Dane Korvit's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The swamp swallowed the light by midday. Dane walked behind Seraphina, boots sucking in the mud. She knew the way, or claimed she did. He watched her back and counted the reasons not to trust her. She conned rich men for a living. She'd told him so herself. Now she led him toward a witch he'd never seen, and he had no way to know if the path ended in a trap. "You slow down at every fork," he said. "Like you're choosing." Seraphina didn't turn. "I choose the way that doesn't kill us." "Or the way that kills me." She stopped. Lanalee hovered near Dane's shoulder, her black aura tight and small. The fairy said nothing, but her wand pulled east, steady, past Seraphina's path. "Your fairy reads the trail," Seraphina said. "Follow her, then. I don't need your knife at my back." Dane didn't move. "Prove it. Take us straight. No more slow feet." Seraphina's face stayed flat. She pointed to a hump of dry ground between two black pools. "Straight runs through the sink there. You want honest? Honest is I've been steering you around a grave." She crouched and pried a boot from the mud. Under it lay a man. Rich clothes, ruined now. His chest was torn open, his face gray. Blood had dried black across his suit. Dane knew the work of claws when he saw it. "Cornelius Ashford," Seraphina said. "The man I robbed. I dumped him here." She looked at the body without flinching. "He stole seeds before I stole them off him. Not garden seeds. The kind that drop a city." Dane crouched by the corpse. He leaned close and smelled it. Rot, and under the rot, something electric. The same smell that had stuck to his clothes for days after Kylie. His hand went cold on his knee. "This is the smell," he said. "The thing that killed Kylie left this." Seraphina met his eyes. "Then the witch didn't just send one. She keeps them." Lanalee's wand jerked hard toward a shape in the mist ahead. Through the black smoke a house loomed on twisted roots, crooked and huge, smoke drifting off its roof in dark ropes. The witch's lair. Right where Seraphina had been leading them. Dane stood. She had told the truth. The slow feet, the forks, the body she showed him plain. She'd walked him around the death traps, not into one. He'd doubted her the whole way, and she'd kept him alive. "You could've left me in the sink," he said. "I could have." Seraphina wiped her hands on her pants. "I didn't." Dane looked at the smoking house. He trusted her now, and that trust cost him his last excuse to turn back. The witch was real. The killer's smell was on her dead man. Kylie's murderer had come from that door. He drew his machete. "Then take me the rest of the way."