by Chloe Neill
“By having another war? By killing more people? That’s moronic. You want to fix the Zone? Get out, and leave us the hell alone. We’ll be better off without people like you.”
Rage boiled over in his eyes, but before he could hit me again, an ear-piercing whistle cut through the air. Bangs were followed by screams and running. Were we under attack?
Fury flashed in Ezekiel’s eyes at the interruption, his head darting up. “Don’t move,” he said, rising, and disappearing through the door.
I wanted to call Liam’s name, to assure myself that he was alive and safe, and the noises hadn’t been gunshots—punishment meted out by one of these crazy assholes. But there wasn’t time for fear. Not if I wanted to live through this.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t entirely sure where I’d been taken, and I didn’t have a weapon.
I wanted to use magic. I wanted to use it so bad my fingers tingled, to show this asshole what happened when choice was taken away. But Ezekiel already believed I was a traitor, and magic would only give him another reason to consider me an enemy, for him to send people into Royal Mercantile—amid innocent customers—with bombs strapped to their chests. Surviving Camp Couturie only to emerge with an enormous target on my back didn’t seem like much of a win. I’d use magic if I had to, but I had to try my other options first.
It occurred to me that I did have a kind of weapon—the wooden posts currently tied to my back.
I could use the chair against him, but I’d have to time it perfectly . . .
I shifted my body weight back, then forward, then back again, and so on until I could rock forward enough to get my feet flat on the ground. I leaned forward until I could stand, the chair still strapped to my back through my tied hands, but at least I was standing.
I crab-walked to the tent flap, listened for a few seconds. The sounds of chaos—shouting, shuffling—were yards away to my left, at least as far as I could tell. But I couldn’t tell much, not hunched over like I was.
Footsteps approached, and I scooted back, just to the side of the doorway.
The canvas flap opened, and Ezekiel moved inside again. His eyes widened when he realized I wasn’t where he’d left me, the rest of his face going crimson with anger. “Goddamn it!” he screamed.
Using every ounce of strength, I swung around, slamming the chair into him, groaned, stumbled, and we both hit the ground. I landed on my shoulder, which sang with pain. I tried to maneuver to my knees, to crawl away from him and toward the flapping canvas door, but he grabbed the chair, held me tight.
“You’re dead!” he yelled again, climbing to his feet and dragging me backward across the ground.
His cruelty helped me. He yanked the chair back, and the rope that had pinned my wrists together snapped. Ezekiel stumbled back with the chair, knocking a lantern from its hook on the wall. It hit the ground, the glass shattering, the flame sputtering out. Small miracle that the tent hadn’t caught fire. The entire camp was a tinderbox.
“You need to learn your place,” he said, throwing the chair across the room and stalking toward me. I climbed to my feet, unraveling the rest of the rope from my hands and throwing it out of the way. Keeping my eyes on him, I picked up the lantern that had fallen to the ground. It was heavier than I’d expected—probably military issue. And that was fine by me.
“Put it down!” he ordered, and his tone suggested he was used to being obeyed.
“Not a chance,” I said, keeping my eyes on him as he circled me, probably looking for a way to get past my defenses.
“You need a strong hand. You don’t understand what’s at stake!”
He’d changed his tone, talking to me like I was a stupid child. Probably not the first time he’d used that approach with a woman.
“I don’t need anything but to get the hell out of this tent,” I assured him.
He took a step toward me, and I swung the lantern. But he dodged, and it grazed his shoulder. He jumped forward to take me down. I shifted just enough to avoid his body weight falling on me completely, but he still pushed me aside. I stepped wrong in a rut in the hard-packed floor, and pain bloomed in my ankle like a hot black flower. I gritted my teeth against it, squeezed my hands around the lantern’s handle.
The air filled with noise as warning claxons began to sound. Liam, I thought, panic and hope warring. If they were ringing the alarm, either he’d gotten away or the cavalry had arrived.
Ezekiel looked toward the sound, which gave me the chance that I needed.
Lantern in both hands, I lifted it and swung like a golfer on the tee box and hit him on the back of the head. He crumpled, falling forward like a felled tree.
“Asshole,” I said, and tossed the lantern aside.
I had to go. And I had to find Liam.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My ankle throbbed, bringing stinging tears to my eyes. One step at a time, I told myself. That was my mantra, my creed in wartime and out of it. It didn’t matter what the step was, or how small. Nothing was insurmountable, as long as you could break it into parts, tackle each one in turn.
“One tent at a time” might be a more accurate description. I had to look into each one as I hobbled past, moving as quickly as I could at my stupidly awkward pace. The ground was pounded hard from millions of footsteps, but still mottled with bumps and holes. I hit one, lurched forward. Regained my balance, but winced as my ankle was wrenched.
And then an arm pulled me into the shadow between two tents.
Already on alert and full of adrenaline, I began to scream, but a hand clapped around my mouth.
“It’s me,” Liam whispered fiercely. “Quit biting my fingers.”
I mashed his instep with my good foot, not entirely an accident.
“Are you all right?” I whispered back, relief coursing through me, then went stiff and silent as footsteps approached us. We squeezed farther back into the crevice, his arm still around my waist, as Reveillon members rushed past us, one man shouting out orders to the others to find us.
“I’ve been better,” he whispered, his lips near my ear, his voice a breath of sound. “But I’ll live.”
“What the hell happened?” I whispered when they passed and the world had quieted again.
“Flares or fireworks, it sounded like. As to where it came from or who did it, your guess is as good as mine. I thought you did it. I managed to get away in the chaos, and then the damn alarms started going off.”
If it hadn’t been either of us, who’d done it? Someone had created the perfect distraction. Coincidence, or a friend on the inside? Whichever way, this wasn’t an opportunity to be wasted.
“We have to get out of here,” I said. “Ezekiel wants us dead.”
“I’m aware,” he said. “We have to get back to the truck. If they find us now, they’ll definitely kill us.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
“I can’t run fast,” I said, and felt tears bloom again. “I twisted my ankle.”
We went silent again as another group passed, the beam of their flashlight slicing into the shadows at our feet.
“Don’t wait for me,” I said when they disappeared again. “If you can get away, go.”
Anger radiated off his body like heat, and his voice was fierce. “If you think I’d leave you behind to save my own ass, you don’t know me at all. No one gets left behind.”
We waited another few seconds, until the camp fell quiet again.
“You can hobble, or I can carry you.”
“Hobble,” I whispered back, and he took my hand, squeezed it.
“Then don’t let go,” he said, and stepped out of the shadows. We ran in the same direction the men and women had gone.
“Ironic, isn’t it, that they think we’re the enemy?” he said, then pulled me backward into a tent when a group of p
eople ran past.
Two children playing on a rug on the floor with wooden cars stared up at us with fear and wonderment. Their lips began to wobble, and I knew that was the step before tears.
“I like those cars!” I said quietly, but with as much enthusiasm as I could muster in a whisper. They looked suspicious but proud, and both held them out to me.
I gave them a thumbs-up, but my smile quickly faded. Because they were playing with toys in front of a terrifying sight.
“Liam.”
He must have heard the fear in my voice, because he looked back at me, and then at the spot where I’d trained my gaze.
The tent in which we stood had been connected to another behind it, the canvas cut and reconnected to build a narrow hallway between them. In the second tent were dozens of stacked wooden crates, with DYNAMO EXPLOSIVES stenciled in black on the box, beside ominous words: WARNING—C-4—HIGH EXPLOSIVES. I knew what C-4 was, and I knew it didn’t take very much to do a lot of damage. From the look of it, they’d amassed enough to take out a good chunk of New Orleans.
Devil’s Isle had been only the beginning of what looked to be a horrible campaign.
“Damn,” he said, and looked down at the children again.
“We have to—” I wanted to offer a plan, to get these kids away from the crates of explosives, and the explosives away from the terrorists who’d use them against us. But we were trapped in a maze of tents without backup, surrounded by people who clearly thought we were the enemy and wanted us dead. There was nothing we could do right now.
“We can’t,” I said, feeling suddenly defeated.
Liam reached out, squeezed my hand. “We can’t right now,” he said, understanding perfectly. “But we will. We’ll tell Containment. They’ll bring this in.”
Before I could argue, voices lifted in the second tent, and Liam yanked me out of the tent again, dodged down another row.
We had made another turn when Liam stopped so quickly I ran into him. Fear struck me, and I assumed we’d been cornered. But when I stepped beside him, I realized what he’d seen and why he’d stopped.
There, in front of us, stood the woman with the black eye—the one I’d given the collard greens to.
She had a clutch of bottle rockets in one hand, a set of long matches in the other. She’d set them off, created the distraction that had given us both the chance to get away.
A chance to live.
“Go!” she said, and pointed to her left, giving us another chance. “Now!”
Liam nodded heavily—an acknowledgment and a thank-you—and we took off.
“To the fountain,” he said. “Stay with me, and stay low.”
“I’m right behind you.”
We reached the end of the row and dashed out of the tents—which was equally exhilarating and terrifying. No more creepy canvas monotony, but no more cover.
The market had cleared out. We ran to the fountain, dived beneath a table, and took a look at the surroundings.
The truck sat nearly alone. One guard stood by, a young woman with a shotgun in hand and oversized boots beneath her poplin dress. I guessed it took all kinds to make a militia.
Liam looked at me, mouth open to give an order, but stopped when he noticed what was probably a blossoming bruise on my throbbing cheekbone.
“Did he put a hand on you?” His voice was low and threatening.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Liam’s eyes fired as he prepared to argue, but I put a hand on his arm to stop him from running back into the labyrinth. “Liam, he’s not worth it. He’d have done worse if he had the chance, and that’s just a fact. We’re his enemies, Liam. All of us—everyone who doesn’t follow his line is part of the Containment machine. That’s why we focus on getting away.” I took in the cut above his right eye, the smear of blood across his forehead.
“And you don’t look so hot yourself,” I whispered.
“Sucker punch,” he said bitterly. “The Capon.”
His tight features said he was furious, but he reined it in, surveyed the truck, and watched the woman pace in front of it nervously.
From the shaking hands and nervously tapping feet, she didn’t look like she’d become a fighter, a soldier, by choice or by necessity. She looked like someone who’d had a weapon shoved into her hands and told to stand guard. Unfortunately for her, that would give us the advantage.
“We do the same thing they did to us,” Liam said, scanning the ground and picking up a rock. “A distraction. I’ll toss it in front of her, and we’ll go around behind to the passenger side. That will give us cover if she sees us.”
“When she sees us,” I said, wondering if she was a good shot. Not that it mattered, because that shotgun would put holes in anything nearby.
“Probably,” Liam said. “Come out behind me on my signal.” He held a finger to his lips, then threw the rock into the bushes past the woman. She strolled forward to take a look, and we darted out, half crouching, and ran to the truck, diving behind the rear passenger-side tire.
There were shouts and movement from the direction of the tents, raised voices and instructions. They’d probably found Ezekiel.
Liam crawled to the passenger-side door, face scrunched as he quietly depressed the button on the door’s old, chrome handle, began to slowly pull it open.
“There! Stop them from leaving!” Ezekiel called out the order, once again sending people into the fight instead of actually doing any of the fighting himself.
“Fucking coward,” I muttered, hustling into the truck behind Liam. Since the noise hardly mattered now, I slammed it shut and mashed down the lock button.
“Nailed it in one,” Liam said, and hit the button for the lock on his side of the car just as the woman with the shotgun dived for it. He stuck the key into the ignition, and the truck roared to life. Thank God the power grid was still up, and the truck’s electric starter could still fire.
The woman with the shotgun pumped it, raised it.
“This is going to be close!” he called out, and hit the accelerator. The truck jumped forward as she aimed.
“Get down!” Liam said, pushing my head between my knees.
The shotgun sounded, the driver’s-side window exploding with glass and shot. “Son of a bitch,” Liam said, and jerked the truck to the right, off the road and into the grass. Half-covering me with his body, Liam drove with one hand on the wheel, his head only high enough to see over the dashboard.
She fired again, hit the back window, blowing glass all over it.
“Asshole!” he yelled, threading the truck between two trees. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to replace a window in the goddamn Zone?”
He yanked the wheel to avoid a fallen log. The truck bounced hard enough that my head touched the ceiling. A little late, I grabbed the seat belt, buckled it tight, and held on.
“You know, I think we’re both going to have to deal with Gunnar on this one!”
“You think?” he yelled as he swerved the truck around one tree, then another, and off the curb onto the road that wound through City Park again.
We heard the engine at the same time, checked our mirrors. A truck pulled onto the road behind us, a multicolored bastardization that had probably been Frankensteined together from lots of different vehicles. And it was loud. A very big engine, or some kind of custom exhaust, or maybe both.
“What’s the plan here?” I asked, holding on to the door as the truck bounced again.
“To stay alive, and get the fuck out of City Park!” he yelled over the roar of the truck’s engine.
“Good plan,” I said with a nod. “Good plan.”
“Shit,” Liam said, gaze slipping to the rearview mirror.
I didn’t want to look but made myself check the side mirror. A man was standing in the back of the truck, aiming a gun at us over th
e cab.
“I’m beginning to think this movement isn’t all about peace, love, and understanding!”
Liam half smiled. “You’re cheerful in an emergency,” he said, and jerked when a shot whistled above us. “Fucking assholes!” he said, and put a hand at my back, tried to push me down again. “Stay down!”
“Better plan,” I said, and from my half-huddled position, I opened the glove box, looking for our advantage.
“What are you doing?”
“You said you had a gun in here.” I pulled out the weighty revolver, which I guessed was a .44. “And you were not kidding.”
“I know you know how to handle it,” Liam said. I’d told him my father had made sure of that. “How’s your aim?”
“Good,” I said. I looked through the glove box, didn’t find any other bullets.
“What’s in the cylinder is what we’ve got,” Liam said, gaze skipping between the uneven ground in front of him and the rearview mirror.
I spun the cylinder, confirmed it was full. Six bullets to make this work. No pressure. “Then I better do this right the first time.”
I unbuckled and turned backward, sitting on my knees on the bench seat, and used the back to brace my wrists. Their truck was right on our ass, only ten or so feet from our tailgate.
Unless you had a really big weapon, taking out a moving vehicle was tricky under the best of conditions. The truck’s back window was gone, but I’d have to climb into the bed to get a closer shot, which would put me directly in their sights and without any cover.
Taking out the driver would be the most permanent fix, but I wasn’t going to get a steady shot on this road in fading light, and I was years from the daily practice my father had drilled into me.
I could fire through the radiator, try to hit something critical in the engine, but I’d probably have to go through the bullets first, and that still might not be enough. A few shots might disable the tire, but I’d have to make every one of them count.
We hit a pothole and bounced hugely. My head nearly hit the truck’s ceiling. “Not going to help my shooting if you do that.”
