Speaking of Bex—he hauled himself up out of the makeshift hole, stood atop the heap that used to be Haskin’s shop, before the little bitch had brought the whole thing down on top of them. He shifted his feet, and the rocks and timber groaned beneath him. He paid no mind to the spectators now pouring into the street, some shocked, others merely curious. This was, after all, the shal, whose unofficial motto was: Mind your own business.
He looked around. No sign of Bex.
With any luck, she was dead beneath the wreckage.
Not that Calin ever had much luck.
He turned, scanning the buildings to either side, the alley and the road, and caught a twitch of movement, a girl-shaped shadow, sprinting away into the dark.
Calin smiled, blood and dust in his teeth.
He’d always been fond of the hunt.
He leapt down from his perch atop the ruins and landed hard, boots hitting the stone road. More blood dripped into his vision, and he wiped it away. The cut in his brow was deep—it would scar. One more mark to add to the tally.
Calin drew a blade from his belt, and started down the road.
* * *
Tes wove between the buildings in the dark.
She knew the shal better than the rest of London, knew it as well as anyone could when they weren’t born and raised among these narrow streets, knew it was a different place at night. The roads were always narrow, a warren of alleys, few wide enough for a carriage or a cart, but in the dark, those winding streets blocked out the light as well. Here and there, the Isle’s red glow tinted rooftops crimson, but no river or lantern could truly push the shadows back.
Luckily for Tes, and her strange eyes, the threads of power shone so bright that no place in the world was ever truly dark. But her feet were clumsy with panic, and unlike the rest of the city, the shal didn’t sleep at night; it came alive as the sun went down, despite the heavy dark, or perhaps because of it. Tes twisted her way through a midnight market, avoiding half a dozen low-lit stalls, only to collide with a group of bodies as they spilled out of a tavern, apologies tumbling out as she pushed past, Vares still shoved in her pocket, and the broken doormaker bundled against her chest.
The roads in the shal weren’t straight lines so much as circles, funneling you deeper in instead of out, as if the warren didn’t want to let you go, and while her head filled with the single, pressing need to run, her feet could only carry her so fast, so far, and she needed to get away, not just out of the shal, or even London, but somewhere no one could follow, and that was how she ended up kneeling in a darkened dead-end alley, the bundle open on the damp ground, the disassembled doormaker filling her vision.
“Come on, come on, come on,” she whispered as her hands flew over the threads.
She suddenly wished she hadn’t done such a thorough job taking it apart, but she’d always had a good memory for patterns once she’d made them work, and it was much easier to repeat a thing a second time than do it for the first.
The dead owl twitched and fluttered nervously in her pocket as if to say, Hurry, hurry.
“I know, Vares. I know.”
Her fingers moved quickly, reconstructing the pattern, tying off the knots she’d torn.
“Almost there.”
Something crashed behind her, and she jerked around, but it was just a drunkard, knocking a planter from a sill as he stumbled home. A few seconds later, a window slammed closed overhead. This time, she didn’t jump. Nor did she look up when she heard the footsteps trudging past the alley.
Not until they slowed. And stopped.
“Well, well,” said a voice like a mouth full of rocks.
Tes’s hands slid from the box as she turned to face him. Calin stood at the mouth of the alley, the green of his magic lighting him better than a streetlamp, glancing off the dagger in his hand, the lank hair plastered to his face. Dust and debris clung to his shoulders, and blood dripped from his temple to the corner of his mouth. His tongue swept across his lip, and found it.
“Bex was right,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “You are hard to kill.”
His gaze flicked to the alley behind her, which ended in a wall. “Nowhere to run,” he pointed out.
“You’d be surprised,” she said, meeting his gaze. “Erro.”
She heard the little box unfold, felt the door rise up behind her. Saw, out of the corner of her eye, the edge of the doorway carve itself across the air, felt the veil, and the draft coming through, carrying the scent of smoke and damp stone.
Calin’s eyes widened, his mouth twisting into a snarl as Tes stepped back, over the threshold. The world shuddered, and blurred, and through the veil, she saw the shape of him surging forward, his arm flung out.