Infidel Read Free Page A

illegal to kill you… But a buck says you’re running a black note.”
    Nyx shoved the note into her pocket. She stood and grabbed the bel dame by the hair.  
    “This’ll hurt,” Nyx said.  
    It took three whacks of Nyx’s sword to take off the bel dame’s head. Blood splattered her feet and swam in lazy rivulets down the alley. She tugged off the woman’s organic burnous and wrapped the head with it. The body shuddered.  
    Bloody fucking bel dames, Nyx thought, and stumbled out the alley and across the next street.  
    Dust quickly covered the blood that coated her from hip to feet, but she still got cautious looks on the street. She turned down another alley and tried to catch her breath. She set down the head. Fuck, she needed a drink.  
    Nyx fell against the alley wall. She turned and pressed her forehead to it. Her stomach heaved. She vomited, tasted acid. Blue beetles lit out from beneath the wall, swarmed toward the steaming bile and blood splattered across her sandals.  
    She moved away from the wall and staggered. She needed to move before somebody else showed up. She needed to take this head to the bel dame office. Might be they’d pay her to bring in a bel dame running black work. She needed to check her account. She needed to bring home a nice girl. She needed a drink. She needed to call Rhys, she….  
    Time stopped.  
    The world went dark.  
    “Nyx? Nyx?”
    She was staring at the pale lavender sky from the floor of an alley. Eshe was staring down at her, a skinny little Ras Tiegan half-breed with a soft face and pouting mouth, too plain and unremarkable in looks for much of anything but disappearing into crowds.  
    He pressed a hand to her forehead, like he was trying to measure something.  
    “Whose head is that?” he asked.
    Dark smears blotted out the boy’s face. “I don’t have time for this shit,” Nyx slurred. She tried moving her arms. Everything felt heavy. Something stank like vomit.  
    “I think you need a magician,” he said.  
    “What?” she said, but searching for the word took a long time, and even saying it seemed heavy, too difficult. “I think I’m a little tired,” she said.  
    “I’ll take you to Yahfia.”
    “The kid…” Nyx said, and then stopped, unsure about what kid she meant. Some kid. Something important. Maybe it wasn’t so important. “I need to call Rhys,” she said.  
    “Who?” the kid said. “I’ll get Yahfia.”  
    “There was a little black dog,” Nyx said.  
    “A what?”
    Eshe started to look like someone she didn’t know. What was a boy doing on the street unchaperoned? Shouldn’t he be at the front?
    “I just need to sleep, Fouad,” Nyx murmured. “A little sleep, and maybe Kine can get me some whiskey…”  
    Something wasn’t right. She saw a body in a tub, bloody, no eyes… Yes, that’s right, Kine was dead. Her sister was dead. “Fouad,” she told her brother, “Kine is dead. I think you’re supposed to be at the front.”
    “I’m getting Yahfia,” Fouad said. He stood, and that was fine, because she was tired of talking. She just wanted to lie there a little longer. Blackness clawed at her, but it felt good, like giving in to sleep after a long, hard day.  
    It didn’t feel like dying at all.

2.
    Y ahfia’s operating theater smelled of death and lavender, and there was something crawling up the far wall where Yahfia kept her jars of organs. The theater was a windowless room built into a storefront along one of the higher-end streets of Mushtallah. It had only been burned out once in four years. Most girls on this side of Mushtallah were training to be sappers and munitions experts. Nyx would have paid good money for a place that didn’t attract bored teenage girls with a passion for fire.
    Nyx licked at her thumb where a hister beetle had harvested a blood sample. Her head felt heavy now, just like the rest of her. The giant insects and organs inside the jars along the theater wall were all the