Diamond in the Rough - Vivienne Savage Page 0,4

alley onto a busy merchant street. Sapphire Lane was occupied by no fewer than a dozen up-and-coming jewelers and metalsmiths hoping to peddle their inexpensive, crudely made designs. The feeling persisted, a sense of wrong so powerful she abruptly halted and jerked around to look behind her.

Even worse than that, she realized they’d lost the sun, and the cold sensation persisted. Above her, clouds billowed in from the ocean and settled, heavy, gray, and oppressive above the city, though the scent of rain was absent and they provided only darkness.

Colder. Chilly. Unforgiving cold slid around her body. It may as well have been the peak of their winter nights, when the desert became all but uninhabitable.

“Madam? Is all well?” a strange man to her right asked.

“F-fine.”

Around her, she saw a woman drawing her shawl around her shoulders. Her breath fogged the air.

“What a strange and unusual chill for this time of year.”

“Yes,” she agreed, tingles of magic igniting like a fire fed splashes from a bucket of kerosene.

“Alms, dear? Alms?” a whisper came from her right.

Rosalia glanced up toward the voice. A bedraggled woman in rags stood beside her with a skeletal hand extended, her wrinkled skin blemished and liver spotted but too pale for the season.

No, not pale, Rosalia thought. Void of life. Dying. The blackened tips of each spindly finger led to white-blue flesh lacking proper circulation. The longer she looked upon the woman, the more apparent it became that something was wrong and that the piercing gaze of blue peering at her from beneath the tattered hood was as unnatural as the frigid air wafting from her.

Something is wrong with her.

Something so painfully wrong with the other woman that Rosalia struggled to break eye contract. A hand that should have been fragile as dry tinder clamped around her wrist. The touch burned and every point of contact between them sang out in scalding agony. She tried to jerk her hand free, but the woman only leaned forward and grinned with cracking, leathery lips framing yellow teeth.

“What’s wrong, dearie?”

“Let go of me!”

“In a rush, are you?” the voice no longer appeared to come from the woman, and instead came on the wind, surrounding Rosalia.

The old woman’s hood fell back to reveal the rapid decay of her face, skin and tissue breaking down to reveal the body had been only a shell. With a scream, the true creature broke free of its flesh shackles, bright and vivid cobalt eyes burning in a face carved from ice.

Rosalia found herself face-to-face with a wailing banshee. The force of a blizzard buffeted against her face, forcing her backwards. Raw power lifted her from the ground and slammed her into the edge of a shop cart. Pain exploded in her back and ebbed through her spine. She writhed on the ground and fought for breath.

The bitter cold stung her nose and her cheeks. Someone screamed not far from her, though she couldn’t see the source of it through the fat snowflakes in the air that materialized with the foul creature’s breath. She did not stink of death and decay—the being smelled of nothing at all but frost. Whatever remained of the shell continued flaking away in particles of freeze-dried dust breaking apart in the wind.

Winded and hurting, Rosalia forced her knees beneath her and darted her gaze toward the sound of her assailant. A blanket of snow had descended, blocking out everything farther than a few inches beyond the tip of her nose.

She blinked rapidly and squinted through the snowy scene until the silhouette of a female body came into view, striding toward her at a slow, measured pace.

The most terrifying vision she’d ever seen emerged from the whiteout. Pale skin lacking any warmth encased a frame that was sexless, but not without the feminine curves of a woman’s body. Bloodless and seeming carved from alabaster encased in ice, the creature approached with murder in haunted eyes gleaming with a sepulchral light.

Everything in Rosalia’s senses told her to run, self-preservation urging her to flee.

“You,” it hissed as Rosalia stumbled back.

“What do you want with me?”

“Because of you, this is my fate,” the winds howled. “Because of you, I cannot rest!”

On any other day, before the absolute corruption of the crown and city watch was exposed to her, Rosalia would have wondered where the city watch had gone and why the streets were strangely absent of law enforcement. Now, she knew better than to expect them to arrive and offer her help. “I don’t