Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (45 page)

“Stop it?” Liem began prowling forward. “
Stop
it? Don’t you get it? I can save Honora! I can fix her! I can make her better!” Suddenly, he snarled. “But what would you know of that? You’re one of
them
.”

“Them?”

“A Westerner.”

“But—”

“Westerners, Pantedans, they’re all the same! They don’t belong! Honora could be powerful, rich!” Liem laughed scornfully. “Instead, she’s like the purebred wolfdog whose owners let her mix with mutts…producing bad blood, wild, untamable pups who will suck her dry. We have to start fresh, start over. With a king who will do things right. And a justice system to drive the scourge away.”

Hayden wanted to run, but something kept him from turning his back, be it habits leftover from Reece and Gideon’s example, or just a strain of common sense he hadn’t tapped before.
Never turn your back on an attacker.

“Do you realize who you sound like?” Hayden asked as he continued walking
backward. If he could just back up far enough, he’d reach the crossroad of the corridors. Putting a turn between him and Liem should give him a few seconds’ head start.
Then
he would run. “That’s what the Veritas believe! But Eldritch
created
them, Liem—he gave them that idea so he could manipulate them! What you believe is a lie! Just another mechanism to get The Kreft more power!”

“Shut up!” Liem screamed, his dark eyes bulging. He came at Hayden with his hands raised, as if to strangle him, and that’s when Hayden saw. The eyes. They weren’t dark…they were black. And his skin, it was more than just pale—it was the sickly, wan yellow of an addict.

Stumbling backward, Hayden gasped, “How long? How long have you been on the serum?”

“Months, now. In just a few more, I’ll have…I will become…” Liem paused and gave his head a shake, as if he were confused. “I had to do it. It was the only way to beat him.”

Three more steps. Two. Hayden gripped the lantern harder, the metal handle imprinting in his skin. “Eldritch?”

Something in the pale face snapped. “Reece.”

Liem attacked.

Shouting, Hayden dove to the right and tripped into the intersecting hallway, Liem’s hands brushing the back of his shirt. Hugging the lantern to his chest so that the heat soaked through to his skin, he ran, refusing to look back. If Liem really was becoming a Vee, he was doomed.

By all rights, that thought should have had him slowing down, giving up. It didn’t. He ran faster than he ever had before, not because he was brave…because he was afraid.

The hallway walls flew away as he sprinted out into the ballroom. It looked as he had left it not five minutes ago: Reece was still alive, fighting Eldritch up above, and Nivy was kneeling by the Stream, transferring a teaspoon’s worth of burstpowder from the bullet to her hand. She looked over her shoulder at him as he gasped her name, and her eyes widened in alarm. For the first time, Hayden chanced a
backward glance. He wished he hadn’t.

Liem was there, not an arm’s length behind him, and if he had been frightening in the dark, in the moonlight, he was terrifying. Screaming so that blue veins stood out along his neck, Liem leaped and seized Hayden, pinioning his arms to his sides. Hayden smashed onto his stomach as his bifocals flew from his face and landed chattering against the marble. His ankle wrenched the wrong way beneath him, throbbing. 

The lantern fell beside them and shattered; the fire went out with a feeble hiss. Dead.

In a streak of howling wind, Eldritch rushed over Reece, cackling. Something cracked against Reece’s forehead, and he flew onto his back, blinking white lights out of his watering eyes.

His body clung to the serum for consciousness as one at a time, his small aches cluttered the front of his brain. His shoulder, his side, his head, plus a half a dozen bruises and the pain behind the effort of just keeping his eyes open. And there was the worry to contend with. He was starting to think he might die, and that his last act would be standing here like a useless lump while Eldritch ground him into dust.

He groaningly rolled onto his stomach, dragged himself up to his knees. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the white glow approaching, and braced himself for another impact. He was surprised when The Kreft pulled up short to hover over him, a sparkling web of flowing mist, like a nebula.

“Are you finished, Reece Sheppard?” that haunting voice sounded amused.

Reece tried to turn, but all he could manage was a breathless roll that put him on his back, staring up at stars, clouds, and
The Jester’s
monolithic balloon. Though his ears felt full of liquid, they caught a muffled shout, and he turned his face to the side to look back over the edge of the observation deck. Dollhouse-sized figures were fighting in the ballroom below, Nivy, Hayden, and…Liem?

“They will not best him,” The Kreft said thoughtfully, as if following Reece’s bleary gaze. “Your brother has done much growing, these years he’s been in my service. I doubt you will recognize him at all in another year.” Reece glanced up at Eldritch, who chuckled. “Forgive me, I have misspoken. No, Reece, you will
not
be here in another year, and neither will your friends. But perhaps I shall be merciful. Perhaps I shall let you pick one to save. Hayden, perhaps? He would make a fine addition to The Veritas. Yes.”

Reece laughed and went up to one elbow, though the laugh burned in his throat and his arm shook treacherously. “Hayden? Right. Not that this is news, but I think you’re a few personnel short of a full crew.”

“And I think you underestimate your Hayden Rice. I could make him into a fine tool. A fine tool.”

What
was
going on down in the ballroom? Reece risked another backward glance and licked sweat off his lip. Nivy and Liem were fighting fist and foot—Liem was an impossible blur, gracefully dodging Nivy’s punches and kicks—and Hayden was kneeling with a broken lantern next to one of The Kreft’s Streams…though there really was only one, wasn’t there? Sinuous and wandering, the Stream started where Eldritch had first left his human body, and ended where he floated above Reece in a cloud of brilliant light.

“What is he doing?” Eldritch suddenly said, voice sharp.

Reece cast The Kreft a quick look. It was impossible to pull emotion out of its faceless white mass, but by the way The Kreft’s misty tentacles were twisting and jerking, he thought it was agitated. He looked back at the miniature Hayden. He held something in each of his hands, too small to make out from afar, and was jerkily rubbing them together. If Reece had to guess, he’d say his friend was trying to start a fire.

“No…” Eldritch hissed. The Kreft began to threateningly swell, its white limbs flailing like angry serpents. “No!”

Reece wrung everything he had left inside of him so one last drop of adrenaline hit his nerves and sent them up in flames. He bolted upright.

“Hayden!” he screamed raggedly over the banister. “Hayden—do it! Do it
now
!”

Behind him, Eldritch roared wordlessly—a sound like thunder, rumbling deep in Reece’s chest. Reece spun, and despite himself, gaped. Eldritch was taller than two men stacked one on top of the other, and he was still shooting up like a weed, gathering himself to charge, to put a stop to Hayden’s efforts…to put a stop to Hayden. For a second, Reece hesitated. And then he figured…Eldritch wasn’t getting any smaller.

With a breaking shout, he leaped at Eldritch and groped for some kind of handhold amidst the coiling tendrils of white. He immediately found a solid core to the mass, and he felt the groove of muscles, and a thick skin like rubber, but skin all the same. He hadn’t noticed during his pummeling, but he should have guessed as much from when The Kreft had first rocketed him up here…the light and the mist weren’t Eldritch’s body, not anymore than Reece’s fingernails or hair were his.
This
was Eldritch’s body.

Reece sensed rather than saw an arm coming forth from the mist. Something like what he imagined a hand with no fingers might feel like wrapped itself around his right bicep; a second later, a second alien hand gripped his left. He tried to pull away, writhing. This time when The Kreft laughed, it sounded like the entire planet should be crumbling apart, the laughter was so loud, so deep. The fingerless hands tugged Reece’s arms in opposite directions so that his feet bounced like they were attached to a clothesline that had been pulled taut.

He began to lose consciousness.

He was here again. Watching while his friends fought for him, waiting for one of them to die because there was nothing he could do. Full of knowledge, full of facts…useless. Hayden’s hands trembled on the lantern, and he cursed down at the flint, the wick, the oil, and the damp burstpowder taken from Gideon’s single bullet. Useless.

Reece’s echoing scream made his stomach whither up, and he jerked his face towards the ceiling, glaring through his cracked lenses. The brilliance of The Kreft, grown to the size of a small house, gobbled up Reece, hid him from sight. But the screams said enough.

Nivy was fighting Liem. She had saved him. Dived in and drawn Liem to herself. Hayden had heard him break two of her fingers with a kick—heard the
snap
, not Nivy. She hadn’t made a sound. Which made it that much worse.

Again, Reece screamed, and it propelled Hayden to his feet. He had to do something—anything! The burstpowder had failed, but he couldn’t just sit there, wishing it to catch fire. He would help Reece…climb every last stair to the observation deck on his sprained ankle if that’s what it took!

A voice surprised him—Nivy’s. “
Hayden
!”

Hayden instinctively turned and grunted as a sideways boot thumped into his gut, bending him
backward. He fell sliding on the marble. Liem, holding a lightning cap weapon just like a real Vee, towered over him with an insane grin. Clucking his tongue, he lowered the gun, and as Hayden wriggled on his back, trying to get away, fired.

Electric jitters raced from Hayden’s good ankle up to the middle of his thigh, and his leg went as dead as a tree stump. At least it didn’t hurt, Hayden thought absurdly. His pain tolerance was a joke. He could never take what Reece or even what Nivy, crawling
towards him, dragging legs as dead as his own, had taken. He wasn’t like them. He shouldn’t have ever pretended he was.

“Liem! Enough!” Nivy growled. She rolled, dodging the blue electric fizz Liem shot casually her way, but came up from the dodge with difficulty.

As Hayden continued sliding himself back towards the Stream, his elbow slipped on something. He gazed down at it blankly. Reece’s jacket, flight wings still attached, curled, disheveled, around his arm. Without knowing what for, he picked it up and squeezed it to his chest. If he thought seeing something of his brother’s would pull Liem up short, even for a second, he was wrong.

With Liem approaching, his face bent on killing, Nivy crawling after him with her teeth grit and her eyes watering, and Reece shouting something, the strength in his voice fading—Hayden felt a small bulge in the pocket of the jacket. His hand slipped into the silk-lined, inside pocket. His fingers rolled something small and smooth out into his palm. It glinted in the half-light, a marble, dark blue and white swirled, like a miniscule planet trapped between his thumb and forefinger. He looked at Nivy. She looked at him.

Shouting with all his might, Hayden picked the marble up over his head and then threw it to the ground.

The dark swelled at the edges of Reece’s vision, blurred everything he saw—which wasn’t much. Just white, flowing light. It was the quietness that let him know the end was coming, the eerie, muffled silence. He couldn’t feel much, but he wasn’t unaware of his body, either. It was like going to that place between sleeping and waking, where even lifting a hand felt like an ordeal when he’d rather just sleep.

What was that…an earthquake? That’s what it felt like. Maybe he really
was
dreaming. Which was strange, because that meant he was alive, and if that was the case, then what was with all the white?

Abruptly, he was falling—just far enough to lose his breath when he landed on his back on the trembling floor. His eyelids felt chained shut, but he wrenched them apart with a groan. There was a film of dust on the smooth wood under his splayed hands, and more of it spiraled in the air, drifting…sparkling…

He bolted upright as all the rest came back to him—his father, the masquerade, Eldritch, the Streams—and at the same time, clamped his bloody hands over his ears. The noise was deafening. Like the braying horn of a locomotive combined with the screech of a windstorm and the squeal of a hundred rusted hinges.

The noise was coming from the opaque cloud looming over the observation deck—Eldritch. Reece shuddered and tried to crawl backward without the use of his hands. For a second, he’d seen something like a face in the white mass, seen two hollows for eyes and a nose and an open mouth too elongated to seem human, undetailed and smooth, as though they were pressing out against an elastic membrane.

That was when Reece knew the fight was over, and not just because he felt like someone had enthusiastically beaten him with a mallet. That scream was inhuman, but he knew the sound of defeat when he heard it—two parts hate, one part despair.