Crown of the Queen (The Wardbreaker Book 3)

by Katerina Martinez

  “Okay,” I said, “Tell us how we get past the prison’s defensive mechanisms.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no quick fix for this,” he said, “It’ll be an intensive process, one you’ll each have to take on your own.”

  I looked around at my group; everyone nodded in turn, even Karim with his ridiculous eye-patch. He still hadn’t taken it off.

  “We’re ready,” I said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I volunteered to face the drone first. There was no preparation ritual, no need to protect myself from what was about to hit me. In fact, I needed to do the opposite. According to Walter —and confirmed by RJ—Mages had a natural resistance to the effect the prison’s magic had on us. All I had to do was open myself up to it, drop my guard, and let it do its thing.

  Its thing, though, was slamming my brain over and over with a sledgehammer made of shitty memories. The moment I let myself relax with the prison in my sights, it came for me screaming. My instinct was to protect myself, it took everything I had to stare at the pain hurtling toward me and not flinch, like I was playing chicken with it.

  But unlike a game of chicken, the pain didn’t turn away at the last second. It hit me hard and fast, that half-a-migraine I had been nursing now swelling to become something much, much worse. The pain was blinding, exquisite. I couldn’t bear it for more than a few seconds, because those few seconds felt like lifetimes.

  In the short time I’d spent looking at the prison from a distance, I had been assaulted by my own past. Visions of Walter, my mother, my childhood home all flooded my senses, trapping me in my own thoughts. It was a cabaret of nightmares, piggybacking on pain like I hadn’t felt before. It was Axel who ripped me away from the window again before the prison’s power managed to totally fry my brain.

  I curled into his chest, holding him tightly just to ground myself—to feel like I was back in the real world. Neither the pain, nor the ghosts left running wild inside my head, disappeared instantly. They lingered at the edge of my senses, the pain throbbing, and the ghosts still screaming.

  I pulled away from Axel once the pain became manageable. I hadn’t noticed, or maybe I hadn’t cared until now, that everyone was watching me—everyone except Walter, whose attention was somewhere outside.

  “Well?” Karim asked, “What kind of fresh hell are we getting into?”

  “Piece of cake,” I said, “Now I only have to do that… what… five more times?”

  Walter turned his head slightly. “As long as it takes, but that’s enough for now. You need to rest for at least a few hours.”

  “We’ll be here for days,” RJ said.

  “Days, but not weeks or months,” Walter put in. “It’s the best I can offer you. Until you’re more resistant to the prison’s power, you can forget getting anywhere near it.”

  That little note was the most frustrating part about all of this. I couldn’t get near the prison, and that meant I couldn’t investigate what kind of protective wards I’d have to cut through in order to get inside. I needed to be able to sniff a warder’s essence before I could break it, and before I could ferret out its essence, I needed to know who had put the ward there in the first place.

  If I could just go to Harrowgate, I could get a head-start on trying to figure out who put the ward in place; that was assuming breaking down its wards was the path I wanted to take. But as things stood, it would be a while before I could get the information I needed. We were going to be stuck in Devil Falls a lot longer than I thought we’d be here for—and that changed things a bit.

  “I’ll go next,” Axel said.

  “No,” Karim said, “Let me. If my brain starts exploding, I’d like to have you nearby to… you know, stop that from happening.”

  Axel nodded, and Karim stepped up to the window. With a deep breath held in his lungs, he parted the slits in the blinds and peered out and into the night. A moment passed, then another, and another, and then I watched his eyes go glassy. Like Axel had done for me, I yanked Karim away from the window and removed him from the prison’s influence.

  He took one grave look at me, then hurried off to the kitchen and threw up in the sink. We all waited for him to be finished and recovered before anyone spoke. It was Danvers who broke the silence.

  “That… was charming,” she said.

  Karim pointed at her like he was about to say something, but then quickly turned that hand back around and covered his own mouth. “You know what,” he said, into his hand, “I’m not even going to dignify that with a response because I may throw up again. But as soon as I’m feeling better, you’re in for it.”

  “I’m quaking in my boots.”

  “That’s enough of that, you two,” I said, “Let’s just get this whole thing over and done with as quickly as we can. We still have preparations to make.”

  “Isabella…” Walter said, inflicting more pain on me than the prison’s drone ever could.

  I rounded on him, about to unleash a torrent of how dare you use my name like that, and you don’t get to call me that, but I managed to keep a lid on my emotions. Why? Because the others needed me to be level-headed now, more than ever. We were in dangerous waters, surrounded by sharks, and about to embark on the most dangerous mission we had gone through yet.

  They needed me to lead. A few months ago, I’d have hated having that responsibility. I still did, kind of. But I accepted that it was mine, now. These people needed me as much as I needed them, so I was going to do my very best to make sure I didn’t emotionally compromise myself.

  Sure, see how long that lasts.

  “What?” I finally said to Walter, my tone short and curt.

  “Can we talk… privately?”

  “Privately?”

  “Look… I know I’m the last person you want to see right now—”

  “That would imply you’re on the list of people I want to see.”

  Walter nodded. “In any case, I would like to talk to you in private, if you’d give me a moment.”

  “How long is a moment?”

  He scanned the others with his eyes, then gave me his attention again. “Five minutes. I just have a few things I want to say, and then I’ll leave you all for the night.” Walter tossed the loft key over at me, and I snapped it up from the air.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend even a single moment alone with Walter. In fact, no, I knew I didn’t want to spend a single moment alone with him. The hurt was still fresh, a wound reopened by seeing him again at a time when I wasn’t ready to. At the same time, I didn’t know what he had to tell me, and he knew my curiosity would get the better of me.

  “You go,” Axel said, “I’ve got this under control.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’ll be fine.”

  “Do you have another room we can go into?” I asked Walter.

  He gestured to the door into the hallway, and I walked through it. Walter followed me outside, shutting the door as he went, and then we were alone. Just the two of us. He and I, reunited after almost ten years of not seeing each other, not speaking, not being a family.

  “So?” I asked, folding my arms across my chest. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

  A pause. “You’re a clever girl,” he said, “I’m not going to stand here and try to justify my actions because you’re not going to buy any of it. The truth is, there’s no reason I can give you that would make my leaving the way I did seem like the right thing to do at the time because a good enough reason doesn’t exist.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have left the way I did.”

  “Oh, there was a better way?”

  He shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. Gods, you grew up to look so much like your mother.”

  Tears stung my eyes. “You’ve said a lot of dumb shit tonight already,” I said, my voice already cracking, “Don’t make it worse by talking about her.”

  Walter nodded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Shit. All this time an
d I’m still a bad parent.”

  “You are, and don’t think you’re off the hook yet. I may not accept any of the reasons you have for leaving me the way that you did, or for leaving me at all, but I still want to hear it. I want to hear all of it.”

  He shook his head. “There are things I can’t tell you.”

  “Oh? And why’s that?”

  “Because I swore I wouldn’t.”

  “You also swore you’d protect me, and then you bailed.”

  “Izzy—Isabella… I left because I had no choice. If I hadn’t left… we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

  “Because you’d be dead?”

  “No… you would be, instead.”

  I frowned. “Who was going to kill me?”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. They’re all gone.”

  “What the hell kind of assholes did you get into business with that you had to leave me like that? I knew you were shifty, but are you seriously telling me your choices were stay and I get hurt, or leave and hope I make it on my own?”

  “Again… I’m not going to win any parenthood prizes. I’m not exactly proud of that part of my life, but I did what I did to make sure our family could live well.”

  “Our family broke into pieces way before you jumped ship.” I rolled my eyes. “Is this really what you wanted to do out here? Try and go into our past and see if you could fix things?”

  “I know I won’t be able to do it overnight—”

  “I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t go to college. I couldn’t live a normal life because of you. You took all those things away from me. But you know what the worst part was? You never told me what would happen to me.”

  He frowned, and swallowed hard. “I couldn’t.”

  “Yes, you could’ve. You could’ve warned me about what I would become. You could’ve trained me, or even given me a heads-up. Hey, Izzy, just a quick FYI for you—you’re gonna develop some whacky powers one day. Careful not to set your eyebrows on fire or burn your house down!”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Forget the apology,” I hissed. “I don’t want it. The only thing I want is help getting to the man I need to get to. After that, we call it even and go our separate ways again.”

  I spun around and stormed back into the loft, leaving Walter shut out in the corridor. I didn’t want to see his face, hear his voice, or smell his cologne. I wanted to bring the Tempest down on him like a hammer and make him pay for what he’d done to me. But I couldn’t do that.

  Stupid moral code.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Out of all of us, it was Karim who took to the acclimatization process the quickest. I had thought maybe Axel would be the first to develop an immunity to the strange power the prison had over us. We all did, especially him. He was a Psionic, after all.

  But no, it was Karim who was the first to make the first exploratory push into Devil Falls, the first of us to get close to Harrowgate prison without his brain exploding.

  This was both a good thing, and a bad thing. It was bad because he didn’t have any of us out there to support him should things go south. Devil Falls was a hostile place to Mages who didn’t belong, and we didn’t belong.

  The good thing about Karim being able to venture near the prison, however, was not having to rely on Walter for every bit of information we were going to need. And out of all of us, he was the one that blended in with the locals best. The bar wasn’t a fluke. He was genuinely liked out here.

  I had a prison break to plan, and if I wanted to pull that off, I was going to need to know everything I could about the prison itself. Who runs it, what are the guards like, what kind of security systems do we have to deal with? And those were just the mundane concerns.

  Harrowgate was a prison for supernatural miscreants and criminals, the worst of us all; and supernatural problems required supernatural solutions. We had already seen one of its defensive mechanisms at work. The psychic assaults were unbearable, and crippling if you deliberately put your guard down.

  But that was only one of what I suspected were many different and complex defensive measures meant to keep everyone within its walls inside, and those beyond them outside.

  Karim dumped a bag of bagels on the floor in the center of the communal sleeping area we had built out of air-mattresses and sheets. Though my head was pounding, my mouth watered.

  “You found bagels?” I asked.

  Karim lifted his eye patch and took his beret off. “I did indeed,” he said, picking a seeded bagel up and sniffed it. “Who would’ve thought you’d find good bagels in Devil Falls?”

  I chose a bagel out of the bag and bit into it without thinking twice. The bread was warm, and soft. Just how I liked it. “Didn’t I tell you?” I asked, chewing, “I knew I’d heard that somewhere.”

  “I also bought painkillers. You know, to help manage those migraines you all have. We can’t expect RJ to keep every little headache at bay, can we?”

  “Not when I have one of my own,” RJ said. He hadn’t gotten up from his mattress yet, and he had one arm draped around his eyes.

  “You alright?” I asked him, shaking one of his legs.

  “I’m good. Just need a minute to make the room stop spinning.”

  “So?” I asked Karim. Around me, the others started tucking into their breakfast. “What did you find?”

  “A prison,” Karim said, eyebrow cocked. “Be more specific.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Did you walk all the way up to it? Did you see any guards? What was the gate like? Anyone going in or out?”

  Karim thought for a moment. “Yes, yes, big and imposing, and yes. I saw an armored van roll out of the place and head down the street. The thing was huge, and covered in plates. It looked military, almost.”

  “Military? I guess that’s not too weird.”

  “I’ve never been to a real prison, so I couldn’t say for certain. But it was a whole thing, getting that vehicle out. A siren went off, then the gate started rising—slowly. Two armed guards moved outside, scanned the perimeter, and signaled for the truck to roll through. When it was cleared, the guards ran back inside and the gate lowered itself. The whole thing took twenty-seven seconds.”

  “Twenty-seven?” Axel asked, “You timed it?”

  “Better to have that information and not need it, than need it and not have it. You never know what she’s going to ask for.”

  “She is sitting right here,” I interrupted. “Anyway, that’s good. What else can you tell me? Anything that stood out?”

  “Hmmm, let me think. Guards, truck, massive walls topped with sharp wire and glass? No, I think that’s everything—oh, wait, no, there was one other thing. What was it? Yes, that’s right, there may be a slight problem with this whole breaking and entering thing.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Great, because it wasn’t already going to be difficult enough.”

  “What’s the problem?” Axel asked.

  “I don’t know how to say this, so I’m going to be as blunt about it as I can be,” Karim said, “They have ghosts.”

  “Ghosts? What do you mean?”

  “Well, some prisons have guards, and walls, and doors. This prison has walls, guards, doors, and ghosts. I saw them hovering above the walls, watching, waiting—each one of them writhing in agony but bound to service.”

  “Jesus…” I said.

  “No, I’m sure he wasn’t among them.”

  “How is that even possible?” Danvers asked, “I mean, who gets an army of ghosts to work for them?”

  “Work? No. Those ghosts aren’t getting employee of the month awards any time soon. They’re slaves, they’re hurting, and that makes them incredibly dangerous.”

  RJ sat upright at the word dangerous. “You can’t beat a ghost with a stick,” he said, “How do we get past them?”

  Karim looked like he was about to say something, but he shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “You’re missing the point,” he said, keeping his
eyes closed. “This isn’t another obstacle to overcome. These people are going to end up becoming collateral damage in our noble quest to get Hugo out of Harrowgate.”

  “They’re ghosts, though…” Danvers said, “They’re dead, Karim… how are they going to be collateral damage?”

  “Do you think you magically stop feeling pain once you die? That’s the biggest lie ever told to every human being that ever drew breath. The afterlife isn’t all white doves, fluffy clouds, and parties at dead celebrities’ houses, nor is it the sweet release of a quiet oblivion. Not for everyone, anyway. Some of us don’t leave this place, and it isn’t unfinished business that keeps us here—it’s pain. These are real people we’re talking about here, people who don’t want to do what they’re being told to do, but they’ll do it because they don’t have a choice.”

  A pause. “Do… what, exactly?” I asked.

  “Keep us out of the prison. Hurt us. Come howling out of the darkness and chill our souls.”

  “That doesn’t sound fun,” Danvers said.

  “You said their pain makes them dangerous?” Axel asked, “What did you mean?”

  Karim shrugged. “How many ghost stories have you ever heard in your life?” he asked, “How many of those ghosts were twisted and warped to the point where they didn’t look human anymore? That’s what pain does to ghosts. It changes them. It takes their humanity away, bit by bit. The angrier the ghost, the less reasonable it is, the more monstrous it becomes—but it’s no less a person than you or me. Not to me, anyway.”

  “And I respect that,” I said, “I’m not a Necromancer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about what you’re saying. What I need to know is, do you have an answer to RJ’s question?”

  “How do we get past them?” another shrug. “There are ways. Ideally, I would like to find the Necromancer that bound them and release them from their prisons. I could try and break their individual chains, but that would take time, and it’d probably let the Necromancer know someone’s tampering with their magic.”