Hellix screamed again, a sound that promised to be never-ending.
No wonder, with his skin cauterized to the pipe.
“We’ll come back for him and finish the job,” Orla said. “If what he claimed about Hark is true.”
Avyi turned in time to see Mal stride through the hot mist, which swirled around his body. His chin was lowered, with his bleak, soulless eyes looking forward. He met her gaze without apology. Avyi found that she didn’t need one. He was a leader, and that meant taking on terrible deeds himself. Avyi had only known Hellix by reputation until the day the man had gleefully carried out Old Man Aster’s order to have Nynn of Tigony flogged to the point of unconsciousness. The smile on Hellix’s warped face had been almost sexually charged. He was guilty of too many crimes to list, mostly against human women the Asters considered expendable rewards for victorious Cage warriors. None of Hellix’s female offerings lived to see the dawn.
Not every Dragon King deserved to live.
Mal had determined Hellix’s fate. Nothing about his posture or assured stride showed the least bit of regret.
She’d known it all along. He was the leader they needed. Apparently one of his first acts as an unrepentant Giva was to dispatch a heinous Dragon King. Leading their people by intending to kill one seemed counterintuitive, but it was what needed to be done.
“East is this way.” She led her two companions on a twisting course through pipes, low-hanging metal ventilation ducts, and solid I-beams. They came to a flight of stairs. The concrete was crumbling, which spoke to Orla’s account of how old Battersea was, with its crumbling underground structures.
“That looks remarkably unsafe,” Mal said with a dark edge of humor. “Care to go first, Avyi?”
“Not at all. My gift has left me in the dark like a woman without eyes. Light the way for us, Giva. We have your back.”
*
Malnefoley regretted the innocent lives he had taken at Bakkhos as he and the sisters at his back forged through the tunnels beneath Battersea. He regretted them in a deep place, where he wished the world could be a different place, a softer place. He’d experienced a glimpse of that softness in Avyi’s arms. Yet that alone should’ve told him what a rare and impossible wish it was. He had never felt anything that intense and full of trust before. Unless he protected her now, he never would again.
That meant the armored men who stood between him and the enclosures that held human and Dragon King alike became his victims. They were unfortunates who had chosen to work for the cartels, seduced by the promise of power or wealth.
They were in his way.
But unlike the burdens he had carried since Bakkhos, his conscience was clear as he used his gift to light the deep tunnels and fell the men who stood ready with plasma guns and Tasers that temporarily stripped Dragon Kings’ powers. These people would not hurt Avyi. They would not hurt Orla. And they would not keep him from freeing his imprisoned Dragon Kings. He was the Honorable Giva, and he was the Great Dragon’s representative on this mortal plane.
He twisted through two pipes. The bow jostled off his shoulder. Avyi snatched it up and threw it over her shoulder where the quiver of arrows was strapped to her back. The two weapons, reunited for the first time, snapped with red fire.
Avyi skidded to a stop and dropped behind a half-rusted beam that appeared sunken and tired of its century-long burdens. She held her head, shook it, stomped her feet. Mal was by her side in a second, while Orla kept watch.
“Avyi,” he said, both of her forearms in his hands. “Avyi, answer me!”
“No. No, no, no …”
“Tell me.”
Haunted golden-green eyes were made sickly dark by the underground shadows. He wanted to see them in daylight. He wanted to see them eager and happy and satisfied—all of the emotions he had never expected of the woman formerly known only as the Pet.
She thrust the bow into his hands. “I can’t. Do you understand me? I can’t. And I … Mal …”
Two tears streaked down her cheeks. Mal wiped them away as if he could just as easily wipe away her distress. “You can’t trust me with this?”
“I can’t tell you, because it can’t be changed. And I hate the Dragon for showing me what can’t be changed.” She shook her head, meeting his gaze with startling hatred.
“You don’t mean that. You believe.”
“Yes, I believe in our creator, but I can hate it, too.”
“Time to go,” Orla said tersely. “No time for this. It happens or it doesn’t. Avyi, you’ve never steered me wrong. For your sake, for whatever you’ve seen, I hope you’re wrong. But Hark needs me. I have to go, and I need your help.”
Mal hoisted Avyi to her feet, which were surprisingly steady. She was wearing her brass knuckles and holding her open switchblade, although he couldn’t say when she had donned the weapons.
“One last time. Tell me.”
Her features, at times so impish and mocking and stealthy, were made of stone. “No.”
She raced after Orla, with Mal to follow them both. The caverns below Battersea shrank and became more narrow, reminding Mal of the crypt where they’d found the bow. Cadmin’s bow. He couldn’t think of it any other way now. He couldn’t think of any of Avyi’s predictions with doubt anymore. Which was why her sudden premonition—the one she refused to share—was so distressing. Something about Orla, Hark, Cadmin.
Or herself.
She wouldn’t tell him if the prediction was a fixed point that ensured her death. That fact, which he knew with utter certainty, knotted in his stomach like a coiling snake. But what was worse? This frustration, or knowing the moment she would be taken from him? She could be taken from him when he envisioned more for their future than this desperate mission.
His wasn’t a prediction. His was a wish.
Knowing would be better. At least then he could fight, no matter how useless. At least then he could say what was bottled inside him, too strong to put into words.
They reached what appeared to be a dead end. Orla kicked the dirt wall and slashed at it with her shield. She railed, cursing Hellix. Mal had to restrain her from taking hold of his sword. The determination on her face said that Hellix was a dead man—sooner rather than later—for having led them on this wild-goose chase.
“Wait,” Avyi said. “Orla, calm yourself.”
Orla was a snarling beast of a woman. Mal cut the leather strap that held her shield in place, then kicked it away. He grabbed Orla around the waist and spread his palm at the base of her skull. “I won’t hurt you,” he said against her ear. “But I can make it so that your place in this fight ends here. Do you want to be unconscious while Hark needs you?”
“No,” she growled.
“Then listen to your sister.” He swallowed, meeting Avyi’s eyes over Orla’s blond-on-blond crown. “Tell us.”
“That’s just it. Orla, use your gift. Try to find something. Anything. Reach deep, sister. Find a Dragon King who can tell us the way.”
“That deformed prick said Hark was trapped with humans.”
Avyi smiled softly. “And you trust him?”
A vicious smile, completely opposite in emotion, transformed her face. Mal was surprised. As the warrior named Silence became more ferocious, her features became more starkly beautiful. “Not enough to stop trying,” Orla said. “You can let go, Giva. Hark has always insisted that my name should be Patience. I don’t feel patient, but I can behave.”
“You two are some pair,” Mal said, releasing Orla and stepping back, his sword out of reach.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Avyi’s words were stripped of emotion, but she caught Mal’s eye with a brief twinkle of sharp humor. Then she took Orla’s hands in hers. “Look. Use my gift. See what I see. No one has ever been able to read me as clearly as you.” She smiled, almost sadly. “Now we know why.”
Orla nodded. The sisters pressed their foreheads together, their fingers clasped. Concentration shaped their features until
only their difference in height and their hair color differentiated them. “There,” Orla whispered. “Dragon be, a Garnis. That’s not the present, is it?”
“No. It’s hours from now. But now you know where he is. Use him. Use his senses to find Hark.”
Because the Sath could only borrow the powers of one Dragon King at a time, Orla let go of Avyi’s hands and backed away, until she was flush against the crumbling dirt wall. Maybe a century ago, humans had intended these tunnels to be an extension of the Underground, or even bomb shelters. Now they were forgotten ruins, propping Orla up as she fought to find one of the Lost among so many warped paths.
Another damned labyrinth.
Avyi took Mal’s hand. “There. She has it. Look.”
Orla grimaced. “Giva, I need a little help.”
“Name it.”
She seemed to shake out of a trance, which must be what every Sath felt like when they released another Dragon King’s powers. “This dirt blockage is roughly ten meters thick. I can hear the Garnis on the other side. He’s in chains. He won’t be for long, if Avyi’s vision is right. But for now, he’s my eyes and ears. The human cage is beyond that. I saw Hark.”
“Then why isn’t he using the Garnis’s powers?” Avyi asked.
“He’s collared,” Orla answered. “And unconscious. I hope.”
Mal wasted no time. He stood before the dirt barrier and closed his eyes. They were away from strong sources of energy. Avyi rubbed her hands together. Orla took the ends of her shirt and scrubbed the fabric until pieces fell away. But friction was only so useful. It took time. Mal dug deeper within himself than he’d ever tried, even during those four isolated years on a distant Greek mountaintop. He focused on the pulsing of the women’s hearts, and how their blood sped through their veins. Their energy was enough for him to work on an even deeper level, as the turbine of his gift amped up.
He grounded himself on the dirt floor. The earth itself became his wellspring of energy. Why hadn’t he ever noticed before? Perhaps because, like most of his life, resources were usually plentiful. Now, he dragged energy from miles-deep wellsprings of water and lava. He harnessed those flowing currents until they were bolts of electricity warping the air around him. He couldn’t see Avyi or Orla. He could only hope they knew to take cover.
In the moments before he released the most potent expression of his gift he’d ever experienced, he thought about his cousin. About Nynn. She was half Pendray. That meant half berserker. Her power had been enough to explode buildings, and was so feared that she had been banished by the Council—at a time when Mal hadn’t been courageous enough to stand up to those ten influential figures.
He was the Giva. He should’ve protected his cousin. He’d known that for a long time, but as unimaginable power surged through his blood, through the whole of his being, he sympathized with her. He admired her. Because he, too, knew what it was to explode.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The wind was knocked out of Avyi’s lungs when Orla grabbed her and they landed in a pile on the hard-packed ground. Orla’s shield covered them both when Mal’s energy burst from him with the force of a cannon. The sound of his raging bellow was even louder than the shock of lightning meeting rock that had been buried underground for hundreds of years. She and Orla huddled together. She clutched her eyelids shut when the light became too, too, too bright. Briefly, she was glad that she didn’t have the power of a Garnis. Those ultra-keen senses might’ve been shattered beyond repair in the wake of such power.
The rock crumbled; she heard it give way. Then it was a shower, beating down on Orla’s shield.
“It’s going to collapse,” she shouted to her sister.
They had to take the chance that Mal would see the danger, too. Avyi knew neither of them would die in that tunnel.
Mal.
All she could see was blood. His blood. He clutched his slit throat as red gushed from a wound. Only when she united the bow and arrows had she been able to see the clearest prediction of her life.
Mal would die at the Grievance.
She refused to share it with him because she refused to believe it.
She wouldn’t let Mal die. She would rip apart the fabric of time if it meant keeping him safe. There was no power short of the Dragon himself to keep her from trying to her last breath.
But she hadn’t seen anything about Orla. Her sister, so new and precious, could die in those caverns without warning. That was the burden of Avyi’s life: to see the unwanted and to fear the unknown. She choked back the flash flood of grief that threatened to drown her, just when she needed a clear head and even faster limbs.
Avyi and Orla scrambled on all fours toward where the jut of Mal’s energy blast was beginning to taper. The hole he left in the earth was considerable where it began, and then narrowed to the width of a body doing a belly crawl. But he had cleared what needed to be cleared.
As soon as he finished with another shout that sounded nearly painful, Orla ditched her shield and began the long crawl. There was no way to get the wide circle of metal through that last meter at the end of the tunnel. Avyi was about to follow her sister, but she caught sight of Mal. He’d dropped to one knee. Something like smoke—no, steam—lifted from his back and shoulders. He was as hot as cinders.
She rushed to his side but hesitated to touch his skin. He was pulsing, vibrating, shimmering with what remained of his gift’s powerful explosion. “Mal, talk to me.”
“Hi.”
“Idiot man.”
He lifted his head. She should’ve seen a charred face, hairless, with nothing but bone remaining, but he was just as handsome as ever. In fact, the extreme usage of his gift added a sheen of otherworldliness that couldn’t be defined. Every feature was sharper and even more dramatic. His eyes burned crystal blue, even in the dim light of the tunnel. High, aristocratic cheekbones added refinement to rugged looks made wild by the power that still hummed from his golden skin. The man who’d let loose on that distant labyrinth in Crete was a weakling compared to this living, wildly smiling god.
“You had a vision that terrified you. You’ve seen most of what happens to Cadmin.” He pushed to his feet, speaking as though continuing a thought that had been interrupted mid-sentence, standing stronger and taller than she would’ve expected from a man who’d just burst apart. “If it was about Orla or Hark … No. You would’ve confided in me. That means what you saw was about you or me. One of our futures. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Avyi’s chest burned. “You’re not wrong.”
“Then I did the right thing. This wasn’t the time to die, or you’d have tried to stop me. Fixed point or not, you’d have tried.”
He grabbed her wrist with one hand and picked up the Dragon-forged sword with the other. With more power than grace, he shoved her toward the tunnel.
“Go,” he said. “Orla will need us.”
Avyi wanted to protest. She wanted to process. She wanted to hold him while he still lived and thrived. Instead, she crawled, the terror of her vision refusing to leave her alone.
How could both be fixed points?
She’d seen them lying together, lovers, but more than that—two people in love. The feeling was just as important as the moment. More so, even, because they’d already experienced the carnal satisfaction of taking each other to the very limits of physical pleasure.
But she’d also seen Mal consumed by fire. Consumed. Nothing left. She’d heard his dying scream. It was nothing like the bellow of raging power he’d expelled when burning the earth. It was absolute pain … in the center of the Grievance arena.
They were going to lie together, open and vulnerable to one another—when? How could what she saw of their love affair take place before the vision of his fiery death came to pass?
She was already in love with him. That sudden, almost easy realization—how could it be otherwise?—contrasted so severely with his fate that she retched as she crawled. She only hoped Mal wouldn’t
hear or see her misery, because he already knew too much about her, and about what would terrify her so much.
She crawled the last two meters with caution, softly calling to Orla.
“Here,” came her sister’s quiet reply. “The way is clear.”
Avyi scampered out and to the left, which allowed Mal to jump clear with his sword at the ready.
“Meet Jorvaki,” Orla said. “He’s the Garnis I found. Would you mind, Giva?”
Jorvaki was chained to the wall of what appeared to be a concrete dungeon. It was large enough that Avyi could see the other side, but barely. Along the walls, another dozen Dragon Kings, women and men in various states of undress, were bound at the wrists and ankles, completely vulnerable. Some faced forward, with cuts and slashes across their chests and thighs. Others faced the concrete and bore the stripes of whip marks across their backs. Only three were so devastated that they wore no damping collars. Jorvaki was one, his body abused to the point that his captors must not have thought a collar worth the trouble.
“Why are you here?” Malnefoley asked the wounded man.
“I killed two Kawashima guards in an attempt to escape. I won’t fight tonight. I’ll be executed as punishment.”
“As will everyone here,” Orla said. “Enemies of the cartels are the opening acts. The fit and ferocious Cage warriors fight last, on a stage already soaked with blood.”
Mal growled in his throat, his eyes fiercely charged with flaming blue purpose. He used the Dragon-forged sword to clip through chains as easily as scissors through paper. Orla grabbed the onyx dragon idol and began to snap collars off callused necks. Gasps and even shrieks followed her progress around the room as she freed each man and woman. The rapture of having their gifts restored was too great to contain.
Avyi watched in stunned wonder. She was overwhelmed by the moment, when her sister and the man she loved did so much to save Dragon Kings who’d been left to rot, or left to be used as fodder for the entertainment of the cartels and their guests. These were powerful beings laid low, but they wouldn’t be forever. They would heal. And they would have their revenge.
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