Succession

The scent of the sun-warmed lavender fields wrapped around the town of Tyburn like a blanket. By this late in August, it overwhelmed every other smell. Even the tanneries on the far side of town struggled to compete with the heavy, close smell of the lavender weighing down the air, although Charlotte was still grateful to be far from that side of town. Today, she was sitting on an iron bench on a sun-drenched balcony, letting the floral-scented air waft her hair back from her face, preparing to do something terrible.

“It smelled like this the day Pennington first brought you here.”

She turned to frown at the man beside her. Jack was using his knife to cut long strokes down a slender piece of ash, as he was prone to doing in the evenings lately. His long, calloused fingers were familiar; she knew the stories behind at least half a dozen of the scars on the backs of his hands and had felt them against her skin more times than she could count during the innumerable training sessions she had endured with him since she was brought to the Ravens at twelve years old. She wondered for a moment if the gentlest thing Jack knew how to do with his hands was whittle. His hands were more commonly wrapped around throats or the handles of weapons, and she struggled to imagine him at an age where he did anything else. He had been recruited to the Ravens when he was only six, plucked from a gutter, not unlike herself, and that must have been nearly forty years ago.

Jack was handsome in a rugged, stab-you-as-soon-as-smile-at-you sort of way that most women seemed fascinated by. Charlotte found it irritating. To her, Jack was the closest thing to an uncle she’d ever had. A short-tempered uncle who was prone to slapping her in the back of the head when he thought she wasn’t trying hard enough. Stop being a baby. You can’t be the best unless you train with the best, he said when she paused or hesitated.

When she was first brought to the Raven’s headquarters eight years ago, she hated Jack. Pennington had smiled when he delivered her to Jack’s doorway, informing him that he was in charge of Charlotte’s training. Jack scowled and snarled and pushed her nearly to the point of breaking for months. Back then, her scrawny teenage body was accustomed to the drudgery of housework rather than stealth and self-defense. It had been years before she realized that Jack’s relentless style of training was a sign of affection, in its own strange way. It was Jack’s technique to prepare Pennington’s investments for a world that was dangerous and cruel. Charlotte had realized that the day Iker, a boy only a few months older than she was, was left dead on the docks, cut open from chin to navel, with a warning to Pennington pinned through his eye. Training had lasted for hours afterwards, and Jack had dislocated her shoulder twice. It was strange, she supposed, the way that assassins showed their affection.

It doesn’t matter, Charlotte reminded herself. It’s too late now.

A warm breeze shifted over them and, as if on cue, Jack’s body seized up, the tremors spasming through him all at once. Charlotte put both of her arms around his broad chest to anchor him to the bench, despite the fever burning through the thin linen of his shirt and into her skin. When the tremor stopped, Jack slumped against her for the space of a heartbeat. Charlotte swallowed down the lump in her throat.

“Thank Merlin you decided to die in August. If it weren’t for the lavender, I’d be gagging from the smell of you, Jack.” It was a lie. The smell of death lingered on him, but it was muted under the weight of the lavender in the air.

“It has long been my dream to torture you until the bitter end, Charlie.” Jack’s laugh was a rattling shadow of its former self and Charlotte looked out at the purple haze of lavender fields that stretched almost to the horizon instead of into his face.

“Your presence is torture enough.”

“You’ve been saying that for the past two days.”

Charlotte ignored the stinging at the corners of her eyes. They had been holed up in her attic room for two days, Charlotte scouring increasingly arcane texts and forcing potions and elixirs down Jack’s throat. Nothing helped. There was only one cure for what ailed him, and they both knew it.

Jack adjusted the moss-green blanket over their laps as though they were having a cozy chat, the way people in normal families probably did. He resumed his whittling, and wood shavings drifted away on the warm breeze.

“I never thought I’d live to see the day when Charlotte Crowley got to make good on her promise to kill me.”

Charlotte snorted out a laugh that was close to genuine. She couldn’t count the number of times she had threatened to kill Jack. There might not be another person in all of Avalon who she had cursed as many times as she had cursed him. Most of her threats had been of the through-gritted-teeth variety during his relentless training sessions. You can’t be the best unless you train with the best. He always flashed that famous heart-melting smile as he delivered blow after blow.

“It was just a matter of time.” Charlotte forced a wink at him, and Jack chuckled.

“They say that Charlotte Crowley always gets her man.” He was so pale now, his usual golden tan long gone, and the blue of his veins stood out starkly. Not now, Charlotte reminded herself. Don’t go soft now. Save it for after.

“You taught me never to make threats I can’t deliver on.” She tossed her hair and shifted her gaze over the pale pink tile roofs of the wealthiest part of Tyburn. “The thing that surprises me is the fact that no one else beat me to it. You could have made a small fortune auctioning off this opportunity, you know.”

“Well, now you know I mean it when I say that you’re my favorite.” When he spoke, there was a foreign, tender look in Jack’s dark eyes that made Charlotte’s chest tight. She could remember the first time Jack had called her his favorite. He was teaching her how to identify poisons when she was fifteen. She had done moderately well, but she had not expected him to continue his training at dinner that night when he proved you could hide the bitter taste of lily of the valley with enough sugar.

Never let your guard down.

She had vomited all over the table and for several hours afterward. The following day, when Jack was out on a job, she had stolen every article of clothing he owned from his bedroom and cut them to shreds before stringing them into a cheerful bunting.

“You only like me for my balcony,” Charlotte replied, keeping her voice light. She wanted to believe that Jack had come to her only because the mansard roof blocked her corner balcony on both sides, making it the third-best room in the house.

Pennington only gave you this room because you’re a girl, Jack had said at her sixteenth birthday dinner, just loud enough for a handful of the newer recruits to hear, wearing the most insincere smile to grace the lips of a man living or dead.

Because you’re a girl. The new recruits mocked her in whispers for two days until she held a knife to Owen Harding’s balls and another to his throat at dinner. He froze under her blade, and she flashed a toothache-sweet smile when she made a very precise and embarrassing slit in Owen’s trousers before resuming her soup course. Jack had been the first one to applaud. Happy birthday, Favorite, he whispered when they left the table, ignoring Charlotte’s glare. It was a terrible birthday present. Don’t let your guard down.

That night, Owen snuck into her bedroom to exact his revenge, but Charlotte had been waiting, crouched in the darkness. Owen’s nose and femur were broken before he made it halfway into the room, cementing her place as the most promising of the new recruits. Charlotte had never been sure if she should have thanked Jack for his unconventional interpretation of a birthday gift. She settled on bristling at his manipulations while begrudgingly accepting his tutelage. All of Jack’s gifts came with a price, and she was paying it now.

They sat without speaking, the only sound the tight wheezing of Jack’s breath. Not long now. It was only a few minutes before another spasm wracked his body. The tremors had started this afternoon: a clear indicator of the end. Charlotte didn’t look at his face until it was done.

“You make a better nurse than I would have expected.”

“It’s easy to nurse a patient who won’t recover.” She shrugged, and Jack barked out a laugh, nudging his shoulder into hers as curls of ash fell at their feet.

“Come on, Charlie.” Jack’s voice was teasing as he tugged her against him, his skin burning like desert sand even through their clothes. “I won’t tell anyone that Charlotte Crowley let a dying man hold her gently in the warm evening air. Your reputation is safe with me.” Charlotte lashed a frown at him, but Jack only smiled. On any other day, she would have punched him square in the face and stalked off. Today, she sighed and leaned into him for the last time.

“Only because it gives me a better view of the sunset.”

When Jack put his arm around her shoulder, the heat of his skin burning against hers, Charlotte realized no one had touched her so comfortingly since her father died, when she was eight. On any other day, she would have been embarrassed by enjoying it. Today, her cheek was resting against Jack’s chest, despite the burn of his skin, before she had even realized she had moved. Sitting like this, watching the sunset over the hazy lavender fields while the soft bustle of the street hummed below, gave her a sudden sharp feeling in her chest and eyes. A feeling like this was a life she could have had, if things had been different. If she hadn’t run away at twelve, if she hadn’t become a Raven, maybe she would have had the sort of life with people who said kind things, and patted your shoulders, and didn’t teach you how to stab men in the kidneys with blades hidden up your sleeves. She might have had a normal uncle who told her she looked pretty in ball gowns. Instead, she had Jack, who had trained her to be ruthless, silent, and deadly.

Any hope for a soft life had passed her by long ago, buried with her father. She was not the kind of girl with a gentle family. She was Charlotte Crowley, the pride and joy of Richard Pennington’s infamous Ravens, protégé of Jack Ashworth himself. Charlotte Crowley, who just last week had slit a man’s throat on Pennington’s orders without batting an eye. Charlotte Crowley, who had been trained to charm information out of the most stalwart of targets. She had no trouble lying, stealing secrets, or sending men to early graves.

So why were her eyes wet and salty now with Jack’s arm wound around her in the warm rays of the dying sun? Just as she wriggled her shoulders to slide to a safer distance, Jack tightened his grip and spoke.

“It has to be you, Charlie.” His voice was thicker now, raspier than it had been even a few hours ago.

“Stop being so impatient. I’ll do it when I’m good and ready.”

“You’ve been stalling for two days.”

“I was enjoying your tales of blood-thirsty adventure.”

That was another lie. For the first time in her life, Charlotte had hated every second of Jack recounting his experience in the Northern Realm. His tale had all the bravado and gory detail of his other stories, the ones she’d heard for years, but there was no fire in his eyes when he told it. The old stories were woven with embellishments and gilded with careless smiles and winks. Jack’s past conquests were the stuff of legend, like Jack himself, and Charlotte had always listened on the edge of her seat, despite feigning indifference. This time, Charlotte had looked at the floor when he told his tale, because she already knew the ending.

“Does Charlotte Crowley long for bedtime stories? You’re lucky I’m dying or I might tell all of Tyburn you’re going soft.” Jack leaned away, letting his arm drop from her shoulder. Charlotte rolled her eyes to push the stinging feeling away.

“You must have known I wouldn’t make it easy. You’ve tortured me for too many years for me to do anything other than savor every moment.” Charlotte gave a well-rehearsed shrug. It was one of the charmingly careless gestures she had learned from Jack over the years. The sort of motion that he would give when he had accomplished something breathtaking as though it were no more interesting than buttering toast. She had first seen him use it when she was thirteen and he had killed a minotaur. Everyone in the distant village of Hian had nearly fallen at his feet, enthralled by his nonchalance, and Charlotte had striven to imitate him ever since.

“You’re nearly as good at that as I am,” Jack said. “If you get much better, you’ll be swarmed with admirers.” Charlotte’s cheeks flushed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It was his silence that made Charlotte’s stomach twist. Jack Ashworth without a snarky reply was a man already dead. He shuddered, and the grating in his lungs echoed in Charlotte’s ears.

“Do it now, Charlie, while the sun is still up.”

Charlotte opened her mouth, but no words appeared to fill the void. She wasn’t sure exactly why her body was revolting against lying to him one last time. She had lied to him hundreds of times before. It doesn’t hurt. I can do this. I hate you. She had said all of those words to him more times than she could count.

There was no reason for words to get lost in her lungs now, but she couldn’t seem to force them out. I’m not stalling. I can do this.

The last curve of the sun, iridescent orange against a sky that boasted all the colors of tulip fields in the springtime, hovered over the edge of the horizon.

“It’s time, Charlie.”

I can do this. I’m not stalling.

Charlotte shifted to look at the man who had taught her how to pick pockets, and break jaws, and smile while doing it. The man who was the closest thing to a father she had known for most of her life. She knew he was giving her one last gift, in his own way.

“You’ll be the best now.”

As the sun dipped below the horizon, Charlotte ran her eyes over the scar that crossed Jack’s face, watched the wind lift his dark hair away from his face, and wondered what it would have been like to know him in a life where they didn’t spend so much of their lives tangled in lies.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” Charlotte said. Even as a sniveling, bloodied teenager, she had never said those words to him before. Today, though, she let the facade fall.

Jack’s face contorted and his fists clenched as another spasm wracked his body.

“Now isn’t a great time to tell me I wasted my energy believing in you.” He ground the words out from between clenched jaws. “I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t think you could do it.” Jack’s neck jerked unnaturally, and he inhaled sharply through his nose. He groaned as he pressed the slender piece of ash into her hands. “Smile when you tell everyone at the pub that you bested Jack Ashworth.”

This is the price of being Jack’s favorite.

Jack wrapped his pale hand around hers, his breath dry and shallow. “Now.”

Charlotte did not ask herself if she responded to his strangled plea so quickly because following Jack’s orders was almost a reflex, or if it was because looking at his face was too much to bear. She raised her right arm over her head as quickly as a kelpie returning to the water, so fast that she would have no time to hesitate. She did not let herself acknowledge that this was the first and only time Jack had ever looked at her with desperation in his eyes.

When the tip of the ash struck his heart he didn’t resist, and something inside of Charlotte splintered into thin shards. She closed her eyes for a moment as his blood spattered against her face and, for the first time since her father died, Charlotte let her tears trace salty lines down her face without wiping them away.

“You’ve always been my favorite, Charlie.” The last words of Jack Ashworth were nothing more than a wisp of air, a soft sigh in the wind, and then he was gone.

Charlotte didn’t move when Jack’s body sagged against her, and she ignored the two little punctures in his neck the same way she had for the last two days. The vampire bite still looked fresh, despite being nearly a week old. She tried and failed to ignore the sharp, metallic tang of blood in the air, but not even the cloying lavender could hide the fact that, for the second time in her life, she had been abandoned.