A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab Page A

… Kell tipped his chin to look at the sky, and nearly lost his balance.
    He needed to focus.
    He was fairly sure he was heading in the general direction of the river. The air was biting against his lips, and it was getting dark—when had the sun gone down?—and in the dregs of light, the city was starting to stir around him. Silence cracking into noise.
    “Pretty thing,” whispered an old woman from a doorway in Maktahn. “Pretty skin. Pretty bones.”
    “This way, Master,” called another.
    “Come inside.”
    “Rest your feet.”
    “Rest your bones.”
    “Pretty bones.”
    “Pretty blood.”
    “Drink your magic.”
    “Eat your life.”
    “Come inside.”
    Kell tried to focus, but he couldn’t seem to hold his thoughts together. As soon as he managed to gather a few, a breeze would blow through his head and scatter them, leaving him dazed and a little dizzy. Danger prickled at the edge of his senses. He closed his eyes, but every time he did, he saw Holland’s blood running into the glass, so he forced them open and looked up.
    He hadn’t meant to head for the tavern. His feet had set out on their own. His body had made its way. Now he found himself staring at the sign over the door of the Scorched Bone.
    Despite being a fixed point, the tavern in White London didn’t
feel
like the others. It still pulled at him, but the air smelled like blood as well as ash, and the street stones were cold beneath his boots. They tugged at his warmth. His power. His feet tried to carry him forward, but he willed them to stay.
    Go home
, thought Kell.
    Rhy was right. Nothing good could come of these deals. Nothing good enough. It wasn’t worth it. The baubles he traded for, they brought him no peace. It was just a silly game. And it was time to stop.
    He held on to that thought as he drew the knife from its holster and brought it to his forearm.
    “It’s you,” came a voice behind him.
    Kell turned, the blade sliding back to his side.
    A woman stood there at the mouth of the alley, her face hidden by the hood of a threadbare blue cloak. If they’d been in any other London, the blue might have been the color of sapphires or the sea. Here it was the faintest shade, like the sky through layers and layers of clouds.
    “Do I know you?” he asked, squinting into the dark.
    She shook her head. “But I know you,
Antari
.”
    “No, you don’t,” he said with a fair amount of certainty.
    “I know what you
do
. When you’re not at the castle.”
    Kell shook his head. “I am not making deals tonight.”
    “Please,” she said, and he realized that she was clutching an envelope. “I don’t want you to bring me anything.” She held out the letter. “I only want you
take
it.”
    Kell’s brow crinkled. A letter? The worlds had been sealed off from one another for centuries. Who could she be writing
to
?
    “My family,” said the woman, reading the question in his eyes. “Ages ago, when Black London fell, and the doors were sealed, we were divided. Over the centuries our families have tried to keep the thread … but I’m the only one left. Everyone here is dead but myself, and everyone there is dead but one. Olivar. He’s the only family I have and he’s on that side of the door and he’s dying and I just want …” She brought the letter to her chest. “We are all that’s left.”
    Kell’s head was still swimming. “How did you even hear,” he asked, “that Olivar was ill?”
    “The other
Antari
,” she explained, glancing around as if she feared someone would hear. “Holland. He brought me a letter.”
    Kell couldn’t picture Holland deigning to smuggle
anything
between Londons, let alone correspondences between commoners.
    “He didn’t want to,” added the woman. “Olivar gave him everything he had to buy the letter’s passage and even then”—she brought her hand to her collar as if reaching for a necklace, and finding only skin—“I paid the rest.”
    Kell frowned. That seemed even less