The Ravenous Dark, page 17
"Apparently, all this time, Jax has been working diligently on fixing it in our old apartment suite and has left quite a mess in his wake. He's been overly cautious about threats to his great work, hence the traps."
"Did he?"
"Did he what? Fix it, you mean?" Bailey nodded. Again, the pair waited for another wave of courtiers to pass by. Bailey caught the bright blue-eyed stare of one of the more curious courtiers and sent them a scowl. "Not to my knowledge, but Jax hasn't exactly been keeping me up to date on his progress." Irina scowled.
"I'll be sure not to touch anything that looks, er, magical?"
"Best not to touch anything that doesn't belong to you, and shower quickly," Irina advised.
"Understood. I'll see you later," Bailey said before the women went their separate ways.
The hallways teemed with supernaturals eagerly heading to their next party or rendezvous. Bailey wove through them, keeping her gaze forward and a gait a measure above the crowds as she aimed for the end of the hall. Her target was a circular staircase, not as accommodating as the main stairwell but still well-connected to the other subfloors.
She would change and shower, then come right back up to eat and fall into bed. If luck was on Bailey's side, her best friend would already be relaxing back in her room. Bailey doubted River would have much energy to do anything else after performing magic for three hours.
Bailey's head swayed absently from side to side. Three hours, was she crazy? If her best friend wasn't already passed out, she would slip a note under her door and clue her in on the story she told Irina. It was always best to cover one's bases.
Bailey trotted down the west-end stairwell, dodging courtiers who leaned too heavily against the marble railing. Arriving at the third subfloor, Bailey gave pause as its ever-present magic slithered over her skin, checking to see if she was an unwanted visitor.
The hair on her arm rose to attention at its inspection but didn't abate after. That's odd.
She took a quick inventory of her surroundings. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. No portraits slanted off their axis. No unnecessary mess was left strewn on the floor. There wasn't even an abandoned glass from some passing courtier, and they did so love to do that.
Bailey cocked her head, listening intently for any disturbances, but the only noise that reached her ears came from the staircase behind her. She frowned.
The floor's enchantment had accepted her, so why did she still feel so… unsettled.
The full moon, Bailey decided as she strode determinedly toward the Vrana's old apartment suite. That's what's affecting me and everyone else in this place.
Bailey toyed with the idea of placing the blame for her rash actions with Ronan on the moon but doubted such an explanation would fly.
A tremulous breath rushed past her lips that somehow disturbed the candlelit sconces on the walls. Bailey slowed. The shadows trembled and wavered as she hunkered onward, while her thoughts lingered on the unpleasant knowledge of what she'd done.
The back of Bailey's neck tingled as she reached the Vrana's door. Her wolf, always vigilant in this area of the Dark Court, bristled defensively. Bailey looked over both shoulders to scout any interlopers. She was alone in the hall, but it certainly didn't feel that way.
Her lips pursed as she pressed her palm to the middle of the door allowing the apartment's wards to identify her before the snick of several locks retreating sounded. Bailey paused before entering, her sight catching on another flickering scone in the hall.
She narrowed her regard upon it, watching the flame suspiciously. When it continued to dance serenely, sometimes flicking out to taste the air and cause its shadow to ripple, she relaxed.
Her wolf did not.
"Chill out," she complained and entered the Vrana's suite, closing the door sharply behind her. "Is anyone home?"
A slew of lights was on, and the air was—
"Ahchoo!" Bailey rubbed at her nose in annoyance, then pinched it shut to avoid the heavy-handed magic in the air. "Hello?"
Bailey waded through the entrance hall to the common room, avoiding the stacks of books left precariously about. The sight that greeted her made her freeze. Irina wasn’t kidding earlier. When she and River arrived four months ago, Jax's experiments had been contained to the unused bedrooms and organized to keep things such as alchemy and spellwork separated. Now?
The chairs and couches surrounding the mammoth fireplace were pushed to the sides, and several long tables took up the length of the room. Winding glass tubes twined and hovered above various beakers, conical flasks, and copper pots and sills. White, hazy smoke clung near the epicenter of experimentation while various books, scrolls, and instruments Bailey had never seen the likes of, crowded the rest of the space.
"Mad scientist? More like a hoarder," Bailey muttered.
She leaned closer, twisting her head beyond the common room's threshold to better see what items the bookshelves tucked against the wall contained. An immediate surge of sizzling heat stung the inside of her nose before she could plug it with the back of her hand. Bailey jerked back and glared defiantly at the room.
"Ahchoo! Damnit!"
Her hand flew away from her nose at the force of her sneeze. Bailey scowled, covered it again, and retreated. The sooner she changed and showered, the sooner she could leave. She just hoped the guest room she and River shared upon their arrival hadn't been turned into some room of oddities and obscurities kept in glass jars. Her face scrunched at the thought.
The room was, mercilessly, free of Jax's influence.
Bailey locked herself in. Unplugging her nose, she sniffed the air cautiously. Magic tickled her nostrils, prompting yet another sneeze from the she-wolf, but the presence of it was not so stifling as it was in the main room. She hurried to the chest of drawers and sighed in relief at the single spare set of clothes tucked away.
After a quick jump in the shower and dressing in slightly musty clothes, Bailey hustled back out of the suite. She was glad to be gone from Jax's suffocating magic, and—
Bailey stopped abruptly as the apartment door swung shut behind her.
Something was wrong.
She glanced down both ends of the hallway; breath held tight in her chest. Nothing was visibly different, but the air was cooler than it had been, and the candlelight dimmer. Strangely enough, her instincts were being pulled in two different directions. Part of her was inclined to stay, and the other leave—immediately.
"Hello?" Her voice projected through the long hall as she straightened her spine and stepped away from the door. No one called back to her, but there was something to be heard. Something faint and indiscriminate. She frowned as she swept her gaze from one end of the hall to the other in another frank assessment. She stopped, arrested at the harrowing sight to her right.
A mass of billowing shadows was gliding down the hall, achingly slow. But then, in no more than the time it took to blink, it jolted forward, gaining several yards.
Bailey yelped and jumped a length away on nimble feet. A ghoulish, irascible howl emitted from its dark depths. Her jaw hinged as the vague impression of a clawing hand raked through the shadows.
"What the fuck?"
Bailey sucked in a deep breath, hoping to calm herself, only to sneeze as familiar magic coiled around her skin. It was the floor's enchantment come to check again if she was an unwanted guest, and this time, it thought differently.
"Seriously?" A panicked guffaw followed her rhetorical question. Her feet continued to backpedal from the shadow's once more slow approach. "That's the unwanted guest, not me!"
But the floor's magic would not be swayed. It sank into her skin and withered beneath it before settling. Bailey's memory blanked an instant later, unable to recall which way would lead her to safety.
"Seriously?!" Her frustration was swallowed up greedily by the hall as the ominous shadows lurched forward again.
The hall continued to darken as the shadow crept closer, snuffing out sconces as it went. That explains the noise, she thought bitterly. Bailey growled, her wolf echoing the sentiment inside her head. She needed to get off the floor.
For the second time that evening, Bailey gritted her teeth and did the one thing she knew she never ought to in the Dark Court. She ran.
The shadows gave chase.
XI
Anxiety made a feast of Bailey's nerves as she bolted through the labyrinth of the third subfloor. She shoved herself into the first hidden passageway she could find, squeezing her way through the unused path. The stones that pressed against her front and back were grimy and cool and thoroughly covered in cobwebs.
She batted off the dirt and dust clinging to her as soon as she exited onto some unknown floor.
What was that?
A ripple of unease left her chilled as she backed away from the tapestry she’d emerged from. No sign of movement came from the oriental tapestry. No shadowy tendrils either.
Regardless, her heartbeat was close to a mile a minute as she continued to distance herself from the concealed passageway. A thick lump clogged her throat. She needed to find Irina and let her know what happened.
Strange and dangerous things often happened in the Dark Court, but a lurking shadowy fog with a lost soul inside? Bailey's lips thinned. That kind of dark magic wasn't exactly favored by the general population.
Courtiers wanted to be entertained by magic, bolstered, and taken to new heights by it. Not be hunted down and potentially consumed by it.
Bailey was on the precipice of yanking her gaze away, her pulse calming substantially when the scuff of a shoe brought her to an immediate halt. Bailey shot a look over her shoulder.
A man stood several feet away, leaning against the wall for support. His chin was tucked against his chest as he studied his hand. Another whisper of noise tickled Bailey's ear, but she kept her eyes locked on the stranger. He wasn't in robes, which meant he most likely wasn't a sorcerer. Bailey listened closely.
No heartbeat.
Vampyré.
Keeping light on her toes, she deftly put a few more steps between them. The vampyré's head rose incrementally. An ominous feeling settled in her gut.
"I don't understand," the man said. From beneath his shaggy splay of hair, Bailey thought she spied two dark eyes peering back at her, but his head was too low to tell their true color. "Do you?"
Bailey knew better than to answer but feared her silence might earn more of the impaired vampyré's regard. Biting back a curse, she answered. "No, sorry."
"It's the moon," he prattled on and extended the hand he was inspecting for Bailey to see. She cringed. A black glob stained the center of his palm with a halo of spindles stretching out from it.
It looks like a leech, she thought with disgust. A globby spider-leech.
"You should probably get that checked out," Bailey advised, swallowing back her rising horror as the blob's spindles seemed to spear into his flesh. "Seriously, maybe check in with—" The color drained from Bailey's face as she met the well-known vampyré's regard head-on. "A healer," she finished breathlessly.
Luka Krovopuskov, the vampyré who Irina had been trying to win over for her political play, stared at Bailey with black eyes.
"Something's wrong with me," he said.
Bailey agreed.
The last time she saw eyes like that had been at Laxmi's wedding, worn by the bride herself.
"I'll go get someone to help."
Luka shook his head slowly. Bailey stiffened as he pushed away from the wall. "I'm just so… hungry."
"I'm sure you can crash a party and grab someone to eat there."
His nostrils flared as he scented the air, his focus zeroing in on Bailey. A strange charge ruffled through the air, drawing goosebumps down her arms. Her wolf's hackles raised, and Bailey's fists clenched at her sides as her heartbeat picked up.
"Why go somewhere else when a perfectly fine snack is right before me?" Luka's raspy chuckle bounced around the deserted hall before he succumbed to a choking fit. He clawed frantically at his neck as dark veins twisted to life underneath his skin.
Bailey risked a glance over her shoulder in the hopes that someone might appear, but luck was outside her clutches. She returned her regard to Luka. He was eerily still, and his blackened eyes locked on something to his left.
"Fuck."
The billowing shadow was back, except it wasn't a massive cloud anymore but a figure. The shadowmancer. Bailey cursed again, watching with a mixture of dread and anticipation as the shadowmancer reached out toward Luka. The vampyré wheezed and jerked back. And then Luka set his sights on her and lunged.
Bailey was an adept fighter, but vampyrés were tricky to engage with. They moved with lightning speed and had a tremendous amount of strength. Even with the full moon bolstering her, it would take all her smarts to outwit and outfight the possessed vampyré.
She dodged Luka's first swing but not his second. Air rushed from her lungs as her abdomen absorbed the hit. Luka struck again before she could react, striking her face with astounding force that left her dazed. She stumbled sideways. Blood filled her mouth from where her teeth met her tongue.
"Prick," she wheezed as he grabbed her by the neck.
His eyes quavered like two bottomless pools of inky black. Bailey clutched his forearm as his finger slowly crushed her windpipe. The marks of his possession traveled up the sides of his jaw.
Silently watching from several feet away was the shadowmancer, its arms outstretched. Smokey shadows cascaded off its body like a phantom.
Bailey sucked in what breath she could and heaved herself up using Luka's rigid arm as leverage. Then she kicked him squarely between the legs. Her release was immediate. Bailey gulped in breath after breath, laboring toward the keeled over the vampyré. She spat out a wad of blood on the ground.
"Let's go, motherfu—what the!" Bailey leaped back as Luka began to convulse on the ground. "Shit, shit, shit."
She looked about desperately, but no one was around, not even the shadowmancer. Her heart trembled. Oh, hell. Whatever poison riddled Luka's body was working toward its ultimate purpose, true death. Bailey could only watch as his struggles culminated in a rasping gasp that speckled his face with red spots before his eyes went lifeless.
Morbid curiosity swept over Bailey as the black veins faded from his body. Even his infected hand was free of its leech-like blob. Her thoughts were sluggish as she tried to absorb and understand the scene that had just played out.
No clarity came to her.
All she knew was that a massive player in the Dark Court had been taken off the board, and without proof of the mysterious poison, the main suspect would be her. Bailey pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut tight as she sucked in a deep breath.
What do I do?
Roping in the Vranas was too risky. A scandal like this would ruin their campaign to help the sorcerers. They needed soundproof alibis, which meant she couldn't rely on them for help. Bailey scrambled to think of a solution.
River? Unlikely, because she never knew where to find her friend.
Stella? No. She dealt with death enough.
William? There was no way she was interrupting his time with Fox.
Ronan? Her heart stung—that option was completely off the table. Under no circumstances did she want him to know she had any part in Luka's death, however unintentional it was. Besides, he was as impossible to find as River.
Which left her with one choice. Bailey’s hand dropped to her side as she swallowed and looked down the hall to where the old fighting pits were. She hoped like hell someone would be there to help her. If not, she was screwed.
"When you said you needed help cleaning up a mess, I didn't think you meant that you killed Luka Krovopuskov and needed help disposing of his body." Franklin's expression was mildly concerning, in that Bailey had yet to see the owl shifter so serious before. Bailey crossed her arms and readied to defend herself when a giant smile split Franklin's face. Bailey stumbled forward as Franklin's hand clapped between her shoulder blades. "I didn't know you had it in you, B. Damn."
The few Wildings that accompanied Franklin gave short hoots and hollers of congratulations despite Bailey's incredulous stare. She scanned the hallway surreptitiously.
Franklin gave her another pat on the back, this one far gentler than the first. "Don't worry, no one's going to wander too close. All the full moon parties are still raging on." The knowledge did little to comfort Bailey as they were only one floor away from the latter. Regardless, she did her best to hide her doubt behind a stoic facade. "Lighten up, B. We've got your back." Franklin snapped her fingers and gestured to the body. "Take the tunnel behind the theater to get to the incinerator. Emmanuel, go make sure the path is clear. If it's not, you know what to do," she instructed.
Bailey frowned at Emmanuel's retreating figure. She didn't want the teenager involved in her mess.
"So, how'd you do it?" Franklin moved closer to the body, examining it curiously. When Bailey didn't answer immediately, she elaborated. "How did you kill him? He's barely got a scratch on him, except on his neck. Did you claw him or something?"
"What? No!" Bailey exclaimed.
She watched with unease as Q hoisted Luka's body over his shoulder with a grunt.
"There's a bit of blood on his face too." Q directed his observation to Franklin. The owl shifter made some small noise at the back of her throat as she nodded thoughtfully before giving her attention back to Bailey.
"So, are you gonna share how you did it or not?" Franklin prodded.
Exasperation painted Bailey's cheeks a warm red. "I didn't kill him."
Franklin and Q exchanged looks of disbelief. Q's ever-present scowl smoothed away as his eyebrows hiked up to his hairline, and Franklin's mouth went slightly agape. Then they burst into laughter.
"I didn't kill him, all right? He was possessed!"
"By what? The boogeyman?" Q snickered at his joke. Franklin snorted and hid her laughter behind her hand.
Bailey bit back a growl. "It was the shadowmancer." The statement didn't have the effect Bailey wanted it to. The pair continued to chortle until Q almost dropped Luka. Franklin snorted again and let her hand fall, not bothering to hide her amusement.
