Eliza watched the fading embers of the clock tower through the window, trying not to think about her part in it. All those long hours in her laboratory, all the soot she’d made Oliver scrub, all the gold she’d taken from Drake, all for this.

  “Nice work, Eliza,” she whispered to the empty chamber.

  She didn’t even flinch when the bolt on the door slid open and a woman sidled in, her mouth covered with the red mask of the order of the Silent Father, a nun.

  “So, how’s your day going?” Eliza asked dryly.

  The nun approached cautiously, stopping between each step as she worked up the nerve for the next. Eliza couldn’t really blame her. She’d be scared of herself too, if she were her.

  “Not as bad as mine, I bet.”

  The nun pulled a section of white cloth, a shift, up over Eliza’s legs. She worked it higher, covering Eliza’s body, then fastened straps at her shoulders and pulled the rags she had been wearing out from under it.

  And as the nun hitched a stone spreader bar between her ankle shackles, Eliza said glumly, “I bet Miranda would get a kick out of this. She’s a prostitute—no offense to the order… or you… or prostitutes.”

  The nun gave a nervous glance and proceeded to ratchet out the chains that held Eliza’s arms, loosening them until she was no longer hanging and could sit on the ground, hard and damp as it was.

  When the nun finished, she stood near the door, giving a pained look as if she was weighing something.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said Eliza. “I haven’t ‘cursed’ you. Honestly, this whole ‘magic’ thing hasn’t been working out for me lately.”

  The nun left, and a few seconds later, crept back in, looking every bit as scared as before. She was holding up a metal scoop of water.

  “Thank you,” Eliza said after she drank, and while she was considering saying something snide to the nun about being part of the Inquisition in the first place, the woman nodded and left.

  That was well enough. Eliza was tired; she’d been awake for over a day.

  Curious about the exact length, she checked her time spell. Unlike most of her magic, it didn’t require hand gestures or anything besides closing your eyes and concentrating for a second. Thirty hours, she’d been awake for thirty hours, half her all-time record, but without the aid of rot brew. And more remarkably, she hadn’t felt the chill when she checked. Her spark was returning.

  Cold and damp as it was, she collapsed to the floor, beyond caring. It felt so good, not to have to lift her torso to breathe, and her limbs felt so heavy, her mind so numb… She closed her eyes and passed out.

  ? ? ?

  A shove. A boot heel to her head.

  “Wake up, witch,” Josephine sounded annoyed, but then, when didn’t she?

  Eliza cracked her eyes open to a dark room, the only light from a slot in the door. “You know, my spark’s coming back. I’d watch myself if I were you.”

  “Well then, go ahead and kill me. They can only execute you once.” Josephine kicked the chains. “Unfortunately, I can’t leave you hanging and just wait for you to asphyxiate. Not after you bombed the Council Clock, murdering eleven people. Now, they’ll need a trial and a confession.”

  “Confession? You already know everything.”

  “Rumors are, you’re working for Shivar.”

  “You can’t believe that?”

  Josephine shrugged. “The cardinal will try you, not me. Honestly, I hope you keep your mouth shut. Seeing as how you couldn’t have done anything on your own from here, you must have had help. Someone’s got to pay, and if you don’t implicate Shivar, it will be the wizards. More fun for me.”

  “So, you’ve come to gloat, is that it?”

  “Basically.” Josephine snorted a laugh. “And why shouldn’t I? I mean I would have preferred to execute you immediately, less chance of you worming your way out of this. But I still have faith that Reuben will finish the job. And with a vampire in the mix, I can say just about anything…” She sing-songed, “Oh, I know you wanted a trial, but it looks like the witch’s dark bargain finally came to collect.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “I could kill him.”

  “And you should have, long ago. Instead, you made him a pet.”

  Eliza shook her head. “A friend. He was harmless until you got ahold of him.”

  Josephine smirked. “Like I said before, either way works for me. I’ll even throw in a third option, confess now, give me the names of, shall we say… three accomplices, all wizards; and I’ll drop my investigation into Oliver. The boy, or whatever he thinks he is now, can go free.”

  Eliza startled at that. “Wait, you have Liv?”

  The inquisitor leaned in closer. “It is so amusing. You finally have a weakness. Three names, a written statement, that’s all it will take.”

  “Fine, Oltho, Masarie, and Whatshiznam.”

  Josephine sighed. “Oltho is a hundred and two, and out of the country. Masarie works for the Church.”

  “And Whatshiznam?”

  Josephine rolled her eyes. “Was your cellmate.” She motioned to the skid mark that led to the vent, the one the lump of flesh had left. “Reuben finished him off last night.”

  “You’ve been killing mages.”

  The inquisitor nodded, then spoke in that particularly haughty voice of someone taking pride in their own humility, “I do as the Silent Father commands. Three names, you can give any three you want, so long as one of them is Drake.”

  “Drake, why him?”

  “The king likes him.”

  Eliza tried to summon the courage to say, ‘no,’ but if she could save Liv… “I want to see her first, make sure she’s okay.”

  “First, the names,” Josephine said and, just for an instant, her eyes flinched away… just like they had all those years ago… back when she was ‘Jo’… back whenever she was lying.

  Eliza let out a breath of relief.

  “First the names, then you get to see ‘her.’” The words came out too smoothly.

  “No.” Now it was Eliza’s turn to smile.

  Josephine ground her teeth.

  “No, No. No no no,” Eliza sing-songed. “I know when you’re lying. You don’t have her.”

  “Fine, then.” Josephine stepped back into the open doorway. “Have fun killing Reuben tonight, or let him kill you. I don’t really care which... witch.” She stepped out and closed the door.

  The cell was freezing, the floor sucking the heat from Eliza’s body. And though her spark was still not at full strength, it was working, and she was the fire witch after all…

  So, Eliza flared spark in her belly, warming her blood. She relaxed, and let her heart do its job. Heat flowed out from her torso to her arms and legs, working itself into every nook and cranny, until finally, her fingertips started to sweat, pruning like she was in a hot bath.

  Exhausted… She closed her eyes.

  ? ? ?

  Cold flesh wrapped in bone, a hand, touched her face.

  “Sca-scagss?” a voice hissed.

  Eliza tried to bolt upright but nothing moved.

  “Scagss?” it asked again. “Come on, wake up.” The boney hand patted her face.

  Jerking up, she ignited spark from her fingers, filling the room with firelight.

  The figure, Reuben, hopped back on all fours. “We haven’t much time.”

  “Much time for what?”

  “You need to ssstop me. Pleassse before I do something… we’ll both regret.”

  “I don’t get it. Last night when you thought I could kill you, that was enough to keep you at bay. Tonight, I actually can. That should be enough?”

  “Lasst night, I was already fed.”

  “Oh.”

  “Josssephine’s right. If you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

  “What do you mean ‘stop you’?” she asked.

  “With fire.” He meant kill him.

  “No.”

  “If I kill you, they’ll kill me anyway. But if you kill me, you’ll have a chance. I’ve lived for centuries. Trading your life for mere hours would be… demeaning.”

  Eliza cocked her head. “So that’s it? ‘Batshit Crazy’ tells us one of us needs to kill the other, and we’re just supposed to believe her?”

  “Scaggsss, it won’t be you killing me. It will be her.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Minutess.” Reuben licked his lips with anticipation. “Perhapss an hour if I can… can…” His nose curled as he drew in several snorts in quick succession.

  “Then give me that hour… please?”

  Not meeting her eyes, Reuben inched away. “I’ll try.”

  “Look, right now I can just kind of flame up, but if we can get my hands free, I could cast spells, I could get us out of here. What is this made of anyway?” Eliza rattled the chains. “They’re just stone, right? We should be able to break that.”

  “Talc.”

  “What?” She shook her head. “No, they’d be dust by now.”

  “They said ssooo when they were tesssting them. Said Masarie made them.”

  “The master of powder…” Eliza ground her teeth. “Why in the Bastard’s Hell is he working for the Church?—Is there any way to get them off?—And what do you mean by ‘testing’?”

  “They tried them on Whatssshiznam before you arrived. They only came off when I…” Reuben’s face filled with shame, “tore his handss off. Scaggs?…”

  “Yes?”

  “Promise you’ll kill me when the time comess.”

  “We’ll find another way.”

  “I don’t want to spend my last moments as the Church’s puppet… as a thing… a monster. Promise me,” he said, his voice now sounding fully his own.

  “I can’t. I won’t. Look, Josephine is like that. She sees the world in black and white. Things are either good or evil. If you choose one, you reject the other. Either you die or I do, but that’s… that’s… an astonishing lack of creativity. I can’t accept that. I couldn’t live with myself.”

  Reuben snorted. “Live with yourself? The question is will you let it kill you? Abandon everything and everyone you care about. Olivia and your stupid notion of not giving up on people, even those of us who deserve it?” He smiled. “You’ve already saved me. If I die tonight, it’ll be Josephine that killed me, not you. But if you die, it’ll be by your own selfish pride.”

  Eliza shuddered at the truth of it. She took a deep breath. “You’re right. It is selfish.”

  “So, promisse?”

  She thought about her fire, about all the times she’d almost lost her temper, about when she’d thrown Oliver out. Then she thought about the eleven people that died tonight to one of her bombs. “I promise,” she said numbly.

  Reuben tucked his legs under, sitting cross-legged, and looked at her with relieved eyes. “Well now, can the condemned have one final request?”

  “Sure.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Then tell me the ssstory. How do you know Josssephine?”

  “It’s not something I want… getting out.”

  Reuben chuckled. “You can alwaysss kill me when you’re done.”

  “Fair enough.” She paused to consider, But where to start? “We met in geography class. She was helping me with geography.”

  The ‘not-a-vampire’ rubbed his forehead. “That’sss not really a story.”

  “Well, not everything is.”

  “But there is more to it, I would guesss?”

  “Yes,” Eliza groaned.

  “Ssstart with context. How were you two in the same class?”

  “We were both at the Rowan Bridge School,” she said.

  “You keep sstarting in the middle. Sstart at the beginning.”

  “Oh, and Master Gregory was there too.”

  “Your… magic instructor?” he asked.

  “Yes, but he was a priest at the time.”

  “Bastard’s Verse, Scaggsss. Save that revelation for the right time.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” She shook her head.

  “I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear it. Start with how you ended up at the sschool.”

  “You want to hear about my childhood?” she asked.

  “Yes, very much.” Reuben nodded.

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