Seeker (50 page)

John’s remaining guard lunged forward to stop Briac, just as John’s own hand slid down the edge of the disruptor. There was a high, piercing whine as the disruptor launched a thousand sparks.

The room was filled with multicolored light again, and the hiss and snap of electricity. The web of sparks collided with both of the men, John’s guard and Briac, who were now locked in a fight.

His own man jumped backward, beating at his head, which was swimming with electrical flashes. Briac fell to the ground, falling out of the cloud of sparks as he did. But he was not completely free of them. A small handful—maybe three or four—were still dancing around Briac’s head. The disruptor field had split between the two of them, something John had not known was possible. Briac rolled along the floor, swatting the flashing lights like they were flies.

John turned away, searching frantically for the athame and lightning rod.

Quin threw me the athame!
he thought, filled with a relief so profound and a happiness so intense that they were almost overwhelming.
She chose to give it to me!

His hands closed around both stone objects. But they were wrong. They didn’t feel as they should. Instead of cool stone, his skin felt something softer, warmer. He hit the athame against an overturned table, and it crumbled to pieces in his hands.

It was a trick. She hadn’t thrown him the real dagger. She hadn’t
chosen to help him. He stood quite still for a moment, despair flooding in. And then came anger.

He could see Quin and Fiona farther up the steep floor, kneeling by another figure. As he approached, he recognized this figure: Shinobu MacBain. Quin’s rescue on the Bridge suddenly became clear. Shinobu had been there. He had been helping her. Perhaps, in Hong Kong, Shinobu had taken John’s place. Perhaps he and Quin had been together for the last year and a half. He could imagine her touching him, kissing him, helping him, as she had refused to do for John. The idea made him furious.

“Can you move?” he heard Quin ask him.

Shinobu was clutching his side, and one of his legs was bent in the wrong direction.

“Sure,” he whispered. “I can move.”

“We’re going to pull you,” she said. “Hold my arms.”

Before Shinobu could grab on to her, John grasped his whipsword with both hands and drove the butt of it into the side of Quin’s head as hard as he could.

She dropped to the floor, stunned.

Then there was a tremendous groan from the back of the ship, followed by the sound of a great amount of metal tearing away from itself.

Traveler
began to plummet.

The room was swinging madly. Something had hit Quin, hit her head so hard she couldn’t see properly. Her vision was spinning, but she was fairly certain the room was spinning as well. There were skyscrapers outside, whirling across the huge glass canopy like the lights of a carnival ride.

She and Fiona and Shinobu were sliding across the floor together, and someone else was there. She could feel him breathing near her face. He was clutching her as they slid, keeping her with him. And his arms were searching inside her cloak.

“No,” she breathed.

“Why wouldn’t you choose me?” he whispered. “Just once?”

She had to stop him from searching her pockets. Her head was throbbing and her arms weren’t working properly, but she struck out. He pushed her arm away like it was a stalk of wheat.

“There,” she heard him say. “There it is.”

It was John, and he sounded
happy
. She could see him now. He was holding the athame and lightning rod, the real ones that she had concealed.

“No, John …”

He continued to search inside her cloak. She tried to push him away, but there was no strength in her arms.

He was taking something else from her pocket. She heard him draw a breath in surprise.

With great effort, her head pounding, Quin turned toward him and made her eyes focus. John was staring at a thick book with a leather cover and a leather tie holding it shut. She grabbed for it and was confused to see her hand move in the wrong direction.

“You don’t want that,” she whispered. But the words seemed wrong: of course John would want it. She watched as he flipped through the pages, a look of joy crossing his face. She made another grab for the book, but her arms came nowhere close.

It’s all right
, she told herself. Even in her dazed state, Quin remembered that John taking the book was not a catastrophe. She’d brought it as a potential bargaining chip, hadn’t she? There was a reason she could let it go. Somehow she’d taken steps …

“How do you have this?” he asked her. He sounded like a child on Christmas.

“Briac …”

They were sliding again. John leaned over her so she could see his face clearly.

“You
have
helped me,” he whispered, his words kind, grateful. “Thank you, Quin. Thank you.”

His lips were on her cheek, warm and soft. And then John was gone, sliding across the floor and away from her.

The ship was screaming.
Traveler
began to rock back and forth. There were hands on her arm. Someone was pulling her. She turned. Shinobu was there, trying to bring her closer. Her mother was lying flat on the floor, tying a thick wad of cloth against the deep cut in Shinobu’s side.

When Shinobu had fallen through the ceiling, Briac’s whipsword had caught him in the center of his chest. The thin layer of armor under his burned clothing had deflected the tip, which had slid across his torso, then finally pierced the armor at his side. There was warm wetness along Quin’s leg. Shinobu had been saved from instant death, but he was still bleeding all over the floor.

The ship was lurching upward now, like a wounded animal trying to pull itself back to its feet. The engines were roaring in different keys. Shinobu was grabbing Quin’s shirt.

“We’re crashing,” he whispered.

“Hold on to me,” she told him. Her head was pounding, but she was no longer dizzy, and her arms were starting to work again. “I’ll pull you out of here.”

“I crashed the ship,” he said. “I think I’m bleeding …”

“It’s okay. Hold on to me.”

The ship was tilting more severely, as some engines cut out completely and those remaining tried to lift the vessel back into the air. Shinobu and Quin slid sideways until they hit the wall. Gravity pressed her tightly against him.

“Keep talking to me,” she whispered as his eyes started to droop.

“Did he take the athame?”

“He did. It doesn’t matter …”

“Am I dying?”

“You’re not dying.”

“Quin …”

“It’s just a little blood, I promise. Hold on.” She grabbed him more tightly, as if her own arms could protect him from the falling ship. His cheek was pressed against hers.

“Quin, we’re only third cousins, you know.”

“
Half
third cousins,” she whispered, her lips close to his ear. “Hardly related at all.”

“Did you want to kiss me … in the basement?”

“Yes,” she breathed, “so much.”

The buildings outside were lurching around the glass canopy drunkenly. The ship was bucking and falling at the same time.

Shinobu pulled her so their faces were level. Then he kissed her lips, very slowly and tenderly, as if they were not lying in a spinning, crashing ship, as if they had all the time in the world.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you,” he whispered back.

Then Shinobu threw himself over her. With one final scream, the ship’s engines pulled the nose up, and
Traveler
crash-landed in Hyde Park.

The glass canopy shattered into a thousand spiderwebs, and the large sheets began to fall. Shinobu was pinning her down, protecting her. She saw her mother in the corner a few yards away, hunched in a sheltered space where two walls met. Quin tried to roll out from under Shinobu, to push him closer to that corner and to safety. There was a thud as a sheet of glass landed on top of them, crushing him into her. Quin felt the breath knocked out of her lungs.

There was stillness then. But not quiet. The ship was settling beneath them, and there were sirens everywhere. Every ambulance, firefighter, and policeman for twenty miles was converging on their crash site.

“Come,” a voice said as Quin struggled to breathe.

The Young Dread was lifting the glass sheet up. Quin didn’t pause to wonder how so small a girl could lift so heavy an object. As quickly as she could, her breath returning, she wriggled out from beneath Shinobu. The Young Dread was holding up an athame. A
deep tremor flooded over Quin as she and Fiona and the Young Dread dragged Shinobu’s limp form through a dark circle in the dark room, the energy of its edges surging inward toward complete blackness. A moment later they were not in the ship at all; they were
There
.

They emerged back into the world a quarter of a mile away. No one paid them the slightest attention. Every human for miles was looking at the crashed bulk of
Traveler
, framed by the greenery of Hyde Park.

Fiona teetered unsteadily on her feet, then fell into a sitting position. Quin and the Young Dread knelt by Shinobu, who lay unconscious on the sidewalk. Quin tied up his wound with a strip of wool from her cloak. He had blistering burns across both cheeks, his leg was broken and also badly burned, and she was certain he had other broken bones as well. But he was breathing and his heartbeat was strong.

She looked up, at the chaos of emergency vehicles near the crash site. Grabbing her mother by the shoulders, she pulled her closer to Shinobu.

“Stay with him,” she ordered. “Don’t let him move.”

It took her mother a moment to understand, but at last she nodded.

“I’ll be right back!”

Quin had a splitting headache, but she found she was able to jog.
She started off toward the mess in the distance, searching for the closest ambulance. Halfway there, she noticed the Young Dread running along with her. When they came to the edge of the crowd, they both stopped, hunting for someone who could help.

“Look,” the Young Dread said quietly, pointing through the mass of people.

In the distance, near the ship, a man was being loaded into an ambulance. Tall, strong, and wild-looking, he was thrashing around furiously as the medical personnel pushed him into the vehicle. It was Briac. Her father had survived.

The Young Dread put a hand on Quin’s arm and pointed in another direction. Quin followed the girl’s gaze to an alley off to their left, below the park. As they watched, the figure of John Hart, just recognizable at this distance, slipped into the darkness between buildings and disappeared.

“Here we part ways,” the Young Dread said softly.

Quin nodded.

The girl withdrew from her cloak the athame of the Dreads and held it loosely in her hands.

“Where is your master?” Quin asked.

“Sleeping,” the girl said. “It is past time.”

There was something different about the Young Dread’s cloak. It seemed too large for her and also more threadbare than the last time Quin had seen it. Its interior pockets appeared to be crammed full of hidden items whose bulk she had not noticed before.

Before Quin could wonder about this change, there were sirens behind them, and she turned to find several emergency vehicles heading their way. She waved her arms.

“My master says I am Young, Middle, and Old now,” the Young Dread told her, her eyes downcast, looking at the athame in her hand. “Or perhaps I am none of those. We shall see.”

An ambulance pulled to a stop by Quin, drawn by the sight of Shinobu’s blood, which covered half her body. She moved toward the vehicle, but the Young Dread caught her arm.

“You will have this,” the Young told her.

Quin watched as the girl placed the athame into her hands. She looked down at the stone dagger’s slender shape, saw the symbols lined up along its dials. Her thumb went to the back of the blade, where the thin lightning rod was fitted neatly into place. This athame was far more delicate and somehow, she sensed, more powerful than her own.