Page 158 of Lana Pecherczyk

You can’t fix stupid.

Panic squeezed her throat.

“I need air,” she said, then spun on her heels and ran.

Chapter

Forty-Eight

Blake’s heartbeat thundered in her ears as she ran. Bodies materialized in her path, solid obstacles she couldn’t process fast enough. Her shoulder connected with a female carrying glass trinkets, then a faceless male whose wings she clipped. Angry cries pursued her retreat.

“Watch yourself!”

“Outsider!”

Direction meant nothing. Only distance. She pushed deeper into the thickening crowd, drawn to the clamor of commerce. When the Great Murder’s marketplace engulfed her, she expected peace. Instead, the paste burned her chin. Each heartbeat pushed the substance deeper into her bloodstream. Colors intensified. Blues became electric, reds throbbed with impossible depth. The scent of feathers, smoke, and thousands of bodies pressed against her nostrils until she could taste them.

Her steps faltered. The world tilted.

“The book,” she whispered, fingers clutching empty air where the anatomy text should have been. Or her phone?

No substance.

One purpose. One task. She’d abandoned it in that nightmare caravan. Her one chance to do something meaningful in thisworld—gone. Because she’d been too worried about why she had no magic like the other women from her time.

Shallow.

The familiar vice of failure tightened around her chest. She pressed her palms against her temples, trying to recall the diagrams of inner ears and cranial structures, but the images dissolved into ribbons of light. The burning sensation spread from her chin to her throat. Her bones itched beneath her flesh.

Singing pierced the market’s din. She stumbled toward the sound, following it past stalls of shimmering fabrics and weapons forged from strange substances. The music emanated from a small, shadowy tent where two fledgling crow shifters sat cross-legged on woven mats. Not singing. Laughter. They threw carved bones into a circle of salt and laughed as the shiny river stones inside skittered after them through some kind of magic. Their mother stood nearby, showing beaded fabrics to a potential buyer.

Blake stepped closer, drawn by their joy. The blue glow from her mating marks spilled across the children’s upturned faces, illuminating their features.

Their laughter died.

“Mama!” The smaller one recoiled, wings erupting from his back in a flurry of glossy feathers. “It’s a human!”

The mother dropped her merchandise. Fabric panels billowed to the ground as she lunged between Blake and her children, wings spreading to their full terrifying width.

“Get away from them!” she snarled.

Blake raised her hands. “I didn’t mean?—”

The mother’s caw pierced the air. Her warning rippled through the marketplace, triggering a chain reaction. Heads snapped toward them. Wings unfurled. Daggers brandished. Conversations halted mid-syllable.

“Human!” someone shouted. “In the nursery quarter!”

“What?” Blake gaped. “I didn’t know?—”

But now she saw more young crawling about, playing beneath tables, hiding behind legs. More wings snapped open. Bodies and feathers closed ranks. The space around Blake expanded as the crow shifters backed away, their defensive postures creating a widening circle with her at its center.

Blake backed away, staggering as the world tilted beneath her feet. The market’s colors blurred and separated, fracturing her vision into prisms. The crowd’s angry murmurs transformed into a single deafening roar.

She needed to find River. She needed to breathe. She needed?—

Her hand closed around something cold and smooth, a discarded glass coin that winked at her from beneath a merchant’s table. She couldn’t remember reaching for it, but its weight in her palm centered her, anchored her against the dizzying rush of sensation.

The mother’s eyes tracked the movement, narrowing with dangerous understanding.