Headless Over Heels [Dark Fantasy Romance]

”I want to take her for a turn first,” Seth said. “Just around the block.”

The stable groom twisted his face as he patted his palfrey’s flank. “We don’t do that.”

“I’m with the Verdugo.” Seth held up his new coin purse. “Annalise al Ydris. Ask her if you don’t believe me.”

The look on the groom’s face made it clear how eager he wasn’t to approach an unlit Verdugo.

“Here.” Seth pulled his stiletto from his boot and held it out. “I’ll leave this with you as collateral. Fine, fine blade. You could get five score for that, easy.”

She was a sleek black-and-white palfrey with bright, placid eyes. A month of riding the sturdy, obstinate drafts and drays of the al Ydrises, and it was like night and day, how smooth her gait was and the calm obedience with which she took corners.

He took his second, and then turned her toward the city gate, and left Fontana. He patted his boot and felt the stiletto there, ready as ever.

Dusk was already underway when Fontana’s outskirts gave way to plainland. The sky was a deep hunter green as he passed the last Fontana-field roadhouse. He slowed the horse’s canter, then sped up again. He’d sleep on the road. He was fine at that. And he wanted to be as far as he could from her and from whoever was looking for him and from everything and everyone and all of it.

In the burnt-sage dark he listened to the rattle and the billow of the wind outside his tent—he’d kept the tent. He had a sorcerous weapon, now, and a new hexentat, and a horse, and a newfound aptitude for swordwork. He had money and he hadn’t even counted it. This he now did, by feel, turning every solitar and brace and score over in his fingers, and by the time he’d piled them up he was worth two hundred score in jade and nickel. More money than he’d ever had.

In a month, he’d gotten all of this. The luckiest month of his life. His creditors dead, his future wide, his pockets full. The dream of all thieves. A genuine blessing from St. Procas.

His hands itched. His hands itched so hard they burned. He scratched until they hurt, and they still itched.

There’s something fucking excellent waiting to come out of you, Seth il Gutierre, she’d said.

Hot tears cut their way down his face. He wept himself to sleep.

But it hadn’t been. It had all happened. The best night of his life, and then the worst, and he was waking up alone.

His fingers were raw from last night’s clawing. Something had happened to them. He frowned in confusion—he’d thought the itching was just on his brain, but his skin was—

Gray. Gray and discolored. His toes too, he realized, as he took them out from the blanket. A month with the al Ydrises and one evening of lush touch with Lisa, and now the pads of his fingers would show it forever.

Fine. He could cover these with gloves when he needed, or a bit of skin paint, or really it didn’t matter. Nobody’d notice at a glance. You really dodged a bullet, he told himself.

But he didn’t feel like he’d dodged. He felt the hole in him.

He saddled his stolen horse. “You’re wondering about your name, maybe,” he said.

She blew air out between her floppy horse lips. Her ear twitched.

“I’ll call you Annalise al Equis,” he decided. “Because I’m never gonna see the other one again. And at least this way I finally get a ride.”

He scoffed dryly at his own stupid asshole joke and clambered into his saddle.

The morning was spent in riding. He let the rhythm of it take him out of his body, let the hours roll onto and over him like a substance, and did his best not to think about anything at all. Briefly he allowed himself to speculate about something as innocent as lunch, and then a memory came to him, of sitting atop the carriage splitting a roast chicken with Annalise and Tiago and Ofelia, and laughing and bullshitting. And so he tightened the border of his brain, and beat any thought that dared to raise its head into submission.

He waited to hear something from the Fox. But it said nothing.

The sun was beginning its descent. He allowed himself to turn into the next roadhouse he saw, a middle-of-nowhere clapboard two-story on the edge of a cattle ranch called The Sirloin.

“The sirloin’s good, then?” he asked the silverhaired, beak-nosed bartender.

“It’s fine,” the man said, mechanically.

“It’s shit,” came the call from the fireplace, where a meager handful of other patrons were gathered.

“I’ll have the sirloin,” Seth said. “And whatever beer’s second-most expensive.”

The bartender wrote sirloin on a slip with a dug-in resentfulness at the affront of having to do his job. “We got two beers.”

“There you go, then.”

Seth drank his watered-down swill and ate his sirloin, which was somewhere acceptably between shit and fine, and became a human again, briefly, with human thoughts, to work out where exactly he was heading.

Not Prossimo. Not any of the places they’d been. She’d be there again next year. He had to go somewhere far, further than he’d ever gone. Maybe to Tuthima. He’d always wondered about life in Tuthima. He’d ride south, keeping clear of the corridor to ensure no syndicate hunter found him, and he’d pick his tricks up again as he went, and all the vulnerable spots he’d opened up would callus over again, and he’d stay low and out-of-the-way, and find a bedmate a head shorter than him and never look twice again at a pair of white-on-black eyes.

A stool scratched out to his right.

“Hello,” Tiago al Ydris said.

“No,” Seth said.

Tiago settled into his seat and undid the clasp of his charcoal felt traveling cloak. “No what?”

“No,” Seth repeated. “No, Tiago. We’re done. We don’t know each other anymore.”

“We don’t?” Tiago smirked. “You have a fall off that horse you stole?” A half-dozen pairs of eyes swiveled their way. “We’ve already paid for it, people. Mind your own mud, please.” He knocked on the bar. “I’ll have whatever he’s drinking, please.”

“You old enough?” the bartender asked.

“You give a shit?”

The bartender shrugged and pulled a draft.

“I am sorry you rode all this way,” Seth said, as Tiago received his drink. “Don’t do it again, okay? Stop trying to find me.”

“Just because you gave up at the first obstacle doesn’t mean I have to, Seth il Gutierre.”

Seth scowled. “First obstacle? I fucking hunted seraphs for that woman. And now she wants nothing to do with me anymore.”

“She wants everything to do with you, Seth. She’s desperate for you. It’s really fucking obvious.”

“It seemed obvious to me that she wanted me gone.”

“If you wanna hear she’s miserable right now, I can tell you she is,” Tiago said. “Normally she’s stiff upper lip, y’know, but she can’t even hide it. Went and postponed the executions again, pissed everyone off. Didn’t leave her room the rest of the day.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” Seth lied.

“Come back, then.”

“No.”

“Come back and help fix her, Seth,” Tiago said. “Don’t make me find a set of stairs, huh?”

This brought a scoff of unwelcome amusement to Seth. “Whatever she needs, I can’t give. I tried.”

“She’s sabotaging herself because she doesn’t think she deserves you,” Tiago said. “And she thinks being unlit is a curse.”

“And I suppose you don’t,” Seth said.

A couple of the travelers in the barroom sidled their ways out. Others tried to hide how attentive they are to this conversation. The bartender stood inexpressive as a decorative suit of armor; Seth didn’t think he was pretending.

“Of course not,” Tiago said. “And don’t pretend you do. I look dead cool, and I get to fly, and I’m gonna live into my hundreds. It’s amazing. It kicks ass. Sure, people look at you like you’re some sort of diseased monster, and you can’t have babies, but it’s not like they were looking at you with big smiles, eh?” He gestured around the barroom and several faces turned urgently away. “And I don’t think you care about kids of your own. I don’t. The only problem is I’ve been going through puberty for a decade but you’re already through that. This is the perfect time for you to get snuffed.”

“Not to hear her tell it.” Seth looked dismally into his drink. “She’s acting like I’m a child. It’s dumb.”

“I know it is, man. I told her so before I came here. The people we love are dumb sometimes. Is that a deal-breaker?”

“Of course it isn’t,” Seth said, and surprised himself with the vehemence of it.

“Then nut the fuck up,” Tiago said. “And come home.”

Home.

Seth retreated back to the grayish hill of his subpar sirloin and busied himself with sawing another chunk from it. “I’m not the kind of guy who chases a woman when she’s told me no.”

“Il Gutierre—hold on.” Tiago took a draw from his tankard. “Lemme be clear here, okay? I have come here asking you to fuck my mom.” Not even the bartender was ignoring them, now. Tiago made no indication he cared. “I need recognition about how difficult this is.”

“I recognize it.” Seth forced his spine straight. Here was ground he would not give. “But I need to hear it from her. If she really wants me, she can come and get me.”

Tiago sighed. One last long gulp of his tankard, and he stood. “I’ll go and fucking tell her that, I suppose. Passing notes in class.” His voice rose an octave and went wispy like his sister’s. “Are you mad at me, check yes or no.”

At the roadhouse’s swinging six-panel door, he tarried for a moment.

“You’ve become one of us, Seth,” he said. “Not unlit, maybe, not yet. But you’ve gone al Ydris.”

Seth tensed his jaw to keep his shock from showing. “You calling me your fucking brother or something?”

“I’m calling you a horse’s ass,” Tiago said. “Take some time and be angry, fine. She deserves it. But she deserves to be happy, too. And so do you. Pretend you don’t feel it all you like. We’re where you left us the rest of the week.”

He strode into the night.

Seth glared around the room. “Get your show’s worth? Anyone wanna toss a coin in my hat?”

“All right now, sir.” The bartender slid his emptied tankard away. “You’re the one who carried on in a public house with a crow-eye.”

“Whatever.” Seth tapped a score coin onto the bartop. “Give me whatever room this pays for and leave me alone.”

He was shown to his sparse room, and told to keep thick socks or shoes on for the floor and that the Sirloin wasn’t responsible for any splinters if he didn’t. He judged his socks thick enough to kick his boots into a corner, underhanded his effects across the room to join them, and locked his door (a cheap four-pin shackle, child’s play). He sat on his scratchy bed, and lay on his back, fully clothed, and told himself you’re tired from the ride and you’re a cup deep. You’ll get some good sleep. You have that.

He stayed up thirty minutes, and the hell of it was they weren’t even spent in tortured longing, at least not consciously. Just in staring at the ceiling in a pool of miasmatic nothing. The roadhouse’s walls were thin enough that the industrial-grade tinnitus drone of the ranch’s slaughterhouse dynamo vibrated through them. Seth thought of the preservative blood sloshing through its blackout chambers.

That’s all she’d been. Just another cell of the Legion swimming its veins. That’s all. What kind of idiot would fall in love with that?

How many days, he asked himself, before you’re galloping back to her? How many more days can you pretend you have any hope in the wild, when she’s domesticated you?

And as if this admission had been the tether keeping him to the world, he slept.

He dreamed about the choke tunnel. He crawled and crawled and the voice at the end kept changing as it urged him on. Annalise, Lisa, Anna, Annalise again, and then Rohan and Uncle and some woman he didn’t recognize, and the water was getting warmer, was steaming against his face like a sauna, and his breathing thickened.

There was a Fox in the tunnel, dripping water, eyes shiny and black. “Wake the fuck up,” it said.

And Seth woke up, and his room was on fire.