Page 34 of Smoke & Ashes
Think.
I still tasted blood, still felt the essence of my quarry in the air, but her name came back to me, and my purpose. I knew this place. Crouching down by the water I stared at my reflection and tried to remember that I was a person from this world, not an immortal creature of primal hunger from a space beyond.
After a moment, I remembered who I was and where I was. This was the viaduct pond on Hampstead Heath, I was sure of it. I’d been here a couple of times with Nim back in the day—the view over the city from Parliament Hill is so famous it’s protected by law. Yelena had come here too, and she had vanished. If my instincts were right, and while they usuallyweren’tmost of the time, they usuallywereon questions like “just how fucked am I at the moment?”,there would be a gate to the Place of Ice and Darkness in the arches beneath the viaduct. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was to swim into a faery realm—you never knew what the water would be like on the other side, and given where I suspected that path led, there was a good chance that I’d come out into the cold and dark and be entombed in ice forever. A vampire could cope with that, especially one who was expecting help when she got through. I really couldn’t.
It also meant the sun wouldn’t do me any good. Even if the King-Queen’s realm was accessible in daylight—faery gates, it might amaze you to learn, didn’t have terribly consistent rules—the Place of Ice and Darkness was, well, the clue was kind of in the name. No sun meant no sunrise meant no mystical symbol of whatever the fuck that was a symbol of robbing the vampires of their powers. And there was no way I was fighting my stalker ex from hell’s stalker ex from hell and a two thousand year old vampire who’d come within spitting distance of godhood and possibly a faery lord I’d both insulted and physically attacked, all at once, and on their home turf.
It was time for plan B.
Plan B, as it stood, was fairly sketchy. It was looking a whole lot like my enemies were working with the backing of a powerful faery lord, and the lord in question had a kid running a pawn shop in town. Of course the fae weren’t exactly the types to be doting parents but, as I’d learned when Sebastian Douglas tried to use me to eat my mother, that didn’t have to matter.
I tromped down off the heath, taking a moment to appreciate the skyline—because sometimes it was worth giving yourself a moment to remember why anything at all was worth bothering with—and then got on the three different fucking buses you needed to reach Seven Dials without going on the underground.
I pushed open the door a bit more forcefully than I’d intended, making the pawnbroker fix me with a disapproving look.
“In a hurry today?” they asked. This was the Merchant of Dreams. I had the impression they were way older than they looked, which wasn’t necessarily surprising. If there was anybody in London who could buy your youth for the price of a sunbeam, it was the Merchant. Trading in abstract concepts was, like, their entire job.
“I need to kill a faery lord, and you’re going to help me.”
They smiled. “Nothing is free, my dear. And what you’re asking is likely to come at the steepest possible price.”
“Yourpatron”—it was the Merchant’s preferred term for the otherworldly entity that had been either their mother, their father, or quite possibly both—“is sheltering a vindictive magic vampire who seems pretty damned keen on killing a bunch of people just to hurt somebody I care about. Also me. Also Patrick.”
“That seems like a vampire problem. I am simply a go-between. A striker of bargains and a granter of wishes.”
“Fine, then Iwishyou would be slightly more helpful.” I regretted it instantly. Words had real power for the fae-blooded, wishes doubly so.
“Oh, my dear.” The Merchant shook their head sadly. “Youreallyshould have phrased that better.”
“Don’t suppose I get to take it back?”
“I fear not. And you didn’t specify who you wished me to be helpfulto.”
A sudden gust of wind slammed the door closed, and the steel shutters rolled down across the windows. But that on its own wouldn’t quite account for how dark and how cold it had got all of a sudden. “You don’t have to do this.”
“We both know that isn’t true at all.”
I tried to run, but something was draining my strength and making it hard to even move my legs. The Merchant had drawn a long sliver of black wood from beneath their desk. That did not look like it was designed to goanywheregood. “Ever consider that you might be making a massive mistake here?”
“That’s what you’ve never understood, Kate Kane. Our kind don’t make mistakes. We live bound by rules and laws as old as time, and we act as we must, in accordance with our natures.” They pressed the wooden shard against my throat, and I felt a pricking that meant it was drawing blood.
Time to act in accordance with my nature.
I’d been far closer to my mother today than I had in a long while, and I was almost shocked how easily her power came to me. Perhaps it helped that the Merchant’s shop itself was on the edge of the cold and dark, perhaps it helped that I was extremely fucking angry.
Whatever force had been keeping me in place couldn’t cope with the rage of the Deepwild, and I was easily able to break free of its grip and spring forward, brushing the wooden spike aside like it was a sprig of bracken. The Merchant of Dreams was a trickster and a trader, their business was bargains and lies and traps—there was little they could do against a huntress on the chase. I struck them full in the chest and they fell, cracking awkwardly against the counter and gasping for air. Somehow, they still had that smug, I-know-something-you-don’t-know look in their eyes.
My mother’s voice said now was the moment for the kill, and while I normally tried to resist her, something this time was urging me on. I went for the throat.
The Merchant got their arm up just in time and my teeth closed around their wrist. I tasted blood—that hot copper taste but mingled deep beneath it with something old and cold and still. I smelled the mouldering scent of deep forests and heard the sound of water running. The shadows that had been creeping into the room faded and the chill ebbed out of the air.
Somewhere in an overgrown corner of my heart, the spirit of the hunt still told me to finish the job, to strike and be done, but another more conscious part of me was very much aware that I was in a crowded part of London, kneeling on top of a genderqueer shopkeeper with blood in my mouth.
I backed off. “Shit.”
“You did as you must.” The Merchant climbed to their feet, straightened their suit, and returned to the other side of the counter. “As did I.”
“You know, I’m really not comfortable with thiswe are but servants to our naturedeal.”
