The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats
Nor do they have tails
But they are most assuredly dead.
THE RED SCRIPT leapt out to Eveen, etched in cursive onto the plain brown card she held between a thumb and forefinger. After speaking the words aloud, she repeated them in her head twice again, trying not to snicker. She failed. Her laughter chortled into a snort that burst from her lips and nostrils like a thing seeking escape. The other patrons in the posh eatery swiveled stiff necks fitted into well-stitched finery to glare disapprovingly.
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” Fennis remarked. He sat across from her, his ginger eyebrows furrowing at her reaction.
No, it was absolutely ridiculous, she wanted to say, until she noticed the crimson splotching his cheeks. She wasn’t normally one to be concerned about feelings. But the man had a face like a baby—with big liquid eyes and cheeks that aunties and grandmothers would travel to pinch and wiggle. Who wanted to make all that upset?
“Umm, did you write this?”
He nodded, going more crimson. Crimsoner? Yes, he was going crimsoner.
“Oh. Well. Then. Ummmmmm.”
He sighed. “Just turn it over.”
She flipped the card. “Oh look. More words.”
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins.
Skilled. Discreet. Professional.
Here for your most pressing needs.
Eveen glanced back up at Fennis: an expectant cherub with a curly ginger halo.
“Stop looking at me like that. I’m doing my best here. What are we supposed to do with these again?” She motioned to the stack on the table.
“They’re calling cards,” he said, far too pleased with himself. “After you and the gang finish a job, you can leave them about. A way to drum up business.”
She held up a finger. “First, stop calling us a gang. We’re not street toughs with matching haircuts. We’re a guild of hired killers.” Another finger. “Second, what makes you think that the employers of someone we ship will want us doing more shipping on their behalf?”
“In this city,” he replied, “there’s always business for that sort of business.”
Well, Eveen admitted, he had a point.
Tal Abisi was a port city on the western peninsula. It was claimed more trade passed through here than through the three largest similar ports on the continent combined—silk and textiles from inland Vash, rum and blue spice from the Baleen Archipelago, magic-rich minerals and ores mined in far-off eastern Gulat, even wonders from the mechanical city of Kons. Goods flowed through Tal Abisi as readily as the gold and silver such trade generated. And where there was wealth, there were people to fight over it: business competitors, feuding mobsters, games of vendetta among the powerful who controlled the city, and more. Work, her kind of work, was ever booming.
Eveen tossed the card onto the table. “You ran this by Baseema?”
Fennis nodded. “She was quite amenable to the idea.”
“I bet.” Baseema was as hard as tempered steel, which is what you’d expect from a guild boss of assassins. But she had a soft spot for Fennis, who she’d hired to handle the guild’s paperwork. Probably that baby face.
Eveen’s attention—along with everyone else’s—was drawn suddenly to the trio that burst into the eatery. Instinct sent a hand reaching not for the two curved knives she kept strapped to her torso, hidden beneath the half-buttoned cobalt blue waist-length sailor’s jacket, but to the throwing dagger in the brown knee-high boot on her right leg. She’d teased out the black hilt, barely perceptible against the dark blue stripe that ran up her white breeches, before reassessing the newcomers.
One, a man in a fur-lined coat sewed with glittering sprocket wheels. Another, a woman, dressed similarly to Eveen. The two tussled over a third figure, in a puffy short skirt, sailor’s boots, and overly large coat, her skin painted a metallic gold. Eveen eased the dagger back into place. No danger here. These were actors and this was a bit of theatre. Not too surprising in Tal Abisi, on the third and final night of the Festival of the Clockwork King, the Pirate Princess, and the Golden Bounty.
Sitting back, she watched the impromptu show—complete with a competition of recited literature. Even this uptight crowd was riveted, gasping as the performers drew flintlock pistols that fired streams of orange ribbon, and descending into a hush as the golden girl reached into her chest to offer up a mechanical heart that burst into shimmering confetti. They were rewarded with applause, knuckle raps on tables, and a shower of coins. The small troupe hastily picked up their winnings, rushing out before the establishment’s matron—who stood smiling tightly and gripping the sides of her purple kaftan—lost patience. You could push things during Festival, but only so far.
“I never tire of hearing that tale,” Fennis murmured.
“I’ve read better,” Eveen said, flicking away confetti.
“All you read are those Terribles the presses in Kons churn out—Asheel the Maniac Hunter or Terrors of the Demon Lands.”
Eveen wagged a finger. “That’s solid literature! Asheel hunts maniacs—even though he’s a maniac! A maniac who hunts other maniacs? Genius! And Terrors of the Demon Lands are reputedly eyewitness accounts.”
Fennis regarded her skeptically.
“Whatever. Still better than the piss we just saw put on,” she retorted.
“Every story carries its own truths,” he said, in a very Fennis-like way.
“Pfft. A girl offers up her own life to stop feuding suitors—dramatic much?”
“She did it for love. And it saved Tal Abisi. Now she’s the city’s patron saint.”
“Love? More like caught between a conniving pirate and a megalomaniac.”
Fennis gestured at her. “Yet here you are dressed as the Pirate Princess yourself.”
Eveen tugged at the gold buttons of her jacket, pulling the white shirt beneath just past the cuffs. “I keep with the fashion. And who doesn’t like a festival? I’m just saying … the city almost gets laid to waste by an army of mechanical giants, is left with a magical hazard that makes an entire district uninhabitable, and almost three hundred years later that near-death experience is turned into three nights of revelry.”
“People deal with memories of trauma in odd ways,” Fennis replied.
“Memories,” Eveen muttered. “Wouldn’t know much about those.”
Fennis winced. “Sorry.”
She waved him off with a lie. “Hard to miss what you don’t have.”
The awkward lull was broken by a server, drinks in hand, wearing a lopsided smile. He’d been making googly eyes at her all evening, likely wondering if she and Fennis were an item. No worries there. The man had never once glanced at her with amorous intent. The only passion or arousal he showed was for food—like the way his face lit up now watching wine poured into a pewter goblet. He’d arrived here as a boy from a backwater village, Mara’s Bay or some such place, where the most exciting cuisine was bluefish, whatever that was. Tal Abisi expanded his palate, and he’d become a connoisseur of rare delights—which is why they’d ended up in this snooty spot, instead of the hole in the wall joints she preferred.
Pushing back twisted dark locs that draped casually over one eye, she bit her lip and caressed the stubble on the side of her scalp she kept shorn. The server was attractive enough. And that whole memory thing was working her mood. Some flirtation was better than having to watch Fennis inhaling the aroma of his wine with unbridled bliss. Aeril’s fiery tits. The man should rent a room already.
The server’s lopsided smile widened. Finger tracing the rim of her goblet, Eveen eased back into her seat, extending one leg its full long length in her tight breeches. That sent his eyes a bit more googly. Like using glow glass to catch river eels. She wondered if he’d pour some of that wine into Fennis’s lap? That might be fun. But his smile abruptly disappeared, face shifting to unease. He looked away, quickly filling her goblet before turning to go. She scowled at his back. What was that about?
“You keep forgetting to blink.”
Fennis eyed her above his goblet, sipping wine.
“What?”
He indicated the retreating server.
“Blinking. You forget that sometimes. It can be … off-putting.”
“Oh,” Blinking. One of those habits you had to remember, when you were dead.
Her eyes—after intentionally timed blinks—went back to the stack of cards.
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats
Nor do they have tails
But they are most assuredly dead.
No lies there. Eveen was dead. Like dead, dead. For real dead.
How that had happened—she didn’t know. No clue about who she’d been in life either. Not a single solitary memory. She was certain her name hadn’t been Eveen. She just liked the sound of it. Eveen. Eveeeen. Eveeeeeen. It rolled off the tongue. About the only thing she could say for certain was that she’d done this to herself. She’d been shown the contract and everything—the one agreed to in life, giving herself to the goddess she now served. Her fingers slid along the nape of her neck, touching the black tattoo imprinted against her dark skin: the jackal-eared hound, sigil of Aeril, Matron of Assassins, to whom she was bound, body and soul, in death.
She took a sip of wine—wishing it could evoke whatever it was doing for Fennis. Dull, of course. She could drink bottles more and she’d never get exactly drunk, just somewhere on the edge of inebriety. Everything was like that when you were dead. This wine. Food. Sex. The sweetness and verve—there was a nice word, verve—was just missing. Like someone baking you a pie and removing just enough sugar. You’d eat it, sure. What kind of weirdo turns down pie? But it just wouldn’t have the proper sweetness. No verve.
At least the guild had done right by her resurrection. Had to give them that. She wasn’t some shambling half-rotted corpse out to devour brains or the like. The reanimation sorcery kept her like a living person. Well, almost. Her skin had a dull cast to it, though nothing the right oils and a good soaking couldn’t fix. Some involuntary acts, like blinking, she had to force herself to do to keep up appearances. And, as a rumble in her stomach reminded her, there was eating.
Thankfully their server was returning. No more lopsided grin or googly eyes, and with others in tow. They set down dishes piled with food. Broiled stepper birds in pungent herbs. A braised shank of mutton doused in mint. One bowl of fried squid in a tangy sauce. And the honey-glazed ribs of some roasted beast. She dug in with ferocity.
The dead were ravenous for food—lots of it. Something to do with the sorcery preserving her undead flesh. Like everything else, none of it even tasted that remarkable. Still, even in death this body hungered for its sacrifices.
“Observing you eat is always a wonder,” Fennis commented, watching her crack open thin stepper bird bones to get at marrow.
“I don’t need your judgment. Aren’t you having anything?”
“Oh yes! Here it is now!”
The server returned with a plate of white yogurt and a sheet of thin flatbread. Two bowls followed, each filled with wriggling things that made her squint.
“Are those ants?”
Fennis nodded, riffling through his coat—a long gray jacket with endless pockets that swallowed him in its fullness—until he procured a small vial. Unstoppering it, he poured a dark viscous liquid over the wriggling ants.
“Peppered honey,” he explained. “A delicacy I learned from a Banari ship captain.”
“Thought all they had in Banar were knife duels if you looked at someone the wrong way,” Eveen said, crunching her squid.
“Well, yes.” He produced a pouch and pinched some green seasonings to sprinkle on the hapless ants. “But they’re also known for their daring cuisine. The ants are from the Splintered Isles, one set red, the other blue. They’re generally docile. But if ever the two cross they turn vicious! It is said the secretions they exude in battle taste like nothing else.” Tearing off a bit of flatbread, he dipped it in yogurt, then rolled it in both bowls of honeyed ants.
“Wait. You’re not going to—”
Before she finished, he stuffed the concoction into his mouth—chewing in ecstasy.
“Of course you are,” she muttered.
By the time they’d finished eating, Eveen had stacked up a pile of plates. And Fennis had had three more helpings of ants. They sat drinking hot kaf with sugary milk out of small blue porcelain cups, as was their usual end of meal ritual. This was more than a casual night of dining. Fennis was a handler for the guild. And sweetened kaf always preceded a commission for murder.
“So what’s the job?” she ventured.
In answer, Fennis pulled out rolled brown parchment from one jacket pocket, a pen from another, and a small bottle of ink from a third. The man was like a chest of drawers. He unrolled the parchment onto the table, using plates and cups to keep it flat.
Eveen’s eyes roamed over the endless legalese. Lots of “Whereby the contractor…” and “provided obligations are met” and “binding all concerned parties…” It was ridiculous the amount of paperwork that went into getting someone shipped.
“Just show me where to sign.” She took the pen and he pointed. With each signature she watched the ink dry, the sorcery of the vows sinking into her skin.
“And who’s commissioning the shipping?” she asked.
“The contractor has chosen anonymity.”
“So they paid extra.”
“As required.”
Anonymity was exorbitant—intentionally so. Better when everyone knew who had ordered a shipping, the cycle of revenge benefitting the four major assassin guilds in the city. If someone was willing to fork up the chunk of change it took to conceal their identity …
“Must be filthy rich.”
“And powerful,” Fennis agreed.
In this city, those two went hand in hand.
“You should know, they also requested you by name.”
Eveen looked up. Fennis’s baby face returned a knowing smile.
“It seems the Eviscerator still has admirers.”
She rolled her eyes. You open a guy up and show him his insides and people think you need a sobriquet. “It was only the one time,” she muttered. Finishing the last signature, she grimaced, digging nails into the table as the hound’s-head tattoo burned like a brand before cooling. One more death sanctioned to the goddess, who always claimed her due.
“The contract is accepted and just,” Fennis intoned.
There were lots of rules to being an assassin. Three were deemed unbreakable. The first was that the contract was just. Aeril was particular about her offerings. You didn’t ship kids. Or women who were with child. Or anyone who could be classified as pura innocentes. Everybody else was fair game, from monks to mobsters.
“The contract is accepted and just,” she returned. “Who’s getting shipped?”
Fennis rolled up the contract and slipped her a piece of paper. She read it.
“An address?”
“That’s what we were given.”
“And the find?”
This time he offered up a golden coin. Taking it, she looked it over—a Festival token. Finds were items that helped locate your job. Usually a personal belonging: clothing, jewelry, even a hairpin. This one was recognizable enough. But the design was decades old—an antique of Festivals past. Good condition though.
“How old is this person?”
“Can’t say. But you’ll find them at that address. Tonight.”
“So quick?”
“That’s the request. The contract is to be fulfilled—before dawn.”
Eveen grumbled. “No rest for the dead I guess.”
“You don’t sleep.”
She stared at him flatly. “It’s a figure of speech. Where can I find you to confirm?”
Fennis’s baby face brightened to a glow. “At the night market. The Traveling Folk are here for Festival. They have a fermented drink of spiced beer and curdled sky bison milk called oosha—”
Eveen held up a hand. “I’ll find you there. At least one of us will enjoy ourselves.”
“Could be worse,” Fennis said, disappearing the contract into a pocket. “You could be the person with the bad luck of getting shipped during Festival.”
Eveen downed the last of her kaf before standing and buttoning up her jacket. “Getting shipped is getting shipped. Doesn’t matter what night. It’s all fucking godsdamned bad luck.” Flipping the coin, she caught it again before turning to let it lead her to her unfortunate quarry.
IT WAS EARLY night as a round moon cast its ghostly light upon Tal Abisi. Eveen crouched atop a ledge on the Tomb of the Patriarchs—a blockish construction of taupe stone that housed the remains of the city’s foremost ruling families. Statues of the first twelve patriarchs were carved into its sides: long-ago founders who had journeyed here to conduct trade. Tal Abisi had grown from a small outpost into a bustling cosmopolitan port, where people from a hundred different lands settled. That history was written into the local pidgin and etched into faces—both as blended as the city’s hybrid cultures.
From this high vantage Eveen could make out the crumbling lighthouse on Tal Abisi’s eastern shore, which had once warned mariners of the rocky coast. Now it leaned like a nodding poppy piper in the abandoned Smuggler’s District. The region was illuminated by a cascade of light, what people still called the Shimmer: the Clockwork King’s lingering mark. To her immediate right were the central trading ports, where vessels of every conceivable make bobbed upon the waters: single-sailed dhows, larger galleons, and at least one gargantuan treasure ship whose curving hull alone dwarfed them all. To the left of the ports was the financial quarter, with its pristine colonnaded banks and merchant houses in neat rows like stacked coins. Adjacent was the clerics’ quadrant of temples, steeples, and spindly towers dedicated to a pantheon of divinities.
But most in Tal Abisi lived here in the center, beneath the stone glare of the Patriarchs’ tomb, what many still called the Old City: an endless array of smaller structures illuminated by glow lamps that blinked like hundreds of eyes. Through the ages, buildings in the Old City had been expanded or simply erected upon the bones of others. It was a mashup of architectural styles, stitched together amid winding stone streets bearing names like the Butcher’s Intestines or the Three-Eyed Way, and with districts from the upscale Fortunate Widow’s Row to the descending slums of the Wheelbarrow.
Umber terracotta tiles made from local clay covered most rooftops, while others were capped by colorful rounded domes or draped in lush greenery. Weaved into this mosaic were shops and markets, gamblers dens and funerary parlors, drinking holes and fine eateries, lavish homes and modest dwellings. Snaking canals crisscrossed it all: threads of tapestry traversed by curving flat-bottomed boats whose dangling lanterns shone against the dark waters.
Eveen often perched here to take in the beautiful mess of it. The dead didn’t require sleep. She’d tried. As liminal as the rest of her existence. She didn’t mind it so much. Only she wished she could dream. The way the living described it, sounded intriguing. Maybe her dreams would be of her past life. Or even of the dreams she once had—dreams of dreams. Then again, the dead probably just dreamt of all the ways they’d possibly died. Or of a stifling dark oblivion.
“You’re morbid tonight,” she muttered. The only living things to hear her on this ledge were two stepper birds, like the ones she’d had for dinner—little puffs of yellow that cheeped and hopped. They were flightless, and she had no idea how the things got up here. But stepper birds were always about, found on every continent, as if they’d hopped their way across each one.
“I ate a few of your friends earlier. If you’re smart, you’ll stay up here—away from cooks and canal eels.”
The birds tilted neckless heads, glass eyes blinking, as if trying to decipher her prattle.
“Another bit of advice. Before you die, think over the costs of post-death employment.”
More blinking.
“Look at me. I must have been what, in my late-thirtieth years when I kicked it? And I sign some infernal contract to work while I’m dead?”
Blink, blink.
“I’ve tried to figure it out.” She tapped her temple. “Wracked my brain puzzling at what kind of person would even do such a thing. But nothing comes up.”
Blink, blink, blink.
“Don’t even know how I kicked it. Slipped and broke my neck? Drowned? Suicide? Mauled by a three-horned bull cat? Or, what if I was shipped? Maybe I was some crime boss and got shipped—only to come back as a vengeful assassin. Story like that should be a Terrible! Escapades of Eveen the Eviscerator!”
Two short black beaks chirped, unimpressed.
“Yeah, well what do you know? Shoo!”
She flicked at one, sending it careening off the ledge—and plummeting like a rock.
“Wow. You guys really can’t fly for shit.” The puff of yellow became a speck in the gloom. “Sorry. That was uncalled-for.” The remaining stepper bird looked after its companion, then to her. “I said I was sorry. Here.” She laid down one of Fennis’s calling cards. “You need somebody shipped, look me up. Speaking of which, time to go to work.”
Reaching up, she pulled down her mask: a bone white cat with a feral grin. The stepper bird cheeped in alarm, hopped, and slipped off the ledge—a yellow ball tumbling into the dark.
She sighed. “That’s life. Short and stupid.” Shaking her head, she snatched up the card, then hurled herself from the ledge to the rooftops below. There was weightlessness, the air flapping her cloak before her padded boots struck terracotta tiles. The height of the drop alone should have shattered her legs. But being an undead thrall had its perks. Better than the fate doled out to unfortunate stepper birds.
In a burst of speed, she crossed the sloping tiles without a sound. Masked revelers feted in the streets below, unaware of the small figure that bounded from rooftop to rooftop. Up here she might as well be a ghost. A sweet scent hit her nose, and not missing a beat, she zig-zagged, swinging into an open window to flow like a silent breeze through a dark room. The woman intertwined with her two masked lovers never even glimpsed the shadow that snatched up a pastry, slipping back outside to crouch on the veranda.
Shimmer cake. Eveen lifted up her mask and bit down, smearing her lips with white icing dusted in golden sugar. Her fingers plucked out the figurine inside—the Pirate Princess. Tradition held she’d have either chaos or fortune tonight. Maybe both: whatever the Shimmer sent her way.
She’d traded in her costume for work clothes: soft-padded boots, black leather breeches, and a matching top. There was also the cloak—a thing of glimpses and shadows, with a hooded cowl to hide her face. As she ate, she looked down at a gathering procession, some in Pirate Princess costumes—set to reenact the march to the old Smuggler’s District to fight the Clockwork King. Nearly everyone held a burning cane stalk. Some jumped to the music provided by a troupe.
They wouldn’t actually go to the uninhabitable eastern shore of course. Instead, the marchers would take a meandering road to the docks—dousing their torches in the sea. That is, if they didn’t run into other bands along the way. Then there’d be challenges of recited literature and the chance of some real violence. Everyone was a little giddy—partly drink, partly the Shimmer at its peak churning out eddies of errant magic. Folks called that bacchanalia Shimmer Fever. There’d be lots of one-time trysts and babies conceived before this final night of Festival was done—alongside brawls and deadly cutlass fights.
“People deal with memories of trauma in odd ways,” she murmured, reciting Fennis.
Maybe she should try the same. Not the cutlass fights. But when she was done here, she’d play the pirate again and try to lose herself in the night’s festivities. Perhaps she’d even try Fennis’s fermented sky bison milk.
She made a face. Or not.
Finishing the cake, she tucked the figurine beside a dagger at her shoulder and set out again. She knew where she was going. The address she’d been given was guide enough. And the coin tucked into her belt pulled like magnetic ore. So it wasn’t a surprise when winding streets gave way to greenery and terracotta roofs were replaced by towers capped in stone. One of the wealthy districts. Not the kind where mobsters and jumped-up trade magnates played at nobility. No, this was old wealth—well-aged like sweet black rum.
She landed in the twisting branches of a tree, laden with bulbous blood-red fruit. Not native to Tal Abisi, so imported. Much of this garden looked to be. Part of a large estate—all stone archways, pillars, and a flat roof with crenellated parapets like a small palace. Towers capped in white enclosed each corner. And it was from one of them that the coin pulled.
That probably explained all the guards.
She hung upside down from the tree’s branches. From this vantage she counted at least twelve guards milling about the base of her intended tower, in red turbans and burgundy uniforms. Swords hung from their hips and the ivory hilts of long knives and pistols peeked from broad gold sashes. Hired help. She’d encountered this bunch before—the Iron Brotherhood or Lady’s Pride or some such thing. They always had stupid names. Then again, here she was a Dead Cat Tail, so maybe no judgments. One thing was certain, this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill security detail. This was a mercenary company: ex-soldiers, with the usual mix of leg-breakers and whatnot to fill out the ranks. She’d wager Aeril’s fiery right tit they were protecting whoever she was meant to ship. And while she could probably fight her way in—messily—assassin rule #240 said no assassin worth their blades actually sought out a fight.
“Where’s that fortune I ordered?” she whispered, rubbing the Pirate Princess figurine.
The words had barely left her lips before she found it—thick vines growing from the base of the tower, creeping all the way to the top. Righting herself, she dropped from the tree, moving fast in a low crouch. Once she brushed right by a patrol and one guard spun about, looking straight at her. The cloak did its job, and his eyes slid off, searching for what he couldn’t quite see. At a chiding from an impatient companion, he turned away.
She reached the tower, pressing flat against the cool stone, clinging to the shadows as more guards walked by. Peering up, her eyes passed four windows to land on one near the top—and the coin at her waist jumped. Of course. Why was it people to be shipped never lived on the bottom floor? Even the middle floor. It was as if the fates had decided killing should always take a good deal of climbing.
Grabbing hold of the vine, she tested its strength—a corded variety common to Tal Abisi, often treated with resin and turned into netting. Even like this, it was strong enough to hold her weight. Securing her footing, she started climbing, grumbling the whole while. All these guards. Her job in a tower. Like a bad fairy tale. More likely, though, some power move. Just you watch, she’d find a wheezing old geezer on his deathbed, with a line of impatient heirs—who’d set upon each other after his death. She’d best remember to leave a card.
When she reached the window, it was open. Unsurprising, when days were warm and nights still cool. But she took it as more good luck and peeked inside. Her undead eyes didn’t need adjusting. And though there wasn’t any light, she could see the rounded room. There was one door. And best of all—no guards.
She swung inside, padded boots landing on marble. The room was sparsely decorated. A giant vase in one corner. A black lacquered chest trimmed in gold against a wall. A divan with red and green pillows against another. What drew her eyes, however, was the bed pushed up near the back: black laban-wood fitted with four brass posts draped by a canopy. Behind the sheer cloth, a silhouette lay atop a mattress, their chest rising with inhalations.
She’d called it. Pull back that canopy and there’d be some shrunken little man with skin like crackled parchment. She drew her knife—one of two, with a black hilt and a dark curving blade long as her forearm. Both hummed in anticipation at the kill. Bloodthirsty things. She’d make this quick: through the heart, then a slashed throat. If her luck held, she’d be in and out undetected. Dropping her hood, she let her mask show. The last view before getting shipped. Like a going-away present. At the foot of the bed, she stepped aside, avoiding a chamber pot—the bane of assassins everywhere. With one hand she pulled back the canopy, knife raised.
Then stopped.
Eveen stared at a tranquil face framed by thick long braids the color of an azure dawn. A girl. The contours of slight cheekbones lay visible beneath her dark skin, as oval-shaped eyes trembled in slumber, and full lips parted to draw and release breath. Eveen frowned. She knew this face. She recognized it. Remembered it. But where—
The loudest bell in the world rang in her head.
Not recognition. Not recollection.
This was a memory!
Only she didn’t have memories. Not anymore.
Well you’re sure as fuck shit having one—now!
And what it told her …
No. This was impossible. This face was impossible.
A storm of emotions seized her: disorientation, doubt, and one she’d almost forgotten—fear. Dropping the canopy, she staggered back, foot stumbling on something. The stupid chamber pot. It tipped over—mercifully empty, but clattering loudly on the marble floor. The girl with the impossible face bolted upright, wide eyes searching until they found her.
Then she screamed.
Inwardly, Eveen cursed.
Aeril’s fiery fucking tits.