Filed to story: When the Moon Hatched Book
Murderers.
Child abusers.
Incompetent kings.
The muscle in Sereme’s jaw pops, her eyes hardening like molten ore dropped in a bed of snow. “You’d struggle without the Ath’s unlimited support were you forced to live like the masses, Raeve. Don’t forget how well we pad your pockets. There would be no more dragon bloodstone to scatter throughout the Undercity and give you that false sense of importance you can’t seem to live without.”
I see neither of us are in the mood to play nice.
Sliding a blade from my bodice, I thump my boots on her desk, nudging a few of her perfectly lined up quills. “Don’t act like you care about my well-being. You don’t,” I say, flipping the weapon between my fingers. “You’re just the bitch who clamped a shackle around my wrist and called it mercy.”
The vein in Sereme’s temple swells so much I quietly hope it’ll burst. “It’s surprising you speak to me with such disrespect, given said shackle.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I mutter, using the blade to dig some of Tarik’s dried blood from beneath my nails. “To what do I owe the honor of being summoned into your den, Sereme?”
She glares at me, watching me flick curls of hardened blood upon her plush purple rug. It’s always interesting to see how far I can push her before she sweeps me from her space like a long-legged bug she can’t eradicate fast enough, hoping she’ll eventually decide my presence is more hassle than it’s worth.
She paces toward me, lowering into the plump purple throne on her side of what I consider our makeshift barricade, folding her hands together atop the desk. “I wanted to make sure you received my parchment lark.”
“Is the mission complete?” I ask, brow arched.
“No confirmation yet. I mean the one I sent last cycle, just before the aurora fell.”
Fresh orders.
Lovely.
My interest dissolves, stare cast on my nails again, digging out more filth. “Must’ve gotten lost. Perhaps it’ll circle back ’round once I’ve slept, as they often do. So considerate. You should take notes.”
I sense her simmering frustration like a welling storm cloud that clots up the air with a static charge.
Still, I flick.
Flick.
Flick.
“Funny how you’re the only one who has trouble receiving my larks.”
“One of the world’s great phenomena.”
“Doubtful.” A brief pause, then, “Rekk’s Moonplume is in the city hutch.”
My heart drops, gaze whipping up, plunging into Sereme’s stony stare. “Who’s he hunting?”
“Us.”
My responding curse is as sharp as the blade in my hand.
“He’s been hired by The Crown, and he’s here to put a pin in our rebellion. To stop us from draining the kingdom of its fresh-faced conscripts.”
Well, he needs to die.
I swing my boots off the table and sheathe my blade. “I’ll take care of him,” I say, an eager hitch to my voice. Every time I’ve seen the bounty hunter, the metal spurs on the back of his boots have been caked in blood. Don’t need a grand imagination to work out who the blood belongs to. Likely the poor Moonplume he apparently charmed after slaughtering its former rider, if the rumors are true.
I’ll take a vast amount of pleasure in his assassination.
I rise from my seat—
“No,” Sereme bites out, and I frown.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Sit,
Raeve.”
I sigh, then do as she ordered, loathing the spark of satisfaction in her eye.
“Why don’t you want me to kill him?” I ask past clenched teeth. “That’s what I do. I take out the trash nobody else wants to muddy their hands with, sweeping the path clear of any filth that might prevent the Ath from completing its missions. Rekk is in the path,
Sereme. He’s endangering other members—
most of whom I respect.”
She gives me a bland look that doesn’t so much as pinch, though perhaps it would if she’d ever done anything to gain my respect.
“Let. Me. At him.”
“No.”
That fucking word again.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s well-watched bait.”
“Then I’m perfect for the job.”
“No,” she chides for the third time. “Your instructions are to lie low until he’s gone. That means no random slaughterings when you find someone doing something they shouldn’t, or hear someone crying out for help. No jobs. Nothing until I say otherwise. You will only leave your home to purchase produce or to come to me if I call on you.”
I frown, thoughts churning hard and fast, whisking into a snowstorm caught beneath my ribs. There’s not a single hit Rekk Zharos has failed to bring down, so he’s not leaving this city without blood on the tip of his barbed whip.
“If we don’t eliminate him, he’ll take one of us down, and it won’t be pretty.”
“I’m aware,” she says through tight lips, a stern finality to her tone that strikes my nerves with that Sereme-serpent bite.
Meaning …
She’s going to toss somebody considered less useful at him. A sacrifice to the ravenous Crown.
Something inside me splinters, bowing beneath an immense weight pressing against my ribs, my upper lip curling. “You feed the monster and more will slip from the shadows. Once the smell of blood taints the air, they don’t … stop … coming.”
Sereme sighs, reaching across the desk to straighten her quill collection. “Are you going to tell me how to do my job again, Raeve?”
It’s getting old for me, too.
“Every time we intercept a transport carriage full of young elemental conscripts, it’s a bandage on a much bigger problem. So long as the King continues to rule, there will be more carriages. More bounty hunters. More death and suffering.”
Still, her eyes are cast on her quills, like she values the task more than she values everything the F?ur du Ath is supposed to stand for.
I snarl, slashing my hand across the table, littering the floor with feathers. “What about the sick? The starving? The nulls?”
Slowly, she pulls her hand back, scouring me with a wide-eyed stare. “We spent all slumber saving fifty-seven nulls. At your bidding—“
“An operation I funded myself,” I snip, brow raised. “Or perhaps you thought I wouldn’t notice, since I don’t often check my reserves?”
“Of course I docked your reserves,” she sneers. “Running such a large-scale operation is costly in ways you’ll never understand. We risked our entire cause to keep you happy. Hindered political progress. Someone had to pay.”
To keep me happy.
Right.
“You know what that tells me?” I say with a humorless laugh. “That the Ath doesn’t value the nulls as much as it values the elementals. I don’t go down to the Undercity just to scatter bloodstone,