A Court of Blood and Desire

Chapter 2

Theresa POV

I had always hated the Vallahan slums, and tonight was no different. Every night somebody I knew seemed to be taken, raped or killed. Not to mention the faeries hunting us for sport whenever they're bored. 

On the other continents, it was against the law to keep humans as slaves, but Vallahan had either conveniently forgotten to sign that treaty or had tossed that agreement down the drain a long time ago. Either way, it wasn't good for anyone who wasn't a pretentious, rich or immortal. 

I was one of the many human girls who worked for the King, who is about as insufferable and gross as they come. Thankfully, he took one look at my red hair and grey eyes and deemed me a bad omen. 

 Instead, I had spent the last ten years sweeping floors, cleaning old prison cells that haven't been used in years and shovelling horse shit out of the stables. It was mind- numbing, exhausting and gave me the barest of incomes, but it was a job, and kept me from being chucked into the streets like trash they viewed me as. Enough to be close to the King without being suspicious. However, I was growing older and whatever childlike beauty I had was quickly fading away. My usefulness was dwindling, and being assigned another job struck me with a greater fear that I let myself feel. 

It was just before dusk when my shift ended, but it was not until night had truly fallen that I left the palace.

Although Vallahan was hardly known for its warm weather, especially in the dead of winter, this night was different. My body hummed with warmth that had nothing to do with the thin coat I had on. Indeed, the night was so bone- chilling cold that I saw nobody as I slunk through the Capital backstreets. But a smile was spread so wide across my face that it nearly hurt, and my cheeks were still burning. My body seemed as light as air as I made my way home around the twisting town roads. 

I had been watching her for weeks; every cup of tea, every meal, every meeting she attended, and in turn she had stared at me; clearing away dishes, bringing food to rooms of guests, dusting the chandeliers. I learned her patterns- when she woke up in the mornings, when she went for walks of the palace, when she liked to have dinner, and I was sure she had learned mine as well, observing me through those warm chocolate eyes of hers. 

So I wasn't the least bit surprised when she found me walking through the fourth floor corridor, and tugged me into her extravagantly decorated room. I wasn't even surprised when her lips crushed into my own and we stumbled to the bed.

My thoughts were still full of her when I reached my destination: a sewer drain. Inconspicuously hidden at the end of a dark alleyway, it was a place where nobody willingly went down. With only one dim lantern to mark the entrance and exit, I'd found few people to ever follow me. I willed my body into the shadows, looking around for any late- night drunks who were still up or gangs that were eager for some night-time entertainment.

I almost missed the symbol on the wall. A sword dividing a wreath of thorns, with a crescent moon in the background, and I had a sinking feeling that it was drawn in human blood. The back of my throat went dry. It wasn't the first time I had seen it, but there was a certain wrongness to it that sent shivers down my spine.

 Shuddering, I bent down, grabbed the grate and tugged it off. It was stuck with a combination of ice and rust, but after a particularly hard tug it came free . I hastily scrambled through the small opening, closing it on my way down.

It was pitch black, but I didn't risk using my ball of stolen faelight. If there was anybody following me, I wasn't going to make it any easier for them.

The smell hit me first, worse than the tavern toilets on Winter Solstice, worse than the mouldy faeces I had just cleaned from guest bathrooms in the palace. A city's worth of pure waste flowed beneath my feet, and it took all my effort to not empty my stomach and feel my way around the darkness to find the footholds that would take me to my final destination. The rungs of the ladder were wet and rusty with mildew, but I kept going. I reached the bottom where the waste ran and I carefully shimmied from the ladder onto the thin strip of concrete that served as a footpath.