Queen of the Night (Witchfire 1)

Chapter 3 - A Deal With the Devil

I felt a pair of eyes on the back of my neck and turned. An old woman, huddled in rags, tapped a crooked finger on one of the lopsided drawings fanned out before her.

Portraits. The right half of every sketch was impeccably detailed, but the left was a jumble of lines skirting a glaring void. I picked up the page she pushed toward me, my breath solidifying in my chest.

"Where did you see this man?" I asked, swallowing past the lump in my throat. She'd captured Arthur mid-sentence, the approachable tilt of his head, the automatic welcome in his right eye... and then the vision devolved into scribbles.

"He paid handsomely for a portrait," she said, but it didn't make sense; Arthur hadn't taken the picture with him. "And so did this one, shortly after."

The old woman tapped on another picture and my nails bit into my palm. Low, swooping lashes guarded the sultry stare of a dreamer. I hated the stamp of nobility in his regal cheekbones; the alluring contrast of his ghost-white skin and squid-ink hair, almost liquid in the way it flowed around his face.

The face of a killer.

"Where did they go?" I asked, my voice sounding strangely hoarse.

The woman pointed a shaking finger at my chest. Stepping aside, I turned around and saw an ocean-themed mural across the road, painted in varying shades of blue, black, and white. 

The smear of red on the mermaid's chin was out of place.

"Thank you," I said, pulling my wallet from the hidden pocket in my corset. Shifting leather, just like everything else; my insides rearranged themselves to accommodate the contents, so I only kept a card and a hundred-dollar bill. "Keep the change."

"Generous," she croaked. "Just like your brother." 

I shuddered as I crossed the road, knowing I was anything but. When I touched the mermaid's chin, my fingers came away wet. A quick whiff confirmed that it was indeed Richard's blood.

Skin prickling with anticipation, I set forth along the alley, letting it draw me into the heart of the block. The asphalt gave way to a road of gold-painted bricks, and I found myself eerily amused as it unfurled, following a strange pattern of left and right turns. Follow the yellow-brick road.

The further I travelled, the weirder and more frequent graffiti became, until I felt utterly estranged from reality. It was like I'd stepped into an alternate dimension of vivid landscapes and mutated creatures. My footsteps faltered as I came upon a sinuous dragon, coiled around the base of a fire-escape. Its amber eyes, the same colour as mine, seemed to follow me as I turned the corner...

The trail ended in carnage. Corpses littered the metallic bricks, their innards strewn about like party streamers. I sucked in a sharp breath, only to quickly regret it; the cloying stench of rotting meat smothered the air. I felt irrationally tainted by that breath, as if by letting the death-laced air into my lungs I'd welcomed it into my body and brain, through the simple oxygenation of the blood that served both.

It was a pointless revulsion; the memory of this scene would stay with me, regardless. I'd never witnessed death of this magnitude before. There was so much red splashed about, the sour aftertaste of so much adrenaline and fear... so many bodies. And crouched in the middle of it all was the man that I'd been searching for. The instigator of and the answer to all of my problems.

I took advantage of the opportunity to study my enemy. I wanted to know him a little before I killed him; to see him animated in life, so that it would be all the sweeter when I robbed him of it.

It was clear even from this distance that the man — no, the villainous creature — was tall. A shock of thick, dark hair brushed the nape of his neck, and when he crouched to pick up what looked like offal from the ground, I glimpsed a hint of an angular cheekbone and a linear nose. His frame was lithe but muscular, and his pale skin seemed to glow ever so faintly, as if he possessed so much power that it was gradually leaking out. London was beautiful in the deadliest sense.