Page 6 of The Demon Prince

A little girl had walked in covered in red bumps. Her mother was coughing into her sleeve, trying to explain that the bumps had appeared overnight. They didn’t know how to treat them. They weren’t itchy, but they were spreading and getting worse.

Then there had been the young man who had food poisoning for the last three days. He’d thought he had lung rot as well, but no one else in his house was vomiting quite so profusely. Then he’d vomited in her trash can and promised to drink more water.

She didn’t know how to help them. Katherine had been trained for stitches and surgeries, not... this. General ailments weren’t her speciality, nor had she ever been trained. After all, she wasn’t a healer. She was a stitcher, good at closing wounds and mending clothing.

Even now, anger bloomed in her chest. How dare her boss throw her to the kelpies like that? What did he think would happen?

He didn’t want to invest the time or energy into making her a real healer, but he was perfectly fine treating her like one. She didn’t even need the money. Katherine was well aware that the trained healers were paid more. And she didn’t mind it. What would she do with money?

Move into her own house?

There weren’t any buildings to buy. The swamps were already threatening their small town that was sinking into the muck. Monstrous creatures waited just below the walkways and they were certain to eventually drag someone into the deep. She couldn’t ask someone to build a home for her in those conditions.

Not to mention she’d be alone. At least here she could yell and someone would tell her to quiet down.

At least here she could pretend she was alive.

Rolling onto her side, she let the cool breeze play over her face. Though outside was getting colder, the boarding house was always ridiculously warm this time of year. She didn’t know if the owner started up the fires in the basement early, but if he did, the man needed to reconsider the resources he was wasting.

Not that they didn’t have a surplus of peat to use whenever they needed it. They were drowning in the stuff.

Her scratchy wool blanket was too warm. Sweat slicked down her back, but she’d never been able to sleep without a blanket covering her toes and back. Annoyed, she sat straight up and shoved her rioting curls away from her face.

This was ridiculous. She was exhausted. Her heart was already racing to keep up with her movements, her entire body ached from standing all day, and all she wanted was a little sleep. But her mind wouldn’t let her, and the zinging ache at her hip only made everything seem worse.

Katherine would go insane if she tried to sleep like this. But if she didn’t sleep, she’d go insane as well.

“Damn it,” she muttered, rolling out of bed and taking a few hesitant steps forward. Her leg dragged behind her, useless now that the nerves were exploding with sensation.

She staggered to the window and threw it all the way open. Bracing herself on the windowsill, she stuck her torso out. Neighbors be damned. If they got an eye full of her in her dingy gray nightgown, then so be it. They could look for all she cared, but she was too damn hot.

“Thank the gods,” she whimpered as the air chilled the sweat on her skin. At the very least, she could cool herself down. Her hip might hurt. Her mind might worry that she’d accidentally murdered someone today, but at least she was no longer sweltering.

She ran her fingers along the smooth wood, the sensation of it as familiar to her as every step of this town. How many times had she stood here in the winter just like this? Too many to count. Years upon years after her father had died and her mother had disappeared into the moors. Though she’d been alone as a child, she’d had enough money to buy her first year here after selling all her parents' things.

And then she’d worked. Oh, she had worked herself to the bone day after day, because there was nothing else in this kingdom but that.

A sharp spike of pain stabbed her in the pointer finger. Frowning, she looked down at the windowsill to see that small splinters had been carved into the wood. Almost as though something sharp had cut through it.

It took her a second to see in the dim moonlight, but she realized it wasn’t just one mark on her windowsill. There were ten of them. Ten marks gouged into her windowsill that looked rather like where someone would put their hands.

“What—” She tried to think of any words, but nothing would come to her.

She didn’t know of any creature that could make marks like this. And if it had been some monstrous being, they’d have woken her trying to get through the window. Besides, none of the creatures had ever gotten up onto the wooden walkways. The silent truce between human and swamp monster had always been followed for countless years.

So if they weren’t trying to attack her, then what had made these marks?

A sound echoed across the moors. Not something she usually would have noticed. It was like someone had kicked a stone into the water. The wet plop could have been anything from a bubble popping as gas leaked between the layers of peat, or it could have been a frog leaping into the shallows.

But her heart stilled in her chest. Katherine felt icy tendrils of fear trailing between her shoulder blades like water dripping down her spine and she knew—she knew—something was watching her.

She could feel their eyes. She could sense their breath that was coming faster now as it realized how defenseless she was. It would be so easy for something to race at her open window and yank her out of it.

No one would even realize that she’d been taken until they needed her at the almshouse. Then someone would ask, “Where in the world did Katherine get off to?”

And it would be too late. They’d never find a trace of her and the entire town would think she’d wandered off with the wisps. Just like that mad mother of hers who had muttered about spirits and ghostly creatures living in the moors.

Breathing hard, she tried to control the panic that told her to run. It whispered through her mind, dragging claws inside her skull as it told her that something terrible would happen if she stayed here. She needed to bolt. To hide. To put herself somewhere that no one would ever find her because a predator watched her from the shadows.

---