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Her eyes told me she wasn’t lying. They brimmed with pain and cold anger, a kind of fury that had burned like a fire but had been repressed for so long, it crystalized into ice. This woman suffered in ways I couldn’t even imagine. People said the eyes were the windows to the soul. If that was true, her soul was raw.
Karat was perfectly still, like a statue.
“There is a price on the Sovereign’s head. It’s enough to buy a whole fleet,” the woman said.
“But it’s not the money, is it?” I asked.
“No. He wants to outdo his father and his siblings. This act would bring him great prestige and honor among those he seeks to rule one day.”
“He’s aiming for the pirate throne,” Karat said.
The woman nodded and put her hood back in place. “Now you know where to look. You can verify everything I said. I ask only that you do not kill him. He and his father owe me a debt for the deaths of my parents.”
“Do you think you can collect what’s owed?” I asked.
“All I need is a small window of opportunity. A shot.” The woman bared her fangs. They were long and slender like those of a cobra.
“You know where the door to my inn is,” I said. “If what you say is true, tomorrow would be a good time to linger outside of it.”
“I have no reason to trust you,” she said.
“I know her and her sister. They do not lie. You will have your shot. Don’t waste it,” Karat said.
The woman turned and walked away, disappearing into the building. The door slid shut behind her.
We started for the stairs.
“Do you believe her?” the vampire knight asked.
“Trust but verify,” I murmured. And I knew just the person who could get me the information I needed in a fraction of the time.
A cold, nasty feeling bloomed in my spine, as if icy, rotting slime dripped onto the back of my neck. Revulsion squirmed through me. I knew this magic.
“Stop!”
Karat froze with her foot an inch off the ground.
A creature moved up the stairs. Its long, tattered robe, so much like my own, swept the stones as if it floated rather than walked. Wide sleeves hid its hands, and the inside of its deep hood was darkness.
Karat put her foot down and pulled her sword from her thigh. Bright red light burst from the hilt, running through the veins within the blade. The blood weapon whined, priming.
The corrupted ad-hal emerged onto the terrace and faced us, blocking our escape. The light caught the bottom half of its face, and I saw the outline of a pale, leathery jaw. We had nowhere to go. The staircase and the building next to it were in front of us. The weapons shop was behind us, and I highly doubted the mystery woman would let us in.
The creature raised its right arm. Its sleeve fell back, revealing a monstrous hand clenched into a fist. The corrupted ad-hal opened its long, clawed fingers. A clump of longish hair fell onto the stones, black shot through with gray.
Goosebumps slid up my arms. Wilmos.
“Someone you know?” Karat asked, her gaze fixed on the creature.
“Yes. This thing shoots lightning. Don’t try to block it.”
A phantom wind stirred the corrupted ad-hal’s robe. Fetid magic condensed around it, like a nauseating cloud.
“Is he alive?” I asked it.
The ad-hal didn’t answer.
“What do you want? What can I trade you for his life?”
The magic pulsed, so intense I almost gagged.
Something leaped off the roof of the building in front of us. It plunged through the air and smashed into the ad-hal.
The werewolf woman. Oh no.
She ripped into it, stabbing the robe in a frenzy with two blood-red knives. The ad-hal grabbed her and flung her off. She flew, smashed into the building behind the staircase with a crunch, and slid down.
The creature’s magic sparked, spawning orange lightning between the fingers of both hands. It leveled one ball at us and the other at the werewolf woman.
“Stay behind me!” Karat barked and charged.
The werewolf woman rolled into a crouch on the stairs and leaped at the ad-hal.
The creature hurled the twin lightning balls. I lunged left, Karat lunged right, and the blinding sphere tore between us. The second ball caught the werewolf in midleap. She’d tried to twist out of the way, but it splashed over her side and back in a burst of white flame. She screamed, the sound of pure agony, and collapsed onto the terrace, writhing in pain.
My body remembered being hit with that lightning. It felt like being thrust into the center of a star, drowning in an unimaginable, searing, unbearable pain that set the marrow of your bones on fire. It had almost killed me. The echo of that pain rolled through my body. Fear filled me, pushing out everything else.
