Still, her skin prickled.
This was the skill that made her invaluable. The one she’d shocked Mari with on that day ten years ago, when she was a thirteen-year-old wandering in the streets with blank eyes and a fresh burn scar on her palm. Val’s wife had been heading to the market and had come across a young Lore staring at a ragged hole in the side of a derelict building, one that led to the catacombs.
Lore still remembered it. She’d blocked out nearly everything that came before this moment, thirteen years of life spent almost entirely underground, but her recall of meeting Mari was crystalline, perfectly preserved, as if her mind could wash over everything that had come before by saving this memory in vivid detail.
“Are you all right?” Mari’s voice was soft and low, her long, dark braids twisted up on top of her head. A moment of hesitation before her golden-brown hand settled on Lore’s shoulder. “Is something wrong?”
Lore had stared at the hole and concentrated on the sting of the still-healing burn on her palm, on the darkness beyond and how it stretched out into what had been her forever. She blinked, and the layout of the tunnels overlaid the back of her eyelids. “No one is coming,” she’d said. “Not right now.”
In the present, Lore shook her head. She’d gotten better at only tapping into her awareness of the catacombs when she needed it—even now, as the strange skill seemed to be growing in strength alongside her sense of Mortem—but standing so close made it nearly impossible to ignore, made it seep through her thoughts like ink in water. She felt the tunnels like phantom limbs, like the catacombs and the Mortem within them were part of her. Sometimes Lore thought that if you peeled off her skin and turned it inside out, there’d be a map on the slick underside, pressed into the meat of her.
With a sigh, she leaned against the side of the building. She was a little earlier than Val had told her to be, and Val was nothing if not punctual.
A minute later, Val was striding down the street toward her, with the same determined gait that equally served for a casual stroll or a charge into a knife fight. A middle-aged woman more severe than traditionally pretty, with a paper-pale face, bottle-green eyes, and a scarf that had faded to near colorlessness holding back her gold hair.
Lore raised a hand in greeting. Val took hold of her fingers and pulled her into a hug instead. “You keeping out of trouble, mouse?”
“Only the kind you don’t want me in.” Lore hugged her back, the familiar scent of beeswax candles and whiskey a soothing weight in her lungs. Val and Mari had raised her since that day when she’d emerged from the dark into a world she didn’t know. They’d protected her and given her purpose, even when it was a risk. Even when the effects of her strange childhood had manifested in terrifying ways.
None of them talked about that, though.
Val snorted and straightened her arms, hands still on Lore’s shoulders. Her gaze had always cut like a scalpel, and now was no different. “I’m pulling you out,” she said with no preamble.
Lore’s brow knit. “What?”
“We have all the info we need on Gilbert’s outfit; if he’s moving as much contraband this week as you say, he won’t be running poison for much longer, anyway. There’s always a rush of religious feeling after a royal Consecration. The Presque Mort might be distracted now, but after that ceremony, they’ll have their noses to the ground like you won’t believe.”
For all that Lore loved her surrogate mothers, there was no denying that they were cutthroat. Val and Mari had visions of being the only poison suppliers in Dellaire—once they were, they’d be nigh untouchable. Bloodcoats took any bribe you threw at them, and even the Presque Mort and the rest of the Church turned their backs sometimes. The criminal underbelly of Auverraine was only criminal until the right amount of gold crossed the right palm.
Still, Lore shook her head, telling herself that her reluctance to leave was a business decision that had nothing to do with Michal. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. There’s still more I can learn.”
One pale eyebrow rose. Val cocked her head, that scalpel look delving deeper. “You like him.”
“No.” Yes. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Oh, mouse.” Val sighed. “I’ve told you before. You have to keep yourself apart.”
But she was always apart. The power in her veins, the awful things she was capable of kept her always, always apart. And it was nice to let the pieces of herself that could be liked—loved, even—have just a little comfort, sometimes.
Val patted her on the shoulder again. “It’s for the best, Lore. Trust me.” A pause, her teeth digging into the corner of her bottom lip. “It’s all for the best.”
And she was right. Val always was. Lore sighed, nodded.
It wouldn’t be difficult. She had scripts for this, lists of excuses she’d given other lovers over the years, lovers she’d similarly been cautioned against taking when she infiltrated their lives to find the secrets of their employers. There was the sick aunt she had to tend, the jealous spouse who’d finally found her, the sudden desire to move to a new city and start over. Typically, the excuses weren’t questioned, and Dellaire was big enough that she rarely saw those people again. On the rare occasions she did, they didn’t notice her. Lore kept her affairs quick, and poison runners moved on even quicker.
“Tell me about this drop,” Lore said, eager to change the subject.
“It’s simple.” Val’s eyes flicked away from Lore’s. “Normally, I wouldn’t bother you with it. But the client requested that the boxes be left at the catacombs entrance in the Northwest Ward’s market square.”
“So you need me to watch it and make sure no one comes near before the client can pick it up.” Vagrants often used the outer tunnels of the catacombs to move around Dellaire. Leaving anything in them was a risk.
“Shouldn’t take long,” Val said. “If you leave now and cut by the dock roads, you should get there by the time the guard is changing. It’ll be chaos, since it’s the day before a royal Consecration. Jean-Paul is bringing the contraband to the square, and if he arrives during the changeover, he should be able to slip through without getting searched. Then you can help him unload.”
Get to the square, unload the drop, watch the poison until it gets picked up. Clients didn’t like to leave their contraband sitting for long, so she shouldn’t have to be there for more than an hour. Then she could go back to Michal’s row house, jump in the rusty claw-foot tub to wash off the itchy feeling of being near the catacombs, and decide which of her lies she was going to use to break whatever they’d built between them.
She gave Val a decisive nod. “I’ll head that way, then.”
The old poison runner watched her for a moment, expression unreadable. Then she pulled her forward again, a crushing hug that made Lore nearly yelp in surprise.
“We love you like our own daughter,” she murmured into Lore’s hair. “Mari and I do. You know that, right?”
Bewildered, Lore nodded, though she couldn’t move her head much. “Of course I do.”
“And whatever we do, we do it because we have to.” Val stepped back, keeping her hands on Lore’s shoulders, her green eyes uncharacteristically soft. “I’m sorry to make you leave him, mouse.”