As I’d assumed, Saela’s locked the door to our room, so I pull out the key and let myself in.
My sister is cozied into her small bed, sleeping soundly, her dark hair spread across her thin pillow. Ten, almost eleven—the same age as Leesa Sawyer.
In her sleep, Saela looks so much like our father, the father she’s never known. She has the same stubborn chin, the same aquiline nose. My own memories of him grow fogged as the years pass, but she brings him alive for me.
I sit down next to her on her bed, running the back of my finger down one of her soft cheeks. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” I whisper, a fierce, protective instinct burning in my chest. “I promise.”
This nauseous, terrified churning in my stomach—I’m absolutely fucking sick of it. Of living a life where I just accept that I have no control, that our children can just disappear and no one will do a single thing about it.
Tonight was too close of a call.
And if no one’s going to stop this… well, then I will.
CHAPTER TWO
“Do it again,” Igor calls during training the next afternoon, unmoved by my heavy breathing, or the patch of sweat soaking through my tunic.
I meet his eyes and groan. He raises his graying eyebrows at me, mouth quirking.
“Again,” he repeats. “Withouttelegraphing your next move this time—remember what I showed you.”
I straighten up, willing my breath to still. My thighs are screaming already, worn out from the morning’s work of endlessly lifting huge buckets of water at the laundry where I work, a job that I inherited from my mom when she stopped showing up eleven years ago.
Someone needed to go in her stead, to make sure that we could keep food on our table and the roof over our heads. I dropped out of school and never looked back.
It doesn’t matter that I’m tired. Everyone’s tired, and Igor doesn’t accept any excuses. Not in the fighting ring, and certainly not here in his yard as he trains me.
He’s right. I can’t afford to show any weakness.
Not if I want to keep winning. And we need those extra coins.
My foot slams into the practice dummy, and Igor grunts his approval, the closest to a compliment I get during these sessions. I repeat the movement again, two, three more times for good measure, before dancing back on the balls of my feet, grabbing a rag to wipe the sweat off my face.
Igor’s side yard is a mess of lopsided practice dummies, rough-hewn weights to build muscle, and a jumble of half-broken furniture that I know his wife Prina wishes he’d spend time fixing rather than sinking more time into training me.
“You okay, Alleycat?” he asks, taking the rag back from me. “Seem a little off today.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. Igor is irritatingly perceptive; but then again, he’s more of a parent to me than my actual living one.
“I can’t stop thinking about Leesa Sawyer,” I tell him, the spark of last night’s fury still burning inside of me, waiting to catch fire. I’ve been mulling over it all day, coming closer and closer to a way to take action.
Igor nods as he motions to the practice dummy, instructing me to keep going as we talk. “That’s a tough one, the Sawyer girl. Good family. Nice people. Heard her parents were up all night searching for her,” he says as I unleash a fast combination of kicks and punches. “But I’ve yet to hear of a missing kid who’s been found.”
“Does it seem like it’s happening more? The Nabbers, I mean,” I say between punches.
They have a silly, childish name, given to them by the very kids who fear them. It’s almost hard to take them seriously when you hear it, which is part of the appeal. If you can laugh at it, it doesn’t seem true—like the Nabbers are nothing more than a childhood legend.
Unfortunately, their menace is all too real.
Kids have been getting kidnapped for as long as I’ve been alive; maybe as long as this entire war has been going on. And we all know who the Nabbers actually are.
Siphons, our ancient, monstrous enemy from the neighboring country of Astreona. They steal our kids out of their beds and take them back across the border, turning them into living blood bags, feeding off of them, sucking out their powerful child life force, and eventually draining and killing them.
It makes me sick, thinking how those depraved immortal vampires are going to win this war by slaughtering our innocents.
Igor hums. “Maybe so. Get higher with that kick.”
I follow his instructions, my legs continuing to ache. “Isn’t it bad enough that our sons and daughters and fathers are being killed by the Siphons at the front? We should be safe in our own homes, shouldn’t we? What’s the king doing about all this?”
