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(Sweltering basements and unfortunate timings)
[11 YEARS LATER, 1878]
AS I PADDED DOWN THE DANK HALLS OF the Dark sister's townhouse, heat swathed me the deeper down I descended. A foul stench accompanied the warmth, and it took everything in me to not gag.
Will had long since left my company, deciding to head into the upper floors of the house whilst I searched the bottom. I felt his absence loud and clear like an ache in my soul. We'd always departed on missions together back-to-back, blade to blade.
Now where his usual comforting warmth lay, a hot clammy wetness resided.
Who kept their basement in such dank conditions?
Had their thermostat combusted?
The institute had recently caught onto a lead surrounding the ouroboros and Emma Bayliss. Will had been ecstatic, his eyes alight with the prospect of another hunt. The dagger that had been embedded in por Emma's chest had led us right here. The Dark sister's townhouse. No one knew their real names. They remained elusive as ever, nothing more than a hushed whisper in the wind, yet everyone knew about them. Despite the Downworlders bristling when Will and I had gone to pry information about the sisters out of them yesterday, they'd eventually relented and spilled what they knew.
That small victory was enough to ease my tension about this day. The day that marked when I'd first been dumped at the institute's steps. My lips formed a bitter scowl. The expression looked so out of place on my cherubic face that it was almost comical. All my life people had told me I had the face of an angel. What they didn't know was Lucifer was an angel once too.
"Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God's right hand.''
My scowl formed into a grin as Mark Lawrences 'Lucifer' sprung into my mind. I didn't care for books the same way Will did, and yet poetry had snaked its way into my cold heart a long time ago.
To smooth over my torrential and destructive thought process on this day Will had gifted me an anthology- compiled and written by his very hand- as chicken scrawl as it may've been. I had yet to read it. The knowledge that it sat untouched on my nightstand was what had kept me going thus far. Today was the day my father had given me over to the hands of Charlotte Branwell and run off with a-
My cheeks flushed with anger. Anger that I now forced and had forcibly shoved down time and time again. I couldn't even say the word. Floosy.
He had chosen a floosy over his child. I should've screamed at him that day. Oh, how I'd wanted to. For some part of me deep down had known that he wasn't coming back. That he associated the, all consuming grief that had turned him to drink after my mother had passed, with me.
