Page 45 of A Steeping of Blood
Now you sit and recollect every feature of my face that you adore, and why, Jin said in her head, most matter-of-factly.
Of course he’d say such a thing. Goodness, he hadjustleft and she was already having make-believe conversations with him.
The ledger weighed heavily beside her. The tribute was inching closer. She had work to do.
The Athereum was much too far away—she didn’t want to risk such a long trek with so many guards present and so few crowds to blend into. She pulled her knit cap tight over her hair, ignoring the errant curls that tickled her neck, and stepped from the shadows, hurrying past the graveyard and through the thick of White Roaring until she found the shady grove near the portside of White Roaring Square where she would sometimes sit to collect her thoughts. Her heart pounded, muffling everything else.
Despite the trees shedding leaves and turning bare throughout the capital, this grove was lush, foliage teeming beneath her feet, branches swaying with the breeze. It looked as untouched as the days when she would run to its shelter to get away from her mother.
A different time, a different Flick.
Now she had a mission. Making sure she was alone and out of sight, she pulled out the ledger from her satchel to thumb through what she’d tabbed that could potentially give them an upper hand for the tribute. If such a thing as an upper hand was possible.Arthie says it is. That had to be enough.
But Arthie didn’t know Flick’s mother. Arthie didn’t know how ruthless Lady Linden could truly be. Flick closed her eyes for the briefest of moments. She couldn’t dwell on that. She couldn’t allow herself to spiral. If her mother truly was that terrifying, Flick needed to do what she could to give them that upper hand. To make sure they won this time.
For good.
She could scout out the site of the tribute, but Arthie had told her not to. Flick would focus on other tasks first, like the personalized invitations she needed to send. She had a list of names that she wasalmost excited to contact, for they weren’t fond of Lady Linden, but they would be most eager to be a guest of the Ram’s. They didn’t yet know there was no difference between the two people.
Their scorn was just what the crew needed to help ruin the Ram’s image. But Flick was quick when it came to forging letters in her mother’s hand. It could wait for now.
She opened the ledger with a sigh. She’d read much of the book already, but her earlier sleuthing had been for clues on Ceylan and the Siwangs, not the tribute and the Ram’s plans outside of the weaponized vampires. Home wafted through the pages as she turned them, that unique smell that could only spawn from a culmination of other scents, from the soil used in their indoor plants to her mother’s perfume. Flick ran her fingers over a page, feeling the imprint of her mother’s words, wishing she didn’t feel a spike in her heart at the sight of them.
The others were sailing off to an island. Deciphering a book and forging documents were the least Flick could do.
12JIN
Jin had lived in a constant state of breathless anticipation since he had died. Even now, as he stood aboard the EJC ship, his insides were churning, roiling, and it wasn’t because the sea was doing the same beneath him. He wanted to dig his hand into his pocket and toss a clove rock between his teeth. He wanted to lick raspberry jam off his fingers. He wanted to look at Flick’s sunshine curls and calm himself.
He felt incomplete, something he rarely ever experienced when it was him and Arthie against the world.
He still tasted blood on his lips. In reality, Jin didn’t mind his new sustenance. He was surprised by how strangely sweet it had tasted. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t tasted blood before. He’d nicked enough fingers and sucked on enough wounds in the battlefields that were both inventing and running the streets, but it tasted different now. Better. Sweeter, yes, but with distinct notes if he really sat down and allowed himself to savor each sip, and Jin had always been known to savor.
Two paces and a million miles away, Arthie gripped the rail and stared into the distance, the billowing sails casting her in shadow. She held her hat tight against her head, the mauve swoops of her hair rippling with the wind. There was something more she hadn’t told him. He’d seen it in her eyes when she’d lifted her bottle to his in the hold of the ship.
Arthie had always been small for her age, but he’d never seen heractuallylookit. As if the world had grown larger since she’d been turned into a vampire and she wasn’t so sure of her place in it anymore.
He took a step closer, and her head whipped toward him. The look on her face, raw and open, was so deprived of her usual mask that it gave him pause.
“The last time I was at sea, I killed people.”
Jin froze at her words.
Her voice was eerie, distant in a way Arthie rarely ever was. She turned to face him fully.
“Remember when Matteo said I came to Ettenia on a boat filled with blood? It was the blood of the people I killed.”
One of the crew spotted them and started walking their way for small talk. Jin shooed him off with his umbrella.
Arthie didn’t even notice. “There were only four of us on that boat. Fleeing. They’d done nothing to hurt me, but if there had been more, I likely would have killed them too. Penn took me in when I set foot on shore, and I killed some of his staff too. I was a half vampire, like the Wolf of White Roaring. Like Matteo.”
Jin had not known any of this.Thatwas the reason for her pause, the reason she’d drunk nothing but coconut water, eagerly gobbling it up when they’d met for the very first time.
Which meant—
“You drank that blood because of me,” he said.
She lifted a shoulder. “Eh, I was hungry.”
