Michael stood to one side, glaring at Jordin as if she, not the virus, were the scourge that hung over her own life.
Cain leaned against a carved pillar to her left, the seduction gone from his eyes.
The change in them was profound. The realization of Immortality cut short wasn’t sitting well with them.
“I have,” Jordin said. “Maybe you should have listened more closely the first time.”
Michael was on her like a cat, hand around her throat. “You will remember your place, Sovereign!” she hissed.
“I…. do.”
“Release her!” Roland snapped.
That Jordin was the only one in the room who might survive the virus could not be lost on them. If this didn’t give her an advantage, it at least emboldened her. The only thing was, she hardly cared if she lived or died at the moment.
Michael slowly released her grip. “Then watch your tongue or I’ll cut it out,” she said, shoving her.
“Enough!” Roland said, gathering himself. “And yes, I was
listening. I want to hear it again. You’re sure the virus was in that vessel?”
“I have no doubt. Releasing it was his great obsession. The vial is marked with an ‘R’ and the virus is called Reaper. Do you need more?”
“And your claim is that this Reaper is carried on the air.”
“It’s no claim. Every Dark Blood who set foot in this place is infected and has taken the virus into the city.”
“Infected. As are we,” Roland said with a glower.
She hesitated.
“Yes. As are your Rippers outside. The virus has a three-day latency, after which every Dark Blood and Immortal breathing today will become deathly ill and die. By coming here, you have executed your own death sentence. I tried to warn you.”
“Does it matter?” he said, sweeping his arm wide. “The damage was done before we came.”
“By Rom,” Michael said. “If everything you say is true, he betrayed all of us.”
“Betrayed you? He
fought
for you!” She shoved a finger toward the exit tunnel. “He could have destroyed all of our enemies without raising a single blade! Instead he went to Feyn, knowing the danger, to save you. If you would have listened to me when I first arrived, we might have reached Rom before Feyn wrung it out of him. This falls on
your
head, not Rom’s.”
“Reached Rom how?” she shot back. “Your memory failed you, remember?”
Jordin drilled Roland with a glare. “I was
delayed
. One day might have made all the difference.”
“By your own stubbornness!” Michael said.
Roland lifted his hand to silence them.
“What happened no longer matters. Only the preservation of our kind.”
“Who are no longer Immortal,” Jordin said.
“Enough!”
The room echoed with his roar.
“Tell me what else you know.”
She turned her exchanges with Rom and Mattius over in her head.
“We have to assume that Rom is Dark Blood and will soon be infected as well.”
“And? How do we stop this virus?”
She gave a faint shake of her head. “There is no way. It will infect the world. All Dark Bloods and Immortals will die. Corpses will come down with a common cold and Sovereigns will probably lose their emotions. The damage is done.”
He stared at her.
She drew a slow breath, not knowing if what she said next might get her killed for the mere suggestion. “There is one way to live. Convert using my blood. Only Jonathan’s blood can save you. It seems that we’ve come full circle.”
“Never!” His response could not have been put more forcefully.
“Not even if it means
living
?”
“Under the tyranny of fear once again? Never!” He took two strides to his left before spinning back, his face dark. “You forget that we were Nomad before we became Immortal. For five hundred years we rebelled against the Order of fear on principle. I am a prince bound by my own history as much as my blood. Your Sovereignty is nothing but humanity stripped of life. The virus returns us all to Corpse. I will
die
before I put even a single drop of death-tainted blood into my body and so betray the true life Jonathan brought us!”
His words sank into her mind and heart like lead, pressing hope from her bones. There was far more truth in them than she would have admitted even a week ago.
Mattius, in his shortsightedness, had sentenced the world to a future not of peace…. but of misery.
“I’m the only living Sovereign,” she said. “It’s not certain that I will lose my emotions. But what
is
certain is that if you refuse to take my blood, you and all your people….”
“Did I not make myself clear? Never!”
Had she expected any other response? Roland would far prefer to die in battle than give an inch to fear or Sovereignty, which he saw as a living death in and of itself. And the example of her own wretched existence had done nothing to convince him otherwise.
Nothing to show him the abundant life Jonathan had promised….
Because she hadn’t found it herself.
She turned away, rubbed her temples with her fingers as if to force cohesive thought through her mind. The door to the council chamber rested closed, as did the door to Mattius’s laboratory. With the world pressing in on her, she couldn’t begin to think of how to properly honor the dead. So many children and elderly…. the thought sickened her. If there was any grace in the situation, it was that they’d died as Sovereigns. And that they had died by sword before fire.
She could only hope that Rom might yet be converted from Dark Blood. And Kaya.
“The virus isn’t
proven
to kill Immortals,” Cain said. “How could this alchemist know if he hasn’t tested it?”
“Because Immortal blood is the same as Mortal blood,” Jordin said. “He was sure, trust me. Do you truly want to take a chance on him being wrong?”
“I am known to take many risks,” he said calmly. “The only one I refuse to consider is changing my nature.”
Cain squatted on one heel and looked up at Roland. “Rom may know what she doesn’t.”
Roland glanced at Michael, but she offered no opinion. He’d come to heads with Rom six years ago when the Mortals had split, but any difference between them was now moot.
Jordin seized the moment. “He has a point. If Rom’s a Dark Blood,
he may be able to return to Sovereign. His blood might be resistant to the virus in ways mine isn’t, having contracted it.” It was a long shot, and she knew it. “If not, in the very least he may know more than I do.”
Roland’s jaw tightened as he considered her words.
“It was his suggestion, months ago, that one of us might become Immortal to reach you, Roland. He might well become Immortal himself if he thinks it will save you. He’s never abandoned his beliefs.”
Roland gave her a distinctly wry look.
“Don’t you understand? He doesn’t want you to die!”
He hesitated only a moment longer.
“Then there’s only one course of action,” he said at last. “We go to the Citadel. I can only hope you know as much as you claim.”
“I know the way. That’s all.”
“Then take us,” he said, moving toward the exit already. “We will rip Feyn’s head from her shoulders.”
She strode after him. “And Rom?”
His words came over his shoulder. “Let’s pray he can save us all.”
J
ORDIN LED the twenty Rippers through the city, flanked by Roland on her right, Michael on her left.
It should have been a time to savor. She, the lone Sovereign, leading Roland and his most accomplished warriors to a destiny of her choosing. Indeed, even now she might lead them astray and leave them to die, forever ridding the world of Jonathan’s scourge.
She could lead them into a pitched battle with Dark Bloods, stand back and watch as they slaughtered each other, soaking the ground with their defiled blood. Or she could use them to kill Feyn and rescue Rom as she had intended. What did it matter?
She was the only one among them who would survive. Jonathan’s legacy, tainted by the effects of Reaper on her emotions, would live only in her. A crippled salvation.
But she felt no salvation. Not a hint of glory or peace in the thought. The circumstances of life had long ago slashed her heart. Somehow, inexplicably, it had not stopped, each pump of her Sovereign blood the living reminder of abject failure. Of Jonathan’s illusive love, long lost. Of the brutal slaying and burning of so many whom she’d loved. Of every Corpse oblivious to the salvation that had once lived among them.
That Feyn had found the Sanctuary meant Rom had given up its location. She had known the moment she smelled the fire within the
cavernous chambers that he had been turned and forced to reveal the Sovereign remnant. If he could betray them, what was she herself capable of? She touched the seroconversion kit in her jacket and prayed she would not fail him.
And then there was Roland. She could not deny the pull of the prince on her heart, even now. The memory of his gentle embrace just last night refused to leave her mind. The prince in him had commanded her once. The heart in the Immortal called to her still.
Kaya was waiting for him, she knew—a young Immortal yearning for her master. She ignored the strange jealousy she felt and pitied the girl her naïve oblivion; death waited for her.
They’d ridden quickly, their thunder of death faded to a silent whisper—toward the west perimeter of the Citadel, Jordin at the lead, detouring past Dark Blood posts at Roland’s signal. With each passing mile, Feyn’s defenses became thicker. They made no attempt to avoid those few Corpses they encountered, knowing they would only run into hiding, perhaps make a frantic call to alert forces—too late.
Their objective: the ancient maze known only to sitting Sovereigns and ancient keepers of secrets—a labyrinth of passages reserved for royal escape. For hundreds of years the knowledge was regarded mostly as myth passed from Sovereign to Sovereign.
Which is why, Jordin had explained to Roland, it was unlikely Feyn would know of the maze. Saric had taken his father’s life—there was no time for Vorrin to pass the secret to him. And Saric had seated Feyn as his successor before Jonathan had come of age.
“How did you come by knowledge of this maze?” Roland had demanded.
“When we took refuge in the Sanctuary under the ruins, the Keeper found ancient papers containing, among other secrets, the existence of the maze by those who first worked on it. He showed only Rom and me.”
“And why haven’t you used the maze to take the head from this snake?”
Jordin gave a wry look. “If it’s Feyn you mean, Rom refused to touch her. Any Dark Blood but her. You know how he has protected Feyn since the beginning. More practically, the maze comes up to the assembly grounds behind the palace. The palace is highly protected by more Dark Bloods than we could have taken on head to head.”
He frowned. She made the case even more plain.
“The Dark Bloods swarming the grounds would have
smelled
us coming. We’ve only ever had a few warriors amongst us. Without our former Mortal sense….” She shook her head. “It would have been suicide.”
“But with an elite force of Immortal Rippers….,” he said.
She leveled her gaze at him. “Yes.”
He gave a faint nod.
“I will get you past the walls of the Citadel,” Jordin said. “You will fight your way to the palace.”
The entrance to the maze was in the cellar of an old basilica north of the Citadel—too close to the Citadel itself, too much in the thick of the Dark Bloods surrounding the capital. They had to come in from the east.
Riding through the abandoned streets, the kit tight against her in her jacket, Jordin couldn’t help but wonder if she would live to get to Rom at all.
An instant later, Roland stopped, hand raised.
Michael and Cain’s Rippers halted as one, leaving Jordin’s horse to trot on several paces before she reined it in.
Roland walked his horse abreast, eyes narrowed down the street. For several seconds he listened closely to the night. She heard only the silence of the city, but that meant nothing; Roland himself might hear a cat land on padded feet a block away…. or the scrape of a Dark Blood boot along the pavement a block beyond that.
“How much farther?”
“Half a mile.”
“They’re too thick ahead. It’s Feyn’s way, these bands of her minions around the Citadel. We could fight our way through, but we’d take too many losses.”
“You are unaccustomed to losses,” she said, unable to keep the tinge of acid from her voice. “Some of us aren’t so fortunate.”
He turned in his saddle and studied the side of her face.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“You’ll have your own soon enough.”
The moment the words entered the night, she regretted them.
“Forgive me.”
He faced the street. “We have to veer east,” he said, and then tugged his mount round without waiting for direction. Still the Prince of Immortals till his dying breath.
Roland took them east and then north, ignoring Jordin as they circled out of range of the Dark Bloods ringing the Citadel like a swarm of black hornets protecting their queen.
Only when they were much farther north did he turn to her with a nod and allow her to take the lead once again.
She took them in several blocks to the Basilica of the Gates—the one reportedly used by Megas five hundred years earlier. Megas, the first Sovereign, who had canonized the Book of Orders, murdered the Order’s founder and unleashed the virus that rendered every living human in the world dead. Megas, who was so paranoid in his new fear-filled world that he had the ancient maze built as a means of escape from the Citadel.
Jordin pulled her horse to a stop before the gate and nodded at the large arched door. “This is it.”
Roland scanned the grounds. The basilica was no longer in use, maintained only as a historical site in tribute to Megas.
True to its name, a large black gate in the basilica’s wrought-iron fence separated the grounds from the street. Patchy weeds had taken over what had once been a wide concrete yard within. It was broken into crumbled pieces, their edges peering through dirt where they
were not obscured by the trash that had managed to blow inside during any one of Byzantium’s characteristic storms.