Page 112 of A Reign of Roses
Still, the entire ride, steed racing at a bone-crunching gallop, my mind ached with the image of Arwen chained somewhere in Ethera’s palace. I’d filtered through every possible reason the queen might have wanted her. Her lighte, to trade her to Lazarus, to hurt me in some way. None of it made any real sense. Ethera knew my army could slaughter hers. She couldn’t withstand another war, not with the south of Rose already breathing down her neck.
I was still driving myself mad with the possibilities as a bistro somewhere pumped out the notes of a deep, brassy saxophone and patrons whooped and hollered. We’d arrived.
Rotter’s End reeked of booze. Not just the fresh liquor, but the smell of it once someone had failed to keep the stuff down. And it was oppressively dark—not many streetlamps or lanterns, and the few thetown did have were dimmed or caked in frozen snow. One watering hole was growing boisterous with the coming night, but even that establishment near the riverbed was so encrusted in snow and dirt I couldn’t make out much.
And yet the shuttered-up windows and closed-down harbor, each knackered barn and splash of horse hooves through cold sludge, was illuminated by a vivid, glowingred.As if the rising moon had first been doused in fresh blood.
I searched for the source of the ruddy glow and found it swiftly.
“The Neck Romancer,” displayed in vibrant flashing lights of red and white and gold—either Aleksander’s lighte or quite the spell. The theater, shaped like a circus tent, with panels of striped fabric and flags at the top of each peak, presided over Rotter’s End like a harlequin on a palace throne.
As we approached, we found the doors barred off with long planks of wood. A lone fish-eyed man sat on a repurposed barstool, bundled in a fur hat and coat, his eyes on a weathered novel grasped between cracked leather gloves.
“We don’t open until nightfall,” he said, before we’d even reached him.
Mari gestured wildly at the cerulean blue dusk all around us. “That’s now!”
The doorman didn’t lift an eye. “No, wench. It ain’t.”
“Listen,” I said, voice low. “We—”
“I’m not saying it again,” the doorman grunted. Finally his eyes found mine. They held the will of a human bull.
My body prickled and instant fatigue flooded my veins.
Gods-damned lilium…
“Please,” Mari tried again. “If I may, nightfall is a very confusing time to open an establishment. Is it simply the moment the sun fallsand it becomes night? Because that would have been hours ago. Is it once the sky is pitch-black? That’s tricky, too, because that might be midnight, and then the show would be long over, right? So, you see, we could bother you with all these complex ramifications of your operating hours, or you could just let us inside and be back to your book.” Mari beamed at him before peeking down at the pages in his hand. “And that’s such a great one. I love Baudaire’s use of color.”
The doorman and his scraggly goatee loosed one unimpressed laugh. Mari laughed, too, and then unexpectedly rushed him, trying to dodge past his hulking torso for the doors.
Before either Griffin or I could move for them, the man caught Mari around the middle and threw her back into the snowy ground. She went down hard, taking a spool of rope and a broken chair along with her. “Your woman,” the maggot spit toward Griffin and me as he sat back down, “is insufferable.”
Rage forced my tongue against my teeth.Breathe…We could not fuck this—
Griffin laughed once. Still bleeding from his ribs and brow, that laugh blunt and mean. His eyes found the fading sky as if in apology before his fist slammed so hard into the man’s jaw, it wasn’t just spit that flew as he toppled from his chair. It wasteeth.
Even without his Fae strength, the entire building trembled with the force of the man’s body smacking the brick façade, and snow tumbled down in heaps.
In two hundred years, Griffin had successfully stopped me from clocking at least two dozen men. He’d failed at holding me back more than double that. And in all those years—all those tavern fights and violent brawls, men who deserved it and those who didn’t—I’d never seen my commander strike someone out of impulse. The man couldn’t even buy a new pair of boots without debating it for weeks.
“Holy Stones!” Mari shrieked from the ground. Griffin offered her his mangled hand—our lilium tea meant those fractured fingers weren’t righting themselves anytime soon—and then, noting the damage, offered her his other one instead.
Mari allowed him to yank her up as she yelped, “Youkilled him.”
“No,” Griffin bit out, flexing his hand when she released it. “I didn’t.”
I leaned over the body, out cold and leaking blood into the stone and snow. His chest rose and fell, and I sighed. “When he wakes, he’ll wish you had, though.” I looked back up to my beleaguered friends. “Come on.”
Per Griffin, on any given night, the Neck Romancer was a glamorous kaleidoscope of light and color and skin and song. Clinking glasses and alluring peals of laughter and enough decadent food and liquor to flood Willowridge twice over.
But the theater we walked into was empty and quiet.
The vaulted ceiling was shadowed, its hundreds of dangling crystal chandeliers still unlit. Heavy, bloodred velvet curtains framed the main stage, pulled off to the side by gilded rope. The balconies above and tables below, all of which surrounded that broad stage, sat empty, though some had a yet-to-be-dressed performer dozing off inside them.
Stale tobacco smoke and perfume thickened the air in my nose, and to our right a coughing man replaced one risqué poster of a blushing woman hiding her breasts with another one of virtually the same image.
Somewhere, one of Ethera’s melographs oozed out a slow metallic accordion tune, and behind the curtains a sultry voice vocalized low, easy warm-ups.
