“FERRO.”
The door obediently slammed shut, erasing Calin, and the shal, and the rest of London.
Tes stood, gasping for breath, not in an alley but on a lamplit street.
It was raining; not a heavy rain, but a light and steady drizzle, and the doormaker sat on the cobblestones at her feet. The night looked strange, and dim, but that made sense, it was a different night, a different world.
She’d done it. She was safe.
Tes let out a small, startled laugh that quickly died because it hurt.
She winced as a strange ache rolled through her stomach, warmth blooming across her front before sharpening into heat, and at first she thought it was just the aftermath of the blast, the chase, but when she looked down, she saw the strangest thing: a dagger’s hilt jutting out above her hip. But that was silly, she’d know if she’d been stabbed. She reached out, and touched the hilt, and as she did, the blade moved and the pain caught up, a blinding, burning thing beneath her ribs.
She acted on reflex—wrapped her hand around the blade, and pulled it out.
That, it turned out, was a horrible idea.
The pain turned white-hot, and Tes sagged to her knees in the street, stifling a scream.
Blood spilled between her fingers. She pressed down hard, even though it made her heart pound and another cry rise up her throat.
“Get up,” she hissed between clenched teeth, saying the words aloud to give them strength. Her body didn’t listen.
“Get up, get up, get up,” Tes chanted, as if it were a spell, and at the same time another voice called out, the words foreign, but almost familiar.
How strange, she thought, head spinning, it sounded like they were speaking High Royal. She and her sisters had all been taught, but it had been years now, language had gone stiff, unused, and she tried to translate now, but the pain made it hard to think. The voice shouted again, and this time, she swore she could make out the last word.
Street.
And then another sound, much closer; this one she recognized as the clatter of hooves, and Tes looked up just in time to see a horse and cart barreling toward her in the dark.
The driver yanked on the reins and the horse reared, turning hard, and the cart wheel broke, and the whole thing began to fall toward Tes and the doormaker on the ground. Her limbs came to life, and she swept up the box and dove out of the way just before the cart crashed down, splintering wood and spilling crates into the street where she’d just been.
Somehow, Tes kept moving. She half stumbled, half ran, trying to put distance between herself and the crash, made it half a block before the pain in her side dragged her to a stop. She sagged to the curb beneath an awning, one hand on the doormaker and the other on her wounded side. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think, but her thoughts were sluggish, slow to answer. She opened her eyes. Her vision was slipping, darkness creeping in, or so she thought, until she realized why the night light looked so strange.
There were no threads.
Not in the rain, which should have shimmered with strands of pale blue light.
Not in the lamps, which should have been shot through with tendrils of yellow.
Not in the road itself, which should have been woven with strands of earthy green.
In fact, the only threads she could see were the ones coiled around the doormaker, or spilling down her front, each drop burning with a filament of crimson light that faded moments after it fell.
A world without magic.
It might have been a nice reprieve, if she weren’t dying.
No, she told herself. Not dying. Not yet. She could fix this. Tes was very good at fixing broken things. Admittedly, she did it using magic, and there was no magic here, and she was a person, not a thing, but she was hurt, and hurt was a kind of broken, and she could fix it. She had to.
The owl in her pocket was fluttering nervously, and she was glad, at least, that he still worked. Glad she wasn’t alone. Even if the movement of skeletal wings against her wounded front hurt enough to make her stifle a sob.
She needed to stop the blood, she knew that much. Close the wound. Quiet the pain. The streets were lined with shops. Perhaps one had something she could use. It seemed like a lot of work.
Tes wanted to close her eyes again. To rest. Just for a moment.
Instead, she took a deep breath, and got to her feet.
* * *
Calin leaned against the alley wall, picking his nails.
“Why the fuck are you just standing there?” said a grating voice.
Still alive, then, he thought, as Bex stormed down the alley toward him. And they said he was hard to kill. She was bleeding from two or three places, and favoring one leg. It wasn’t as good as dead, but he’d take what he could get.