The dead woman keened, a crawling lament that sank its claws into me and lingered like the scent of charred flesh. If Baz hadn’t caught on that I was intimately familiar with a cage just like this one, our phantom had.
In the fighting pits, our owners had at least let us out of our cells to train and spar. The longest stint I spent in the cage had been two months. That was when I’d still resisted killing, when the remorse of hunting Rafaela’s targets had eaten at me, when I’d shared in the person’s pain as I ended them. Even as an immortal, two months in the cage was sufficient to knock me off my moral high horse.
This woman cum ghost had been locked up long enough for her body to rot, for her bones to dry. She was broken beyond all repair—she absolutely had to be.
She wouldn’t feel the comfort I wanted to offer her, but I still extended my hand to hers another time just the same. She reached for it. Her crying faded into stuttered whimpers when our fingers predictably passed through each other. With a phantom touch, I petted the hand of the dead woman while I spoke to Baz.
“Tell me how we’re going to get her out of here.”
When long moments passed and he didn’t answer, I looked over my shoulder. With eyes that churned like a thousand ocean storms, he was staring, unblinking, at me, while the rope drooped between us.
“Baz?”
Several more seconds eked by before his nostrils flared, his chest heaved loud, deep breaths that, as a sänglure, he didn’t actually need.
“What’s your idea?” I asked. “How do we free her?”
His jaw as hard as stone, he stalked toward the cage with angry steps that were many times heavier than usual. His muscles practically vibrated, but when he took my wrist and moved it from the specter’s hand, his touch was as gentle as the buzzing flutter of a dragonfly’s wings.
“Step back.”
I waited for him to offer more, the explanation I kept asking for, but when he didn’t I backed away until the Rillis rope stretched taut.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“What I’m best at.”
“For dragon’s sake, what does that mean?” Could the man be any more exasperating?
Instead of replying—no, because why would he?—he smiled sadly at the ghost and spoke to her with the gentleness one usually reserved for wounded animals.
“It’ll be okay now. You won’t feel any more pain. I’ll take it all from you.”
From within her emaciated face, her eye sockets were pronounced, her eyes bulging too large.
“And if you don’t want your memories, I can take those too. Whatever and whoever hurt you, anything that hurts you still, you can be free of it all forever. Would you like that?”
Seeming to consider Baz’s unexpected offer, she dipped her chin to her chest. When she eventually looked up, her mouth began to move.
“We can’t hear you, dear,” he said, still talking to that wounded animal that had suffered a cruel, unjust fate.
With a bony finger, she pointed at me.
“What is it? Can I help?” I asked, advancing.
“Stay where you are,” Baz snapped. For her, he gentled once more. “Do your memories have something to do with Soravelle?”
The woman waved a horizontal hand back and forth: kind of.
“You can keep your memories. You can keep whatever you’d like. But if I don’t take them now, I won’t be able to later. Do you understand?”
Glancing from me to him, she hesitated.
“Maybe if you actually inform her”—and me—“about what’s going to happen…”
“That’s not how this works,” he told her instead of me. “I don’t explain myself.”
I scoffed. “No, of course not. Why would you?”