True Born (24 page)

“Jared, no,” I shout at his back as he marches me toward the guard’
s entrance.
“Put me down. I need to get to Margot.”

“Too risky,” he yells.

“Jared,
please
. I will never forgive you!”

He pauses, and for a moment I think he might put me down. But he bounces me a little higher on his shoulder, grabbing my legs tightly, and starts moving quickly toward the gate. “I can live with that risk,” he yells up at me through the chaos. I am about to unleash holy hell when something arcs across the sky, doing it for me.

I don
’t see the bomb lobbed over the gate at the house, but I hear it. It makes a deafening sound as it impacts, a shrill scream just before the air bursts into violet pink hues. Jared and I are knocked down. My wrist crumples beneath me as we hit the ground.

He scrambles on top of me, stretching himself flat around my body and curling my head under his arms and torso. I am surrounded by him, but I don’t feel him. For once, I am not aware of Jared Price. I can’t see, can’t breathe. I’m not even sure I’d want to as the air transforms into a pink and white dragon.

It doesn’t smell like any fire I’ve ever been close to. I struggle beneath Jared, who curses but eventually lets me poke my head up. A streak of dirt mars his beautiful face. A deep cut next to his eye bleeds freely. I reach up as if to touch it, but he grabs my hand and tries to stand us both up.

“No,” I scream, looking at the house. There is a hole in the front of the house. It slashes across the second floor. From here I can see the mess of matchsticks my bed has been made into, debris littering the room. Where is my sister? Someone from outside the gate is shouting about retreat, something about screwing up. It doesn’t sink in until I see the guests streaming out from the double doors leading out from the ballroom on the other side of the house. Women with shocked faces, grim men in their evening wear.

Jared pulls me back up in his firemen’s pose before I can protest but quickly comes to a dead stop. From under Jared’s arm, I spy an upside-down Richardson. His hair is mussed, his face battered and swollen and filled with murder.

“Put her down,” Richardson snarls. Feathery hands grab me from the side and haul me off Jared’s shoulder none too gently.

Jared’s face elongates, the bones in his cheeks becoming more pronounced. His eyes transform, indigo to emerald, his nails lengthen, as he turns into the stuff of nightmares. His hair-singeing battle cry rises up over the sound of the wind before he pounces. They tussle across the grass of the front lawn, rolling end over end until Jared is on top and beating the ever-loving tar out of Richardson. Talons break through the skin of my upper arm. I stare into the inhumanly round, yellow eyes of the falcon man and realize I’ve had enough. I bow my head, going slack, until he’s forced to relax his grip. Then I knee him in the groin, hard enough to make him double over. He doesn’t let go but his grip isn’t as strong as it was. I slap my palm as hard as I can with the awkward angle against the bridge of his nose. A sickening crunch sounds and the wide eyes blink closed, giving me an opportunity to break free and run for shelter.

Lasters rattle the gate until it sways like a sapling. I run for the row of shiny OldenTimes cars lining the driveway, out of sight from the guards at the house—who are busy with the chaos set off from whatever the Lasters threw at our house—and hopefully out of sight of the falcon man, the Lasters, and the Preacher man.

A blur of dark feathers blends in among the panicking guests. Not sure I’m safe, I crouch behind a car and search for signs of Jared and Richardson. A body flies through the air, and Jared pounces after it like a cat chasing a chew toy. I stand up to get a better look, but the car I’m leaning on suddenly ignites, burning me with its exhaust pipe. The car backs up as I glide out from behind, just in time to hear the
smack
! as it slams into the car behind, then floors it into a U-turn toward the still-locked gate.

Tires squeal. More cars pull out from the parked line. The first car speeds up as it hits the gate, crunching against steel and bodies. Screaming. So much screaming. The car is dented as it backs up about fifty feet and rams the gate again, this time shattering the locking mechanism and leaving a trail of bodies on either side as it forces the gate open, inch by squealing inch.

The Preacher’s rabble pour through the gate, shouting bloody blue murder. I stand there, a deer in the headlights, unsure where to turn. Behind me, the house is ruined. The smoke has died to a curl. But where is Margot? And then I feel it, that tenuous bond, bright and thin between us, growing thicker.

Margot appears at the front door, her upper arm held by Resnikov. Falcon man stands behind them, feathers ruffled and a thick trail of blood coating the down around his face. And a second later, my parents appear, harried and mussed but safe. I want to sag in relief.

My attention fastens on Margot. She’s pale. A tiny streak of blood smears her temple and there are tiny red spatters on her dress, but otherwise she seems fine. I would have felt it if she wasn’t. She scans the chaos with a blank expression of horror.
Margot
, I tug at her, but of course she can’t hear me. I start toward her when I’m knocked off my feet again.

A dirty hand covers my mouth. I gaze into the crazed eyes of a skin-and-bones man. His shirt is torn and bloody, his dark pants a soiled mess. He shouts at me, his shaggy hair falling into a blotchy red face, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. A hand snakes out. I don’t realize what’s happening until the punch lands in my face and the world shuts off like a light.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

It’s the Flux storm that rouses me. Water falls in trickles down my neck. Pain overwhelms me as I open my eyes at the ground swaying beneath me. The Laster has me hooked around his neck where I dangle like a carcass.

I hear a boom, so loud it’s as though the heavens have opened. Another. Then another. The Laster holding me pauses, shouts something unintelligible to his comrades. He turns just long enough toward the gate that I catch a glimpse of the house. Margot and my parents are still on the steps, held there by a few dozen Lasters and the chaos all around them. It’s not too late, then. And suddenly the earth stops.

Storm pounds down the steps of the house. Lightning dances across his antlers like he’s connected to the heavens by strings. On his face is a look of pure rage, which he proves as he grabs an unsuspecting Laster stupid enough to rush him. A neat twist of his hands and he breaks the man’s neck. The Laster falls to the side. Storm walks on like he’s riding the rain. Bombs of rain now fall, soaking the grass, the cars, bodies awash with blood and dirt running into the ground.

Storm turns. I catch my breath as he takes in the scene of chaos and charges the Lasters. The smart ones stop in their tracks and back up as the rain begins to fall harder, obscuring the green-gray sky.

Another jolt and I’m on the ground again, covered in mud. I roll a few feet away and watch as Jared bites the cheek off the Laster who was holding me seconds before. The panicked man tries to dig his fingers into Jared’s face. I hear a terrible crunch as Jared bites first one, then the other hand. Bones crack and break as Jared shakes and tosses his head, splitting the man’s skin. Casually he spits pieces of bone into the grass. His chin drips blood on the screaming man as I try to right myself. I don’t want the man to die, even if he has hit me. Crawling over to Jared I put my hand on his arm. Feral eyes, filled with bloodlust, greet mine. I’ve miscalculated. He takes in my swelling cheek and eye and those eyes tighten a little more. He looks down coldly at the captive trapped between his thighs. He straightens his fingers so they are stiff knives before he drives them through the Laster’s temples. A final death cry sounds from the head, which explodes like a ripe melon. Jared rubs his hands clean on the Laster’s filthy shirt and stands up. I look away, not sure how to be gracious with this violent love poem.

I glance over at the door. Margot and Resnikov look like a bizarre parody of the newly married, surrounded by the uninvited. I have just seconds to get to them if I’m to go. They’ll not wait for me in this chaos.

“You have a bad habit of attracting the wrong men, Princess.” Jared stares at me a long minute in the rain before putting out a hand, as though we’re about to waltz around the ballroom. A strange, charged silence stretches between us. “I’ll help you,” he tells me. His eyelashes flutter. But he makes no further move to touch me. “I’ll help you, I swear. I can help you get her back. But for God’s sake, do it from a safe distance. Do it smart. Do it with me.”

It’s not that simple
, I want to scream at him. I’d be giving up my life. My family. My friends. The entire Upper Circle. Yet, as my pulse jumps and I stare at the gore-covered True Born before me, I suddenly understand that old life was already gone. Whatever deal our father has made with Resnikov, it doesn’t include us continuing our cozy life in Dominion City.

More than that: as the rain and smoke flatten my pretty dress and wash over the hot bruises on my face, for the first time in my life it occurs to me that I no longer want to be dictated by duty. I want to forge my own life.
And if I had a choice?
a quiet voice inside me asks.
What life would I choose? Who and what would I choose to be?

And then I don’t hesitate. I place my fingers, slim and slight, in Jared’s large, rain-washed hand. I expect him to lead me away, but instead he pulls me up into his arms. I feel his chest vibrate with the long, deep breath he takes, as though he’s been starved of oxygen. He holds me tighter, arms drawing me close, mouth hovering over my skin, before murmuring in my ear, “Hang on.”

We follow Storm out the gate. Jared snarls with long canines every few seconds. The Lasters pull back, forming a corridor, suddenly quiet. I wait for a bomb or whatever it is they’ll pull next, but nothing happens. Nothing happens. Even if I wasn’t tipped off by the hopeful glances they throw my way, I can feel it, an air of satisfaction swirling through their ragged ranks. Guests are still flying into their cars. I take a last look back at the window that was my bedroom. A tendril of green pokes its way through the gap, aiming for the sky.

My parents and sister have vanished, along with the mysterious Resnikov. At least Margot is alive. Wherever she is she has access to her hands—she pinches her thigh, hard enough to draw blood then rubs it, a silent goodbye. I can’t reach my leg to pat the stinging flesh. Wouldn’t want to. The cord between us stretches, golden and fragile, until it becomes a thin, silent string.

My eyes glaze over until I spy the witch—no, the witch’s daughter, I remind myself—pull herself out from behind a line of cars reflecting red light in the gloom. She sets out at a stroll, a smile tugging at her lips. A commotion to my left catches my eye, and I watch as a massive man covered head to toe in marmalade fur tosses Lasters aside like they’
re garbage bags. He
’s a spitting angry, man-sized cat, ears flattened against his head under a black bolo hat. Cat man has paired his hat with a white undershirt, black leather pants, and rounds of ammo lacing his shoulders and torso. His feet, marmalade paws ending in four-inch claws, are bare.

“There you are,” he says in a whisky voice to the witch’s daughter. Cat man pulls out a cigar and sticks it between two sharpened cat teeth. His fingers rummage through pockets.

“Don’t smoke those here, Carl,” the blond woman returns in a tired voice. “They’ve gone and set off bombs.”

Cat man grumbles but shoves the cigar back behind his ear as he follows her thin figure through the parted crowds. Father Wes is nowhere to be seen, although I suspect he’s too smart to have been shot.

Storm must be thinking the same thing. He stops in the middle of the crowd, which has formed a healthy gap around him. Dirty, dark-streaked, and hungry faces stretch as far as the eye can see. How many are here now? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Storm stamps one foot. The ground shimmies and booms. His antlers angle sideways as he glares at the crowd.

“Where is he?” his voice shakes the air. Pin quiet settles through the rabble until, far in the distance, the wail of a siren rises over the city. Our father has gone and called in the fire department. It will cost him a fortune. “
Where is he?
” Storm booms again. The Lasters shift uneasily but no one says a word. “Fine,” he spits. “Tell him Nolan Storm has just taken Dominion for his own. Tell him,” he says with a feral grin, “I’m coming for the man who would steal little girls.”

The Lasters shrink back even more, happy looks wiped from their faces, and we walk off into the deepening gloom of twilight. No one looks particularly bothered about Father Wes’s morality. The Lasters stretch all the way to Mercy, two streets away. There hasn’t been a congregation so large since the Plague first started eating through our ranks. Whatever else can be said about the man who’d steal little girls, Father Wes inspires devotion in his followers.

We keep walking, though, a tribe of dark angels amidst the ruined people. No one bothers us. And we don’t bother them as they shuffle closer to my parents’ wrecked house.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The air steams with rain as we head toward the rendezvous point. “What happened to Richardson?” I croak in Jared’s ear.

“I killed him.”

I punch Jared’s shoulder, but it’s a weak and pathetic attempt, even for me. “You shouldn’t have done that. We needed him for information.” It should concern me, how quickly I have become immune to Jared’s violence. How quickly I have become a plotter in this giant game. I wonder what a lifetime of exposure would do to a person, what they turn into.

“I know.” He looks down at me, a trace of regret in his eyes. But behind the nugget of remorse lies something else: he’s happy he got to be the one to do it. “I’m glad I got to kill the other guy, too,” he says as though he’s read my mind. His smile doesn’t last long as he takes in the rapid swelling of my eye. Soon I reckon I won’t be able to open it. Soon, I reckon, I won’t care.

“They still took my sister,” I whisper.

Jared’s arms tighten around me as we near the big black car. “I know,” he tells me with real sadness.

Those few words are all it takes to make it real. I hold in a sob as Jared places me carefully in the back seat and slides in beside me.
Just like old times
, I hear myself think. Except it isn’t. There’s no rescued Margot beside me when Jared pulls me close to his body. His hand riffles through my hair, and I hear his indrawn breath as he methodically recounts the events of the night.

Did I make the right choice?

The front door opens, and Mohawk slides into the driver’s seat.

“Where the hell have you been?” Jared growls.

Mohawk snorts. “You’re welcome, Grumpy. I love driving your snippy ass around.”

“Where’s Storm?”
I don
’t ask about the witch’s daughter or the cat man. I simply don’t have the energy.

Mohawk turns to give me a saucy smile. “Antlers and cars don’t mix.”

For the rest of the drive back to Storm’s, we’re silent. The rest of Dominion is empty, as though someone had opened some doors and every citizen fled. A body slumps against a tired building, but that’s it: no mercs or bodyguards, no fancy Oldworld cars riding around, not a single living Laster. But on the walls are the markings they have left behind: two circles, joined in the center. And the bloody red letters accompanying their hieroglyphics.

Evolve or die.

...

Jared carries me into the bedroom I’m beginning to think of as mine. He gently strips off my high-heeled shoes and pulls one of his oversized shirts over my head before unbuttoning me from my ruined dress. He pulls the pins from my hair, raking his fingers through it, and warms up a washcloth for me to wipe my face. By then he’s slung me into the bed and has changed into a pair of sweats and a faded blue shirt. I’m too tired to fight it when he slides in next to me and curls me in close.

We sleep through the night and half the day before Jared’s whiskers scratch my skin where he rubs against my cheek. His breath tickles strands of hair framing my cheek.

“We need to get some ice for that eye of yours.” His voice is gravelly and deep. I try to look at him but one of my eyes isn’t quite cooperating. I push back an inch.

“I reckon I look like hell warmed over.” His answering chuckle confirms my suspicions, but I still don’t move. Even as he gently brushes strands of hair away from my face. “What do I do?” I whisper. I’m not certain what it is I’m even asking about. Am I asking about Storm, or Margot? Or am I asking about something deeper, more mysterious—like the thing scratching between myself and the wild man beside me?

Jared’s fingers freeze on my face as though I’ve uttered magic words. I think he’s about to roll out of bed and tell me we’ll speak with Storm. But he surprises me. He takes my chin in his hand and stares deeply into my eyes.

“
I don
’t know,” he confesses. His fingers trail over my ears, down the back of my neck where he tangles with my hair. “I’m like an addict,” he says without humor. “All it took was one look, one scent, and you were hardwired into me.”

“You don’t even know me,” I say. At least half the time I am convinced he hates my guts. And the other half? I suspect I hate his.

His smile is rueful. “I guess not in the traditional sense. But”—his fingers trail down my shoulder, rousing my skin as he brushes my back—“
scents don
’t lie. Not like people do. Not that it matters.” He sighs. His heat curls up inside me.

“Why?”

“It’s my job to protect you.” His face is bathed in shadows and stubble as he cracks a serious blue eye at me.

Against the sinking pool of disappointment in my belly I return, “
I don
’t know what that means.”

He shrugs, but I can see shadows creep into his eyes. “You come first. You’ll always be first,” he tells me fervently.

I want to unravel every thread he’s just laid bare, but everything beats urgently inside me. And I need answers. I need a plan.

“Jared.” My hand splays across his chest. I can feel his heart beating wildly under my hand, pulsing under the muscles of his chest. “Jared,” I say again, wetting my cracked lips. “The woman with the white eyes said my blood is different. She didn’t say it exactly, but she made it seem like it can do something to the Plague. But Dorian told me my blood was different from Margot’s—our blood is different.” My mind leaps in horror from one realization to the next. “They were going to kidnap me, too. I think whatever they wanted us for, they needed me, too. I need to get her back.”

His warm, calloused hand closes over mine. “I told you I’d help you.”

And in that moment I know everything I need to know.

...

“Good, you’re up.” Storm breezes into the kitchen where I’m busy sucking up a bowl of cereal while watching the NewsFeed. I look up. He looks rested, younger than before, if possible.

“Senator and Mary Kain are still missing,” I tell him. The headlines all scream about the missing Senator and his wife. The strangeness surrounding their unexpected departure. Were they killed during the bombing or were they ripped apart by the Lasters?

My own family does not appear in the NewsFeed. Nor do the thousands of Lasters who stormed the gate, the dozens that were killed. They have simply vanished like the genetic sequences that burn their lives away. And my own parents? Have they gone away with Margot and Resnikov? Will they watch over her? Whatever their plans are, I reckon they’ve just begun to hatch.

My spoon clatters in the bowl as Jared glides into the kitchen, looking cool and relaxed and showing too much skin in his boxer shorts and shirt.

“Yes, I know.”

“You know?” My attention diverts back to Storm. “What happened to them?”

“I suspect Resnikov happened.”

My brain short-circuits. “What does that mean? Were they in on everything—the protocols? Did they—”

Storm’s hands smack down on the counter like hammers. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Why don’t you come and speak to me in my office when you’re through here?”

“I’m coming, too.” Jared gives Storm and me his biggest killer cat grin.

“I see,” Storm says thoughtfully as he starts out the opposite door toward his office.

“Storm, wait,” I say, getting clumsily to my feet. He turns and waits for me, patience stamped into every feature. “Did you—do you know about us? About Margot and me?”

His head tilts to the side, studying me. There’s no apology in his gray eyes, no sense of remorse as he tells me, “I’ve had suspicions.”

“Suspicions.”

“There are a lot of players on the board, a lot of people who seem to want to get their hands on your blood. As you know, big money runs the Splicer Clinics. I’ve suspected for a while that there’s something different about you girls. But do I know exactly what you are? What your blood is capable of?” Storm shakes a fiery head. “Not in the least.”

“Did you know our father was going to sell us?”

“No.” The words are just that: flat, emotionless.

“Is she—I mean, the witch’s daughter. Is she coming back? I’d like to talk to her.”

He nods, a spark lighting his eyes. “As a matter of fact, she and Carl will be here in about”—he consults his wristwatch—“half an hour.”

I nod back, glad there will be some lead, however fragile, to help me repair the stretched cord between my sister and me. There are too many things to repair, I realize as Jared tugs me back to the breakfast bar. My father and mother, wherever they might be. But first, Margot.

When I had finally crawled out of bed that morning, it had been from a dream where the witch’s daughter watched with her sightless eyes while I sobbed and sobbed from above the city. As I cried, my tears became rain, watering the dark brown patches of urban darkness. Everywhere my tears fell tiny lights blossomed.

When I opened my eyes, I was sure I felt Margot, tugging at me like a fish on a line. Not scared, exactly. Not angry. But some gray zone in between. Someone was stroking Margot’s arm. Softly enough, but she felt menace. In the next moment it was gone—like someone had shut off a tap.

Like a lock and key that didn’t fit together anymore.

I turn a hard, dazzling smile on a stunned-looking Jared. Despite everything that has happened, everything I’ve lost, I’ve good reason to smile. I have an ally, someone I can trust. Maybe more than one. And I’ve got a plan: come hell or Plague fire, I’m going to get to Russia. And once I’m there, I’m going to find out what Resnikov knows, what my parents obviously want to keep secret. And I’m going to get my sister back.

A wash of bright green floats across Jared
’
s eyes as he tugs me over the threshold of the kitchen and into the hall. I have one more reason to smile, I muse as I pause.

Today is my eighteenth birthday. And my own future has yet to be Revealed.