City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World) by Barbara J. Webb Read Free Book Online Page B

at the neck, holding it closed. If Iris noticed, she didn’t say anything.
    Our luck held until we reached a particularly seedy looking apartment complex and Iris stopped. There was just enough ambient light for me to make out the splashes of graffiti on the walls of the building and the muzzle of a gun poking out through a gap in one of the boarded windows. Iris rippled and shrunk back down to my size, but with a different face than she’d worn when we left our building. Her whole body was lean, harder-looking than I was used to from Iris.  
    From the shadowed doorway, a man’s voice called out, “Hey baby, you lookin’ for some fun?”
    “Shut up, Vik.” Iris walked boldly up to the crumbling concrete porch. I followed, unable to look away from the gun pointed at us.
    “Who’s your friend?” Vik asked as he stepped into the light. Bald, burly, and carrying his own very large gun, Vik was not a man I wanted to be on the wrong side of.
    “Viktor, this is Ash. Ash, Viktor. It’s okay, Vik, he’s with me.”
    Yet another surprise in a day full of them. I would never have imagined Iris knew people like this, much less worked with them. I smiled as best I could.
    Vik’s grin was predatory. “Your boy’s nervous.”
    Iris stepped forward, somehow managing to loom over a man with twice her mass. “Stop screwing around. Ash needs to sweep the place.”
    “For what?” Vik slung his gun back over his shoulder and crossed his meaty arms. “Our security’s been good enough for Price before. What, she thinks we’re fucking up all of a sudden?”
    “It’s different this time. And I can explain. But only after Ash has done his thing.”
    Vik glared, but he stepped aside and let me through. I was glad Iris kept close. Especially as we moved through the hall and past a room with three more men like Vik.  
    Maybe I had been naive. It was no secret the influence the criminal element had in Miroc. The city’s bad reputation was one hundred percent earned. Even back when we priests had real authority, this city was nothing like Tala, where the gods and the churches kept folks safe. Miroc was the place where dangerous people came to disappear, where criminal enterprises could count their money undisturbed, where back-alley deals didn’t have to take place in back alleys.
    The Ellsworths, the Ramiydhs, the Cuandos, the criminal families had as much influence over the city as the council did. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that to get things done, Amelia—via Iris—also worked through some questionable contacts. “Amelia trusts these people?” I whispered.
    Iris turned to me and rippled through several different faces, settling back on the lean, hard visage these people knew. “Judging by appearances?”
    Chastened, I said, “I just hope she knows what she’s doing.”
    “Me too.” By her flat look, I knew Iris was talking about me.
    The apartment building wasn’t large. Six two-bedroom units, all had seen better days. Four showed signs of occupation—by the men I’d seen here, I imagined. The fifth was storage. Guns and barrels of water and smaller bags of—I didn’t want to know.  
    The sixth apartment was obviously our safehouse. It didn’t have much in the way of furniture—a bed in each bedroom and a table with mismatched chairs in the front—but it was clean and secure-looking, with a new lock on the door and thick metal shutters over the windows.
    I went over the whole building the same way I’d scanned the warehouse. The other men watched me as I moved through their space, but Iris’s presence kept them from interrupting. I was as thorough as I could be. If this job went bad, it wasn’t going to be because of me. It took an hour before I was willing to declare the complex safe.
    Iris called all the men together—six of them including Vik—and explained the situation. They weren’t any more thrilled at the mention of Jansynians than Iris had been.  
    “Amelia wants to move Spark in