Chương 14: So Who's the Prey Now

She tried to sleep. It didn't work. The dip in the blanket still held Garr's shape, and hers now too, curled into what warmth was left of it. She closed her eyes more than once, waited for sleep to catch up the way it always did. It never came. The confusion kept turning over in her, the same shape each time, without settling into anything she could set down and leave alone. The pale square hadn't shown itself once since she'd woken up. She kept expecting it to, waiting on nothing. It stayed quiet.

That unsettled her more than the words themselves ever had. Her ears kept turning toward sounds that weren't there. Every creak of the building settling made her tense before she caught herself, waiting for something she couldn't name to happen next. Under all of it, something like hunger sat too. Small and persistent, enough to keep her from lying still. She gave up on sleep and sat up instead. She went looking for Bram first, out of habit more than anything.

His kitchen door stood open the way it never did once he'd banked the fire for the night. No pot on the stove. No smell of anything recent, only the cold ghost of old stew still clinging to the walls. She tried Ren next. Ren was slumped over her desk, cheek flat against a half-finished page, ink smudged where her hand had gone slack across it. Amber pressed her head against Ren's wrist. Nothing. She tried again, harder, a full weight headbutt into the side of her arm. Ren didn't stir.

Whatever kind of tired this was, it went deeper than sleep usually reached, and no amount of pushing was going to climb out of it tonight. She sat by the desk a while longer, waiting for something that wasn't coming. Then she left, through the kitchen door, out into the cold. The grate was the only place she knew that had ever answered hunger like this. She remembered how much lighter she'd felt walking out of that tunnel each time.

She headed for it without deciding to, the same pull that had first sent her down there months ago, worn into a groove her paws knew on their own now. The street looked the same as always, right up until the spot itself. Something had been built over the gap in the old iron, fresh stone and mortar still pale against the grime around it, a second grate laid flat and bolted down hard over the first, the bars too close together for anything her size to fit between. She circled it twice. Pressed her nose to every seam.

Nothing gave. She sat back on her haunches and looked at it a long moment, the hollow feeling under her ribs no smaller for the walk. There had to be another way down. There always was, somewhere. She kept close to the walls and let her nose lead instead of her memory, following the cold breath of old stone wherever the streets let it through. The city changed shape around her the further she went, buildings pressing closer together, the smell of woodsmoke turning to something greasier, unwashed.

Fewer boots than usual. That was the part that struck her first, before the smell did. No matched gear standing at the corners here. No oil and cold metal cutting through everything else. Most of that had gone with the expedition, she supposed, wherever they'd all disappeared to, and whatever was left of it hadn't bothered coming this far. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Nobody was watching this part of the city at all.

She didn't know that should have mattered to her. She only knew it as one more absence in a night already full of them. The streets here ran narrower, the buildings leaning in over her head like they'd forgotten how much room they used to take up. Rubbish sat uncollected in the gutters, and something in it had gone sweet with rot. She kept moving anyway, hunger flattening her caution down to something thinner than it should have been. A footstep reached her, too quiet.

The kind of quiet that didn't belong to a footstep at all. By the time it meant anything to her, a man was already standing at the mouth of the alley, close enough that she should have heard him minutes ago. Hands empty. An exaggerated, wide smile aimed straight at her. She backed up, ears flat, and hissed at him, low in her throat. He didn't come any closer.

One hand came up and tapped slow against the side of his own head, over and over, his whole body leaning into it, shoulders hunched, like the thought inside took real effort to find. Then something in him changed all at once. The tapping stopped. A hand shot up to the side of his mask, quick and bright, the whole gesture big enough to see from across the street, and the mask's face stayed fixed the whole time underneath it, painted eyes and a painted smile that never once moved no matter what he did.

His other hand dipped into a ring on his finger and came back out holding something small. He held it out on his open palm, arm stretched toward her, and waited. She didn't move. His whole body sagged at once, shoulders dropping, head bowing low like something in him had genuinely broken. He stayed like that a beat too long, longer than any real sadness would. Then just as fast he snapped back upright, bright again, like nothing even happened at all.

He crouched low instead and set the bread down on the ground between them, then backed away in big, exaggerated steps, knees lifted high, arms swinging wide with each one, hands still open, still empty, the painted smile on his mask fixed and wide the whole time. Bread. Something rich baked into it, butter or egg, the smell of it reaching her even from where she stood. She watched him a long moment. He didn't move again. Hunger decided before caution finished arguing.

She'd grab it and go, the same as anything worth taking, snatch it up and put distance between them. She crossed the distance low and fast and closed her teeth around it. The ground beneath her own shadow moved before she'd taken a single step back. It happened too fast to understand. Her own shadow, thrown long and black across the cobblestones by the moon overhead, shot up around her all at once, bars of solid black rising on every side and curving in overhead, locking together where they met.

Her whole body thrashed before any thought caught up to it. Claws raked out and found nothing but the bars themselves, hard and cold as metal but black straight through, no give in them anywhere. Legs kicked against a floor that hadn't been there a breath ago. A sound tore out of her throat, more yowl than anything, and got swallowed by the narrow dark the moment it left her.

[SYSTEM] A debuff has been applied to you: Silence Above her, a length of cloth dropped down over the top of it, blotting out the last of the light. A sound drifted down after it, low and wordless, some tune hummed without any words tied to it at all. He hadn't made a single other sound this whole time, not once, not even when she'd hissed at him. Just the tune now, easy and pleased with itself, like whatever had just happened had made his entire night.

Footsteps started walking, easy in time with the humming, like there was nowhere in particular he needed to be. They carried on for what felt like a long while, the ground underneath shifting from rough stone to something smoother and back again. Sound started creeping in around her, more of it than she'd heard all night, voices layered together the way they did in the market, a horse shifting its weight somewhere close, the creak of old wood and leather sitting still too long.

She yowled anyway, threw everything she had into it. Nothing came back. No footsteps changed direction. No voice paused. Whatever he'd done to her, it had been done completely. The footsteps under her finally stopped. A voice reached her from somewhere close, different from the humming, another person entirely.

"Sire, are you leaving today?" The humming cut off. She felt him nod, one slow dip of his whole upper body, exaggerated the same as every other motion of his tonight, held a beat too long to be a normal answer to anything. Then a different kind of movement. A lurch, then a settle, wood creaking under new weight beneath her.

The carriage started moving, and with it came a sway she had no way to brace against, nothing to see, nothing steady to plant her feet on, just the dark tipping one way and then the other with no warning before it happened. Her body went still on its own, the fighting gone out of it now that fighting had nowhere left to go. The sounds outside thinned after that, one layer at a time, voices first, then the horse, then nothing she could place at all. Time stopped meaning anything.

Just the dark, the swaying, the stillness she'd sunk into, no way to tell where one ended and the next began. Somewhere in all of it she lost the thread of how long this had been happening.