Page 9

Chapter seven

Silver Star Customs was busier than usual. It was no surprise; attacks in the city made humans panic buy, and Rae’s products weren’t just about the aesthetics, though she prided herself on how good each piece looked too.

“You look like shit, boss. Need a top-up?” Nim affectionately asked from the adjacent workbench.

A healing top-up, and the answer was always no.

Rae wouldn’t risk Nim draining herself. The Witch was many things, but she hadn’t yet mastered her magic, and even if she had, Rae would have declined.

Magic left a trace, and unmastered healing magic like Nim’s had a blue aura, visible to some of the Orders, particularly the Provident bloodsuckers.

Though Rae often wondered if Nim offered just for a chance to flex her abilities, a chance to truly be herself within the walls of the workshop when she worked so hard to disguise who she was from anyone outside it, it wasn’t worth the risk.

Witches were an incredibly rare sight in Demesia.

Historically, they’d been coveted by Vampires for their abilities, and Rae had spent most of the day mulling over whether telling Aidan it had been a Witch’s syphon that suppressed his Provident abilities was a mistake.

The fact that the Witch had been a prisoner, just as they had been, was of no concern to the Vampire.

That was the bigger mistake, believing for a moment the Vampire Lord might have spared him.

Rae sighed, slid her goggles onto her face, and snatched up her piercing saw.

She’d taken a break from protective charms to make a wedding band, and she needed to concentrate.

It wasn’t just that the design was intricate, but that she needed her mind to be clear as she made it, on the off chance any of the previous night’s events slipped into the fabrication.

A cut in the silver, a piece of solder, a lick of flame.

All moments the wrong kind of magic could seep in.

As the thought of Calder’s demise lingered in her thoughts, the blade snagged on a fleck of silver and snapped it clean in two.

Typical. Rae bit back a curse, set her saw down, and unclamped the ring.

“Another day,” she murmured quietly, brushing off the lemel onto the deerskin hanging beneath her bench.

Every scrap and fleck of metal filing was saved and collected into jars to trade for whatever silver they could get hold of.

Prices were higher than ever, and it meant Rae needed to increase her number of nightly visits to Rush.

At least there was never a shortage of pockets to pick, though now she’d need to find a different hunting ground.

Time to polish instead; she owed it to Nim for covering the previous day’s order.

Goggles still firmly in place, necklace slung over her shoulder so it wouldn’t get caught up in the machinery, and her mask secure over her face, Rae flicked on the polisher and settled into a stool.

The familiar hum of the machine filled the space before the mop whirred to life, powered by a combination of hydro and biomass electricity from facilities on the west side of the river.

Nim set a mug of steaming tea and one of her drool-worthy elderberry cakes off to the side of Rae’s bench, her choice of frosting matching Rae’s strawberry pink hair.

It had become one of her friend’s favourite games to guess what colour hair she was going to settle on each day; she’d never once gotten it wrong.

Where the Witch found the time to bake, Rae didn’t know.

The small daily gesture and the dozens of other tiny ways Nim brightened every morning made Rae even more protective over her friend than she had been when they’d first met.

More determined to preserve the softness she saw in Nim that she had once possessed.

Being a Witch in Demesia was no easy thing. Being alone was something else entirely, and Rae had endured years of that. Years of fighting and clawing her way out of the dark, doing anything she could just to keep afloat, no matter what it cost her.

“What I don’t understand,” Nim mused behind her, licking a piece of frosting from her thumb, “is what anyone hopes to gain from this ramshackle alliance. It has to be Weyland, surely.”

Weyland was responsible for the ISA, one of the human factions that sought to drive the Vampires out of Demesia, as if the feud between Vampires and Fae wasn’t already enough.

Not that Rae complained too much; the factions were her biggest customers, her own included.

Silver Star was a great source of pride for Rae, but it was a front for everything else she needed to do. Had to do.

The scales had tipped far too long ago, and it was time to right them.

Nim hummed along to a song playing through her PAD, an all-female Fae band she’d have sold her soul to see live, or so the Witch claimed.

Her birthday was fast approaching, and Rae had snagged two tickets from a client in exchange for a few extra silver cuffs.

A huge expense, but Nim had lamented for weeks about how quickly the tour had sold out and she couldn’t go, decorating her cakes with little frosted images of the band members and sighing dramatically whenever she ate one.

“Weyland is a possibility,” Rae murmured, bringing the red polishing compound to her mop to ease a piece onto the yarn as Nim’s singing grew louder with the chorus.

A box of unfinished cuffs sat to her right and Rae reached for the first, polishing methodically; top, sides, edges, repeat.

Finer details around the settings she’d get into with her hand tools, but this part of the process was relatively quick.

Nim sucked in a breath, but Rae didn’t lose her focus.

“Called it! They’re blaming Weyland for the attack on Rush.

” The music stopped, and the Witch slammed her PAD down onto the bench beside the polisher.

Rae allowed her eyes to dart to the screen for a second before returning her attention to her piece of silver.

Only once she was finished did she switch off the machine, depositing the polished cuff in the tray to her left and brushing her hands against her apron before picking up Nim’s PAD to read the news report.

Pictures of Rush mostly. Or what was left of it.

And that was a problem for them, because there weren’t many accessible locations in Demesia that housed an abundance of wealthy Vampires to fund their silver.

Rae swiped through the images, scanning the report for any scraps of information she could use.

She’d filled Nim in on everything that had transpired the night before, though she’d left out the details of the fate of the Witch, Calder, and her friend had listened carefully to every detail.

Nim chewed her lip as she leaned over Rae’s shoulder, a gesture that reminded Rae too much of her younger brother, Seylan.

A pang of nostalgia twisted in her chest as memories played on repeat.

It was all for him: every stolen wad of cash, every piece of polished silver, and every move she made. Rae let that thought ground her.

“Reed’s taking me to the docks tonight. I’ll ask him what he knows,” her friend said, reading the news report for a second time.

Rae tried not to frown. “I don’t like him, Nim,” she murmured, swiping through the last of the photos.

Like wasn’t strong enough a word. She thought of the Witch as though Nim were her little sister, and though she knew her overprotective streak was creeping too far into asshole territory, Rae wasn’t about to let down another sibling, real or not.

Nim scoffed. “What’s not to like? Have you seen him? He looks like he was chiselled from a slab of marble.” She tapped her PAD, pulling up a picture of her and Reed together, Reed’s attention fixed firmly on the Witch as Nim beamed at the camera.

Rae already knew what he looked like. Knew a number of things about him she probably shouldn’t.

Where he lived. Where he worked. How his only serious relationship had been with a young man from the ISA faction who’d broken his heart.

But it was the look on Reed’s face Rae didn’t like.

That look spelled trouble. Like he hadn’t decided whether to keep Nim as his pet or his plaything.

That, or he really did love her. And a part of her—the selfish asshole part of her—worried that worse than that, they’d fall in love and he’d take Nim away from all this, and Rae would be left with no one.

“Statuesque,” Rae said with as bright a grin as she could manage.

Reed was a Shifter, and everything he wore showed off his muscled frame, hinting at what form he took when shifted.

A lion, if Rae had to guess from his scruffy mop of light brown curls.

He was a big guy; she’d met him once, despite Nim’s constant requests for the three of them to go out together more.

A formidable presence, though not as formidable as Aidan.

Rae almost scoffed at the thought. He’d been a monster in every way the night before.

Nim hummed at her side. “He also said he’s going to talk to his father to find out what’s going on with the mines.”

It was no secret that silver was getting more difficult to source, but it was the reasoning that Rae wasn’t buying.

There was plenty of it. She suspected it was the transport back to Demesia that was the real issue.

With so many Liberalist Fae camped out on the border at the base of the mountains, it wouldn’t be long before they halted more goods entering the city.

Luckily, the humans had created indoor greenhouses, underground, some eight levels deep, and even the meat substitutes they’d created from plant proteins were convincing enough if you weren’t too fussy.