Black, White, and Grey

CHAPTER 1

The Poisons Dealer

The night sky pressed down, brushstrokes of grayish-orange highlighting the low clouds as they rolled in. The glow of needle-thin streetlamps faded into the ghostlike mist. In every gutter, wilted pink petals tumbled with the dust and grime, carried along by the warm breeze swooping through the cherry trees and stealing away the blossoms. Cars roared down one of the city’s main arteries. A girl’s shiny black shoes made sharp clicking sounds against the bubblegum-peppered sidewalk.

            They weren’t beautiful. Not even an heiress with Daddy’s credit card would purchase them if they sparkled under a spotlight in a pricy Milan boutique. The girl felt rather attached to them, though. Sentimentally, that is; no one had put crazy-glue on the bottom of her sock. Yet, if one asked her to part with them, they’d have an equally sticky situation on their hands. As this particular girl didn’t coo over shiny rocks or outlandish handbags, her reluctance to let them go had something to do with the last person whose metatarsals they’d tortured. They were something of a family heirloom, those toe-pinchers.

            The girl turned a corner, sidestepping a hotdog wrapper cemented to the concrete with ketchup. A long black coat wrapped around her slim figure, blending her in with the shadows. She’d hidden her face behind a huge pair of mirrored sunglasses, and a black scarf covered her hair. Her gloved hands huddled in her pockets, one wrapped tight around a small brown bottle, corked and sealed with green wax. The fingertips of the other played over the handles of her shrike throwing knives, their keen blades muffled in secret sheathes.

            She walked on, skirting the few streetlights that still worked, then turned and strode down a flagstone walk to an old house with peeling paint and a For-Sale sign out front. The overgrown blades of grass in the lawn rustled, stirred by an invisible wind, and ignoring the Neighborhood Watch sticker pasted to the window, she let herself in. The night sat, holding back its breath, as ancient hinges creaked. Ten minutes later, the hinges squealed again.

            Folded into a deep shadow near the back of the foyer, sixteen-year-old Viola Mavolini felt the vibrations through the wooden floor as the man took a step inside, eyes scanning the room, looking for her. She didn’t recognize his silhouette, wide-shouldered and stocky.

            Fear flitted through her mind before she threw it out. Cobra quick, her left hand shot out of her pocket. Her wrist flicked forward; the tip of her throwing knife embedded itself in the wood of the doorframe just above the man’s head. He froze, hands jumping up in the universal gesture of Look, I’m unarmed; don’t kill me, but he didn’t seem to be unnerved. After all, to him, she was just Heather Van Murn: Kingen’s feisty pet poisons dealer.

            Viola stepped out of the shadows and into a shaft of muted light let in through a window. She had calculated the distance, and, as she had planned, her face remained shrouded in darkness. “Where’s the man I’m supposed to be meeting, you blundering brute?” she asked, noting a ring of lock-picks dangling from the stranger’s hand. “And don’t bother playing games with me, or next time it won’t be your hair that gets cut.”

            To her surprise the blundering brute let out a soft chuckle. “The Bossman warned me you were a bit of an anomaly, Heather. Could you lower that butter knife of yours? Thanks.” He tucked away his picks in an unseen pocket with thick-knuckled fingers.

            Viola tasted bitter scorn on her tongue. You think I’m not dangerous, don’t you? Mistake.

            The man stepped forward. The next knife stuck, quivering, a millimeter in front of his shoe. “Whoa,” he said, “take it easy now. I thought you knew who —”