Among Aniels Read online

  Silver is my only shot at freedom.

  And so I wait—a long, long while—before the door finally rattles and I take a step back. A gasp catches in my throat as a square piece of the door suddenly vanishes and a pair of black beady eyes stare at me through the gap.

  The eyes run me over for a sleazy moment. Then, they fix on the pin on my vest. They blink once, twice, then fling back up to me.

  “One moment,” a hoarse, manly voice whispers. The square fragment of door reappears and it’s as though the door never fractured in the first place.

  I watch, stunned, my heart in my throat, as the door rumbles once more, then slowly lifts up with a loud, screeching creak. It rises and rises until there is no more door left, and I find myself staring at a short lump of a man with a scruffy beard and tanned skin that gleams like sand on a Sun Season’s day.

  An aniel. A lesser one—I can tell by his appearance. Whoever his God is, they didn't have enough care to make him beautiful or spritely or powerful. And the first aniels of a God are always made in that God’s appearance. That’s why Silver wears the pearlescent hair of Prince Poison and has matching moon-like eyes to boot.

  In the doorway, the scruffy aniel looks me dead in the eye, and my heart stops for a beat.

  “And you are?” His voice is a slithery croon.

  “Keela,” I whisper. “I’m here to see Silver.”

  He glances at the pin again. “That is not his invitation.”

  I shake my head. “Fox sent me,” I lie. It seems to work. Or the aniel doesn't care much about why I’m here or who sent me.

  He steps aside and suddenly all I see is complete and utter darkness.

  I suck in a sharp breath before I duck under the vanished door and venture into the blackness.

  6.

  Oskar’s, I learn, is an opium den. The stench is pungent, a blend of musk and acid residue. I force myself to stomach it, though the smell is quick to dizzy me.

  Once I step over the threshold, and the sliding door falls shut behind me, the thickness of the dark gives way to broken, dim lights. Candle lanterns, burning orange in shadowy corners. In those corners, mortals and aniels alike drape on the curved couches that encircle round tables, where opium pipes stand tall and dusty with age.

  Clearly, the effects of the opium aren’t the same for both aniels and vilas. Where the aniels have lowered lashes and dangerously lazy gazes, the mortals are wiped out, mouths parted, and plunged deep into sleep.

  I hover by the entrance.

  The aniel at the door parks himself on a stool and flaps open an unfurled parchment scroll. He returns to his reading, already forgetting all about me.

  Heartbeats pass me by, and I haven’t moved from the door. I rinse my gaze around the den, seeing only unfamiliar faces around messy tables, dark mud-like stains on their shirts and unfastened cravats.

  Finally, I pluck the strength to push through the dizziness that envelopes me. I stride from the doorway and stroll through the den.

  Aniel gazes, narrowed and gleaming with curiosity, shadow my every hesitant step. I’m careful to avoid the round couches and the used pipes. Can’t risk an aniel snatching me up before I get what I’ve come for. If Silver denies me and my pleas, then an opium coma that might just kill me could be my only way out of Koal’s clutches.

  It’s a thought that strikes cold fear through my heart, like a whaling spear pitched in the dead of the Frost Season at sea. I toss it from my mind as I reach the end of the den.

  No sign of Silver yet.

  I worry, did Fox trick me? She earned a favour from me by giving me her invitation pin, and for what? When it comes to aniels, there is always the risk of deception. And that’s very well what she might have done to me today. Deceived me into a deadly corner.

  But I’ve come too far to give up so easily.

  I eye a nearby aniel. His long amber lashes hang low over his glittering blue eyes, and he watches me closely. His arms are draped over the back of the couch, and sprawled over his lap are two vilas women, their corsets unravelled, and opium-sleep clinging them tightly.

  I hesitate a beat.

  My boots seem stuck to the murky carpet floor. But I pluck my legs up and force myself to approach the aniel’s table.

  “Pardon me,” I utter, and my voice is a balled-up whisper of nerves and frailty. The stench in this den is like smog to my poorly lungs. “Do you know where Silver is?” I add, if only to protect myself from his devious ways, “Fox said I would find him here.”

  Slowly, a perfectly chocolate-brown eyebrow arches above his sea-blue eyes. Then, he turns his faintly curious gaze to the wall behind me. I trace the gesture to a heavy pair of velveteen curtains.

  “Thank you,” I mutter and peel away from the table as fast as my wobbly legs can carry me. Weakness clings to my muscles. A fog is drifting over my mind, and I all but stagger into the curtains. Numbly, I paw at them, trying to pull them apart, before I notice a golden-threaded rope to my right. I pull it with all the might I can muster.

  The curtains spread apart.

  They hide no door, but a set of shadowy stone stairs descends down into darkness. Fleetingly, I say a silent prayer of thanks for the darkness. It gives me an excuse among a den-full of aniels to spread my hands over the narrow walls that cage the steps, and use them to help guide me down. Don’t want to risk the aniels sniffing out my sickness before I even get the chance to plead my case to Silver.

  The stone steps don’t descend for long. I half-expected them to spiral around and around, taking me all the way down to the underground tunnels of the Capital. But they are short, and within moments, I’m staggering into a plain basement fixed to look like an office.

  Feels like I’ve been stuffed into a dusty, leather-bound book from the libraries in the Scholar Square. Button-tufted armchairs sit hugging a simmering hearth, whose floor is piled high with soot, and bookcases line the walls with bowing shelves, ready to collapse if one sneezes too hard.

  Everything in here screams age and neglect, even the dust that clings to the air and gathers at the back of my throat.

  I hold my hand to my mouth to filter out the dust before it sends me spiralling into a hacking fit, and I wander farther into the basement office. It’s not an ordinary squared room—it curves like a half-moon on a clear night.

  I follow the shape around the curve. At the sharp end of the basement, there stands a blackwood desk. Silver sits there, scratching the tip of a quill on thick, costly parchment. He doesn't look up.

  Pushed against the narrow wall, there is a loveseat where two vilas are deposited, a man and woman, both undressed down to their undergarments. They don’t even stir as I approach, but their tired gazes follow me.

  For a strangled heartbeat, I stand there, throwing my glance between Silver and the pair on the loveseat. Looks like I came just as things have cooled off with—what looks to have been—a bit of a fumble.

  My cheeks burn hot. I’m not too familiar with casual fumbles. The way I was raised by my father, I always believed fumbles to be what happens between husband and wife to conceive. But also, it’s easy to say that when in my limited life, I’ve never truly been swept off my feet by someone and thrown into a pot of lust. I’ve never been tested by seduction.

  Finally, I decide that the seconds ticking past me are too precious to waste, and I clear my throat.

  Silver glances up and his eyes flash like steel caught in the sunlight. Then, as quickly as he looked at me, he returns to his writings.

  “Leave us,” he says once he drops the quill in the ink pot and sets aside the parchment to dry.

  For a heart-stopping moment, I thought he was talking to me, ordering me out before I even had the chance to explain myself. But then, the loveseat rustles, and I watch as the undressed pair scramble around for their clothes.

  They usher past me, heads bowed, their garments bundled into lumps in their arms.

  The moment that the pair are out of sight, I rush to the table and
drop into the torn armchair opposite him. I try to hide the sudden rush of relief as I sit. This den is truly poor for my health, and I’m scraping by on scraps of remedy that I have left. I’ve been needing more and more these past few days, and I hope the cause is my stress, not suddenly too-fast deteriorating health.

  Silver reclines in his high-back chair and, bringing his slender hands to his front and pressing the tips of his fingers together, he studies me. The silence is quick to thicken.

  He runs his gaze over my attire. “My taste never fails,” he says.

  My hands fidget on my lap. Then, it just spills out of me in a rush of hushed urgency; “I need your help.”

  He blinks once, a slow and uncaring gesture. “You need a miracle.”

  “So you know what has happened?”

  His sea-foam eyes narrow. “All of the Capital does.”

  “You say I need a miracle.” In my chest, my heart deflates and flitters down to my churning gut. “Can’t you perform those? You are, after all, magickal.”

  Silver tilts his head to the side. Lashes lowered, his studious steely eyes pierce through me like blades. “You are asking if I would risk my life to help you? That is what I would be doing. Risking my life. Any fool who stands in the way of a Daemon should expect a violent end.”

  My heart hammers in my chest. Hope is fast to wilt inside of me. I’d hoped for some better care from him, but that’s the trouble with aniels, isn't it? They fool us mortals into thinking you mean something—anything—to them, then they so quickly dismiss our pain when we really need them.

  Silver rest his chin on his pressed-together fingertips. “There is little that can be done to help you, Kee. A mateship to a Daemon is an ancient, powerful connection. Not even the Gods are safe from this old magick.”

  I shift forward on the armchair. “You said there is little that can be done—so there is something?”

  Steely eyes spark in the dim light. “Nothing that will be available to you.”

  “Please,” I gush and clutch the edge of the table. My hands tremble with the grip, but I battle away the fatigue clinging to my bones. “I can’t survive this ... this creature. You said yourself that something can be done—and perhaps you care enough about me to help me.”

  His face is impassive, unmovable stone.

  My voice shivers with the tremble that seizes me. “I promise you, Silver. I will do whatever you want, I will owe you a debt that spans a lifetime and more, if you help me get out of this fate.”

  “Kee,” he starts and lowers his hands to fold on his lap. “You mistake my interest in you for something grander than what it is. I have made myself clear. You mean to me what a pet might, with an injured leg. Within me, there is a spark for you—a spark made of faint pity, curiosity and darkness. This is not love or care. You vilas take words and gestures too much to heart.” A cruel smirk dances on his lips. “Or perhaps it is your fanciful ideas about love that fool you?”

  Deflation slumps me in the seat.

  I sink back and turn my gaze down at the limp hands on my lap. Distantly, I’m aware of the rustle as Silver fishes out a black cigarette from his pocket, then lights it.

  I look up just as a cloud of silvery smoke masks his face, making him look like some sort of dangerous performer found in the Merchant Markets on a full moon’s night.

  “No one or thing in the Capital has the power to sever this bond,” he tells me between long, drawn-out inhales of his cigarette. “And you could never afford the price it would cost to lure in the help you need.”

  “So that’s it, then?” My lashes hang low, defeat clutching me. “You’ll just sit by and watch as I’m stolen away by one of those devils? After all that—forcing me into the boutique, dressing me up like a doll, the feelings you do have for me—it’s all for nothing?”

  “Nothing is ever for nothing,” he says. “But just not in the way one might expect or hope for.”

  “For all your power and magick, you are utterly useless,” I mutter and push myself off the armchair. It creaks with the loss of my weight and, as I stand at the desk, a wave of dizziness washes over me like an evening’s violent wave with the tide coming in, and I close my eyes as everything starts to blur around me.

  For a beat, I hold onto the edge of the desk and wait for the vertigo to pass. But the opium fumes from the den have dug deep into me, and moments tick by with my sickness only worsening.

  Slowly, I sink back into the seat. When I force my eyes open a crack, Silver is watching me through thick smoke, his face like a marble mask.

  I fish out the pendant from my blouse. Only half a phial left. I down it in one go. Before I can cork the lid back on, Silver has pushed from his chair and is striding around the length of the table towards me.

  I look up as he comes to a stop beside me.

  Silver reaches out his hand, palm-upwards, and his gaze cuts like shards of glass to my phial. I hesitantly rest it on his offered hand.

  “What is this that you take?”

  “What do you care?” I snarl at him. But the venom behind my words is lost in the hoarse thickness that sweeps my voice.

  He brings the phial to his nose and sniffs it once. “From the Shadow Quarter, I suspect.”

  “It might be.”

  Silver studies the phial for a few heartbeats before he offers it back to me, a gleam sharpening his stare. His face turns severe, and a chill runs down my stiff spine.

  There is something in the way he watches me, a faint glimmer of understanding, of realisation, but I can’t quite decipher it in all my blurry vision.

  The remedy starts to kick in, and the room around me stops twisting and tilting. Just as Silver clears in my view, he reaches out his slender hand for the dip between my collarbone, and he pushes me back into the seat. His sea-foam eyes cut to the pin on my vest. He studies it for a breath.

  “Rest,” he murmurs, his voice a low growl of a sound. “I will return.”

  With that, he leaves me alone in the basement, and disappears up those narrow stone steps into the den. As I wait, I re-cork the phial and tuck it into my blouse. Then, I shut my eyes and let the armchair hug me like a cushioned embrace, and wait for the remedy to bring me back to my full senses.

  Silver isn't gone long. It’s mere moments later when he’s marching back into the basement. I watch him stalk to his desk and, for a few seconds of silence, rummage through his parchment scrolls.

  Without looking up at me, he says, “I will help you, Kee. But it comes at a cost. When the time comes, you must help me in return.”

  My heart stops dead in my chest. I stare at him through wide, glazed eyes and all the air catches in my throat.

  I loosen my breath. “You said you couldn’t help me. You said that there was no help for me in the Capital—”

  “Exactly why we must leave the Capital, and soon.”

  Ice trickles down from my heart to my belly. A breath shudders out from me. “Out of the Capital?” I’ve never been anywhere beyond the borders of this city. The farthest I’ve been is to dip my feet in the icy, choppy waters of the shore. “How far out?”

  Silver shuffles a bundle of parchment scrolls into a drawer. “Farther than any vilas has gone before and lived to talk about it.” Finally, he looks up at me, and there’s a foreign glint of urgency in his silvery eyes. “When will Koal come for you?”

  “Noon,” I whisper. My hands grip the arms of the chair, my nails digging deep into the torn, faded leather. “Why?”

  “We must be out of the Capital by then. The closer he is to you when he starts to hunt your trail, the less of a chance we will have to breach the border of the Wild Woods.”

  “The Wild Woods?” I screech and near-topple off the chair. “That’s where you’re taking me? I’m-I’m a mortal—I can’t go there!”

  He stills and, slowly, brings his dangerous eyes to mine. “If we are to do this, Kee, you will follow me without argument. No quarrels. I know where we are headed, and if you do not come with me
, there is nothing to stop Koal from coming for you.” He pulls back from the table and pins me with his stare. “Are we clear?”

  Mutely, I gape at him for a long, thick moment. Then I nod, unable to summon even a whisper of a voice.

  “So leave now,” he orders me. “Pack what you can—but not more than you can carry on our journey—and meet me back here before the clock tower strikes noon.”

  “But you said...” I bite back my tone. Don’t question him. The only rule he’s given me for his help. “You want me to help you in return,” I say. “You haven’t said what you want from me.”

  “And I won’t until the time comes.”

  I release a shaky breath. “So we are to run,” I think aloud, churning the thought around my mind. For years, I have dreamt of running, but now that the reality faces me—and with an aniel I don’t trust all too well—it’s a thing that brings terror my shivering heart.

  Silver brings his dark smirk to me. “Not quite,” he says. “We will return, and hopefully when we do, you will be short one Daemon.”

  And what will you return with? I wonder, but I don’t ask. Not yet.

  Can’t have him going back on his word to help me escape my fate with the Daemon.

  I accept his terms—for now—and push from the armchair.

  I force myself not to think on what it means that we are to leave so soon, and where our destination lies. Because to worry on it too much will only leave me falling into another sickly spell, and I can’t afford weakness right now. Not when time is so short.

  I rush out of the opium den without another word to Silver, and he says nothing as I go. I must meet him here at noon, and since the sun is already so high in the sky, I’m all too aware that most of my morning has been eaten up, and we draw ever closer to midday.

  Like it always has been this day, time is not on my side.

  And that makes me wonder, is fate against me too?

  7.

  Since I didn’t bring enough coin with me for a carriage ride back to the Textile District, I’m forced to return home on foot. And that really eats into the sparse time I have before noon strikes the Capital.