The City on the Edge

Outside, Ronnie found Lorna sitting against a wall with her knees drawn up to her chest. The rush of the busy street did little to stifle the sound of her rapidly beating heart. It was a good thing that they were still a distance from the mouth of the alley. Ronnie knelt down in front of her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. Her thin body shook beneath Ronnie’s fingers.

“Are you okay?”

Lorna shook her head. “Just give me a minute. I’ve never seen…” she trailed off, biting her lip. The tender skin around her eyes was red and puffy, her cheeks were still damp.

Ronnie nodded and sat with her against the wall. Lorna held out her hand and Ronnie took it, twining their fingers together. Lorna took a couple of deep breaths before she spoke again.

“What happened in there?”

The weight of the coin was heavy in Ronnie’s pocket, but the sight of Lorna already so shaken forced her to push it aside.

“I don’t know,” she lied. She hated lying to Lorna. “Out here, it could have been anything.”

“Those were children,” Lorna’s voice was whisper soft.

The girls were weighing heavy on Ronnie’s mind as well. How terrified had they been, to see their death’s looming over them like that? Had their mother been killed first? Mercy wasn’t in Purity’s reputation. No doubt they made the mother watch as they took her daughters from her.

“I think I’m ready to go home,” Lorna said, her head coming to rest on Ronnie’s shoulder. Her red braid draped down Ronnie’s arm, the fine hairs tickling her skin. “I don’t think I’m going to forget this house any time soon, though.”

“Me neither.” Ronnie closed her eyes and breathed in Lorna’s scent, springtime flowers and warm honey, and relaxed. Lorna was the soft curve to her abrasive edge.

A gentle breeze drifted down the alley. Ronnie opened her eyes to the sound of rustling paper. Across from them, close to the street, was a collage of paper. Some were formal notices from the White Guard to report any supernatural hybrids- as if there were any left after the purge. If there were, they were doing a damn good job of hiding.

The rest were missing person notices that took up most of the wall. Portraits were drawn in black ink- faces of men, women and children of all supernatural races were vacantly staring out at a world that seemed to forget they had vanished. Ronnie briefly wondered how many of them had ended up like the shifter mother and her daughters.

It seemed like people were vanishing everyday. It was a tragic truth here in the Edge. Everyone was poor. Everyone was hungry. Everyone was stealing. And sometimes, unfortunately, someone got caught.

A scrape of metal broke through Ronnie’s thoughts. Even Lorna raised her head. A sewer cover, set at the back of the alley, was twisting slowly. Lorna leaned forward, peering around Ronnie. It cracked open an inch and a single appendage poked out, long and deep green and tipped with a red claw. It scraped along the stone, testing the area, and pulled back inside.

“Demons?” Lorna asked.

Ronnie nodded. “They must smell the bodies, even down in the sewers.”

The cover moved another inch. “Let’s go,” Lorna said, pulling on Ronnie’s hand as she stood. “Demons give me the creeps.”

“Oh?” Ronnie joined her. “I thought you believed that every creature deserves respect?”

“They do but I can still be creeped out. I don’t want to hear a demon munching on those remains. I feel bad enough already.”

It was easy to leave the house behind and get lost on the busy street. Ronnie cast one last glance over her shoulder and watched the end of a spiked tail disappear through the door. It was a shame that there would be no burial for the mother and her daughters, but in some morbid way, Ronnie was at least a little glad that they wouldn’t go to waste. Demons were scavengers and even they had to eat. Still, she held on to Lorna’s hand a little tighter than she normally did.

It was the middle of the shopping day. Stores were open and smaller stalls were placed between them, each one beckoning people to come have a look. Money was sparse in the Edge, but people still managed to get by. Either they stole, like Ronnie, or they bartered with what little they had. The humans had no doubt thought that the supernaturals would perish out here, but instead, they had developed a strained system that somehow functioned.

The market was busy today. A witch was trading fresh herbs for bread. A shifter was cleaving meat for a father and his son, who watched with shining yellow eyes and tiny claws scratching eagerly at the glass. The butcher, Basso, raised his hand and waved as Ronnie and Lorna passed his shop. They waved back.

A vampire, keeping herself hooded and her face covered, tucked away under the awning of her shop, was displaying hand made jewelry. The stones were fake but they were beautiful. Sky blue, spring grass green and sunshine yellow. They glittered in the sunlight as she held her gloved hands out to passersby. Ronnie wasn’t attracted to jewelry, but she could appreciate the craftsmanship that made them. The only thing she wore was a simple beaded bracelet, a gift from Lorna. It carried the redhead’s scent on it so Ronnie always had a tool to keep her more primal side under control. There were times that it didn’t feel like enough to temper her more feral instincts, but it always helped.

“Hey!” A booming voice cut through the noisy street. “Get out of the way.”

A large man, clothed in a uniform so white and clean that it was nearly blinding under the sun, was standing before a ramshackle stall. An old man was lying on the ground, an arm raised in front of his face. Ronnie recognized him. He was a local artist. He drew the missing posters for families searching for their missing loved ones and hung them around the city.

The large man, with a shake of his blond head, moved on without another word. Ronnie stared after him, furious words on the tip of her tongue, but she bit them down when Lorna’s gentle fingers traced over hers. It wouldn’t do to cause trouble.

Ronnie bent down and offered the old man a hand. “Are you okay?”

He took it and nodded. “I’m used to it. It could have been worse. One doesn’t anticipate kindness from a human, let alone a guardsman.”

Ronnie hooked a hand under his arm and hoisted him to his feet. His fingers were stained with black ink. She looked at his stall. A fresh poster was drying. It was a young girl, dark haired save for a single streak of white in the front. The old man could be rich if he actually charged people for his work, but he never did.

“What happened?” Lorna asked as she helped the man to his stool.

“Ah, the same as always,” he sighed as he spoke. “I just happened to be in the way. I was saying goodbye to a mother and lingered a little too long in the street.”

“A mother?”

The old man sighed wearily. “Her daughter is missing. A shifter. Poor girl has been gone for days.” He gathered his papers together. “More and more of us supernaturals are vanishing.” His green eyes had dimmed with age, but a watery sheen seemed to brighten them for only a moment. “It seems like I draw a new face everyday.”

Lorna looked at Ronnie, biting her lip. The weight of the coin seemed heavier now. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Oh, I’ll be fine. It isn’t the first time I’ve been pushed around.” He smiled at Lorna. “We witches are made of an iron will that the humans will never touch.”

Lorna smiled back at him and their green eyes, witch’s eyes, seemed to share a secret that Ronnie wasn’t privy to. And she supposed she wasn’t. Witches had a different thread of magic than shifters did, though like shifters and all supernaturals, their ownership of it had been stolen and held caged in human hands.

Somewhere in the distance, a horn sounded. The old man quickly collected his pencils and sticks of charcoal. “You two better get going. It’s best not to be in the market today.”

“Why?” Ronnie asked but the old man was already shuffling down the street.

The horn sounded again and people along the street began to move all at once. Someone bumped into Ronnie, pushing her into Lorna.

“Hey!” The witch hissed, nearly toppling over. Ronnie had a lot of bulk.

“Sorry,” she said. “Let’s get off the street.”

They dashed through the crowd and stood off to the side, watching as people retreated into their shops and pulled their wares out of sight from their stalls. Down the street, the crowd was parting like waves before a massive ship. Through the bodies, Ronnie could see the glimmer of white pressed cloth and gold trim shining under the bright afternoon sun. The tightly wound cords of gold rope looped under each arm. She took a sudden, instinctive step back, pulling Lorna with her.

Tiberius Sloan.

The White Guard’s captain had a presence that seemed to force down everyone around him. He was a man with snake-like features- his blue eyes were ice, sharp and deadly. His blonde hair, nearly white, was slicked back with not a single hair out of place. He strode forward with purpose, each step measured and precise, with his hands tucked behind his back as if he didn’t feel that the people around him, who despised him from their very cores, were a threat.

His narrow eyes darted from face to face as he passed, guardsmen marching behind him in two rows. Those eyes never missed anything. Ronnie tried to avoid looking at him. There wasn’t a single supernatural soul in the entire Edge who would look upon this man willingly.

Movement behind the guards caught her attention. Humans she had never seen before. They were young, as young as herself, a boy and a girl, blue eyed and blond haired in the way only humans were. The girl’s thick looping curls bounced with her every step. She beamed widely at each face, ignorant of the evidence on several faces that they weren’t please to see her, whoever she was. There was a reserved politeness in the boy’s actions that the girl didn’t have. For him, each step was measured and aware, and he didn’t let his gaze linger too long on the unhappy faces watching him.

Were they Sloan’s children, Ronnie wondered.

As the two of them passed, the boy looked over at her. A small smile graced his lips, polite in an unfamiliar way and he waved, nothing more than a gentle flick of his wrist. When Ronnie didn’t wave back, his steps slowed until had came to a pause. The moment his feet stopped moving, the guardsmen around him did as well. They held each other’s eyes, confused uncertainty bouncing between them. The people around them blurred until her focus was solely on this single human boy, who for some reason, stopped for her.

Adrenaline surged through Ronnie, every hair rising to stand on end and snapping the world back to definition. A response to danger. Ronnie glanced to the front of the march to catch Sloan’s sharp eyes watching her over his shoulder. The predatory look in his gaze, the look one gives to vermin as it raises an ax to cleave it in half, sent a cold shudder up her spine.

Ronnie looked back to the boy, whose smile had fallen from his face. His hand lowered and he moved again, his eyes not leaving her until the girl beside him grabbed his arm. The guards bringing up the rear had no kind expressions for her as they kept pace.

“That was…strange,” Lorna said, stepping back onto the street, breath escaping her as if she’d been holding it in.

“Yeah,” Ronnie agreed. “Who were those two-“

A sudden scream cut her off. Her head snapped around to the source, ears pricked at every sound, trying to determine what the source of distress was. She moved forward up the street. The guards had stopped moving and were forming a wall between the two young humans and everyone else. The girl’s white dress was marred by a dingy brown smear of dirt.

“Answer me,” Sloan was demanding.

Ronnie turned her eyes to him. He was standing before a stall. The jeweler’s stall, Ronnie realized. The bowls on top, which contained the woman’s colored stones and glass balls, had tipped over. The shining pieces of glass littered the street, sparkling in the dirt. It didn’t take much for Ronnie to piece together what had happened.

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do anything.” Even under her hood and mask, Ronnie could hear the terrified tremor in her voice.

“An accident, you say?” Sloan’s voice was deceptively flat and impossible to read.

The vampire nodded. “Yes! My gloves, they just don’t grip the bowls very well,” she stammered out the excuse. “They just slipped, is all.”

“Indeed,” Sloan drawled as he stared down at her. “Then perhaps I shall relieve you of them.”

His hand shot out so fast that Ronnie almost missed it. His fingers curled into the vampire’s robe and he hauled her over the stall, knocking more of her precious glass gems to the ground. She screamed and struggled, but vampires weren’t what they used to be. Nearly two centuries of limited blood left them weak.

“Allow me to ensure that this mistake doesn’t happen again.” With that, Sloan ripped off her hood.

Her grey skin immediately began to darken and blister as the sunlight hit her. Even her long black hair did nothing to shield her.

Sloan held her hooded cloak up high in the air, presenting it to the crowd. He didn’t speak, but then again, his words weren’t needed. The threat was clear.

Let this be an example. You are beneath me.

A harrowing shriek ripped from the vampire’s throat and tore through Ronnie, forcing her to move forward. Claws pushed out from her fingers, sharp as a steel blade. Before she could force her way through the circle of people and get to Sloan, a large hand wrapped around her shoulder and yanked her back against a chest as solid as stone. For frightening moment, she thought that a guardsmen had grabbed her, before a familiar scent flooded her nostrils.

She was hauled through a doorway and pushed to the side. Lorna came in after her seconds later.

“Put ’em away, cub.” A gruff voice growled at her.

Ronnie wrenched away from the arm and spun around to face the man who’d grabbed her. “Basso?”

The great shifter had his meaty arms crossed over his wide chest. His golden eyes glittered like polished coins under his bushy brows and when he spoke, his sharp teeth peeked through his untamed beard. “You’re gonna get yourself in trouble.”

“He’s hurting her!”

Basso at least looked sympathetic. “I know,” he lifted his chin and sniffed at the air. “I can smell her from in here.”

Ronnie copied his motions. She sniffed lightly, taking in the coppery tang of blood and freshly cut meat, but also something darker beneath it. It smelled as if something had been left in the oven for too long.

Basso’s heavy hand settled on Ronnie’s shoulder. “The sun won’t kill her. When Sloan leaves, I’ll bring Valerie in here and patch her up. You know as well as I do that if we try to stop him, our heads will be rolling through the dirt before we can raise a claw.”

Lorna spoke up in a quiet voice. “There isn’t anything we can do to help?”

Basso turned his head to her. “Not unless you wanna be hauled off in chains, which I don’t recommend. People who get arrested tend to not come back.”

Ronnie joined Lorna at front window. From there, they could just barely see Sloan and the humans, but Valerie had disappeared among a forest of legs. Her eyes moved from Sloan to the humans. The girl was furiously brushing dust from her dress. Ronnie thought for a moment that she looked angry, but after a moment of watching her, she recognized the distress on her face. It was the same look that Lorna wore whenever someone was hurt.

The boy next to her was speaking to the guards and pointing at Sloan. It surprised Ronnie to realize that he was actually angry. She couldn’t make out his words, even with her keen sight, but she could see his lips move rapidly and catch the glint of white flat teeth behind pink lips.

For a single moment, she had a bizarre thought of how strange it was that humans had flat teeth like witches. They were one of only three races in the world like that. It was jarring to find that humans had anything in common at all with supernaturals. They held themselves so far above everyone else and spent their entire lives behind the walls of their city. This was her first time seeing humans who were so young.

The boy pushed against the guard roughly, his lips moving until Ronnie finally noticed a pattern that quickly formed a word: stop. Was he telling Sloan to stop? Was a human actually coming to the defense of a vampire?

As if the boy’s frantic words finally broke through Valerie’s screams, Sloan turned to look at him. He didn’t speak but the boy stopped moving anyway. Sloan hand was still raised high over his head, his fingers still wrapped in Valerie’s cloak. He shook it, a trophy and a threat, then let it slip from his grasp. Ronnie hoped that it fell on her.

She expected a big speech about what he’d done or even a final warning to never cross his path, but Sloan simply motioned for the guards to fall in behind him. When they did, uniform in pattern as they had been before, the group moved again as if they hadn’t just cooked someone alive.

Basso wasted no time in ducking out of the shop and hurrying to Valerie. Ronnie followed behind him, pushing people out of her way. “Move!”

A small crowd lingered around Valerie where she lay huddled on the ground under her ragged cloak. Ronnie nearly retched at the smell. It was much stronger as it drifted off of her trembling form in tiny wisps of grey smoke. Ronnie’s foot slid suddenly forward through the dirt. She steadied herself and looked down, blanching at what she’d stepped on. It was a clump of oozing grey skin, still sizzling and bubbling under the sun.

Basso knelt down next to Valerie. He placed a hand lightly on the cloak, which jolted violently in response. He murmured soothing noises and words as he slid his arms under Valerie and lifted her up from the ground. She gasped in pain, her long fingers poking out from under the cloak to clutch as Basso’s chest. He elbowed his way through the crowd, growling and baring his fangs at the people that barred his way back to his shop. Ronnie looked down the spot where Valerie had lain. There was a wet outline of the vampire’s black blood in the dirt. Clumps of dry, crusted meat, nearly ash under the burning light, were stuck with strands of singed black hair.

Ronnie raised her eyes. In the distance down the street, she could still see the backs of white uniforms. How could they go on like nothing happened?

Because, a voice in her head answered, to them, you are nothing.