I had a death grip on that damn bag. No force in the universe could make me let go.
The bloody knife slashed in front of me, drawing an icy line across my neck. Heat wet my skin. Bright, shocking red sprayed Lecke’s face and cloak.
He’d cut my throat. He’d killed me. No more curling up in my apartment with a book. No more Netflix. I would never see my parents and my brother again. All my dreams and hopes, all the things I didn’t get to do, it was all over. My small comfortable life ended right here.
He wouldn’t take this bag even if keeping it was the final thing I did in my short life. I gripped the canvas sack and, with the last of my strength, hurled myself backward over the rail into the river. The gray stormy sky yawned at me, tilted, and then cold dark water fell on my face and swallowed me whole.
CHAPTER2
Ichoked on muddy water. Before my brain could process the situation, my body took over. I flipped onto my stomach and retched.
I was still alive and drowning again.
How was I alive?
Every spasm hurt like hell. I felt the pain all the way in my toes.
The last of the water spilled out of me. I coughed, my throat raw, and opened my eyes, half expecting to be back in the same ditch somehow.
No, not a ditch. Above me, high up, was some sort of dark roof or ceiling. I was on my hands and knees in about six inches of water. My left hand was squishing slimy mud. My right was still clutching the money bag, its cord wrapped in a tangle around my wrist.
How . . . ?
I untied the cord and pulled the bag open with shaking fingers. Coins. Handfuls of them.
I hugged the bag to my naked chest and sobbed. For a few moments nothing existed except the bag and overwhelming relief.
Gradually it dawned on me that I was naked again and that what I could see of myself looked unwounded. Lecke had stabbed me. I was sure of it. I closed my eyes, and my memory served up the knife slicing into me in a flash of pain. Yes, he’d definitely stabbed me. And then cut my throat. I checked my neck. No blood. No wound. No scar that I could feel. Nothing on my stomach either.
Even if he hadn’t stabbed me, the river should’ve killed me. I should’ve drowned.
Where the hell was I?
I looked around. The rain still sifted from the sky, but it was no longer a drenching shower. I had attacked Lecke about thirty minutes after four pm. Now dusk was creeping in. Dark water stretched in front of me and to the sides, flowing around a narrow strip of muddy ground choked with weeds and low bushes wrapped in a thorny vine. A stone column rose behind me, supporting the roof above my head. Far in the distance, the top of the Mage Tower fluoresced weakly against the encroaching darkness. When I’d waited by the bridge, it had jutted almost directly across from me, and now it was much farther away, which meant the river had carried me downstream.
I had washed up on Ogden Island, a small, marshy chunk of solid ground at the junction of the Koreg and another small river. Ogden was the only island downstream of the Estret Bridge that would still let me view almost all of the Mage Tower. I knew this because one of the characters chose this spot for an ambush and had a whole page of inner monologue about the beauty of the Mage Tower and how this was the only island where so much of it could be seen. On other islands the trees or buildings blocked the view.
I was sitting under Ogden Bridge right by a busy neighborhood. I needed to get the hell out of here before someone noticed me or Lecke came looking for his blood money.
Getting up proved to be a heroic challenge. My stomach didn’t have a gash, but my whole body hurt as if someone had pummeled me with a baseball bat. After three tries, I stood and leaned against the column, which was likely a bridge pier, took a short breather, and stumbled forward, keeping my left hand on the stones and my right cradling the money. Every step hurt, but I was losing light and fast.
I rounded the pier and squinted at the narrow stretch of shrub-covered ground. Something rested on the muddy shore, halfway in the water. The air reeked of an unmistakable, slightly sweet stench.
A dead body. I waded through the ankle-deep water toward it.
It was blue-black and bloated. I couldn’t even tell if it was a woman or a man. It looked like it would fall apart at any moment.
I retched, but there was nothing in my stomach, so I just dry heaved until I peed myself. I would’ve cried, but I didn’t have the energy for it.
The body wore a cloak and some sort of tunic and pants, ripped and stained. A rope with torn ends wrapped around the corpse’s waist. There must’ve been a weight attached to it. This was a planned drowning, never meant to be discovered. The floodwaters had dislodged the corpse from the riverbed and carried it to the island.
I waited until my eyes stopped watering from the stink, walked over to the body, crouched, and unhooked its cloak. Getting it off the corpse proved a lot easier than expected. I pulled, and it came free.
I had to wash it. The river was cold, muddy, and dark. I gritted my teeth, dragged the cloak into the water, and sloshed it around.
A small shape slunk out of the twilight to the right of me. I turned my head.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
