Edge of Power

by Megan Crane

  But a glance showed that his small living room was empty, too. Wulf eyed the privacy screen that stood around the freestanding tub to the left of the fireplace, but heard the scrape again. And this time he could tell where it was coming from.

  His window.

  He didn’t stop to think about what little sense that made, because a sound was a sound, and sound like that meant an intruder.

  Wulf moved toward the window with a frown and his blade ready in his hand.

  But before he got there, it was thrown open from the outside and a man in black hauled himself through it from the sheer, slick drop outside. The asshole flipped over as he entered, rolling in midair to land on his feet. He jerked his head to get his dark hair out of his dark green eyes. He was tall and packed with muscle. He had two short blades strapped to his chest, a strange little axe, and shoes with grips on the bottoms. More noticeably, he had rings through his nose, his lip, his brow, and through the nipples on his bare chest, proclaiming him one of the bandits who hailed from the general area around the port city of Lincoln.

  He looked like trouble.

  But Wulf knew him as Indy, the bandit who had chased Riordan and Eiryn across the sea last fall, then spent a good three months in the Lodge’s back caves that the brothers used as a prison to think about the error of his ways. He’d spent the rest of his winter in the raider city proving himself trustworthy enough to come on this mission.

  Trustworthy was a strong word, Wulf thought now, especially when applied to a bandit with seriously questionable loyalties. But Indy’s abiding hatred of King Athenian had provided him with a way out of the caves where the brothers might otherwise have left him to rot, especially since he could use those blades of his well and he knew his way around the mainland.

  He could be an asset, Tyr had said in his usual gruff, matter-of-fact way, at one of the council meetings Wulf had called to decide who would come on this journey, which could potentially kill them all and leave the clan open for attack and devastation. No pressure, then. And if he’s not an asset, he’ll be dead, and no one will give a fuck either way.

  Indy had proved invaluable already, guiding the raiders across the mainland deftly, avoiding other bandits and highwaymen with ease, and even leading Wulf to the foothills of Athenian’s mountains.

  Think of me as your handy guide, he’d said to Wulf, in that voice of his that always, always sounded faintly mocking.

  I don’t want to think of you at all, asshole, Wulf had replied.

  “When asked about your skills,” Wulf said now, eying the fucker as he stood there before him in the middle of a room he shouldn’t have been able to access, “you should have mentioned that you can apparently climb up sheer, slippery stone walls with no purchase in the dead of night. That might have saved you at least a month of hard time in my caves.”

  “You don’t look happy to see me,” Indy said with a smirk. He wasn’t even breathing hard. And the steel ball through his tongue was visible when he spoke. Fucking bandits and their fucking piercings. Wulf didn’t get it. He also didn’t try that hard to get it. “Don’t tell me you’ve been lured in by King Dickhead’s tacky gold and marble vomitorium of a palace. I expected you, of all people, to be immune.”

  “How the hell did you get up that wall?” Wulf moved around the other man to peer out the window, but nothing had changed. It was the same steep, slick drop that should have been impassable. And deadly to anyone who tried.

  “Magic.” Indy wandered further into the room, warming his hands by the fire, which was the first indication he’d given so far tonight that he was merely a man like everyone else. “Also, I climbed it. Not everything is shouting and leaping over walls and brandishing blades in the dark of night.”

  Wulf sighed. “I miss raids.”

  “I told you this a long time ago,” Indy said gently. “Bandits can always find a way in. Always.”

  Wulf took another look down into the gorge, a sure death for anyone who fell or he wouldn’t have kept throwing his would-be assassins down there, and then closed his window. He turned back to the room and gave Indy his full attention, all of the senses he’d had to tamp down these past weeks roaring back to full capacity.

  He’d had to operate at about one quarter capacity since he’d walked through those gates, so as not to scare anyone too badly, and it felt good to switch back over to himself again.

  Because if Indy was here, it was almost over. It was as good as done. And he could stop pretending he was the kind of dumbfuck moron who would hang around accepting insult after insult from a little turd like Athenian with no hint of reciprocity.

  “I hope you’re here to tell me I haven’t been sitting here with my thumb up my ass for weeks for nothing,” he said gruffly, going over to toss himself down on the couch. He kept his blade beside him out of habit, but he didn’t mind if Indy thought it was because he was prepared to handle him if necessary.

  And he trusted his men. His brothers were the best of the best—not because he liked them and thought highly of them, though he did, but because they trained their asses off to be the best. If they hadn’t managed to carry out their part of their plans, it couldn’t be done.

  But Wulf would still be pissed he’d hung around letting Athenian condescend to him for nothing.

  Indy straightened, but only a little, as if he didn’t want to show Wulf too much respect. Wulf bit back a smile and let him.

  “Gunnar made it here last night,” Indy told him, losing the smirk. “He said everything is in place in Kansas City. He wired up the docks and left two men to make sure the explosives go off at the equinox, and if they don’t, to go in there and do it manually.”

  “Gunnar’s shit always works. That’s why he’s the tech genius.”

  Indy nodded. “That’s why the brothers are waiting outside the city.”

  “Eiryn and Riordan?” Wulf asked.

  His fierce sister was the fastest blade in the clan and his personal bodyguard. When she and Riordan had gone undercover as compliants last summer, they’d taken out all the braids they’d earned as fighting brothers, leaving them free to mingle with mainlanders too blind to see them for who they obviously were based on how they moved. It had been a no brainer to send them back to the Great Lake Cathedral, given they’d already cased the place last fall. It was where they’d met Kathlyn.

  But this was no time to think about the one person in this kingdom who’d seen a little more of the real Wulf than he was prepared to admit to himself.

  “The Cathedral is ready,” Indy was saying. “They seemed pretty happy about it. They also left a few men to oversee the church’s equinox surprise, and are even now waiting with the rest of the compliant dumbasses at the base of this mountain, wetting themselves to get in here.”

  “The equinox isn’t for days yet.”

  “They let people in early.” Indy nodded his head toward the north, and the top of the gorge. “Tyr and Helena say the power station and the server farm are in working order, you’ll be delighted to hear, but they can’t find any control room but the one marked on those old maps, which they can’t access.”

  Wulf ran a hand over his braid. He’d known his war chief wasn’t far away this whole time. Tyr had taken his woman up to the top of the gorge to see if the hydraulic dam there really was the one Helena’s family had marked for generations as one of the few that could allow someone—someone other than the king who held it and clearly didn’t wish to share it, that is—to take control of all that power and give it back to the people. There had been other power plants with similar server farms attached that could allow Helena and her tablet full of passwords to access the satellites she was sure were still up there in some form or another, but Athenian’s mercenaries had destroyed them, one by one, as they’d hunted down Helena and her family across the planet.

  This is the last one, Helena had said this winter, sitting down in Gunnar’s basement, filled with those old screens he’d made new and the mystifying graveyards of
every machine anyone could think of, old televisions and computers and other tech Wulf couldn’t even identify. If we can’t make this one work, or if the king blows it up out of spite, that’s it. The only other ones I’ve heard of weren’t on this continent when it was still a continent and might be beneath the sea now, for all we know.

  That was the second reason to take control of this place. The first was to see about getting electricity back out to everyone on the western and eastern mainlands who wasn’t tucked up in the western kings’ aristocratic bubble. But the second was to use the satellites and the old Internet to see if there was a way to find out who else was left out there. To get a picture of how much of this world was left. If there was anything else out there besides what they knew and the few myths about shit like a floating city somewhere in the sullen gray Atlantic or settlements in the legendary Alps somewhere on the other side.

  That dirtbag king isn’t going to blow up his own power source, Riordan had said, shaking his head. No way.

  There’s no way any king would deliberately throw himself into the dark, Maud had chimed in then, sitting on her creepy little pillow in the corner with the metal collar she wore around her neck attached to a chain, which was in turn attached to a wall. Just the way she liked it, because she and Gunnar were kinky fuckers, but whatever. That wasn’t Wulf’s business. Not while they both clearly got off on it. That would make it far too difficult to continue claiming all light is his by divine right.

  “It was only ever a little wishful thinking that there was a newer, unprotected control room somewhere above ground,” Wulf said now. “It’s got to be the one in the tunnels, just like Helena and her sister said.”

  Helena’s sister was Melyssa, whom Wulf hadn’t thought much of when she’d arrived on the eastern islands as the captive of the douchebag kinglet who’d impregnated her and the mercenary asshole who was using her as bait. But Melyssa had grown on him, meeting by meeting, as she stepped up and helped Helena sort through all the information their ancestors had been carrying around with them since the Storms. Or maybe it was more accurate to say he no longer found her quite as useless as he had when his warrior brother Jurin had felt compelled to step up and claim her infant as his own.

  “Did you map out the tunnels?” Indy asked.

  “I know where they are.”

  “So, no map, then.”

  And the world really was back to normal, Wulf realized, because when he leveled a cool stare at the snotty-ass bandit, Indy winced. Then lifted a hand in apology.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time alone in the snow over the past few weeks,” Indy muttered. “I forget myself.”

  But Wulf thought that maybe he was the one who’d forgotten, over these past, strange weeks, who the hell he was. He was only pretending to be King Athenian’s pet raider. He was pretending to want to negotiate a peace that would somehow involve him giving up settlements in the east he’d won and had no intention of surrendering. Ever. He’d allowed the king and all his simpering asshole minions to think that they were getting away with insulting and humiliating him because he hadn’t ripped off a head every time they poked at him. The only person he hadn’t fooled with his lazy act was a pretty little princess whose distracting brightness had no practical application to his life. In any way.

  No matter how deep he’d gotten into shit with her. Dancing, for fuck’s sake. Like these asshole aristocrats had neutered him.

  You could use her the way you told her father you would, a little voice inside him argued. You saw how much her people love her. If you married her it really would go a long way toward bringing the kind of peace that would only serve the clan.

  But he dismissed that as so much so-called political ranting from his cock, the known agitator, who wanted only one thing where Kathlyn was concerned. More.

  Wulf was a raider brother. The king of a clan that chose its leaders by their strength. If someone didn’t step up one day and take his throne, as he’d taken his, when he grew too old to hold it any longer the contenders would fight it out. The man who won would earn his throne and the clan’s respect, fair and square.

  That meant Wulf required no heirs. He didn’t give a shit about his bloodlines. And he certainly didn’t need a wife. Raider brothers rarely took a mate, much less went through an elaborate wedding ceremony to mark their claim. And when they did claim a mate, they spoke a few words in front of king and clan, and that was the end of it. But Wulf had no doubt that these mainlanders had taken something as simple as a claiming and made it into theater.

  Not that he wanted to claim Kathlyn, he reminded himself. Of course he didn’t. He didn’t need any more responsibility in his life. He was going through the motions to get to the equinox, so he and his brothers could do what they’d come here to do—change the fucking world, which probably deserved to wither away in the dark, and then leave them to it.

  He couldn’t fucking wait to leave. If only so he could get the hell out of this stone tower.

  “There’s only one way in and one way out of the king’s wing, and I’m certain the tunnels are beneath them,” Wulf said now. “The entrance is guarded by the king’s squadron. Not the regular palace guards, who are a laughable group of pathetic morons who’ve never faced a challenge in their lives. But trained ones.”

  “How trained?” Indy asked.

  “Not to anything approaching my standards,” Wulf said, his mouth curving a little. “But when there are fifty of them, does it matter?”

  “Then we have to go with Plan B.”

  Plan A was the much simpler, if less fun option they’d hammered out back in the raider city. Wulf would have long since located and explored the tunnels on Helena’s map, made sure they matched the reality all these years after her parents or grandparents had found them, and then, during the equinox when the king’s war effort in Kansas City and the powerful church that supported him were blowing up all over the western mainland, saunter on back and let the rest of his men in to take control of the power station that farmed out electricity to most of the western kingdoms.

  Plan B was the more dramatic workaround they’d come up with, if they didn’t have the access to the tunnels they wanted. And after weeks in this place, Wulf was both weary of the drama and not at all surprised that, of course, he’d have to participate in more of it.

  “Come on,” Wulf said, surging up to his feet and rolling out a crick in his neck. “I’ll show you. You keep telling me bandits can get in anywhere.”

  “We’re good at being invisible,” Indy agreed.

  Wulf eyed him as he pulled on his boots and the rest of the shit he wore to move around the castle every night with no one the wiser. He was sick of that, too. “You have a foundry on your face.”

  Indy grinned. “You’d be surprised how many good, compliant folks don’t see a devil when he’s directly in front of them. It’s a trick of the light, surely, they tell themselves. That can’t possibly be metal in a face.”

  Given that Wulf had spent years fooling enemies who should have known better into believing he was a weakling punk bitch, he couldn’t really argue with that. People saw what they wanted to see. Wasn’t that how the legends of the Storms went? The waters kept rising and the storms kept getting worse every year, but the people stuck their heads in their asses and spent so long pretending it wasn’t happening that when they finally tried to do something to save themselves, it was decades too late.

  The whole world had drowned, but nothing had changed.

  Wulf led Indy out into the palace, over the snoring guards and through the winding corridors, but the bandit couldn’t figure out a solution to the guards milling around the entrance to the king’s wing any more than Wulf could. They were cluttering up each level of the palace, balcony after balcony, though there were no doors on the floors above the main level, as well as lined up in front of the actual entrance.

  “That sucks,” the bandit murmured as he crouched next to Wulf in the shadows of the top tier. “You’ve tried
looking for lower-level access, I assume. Down in the basement?”

  “All walled up, four levels down.”

  “Shit.”

  Wulf had his black hood up, and he hung back against the wall, making sure he looked like just another part of the darkness. “That’s been my general assessment, yes.”

  But something else occurred to him then. There was one avenue he hadn’t tried. One person who’d grown up here and had managed to sneak into his rooms all by herself, and not when the guards had been asleep. Who knew what other secrets she knew about this place?

  His traitorous cock, of course, was in complete agreement that he should seek Kathlyn out immediately. He could dismiss that as the usual urge to fuck himself into a state of relaxation, but there was no denying that as much as he didn’t want to admit it, Kathlyn’s innocence and the fact he’d been the only one to touch her got to him.

  Really fucking got to him.

  But he knew he was in serious trouble with his princess when he didn’t tell Indy what he had planned.

  “Tell Gunnar to get ready to make that workaround happen,” he told Indy. “I have one more thing I can try.” He held the bandit’s gaze and smiled. Slightly. Because he might have just lied about Kathlyn by omission, but he refused to be a complete punk bitch about his situation. Especially if it could have tactical significance. “And if that fails, there’s my wedding.”

  “Your wedding.” To his credit, Indy didn’t react to that. Much.

  “To a princess on the equinox.” Wulf let his smile deepen. “I’m a fucking fairy tale.”

  The bandit considered that. “Are you sure you don’t mean your execution?”

  “I expect that to be a major feature of the vows,” Wulf murmured. “So I’d prefer it if Plan B could start before I get my head blown off by a pissant bitch of a king whose shit I’ve been taking for entirely too long.”

  Indy nodded. “Noted. I’ll be back as soon as everyone stops pissing themselves laughing about your—ah—nuptials. Congratulations, by the way.”