Nite Fire: Flash Point

by C. L. Schneider

  He looked at me sideways. “And what’s that?”

  I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I was lying through my teeth. But if Brynne was listening, I’d definitely intrigued her.

  Wary of my silence, Ronan stepped closer. “Dahl, what’s going on?”

  “There’s something else. Brynne is here.”

  “Here?” he repeated. “In the city?” I nodded, and he ran an anxious hand over his face. “Shit.”

  “She blames me for what the Guild did after I left. Her re-training,” I clarified, and his eyes drifted. “Ronan, it was Brynne. She killed Ella and her family. The hit was carried out by her and two other male operatives. One was her squad commander named Reech. The other I haven’t identified yet.”

  “Reech?” Ronan’s gaze snapped back with purpose. “Did he hurt you?”

  So you do know him, I thought. I cleared the evidence of my building annoyance from my throat. “He was getting to it. But he was after something else, something to do with Aidric.”

  “You’re wrong. Reech is always after blood.”

  I took a breath. I wanted to know more, but it would have to wait. Arguing wasn’t part of my plan. “Right now, Brynne is the bigger pain in my ass. She’s been leaving human bodies all over this city just to get my attention. When she gets tired of that… She’ll come for me.”

  Comprehension settled into his gaze. “And me.”

  Eyes grim, I nodded. “You were there, Ronan. I need to know what happened to make her turn against me. What happened after I left Drimera?”

  His gaze darkened. Once more he turned away.

  I tried to be patient, to let Ronan talk on his own, but as the minutes ticked by and he stood, staring at nothing, all I kept thinking was: I’m running out of time. Evans wouldn’t be under Nadine’s spell forever. When it broke, he’d come looking for me, and I didn’t want him here if Brynne made a move.

  “Ronan,” I said, startling him. “This is important.”

  His shoulders stiffened. Pivoting slightly, he stared out over the city. “I wasn’t there long. I escaped and came here the first chance I got.”

  “You were there in the beginning, for the arrests. And you’ve associated with far more lyrriken over the years than I have. You have to know more than the rumors. More than you’ve told me.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” he said, and I knew I had him.

  I stepped closer. “After I came here, after the nageun venom ran its course and my head cleared, I woke up in the city and you were beside me. I asked how you got here. How you found me. How you knew which exit I went through—how you knew I’d gone off-world at all. You gave me some vague response I don’t even remember anymore. But I let it go. I let it go because I had you. I was scared and panicked. My life was gone. I had no idea what was ahead for me. I only knew that you were here, and I wasn’t alone. I needed that connection, that security. I needed you.”

  A twinge, like a sudden sting, ran across his face. “And now you don’t.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said, knowing how easily the conversation could deteriorate. “But I was a hell of a lot more vulnerable back then. Now, I just need the fucking truth.”

  Ronan didn’t reply. I watched for subtle cues in his movements and posture, but he stood perfectly still as the breeze ruffled his hair, caressing the rigid lines on his drawn forehead.

  “There are only two ways,” I said, “two ways you could have known which exit I took that night. Either you were in the woods when I left or Brynne followed me to the cliff and she told you.” He held his tongue. I swallowed the curse on the tip of mine. “Exit zones are restricted, Ronan. She had no authority to even enter the area. If she was caught there…”

  Running a hand over his scruff, he nodded. But it wasn’t a response. It was an unconscious gesture of surrender. If Ronan was finally coming clean, it was because helping me was the best way he could think of to help himself.

  Abruptly, he stripped off his jacket. Biceps hard and tense, there was anger in the movement. The one that followed was no better, as Ronan spun and threw his jacket down on the nearest chair. Claiming the other one, he fell down hard in the seat. His eyes were wide. The strain in his jaw was more than I was used to.

  I crossed to the table in front of him. Sitting on its edge, I put my hands on his knees and grabbed his hazel eyes with mine. In them, I saw a sort of caged-panic that made the guilt twist a little harder in my stomach.

  Stop it, I chided myself.

  He’s been holding back. He should feel guilty, not me.

  But I’m the one who’s throwing him to the wolves.

  And I was doing a piss-poor job of it. If I didn’t soften my approach, Brynne would never believe Ronan meant anything to me. I needed to convince her to take the bait.

  Leaning forward, my hands on his legs tightened. I placed a gentle, comforting kiss on his mouth. At first, his response was pleasantly tender. Then stress brought his lust to the surface. With force and speed, he took my tongue into his mouth. One hand slid into my shirt while the other found my hair. Tugging at the loose waves, he wrenched me closer.

  Ronan wanted me on his lap. He wanted inside me. And I would let him. But not until he told me what I needed to know.

  Moving my hands to his shoulders, I forced him back. Reluctantly, his mouth fell off mine. He stared at me, eyes glassy with desire, breath heavy. I thought he might beg me to continue. It was better than the interrogation he knew was coming. But as vulnerable as Ronan made me, tonight I was in control.

  I licked his kiss from my lips and grinned. “Talk first.”

  He sighed and glanced away. “I was there, in the woods, the night you left Drimera. I was there before, too, when you wavered in killing that human child. I saw you hesitate. We both did.”

  “Both? You mean you and Brynne? You were out there together?”

  Wordless, his stare bore into mine for a brief, anxious moment before he averted his eyes again.

  My pulse racing with confusion and implication, I shook my head. “It was late. Brynne should have been asleep in the barracks, not shadowing me. And why were you out there? That human kill was mine, not yours.”

  “We weren’t out there because of you. I didn’t even know you were on assignment. Those woods were our place. It’s where we would meet. Where Brynne and I would go to...”

  In the silence of his hanging words I drew a painful breath. Comprehension blew cold through my stomach. “You were fucking her. For how long?”

  His guilty gaze swung back to mine. “A while.”

  Rage rushed in to drown my shock. I stood and stepped back. “She was an apprentice, Ronan. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “She’d been coming onto me for weeks. I tried to brush her off. But she wouldn’t stop. She kept coming back, cornering me, begging for it. I tried to tell her no.”

  “Maybe if you’d gotten your face out from between her legs she would have heard you.”

  “That’s not fair. You were so focused on winning the Queen’s attention. You barely had time for me anymore. Brynne felt the same way. We actually spent a lot of time talking about you.”

  “You talked about me while you were fucking her? That’s disgusting.”

  “It wasn’t like that. Brynne worshipped you.”

  “Except, it wasn’t me she was on her knees for.”

  Defensive, he shot to his feet. “You barely gave her the time of day. And all she wanted was to be like you, to be as good as you, as strong, as respected. Sometimes, she would pretend it was her squad. She wanted me to call her by your name, to treat her like I would you. She was so eager to please. It seemed harmless.”

  “Harmless?” His stupidity, his narcissism, made me sick. “You’re like some goddamn tabloid headline.” I gestured in the air with a dramatic voice. “Horny teacher sleeps with student. Claims he was powerless to resist her seductive charms.”

  I jumped as he kicked his chair across the roof with a growl. I wai
ted for him to hit me. I wished he would. I wanted an excuse to beat the shit out of him. Instead, he ran both hands over his face and dropped his head. “She was pregnant.”

  His proclamation pulled the air from my lungs. “You know what happens when a lyrriken gives birth, Ronan, the mutations that come out of us. How could you be so careless?”

  Shoulders slumped, he declined answering. “After you were arrested, Brynne was determined to tell you about us. She thought you deserved to know the truth before your execution.”

  “Point for her.”

  “I told her to let it go. I couldn’t let her ruin your last thoughts of me.”

  “Wouldn’t want that.”

  My bitter tone clenched his jaw. “When I saw Brynne sneaking out of the city that night, I followed her. I didn’t know you’d escaped. I just wanted to talk to her, to convince her to keep her mouth shut. To let you die in peace. But she had a gift for stealth, and I lost her. Then I saw you at the cliff. The way you were looking over the edge, like it was your last hope. I knew there had to be an exit down there. I thought it was new. That it hadn’t been cordoned off yet. That maybe you’d heard of one I hadn’t. I didn’t know you could see the damn thing. When the nageun caught up to you, I hollered a warning. But you were already jumping.”

  “And Brynne?”

  “I never saw her again. She must have gone back to the city. When I walked into the barracks later that night, the guards were waiting for me. The rest of the squad had already been taken in. They questioned me. They wanted to know where you were, where you’d gone. Naalish looked into my head, but all she saw was you leaping off a cliff to escape the nageun. They didn’t know you’d gone off-world. Not until long after when the exit was discovered. Then my memory of your jump made sense and the retrievers were sent in.”

  “That’s why they showed up all those months later. They finally knew where to look for me.”

  “Naalish and Aidric made it clear what I was facing. I’d not only consorted with the traitor, I’d been her lover. I was the most infected of them all, polluted by your treason. They promised to make me forget you ever existed. The first step…” His face going pale, Ronan swallowed. “They were going to castrate me, Dahl. I heard Naalish give the order and…”

  His hesitation pushed me forward. “And what?”

  “I couldn’t,” he shrugged. “I just couldn’t. I was laying there, waiting for them to come for me, and thinking of you, and… I couldn’t let her take it all away. I couldn’t forget you. So I broke out. I killed anyone who got in my way, and I headed for that ravine. I climbed down and searched until I found the exit. When I went through and found you in that drainage tunnel, cut and bleeding and half-dead... I watched over you for hours before you even knew I was there.”

  “You teased me about those nageun for years, acting like they’d never bit me, like I’d hallucinated the whole thing. Like I had some kind of panic attack and couldn’t shake it. But you saw me jump. You saw them chase me.”

  “If I’d told you I was there, then I’d have to tell you why. I’d have to tell you about Brynne. And I didn’t see a point. You and I were here, in this new world. It was a fresh start, a chance.”

  And look what we did with it, I thought. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. The sense of lost hope in his voice was as heavy as the weight of betrayal on my chest.

  Ronan offered a grim frown, as if the worst was yet to come. “I heard later that Brynne resisted the re-training. They beat her, messed with her head like the rest of the squad. But she wouldn’t bend. The elders decided her strength was something they could use and transferred Brynne to isolation. Her pregnancy was discovered, but it earned her nothing. She was subjected to months of deprivation, left in the dark with no sound, no physical contact. They alternated it with exposure to light and sound. Day and night, they put her under these blinding lights with this terrible, deafening noise. She carried to term like that.” Then, hastily, like he couldn’t keep it in anymore, he blurted, “Brynne gave birth alone, in her cell, strapped to a fucking chair.”

  My hands were over my mouth, but I wanted them over his. I wanted to make him shut up. Because I knew what he would say next, and I so badly didn’t want to hear.

  “When the time came, she bore three of the creatures,” he said, his face contorting with disgust and disdain. “The deprivation stopped, then, but they kept her strapped down. They kept her locked in with them. The nageun didn’t just drink her milk, Dahl, they….” Hesitating, Ronan swallowed. He gripped my eyes like he needed me to see his revulsion, like it was proof of the pain he’d suffered. But whatever Ronan felt—regret, self-loathing, relief that it had been her and not him—it was nothing compared to the horror that had stolen my breath.

  Then he put my thoughts into words and made it worse.

  “It was like what happened to you,” he said, “when you fell into that nest, when they fed off you. Except, for her…”

  Shivering, I crossed my arms. “Help didn’t come.”

  “With all their venom in her blood, she was delusional. They thought she didn’t know what was going on, that she couldn’t feel it. But I heard… She knew. She felt. At least in the beginning, until it took whatever sanity she had left. It was easier then, for the Guild to twist her mind and manipulate her.”

  “For them to break her?”

  “They broke them all, Dahl, everyone you ever led or trained.”

  “Everyone but you.”

  “You think I don’t know that? After I found out what she went through, what all of them went through, it haunted me for years.”

  “I’m glad. But for once, this isn’t about you. So whatever guilt you feel about letting Brynne be devoured by her young, while you were here fucking me—stow it.”

  Chest heaving, his eyes on me were dark and fierce with resentment. I was shocked when Ronan tightened his jaw and choked back his rage. “After Brynne’s re-training, she was stronger, more aggressive and brutal. But a part of her never came back.”

  “Did she tell you all of this? Have you seen her?”

  “No. Once in a while I’d see some of our old squad. They were back to work within a year, reassigned and forgiven. Naalish held Brynne for ten years.”

  My stomach dropped. “Ten?”

  “When the Guild released her back to active duty, she could generate more than the water she was born with. Naalish handpicked her missions, treated her like a pet. She kept her close. Last I heard, Brynne wasn’t allowed off-world. She was too unstable to be that far off the leash. Something must have prompted Naalish to let her go.”

  “And your children?” I said with blatant scorn. “What happened to them?”

  “How the hell should I know?” he balked. “And don’t call them that. If you’re going to use human words to describe the nageun, then call them what they are: mutated freaks.”

  “Those freaks were made of you.”

  “And if you hadn’t escaped that night, I would have taken care of it. No one would ever have known she was pregnant. What the Guild did to her would never have happened.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been so fucking selfish.”

  “You think I wanted to breed those creatures with her?”

  “I think you wanted to fuck her and nothing else mattered.”

  “She came on to me, Dahl!”

  “You were her superior. You should have known better.”

  He stabbed a finger at me. “And you should remember that monogamy is a human concept. Lyrriken live by instinct, we live by our senses. We accept our physical needs, embrace our animal side. Not bury it under invented religions and societal ethics. We feel the land, Dahl. Enjoy the sensation of warm blood on our hands after a clean kill. We are made of everything the humans have tried for generation upon generation to repress in themselves.” Breath ragged, the veins rigid in his neck, Ronan paused in his rant. His words were more insightful than he was usually given to, and made fa
r more sense than I was comfortable with.

  But Ronan never knew when to quit. He threw in one last comment, and his moment of perceptiveness shriveled under the taint of his jealousy. “And it’s not like I was your only lover.”

  “No, you weren’t. You were just the only one I acknowledged. The only one I cared for.”

  His jaw softened. “About a year ago, I heard Brynne had hired someone outside the Guild to look for me. It seemed the memories suppressed by her re-training had come back. With a vengeance, apparently,” he threw in, irony curling his lip.

  “Wait. She hired someone to look for you? Not me?”

  “I’m sure you were next on the list. Or she was using you to draw me out. It’s no secret you and I run together.”

  “But not for a long time.”

  “Maybe her intel was old. Either way, Brynne probably figured if she found one of us, she’d find the other.”

  “And she did.” I stepped away, thinking. “This isn’t just about me. It never was. It’s about us.”

  She knew what I’d do.

  She knew I’d use Ronan to draw her out, when all the while...

  She was using me.

  Everything I’d planned—reeling Brynne into a trap, falling all over Ronan in public, slipping a tracker on him and trailing him until she attacked—it was all useless, unnecessary. I’d already given Brynne what she wanted: her primary targets out in the open, alone together.

  “We have to go.” I grabbed Ronan’s jacket and threw it at his chest.

  Catching it, he took my hand. “I’m sorry, Dahl. I was never strong like you.”

  “I know.”

  Something sharp and cold hit my hand. I thought it was rain, but the contact was too painful. I looked down to identify the source, and more struck the side of my neck—my back, my left leg, my right hand, my chest, my neck. With the last, a wave of wooziness blew my thoughts away. My knees buckled. I barely felt the impact as my face struck the rooftop, only a faint whoosh of air from the flapping of lyrriken wings overhead.

  Thirty-One