by Ford, Lizzy
The thought of anyone dishonoring him stoked her anger, and she yearned to disregard her father’s insistence she always control the hereditary curse she bore, the part of her touched by the devil. In a moment such as this, she wanted to let the devil’s wrath free upon anyone who drew near her father’s body.
“Avi! Come on!” The urgent hiss came from the direction of the crawlspace leading under the back wall of the cabin and into an alley. The black-haired head of her closest friend, Rockford – known as Rocky – poked out of the crawlspace, and his dark eyes settled on her.
Her fury fizzled, and the devil’s hunger for blood loosened its grip on her. Aveline’s mouth went dry. Her heart pounded loudly enough to fill her ears. Part of her understood Rocky’s urgency, but moving did not seem possible when she realized she would never return here, never see her father again. This was their last time together, and the infuriating knocking was ruining it. The door bucked beneath the fists of the fate awaiting her, if she did not flee.
“Avi!” Rocky insisted.
Wiping warm tears from her cheeks, Aveline sucked in one last breath laced with her father’s familiar scent then leapt to her feet. She hurried to the lopsided dresser where they stored their weapons and yanked open the bottom drawer. Her father had drilled into her the importance of never allowing their only possession of value to fall into the hands of anyone outside their family. More than once, he had shown her the envelope in the drawer and reminded her how dangerous his position was, and how likely it was that she would one day need to protect his treasure.
Those coming to dismember her father would take his body, but not his only treasure. The small gesture was all she could think to do to honor him before he was lost to her forever.
Shoving the envelope into her pocket, she dropped to her knees in front of the crawlspace and shimmied beneath it just as the front door splintered under the blow of an axe.
Waiting for her, Rocky reached in and hauled her out of the hole into an alley reeking of rotting refuse and human waste.
“There are ten of them, including the Shield and Miguel’s men,” he whispered to her. “They were arguing over who decides what goes to who. Hopefully it will be enough to distract them, so we can run.”
Aveline barely heard his words. Rocky’s eyes darted up and down the alley, aware whereas she was numb. The sting of winter nibbled on her ears, fingers and nose, and she shivered reflexively. Her breath floated over their heads in tiny puffs towards the night sky, away from the alley, from the damned city. Was her father up there somewhere, looking down upon her?
What remained of the thick wall that used to surround the city formed one side of her father’s cabin, which was the last dwelling in a line of shacks and cabins. With the crumbling wall to one side, the intruders on another, and the cabin on a third, there was only one direction for them to run: across a wide road and into the city’s criminal underbelly.
Her focus, however, was not on escaping but on the sky. The stars and moon were hidden behind the puffy gray clouds which covered the skies for the greater part of three months every winter. Was her father able to see her through the clouds? Was he finally free of the devil’s curse? Of the hunger for blood and death?
The sound of people ransacking her home made her wince. If she let herself envision them ripping his body apart, she would lead the second greatest massacre the city had ever known.
Rocky was at the corner of the cabin, peering around to the front. Those who came for her father’s body and possessions held torches that sent shadows dancing across the dark features of her best friend. “Six inside, four outside. Now’s our chance,” he whispered.
“I don’t want to leave him,” she said. Tears further blurred her surroundings.
Rocky approached her and gripped her arms. “You remember what you told me when my Papaw died?” he asked.
Aveline swallowed hard and nodded. “Crying is a weakness.”
“That, too,” Rocky said with a tight smile. “You told me your mother’s people believe the dead return to where we all came from, and they’re happy spirits again. This,” he motioned to their surroundings, “is probably hell.”
“I don’t think I said that,” she said, a small smile tugging up one corner of her mouth despite her tumultuous emotions.
“You said the first part. I’m declaring this hell,” he answered. “Your father is happy and he wants you not to be caught by those bastards. You deserve a chance to start a new life. It won’t happen if we stay here.”
Less than two years older than she was, Aveline often wondered how Rocky had become so wise. She suspected it had something to do with the scars running down the side of his body, from the tip of his scalp to his toes, stemming from his run in with the Shield last year.
“Maybe we should let them catch us, so I’ll match,” Rocky added and motioned to the side of his face without scarring.
“Burn you, Rock,” Aveline replied, though she appreciated his attempt to lighten her mood. She shook off his hand and then rolled her shoulders back. “I’m ready.”
Energized by the cold, she became more cognizant of their danger as her emotion was pushed back in favor of surviving the next hour. Rocky was right. She could mourn her father later. For now, she needed to hide. It was not possible to guess how many of her father’s enemies would seek her out. As the former head of the Assassin Guild, he had collected enemies for twenty years and was wanted by the Shield and city leadership for thousands of deaths. Trained by him secretly, possessing the feared curse, she would be hunted by hundreds, if not thousands.
She hoped some of the Guild members would remain loyal to her father long enough to help her apply to the Guild’s council for permission to complete the final trial required for her to become a full-fledged assassin. Her plan had been to one day lead the Guild as her father had. As an assassin-in-training whose sponsor was now dead, she would have to appeal to the new leadership for consideration, alongside hundreds of other applicants eager to join the elite, discreet organization.
This morning, she had confidence in her father’s recovery and her fate. Standing outside her home, without her father to guide her, she no longer knew where she belonged.
“Almost time,” Rocky said. He lowered the assassin mask over his head.
At least I have one friend, she thought.
Despite his warm eyes and ready humor, Rocky was second in lethality only to Aveline’s father and one of his favorite students. Her friend carried a bone machete and wore his full Guild blacks, the coal-hued uniform of the assassin. She envied him for his position as a newly sworn in member of the exclusive Guild. She had become an outsider the second her father died.
Rocky peeked around the corner of the cabin once more then motioned for her to follow.
Aveline shifted to the balls of her feet, ready to sprint when he did. She watched him calculate the movement of others she was unable to see from her position. With a quick nod, he focused on their destination – crossing the wide road on the other side of the men – and then ran.
She sprinted after him. Small and agile, Aveline caught up to him quickly. No sooner had they reached the point where they were fully exposed to their pursuers than a shout came from the direction of the cabin.
Aveline risked a look over her shoulder and almost tripped. The door to her home was open. Her father’s body had been dragged off the dais she built and was in the process of being dismembered.
She stopped, unable to take her eyes off his form.
“Avi!” Rocky shouted from across the street. “Happy spirits, remember?”
It was her mother’s belief, not her father’s, though her father had been diligent about teaching her about the woman who died in childbirth. Would it matter if he had not believed in spirits? Would he still become one, if he were touched by the devil, as she was?
As if to reassure her, the clouds above thinned until the moon spilled silvery light around her feet. She glanced up.
&nb
sp; “Happy spirits,” Aveline repeated, wanting to believe the rare sighting of the moon in winter to be a sign from either her father or mother.
With dread heavy in her stomach, Aveline turned and ran, joining Rocky on the other side of the street. The heavy footsteps of pursuers sent both of them bolting for the relative protection of the shadows.
They plunged into the dark alleys making up the inner city of Lost Vegas and filled with criminals, the poor, orphaned, and anyone else who did not fit neatly into the strict social castes of those privileged few who dwelt in the outer city.
“We’ll lose them in the markets!” Rocky told her.
She nodded. It normally did not take more than five minutes to shake any kind of pursuer, and evading the Shield members was a skill every child on the street had learned by the time he or she turned five.
Aveline and Rocky leapt over obstacles, slid around corners, ducked through closed merchant shops, and doubled back periodically to confuse their pursuers with the innate familiarity of their surroundings only those raised in the streets possessed. Past a statue of the Lost Vegas Founder and the Wynn monument, into the narrow maze making up the oldest of the city’s markets, through the brothel and neighboring slave districts, and around the heavily guarded central water and food storage buildings. Navigating the familiar footpaths and landmarks was second nature to them both.
By the occasional change in Rocky’s speed and the increasingly erratic route, he sensed what she did. Someone had managed to track them long past the markets. Her heightened instincts picked up the periodic brush of cloth, the scrape of soft soles against stone and the pungent scent of the polish used solely on metal and iron weapons, which were reserved for the upper castes, their elite protectors, and decorated members of the Shield. Even if assassins did not prefer bone and stone weapons, the Guild built around discretion and secrecy would have avoided the attention possessing steel weapons drew.
The longer Aveline and Rocky ran, the clearer it became their pursuer was having no trouble tracking them.
At long last, Rocky paused inside an abandoned dwelling in the middle of the temple ward to catch his breath.
Aveline stopped beside him. They listened, panting in the darkness. The sense of being followed did not abate and yet, no one charged through the door to confront them, either.
“This isn’t right,” Rocky said quietly. “No one from the outer city could’ve followed us. We learned these routes from your father himself.”
She silently agreed. Her father had been the city’s most wanted for twenty years. No one had been able to find him, once he entered the maze of streets, alleys, and paths making up the inner city. At one point, the Shield had ordered a manhunt with no less than five hundred foot soldiers and still her father escaped and returned home by dinner.
How were they being tracked? More importantly, which one of them was being followed? Rocky, because of his forbidden profession as an assassin, or Aveline, the daughter of a wanted criminal? And why did either of them rate this persistent level of attention?
“There’s more than one,” Rocky said and held his breath.
She did the same, listening.
Voices came from two directions. Unable to make out their words, Aveline could estimate how far they were. The two search parties were no more than a hundred feet away – and closing in on the abandoned building where she stood.
“Maybe they have the help of Ghouls,” Rocky said.
“Maybe they are Ghouls,” she growled in frustration.
“My mother used to say you could hear them scream from ten miles away and devour a horse in -”
“I’m not in the mood for stupid fables meant to frighten children,” Aveline interrupted. It was the worst night of her life, and she was being given no chance to mourn before her world fell spectacularly apart. She never asked the Great Spirit or people around her or the city for much of anything, but she needed a small break this night. “We need to split up.”
Rocky hesitated before agreeing. “Meet at Guild Main at dawn?”
“Yes. If something happens …”
“… we always come back for one another,” he finished their friendship motto. Raised on the streets, their survival had been a matter of working together from the time they met, when she was five and he seven.
“Stay alert. I’ll see you at dawn,” Aveline said and stepped outside the building. Listening once more, she decided to go left, towards the center of the city.
Aveline deftly wove through forgotten and abandoned routes, across streets and crossing the different wards dividing the sprawling inner city. Passing through the slave ward once more, she paused at one point and let her senses fill with the late night sights and sounds.
From one of the buildings near her, a man had been seized by a round of coughing. Music on ill-tuned instruments floated from another direction, while the movement of the vermin living within the city came from several directions. A rat was dragging what appeared to be a human hand towards the sewers, and larger scavengers were tossing inedibles from heaps of refuse in their search for food.
And then the faint scent of metal polish reached her.
She took off once more, vowing this would not be the night she joined her family as a spirit.
Whipping around a corner, Aveline was halfway down the street before she realized it had been recently rerouted. Streets often were dammed and changed in attempts by the Shield and city leadership to curb crime in the worst parts of the inner city. She had been at her father’s side the past week instead of exploring the streets as she normally did.
The sounds of pursuit grew louder. She hesitated too long, her mind racing to find an alternate route. As she tried to decide what to do, a low whistle reached her from above.
Aveline looked up. A figure in dark clothing was framed against the night sky, crouched on the edge of a roof of the building flanking the alley. The figure stood, revealing the tall, lean form belonging to a man. He tossed a rope down towards her and motioned for her to take it. The figure was too wiry to be Rocky, but it was difficult for her to determine anything else about her rescuer.
Aveline snatched the rope and began to haul herself up the side of the building, pushing and bracing herself with her legs.
“Hey!”
She glanced down and saw two dozen men had jammed up the entrance of the alley. Her thoughts went again briefly to why she and Rocky rated a search party before she concentrated on climbing. When she reached the top, she slung one leg over the edge of the roof and hefted herself over. Her heart flew, and she yanked the rope up before any of the men below could grab it.
Aveline leaned over, trying to identify something about her pursuers that might tell her who they were or why they were so doggedly chasing her this night. Rocky had seen the Shield members as well as the men working for the largest debt collector in the inner city, Miguel. She fully expected both to show up the night her father died. Miguel would sell off her father’s possessions – which included her – to the highest bidder to settle the debts of the Guild, and the Shield had an interest in confirming the assassin leader was dead. Why the latter insisted on chasing her, though, was not something she understood at all. What was one orphaned street dog to the Shield?
These two parties were joined by men in maroon she did not recognize. There were four of them. She ducked back from the edge of the roof when the men on the ground spotted her peering down at them. It was better to find safety first then spend time debating who was chasing her.
“You’re welcome,” a low, unfamiliar male voice said from nearby.
She had nearly forgotten the man who threw her the rope. Aveline whirled to face the shadows cast by the neighboring building. The man was there, hiding from the night. She breathed in deeply, using all her senses to pick up any clues as to who he was.
No smells, no sounds, no impressions. He was being very, very careful.
“Do you work for my father?” she asked.
“Sort of.”
She frowned and ran through the voices of every assassin or client who had ever crossed the threshold into her father’s cabin.
“You are for hire, are you not?” the man asked. His accent was polished, the rhythm of his speech slow and enunciated.
He was from the outer city. What was he doing here?
Wary, she shifted one hand to the knife at her thigh. “Why do you care?” she replied.
“Because, if you are, I would like to hire you.”
“Hire.”
“You are a seventh generation assassin, are you not?”
If he were one of her father’s men, he would know she was not allowed to call herself thus yet, because she had not completed her final trial.
“I assume you need a benefactor of some sort. Or were you running through the inner city for exercise?” he asked.
“Thanks for the help, but I’m not interested,” she said.
“You have not yet heard what the job is or what it pays. I have never met an assassin who did not wish to know how much I was willing to donate for my wishes to be carried out.”
“There are dozens of assassins. Hire one of them,” she said shortly. “I’m not currently looking for employment.” Aveline started away, towards a ladder leading up to the roof of an adjacent building. Roof walking was dangerous. She had done it before but generally preferred not to risk falling through anyone’s ceiling. With her current route blocked, she had little choice.
“You bear the devil’s blood, do you not?”
She stopped in place at the polite question. It was not chance that placed this man in her path. Devil was her father’s nickname, earned from his actions during the single deadliest massacre ever to occur in the inner city of Lost Vegas. Those who coined the nickname did so out of a sense of admiration, claiming her father had to have the blood of the devil flowing through his veins in order to kill a thousand people in three days time.
