He gestured at the dead woman, and she lurched forward, sword at the ready. Owen backed away, and the corpse of what had once been his mistress came after him. He tried to speak to her, but his mouth was too dry. This wasn’t Cathy. Cathy was dead, and the computers currently inhabiting her body cared only for the orders programmed into them. Owen knew this, but he couldn’t fight her. Not her. Killing Cathy had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do then, and he didn’t think he could do it again. And so he allowed her to back him away from the open door, and Valentine Wolfe slipped easily past them, chuckling happily. He darted away down the corridor, still laughing, leaving Owen and what was left of his old mistress to sort out their differences together.
And in the computers of the security center, a program was slowly counting down to zero—Valentine’s last gift to the Deathstalker.
Back in the main hall, Hazel d’Ark was bored. She sat in a chair with its back to the wall, so no one could sneak up on her, and watched the Romanov and the Kartakis sit quietly together. Hazel could have contacted Owen through his comm implant, to see how he was getting on, but she knew how snappish he could get if you interrupted him while he was in the middle of something. Hazel crossed her legs, just for something to do, and wished Owen would get on with killing the Wolfe. There was always the chance he’d go all soft-hearted again at the last minute, and insist on dragging the Wolfe back alive to stand trial, but she didn’t think so. Not this time. Hazel crossed her legs again and sighed heavily. Boring, boring, boring.
She glared across at the two silent aristocrats, and only then realized that the Romanov had disappeared. His exoskeleton was still sitting where it had been, but he wasn’t inside it anymore. Hazel was immediately on her feet, gun and sword in hand, eyes sweeping the great hall. How the hell could she have missed the Romanov getting loose? There was no way he could have clambered out of that much armor without her noticing, no matter how preoccupied she’d been with her boredom. Unless the body armor had built-it stealth technology—in which case the Romanov could have freed himself while hidden behind a projected holo illusion. And if the Romanov had dropped that illusion, it could only be because he was currently skulking somewhere in the hall, hidden again behind some projected holo disguise that rendered him, for all practical purposes, invisible. Wonderful.
Hazel held her sword out before her and spun around in a circle. She strained her ears for the slightest sound, but the hall seemed utterly silent. The Romanov could be anywhere in the damned hall. . . . She shot a quick glare at the Kartakis, to warn him to stay put, and was cheered silently by the way he immediately sank back in his chair. And then an arm shot around her throat from behind, tightening its grip, shutting off her air. She struggled furiously against the choke hold, but couldn’t shake the Romanov off. Strength wasn’t enough to break a hold like this, one of the few holds that actually stood a chance against someone as strong as her. She still had some human weaknesses, after all. Hazel staggered back and forth, dragging the Romanov with her, desperate for air, furious with herself for letting her attention slip. She had to defeat the Romanov before Owen got back, or she’d never hear the end of it.
She snapped smartly forward at the waist, and the Romanov went flying forward over her head, his own weight and momentum breaking the stranglehold. She heard him hit the floor hard, and immediately turned and blasted the exoskeleton with her disrupter. The armor exploded with a satisfyingly large bang and went up in flames. The Romanov’s holo illusion snapped off, and there he was before her, rising to his feet with a short but nasty-looking knife in his hand. She really should have searched him.
Hazel sucked the air back into her straining lungs, her sword held steadily out before her. The Romanov was a big man, but she’d faced bigger, and the advantage was back on her side now. The Romanov seemed to sense this, opened his hand, and let the knife fall to the floor. Hazel relaxed just a little. She should have known the aristo wouldn’t have the guts for anything remotely resembling a fair fight.
She gestured with her sword for the Romanov to go and sit down again, and knew immediately they she’d made a mistake. For a man who had one hidden weapon might well have another. The moment Hazel’s blade moved away from him, the Romanov flexed his arm, and a knife dropped down into his hand from another hidden sheath. The knife in his hand streaked toward her undefended gut, and her sword was miles out of line. It was a sudden, simple, blindingly fast attack, and anyone else would surely have died, but Hazel wasn’t like anyone else, and hadn’t been for a long time now. She hauled her sword back into line with inhuman speed and strength, parried the knife, and knocked it aside. The Romanov plunged on, unable to stop, and impaled himself on the waiting blade.
The Romanov sank to the floor, face twisting, and dropped his knife to clutch the transfixing sword blade with both hands, as though he could somehow pull the killing steel out of his body. And it was as he held Hazel’s sword with a dying man’s desperate strength that Hazel realized she’d lost track of the Kartakis. She glared around her, desperately tugging her sword, but couldn’t budge it. And there was the Kartakis, on his feet, a concealed knife in his hand too. She started to raise her gun, but the Kartakis’s hand whipped forward, throwing the knife with deadly practiced skill, and Hazel knew she wasn’t fast enough to dodge it. She tried anyway, and time seemed to slow to a crawl. The knife inched through the air, heading straight for her left eye. And Hazel knew she was going to die, alone and far from friends and help.
Oh, Owen, I wish—
And then there he was, materializing out of thin air, his hand slapping the knife aside. It flashed through the air, back to its owner, and sank to its hilt in the Kartakis’s throat, as though it belonged there. The aristocrat bent slowly forward, as though bowing to Owen and Hazel, and fell dead to the floor. The Romanov breathed his last, let go of Hazel’s sword, and fell backward, dead too. She jerked the sword out of his body and turned, just a little breathlessly, to thank Owen for his last-minute rescue. And it was only then that she realized how different he looked.
His clothes were different, torn and bloodied, and topped with a great furred cloak. His face was tired and gaunt, and he was breathing hard and deep, as though he’d been running for a long time. He looked as though he’d been through Hell and had to fight every step of the way, but in his steady gaze Hazel saw both determination and a desperate, bone-deep sadness. He smiled at her, a strange, gentle smile, and reached out a hand as though to take hers. Hazel thrust her gun into its holster and reached out to take his hand. And that was when she realized Owen was extending his flesh and blood left hand, not the golden Hadenman hand that had replaced it long ago. Hazel hesitated, her hand stopping short of his, and Owen smiled sadly, as though he knew he’d be denied but had still hoped otherwise. He opened his mouth to say something, and Hazel leaned desperately forward, somehow knowing it was vital she heard what he had to say, but he was gone, vanished back to wherever he’d come from, to whatever desperate flight he’d interrupted to save her when no one else could.
Hazel looked about her, but the hall was empty, save for the two dead aristocrats and the quietly burning exoskeleton. Had that really been Owen, appearing out of nowhere to save her when she needed it most? But he’d had two human hands. Could it have been an alternative Owen, from some different time track, like the other Hazels she sometimes summoned? And if so, why had he looked so sad? She accessed her comm implant.
“Owen. Report in. Are you all right? Owen? Owen!”
The Ghost Warrior made out of Cathy’s remains lurched toward Owen, sword at the ready, and he didn’t think he’d ever been so angry in his life. He wasn’t worried. For someone who’d once gone one on one with a Grendel, a lone Ghost Warrior with just a sword wasn’t much of a threat. Her sword lashed out at him, and he parried it effortlessly. But to have desecrated the grave of the first woman he’d ever felt anything for, just for a sick joke . . . for another way to hurt him . . . Owen clutched his sword hilt till his hand ached. He didn’t want to have to kill Cathy again. It had been hard enough the first time. But he couldn’t let this mockery of an old love go on. It had to be stopped, if only so he could go after Valentine and tear him apart with his bare hands. And then the dead mouth opened, and an approximation of Cathy’s voice came out. It wasn’t the body speaking. The vocal cords had to be rotted away by now. It was just a recording.
“Don’t hurt me, Owen,” said the dead woman, her torn black lips trying to keep up with the words. “Please. I don’t want to die again. I know I’m not what I used to be, but it’s still me. Cathy. Your mistress. Valentine brought me back, back from the dead, and trapped me in this rotting body. He can do things like that now. He has new friends. Powerful allies. You’d be amazed what he can do now. Please, Owen.”
“Shut up.”
“All right, then, let me kill you, and we can be dead together, lying side by side in the warm earth, forever. Do it for me, Owen.”
“You don’t sound a bit like her,” said Owen, and he stopped backing away. “You don’t sound at all like my Cathy.”
“Being dead changes you.”
“Not this much. Cathy never pleaded for anything. Damn you to Hell, Valentine.”
And he lashed out with his mind, the power boiling up within him, driven and focused by fury and outrage, and the dead body before him blew apart into tiny pieces of rotten flesh and shattered tech. Owen watched them fall and felt nothing at all. It hadn’t been Cathy.
“Owen?” said Hazel’s voice through his comm implant. “Report in. Are you all right? Owen? Owen!”
“I’m fine,” he said finally. “But Valentine’s escaped. We’ll have to search the castle for him. Lock up the two Lords and come and join me in the security center.”
“The Lords are dead,” said Hazel, just a little apologetically. “They tried to escape.”
Owen started to say something cutting and then hesitated. There had been something in her voice. . . . “Are you all right, Hazel?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’m fine. I’ll be with you soon.”
She shut off contact. Owen looked down at the remains of a human body scattered across the floor, and told himself he felt nothing at all.
Together, Owen and Hazel searched the Standing, floor by floor, room by room. It took some time. The security system should have been able to locate Valentine, but he’d programmed it to ignore him. The Wolfe always planned his moves well in advance. And so they made their way through the ancient castle and did not find him, or any trace of his people. Valentine Wolfe had left the building.
They finally ended up in Owen’s old bedchamber. The secret passage was still standing open, but Hazel talked Owen out of going back down to the flyer caves. It had been clear to her for some time that the Wolfe had made his escape from the castle, and probably from Virimonde, but she’d let Owen go on searching, because she could see he needed to. They stood together in the bedchamber and looked about them, wondering what to do next. Hazel sat down on the edge of the bed, legs swinging, and smiled as she sank slowly into the deep mattress.
“This is some place you got here, Deathstalker. Did this really all belong to you?”
“When I was Lord, this whole planet belonged to me, and everything on it,” said Owen. “Now the planet and everything on it is dead. All I have left is a Standing I never really cared for, and a few memories.”
Hazel smirked. “I’ll bet you have some good memories from this room, at least.”
“Some,” said Owen. “I had a mistress called Cathy when I was Lord. We were happy here.”
Hazel sat up straight. Owen had never mentioned any previous women in his life before. She’d always supposed there must have been someone, somewhere, but a mistress was news to her. She kept her voice carefully casual. “And what happened to this Cathy?”
“She turned out to be an Imperial spy. Tried to kill me when I was outlawed. I had to kill her.”
“You killed your own mistress?” said Hazel incredulously. “Damn, that’s cold, Deathstalker.”
Owen stared at the holo portrait before him, showing the original Deathstalker, founder of his Clan. “I killed him too, and he was my most revered ancestor. Seems to me I’ve been responsible for too many deaths in my life. And far too many of them people I cared for. Maybe you should find yourself a new partner.”
Hazel got up off the bed and moved to stand beside him. “You never killed anyone you didn’t have to.”
Owen shook his head. “I betrayed my inheritance when I killed Giles. I betrayed my name and my Family honor.”
“No,” said Hazel firmly. “He did that when he forgot what he was fighting for. He was Warrior Prime, in his day, defender of Humanity. When he decided he wanted to be ruler instead of defender, he betrayed us all.”
“He really was a legend,” said Owen. “An authentic hero. He actually did do most of the things the stories say he did.”
“Yeah, including the creating and wielding of the Darkvoid Device. A thousand suns snuffed out in a moment, and no one knows how many billions dead. The greatest mass murderer in history.”
“He meant well. He always meant well. He just . . . lost his way.”
“Ah, hell,” said Hazel, slipping an arm through his. “We all lose our way sometimes. You just killed the man, Owen. The legend lives on.”
“I can’t go home again,” said Owen bitterly.
“You couldn’t have anyway. You’ve changed too much. And mostly for the better.”
Owen raised an eyebrow. “Only mostly?”
“Gosh, sir aristo, could you teach me to arch one eyebrow like that?”
“Go to hell, peasant.”
They stood together for a while, thinking their separate thoughts. “Owen,” Hazel said eventually. “Have you been manifesting any new abilities just recently?”