Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(55)

“What the hell?” she said. Her words boomed in the silence. She turned around and stared at the marketplace sprawled out behind her. Even a bit of spittle flying from a shouting man’s mouth hung in midair. She was swaddled in silence. While everyone was perfectly still, the prince’s chest rose and fell, as if since he’d been incapacitated by an injury, he had been spared. Finn had never been so thankful to see him breathe.

“Prince!” She shook his shoulder. “Wake up! Something’s going on, wake up!” But he didn’t wake, didn’t make a sound.

A sound cut through the quiet, a voice on the wind behind her.

“Little chameleon . . .”

She heard his voice on the wind, lilting and soft as a lullaby.

Ignacio.

“He’s not here,” she said to herself. “He’s not here. Wake up.”

This was all a nightmare. The whole thing. What she’d seen in the palace, Kol taking her propio, the Brim freezing. It was all a dream. Soon she’d wake up. She would. She had to.

“You know I don’t like it when you make friends with unsavory types. . . .”

She was still crouched beside the bleeding prince, her ears ringing with Ignacio’s warning. Her hands shaking, Finn turned, following the pull of the sound. There, in the center of the stillness on the other side of the stretch of market stalls ahead of the Blue Thimble, stood Ignacio. A chilling energy zipped through her, wriggling beneath her skin like a snake slithering through grass. Shock squeezed her heart in a tight vise. She couldn’t breathe. The quiet was no longer the absence of sound but a warning of what was to come.

He took a step forward.

That one motion sent a tight knot of fear unspooling within her until she was nothing but flesh full of paralyzing terror. He was here to collar her once more, to drag her back into his arms and under his will. Finn turned away from him and left the prince where he lay, taking off in a sprint around the corner of the Blue Thimble and down a stretch of the Brim that was dedicated to stalls of fine jewelry, silks, gowns, and capes. She dashed by the silent market stalls where the buyers and sellers stood eerily frozen, bolts of fabric petrified in midair. Finn’s arms pumped at her sides, her feet carrying her farther and farther from the prince. Staying near Alfie now would only convince Ignacio that she cared for him, and that would be all the motivation Ignacio needed to kill him.

Or to make her kill him.

“No,” she said, rejecting that thought with every ounce of energy she had as she ran deeper into the twists and turns of the Brim, leaving the prince far behind her. She wouldn’t let him make her do those things anymore.

She wouldn’t.

She didn’t make it ten paces before string wrapped around her ankle like a vise and held fast. Her own momentum worked against her and she fell forward, landing on her stomach beside a stall of jewel-toned dresses, her mouth open against the dirt. The pull was so strong it felt as if a hand had sprung from the ground to grip her ankle. She looked over her shoulder.

Ignacio took another leisurely step forward.

“Puppet strings, my little chameleon. Puppet strings.”

His mouth hadn’t moved, yet his voice whistled through the air. Everywhere and nowhere, as if it always had been in her head. How was he doing this? How had he found her? And his eyes, they’d changed. Black from edge to edge. Her mind narrowed to a hazy point of pure panic.

He looked just like the man in the Blue Thimble.

Ignacio was entangled with the dark magic. Finn’s throat thickened and seized with fear. He had been a monster before when he was only a man. Now he was something else, a creature who would use every ounce of the dark magic within him to hunt her down like a dog that had strayed too far from its master. He didn’t titter about a dark god coming to life like the man in the Blue Thimble did. Ignacio was himself, only made powerful. She didn’t know if this was better or worse.

Finn could hardly breathe as Ignacio took another step forward, his black eyes glinting.

Adrenaline burning through her, she made to cut the string with her dagger, but it wouldn’t break. The thread bent on her blade but would not snap. He was still walking to her. She had to get away. She pulled on the string with her free hand. It sliced into her palm and after a long, painful moment, it broke free from her ankle. She was up and running again.

“Where are you hurrying off to?” he called. “We haven’t had the chance to catch up, and I have a gift for you, little chameleon. One I think you’ll like.”

Don’t look back, don’t look back. If she didn’t look him in the eye, he couldn’t do what he’d always done to her.

She’d made it past four market stalls before she heard a whirring sound, like a fisherman casting out a line. Pricks of pain stung her skin as strings cut through her clothes and burrowed themselves in the flesh of her back and the backs of her ankles. He yanked her with such force that she landed faceup and skidded back toward him. Her lungs burning, she got on all fours. She was beside the stalls of dresses again. She sawed at the strings, but this time they wouldn’t give, whether by her hand or her dagger’s edge. She could feel them burrowing deeper into her skin, as if they were trying to replace her very veins. She clawed her way forward, fighting the pull. A string dragged her violently by the heel, and when it pulled backward she felt her skin rip, as if a seam had come undone. Her leg gave uselessly beneath her weight. Blood didn’t drip but gushed from the torn flesh of her heel. She was done for. She would be his again.