At the mention of the Empire soldiers, Harkan tensed. “I don’t see any adatrox. Are you sure?”
A third scream—more desperate this time and quickly stifled.
“Whoever it is,” Eliana muttered, her voice tight and angry, “they’re close.”
“What? Who?”
“Arabeth’s next meal.” Eliana flashed Harkan a grin, then unsheathed Arabeth—the long, jagged-bladed dagger she kept at her hip. “Time to play.”
With one last peek at her reflection, she darted out from the shadows and into the cramped, grime-slicked alleyways of lower Orline. Harkan called after her; she ignored him. If he wanted to stop her, he could try, but she’d have him flat on his back in two seconds.
She smirked. The last time she’d pinned him like that, it had been to his bed.
She honestly couldn’t decide which context she preferred.
All the same, she didn’t want to start a fight just yet. Not when she had a girl-snatcher to hunt.
She entered the Barrens, slipping between patched tents and sagging wooden shacks dotted with dying fires. Beyond the Barrens crawled the wide Bruvian river, its banks clogged with piles of festering white moss.
Her first time in these slums, aged ten, she had nearly gagged from the smell. That had earned her a hard glare from her mother.
Now, eight years later, the stench hardly registered.
She scanned the night: A beggar picking the pockets of an unconscious drunkard. A gaunt young man, coifed and powdered, coaxing a woman through a painted door.
Another scream. Fainter. They were heading for the river.
The feeling crawling up her spine magnified. It felt—she knew no other way to describe it—as though it had a will.
She placed her hands on her knees, squeezed her eyes shut. Spots of color danced behind her eyelids. On the battered wooden support beam beside her, someone had scrawled a childish drawing of a masked woman in black, leaping through the air with a knife in each hand.
Despite the ill feeling blotting her vision, Eliana couldn’t help but grin.
“El, for the love of the saints, what are you doing?” Harkan came up beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“Me? Hurt?” She swallowed hard against the sick feeling tightening her throat. “Dearest Harkan.” She gestured grandly at the drawing of herself. “How could you think such a thing of the Dread of Orline?”
She sprinted away and jumped off the top level of the docks onto another level about one hundred feet below. The impact jolted her with only a slight pain. She was up and running again in an instant. Such a fall would break Harkan’s legs; he’d have to take the long way down.
If Remy were there, he would tell her not to be so obvious.
“People have started to notice,” he had told her just the other day. “I hear talk at the bakery.”
Eliana, stretching on the floor of her bedroom, had asked innocently, “What kind of talk?”
“When a girl falls three stories and then jumps right back to her feet in the middle of the Garden Square, people tend to notice. Especially when she’s wearing a cape.”
Eliana had smiled at the thought of their gaping, awestruck faces. “And what if I want them to notice?”
Remy had been quiet for a long moment. Then: “Do you want Invictus to come and take you away from me?”
That had silenced her. She’d looked up at her little brother’s pale, pinched face and felt her stomach turn over.
“I’m sorry,” she’d told him quietly. “I’m such an ass.”
“I don’t care if you’re an ass,” he’d replied. “Just don’t be a show-off.”
He was right, she knew. The problem was, she liked showing off. If she was going to be a freak with a miraculous body that no fall could kill, then she might as well have fun with it.
If she was busy having fun, then she didn’t have time to wonder why her body could do what it did.
And what that meant.
Running through the docks, she followed the trail of wrongness in the air like tracking the scent of prey. The docks’ lowest level was quiet, the summer air still and damp. She ran around one corner and then another—and stopped. The scent, the feeling, roiled at the edge of this rickety pier. She forced her way forward, even though her churning stomach and every roaring ounce of her blood screamed at her to stay away.
Two figures—masked and wearing dark traveling clothes—waited in a long, sleek boat at the pier’s edge. Their tall, blunt builds suggested they were men. A third figure carried a small girl with golden-brown skin like Harkan’s. The girl struggled, a gag stuffed in her mouth, her wrists and ankles bound.