Mild panic tingled down my spine, raising nubby spikes, but Death stroked them smooth again.
“I won’t hurt the child.” She sounded amused when she added, “Or you, sister.”
Chest heaving, muscles trembling, I reached for the sky. The Malakhim sensed weakness and crowded in, not close enough for me to bite or claw, but enough I had to veer to avoid them or risk falling. They were herding me toward the swamp, clocking my decline until it was obvious I would smash into a copse of ancient cypress trees then plummet into the water. We would all be sitting ducks then.
“Hold tight, little one.” Death pressed her lips to the dagger in Lira’s hand, and blood trickled down her chin. “Nick anyone who gets too close. My kiss is death, and you carry it with you.”
“Okay.” Lira’s voice didn’t tremble. “I’ll be careful of the sharp end.”
Clearly, Death had no experience dealing with living children. Her offspring were dead, reanimated somehow. Giving small kids poisoned blades and trusting them not to kill you, or themselves, with it by accident was overreaching. But I couldn’t find the oxygen to grumble a disagreement.
“Hold steady.” Death stood on my spine, her toes digging into my scales, and raised her arms. “I am Death, and you are mine. I claim you, as is my right.” Springing onto the back of a Malakhim who had flown too close, she leapt from soldier to soldier, dropping them like flies with a touch. “You cannot defeat Death. I am inevitable.”
But she wasn’t indestructible. Obviously. Or this terrene would be lousy with the remnants from her namesake’s previous cadres.
Lira held on tight, one fist twined in my mane, the other gripping a weapon no child ought to wield.
A sharp cry pierced my ears, and I twisted to find a spear jutting from Death’s shoulder. She fought to dislodge it even as the soldier beneath her plummeted in empty-eyed silence.
Maybe it was a dormant sibling bond roaring to life, or maybe it was the simple fact Death had helped when she could have elected to sit on the sidelines. She was aquatic, and so were her coterie. They could have fled underwater faster than the Malakhim could trace them from above. But she had stayed. She had called me sister and meant it. And I couldn’t let her die, no matter how inevitable Death might be.
With no better options, I used my tail to encircle Lira, swung her around to my chest, then caught her in my clawed hand. She was safer there, where I could protect her and my tender belly, than on my back. The child laughed and brandished her dagger while I tried valiantly not to get cut or stabbed with its sharp tip.
Groaning from the effort, I pumped my wings harder, not bothering to go higher. Just closer. Death rode the fallen soldier like a surfboard, no longer struggling to remove the spear but bracing for grisly impact. I flew as hard, as fast, as my flagging body allowed, but Death’s fingers slid over the tip of my wing without purchase. Gritting my teeth, I whipped my tail after her, snagging her wrist in a wrap tight enough to do Cole proud.
Bone snapped, and Death cried out in pain, but her eyes were grateful when they met mine.
I glided over the bunkhouse and dropped Death on the pier. She turned the fall into a practiced roll and came up cradling her wrist. A half turn kept me from flattening Lira as I released her in the space Miller had cleared around the front door. But I was done. I couldn’t lift my wings again. They weighed too much. A headache pounded in my temples, and my tongue went dry. For some reason my stomach hurt. Not hunger. Not overindulgence. Just pain. Searing, burning, almost like …
The last thing I saw before slamming into the water were the fat tears streaking Lira’s windburned face as she stared in horror at the knife in her hand, and then in misery at me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I woke on a battlefield littered with corpses. Feathers drifted on the air, and the reek of death stuffed my nose. Sour blood caked me, and I wish I could say it turned my stomach rather than made me hungry.
“She’s coming around.” Thom’s gentle hands touched my face. “How do you feel?”
“Did we win?” I groped with a very human hand until a wide palm clasped mine. “Cole.” I hadn’t realized I was searching for him. It had been instinct. “Hey.”
“We won,” Miller said from my left. “It cost us.”
The enclave weren’t my people, but the news still hit hard. “How many?”
“Three.” He worked his jaw like he wanted to say more but had decided against it. “Death lost two members of her coterie. She’s in mourning. We’re on our own for the next seven days, long enough for her to observe Otillian funerial rites.”
“She saved us.” I clutched Cole tighter. “We would have been wiped out if she hadn’t pitched in.”
“For that, I’m grateful.” He kissed my knuckles. “I should have been here.”
“You got the Rixtons to safety.” I attempted to shove upright then wished I hadn’t as the world sloshed. “Phoebe too. Death told me you came for her.”
“I took your advice.” He attempted a smile. “Your father will protect her.”
“My … ” I squinted harder, like that might boost my hearing. “What?”
“As far as he’s concerned, Phoebe is his granddaughter.”
That was guaranteed to have him polishing his shotgun in preparation for future boyfriends. “You told him Phoebe is our daughter?”
“She is our daughter.” Cole helped me sit upright while I regained my equilibrium. “Your relationship with her is complicated. His will be too. I didn’t think it was wise to tell my mate’s father she wasn’t the mother of our child.”
“That … sounds worse than it is.” I had lost all perspective. “I will agree Dad wouldn’t have taken you stepping out on me lightly, even if you technically aren’t. Haven’t?” I leaned my forehead on his shoulder. “My head hurts.”
“I should have consulted you first.” He raked his fingers through my hair. “I didn’t anticipate him meeting us.” He kissed my temple. “When he showed up expecting you, I didn’t know what to tell him.”
“I suggested the truth.” Wu walked up from behind me. “But you’re the one who wanted transparency.”
Biting the inside of my cheek to keep from growling, I had to admit he was right. “He would find out about her eventually. This isn’t how I planned on having the talk with him, but maybe it’s all for the best. After all, you did it for me, and I didn’t have to be there to witness it.”
Once I was sure my stomach wouldn’t invert when I stood, I got to my feet and surveyed the carnage. So much senseless violence. Life spilled in red rivulets at my feet. Such a waste. The Malakhim had been raised to hate, nurtured on vengeance, and that upbringing had killed them every bit as much as teeth or claws.
Checking on my coterie heartened me.
Miller wasn’t looking so hot. I couldn’t begin to imagine how many Malakhim he had swallowed to prevent them from entering the bunkhouse, but he was standing. The indigestion would pass.
Despite being coated in blood from his head to his shoes, Thom didn’t have a scratch on him. I had done that much right at least.
Rixton was standing at the edge of the pier, a distant expression on his face, a stiff set to his shoulders, but soothing him would have to wait.
Guilt throat-punched me a second later, and I couldn’t believe I had forgotten to ask. “How is Lira?” I touched my shoulder. “Death? She had a … spear? Lance? Giant arrow thing? Sticking out of her.”
“I treated Death,” Thom reassured me. “She’ll recover in a day or two.”
The fact no one rushed to reassure me about Lira left me cold. I searched each of their faces, waiting.
Santiago, who I hadn’t noticed lurking in the water, was the one who let me have it.
“Lira’s parents are dead. Her mother was struck by an arrow while she was helping with the wounded. Her father was shot through the heart during the farmhouse skirmish.”
“That explains why she took up the dagger.” I scrubbed my hands over my face. “No
wonder the kid was primed for a fight. Her parents were murdered.” I sought out Wu, found him pale-faced and grim. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Wu managed a nod, but his expression didn’t change.
“She’s got family to take her in, right?” I rubbed my arms, and dirt flaked off in handfuls. “She isn’t alone?”
“The enclave believes it requires a community to raise a child,” Thom answered to spare Wu. “She is with her aunt, uncle, and cousins. They’ll take her in, love her like their own.”
“We need to establish a new safehouse.” As the dizziness cleared, I got my brain back on track. “The survivors need shelter.”
“I’m sending them overseas.” Wu watched a single white feather, speckled with crimson, dance in a whirl of leaves. “I own a small castle in Scotland. It was a gift from heri, General Valero. We were careful. It will take a while for Father to ferret out the deed.” He lifted his foot when it danced closer … and crushed it flat. “He won’t look away from the Deep South. Canton is the epicenter.” He scraped the crud off his shoe. “The seal is here. Your home is here. It will end here.”
Santiago’s hiss of breath drew my attention back to the water. “We’ve got movement near the breach site.” His fervent tapping on the planks led me to believe he had left a tablet within easy reach. “Pulling up camera four now. Camera five. Camera — ” He bared his teeth. “There you are.”
Exhaustion weighted my limbs, but I started toward him. “Who?”
“An unidentified Drosera.” He zoned out for a few seconds. “Winding back the video. Back, back, back.” He smiled from ear to ear. “Clever, aren’t you? Hiding out of range of the doppler sensors.”
“Are you done talking to yourself or … ?”
“The Drosera has been dormant in the swamp, watching for hours. It didn’t trip any of my sensors, so the cameras didn’t activate.”
“What are the odds of a random Drosera not bumping into the minefield you rigged out there?”
“None to none.” He stared at the tablet, his face lit by the screen. “Whoever this is knew we had sensors in the water and had an idea of how to trigger surveillance that would let us know they were there when they were ready.”
“Let’s greet our guest.” I waited for Cole to join me. “Fly in or airboat?”
“Let’s take the boat.” He rolled a shoulder, grimaced when it made a popping noise. “We’ve all exceeded our limits today. We need all the help we can get.”
While Cole and Miller readied the airboat, I stood on the pier with Rixton. The silence between us pressed in on me, his inattention almost a blessing. Until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“The first time I saw Maggie … after … she was sitting right here.” I scuffed a boot over the planks. “I don’t know why I told you that. I wasn’t going anywhere with it. Just a random thought.”
He made a humming sound that was drowned out by the buzzing motor of an approaching airboat.
Black, streamlined, shining. It was the new boat, the stealthy one. Cole was at the helm, and he bumped its edge gently against the pier. Thom leapt on without help. Miller, ever the gentleman, took my arm to hand me across.
Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed Rixton hadn’t moved. “You coming?”
“I’ll stay here.” He shook his head, eyed the bunkhouse. “Help the remaining survivors onto the second boat. You were unconscious during the first load. They ought to be here any minute to pick up the rest.”
“All right.” I got the feeling he needed to help them, to be among the living, after so much death.
“Wait for me,” Portia yelled as she took a running jump and landed on the deck in a Thom-worthy crouch. “Phew. Just made it.”
Looking her over to make sure she and Maggie were okay, I asked, “Find anything?”
“The Malakhim have withdrawn from the area. I estimate two-thirds of their force was depleted. We don’t have firm numbers on the exact size of the host, so it’s difficult to gauge how hard this loss will hit Ezra.”
“Not half as hard as it hit us.” Each member of the enclave would be mourned. I doubted the same could be said for Ezra’s legion. “Santiago? You coming?”
“I texted Miller the coordinates.” He eased back into the water. “I’ll follow.”
Once his head was good and underwater, I muttered, “He knows that just makes me wonder what he is that much more.”
Portia chuckled, her eyes dancing with amusement. It should have been obscene, the contrast between her easy laughter and the bodies stacked behind us, but I had been a cop long enough to know people cope with horror in myriad ways. Laughter, snark, anger, sorrow. All were valid choices. Whatever eased the burden. Whatever made the senseless make sense. Whatever dulled the images that danced behind your eyes when they closed at night. As long as it hurt no one, there was no wrong answer.
The airboat glided over the water like butter across a hot skillet, and soon we spotted the spine of an animal too large to pass for an American alligator. Miller leapt into the water, and the head of a giant snake reared over us, fangs glistening. Between him, the boat, and Santiago, we cornered the Drosera.
Since it hadn’t shown aggression, we returned the favor. Odds were good Sariah had positioned a scout in the area to keep tabs on Death. I wasn’t a fan of being spied on. The fact she might know about the pod, what was in the pod, chilled me. Phoebe might be out of reach for the moment, but Sariah was cut from the same cloth as her mother. If she needed leverage, a child gave her plenty.
The unformed thought from earlier returned with a vengeance. The text Santiago hadn’t received would have turned the tide of the battle against me and my coterie if Death hadn’t joined the fight. Coincidence? Electronic malfunction? Somehow, I doubted it.
“Shift,” I called to it. “Let’s talk this out like civilized folks.”
A safe distance away, the Drosera shifted into Sariah, her wrists uncomfortably bare.
Shock at seeing her doing her own dirty work numbed to a cold certainty that whatever brought her here was nothing good.
“How are you so hard to kill?” She looped her arm companionably around the knee of a bald cypress tree to keep herself afloat. “Conquest usually dies first. First in, first out. Did anyone tell you that? By surviving for this long, you’re beating the odds in more ways than one.”
Slow halting steps guided me to the end of the boat. “How are you enjoying your freedom?”
“How are you enjoying your captivity?” Her lip curled at the sight of me wearing the bangles. “Though, I suppose, Cole might have developed all sorts of dominance fetishes over the centuries. Have you slept together wearing them? How did that work? When he said to come for him, did you do it because he’d worked you up to it or because he’d given the order?”
“I’m not comfortable discussing my sex life with my niece. Let’s keep this conversation PG.”
“Prude.” She clucked her tongue. “Conquest mated Cole in the middle of cadre meetings. Trust me, there’s not much about your male I don’t know.” She raked her gaze over him. “Or haven’t seen.”
Rage kindled in my center, cold and burning, and all mine. “Why are you here?”
“I came to watch the show.” Her cheeky smile chilled me. “You really need to work on your technique. You almost crashed a half dozen times. You resembled a drunk chicken more than a dragon.”
“Chickens can’t fly.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t see any popcorn.” Or any backup, Drosera or otherwise. “How did you know where and when to be?”
“Lucky guess?”
“Your luck ran out when Luce gave you a second chance.” Cole stared her down. “Who’s your source?”
“The source.” The amusement on her face shifted to icy calculation. “Ezra.”
“He hates charun.” I snorted in disbelief. “He wouldn’t align with one.”
“I came to you with an offer of alliance,” she reminded me. “I
told you then I had seen what lay beyond this terrene. I wanted no part of it then, and I want no part of it now. How do you think I found out? Who do you think told me? I went sniffing after the source of power on this terrene, as I have done for Mother on all other worlds, and rumors of Ezra are what I found.”
She flicked duckweed off her arm, giving me a second to absorb the fact she had known damn well who I was talking about when I set her task but lied to my face about it. She had wanted to have her cake and eat it too.
“I don’t believe in gods,” she said. “I’ve seen no evidence of them in any civilization we’ve visited. Unless their divine plan was to universally let us wreck and ruin their flock. Faith is a lie, but most lies are rooted in truth. I just had to dig deeper to find it, that’s all.”
“You found Ezra.” Doubt coated my tone. “And he — what? Took a meeting with you?”
The figment I had searched for my entire remembered life, and she just stumbled across him? Granted, she had been hunting the apex predator in this terrene. Without knowing it, I had been tracking his son. That was the whole problem. All I had was a name, and it had gotten me nowhere. I had been exhausting human leads, through human means of investigation. She had a leg up on me there. She had known he was charun, and that’s how she researched him. Considering I hadn’t had a clue about my heritage, I had done the best I could given my resources, but she had lifetimes of practice doing her mother’s dirty work.
“Can you picture me in a pencil skirt?” She glanced down her stolen body. “Actually, there was this one host. Legs for days. I wouldn’t have tossed her body if I hadn’t needed this brain, but human technology is rather advanced for a bunch of monkeys. I had to adapt and quickly.”
Santiago got there ahead of me. “Your host was a programmer.”
“The best.” She tapped her temple. “Too bad knowledge degrades over time. I had to act fact, memorize as much as possible, before that little voice screaming in my head went silent.”
“You intercepted the text from Miller.” The bigger picture loomed, and I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. “You hacked the feeds the night Death killed War.”
Rise Against: A Foundling novel (The Foundling Series) Page 24
