They were weakening my Shield with multiple cuts. Professionals. Professionals wouldn’t break easily, which left me with so few options.
I ducked around one, changed my sword beat, and hit him with a compound attack that sliced open his cheek and sent his knife flying. Before he could recover, I speared him through the heart. It would have taken too long to pull my blade free, so I let it dissolve with a fiery hiss. When the leader came at me with his broken sword, I shot him with a firebolt. He swerved, taking only a singeing shot across his bicep.
Another came at me from the side. I dodged his swipe, pushed in, and put my sabre hilt against his throat while extending a new molten blade. The garnet blade foamed out his head. He dropped and slid off my sword. I spun to block another advancing kidnapper.
My bond with Brand went cold—frosted by the very unique adrenaline surge he got when he engaged. I tried to set my anxiety for him aside, but I’d never managed that battle fugue as well as he did. So I turned my worry into anger, and my anger into fuel.
The remaining three pressed in. I dropped into a defensive stance, backing into a line of shrubs. The shrubs protected my rear but limited my mobility.
Then I stumbled. I fucking stumbled and went down hard. My bleeding foot was caught under a loop of tree root.
A kidnapper swung back for a vicious downward blow. My hand landed on a metal rod as I scrabbled. I wrapped my fingers around it and swung up. The shock of metal against metal sang up my arm. I surprised a moment’s hesitation out of the man, but I was still sprawled on the ground.
My Atlantean Aspect—the physical manifestation of my magic and bloodline—answered my desperation.
Sunlight-colored fire raced along my arms. Flickers of it danced under my eyelashes. I pumped it full of willpower, and the light blazed so bright that it spotted the kidnapper’s vision. When he staggered, I put a firebolt through his mouth. The man screamed flames, and fell.
I stood up and dropped the metal rod. As it hit the ground, I saw it was a crowbar.
“Enough!” I said, and it was as if I exhaled fire. “Yield!”
“That we cannot do, sir,” the leader said hoarsely, and unsnapped a sphere from the back of his belt. He pulled a pin and tossed it. For a moment I thought it was a bad throw—until it dropped into the fountain and exploded in a huge, angry geyser.
A creature shot from the depths like a startled cat. It—she—landed on all fours. Her weed-like dreadlocks, serrated like alligator tails, dripped onto the flagstone patio. She was Jenny Greentooth, a dangerous water hag.
Jenny Greentooth spun in a furious circle. The first thing she saw was the guarda I’d spoken to, who was running up to help me. He’d drawn a gladius, but didn’t even have time to raise his arm before Jenny Green-tooth was on top of him, digging hunks of flesh out of his cheek with her mossy claws. Fungus spread from the touch, killing healthy tissue in horrific fast-forward. By the time the man dropped, he didn’t have enough face left to scream.
The last two kidnappers took off at a run. Before I could go after them, Jenny sprang. The leader was able to get clear, but his partner staggered to the ground under Jenny’s thrashing fury.
Brand was somewhere fighting. The leader was getting away. And a very pissed-off water elemental wasn’t going to stop with two deaths. Too many things to handle at once.
Then I heard the high-pitched screams of nearby children, and knew I didn’t have a bloody choice.
“Stop!” I roared at the elemental. “Look! Look! That man—that was one of the ones who hurt you. No one else!”
Jenny hissed from her squat over the now-dead man, and turned to me. She smelled like crushed dandelion stems. The grenade had left a long cut along her side that bled green.
“There will be consequences, if you hurt anyone else,” I warned her. “Be smart. Go back to your den.”
“Two-legged-air-sucking-infestations!” she screamed.
“Go back to your den,” I repeated.
She shrieked at the ground while curling her claws into fists.
I knew she’d made up her mind a half-second before she vaulted toward me.
My Aspect flared, broiling the air. I rolled away from her leap, and fire trailed me in thick tracers. Jenny Greentooth’s hair melted with a fatty popping sound. She rolled into a ball, regained balance, and charged me. I lifted my sabre hilt and shot three firebolts into her gut. She dropped in her tracks. It was not a killing blow, but it was fire, and water elementals had a weakness to flame.
Hunched over her injury, she stumbled toward the edge of the fountain and dove into its shallows. She didn’t resurface.
Through my bond, I felt Brand. It was a staccato thrum of victory, the way he always felt when he took down his enemies. Brand didn’t tend to leave survivors, either. He didn’t like that movie shit when they jumped back up after you thought they were dead. Which meant we’d probably killed anyone who could tell us what the hell was happening.
Except for the two last kidnappers who’d run away from me.
I took off after them, glad that whatever metaphysics powered my fiery Atlantean Aspect kept my underwear from burning away too.
The men had parkoured over shrubs and stone benches, and made a beeline for a crowded area of the park. The abduction protocols were still active, so they’d be looking to lose themselves in a mob.
I ran, and tried not to feel how much my feet hurt. I could just still see the kidnappers ahead. Too far. They’d gained too much of a lead.
And then the violet ward by the main gates parted like a curtain. A phalanx of guarda officers rushed through. Striding in their lead, a sword in hand, was a tall, handsome man with sandy blond hair.
Addam touched a sigil on his belt and pointed at the two men. Stalagmites burst from the earth underneath them. One of the kidnappers was tossed in one direction while his severed leg flew in another. The other kidnapper—the leader—backtracked to his left and ran into the mouth of a hedge maze.
I was closer now. Addam would have my back in a minute, but a minute might give the kidnapper enough time to go to ground.
I ran into the hedge maze.
The startled pedestrian chatter was immediately muffled by leafy branches, which rose a good foot above my head. The path was swept clear—nothing to track—so when I hit the first fork, I had no idea which way to go.
I’ve never had a luxury of sigils, not like most scions. In a way, though, that made me better, because desperation taught me to use my own magic in very economical ways.
With a burst of willpower, I pulled Shield off my body and slammed it onto the ground in front of me. I stepped on a circle of vibrating air, and forced the Shield into a rising pedestal. I jerked upwards in stages, arms thrown out for balance, until I was above the top of the hedges.
The kidnapper was only one row away, doubling back on a parallel path.
I jumped off the pedestal, clearing the row. I managed to grab the collar of his black jersey and knock him off his feet. We hit the ground and rolled, only an arm’s length apart. I swung up my sabre hilt, just as he swung his broken sword. The blade caught the hilt guard. Neither of us had good footing. Both sword and sabre flew into the foliage.
The man went for a blade in his chest holster. I touched a platinum disc looped by a leather thong around my wrist, the only spell I had left. Sunburn-warm magic covered my hand.
Like I said, desperation had always been my angry teacher. Even healing magic could be a weapon, with the right mind-set.
I slapped my hand over his right eye and focused the Healing into a pinpoint. The normal burning sensation that accompanied aid dug into his skull like a laser. He’d have the eyesight of a teenager when he was able to stop screaming in pain.
I grabbed my sabre hilt while he rolled around the ground in agony. I put the hilt against his forehead and said, “Stay still, or die.”
The man stopped thrashing, biting down so hard that his screams distorted his throat.
�
��Is the Hanged Man moving on me?” I asked. The man kept his jaw clenched, spit making his lips slip against each other. I dug my sabre hilt into his forehead. “Is he?”
Turns out, it wasn’t spit. It was foam. Green foam.
The man kept convulsing for seconds after he was dead. I sat back on my haunches in disbelief and stared at him.
“Rune!” Addam shouted. He ran past the row I was in, slammed to a stop, ran back. Three members of the guarda were on his heels. They came to an unsure stop and looked at the dead body.
“Poison tooth,” I said angrily. “What sort of 1950s James Bond crap is that?”
Addam—who was sort-of my boyfriend—helped me up. His eyes flickered across my injuries. Bleeding feet. Blistered and bleeding hand. Bleeding shoulder from the cashew cart.
He said, in the faint bite of a Russian accent, “Your boxers have little smiley faces, Hero.”
I was too upset for a comeback. And I was worried about Brand, even though I knew he’d survived his fight. I looked behind Addam, at the guarda. “My Companion, Lord Brandon Saint John, went to fight my ward’s kidnappers. I need to know if they’re both okay.”
“Another unit already radioed in, Lord Sun. They’re fine, and moving this way.”
I gave the officer a small nod, and let Addam help me out of the hedge maze.
While we walked, I said, “Quinn?”
He nodded. “We were eating nearby. I was with him when he called you. What has happened, Rune? Who tried to take Max?”
“I don’t know. I don’t . . .” Two of the guarda were following, while the third had stayed with the body of the kidnappers’ leader. It would be fantastically unwise to even breathe the Hanged Man’s name in mixed company.
Three months ago, I’d learned that the Hanged Man, Arcana of the Gallows, had a prior claim on my ward. But with the fall of Max’s court, the Lovers, I’d hoped the Hanged Man would lose interest in the association.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “And hey. Thanks for coming to my rescue. I could get used to this.”
“You appeared to have the matter well in hand.”
We left the hedge maze. Addam’s brother, Quinn, stood by an oxidized copper fountain—not the one with a pissy elemental—throwing pennies into the water. When he saw us, he frowned. There was a mustard stain at the corner of his lips.
“Where’s the crowbar?” he asked. “Didn’t you beat him to death with the crowbar? You almost always do.”
I said, “It bothers me you always think I’m going to pick the most violent possibility.”
I looked in the direction Brand had gone. A small crowd of guarda was coming toward us, and in their middle I saw Max’s pale head, and Brand’s black hair. I turned to the guarda with the handheld radio. “Are you taking the bodies to the morgue? I want to know if anyone claims them. I want to know if you find any markings, anything that may identify them.”
I had power. I had plenty of power. But that didn’t mean I had position, which was always a problem when matters got political. I caught the guards trading looks between me and Addam—who came from a court with much more administrative power than I did. I said, pointedly, “I’m happy to have Lord Tower make the request, if you want.”
The man blanched. “No, Lord Sun. I mean, yes, Lord Sun, I’ll pass along word of your request.”
I started toward Brand.
He wasn’t limping, but there was blood on his thigh. I’d have to rely on Addam for a Healing spell, since I’d used mine. I knew Addam had Healing spells without asking. He’d told me recently that the daily storing of Healing spells was only one of the small ways I’d changed his life.
Brand strode ahead of his party and glared at my injuries. “You fucking led me to believe you could handle a half dozen men.”
“I lulled them into a false sense of security with my bleeding. Your leg?”
“Fine.”
“Any chance you left some men alive for questioning?”
“Why? So they could pop back up and stab me when I’m victoriously pumping my fist in the fucking air?”
I smiled, but only for a second. “Max?”
“He’s shocky. We need to get him home. We need to figure out what the hell just happened. What’s going to happen.”
I looked behind Brand, toward Max, whose beautiful fae features were filled with the hollow remains of spent emotion. I went up to him and put my hands on his shoulder. When he wouldn’t meet my eyes, I pressed my thumbs along his jaw and gave his chin a little shake.
He blinked and said, “I dropped your coffee.”
Then he started to cry. I pulled him into me.
Behind me, Brand said, “Maybe we should call the Tower.”
And I heard Quinn say, miserably, “No. Not yet. He never likes what you do next.”
JIRVAN
Months ago, I’d been involved in a raid that took down Lady Lovers, a corrupt Arcana. Through a series of events that didn’t reflect poorly on me at all, I’d found myself chained in a secret room while Lady Lovers decided whether I was worth the effort of reprisal. In the end, we’d made a deal. For one of her sigils, I would safely deliver a package to a destination of her choosing. She promised it would not interfere with my benefactor’s agenda in any way, nor would it intrinsically cause harm to me or mine. I accepted that sucker bet, because my personal armory of sigils was catastrophically limited, and owning another one was a lifechanging opportunity.
The “package” turned out to be her seventeen-year-old grandson, Matthias Saint Valentine. And Max’s “destination” was his age of majority— four years in the future.
Vows among Atlanteans carried power and consequence. I hadn’t known—still didn’t know—if breaking that vow would rebound on me. But over the last few months, Max had become a part of the household. He and Brand sniped at each other with the affection of brothers; and anything that put more love in Brand’s heart was something I’d fight to preserve.
The loose thread to the arrangement was the Hanged Man. We’d learned that Max had been promised to him as marital leverage between the Heart Throne and Gallows. I suspected—based on absolutely no evidence or fact—that Lady Lovers’ deal, arranged in the last moments of her court, was an attempt to spare her grandson this future. I’d like to think some shred of decency had illuminated her mistakes in the end.
The Hanged Man’s court operated on the fringes of Atlantean society. Once upon a time, the Gallows had served a purpose. Much in the same way that Lady Lovers’ Heart Throne had served a purpose, before she corrupted it with rape and human slavery. The Gallows had been the patron of victims, and a recourse for the wrongfully accused. It had treated death with honor and reverence. It had believed in justice.
In the modern age, it had become its reverse. The Hanged Man was a killer. He’d left his humanity behind centuries ago, and, in the days before Atlantis was revealed and a peace treaty signed, was linked to some of the worst human myths.
He was surrounded by no great houses. His rule on his court was absolute and unchallenged. He was a monster to monsters, even in a city like New Atlantis.
But I’d survived monsters before.
We accepted a ride in one of the guarda cars.
Addam sat next to me in one of the two backseats. His hands kept itching toward his platinum disc sigils, the way he always got when he wanted to maul me with a Healing spell. “Your hand looks very bad,” he said, concern sharpening the consonants of his Russian accent. “And your feet are black.”
“Cantrip blowback,” I said. Another side effect of quick, cheap magic; I was losing the outer layer of skin. “It’ll hold.”
“Heal him,” Brand said from the front seat.
Addam touched his sigil. The warmth of the spell filled the air, then he set about sunburning my injuries back into health.
We soon pulled up in front of Half House. In silence, we got out, and filed into the narrow townhouse. Queenie was waiting in the living room, twisting a dish
towel in her hands. She took one look at Max, and grabbed a blanket off the sofa.
“You look cold?” she said, in her halting way of talking.
Max sat down in an armchair and buried his head in his hands.
“Tell me what’s happened, Rune,” Addam said, now that the door was closed behind us. “Quinn only mentioned a—Quinn? A scarred man?”
“It was the scarred man,” Quinn said. He was wiping away the mustard stain with the end of his tongue.
“Who does the scarred man work for, Quinn?” Brand asked.
“The Hanged Man. But you guessed that, right? He and the Hanged Man overlap in almost everything, except for their legs.” He gave Brand’s eye roll a stubborn look. “It’s clearer than you think.”
“It really isn’t,” Brand said.
I didn’t say anything. I just stared at Max, trying to figure out an easy way to snap him out of his fugue. An easier way than what I intended to do next, at least.
As Addam activated a second healing sigil to deal with the cut on Brand’s leg as well as his own black feet, I started upstairs. Instead of going to my own room on the fourth floor, I stopped on the second. On one end was a bathroom. On the other was Max’s room.
I went into Max’s room and began, methodically, to tear it apart.
I tried not to fling everything into chaos, but I needed to be thorough. By the time the second drawer bounced on the mattress, Brand was standing in the doorway. Max was behind him, face alternating between red and white.
“What are you doing?” Brand demanded.
“Looking for the letters,” I said.
“What?” he said at the same time Max whispered, “Rune.”
“The Hanged Man is old guard,” I said. “There are rules. Where are they, Max?”
“I,” he whispered. Brand turned to drill him with a look. “I didn’t want to put you in any . . . I . . . You’ve done so much already.”
The Hanged Man Page 4
