Upstairs at the inn, I fell onto one of the three narrow beds and kicked off my boots, grateful to be horizontal. Cherie went straight for the train case of blood and downed two vials, handing me a third. I sipped it carefully without sitting up.
“I’m going down for supper, mes filles.” Mademoiselle Caprice smoothed her glossy hair and straightened her dress. “Drink your blood, and get some sleep. We shall leave at dawn.”
“Yes, mademoiselle,” Cherie said.
“Good luck finding some sexy victims,” I added.
Caprice shot me a glare. “You should take care to curb your attitude before you reach university, my dear. The professors have been known to strike deserving miscreants with a cane. Bludmen are not exempt from manners.”
As soon as she was gone, I sat up and held out my hand to Cherie, so she could see what nestled in my palm.
“Demi. You didn’t.” She poked the pile of coins with a finger.
I grinned. “Criminy taught me well.”
“We can’t use it. Even if I agreed, even if I wanted to go to Paris, all the carriages in Callais leave from the same place. She would find us in a heartbeat.”
Tucking the coins back into my pocket, I sighed deeply. “I guess you’re right. No point in trying to give her the slip. Oh, well. Good night, Cherie,”
She looked me up and down. “You’re not going to change into your nightclothes?”
“Of course not. Good Pinky girls don’t change in inns. Who knows if they have bludrats?”
“Excellent point. You’re finally starting to be sensible.”
She lay down on the bed beside mine, fully clothed, and blinked sleepily at me.
“It’s strange, going to bed this way. I’m so used to being in the top bunk with you below me. And now you’re staring at me. And we’re in Franchia.”
I rolled over, showing her my back. “Creepy staring problem solved. Don’t worry, honey. Everything will be better in the morning.”
But I hadn’t shown her what was in my other pocket. And I wasn’t going to sleep yet, either.
* * *
“Cherie, wake up. We have to hurry.” I rolled her shoulder gently and glanced over her at Mademoiselle Caprice, who let out a roaring snore.
“Why? Are we late for the carriage?”
“We will be.” I slipped a vial into her hand and guided it, uncorked, to her lips.
She chugged it agreeably and blinked at me. “Where’s Mademoiselle Caprice?”
I stifled a giggle. “Sleeping off too many daimon drinks, I suppose.”
But Cherie knew me too well. Her eyes went to slits. “What did you do, Demi?”
“Well, Cherie, I might have brought a bag of Criminy’s famous sleeping powder. And I might have used it on her after she went to sleep. And I might have grabbed our papers and carriage tickets from her reticule. And she might be sleeping for another day, at least, because I might have used more powder than was necessary.” I held up our forged papers in one hand and a sack of coins in the other and waggled my eyebrows.
Cherie groaned and stood, looking down at our insensate chaperone with her usual concern. “Oh, dear Aztarte. You are a horrible person and a bad influence, and Criminy is going to kill us, and we’re just going to sit right here and wait until she wakes up and pretend like nothing ever happened, because I really don’t want Criminy to kill us.”
“Criminy has to find us before he can kill us, and he’s not going to find us.” I smiled and patted her shoulder. “At least, not until we’re the most celebrated act in the cabarets of Mortmartre.”
“No. No no no no no. I’m going to Ruin. I’m going to university. I am not, under any circumstances, going to Paris. And I’m definitely not going to the cabarets. Did you even listen to Caprice yesterday? It’s dangerous. Even for us.”
“And it’s the only way to be a star.”
“I. Don’t. Want. To. Be. A. Star.” She punctuated each word with a little slap on top of my head.
“I don’t want anything else but to be a star. Besides, you’re going to live to be three hundred. You’ve got plenty of time to make youthful errors. You can always use your mad cash from the cabaret to go to university later, after you sow your wild oats.”
Cherie sat down and put her head in her hands.
“What are oats, and why should I sew them? I hate sewing. Honestly, Demi, I feel like a mother with an out-of-control child. You won’t listen to anyone. Not me, not Mademoiselle Caprice, not even Criminy and Letitia. Why can’t you just be happy with what you have?”
I stared into her cloudy gray eyes, begging her to understand, as pink-tinged tears spilled down my cheeks unbidden and unwanted. “Because I’m not happy, Cherie. I’m hungry. Why are you so ready to be complacent? Why don’t you want more?”
She scooted over to me, folded our black-scaled fingers together. “I don’t know how to get through to you. You’re my best friend, and you’ll never be happy until you’ve destroyed us both.”
I shook my head. “It’s not destruction. It’s reinvention. Trust me. It’s going to be the biggest adventure of our lives. We just have to reach out and take it.”
She sighed deeply and reached to pull the coverlet over Mademoiselle Caprice’s shoulder. “You’ll never give up, will you?” she asked quietly. “No matter what?”
“Not until I get what I want.”
“So my only choices are to join you on this mad caper to Paris or stay here alone and explain to Mademoiselle Caprice why I let you go?”
“Pretty much.”
She took two more vials from the train case and twined her arm around mine. We uncorked the vials and sipped them at the same time, a Bludman’s pinkie promise. Her eyes were sad and rueful, maybe the tiniest bit amused.
“Then I guess, yet again, I’ll give in to you.”
“It’s going to be amazing, Cherie. I promise.”
She tossed her empty vial at my chest. “If you’re wrong, I’m going to kill you myself.”
“Fair enough. But I’m going to be right.”
We slipped out the door with nothing but the train case of blood vials, our papers, and a pocket full of dreams.
And by dreams, I mean money I nicked off our sleeping chaperone.
Little did I know how quickly we would lose them all.
4
I was giddy as I watched the muffin-shaped haystacks roll past like a live Monet painting, the sky shimmering pink behind them. Beside me, Cherie vibrated like a frightened chihuahua.
“Criminy’s going to kill us.”
“You’ve already said that a thousand times. It’s too late to worry about it.”
“It’s never too late to worry.”
I rolled my eyes at her and leaned my head against the worn cushion of the jouncing carriage, which was moving across the fields of Franchia at a fast clip, spiriting us from Callais to Paris. My best friend was starting to sound way too much like my conscience. I was fairly certain she would nag me to death before we even reached our destination, much less before Criminy found out.
“He’s got to find us before he can kill us. And Paris is a big city, mon petit chouchou.” I elbowed her in the ribs.
“And what is that supposed to mean, Demi?” She elbowed me right back.
“It means I called you a cabbage. It’s a French—I mean, Franchian—term of endearment. And did you know you have seriously pointy elbows?”
Her voice went so quiet that surely the Pinkies in the carriage wouldn’t hear. “I just don’t think it’s right, running out on Mademoiselle Caprice and taking all her francs. Criminy’s going to kill her, too, for being a bad chaperone. What was so horrible about going to the University of Ruin, anyway?”
We hit a pothole, and my head knocked against the wood, loosening a dark brown curl to dangle in my eyes. I sat up straighter and shrugged. “I left her enough money to get back to the caravan. And Ruin wasn’t horrible; I just wanted an adventure. I don’t want to be a boring contortionist
in the boring caravan anymore, and I don’t want to go back to college, either.”
“Back to college?”
I wedged my head onto her shoulder, my mouth to her ear behind a curled glove. The other passengers didn’t know we were Bludmen or that I was a Stranger from Earth. We would be in serious trouble if they found out we were bloodsuckers—not the nice, normal, Pinky girls we appeared to be. “I guess I never told you. I was at university when I . . . when I ended up in Sangland. When Criminy found me and saved me. I was a student, in my world. I hated it.”
“Why did you never say? And why did you hate it so?”
I scowled behind my hand, but her confusion was genuine.
It was easy to forget that Cherie had grown up poor and freezing in the forests of Freesia after her family fell out of favor with the Tsarina. To her, the caravan was a life of warmth and security. And I had taken that from her when I decided to leave. Breathing in the scent of her hair, I felt a rush of love for the first person who’d reached out to me when I arrived in Criminy’s caravan, naked and confused and newly blood-hungry. She’d hugged me and taken me in like a lost kitten, teaching me how to drink blood from vials without staining my clothes and showing me how to line my eyes with kohl like the other girls. When I looked at her, I saw only my dear friend, the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. Golden curls, eyes too innocent for a Bludwoman, pink cheeks, and an upturned nose. She looked like an American Girl doll, not a well-disguised wolf.
But to her, the University of Ruin represented untold wealth and opportunity. Most likely, no one in her entire family had ever been to university, much less a woman. I would have to keep reminding myself, before we landed in Paris, that women in Sang didn’t have the sort of freedom I had known back home in Greenville, South Carolina. I hadn’t spoken much of my life before Sang, it was true. But I owed her a better explanation for why I’d forced her to join me on a risky adventure.
“I never told you because I wanted a clean start, wanted to forget how I ended up here. Earth is different. Safer. I guess I thought that once I left home and got to a new city for college, everything would be different. That I would make friends and get a boyfriend and do well in my classes without really trying and that a degree in art history would actually get me a job. I thought life would be as pretty as it looked in the brochures, in the advertisements. I thought that just getting away from my parents would suddenly make everything better.”
“It didn’t?”
“Nope. Kind of the opposite. It just made me more depressed and alone.”
The Pinky gentleman across the carriage watched our whispered closeness with an unhealthy fascination, a creepy gleam growing behind his spectacles. My instinct was to flash my fangs at him and hiss, but that would get us thrown off the carriage, if not killed. Instead, I pulled my head away from Cherie and locked eyes with the older man. After a few moments of my intense glaring, he cleared his throat juicily and looked away. The prim nursemaid beside him sniffed in disdain and sidled closer to her charge, a girl of about seventeen. The girl gave us an innocent, hopeful smile, which I was sure Cherie would return behind closed lips. We might have looked her age, but we were probably ten years older. There were benefits to being bludded, after all.
“Well, I think it’s important that we—”
I never found out what was important. Two sharp thuds outside set the bludmares screaming as the scent of fire reached my sensitive nose. Cherie’s head whipped around, her eyes wide and alert. The coach shuddered with sudden violence, throwing us against each other and the walls. Flames caught at the curtains, black smoke rolling into the stuffy, airless space. The gentleman who’d ogled us earlier threw open the door and froze before tumbling out onto the ground, a flaming arrow lodged in his jabot.
I leaped out, tugging Cherie behind me, trying to make sense of the chaos, while the young girl behind us clutched at her nurse with one hand and the carriage seat with the other and screamed bloody murder. I forgot myself and turned to hiss at her, which only made her more annoyingly hysterical.
A loud screech in the road caught my attention. It was a metal conveyance, shaking and belching smoke as it skidded to a halt. Masked figures with bird beaks and round goggles appeared in the haze, and I started to run in the opposite direction. Cherie was motionless beside me, stiff with fear.
“Run, you idiot!” I hissed.
“I—I can’t.”
The figures hovered closer, dark arms up as if to calm us, as if creepy, masked monsters could ever calm anyone. I grabbed her hand and pulled, but she was rooted to the ground and stronger than she looked. Gritting my teeth, I slapped Cherie’s white face. “You’re a goddamn predator, Cherie. Act like it. Run.”
“I can’t. I’m . . . I’m scared of fire, Demi. You don’t understand. I never told you—”
With a growl, I scooped her up over my shoulder and dodged around the thrashing, burning, screaming bodies of the once-white bludmares to charge into the waist-high grass of the moors. Crossbow arrows thwacked over my head, carrying nets instead of killing points. I tripped and fell face-first into the grass. Cherie slipped out of my grasp and landed with a groan just ahead of me. I couldn’t see her, but the plants up ahead swayed with her passing, her frantic breathing and grunts as clear as the sounds of prey being hunted.
I stayed low to the ground and followed her, but the smoke was everywhere now, blocking my view and filling my lungs with the greasy funk of magic. I didn’t dare call to Cherie, but I had lost her in the maze of foggy grass. Waving the smoke away, I clawed through the chaos and into a thick pricker bush that would have torn apart anyone not wearing so many layers of city clothes.
“Come on. Come on come on come on,” I chanted, listening for Cherie, waiting for her to join me.
I’d given up on sight, but my eyes were screwed, too. With the screaming of the girl in the coach and the bludmares dying on the ground, the conveyance’s rattling, the roaring of fire, and the thrashing of the grass as the cloaked figures hunted us through the smoke, I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t dare peek up or call out for Cherie. I would have to hope that her inner strength had overcome her fear, that she was waiting somewhere, crouched, as I was, hiding under the heavy gray sky. I was one of the few people who understood Cherie’s quiet tenacity and power, and I prayed it wouldn’t fail her now.
The screaming stopped all at once, leaving only the rumbling of the conveyance, the crackling of the fire, and the eerie whispering of the wind in the grass. I took a deep breath, trying to scent Cherie, but I smelled only smoke and charred meat. When the conveyance’s racket quieted, I rubbed my ears. It took me an extra moment to realize the sound was fading as the vehicle moved rapidly away. I stood in a crouch and found a trail of black exhaust lingering over the road as the mixture of smoke and magic lifted. The machine was far off now, low-slung, dark, and mean, like a blackened raven’s skull. And faster than anything I’d seen since coming to Sang.
“Cherie?”
The only sound that reached me was the creaking of the burning coach as the timbers collapsed. I was about to rush over and hunt for Cherie amid the flaming pyre when I heard the loud, nasal sound of a horn. Were they coming back?
I dropped to the ground behind the bush, the adrenaline finally running out of my veins and leaving me cold and wobbly. A bludbunny darted past me with a bleeding human finger in its mouth. The next one stopped by my boot to hiss, nearly dropping an ear. I shook my head to dislodge the woozy funk of magic and smoke, and one of the rabbits hissed at me.
“I’m not that desperate,” I muttered. When I started to sit up, I only fell back, dizzy.
My head was pounding—at least, I thought it was. Then the pounding turned into the slamming of hoofbeats against packed dirt. I froze. I needed to find Cherie and get back on the road without interference. The only thing I needed less than further trouble was a cadre of helpful Pinkies and Franchian gendarmes asking too many questions I couldn’t answer.
“Damn. Just missed them!” an older man’s gruff, gravelly voice shouted.
“Nicely done, Vale.” That voice was younger, smug and nasty.
“Yes, of course. Blame the guy who had to take a piss.” A third voice, sarcastic and dry. All three voices were heavily tinged with the boozy kiss of a French accent, which told me they were likely humans, as only daimons actually spoke Franchian in Sang.
The horses skidded to a stop somewhere to my left. I pried a hole in the bush but could only see more grass and a column of white smoke. That had to be the coach. I could smell it, wood and flesh melding into the now repellent scent of barbecued pork. Horses whinnied and pawed the earth somewhere nearby, far more beasts than were necessary for the three voices I’d heard. I struggled to hold very, very still. Bludman or not, with a crowd of any males, the likelihood of being raped was just as high here as at a frat party back home.
“You three, after the slavers. Another man in each direction, hunting for survivors. Don’t return until you hear the horn. Lorn and Vale, with me.” The old man sighed, and I could imagine him. Paunchy, starting to stoop, a barbarian in decline, wiping his balding head under the Franchian sun. “I’m getting too old for this merde.”