Page 3 of Poison Nights & Twilight Alchemy

Cornelius didn’t move to catch Dulce as she collapsed, her mouth dry, her lungs screaming for air.

She attempted in vain to pull herself up on shaking hands, only to meet Cornelius’s indifferent stare. He almost looked intrigued by what he’d done, tilting his head to the side like a curious raven while she struggled.

“Indeed, I did poison you,” he cooed. “Death is a wonderfully convenient part of life, isn’t it? Rest assured—I will grieve yours more spectacularly than any groom before me.”

“Why…?” Dulce slurred.

“Why?” He crouched just out of her reach, smiling with apparent delight.

“My fortune,” she rasped. “It was yours…”

“Money? You think this is about money?” Cornelius chuckled. “How vulgar, my dear bride.”

“You filthy bastard,” she ground out.

He chuckled and rose, placing one shining shoe on her back and pressing until she fell to the floor.

Blackness cloaked Dulce’s vision then, buzzing filling her ears … until there was nothing.

CHAPTER TWO

REED

The saying goes, bad luck is when perfect timing and a lack of preparation meet reality. Growing up in Dogwood Glen, Moonglade’s neighboring slum, Reed didn’t believe in luck. Believing in luck would only get you empty pockets at a gambling tavern. No, there were those born with privilege and those born in squalor, who made their own privilege.

Tragedy and struggle just happened, sure as the sun rose and set. It was nothing personal.

Dogwood Glen had once upon a time been a quiet village filled with dogwood trees, their flowers decorating its swampy forests in white lace. Today it was nothing buta maze of muddy lanes between ramshackle huts of rotting wood. Lanes that grew narrower by the day, a stench-infested serpent winding its way past the masses of those born in squalor. Sure, the occasional tavern made of slightly less rotting wood could be visited—if one didn’t mind a fight with an unmuzzled codpiece of a drunkard and questionable cuisine. And on Sundays the market, full of shouting vendors, smelled slightly of decaying fish.

The Glen was surely not what it used to be.

Reed left Dupont’s apothecary that afternoon wondering if he should change his stance on luck. It was beginning to seem he might have the worst luck of all the unfortunate moldwarps in the Glen. One thing after another went wrong, until it felt as if his brand of bad luck had particularly good timing. If a fresh leak in the roof wasn’t enough, his brother Philip let himself be pickpocketed out of the rent by walking through a crowd of reeky children at play, an activity any dimwitted toad knew to avoid, and then—in a fit of regret over the loss, no doubt—he went and got himself sick by insisting on hanging around Dankworth’s, knowing full well the pestilence had taken the tavern’s main chef only the week before.

Admittedly, it was hard to be too angry at his brother while the poor man lay whey-faced and sweating on his bed, his tongue the color of a putrefying aubergine well past its date. He could scarcely drag himself to the chamber pot and hardly eat more than a few bites of treacle porridge.

Still. Now Reed had two problems to solve. The rent money, such as it was, had to be paid in no more thantwenty hours, or the Leper’s ruffians would start collecting fingers. Or ears. One of them preferred noses, he’d heard, and Reed touched his own protectively at the thought. He was rather fond of his nose. His second problem was acquiring the remedy against the pestilence, a tonic that must be administered before Philip’s eyes filled with blood, a sure sign the plague’s victim had reached the point of no return.

The only known cure was a mysterious concoction of herbs Reed had just discovered was by no means cheap, thanks to the Glen’s bull’s pizzle of an apothecary and his colossal greed.

Reed thought of his brother and tried not to panic. Philip was the only family he had left. The only family he had ever known. The two of them survived—that was what they did. They made their own luck. Losing their parents, along with everything they had, the brothers had scraped by on whatever they earned in the smoky taverns and sunbaked fields of Dogwood Glen. They had clawed their way to a roof over their heads that they could call their own, clawed their way to something resembling respectability. Reed would not lose his brother now. Not when Philip still had dreams, aspirations, to one day teach at a school outside the Glen, which proved how completely opposite from each other two brothers could be.

Reed wracked his brain for some solution, forcing himself not to turn around and re-enter the apothecary and punch Dupont in his puke-stocking of a face, the grasping clotpole.

The farms weren’t hiring yet. No one was building anything either. He could work for the blacksmith, orlend a hand at the butcher’s again, a job he detested, but so did everyone else. He could bake bread at Rohwedder’s, if he wanted to work before dawn. But all of these options would still mean waiting to save enough for Philip’s remedy, and waiting was not an option—it would mean his brother’s death.

He knew of no job that would pay on short notice, no employer loggerheaded enough to hand out advanced pay, not if Reed wished to prevent him and his brother from falling deeper into the Leper’s debt.

No job but one.

Reed would just have to fight for the coin. What were bruised knuckles and a few broken ribs, all things considered.

Passing through the market, Reed heard nothing but talk of the beloved librarian who’d died tragically from the pestilence the day before. How her family couldn’t afford her a proper burial.

Old Mrs. Mason was even crying about it, her considerable bosom heaving like some spongy sea beneath her many chins, and Reed halted for a moment to eavesdrop.

“Tansy was the kindest lass here in the Glen,” she sobbed into her stained handkerchief. “No one gave as much time to helping the children here as her. She will be greatly missed—that I can promise you. Greatly missed.”

“She deserved a funeral to make even the sprites cry,” Miss Atkinson called while she stirred something in a bowl, her skeletal arms moving like branches in a strong wind.

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