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He nodded and turned, pushing through the kitchen doors. I drummed my fingertips on the counter… then glanced sideways to find the human girl’s eyes on me.
“So you’re a faerie?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Why aren’t you wearing a helmet and armor like the other faerie sentries?”
The word snagged my attention. Sentries? Queen Mydusia had sent our soldiers to help the humans protect and guard themselves from the vampires, but all I heard was trepidation in her voice when she spoke of them. Something about this entire place seemed… off, but I couldn’t let my attention deviate. Find a weapon with lead and other metals that were hard to come by in Sorronia and Eshol. That’s what I’d come to do. I could unravel this other mystery later.
“Guess I just don’t need the helmet and armor,” I settled on.
She wrinkled her nose at me. “Does that mean your power is something super deadly that could kill all of us in seconds?”
Shit, she’d said that loud. Conscious of all the attention as the voices behind us petered out once more, I settled on a question of my own. “What would you consider a super deadly power?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” The girl shrugged. “Maybe if you could sprout tentacles and sting everyone around you and then use them to swim through the air like a jellyfish until you made it all the way to the clouds. Or if you could whistle so loudly that the entire world would have to cover their ears or else everyone would explode. Or if you could create little cracks in someone’s body without them realizing until they suddenly crumble into a million pieces.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “I’m afraid mine’s not nearly as impressive as any of those.” Best not to mention that I had two powers in a room full of people who thought faeries only had one. And best to downplay what I could do. “I can read minds.”
As soon as I said it, a realization snapped into place within me. I could read minds, yet I hadn’t used my Mind Manipulating one single time since materializing in these streets. I had pushed the Sorronian soldier rather than commanding him to step away from me, and he hadn’t revealed a single hint of his own power to me.
Something truly was dampening our magic here.
And that thought made me smile.
At that moment, the bartender pushed through the kitchen doors again, his arms laden with trays of food balancing a mug of frothing ale. He took one look at my canines and hastily dropped the platters of what looked like worms over brown hunks of coal in front of us. The girl dug in immediately, hunched over as she shoved fistful after fistful into her mouth.
I cleared my throat as I took my mug.
“Is it usually this… quiet around here?”
The bartender paused mid-turn, nervous sweat sparkling on the back of his neck. “Used to be quite a bit busier, ‘m afraid. Nowadays, nobody wants to come out after sunset. But I’m sure you’re well aware, being…”
He trailed off, an unspoken question in the silence. Concentrating harder than I ever had on lowering my blockade, I rifled through the forefront of his mind to make sure I was on the right track. The sheer effort of using my magic here—like trying to swim through mud—made sweat bead on my own neck.
“I’m newly stationed,” I said. “Start my first shift tomorrow.”
“Well, that’s good.” The bartender’s forehead relaxed slightly. “God knows we need more help after Governor Eugan sent most of our own soldiers to the border last month.” He shook his head, wiping the counter again. “They’re coming in a different way, I tell you. A tunnel or portal or… shit, I don’t know. But our borders are goddamned airtight, I tell you, and the vampires just keep coming.”
“But you never actually see them in action?” I asked, choosing my words carefully and thinking of Ambassador Madran’s words: they leave their blood mark behind. On floors and windows and doors.
The bartender shook his head, eyes hardening… and tongue loosening, apparently. “Never, or else I’d stick a grenade up their marble assholes.”
“A grenade?” Where did someone like him get a grenade?
The bartender seemed to realize he’d said too much. Fortunately, I was still in his mind and able to pick out all the information anyway. With most of the guards sent away to the borders of Pliyith, the locals had taken to stealing from the armories and forming their own brigade whenever they could.
Fuck Calioke & Sons. An armory would work even better.
“Thanks for the drink.” Not that I’d even taken a sip, but I clinked some Sorronian coins on the counter and turned to make sure the girl had eaten her fill so that I could walk her back to… wherever she slept at night.
My smile slipped. Both her platter and mine were licked clean.
And the girl herself was gone.
“Where did you go?”
I slapped a canvas bag down on the floor of Nara and Barberro’s quarters, panting, muscles shaking. Out of all the rooms on the flagship, theirs had to be the strangest. Barberro had plastered dried flowers, rocks, feathers, and other random items to the wall for him to study with his magnifying sight, while Nara had bags of different herbs hanging from the ceiling, all of them swaying with the rock of the ship.
