Reign of Beasts Read Online Free Page A

back.’
    There was movement out the corner of my eye and I turned — just as a lion leaped out of the tower. Lioness, I should say. I’d never seen one apart from the mask Ruby-Red used to wear in the cabaret of monsters. This was the real thing. She was long and muscled and golden, and she was looking right at me. I swallowed hard.
    She shimmered and shaped herself from lion to woman, all golden and glowing, eyes as yellow as her hair. Saturn’s woman.
    â€˜Garnet,’ she said to Bad Cravat, ‘what have you brought?’ She was practically licking her lips as she looked at me. ‘Such a treat.’
    â€˜He’s nothing,’ Garnet said. ‘Just a beggar child.’ Who had taught him to lie? He was as bad at that as he was at choosing his clothes.
    â€˜Did you kill her?’ I blurted. The lion lady raised her eyebrows, sort of prowling around me. ‘Madalena. The Saturnalia before last.’
    She laughed then, throwing her head back. ‘You expect me to remember who I killed over a year ago?’
    Something clicked in my head, then. I didn’t care about anything; I was burning up all over. Madalena was sweet and never harmed anyone and all she wanted was to be a stellar forever, for people to love her.
    â€˜The actress from the Vittorina Royale!’ I yelled. ‘The one who trusted Saturn to look after her! But he didn’t, did he?’
    â€˜Tasha, he’s too young,’ warned Garnet, but she turned fluidly and slapped him, knocking him to his knees.
    â€˜I decide who is too young,’ she said. Then she looked at me and smiled again, all teeth. I had thought she was beautiful, but she wasn’t, not really. She only believed that she was.
    â€˜Come and find me this nox,’ she said, and reached out to pull the silk cravat from around Garnet’s neck. Sherubbed it against her hair, her stomach, and passed it to me. It smelled of her, of perfume and lion and bitch . ‘Find me,’ she said again. ‘And I will answer your questions. Even those you don’t know you have.’
    She shaped herself into a lion again and left us, her body gleaming in the sunlight as she trotted off down the hillside.
    Garnet stood up, looking shaky. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Not the theatre. Keep going to whatever ten centime town you come from. This isn’t for you. You don’t want it.’
    I breathed in the scent of the lioness, and tucked the silk cloth into my pocket. ‘You don’t know what I want,’ I told him.
    Â 
    I left the theatre that nox after the show ended and I could smell her in the alley out the back. Tasha. The scent of her was so strong and certain, I didn’t have to inhale from the silk cloth in my pocket to be sure of it.
    I followed her scent up the Via Delgardie and all the way to the Lucian district, which was still full of people at this time of nox — their musettes and theatres stayed open later than ours. I tracked her through a maze of side streets, and then she disappeared somewhere near the Circus Verdigris. Only she didn’t disappear, her scent went in and down between buildings, somewhere I couldn’t follow.
    â€˜Good enough,’ said a voice. A dark lad slipped down off a wall to face me. He was as tall as Garnet, broader in the shoulders, and he wore his fancy clothes better. Another came out of the darkness, a blond lad with curly hair, and then Garnet himself.
    â€˜Bring him down to her,’ said Garnet.
    The lads grabbed me and hauled me down into the darkness, into a space between buildings that I’d never seen for myself, down a path that shouldn’t exist, deep into the undercity of Aufleur.
    I didn’t fight. This was what I wanted.
    Tasha had a sort of den deep in the ruins beneath the real city. It was cozy, lit with oil lamps, and her scent was everywhere.
    â€˜Impressive,’ she said, stretched lazily across a bed covered with