Chapter 71: Cleaning the Scene
But faced with a boy drenched in blood, holding a dripping dagger, the slum-dwellers chose to retreat. One look at Jared’s eyes—the eyes of a predator who had just made a kill—was enough. No one wanted to cross him now. In the slums, murder was not a rare occurrence. The dregs of this city had no moral compass. If their blood was up, it was common enough for a well-dressed man or a pretty girl to be dragged into the labyrinthine alleys, never to be seen again. The peelers rarely ventured into these festering corners of the city, and the nobles kept to their own districts, leaving the slums to become a lawless, forgotten territory. The brutes who had the courage and the savagery to rob and kill became the kings of these dung heaps. Men like MacDuff and Bartholomew. And there were worse, more successful brutes, men who had clawed their way out of the gutter and could now be found in the city's smoky taverns, their hands still stained with blood, ready to do any dirty work for the right price. This was the city's black, beating heart. And now, in the eyes of these people, Jared was one of them. A mad dog, a lone wolf who would kill without a second thought. They backed away, their curiosity replaced by a primal fear. Of course, they didn't dare to go to the peerlers, because the peerlers usually bring more bad news.
As they dispersed, melting back into the shadows, Jared returned to the alcove, his breathing still ragged. He saw that I had already dragged the witch's body into the muddy pit she herself had created, and had covered it with a ragged cloth, a futile attempt to hide the evidence. A great, dark pool of her blood was still spreading across the stone floor, viscous and black in the dim light.
“What now, Parula?” he asked, his voice still buzzing with a strange, manic energy. “There’s a big bounty on her head. We could turn in the body, collect the reward.” His first thought, as always, was of money. Survival.
“Absolutely not,” I said, my voice sharp and cold, surprising even myself. “That bounty isn’t a reward, Jared. It’s a trap. A baited hook for fools. Her body is nothing but trouble. The Inquisition… they won’t let anyone connected to her go. Have you already forgotten the peelers? The way they work? They’ll take us, they’ll torture us, and they won’t care if we're innocent. They just need someone to blame.” He sobered instantly. He didn’t know much about the Inquisition, but he understood the peelers. He had seen how they operated, had witnessed the casual cruelty of the execution. He knew that justice in this city was a bloody, one-sided affair. The bounty was not for the likes of us.
“Then what do we do?” he asked, his brief moment of triumph gone, replaced by a grim uncertainty.
“What do you think?” I replied, “We do it your way. We wait until the dead of night, when the city sleeps, and we dump her in the canal.” I was horrified by how easily the words came, how quickly I had adapted to the brutal logic of this world. A few days ago, the thought of his casual disposal of a corpse had filled me with disgust. Now, I was his accomplice, his strategist. This world was changing me, stripping away my old self piece by bloody piece. Then again, now that we had the well, we wouldn't have to drink the corpse-water. That, perhaps, made all the difference.
“Alright,” he said with a grim nod. He looked at the bloody floor, then at me. I had already taken a rag and was scrubbing at the stain. “Is that necessary?” he asked, a note of confusion in his voice. “It’ll dry.”
“Yes,” I said, not looking at him. “It will make me feel better.” I covered the stain with dirt from the floor, then swept it away, then scrubbed again. A faint, brownish outline remained, but another layer of dirt would hide it well enough. It was a ritual, a desperate attempt to erase what we had done. When we had finished, when all traces of the violent struggle had been scrubbed and hidden, we were finally able to turn our attention to our only spoil, the true prize of our bloody work. The witch’s grimoire. A book of secrets, paid for in blood. Our new beginning.
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