ItCP04

## Chapter 4

**Chapter 4** of **Into the Crooked Place** stars **Tavia**.

## **Full Version**

TAVIA HITCHED A HAND on her waist and looked up.

Saxony’s cell was most likely on the sixth floor and Tavia hated heights. She also hated climbing and any task that required athleticism beyond street performing. She had no rope or wall-scaling materials and she certainly didn’t have any acrobatic skill.

But she could fly.

Tavia had stolen the hover charms from the old underboss on her fourteenth birthday, as a present to herself because though she didn’t like heights she did like the idea of being able to escape at a moment’s notice.

Ironic that she was now going to use that very thing to break *into* a cell.

Tavia rubbed her hands together, letting the charm warm in her palms, and when she felt air beneath her feet, she winced. She tried her best not to look down.

“Just stare straight,” she told herself, counting each of the windows that passed.

The wind swiped against her feet and Tavia jolted forward, hands slamming into the brick.

“Damn.”

She dug her nails into the wall. Her feet dangled perilously.

Five. She had floated five floors up and the ledge of the sixth window, where Saxony was sure to be, hung above her like a tease. That was where they put all the magic junkies on a comedown and so it was scarcely guarded.

Tavia hitched in a breath and she could feel the hover charm faltering from under her—it was *all* she could feel under her. Any second now she was going to fall and break her neck. Or get caught by the amityguards, who’d no doubt tattle to Wesley before they told their captain.

Tavia reached for the window.

Her fingers skimmed the ledge and she gritted her teeth, digging the steel knives of her boots into the wall. Then, summoning a rarely used strength, she hoisted herself up, hands quickly curling around cell bars of the window in a vice grip.

Now she looked down.

“Oh, *skeht*,” Tavia said, eyeing the black cobblestone below.

It was a lot higher looking down than it had been looking up.

Tavia shuffled closer to the bars so that she could see inside.

The holding cell was significantly larger than her bedroom, but that wasn’t saying much. It was made from patchwork concrete, with large drips hanging from the ceiling like spears. To the left was a metal toilet barely off the ground, with a tap screwed to the wall beside it. Three mattresses were lined up on the floor, their sheets weathered and damp. On the one closest to the cell door was a man who was definitely not Saxony.

He was wearing the purple jumpsuit most buskers found themselves in at one point or another. Even Tavia had spent a day in the holding cells, dressed in her prison worst, while she waited for Wesley to get out of his meeting and lend her some pull. In Creije, you were guilty until someone faked enough evidence to prove otherwise.

“Hey,” Tavia said.

She didn’t bother whispering. She knew the guards’ schedules and they wouldn’t do their rounds for another eleven minutes.

The man flinched, but kept his hunched back to Tavia.

She sighed, inching closer, keeping her hold on the bars and not daring to look down again. Any minute now she was going to lose her nerve.

“*Hey*,” she said again. “Has anyone else been brought into the cells tonight?”

The man’s head angled in her direction. The light was steady but dim, a single bulb hanging from string that brushed the floor. When he turned, Tavia had to squint to make out his face, and it wasn’t until he rose from the mattress and walked toward the window that she finally recognized him.

The man she had sold the elixir to earlier that night, before Saxony downed a vial for herself. The man with arrogant eyes and a haughty top hat and a mustache that was now thick with blood.

And what made things worse, was that Tavia somehow knew that blood wasn’t his.

“Are you here to save me?” he asked, and then, far graver, “Everyone keeps screaming.” He looked down at his hands. “They say I killed someone. I’ve never killed someone before.”

Tavia opened her mouth, but no words came.

Whatever had happened to him, the amityguards didn’t even bother to clean him up before throwing him into the holding cell. They’d stripped him down, thrown on the Creijen colors, and let him stew.

“I’m looking for my friend,” Tavia said, trying to pull herself together. “The amityguards picked her up outside the old temple. Have you seen them bring anyone else in?”

The man shook his head.

“What’s your name?” Tavia asked.

“Deniel,” he said. “Deniel Emilsson.”

“What happened to you?”

Part of her hoped he wouldn’t say.

*The elixir. The elixir. The elixir.*

“I met you earlier,” Deniel said, frowning as though that was the most bizarre thing. “I wanted … There was magic and you said it was a dream.”

He swallowed, took another step forward, so the light hit his face like a beam.

Tavia caught sight of his neck and when she did she felt like crying.

He had it too, the very thing her nightmares were made of.

The mark of the magic sickness.

The mark of her mother’s doom.

It was barely the size of a finger, shaped almost like a doorway, with a line across the center that broke left and then right at the singed edges. It was a sign of the dead and the damned.

“There was a voice,” Deniel said.

His hands closed over Tavia’s, pinning her to the steel bars. Then his nose began to bleed and all she could do was stare.

“It whispered for me to do awful things,” he said. “But when I tried not to, it stopped whispering and started screaming.” He squeezed his hands tighter over Tavia’s and she hissed in pain. “It told me to kill that amityguard.”

Tavia pulled against his grip. “Let go,” she said.

“Tell me you believe me.” Deniel was crying, the blood on his cheeks rolling down with the tears. “I couldn’t control myself. It was like someone was there telling me what to do and I couldn’t think of anything past it. I just *had* to. You—”

Deniel stopped, hands going slack over Tavia’s. For a moment, she thought maybe he was going to pass out. There was a dead look in his eyes and the corners were inked black just like Saxony’s had been.

“What did you give me?” he asked, quiet and broken.

Tavia paled. She wanted to know the answer to that too, because if what this man said was true, then it damn sure wasn’t happiness.

“Busker.”

Tavia looked up at the man, at Deniel Emilsson, his face pale and his bloodied lips drawn to a thin line. He knew he was destined for death, or things far worse.

“What was in that magic?” he asked.

Honestly, Tavia said, “I don’t know.”

A tear slipped down the side of Deniel’s face. His eyes searched the floor, as though written somewhere on the uneven cement there would be a spell to undo it all. Take back the day and whatever horrors he’d committed in the name of a magic Tavia conned him into taking.

Deniel’s hands curled back over hers. His head shook slowly from side to side.

“You did this to me,” he said. “This is all your fault.”

And then he ripped Tavia’s hands from the bars and pushed her from the ledge.