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EDEN USED THE POTION to teleport to an alley near her home. Someone had been spying on her at Padavion’s house, but she’d only caught a brief sense of being watched before the spell had kicked in. Were her lords and masters getting suspicious? Did they somehow know what she was planning to do?
“If they knew, they would have summoned me to them to punish me by now,” she murmured, trying to reassure herself that she was safe. Her link to them only let them know when she’d eliminated her targets. It didn’t convey any other information to them. They didn’t have a magic window to see into her soul and they couldn’t glean her thoughts from her head.
It was now snowing hard enough to coat her umbrella with a thick layer of ice as she headed home. Few people walked the sidewalks in the City Square. Everyone was inside where it was warm and dry. She saw a wizard in a dark red cloak hurrying towards her, carrying a package beneath his arm. He nodded at her politely and she saw a glimpse of his inhumanly handsome face and amethyst eyes. She nodded back, then he disappeared into the snow as he continued with his mission.
Eden had almost made it to her mansion when a letter zoomed towards her and fluttered in front of her face impatiently. Ice had started to form on it, which showed how bitterly cold it was. The assassin took the letter and opened it. She huffed out a sigh when she saw it was a new mission to kill a shifter.
The succubus pivoted on her heel and headed back towards the City Square. She was in luck and a carriage rumbled towards her a few minutes later. She lifted her hand and the vehicle came to a stop. She called out the address where she wanted to go, then quickly climbed inside. The skeleton driver set the vehicle into motion, heading for a bridge that would take her to the Shifter District to the west.
Her thoughts went to the bargain she’d made with Padavion during the drive. She had no idea how she was going to find the mysterious Night Cursed healer. The logical place to search would be in the hospitals that were scattered throughout the Districts. Eden realized the flaw in that plan immediately. Everyone in Nox would have heard about the healer by now if they worked in one of the hospitals. The holy person appeared to be a well-kept secret, so she was going to have to think of a way to locate them.
By the time she reached her destination, Eden had come up with a plan. It was obvious that she needed to head to the Night Cursed District and question the holy folk there. They might be drained, but they would hopefully be able to point her in the right direction. “If they can even remember this healer,” she muttered as she climbed out of the carriage. The skeleton looked down at her and clicked its teeth enquiringly. “Never mind,” she said. It gave a bony shrug, then set the carriage into motion again. After a few yards, it vanished into the gloom.
Eden walked the rest of the way to the apartment building where her next target lived. He was another worker drone who was most likely trying to cause dissent and rile up his colleagues against their rulers. She couldn’t sense him when she reached the building, but it was only a couple of hours until dawn now, so his shift would be over soon.
The succubus settled down to wait beneath an overhang of a building across the street and a few doors down. After an hour or so, the workers began returning to their homes. Some of them were covered in coal dust. Their skin and clothes were black with filth that the magic of Nox could no longer clean for them.
Sensing her target drawing closer, Eden saw him with a group of other workers. She picked him out of the crowd through her link to whichever of her leaders had given her the order. Since he was a shapeshifter, she assumed Lord Graham had sent her the letter. Her hearing was sharp enough to pick up on what he was saying.
“We can’t keep going on like this,” the rebel said quietly to his followers. “The Energy Tax is slowly killing us. Each year, the children that are born are weaker than the last ones. Soon, they’ll begin dying in the womb before they can even be born.”
That drew concerned murmurs from the others. “What can we do about it?” one of the women asked shrilly. She put a hand on her bulging belly protectively. “We can’t stand against the Immortal Triumvirate! Without the Energy Tax, there won’t be any magic at all left in Nox!”
“Do we even need magic?” Eden’s target asked. “Coal is being used to power some of the factories in our District. Soon, all of Nox will be forced to use coal. It will become like normal cities in the US. Do we even really need magic to survive?”
“We came to Nox because it was supposed to be different from the other cities,” someone pointed out. “It was far better before the Night Cursed monsters turned on us and ruined everything.”
“We can’t change the past,” the man who had been marked for death said and the mutters died down again. “But we can try to shape the future. I’ll request a meeting with Guild Master Reed tomorrow. I’ll suggest that the Shifter Guild should be exempt from the Energy Tax this year. We can trial how well our District will fare without using the stores of magic.”
Murmurs of agreement and relief sounded, then the group dispersed and headed for their apartments. Eden wished she could allow the werewolf to request the meeting, but she couldn’t defy her orders. The shifter would never get to voice his suggestion to boycott using magic altogether to see if they could survive without it. He obviously wasn’t alone in his opinion. Someone else would raise the issue with the Shifter Guild Master after the worker disappeared.
Eden sent her succubus magic towards her mark and ensnared him in her clutches. His head turned and he stared straight at her as if he could see her through the snowy deluge. His coworkers flicked curious looks at him when he veered away from his apartment building rather than entering it. They were too weary and cold to follow him and trudged inside their homes.
The werewolf loped across the street. He followed Eden when she walked a few blocks away to an uninhabited building. She couldn’t sense anyone nearby as she stepped into the derelict structure. Her target followed her inside and closed the door. His amber eyes were dazed and he stared at her worshipfully. The assassin didn’t need to ask him why he’d been marked for execution. She’d just heard his views about how Nox was being run. The rulers of the City of Night didn’t allow rebellion in any form. That seemed to include suggesting that an entire District should be exempt from their precious Energy Tax.
Pulling the shifter’s head down, Eden pressed her lips to his and siphoned his energy from him. She felt the usual surge of energy when his life was extinguished, but it left her feeling hollow. He’d done nothing wrong. He was just trying to find a way to help his people. This was what Lord Graham should have been doing for the citizens of the Shifter District. He’d failed them, just like Lord Dallinar and Lord Kreaton had failed their people.
Eden ignited the husk of the werewolf and burned him and his clothes to a pile of ash. She looked down at the remains and tried to estimate how many murders she’d committed over the past decade. She knew the number had to be in the high hundreds, if not over a thousand, but she hadn’t kept count. The succubus wasn’t proud of her job. This wasn’t a career she’d dreamed of embarking on as a little girl. She was a beautiful monster whose only purpose was to cause death. She had a glimmer of hope that she could change her life, but there was no guarantee that she would succeed.
“I have to try,” Eden said and resolved to head to the Night Cursed District tomorrow night to search for the mysterious healer.
