Page 15 of A City of Smoke and Demons
‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Analise told them. She clawed at the fingers around her throat. The man laughed and struck her across the face so hard it made her ears ring. He released her, and she fell to her knees. When his hand tangled in her hair and he hauled her upright, she wrapped her fingers around his wrist, grit her teeth, and unleashed her magic.
She pushed her way into his body, ripping through muscle and vein and tendon. She knew what the inside of a body looked like. She wasn’t gentle. The man’s mouth opened in a silent plea as Analise’s death magic plunged into his heart, tearing the life from his body. The hand gripping her head slackened, and the man slumped to the ground.
On her hands and knees, Analise gasped. Life flowed through her, as warm as sunshine and as powerful as a bolt of lightning. It fizzed and thrummed through her veins. Slowly, she stood, finding the other man staring at her in horror.
‘He’s dead!’
‘I know,’ she managed. ‘Fuck off or join him.’
The man stared at her a moment, then turned and ran, his footsteps echoing off the pavement.
Analise didn’t spare the dead man a second glance. She hurried towards the morgue, needing to get inside and off the street.
There had only ever been one other time—a bird. She found it in the jaws of the convent cat and pulled its tiny, feathery body free. She wanted to help it, and had held it between her hands, staring into its liquid eyes. One of the nuns had been with her. The woman put her hand on young Analise’s shoulder and told her the bird would not survive, that it was better God took it now than let it suffer.
Analise had seen death approaching, a shadow that crept along the grass, and the magic that was so new to her had stirred. She felt death in her hands, and not wanting the bird to suffer, she’d instinctively pulled what little life was left from its fragile body. The bird's tiny heart fluttered beneath her fingertips, and then, it was still.
She told no one what she did, or what it had felt like, and she’d never done it again—until tonight.
Analise unlocked the morgue with shaking hands, glancing fearfully over her shoulder. It was obvious, even to a half-drunk lout, that she was a death witch. The Gendarme would be here soon.
She threw open the door to the cold box and pulled out the metal tray with the dead woman on it. Quickly, Analise unwrapped her face. A noise in the alley made her jump; she paused, hands hovering over the woman, heart in her throat, but no one came charging through the door.
‘I’m sorry, I need to see,’ she whispered.
The experience always started the same—heat, the sound of blood pumping in her ears, fast, furious, a heartbeat fading from existence. Sometimes, they died slowly. Other times, death was swift, the threads that held a body to the world of the living cut abruptly.
There was a moment between life and death where the human soul paused, waiting to be collected and guided on. By the time Analise put her hands on the dead, the soul was gone, but there was enough of who that person had been for her to glimpse their last moments. Sometimes, it was the faces of friends and family, a quiet peaceful death, but more often than not, death was anything but peaceful. It was terror and confusion, pain, remorse, a whirlwind of regrets and what-ifs slamming through a mind now irreversibly faced with its own mortality. With nowhere else to go, those emotions hurtled towards Analise like the ocean against the shore.
It wasn’t the emotions she wanted to see tonight, so she pushed them aside when they came, let them slide past her until a flash of a face appeared in the darkness. Pale skin, black, fathomless eyes, elongated canines, claws, membranous wings, and a screech that made her want to cover her ears.
In a dead woman’s memory, black eyes bored into hers.
Analise tore her hands free, leaving them hovering above the corpse, her heartbeat threatening to drown her. Terror seized her limbs and she couldn’t move, eyes staring at nothing, seeing nothing except that face. Her stomach churned. She wanted to vomit, but couldn’t move to find the bucket.
There had to be more to see. There had to be.
Swallowing, Analise laid her hands on the woman once more.
Looking for a death witch in the guts of the Credges would be a breeze. She’d be as easy to find as the proverbial needle in the haystack, as a priest in the skin market, or a truthful income report in Maddog’s books.
Ezra sighed.
Maybe if he asked God for the slightest bit of a break, the witch would appear in the street waving a white flag in surrender? He’d fucking earnt it.
He was mad for doing this. The Unseen never worked alone. Death witches were dangerous but here he was, traipsing around in the dark, alone, after one that probably didn’t exist. But what if she did? Ezra had no plan for when, if, he found her. He flexed his fingers. Sore, but not sore enough to stop him doing whatever necessary to stay alive.
Ezra used to enjoy the thrill of the hunt. He used to be good at it, so good it prompted more than a few people to wonder what he’d traded for his skills.
He’d traded nothing. He’d been born with it.
He was, as far as he knew, unique, but he had no idea where his skill came from, whether it was from his father, a member of the Kingsguard, or his mother, a seamstress. Both his parents died within a year of one another when Ezra was sixteen. His mother during the plague that swept its way through London and his father had done his duty and lost his life in service to the Crown.
Tracking a witch wasn’t difficult—magic left a trace, a signal, an actual shift in the air. Some could smell it, some felt it as the hair standing up on the back of their necks, but Ezra saw magic like an aura, a second skin of gold or silver or red.
He took a deep breath and set off. It was late and the streets were quiet, a grey sky hanging above the world. On a wall up ahead was a smear of gold, but the magic was old, its owner long gone. Before Ezra could stop them, memories pressed against his mind, faces, voices stirred to life, blood on the stones, trembling lips and bound hands. For a moment, he could see it all clearly, could taste the guilt, feel the weight of it in his stomach. Her face shoved against the ground. White hair tumbling over her shoulder, blood from her head wound seeping through it.
He took a deep breath, and pushed it away, continuing down the street. Footsteps echoed behind him, slow, methodical.
