The Blood Hours Read online

  Copyright © 2023 by Ann H. Fox

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author or publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental. Although real-life locations or public figures may appear throughout the story, these situations, incidents, and dialogue concerning them are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events nor change the fictional nature of the work.

  First published in the United States of America March, 2023 by Lake Country Press & Reviews

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  Author website: www.annfoxauthor.com

  Publisher website: https://www.lakecountrypress.com

  Editor: Borbala Branch

  Cover: Emily’s World of Design

  Internal Formatting: Dawn Lucous of Yours Truly Book Services

  CONTENTS

  Note from the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Hello Readers,

  The Blood Hours is a dark fantasy, and as you travel through the city of Toeska by Sayer's side, things will get brutal. Please be aware this novel tackles graphic and traumatic content, which may be distressing to some. My wish is to bring you a story that heals as much as it hurts, but your mental health, my dear readers, is the most important thing of all. With that said, please consider the list of triggers below (may contain spoilers) and keep looking out for what's best for you.

  Wishing you good reading and happy(ish) endings,

  Ann

  Content/ Trigger warnings:

  - Death of partner

  - Death of family (siblings, parents, etc.)

  - Death of children

  - Suicidal thoughts and ideation

  - Religious fanaticism

  - Persecution of magic users

  - Violent death/ violence

  - Explicit sexual content

  To A, D, and L, for loving me (daggers, darkness, and all)

  Also to C and K, for devotedly keeping my lap warm and my keyboard furry

  Desperation and midnight is always a dangerous mix, and never more so than tonight. This is the last night before the Blood Hours begin—the last night I have to kill someone.

  The alley cloaks us in darkness, shadows seeping from the high walls on either side to pool at my feet. Just one more time, I promise myself, steeling my pounding heart against the muffled panic of the man struggling in my hold. I grit my teeth, utter one last apology, and pull the blade across.

  A wet, strangled sound escapes as the man tries to gasp, my knife catching on skin and flesh. Warm blood gushes down his neck, his shirt, gathering in the crease between his body and the arm I have wrapped around his chest. It spills over my skin, the red, thick ichor dripping from my fingers.

  He stills, and I stumble with the sagging weight, dropping him to the cobblestones. A final breath heaves from his mouth; the remaining black tally mark fades from his arm as it lands with a shallow splash in his own blood.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper again, panting against the guilt. But I am not sorry enough. Have not been sorry enough to keep me from killing again and again. Not sorry enough to keep me from robbing this man of another year.

  Monsters with good intentions are still monsters, after all.

  Normally, I try to find people whose bare arm tells me they don’t have long, who will be entering the Blood Hours in months or weeks or days. He had an entire year’s worth of memories to make, but desperation has driven me to do things I never thought myself capable of.

  I scrape the last of my resolve together and turn, letting my steps spill me out the alley’s mouth. A breeze brings winter-fresh air curling through the narrow street, chasing off the metal and salt tang lingering in my nose. Away from the dim shade between buildings, the moonlight slants across worn cobblestones, bathing the world in muted silvers and frost blues.

  When I glance down, my skin glows ghastly pale around the still slick blood and the last black line still on my arm. Like my victim before I took his life, only one tally remains.

  Once there were rows and rows of them—the most the gods had given any ebber in Toeska’s history. My mother cried joyful tears at my naming ceremony, thinking seventy-two years would make for a long and happy life.

  As if a long life has ever held any meaning in this city.

  The onyx slash on my arm stares back at me, like a gash rending my skin, exposing the blackness of my soul beneath. My name, like my little sister's, came with a promise—a promise of death once all seventy-two lines were gone. I’ve carried these tallies with me since I was a month old, and done terrible, horrific things to make them disappear. One by one, over the last few years, they have.

  All at the expense of the people I’ve killed, like the man whose blood is spidering in red rivulets through the cracks in the road behind me.

  You’re doing this for Ena, I remind myself, gulping in a mouthful of sharp night air. Every sullied knife and tortured gasp for the past two years has led to this moment, the culmination of this desperate plan to save her. I have become more monster than man, but I have my reasons.

  I refuse to let Ena die like our older sisters before us.

  My stare drills into my forearm, willing the punishment magic to take effect. The city knows I’ve committed murder, but as long as there are enough ebbers to bring to slaughter during the Blood Hours, no one cares that I’ve killed one of my people. With the Blood King's sentient magic in the city to exact punishment, the sun guards won’t bother with me.

  Fucking hypocrites. They hate us for ebbing, but worship a man, more tyrant than king, whose power runs through Toeska’s very bones.

  My thoughts are derailed as searing pain flashes like a dagger, carving up the inside of my forearm. Although I’ve experienced this sensation over seventy times now, the shock does not lessen. I hiss, mouth stretching into a grimace. The pallor of my skin bleeds through the black, eats at it, until the line is gone completely. As if it were never there.

  Relief and fear and guilt coat my throat as I curl my fingers into my palm, flexing the muscles and veins that move like water in the pale moonlight. Nothing mars my forearm, the expanse
smooth and whole.

  There suddenly isn’t enough oxygen in the air. I drop my arm and lean into the nearest wall, the light snow that began to fall when I left the house now tumbling in dizzying spirals around my head. Pressing my back against the rough stone, I slide down until I reach the ground and hang my head between my knees. The leather of my jacket rides up and exposes my spine to the bone chilling night, but I don’t care, focusing on not adding my stomach’s contents to the muck along the street’s edge.

  My tallies are gone. My years are gone. Seventy-two years promised, but only twenty-one lived. So many lives extinguished for the chance for ours to remain.

  I can protect Ena. Or by tomorrow, we both could be dead.

  I realize I’m still clutching the knife and let it fall to the road with a soft clatter. I concentrate on breathing, pulling the frigid air into my lungs and exhaling a cloud of misty smoke around my head. Without thinking, I push my hands back into my thick hair.

  It’s only after I pull them away that I realize the right one is still covered in blood. Sickness roils at the tacky sensation, but at least the color won’t show against the dark strands that flop over my forehead. I do my best to wipe the worst of it from the shorter sides with my shirt. I can only hope Ena will be sound asleep when I get home; I don’t want to scare her.

  My magic calls to me, and more than anything, I wish I could ebb right now. But the energy so close to the alley is full of terror and blood and death, not the calming energy I seek.

  Another wave of dizziness hits me when I glance at my forearm again, so I roughly pull my jacket sleeve down to cover the eerily empty skin.

  I try to shake off the feeling of my knife biting through flesh, of my victim’s final death throes against my hold. Better to go like this than the way the city’s priests would have taken him down, hunted like prey for holy glory. A sacrifice for silent gods.

  At least, that is what I tell myself. But the remnants of his muffled scream still clatter against my skull.

  I shudder, but even amongst the horror and disgust at my own deeds, I can’t make myself regret it. I know what I face in just a few hours, what I have given up fifty-one years of my life to do.

  What I committed fifty-one murders to protect.

  Finding a controlled rhythm for my breathing, I push myself to my feet. I collect the dagger from the ground, its ornate hilt crusted with blood, and sheath it silently. It sticks a little going in. Isaac wouldn’t have liked that—the thought comes unbidden, and I push it away. I can’t afford to think about him right now.

  Forcing myself to return to the body would be the right thing to do—to honor this man’s sacrifice, to pray to Nidaos and make sure his spirit is received into the gods' graces. But I never could bring myself to pray to divinities who demand my death simply because I was born with magic in my blood, cursed by the gift of a ruined Goddess.

  I turn on heel and stride south, away from rowdy bars and tidy homes in this part of the city. As I walk, I pull up my sleeve and peek at the blank spot once again. My skin looks nearly silver in the faint moonlight reflecting off the gathering snow, the larger of our two moons a tiny crescent nearly at its zenith in the night sky. Tomorrow, the red moon will join it, and the Blood Hours will begin.

  It’s hard to believe it’s really happening.

  Seventy-two lines, reduced to none. Fifty-one murders. Many people have asked me why I’ve given up the years the gods gifted me, ticked off the marks on my arm like they represented minutes rather than the long expanse my life could have been. And there is really only one answer.

  Because they gave my sister ten.

  There isn’t much further to go—only a few more blocks, then a sharp right turn down a narrow but well-lit street, empty save for a stray cat scurrying along a garden wall. No one up to any good is out at this hour. I’m proof of that dark fact.

  The cobbles turn rough here, but the space is cheered by glass firelights strung overhead between me and the star-flecked sky. The walls are a mix of yellows and blues and greens as I pass by each small townhouse, turf dotted across the pitched roofs to keep in much needed heat, especially tonight. Piercing cold has trapped the usually waving fronds of half-dead grass into stillness under carapaces of frost, leaving an eerie silence only broken by the muffled echo of my boots between the notched clapboards.

  I stop in front of a yellow house with a wooden fence sitting waist high around the tiny front garden. Winter lays heavy over the ground, where dead skeleton bushes whisper in the soft wind and a little dove statue Ena put among them sits with a cap of blue-white snow. I notice the paint on the door is chipping again as I open the gate and approach our small porch, fitting the key into the old brass lock.

  When I push the door open, the smooth glide of the hinges comes to a halt after only six inches. I curse, already knowing the problem, then kick at the small boot wedged in the door’s path. It flies backward and into the wall with a thump. Hopefully, Ena is deep asleep and didn’t hear it. I ease inside and shut the door with a click, then reach for Ena’s boots and arrange them neatly along the wall. She never remembers to pick them up—just dumps them and takes off into the house. It’s been like that since she was old enough to walk.

  The smile sneaking its way onto my lips disintegrates. My stomach hollows out. Tomorrow, there may not be any more boots strewn in front of the door. Tomorrow, those boots will walk out of this house, and they may not come back.

  Ignoring the wrench in my gut, I slip off my own shoes and set them in the wooden bin I made for them a few years ago. Ena spotted the blood on them once, and the sight shook her for days. She had nightmares, even after I lied and told her it was from an animal—my official profession is hunting, after all. She is a kind soul, and though she’s grown tougher in the last few years since Avaria and Ahnica died, I still don’t want her to see that again.

  Even I don’t want to see the blood anymore, the crimson drying in brown-red stains on my shirt. I strip it off along with my jacket, rolling them into a ball and dumping them into the bin too. As much as I’d rather leave them there, I should clean the jacket tonight—I’ll need it when we head into the wilderness. And Isaac’s dagger.

  Satisfied that I’ve removed the worst of the stained garments, I pad down the hall, not bothering to turn on any firelights as I go.

  There’s still a light on in Ena’s room when I reach the secondary hallway branching off the entry in our small house. Ducking under the doorframe, which has smacked me in the forehead more times than I can count, I reach for the handle. As the door cracks, a buttery sliver of firelight slants into the dark hall.

  A book is draped across Ena’s chest, rising and falling in time with her breaths. The title obscured by her hand could be any number of well-loved tomes she keeps heaped on the rickety bedside table.

  The other table holds the glass firelight; the magic keeps it lit, swirling in patterns strewn with pink and gold. The lamp is probably the most expensive thing in the entire house—a gift from me to the girls years ago. Once, my three sisters shared the light and the low-ceilinged room. Now, it’s only Ena who stays up at night, giggling and reading by its glow.

  I should step in and turn the light off, but I don’t want to risk waking Ena. She might catch the blood in my hair, the remnants I couldn’t clean from under my nails, or the haunted look in my eyes she’s noticed too many times before. She’s gotten more observant as she’s grown, more watchful. I’ve tried to be a good brother, tried to protect her from the realities of our world. But our family’s deaths have touched her, and me, more than I’d like them to.

  Of course, the creak of the door when I start to slide it closed gives me away. Eyes like soot and hazy wood smoke crack open. They widen when she sees my own dark gray gaze staring back from the gloomy hallway. She sits up, the book falling open onto her lap.

  “Sayer?”

  “Who else, silly?” I say with a sigh. I can’t leave now.

  I enter, avoiding th
e clothes and few meager toys strewn across the floor, and take a seat on the edge of her bed. The small mattress gives under my weight, sliding her closer to me. She giggles as I pull her in to kiss the top of her unruly hair, the firelight catching the coppers mixed into the light, curly red.

  “Did you just get home?” Her narrowed eyes peer up at me like she’s caught me doing something wrong. She picked that up from Ahnica, who used the same shrewd expression on me too often.

  “Did you fall asleep reading?” I counter, thumbing the book in her lap. She snaps it closed and snatches it away from my hand, setting it precariously on top of the pile with the others. “You know you were supposed to go to bed hours ago.”

  Ena ducks her head, reaching out a hand for mine. I give her my left, so she doesn’t notice the blood under the nails of my right.

  “It’s hard to sleep when you’re not here,” she says, slipping back into the little girl I know. Sometimes she tries to act older, braver, than she is. I kiss her crown again.

  “I know. It’s okay. I’m home now.” I ruffle her hair, and I’m rewarded with her wriggling from my grasp.

  “Go to sleep, Ena,” I whisper.

  As she snuggles back into her bed, I pull the rough comforter up to her chin. It’s not the nicest thing, a bit homespun, but Avaria embroidered flowers around the edges, making it prettier than most we own. I tuck the stuffed dove Mother knitted her under her chin, then smooth her hair down behind her ears.