“No one’s been here recently,” Kynan said.
She pointed at the shelves and cabinets. “Everything neat and organized by Latin nomenclature and grouped by virulence. That’s thousands of dollars of supplies. Maybe no one’s been here recently, but when Cifai comes, it will be through that door.”
Kynan walked to the cabinet and studied it, then did the same with the other furniture. His memories weren’t pretty right now, and it was distracting. He opened the fungi box, looked inside, and let the lid fall closed on the scent of wood and decaying organic matter. “Everything you need to kill someone over dinner.”
She itched to pull him away from the cabinet with its supply of poisons and paralytics. “They needed me to be sure of having control of you.”
He gave her a look. “That’s not the only reason.”
“It’s the main one.”
“They need us both.”
“Cifai is going to bring his personal knives and magehelds. At least thirteen.” Her chest tightened. “He intends to sacrifice you.”
“Maybe.” His changed emotions swept through her like an incoming tide. Rage, but also anticipation of the battle to come. She recognized his reactions from all the times she’d been along for the ride on a sanction. He was looking forward to killing.
“What else would he do?” She gestured. “Why else bring us here?”
He held her gaze. “Winters. The question isn’t just whether our good friend Ugo Cifai is thinking he’d rather try immortality on for size. It’s whether he’s going to try for both.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’s decided one baby from you is a decent trade for my life.”
“That’s sick.”
“So?”
Hands on her hips, she pressed her lips together. “He’s not getting anything.”
“With you on that one, Winters.”
Horror curled up tight in the pit of her stomach. She crossed to the second door, her heels echoing on the tiles. She lifted her palm to the door, but before she could touch the surface, Kynan gripped her wrist hard. “Booby trap.”
She backed away. If he said it was live, then it was.
“See?”
She hooked into his perceptions so fast her stomach objected. When she had herself steadied, she saw what he meant; a flickering perimeter of magic. He made a flowing motion with one hand and at the conclusion, hooked his fingers. She saw a flash of talon, so smooth and quick the sight barely registered. Now that he’d torn away the layer disguising the ward, what was underneath leaked through the fissures Kynan had created. The energy securing the door pulsed with the beat of a disembodied heart. The stink of festering magic floated on the air.
Somewhere, probably not far from here, a demon was being drained of life to power this magic. “There’s too many fucking rubies.” He glared at the warded door before he peeled back more of the camouflaging magic. He made it look easy, the way power slid through him. Silky smooth, like a warm knife through butter. Two minutes later, the ward was dismantled. He opened the door.
She expected to find another room, but the stale air that wafted in smelled of dirt and damp. A tunnel led into blackness.
Kynan’s sworn screamed.
CHAPTER 13
Fucking rubies everywhere. The skin across his neck and back tingled as the urge to shift forms headed toward unmanageable. Being in here wasn’t good for his jittery state. He didn’t even have the massive high of the closed bonds with Winters because this whole room was designed to fuck him up. And it was working.
The fucking sick ward. The layering over of the mageheld bond. Memories of Magellan and the screams of his dead sworn.
“Kynan?”
The world spun away from him. Hatred and resentment boiled through him, carried along with the screams of his sworn. In his head, as real as ever, Magellan stood just out of sight with one or the other of the magekind he’d deemed worthy of an apprenticeship. Kessler, that bastard mage he wished he’d been allowed to kill. Sessani, for sure, since some of the curses on the wall were in Pahlavi script.
He flexed his fingers, feeling the heft of the knife he’d used to take Magellan’s heart. His sworn, roused anew, surged into the maelstrom of his thoughts. There would never be enough vengeance. Never.
He focused on the witch in front of him. She gazed at him, trusting when she shouldn’t be. Not with him in this state, half out of his mind.
Maddy Winters. They used to be sworn to the same warlord, but that wasn’t true anymore.
Not mageheld. Not her mageheld.
So beautiful. He’d been to bed with her, recently too, but she hadn’t forced him. The witch had never forced him to do anything he didn’t want to. He’d fucked her more than once. Because he wanted to. Because she needed him. Because she liked to play close to the line. Just like he did. He wanted to play some more.
The witch touched him again. Two fingertips pressed to his torso, her power flowing through to him. His sense of time collapsed. At some point in the past, or maybe it was something he was to do in the future, he’d taken her to his place. They’d messed around. No different from any other hook up with a human woman, except he knew it wouldn’t stay that way. A glass of good wine, a kiss leading to more of the same, both of them getting off on not admitting what they were. For longer than he’d expected, he’d kept his insanity from pulling him in, but he’d still wanted her pain. Needed it. It turned out, she’d go there with him.
He tried to make it back to the present and couldn’t. They’d been naked. Her hands on him, stroking him like she couldn’t get enough. He lost the distinction between fucking a willing witch and his need for retribution. He couldn’t recall how long ago he’d done that. There was only a succession of recollections about the two of them when they were alone.
“Kynan.” Words and thought. “Snap out of it, warlord.”
He blinked, and he was staring at the steel-plated table where Magellan was going to cut the beating heart out of a demon. Any moment now, he’d feel the rancid burn of an order he had no choice but to obey. The mage had figured out the exact mix of magic and timing that let him take on the demon’s life force and extend his own life by a year or two. For a long time Magellan had killed at least monthly. Sometimes more often. If any of the steps were wrong, you ended up with a dead demon and no magic, or magic that nobody controlled, and sometimes that magic could be lethal.
The room shuddered with the voices of the murdered dead, and his sworn called to them. He extended an arm, magic softly rippling out, and made contact with a screaming, fading life force just coherent enough for him to assimilate. One more returned to the kin. One more rescued from unending death.
His sworn howled with despair and rage. About half had fully assimilated with him before Magellan had enslaved him, but the rest had ended up trapped in some half-living, half-dead state of existence. Some were so damaged they would never assimilate. He held them intact by dint of will, but sometimes all that was left was their hatred of him for trapping them. They weren’t coherent enough to understand that the alternative would have been far worse.
He’d saved them from Magellan, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he let the mage enslave him so he could save them all? He could’ve let ten thousand die and saved himself. He hadn’t.
“Kynan.” A woman’s voice that pulled at him. What the fuck? Had Magellan given him to someone else to command?
The bond that enslaved him was spreading through him, weakening, thinning down to the surface of something else. Enough to break free? His sense of time and place snapped back, but his sanity was stretched and tattered at the edges now, and it wasn’t a good place for him to be.
The present returned full force. He stood alone in a killing room with a witch who’d been formally trained. They weren’t in Nikodemus’s territory where she’d be bound by the rules. Worse, she’d walked out of his direct sight and dropped out of their link. Maddy Winters, unbound by any oath of fealty, could do him serious harm. In a room like this, surround
ed by ruby-layered surfaces, her human-bound magic was focused. His power was diffused. He had to work harder to shape the world to his will because the rubies reacted with all of him.
Everything the witch needed to fuck him over but good was right here in these four walls. For all he knew she was going straight for those vials of poison. Maybe while he’d been out of his head, she’d medicated herself with enough copa to make it real because a killing room this well stocked would have a generous supply of copa.
Another dose of poison might give her the opportunity she’d missed before. Maybe copa and something from that cabinet would separate him from Carson, and Winters could enslave him for real. If anyone could do something like that it was Winters. She’d studied that shit. She’d admitted to making slaves of his kind. She knew what all the powders, pastes, and solutions did and how to combine and bind them with magic. Several of the mushrooms here would slow him down if administered in the correct dosage.
She could paralyze him long enough to cut his heart from his chest.
Payback for what he’d done to her that day.
Kynan?
If she was going to take her revenge, she’d do it here. Right now. There’d never be a more perfect place and time. She was at her strongest while he was off-balance.
“Warlord.”
The bond Carson had with all the kin she had severed was still in place, still protection against his being taken mageheld again. He picked out the thrum of that bond from among the others. Those others were promises he’d made thousands of years ago—never to be triggered because the other parties were dead.
The knife Carson had given him that day had slid though Magellan’s bone and sinew with ferocious grace, and he held that memory close. He’d killed Magellan and released all the lives the mage had taken. Kynan had assimilated with them, too. Every single life Magellan had taken had become his to guard.
The two fingers on his torso became three. The voices of his sworn went quiescent. Odd that they’d settle down at a time like this.
She stood an arm’s distance from him, one hand lifted so he wouldn’t come too close, eyes wide and fixed on him. Yeah. She’d followed his entire train of thought from his past to his immediate future. “No,” she whispered. “Never.”
Whatever civilization he possessed fell to ashes. The only thing left to him was his certainty that she belonged to him. Bound over and marked. She tipped her chin to look at him, and she really should be on her knees or else bow her goddamned head to him.
“Warlord.” She placed a hand over his heart, smart enough to ramp herself down as if she were submitting to his rank. She wasn’t. He knew that. Sometimes it was worse when she dealt with him like this. If he challenged her, she’d bust him open, and he’d have to walk away, and that was all kinds of fucked-up, him walking away from her. “It’s okay,” she said.
He formed words from memory, not instinct. For a long time, memorization had been how he’d passed for human. “No. It’s not.”
He needed not to be in human form. He needed not to be trapped in this room with Maddy Winters when he knew she belonged to him, and she refused to accept that truth. His. Nikodemus could go fuck himself with his claims on her. Straight-up fact. Nikodemus had no right to her fealty.
“It’s never going to be okay,” he said.
“Kynan.” Her eyes were glued to him. “Kynan?”
“I don’t need your pity.”
She stepped back, and he remembered that cool expression and how she kept the world at a distance. Especially him. “No.”
He turned back to the door to the tunnel. She was a witch, not kin, and her experience with warlords was limited to Nikodemus, who had never been mageheld. Fuck her concern. He was Kynan Aijan. With his back to her, he replaced the snare on the door to the tunnel. The sick part was how he felt like it was only yesterday that he’d been watching Magellan do things that made him regret that the mage’s death hadn’t taken longer and been more painful.
There. Done. The snare was reset. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Please.”
They made it to the other door without incident, with her carefully controlling her magic so she wouldn’t set him off while he was in this volatile state. He could control himself, so eff her for behaving like he couldn’t.
In the stairwell with the door closed, he leaned against one of the plaster walls. His magic settled down. Winters sat on the last step, still open to him. He pushed off the wall and crouched down to work the atoms of the nearest wooden surface into new shapes. Titanium and steel wouldn’t reliably hold a ward, but the stairs would. He made a shallow ward that covered the entire stair. He pushed in a lot more magic to make sure it was concentrated enough to do some damage when it triggered.
“Aren’t the rubies a problem for you?”
“Yes.”
After another couple of seconds, she said, “It doesn’t look like it.”
“Not my problem what it looks like to you.” He gave the magic awareness and wove in a set of reactions to explode if magekind or kin who weren’t in some way sworn to Nikodemus ever stood here.
Or Winters. He had to make sure the ward wouldn’t kill her, too. He took a deep breath. They were working together, him and Winters, and underneath that mageheld bond, she belonged to him. The knowledge settled him down considerably. “When Cifai and his buddies come through that door. . .”
“What?”
He gave her an evil grin and made an exploding motion with his fingers. “Kablam.”
“I don’t know if I should be terrified or high-five you.”
“Both.” He headed up the stairs without waiting for anything or anyone. If Winters followed, fine. If she didn’t, that was fine, too.
She did follow, though, and on the other side of the stairwell door, he set another ward so anyone who tried to open the door from either direction wasn’t going to be right in the head for quite some time afterward.
“How did you do that?”
He looked over his shoulder at her. “What?”
“That.” She nodded at the door. “What you just did. I don’t usually have trouble following you, but that was ten things at once.”
“You haven’t seen half of what I can do.” He was aware his tone was curt, but he was less civilized than usual right now.
“Really?”
Her sarcasm made him turn around again. She had fine, dark eyes that told a tale, didn’t they? Her lip curled. Classic Winters. Cold and hard as ice. “What’s your problem?”
“I tried to get to know you better, remember? You told me to fuck off. You don’t get to keep to yourself like that, then complain no one understands you.”
Yeah. He did remember. Too much. He went back to his work on the ward. Extra nasty for those magekind fuckers.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” she asked from behind him.
“What now?” He knew what she meant. Those last two wards were beyond vicious. They weren’t inert until triggered, they were dangerous right now this minute.
“A ward like that. So close to us.”
“My advice is stay away from it. There’s a fucking tunnel into this house.” He stopped working, but he didn’t look at her. “We are one mile through the fields from where Infante held Addison.” He pressed his palm to the wall beside the door and turned just his head so he could glare at her. His. His. His. “She was pregnant when Infante killed Bejar.”
She didn’t respond with his level of spite. “I know,” she said.
He wanted his hands in Maddy’s hair, gripping hard—“When she ended up surviving, he wanted her killed because he was in over his head, and he was afraid someone would find out how badly he fucked-up. What happened to Addison happened because he couldn’t deal with Bejar. Someone like me. I saw what he did to her. I was there. Harsh and I dragged her out of that place so close to dead it’s a miracle she survived.”
She nodded at the door. “Is that vengeance for her?”
“Yes.”
She drew a breath and let it out, and then she blew him out of the water. “You still love her, don’t you?”
He could have. He wanted to have. Part of him had. “She always loved Harsh. I knew that from the start.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Addison lived because she is strong and resilient. A survivor. And for a while I hoped Harsh would be a fucking idiot. For a while he was.” Winters was such a little thing, and she didn’t know what made her remarkable. Addison had told him to try to fix his problems with Winters, but he never had. They were just too different and too much alike, and he had screwed up with her before he ever set eyes on her. “Bejar was more than Infante could handle. You can bet your ass some mage besides Infante did the job of taking Bejar. Infante wasn’t that good. If it wasn’t Sessani, then it was someone like her. Someone good enough that Magellan would work with him.”
“Then we should be worried about Cefai.”
“Exactly. When he gets here, if he comes up these stairs, I want to know about it before he figures out something’s wrong.”
She bent her head almost as if she were going to touch her forehead, and his stomach tightened with anticipation.
Acknowledge.
She didn’t because the one thing he needed from her was the one thing she’d never give him. Too bad. “Fuck you, Winters.”
Silence. Stone cold silence. “Same to you.” Winters headed for the kitchen. He followed. She grabbed a fork and started eating leftover macaroni straight from the saucepan she’d cooked it in. She stabbed her fork in his direction. “We have to work together, Kynan.”
“So?”
“So, what the hell is your problem that you act like what happened to Addison is somehow my fault?”
“What’s my problem? You.”
“Me?” Again with the fork.
“Not even an hour ago you and I were naked and loving it. Now you can’t stand me. So that’s right. You are my problem.”
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