Page 13 of Never Run from an Immortal

Calder swallowed. “I… I can’t.”

Aidan made a point of glancing around the room. “No one is holding a gun to your head, Witch.”

“Please,” Calder whispered. He clutched a hand to his chest, fingers tightening into his shirt.

Aidan’s attention fell to the string of a necklace peeking out of Calder’s tunic, the pendant under the Witch’s fingers. It was said Witches could call power from objects, and though Aidan wanted to test that rumour, he was out of patience. His fingers closed around Calder’s throat and the Witch gasped for breath, even as Rae screamed at Aidan to stop. The prisoner had made his decision. And he’d chosen wrong.

Rae yanked at Aidan’s arm, but he only squeezed tighter. A second more, and the Witch stopped struggling, Aidan’s Provident abilities slamming back into him with the ferocity of a breaking wave. He shoved the dead Witch away and flexed his powers over the facility, feeling out for every mind within it.

“You’re everything they say you are,” Rae breathed quietly beside him.

He turned to face her and took in her furrowed expression as she stared at Calder.

Aidan followed her gaze to the dead Witch at their feet, hand still clutched around the pendant at his chest. “He was complicit.”

“I’m sure you don’t need any more of my help to make your way out of here.” Rae threw him the case. “Come find me at Silver Star Customs when you know what those are and you’re ready to make good on your end of our bargain. Western Quarter.” She didn’t wait for his response, taking one last look at the dead Witch, and then slipped out of the door.

Find her, she’d said, because she knew how to get his missing magic back. Hisothermagic. Or so she claimed. Aidan considered invading her mind, taking everything he needed, and ending this right there and then, but she had got him this far,and ending her life now felt too much like something his uncle might have done.

Rae had taken out at least half a dozen Orders and humans since Rush, so why the life of a single Witch mattered to her, Aidan couldn’t be certain. He unlatched the case, opening it carefully. Four glass vials, two different colours that she’d carried through the entire facility so that they could get some answers.I’ll need your money, your resources… we both want to get to the bottom of this. I stand to lose as much as you do.

Aidan sealed the case, an unpleasant feeling in his chest. He reached out with his Provident abilities, clearing a path for Rae out of the facility, though he knew she didn’t need it. With a shake of his head, he tucked the case under his arm and made good on his earlier decision. First, he was going to get some answers, and then he was going to kill every last living thing in this damn place.

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.Thatwas 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 acombination 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.Hadto 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 fewextra 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.

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