teaser Tuesday

Back to the book I’m tentatively calling Dowser (and that will definitely change if I ever finish it) for the moment, since I’m in the middle of some rather delicate, pivotal-type scenes in the urban fantasy at the mo. This is an early scene, almost on top of one I posted for the 2nd or 3rd Teaser Tuesday.

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The view from her full height was a far better one: it showed her the bodies, their drowned faces mercilessly painted by the sunrise, their town sneers forever erased by her last, desperate attempt at escape. A stein floated past on its side, whiskey winking amber at the bottom. Cass felt the blood drain from her cheeks. She swayed, dizzy with it, and was brought sharply upright by the grip on her collar.

“Don’t faint,” the gray-eyed gadjo said sharply.

Cass wrenched herself free. The boy, hovering anxiously nearby, held his hands up in a confused gesture somewhere between capture and a warding-off; she understood it perfectly, and sidestepped his halfhearted grab with ease. The gadjo only watched, wary of her. She waded one ankle deep in her lake and leant far enough to spit on the face of the nearest unlucky one. Her victim looked back in bulge-eyed, blue-skinned indifference, drifting in the eddy of her movement. Her stomach flipped once, lazily, and she swallowed bile and clenched her teeth together.

The horizon was empty in every direction but Shelton, where the too-proud spires of Nuthian College pierced the coming day. Her kumpania was gone. Her grandfather had warned her he would do it if she made trouble, and gods witness, she had made plenty. They wouldn’t wait for the town-thugs’ kin to come with torches for the wagons and shackles for the men; they were halfway to the Sussex crossroads by now, and Millicent was probably moaning about the bruises on her heels. Dinah would ask after her lost cousin, and Alain would be outraged at the abandonment, but grandfather would be relieved, that was the plain truth: grandfather had never wanted a reminder of his daughter’s mistake, and he would not come back for one didikana granddaughter, not and risk the kumpania for her.

She was on her own with the College spook, a man with eyes so like her own he might have been a brother. That gray meant life right now, a reprieve from town justice, so Cass turned it his way in a direct stare no maiden of the Dromichal ought to give a man; not and expect a place at the fire that night. She had none to claim, so she did it, and tried to still the quiver in her spine and her lower lip.

She was on her own now.

The gadjo raised a brow, with a glint in his storm eyes that said she had at least set him back a step or three. He waved with mocking courtesy toward a coach pulling into the trees, leaving great tracks on the greensward. It was sleek and black, door open on an uninformative darkness.

She was in it almost before she could register Nuthian’s silver-gilded crest etched on the door.