Page 47 of The Rebel and the Rose (The City of Fantome #2)
Ransom couldn’t remember the last time he’d watched someone sleep.
Not since he was a boy, standing guard over his younger sister Anouk on the nights his father came home steaming drunk, smashing up everything – and everyone – in sight.
As a Dagger, he always slept alone. Deep and fitfully, his head full of monsters, as if some primal part of him was still rebelling against what he had become.
In the waning moonlight, he watched over Seraphine.
Years had passed since he’d felt contentment like this.
Like everything he cared for was still within his grasp.
Like, maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t too late to have it.
As he slipped off the skull ring he had inherited from Dufort and placed it on his nightstand, along with his book of nightmares, he wasn’t thinking about before, or what was yet to come, only the warmth of Seraphine’s body curled inside his, and the slow thud of his own settled heartbeat.
It lulled him to sleep – this creeping sense of possibility – and when the darkness found him, for the first time in forever, he didn’t dream at all.
He woke to the sound of weeping. Dawn was sweeping across the sky, misting the clouds pink.
Seraphine was sleeping on her back beside him, an arm slung over her eyes to block out the encroaching light.
Following the unsettling sound, Ransom slipped out of bed and went to the window.
There was a woman crying on the street below.
Barefooted and bent double on the kerb, she held her head in her hands like she was afraid it might shatter.
Further on, by the shoemaker’s, a man in a top hat was slumped on his side, the street around him painted with vomit.
In the dawning light, the cobbles were stained and strewn with fallen rose petals. The garlands above were withering. The music had stopped some time in the night, replaced now by the distant cawing of a crow.
Up on the hills, the red mills were still turning, but all the laughter had died away.
Gone was the night magic of Marvale.
Here was its true face. The starkness of it made Ransom’s stomach churn.
You’re being paranoid , he told himself. Looking for cracks already .
Can’t you ever just be happy?
He crossed to the bathroom to examine himself in the mirror. The planes of his chest were still smooth. His arms and hands too, the whorls there washed away in the tide of their pleasure. Much of the heaviness inside him had lifted, so why, then, did he feel so on edge?
Seraphine had scoured his soul clean, taken the deepest pain from his body and scattered it to the wind.
She’d reached beyond the Dagger to find the man beneath it.
His spitfire. Flame or saint, he didn’t give a rat’s ass.
He’d spent his entire adolescence worshipping at the altar of Saint Calvin.
Now he had someone else – someone true – to love. To protect.
It was that vital, keening instinct, and not the creeping mist of his own pessimism that sent him back to the window. The hairs on the back of his neck rose when he saw the streets were empty now, the people there wiped away as if he had imagined them.
The vomit remained.
Something wasn’t right.
Leaving Seraphine to sleep, Ransom got dressed and slipped out of his bedroom. He went first to Nadia’s room and then to Caruso’s, but there was no sign of either of them. That grumble of suspicion quickly rising to a roar, he took the stairs two at a time.
Down in the lounge, he came across Caruso. Still dressed in last night’s outfit, he was wide awake and sitting on one of the couches. Val was curled up against him in her gown, her head resting on his shoulder. She was snoring.
Ransom frowned. ‘Well, this is odd.’
‘Keep your voice down.’ Caruso was stiff as a statue, either from the sheer discomfort of actual human touch, or in an attempt not to disturb her slumber.
‘What’s going on here?’
‘Too much drinking and dancing. Val took against the stairs when we got in. Insisted she had to sit down first.’
‘When was that?’
Caruso rubbed his forehead. ‘Hours ago.’
‘Did you speak to the prince?’
‘I found myself in better company.’ His eyes flicked to Val. ‘Nadia did. She made a point of it actually.’
Unease churned in Ransom’s gut. ‘Has she come back yet?’
‘Isn’t she in her room?’
‘No, Caruso. She’s not in her room.’
‘Well, don’t look so narky about it. You fucked off long before I did. And I had my hands full with this one.’
Ransom looked at Val. ‘She’s drooling by the way.’
‘It happens.’
‘All hell,’ he muttered. ‘You like her.’
He spluttered a laugh, a familiar sneer curling his upper lip. ‘I don’t like anyone.’
There wasn’t time to needle Caruso about it.
Ransom’s thoughts were on Nadia now, his feet already leading him out onto the dawn-lit street.
More revellers appeared as he headed north, bodies drifting aimlessly through the town as if they’d forgotten where they lived.
Their eyes were glassy and, despite the rising sun, they were shivering.
The closer Ransom drew to the red mills, the more disquieted he felt.
He had seen enough hangovers – hell, he had endured enough himself – to know that whatever this strangeness was stretched far beyond alcohol and tainted smoke.
It reminded him of the comedown after a Shade-heavy night, the creeping panic that twisted magic so often left behind long after it had run you through.
As quickly as they were swept off the streets by plain-clothed mercenaries, more appeared, with bare, bleeding feet, wandering around like lost children. When Ransom tried to speak to one – a man not much older than him – his words came out garbled, his eyes unfocused.
Ransom broke into a run, the mills soon rising to meet him.
They were grotty in the morning light, the wooden blades cracked down the middle, their red paint chipping away.
The smell of stale alcohol mixed with fresh vomit was even worse up here.
Ransom held his breath as he ducked inside the Rose Garden, scanning the dim, airless interior.
There were bodies on all the couches, revellers groaning as they tried to sleep off whatever strange magic was still coursing through them.
Raised voices filled the cavernous hall, echoing back at him.
Keeping to the shadowed alcoves, Ransom crept closer, eyeing two figures standing by the stage.
Despite the low lighting and distance between them, he could tell one was the prince by his golden mane of hair and the outfit he had been wearing the night before.
Still pristine.
The blonde woman beside him bore a passing resemblance to him. Ransom recognized her as the same one who had briefly sat with Andreas and Seraphine last night.
‘… to come to us. Or you’ll scare her off,’ Andreas was ranting.
‘To where?’ She threw up her hands. ‘I’m tired of waiting, Andreas. I’m getting bored.’
‘So dance, Talisa.’ The prince’s voice was hard and low, the words more a threat than an invitation.
The woman whimpered. ‘Andreas, please . I don’t want—’
‘I said, dance,’ he hissed, his eyes flaring gold. ‘Dance and be merry, and stop breathing down my fucking neck.’
To Ransom’s horror, the girl began to twirl. And twirl and twirl and twirl. She slipped, losing a shoe, then crashed into a glass table. Picking herself up, she twirled again. Her dress had ripped and her leg was bleeding, and still she danced. Crying out, she begged him to let her stop.
The prince swished his hand about, waving her off. ‘Dance away from me. Until your feet give out and you remember which of us is in charge here.’
Wailing now, she moved like an unsteady spinning top, staggering towards the doors. She passed Ransom, but her eyes were glazed, looking right through him. And then she was gone, crying and twirling into the harsh dawn light.
Now the prince stood alone on the dance floor.
Without turning in his direction, he called out, ‘I don’t care that you saw that, Dagger.’
So much for pleasantries. Ransom had already downed his vial of Shade anyway. He stepped out of the darkness, dragging the shadows with him.
‘What the hell did you just do to her?’
‘I asked her to dance,’ said the prince, flatly.
‘Would you prefer I backhanded her? I’m really not the violent sort.
Despite what my uncle told you when he placed that bounty on my head.
’ He tapped his chin, amending his answer.
‘Or rather, I don’t like to do the violent part myself.
Such is the purpose of rebels and mercenaries.
’ He gestured casually to the shadows pooling around Ransom. ‘I suppose we are unalike in that way.’
‘We’re unalike in every way, Andreas.’ Glancing around, Ransom counted at least forty bodies, struggling to come to. There must be hundreds more strewn across Marvale, like wind-up toys that had sputtered out. ‘They’re in your thrall. All of them. Last night was a farce. None of it was real.’
‘It was real enough for sweet Seraphine.’
Ransom’s fists curled.
‘Unlike you, Dagger, she understands my grand vision.’
Ransom might have laughed if he wasn’t so close to throttling the smarmy bastard. Shaking his head, he said, ‘She would never want this.’
An irritating shrug. ‘I suppose we’ll see.’
Not after I fucking kill you .
‘Where’s Nadia?’
‘Sleeping somewhere around here, I suppose.’ He couldn’t have cared less. ‘We had a long talk. After a little persuasion, your friend sang like a canary.’
Ransom spotted her just then out of the corner of his eye. She was slumped in an armchair by the dance floor, her chest rising and falling. The tightened strands of her ponytail had come undone, and her brow was furrowed. She was twitching in her sleep.
‘She looks like she’s in pain.’