Total pages in book: 222
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 210715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1054(@200wpm)___ 843(@250wpm)___ 702(@300wpm)
The series had two books, The Thieves of the North and The Lords of the East. The third one had never come out.
I had been rereading those two books for the last ten years. Whenever life got to be too harsh, I would grab them off my bookshelf, and they never failed to pull me out of whatever funk I had going on at the time. I could quote passages from memory. I had stalked the author’s abandoned website religiously for any hint of a release date. I haunted the fan groups looking for rumors and stewing in collective frustration. Adrian Latour, the author of the series, was always an enigma. He didn’t do social media or appearances, and his bio, with a blank square where the author photo should have been, consisted of a single sentence: Adrian Latour, man of dreams and chronicler of stories. After the second book came out, he seemed to vanish. He never wrote anything else, and nobody offered an explanation as to why he stopped working. The story just cut off. One of my favorite characters was left standing on a box with a noose around his neck for a decade.
Three nights ago, after a long day of delivering groceries, I went to sleep in my apartment south of Austin and woke up in Kair Toren.
A hint of movement on my left made me turn. Something small padded through the rain toward me. I brushed the water off my face.
A red furry creature padded out from the rain-soaked alley and stared at me with unblinking dark eyes. Its head was round, with curved marten ears that stood straight up, a button nose, and very long whiskers. It didn’t walk, it slunk, its longish body sitting low on four short legs that ended in webbed hand-paws armed with sharp retractable claws. It was as if an otter and a Ragdoll cat had a baby and dyed it red.
A stelka. A female one. Males had tufts on their ears.
Stelkas infested Kair Toren and its five rivers, catching fish and rats, eating garbage, raiding cellars, stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, and generally being a nuisance. Like overly smart foxes, except that normal foxes at least hesitated before they scurried over to take a bite out of someone five times their size. Last night, exhausted and desperate, I’d fallen asleep under some busted crates, and this morning I woke up because one of these red assholes decided to chew on my leg.
The stelka opened her mouth and showed me sharp white teeth.
It couldn’t be.
I crouched and tilted my head, trying to get a better look.
There it was, a white patch on the stelka’s chest that looked like a lopsided half-moon. I had seen a dozen stelkas in my three days of stumbling around the city, and only one of them had a white patch like that. I must’ve been really delicious.
“You followed me.” My voice creaked like I had crawled out of the grave.
The stelka eyed me.
“Nope. Not happening.”
The little creature took a step forward.
I showed her my rock.
Another step.
I gripped the rock and hit the cobblestones with it.
The beast shied back and hissed.
A piercing screech tore through the air above us. I glanced up. One of the weird birds swooped at the tower in a suicidal dive and rammed the petals.
For a moment, the entire flower went dark, barely visible in the rain.
Oh crap.
The bud pulsed with pale light. Tongues of golden lightning erupted from the petals, snaking toward the birds. They tried to flee in a panic, but the lightning chased them, stabbing at their wings.
One of the bird-things cried out, plunged from the sky, and smashed onto the paver stones between me and the stelka with a wet thud. It was about the size of an eagle, with a long whip-like tail tipped with a fan of dark feathers. Its wings were wide, its long hind legs were sheathed in contour feathers, and all four of its appendages ended in paws armed with sharp talons.
A lorsse. Those long dinosaur-looking jaws were a dead giveaway. So that’s what they looked like. In the books, they came out during storms and were attracted to magic.
The bird-thing clicked its needle teeth and tried to rise.
The stelka lunged forward. Her mouth closed on the creature’s neck and bit down. Blood drenched the feathers. The lorsse went limp. The stelka growled at me, clamping the neck in her teeth, slung the dead lorsse over her back—it was bigger than she was—and took off deeper into the alley, back the way she had come.
That’s right. And don’t come back.
I slumped against the wall. Kair Toren in a nutshell. One moment you are flying high and screaming at the world, the next someone bites your throat and drags you off into a dark alley. It was unhinged, but I was almost sorry to see the stelka go. In the past three days, that little beast was the only living creature that had acknowledged my existence.