Read Online Worldsoul by Liz Williams - Free Book Online Page B

round to snap at her hand. Its face was like her own: her human face, not the wolf-face she now wore. Mercy dropped it in the snow in a spatter of blood and, to her great relief, woke up.
    Daylight was flooding through the window, along with the scent of jasmine. Mercy took a deep breath and sat up. The headache had receded to a dull afterburn and her first thought was that she had overslept and was late for work. Then she remembered: day off, because of the accident. But a day off was the one thing she could not afford to take right now.
    Objectively, she knew the house was warm, but Mercy felt cold. She wrapped the robe more closely, flung a wrap around herself and went downstairs. She could not stop thinking about the woman-thing at the Library. It had made more of an impact on her than being caught in the flower blast. For a moment, whirling around, thinking the thing was actually in the room. But it was only the steam from the kettle, rising up. She was starting to become annoyed with herself. Let’s think about what’s real. She heaped green tea into a frog-shaped pot and stood staring at the familiar walls of the kitchen while she waited for it to brew. The walls, painted yellow. The polished boards of the floor, with a speckle of white by the stove where, long ago, her mother Sho had spilled hot oil while trying to make pancakes. Sho, always taking risks, always getting things wrong, but somehow it had never seemed to matter. So different from her other mother, Greya: the cautious, sensible suffocating one, the mother who had wanted Mercy, the single chick, to do something sensible in turn, something safe.
    Mercy had never been able to blame her for this. Greya was from the Northern Quarter, after all, and something had frozen inside her, causing icicles in the heart. Greya’s mother had been from one of the wolfclans, or so Sho had whispered to Mercy as a child; Mercy had never known whether or not this was really true, although Greya’s eyes, in certain lights, gleamed gold. And there had just been that dream . . . But Greya herself—no wolfcub. Whatever fire and spit she’d owned had been burned out of her on the journey south, made her dry as a winter leaf, careful as a cat on ice.
    Yet Greya had been the one to go, when the first word of the Barquess had come, asking for volunteers. Mercy had resented that, after all the slammed doors and hisses over her dangerous choice of career at the end of her teens. Greya had not stayed to see her try to survive in the now-Skeinless Library, as though she’d just hung around long enough to really piss Mercy off by doing something completely unpredictable.
    Sho had gone after her, of course. No change there. She’d bequeathed the house to Mercy, which had been both reassuring and not: Mercy wouldn’t lose the family home, but it didn’t say much for the chances of either Sho or Greya returning. She’d asked the ka about the fate of the Barquess, but the ka had been unable to tell her, said that no oracle could, said it was “fuzzy.” Oh, well. Mercy was used to that.
    She sipped her tea, now brewed and sour. It suited Mercy’s mood. Something was loose in the city, something for which Mercy felt responsible. If the Library had seen fit to give her a day off, it therefore made sense to Mercy to see if she could find it.
    “Perra!”
    The ka leaped lightly onto the kitchen table. Its feet made shadowy golden traces, like pollen.
    “I think,” Mercy said, “that I’m going to need your help.”
    The docks were a hubbub. The Golden Island steamer could not get into harbour, having to wait at anchor in the waters beyond. Mercy could see the passengers milling on the deck, gesturing, but they were too far away for her to hear what they were saying. She doubted it was polite. The harbour itself was thronged with fishing boats, private yachts, a junk from the far side of the Eastern Quarter, and the air smelled of salt and smoke and fish. Mercy and Perra walked