Prophecy (Residue Series #4)

by Falter, Laury

  “Thibodeaux?” I repeated quietly.

  There was a reason this man had recognized me. He was the same one I went to every year for school supplies, the one whose prominent family owned warehouses worldwide of rare and distinguished artifacts, the one who had given Jocelyn The Rope of The Sevens.

  I had known him my entire life, and yet I couldn’t recognize him.

  The Sevens used various methods to accomplish what they needed, but they had their favorites. La Terreur, an extreme type of sickness that set in just before death, had been used on the penal colonies in the past; hanging was common in the Ministry’s main courtyard; and the traditional home invasion wasn’t rare throughout the provinces. But this…I had never seen this…. The Vires who had done this to him weren’t interested in making him an example, as was their usual purpose. No, Mr. Thibodeaux was a Dissident, and he had been tortured for information.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” I stated, and instantly started freeing him from the ropes strapping him to the table.

  But his head rolled back and forth. He was limited to that one method to tell me to stop.

  I opened my mouth to argue with him when our eyes met, and I saw the life behind his ebb away.

  I didn’t hesitate, turning toward the other body slumped against the wall behind the door, searching the face for any sign of Jocelyn. When I realized it was a woman, my heart stopped. The long black hair matted with blood across her face, covering it almost entirely, sickened me and sent me into a rage as I crossed the room.

  A single word escaped, although in my haze I didn’t process right away that it came from me.

  “No…NO!”

  I reached her and fell to my knees, my hand sweeping the strands from her face as I descended, my eyes franticly searching for any sign of life, any at all.

  “No.” My throat closed off, a sob constricting it. The rest of my breath was released in a moan that seemed to echo its way through my chest.

  My fingers still held back the hair that clung to her skin, thought it was parted just enough to expose her features. My hand was shaking, but it was removed enough to allow me to see her clearly. I knew every fine detail of Jocelyn’s features, the curve of her cheekbones, the subtle indentations at the sides of her lips, the delicate slope of her nose. I memorized her from the second she turned to face me in Olivia’s store on the day we met, and it was this memory that was conjured as I inspected the face of the woman before me.

  Only the long, narrow nose of Mrs. Thibodeaux made me breath again. It emerged from behind her hair, crusted with pus and dirt.

  I withdrew my hand while settling back on my heels.

  The two of them had died together, tortured in a small room for information they probably never had in the first place.

  Damn it, I thought wearily.

  The grief I felt washed away by what I could only describe as hatred, directed solely at the seven individuals safely in their living quarters elsewhere in this fortress while the Thibodeauxes were tortured to their last breath. I had seen enough blood spilled for several lifetimes now, but still I coveted the blood of seven more. Rising to my feet, I fought the incredibly strong urge to leave the room with vengeance as my goal.

  Not yet, I told myself.

  Jocelyn…

  Placing my hand against the wall, I appreciated the feel of the cool rocky surface. My palm flattened as much as possible to take advantage of its chill, which I used to distract me from my emotions.

  I can’t allow my anger too much influence over me. That’s how people die. And if I die, Jocelyn dies.

  Whether it was the severity of that concept or the cut of the rock against my skin, I’ll never be sure. But I do know it was the flattening of my hand, that simple act that told me what I needed to know.

  With my head down, I didn’t see it at first. My fingertips registered it before my mind.

  The rock wall is dry, I realized, bone dry.

  Jocelyn was being kept in a cell surrounded by dewy rock, moist enough to glisten, to reflect back. I knew this because I had seen her memory of it. What hadn’t registered at the time was that only one element leaves a reflection…

  My head snapped up.

  Water.

  As if fighting its way in, the memory of Lacinda dragging Jocelyn on and off the stage in Mexico City hit me with the force of a sledgehammer.

  Lacinda…water…

  Lacinda lives on the cliff of the Oregon coastline…

  That cliff borders the ocean…

  Yes, I muttered to myself, finally reaching the conclusion my mind was leading me to.

  Jocelyn was being held at Lacinda’s…

  I paused, my muscles tensing.

  Beneath Lacinda’s house.

  Bastards.

  If The Sevens hadn’t led us to her home under the false pretense of agreeing to a truce weeks ago I wouldn’t have put it all together. But they had…and I now knew exactly where to find her.

  Rapidly straightening to a standing position, I headed for the door, plans I’d designed to escape the Ministry returning to me, the desire to get to Jocelyn overpowering. But as I stepped in front of it, a movement on the opposite side brought me to a halt. Ironically, I processed the shape of the person coming through the door at exactly the same time as he did with me.

  There was no hesitation from either of us.

  Our fists crossed in the air, making contact with each other’s jaws. Our heads simultaneously whipped to the side. Just as I was pushed back into the room, I hurled him to the side, against the wall to the left. From there, the struggle to gain ground over the other sent us over chairs, to the ground, and finally slamming into the wall opposite the door.

  Our fists pulled back with equal speed, aiming at the other’s face. And that was when we came to a stop.

  “Eran Talor?” I muttered, sucking in a deep breath, refilling my lungs.

  He blinked, seeming to be just as surprised as me. “Jameson?” He said this in an accent, which I always assumed to be English.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked in a rush.

  Laughing through a scoff, as if we hadn’t been about to inflict serious bodily damage on each other, he said casually, “I was going to ask you the same thing.” We released our grips and stepped back, each of us taking a quick glance at the door to ensure no one else was coming through. “I came for Magdalene. The damn…” His face hardened, and I sensed the frustration he was going through. “They’ve got her pretty well hidden.”

  “Yeah, they have a talent for that…,” I mentioned, noting that we’d come to the mutual conclusion without much data that ‘they’ were The Sevens. “What kind of business do they have with Maggie?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, a clear sign of agitation. “She can harm them, and they know it.”

  I interpreted that to mean…“So they want her dead.”

  “They want her out of the way,” he clarified.

  “In order to do what?” While I had my own beliefs about their end goal, I wanted to hear his version. Right now, there was overwhelming evidence that he knew more about them than I initially thought.

  He stared back at me, unflinching, as he answered. “The Sevens aren’t who they seem to be. They aren’t like one of us.” Pausing, he reconsidered that concept and corrected himself. “They aren’t like one of you.”

  My eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “You know about our world?”

  He stared at me, inquiring, and again I got the feeling he knew more than he was letting on. “Your world?”

  I admitted to myself that it was an odd way for me to put it, and then shoved the thought aside. A strong part of me wanted to tell him. While knowing the jeopardy of admitting the truth, I reasoned that Eran was locked inside the headquarters of our world’s most vicious enemy. He had a right to know what he was up against. “The witch world,” I added, leaving him to figure it out from there.

  “Right…,” he muttered. “That’s wha
t you call yourselves.”

  “Yes.” To be clear, I said, “We don’t advertise it.”

  “No, I haven’t seen anyone wearing pointy, black hats or carrying wands.”

  This time I did laugh, at the irony.

  The fury beneath his expression remained unchanged. “Regardless, I haven’t been fooled into thinking those in your world aren’t lethal.”

  “We can be,” I said, and immediately became reserved. “How do you know so much about us, Eran?”

  Diverting his attention briefly to the ceiling where footsteps loosened pebbles of rock down over us, he hesitated. When they faded, he confessed, “Magdalene and I are well aware of what you all are capable of. We studied your Vires, this place you call the Ministry, those who you call The Sevens. And what I said still stands. The Sevens aren’t one of you.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, my voice thick with sarcasm, “that I know. What I can’t figure out…is who you are. Why are you stalking The Sevens, and what does Maggie have to do with them?”

  He opened his mouth to speak when the rumbling of footsteps below us drew his attention.

  “They’re getting closer,” he determined.

  “Did you come alone?”

  He nodded. “You?”

  I gave him the same response.

  “So it’s pretty much the two of us,” he deduced.

  “Against an army of Vires,” I concluded. “Excellent.”

  He didn’t seem alarmed, which struck me as a bit insane. Instead, he looked pointedly at me. “You still haven’t told me what you are doing here.”

  “Was just getting to that,” I said, and then paused, noting the paradox of our situation…

  We’d both come to find the woman we love.

  “I’m here for Jocelyn.”

  His eyes narrowed. “So they have her, too,” he muttered and shook his head. “What do they want with her?”

  “To use her.”

  Eran didn’t show any sign of surprise hearing this, but my follow up statement caught his attention.

  “The two of them are together.”

  His eyes widened. “Magdalene and Jocelyn? How do you know?”

  We paused to listen as the rhythmic pounding of a unit’s footsteps passed. They now came from the floor above, but I had a feeling they would be at our door soon. Getting back to the conversation, I lowered my voice. “They’re not here.”

  “Where then?” His voice came out as a demand, harsh and tense, in a manner I identified with.

  It would have been too difficult to explain. So my reply was short, and came out as a command. “Follow me.”

  We made it halfway across the room before we were stopped.

  The faces of three Vires appeared in the hallway, Stalwart, the meaty one from the mess hall, being the first. He stepped inside the room as the remaining two followed. My muscles stiffened, readying for the brawl while Eran came around my side and settled into a fighting stance, just as the last Vire to enter turned and closed the door.

  Before we could be locked in, though, the room broke into chaos.

  I still held the dagger used against the Thibodeauxes, and brought it up to Stalwart’s neck, shoving him against the wall. Eran somehow found a sword and placed the tip of it into the second Vire with the blade running along the neck of the final Vire in Stalwart’s contingent.

  Their eyes were alert but there was no fury in them. And I didn’t expect there to be. Vire’s were trained from an early age to suppress their emotions.

  “Sheath your weapons,” Stalwart commanded in a low, deep rumble.

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said, keeping my blade against his neck.

  “Men, sheath your weapons,” he repeated in a way that didn’t seem to be directed at me or Eran. The grating sound of metal against metal filled the room and ended suddenly, leaving a void of uncomfortable silence.

  “Eran,” I said. “Keep your weapon where it is.”

  “I have no intention of doing otherwise,” he muttered.

  Stalwart ignored our stances, and the threat to their necks, and began to speak. “Your weapons threaten yourselves more than us.”

  “Cast,” I solicited, “and I will cast against you.”

  This didn’t seem to concern him.

  As if I hadn’t heard him, he dared, “Use your weapons and you will find escaping from the Ministry to be impossible. Your efforts to reclaim your women will fail. They will exist separate from you for the remainder of your lives. That, gentlemen, will be more devastating to you than a quick death for us.”

  He made a good point. As I calculated the situation we were in, I realized that Eran and I were ready for battle, but, ironically, we seemed to be the only ones.

  “Who sent you?” I asked, knowing their excursion to the depths of the Ministry wasn’t because they were simply on a midnight stroll.

  “Sartorius knows your plan.” My grip tightened around the blade’s handle. Stalwart, evidently, had seen combat because this didn’t seem to intimidate him. “And you picked a fine time to implement it,” he sneered. “Security has been added tonight, something having to do with the interrogation of two Dissidents.” In a motion that brought his skin tighter against my blade’s edge, Stalwart tipped his head toward the table behind us, at the one where Mr. Thibodeaux lay, and added derisively, “Looks like that’s been accomplished.”

  What struck me while listening to Stalwart was the same trait that made me notice him in the mess hall. He was human, a part that seemed absent from the rest of the Vires.

  “If you don’t want the same happening to your women, you’ll need to trust us.”

  “And why should we do that?” asked Eran, rightly suspicious.

  “Because we were given orders to kill you, and you’re still breathing.”

  “Which means you have an agenda,” I countered.

  Stalwart smiled. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Another valid point.

  His smile fell away. “If I wanted you dead, I would have taken the opportunity given me long ago.”

  “And how would you have done that?” I tested, more curious than alarmed.

  “By ensuring my weapon landed where I was instructed.”

  “Which was?”

  “Where yours is now,” he replied, again tipping his neck against my blade.

  “And where did it land instead?” I asked slowly, because I was beginning to understand what he was inferring.

  “Just above your upper lip, Jameson Caldwell.” After making this declaration, he studied me, waiting for my reaction.

  I didn’t reply immediately, my initial response being the involuntary tensing of my muscles as a single string of words began repeating in my mind, which I eventually vocalized.

  “You were the Vire sent to kill me at birth.”

  His reply bordered on humor. “Pleased to finally meet you.”

  Only then did I lower my weapon.

  “What are you doing?” Eran muttered.

  “He missed on purpose,” I replied. “Which means-”

  “You have an ally,” said Stalwart.

  I glanced at Eran and then at his sword. He seemed opposed to the idea of dropping our guard but, hesitantly, he unpinned Stalwart’s men. I noted, however, he didn’t sheath his sword.

  “They will be coming for the bodies,” Stalwart warned, “and that means we’ll need to get moving. Incantatio alligaveritis.” The last two words rolled off his tongue as if they were a part of his message. They weren’t. I instantly knew what he had done, well before Eran.

  The sword Eran held dropped to the ground, the clang vibrating off the rock walls, spurring me into action. My blade returned to Stalwart’s throat.

  “Remove the binding cast.”

  “No,” Stalwart retorted. “I know you…I don’t know your friend. Until I trust him, he won’t be relieved of his restraints.”

  “Remove-”

  Eran cut me off. “Let it go, Jameson.” He inclined
his head toward Stalwart and demanded in a way that didn’t leave room for disagreement, despite the fact his hands were now bound by an invisible force behind his back, “You can use me as a prisoner.”

  “We intend to,” replied Stalwart, decisively.

  As if he hadn’t heard Stalwart, Eran continued. “Under one condition…you’ll be taking me with you.”

  I figured out Eran right there. His abrupt demand said it all. He had no intention of challenging Stalwart. He had one concern, only one, and it had nothing to do with his own wellbeing. His sole purpose was getting to Maggie, and he would do whatever it took.

  His resolve was impressive, but then I had the same feelings about Jocelyn.

  Stalwart showed his agreement by seizing Eran’s arm and leading him through the door. I trailed his men, observing as they marched with an air of authority through the Ministry. We crossed the path of four Vire contingents, all without any opposition. Not a single curious glance was made in our direction.

  Apparently, Eran noticed this too. “What do you do here Stalwart?” he asked, once we were in a vacant hallway.

  “I ensure the safe transport of prisoners.”

  That stunned me. “But you were sent to apprehend me?” I asked, muddling my way through understanding. “Why didn’t Sartorius send someone whose job is to arrest and detain?”

  Stalwart paused, and the stiffening of his shoulders told me that he didn’t want to answer.

  His gruff reply reinforced my theory. “You’ll need to ask him that.”

  I didn’t speak again because, at that point, I got the distinct feeling we were being led into a trap.

  4

  LACINDA

  WE CHASED NIGHTFALL TO THE OPPOSITE side of the world, reaching the Oregon coastline just as darkness fell. The last hint of light peering between the jagged tops of pine trees on the horizon slipped away as our feet touched down on the soggy earth, and we stared up at Lacinda Pierce’s two-story Victorian home. It was just as I remembered it, dismal, lonely, and reminding me of an animal studying us from the shadows. In the distance waves crashed against the rocks down the cliff face below us, bringing back to me the memory of Jocelyn’s damp prison walls. It got my legs moving the second I found my balance.