Web of Lies: Trueborn Heirs Series Book 2

by Nyna Queen

  “Some people say he is a fool to continue competing in the election,” the master went on. “But at least as many think it is a sign of strength. Of bravery!” He spat the last word. Ah, bravery and foolishness were so easily confused. And Stephane Dubois-Léclaire, if nothing else, was a very brave fool. When asked, during the latest press conference if, in the light of the recent happenings, he was still against the much-debated shaper regulations, the arrogant prig even had the brass neck to contend that “despite the personal flavor of this incident, the wrongdoings of a few misguided individuals could not be held against a whole group of people.”

  Nice words, Stephane. Yes, yes, very nice words.

  It was a real shame that the shaper in question had been killed outside the Pacified Zone, thanks to Darken Forfeit’s unsolicited involvement. The master would have loved to see Stephane struggling to uphold his moral stance on shaper rights in the face of the very creature who had kidnapped his son and daughter. Yes, a true shame. And that brother of his was another problem that had to be taken care of. But all in due time.

  In this game of marked cards, Stephane still thought that he could win by playing fair. That his righteousness somehow made him invincible. Well, he’d soon find out that he was not. No one was. And the master held all the cards to bring him to his doom.

  He put his hands on the table and leaned forward with a cold smile, taking in every face before him. “It’s about time that we send him a more convincing message, don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALRIGHT, sugar! Just don’t panic!

  Alex stared up at the golden gates of Crona Palace and felt something sharper, fiercer, and way more intense than panic ignite inside her chest.

  She knew panic: those hot needles of adrenaline prickling along raw nerves, the jitters winding around the spine, calling all the focus to the moment. It was the fear of fight or flight, the fear that came when your life was acutely threatened and to survive you needed to have your wits about you. It was the fear of being thrown in at the deep end and surfacing to a stormy sea.

  Only this time she wasn’t being thrown in at the deep end. No, this time she was willingly walking into those wild tides, keenly aware of the weights around her ankles that would more than likely drown her. And it terrified her to the core.

  It was a deep, primordial kind of terror that paralyzed her muscles and rooted her to the spot. Her face was hot, her hands cold, and her stomach was churning so much, she wondered if anybody would be upset if she threw up right there in front of the palace.

  Sweet Jester, she really shouldn’t have had that second helping at lunch. But that had been more than four hours ago and at that point, it had seemed like a good idea. Now it was the hard knot in her belly that was reminding her that you shouldn’t go swimming on a full stomach.

  Why? Why, in the Jester’s name, hadn’t she taken Rachel up on her offer?

  Of course, it had been the right decision.

  When Hugh had finally calmed down enough to phase them back to Shelston and they’d soothed his nerves with one of Rachel’s strong home brews, her friend had taken her to the side. Before the words were halfway out of Rachel’s mouth, Alex had told her no.

  Rachel had a good thing going. Scratch that. A terrific thing!

  She had exactly what she had always wished for Alex: a safe, cozy home; a little community where she was not only grudgingly accepted, but appreciated; and, the Blind Child’s cursed eyes in the dark, even a lover—a trueborn lover—who knew what she was and who was, more or less, comfortable with it.

  How could Alex even for a second consider endangering the life Rachel had built for herself after all those years of going through rough patches? How could she hide behind Rachel’s coat-tails, knowing that if this all came crashing down on her, it wouldn’t just jeopardize her own, but also her friend’s life? A fine friend she’d be. No, there was no way she could do that. No matter how tempting the offer was.

  Rachel had smiled at her, that calm Rachel-smile, and said, “I knew you’d say that, darling, but remember that I’m always here for you.”

  And that was exactly the reason why declining had been the right decision. It had been the right decision. Of course, it had.

  Yet now, faced with what was probably the stupidest decision she had ever made in her life, the doubts started to creep in like tiny buzzing insects. And that treacherous voice at the back of her mind kept insisting that, somehow, it would all have worked out, and that, if only she had accepted Rachel’s offer, they would have found another way out this mess.

  Yeah, sure they would! Like hell!

  “Milady?” The coach driver politely cleared his throat.

  Hardly surprising. They had stopped at the bottom of the grand staircase that led up to the palace entrance about five minutes ago and Alex hadn’t moved a muscle. Other coaches were piling up behind them and their drivers were getting impatient.

  With a muttered excuse, Alex fumbled with her undersized purse, pulled out some cash, paid him—including a big tip; easy to be generous when it wasn’t your own money to spend—and got out of the coach into the late afternoon.

  Brilliant sunlight dazzled her eyes.

  Around her, finely dressed people were flowing up the wide flight of crystal-white stairs that rose to meet the huge palace entrance like a stairway of clouds leading up to the pearly gates.

  In the glittering sun, the palace was almost gleaming, a lofty structure of sleek white, cream, and gold, festooned with countless balconies, terraces, and spiraling towers. The home of a little girl’s fantasy.

  So this was Crona Palace. Never in her life would Alex have imagined that she would ever see the Royal Palace for real, not even from the outside and much less from the inside.

  Yet here she was. Only she wasn’t a fairytale princess approaching her happily-ever-after. She was an impostor. The wolf in sheep’s clothing, so to speak. And she would be put down like one, too, if she let her teeth show.

  Alex realized that people were lingering and looking at her from the side as they passed. Anxiety crushed her in its painful vise. Had she done something wrong already? Was she slipping?

  A glance down at her hands confirmed what she already instinctively knew: She was as human as she could possibly be.

  Relax! People are looking because you are standing there like a lost puppy, blocking the way. Get moving, sugar!

  Clutching her tiny silver purse like a crutch, Alex took a deep breath, raised her chin, gathered her skirt, and made her way up the stairs alongside the other guests drifting toward the entrance.

  Okay, belong …

  The marble stairs seemed to stretch impossibly far into the distance, getting longer and longer with every step she took, as if her destination was forever beyond reach.

  Blood was rushing in Alex’s ears, drowning out the excited chatter and murmurs around her, and her mouth was so dry that swallowing hurt. By the time she reached the top, her legs were shaking but not just from exhaustion.

  From this close, she could see the intricate net of magic wards covering the walls of the palace, a rippling sheen of glowing threads like spider webs occasionally flashing in the sunlight, all but invisible yet a hundred times more deadly. Even more than see, she could sense them. The place was pulsing with enough heavy-duty magic to make Alex’s skin crawl.

  Darken had been right: no one could climb these walls and survive.

  The palace doors gaped wide open before her. Her inner voice kept shouting at her to run. But she seemed to have lost control over her body. Her legs moved forward on their own accord.

  Closer and closer.

  Alex stepped into the palace.

  For a second, the inside was dark compared to the bright sun outside, but then her shaper senses kicked in and shapes peeled out of the darkness.

  The first thing she noticed was that the entrance hall was teeming with security guards armed to the teeth. Great Mother, were they expecting a full-
blown attack or what?

  Her heart pounded even harder, pushing painfully against the cage of her ribs, which were still slightly sore from her encounter with that scorpion in the Scarlet Mountains.

  The rectangular hall reminded Alex of an elegant version of a halfborn train station. Three separate lines led to security check units, each sporting a foursome of armed security personnel as well as a magic-fueled full-body scanner. They would check every single newcomer for hidden weapons, harmful magic devices, poisons, and whatever else could be a potential threat to the crème de la crème inhabiting the palace for the next few days. Like, for example, the claws and teeth hidden inside Alex’s body and the venom that was naturally stored inside them.

  During the past few days, Stephane and Darken had repeatedly insisted that she wouldn’t set off the alarms. True, they weren’t triggered by all the trueborns stuffed to the brim with magic, but who knew if the same held true for shapers? She’d bet no shaper had ever been stupid enough to try and walk into these premises.

  To reassure her, they had taken her to the senator’s office in Lancaester yesterday and made her walk through the magic security scanner there twice—without any incident.

  It should have soothed her nerves, but unfortunately, it had quite the opposite effect. That was just one little office, no offense to Stephane and his senatorship. This, on the other hand, was the royal fucking palace, the latest word in terms of security. Who knew what kind of cutting-edge equipment they had that others didn’t even know about?

  The stream of people around Alex directed her to the middle line, and suddenly she found herself between two shoulder-high walls made of three-inch-thick bulletproof glass.

  Trapped!

  The thought sent another twinge of panic through her.

  Through the crowd in front of her, Alex watched a stuffy-looking man in a dark blue tuxedo step into the magic scanner. A circular wall of transparent blue energy snapped up around him and started rotating, slowly at first, then quicker and quicker. Seconds passed: one, two, three, four—a green flare lit up a crystal, which was attached to a complicated network of crystalline cables, flowing from the base of the scanner, a brass circle engraved with glyphs, to the magic-fueled generator.

  The glowing barrier vanished and the man stepped out and moved on toward another staircase behind the security area that led up to the real action.

  There was no need for security measures beyond this point. If anything were amiss, the scanner would trap the perpetrator like a fly in a spider’s web, holding them in place so that they could be ferried off by the guards and subjected to further questioning.

  A sudden screeching alarm made Alex jump at least a foot into the air. Heads turned toward the source of the sound.

  The scanner to her left was wailing its head off, the crystal flashing a bright, ominous red.

  Guards’ boots thundered through the hall, before they swarmed the scanner.

  Alex craned her neck, just as all the decked out ladies and gentlemen around her were doing, but she couldn’t see much of whoever had set off the alarm. The scanner had stopped spinning and the ward barrier had turned an opaque white, so that it looked as if he or she was frozen inside a pillar of ice. Blue threads of energy sparked over the top of the barrier, and Alex would bet anything the person inside was being tasered.

  That was trueborn security policy for you: taser first, ask questions later!

  The wailing siren stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  People muttered between themselves, wildly speculating about why the alarm had been set off.

  On the far side of the scanner units, Alex caught a glimpse of a limp body in a black suit being pulled away by two security guards and vanishing through a security door at the back of the room.

  Maybe a bomber. Or maybe a family man who hadn’t known that his wife had stuffed a pair of nail clippers into his suit pocket just in case of an emergency.

  Yeah, emergency, my ass!

  The guy likely wasn’t dead, but even if they eventually found him to be innocent, Alex doubted he would be in a good enough state to attend the ball any time soon.

  She turned back to the security booth in front of her and realized with a chill that there was only one more person left in front of her.

  A cold sweat broke out on Alex’s brow and coated the skin between her shoulder blades, despite her shaper genes. This was mental! In a minute—two tops—she’d probably be the next body being dragged off to some secure underground vault. What had she been thinking? This would never work!

  Alright! That’s it! I’m out! Making a split-second decision, Alex spun around to leave but the people behind her were blocking her exit, shoving her mercilessly forward.

  Panic rose inside her like a wild animal and the spider clawed and snarled, pushing its way up through her skin.

  “Milady?”

  In slow motion, Alex turned toward the voice and found herself staring into the weathered face of a security guard in tarnished black body armor. Her brain screeched to a halt.

  The guard smiled at her. When she didn’t move, the man raised an eyebrow and cleared his throat. “Milady … your identification?” He indicated the slim panel beside him.

  Identification? Oh, identification! Of course.

  With what could only be described as a strained smile, Alex took a big step forward and raised her hand. Her fingers shook slightly when she pressed them against the blue crystal plate. Magic nipped her palm.

  She held her breath.

  Belaris and Darken had loaded her genetic profile into the palace’s security database last night, confirming her identity as Lady Alexandre de Nuy. It was incredibly chancy to feed her genetics into the database—after all, her profile was also still in the guardaí files as a wanted murderer—but it was the only way to get her into the palace. According to Belaris, her profile, including fake birth and graduation certificates, was completely ironclad—that is, as long as nobody dug any deeper for information on the person behind the name and face. If they did, they would find a whole fat lot of nothing.

  Ergo, she only had to make sure not to give anyone any reason to take a closer look at her. Well, cheers!

  “Thank you, Lady … de Nuy.” The guard leaned back and checked her name off the guest list on his table. She had been officially registered by Heloise Dubois herself. At least one thing that wasn’t fake. Sort of.

  “Welcome to Crona Palace, lady.” The security guard smiled at her again. “If you would please put your purse in here …”

  As if on autopilot, Alex raised her hand and dropped her tiny purse into the opening of the smaller scanner. The lid of the capsule closed and her purse was whisked off, to be scanned in an area hidden from view. It would be returned to her once she had made it to the other side of the body scan.

  If she made it to the other side …

  “There we go, miss. And off to my colleague over the there, if you will.”

  The guard motioned toward the body scanner, in front of which another young guard waited. A rookie by the looks of him. Clearly anxious to follow protocol to the letter, he didn’t even look up from his clipping board when Alex approached, producing a practiced blurb: “Are you carrying any items on or within yourself including, but not limited to, weapons, magical devices, augmentations, implants, medical equipment”—he rattled off another number of things that might activate the detector—“or anything comparable thereto that could possibly be used, purposefully or accidentally, to cause harm to another human being?”

  Oh, let’s see, sugar. Do my claws fall into the category of weapons or augmentations?

  Swallowing these words, Alex hit the guy with a bright smile. “Only the clothes and jewelry I wear, but I’m not supposed to take those off, or am I, sugar?”

  The young man glanced up and his mouth fell open. He blushed and stammered wildly, “I—uhm, n-no, m-milady. There’s—there’s nothing in the regulations to that matter.”

  No hu
mor, these trueborns, Alex decided, as she watched him trying to regain his oh-so professional attitude.

  “Now, if you … hem … would please step into the scanner, miss?” He pointed to the brass plate that made up the base of the scanner. “In here.”

  Finally. The moment of truth.

  Alex’s heart hammered so loudly, she was sure it could be heard back in the Trash Bin. Her teeth started to chatter. She bit down on them and her knees wobbled. Oh, for the love of—

  Get a grip, sugar! Don’t screw this up now!

  Her feet crossed into the glyph-engraved circle.

  Here goes nothing!

  The plate rose about five inches from the ground, startling Alex into a stupor, and then a pale blue, transparent barrier snapped up, a delicate cage that was even more impenetrable than the bulletproof glass walls she’d just walked through. Now she really was trapped.

  Panic slammed into Alex’s chest, making it tight, taking her breath away. She felt dizzy, lightheaded. A numb, tingly feeling filled her hands and feet. The world became brighter, almost crystalline, and some remaining reasonable part of her told her that she was hyperventilating and sucking too much oxygen into her lungs. Or was it carbon dioxide? Something like that anyway.

  She swayed.

  Breathe! she told herself. Just breathe.

  In. And out.

  In. And out.

  In. Out.

  The blue ward around her started spinning, faster and faster, a sickening blur, adding to the nausea in her stomach. Magic hit her like a wave, tingling over her skin, penetrating flesh and bone. It felt as if she was being doused with lukewarm water, only without the wetness.

  One …

  Breathe in.

  … three … four …

  Breathe out.

  … six … seven … eight …

  Too long. Way too long.

  From behind the spinning blue barrier, Alex glared at the crystal atop the silver pole, willing it to flare green.

  Come on! Go green, damn you! Go green!