Her extremely deadly Gifts.
“Bullies,” Lu finished quietly, staring Honor down. “And that’s exactly what you are, isn’t it? You’re nothing but a big fat bully.”
The harsh intakes of breath from the Assembly were loud in the silence of the cave. For a moment, Honor looked stunned, which left him stunned; was she . . . hurt?
“No,” Honor whispered, shaking her head. “That’s not . . . I’m not . . .”
“Yes, you are,” Lumina insisted, stepping closer to her sister while everyone else in the room began to edge away. Christian pulled Ember against his chest, Demetrius stepped in front of Eliana, Hawk yanked Jacqueline to his side. Xander merely shook his head and muttered, “Women.”
“You tried to choke me the minute we met. Why, because you didn’t want any competition? You liked being the strongest one? The most powerful? So that everyone else has to do whatever you say or face the consequences?”
Honor’s mouth dropped open. She looked crushed. Lost.
Between Magnus’s fear at what might be imminent and his anxiety for Lumina’s safety, lurked his astonishment that someone—finally—had gotten Honor to show any kind of emotion. He’d known her since she was born, and had never seen her be anything but . . . cold.
Okay, angry, too, but mostly just cold.
Lumina stepped closer to her sister, until they stood just a few feet apart. “That’s it, isn’t it? You like being feared.” She tilted her head, examining Honor with a shrewd eye. “You know who that reminds me of?”
Don’t say it, Magnus thought. Dear God, please do not say—
“Sebastian Thorne.”
As Honor stiffened, the air in the room went frigid. Ice formed in crackling long fingers along the walls. The group behind Magnus took another few steps back.
“Well,” said Honor in a furious whisper, “at least I’m not a coward!”
Lumina flushed, looking as if she’d been slapped. “What did you just call me?”
She’d said it slowly, enunciating every word, and Magnus knew that if he didn’t intervene quickly all their lives were in peril. He said, “Ladies, this really isn’t the time or the place for—”
“Butt out!” Honor and Lumina yelled in unison, and a low tremor rumbled through the floor.
Behind him, Ember squeaked in terror. Magnus held still, calculating the time and distance it would take him to get to Lumina. With his Gifts, he could get her to safety, unseen, at least giving her a chance to escape aboveground and get a head start before Honor came looking for her. His own head would be on the chopping block for it, but there was no way he was about to let Honor hurt Lumina.
So you’ve chosen sides after all. Apparently one of your Gifts is Epic Stupidity.
“I said you’re a coward,” snarled Honor, her mouth skewed in the identical don’t-cry grimace he’d seen on Lumina so recently. “You’d rather hide out and pretend to be something you’re not than be with your own kind!”
“That’s a lie! I never knew where you were! I never knew who I was!”
“Because you wouldn’t let me! You blocked me every single time I tried to reach you!”
“I was just trying to live my life! I was doing the best I could! I was just trying to fit in, to be normal, and not get killed in the process!”
They’d drawn closer to each other as if magnetized. The low rumble in the ground amplified. Around the table, the chairs rattled. A fine dusting of grit drifted down from the ceiling above, and a candelabra near the entrance toppled over, falling with a clatter to the stone.
Christian warned, “Magnus.”
“Lumina. Honor. Please.” Magnus eased closer to them. They ignored him, staring at each other with blatant hostility, rigid and silent, fire and ice, opposite sides of the same coin. “You can sort out your differences later, after you’ve both had a chance to—”
“Not get killed?” Honor repeated with an ugly laugh. “Are you kidding me? That’s what you’ve been afraid of? That’s what kept you living like a scared little mouse, hiding under the baseboards? Your fear of getting killed?”
Her voice had risen to a shout. Magnus knew his time was up; he had to act now, or risk Lumina’s life. He inhaled, feeling his muscles relax into the loose readiness they always held before battle, feeling his mind sharpen, all his senses honed to the task at hand. When he exhaled, his breath frosted out in front of his face in a plume of pearlescent white.
Honor said, “Time for a reality check, little mouse.”
And because his senses were so heightened, he sensed rather than saw the sword that flew through the air toward Lumina, wrenched from its sheath on Xander’s back by an invisible force. It parted the air with the barest, sinister hiss.
He moved to leap in front of its path, but too late.
The sword punched through the space between Lumina’s shoulder blades with a loud, sickening crunch of bone, burying itself to the hilt.
Everyone else in the room gasped, or shouted, or cried out in horror, including him. But Lumina only stared at Honor with parted lips, her eyes bulged wide, her face disbelieving. The blade that protruded through her breastbone spurted blood in a fast-flowing gush onto the floor.
Lumina staggered forward a step. Calmly, Honor reached out and steadied her. Then in one swift move she pulled the sword from her sister’s back and tossed it aside. It skidded over the floor with the racket of metal striking stone, rocked once, and came to a standstill.
Magnus caught Lumina as she fell. He eased her to the cold floor, horror permeating every cell in his body. His mind refused to accept what he was seeing, refused to accept the impossibility that Honor had just murdered her own sister, the woman he’d spent half a lifetime searching for.
The woman he’d spent half a lifetime dreaming of.
He looked up at Honor. She stood staring dispassionately down, her white clothing splattered with a lurid spray of crimson, while Lumina lay warm and still in his arms. He growled—a savage, threatening sound that reverberated off the walls—but Honor’s only reaction was the slightest flicker in the depths of her eyes. Her anger seemed to be cooling in degrees, keeping time with the blood pulsing from the gash on her sister’s sternum. She knelt down, watching Lumina’s face, intently watching the light drain from her eyes.
Lumina’s lids fluttered shut. Her breath rattled to a stop, then she fell perfectly still.
Magnus had never hated anyone in his life as much as he hated Honor in that moment. His hatred was a thing inside his chest, a pressure, a volcanic heat—
“Don’t get your panties in a wad, Seeker,” Honor muttered, shooting him an icy glare. “I know what I’m doing. Demonstrations are always more effective than conversations. Have a little faith, will you?”
What?
Honor reached out, and lightly slapped Lumina’s cheek. When that produced no response, she tugged—not gently—on a lock of her sister’s hair. “Hey. Drama queen. Get over yourself. We’ve got work to do.”
There was a long, terrible silence. Lumina’s blood was splashed on his hands, his clothing, all over the stone beneath his knees. He was finding it hard to breathe, hard to think, but he knew beyond his fury and panic and crushing sense of loss—was that even rational, to mourn for a woman he didn’t know?—that he was missing something. Something Honor obviously knew, but he didn’t.
Something that caused a faint glimmer of hope to flare in his chest.
It was at that moment that Lumina coughed. Her body was wracked by a deep shudder. She sucked in a ragged breath, and opened her eyes.
Lumina stared up at Honor with a frown of confusion, and Magnus’s heart skidded to a dead stop inside his chest.
With the single most satisfied smile Magnus had ever seen, Honor said, “Happy birthday, Sunshine. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.”
Gasping, L
umina touched her chest. She yanked down the collar of her blood-soaked shirt, and stared; the gash that had been pumping blood only seconds before had entirely vanished.
She looked up at Magnus, and he waited to hear what she would say with his heart now pounding like a jackhammer in his chest.
Her lips quirked. On a faint, exhausted sigh, she said, “So, about that drink . . .”
PART TWO
TWELVE
The clipped footsteps that echoed down the corridor leading to the lone cell on the bottom floor of the prison were measured and precise, as regular as the mechanical tick of a time bomb counting down the seconds until doom into the silence.
Four. Three. Two. One.
Never hurried. Never slow. Never a single alteration in pace over all the years the slight, stooped man with silver hair and dead eyes had visited. Just that slow, rehearsed, bride-down-the-aisle-wedding-march approach, joyless and inevitable as death.
Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock.
The woman lying in wait for the man with the precise footsteps couldn’t stop the bitter smile that curved the outer corner of her lips. Thursday again, she thought. Nothing if not predictable.
His appearance was the only way she knew which day of the week it was. No clocks or calendars decorated the walls—nothing, in fact, decorated the walls—but once at the beginning of her incarceration, he’d let it slip on his way out that he’d be back to see her next Thursday. From then on she hadn’t needed a calendar to tell her what the day was; she had one in her head.
Today marked the thirteen hundredth Thursday she’d spent in this cell.
From the simple cot that folded down from the wall, she rose to a sitting position and thrust her bare feet into a pair of cotton slippers. Her plain white shift was of the same material, and had no zipper or even a single button. It was one piece, sleeveless, and fell just above her knees. Her captors had never even given her underwear, and she still couldn’t decide if they thought she might somehow be able to use a bra and panties as weapons, if it was a psychological tactic designed to make her feel vulnerable, or if it was simply spite.
Her gut voted for spite.
She folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and inhaled. Listening. Scenting the air. Even three state-of-the-art airlocks and a perfectly seamless lead box couldn’t contain every single atom of nitrogen and oxygen, and a few was all she needed.
Sweat. A stronger odor of smoke than usual. Stress pheromones, sickly sweet like overripe fruit.
Hmm. Doctor Evil’s agitated today.
She hoped someone close to him had died. Painfully.
She lowered herself to the floor and began to do pushups, partly because it was her routine to exercise upon awakening, but mostly because she knew Dr. Evil absolutely hated to be forced to wait for her heart rate to return to normal before he could perform his unwelcome task.
By the time he’d passed through the final airlock and entered her cell, she was up to thirty-six. He stopped and waited by the door, silently watching, as she continued from thirty-seven to one hundred, counting aloud because that really annoyed him, too.
He wasn’t the only one watching. She was always watched, monitored by camera and audio, her every move recorded. She’d long ago become accustomed to it; all sense of modesty had fled along with her sanity, and she didn’t mind that they watched when she ate and slept and showered, watched when she went to the toilet, watched when she cleaned the blood from her thighs when she had her period because tampons had been refused. She even let them watch when she touched herself in bed, because an orgasm was the single thing of luxury or pleasure in her life. And she hoped whoever was watching was disgusted by it, and by her.
It was a small sort of rebellion, but it was all she had.
When she was done with her pushups, she rose and faced the man.
He didn’t look pleased, which was no surprise. The surprise was that he was empty-handed.
He waited for her to speak. When she didn’t he said, “No exam today, madam.”
He always called her that. He was an evil little fucker, but she had to admit, his manners were impeccable.
She stayed silent, enjoying the look of irritation that flickered over his face. No doubt he’d hoped she’d weep with joy, or thank him, or even have the decency to look relieved.
Instead she kept her expression as bland as her cotton shift, and waited. She’d become an expert at that, and knew that almost anything you needed to know could be determined by watching, waiting, and keeping your mouth shut.
In her mind, she imagined crushing his sternum with her teeth, ripping his heart from his chest, and devouring the still-pumping organ while he looked on in helpless horror. It brought a faint smile to her face.
“This way, please.” He gestured to the airlock. The door slid open with a near-silent siss of pressurized air, and her flat expression vanished along with her determination not to speak.
“Out? Why? What’s happening?”
Dr. Evil said, “The Chairman has sent for you,” and she knew from both his tone and the spike in his heartbeat what a bad idea he thought it.
Explains all the extra cigarettes he’s smoked in the last few hours. She wondered just how long and how vigorously he’d argued against allowing their most valuable prisoner out of her cell.
But what did the Chairman want? Why, after all these years, would he summon her?
This was one case where waiting and watching wouldn’t help; she’d have to go and find out.
But first a bit of fun.
Faster than he could move or scream or even blink, she crossed the room and was at his side, smiling. “Well, we don’t want to keep the Chairman waiting, do we?” she breathed into his face, and gently laid her hand on his arm. Beneath his starched lab coat, it shook.
“Harm me and you only harm yourself, you know that, madam,” said Dr. Evil, his eyes wide and terrified, his voice doing no better than his arm. In fact, his whole body was shaking.
How many years had it been since she’d attacked him? She didn’t remember exactly; a decade at least. Maybe two. With the collar someone had fitted around her throat when she’d been unconscious when first brought to this facility, she couldn’t Shift, and therefore was far less of a threat, but she still had her speed and her strength, which had been enough to beat him bloody on more than one occasion.
So long ago, though. He probably thought since she was past fifty now and had been docile as a lamb for years, all the fight had been leached out of her. He probably thought the memory of what they did to her when she acted out or disobeyed had weakened her will, that perhaps the all-too-vivid recollections of billy clubs and stun guns and high-voltage electrodes against her temples had been an effective deterrent.
Wrong.
“I know,” she said lightly, “but at least this time it will be worth it.” She placed her hands on either side of his head.
It took only a single sharp twist, and it was done. Dr. Evil slid to the floor, tongue protruding, eyes still wide and terrified.
His shaking, however, had stopped.
Twenty-five years of needles, poking, and invasive examinations by this man, ended with a flick of her wrists. Wondering who they’d send as a replacement, she calmly went and sat on the bed.
A disembodied male voice came over an invisible speaker. “Subject. Lie face down on the floor and put your hands behind your back.”
Subject. Not prisoner or citizen or even her own name. Subject was meant to remind her that she was property, a thing owned by people more powerful than she, a lowly peasant beholden to a sovereign under the theory of the divine right of kings.
She wasn’t a peasant, though. She was a Queen, no matter what they called her.
She did as she was told. In a few moments, through the airlocks filed a team of hulking men with rifles. Dressed in combat black
, they wore face shields, gloves, and boots, so not a single inch of skin was visible. Not even their eyes were visible behind the mirrored shields.
While the others kept their gun sights trained on her, one of them put a knee to her back and cuffed her. He hauled her to her feet. Without a word—and, curiously, without a glance at the body on the floor—he shoved her ahead of him into the first airlock. Four men stepped in behind them, and the doors slid shut.
A whoosh of suction from above, that same siss of pressurized air when the rear doors had closed, and another set of doors in front of her opened. A rifle poked into the small of her back, which she took as an invitation to step forward.
Once through all three airlocks, she stood blinking in a long, bright, sterile corridor. More of the black-clad men with rifles lined either side, down its entire length. She said loudly into the silence, “Not a great plan, boys, lining up on both sides. How many do you think would be killed in a cross fire?”
This caused more than a few of the men along the walls to shift their weight from one booted foot to the other.
“Move,” said the guard with the gun at her back, and so, more curious than anything, she did.
The room the guards led her to required a long elevator trip, but the ride was so smooth and swift she couldn’t tell whether it went up or down. Another lighted corridor, another row of men with guns, a short stairway carpeted in plush, ivory wool, and then she stood before a set of polished wood doors. The doors opened, and she looked in.
The room was big, but the time she’d spent in her cell made it seem cavernous. Decorated in muted tones of ivory and gold, the furniture, carpeting, draperies, and silk-paneled walls were all of the finest quality, which her eyes, so long denied anything of beauty, drank in.
A guard uncuffed her, and said, “In.”
She stepped forward a few feet, then stopped, shucked off the cotton slippers, and went on, stifling a moan at the silky decadence of the carpet against her bare soles. The doors closed behind her with a quiet snick.
Into Darkness (A Night Prowler Novel) Page 11
