A LANCE OF PAIN SLASHED across his shoulder blades. Nicholas was thrown forward by the force of the unseen hit, his breath exploding out of him. He whirled to see the last glimpse of a long spear disappear into the nearby water. Blackness threatened to swallow his vision as he rolled closer to the nearest building’s wall, trying to find cover from above.

Sophia—He searched her out, fuming and fearful. A hard gust of air and a grunt had him flying back, narrowly avoiding a new hooded figure as he slammed his sword down hard enough onto the stones for the blade to spark. It was close enough for him to see his own startled reflection in its surface.

Hell and damnation.

Nicholas ripped his own knife from his belt, parrying the swipe the first attacker took with the clawlike dagger. His forearm throbbed as it absorbed the shock of the blow, and he couldn’t pull back far or fast enough to avoid the bite of its tip at his chin. The cloak the man wore smelled of salt and sweat, and looked to have been cut from the night sky. It was only because the moon shone from so high above them that he could make out the embroidery stitched along its edges, the swirling pattern of what looked to be vines, or the powerful rays of a hundred small suns.

His attacker’s foot lashed out, hooking behind his knee, taking advantage of Nicholas’s unsteady balance and exhaustion. He crashed to the ground hard enough to see the lights of heaven behind his eyelids. As he tried to push himself off the ground, his right arm seemed to fill with white-hot needles and collapsed beneath him, aching.

A sickening thump struck the ground to his right, but Nicholas didn’t dare take his eyes off his attacker except to throw himself back onto his feet. His mind locked into the elaborate dance of death—strike, block, swipe, jab—the heat beneath his skin growing as he leaned into the fight. He allowed the towering man to back him up closer to Sophia, where she was now bending to retrieve her own knife from the neck of the shuddering body on the ground.

These attackers were all the same: black in the cloak, silver in the claw.

What the devil is this?

The attacker missed slicing the tip of Nicholas’s nose off, but clobbered him with a blow under the chin. Hard enough to knock that thought, and his brain, loose. Seeing double now, he couldn’t tell which of the split forms was the man, so he took a broad swipe at both. The claw lashed out, slicing up his arm, nearly puncturing his wrist. Closer, he saw the paleness of the man’s skin, the waxy quality of it, as if he had known nothing but night itself.

The attacker stumbled suddenly with a lurch and a gasp. Behind him, Sophia wrenched her knife out from where she’d jabbed it between his shoulder blades. Nicholas raised his wrist, but his arm still felt peculiar, heavier than it ought to have been, so slow that his next slash was blocked by heavy dark leather gauntlets. The attacker righted himself, keeping his claw on Nicholas and his blade on Sophia.

“You must be joking,” she said, eye white as a pearl in the dark.

He was not. If the man had split himself down his center and become two, he couldn’t have been any more effective than he was then, with his attention divided between them. Nicholas struck, Sophia struck, and he threw them back again and again. Nicholas felt every ounce of pent-up fury crest over his final bit of restraint. A last gasp of strength surged into his body, and, beneath it all, a single, cool thought.

Lure him in.

He feinted left, letting the man’s next hit knock the knife from his hand, letting him crowd closer. Sensing easy prey, the attacker moved in for the kill. The claw ripped the air in two, skimming over his throat as he leaned back.

Sophia slammed her blade into the base of his skull. The attacker’s hood was thrown back as he fell to the ground, his long, pale hair stained with bubbling blood.

The air heaved in and out of Nicholas, his lungs screaming for mercy as the red haze disappeared from his vision and that most basic instinct—to kill or be killed—abandoned him. He wiped his face with his sleeve, ignoring the way his hands shook.

“That was…” he began at the same time that Sophia said, “It’s the same weapon, isn’t it?”

Trying to rub away the prickling pain from his right arm, he glanced down, searching for a wound that might explain the slash of hot pain that stretched across the back of his hand. But there was nothing, not even a cut.

A word hissed through his mind, unbidden. Poison.

Impossible. If anything, he’d strained a muscle or given himself a sprain. This would resolve itself, with nothing so nefarious to blame.

But the sensation did not disappear. It worsened. There’d been longer and harder battles fought for his life that had left him feeling nowhere near the level of exhaustion overtaking him now, like a sudden illness. Nicholas coughed up dust he’d inhaled and spat out a wad of blood, retrieving the satchel from where it had fallen some distance away. The hollowness at his core spread as he checked to make sure the string with Etta’s earring was still around his neck, still safe. He clutched it in his left fist, as his right felt nearly too numb now to move.

Not good. Nicholas glanced down at the ring again, and forced himself to look away before his thoughts sank him any deeper into worry.

“Come on, we need to get rid of the bodies before—” Sophia interrupted herself midsentence, her gaze shooting up toward the warehouse above.

But Nicholas had seen the shadows first—five of them, fluttering around like ravens, jumping between the buildings with animalistic ease. Nicholas took her arm and forced himself into a run, moments before the first arrow cleaved through the air over their heads.

He looked up in time to see another shadow on a nearby roof. With the lingering traces of his composure, he hefted a large stone and threw it as hard as he could. It startled their attacker long enough for Nicholas to drag them under the cover of the nearby building’s overhang. But the pounding steps behind them didn’t cease, nor did the realization that they were running without any particular destination in mind.

Better to be like rats, he thought, and try to confuse a pursuing cat by taking as labyrinthine a path as possible. It was just a matter of finding the right hole to disappear into.

“Who are they?” Sophia gasped out.

The Belladonna’s men? The rogue idea cut up through the rest. She had taken particular interest in getting the claw back, hadn’t she? She might have overheard where they were going and taken action after his refusal to serve her.

“I’m reasonably sure we should not stay to find out,” he told her, craning his neck just far enough to check for the shadowy figures on the roof. Seeing nothing but the clouds and stars, he motioned for her to follow, and picked up his punishing pace again.

The whole of the city reeked as though it had been boiling in its own waste for a month. It felt like climbing into a festering wound. Unwashed bodies, living and near-dead, blocked their path no matter which street they turned onto, sleeping scant inches away from rotting garbage—or, in a few sorry instances, using the rotting garbage as a kind of pillow against the unforgiving stone streets.

Sparks flew up, scattering across the night, as they passed a blacksmith busy beating a sword into submission despite the late hour. Feeling the unwanted prickling in his right hand again, he switched his knife to his left, and he kept his head down as they passed, only glancing at the pile of metal goods waiting to be melted down and re-formed, and the pile of finished, somewhat crude weapons waiting to be picked up and taken to battle.

There was a sliver of space between his workshop and the next building, an alleyway that curved around. He led Sophia into it, giving them a moment’s reprieve to catch their breaths.

“I think we’ve lost them—”

Sophia had cursed them with that. A darkly cloaked woman burst out of the streams of fabric that had been draped over lines to dry, like a wraith.

Without a second thought, Sophia tossed Nicholas the soldier’s blade she’d been carrying and, catching it, he whirled back, smashing the hilt against the attacker’s throat, stunning her. While she gasped, Sophia seemed to flow in, cutting the woman across her face with her knife. The moment the attacker hit the ground, pressing her hands against the flowing blood with a howl, they were running again.

The city curved before them like a question mark, laid out like a maze within a puzzle. Pale, sturdy limestone buildings leaned against their close neighbors, and lines of them stretched as far and wide as Nicholas’s eyes could see, culminating on a hill at the city’s heart. The homes rose not just two stories, but usually six or seven, as if the city had one day decided the best course was to grow up, rather than out. Much like, he thought with a sad sort of smile, the way Etta had described her Manhattan.

At the next small lane they approached, Sophia stopped, blocking him.

“Let’s go a different way,” she whispered quickly.

Nicholas held his ground as he felt Sophia pull at his shoulder, searching for what had upset her—and, with a shudder, located it. Stretched across the stone, curled up on his side as still and pale as a seashell, was a child. On closer inspection Nicholas saw that his eyes remained open, unblinking, that his skin was dotted with scabbed-over sores. He followed the line of the boy’s desperately thin arm. His fingers were still hooked around a slender hand hanging out of the bottom of a pile of bodies, already at the mercy of flies and vermin.

He kicked a rat away before it could reach the boy, his stomach rioting. The only reason he didn’t cast up his accounts was because there was nothing left in his stomach to lose. Sophia heaved once, twice, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth, and looked away.

“There’s disease here,” he said unnecessarily. “We’d better make quick work of this. Try not to touch anything or anyone.”

Sophia nodded, wiping her hands against the tunic she’d taken from the unconscious soldier.

As they approached a low hill and the stately structures atop it, the stench of the city was tempered by smoke. But rather than masking the excrement and sickness, it drew out a different flavor of it. History, as it was, stank of disease and desperation, fire and ash. The slightly damp quality of the air made Nicholas feel as though it were seeping inside of his skin, as though he would carry the proof of his visit here forever. And in the distance, the infernal clanging carried on unseen out in the dark water.

Where the Romans are lying in wait…Building something? Manufacturing the tools of Carthage’s destruction? The sound was incessant, without beginning or end, and Nicholas wondered how long it had been carrying on for. If the people of this city had been forced to listen to it each day and night, like the heavy steps of a predator edging ever closer.

A rattling up ahead drew his feet up short; both he and Sophia pressed themselves against the nearest wall, their backs flush against it.

He had only just closed his dry eyes, rubbing at the crust forming on them, trying not to dwell on the hopelessness of it all, when a familiar scent hit his nose. Swinging around, Nicholas cast about for the direction the breeze was blowing from. And there it was, just to the east of where they stood. Warm, fresh animal excrement.

“I think there’s a stable near enough,” he told Sophia, already picking up his steps, trying to fight the urge to run when his suspicions were confirmed. A long, two-level building was up ahead, with piles of dried grass tucked up against the back wall. There, stalls had been formed from arches, not unlike the ship sheds in the harbor, which opened to a kind of courtyard. Nicholas crouched low, trying to massage the burning sensation in his right arm away as he crept forward, using the tents and draped fabric for cover.

A lone soldier stood guard at what looked to be a side entrance, leaning back against the heavy iron door. Nicholas glanced at Sophia, who had caught up and crouched beside him. At her nod, he slipped out into the night’s shadows, casting one last glance around to ensure there was no one else watching.

He decided he liked these soft sandals the men of Carthage wore—they made sneaking up on a soul far easier than the leather shoes of his own era. By the time the soldier startled fully out of his light doze, Nicholas already had his arm hooked around the man’s throat.

The soldier smelled of sweat and sweet wine, and his breath exploded out of him with a spray of spittle. He thrashed, kicking his legs out and around, clawing so deeply into Nicholas’s arm that he wondered if the marks would scar. With the slightest bit more pressure, the man passed out. Despite being nearly a full foot taller, Nicholas struggled to get a grip on his weight—it was like holding an unwieldy sack of warm water, limbs spilling and flopping around as he dragged him.

Sophia rushed forward, feeling for the ring of iron keys hooked to the man’s armor. Her hands shook, either from exhaustion or excitement, as she tried each of the six in turn.

“Hurry!” he whispered.

“Hah!” she breathed out when the right key slid into the crude lock. She shoved the door open with her shoulder, and showed an enviable amount of patience in holding it open long enough to allow him to drag the soldier inside the stable’s warm darkness.

Nicholas dropped him behind several barrels, stopping only long enough to use the sword to crack the wood and see if there was water or wine inside.

Wine. Sophia doubled back to help herself to a mouthful of it and would have tried to gulp another if Nicholas hadn’t taken his turn. The sourness exploded across his tongue, but it wet his dry mouth and aching throat.

A few candles held on to their faint glow, casting shallow pools of light along the path leading to the front of the animal stalls. Nicholas balked a moment at their size, wondering how many horses they were keeping in each to require them to be that large. The walls were covered with bright paint—in the low light, he could just make out the soldiers, the scenes of ferocious battle. Nicholas felt his feet slow to a stop, and was leaning in to study the legions of soldiers depicted, when the sudden sound of heavy steps rained down over them.

There was something awake up there. Dust drifted from the ceiling with the movement, marking a path.

Sophia’s gaze shot toward the other end of the stalls, where another door, this one likely leading upstairs, stood closed. He waited a beat of silence more, his body drumming with adrenaline, but no one emerged. He waved Sophia forward.

“Let’s find the storeroom,” he whispered. “If it looks like oats or barley, take it, even if it’s from the horses’ feed bins.”

Sophia nodded and took off at a fast clip. She swung her attention up toward a stall in the middle of the long line. The candlelight caught the angle of her face as she looked up, then up again—first in surprise, and then in pure wonder.

Nicholas doubled his pace, catching up to her in a few short strides. “What’s the matter—?”

He stumbled back against the wall in alarm.

A long, leathery gray trunk snaked out from between the stall bars, coming within inches of Sophia’s face. The elephant watched them, interest flickering in its dark eyes. Its ears flapped against its neck like butterfly wings as it made a small trumpeting sound. Nicholas had never seen an elephant before—only etchings and sailors’ descriptions—and he found it almost impossible to look away. He leaned forward, only to fall back again when its ivory tusks banged loudly against the stall door.

“They use elephants in war,” Sophia muttered, her voice as soft as he’d ever heard it, her fingers brushing the trunk. It seemed to tickle the loose pieces of her hair. “Sorry about this, my handsome fellow.”

She reached between the bars and carefully, with a touch as soft as a flower petal, unlatched the door.

“Sophia!” Nicholas whispered. Scraping up the remains of her trampled body from under an eight-foot-tall beast hadn’t been included in his plans for the evening. “Stop this!”

Sophia held out a hand and eased her body into the stall. The elephant shuffled its heavy body back a step, giving her enough room to slip inside the stall and crouch in front of the large food trough, half-full of what looked to Nicholas to be grain and grass. Sophia took up her small bag and began to stuff handfuls of the raw food in it, before motioning for him to pass his bag over.

“Here.” She filled it, then threw his bag back to him. “Let’s get moving.”

He caught it easily, turning back toward the door. Sophia gave the beast’s flank one last pat before she shut its stall. Eyes scanning the ground, the walls, for anything that might be of use, Nicholas had nearly missed the one thing that wasn’t present.

The guard.

He gripped Sophia’s arm and brought a hand to her mouth, muffling her protests. Nicholas nodded to the spot where they’d left the unconscious man and felt her suck in a small gasp of surprise. Pulling away, he moved back to the entrance and put his eye back to the door’s lock, peering out into the darkness.

There was movement outside—shadows gliding against one another, fading in and out of the night. Sweat broke out at the base of Nicholas’s skull, his mouth shaping into a silent warning as a nearby guard was knocked out in an instant, crumpling to the ground; shadows swept in around him, covering him, dragging him away.

Hiding the evidence.

Not killing him, so as to avoid changing the timeline? He and Sophia had played a dangerous game in how careless they’d become, risking change after change to ensure their own survival. These…travelers? These warriors, men and women, were decidedly not careless.

Nicholas strained his ears to catch the murmuring on the other side. Once his eyes adjusted well enough to the darkness, he was able to count four figures of varying stature, all sweeping toward the door like a high tide. It might have been the thrumming fear in his mind playing an unwelcome trick, but he could have sworn the ring on his finger grew warmer with each step closer they took.

Sophia pointed up, but Nicholas shook his head, competing thoughts racing to best one another. There might be more soldiers on the second level, and to get out of the stables, their ultimate goal, they would need to jump onto a nearby building—but none were near enough, and all were taller. He didn’t fancy breaking his neck after nearly being drowned and stabbed already in one night.

In battle, you could fight a foe head-on until both of your ships were in splinters around you. But, when outmaneuvered, there was always the potent combination of creating a distraction of some sort and escaping at full speed, hopefully with the wind on your side.

His idea was almost absurd. In spite of everything that had occurred, or perhaps because of it, Nicholas felt a grim smile touch his lips. It hadn’t made sense to him why they would store wine here in the stables, other than to hide it from the people outside who desperately needed it. But what if the wine wasn’t for men at all, but for the elephants?

They’d pour it down the elephant’s throats, see, Hall had told him and Chase, miming the gulping. Get them good and primed. The wine would send them into a rage, enough to trample any men who stood in their way.

Nicholas ducked down, peering one last time through the lock to see if the men had moved. As if they’d somehow heard him, one of the men—the one nearest to the door—shouted something. Sophia clucked her tongue, likely at the viciousness that coated the nonsensical words.

“I have a thought,” Nicholas told her. “About what to do—”

“Is this a thought that’s going to get us murdered, our heads smashed under an elephant’s foot, poisoned, et cetera?”

He gave her an exasperated look that Sophia shrugged off as she took his place at the door. “Keep watch for a moment—make sure they aren’t planning to storm their way in.”

She gave a sloppy salute and leaned down to peer through the lock. “What are you on about, Carter—?”

He took the sword and swung down, cracking open each of the wine barrels in turn.

“Are you deranged?” Sophia whispered, jumping to her feet.

He took her by the arm again and launched them at a run back toward the nearest elephant’s stall. Before Sophia had time to question him, Nicholas unlatched the door and dragged it open.

The elephant didn’t move.

There was a sliver of a second in which he was furious with himself for wasting good drink. Then, as the air thickened with the smell of the wine, the elephant let out a deafening trumpet, as if alerting the others, and all but charged out of the stall. Sophia leaped back with a cry of alarm, even as Nicholas attempted to shield them with the stall door. The animal must have weighed well over a thousand pounds. The whole building quaked as it galloped toward the pooling wine.

“My God,” Sophia said. “That’s an animal with his priorities straight.”

“Come along,” Nicholas insisted, waving her after him.

There were two more elephants stamping and hollering to be let out, their enormous ears flapping like a ship’s colors. Nicholas leaned back, away from one of the trunks that was feeling down his front, as if trying to hurry him along, as he worked the door open.

The third elephant, larger than even the first had been, had no patience at all—he rammed his way out of the stall, his tusks tossing the barrier to the side. Sophia dove out of the way, narrowly missing the door as it smashed back onto the stone floor.

Somewhere, beyond the gray mountains of their leathery hides, the main door burst open and the shadowy attackers attempted to rush inside—attempted, because the nearest elephant lifted its head from the wine and trumpeted a warning that would have made the dead turn in their graves. The two in front had a moment to fall back before the elephant reared up, scraping the ceiling with its tusks, and forced its way out through the door, stampeding into the night.

“What now?” Sophia asked, righting her eye patch.

Nicholas pointed to the side of the nearest stall, which led into an open-air exercise or training courtyard. Hopefully there would be a way back into the city through it as well. He hoisted his full bag, switching shoulders, as he entered the stall. The soft grass padding it seemed to eat his footsteps, but it didn’t matter—three drunk elephants were enough of a distraction for their pursuers.

Nicholas edged around the nearest wall, tucking himself between two tall structures, out of sight from the street. A moment later, Sophia followed. He leaned his head back against the stone, looking down at her, brows raised. She returned the look. “Elephants. That was a first. Not bad, Carter.”

He inclined his head, accepting the rare compliment. He wasn’t such a fool to think it would be the first of many; fighting had a way of bringing even the unlikeliest of allies together. Once the haze of excitement wore off, they’d be back to circling one another like half-starved sharks.

And their brief alliance would devour itself.

“We need to find the Jacarandas,” Sophia whispered. “Now. I don’t want them to catch wind of anything strange and guess there might be travelers here before we have a chance to come forward.”

“All right,” he said. “How do you propose we—?”

The clawlike blade caught the light of a nearby torch from above, casting a glow on Sophia’s dark hair. Nicholas shoved her as hard as he could, but not nearly soon enough to prevent her from taking a kick to the face as a cloaked attacker leaped down from the roof of the building behind them.

“You just can’t take no for an answer, can you?” Sophia growled, clutching her cheek.

The fall should have broken his legs, but the man rose, pushing his hood back just enough for Nicholas to see the gleam of his bald head, his pointed features. It was a man well within the prime of his life—a life that had sliced his face into a quilt of scars.

“Give it to me,” he rasped out. “I will spare the woman. Give it to me—”

The tip of an arrow sprouted from the center of the man’s throat. The spill of blood from the wound left him sucking at the air, his claw clicking against the arrow’s crude metal tip. The fear that had coiled so thickly around Nicholas’s chest did not release—not when Sophia staggered up to her feet; not when the frail old man in a homespun tunic stepped out of the night, his bow still in hand.

“Come now,” he said, his voice frayed with fear. “The Shadows feed on the night, and they will not stop until they consume us all.”