A creak sounds from somewhere in the apartment, followed by several heavy clomping footsteps and a pair of male voices that I’m certain don’t belong to Kit.
There’s someone inside.
Chapter 10
Torin
Kit is gone.
Jack and I search up and down in his apartment and then all the way down to the shop below, but there’s no sign of him.
I can’t get that smell out of my oversensitive nose. Blood and rot mixed with something herbal I can’t place.
Jack knows it, though. He’s been sickly pale ever since we first scented it, wandering around like a ghost with a bad attitude. Usually, he talks my damn ear off, but not today.
“Anything?” I grunt as I slide into a chair at the kitchen table.
“The chains have faint traces of sorcery,” he replies. “And this thing has some kind of magic to it, too.” He holds up the gold cylinder we found on the kitchen table, etched all over with unrecognisable sigils.
Everything else looks normal, even though there’s a gnawing feeling in my gut that we’re missing something.
“We need to ask around,” Jack says with a sigh.
Tricky, when neither of us speaks more than a handful of words in the local language. Kit’s lived here long enough that we should have tried harder to learn. I don’t know why we haven’t.
Well, I know why I never bothered. I’d avoid speaking to anyone outside of our crew if I could help it. And sometimes even they’re exhausting. Even Jack knackers me out with his talking, and he’s closer than a brother to me.
I’m slumped in my chair, mind working through the possibilities of what might’ve happened with Kit, when the air changes. The hair on the back of my neck prickles, my spines threatening to make an appearance.
“Someone’s here.”
We climb to our feet and head to the stairwell, glaring down at the intruders.
A man, a woman and an ogress stand at the bottom of the stairs, gaping up at us.
Not the start of a joke, however much it might sound like one.
“You.” The woman climbs the bottom step, her eyes locked firmly on me. “You’re the pirate from Captain Finch’s office yesterday.”
My eyebrows shoot up of their own accord as I growl, “I’m the what now?”
“I don’t think they like the ‘p’ word,” the ogress says in a carrying whisper.
But the woman seems entirely unbothered, tossing her shock of hair behind her shoulders. “All right then, you’re the man from the perfectly respectable and not at all cursed ship I saw yesterday on Kit’s scrying glass.” She climbs the rest of the stairs, peering past us like she’s looking for someone.
“Where’s Kit? What happened to his door?”
“He’s not here,” Jack replies.
“What’s it to you?” I add.
She rubs at her chest, gazing around before unknowingly retracing mine and Jack’s path through the apartment.
“Kit’s my mate,” she replies quietly, eyeing the cylinder on the table and reaching out as if to touch it, before snatching her hand away.
Jack and I share a startled look before turning back to her. “He’s yourwhat?”
“Since when?”
