“Sorry,” I said to Zosa when the cage tipped sideways. I winced when my sister’s tiny feet scrambled and her body slammed against the bars. Her beak tapped down on my thumb. “Not now.” I shifted the cage so it wasn’t crooked.
She cooed. Too loud.
Yrsa shouted something to Sido. My heart raced. Hugging the cage, I dipped into Cheat’s Alley.
“You might as well give up.”
I turned. Yrsa stood twenty paces away. She tapped her right eye. “Only need to catch you once.” Sido came up behind her.
I stumbled backward until my elbows knocked glass. The alchemist’s cart. My fingers wrapped around a bottle.
Yrsa flung an arm across Sido’s chest, stopping him.
I glanced down. The bottle was filled with a swirling silver mist I recognized instantly. A skeletal hand reached out, its bony claws clicking the inside of the glass, same as in the salon.
Bottled nightmare.
“Put it down,” the alchemist who ran the cart said in a harsh whisper. “That stuff is undiluted. If it gets out it’ll give you terrible visions.”
“Don’t be reckless,” Yrsa shouted.
I started slowly lowering the bottle. But when Sido lurched forward, reckless was all I had left.
“Hold your breath,” I said to the alchemist.
She looked on in horror as I slammed the bottle against the ground. It burst on impact and shot up in a brilliant silver plume, like a drop of ink in water, and spreading just as fast. I barely had time to cover my nose and mouth. I didn’t think to shut my eyes. I only blinked when the oily silver cloud misted my face and seeped into the back of my throat. The world turned velvet black. Screams erupted and Cheat’s Alley became a nightmarish scene straight from that terrible bottle.
My right hand held Zosa’s cage, while my other hand felt around the alchemist’s cart. I gagged. The thick mist coating my eyes made my skin crawl, but what I saw was worse.
It’s not real. It’s the nightmare twisting my senses, I told myself. Just walk.
I smelled rotting flesh as I passed things that no longer resembled women. I cried out when a massive black worm wriggled against the alley wall. A forked tongue flicked out. It lapped my neck, wet and rough. Below it, a stone statue turned to me and blinked. It lifted its clawed hand and plunged it down its own throat. A woman’s scream filled the air.
In the center of the alley, a tall thing stalked forward, blood dripping from an empty eye socket, one single eye remained. The right side of its body looked as if a piece of it had been ripped away.
Sido.
He thrashed his head from side to side, backing away from the other nightmarish creatures dotting the alley. I knew Sido was still a man, and it was just the nightmare playing tricks on my eyes, but I still gagged.
“Jani!” Yrsa’s voice boomed. A figure stepped forward. It looked like Yrsa but not. She was now taller than everything, looming over us.
Run, I thought. Except I stood frozen in place, watching the thing that was Yrsa. She leaned against the alley wall, wiping at her eyes.
There was nothing where her eyes should be. The holes oozed white liquid, as if she were weeping tears of the not-milk.
She walked toward me as if she could still see. Her mouth opened. Each of her teeth came to razor-sharp points.
“You can’t leave us, you realize,” Yrsa said. Her tongue snapped out like the lash of a scorpion’s tail. Then she pulled a piece of porcelain from her own pocket, rolling it in her hand. A threat. When she held it up, everything inside me stilled.
“Who does it belong to?”
“You already know the answer to that.”
A strangled noise came from my throat. I wanted to swipe the porcelain piece from her fingers, but Sido had already come up behind her. I couldn’t risk it. I had to go.
“The ma?tre wants you inside by two or he’ll snap this in half himself. Now that you’ve seen firsthand what my teacup can do, I suspect I’ll see you shortly,” she said, waggling the piece of porcelain. It wasn’t an eye—it was a finger, but not Zosa’s petite one.
This porcelain finger belonged to a man.
I stumbled down more cobbled streets, through a city full of beasts, trying to stop crying.
Not real, not real, I chanted to myself, picking my way to the banks of the Noir. At the iron rail, I finally stopped running. Zosa squawked when I dropped her cage and vomited.
Even with the nightmare, Zosa still appeared the same. She pecked at my hand, quivering. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I tried rubbing her feathers, but she bristled at the touch, her eyes squeezing shut. “We’ll fix it all, I promise.”