That was bad but bearable. He was a soldier, after all, born and bred for battle. His life was not expected to be long, and, forbidden from taking a wife, it was also expected to be loveless. Even any children he sired from the anonymous encounters with the Electi or Servorum or random human women would never know him as a father; he was a sperm donor, nothing more.
He knew it. He’d hardened himself to stark reality long ago.
What was not bearable: If somehow, against all odds, his feelings were returned…his beloved would die, too. Only it would not be swift. It would be gruesome. It would be used as a lesson to all, an assertion of power so blatant its meaning could not be misunderstood. A spectacle that would make even the most fearsome of warriors tremble in dread as they watched.
Disobedience equaled death. Taking a woman above his own caste equaled death. Taking the king’s daughter—slow, torturous, epic death. There was no other way for a soldier of his station and hadn’t been in millennia.
So love—aside from being pointless—was agony. Love was a soul-eating demon. Love was the most terrible feeling in the world.
A close runner-up: despair.
He was filled with that now. Dead cold where love was red hot, despair clogged his throat and choked him as if he’d swallowed handfuls of crematory ash.
She’d come to him and they’d fought and made love and even slept together—simple things, normal things he’d wanted for years—and yet he’d awoken alone, and the simple fact of the silent room and the empty bed beside him filled him with such despair he wondered for a breathless, bottomless moment if this is what hell might be like. Not flames and screams and lakes of fire, but anguish and hopelessness and misery wound together like a wretched braid, cinched tight around his neck in an invisible noose from which he would hang for all eternity, alone.
D had no Foresight to anticipate this. His sleep had been deep and silent.
Slowly, painfully, he rose from the bed he and Eliana had shared together, his heart like a wild thing in his chest, refusing to settle. He’d told her the truth last night; he had no idea where her colony was, he’d just followed those laughing men through a silent graveyard and then into the winding bowels of the earth. He could go back there, he supposed, but what hope did he have to find her in the same place? If she wanted to be lost to him, she would be. She wouldn’t go back to the same place. She might already be on another continent.
Or captured by The Hunt.
The thought sent an electric jolt of fear through his body, which was swallowed quickly by fury. Damn her. Damn her stubborn pigheadedness, damn her refusal to believe him when he said it wasn’t him who shot her father. Okay, he’d concede it didn’t look good, him standing over Dominus’s corpse with a gun, but she should know that his word was his oath—
He stiffened. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He looked around the darkened room, listening hard into the silence.
Was that a scream?
He held still, breathless for a long moment, every nerve alert, every pore attuned to any noise, until—
No. It wasn’t a scream. It was a pulse, an invisible push, palpable as a hand reaching out to shove him, which sent a shockwave of recognition through his body. It came again, fainter than before, but unmistakable.
D never dressed so fast in his life. Shirt, pants, boots, and blades, all of it donned without thinking, both ears attuned to the feeling that might come again at any moment, the vibration that would show him the way to find her.
Because it was her. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was Eliana, and she was in trouble, and she needed him.
And because she was his life, his heart—his soul—he would find her. He would.
It thrummed through him like the bloodlust he sometimes felt after a kill, bright and blinding. In the sharing of their bodies, their breath, in the consummation of a love so long unrequited, his soul had fused to hers the way a grain of sand accretes to the nacre of a shell, and something else had been born between them. Passion had always existed, but tonight a pearl of something deeper had formed, permanent and unbreakable.
Possession.
She belonged to him now. He’d find her.
Not even death could keep him away.
“Demetrius,” said Silas with a sneer, his handsome face contorted with anger. “Always this obsession with Demetrius. It’s beneath you, my dear. He’s nothing but the help.”
Eliana felt frozen to the floor. She didn’t have to look over at Mel to see she was frozen as well, her face reading white against the dark stone wall behind her, eyes wide and staring at the gun in Silas’s hand.
“So are you,” Eliana said calmly in spite of the blood roaring through her veins.
He clucked, disapproving, but it didn’t faze him. Silas smiled, a malicious specimen that pulled his lips flat over his teeth, and took a slow step into the room. “Probably not smart to antagonize the man holding the gun. However, you are incorrect. I was a servant—and a loyal one, at that—but now I’m something a bit more elevated, wouldn’t you agree? Your father’s death created a vacuum, my dear, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum.”
“My brother—”
“Your brother is a sock puppet.” It was hard, abrupt, and possibly louder than he intended, because his glance flickered to the doorway behind him before it settled back on her. “Not only is he unGifted, he’s a fool, unworthy of his position. Not even worthy of his name. Caesar, indeed. What a bit of wishful thinking that was! Didn’t it ever bother you, Eliana, that you were the one in the family with the brains but you were never allowed to be…anything…because you were a woman?”
He took another step forward, and she and Mel took corresponding steps back. He seemed to be enjoying this, their shock and patently obvious fear. His smile grew wider and more excited by the second.
“I would have changed all that, you know. I would have let you lead beside me. We could have made a glorious team, you and I.” His voice grew soft, while his eyes, ever dark and glittering, grew heated. “Unfortunately, I don’t team up with whores.”
He’d heard everything, then. It didn’t sting, him calling her a whore; it hardly even registered because she was too intent on formulating a plan for getting out of this that didn’t include getting shot.
She backed away another step as he moved closer. “What are you going to do?”
“I?” he replied with feigned innocence. “I’m not going to do anything. You, however, are going to kill your best friend.”
What?
She wasn’t sure if she spoke it aloud or not, but Silas answered as if she had, smiling his chilling, rabid smile all the while.
“Terrible how you just couldn’t adjust to our new life here. You never really got over the sudden death of your father, did you, my dear? Everyone could see how much it affected you. How depressed you’d grown. It won’t be much of a surprise when you finally go over the edge and kill your best friend, and then yourself. So tragic, really. Such a waste of life when we were on the verge of such momentous things.”
It hit her with sudden clarity, and she knew he’d be able to pull it off because he had a way of making people believe him. Mel’s dead body, her own beside it, his gun in her hand…she saw it with the detail of a photograph. How her kin would react with shock, how Silas would comfort them, how he’d use their grief to his own advantage and make them rely on him even more. He would kill the two of them, and no one would be the wiser to his treachery.
His callousness, his cunning, sent a surge of rage unlike anything she’d ever known singing through her body. There was a thrum of light and noise inside her, a sound like a thousand wing beats, a gathering that incinerated her fear and honed everything to a pure, crystalline sharpness.
Then Silas changed his aim and pointed the gun at Mel.
Literally translated, budō means “way of the warrior”. It is more than a fighting system, though it is certainly that. An ancient samurai practice from Japan, budō is a
way of life, a philosophy. It is an art.
The art of killing.
As with all art, there is beauty in it.
Eliana had practiced ritual katas at dawn for years. It was a way of assimilating herself to a new life, and a way of acquainting herself with the sun. For a girl born and raised underground who’d never glimpsed the sky until she was twenty-three years old, the sun had been a terrifying thing to her, a monster of heat and light suspended against a canvas of blue so vast it had no edges but bled off into infinity. She cried the first time she saw the night sky, but the first time she saw the sun, she cowered in terror.
She was a child of darkness. For her, daylight was where the bogeymen lurked, not in the cool, comforting arms of the night.
So she practiced in the garden of the ruined abbey at dawn, the rhythmic, calming flow of steps and turns and sweeping moves with her sword, until the rising sun was no longer a source of fear and her mind had sharpened, her spirit deepened, her muscles hardened from the girlish softness they once held. She practiced with a budō master who challenged her concentration and her form, and she became his best student. She never achieved katachi, however, that state when the repetitive mold-making of katas becomes perfection of shape and all training is aligned so you arrive at the calm center of yourself, weightless and magical, where movement is effortless, everything is slowed and crystallized, and you see with perfect vision what is all around you.
In this heightened state, even the intentions of others become visible. Their light moves ahead of them just before they do, and you can see what they are about to do.
In the hairbreadth of a second just before Silas turned his gun toward Mel, Eliana, at long last, achieved katachi.
It was instantaneous and unthinking. From one heartbeat to the next, she became.
A surge of energy crackled over her skin, and a wave of power, huge and pulsing, lit through her like dry kindling bursting into flame. Her sword was at her side, sheathed in its leather scabbard and hidden beneath her long coat, and then it was in her hand, sweeping up in a long, perfect arc with no more effort or concentration than it takes to inhale. There was no conscious decision; there was only action and reaction. The clarity of her vision supplied her muscles and nerves with everything they needed to move lightning-fast, invisible.
She lunged forward, and her feet never even touched the ground.
In a single, clean stroke, she lopped off Silas’s hand at the wrist.
Still clutching the gun, it went flying into the air in a spray of crimson and landed with the flat thud of meat against the wall. It fell to the floor, and the gun popped out from between the lifeless fingers and clattered against the bare stone.
He staggered back, stunned, mouth gaping, as blood from his severed hand began to run from the wound in a trickle, then a pulse, then a flood. He clutched his wrist with his other hand and backed away, then turned and ran, trailing blood in a long, dark smear behind him.
Then as quickly as she became, Eliana unbecame, and all the light and magic drained out of her as if a switch had been flipped.
She sagged against the doorway Silas had just been standing in and let out her breath in a gust. There followed a silence so profound it seemed as if the Earth itself might have stopped spinning on its axis and everything on it—every person and bird and insect, lacking gravity—had been flung out into the far reaches of space.
Then an odd sound, liquid and gurgling, broke the unnatural stillness.
Choking.
She whirled around and—no. No!
Mel was lying on her back on the stone floor, coughing up blood.
The bottom fell out of the world. Eliana dropped her sword and dropped to her knees beside Mel, her hands fluttering over the spreading stain in the middle of her shirt. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be, she hadn’t heard the gunshot, she hadn’t seen the flash of light, it couldn’t be—
But then she smelled the sharp, lingering scent of gunpowder in the air, registered the swiftly widening pool of red around Mel’s shoulders, and she knew that it could.
“Ana.” Mel’s eyes were wild, rolling, one hand clutched at the front of her coat. “Ana.” It was almost lost beneath the horrid burble of the crimson tide that spilled from her mouth and bubbled from her nose. Her lung must have been punctured. She was drowning in her own blood.
“Help!” Eliana screamed, turning to the door. “Someone help us!”
There was the sound of fleet footsteps and murmuring voices, and then faces appeared in the doorway, blinking away sleep. One of them rushed forward—Bettina, gray-haired and nimble-fingered, she’d been the midwife back at home. She’d helped to bring Eliana into the world long ago, had been her mother’s devoted friend and something like a mother figure after she died. She’d refused to stay behind when they’d fled the catacombs, insisting her place was at Eliana’s side.
“Sweet goddess Nephthys,” she whispered, bending over to inspect Mel, “don’t take her yet.” She tore open Mel’s shirt to reveal a gaping wound in the center of her breastbone, pulsing blood. She cursed in Latin, tore a strip of the sheets from the bed, and pressed it to Mel’s chest.
Mel’s head lolled to the side. She coughed, and a spray of blood splattered Eliana.
“What happened?” It was Aldo, one of Caesar’s most devoted followers, a young male with wide shoulders and a brash, in-your-face attitude that had rubbed her the wrong way for years. He followed Caesar like a dog follows a trainer with bacon in his pocket.
“Silas shot her!”
Aldo recoiled in disbelief. “Why? What’s going on? What did she do?”
Eliana wanted to kill him for that. “We have to get her to a hospital!” she shouted, her control beginning to crack. Everything was beginning to slip sideways, and the shape of the room was beginning, just slightly, to blur. She bit down hard on her tongue to focus herself and tasted blood, but she blinked back into control.
If she had a panic attack now, she’d be utterly useless. And Mel might die. And Mel could not die.
“No hospitals, Eliana, you know that,” replied Bettina, very softly. She met the woman’s gentle black eyes. “We can’t take the risk.”
She read it in Bettina’s eyes. It wasn’t only the risk, it was the way of their kind since time immemorial. Survival of the fittest meant exactly that; all who were no longer fit due to age, injury, or infirmity were left to die. It was a hard, cold truth they all lived with, a law of nature that until now had seemed brutal but just. Necessary, even. Strength was their one advantage over all the other species. Only the Bellatorum, who were too valuable to her father to be discarded if injured, were given medical attention, trained to do it themselves. Everyone else was SOL.
Shit out of luck.
Her face hardened. No. Not this time. She would do whatever it took to keep Mel alive.
Mel writhed on the floor between them, wracked with a spasm of pain. Her mouth was working, and Eliana leaned down to hear her. “Mel,” she whispered, “Mel, you’re going to be okay, we’re going to figure something out—”
“Demetrius.” Mel choked it out, the veins on her neck straining. “Take me to Demetrius. He’ll know what to do.”
At the mention of his name, Bettina drew back, horrified, and there were more murmurs of shock from the doorway where more of the others had gathered. She noticed that Aldo had disappeared.
“What is she saying? Demetrius?” hissed Bettina. “Why does she mention the King Slayer?”
That’s what he was to all of them now, the King Slayer, the one who’d plotted to kill Dominus and take over the kingdom for himself. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, and Silas had done a wonderful job of convincing them all that Demetrius wouldn’t hesitate to slay them all if he ever found them, or if they ever returned to the catacombs.
He’d convinced her best of all.
“Help me lift her,” she said to Bettina, ignoring the question, and then she turned to the gathered group, gray-fa
ced and wide-eyed in the faint light that was just beginning to show through the cracked window. “Geo.” She looked at a tall, young male standing near the door who had a talent for hot-wiring anything electrical. “Find a car. Fast. Bring it to the south entrance. We’ll meet you there.”
Geovanni nodded and disappeared.
From the others that were left, there were murmurs of confusion, Silas’s name repeated in shocked whispers, the shuffling uncertainty that accompanies a scene of such jarring unreality. No one knew exactly how to react or what to believe.
“Silas is a traitor.” Eliana, voice throbbing, looked at each of the gathered group in turn. “He’s a liar and a murderer and cannot be trusted. He shot Mel and would have shot me, too, if I hadn’t stopped him.”
Eliana jerked her head toward the corner, to the bloodied stump of Silas’s hand lying still near the gun it had been grasping, and some of the shocked whispers turned to cries of disgust. “Everyone go to the Tabernacle and wait for me until I get back. Has anyone seen my brother?”
“He went out, my lady,” came a small voice from the back of the gathered group.
They turned aside and Lina stepped forward, the youngest of them all, a girl with glossy black bangs and a shy smile who’d fled with them from the catacombs because her highborn father had informed her that very night she’d be wed to the son of another highborn family the day she turned fifteen. That boy had been known to enjoy torturing stray dogs he captured by taping their muzzles shut until they suffocated to death.
“I saw him leave, and he hasn’t come back; I’ve been up since he left.”
“All right. Never mind. Get to the Tabernacle as quickly as you can and wait for me there, all of you. I’m going to get Melliane some help, and then I’ll come back for you. We can’t stay here anymore.”
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