Fractured (30 page)

“Give me more information.”

“Captain,” Jim said quietly.

Clarence grinned. “Captain, girl? You are the Captain?” The laugh boiled up from inside him, phlegmy and thick, and rolled out hysterical and shrill. “The mighty Guards of the Shadowlands, led by the girl with the hair.” He could barely get the words out through peals of wild laughter.

I sank down next to him, feeling ice crystals form along my spine. “I know. It’s hilarious, isn’t it?” I nudged his leg with my elbow. “There. See what I did for you? Try to hold on to that funny memory when you’re sitting in the mouth of the dark tower. I’m sure it’ll help.”

His laughter cut off like I’d chopped him in the windpipe. “I gave you information,” he squeaked. “Important information.”

I got to my feet. “
Meh
. Not enough. I need to know how you guys know so much about us. Now
that
would be worth something. Maybe even a quick death.”

His eyes glinted with eagerness. “We have many ways.”

“You’re going to have to be a lot more specific than that, Clarence. Do you guys have anyone else at our school?”

He nodded, smiling, his pointy teeth sticking out over his bottom lip.

“Who? Who is watching us?”

He winced and shook his head. “She would know. She would eat my heart.”

I gritted my teeth. “Then what can you tell me?”

He lifted his head off the mat. “Your mother misses you. Rita wants you so badly, girl. You are deeply in her head. So deep that my poor sister cannot get her mind off you.”

“Shut up.” I took a step back.

“Your mother didn’t even scream when we took her. No struggle. Her soul slipped free like it had been hanging by a thread. I wonder if your eyes will look like Rita’s did as the Queen takes hold of you. So wide. So perfect.”

“Enough!” Malachi roared.

I snapped to, realizing with disgust that there were tears on my face. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how they had tied my mother to a table and torn her soul away from her. I couldn’t shake that vision of her wide gold-brown eyes, of the ropes around her wrists.

Jim touched my arm. “Raphael’s here.”

I opened my mouth, gasping in a shuddering breath. I brushed my sleeves over my cheeks and turned around. Raphael stood against the wall. “Do you know why I called you here?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Will you open the doorway?”

His eyes lingered on my face, solemn, unreadable. He nodded again.

Without looking away from me, he ran the flat of his palm along the concrete wall of the basement, and a door appeared. He turned the knob and opened it, and beyond the threshold I could see one of the stone corridors of the Guard Station in the dark city, lined with gas lamps giving off that melancholy greenish light. Malachi’s gaze flitted toward it, and then he turned away, like it hurt him to think about going back there. In the distance, I could see two of the enormous, inhuman Guards striding toward us. One of them was carrying the thick leather muzzle and mittens made especially to protect from Mazikin teeth and claws.

“Tell them to take him straight to the dark tower,” I said to Malachi, my voice hard and cold and frighteningly steady.

As Clarence began to shriek and writhe, I headed to the stairs, seeing nothing in front of my face but my mother’s eyes, feeling nothing but a restless tug in my chest, making me wonder if my soul was fastened as tightly as it needed to be to get me through whatever was coming.

TWENTY-EIGHT

FOR A SINGLE DAY,
I wondered if we could cancel prom, avoid the whole thing, but then I realized that the Mazikin were watching, and that no matter what we did, they would know. Better they come after us in a way we could plan for than to come up with something we couldn’t anticipate.

I talked to Henry once or twice over the next few weeks. He was lying low after the Jewelry District Massacre, in which twelve individuals were murdered in what was thought to be some sort of turf fight between vigilante groups. The police were apparently seeking connections between these killings and the attacks on the homeless camps, seeing as some of the individuals killed in the warehouse had been survivors of the earlier raids. Nancy, my PO, and her pals on the force came to talk to me informally a few times, but seeing as there were no witnesses, no physical evidence, and about a million other, more plausible perps, they eventually decided to leave me alone and spend the taxpayers’ dollars elsewhere.

The Mazikin were lying low, too, though we weren’t sure if it was because they didn’t want to draw more attention to themselves or because they were busy planning something horrific. We patrolled every night, but the streets were eerily quiet. We began to wonder if human informants were alerting the Mazikin to our movements, making it easier for them to avoid us and more human attention.

Along with Jim and Malachi, I obsessively watched every student at Warwick High, wondering which of them was on the wrong side. But whenever I could, I avoided the cafeteria, preferring to eat outside with Ian and let him distract me for a half hour each day. Seeing Laney with Malachi made me want to hurt her. Even the idea of them together added fuel to my training sessions with my Lieutenant, which left us both spent and aching. More than once, I hit him harder than I should have. More than once, he made me pay for it. More than once, Raphael had to be called in to fix us up afterward so we didn’t go to school the next day looking like we’d participated in a prison riot.

My times with Ian were the only moments I felt normal and even the slightest bit happy. Seeing him smile reminded me why all the vigilance and training was worth it and helped ease the ache of missing Malachi a little. I hung out with him at a party one night when it was my turn to guard our friends and realized how much I enjoyed his company. I even attended a few of his home games, though I spent the time staring at the spectators, trying to figure out which of them were Mazikin spies. Time was running out.

A week before the prom, I showed up at the Guard house after school and slid out of my car, yanking the garment bag from the passenger seat. I stood at the top of the stairs to the basement and listened. Judging from the clang and sizzle of a blacksmith’s forge coming from below, Michael was already waiting for me. I went to the bathroom and changed. I put my hair up as best I could, in a semblance of the style that Tegan had selected for me. I strapped on the shoes with two-inch heels. Shimmering, floating, I descended the stairs.

“
Bhebha
, Lela, I’ve been waiting!” his gravelly voice called from below, followed by three sharp clangs.

“Coming!” I shouted. “Trying not to fall down the stairs.”

“If that’s what we’re dealing with, I’m not sure I can help you, my darling
iqaqa
.”

I reached the bottom step and wobbled onto the mat. Waves of heat coursed over my face. In front of me, half the basement appeared to be connected to another realm. Specifically, to the vast workshop inhabited by the only person I figured could equip me properly without getting too personal about it. Unless calling me an
iqaqa
was personal. “Look, Michael. I know Malachi tolerated the name calling, but I’m a totally different—
whoa
. Are you all right?”

Though I was sure he was an angel, Michael didn’t look any more like one than Raphael did, and certainly never acted in any way angelic. He was staring at me with his mouth hanging open, a red-hot column of metal in one hand and a hammer in the other. He looked like he was having a stroke. I’d already made it halfway across the mat before he snapped out of it, dropping the half-forged scimitar into a barrel of water and wiping his hand across his mouth. He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Er. Captain.” His gaze moved to my chest. “
Amabele
,” he mumbled, tossing the hammer over his shoulder.

“I see we’ve moved on from the British slang.”

His gaze lifted a bit, almost making it to my face before being dragged back down. “Zulu. I needed a change.”

“Are you going to be able to keep your eyes off my boobs long enough to help me?”

His eyes snapped up to mine. “I’m an excellent multitasker.”

I shook my head. “I guess I look all right, then. Like a normal girl.”

The chortle rolled out of him like an ocean wave, causing his enormous belly to undulate, shaking the floor. “
Uyahlanya
, Lela, if you think you could ever look like a normal girl.” He squeezed his eyes shut and a lone tear leaked out as he tried to control his laughter.

I scowled, and then silently counted to ten. Malachi and Ana tolerated this for decades. I could tolerate it for one afternoon. “I hope that’s a compliment.”

“Get over here,” he said, motioning me around his forge, into the sweltering open space between a workbench piled with tools and half-completed weapons, and that huge, steaming barrel of water. “I made something just for you.” He held up two silky loops of material in his chubby fingers. “Behold!”

“And that is—”

“Your garters, my dear.” He leaned forward. “May I help you put them on?”

I snatched them from his hand. “How about you watch? That enough for you?” I’d learned the first time we met that Michael could be handled with one part charm and one part sass. Ana had been a master of it, and that made me miss her more than ever. She would have handled this situation beautifully. It made my chest ache to think of her.

Michael leaned back against the barrel. “Don’t let me stop you.”

I lifted my foot to set it on the workbench, and then pulled my skirt high on my thigh, leaning forward to try to keep Michael from seeing too much. Judging from his sharp intake of breath, I wasn’t doing a good enough job. As quickly as I could, I strapped the circle of silky material to my upper thigh and set my foot on the ground. It remained secure, even though it seemed like it should come sliding down. “This will stay in place?”

“Eh?” he grunted, still staring at my legs. “Oh. Yes. Specially designed. Here you go.” He handed me three small knives. “The blades have a forward drop like all the rest. Your Lieutenant said they fit your style—slash and slice. Hang ’em high, or everyone will know you’re armed when you shake your
nqe
on the dance floor.” His eyes glazed over.

I took the knives from him, cringing at the creepy half grin on his face. “You’re picturing me doing that right now, aren’t you?”

He nodded, his eyes still dreamy.

“Thanks for your … thoughtfulness.” I tucked the blades into the sheaths along the outer curve of my thigh and then repeated the process on the other side. Malachi was right: thanks to his endless drills, I’d gotten pretty good with these knives over the past few weeks and could fight efficiently with one in each hand. I would just have to practice drawing from the thigh instead of the waist. “Anything else you can do for me?”

He whipped out a long, slinky pair of silver gloves. “I made these just for you. Lightweight sap gloves.”

I took them from him and raised my eyebrows, surprised by the weight of the silky material. I turned them over to see the delicate stitching along the backs, extending halfway along the fingers. “Is there something sewn into these?”

“Steel shot. You’ll be able to punch through concrete boards.”

“For real?”

“Trust me.”

Damn. I slipped them on and examined the effect. Beautiful but badass. I smiled, something that felt almost foreign these days. “Anything else?”

He motioned for me to turn in place. I obeyed, ignoring the low whistle as he took in the rear view. After I’d completed a full revolution, he pointed at my feet. “Off with the shoes.”

I did as he asked, handing over my heels and enjoying having my feet flat on the ground again. He held the shoes in front of his eyes, making a sour face. “You really going to wear these things?”

“It’s not an occasion for boots.”

His brows lowered, and he shooed me away. “Go play, and let me work.”

I took my bare feet over to the unoccupied side of the training room, where I practiced drawing my knives from my new thigh sheaths, thinking this was not really what I pictured when I got asked to prom. Still, if it was going to prepare me to protect Ian and Tegan and Greg and Levi and Jillian and,
yes
, Laney, then I was all—

“Michael, are you ready for us?” a voice called from the top of the stairs.

My heart did an uncomfortable little flip.

“You’re early,
umdidi
!” Michael roared, pausing in the middle of using a tiny mallet to hammer at a small metal spike on the forge.

I scrambled back against the wall as hard soles tromped down the stairs.

“Yes, but I thought maybe we could talk about what Lel—” Malachi froze at the bottom of the stairs. He was wearing a tux. The top few buttons of his shirt were undone, and he held a tie in his hand. His black hair was disheveled, like he’d just changed. And his dark eyes were on me.

His mouth opened and closed a few times. “Lela,” he said in a strained voice. “I didn’t know you would be … here.”

“My car is in the driveway.”

He swallowed hard, nodded, and tried again. “I didn’t know you’d be …” He gave up and gestured at my dress.

A red-faced Michael plunged something into his barrel of water, sending a thick cloud of steam rolling across the space, curling my hair with the humidity. “Did ya think I’d make two trips?” he yelled at Malachi. “
Tsa mor kaka!
”

Malachi gave me a questioning glance. I shrugged. “Zulu.”

Jim trudged down the stairs, his tux jacket slung over one shoulder. “Hey, Captain. We came to get outfitted for the party.” He looked me up and down. “You look good. No idea where you’ll put your weapons, though.”

I slid my hand down my thigh and teasingly tugged up my skirt, just far enough to reveal the lower tips of my wickedly sharp blades. “I have my ways.”

Jim smiled appreciatively, but Malachi frowned. “It’s a start,” he said to me. “I was going to talk to Michael about your—”

“But I decided to take care of it myself.” I turned back to Michael. “How are we doing there?” I was suddenly desperate to leave the basement.