City of Stars & Shadow | One. Ara’s Date

Ara looked down at the blood-covered, obsidian knife in her hands and whimpered. She watched the crimson drip down onto her shoes. The white canvas was now forever ruined.

She flipped the knife she’d just pulled out of her lower abdomen in her hand, so the handle was facing her attacker again.

“Did you want this back?” She drawled, her Texas twang somehow coming out thicker due to the blood loss.

The man who’d stabbed her goggled at her for a moment, not reaching for the knife, before he turned and ran. He dropped the loot he’d taken from her date in the alley, Mac had sworn was a shortcut.

She looked down at her companion, who was now dead. They said a certain peace came over you when you died, but it wasn’t peace that was scrawled across his face; it was terror.

Ara stretched, popping her back as she did so, and inspected the blade more carefully. It had hurt like a bitch when he’d plunged it into her, but now, it didn’t feel so foreboding. The handle was silver; it had the Britannia mark near the hilt to prove it. 

There were what looked like garnets set into the top of the handle. Witch hunters usually used garnets to stimulate the recollection of a past life. Supposedly, when you stabbed a witch with a knife with a garnet in the handle, you got visions of her life as the life leaked out of her.

Ara looked down at the knife and wiped her blood off the blade before she put it in her purse. The wound in her stomach was already healing and nearly closed - she could tell from the itch she felt.

She pressed a kiss to her fingers and then pressed them to her dead companion’s temple. He wasn’t a witch; he was just a guy who worked in finance who asked her out after she’d read his tarot for him.

She pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed 911. She told them the address and where to find him, then left the phone on his chest with the call still active as she walked away.

Obsidian and silver looked cool, but they wouldn’t kill a witch. You needed iron to leach the magic from a witch’s bones and blood. Ara walked out of the alley and made her way home. She looked and felt like hell, maybe she’d just gotten back, but she was alive.

“And, I have a cool knife now,” she mumbled as she walked along the sidewalk in the City of Stars and Shadow.