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She should abandon him. She knew that. It was one of Val’s earliest lessons. If a job went south, it was every man for himself.
But she couldn’t make herself run. Jean-Paul had a husband and a young son, and if he was caught, he’d be sent to the Burnt Isles. Lore couldn’t just leave someone to a fate like that.
“Shit.” Lore cursed one final time, landing hard on the t, then ducked out of the alley and into the crowd.
The bloodcoats didn’t pay her any attention as she sidled up, as inconspicuous as she could manage. One of them, a burly man with a curling mustache beneath his small, pale nose, held up a dummy box full of nearly sprouting potatoes and cocked an eyebrow. “If you were making my deliveries, old man,” he sneered, “I’d be very concerned you were skimming them.”
The boxes with the contraband were always on the top. The bloodcoats never expected it, always checked the boxes on the bottom first, assuming the poison would be as hidden as possible. That way, if you were found in the middle of a job, chances were the lode had already been moved to the drop point.
“Alaric needed boxes,” Jean-Paul said, deadpan. Alaric was the name they always used if stopped and asked whose business they were about. “Wanted to store something. The potatoes were just to hold them down on the cart.”
All the boxes were off the cart now. Curly Mustache’s cohorts started poking through the new ones. One, opened, full of nothing but more mealy potatoes. Two. Three.
“You’re telling me a merchant hired a cart to haul boxes of old potatoes from the Southwest Ward to the Northwest?”
Six boxes left. Three of them held mandrake. Sweat slicked Lore’s back.
“Not my concern how he spends his coin,” Jean-Paul answered.
A fifth box opened. If Lore was going to do something, it had to be now. She just didn’t know what. There were too many of them to take with a dagger, especially once she lost the element of surprise, and she’d never been much good at brawling.
A creeping feeling began in her palms, the tips of her fingers. Pins and needles, an acute awareness. Mortem waited in the stone beneath her feet, the brick and dead wood of the storefront, the cart, the poison waiting in the still-hidden mandrake. It was a low hum, a string she could grasp and pull, and it’d be so easy…
A bloodcoat reached for a sixth box, the end of his bayonet cracking open the lid. In the shadows beneath, Lore saw green.
She rushed forward, banishing the call of Mortem, speaking before she even knew what words were on her tongue. “You found them!”
Jean-Paul and Curly Mustache turned toward her, the bloodcoat she’d interrupted looking up with a curious wrinkle in his forehead. She snatched the box, open lid pressed to her chest. “Father sent me, I’m so sorry I’m late.”
Curly Mustache cocked his head. “Would your father perhaps be Alaric, girl?”
Damn her breasts. She thought this shirt would be baggy enough to obscure them, but she’d never had the kind of chest that was hidden easily. “Yes,” Lore said, standing up straighter, making her smile wider. “He’s been so upset, I’ve broken too many jars trying to load them one by one, we need the boxes immediately…”
She backed up as she spoke, rapid-fire words and smiles, inching the contraband closer to the old storefront. The trapdoor inside would lead to the catacombs, and the uncanny map in her head said the tunnels nearby were empty. If she could just get the boxes through the door—
Her foot hit a pebble and slipped sideways, throwing her off balance. The box tumbled from her hands.
Mandrake carved a green swath over the cobblestones.
For a moment, they all stood in tableau, Jean-Paul and Lore and the bloodcoats and the big, placid horse Val kept only for poison running, the one Lore affectionately called Horse because no one had ever actually named him.
Then, a heartbeat, and with a cry of triumph, Curly Mustache charged forward.
“Run!” Lore threw herself sideways toward the mouth of the alley where she’d hidden, drawing her dagger. Her foot twisted beneath her, made her fall to her knees, the crack of it whiting out her vision. Gloved hands closed roughly on her shoulders, hauled her up.
The bloodcoats were a chaos, and Horse responded, rearing and upsetting the cart, sending it careening toward onlookers. Jean-Paul yelled wordlessly, trying to grab Horse’s bridle. The creature’s whinny sharpened in fear, hooves slicing at the morning sky as bloodcoats surrounded them. Jean-Paul dove for the reins, but he wasn’t fast enough to wheel Horse around and away; a bayonet ripped through the animal’s throat, and it collapsed into a heap of shuddering meat.
Lore’s vision was still watery as she tried to throw a punch at the bloodcoat holding her, swiping out with her dagger blade between the fingers of her fist. Another bloodcoat caught her arm and twisted it back hard enough for her to feel the bones grind, a breath away from breaking. A harsh, choked noise erupted from her throat, a cry aborted by the bayonet’s cold muzzle, the pointed end grazing her windpipe. Three of them had her now—two holding her arms, and one with a gun. Not very good odds.
The pricking feeling sparked in her palms again, cold awareness slithering through her limbs.
“Move and I’ll shoot,” the bloodcoat with the bayonet snarled. “And a shot through the neck doesn’t make for a quick end.”
Her fingers trembled, the Mortem seeping out from the catacombs and Horse’s dying body making them itch. Lore hadn’t channeled it in thirteen years, had pressed it all into the back of her mind and left it there to rot. But now, the awareness of it nearly drowned her.
Awareness, and instinct. Her hands burned with the desire to call Mortem up from every dead place where it waited, to channel it through her body and make it do her bidding. Resisting made her head light, her breathing shallow.
Half the bloodcoats went for the spilled mandrake, but their leader was focused only on Jean-Paul. He caught him by the arm; Jean-Paul tried to go for the hidden dagger in his coat, hands stained with Horse’s viscera—poor Horse—but the bloodcoat brought the bayonet end to his throat before he could reach it.
