Page 16 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)
JASPER FOLLOWED ANA toward the main performance tent, but his words did nothing to draw out answers. Initially, they were here to wait for Evira to finish. At this point, she wanted to be anywhere else but at this festival.
“Who was that?” Jasper asked again.
She wasn’t even sure what manner of insult could properly describe him. He was an Ocean’s War hero if there ever was one.
Ana pulled back the flap to the tent, charging through. She’d opened her mouth to utter a word back to Jasper, but as soon as the tent flap closed behind them, there was nothing to be said.
They’d entered The Ocean’s War, a history that closed in with suffocating presence. Its stakes, swords, and tools hung like hieroglyphs along the walls, sending complex messages that gave the past they’d murdered and buried a voice again.
Ana felt it speak from the inside out, the dark calling to the dark, and impulsively, she pushed Jasper back toward the door. He grabbed her arm, pushing back as he sought to catch her eyes.
Everyone inside the tent wore wristbands, hats, and rings of the Strike’s broken arrow, sitting in row after row on folding chairs in the grass, all set up around the circular stage. Once a dangerous symbol, now it was nothing but a cheap fair keepsake.
The symbol didn’t have any meaning to them any longer, but did losing its meaning mean that the symbol had lost its power? To Ana, it still had meaning. To her, it still had power.
The crowd laughed, the sound grating to a raw degree.
Ana’s eyes focused on the single stage in the center, surrounded by rings, a water tank, silks, a catapult, and a variety of props. A single hot light shone down on the center of the stage, transforming the props into alien shapes and silhouettes that gave some semblance of mutated life.
She saw past the props—the old dissection table in the catapult; the cage bars in the suspended grates and rigs near the ceiling; the dismantled war wagon in the wood that built the stage, all branded with the broken arrow of the Strike and their followers.
Like a patchwork corpse, this production did to her what it did to the audience, issued an invitation to the forbidden past of The Ocean’s War. The difference was that she wasn’t laughing.
The crowd hushed into silence. From the darkness rose a woman unlike any Ana had ever seen.
She had skin marked with black mutations, evenly on each side of her neck, her waist, and down her hips and legs. Her clothes were gold with silver buttons trailing down her chest. The light hit her and blasted over the crowd; Ana flinched until her eyes adjusted.
The woman’s hair was almost silver, half of it braided along her head and woven into a high bun, while the other half hung in brilliant waves to her hips.
Her body moved like a serpent’s, the muscles shifting subtly under the exposed skin of her arms, waist, and shoulders.
Her movements gave the semblance that her bones bent with her.
She walked on long, poised legs like a deer.
The light caught the knives serving as her heels.
“You see those marks on her skin?”
She turned to see Lethe standing behind her, a sudden apparition in the midst of the chaos in her mind.
His eyes were focused on the stage, and he spoke up again before she could object to his presence.
“Those aren’t mutations. They’re intentional.
She was cursed to look like she does. A Strike changed her into that exact shape. ”
Ana watched as Lethe removed a large metal lighter from his belt in the shape of a skeleton. He pulled a trigger on the skeleton’s skull. Its fanged jaws opened. He released it and they snapped closed with a metal clap.
She startled at the sound and stepped back, hands reaching out to grab something as if a veil had just been removed from her body.
Lethe’s hand pushed against the small of her back, steadying her, but she nudged him off before capturing his wrist and twisting it hard. He grimaced, leaning away as she released his wrist.
“Got it. Got it,” he whispered, and then nodded back toward the stage. “The light hypnotizes. I just loosened its hold,” he explained. “There are cursed things all over this place.” His eyes finally found hers, and he gave her a slight smile. “I’m not the enemy.” He winked. “Not right now.”
She gave him no indication that she believed him, preparing to look over at Jasper to see his reaction to Lethe, but then Evira spoke.
“And now for our final act,” she announced, throwing her sculpted arms out wide, “Madam Helena!”
A woman in a black cloak hobbled out onto the stage in a robe with Mystic designs.
“Madam Helena is from the perilous, strange land of the Mystics, rehearsed in the use of mutated items and abilities,” Evira said as she startled to circle the stage.
Helena stood in the very center, dark eyes glimmering against a white face.
“And she will be using her gifts as a mutated woman to see what no man or woman can see in all of us. Witness for yourself the eyes of a Mystic witch!” Evira swept her gloved hands over the room, and the crowd cheered.
The Mystic woman hobbled to the edge of the stage and gestured to someone in the audience. She started speaking in the Mystic tongue. Evira translated.
“You’ve worked for thirteen years under Chamberlin in Brideport. He’s involved in a rather unfortunate affair.”
“He’s trading illegally with the Mystic military,” the person in question blurted out from the crowd.
Ana noticed a small boy at the very edge of the stage. He was taking notes.
Evira was sourcing her secrets, using some type of strange hypnosis to lure the truth from the audience.
Ana looked to where Lethe had stood.
He was gone.
She looked at Jasper, who met her eyes in question. Like he didn’t know what she was looking for. Did he not see him?
Ana started scanning the crowd. Her heartbeat rose. Something felt terribly wrong.
She moved forward, glancing back at Jasper with a subtle nod that assured him something was going on.
She searched the tent. Subtle shapes were hiding in the darkness of equipment or people—she couldn’t tell.
She reached the edge of the stage between the chairs. Hypnotized, no one in the audience seemed to notice or care. She glanced up when silence fell to see that Evira had noticed her.
Ana met the woman’s eyes, and their surprise mirrored one another’s for a flash.
Evira’s eyes flinched, seemingly at her failed hypnosis.
With an expression of unease, she scanned the crowd.
Evira’s chin lifted in increments and then she searched the room, as if responding to some deeply seeded instinct.
She took a step back and then another, feet completely silent.
Her eyes zeroed in on smoke accumulating from the darkness to the left of the tent.
Ana could smell something burning.
The twang of a bowstring cut the silence. An arrow loosed from one of the prop crossbows in the darkness in the opposite direction. Evira dodged it, and Ana saw a growing shape behind her on the stage.
“Get back!” Ana shouted, leaping up onto the stage and shoving Evira over.
The object, a hanging balance beam, loosed from one rope, slammed into Ana, and carried her off the stage.
She crashed into the ground, rolling back to her feet in just enough time to see a figure leap from the darkness and tackle Evira.
Evira’s back arched with some resistance, but the force of the action wrestled her into the boards of the stage.
The crowd clapped in dazed hypnosis as the figures rolled through the light on the stage and then off into the two hanging silks. Blood trailed through the light. Evira’s shrill screams sounded unnatural, her limbs fighting through the silks like an animal trapped in a bag.
Ana dove into the mix, tackling Evira’s assailant off the stage. He rolled with her, slamming her in the ribs and propelling them into metal props that clanged as they collapsed like a pyre over them. A sword nicked her shoulder, another slicing over a face she now recognized to be Lethe’s.
He recoiled from the metal, escaping with a red line bleeding down below his eye.
She fought through the metal swords and spears, breaking free as Jasper intercepted Lethe, who hopped back onto the stage. Lethe dodged him. Ana grabbed Jasper’s arm before he could pursue him.
“Wait!” Ana warned, searching the area in a panic. Fire had started to spread around the tent, a heavy cloud of smoke accumulating over them. An eerily familiar smell saturated her nostrils.
Ana showed Jasper her open palm coated in dark oil.
For the first time, she saw the extent of it smeared across Lethe’s shirt, dribbling over the stage, dripping from the silks. Evira fought through the silks Lethe had managed to wrap her in, her body doused in it.
Lethe removed his lighter, something like a porous blade inserted where the flame had once been, the skull opened up around it.
The blade ignited. Evira was yelling at him now, shouting in fluent Mystic. Her servants tried to free her but started to scatter at Lethe’s approach. The oil had made the silks stick. He was in no rush, as if observing the patient ritual of a ceremony.
“Mutated knife,” Ana said in alarm.
“Cherry Knife,” Jasper corrected in a rushed whisper. “Used by the Riders of Saint East to kill Strike.”
“Does he have a death wish?” Ana set a foot on the stage as she drew out her Atlas, fingers lingering on one of the light triggers.
“Looks like it,” Jasper said, backing away as Lethe drew closer to Evira. “I rolled the water tank near the stage. I’ll get Evira. Do what you do.” He rushed off.