Oathbound

by S W Clarke

  “Very bad,” I said.

  He lifted the empty hypodermic needle. “As you should. That man stuck you with a drug potent enough to put a human down for days.”

  “How would you know what drug it was?” I asked.

  “Philia’s a registered nurse,” my Cupid explained. “That was before we got our sugar mother.”

  “Sugar mother?” Justin repeated. “Don’t you mean sugar momma?”

  “This is a very common anesthetic in hospitals,” Agape went on. “Apparently not as effective on encantado as on humans, though.”

  “Apparently,” I said. “Cupids, why did you insist that Daiski not be killed? And who’s guarding him right now?”

  “Philia,” they said in unison. My Cupid, who hadn’t stopped hugging me, now lifted his face. “This man matters.”

  Justin flared on them. “What do you mean, he matters?”

  My Cupid’s eyes flicked to Justin, then back to me. He looked uncommonly afraid. He almost never showed fear.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He leaned close, whispered to me so that Justin couldn’t hear, “He matters to your love story.”

  Cold dread filled me.

  Daiski mattered to my love story?

  Daiski?

  I didn’t know if I could ever look that man in the eyes again. I thought I might hate him, after everything he’d done to the Cupids, to my boyfriend, to Hercules.

  And yet, I couldn’t deny that something real had passed between us in those brief, unfiltered moments we’d met eyes. Maybe lust, but another sort of attraction, too. Gravitic, like a moon to a planet.

  “Whose arrow got him?” I said.

  “We don’t know,” the Cupids said together. “Whatever sort of desire he feels, we won’t know until you see him. He keeps asking for you,” my Cupid added.

  “Isa, there’s no chance the World Army doesn’t know we’re on this train,” Justin said. “We have to get off.”

  “Where are we right now?”

  “Somewhere near the Rockies. The next stop is in six hours.”

  “And then what?” I sat up and my head pounded as I did. “We just … walk to Phoenix? If they know we’re on this train, they’ll be waiting for us at the next stop and in Phoenix.”

  “I don’t think they know,” Agape whispered.

  Justin and I looked at him. “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I heard that man saying things,” he said. “You should talk to him, Isabella.”

  The last thing I wanted was to talk to Daiski. To be in a room with him again—the man who had attacked us, who had stabbed me with a needle, who was going to carry me off to them. He was the reason I felt half-dead right now.

  But as of late, the last thing I wanted to do more often than not ended up being the thing I had to do.

  “All right. I’ll talk to him,” I said, trying to climb out of bed. As I did, my stomach turned over and I threw a hand over my mouth.

  “Puke incoming!” the Cupids yelled, and Justin grabbed a wastebasket just before I blew chunks.

  GoneGodDamn tranquilizer.

  Chapter 9

  When Justin pulled the door open, a growing triangle of light revealed Daiski in the darkness. He was strapped to a railing on the wall, both arms behind him as he leaned forward toward his legs.

  His face lifted, blinking into the brightness, just as Justin’s fist came down on it—knucklebones on cheekbone, a sickening sound. I could practically hear Daiski’s brain rattle around in his skull as his body ricocheted around, arms yanking on the restraints.

  “Stop!” I said. I didn’t blame Justin, and I also did. Whatever Daiski was, however bad, my boyfriend had just sucker-punched a bound man in the darkness.

  Justin straightened. “He had it coming.” He stared down at Daiski. “And you’ve still got it coming. Do you hear me?”

  Daiski said nothing.

  I set a hand on Justin’s shoulder. “I’m going to talk to him.”

  “Then talk to him.” He made a be my guest gesture.

  We stepped inside, Justin flicking on the light and closing the door behind us. In the corner, my tiny laboratory, courtesy of the resistance, sat unused. And on the floor around Daiski lay a spattering of blood from the new cut over his eye. Justin’s doing.

  I crouched in front of him. “Daiski.”

  “Not with him here,” Daiski breathed. His voice sounded like it issued between the dry cracks in an arid plain. “Only you.”

  “No way,” Justin said. “You saw how he fought, Isa.”

  I looked up at Justin. “You’re right. I want you to stay in here with me.”

  Justin’s eyebrows went up like he’d expected me to fight him. He folded his arms. “I don’t know what Others they’ve combined him with, but they’ve definitely spliced him with Other DNA. I don’t know what he’s capable of, except that he can escape a leather belt around his wrists.”

  “He’s right: if I wanted to, I would have,” Daiski said. “Except I don’t want to.”

  I stared at Daiski. “Why don’t you want to?”

  He lifted his blue eyes to me, and despite the blood trailing down one cheek, serenity washed over him. “Because you’re here. And I really like you.”

  Well, that was just a little creepy.

  I heard Justin move, and I shot up. “He’s under the effects of one of the Cupid’s arrows.”

  Justin stared back at me, unwilling to move.

  I slid my hand into his, raised myself to whisper, “I’ve felt the effects of Cupid’s arrow. I really think he’s just a happy drunk right now.”

  With a tiny flinch, he nodded. He didn’t say anything else; his eyes only shifted to Daiski, narrowed, and then he went to the chair on the other side of the room and sat with his arms folded.

  Which left me standing in front of the man who had tried to kill everyone who mattered to me on this train. All for the World Army.

  “They’re not coming,” Daiski said, as if he’d heard my thoughts. “But they will be.”

  I turned toward him. “What are you talking about?”

  The belt shifted on the railing as he moved his crossed hands into my view. There, on his left wrist, the watch I’d noticed earlier. “If I hit the red button, they’ll know I’ve found you. If I hit the silver button, they’ll think I haven’t.”

  “I’ll take that.” I knelt by him and removed the watch, inspecting it before I passed it to Justin. We would need to strip all his clothes off and inspect everything. “Why haven’t you hit the red button already, Daiski?”

  “You mean before? Like say, back in Penn Station?”

  “Yes.”

  He let an enormous sigh. “GoneGods, those Cupids are potent. All my training is telling me to lie to you, but it’s like …”

  “Like you can’t?”

  “Right. It’s like being drunk, but worse.”

  “And better at the same time. I got hit with one of those arrows yesterday,” I explained.

  He breathed a small laugh. “I thought you were going to leap on me when I saw that arrow hit you.”

  “I thought I might, too,” I admitted.

  “But you love the other two—Justin, Hercules.”

  My chest tightened. Behind me, I heard Justin shift in his seat. How would Daiski know I felt anything for Hercules? I couldn’t admit as much, even though every time I entered his presence I felt wobbly. It struck me as a betrayal of Justin, who was the most monogamous man I’d ever been with.

  So I changed the subject. “Why didn’t you hit the red button?”

  Daiski looked up at me, scrutinizing me. “Do you know, I’ve been with the government since I was eighteen? I’m thirty now. That’s twelve years of training.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  His eyes glazed over, staring past me. “I joined as soon as I could, straight out of high school. It’s not easy in Alvin, Texas—you don’t get a lot of opportunities. But I was always fighting kids in sc
hool, and so I thought: this is mine. This is my opportunity.”

  I said nothing; I just listened. If Cupid’s arrows were compelling him to tell me something about his life, then maybe he would tell me something useful about his involvement with the World Army. I just needed to be patient.

  “After two years, special forces recruited me,” Daiski continued. “They asked me if I would die for their cause—to fight for humanity’s survival—and I was hooked up to a polygraph machine. I couldn’t lie. But I didn’t need to, because I said I would die. I hated Others.”

  I tried to keep my breathing steady as he let that last phrase settle between us.

  “Why did you hate Others?” I finally asked.

  “Do you know what it’s like, being the kid in school whose father died to a chupacabra?”

  I stared at him. “A chupacabra? Those are …”

  “Real,” he said with a snort. “Even you doubt their existence, and you’re an Other.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “I’ve met enough Others in my lifetime to know that when someone tells me they’ve seen a chupacabra, they have.”

  Daiski sighed. “That was the story my mother always told anyone who would listen, because she was there when it happened. She saw it drag my father off into the forest. And then I became the kid with the batty mom and the dead dad.”

  “That must have been hard,” I said.

  “For me? Sure. For her? It was absolute hell, because her only son thought she was crazy, too.”

  “You didn’t believe her,” I murmured. “What changed your mind?”

  He took a deep breath. “When the gods left.”

  “And you found out we were real.”

  His eyes refocused on me. “And I hated you.”

  I forced myself not to move, to scoot back. I made myself meet his gaze. “So why didn’t you hit the red button?”

  He sighed out an embarrassed laugh. “Because I met a woman who called herself the Oracle of Delphi.”

  ↔

  I dropped to a seat on the floor. My hands found the carpet, felt the rumbling train beneath us. It was a comfort, a reassuring consistency in the face of shock.

  The Oracle of Delphi. Pythia.

  “When?” I said. “Where?”

  “I was assigned to New York City. We all knew you were headed there when you crossed the border from Canada.”

  “Because of the tracker in Justin’s car,” I whispered.

  “One night, I decided to take some steam off. Some of the other guys talked me into going to a club.”

  A club. A strip club.

  “Called Nymphos,” I murmured.

  His eyebrows raised. “Called Nymphos.”

  I stared hard at him. “You met her there?”

  “I wasn’t looking to have my palms read. I’m not that kind of guy. I just wanted to relax, get a little drunk, forget about the war between us and you.” He sat back, relaxing against the wall. His eyes rose toward the ceiling. “About an hour in, she came walking up to our table. That woman only had eyes for me. She said, ‘You—come with me.’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  “The other guys laughed, and I laughed with them. We made jokes about her. She was old, you know?”

  “I know,” I breathed. I had watched her burn her life away at the end, shriveling to a set of meatless bones just to save me. All to save me, and the future she felt I could bring. Immortality for Others. “But she eventually persuaded you.”

  “I don’t know how. I think she was just so persistent, I finally agreed. It was a joke still. She led me into a bedroom, sat me down at her dresser. And then …”

  “And then?”

  “She touched my hands, and her eyes grew wide. She clapped her fingers to my cheek and she said that I was important. She told me to go to Penn Station on a certain day. That when I found the encantado—you—I needed to protect you.”

  By now I was having a hard time not getting emotional. “What did you say?”

  “I grabbed her wrist, pushed her hand away.” His voice sounded pained, and he paused before continuing. “I set twenty dollars on the dresser and walked out. Then I got so drunk I got in trouble with my superior the next morning.”

  “You treated her like that?”

  He shrugged. “I thought she was crazy.”

  “Just like you thought your mother was crazy.” The words came out of me before I could stop them.

  When his eyes found mine, I knew what I had said was beyond the line. But he only gazed at me with perfect affection. “You know,” he said, “I can sense that if I was in my right mind right now, I would have hurt you for that.”

  “Watch it,” Justin growled.

  I raised a hand for him to stay back. “What mind are you in?”

  “The one that tells me, with overwhelming surety, you’re the best friend I’ll ever have. It tells me I can reveal every secret and fear and desire to you, and you’ll accept me without judgment.”

  Philia. Philia’s arrow had gotten him.

  “Is that true?” Daiski asked.

  “Is what true?”

  “Can I tell you everything?”

  “I …” I didn’t know how to answer. A half an hour ago, I had felt something like hatred for Daiski. Now, under the effects of Philia’s arrow, he regarded me as his closest friend in the world. And, thanks to our conversation, I didn’t thoroughly detest him anymore. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

  “Yes,” I said. For as long as he was this Daiski, he could tell me everything. And he could potentially save our asses from the World Army.

  A smile touched his lips. “I knew I could.”

  “Start by telling me why you didn’t hit the red button.”

  “Because some part of me couldn’t forget what that woman at Nymphos had told me about protecting you. I wanted to see you—really see you—before I gave you to them.”

  “What do you mean, really see me?”

  “I observed you. At Penn Station, on the train.”

  My brow furrowed. “You only walked by us at the coffee shop in Penn Station.”

  He chuckled. “Isabella, I’m a spy. Do you really think that was all it was?”

  “All right,” I said, an odd snappishness surging in me at the thought of being observed without my consent. “And what did you see?”

  “I saw two men and three Cupids who would give their lives to protect you. Somehow you’d drawn them to you like a flame attracts moths.”

  “I didn’t ask for that,” I whispered. “It just …”

  “Happened? So it did. Light happens, and insects fly toward it.”

  “You tried to kill them. And back in New York City, your beloved army shot me with something that took away my ability to use magic.”

  “Ah, the magic suppression. Do you know they dredged up El Lobizon from the river in Montreal for that?” He pointed at the claw tucked into my boot. “They modified it a bit to suppress magic instead of stripping it away completely. But nonetheless, it’s all thanks to you.”

  “To me?”

  “You were being watched from the time you started at Dr. Russo’s laboratory. The same is true of every assistant she hired, so don’t take it personally. Dr. Russo isn’t exactly a trusting woman.”

  Understanding filtered through me. “They watched me return to the river every day.”

  “And they dredged that bad boy up,” Daiski added.

  I stared hard at Daiski. “But whatever they shot me with … it wasn’t El Lobizon’s power. At least, not exactly. That creature could strip magic away forever, like you never had it at all. Mine isn’t gone … I just can’t use it.”

  “You wouldn’t be any use to us if your magic was completely gone,” Daiski said. “Hence, Dr. Russo made a few modifications.”

  “How long does it last?” I asked. “The claw’s power wears off in a few hours. But I haven’t been able to use my magic in days.”

  “Dr. Russo didn’t base her formula on t
he claws.” Daiski parted his lips, set the tip of his tongue beneath one canine. He tapped his tongue on that tooth.

  I thought back to what I had read about El Lobizon, the magical creature from South American lore. What had the passage said about his bite? “It’s permanent,” I whispered, the cold realization slipping through me. “She made it permanent.”

  I would never be able to change illusions again.

  Daiski clicked his tongue. “Let’s call it indefinite—until you use the antidote.”

  Chapter 10

  Justin and I both sat forward. “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Dr. Russo made an antidote.” Daiski let out a little laugh. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this shit. The World Army has got to get some Cupid power.”

  “Focus, Daiski. Tell me how to make the antidote.” A sudden fear of losing my chance to get the answers I needed thundered through me. “What goes into it? I need you to tell me exactly.”

  “Do I look like a chemist?”

  Merda. I slammed my hand on the carpet, which made an unsatisfyingly muffled patting sound. “Not in the slightest.” I leaned forward, pulling open the sides of his jacket to reveal the inner breasts. “But you do look like a guy who comes prepared.”

  “I don’t even know if I would object to this if I was in my right mind,” Daiski breathed next to my ear. “Of course, I’m not usually the one tied up.”

  “Shove it.” I patted his jacket on both sides until I touched it. Long, hard and tubular—another syringe. I yanked it out of his pocket, stared at the liquid inside. It wasn’t the same color as the tranquilizer. “Tell me what’s in this.”

  He stared at it with vague curiosity. “That’s my super-special concoction.”

  “Can you be a bit more exact about the ingredients, please?”

  He gazed at me placidly, totally unaffected by my irritation. “It’s the stuff they injected into you in New York City.”

  I stood up. “Let me guess, they give it to all you World Army agents as Other protection.”

  Daiski chuckled. “Right-o. Except I didn’t even have to escalate past the tranquilizer. Your guys went down easy.”

  He watched as I crossed to the tiny lab in the corner of the room. “What are you going to do with it?”