Page 20 of Turncloak

Hells, he needed to replenish, and fast. If someone tried to take him down now, they might well succeed. He vowed to go for a long, brutal run. Ten miles, twenty, enough to hurt badly, so badly it was good, enough to begin the process of refilling his well.

For Levan, pain and pleasure had always been two sides of the same coin. He could not refill his well with a simple cup of hot cocoa, because on some level, he did not believe he was deserving of pleasure at all. No, he had to suffer for it.

Then again, perhaps there was a simpler way.

Loxlure.

A small stash of the black substance was tucked away in his desk drawer; an omnipresent test of will. A test he was dangerously close to failing.

Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s lifeless body, the shocked peel of his dead stare. Heard the hoot of an owl overhead, the judder of time as Saffron inelegantly paused and unpaused it, her body lurching across the room in uneven fits and starts, uncanny, arachnid-like. Felt a deminite shard through his palm, draining away his very lifeblood.

Loxlure would ease the memories in a way nothing else could, like fresh water cleansing blood from a wound until it ran clear. All the tense muscles and rattling bones in his body would soften. The shooting agony in his wrist would melt to nothing. The questions in his mind, too big for the cage of his skull—how to lead, how to find another necromancer, how to exist alongside the silver traitor he had so loved—would shrink and shrink until he could roll them in his palm like dice.

Oblivion called his name, and it took every shred of willpower he possessed not to answer.

11

• • • •

A Rookie with a Grudge

Saffron loathed the kingpin’s office. The black walls with bolted-in manacles, designed to hold victims in place as they were branded. The heavy red velvet drapes, in which Porrol Vogolan had concealed himself on the night Saffron was initiated. The soot-streaked hearth, once fiercely hot all the time, stifling, oppressive, but today cold and coated with ash.

Levan sat at his father’s old desk, cleared of its old paraphernalia: the bowl of sentient eyeballs, the stacks of correspondence, the miniature golden hourglass. Instead sat only a hexagonal gold teapot, three tea-bag tabs dangling over the handle. Saffron knew exactly what Levan was straining from the scent alone: clove tea, “for the curing of anguish.”

There was something faded, something internally bruised about him. Grief, perhaps. He’d run for three hours that morning, which struck Saffron as vaguely obscene. She badly wanted to be soft with him, to insist he rest and eat and recover, to knead his sore muscles in a gently suggestive manner, but forced herself to match his cool indifference.

Perhaps cool indifference was needed, given what she was about to do.

Levan gave her a terse nod. Rasso snored emphatically from his sprawl along the fireplace as Saffron lifted her wand to her mouth.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan.”

Levan and Saffron had argued for hours over whom inside the Order she should target as a new bridge. Saffron felt it should be Tenébo Jebat, who already knew the dead captain had sent someone into the scarlet lair. Levan had compelled the information out of Jebat in the Havenwood: Aspar has an undercover Silvercloak in the Bloodmoons. I don’t know who, but they’re close to you. Jebat was also a kind, merciful mage, trusting when it mattered, a believer in the honor code among detectives, willing to bend the rules in the name of the greater good. Saffron couldn’t imagine a better handler.

But Levan had insisted she approach Auria.

Saffron was reluctant. Not only had Auria not believed Saffron about the assignment in the Havenwood, but she wasn’t senior enough to action anything significant on Saffron’s behalf. There was also the fact that Saffron still cared deeply for her former friend—after all that had happened with Tiernan, the prospect of ensnaring Auria tighter in the crimson web was agonizing.

Yet Saffron would have to heed Levan’s orders if she wanted to stay beneath the scarlet wing, if she wanted access to his vast vaults of ascenite when the time came to unmake twenty years and save her parents. Auria, Jebat, what would it matter in the end?

Auria, however, did not answer.

“Et vocos, Auria Marriosan,” Saff tried again.

Only silence; long, defiant, poignant somehow.

Saffron lifted her gaze to Levan, who watched with a keen coldness not unlike his late father’s. She tried not to shiver. “I told you—this isn’t the right way to reestablish contact. Auria isn’t senior enough, and is such a sanctimonious rule follower that she won’t engage with—”

Levan held up a golden palm. “I found her betrothed’s body in the crypt and had it deposited outside the precinct with a note implying our involvement. She’ll want to know what happened to him.”

The kingpin delivered this information as though discussing dry foreign policy and not the crude murder of her old friend. Despite her vivid experience with his callousness, Saffron still felt a lurch of horror. All the caring instincts she’d felt toward Levan withered and died.

Tiernan had been handed over in the most brutal way possible. Saffron might have had the chance to revive him, to rewrite his terrible fate, but now…

Auria would be destroyed.

Saff swallowed the grief, the disgust. It would all be unmade eventually, if she played her hand right. In the version of reality where her parents survived, so too would Tiernan. Whatever happened between now and then was entirely impermanent—though it was hard to convince her roiling stomach as such.