Special Edition - A Poison of Shadows

Nadia

This was what I got for being nice to people.

Three weeks ago, I'd shadow-walked three full-grown vampires through the deep in one night because a girl I'd known for approximately two weeks had been taken by a man who deserved to die slowly. I'd decided—against every instinct I'd successfully cultivated over a hundred and sixty years of survival—to give a fuck about it.

The result: I'd spent a week unconscious in the castle healers' wing, another two weeks recovering while various well-meaning people asked if I needed anything. And somewhere in between, the Vampire King had appeared at my bedside, with the particular expression of a man who was about to ask for something and already knew the answer.

He'd been good to me over the years. Better than most. Good enough that when he sat down and said, “I need someone I trust in Tharros,” I’d said “yes” before he’d finished the sentence.

Because apparently, one attempted coup in Morathen wasn’t enough excitement for the month. Every whisper since had pointed toward Tharros having rot of its own—cells, sympathizers, loyal faces with knives behind their backs—and the king wanted his eldest son home before it spread.

More specifically, he wanted someone mean, paranoid, and very hard to kill, watching Lorenzo Veyne’s back.

Lucky me.

And this was how I'd ended up crouched in a shadow in the Divide at two hours before dawn, watching his son organize saddlebags like a man who had never once done anything spontaneously.

Nice. I'd been nice.

And loyal. Gods help me.

I'd have both engraved on my fucking headstone.

The Divide hummed around me the way it always did at this hour—somewhere between dangerous and alive, which in this part of the world was basically the same damn thing. The night market was packing up two streets over, the last stallholders folding their wares with the practiced efficiency of people who knew better than to linger. A pair of shifters were doing something inadvisable in the alley to my left. Above the stables, a couple had been having the same argument for going on two hours—something about money and a debt and a man named Osric, who apparently owed someone significantly more than he'd claimed.

I knew this because the shadows told me.

That was the thing about shadows—they were everywhere, and sound moved through them the way water moved through pipes, but only if you knew how to listen. Doorways, most of them. Step into one shadow, step out of another two streets away. Or just press against the edge and hear what was being said on the other side of a wall, which was way less dramatic but significantly more useful in my line of work.

I had a lot of lines of work. Nary a one of them involved horses.

Speaking of horses, Lorenzo had now checked the saddlebags three times. Left side, right side, top buckle, bottom buckle, each strap tested with the same pressure, in the same order, with the expression of a man who had decided by the gods he would be ready regardless of whether it was strictly necessary at two hours before dawn. He'd also checked the road. Checked the sky. Produced some kind of document from his coat, read it, folded it back into thirds with surgical precision, and returned it to his pocket.

Centuries old, and he still made lists. As if a vampire needed to.

Vampires had a recall that made most supernaturals seem like they were running on a faulty memory charm—hundreds of years of accumulated information, perfectly indexed, instantly accessible. They had senses sharp enough to hear a conversation through a foot of stone, to track a target by blood alone across a city, to read the shift in someone's heartbeat and know they were lying before the words were out. Lorenzo Veyne could probably recite every supply route between here and Tharros from memory, including the ones that had changed in the last decade, cross-referenced against weather patterns and known threat assessments.

He was also stronger than me. Faster than me, on a bad day. Built like something the world had specifically designed to be difficult to kill.

And he was standing in a courtyard in the dark, making a list.

I didn't know whether to be reassured or deeply concerned about what the next three weeks had in store.

Most of the people I'd worked for over the years had been significantly less competent than the man currently murmuring something to a dark bay horse that was doing what horses did when they knew something was wrong but couldn't see what. Ears swiveling, weight shifting—the particular restless unease of a prey animal registering a predator it couldn't locate. She'd probably been doing it for the better part of an hour.

I felt a little bad about that.

Not enough to move before I was ready, though.

He was good—I'd clocked that much the first time we'd met, under circumstances neither of us would bring up.

Ever.

For any reason.

On pain of death.

Preferably mine.

Four centuries old, which on a vampire meant early thirties on anyone else. He had the kind of build that came from spending those centuries doing something considerably more physical than sitting behind a desk. Tall. Dark-haired, close-cropped, the kind of severe cut that said he hadn't thought about his hair in approximately his entire life, and it had decided to be attractive anyway out of spite. He had a jaw that looked like it had never once done anything soft, and hazel eyes that caught the torchlight in a way that was completely irrelevant to my current tactical assessment.

Completely.

He was also, I noted with the same clinical detachment I applied to all threat variables, wearing weapons the way most people wore clothes—the kind of easy familiarity that meant he'd had them long enough to stop thinking about them. Two blades visible. At least two more that weren't. The coat was good quality, dark, and cut for movement rather than appearance. His hands on the horse's nose were steady. Unhurried.

I remembered what his hands were doing the night I’d plucked him from his home, and my pulse did something it had no business doing.

I labeled that under “Irrelevant” and moved the fuck on.

Shadow-walking passengers was an experience I wouldn't wish on most people and actively would on a few. But Lorenzo Veyne had handled it the way he apparently handled everything—badly at first, then with rigid, furious composure the moment he had his feet under him. Military background, obviously. The kind of soldier who'd become the kind of commander that didn't raise his voice because he didn't need to. Dangerous in a quiet way, which was the worst kind.

Through the shadow at my shoulder, I reached for home—a reflex, the way you'd check a wound to see if it was still bleeding.

The deep didn't answer.

Not the surface shadows—those were fine, thin, and obedient and everywhere. The deep was something else. My “something else,” specifically—a piece of the Shadow Court's realm I'd carved out years ago and walled off and made mine. It was the only place in any world where I could exist without one eye on the door. Where no one could reach me. Where I was, for the first time and only time in my very long and occasionally terrible life, completely safe.

It had been shut for three weeks. Since the castle war room, since the moment I'd shadow-walked the third vampire through and my knees had hit the stone floor, and someone had said something that I didn't catch because I was too busy trying not to die.

It wasn't gone. I could feel the shape of it—warm, present, mine—just on the other side of something I couldn't currently push through. Like a door I knew how to open that had, temporarily, been locked.

Temporary, I told myself, for the hundredth time, and withdrew before I could confirm that it was still very much shut.

Across the courtyard, Lorenzo said something that made the dark bay exhale like she'd been holding it for an hour, and I decided it was high time I stepped out of the shadows and got this show on the road.

He heard me immediately—the slight shift of his shoulders, weight redistributing. He didn't reach for a weapon. Just turned with the composure of a man who had expected me to appear eventually and had decided he could wait.

Those hazel eyes found me the moment I cleared the shadow—vampire sight, which was annoying on principle because it made lurking significantly less viable as a tool in my arsenal. I had perfect night vision of my own, which meant I could see him seeing me, could catch the two-second assessment he ran before filing the results somewhere I wasn't getting access to.

"You're early," he said.

"Are you complaining? You've been out here for two hours already," I pointed out.

"So have you. I said dawn." He looked back at the horses, unbothered. "It isn't dawn."

"Gold star for telling time." I crossed the courtyard toward him, rolling my shoulders against the pull of the pack strapped across my back—weapons, supplies, everything I owned that was worth owning, which wasn't much but was very sharp. My dagger found my hand the way it always did, handle-first, turning once in my fingers. It was habit. A comfort to me, or a warning, depending on the audience. "Couldn't sleep?"

"I don't do much of that." His gaze dropped to the blade, then back to my face. "You look terrible."

"Wow." I pressed a hand to my chest. "Three weeks in a healer's wing and nobody warned me I'd come out the other side looking like something a cat threw up. Flowers exist, you know. As a concept. People send them when other people nearly die."

"My condolences." Flat. Completely without performance. "I'll note it for next time."

"Let's not have a next time."

"Given what I've been told about your methods," he said, with the particular tone of a man stating an observable fact rather than making a point, "that seems unlikely."

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

But he’d already turned back to the horses, completely missing my impersonation of a goldfish.

Bastard, I thought. And then, against my will: Fair.

I stopped beside the dark bay. She pinned her ears immediately—I was an unwelcome development in her evening, and she'd clocked it faster than most people did. I held out the back of my hand, anyway. Let them come to you, my uncle's voice, decades old and still insufferably correct rang in my head. And she considered it with the expression of someone being asked to consume a giant pile of shit.

She turned her nose toward Lorenzo, stamping her foot.

"Her name is Sugar," he said.

I looked at him. At the horse. Back at him. "You named a horse Sugar?"

"I named her when she was a sweet foal." Those hazel eyes didn't so much as flicker. "She's had time to develop a personality since then."

"That's one word for it," I said under my breath as I considered the animal. Sugar, who was studying the middle distance with the focused intensity of an animal with opinions, ignored me completely. "She doesn't seem to like me."

"She doesn't like most people," he said. "She'll tolerate you or she won't. Either way, she's the better horse for this terrain, so she’s what you get." He said it the way he apparently said everything—as a simple fact, take it or leave it, with no particular investment in whether I found it comfortable or not.

I stared at Sugar, and the giant she-beast of an animal looked right through me.

"Fantastic," I muttered. "Looking forward to it."

"Have you ridden before?" he asked.

"Yes," I said begrudgingly. I had ridden before. A few times. With my uncle. I even managed to stay seated.

Once.

He looked at me like a man checking a calculation he already knew should have worked, only to find the answer wrong. "How often?"

"Enough." That was a total lie, but in my line of work, I didn’t do travel. I’d had access to my shadows since I was a baby. Why would I ever in a million years consider a reality in which I wouldn’t have them?

I didn’t journey to places. I arrived. And now I would spend the next few weeks on horseback trying not to die… again.

"That's not an answer." I wouldn’t call the statement a bark, but it was close.

I gave him an unrepentant smile and a shrug, knowing somehow that he could see through my bullshit. "It's the answer I got."

He held my gaze for exactly two seconds—the same two seconds he'd used to assess me when I'd cleared the shadow, unhurried and complete—and then he turned back to his grey without another word.

Which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed it.

He knows, said something unhelpful in the back of my mind. He already knows.

I sobered, the bravado I didn’t feel sliding right off my face.

"I'll manage, okay?" I told his back.

He didn’t look back at me exactly, but he did turn his head, that stupidly hot jawline catching the gray light like it had been placed there specifically to ruin my morning.

"I know you will," he said, which wasn’t the same thing as saying it would go well, and we both knew it.

Insufferable man.

The Divide was beginning its slow crawl toward morning—the night market fully packed up now, the couple above the stables having apparently reached some kind of exhausted armistice that involved way too much moaning. Through the surface shadows, I could still feel the neighborhood: a drunk finding his way home with more optimism than direction, a witch banking her shop's hearth fire for the night, three cats doing whatever cats did when they thought no one was watching.

The Divide was the only place in Veyntheir where every manner of creature that didn't fit neatly into the daylight world's categories could exist without looking over our shoulders every five minutes. Sacred and inconvenient enough that the Crown had never bothered to fully claim it, which meant it had ended up claimed by everyone else instead. The result was roughly what you'd expect: lawless, layered, alive in the particular way of places that had never been told what they were supposed to be.

I liked it here. I liked most places I could leave quickly, and the Divide had exits in every shadow.

But for the next few weeks, I’d only have two horses and a man with a schedule.

Lorenzo had produced the document from his pocket again. He unfolded it, reviewed something, folded it back with the same three creases, and returned it to his coat.

"That document," I said. "What is it?"

The corners of his eyes tightened a fraction as if he was equally interested and irritated at the question. "A route map."

Oh, now I had to see this thing. "May I see it?" I asked sweetly—or as sweetly as I could manage.

He held it out without a word, but his reluctance for me to get my grubby hands on his pristine map was obvious.

I took it, unfolded it, and then I just stared. This thing was detailed, annotated, color-coded, with a schedule inset in the corner that had contingency notes in a margin so small I'd have needed a magnifying glass to read them if my eyes weren’t as keen as they were.

"There's a color-coding system," I said, stating the obvious.

"Terrain and threat assessment."

"There's a schedule with contingencies for the contingencies."

"Obviously." He said it without looking at me, adjusting Sugar's girth strap with the focus of a man who had decided this conversation didn't require his full attention, which was somehow more irritating than if he'd been dismissive. "Are you going to be a problem with the schedule?"

That made me grin. "I'm going to be a problem with most things," I said pleasantly. "The schedule's just first."

He took the map back and returned it to his pocket. "Then I'll make new ones."

"How many copies did you bring?"

He looked at me then. Just looked at me, level and unhurried. "Enough," he said, in exactly the tone and cadence I'd used about the riding and turned back to the horse.

My pulse did the thing again.

I told it to stop immediately.

Oh, said something deeply unhelpful in the back of my mind. This is going to be a problem.

I filed that under “future Nadia's problem” and moved on.

Dawn came up gray and reluctant over the Divide, the kind of morning that looked like it would rather have stayed in bed. The surface shadows thinned, retreating to corners and doorways. I felt the shift the way I always felt it—automatic, constant, the ongoing low-level awareness of every shadow within range that had been part of me since before I could remember being anything else.

I didn't reach for the deep. There was no point.

I looked at him instead—centuries of rigid discipline and sharp edges, standing in a Divide courtyard in the thin gray light with perfect posture, completely prepared for a weeks-long journey he hadn't asked for, with a shadow Fae he didn't trust.

I thought about what Kieran had said as I was walking out the Lock & Key's door. The particular cruelty of a man who loved his big brother and had just been handed the perfect weapon to dick with him.

"Try calling him Enzo. He hates it."

Something settled in my chest. The particular loosening of a person who had identified the only manageable thing in an otherwise unmanageable situation.

"All right, Enzo," I said. "Let's get a move on."

He went completely still.

Vampires didn't startle. Lorenzo simply became very calm in the way dangerous men did when they were deciding exactly how much of a problem something was about to become.

"Don't."

Low. Quiet. Absolute. The kind of voice that had probably stopped soldiers mid-charge and made them reconsider their life choices. The kind of voice that came from a jaw like that and eyes like those and centuries of being the most dangerous thing in any given room.

Something entirely traitorous happened in my chest. And my belly. And other places I was refusing to think about.

I told my body to mind its own business.

"Don't what?" I asked, the picture of innocence, already reaching for Sugar's saddle.

Then that damn horse bit me.

It wasn’t hard enough to break skin, but she'd made her point and considered it made. My hand flew off the saddle, and I found her already facing forward with the serene expression of an animal who had absolutely no idea why I was delaying our departure.

"She does that," he said. "To strangers."

"Charming animal." I reached for the saddle again, more carefully this time. "Really. A treasure."

"She is, actually." No irony, just fact. "Best horse I've had in a hundred and forty years."

Sugar looked at the road with the thousand-yard stare of a warhorse who had seen things, ignoring me as best she could.

"High praise," I murmured, wondering if she'd ever saved his life. If she'd carried him off a battlefield somewhere, or stood her ground when a lesser animal would have bolted, or—

I caught myself.

I wasn’t curious about Lorenzo Veyne. I wasn’t curious about his horse or his battlefields or the years that apparently existed between them. I was curious about exactly nothing that didn't directly affect my survival for the next few weeks, and a vampire's sentimental attachment to a bad-tempered dark bay wasn’t on that list.

I looked at Sugar.

Sugar looked back at me for the first time, dark eyes flat and assessing, like she knew exactly what I'd just been thinking and had opinions about it.

“Don't,” those eyes said.

Apparently, it ran in the family.

"She'll keep you alive on bad terrain." He swung up onto his grey with the ease of a man who'd been doing it for centuries and had zero patience for anything less than correct form. He looked down at me from what seemed like an unreasonable height and waited. The patience of a man who had spent centuries waiting for things and had gotten exceptionally good at it. "Which matters more than whether or not she likes you."

"Does she like you?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

His hazel eyes held mine for one beat. "Because I don't ask her questions she's already answered."

My mouth opened. Closed.

He looked at Sugar. "She's ready when you are."

Bastard, I thought, and grabbed the saddle.

With some difficulty, I finally ended up on the horse. Technically. In the sense that I was on it and not on the ground, which I was choosing to count as a win. The specifics were being taken to my grave. I was just glad he’d stopped watching me like he was mentally drafting a casualty report at about minute four.

"Ready?" Lorenzo asked after I’d stopped breathing hard.

"Ecstatic," I huffed.

We rode out of the Divide as the sun came up, and I reached for home one more time without meaning to, and got nothing, and told myself that was fine.

The road to Tharros stretched ahead of us.

I flipped my dagger, caught it, and started counting all the ways this would go wrong.