Page 7 of Embers of Midnight
“Buy a dictionary,” I say, which is a bad plan and the only one my mouth knows. “Learn a new verb.”
He laughs, low, and his nose skims my temple. “How aboutbeg?”
There’s a metal lick in the air. I don’t see the knife first; I hear it. That little ceremonialsnickas it opens. He holds it level with my ribcage like he’s teaching a class. It’s not big. Hunters in moviesalways overcompensate. Real men who do real harm prefer what hides in a sleeve.
“You don’t want to do this,” I say. My voice comes out flatter than fear. “There are cameras.”
“Are there?” the one by the door asks, amused, eyes flicking up. “Want to bet they work?”
The blade kisses the hem of my coat. He doesn’t stab. He tests. He likes the way power changes posture. He slides the edge along the bottom button andsnicksit clean, then moves for the next. I lunge for his face, bring my forehead forward hard, and ram bone to bone. There’s a perfect sickcrack. Pain explodes in my skull and his nose gives under it like thin ice. Blood pours. He swears, sound sharp and childlike for half a second, and shoves me harder into the brick.
“Bitch,” he spits, voice thick, “you’re gonna—”
He drags the knife down my sweater instead of my coat now, the edge catching on knit and skipping. The cold finds skin in a line where fabric parts. My chest convulses on reflex. I go for his eyes again but his friend catches my wrist mid-swing and slams it above my head, stretching me tall and useless. The first man’s hand slides under the ripped sweater, the palm hot and cruel, and I go cold in the way that’s not about weather.
You are not small,I tell myself.You are not a body they get to use.
I rack my knee again and catch the knife wrist. It wobbles. He snarls and jams his other hand at my throat like he’s trying to pin both my voice and my air at once. His friend’s weight cages my hips, thigh trapping my leg, breath sour against my ear, whispering stupid things that pretend to be promises.
“Easy now,” Knife says, and the blade nicks under my ribs. Not a stab. A warning. It stings bright. My vision spots white at the edges.
“Let go,” I say. It sounds like someone else—low, controlled, science experiment calm. “Walk away. No one has to—”
He moves the knife to my waistband and starts to saw. The world slants. My skin learns new words for hate.
I do not beg. I bite. I turn my head and sink teeth into the meat of his palm where it shoves my jaw. He bellows, jerks, and the knife leaps in his grip. It’s a reflex more than a choice. The blade drives forward three inches and finds my gut.
Everything stops at once.
The cold vanishes. Sound folds in on itself. My body forgets how to breathe, then panics and drags air in like a drowning thing. Heat floods my middle in a sudden, searing bloom that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with something older remembering me.
The pain should own me. It doesn’t. It opens me. It’s wrong and right and huge. It’s like a lock turning after decades, like a door that thought it was a wall starting to understand.
Something inside mesnaps—not bone, not tendon. A tether. The sound isn’t in the alley; it’s in my marrow. The air tastes like metal and rain and the first breath you take over a campfire. Light crawls under my skin, hot and relentless, chasing the cold out like it’s insulted it ever got in.
The flame shall wake when blood is spilled.The words arrive without a mouth, threaded into the heat, ancient and quiet and sure.
Both men feel it, even if they can’t name it. The one pinning my wrist goes still. The one with the knife staggers back a step, hand slick with my blood and his, eyes flaring with an animal’s honest fear.
“What the—” he whispers.
I’m not on the wall anymore. I’m not anywhere I recognize. I am a furnace with skin. I am a heartbeat pounding against metal. Breath roars in my ears like wind in a canyon. The alley narrows to a tunnel, and at the far end is a red-gold horizon I have never seen and have always known.
I fold forward around the heat, around the blade still in me, and the heateats. Fabric blackens around the wound. The smell is wrong; it’s me and it’s not. I grab the knife handle and pull. It comes free with a wet sound that would haunt me if the rest ofme weren’t howling. Blood surges. The heat surges louder. The knife warps in my hand, metal softening a fraction, and drops to the snow with a hiss like a match in water.
“Run,” the friend says, low, rough, the word more prayer than plan.
“We finish it,” the bleeding one says, voice shaking, jaw red, eyes mean because scared is only allowed a second in men like this. He lunges, and instinct stops being a word.
I move without deciding to. My hands hit the ground. No—my hands become weight and pressure in a way hands don’t. The alley is suddenly too small. My spine uncoils into a line that demands space. There’s tearing and there is no pain in it; there’srelief. My skin can’t hold me and so it doesn’t. It splits soundlessly. Heat pours out like I’ve been carrying a hidden sun and someone just broke the seal.
I go down, except down becomes forward. My feet—no, myhooves—punch into slush, steam blasting up around them. My breath detonates into the cold and drags flames in its wake. The world reorients around four points of contact and the weight of a head that carries a line of pressure above my eyes—sharp, lethal, right.
The first man never finishes his lunge. He stops moving because there’s a horse in the alley and his brain cannot fit that with the rest of his night. I bellow. The sound starts in my chest and picks up heat like it travels through a forge. It hits him square and he flinches like I struck bone. My mane throws light. The snowhisses. The smell of old oil on the brick flares and dies.I am on fire and I am fine.
He raises the knife. I don’t think. I open my mouth and the heat inside finds a path out. Flame licks his sleeve and then his shoulder and then there is no sleeve and no shoulder, only light. He screams and drops the blade and slaps at himself and that feeds it. Fire likes air and panic gives it both. It eats the cotton first, then the beard, then the part of him that still thought he was in control. I turn my head away at the last second and the angle spares his face from being a mask of bone. It doesn’t spare his throat. He staggers, falls backward into snow that doesn’t know what to do with heat like mine, and goes quiet, the quiet of a thing that only exists in outline now. The steam smells like pennies and cruelty.
The second man doesn’t scream. He runs. He makes it two steps and slams into the far wall because the alley pinches when you don’t know it. He turns back because people always look at what kills them, just once, like they might make a deal if they find the right angle. He raises empty hands.
