She rushed forward, banishing the call of Mortem, speaking before she even knew what words were on her tongue. “You found them!”
Jean-Paul and Curly Mustache turned toward her, the bloodcoat she’d interrupted looking up with a curious wrinkle in his forehead. She snatched the box, open lid pressed to her chest. “Father sent me, I’m so sorry I’m late.”
Curly Mustache cocked his head. “Would your father perhaps be Alaric, girl?”
Damn her breasts. She thought this shirt would be baggy enough to obscure them, but she’d never had the kind of chest that was hidden easily. “Yes,” Lore said, standing up straighter, making her smile wider. “He’s been so upset, I’ve broken too many jars trying to load them one by one, we need the boxes immediately…”
She backed up as she spoke, rapid-fire words and smiles, inching the contraband closer to the old storefront. The trapdoor inside would lead to the catacombs, and the uncanny map in her head said the tunnels nearby were empty. If she could just get the boxes through the door—
Her foot hit a pebble and slipped sideways, throwing her off balance. The box tumbled from her hands.
Mandrake carved a green swath over the cobblestones.
For a moment, they all stood in tableau, Jean-Paul and Lore and the bloodcoats and the big, placid horse Val kept only for poison running, the one Lore affectionately called Horse because no one had ever actually named him.
Then, a heartbeat, and with a cry of triumph, Curly Mustache charged forward.
“Run!” Lore threw herself sideways toward the mouth of the alley where she’d hidden, drawing her dagger. Her foot twisted beneath her, made her fall to her knees, the crack of it whiting out her vision. Gloved hands closed roughly on her shoulders, hauled her up.
The bloodcoats were a chaos, and Horse responded, rearing and upsetting the cart, sending it careening toward onlookers. Jean-Paul yelled wordlessly, trying to grab Horse’s bridle. The creature’s whinny sharpened in fear, hooves slicing at the morning sky as bloodcoats surrounded them. Jean-Paul dove for the reins, but he wasn’t fast enough to wheel Horse around and away; a bayonet ripped through the animal’s throat, and it collapsed into a heap of shuddering meat.
Lore’s vision was still watery as she tried to throw a punch at the bloodcoat holding her, swiping out with her dagger blade between the fingers of her fist. Another bloodcoat caught her arm and twisted it back hard enough for her to feel the bones grind, a breath away from breaking. A harsh, choked noise erupted from her throat, a cry aborted by the bayonet’s cold muzzle, the pointed end grazing her windpipe. Three of them had her now—two holding her arms, and one with a gun. Not very good odds.
The pricking feeling sparked in her palms again, cold awareness slithering through her limbs.
“Move and I’ll shoot,” the bloodcoat with the bayonet snarled. “And a shot through the neck doesn’t make for a quick end.”
Her fingers trembled, the Mortem seeping out from the catacombs and Horse’s dying body making them itch. Lore hadn’t channeled it in thirteen years, had pressed it all into the back of her mind and left it there to rot. But now, the awareness of it nearly drowned her.
Awareness, and instinct. Her hands burned with the desire to call Mortem up from every dead place where it waited, to channel it through her body and make it do her bidding. Resisting made her head light, her breathing shallow.
Half the bloodcoats went for the spilled mandrake, but their leader was focused only on Jean-Paul. He caught him by the arm; Jean-Paul tried to go for the hidden dagger in his coat, hands stained with Horse’s viscera—poor Horse—but the bloodcoat brought the bayonet end to his throat before he could reach it.
“Don’t make me fire,” the bloodcoat snarled through his bloody mustache. “They could use someone like you in the mines on the Burnt Isles.” A guttural laugh. “Your girl, too. She looks strong enough for a shovel.”
A bullet would be preferable to the mines. Lore had heard of more than one poison runner who slit their own throat rather than be made to live the rest of a cut-short life in the dark and dust of the Burnt Isles.
Dark. Dust. Death. All of it swirled around her, coppery blood and an emptiness that abraded her sinuses. Black mist rose from Horse’s body, coalescing into dark threads that only a channeler could see, seeping from the eyes, the slack mouth. Mortem. Calling to her.
Use it.
Lore didn’t know if it was truly a voice she heard, or just the firing of her own brain, desperate to do something, to use whatever it could.
A distraction, that’s what they needed. Something that would allow her to run, something awful enough to pull the bloodcoats’ focus so Jean-Paul could escape. It was too late for her. Lore was caught, and what she did in these next few moments wouldn’t change that.
The choice was between the Burnt Isles or a pyre. In the end, it didn’t make that much difference, if it meant Jean-Paul could go back to his family.
Distraction it was, then. And as soon as Lore made the decision, her body went to work.
She took a deep breath and held it in her lungs, letting instinct take over, drive her as it had before. She’d been born to this, to the magic and the dark, and every part of her but her mind was eager.
One moment everything was bright and lurid, and the next she saw only the barest impression of her surroundings, the world cloaked in grayscale as her lungs began to burn, her body tipped toward death. The bloodcoats and Jean-Paul and the living bodies of the crowd were all surrounded in auras of white light. The outline around Horse’s corpse leaked slowly from white to black, life leaving as death took over. Threads of Mortem waved in the air like spider legs, the black corona of an inverted sun.
Lore didn’t look down at herself as she slowly let her breath out, keeping her grip on Mortem strong, because she was in it now and the current of instinct had pulled her under. She knew what she looked like—her fingers cold and corpse-pale, her eyes shifting from hazel to opaque white. On her palm, the moon-shaped scar blazed like a beacon, a black glow that was the absence of light and yet so bright it hurt to look at. Over her heart, a knot of darkness swirled, a black star of emptiness hidden beneath her shirt.
She knew what she looked like, and it was death walking.
Her hands curled, pulling the dark matter that was the power of death inward, as if her Mortem-touched heart were a magnet. The threads waving over Horse’s body shuddered, then flowed toward her. They braided in the air and attached to her fingers, magic easily breaching the barrier of her skin.