my veins.
Gods-damned lilium…
“Please,” Mari tried again. “If I may, nightfall is a very confusing time to open an establishment. Is it simply the moment the sun falls and it
becomes night? Because that would have been hours ago. Is it once the sky is pitch-black? That’s tricky, too, because that might be midnight, and then the show would be long over, right? So, you see, we could bother you with all these complex ramifications of your operating hours, or you could just let us inside and be back to your book.” Mari beamed at him before peeking down at the pages in his hand. “And that’s such a great one. I love Baudaire’s use of color.”
The doorman and his scraggly goatee loosed one unimpressed laugh. Mari laughed, too, and then unexpectedly rushed him, trying to dodge past his hulking torso for the doors.
Before either Griffin or I could move for them, the man caught Mari around the middle and threw her back into the snowy ground. She went down hard, taking a spool of rope and a broken chair along with her. “Your woman,” the maggot spit toward Griffin and me as he sat back down, “is insufferable.”
Rage forced my tongue against my teeth. Breathe…We could not fuck this—
Griffin laughed once. Still bleeding from his ribs and brow, that laugh blunt and mean. His eyes found the fading sky as if in apology before his fist slammed so hard into the man’s jaw, it wasn’t just spit that flew as he toppled from his chair. It was teeth.
Even without his Fae strength, the entire building trembled with the force of the man’s body smacking the brick façade, and snow tumbled down in heaps.
In two hundred years, Griffin had successfully stopped me from clocking at least two dozen men. He’d failed at holding me back more than double that. And in all those years—all those tavern fights and violent brawls, men who deserved it and those who didn’t—I’d never seen my commander strike someone out of impulse. The man couldn’t even buy a new pair of boots without debating it for weeks.
“Holy Stones!” Mari shrieked from the ground. Griffin offered her his mangled hand—our lilium tea meant those fractured fingers weren’t
righting themselves anytime soon—and then, noting the damage, offered her his other one instead.
Mari allowed him to yank her up as she yelped, “You killed him.”
“No,” Griffin bit out, flexing his hand when she released it. “I didn’t.”
I leaned over the body, out cold and leaking blood into the stone and snow. His chest rose and fell, and I sighed. “When he wakes, he’ll wish you had, though.” I looked back up to my beleaguered friends. “Come on.”
Per Griffin, on any given night, the Neck Romancer was a glamorous kaleidoscope of light and color and skin and song. Clinking glasses and alluring peals of laughter and enough decadent food and liquor to flood Willowridge twice over.
But the theater we walked into was empty and quiet.
The vaulted ceiling was shadowed, its hundreds of dangling crystal chandeliers still unlit. Heavy, bloodred velvet curtains framed the main stage, pulled off to the side by gilded rope. The balconies above and tables below, all of which surrounded that broad stage, sat empty, though some had a yet-to-be-dressed performer dozing off inside them.
Stale tobacco smoke and perfume thickened the air in my nose, and to our right a coughing man replaced one risqué poster of a blushing woman hiding her breasts with another one of virtually the same image.
Somewhere, one of Ethera’s melographs oozed out a slow metallic accordion tune, and behind the curtains a sultry voice vocalized low, easy warm-ups.
Across the stage, lit only by oil lamps and candles, dancers practiced a provocative performance in various stages of undress. Some twirled in faded, ruffled petticoats clearly worn just for practice, while others leapt in sensual lace silhouettes, with tights that crisscrossed up their legs and silky satin gloves. The troupe rehearsed before a woman whose face had been painted to resemble a pouty jester. She tapped her leather-bound foot in a rhythm for them to follow.
“Hey,” I called to her, pushing past shiny red booths and high wooden tables. “We need to speak with your proprietor. Urgently.”
The entire stage’s attention fell to me and I watched as most faces lit with fear while a scarce few sparked with lust. Those women offered heavy- lidded, finger-twinkling waves; one who was lacing herself into a harness tethered to some sort of trapeze blew me a kiss.
I grimaced.
“Anya will know where he is,” the head dancer replied, jerking her painted chin toward a woman over by the tables.
I maneuvered past two men hefting an ornate theatrical mirror through the booths and found Anya bent over a dining table, flattening out a tablecloth. She wore nothing but puffed, frilly bloomers that offered a scandalous peek at her curved bottom and hosiery that resembled a fisherman’s net, climbing up her legs and stopping in the middle of her thighs. Her lean back was expertly cinched in a corset of rich indigo.
“Anya? We’re looking for—”
When she turned to face me, I was greeted with two supple, bouncing breasts.
Tiny circles of fabric dotted with a single tassel carefully concealed Anya’s nipples. That velvet corset dipped low in the front beneath both breasts, which struck me as senseless—supporting the woman’s chest was the very purpose of the garment.
“Me?” she purred, rolling a single finger down my shoulder to my waistband. “Certainly I have what you’re looking for?”
“Not even close,” I admitted. “Hearken Sadella. Where is he?”
Anya rolled her eyes, which had gone from heavy-lidded with interest to morosely bored. “Who’s asking?”
“An investor. And longtime admirer of his establishment.”
Those long-lashed eyes, lids doused with a glittering sheen, popped right back open. “A patron of the arts…Oh, la, la,” she sang. “Stay right there. Sir will be glad to meet you.”
He made all these women call him sir? It was already going to be a phenomenal effort not to relieve Aleksander of his fingernails before asking him to help us. I didn’t know how many more reasons to revile him I could take.
“This place is kind of magical, isn’t it?” Mari asked, returning to us with a fresh rag she’d swiped from somewhere. She pressed it to Griffin’s ribs and then dabbed his brow and sliced arms.
“I don’t know, I guess.” Griffin rubbed his hand across the back of his neck as she worked, blushing like a schoolgirl. “Thank you, for this. I can probably take it from—”
“It’s just the chandeliers, I think,” Mari continued, grinning up at him. “I love their intricacy. I wonder what they look like all lit up.”
“Yeah.” Griffin nodded, eyes on the crystals above us. “It would definitely be…bright.”
Evidently, my commander had been woefully underprepared for what he’d do if Mari ever stopped harassing him and showed him even an ounce of interest. She tapped her foot a bit, waiting for him to say more—anything else at all—but he didn’t.
I fought the urge to knock their heads together.
The provocative dancer returned from behind a single dark satin curtain with a frown.
“Apologies, Sir is a tad indisposed. May I suggest you return when we open in a few hours?” Anya leaned closer once she reached me, her candy- apple breath whispering against my chin. “For you, patron, I’ll open whenever you tell me to.”
Irritation prickled along my skin. Wrapping my hands around the woman’s slender shoulders, I hefted her up and deposited her a foot away from me. Her disgruntled humph didn’t even register as I made for the still- swaying curtain.
“You can’t go down there. Excuse me! Hello!”
Anya didn’t do much else to stop us slipping behind the roped-off fabric. The girl had likely seen enough unsavory acts in this place that she knew when to steer clear. She hadn’t even balked at Griffin’s blood-soaked body.
We hurried down an old wooden staircase adorned with little twinkling elvish lights. If I squinted, the corridor almost resembled a night sky.
Breathy, pleading moans echoed through the darkened stairwell and a sneer warped my face.
Mari’s feet stalled, her voice echoing a similar distaste. “That better not be—”
“It is,” Griffin grunted behind us.
The low ceiling at the bottom of the stairs told me we were standing just below the Neck Romancer’s main stage. The shallow basement had been converted into some kind of tiring-room, and candles dousing their votives in melting wax flooded the space in flickering shadow. The scents of s*x and tobacco mingled with old wood and oily makeup. On a tufted, red leather couch that sagged in the corner, a kneeling man was tongue-deep in a very vocal performer.
“Fuck,” the woman groaned, face wound tightly. “Fuck, fuck do not stop
—”
“Or do,” I offered, leaning against the stairs.
Her wanton whimper warped into a shrill cry of surprise as her eyes sprang open to find myself, Griffin, and a stunned, pale-faced Mari. I unleashed a chilling grin that I hoped said, Correct. Now scram.
The still-panting woman snapped her legs shut so fast she nearly took Aleksander’s infamous head with her as she yanked her checkered skirt and its many layers of tulle down and scrambled off the couch. Breezing past us in a cloud of flustered apologies, I only caught a flash of those eerie, glowing red eyes as they lingered on Griffin’s body before she careened up the stairs.
Aleksander stood, his back still to us, and I worked my jaw free of its iron vise on my teeth. Then I unfurled my fists and flexed my taut palms. And then, for good measure, I breathed. Deeply.
“Aleksander,” I tried. It did not come out friendly. Not by a mile. Aleksander’s long shock-white hair swayed at his back as he stood.
When he turned, he was wiping blood off his lips, grave red eyes glowing. “What have you done to yourself, Ravenwood?”
Griffin’s head snapped sidelong toward me and I tensed my jaw. Aleksander, like all Hemolichs, could scent quite a bit from someone’s blood. Their fear, arousal, health. And, clearly, that I had been made full- blooded.
When I didn’t answer, Aleksander leaned his long neck to the side until a crack sounded loudly across the hidden den. “Are you here to kill me?”
“Actually,” I gritted out, my smirk laced with venom, “I need a favor.”
