Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(44)
For Ignacio.
A monster, just as I always said you were, Mija.
Finn pushed Ignacio’s voice away before it pulled her under. Her stomach twisted into a knot of guilt and a searing desire to be something other than what Ignacio had told her she was. To be better.
Or to at least try. For once.
“Finn.” The prince’s voice snapped her out of the memory’s choke hold.
She sucked her teeth. “I grew up in a world where watching bad things happen to others and not lifting a finger was how you survived, if not doing some bad things yourself. It’s how I’ve lived my life for a long time.”
The prince tilted his head. “But not today?”
Finn looked away from him and picked at her nails. “No, not today.”
“Why?”
“Because whatever monster you released looks like it could end the maldito world if it feels like it. I need to fix this, so that the world keeps spinning and I have more chances to say, ‘Not today.’” She held his gaze. “Understand, Prince?”
She’d spent so much time drowning in her past that she hadn’t been able to swim to the surface and see a future for herself that wasn’t stained with blood and fear. She wouldn’t let memories of Ignacio or some strange magic snuff it out before she had a chance to reach for it. To take it and weigh it in her hands like a freshly filched coin purse.
The prince looked at her for a long moment, as if he were reading a compass. She squared her shoulders, inviting his scrutiny, though she knew that if she were a compass, she would be one that had never pointed north. She wondered if he could see it all through her skin.
“Very well,” he said. “I believe you.” He seemed a little relieved.
Finn nodded, her face unfazed. But something reverberated through her, as if the taut string that held the broken pieces of her together had been plucked. It took her a moment to realize that was the first time anyone had ever said that to her. At least, that she could remember.
“Fine,” she said flatly to fill the silence and quiet that ringing thought. “And I still get to borrow the cloak when this is all done, are we clear?” After this she was going to hunt Kol down with that cloak and get her propio back, one way or another. That was really why she had to help the prince, she decided. Not because of the heartbreak on his face as he’d knelt over that boy. No. She was doing this for the cloak. For revenge.
“Fine,” he said back.
When the quiet stretched a beat too long for her comfort, Finn looked at him expectantly. “Well? What’s the maldito plan?”
Alfie looked up at her from where he knelt beside Bathtub Boy. “First, we get Luka to bed. Then, I need a book.”
Finn rolled her eyes as the late morning sun stretched its glowing fingers across the room’s tiled floor. “Of course you do.”
15
The Man in the Gray Cloak
The magic soared through the air, hungry for a home of flesh and bone.
In a tangle of black smoke, it moved past the green expanse of the palace grounds and through the sunlit rings of the city, from the immaculate haciendas of the Bow to the swirling marketplace of the Brim, the dirtied alleys of the Bash, and finally the sea-soaked, outer ring of the city—the Pinch. And yet it could not find what it searched for.
It went unnoticed by the men and women who celebrated and drank in the name of tomorrow’s holiday, their energy tugging on the magic as if begging it to claim them as its own. But as it drew nearer, making the downy hairs on their necks rise in quiet alarm, the dark magic grew repulsed.
It could hear the thoughts in their simple minds, the hopes for love, for safety, for the health of their children. It could feel the light burning within them, the stench of it stifling.
The magic could not take just any body. Only a body that could hold a candle to its former master’s darkness would do; the rest would crumble to ash, as they had in the palace. It had zoomed through the city several times now, finding nothing but useless bodies. It was like a man dying of thirst surrounded by poisoned waters it could not drink.
Aggravated, the magic made its way, yet again, through the Brim, hoping that it had simply missed its prey when it searched before, hoping that this ring did have what it so desperately sought. It flew down a dank alleyway between rollicking pubs where the air smelled of sweat and spilled tequila. There, leaned pathetically against the alley wall, was a man in a tattered gray cloak taking a long swig from a nearly empty bottle of tequila. He had a scar across his eyes, as if someone had drawn a blade from one temple to the other in a messy slice. The man stank of poverty. His irises were a milky green, and the way he moved down the alley told the darkness that his vision was murky at best, perhaps not fully blind but close. This man should mean nothing to the magic, just another drunk in the Brim, and yet the dark magic felt a pull to the man, like a fierce current hidden beneath calm seas.
It drew close, attracted to the darkness that roiled inside him. Within the man’s mind, a single desire beat like a drum.
To kill.
The image of a person sat in his mind, heavy with ire, someone he’d once called his kin. His hands were curled into fists, his chipped, dirtied fingernails biting into his own flesh as he dreamed of the girl’s demise over and over again. At his feet curled a graying shadow. The magic pulsed with excitement at the sight. This man had propio, a deeper connection to magic that made him stronger, an ideal host. Those two simpletons in the palace had had moving shadows as well, but they were not dark enough. This man was the perfect combination of all that the magic sought.