The Paper Magician

Blowing out a foggy breath, Ceony moved forward, squinting into the darkness until she spotted a door left ajar across the massive room, just past the hanging loops of entrails and sausages. She hurried for it, the steps of her shoes horribly loud. Dusky taupe light filled the small room the door had guarded—a storage room—and Ceony found Emery turned away from her. His drooping shoulders heaved with every breath. The police chief stood beside him, rubbing his mustache and grimacing. Like a switch flicked on, the warehouse behind Ceony filled with officers carrying lanterns, as though Emery’s heart had waited for this specific moment to include them in the vision. None blew whistles—none even spoke. They walked around, investigating, some seeming unsure what to do with themselves.

Fennel growled with his head between Emery’s legs. Stepping around the chief and the paper magician, Ceony looked out onto the scene.

Her body tensed all at once, and so much bile filled her throat she couldn’t keep it down. She barely managed to turn her head before vomiting over the cement floor. It stung her throat and sinuses. Her stomach pressed in and up, in and up, over and over until not a single drop more could be squeezed from it.

Even if the others had been able to see her, her retching wasn’t enough to get their attention away from what lay before them:

Bodies.

Pieces and halves of bodies, human bodies, just like the pieces and halves of the animals in the next room. Ceony couldn’t look twice, but her memory—curse her memory!—had seen enough. To know that image . . . the image of headless men, women sawed in half, and children missing their hearts, their chests filled with maggots . . . to know that image would never, never leave her mind . . . Ceony would have wept had she not felt so dry, sore, and sandy inside.

They smelled no different. They smelled no different than the animals, and Ceony found herself grateful to have the scent of her own sickness on her tongue instead of tasting those poor, dead, and ruined people in her mouth.

“So close,” the police chief murmured. “So close. They’re gone now. This one’s fresh, and this one. So close.”

Shuddering, Ceony looked up to Emery’s face, his eyes wide and sunken, his skin pale, his chapped lips parted. Though he did not speak, she could hear his thoughts. Because of me, they said. Because I let her go. They died because my heart was too weak.

She could see it ripping him from the inside: the creased layers in his forehead, the tautness of his neck, the wet gloss of his eyes. She breathed, spat, wiped her mouth. Emery’s guilt pressed into her like the hot throbbing walls of the valves, suffocating her. It made the air thick and tart, and she knew that this room was something he still carried with him. Even without a perfect memory, no one could forget this. No one could ever forget how this felt.

Steam billowed in the corners of Ceony’s vision and the damp smell of iron clung to her sinuses. Despite the horror before her and Thane’s obvious pain, this caught her attention.

Streams of crimson whipped around her, bubbling and broiling. They sailed for her like snakes before taking sharp turns in their paths, instead colliding into the carnage of the storage room. They evaporated the corpses, the shelves, and the boxes—everything but the walls, the police chief, and Emery himself, who still gaped at where the bodies had been, his eyes wide and sunken, his dry lips parted in disbelief and self-hate. He didn’t see Ceony, nor did he see Lira—the true, present, and very real Lira—who approached Ceony with wild eyes from the room’s only door, bubbling blood dripping from her fingers. The very reincarnation of the devil from hell, the villain of every fairy tale cut into pieces and sewn into a patchwork that had once been beautiful.

Ceony paled at the sight of Lira’s dripping hands, at the thought of just how Lira’s magic worked, at what sort of horrid thing—like ripping the heart from a child—an Excisioner would have to do to make blood boil. Blood that hadn’t touched Ceony, despite it being aimed at her.

Ceony touched the paper shield chain around her and staggered to her feet, backing away from the raven-haired woman who seemed more than a touch upset that her spell hadn’t taken effect.

But Lira hadn’t touched her. Thank God, she hadn’t touched her. Not yet. Ceony didn’t want to think—

Lira pulled that same dagger from her belt and raked it across her palm, spilling her own dark blood into her hands. She mumbled something hard and foul and shot the droplets forward. Each crimson bead steamed and warped with invisible fire, but before they struck Ceony, the paper chain crossing her chest pulsed, deflecting them into the surrounding walls. The blood dulled the details of the vision, sucking mortar from between bricks and specks of color from the cement floor. Emery began to fade.

A door appeared to Ceony’s right, beside the dissipating paper magician. Not a white door rimmed with scarlet, but a red door edged with shadow.

“No!” Lira shouted, blood raining onto the floor. She ran for Ceony, red hands outstretched.

Ceony bolted through the door before Lira could grab her, Fennel at her ankles. But instead of the red walls of Emery’s heart, she found herself once more in the dark office lit with a single starry window. Back to where she had started. Shadows moved before her, predatory. Ceony’s own heart ebbed within her chest.

She had been trapped.





CHAPTER 13