The Last of the Ageless (57 page)

She struggled to her feet and scanned the horizon, wondering if Caetl knew what he was saying. Azaiah’s body lay in the grass not far away. She wished she’d been the one to kill him—she would’ve bathed the grasses in his blood.

The world tilted, and Nyr widened her stance to keep from falling. She considered shifting into the cat, for its strength and agility would be helpful right about now.

In the distance, Korreth, Jorrim, and Soledad ran at breakneck speed back toward Searchtown. Something to do with Zen, she guessed, but that wasn’t her fight. Ti’rros bounded in the direction she’d last seen Dalan chasing the Wizard.

“Why is Ti’rros—” Nyr wondered.

“The master needs help.” Caetl didn’t blink or look at her. “Ti’rros is the only one who can catch them now.”

“Tell her to come back. The Wizard will just torture her to force Dalan to give up.”

“Lucky for you, I can’t control both of you at once.”

Nyr’s eyes narrowed. He was sounding more and more like the Wizard. “Fight him, Caetl. Don’t let the bastard in again.”

“I can’t keep him out. You don’t know… Please—” Caetl’s voice seemed all wrong, nothing like himself. “I’m begging you, help me end this suffering.” His hands flew up to his hair.

“Is he torturing you
right now?
” Nyr couldn’t believe he could endure it and still carry on a conversation. “Dalan went after him. He’ll stop him.”

“No.” With a groan, Caetl pushed himself up to a seated position and then climbed to his feet. “When the Wizard uses me like this, it does things… Listen, the only way to help Dalan is to help me.”

Both his hands came up, cupped as though to touch a lover’s face. He slapped his hands to both sides of her head, and her world blanked out from the pain in her ears.

Nyr hadn’t recognized the attack—most people tried stay outside of claw range when fighting her kind. She reeled, putting her good hand forward to ward him off.

Caetl stared through her. His lips moved as though whispering, but no words came out. She balled her good fist and struck his jaw. The force of the blow knocked both of them back, and her entire body suffered for it.

He came toward her, his face twisted in a scowl. She held her ground and backhanded him. Though he didn’t try to stop her, he also didn’t seem surprised by it, either. She knew he must be peeking inside her mind.

“I already killed two friends today, Caetl. I refuse to make you number three.” Saying the words made her throat close up, her eyes blur.

“You… considered me a friend?” The large man’s defenses came down, but she didn’t want to take advantage of it.

“You’re one of us, aren’t you?” Nyr raised the purple trinket, hoping to remind him who the real enemy was.

Don’t worry, my dear.
The Wizard’s voice was like a knife in the back.
You’re next on my list to scoop out and reprogram.

What’s stopping you? Dalan keeping you busy?
Nyr glanced in their direction and saw the Wizard running away.
I see you running away like the coward you are.

“You’ve mastered two-way communication, I see.” Caetl sounded more like himself.

She didn’t see Dalan or Ti’rros. The Wizard shrieked in her mind, and Nyr went to her knees. Without intention, her fingernails clawed the sides of her face. Only the sudden pain of scratching her open wound brought her to her senses.

“There’s only one way to stop the madness,” Caetl said, his voice far away.

Nyr opened her eyes. He stood over Azaiah’s body with a gun in his hand.

He pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger. Pink light flooded her vision. The force of something hitting the pendant’s shield knocked her on her ass. She frantically rolled to the side in case Caetl fired again.

The Wizard chuckled. W
hy would you want to give up the device, when it’s all that’s stood between you and death so many times?

Nyr pushed herself to her feet. “Caetl, that’s enough!”

He held the gun in front of his eyes, as though trying to determine why it had fired.

Getting up had sapped the last of Nyr’s energy. “I’m too tired to fight you.”

“So is Dalan,” Caetl said in a sad voice. “Too much transmelding.”

He kicked at her, but she shifted her weight into a deep stance, and his foot found only air. He seemed to have forgotten the gun. Moving in close, he raked her face with an open palm, fingers splayed and curled, as if he had claws. She skipped a few steps back.

Caetl grimaced. Then his eyes lit up, as though he’d remembered something. Lightning struck, cleaving through her skull. The anguish on Caetl’s face turned to agony. Before her world faded to black, she saw him slump to the ground with her.

When Nyr opened her eyes, she and Caetl lay in a crushed circle of grasses. His hands clenched into hooks, his fingertips were stained red… Gouges on his neck showed where he’d clawed at himself, trying to get the pendant off.

His eyes were open. Though the rest of his body was limp, his lips moved, whispering. Nyr rolled to her side to better hear him, but his voice strengthened with his next words.

“That’s right, Dalan. It’s safe to go back to your human form now.”

Nyr’s head swam as she tried to puzzle out the meaning behind the words. Dalan’s ability to transmeld the trinket away was the only thing protecting him from the Wizard. Why would Caetl—

“Listen to me, Dalan. I’ve got him under control.”

Nyr examined Caetl’s vacant expression for any clue as to his plan. She waved a hand in front of him, but his eyes were glassy.

Like a corpse.

“No,” she said.

“Do as I say.” Those words, that voice… It wasn’t Caetl at all.

Nyr climbed to her feet, fighting nausea. “Don’t listen to him, Dalan.”

The grasses swayed in the breeze, with no sign of her companions or the Wizard. Behind her lay Azaiah’s body, and beside her, what was left of Caetl.

So much killing... first as a trained warrior for her clan. Truth be told, she’d never been a real warrior. She realized that now. More like a butcher of the weak, of those undeserving of death. Why should Caetl be any different?

After all, she’d brought her own clanmates, the people she’d hoped to lead, into the slaughterhouse. Neula and Jaul had been justified in seeking vengeance, and she’d killed them as well. Caetl would be just one more death on her hands.

She’d become the ruthless killer Dalan always thought her to be. She was alone in the world.

“DO AS I SAY!” The voice tore out of Caetl, making her jump. The man beside her was just a husk, an extension of the Wizard’s will. He’d found a way into Dalan’s head through the mystic.

“This is your final warning,” Caetl’s voice was toneless. “I know what you’re going to do before you do.”

Fur pushed out of her skin. As her ears slid up her skull, her hearing improved. Closing her eyes, Nyr gathered her resolve.

She wasn’t alone. She’d found a new clan, and to keep them alive, she needed to kill one last time.

“Obey me, and I will let her live,” Caetl whispered.

Nyr straddled Caetl and met no resistance when she pulled the gun from his grasp. She stared at him, the feline in her focused on the blood on his neck before flinging the gun into the tall grasses far afield.

She’d killed so many times before, and for what? To plunder, to bring so-called glory to the Tiger Clan and the greater Hellsworth Tribe? Pointless. Yet now, when she needed her old bloodlust most, it was missing.

Caetl whispered something else, so quietly Nyr couldn’t hear his words, even with her improved hearing. Hope rose in her, making her wonder if Caetl could still fight back. But his green eyes stared up at the sky.

He’s gone
, Nyr told herself. What lay beneath her was only a shell.

“Do it,” he whispered. “Kill me.”

She blinked, and just like that, all her resolve evaporated. Caetl had become their ally, part of their plan to beat the Wizard at his own game. None of this was Caetl’s fault. Despite her earlier skepticism, she knew he’d done his best to protect them. She couldn’t repay him with death.

“I’m sorry,” she found herself saying, hoping he understood the full depth of those words. She was sorry she’d dragged him on horseback to test his story when he’d first come to them, she was sorry she’d tried to kill him, and she was sorry now that she couldn’t.

Caetl’s lips curled in disgust, the first expression he’d made in some time. “No, you’re not. You’re weak. Clanless. Unworthy of being called a feline.”

He bucked beneath her, and Nyr leaned forward to keep him pinned, to keep him from hurting either one of them. Too late, she recognized it as a distraction. His hand snaked up to her bad forearm. Then he squeezed, grinding the broken bones within.

Nyr howled in pain. The frustration she’d borne all day, unable to fight the Wizard, erupted. The claws on her good hand reached their full length.

She buried them into soft flesh and twisted even as she cried, “No!”

Blood spewed from Caetl’s neck, and she jerked her face away. She couldn’t bear to watch the light in his eyes fade.

Caetl made a gagging cough, as though trying to speak. The words came to her mind instead.
I forgive you, Nyr of the felines. Thank you for setting me free.

Where her knee touched the ground, warmth and wetness crept through the fabric of her pants. The earth leeched his lifeblood away.

She didn’t want to see his face frozen in agony. He’d become one of them despite the rough welcome he’d received at her hands.

Her eyes searched for the object in the sky that always comforted Dalan. As Caetl’s body twitched beneath her, the clouds in her view blurred together.

When she found the All-Seeing Eye, Nyr let out a primal scream, remorse tearing from her. A sob caught in her belly and seized in her chest, coming out as nothing more than a whimper. Cries wracked her body, and for the first time in a lifetime, she gave in to grief.

Chapter 31

Jorrim stared at Korreth’s broken form, trying to block out the conversation between the Ageless as Zen said, “Mortal humans are unworthy. Their lifespans aren’t long enough to appreciate the implications of the power we wield.”

A drawn-out cry got everyone’s attention. Gryid leaped over the wall in one bound. The blades of his forearms flashed, his expression twisted by fury. He clenched an additional knife in each fist.

“Korreth, Jorrim!” Soledad called out. “Stop him!”

Jorrim’s blood ignited in anger. His bad ankle protested, but he got to his feet anyway. He forced the words out, testing their newfound freedom. “No,
mistress
, we will not.” He didn’t say that Korreth could not.

The spell—the nanotech—hadn’t forced him to call her Soledad, or forced them to obey her command. They were free, for all the good it would do Korreth now. If he had the strength, Jorrim would raise the remaining SCL and shoot her, but climbing to his feet had exhausted him.

Though Zen couldn’t move, Gryid’s blades had no effect against his metal. Soledad tackled him before he could find soft flesh to sink his knives into.

Soledad had never wanted them to kill Zen. She’d commanded them to do everything but. Jorrim looked down at his friend again. Despite his earlier pessimism, some part of him had hoped Soledad really would stop Zen. And she had, but she didn’t intend to finish the job.

Korreth was dead because of her. His children would never know their father. Jorrim raised his eyes to the Ageless, wrestling in the grasses beneath the towering cyborg’s immobile form. Zen’s very existence threatened Korreth’s family’s safety. Zen hunted technology, and if someone didn’t stop him, he’d keep at it for centuries. Jorrim owed it to Korreth to make sure Zen never found Zhouri or his children.

Soledad kicked Gryid in the head. “Damn it! We’re supposed to protect the technology, not destroy it!”

Gryid aged, wild-eyed, and returned her blows.

Jorrim leaned against the wall, his eyes drawn to them. If Gryid wouldn’t do it, Jorrim would find a way. He gripped Korreth’s SCL in his right hand, though he hadn’t the strength to raise it. His strength failed, and he slumped back into the grasses, defeated. He leaned against the wall.

“Kaia deserves vengeance,” Gryid’s voice was high-pitched, on the verge of hysterical. “And you would become another Zen in the end.”

Jorrim tried to raise the rifle once more, but couldn’t get the barrel above kneecap height. Groaning at the pain, he lifted both arms to heave the SCL onto his knees.

Soledad whirled and said, “I release you,” to Zen.

The cyborg’s mouth opened in a yell as he reached for the lamppost on the ground. Jorrim pulled the trigger, and a red ball of energy tore through Zen’s mouth and throat.

The giant toppled over. His fingers and legs began twitching.

Soledad stared at the body, her jaw going slack. Gryid went into a rage, kicking the corpse and screaming, crying, his voice tearing.