Wicked After Midnight

33

Monsieur Charmant snickered.

“There’s poison on the blade, you know. You’ll never make it out of the catacombs, Demitasse.”

His voice was slick and cruel, his laughter a mad chittering. And I was done with it. I could have told him how wrong he was, how I would never stop. How I’d died in my world, been dragged into this one, almost died again, and lived to keep going. How he couldn’t kill the daimon girls, and he couldn’t kill me.

Instead, I made the most eloquent argument imaginable: I ripped out his throat.

He tasted rancid, like old eggs mixed with stomach acid. Still, in case he wasn’t lying, I took in as much of his nasty blood as I could, hoping it might fortify me against his venom. And then, once the predatory urge receded, I had the good sense to pull the blade from my back, hack off his tail, and take it with me. Criminy had once told me that poison often held its own antidote, and judging by the numbness creeping into my legs, I didn’t have long to find out the truth. Normally, a knife strike wouldn’t take down a Bludman. But Charmant’s poison was insidious. And fast.

The niche was half collapsed, and the stones were too heavy to budge. I wouldn’t have made it out if I hadn’t been a Bludman and a contortionist to boot. As it was, I had to dislocate both shoulders to slip through a tiny crack. I fell out of the niche and crept along the tunnel, first on my feet and then on my knees. I kept waiting to see the lantern up ahead, to hear Vale’s voice calling me or smell Cherie or find a piece of red yarn with a brush of my hand. At the very least, I began to hope the bludhounds would make short work of me before I died alone, one hand trailing in sewage. Instead, I felt cold stone on my cheek and saw only darkness without a single star.

Time stopped as I lay there, numb and freezing and empty, for the second time that night, listening to froth drip from my lips. The bastard hadn’t been joking, then. The tail clutched in my shaking fist would be useless. I managed to move my hand, twitch a few fingers. But I couldn’t hear anything but water, cold and forever running, and my eyes bulged open, blind.

But then I felt something strange: cold, smooth metal.

Breathing in deeply, I could smell it, too, just a little. Copper, brass, clockwork oil. I twitched a finger, and the metal wrapped gently around my hand and squeezed it. Strange that I would die alone in the dark under a foreign city that I’d never seen in my world, dreaming of robots.

Something probed and poked along my back, my arms, as if feeling me out. Metal cradled me, turned me, held me aloft. My head swung back and forth, spineless and light, as I was carried away in the darkness.