“Oh no.”
The words fell from the girl’s mouth as if she hadn’t meant to let them out. Barely a few feet away, cupped in a limp hand, was the magic.
Puremagic.
Bright green, with hundreds of tiny threads twisting together like moss, it could have only come from one place. The forest beyond the city wall, torn straight off the bark of a tree.
Nes’s heart stumbled at the face of the dead. The boy was young. No more than fifteen. In death, only the whites of his eyes were visible. A waterfall of dried blood ran from the boy’s lips, covering his chin and neck. The dark of the new moon allowed Nes to just barely make out the soft green glow of pure magic inside the boy’s mouth.
The dead boy’s shirt had been torn open, revealing what looked like claw marks marring the skin over where his heart had beat. The boy had made them himself, a last desperate attempt to get the magic out. But once magic took hold of your heart, there was no hope.
The residents of the Ditch could dabble with the stars, but the magic never let them forget they were playing with fire. For pure magic killed. Every time.
Nes did not shy from the body. She couldn’t stop the evil of the world, but she could stare it down. To her surprise, Marnie did not look away, either. Maybe the girl was stronger than she thought.
“For magic’s end,” Nes whispered. The phrase was both a curse and a prayer. For her, the prayer always won out.
Marnie stepped closer to the corpse, her mouth hollow. In one hand, the boy still held the green threads of the pure magic, and in the other, the pulping, bloody mass that was once his tongue. Marnie bent down, a hand reaching for the magic.
“Don’t touch it.” Nes grabbed Marnie and yanked her upright. “Do you want to die? If the guards find you with that, you’ll be drowned as the Witch for sure.”
There had been three Witch drownings this week alone. An unusually high number, even for a country as paranoid about the Witch as Orlonea. Neither Nes nor Marnie could give the King’s Guard reason to suspect them.
Marnie gnawed on her chapped bottom lip. “But shouldn’t we—”
“No,” Nes said. “Leave him.”
The boy wasn’t magic’s first victim. Nor would he be its last.
Nes pulled openthe door to the gambling den, the tambourines on the inside rattling.
On the surface, the Siren’s Hair was like any other gambling den scattered throughout the Ditch. The green felt atop each table was stained with splotches and dark rings from pissed-away drinks, while the legs on the stools clustered around the tables were scuffed and scraped. The Siren’s Hair had seen better days.
But that was the point. As the only legal business Phineas Wraw had his name on, it wouldn’t do well for the lowly Ditch den to be gleaming with signs of her boss’s true wealth.
“It is only a matter of time,” Phineas once told her, “before suspicion becomes certainty.”
For the better part of two years, the Siren’s Hair—specifically the tiny room she shared with Suri on the second floor—had been her home. A shitty, sew-your-pockets-shut home, but home nevertheless.
Suri had made the place more like home than anything else—despite all of Nes’s efforts to avoid her. A runaway bride from Brevna, Suri hadsomehow found a place in Nes’s life, and, much to her own surprise, Nes liked her in it.
But that wouldn’t matter for long. Once Nes freed her father, they’d have to flee, and she wouldn’t be able to return to Gadore. She had to stay focused on what mattered. This was it. Marnie was her last job.
She pulled Marnie into the den’s kitchen. The space was a cacophony of sound. Spoons clattered at different pitches against the insides of pots. Knives hit cutting boards in various rhythms.
There were two doors in the kitchen. The first led out back to the dumpstreet. A long, thin space that stretched across the backs of every Ditch business. Appropriately named, as it was a place people tended to dump their trash—and sometimes bodies—until the plows came at midnight to sweep it all away.
The second door led to a fully stocked pantry. But it was what waited inside the pantry that made her palms sweat.
She threw open the pantry door and, skirting bags of onions and potatoes, found the third door. The one that concealed a staircase down.
“Ready?” she asked Marnie.
The girl shook beneath her cloak, her knees and elbows no more than tree branches shuddering against a strong wind. “He’ll pay me a hundred gadots a week?”
“As long as you do as Phineas asks.”
Marnie swallowed. “Then yes.”
