“The merman you should meet is—”
A dagger flew past Coralline’s scales and stabbed Tang in the chest.
Her head whirled toward the small side window from which the dagger had flown in—she caught the barest glimpse of a head as it vanished. Had the dagger been aimed at her? But who would aim it at her?
Coralline trembled. She wanted to cower, to take shelter behind the settee, but her nerves seemed frozen. All she managed was to shield her torso with her arms.
Tang tumbled off his chair to the floor, his hands encasing the dagger. It had stabbed him in the heart—the precision of its location suggested to Coralline that it was meant for him, not her. But that provided little consolation. Blood was spurting out of him, spewing through the waters, accosting her nostrils. His tail started bleaching, scale upon scale turning a dead white, a disappearing act of color.
It was Coralline’s fault. She’d seen a shadow pass the window, but she hadn’t said anything—just as she hadn’t said anything when she’d seen black poison spreading above Urchin Grove.
“Look at the dagger,” Izar said quietly, next to her.
Its hilt was encrusted with translucent-green olivine stones in the pattern of a serpent. Beware of the serpent, Mintaka had told Tang—this was that serpent. To know in theory that the elixir came accompanied by a curse—to read of it in a story book, to hear of it through Tang—that was one thing, but to see the curse in action was yet another. It seemed unbearably cruel, the way it worked, the blessing and the curse. If Coralline found the elixir, this could well be her own fate—a dagger in the heart, or death in some other way.
Focus on Tang, Coralline told herself. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands to bring her attention back to her present environment through pain. She had to do something—but what could she do? She was a disbarred apothecary. If she tried to save Tang, she would be in trouble legally under the Medical Malpractice Act for practicing without a badge; in that case, she would be forbidden from practice for the rest of her life. If she let Tang die, she would be in trouble morally—how would she live with herself?
“I’ll find you a back door,” Pavonis hollered through a window.
Coralline turned her head in his direction mechanically. He must have smelled the blood. And the reason he wanted to find a back door was that Tang’s body lay so close to the front door that it would be impossible to open the door without passersby seeing.
“Be ready to beat a hasty retreat as soon as you hear my dual thumps, Coralline!” he hissed, before vanishing around the corner.
It was a game they’d played many years ago, when she was a mergirl, called A Hasty Retreat. She’d enter a place such as a library, he’d find a back door, and she’d try to reach it as quickly as possible upon hearing the dual thumps of his tail, the private alarm signal between them. Over time, he’d become faster at locating exits and she’d become more accurate at locating the beat of his tail. But it had always been just a game; she’d never once thought she’d actually have to beat a hasty retreat.
“Let’s go, Coralline,” Izar said. “We can’t do anything for Tang.”
Tang’s eyes were closed, and his face was still, but its lines were set in pain—that meant he remained alive. Regardless of the Medical Malpractice Act and what it might mean for her future, she could not just let Tang die, she decided.
Her fingers fumbled with the zip of her satchel. She extracted the pouch of carapace sitting atop her apothecary arsenal, deposited it on the floor with a jangle, then took out her arsenal and unclasped it. She unrolled thick swaths of pyropia to stanch the flow of blood and put pressure on the wound. She then turned to the dagger: She would have to pull it out. But that would cause more blood to flow. The thought made her fingers jitter and her stomach turn somersaults.
She heard two consecutive thumps; Pavonis was tapping his tail against the back door he’d found.
Coralline wrapped her hands around the hilt of the dagger, its encrustations hard and cold beneath her fingers. Closing her eyes, leaning forward, she mustered all her strength to wrench it out—
“Murderess!” a voice yelled.
Coralline’s head whirled toward the shout. A square face was staring at her through a window—it belonged to the thickset loiterer she’d noticed as she’d hovered at Tang’s doorstep. She looked down at the dagger in her hands, then she looked at Tang: Each and every scale of his tail was white, and his face was blank—he was dead. Just minutes ago, he’d been alive—thinking, feeling, breathing—telling her and Izar about his wife, about the elixir, and now, as fast as a snap of her fingers, he was dead. It was dizzying, the speed of it.
“Let’s go, Coralline!” Izar said. “We can’t remain here. . . .”
The wide movement of his lips told her he was yelling, but she could hardly hear him through her daze. His words were arriving to her as though from across a great distance.
The living room doorknob turned. The door did not open—thank goodness Tang had locked it. And the windows were too small for the loiterer to fit through—earlier, she’d disliked the tiny windows of Hog’s Bristle; now, she felt grateful for them.
Izar shook her by the shoulders, stopping only when her teeth rattled. It snapped her out of her stupor. Shrugging his hands off, she returned her apothecary arsenal to her satchel and added the invitation to the Ball of Blue Bottle on top. She then stopped in her tracks and closed her eyes, trying to listen to Pavonis’s dual thumps not just with her ears but with her body. “This way!” she called to Izar. Trailed by him, she fled through a narrow corridor, swept past a few bedrooms, and erupted out a back door.
“Murderess!” screamed the square-faced loiterer, speeding toward her from within the alley outside Tang’s home.
Pavonis’s tail cut a mighty diagonal streak above, and Coralline followed it resolutely.
14
A Shady Place
Bristled Bed and Breakfast looked like a wide, crooked, coarse-grained rock, misshapen in places, with haphazard crevices carved throughout to serve as rooms. Even algae seemed to have given the place a wide berth, for its surroundings consisted of bare, brittle sands.
Two mermen lingered next to the door like weeds, both with orange tails. One of them was obese, his belly pushing against the seams of his waistcoat, and the other was gaunt, with concave cheeks and hollow eye sockets. A dagger glinted in the hand of the fat one.
“I feel sick to even look at this place,” Altair moaned from Coralline’s satchel.
“Everything makes you sick, Pole Dancer!” Nacre said from Coralline’s shoulder.
“To think what your father would say, Coralline, at the prospect of your staying here,” Altair persisted.
Coralline tried not to think of it.
“Regardless of its aesthetics,” Pavonis said, “Bristled Bed and Breakfast is our safest option for the night. Located along the southern perimeter of town, this hotel is as far as we can get from Tang’s home, in the north, while remaining in the same settlement. The distance from Tang’s home is important in case any constables are searching for you, Coralline. We face two options at this moment: We can swim through the night to reach the next settlement, far away, or you can stay the night here.”
Coralline’s scales quivered at the thought of a second night without sleep. Her gills had fluttered profusely all day during their swims between settlements, and there was an airy lightness to her body. It took all her effort to even keep her shoulders straight. And even if she were willing to swim through the night, she knew from her visit to Ecklon last night that Pavonis, despite his strength as a daytime navigator, might well lose his way in the dark.