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Lore took a deep breath. “Gabe, there’s something—”
But she was interrupted by a shape flying from the shadows and knocking her backward.
Her already-aching stomach felt like it was catching fire as her skull cracked against the dirty wall. Through the high-pitched ring in her ears, she heard Gabe shout, heard the sound of fists meeting flesh, a snarl that could only be Bastian.
The blow to the head made her vision blurry, but Lore pried her eyes open.
“You didn’t learn your lesson, huh?” There was something familiar about the voice; she’d heard it before. But there was an almost desiccated quality to it, now, as if the throat she’d heard it from the first time had been scoured out. “Doesn’t matter you’re a prince. Doesn’t matter you’re a lady. I need more money, and I know you fuckers have it.”
Lore’s vision stopped swimming gradually, making sense of the figure blocking the gas lamp’s light. He looked far worse than he had before—his large frame sagged, like he lacked the strength to hold it up, and lines of gray rock crisscrossed where his veins should be—but she recognized him. Milo, the bruiser who’d tried to shake Bastian down for more than his bet the last time they’d come to the ring.
Gabe was crumpled against the dirty brick, conscious but dazed, dark purple spreading over his temple. The handle of Bastian’s dagger stuck out of Milo’s shoulder, but the man didn’t seem to feel it at all. His veins were so full of stone, it was a miracle the blade struck through his skin at all. The man had dosed himself halfway to a revenant.
Bastian slumped in the center of the alley, arms crossed over his middle. Milo had landed a knife-blow, too. Crimson seeped through Bastian’s shirt, night-black in the dim light, pattering softly to the trash-strewn ground.
Milo turned the bloody knife in his hand. “Don’t care who you are,” he murmured in that stony, graveled voice. An unsound smile lifted his lips, slowly, his eyes unfocused and glassy with a euphoric poison high. “This time, you die.”
Time slowed. Something crystallized in Lore’s mind, fully formed, instinct she knew how to follow.
“Move,” she said to Bastian, her voice somehow strong despite her aching stomach and ringing head.
Whatever deep knowledge she followed, it seemed he knew it, too. Bastian pressed his hand harder against his middle and stumbled down the alley in the opposite direction, as far away from Lore and Milo as he could get, much faster than he should be able to run with a stomach wound.
Milo moved to follow, but Lore was faster. With Bastian farther away, Mortem was simple to call. It came easily, flowing from the stone walls, the trash piled in the corners, the cold steel of the dagger that was even now slicing through the air toward her.
It was stronger than it ever had been, a wave that should’ve overwhelmed her senses. But Lore took the power, and took it with ease.
Hands stretching out, vision graying as she held her breath and dropped into the place where death was visible, death was a tool. Lore channeled Mortem through her body, veins blackening and eyes going opaque, heart going still in her chest for one beat.
Almost without thinking, she took all that death and pushed it out toward Milo.
Weaving death felt like taking in air, like an intrinsic part of her that had just been waiting to bloom. Before, she’d done this without thinking, her born ability making such a careful thing easy. But now, she paid attention and reveled in just what she could do.
Lore spun the Mortem like thread, knitting it around the man like a shroud. Like the roses in the garden, merely cased in stone, merely frozen. Just enough for stasis, just enough to stop him, because she didn’t have any other choice.
See how easily you take to it, daughter of the dark?
The voice was faint, but it was enough to break Lore’s concentration. She shook her head and opened her eyes.
Milo was stone. The tip of the knife glinted mere inches from her throat. She expected his face to be frozen in a snarl, but instead, the expression he wore was open-mouthed terror.
“You…” Gabe gaped, his daze shaken off, hands opening and closing on empty air as he pushed himself up from the ground. “You shouldn’t have…”
“What else would you propose she have done, Remaut?” Bastian, striding up from the end of the alley. His shirt was bloodstained, but he didn’t clutch at it anymore, and he didn’t walk like a wounded man. “Waltz with him?”
Gabe didn’t respond. He leaned against the wall and stared at the statue Lore had made of a living, breathing human being.
Milo. He’d been a person, with a name and a job, even if that job was extorting bets on illegal boxing matches. A person she’d turned to stone. Was he still aware, somewhere in all that? Did it hurt?
She shook her head. She didn’t want to know.
Lore didn’t look at Gabe. She knew his expression now would be so much worse than it had been the day of the Mortem leak, and she couldn’t take it, couldn’t face it, not when there was so much else to do.
“How’s your gut?” she asked Bastian, her voice thin and shaking.
He glanced down like he’d forgotten, frowned at his bloody shirt. “Fine,” he said. “Must’ve just been a scratch.”
It’d been more than that. At least, Lore thought it had been. But when he raised his shirt, the skin was unblemished, marred only by a scrim of dried blood.
