The air filled with frightening shapes the soldier knocked away.
Amele pulled herself up, rolled her jaw, and swallowed blood. Firmer now, both hands against his jugular, she demanded, “Down into the dark,” and dropped him to the floor to take his keys.
The cell door opened onto Nika squinting into the gloom as Amele said, “You are in the black and cannot see. You are in the void; the only sound is me.”
~~~~~~
Remy collected Sable from her rooms as was his custom before dinner. He had made it a point from the beginning to look in her eyes and take whatever was there without shrinking. He had felt the breach expand as the weeks passed, aware she retreated to view him from ever greater distances. He knew the hollow that lie between them widened and deepened with every day, but standing before her that night, he heard the wind blow.
For the first time, he could not bear to look.
He remembered Aidan’s warning, “She will return to you in multitude what you give her. Give her nothing and, I promise you, she will drop you into the abyss and show you the void.”
She had been right in declaring the clergy would say nothing about what she’d done, and with the same certainty, she believed she was right to have done it. Remy didn’t know what was more infuriating, that she had done it, or that she was incapable of remorse.
Venturing into the intimate territory only once, Laudin had said, “She has been through a great deal in the last year. I am not excusing the incident, but I have too often seen educated minds get stuck in a pedantic defense of meaning. She has asked forgiveness but cannot be sorry, and you would have her regret the action over the outcome. She certainly regrets losing your favor.”
Remy had said flatly, “She killed eight people. She has no right to be particular with her remorse.”
She was baffling in her inability to recognize what was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, no arguable defense could change that, but the killings disturbed him far less than he wished. His affection for her should have expired the moment he saw her ready the axe and turn from him to continue her violence, demanding the doors be shut while she rampaged. But what overrode his abhorrence of the carnage was the desire that caught his breath when the memory came unbidden of her body under his. He wanted to feel her cling to him again, to hear the sound of yielding that came from her throat, to leave her looking dazed so that her eyes met his searching.
Something had happened. It had not been expected. He had made her bury her face in his neck to keep from crying out and she had given more than she intended. He felt it in his chest: power, a tremendous flush of energy. He felt indomitable. He’d made a beastly sound and she looked at him with guilt, like she’d betrayed something horrible about herself and he had rebuked her. But he was not angry, he had wanted more.
It was this that wound around his heart and yanked him still every day. He could not concentrate for pulling the memory in with his breath, filling his lungs in a feeble attempt to recreate it, and nothing he could do with himself would abate the need she had created. He wanted what Sable could do without caring what she’d done, but his intellect damned him with ethics.
Before he had removed her dress, he had asked for the sake of courtesy but completely without caring, “They tell me you are a virgin.” He assumed it was a mere artifice of the Cloitare, but she had replied yes, as though it were obvious and somehow meaningless. He had been astounded, asking, “But why?”
And then she was just as mystified. “Because I was bound to you.” She had studied him, trying to understand why or how he had missed something so important in her title. Then, with comprehension, she closed her eyes on her own ignorance. “You do not see it. To you it is merely a word.” Smiling with what appeared to be sympathy, “I will let you discover the meaning for yourself.”
He had bent to kiss her as a skeptic, silently amused by her belief, by the suggestion of something esoteric. Drawing her near, he kissed her lips, but his passion for her was still undecided. He had a fondness for her, an affection that had never been sexual. To raise his desire, he needed to overlook her and focus on the body. Dropping his mouth to her neck, hand trailing the outside of her breast, across her side to the hip, he felt her respond.
Hours earlier, they had danced and she tried to lead. Tight with control, she would not relinquish self-possession, making him compensate with strength to direct her. But in his room, under his touch, she yielded, and with it came just a hint of what she offered. Her every murmur of acquiescence surged through him like a current, bringing him to life, creating a need to hear her louder, make her surrender weaker, building a craving in him for what was in his hands.
Gone were all reservations that Sable was not what he wanted. Like madness, he was in the moment, possessing the present, his attention centered on making Sable give more until she gave everything in a rush that filled him to frenzy.
It had been overwhelming. If they were really bound, he had felt it. Wide awake, feeling invincible, his whole being charged electric, he had laughed to himself that she could have looked on him with sadness if this is what it meant.
Then unable to accept her defiant sense of justice, her indefensible violence, he tried to sever ties with her only to be consumed. She responded by withdrawing, slowing her heart cold until he could feel the chill when he walked at her side. Now, behind her dead eyes, she was traversing a landscape of ice, determined to drag him with her through the most barren of waste, tugging at the bond, forcing him to follow, and he finally understood her expression of pity.
He had met her stone cold at her rooms, unable to hold her gaze, and he’d delivered her to his guests the same. He had expected she would emerge from her frozen remains to charm again, but this night she had no sentiments to share, no interest in appeasing. She held a drink but did not consume, met no one’s eyes, and could not be engaged. At the long table for dinner, she sat to his right, her Cloitare face staring relentlessly ahead, unnerving Remy’s visiting cousins until they began to stutter. Catherine was at her wittiest to rescue them, but three dropped utensils and one spilled wine glass later, the cousins gave up all pretenses of enjoyment and started throwing back spirits at an alarming rate, and Sable cared not the least for their discomfort or anyone else’s. She was blind to it all, content in her isolation to turn the meal into the most arduous event any of them had ever endured.
Feeling responsible for it all, it seemed clear to Remy that Sable had decided to demonstrate she could take not just him, but everyone, into hell.
~~~~~~
Amele sat Nika in the plane and Ava stopped humming.
Sable returned. Back from the distance, she found herself in the hall with Remy, the door to her room opening to admit her. She dropped from Remy’s side as was routine. She waved away the lady’s maid as she did every night, saying, “Leave me, please.”
Hearing the door close, she fell into a chair, face in her hands, bent to her knees, exhaling the day, and again the days, then muffling the heaving turned to crying, she covered her head against the whole cursed stretch of days in the palace. She started to tremble.
“I had no idea you were so miserable.”
His voice seared through her, leaving abrupt terrified silence. She instantly made herself still and rearranged her features. She came up blank, staring at the wall, heart beating too fast for proper defenses.
Slow, slow, she told herself, slow. She had been startled and she no longer reacted well when alarmed.
Pulse measured, pupils gone, she turned slowly to put her cold focus on the King. She knew he was hoping for something in her expression, but she had nothing he wanted. She had bleeding sorrow wrapped around her neck always threatening to choke her senseless, but she would spare them both that scene again.
Remy faced her Cloitare Stare with determination. “I am going to the salt flat tomorrow and would like you to join me.”
She wrestled sorrow’s grip off her throat to speak. “Yes, of course.”
&nbs
p; He watched her. He wondered if she would give anything, any softening of her features to help him, but she returned his gaze unmoved, too far away to see he was trying. He nearly said something earnest, an offer to start over, but the desolation was vast and her eyes dared him to hold them. He said instead, “Well then, tomorrow.”
~~~~~~
“Are you telling me it was magic, Lieutenant Fallon? Because that’s what I’m hearing.”
“She was there. We installed new software, brought the hardware back online, and she was gone.”
“And not a goddamn thing caught on camera.” Berringer stalked around the prison’s security booth. “Nobody leaves.” He swept the whole stone building into his gesture. “And nobody sleeps. You corporal,” he pointed at the soldier who had been in the booth, “I am starting with you.”
~~~~~~
“Fallon, you kill stealing motherfucker,” were the last intelligible words spoken by Max since being permanently kicked from the military network. He knew the name of his nemesis from a program he’d written to find any new mention of Mission Retrieve, and there in the military record sent to the major in charge of the prison was Lieutenant William Fallon, information security specialist, cleared to inspect the prison network, and formerly assigned to Mission Retrieve.
Max had already been awake four nights when Fallon shut him down. He’d been dropping his head every six hours to pull powder up his nose, and it had been at least a month since he’d reacted to the burn.
Half a day later, Enzo dragged him across most of the hangar to get the bag of amphetamines from his hand, snarling his exasperation, “You are going the fuck to sleep.”
In protest, Max grabbed a pair of Marlow’s hair sticks he’d been keeping on his desk and tried to stab him, but Max was in no condition to fight.
Enzo forced him to the ground and laid on top of him until he thought Max might heave into tears.
Thinking he could trick him to sleep, Enzo had chopped sedatives into his drink and then watched it go untouched for hours. Now he wasn’t fucking around. He’d only let Max up from the floor enough not to drown him and then, bottle to mouth, forced him to swallow.
An hour later, Enzo was sitting on the concrete floor with Max sleeping on the couch at his back. He was absently staring at the flat screen as video from last night’s rally showed Felix Magnus working the yellow-banded Libertines into a frenzy. The square in the border town had never been designed with ten thousand in mind. Residents of Ulphia had pushed in from the side streets when Felix spammed their phones with the time and place for assembly. The King’s Army had just started to push through from the outside when a massive paper effigy of the King being ridden with bit and saddle by a nun was set ablaze. The fire rapidly spread to a tree in the first changes of autumn then to a banner strung from the windows in the occupied courthouse. By accident or assistance, the fire lit the curtains and gathered fuel as it spread so that to a backdrop of burning authority Felix called for “freedom from coercion” while the crowd shouted, “Freedom be dumb,” until it sounded like a meaningless drum beat.
Nika should have been there.
It had been a long time since it was only Enzo and Max. He had only just taught Marlow how to use a phone when she declared she was off to see the war on Sierra’s most southern border. Max had said, “Well, that’s the last of her.” But she had returned a month later with Nika. Nika had taught her to swear.
They were such a strange pair. Marlow always looked somehow dusty but cultured in denim and boots, and Nika kicked around in shiny black leather with T-shirts so obscene mothers in Erentrude would pull their children into their skirts. Enzo had not been sure about Nika—she kept burning shit down. But Marlow had shrugged and said, “You steal power and he hacks grids. Her vice is her art. I would be damned to tell you, or any other, not to do what you will.”
Something in the way she said it made Max stop as abruptly as Enzo’s argument. Head lifted from his keyboard in consternation, Max ordered, “You’re fucking sixteen. I’m half a decade wiser than you, so shut the fuck up.” But it had stuck. Like a mantra, it played in their heads, do what you will. Enzo had let them and fast saw the potential.
Nika’s skill in a plane changed everything. It opened to Enzo contacts and possibilities beyond local theft. Her willingness to fly perilous became Enzo’s business. She’d land a plane on a warehouse roof for night security to load and then come home bragging it had been too easy. By the end of the year, Enzo had rented their first permanent hangar, and to Nika he’d given a platinum lighter to burn whatever the hell she wanted to the ground.
Now Nika was hugging her knees in a cell and Marlow had vanished. The combined absence destroyed. Enzo couldn’t sleep without pills. Max couldn’t function without powder.
Enzo was too awake and waiting for a delivery. He’d ground the last of his sedatives into Max’s drink. Through the open doors, he felt the morning drop dew in the building. He saw the unfamiliar plane coming in but thought nothing of it. They would go to the main building, but once on the ground, the plane cut its rudder and rolled with the wind to his hangar.
She dropped from the cockpit, just feet on the tarmac, then ducked under the wing to smile at Enzo.
He tried to get up but his legs wouldn’t work. His muscles went weak and then everything stopped as inertia took over.
He pulled his face off the floor to Nika’s bare toes.
She sunk to his level and, despite the tremble in her voice, tried to sound light, “Some weird ass shit just happened.”
Salt Mountain
She is the Ice Queen, Remy thought when he saw her. If he had not witnessed her collapse the previous night, he would not have suspected there was anything inside her alive. He remembered the months he spent with her in the medical room, before she remembered how to defend against emotions, when she was still soft and vulnerable, so unlike the trained Cloitare he faced now. But since he’d seen where she went when she thought she was alone, he knew beneath the ice she was not dead, not even permanently frozen, just terribly broken.
Before leaving the private hall, Remy stopped and turned her rigidly to face him. He searched her face, hoping again she would give just a little, and when she didn’t, he leaned down to kiss the top of her head, placing his lips above the enamel sticks in her hair. He took her wrist and examined the wide bracelet with sadness. “If you had wanted it, I would have torn down the doors for you. If you had asked it of me, I would have given it. When you have a problem, Sable, come to me.”
He only knew he reached her because her face briefly flamed from white to color.
For all he hoped to achieve in a day, Remy thought it preferable to be driven the hours to the salt flat. In the line of armored vehicles, Berringer was in the fifth transport with the uniformed soldiers, asleep in his seat.
From the backseat of the car, Remy was offering details about the area, pointing out how the flora and fauna rapidly changed with the elevation, describing the geology and formation of the salt flat not yet in view.
He had taken Sable’s hand, determined to hold it no matter how awkward she planned to make it. He held it until his blood warmed the cold from her fingers, and he held it even when the heat made them both uncomfortable, though neither would show it.
He was coming near to an end of what he could present without boring himself any more witless. Never before had he attempted trivial banter, and now he was down in the dregs speaking about the weather. “As we descend into the bowl, the mountain becomes more and more barren until it turns to desert. In the spring, the clouds manage to make it over the peaks and the rains make the area quite stunning. I think you would enjoy seeing it then too.”
Through it all, she gave only as much as she’d been forced to once before. Proper agreement, her focus straight ahead, nothing more than a lesson she recalled from the nuns.
He said, “The summer was long this year, so we will see very little life, but there is a beauty not seen anywhere el
se.”
And she agreed but saw nothing.
With his free hand, he pressed his temples, and then in a moment, once again composed, he said, “Sable.”
“Yes.”
“Sable,” he called her attention sharply.
Slowly, she turned and put him under the glare.
“Let it remain in the past.”
She was still staring but she rose from the depths, the frost clearing from her sight. She was considering what he said, and she considered it for a very long time, all the while coolly testing his strength, searching him for stability, seeing if he could take what she gave, then for the first time since she froze deep, she dropped her eyes from the fight. He watched her shift so that she settled with her body inclined ever so slightly toward his, and he felt the thaw when she declared, “The most desolate places have the potential to create powerful life.”
~~~~~~
They had come on a day when the clouds streaked white through the sky and smudged the horizon so it was impossible to tell where the flats ended. Remy loved it no matter how it appeared. He loved the crisp blue on white of the winter, the white on white as it was now at the end of summer, and in the spring, when it was all blue from the rain as the water mirrored the sky, he loved it just the same.
Sable had only seen it in pictures. Remy knew it would have to affect her.
Berringer woke to the change. He heard Sable laughing. The flats were so smooth they had ridden far into the center, and Berringer, who had spent the night grilling soldiers over the missing pilot, had slept through it. He emerged from the car to see Remy watching Sable with pleasure. She had her lips parted in awe beside him.
Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1) Page 14
