“It will.” Lore nodded, channeling confidence she didn’t quite feel. “Don’t worry.”
Val stood there a moment longer, mouth twisted. Then, whip-quick, she leaned forward and pressed her dry lips to Lore’s forehead. She was off the stoop and headed down the road before Lore’s teeth clicked shut, chasing the shock off her face. The old poison runner might be the closest thing Lore had to a mother, but she still wasn’t one for affection.
Lore’s brows stayed furrowed as she went back to the kitchen and collected her coffee again—though the look on Elle’s face said chances were high she’d spit in it—then drifted toward the stairs.
Could just be nerves. It’d been a while since Val picked up a new client. Most of the deathdealers they ran poison for were well established, dug into the underbelly of the city like rot in a tooth. Mari, Val’s partner, was historically picky about who the team took on. The two of them had raised Lore on tough love and hard choices, and be careful about who you let in was high on their list of lessons.
Maybe the collective coffers were low, though Lore couldn’t imagine why. It seemed to her like more and more people were gobbling down poison every day, stuffing their mouths with petals to chase power or death or a few hours of kaleidoscopic high.
Whatever. She’d never had a head for the business side of things. Just the running. Lore was good at running.
The stairs of the row house were rickety, like pretty much everything else, and the fourth one squeaked something awful. Lore made sure to grind her heel into it. Fifteen minutes weren’t much, and Michal needed the job with Val’s team. Even with rent taken care of, they could use all the coin they could get. She didn’t want him in the boxing ring again.
Michal had apparently heard the squeak. He was sitting up when Lore pushed aside the ratty curtain closing off their room, sheets tangled around his waist and dripping off the side of the mattress to pool on the floor. The light through the cracked windows caught his gold hair, so like his sister’s. He ran a hand through it and squinted at her. “Coffee?”
Lore leaned against the doorframe. “Last cup, but I’ll share if you come get it.”
“That’s generous, since I assume you need it.” He grumbled as he levered himself up from the floor-bound mattress, holding the sheet around his naked hips. “You had another nightmare last night.”
Her cheeks colored, but Lore just shrugged. The nightmares were a recent development, and random—she could never remember anything about them, nothing but darkness and the feeling of being trapped. Usually she could trace her dreams back to a source, pick out a piece and see how something she’d thought about that day had alchemized as she slept, but since the nightmares were so vague, she couldn’t figure them out. It made them more unsettling. “Sorry if I kept you up.”
“At least you didn’t scream this time. Just tossed and turned.” Michal took a long drink from her proffered mug, though his face twisted up when he swallowed. “Damn, that’s bitter.”
She didn’t tell him that the taste was probably not improved by his sister’s spit. “Val came by. We need to leave in fifteen minutes.”
Another squint. His eyes were blue, also like Elle’s, but deeper and warmer. If Elle’s eyes were morning sky, his were twilight. “Guess I’ll be late, then.” He leaned in and kissed her, mouth hungry and as warm as his eyes.
She kissed him back, just for a moment, before pushing him away. “If we don’t make it to the rendezvous point in time, it’ll be crawling.”
Michal frowned, concern cutting through the haze of heat and sleep. “I wish Val didn’t make you watch the drop point,” he said quietly. “It isn’t safe.”
The solemnity in his voice made her stomach swoop, for more reasons than one. Lore poked his shoulder, and her lips bent the corner of a smile. “I can take care of myself.”
“Doesn’t mean you should have to.”
Her wry smile flickered.
But Michal didn’t notice, running a hand through his hair to tame it while he bent to pull clothes from the piles on the floor. The sheet dropped, and Lore allowed herself an ogle.
“I don’t get why she always gives you the most dangerous jobs,” he said, voice muffled by thin cotton as he pulled a shirt over his head. “Didn’t she and Mari raise you? They act like your mothers, and then they send you to be the lookout. It doesn’t make sense.”
Lore just shrugged. She’d only given Michal her history in broad strokes, an outline she had no intention of ever filling in. He knew it, too, though sometimes he prodded. “Yes, they raised me, but that just means I know my shit,” she said, turning to slip her feet in her well-worn boots. “And we need to get a move on. Val won’t tolerate lateness, even if the guilty party is my…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She wasn’t quite sure how.
The mischievous curve to Michal’s mouth said he noticed. Now dressed, he crossed the room, hooking his hands languidly on her hips as she turned away to hide an answering smirk. He leaned forward, chest against her back, brushing his lips over the shell of her ear. “Your what?”
Lore turned, flicking his collarbone, biting her lip to keep it from turning up. “Mine,” she finished decisively, and let him kiss her again.
Still, cold clawed into her chest. She could feel Mortem everywhere, now, like her realization that it was somewhere it shouldn’t be had sharpened her perception of all the places where it should—the cloth of Michal’s trousers beneath her hands, the stones in the street outside, the chipped ceramic of the mug on the windowsill. Here on the outskirts of Dellaire she didn’t feel it as intensely as she would near the catacombs, near the Citadel, but it was still enough to make her skin crawl.
The Harbor District, on the southern edge of Dellaire, was as far as Mortem would let her go. She could try to hop a ship, try to trek out on the winding roads that led into the rest of Auverraine, but it’d be pointless. She was tied into this damn city as surely as death was tied into life, as surely as the crescent moon carved into her palm.
All of it, reminders—she shouldn’t linger too long. She shouldn’t get too close. It wasn’t safe.
Michal’s mouth found her throat, and she arched into him, closing her eyes like it might shut out the cold in her chest and the itch of so much death. Her fingers clawed into his hair, and his arm tightened around her waist like he might lift her up, carry her to their mattress on the floor, and forget all about running poison for Val. Forget about everything but safety found in skin.
She wanted to let him, and that was the decision-maker, in the end. Lore had to stop using people like fences, like moats, like things to wall herself in with.
Masking it as playful, she pushed Michal away. “Go. Val won’t wait.”
Blue eyes hazy, Michal pulled back. “Will you?”