Stranger Rituals by Kali Rose Schmidt

Author:Kali Rose Schmidt [Schmidt, Kali Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-08T18:30:00+00:00

12

Window Tension

She wasn’t sure why she decided to stay.

As she had walked back to the Cove that night with Ida, Rhodri nowhere to be seen, she debated it over and over, wondering if she was making a foolish decision. If Vojtech would eat her bones for her royal screw up when she returned to the Order. If she returned to the Order. She didn’t trust Zephir and his crew, not enough to not believe he wouldn’t try to kill her after she served her purpose for whatever he was planning.

But she would be ready.

Rhodri’s warnings rang louder in her ear, his mere presence terrifying and yet phantom all at once.

But if Zephir intended to hand her over to the Warskians, he could have done so a dozen times by now. Besides, she reasoned, it was one more night, then she would kill the Praeminister, find Zephir, and she would return to Vojtech, just as he had asked of her. She was already ahead of schedule, owing to the wolf bones that had taken her through the Skov forest. She’d likely be back before Vojtech even expected her. If she could evade Rhodri.

Burying beneath the sheets of the inn’s room, knowing sleep wouldn’t come to her, not as she was half-waiting for the horned man to pop into her room again, she smiled as she thought of the Djavul. He would be appalled she had spent so much time with the enemy, appalled that she had let herself be put under by those damn mindeta cigarettes, not once, but twice.

What a clever invention. She could take it back to the Order, perhaps they could use it for any Vrakan Marazan rebels or Vrakan Royal soldiers they wanted to interrogate. Vojtech might enjoy that idea.

He rarely let himself enjoy anything save for his visions and his bones. The nights they had spent staying awake together, plotting the final battle in the coming Holy War, he had never reached for vin himself. He hadn’t partaken in syn when he had led her to the forest to do so. Part of her thought, in those moments, he was looking after her, keeping her safe.

Maybe he was just keeping himself safe, his own secrets.

And what of Zephir’s? Finding out his mother was a Vraka only made his fighting seem sick, more twisted. What had happened to her to cause her to die in the streets? Ida hadn’t said, and she hadn’t pressed.

What, too, of Ida, of Jalde, the latter of whom trailed after him like a little brother, even though the two looked nothing alike? Zephir was lean and wiry with light brown skin and those vivid green eyes, Jalde short and stocky with deep brown skin like Klaus’s. Ida said they were close like brothers, said that Zephir’s mother had died trying to keep them both from the cold, but how had they found one another?

It was a shame, Scarko thought, stifling a yawn, that she would never be able to find out more about them, more about Zephir’s mother’s story.

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