Page 24 of Mortdale

They were blaming Logan? “That would be my husband.”

Gerda stopped walking. “You’re married to Logan Duncan?”

“That’s the one.”

“My dear girl, what have you done?”

“Men don’t frighten me.”

Her ghostly face grew even paler. “Logan Duncan is no man.”

So I kept being told.

I stood like a statue on top of the stool the seamstress had perched me on while she wrapped and unwrapped a tape measure around all my limbs. Liam seemed pretty content to have abandoned me at the hands of the pouting woman who sighed and clicked her tongue with every measurement she took of my limbs. He’d taken refuge outside, leaning against the window and watching me while chewing on an apple like a starved war horse.

Gerda had gone on and on about all the tales being told about my husband, mainly about his days in the Eastern Continent. He’s a brute who’s fought every creature of God known for fun—purely for fun, she’d told me. Apparently, he’d secured a reputation in prize fighting establishments in every continent he could step on.

Was that how he’d gotten those scars?

I jumped out of my thoughts when a pin pricked my side.

The dressmaker hummed, lowering her specs halfway down her nose to swivel a long look at my poor breasts, that’d never offended anyone as much as they were offending her. “There isn’t much to you. Not even enough to properly fill a handful let alone a corset,” she said. “You will make my garments look drab. It’s bad for my business.”

Gerda gasped. “How rude.”

I peeked a glance down south. They most surely could fill a handful.

When her thin mouth wrinkled in a squiggly line as if I stank of sewage, I wished I’d paid attention to curses and enchantments.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Gerda said, probably sensing the murderous signals wafting off the curls that had escaped my braid. “They cut off a finger for a charm, two for a potion, and a hand for a hex. No magic in Mortdale. Vampires can sniff it from ten miles away. It gets their tingly senses up in a tizzy.”

As I’d come to find out almost too late.

The old dressmaker smacked her lips again, obviously unaware of the pox I’d almost inflicted on her. “It’s best you go now.” She grabbed me by the elbow, dragging me off the stand. “Off the stand, witch! Off the stand, shoo!” She jumped upright when Liam knocked on the glass window so hard it cracked a little. Shifting a little nervously after noticing Liam’s steely glare, she jotted down a few measurements in her tattered notebook, and said, “I’ll have them sent to the Duncan estate, my lady.”

Great. So, he’d heard all the comments she’d made about my breasts. I almost forgot I was in the midst of the most anatomically sophisticated creatures in the realm. Their heightened senses made them apex predators of all species for a reason.

A few murmurs caught my attention, and I turned to glance at the flock of entirely-too-overdressed women behind me. The moment our eyes met, they scurried away, muttering some unpleasant words between their teeth.

Gerda scoffed, shaking her head at them as she fussed with my hair. “Witches typically try to not look too much like a witch here in Mortdale. But you can’t really help it, my dear girl.”

“Why? My kind has been marrying into their kind for hundreds of years. I thought they’d be used to it by now. Could bet some of their mothers are witches, too.”

“Well, your kind is known to be responsible for every bane and weapon and disease that has befallen the blood creatures,” she explained. “Rumour has it that humans have started buying potions from witches that kill vampires when they consume their blood.”

“I do not see the issue. It is protection. Predators and prey cannot live harmoniously. Especially in times of war.”

“Vampires see what the witches provide as threats and weaponry rather than protection, considering they haven’t outright harmed anyone for centuries now.” For a moment, she seemed to hesitate. “But a few humans…are actually weaponising them, too. They take the potions cooked by the witches and offer themselves to higher ups, killing them purposefully. Word on the street is they’ve started the Madness that’s been going around.”

“Morngate?” Humans? The least medically creative creatures of the Epiron bunch?

Gerda drew in a deep breath. “King Ignatius has gone quiet. No battles on the front for many months now. They’re saying he’s letting the Madness take them all out before he storms into Mortdale and claims it for himself.”

Shit.

Watching Liam walk across the street to bin his apple, I decided to ask, “Have you heard of anything about the death of Harriet Derby? She was married to a statesman, part of the House of Lords. It must have been in the corner of some paper at the very least since her husband was a very wealthy man.”

She resigned a little, turning away from me to inspect a few rolls of fabric. “I know nothing of it.”