Six of Crows (Six of Crows #1)(51)

“Help her.”

“Kaz, I’m a Heartrender, not a real Healer.”

“She’ll be dead by the time we find one. Get to work.”

“You’re in my light.”

Kaz stepped back into the passageway. Inej lay perfectly still on the table, her luminous brown skin dull in the swaying lamplight.

He was alive because of Inej. They all were. They’d managed to fight their way out of a corner, but only because she’d prevented them from being surrounded. Kaz knew death. He could feel its presence on the ship now, looming over them, ready to take his Wraith. He was covered in her blood.

“Unless you can be useful, go away,” Nina said without looking up at him. “You’re making me nervous.” He hesitated, then stomped back the way he’d come, stopping to purloin a clean shirt from another cabin. He shouldn’t be this shaken up by a dock brawl, even a shoot-out, but he was.

Something inside him felt frayed and raw. It was the same feeling he’d had as a boy, in those first desperate days after Jordie’s death.

Say you’re sorry.  That was the last thing Inej had said to him. What had she wanted him to apologise for? There were so many possibilities. A thousand crimes. A thousand stupid jibes.

On deck, he took a deep breath of sea air, watching the harbour and Ketterdam fade from view on the horizon.

“What the hell just happened?” Jesper asked. He was leaning against the railing, his rifle beside him. hair dishevelled, pupils dilated. He seemed almost drunk, or like he’d just rolled out of someone’s bed. He always had that look after a fight. Helvar was bent over the railing, vomiting. Not a sailor, apparently. At some point they’d need to shackle his legs again.

“We were ambushed,” Wylan said from his perch on the forecastle deck. He had his sleeve pushed up and was running his fingers over the red spot where Nina had seen to his wound.

Jesper shot Wylan a withering glare. “Private tutors from the university, and that’s what this kid comes up with? ‘We were ambushed’?”

Wylan reddened. “Stop calling me kid. We’re practically the same age.”

“You’re not going to like the other names I come up with for you. I know we were ambushed. That doesn’t explain how they knew we would be there. Maybe Big Bolliger wasn’t the only Black Tip spy in the Dregs.”

“Geels doesn’t have the brains or the resources to bite back this fast or this hard alone,” Kaz said.

“You sure? Because it felt like a pretty big bite.”

“Let’s ask.” Kaz limped over to where Rotty had helped him stash Oomen.

I stuck your Wraith, Oomen had giggled when Kaz had spotted him curled up on the ground. I stuck her good.  Kaz had glanced at the blood on Oomen’s thigh and said, Looks like she got you, too.

But her aim had been off or Oomen wouldn’t have been talking to anyone. He’d knocked the enforcer out and had Rotty retrieve him while he went to find Inej.

Now Helvar and Jesper dragged Oomen over to the rail, his hands bound.

“Stand him up.”

With one huge hand, Helvar hauled Oomen to his feet.

Oomen grinned, his thatch of coarse white hair flat against his wide forehead.

“Why don’t you tell me what brought so many Black Tips out in force tonight?” Kaz said.

“We owed you.”

“A public brawl with guns out and thirty men packing? I don’t think so.”

Oomen snickered. “Geels doesn’t like being bested.”

“I could fit Geels’ brains in the toe of my boot, and Big Bolliger was his only source inside the Dregs.”

“Maybe he—”

Kaz interrupted him. “I want you to think real careful now, Oomen. Geels probably thinks you’re dead, so there are no rules of barter here. I can do what I want with you.”

Oomen spat in his face.

Kaz took a handkerchief from his coat pocket and carefully wiped his face clean. He thought of Inej lying still on the table, her slight weight in his arms.

“Hold him,” he told Jesper and the Fjerdan. Kaz flicked his coat sleeve, and an oyster shucking knife appeared in his hand. At any given time he had at least two knives stashed somewhere in his clothes. He didn’t even count this one, really – a tidy, wicked little blade.

He made a neat slash across Oomen’s eye – from brow to cheekbone – and before Oomen could

draw breath to cry out, he made a second cut in the opposite direction, a nearly perfect X. Now Oomen was screaming.

Kaz wiped the knife clean, returned it to his sleeve, and drove his gloved fingers into Oomen’s eye socket. He shrieked and twitched as Kaz yanked out his eyeball, its base trailing a bloody root. Blood gushed over his face.

Kaz heard Wylan retching. He tossed the eyeball overboard and jammed his spit-soaked handkerchief into the socket where Oomen’s eye had been. Then he grabbed Oomen’s jaw, his gloves leaving red smears on the enforcer ’s chin. His actions were smooth, precise, as if he were dealing cards at the Crow Club or picking an easy lock, but his rage felt hot and mad and unfamiliar.

Something within him had torn loose.

“Listen to me,” he hissed, his face inches from Oomen’s. “You have two choices. You tell me what I want to know, and we drop you at our next port with your pockets full of enough coin to get you sewn up and buy you passage back to Kerch. Or I take the other eye, and I repeat this conversation with a blind man.”