“All right, you caught me. I can. But I won’t.”
“This doesn’t have to be hard,” John said, his voice scratching and hissing.
“I’m afraid it does,” replied Alistair.
John nodded subtly. The disruptor let out a higher whine, preparing to fire.
“Will I be likely to explain it to you when I’m in a disruptor field, lad?”
“Very well.” John hesitated, hoping he could trust his men to follow orders and kill no one without a direct instruction to do so. Then he gestured at the man who sat behind Fiona on horseback.
John avoided looking in her direction as the man pressed a knife to her throat and Fiona let out a strangled cry. He kept his eyes on Alistair.
“Remove the dagger from the device,” he said evenly.
“I can’t do that,” Alistair replied. “No matter what I feel, the athame is more valuable than a life.” His eyes, however, told a different story—they darted again to Fiona.
John steeled himself and gestured again. The man began to make a shallow cut across Fiona’s throat. She struggled frantically within his arms, blood dripping down her fine, white skin.
It’s only a little blood. He won’t cut her deeply, John told himself. Please don’t cut her deeply! He swallowed, kept his gaze on Alistair. The big man looked at the ground as the cut along Fiona’s neck grew longer. At last Alistair nodded, giving in. He reached for the vise grip and began to unwind the levers holding the dagger in place. The knife at Fiona’s throat stopped moving.
“Easy,” John said to Alistair.
Alistair’s hands moved slowly over the many levers of the apparatus. The athame itself began to move as the device loosened around it. At the moment when John expected the dagger to fall out onto the table, Alistair very gently took hold of the longest lever with both hands. Then he twisted the lever fully around, his huge arms straining as he yanked it toward himself in one sudden, brutal motion and the razor within the device bit deeply into the dagger.
At once, the athame began to throw off a terrible vibration. They could all feel it in their teeth, in their bones. It was like metal tearing or glass cracking. John’s muscles tightened of their own accord, his fists clenching, his legs beginning to cramp.
Across the room, the man with the disruptor experienced the same tightening of his own muscles, just as his horse staggered backward, similarly affected. Involuntarily, the man’s right hand clamped onto the disruptor, and the weapon fired.
John’s teeth were gnashing uncontrollably. He saw disruptor sparks shooting toward him, but he could hardly get his legs to move. With a huge effort, he threw himself to the floor, landing like a bag of bricks.
The sparks passed above him and collided with Alistair.
The vibration from the athame stopped dead, as if snuffed out by an unseen force.
There was silence as everyone slowly regained use of their muscles. Then Alistair began to scream and beat at his own head.
John struggled to his feet and grabbed the device holding the athame. He saw then why the vibration had stopped. The razor arm within the apparatus had cut deeply into the shaft of the dagger, shattering the blade. Some of the stone pieces were still locked in the vise. Others had scattered across the workbench, along with a handful of gritty dust. The color of the stone itself had changed, become more gray, its surface dull. Whatever energy had existed inside that ancient artifact was gone.
Alistair was staggering toward the barn door. His red hair stood on end as multicolored sparks danced around his head and shoulders. He could not walk in a straight line, but kept turning back, striking out at the air, then staggering again toward the door. Fiona was crying freely as she watched him, and John’s men stared in stunned silence.
John himself felt a rolling wave of nausea as he saw Alistair stumble through the doorway amidst those rainbow flashes. This sensation mixed with a regret so strong, it was physically painful. Not Alistair!
He ran for his horse and leapt up into the saddle. Bringing the animal close to the man with the disruptor, John slapped him across the face. He knew Alistair’s condition was not the man’s fault, and yet he couldn’t stop his anger—at Briac, for putting him in this position, and at himself for losing control of the situation.
“How could you?” John screamed with his distorted voice. “He was a good man, and you’ve destroyed him.” He put his hands to his head for a moment, then ordered, “Go find Briac!”
The explosion from John’s blasting coil took out half the wall, but the withered figure made no move, not even a small flinch. The figure’s position on the hospital bed and the faint sparks dancing around its head were just as they had been a month ago.
John stepped through the dust and smoke into the room. His eyes swept the medical machinery along the back wall, and then he took a seat on the edge of the bed.
He had never been alone with this creature. He’d always been in Briac’s presence, and very much on guard. Now, gently, his fingers found the bottom edge of the ancient hospital gown covering the figure, and slid it up the withered left leg. On the upper thigh was a puckered scar, as long as a man’s hand. It looked like a sword or knife injury that had been sewn up very carelessly.
He had known he would find that scar, and yet it still took his breath away. Briac had stood here twice, taking perverse pleasure in making John look at this decaying, tortured figure as John tried to pretend he had no idea who it was.
John dropped the gown back into place. Though he could not stand the thought of touching the body, he forced himself to put a hand on one of the bony shoulders. He studied the sunken eyes, the withered nose, the prominent jawbone. Nothing was left of what the face had once been.
He took out a knife and positioned it above the creature’s chest. It would take only one hard thrust, he told himself, to drive the blade into the heart and put an end to it. He held the knife there for a full minute, trying to make that thrust, but he could not. Finally, he let his hand drop to his side.
He sat on the bed for a long while, unsure of what to do next. Slowly, as though he could not support its weight, his head fell forward until it was resting on the mattress next to the figure. He closed his eyes, pushed his forehead into the old sheet. The tears started gently but soon became fierce. His body convulsed in sobs, the sort of cries a small child might make when he discovered his world was ending.
At last, still crying, he stood up from the bed and blindly cut through all of the IV tubes. One by one he switched off every piece of machinery in the room.
When the equipment had all gone silent, he turned to look at the body in the bed, expecting to see some change. There was none. The figure was completely still, and the sparks still danced around its torso.
It might take hours, or even days, he realized, before the figure finally died and the sparks went out. Surely, after all this time, the end would be painless.
As he stood by the hole in the wall, he loosened the distortion box around his neck so his voice would not sound demonic. “Soon I will have back what is rightfully ours,” he said quietly, his natural voice sounding foreign to him. “I will pay them for what they’ve done to you and put things back as they should be.” He paused, looking at the body for the last time. “Goodbye, Mother.”
Tightening the box around his throat again, he stepped back out into the night.
CHAPTER 16
SHINOBU
Shinobu grabbed his father’s huge shoulders, trying to steady him. Alistair swung a fist at his son. Shinobu ducked, then found the big man’s hands tightening around his neck. But Alistair’s mind twisted away before he could do any damage. He released Shinobu and fell to his knees, beating his own head on the ground.
“Da. Do you know me?”
He pulled Alistair’s head around so they were looking each other in the eyes. The moon had risen, lighting the floor of the forest. His father was still for the briefest of moments, his eyes wide and blank, cuts along his eyebrows from s
mashing his head into the dirt. Then he lunged. His hands reached for Shinobu’s neck again, his fingernails grazing the skin. Just as suddenly, he stopped himself, groaning, and began beating his own legs.
The field distorts your thoughts. You form an idea, but the disruptor field changes it, sends it back to you altered. Shinobu was recalling Alistair’s own words. He had drummed the perils of disruptors into their heads for years. Your mind will tie itself in a knot, fold up, collapse. You will want to kill yourself, but how can you? Even that thought spins out of your control …
Smoke lay heavily over much of the estate, making it difficult to breathe or see. Shinobu had checked his own cottage, looking for the trunk full of guns, but had found nothing except a pillar of fire where his home had once been. He’d gone farther, to the cottages of the Dreads, hoping they might have weapons he could take. But those structures, while not burning, had been completely empty. The Dreads had taken their belongings and gone.
He and Quin had agreed to follow Fiona if they got separated, so he’d headed back around the commons and through the forest toward the workshop. Halfway there, in a section of the woods the smoke had not yet reached, he had come upon his father, staggering through the trees, caught in a web of sparks that would be the end of him.
Shinobu was ashamed to find that he didn’t feel sorry for Alistair. If his father had been disrupted only a few short weeks ago—before their first assignment—Shinobu would have been devastated. But now his heart was numb. Truly numb. Alistair had let him make the wrong decision. Yes, he’d warned him, but so gently there was no way Shinobu could have understood. How could he possibly have understood?
His father had let him go on that first assignment and swear his oath. Alistair had known what it meant, and he had let it happen. And then he’d accompanied them and Briac on more assignments, without saying a word.
“Why did you not stop me?” Shinobu yelled at Alistair. “I would have listened if you’d explained …”
Alistair was gritting his teeth as though fighting a battle inside his head. He cried out, and in the same moment managed to pull a knife from his belt. He lashed at the air with the blade, hit his own head with the hilt. Then he raised the knife and struck down wildly at Shinobu.
Shinobu blocked him and pushed. Alistair landed in the dirt, but his hand was still pressing against Shinobu’s with the knife. It was not the blade against his skin, Shinobu realized, it was the handle, and Alistair was shoving it into his hand.
Shinobu grabbed the knife, and his father rolled away, his fingers scratching at tree roots. Then he kicked at his son’s legs. Shinobu took a step backward, out of reach.
He should end this for his father. That was what you were supposed to do for a comrade caught in a disruptor field—end it. The field was permanent, and only a monster would let someone suffer like this.
If I am a monster, Shinobu thought, it’s because of you. You stood by and let me do it.
He tucked the knife into his belt and walked away.
CHAPTER 17
QUIN
Quin was following the sound of John’s voice through the smoke, which lay so thickly around her that she was forced to creep along the ground, her cloak over her nose and mouth. She had been following that voice all around the commons, but at last she was getting close.
It wasn’t John’s real voice she was following, of course, but that strange, harsh metallic one he was using, as though it could separate him from what he was doing. She hoped Shinobu could hear that distorted screech as well and that he was nearby with an armful of weapons. She didn’t want to hurt John, but weapons seemed a necessity if she wanted to get her mother back.
“I don’t have what you’re looking for.” This was a new voice through the smoke—her father’s.
“You have it,” John said. “When you give it to me, you will have your wife back.”
“Have my wife back?” Briac repeated, a mocking tone in his reply. “That’s what you’re bargaining with?”
There was a breath of wind, and Quin came into a patch of clear air unexpectedly. The moon was up now, and she discovered she was again near the smoking wreck of her own cottage at the edge of the field. Her mother was visible directly in front of her, still on horseback, with a man seated behind her. A short distance away, John faced Briac in the tall grass of the commons, the mounted men encircling them both.
Quin crouched low in three-foot-tall scorched stalks that had been a green meadow only a few hours before.
“You can kill my wife only once,” Briac said. “Then what?”
You’re a beast, Quin thought, staring at her father.
“You’re a beast,” came John’s altered voice, speaking Quin’s own thoughts aloud.
“Aye, I’m a beast,” Briac agreed. “But I don’t have the athame.”
“All right,” John said.
Quin watched as John pulled out a pistol and shot Briac in the leg. Her father cried out and collapsed into a sitting position, blood blooming through his trousers along his upper thigh.
“There’s a matching scar for you,” John told him in his inhuman voice.
She knew the sight of her father bleeding should bother her, but Quin could not stop herself from feeling a fierce satisfaction at his pain. Briac would kill any of us if he had to, she thought, finally admitting the truth to herself.
Her eyes went back to John. She couldn’t see his face because he still wore his mask, but his hatred for Briac and his desperation for the athame seemed to radiate from his body. Is he desperate enough to hurt my mother? she wondered. She had the strong urge to pull the athame from her cloak and toss it to him. That simple action would put an end to the attack and make John happy all in a moment.
And then what? she asked herself. What if we were to decide, Quin? John had whispered to her in the barn. We’d do a better job …
“Where is the athame?” John demanded of Briac again, bringing Quin back to the present.
“I don’t have it!” Briac yelled, clutching his injured leg. “Kill me, kill her, kill anyone you like! I still don’t have it!”
It was time to act, while everyone’s attention was on her father. Quin moved in a crouch toward her mother, staying low in the grass. As she approached, she could see a wash of red over Fiona’s neck—her throat had been badly cut and was covered in blood. Had John done that to her?
Quin pulled a knife from its sheath at her waist, thinking, I hope you’re sober now, Mother. Fiona turned her head and looked directly at her, as though Quin had spoken the words aloud. Seeing Quin’s knife, she moved her head slightly, acknowledging that she understood. Her horse was the farthest back in the circle of men, away from notice at this moment.
“I was betrayed,” Briac said frantically as John got closer. “I don’t have it, I tell you!”
John shot him again, hitting his shoulder. Briac was thrown backward, and the new wound bled quickly, soaking his shirt.
“Don’t worry,” John told him in his awful voice, still approaching. “I’ll stitch those up for you. I’ve got a needle and thread around here somewhere.”
Quin saw her moment. She threw her knife, knowing she wasn’t as skilled at this as the Young Dread but hoping her talents were sufficient. The knife arced through the smoky air and buried itself in the throat of the man holding Fiona. He tried to grab the blade, but before he had a chance, Fiona twisted her head and slammed it back against him, crushing the knife farther into his neck.
Staying low, Quin ran to her mother. She eased both Fiona and her captor—the man desperately clutching his throat—off the horse. By the sounds he was making, he would be dead in a minute or two. Quin retrieved her knife and slashed the ropes from her mother’s hands, and then they were running back into the smoke.
When they were past the burning cottages and among the trees, Quin paused to examine the wound at Fiona’s throat. Blood was still seeping from it, but the cut was shallow enough to pose no immediate threat. Had John and hi
s men meant only to make a surface wound? Or had Fiona simply been lucky?
“Your father …” Fiona whispered.
“We’re leaving.” Quin said it firmly, and though unspoken, it was clear she meant: We’re leaving without Briac. “As soon as we find Shinobu.”
She took her mother’s hand, and they ran deeper into the woods, heading along the west side of the commons. Unless Shinobu had abandoned the estate, it was the only place he could be.
“John may kill your father,” her mother breathed.
From their new location, they could see Briac again. John was approaching him with a knife. At that moment, Quin realized that she wanted John to finish him. Whether John was dangerous or not, sane or not, she wanted him to finish Briac. It would set her free; it would set all of them free. She was about to answer her mother—If John doesn’t kill him, I promise you I will—when her attention was drawn to a large shape moving deeper in the woods.
“Look!” she whispered. “There’s Yellen!”
CHAPTER 18
MAUD
The Young Dread and the Middle Dread were perched in the branches of a huge oak tree near the edge of the forest, watching the apprentice with the mask. He was holding a knife in his hand, approaching Briac, who lay wounded in the grass of the commons. Briac began to yell.
“You cannot stand aside! You cannot stand aside!”
Though her companion stood as still as stone, his breath so slow and soft that even she had difficulty hearing it, there was a tension about the Middle Dread as he watched Briac.
“You must help me!” Briac called.
He is speaking to us, the Young Dread realized. No, she corrected herself, he is speaking to the Middle. Those two have secrets.
And the Middle was listening. She moved her head slightly to observe him. His body was tensing. He was preparing to speed up.