Oops. I guess sometimes a tool shed really is just a tool shed.
I count to a whole minute before emerging from the hedge, plucking leaves and twigs off myself as I do. I find the spot on the fence with the sigil, but stop just before putting my hand on it. Will it recognize me as an intruder and not let me in? Can the cloak counteract that? Well, let’s see. I tie the neck of the cloak tight under my chin, press my hand against the sigil, and say, “Wear these bright jewels, beloved Beowulf,” in Nádasdy’s voice.
The square on the ground opens back up, thank fucking gods. I hurry downward, trying to keep a good balance between stealth and urgency.
When I reach the bottom of the stairs, the hole above me closes up to leave me in utter darkness. Something heavy and alive brushes against my back—I whirl around, crowbar swinging. But just as the steel hook embeds itself in the dirt wall, lights blind me with their suddenness.
I spin blindly, trying to stay a threat to whoever’s in here with me. But when the black-green-purple blobs in my vision fade, the corridor yawns empty.
“Lilith?” I call haphazardly. No response. But my gut says she’s not who I was sensing.
That’s not important right now. Right now, my priority is finding the human sacrifices. It would be great to find some definitive evidence of Nádasdy’s guilt, maybe even incapacitate her and Jax so they can’t cause anymore trouble, but the victims’ survival is first and foremost.
I move quickly down the hallway. It’s tilted downward, and the floor transitions from hard-packed dirt to concrete a few yards in. My heart is still rabbit-thumping, and every step I take feels glacial. Damn it, this is not the time for the potion to be working so well. It’s a chore just to get five steps down the corridor, and then five more steps, and five more, and it’s like the tunnel is stretching out in front of me longer and longer the further I walk—
I emerge into the most lavish murder-chamber I’ve ever seen.
Marble columns hold the place up, just like the outside of the mansion. The whole ceiling is alight, imitating an underground sky, and from that light hangs a hook—a big, industrial meat hook skewering an upside-down body in a white hospital gown. Chains wind around the corpse from the waist up to the ankles, neck slashed open as it dangles lifelessly. My heart leaps into my throat as I try to identify the dead face, but I can’t name its owner. Not Joy, not David, not Aden. That’s a good thing, I remind myself, it’s a good thing. Even if I feel a little guilty for indulging in that relief.
Below the body is an enormous, square marble pit, filled with an even foot of blood. The pool is so stagnant it looks like solid, opaque glass.
“You shot me,” Nádasdy is hissing, sitting at the edge of the pit alongside Jax. Jax has one of his sleeves rolled up to his shoulder, showing a neat cut on his bicep. Nádasdy has her hand on the cut, bracing herself on Jax’s shoulder, as the other hand holds a bloody, six-inch combat knife.
“I didn’t know it was you, Katlin,” he says, wiping the site of Nádasdy’s bullet wound with a rag. “And, to be frank, you may have needed the shock. You were losing it, Kat. I didn’t hear everything, but I assume Lee found out about—”
“I didn’t kill him.” Nádasdy clutches Jax’s sleeve and presses her forehead into his chest, making him drop the rag. “She said I killed him, but that’s a lie, the bird lied to her, I didn’t kill him.”
Jax places a hand on her hair, more gently than I had thought him capable. His jaw twitches beneath a pale five o’clock shadow. “I know, love. I know.”
“The bird said sunset and sunrise, sunset and sunrise—I should, shouldn’t have—Jax, I felt it happen. We were killing and killing but it was so fast and so much, and when it stopped screaming for my blood I was so tired, I thought we had done enough, I let it slip from my fingers—but then I felt the hunger of it when it found my baby—my son—” Her voice collapses into muttering sobs, each word bleeding into the next in a low, desperate chant. “It was just a grab for power, it was just what anyone on the Council ever does… it wasn’t supposed to be anything more than that…”
“I understand, Katlin, I was there too. I should have stopped you.”
“I miss him so much… I want him back, I want him back—he can have sweets for dinner and drop his cello from the balcony and wear socks on his ears and I’ll read him the same inane book over and over again until he falls asleep just as long as he comes back—”
The knife in her hand bobs toward Jax, flashing uncertainly. Jax stops it with a quick grab, keeps it immobilized as Nádasdy claws scarlet trails down his other arm. “Katlin…”
She doesn’t even hear him. “If I stop now, this would all have been for nothing, do you understand? How could I do that to him? Let him die for nothing?”
“It won’t be for nothing. We just need to be steadfast—”
“We need to start the spell right now.”
Jax pauses. The grim set of his mouth never changes as he puts down the knife, picks up the rag, and dabs a sheen of sweat off Nádasdy’s forehead. “I thought we were going to find more sacrifices. For the next phase.”
The white of the room seems to seep into Nádasdy’s eyes, giving them a ghoulish glow. “There are no more phases, my love, there is only war and victory. What is the use of being careful, if we’re trying to gain absolute power?”
New wrinkles appear below Jax’s eyes. “Katlin—Katlin, you’re burning the match at both ends. You can’t do this at this pace, be this reckless. It won’t work like that.”
She cups his face in her hands, this manic, rubber smile etched onto her face. “I always forget that you aren’t a mage, my love. I keep showing you, don’t I? That the impossible is never impossible, that there are rules and ways to bend those rules, and you have known, we have always known, no one can stop me, no one can stop us. Who can stop us? Once we kill the Arbiter, who can stop us? It won’t matter if a pest like Lee sees what we are doing, it won’t matter if the world sees what we are doing, it will already be done. Or do you not believe I am strong enough?” The smile and the delicate hands tremble. “If you don’t believe me, who does?”
Jax’s head bows. He’s silent. I hold my breath, watching him, watching her watch him. Then he kisses the knuckles of her hand. “I believe you, love. I made you a promise, remember? To death and beyond.”
She curls up into him, like a snake, like a plume of smoke, like a puppy demanding cuddles. I can’t see her face, but her voice is euphoric.
“We are not going to die, my love.”
She grabs him by the collar and presses her lips against his, and within moments I’m seeing flashes of writhing pink tongue. My nose wrinkles in disgust—especially when Nádasdy pulls back to say, breathlessly, “We’ll have a daughter this time. Miklos was perfect, but we can still make better—we’ll have a daughter, and she will rule the world.”
She clambers to her feet, and I slip back into the corridor so as not to be seen. Peeking in small bursts, I see her kick off her slippers, tie one side of her skirt up to her waist, and step gingerly into the blood bath. She’s submerged up to about her calves. Jax stops for a moment to watch her go. Then he holsters his knife and steps around the pit, grabbing hold of the body dangling from the ceiling and pulling it away from the center of the room. The hook above slides across the artificial sky, and once Jax gets it into the corner, he starts undoing the chains so as to lower the body to the floor.
Nádasdy rolls her head from one side of her shoulders to the other, chanting in what sounds suspiciously like French, eyes closed. The blood at her feet bubbles. I start to step forward, quietly at first. Then I see Jax turning toward me—I run, throwing off the cloak to get to my crowbar. Each step I take, my mind recalculates the best distance and angle with which to reach Nádasdy. The individual muscle strands in my arms tighten, and the crowbar extends naturally from my hands’ grip like an elongated limb. My pupils turn to pinpoints, letting me tunnel vision on Nádasdy’s shoulder blades, the broad
est and easiest target.
Jax is just watching me run, not even reaching for his gun or shouting to warn his girlfriend. Is the potion making me so fast he can’t keep up? But there’s no alarm in his eyes or even the barest beginning of a shocked expression. I can’t process why, and I’m still puzzling when I slam face-first into a magical barrier the color and thickness of bulletproof glass.
I stumble back, landing first on my ass, then flat on my back. I’m dazed for a second—then I heroically spring back up and try again, ramming my shoulder into the barrier with my corrupted magic radiating out of me full blast. I bounce back like a tennis ball, both my pride and my palms stinging as they hit the floor.
A pair of boots leisurely steps into my field of vision. I hear the muted click of a handgun’s safety being unlocked, and when I look up, I see Jax’s cold eyes from behind the barrel of his pistol.
“You should be more careful about who has access to your blood,” he tells me, in a benevolently educational way. “I’ll admit, you had a good plan. A drop of your corruption in the pool would have spoiled the whole batch, and the spell would have backfired the way it did six days ago.”
I blink at him. “Okay,” I say, “to be really honest, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. But you’re right, that would have been a great plan.”
The radio at his hip cchhhkkkkkks to life.
“We found the intruder!” someone is screaming. “She’s too fast, we need backup!”
Jax frowns. He keeps the pistol pointed as me as he unclips the radio and brings it to his mouth. “The intruder is right in front of me. Who are you seeing?”
The radio is having trouble keeping connection, either because of commotion on the other side or our underground location. “Brown-skinned woman in a white dress—long black hair—a tail—? She’s trying to get past the gates—have to cover the whole perimeter, she can climb—we’re keeping her back but we lost a man to a-a—a brick?”
Jax narrows his eyes, then looks down at me, the aim of his gun never wavering. My nose is pouring blood from smashing into the barrier, and my stomach is suddenly a whirlpool of burning acid. But I push myself up off the marble, just far enough for Jax to see the sigil glowing on my stomach, and grin so wide my cheeks hurt.
“Your girlfriend’s not the only one who deals with demons, Jacky boy,” I say. “If you don’t want my girlfriend to GPS this exact location and crash the party, you need to put that gun away.”
And I puke all over the floor.
For a second, I think he’s not going to believe me. But he moves the gun to the side, just by a few inches. The sigil stops glowing. I wipe saliva and foaming bile off my lip with the back of my hand as the radio turns on again.
“Intruder is no longer visible. Should we pursue?”
“No.” Jax says immediately. “Leave her be, go back to patrolling the perimeter. Report any further suspicious activity.”
I twist backward to look at Nádasdy through the barrier. Nádasdy has her arms raised, the blood at her feet now arcing up to the ceiling in eleven surprisingly graceful spires. I want to think of a plan, of a way to save the Arbiter, anything, but all my brain can process is the weird aesthetic elegance of the moment.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” I hear Jax say quietly behind me, holstering his gun. I squint at him, then back at her.
“I mean, she’s too insufferable for my taste, but whatever you say.”
Jax stabs me in the hand.
“SHIBALGESEKKI!” I scream. Jax is already wiping the blood off on his pants, and I holler some more and clutch my hand as he hauls me upright by the back of my collar. I don’t realize he’s checking my stomach sigil until he lets go of my shirt and claps me on the back.
“Your demon isn’t alerted unless you’re being fatally threatened. Stop being a nuisance, and I’ll grant you a quick and painless death once this is over.”
He turns his back to me with an insulting nonchalance. But my eyes detect the smallest, scabbed-over needle mark on the nape of his neck.
“Hey, Jacky boy,” I say. “You’re a real bad boyfriend, you know that?”
He doesn’t dignify that with a response, just continues walking away.
“Now that Lisa’s gone, where are you going to get the drugs to keep that terminal illness in check?”
He stops. His eyes don’t go to me, but to Nádasdy behind me. Nádasdy’s raised arms falter a little, and she starts to turn.
“Jax?” she says.
I jump onto Jax’s back and clamp my teeth onto his ear.
He curses and sinks his knife into my thigh—I scream through my teeth, and jerk my head backward. The grip of my jaws stays strong and the flesh tears surprisingly easily, like a hundred overlapped layers of wet tissue paper—and then I’m still on Jax’s back, close to falling, with the folds of a severed human ear against my lips and tongue. Jax twists to shake me off, trying to elbow me in the side; I aim my face at Nádasdy, and I spit the ear as far as it’ll go.
It lands in the bloody pit, bobs a little, and floats back up. All around it, the blood ripples, then blackens, and then the inky color spreads rapidly in a near-perfect circle.
Jax hasn’t noticed it yet. He throws himself backward into the magical barrier, trapping me between it and him, squeezing the breath from my lungs. The pain in my thigh flares up, and I drop to the floor in a heap of limbs. A hand grabs me by the back of the neck—and slams my face into the barrier. And does it again. And again. Vaguely, I realize I must look like a pigeon flying into a window—but through the blood running into my vision and my swelling eyelids, I see the blackening corruption reach one of the eleven spires. As the corruption creeps up the spire, it falters, then rains down in a gloopy shower that splashes all of Nádasdy’s left side.
Nádasdy screams. The same happens to another spire. “NO!” she screeches. “NO! NO NO NO!” She turns, stumbling with her feet still in the blood—it’s not just blood anymore, it’s thicker and stickier, clinging to her legs and trying to drag her back in—and her eyes are so wide her waterlines are showing.
“Katlin!” Jax bellows, running for her—and crushing my hand beneath his boot along the way, ow.
“Jax!” Nádasdy screams in turn, reaching for him, just as the skin of her face splits from forehead to cheek and and pours out a waterfall of blood.
The oily black surges up to meet the torrent, like it’s hungry for it, desperate for it—the spell needs eleven people’s worth of pure blood and it now has absolutely none—and Nádasdy’s face splits again, across the nose, lips and chin, through one eye—the rest of her body is criss-crossing with cuts too, and she’s so covered in red that I can’t see the pale of her skin.
“KATLIN!” Jax’s voice breaks, his hands closing around her shoulders, trying to haul her out of the tub and staunch the wounds at the same time. “KAT—”
Nádasdy slashes her talon-like nails across his throat.
He’s still gurgling as she desperately claws at him, her nails catching on the fabric of his shirt as she opens gash after bloody gash in his chest. The spell slices through her hands—two of her fingertips fall off and disappear into the pool. She stops clawing, just sinks what remains of her fingers into the wounds she’s opened in Jax’s flesh, groaning in a hoarse, scratching, gurgling voice distorted by blood and torn vocal cords.
“Take him, not me… take him, not me… take him… take… him…”
She drags Jax’s body down with her as she slumps into the pit, and the living oil wells up to swallow both of them. Some of it splashes out of the pool in long, ropy clumps, like appendages foraging for more food. One of them crawls in my direction, flailing back and forth, like it’s sniffing out my body heat—I skid in a half-circle, plant both feet on the invisible barrier, and shove myself away. The black tentacle shrinks back, flopping feebly back into the pool with an air of disappointment.
The corrupted blood starts to simmer down, revealing scraps of clothing; the knotted hem of
Nádasdy’s dress, the drenched sleeve of Jax’s shirt. I turn away before more is uncovered. I don’t know what’s going to be left of Jax and Nádasdy, and frankly, I don’t need to find out. There’s just no point in having certain images in your mind.
I push myself up into a sitting position, and it takes so many more steps than usual. I have to untangle my legs, one of which, oh, look, still has a knife stuck in it. And then I have to anchor myself with the hand that also got grievously stabbed. But I can’t call the Council just yet—I have to find them first. The sacrifices. I need to look each of them in the face, in the eye, until I see the three I’m looking for—Aden. David. Joy.
I spy my crowbar on the floor a good three feet away. I make it my new project, inchworming over on one leg and one hand and getting a good grip on it. That energizes me, the familiarity of the object—and the discovery of a distinct, trapdoor-shaped outline built into the floor.
I try to stick my crowbar into the crack, but the crevice isn’t deep or wide enough. I try to chip at it, but the crowbar just CLANG CLANG CLANGs against the marble. I almost scream in frustration before I notice a triangular sigil right under my nose at the center of the hatch, identical to the one that opened up the entrance to this murder cave.
As soon as I press my hand into the sigil, the outline of the door glows orange, and the whole square slides to one side. One of my arms falls in and I almost tumble the rest of the way into the hole, but I catch myself on the lip.
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