003; RED RIGHT HAND
DESPITE THE OVERARCHING TRIALS KETTERDAM LAID UPON ONYX, SHE FELT SOMEWHAT RELUCTANT TO DEPART.
In truth, Ketterdam and at more vague and broad sense, Kerch, was the only home Onyx knew. Of course, she knew a great deal about the countries that surrounded the small, trade driven island she spent her life on, but that didn't ease the unforgiving anxiety bubbling beneath the surface. Ketterdam had never been kind to her, and those within it even less so. But for all its darkness and greed driven tourists, the city itself had become hers-- the gabled roofs were her well trodden paths and the districts were where she hunted her prey. For all its downfalls, it was her only sense of home and relative familiarity.
And she was leaving it to spend six or seven days on a small ship with a skeleton crew that would take them to Fjerda. How utterly exciting.
After they departed from the Crow Club the day prior, Onyx had been set about with the task of gathering some roughspun, old clothing that would allow them to blend in with other dockworkers. It was an easy enough job, but Onyx felt ill at ease without her cloak wrapped around her body as she approached Fifth Harbor. And it was a strange sight, seeing the others in the same uncomfortable clothing as herself. Kaz was without his fitted, intricately cut suit, Onyx noticed. It made him appear like any other fisherman or dockworker preparing to head out to sea for the day. Everyone else was there, save for Inej, who must've been running behind schedule.
Onyx slipped down the dock as quietly as she could, shooting Nina a raised eyebrow when she noticed Matthias had been practically bound to her side in order to keep him from bolting. The big ones never do know when to stop, do they? She stopped somewhere near the edge of the dock and a moment later, Kaz silently slipped in beside her, just as he had the morning he dragged her into this endeavor.
She glanced up at him briefly. "I see you made decent work of the big Fjerdan."
"His ankles were shackled last night," he told her, folding his hands atop his cane, gaze pointed out over the silent docks. "It may come as no surprise to you, Miss Vissier, but the bigger they are, typically the less common sense they have."
Her lips twitched minutely at that. "That would entail all--"
She never had her chance to finish, however, as the whole of Fifth Harbor seemed to spin on its head. The ship only feet behind them exploded, sending splintered pieces of wood through the air and a black trail of smoke into the sky. The sheer force behind the explosion knocked Onyx off balance and made her ears ring uncontrollably. She dove behind the nearest crate she could find as the scattered, thrumming sound of gunfire reverberated overhead.
Kaz mentioned other teams potentially wanting in on this deal, of competitors wanting to beat them out on the payout, but this soon? It didn't matter now. It was pointless wondering and pondering why they were under attack or who was attacking them. All that mattered was managing to get out of this fight alive and intact enough to complete the mission.
Onyx slid her bow over her head and pulled an arrow from the leather quiver wrapped around her leg and quickly notched it in place. She carefully peeked out over the edge of the dilapidated crate she was using as cover. None of the others were visible, which hopefully meant they were in the same state as she was-- preparing to take out as many as she could before they could safely make their escape. With a quick once over of the surrounding dock, she spotted two men, guns drawn, advancing in her direction. The first went down mere moments after she saw him, an arrow careening through his throat. She dispatched the second with a knife from her sleeve.
The thrill of such a fight was foreign. Onyx had only ever encountered true combat in a deal or two gone bad, however the numbers then and the numbers being pulled at the present were far, far different. But a fight was a fight, and Onyx Vissier did not lose. At the heart of it, she was a silent killer, a deadly shadow circling her prey. And wouldn't change today.
She leapt over the old crate and dislodged her knife from the man's throat and wiped it off on her breeches before returning it to an empty sheath. The tattoo she spotted on his arm was one of five birds fashioned together in a wedge formation. Razorgulls? Onyx shook her head and kept moving. She could ponder why the Razorgulls were after them when they were at sea.
Notching another arrow at her side, Onyx pressed herself up against a larger stack of crates and chanced a look around the edge. She spotted Jesper and Wylan a little farther down, pinned down with even more men advancing. She made quick work of dispatching the three men moving their way. They hit the dock within seconds.
With the men down, Jesper caught her roving gaze over their individual cover and held his hand up, then flashed two of his fingers twice, in quick succession. Berth twenty-two. Kaz must have expected something like this happening. With a quick, curt nod, Onyx rolled out of her hiding place and carefully maneuvered her way farther down the dock.
It wasn't until she was sliding into another piece of sturdy cover that she spotted Inej, pinned against an opposing shipping container by one of the Black Tips' enforcers, Oomen. Black Tips and Razorgulls? Onyx hardly had the time to reach for another arrow before the glint of Oomen's knife hit the early morning sunlight and descended into Inej's side. She moved without thinking. One moment, she was watching the scene play out with sickened concentration and the next, she was on Oomen's back. He lurched on the sudden impact and scrambled to grab hold of her.
Their struggle was brief and, far less effective than Onyx would've liked. Oomen spun and careened back into another set of crates. Pain shot up her back and throughout her skull and forced her grip away. Onyx hit the dock with a harsh thud and only seconds later, Oomen's lanky, whip-like frame shadowed her vision.
"The Wraith and the Reaper?" He grinned wickedly, kicking her bow away. "In one place? Luck must be on my side today."
"You're lucky you're not dead already," Onyx bit. "How someone could've missed your big lump of idiocy with a bullet is beyond me."
Her fingers shot out for her knife, but in her mild disorientation, Oomen was faster. His boot landed on her nimble fingers with such force, Onyx wondered if he'd managed to break a finger or two. Pain shot up her arm. "Ah, ah, not so fast, Reaper. I'm not quite done with you yet." He grasped the front of her. shirt and yanked her head up off the dock. "I'm sure you've got plenty of little secrets tucked up in that pretty little head of yours, don't you?"
She sneered. "Oh, bite me, you miserable skiv."
Ignoring the pain in her hand, Onyx curled her legs up and thrusted her boots into Oomen's chest. He stumbled back a few paces and Onyx reached for her knives once more. She jumped to her feet and let the first of her weapons fly through the air. The knife's blade hit home in Oomen's knee, then another sailed into his opposite thigh. He hit the wooden dock mere seconds after the second blade hit its intended destination.
With Oomen briefly dispatched, Onyx made a dash for her bow and slung it around her body once again. But it was the pathetic safety and confidence that the bow gave her that was her demise. She felt his presence behind her only seconds before she was able to spin on her heels, before she was able to even give thought to fending off the blade he sunk into her stomach. Pain blossomed through her abdomen and blood spilled over, weeping from the wound like tears.
"Skewered on the end of your own knife," he hummed, digging the knife impossibly deeper. "What sorry way to go for someone such as yourself."
The pain was far too much. It was searing. Onyx had been hurt before, she'd been wounded too badly to move for days at a time, but the pain of the past and the pain of the present were two opposing mistresses. Every time she attempted to take a breath in, the blade only seemed to sink deeper into her body, penetrating through muscle and surely now through organs. The taste of iron stained her tongue.
Not like this. Not on goddamn Fifth Harbor.
Mustering the last bit of strength she had, Onyx reeled her leg back and jammed her knee between Oomen's legs. He yelped and released her. Blood was everywhere. On her hands, on her clothes. And it was only making her weaker. She needed to move, and fast.
"You can die on that goddamn ship," she told herself as she grabbed a hold of the knife in her side. Onyx gritted her teeth. "But not on this stupid dock."
She yanked the knife from her side and, in one fluid motion, slammed the bloodied blade into Oomen's stomach and kicked him back. Onyx slapped a hand to her weeping stomach and stumbled over to Inej. This would be a hell of a trip for the others if they were both dead on whatever saints forsaken ship Kaz had waiting for them. Carefully, slowly, Onyx lifted Inej's slender, lithe frame into her arms and ran.
Each footfall sent a dolling of pain through her abdomen, hot and searing and agonizing. But she refused to stop. Onyx Vissier would not die before this miserable excuse for a mission even properly began.
It was an agonizingly slow journey to the other end of the harbor. And by the looks of it, it didn't appear that it would get much better. Kaz was shouting at their miserable excuse for a crew from somewhere aboard the real schooner and Jesper's lanky, spry silhouette was just barely visible through the blur her vision was taking on as she stumbled onto the deck.
Jesper swiveled around at the sound of her boots scuffing against the creaky, wooden deck. His eyes widened at the mere sight of them. And they had to have been a sight to behold. Both of the girls were covered in each other's blood with a trail in their wake and a readily spreading pool beneath Onyx's boots.
"Saints," he breathed. "What the hell--"
"Where's Nina and Kaz?" she asked. "Tell me where they are."
"She's below deck," Jesper answered, and it wasn't until then that Onyx briefly recognized the dried blood staining his leg. He inched closer. "A few others got hit during the fight. She's patching up Wylan right now. Kaz is-- is that all Inej's blood?"
"I'd be willing to say its a fifty-fifty between us." Onyx blinked a few times, fighting away the black splotches pulling at the edges of her vision. "Show me where they are."
Onyx didn't wait for him to answer, nor did she wait for him to show her the way. She found her way to one of the few doors on the schooner and shoved it open with her shoulder. Jesper hovered behind, arms held at bay in case she became too unsteady. Wylan was sitting at the table with Nina, getting his arm patched up from what looked like a small graze from a bullet wound.
Nina's eyes fluttered up in their direction as Onyx and Jesper descended the stairs. One look from Onyx was all Wylan needed to practically leap from his chair.
"Stab wound," she breathed to Nina before she could ask. "Right side."
Her whole body was practically engulfed in flames, edging closer and closer to the blissful tug of sleep. She heard the others voice's somewhere behind her, steadily moving closer and closer, yet the sound was only becoming more distant. Onyx stepped off the last stair and her knees buckled beneath her and Inej's weight. Jesper grasped her arms from behind before she could hit the ground and half carried her and Inej to the empty table only a few feet away.
The door at the top of the staircase opened up as Jesper took Inej from her arms and laid her out on the table, beneath the swaying orange lamplight of the surgeons quarters. Her vision blurred, then sharply came into focus again. The sound of their footsteps was muffled in her ears, all too loud and too quiet at the same time.
She swiveled around toward the light streaming in from the top of the stairs. Matthias and Kaz descended the stairs together, seemingly following the long trail of deep red blood that marked Onyx's path downward. Kaz met her eyes when he stepped off the last stair. His lips moved, he was saying something, he was asking her what happened, speaking to her, trying to communicate with her, but through the dark, rising tide threatening to take her under, she could hear him.
"What the hell just happened out there?" she finally heard him ask, though it was muffled, as if he was underwater. His eyebrows raised impatiently when she didn't answer. "Onyx!"
Onyx opened her mouth to reply, to try and explain, to tell him who was responsible, but the taste to iron choked her and spilled over her lips. Her gaze went out of focus once again and the rising tides finally took their horrible, agonizing hold and yanked her beneath the raging waves.
And it was truly a shame that it felt as though no one was there to pull her out from such treacherous depths as she fell.
─────
The throbbing pain in Kaz's leg was horrendous, and the journey had hardly even begun. The journey north barely had time to sprout its wings before it all came screeching to a bloodied, chaotic halt. They were moving now, among the sea and heading to the destination, but not hardly as fast he was planning on moving.
While he had managed to pull Onyx along into the roster for such a feat for her skillset with a few blades and a bow, having her aboard as a Squaller was supposed to be an added bonus. But that was before she had walked aboard the Ferolind with Inej in her arms and a dark, bloody wake following her. That was before she had walked below deck, handed Inej off to Jesper and Nina, and collapsed into himself and Helvar before she could explain what happened. Kaz Brekker never thought he would see the day where the Reaper of Ketterdam had her guard down.
It was a shame, considering it wasn't under her own power.
But, at the very least, it wasn't too terribly hard to find out who exactly managed to wound both his Wraith and Onyx Vissier. And his severed eyeball was sitting right between Kaz's fingertips.
Blood poured down the side of Oomen's face like a torrential flood of dark red tears. It vaguely reminded him of the blood that spilled over Onyx's lips when she tried to answer him, before she collapsed and before Matthias caught her. Kaz tossed the eyeball over the side of the ship as Oomen shrieked and squirmed, then shoved his dirtied handkerchief into the empty socket to staunch the blood flow. Despite the damage he was doing, Onyx had already done her part. They found one of her knives not too far from where they found Oomen bleeding out on the docks.
This was a foreign type off rage. Unbridled, untouched. And it was serving its job well.
"Listen to me," he sneered, his face mere inches from Oomen's. "You have two choices. You tell me what I want to know, and we drop you at our next port with your pockets full of enough coin to get you sewn up and buy you passage back to Kerch. Or, I take another eye and I repeat this conversation with a blind man."
"It was just a job," Oomen responded. "Geels got five thousand kruge to bring the Black Tips out in force. We pulled in some Razorgulls, too."
"Then why not more men?" Kaz pressed. "Why not double your odds?"
"You were supposed to be on the boat when it blew! We were just supposed to take care of the stragglers."
"Who hired you?" Oomen quieted once more at that, bottom lip quivering. "Don't make me ask again, Oomen. Whoever it was can't protect you now."
Oomen sniffled a few times. "He'll kill me."
"And I'll make you wish for death, so you have to weigh those options."
"Pekka Rollins," he finally babbled. "It was Pekka Rollins!"
It shouldn't have shocked him as much as it did. Helvar didn't know enough about anything in the Barrel to feel the weight of the revelation, not like Jesper and Wylan did at the mere mention of the name. Kaz worked his jaw.
"Saints," Jesper groaned in complaint. "We are so screwed."
"Is Rollins leading the crew himself?" Kaz asked Oomen.
"What crew?"
"To Fjerda."
"I don't know about no crew," Oomen replied. "We were just supposed to stop you from getting out of the harbor."
"I see."
"I need a medik," he continued, lolling his head to the side, where more blood slowly trickled from his empty eye socket. "Can you take me to a medik now?"
"Of course," Kaz replied. "Right this way."
Kaz reached out and wrabbed his gloved fingers around the lapels of Oomen's jacket and hauled him up to his feet. He shoved him against the nearest railing and braced him there, with a perfect few of the sea waiting below. Oomen reeled at the sight.
"I told you what you wanted!" he shouted, shoving back against Kaz's grip. "I did what you asked!"
Kaz tightened his grip on Oomen and leaned in close, so the words he whispered were shared only between the two of them. "My Wraith would plead your case and counsel mercy. The Reaper would have you choking on your blood, begging for your death. It's a shame she's not here to see to you herself."
And with that, he yanked Oomen up just a hair higher and tipped him into the waters waiting below.
AUTHORS NOTE
hi, hello, i sincerely hope that was okay. i've edited all the action-y scenes to hell, so i really hope it reads nicely post editing. but as always, tell me what you think!