Hunted Warrior (32 page)

“You?”

“Yes. I hate it.”

“Our time will come. Every attack has multiple assaults. Yours, Malnefoley, will be of the explosive variety. This . . .” She shook her head, watching her sister and the Indranan man physically bound as they fought a mental battle. “This is not our domain.”

“The rebels will still die? Do you know it, Avyi? A fixed point?”

She mashed her lips together. “No. I don't know for sure. I thought I did. It's all coming together too quickly. Nothing makes sense anymore.” Embarrassed, scared, she glanced at him, where he stared her down with piercing eyes. “Maybe that's why I've needed you all along,” she said softly.

“Hark,” Orla whispered, sounding strangled by an unseen hand. “And that girl.”

“Cadmin?”

“Yes. Dragon be merciful—yes.” She shook free of Grandio's hold. The man collapsed onto the sidewalk. “I couldn't— The witch— It was let him go or be erased along with him. Oh, Dragon forgive me.”

Mal knelt beside Grandio's fallen body. He felt the man's neck, twisted his pinkie finger, pulled his eyelids apart. “Nothing. Not a thing. Ulia did this?”

Orla swayed on her feet. Avyi supported the taller woman, who replied, “Yes. Like flipping a switch. We can't search again. She could find us, but the cover of so many Dragon Kings may give us time. We have to get to the holding cells.”

“You found Hark?” Avyi asked, hoping as she'd never hoped.

“He's in chains. Alone in a . . . a tunnel? Human guards surrounded him. He . . .” She broke off and hefted her shield. A murderous expression turned her sharp but beautiful features into those of an unearthly avenger. “He's not suffering another moment that can be helped. Do you believe I can find our way?”

“We have no choice,” Mal said.

“What about Grandio?” Avyi knelt next to the fallen man and stroked sweaty hair back from his face. He didn't respond in any way. Had it been so simple for Ulia to turn him from man to meat? “We can't leave him here. Are we sure he won't recover?”

Orla shook her head, leaving Avyi with a wellspring in her stomach where sickness and fear bubbled up. “There's nothing left of him now. I was lucky to escape with my own mind intact. The Indranan can only focus on one individual at a time. That mind witch got to him first.”

“I'm glad you're safe. But we can get him out of sight. And we can . . .” She flicked her eyes to the sword Mal held.

“I'll do right by him.” Although Mal's face was etched with dreadful tension, he moved Grandio so that his body lay horizontally on the sidewalk and his head dropped back into the gutter. His chest cinched tight. “Great Dragon,” he said, echoing Avyi's words back in the labyrinth, “he is yours.”

He swung the sword in a sure arc, beheading Grandio with a single blow. Without speaking, Avyi and Orla moved his body back into the shadow and aligned his head with his torso. They each whispered, before touching his forehead and standing.

“No more,” Avyi rasped. “Not another one of our kind.”

CHAPTER

A
vyi ran, with Mal on her heels.

Orla raced up the street and veered into a narrow shaft that connected two segments of the Battersea. “This may get tight,” she called over her shoulder.

The shaft was hot and shot steam up from slats low along the wall. “Some sort of release valves if the turbines overheat,” Mal said. “A way of venting excess energy.”

Avyi smiled despite the throbbing in her chest, as anger, grief, and their fast pace tightened her lungs. “You could do with some of that.”

A quick glance backward revealed Mal's grim smile. The expression in his eyes was a combination of mirth and teasing that made Avyi's heart pinch.

“Right now I'm trying not to lose my legs to bursts of steam.”

The shaft narrowed as Orla had warned, until Avyi was forced to shuffle sideways. Mal shed his lightweight overcoat. He had gained a wildness that appealed to Avyi on a deep, inexplicable level. The heads of the cartels bought and sold and negotiated. She would rather place her faith in Mal's ability to lose control than his fallback penchant for trying to keep matters covert or on an even keel.

She might even put her trust in him after the bitter words they'd said. She didn't want their argument to be the final, overwhelming sentiment they exchanged.

The grim set of his mouth, the tense readiness that radiated from his chest to his shoulders to his arms, and the dusty, ruffled hair of a true fighter made him more handsome than she'd ever seen. He shuffled beside her, taking up the rear of their trio, and she felt calm. Suddenly calm. Orla and Mal. She wasn't alone anymore. She
had
chosen the right side, without the need to explain to herself, over and over, how the ends justified the means.

She was a woman at home in her body and in her life, even on the verge of battle and the potential for the bloodshed she'd foretold. She would be a part of it, but on the side of her people. So when Orla stole a burst of Mal's kinetic energy, blazing light into a hollow space at the end of the tunnel, Avyi was ready.

Ready to face the most deformed Dragon King she'd ever seen.

“Hellix,” Orla said coldly. “You here to die in the Grievance or die right now?”

“You always were a cold-ass bitch. Where's that jester freak of yours?” He smiled in a way that bunched the lines on his forehead. There, the brand of a knife warped into garish folds of scarred skin on skin. “Maybe I could help you find him.”

Orla sneered. “Maybe you gave him up.”

“That's a possibility, too.”

Avyi felt a tickle of awareness along her nape before the actual strike. It wasn't premonition so much as simply knowing the two warriors who fought at her side. She dropped to her stomach. Mal crackled with energy, which Orla concentrated in the metal of her fiercely serrated shield. Sparks like a hundred bolts of lightning shot from its knife-point edges.

Hellix was fast, and he was well trained. That probably explained why his deformities included more than just his brand. He looked like he'd been caught in a fire and burned and burned. Part of his left forearm was twisted down to the bone. Yet he was still able to deflect the energy bursts when he spun into the ferocious berserker rage of Clan Pendray. He tore through the pipes until steam concealed him, and the heated vapor was nearly suffocating. Orla fell to her knees, with her hands around her throat.

Mal leapt over Avyi and her downed sister. His body was a living electrical current. Each microscopic droplet in the steam glowed, supercharged all the way to their neutrons. Steam became living light that he swirled—an in-person view of how he manipulated the skies and brought lightning down at will.

Briefly, Hellix's spinning, furious, malformed limbs could be seen silhouetted in the bright vapor. Avyi didn't expect her sister to recover so quickly. Then again, the woman known as Silence would not have survived more than five years in the Cages, and her entire life on the run from Clan Sath, had she been any less resilient. Or any less deadly. In the time it took for Mal to reveal Hellix's location, Orla pounced. She used the shield first as a slicing weapon, then as a blunt battering ram.

She landed atop it, square on Hellix's chest. From where she lay flat on the ground, Avyi almost smiled at that familiar crouching stance. She'd used it herself countless times. Cut off an enemy's air. Squeeze his heart. Loom above him with the ability to leap away if needed. They were sisters in combat, as well as by blood.

“Where is Hark?” Orla asked, her voice deadly quiet.

“Fuck off.”

“Giva? Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Mal replied, equally cold and deadly.

Orla balanced on the toes of her boots and spread her palms on either side of Hellix's head. Her fingers already glowed with the power she borrowed from Malnefoley. The zaps made Hellix's legs twitch. His arms splayed out to the sides, useless. “I won't kill you,” she said. “I'll paralyze you, with your mental functions still intact. Nod.”

The man did.

Avyi crawled to her knees, crouching, ready to aid Orla however she could. In the face of such skill and power, however, Avyi's street-fighting techniques and man-made weapons seemed like barbarian clubs.

Hellix's eyes were wide, although it didn't appear as if he did it on purpose. Orla was in control of the man's mind, right down to how his body functioned.

“Then I'll leave you here in the steam, until you suffer even worse than when you burned in the rubble of Aster's labs. I'll press you against the furnace pipes. You'll sizzle, feeling every second, but you won't be lucky enough to die. The Giva carries a Dragon-forged sword, but I doubt he'll do you the mercy of a beheading.” She smiled, seeming half crazed. “I'll kill him with it before he tries. Nod.”

Hellix was losing consciousness. His eyes rolled back. But he still managed a scant acknowledgment.

“Now,” she said calmly. “Where is Hark?”

“Asters.”

“I know that, you
bathatéi
shit.
Where
?”

“East of here. One level below. With humans.”

“He wouldn't be able to use his powers,” Avyi said. “Trapped with humans, with no Dragon King gifts to borrow.”

“I bet we'll find all of the Sath in similar confinements,” Mal added.

Orla hopped away from Hellix, who gasped and smacked at his head as if it were on fire. “Bitch,” he growled.

“Help me, Avyi?”

Avyi stood and grabbed a foot and hand, as Orla did. They pulled Hellix to one side, carefully avoiding the steaming-hot pipes as they positioned his body flush against one. The man screamed. “Mal,” Avyi said. “We have no rope. What can you do?”

“Something terrible.” His face closed down. She read nothing in his expression, much like when he'd related the tale of his destruction of Bakkhos. “Go. I'll follow.”

Orla took hold of her, just as Avyi saw the flash vision of Hellix's future. Mal was going to . . .

Hellix screamed again, a sound that promised to be never-ending.

No wonder, with his skin cauterized to the pipe.

“We'll come back for him and finish the job,” Orla said. “If what he claimed about Hark is true.”

Avyi turned in time to see Mal stride through the hot mist, which swirled around his body. His chin was lowered, with his bleak, soulless eyes looking forward. He met her gaze without apology. Avyi found that she didn't need one. He was a leader, and that meant taking on terrible deeds himself. Avyi had only known Hellix by reputation until the day the man had gleefully carried out Old Man Aster's order to have Nynn of Tigony flogged to the point of unconsciousness. The smile on Hellix's warped face had been almost sexually charged. He was guilty of too many crimes to list, mostly against human women the Asters considered expendable rewards for victorious Cage warriors. None of Hellix's female offerings lived to see the dawn.

Not every Dragon King deserved to live.

Mal had determined Hellix's fate. Nothing about his posture or assured stride showed the least bit of regret.

She'd known it all along. He was the leader they needed. Apparently one of his first acts as an unrepentant Giva was to dispatch a heinous Dragon King. Leading their people by intending to kill one seemed counterintuitive, but it was what needed to be done.

“East is this way.” She led her two companions on a twisting course through pipes, low-hanging metal ventilation ducts, and solid I-beams. They came to a flight of stairs. The concrete was crumbling, which spoke to Orla's account of how old Battersea was, with its crumbling underground structures.

“That looks remarkably unsafe,” Mal said with a dark edge of humor. “Care to go first, Avyi?”

“Not at all. My gift has left me in the dark like a woman without eyes. Light the way for us, Giva. We have your back.”