V.E Schwab - A Darker Shade of Magic

Lila swayed on her feet and caught herself on the chest of drawers, her brief possession of the stone clearly taking its toll, the way it had on Kell. She managed to drag in a single shaky breath before he closed his bleeding hand around her throat.

“Where is my knife?” he growled.

“Top drawer,” she said, gasping.

Kell nodded but didn’t let her go. Instead, he grabbed her wrist and pinned it back to the wall beside her head.

“What are you doing?” she snapped, but Kell didn’t answer. He focused on the wood, and it began to crack and warp, peeling away and growing up around her wrist. Lila struggled, but in an instant it was done. When Kell let go, the wall did not. He retrieved the stone from the floor as Lila twisted and fought against the makeshift bind.

“What the bloody hell … ?” She tried to pull free of the wooden cuff as Kell forced himself to pocket the stone. “You’ve ruined the wall. How am I supposed to pay for this? How am I supposed to explain this?”

Kell went to the drawer. There he found most of the contents of his pockets—thankfully she’d only raided the black coat he’d been wearing—and his knife.

“You can’t leave me here like this,” she muttered.

Kell refilled his pockets and ran a thumb over the familiar letters on his blade before returning it to the holster against his forearm. And then he heard the sound of metal sliding free of leather behind him as Lila fetched another dagger from a sheath at her back.

“I wouldn’t throw that if I were you,” he said, crossing to the window.

“Why’s that?” she growled.

“Because,” he said, sliding up the glass. “You’re going to need it to saw yourself free.”

And with that Kell stepped up onto the sill, and through.

It was a longer drop than he had hoped for, but he landed in a crouch, the air in the alley rushing up to ease his fall. The window had seemed the safest route, since Kell wasn’t actually sure where in Grey London he was, or even what kind of house he’d been kept in. From the street, he realized it was not a house at all, but a tavern, and when he rounded the corner, he saw the sign swaying in the evening air. It swung from shadow into lamplight and then back to shadow, but Kell knew at a glimpse what it said.

THE STONE’S THROW.

He shouldn’t have been surprised to see it—all roads seemed to lead here—but it still threw him. What are the odds? he thought, even though he knew that the thing about magic was that it bent the odds. But still.

Kell had a strange feeling about the girl, but he pushed it aside.

She didn’t matter. He had the stone.

Now he just had to figure out what to do about it.

IV

It took Lila the better part of an hour to hack, slash, and saw herself free. By the time the wood finally gave way under her knife, the blade’s edge was irreparably dulled, a portion of the wall was destroyed, and she was desperately in need of a stiff drink. Her coins had not multiplied, but savings be damned: tonight she needed the drink.

She rubbed the pain out of her wrist, tossed the dulled knife onto the bed, and fetched her second, still-sharp dagger from the floor, where she had dropped it. A steady stream of oaths crossed her lips as she wiped Kell’s blood from the blade, and a steady stream of questions filled her head as she sheathed it, but she pushed them all down and dug her revolver out of the drawer, slotting it into its holster—if she’d had it on her at the time, she’d have blown a hole in Kell’s head.

She was still quietly cursing and pulling her cloak about her shoulders when something caught her eye. The sword, the one she’d summoned, was still propped up against the wall. The bastard hadn’t stopped to dispense of that on his way out. Now she lifted it carefully, beautiful thing that it was, and admired the glittering black hilt. It was everything she’d imagined it would be. Down to the details carved into the grip. The scabbard hummed beneath her fingers, just as the rock had when she’d held it. She wanted to keep the blade, wanted to keep holding it, with a strange, bone-deep sense of longing that she didn’t trust. Lila knew what it felt like to want something, knew the way it whispered and sang and screamed in your bones. And this felt like that, but wasn’t. An impostor of longing.

She remembered the way she had felt when she lost the rock, the sudden, gutting dizziness that followed, like all the energy had gone out of her limbs. Stolen when she wasn’t looking. In a strange way, it reminded Lila of a pickpocket, a sly piece of sleight of hand. That was the way it worked. A proper trick took two hands, one you paid attention to, the other you failed to notice. Lila had been so focused on the one in front of her face, waving something shiny, that she hadn’t noticed the other stealing from her pocket.

Bad magic , Kell had called it.

No , thought Lila now. Clever magic.

And clever was more dangerous than bad any day of the week. Lila knew that much. And so, much as it pained her to do it, she went to the open window and cast the sword out. Good riddance , she thought as she watched it tumble to the alley stones below.

Her gaze drifted up to the rooftops and the chimneystacks, and she wondered where Kell had gone. She wondered, but the question spawned a dozen others, and knowing she would never learn the answers to any of them, she slammed the window shut and went to find that drink.

* * *

A man stumbled through the front door of the Stone’s Throw and nearly fell down the front stairs. Tricky buggers , he thought groggily. Surely, they hadn’t been there when he entered the tavern only a few hours earlier. Or if they had, they’d gone and changed, rearranged somehow. Maybe there were more of them now. Or fewer. He tried to count them, but his vision blurred and he gave up, swaying on his feet.

The man’s name was Booth, and he had to piss.

The thought rose up out of the fog and there it was, bright as a light. Booth scuffed his boots along the cobblestones to the nearest alley (he had the decency not to relieve himself on the steps, even if they had come out of nowhere).

He half walked, half tumbled into the narrow gap between the buildings, realizing only then how dark it was—he couldn’t see his own hand, even if he’d been sober enough to look for it—but his eyes kept drifting shut anyway, so it didn’t really matter.

Booth leaned his forehead against the cool stones of the tavern wall as he pissed, humming softly to himself, a shanty about women and wine and … something else that probably began with w , though he couldn’t remember now. He let the melody wander off as he refastened his pants, but as he turned back toward the mouth of the alley, his boot caught something on the ground. It skidded away with a scrape before fetching up against the wall, and he might have left it there had a gust of wind not blown the nearest lantern on its hook, sending a flash of brightness into the darkened alley.

The shard of light glinted off metal, and Booth’s eyes widened. He might have been several pints along, but greed was a sobering thing, and as the light vanished again, he found himself on his hands and knees on the damp alley floor, grasping in the shadows until his fingers finally curled around the prize.

Booth struggled to his feet and toddled a few steps nearer to the lantern light, and there realized that he was holding the casing of a sword, the weapon still safe within. The hilt glittered, not silver or gold or steel, but black. Black as oil, and smooth as rock. He wrapped his fingers around the grip and drew the weapon from its sheath, letting out a low groan of appreciation. The metal of the blade was as glossy and dark as the hilt. A strange sword, and rare by the looks of it. Booth weighed it in his meaty hands. It would fetch a pretty penny. A very pretty penny. Only in the right places, of course. Couldn’t be thought stolen, of course. Finders keepers … finders sellers, that is, and such, of course.