Page 37 of The Deathless One (The Gravesinger #1)

“Magical maladies,” Elric hissed as she strode through the streets, looking for a sign that would say there was an inn nearby. “We need to research those. There is something going on here, and I think it’s something you need to look into.”

“You and your gut instincts.”

“I’m telling you what to do, Jessamine.”

“And I don’t like it when people do that.” Huffing out a breath, she finally found an inn that looked like it might be the only one in the district. “But I’ll consider it. All right? Let me find a safe place to sleep for the night first.”

The building was a hulking monolith surrounded by belching factories.

The giant rectangle seemed to wear a crown of smokestacks, but at least there were rows of windows on this building that glowed from candles within.

Those must be rooms to rent for the night, and she desperately needed one.

She stepped in through the worn door, wincing at the raucous din that met her ears.

A bar. She’d walked into a bar.

There were some tables in the far corner, it looked like.

But for the most part, this was a space for drinking.

Men crushed into the small area shoulder to shoulder—she had to push and shove to get to the bar itself, where she could see at least a few women.

Most of them were seated with a much larger man at their back, barely holding the crowd at bay.

Slapping her hand down on the counter, she told herself to be brave.

“Excuse me!” she shouted.

One of the four bartenders turned in her direction, a smile flashing on his suntanned features. The bright flash of a smile didn’t make her feel any better about where she was, though. If anything, that lecherous grin only made her feel greasy.

“What do we have here?” he said, walking over to her and leaning an elbow on the counter. “Fresh meat?”

“I need a room for the night.”

“Booked up.”

She blinked. “I don’t think that’s true. You must have plenty of rooms.”

“And they’re all taken for the night.”

Elric leaned closer to her, the darkness of his power pressing against her back. For a moment, she allowed herself to believe that he was keeping the crowd away from her. And then he spoke.

“The man is lying. I can taste it.”

She stiffened her shoulders. “I’d like a room for the night, and I know I don’t look like I’m from here, but I can tell when someone is lying.”

The bartender tilted his head back and laughed. “Ah, you’ve got the confidence of a queen, lass. But you’re not getting a room here tonight. The Butcher keeps rooms on hold ever since the royal family died, you know.”

The Butcher?

He must have seen the confusion in her expression, because he leaned so close she could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“You can get a room if you’re willing to work on your back a bit.

I’d be the first one to step into line for that.

” She didn’t have time to dodge his finger.

He swiped his thumb down her cheek and then licked the digit.

“So clean. We don’t get many like you in the Factory District. ”

Reeling away from the bar, she staggered through the crowd. All the while, she tried to ignore the hissing in her ear.

“Summon me, Jessamine. Let me punish him for touching what isn’t his.”

She shoved past a man who smelled like metal, trying not to look at all the soot now covering her hand. “You can’t kill him, Elric.”

“I could keep him alive, if that’s what you prefer. I know how to keep a man still living, even after I peel the skin from his form.” The dark edge to his voice left no doubt he’d actually done that. Jessamine wondered to whom.

Another man stepped in her way but was quickly swept into the crowd by a woman who looked like she might be spending the night on her back, just as the bartender had said.

Where had she ended up?

How was this her kingdom? Jessamine had never seen the underbelly of her world. She had thought her people were doing well, much better than this. She’d thought there were at least clean people in every corner of her kingdom. That was what she’d always been told.

Stumbling out into the night, she crossed the street without looking and then pressed her back against the soot-streaked stone. Breathing hard, she knocked her head against the back of the wall and stared up into the sky, now streaked red with the sunset.

“Jessamine, summon me.”

“I really don’t want to,” she muttered.

Another voice joined theirs with a bright red flare of a cigar in the alley to her left. “Not wishing to spend the night with a stranger?”

A woman stepped out of the shadows, the cigar in her mouth curling black smoke up into the air. She wore her red hair in a braid with a hat shoved down over her head. She looked just like everyone else here. Covered in grime and hard in the eyes.

“Not really,” Jessamine said with a slightly hysterical laugh. “I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be like this.”

“Been like this for a while. Got worse after the princess died.” The woman tossed the remains of the cigar onto the ground and stepped on it hard. “You’ll learn the longer you stay here, the more it’s necessary for us to give up that old life.”

“Old life?”

“Royal family gave us all hope, you know?” The woman shrugged. “At least when there was a woman in power, there was more reason for men to respect the women in their lives. Now? We’re all back to just being a useful hole and a distraction.”

Her heart broke. Shattered into a million pieces. “What if she didn’t die?”

“Jessamine,” Elric hissed. “What are you doing? You can’t tell anyone you’re alive or our plan is ruined!”

The woman smiled, though, and a bit of that hard edge dropped. “Well, that would be a little hope, now wouldn’t it? Strange to even think about, though. Girl’s dead. We all watched her fall into the sea.”

As she walked away, an idea bloomed in Jessamine’s mind.

A terrible idea. An idea that could certainly ruin everything, but also made her feel like there was a purpose to all this. Like she could breathe for the first time since she’d died.

She was a princess, and this was her kingdom.

No, not a princess. She was more than that.

“What are you doing?” Elric asked as she ducked into the alleyway the woman had just come out of. “Where are you going?”

“They want their princess back, but they don’t have her anymore.” She looked around for a bucket of water and found a rain catcher on someone’s stoop. But it would do. “They do still have a queen, though.”

Using the water, she dipped her hands to wet them and then used her palms to write a message on the wall. A message that all would see because it revealed clean stone under years of grime.

She scrubbed into being a message that would fill every person in this district with hope.

And when she was done, she stepped away to look at her work. Elric stood beside her, a low chuckle rumbling through his chest. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

“Well, sometimes you have to spoon-feed it.”

Still, it did feel rather liberating to read the words cleaned into the wall. She’d even put her symbol beside it. A butterfly for a princess, but this time she had left it with its head cut off.

I am not dead.

And soon, the entire city would know it.