Fury's Kiss

Page 92

“But it didn’t matter. He had to be removed in any case,” Lawrence added, and stopped again.
Baiting me.
I told myself to shut up. To concentrate on finding a way out of this. Only I didn’t see one.
Even if Lawrence was lying, and a competent mentalist could have brought me out, where was I supposed to find one? The only one I knew about was Ming-de, and I had no way to contact her. Or reason to believe that she would help if I did.
And say he was making that stuff up about time being perceived differently in the brain. I could still lie there in the rubble a long time before anybody noticed me. And even then, if my rescuer wasn’t one of the handful of people who knew me, he’d just assume I was one of the human guests and put me wherever they were keeping the others. It might be hours before anybody realized I hadn’t just been knocked out cold.
And I didn’t think I had hours.
“Was that your job? To betray the Senate?” I asked, taking the bait. And starting to search the shadows for the one searching for me.
“Betray?” Lawrence’s voice was mocking. “Was it betrayal for those fools to gut each other nightly on the arena floor? Fools fight; winners think.”
“So you planned to get on the Senate this way?” I asked in disbelief.
“No, I planned to rule the Senate this way,” Lawrence said. Because he was obviously crazier than I was.
“If you’re so strong, you could do that anyway,” I said, watching a shadow slink along a wall. “Challenge the consul. As far as I know, she isn’t a mentalist.”
“No, but your father is.”
“Ahh.” Things started to make sense. The consul could fight her own battles, but she could also call for a champion when challenged. And obviously, Lawrence didn’t think he could take Mircea.
So he’d just decided to murder him instead.
“Is that what the fey promised you?” I rasped. “The consulship?”
“No, that is what they promised Geminus. He’d discovered that a Senate seat is merely another form of slavery. The only way out of bondage in our world is to rule.”
“And that’s what you think you’re going to do?” I demanded. “Rule? Because I got the impression that’s what the fey want. And their godly buddies.”
“The fey care about Faerie, not Earth. And what gods?”
“The gods the fey plan to bring back! Or didn’t they share that tidbit?”
He laughed. “Oh yes. I think it was mentioned a time or two. But you forget—the gods are not here. And will not be here until the Circle falls.”
“And isn’t that the idea? Take out the Senate, then destroy the Circle?”
“That’s their idea,” he said condescendingly. “Mine is to remove the consuls and to consolidate rule of the six senates in my hands. Once I have it…Well, both sides will need my favor then, won’t they? And with the odds in the war nearly even, the vampires will be poised to make the difference.”
“And you’ll throw your weight behind the Circle,” I said slowly.
“Who will then owe me their victory, further cementing my position.”
“So this is just another vampire power play.” It shouldn’t have surprised me. Mircea had guessed as much, and it was certainly nothing new. Where vamps were concerned, it was the oldest story in the book and I’d seen a thousand examples. But for some reason, this one seemed particularly—
I belatedly realized that memory-me had started climbing out of the trench she’d been slogging through. And that the trench had been in shadow and outside was a whole lot brighter. And suddenly, so was I, as light from the scene spilled over into the surrounding area.
“The power play,” Lawrence said, materializing out of nothing right in front of me. “And even for a novice, that was pathetic.”
Behind him, memory-me made an “oh shit” face and launched herself back into the trench.
“Really? How’s this?” I asked, and kicked him viciously backward.
Because I might not be strong enough to kill Lawrence myself, but I had plenty of lethal memories that might.
As he was discovering.
I saw him fall into the scene, saw him land in a splash of mud and blood and half-rotten donkey parts. But I didn’t see him get up. Maybe because a barrage of artillery fire ripped across the scene a second later, whiting out everything.
Or maybe because I was running like hell.
Not back for the entrance, but farther, further in. Dodging around, looking for other memories, worse ones, because the son of a bitch wasn’t dead yet. No, not yet, or I’d be out of here. I ran past strafing gunfire and a stampede of horses and a crashing surf and—
And straight into the fist that came out of nowhere.
It looked a little different than it had a moment ago, blackened and bleeding, with bare knuckle bones protruding from ruined flesh. It matched the face above it, which was almost unrecognizable. Demon red eyes looked out of a mask of charred skin that had partially flaked off, including the part that had once covered the now hairless skull. One cheek was split open, the guard uniform he was wearing was smoking, and half of the breastplate had melted to the burnt torso.
It looked like Lawrence hadn’t come apart fast enough this time. But he hadn’t died, either. A fact he demonstrated by sending me staggering back against the floor. He tried to shove a boot through my skull next, but I grabbed it—hot, melting rubber, shit—and twisted. I heard his knee pop before I felt it, before he screamed and grabbed my hair, jerking me up and throwing me face-first into the wall.
Right before I whirled and kicked out with everything I had left, sending him flying back into another memory. Of an earthquake-fueled rock fall that had very nearly caved in my head once, a few hundred years ago. And then I turned and scrambled away, trying to look ahead and behind at the same time, my eyes watching half a mountain slough away into billowing dust, while my feet—
Splashed down in a puddle.
The puddle was on wet cement. The cement was in a warehouse. And the warehouse looked to be on the edge of what passed for civilization.
Shit. I immediately spun back around, looking for the way out, because I must have accidentally fallen through one of the flickering memories that formed the obstacle course outside. But there was no door, no square of boiling darkness, no furious pursuer.
Just a drab, water-stained wall, a couple of broken pallets and the puddle. The puddle was water. I looked up.
And a great drop of tar-laced rain hit me square in the face.
Great.
I looked back down, holding my eye and wondering: Now what?
I honestly had no idea. I was panting with exhaustion, my wrist was on fire, and now I was half blind. I wasn’t going to win a fight like this. If Lawrence found me, I was toast.
Of course, I probably was anyway. I didn’t recognize this place, so it must be one of Dorina’s memories. And since I didn’t even know how to navigate my own, the chances of figuring a way out of hers didn’t seem so great. So I went in instead, because it was either that or wait around to die.
Although it smelled like something already had.
Maybe a lot of somethings, judging by the stench. But it wasn’t the old, familiar stink of putrefaction that caught my attention as I passed behind a wall of crates. It was the fact that whatever had died in here wasn’t exactly—
Human.
I stopped abruptly, staring at the remains of what looked like hundreds of creatures, stacked against the far wall in cages three and four high.
Most were various species of fey I had encountered through the years, along with what might have been shifters. Others…I didn’t know about the others. And I doubted that anybody else would have, either. The monsters who had engineered these crossbreeds hadn’t been concerned with viability or quality of life or anything but their intended outcome.
I wondered how many creatures they had killed along the way.
I wondered if those hadn’t been the lucky ones.
Because it looked like they had just abandoned this place, once they’d finally achieved the result they wanted. Or maybe the Circle had gotten too close, and the conspirators had decided to walk away, leaving us another cache to find. Only we wouldn’t have learned much from this one.
Because they hadn’t bothered to open the cages before they left.
And the contents hadn’t managed it themselves. There were signs that a number had tried, biting and clawing at the bars, before succumbing to hunger or thirst. Or in a few cases, to their fellow experiments. But it didn’t look like any had made it out.
Or maybe I spoke too soon.
A bunch of boxes formed a tall line facing the cages, blocking off the view of at least half the wall of horrors. That was true even when I got close, drawn by morbid curiosity and a weird sense of hope. And found a woman kneeling on the floor.
Her head was bowed, but not in shadow. A beam of moonlight was filtering down from a high window, illuminating her like a spotlight. As a result, her face was mostly still visible.
And her face was mine.
I had a killer on my trail and, given his track record, he wouldn’t take long to find me. I should get moving, should try to find a defensible position. Should try to figure out how to fight something that could dust away to powder in the blink of an eye.
But I didn’t move. She didn’t seem to notice me, or even look up. But I…couldn’t look anywhere else.
She looked like a vampire.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but we weren’t twins, despite the superficials. She had my short dark hair, my features, my height, even my basic style of clothing. At least, the kind I wore when I wasn’t going to the party from hell: black jeans, a black tank top, a black leather jacket. She had on rubber-soled shoes instead of my usual ass-kicking boots, maybe because she didn’t need any help in that department.
And yet, if I’d seen her from across the room, I’d have sworn she was a vampire.
It was something in the way she held herself, so preternaturally still. Something in the way she squatted there, effortlessly balanced on just the toes of her feet, in a pose a prima ballerina would have tired of very fast. Something in the way she didn’t seem to breathe or blink quite the right number of times per minute.