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“I wouldn’t recommend it, my queen,” I say, though I can’t provide a valid reason without lying or delving into the morality of the situation. If the queen is bringing it up, then it’s already passed her elusive standard for right and wrong, and there’s no use in taking that approach.
“But you agree it would be more likely to be effective?”
I have to clench my jaw a bit when I answer, like my body is fighting being complicit in this. “I suppose it would eliminate one of the less stable variables.”
“I see.” The queen strokes the urn absentmindedly before setting it back on the workbench. In its place, she picks up the life-giving vial and caresses it.
When she shoves the vial to my lips and tips it back, it’s only instinct and shock that cause my throat to swallow.
I am no longer.
There is darkness and death and the echo of screams, but it is not my ears that hear them. Not my tongue that tastes the bitterness of death.
Inky waters engulf me, filling my lungs and sticking like tar to my ribs.
I am so very hungry.
Someone is laughing, but it is not me.
“Nox. Nox, my boy.”
I roll over in bed. Perhaps if Father thinks I’m still asleep, he’ll take pity on me and allow me to stay in bed a few minutes longer.
Besides, the sun is not yet up.
Everything is so dark.
“Nox, you presumptuous fool.”
My ears twitch, because it is not like my father to call me a fool. Zora—perhaps, because she’s most often deserving of the title, but never me.
But now that I think of it, the voice doesn’t sound like my father’s. It sounds like Gunter.
I’m plunged into a slumber of shadows and ashes and screams.
The next time I wake,I know I am not where I should be. I’m well enough aware that it wasn’t my father’s voice I was hearing earlier; it was Gunter’s. Something must have gone horribly wrong for him to slip and call me by my name.
But I am no longer with Gunter, either.
The twinge of copper coats my tongue, and I wonder if I bit through my cheek in my feverish haze. My stomach feels as if it’s going to burst, like an overfilled wineskin, and when I roll over, the contents of my gut slosh about.
The coppery scent hits me when I move, and something wet and sticky stains my forearm.
There’s something cold, too. Cold and clammy and…
I open my eyes and immediately regret doing so. A pale, limp arm brushes against my nose, and when I jolt back, the woman doesn’t stir.
It would be strange if she did, for she is very, very dead.
Fresh blood coats her front, though I can’t find the wound from which it originates. She is young, hardly older than I am, but her face is drained of color.
I jolt away, frantically searching my environment for any sign of the creature or being who might have done this to her. My stomach rolls over in my gut, cramping, as I examine the room. It’s small, with only a cot in the corner, no rug to soften the slatted floors.
The woman’s blood drips through the gaps in the slats.
There’s a window on the wall facing us, but it’s been covered with cheaply woven drapes. A latrine hides in the shadows, and a small chest sits at the end of the bed, but there is nothing here to see but the few possessions of a poor city-dweller.
There is no monster to be found.
