Talis sobbed harder. Ranka lay there, head throbbing, blood dripping from her ear. Her mind spun sluggishly, aching from the blow, struggling to make sense of what had just happened. Her blood-magic yanked at her senses, trying to drag her to her feet.

“What are you doing?” a familiar voice shouted from the street below. “Stay away!”

A guttural scream sounded, followed by howling wind and the stench of rot.

Oh no.

Galen.

16

RANKA POINTED AT TALIS. “RUN for the palace. Tell them you’re under my protection. Go!”

She descended the stairs two at a time.

From the street came a cry, a blast of wind, and the thud of flesh slamming into something hard. Ranka tore through the living room, heart pounding, and burst out the door. Afternoon sun slanted into her eyes. She stumbled, shading her brow—and found the street empty. Only the dust swirling in lazy particles was any indication of a struggle at all.

“Galen?” Ranka shouted. “Galen?”

Silence.

Bell’s Corridor looked back at her. Panic bubbled up in her chest. This wasn’t the plan. If she lost him now—if he died on her watch—

Enough.

Ranka forced herself to straighten.

She was not some green witchling. She was Skra. She was the Bloodwinn, and before she’d been named Bloodwinn, she’d been a hunter.

Ranka closed her eyes and inhaled.

She tasted the sea, the carrion of the street, and the horror baked into the very stone of this city. She tasted decades—centuries—of pain. Of not just witches burned alive, witches who’d only wanted a life among the humans they’d been born from, but the pain of humans, too. Humans who woke to find their streets soaked in blood, who starved under careless kings and mourned children sent away to die in a needless border war. All of them trapped in a cycle of pain, and for what? It’d changed nothing. Saved no one. This city was a living graveyard, and its citizens were already ghosts made flesh.

She pushed past it all, seeking something living, seeking something new, tasting rot and ruin and hatred, and there—metal polish, an ocean breeze, and an ever-present blanket anxiety. Galen. He was alive—for now.

Ranka ran.

She sprinted down a side alley, counting ten, fifteen bodies in the street, abandoned to the rats. Galen’s scent grew stronger, and so did that reek of a body turned septic. Beneath it, something familiar squirmed. Something that reminded her of home.

Ranka turned the corner.

Galen slumped against an alley wall. Blood crusted his temple. He looked at her, dazed, blinking sluggishly. “Ranka?”

“Goddess, Galen, you scared me.” She hurried forward to pick him up. “I thought—”

“Ranka,” Galen whimpered. “She’s behind you.”

The scent of rot spiked.

Ranka turned—and the world ground to a halt.

A sick witch stood in the alley.