“Ah, SC, my deepest apologies,” Blake said, gesturing to the full spots. “I had one for you, but it must have been taken! You know how these things go, and I wouldn’t want to kick anyone else out.”
“That’s fine,” I said, and rested both my hands on the back of Francesca’s chair. My skin pricked as I saw the others at the table, a mix of soft-faced men I assumed were there for business, and hard faced men for more physical means. And I realized the game had changed—at this point, all Blake had to do was make Francesca lose favor with me, after which he could have security escort me from the building, putting her right in his pocket. “I’m perfectly comfortable standing.”
Chapter 49
“This one time, SC saved me from not two, but three alligators in the Nile,” Francesca declared, one-upping Blake as he just finished a story about how he had just returned from business ventures in Egypt. Behind her, I shifted as Blake raised an eyebrow, the other faces of the table turning to face me. This was the third story Francesca had brought up from Lucio’s memories, and each were growing more and more outlandish. And since I had the memories, I cringed as she started each, knowing how they would end.
“Did he now?” asked Blake, tapping his cheek with a diamond finger, one I noticed he left on, and sharp, so it rang against a hard section of his cheek with a clink.
“Somewhat outlandish, but how remarkable,” added Renalt, wiping the condensation from his glass away with a white cloth napkin. “A true gem you have. A diamond in the rough, I would say from my mining days, but how often when you are digging, they are difficult to discern from coal.”
“Oh, that isn’t the half of it,” said Francesca, leaning forwards now that she had their attention. She reached back to hold my hand, turning to show me a quick proud smile, one that I matched with my best possible mirror. Perhaps this would be one of those situations that a scowl would be better suited as she continued barging into territory that I’d rather leave untouched. “Afterwards, he dove down into the riverbed to pull out enough pearls to make me a necklace.”
“From the Nile?” asked Renalt, narrowing his eyes. “How interesting, Miss Francesca. What I see here is young love, which can be wonderfully blind. I remember my own—it was magical, almost mythical, you could say. One might even say too good to be true.”
“Tell me, Francesca,” pressed Blake as Renalt watched us. “When did you find time for all of this? Every time I check your schedule, you seem so busy with your work and tours. You must never sleep!”
Francesca started to speak, but then she flushed, her eyebrows moving together as she worked to produce the memory. Then she threw her chin out in defiance, speaking with confidence.
“I’ve always had time. I’m not some servant to the industry. Are you saying I shouldn’t enjoy it?”
“Not at all! Of course you should,” said Blake, his eyes flicking up towards me, the corner of his mouth starting to lift “But tell me, whatever happened to those pearls? They’re such a treasure that you should wear them. Did you leave them at home?”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re in my jewelry box somewhere,” she said with a wave of her hand. But I could see she was flustered, and I took her hand.
“Want to get a drink?” I asked as she nodded. “It’s starting to get warm and I could use some fresh air.”
“Please!” said Renalt, motioning her to stay seated. “We’ll have a waiter right around, and a Cooler to stand nearby as well. We have them, of course, to keep the ice sculptures from melting, but I daresay Francesca is more important than any likeness they bear. Now, how long have you two been together? I read about your last relationship in the papers, Francesca, truly a disappointment that it did not work out. But taking that into consideration, couldn’t be more than, what, two months?”
“Oh, just for the season,” Francesca said, batting her eyelashes. “It’s still exciting.”
“Really?” asked Blake, and his finger clinked again. “Such a busy, bustling summer. Especially if he’s on assignment here and had his own classes. He must be such a romantic, then, to set aside all those plans for you! On one hand, we have one of the busiest actresses in Italy. On the other, in a mere ninety days, you’ve been saved from gators, spent three weeks lost in the Alps, and described a story that sounds incredibly similar to the plot of the Swiss Family Robinson condensed into two weeks. Years’ worth of tales, all in three months. You two hadn’t met prior to this, had you, Francesca?”
I cursed Lucio inwardly. It had been The Swiss Family Robinson; he’d been watching it right before we’d departed, when he and Slugger started arguing who could build the better tree house with a team of five Worldwalkers. It’d nearly ended in a fistfight.
“Well, no, we did just meet,” she answered, Blake’s point not yet hitting home.
“And he paid for all this? Or you did?” Blake asked. “Personally, I’d love to see if I could afford some of your vacations if you still had a receipt.”
“That’s quite rude, Blake,” she stated, her tone flat.
“I’m sure as the gentleman we see him to be, that he put forth the check,” said Renalt. “Unless you paid for it, Francesca, with your own earnings?”
“I don’t see why it matters,” she retorted, and Renalt shared a look with Blake before leaning across the table, his tone accusatory as the physical men on either side of him bristled.
“Because you are being taken advantage of, Miss Francesca,” Renalt hissed, his voice low enough that only the table could hear him. “Yet you are too blind to see it.”
Francesca’s mouth fell open in shock, and I took her by the arm, pulling her to leave.
“It’s time for us to leave,” I announced. “If they won’t respect us here, then we have no reason to stay.”
But Francesca hesitated, doubt trickling into her expression. Throughout the night, our relationship already had started withering away, and her glances at Blake may have had more truth in them than to simply make me feel jealous. Of course, having mild attraction to Blake would be normal, and our relationship should be able to weather that. But the introduction that our relationship might be a total fabrication would bring it crashing down.
Which, of course, it was.
“Relax, SC, we’re just joking,” said Blake. “I’m sure you are the perfect gentleman, and Francesca the perfect lady. If I may suggest it, perhaps we should take a picture of you two together along the skyline—the view here is incredible, and the background of the city along with Renalt and me would make a wonderful photo for the papers. It’s right upstairs to roof access.”
He inclined his head towards the elevator behind us, where, if a fight broke out, anything could happen. Using my orbs in there would be dangerous—I could cut the cables, and send us rocketing back to the ground floor, or accidentally clip Francesca. But the muscular men had already stood, and their sheer size confirmed they were in fact guards. After training with Cane at the academy, I had learned there was a certain way that those who knew how to fight stood, a balance that indicated they were ready to take a solid hit and come back swinging. Something that they possessed.
I braced myself, looking for other exit points across the room, but with us already outnumbered and me having to drag Francesca, we would quickly be outpaced. Rather, if they forced the matter, I’d have to fight them, hoping that Ennia and the others could arrive in time before any true damage happened.
But Francesca’s face had already lit up at the mention of a photo, eager to escape the conversation.
“That might be even better than the last one we took, SC,” she said. “Remember, when the coliseum filled up with snow and we had a snowball fight, just the two of us?”
The CEO’s face darkened as he looked towards me, then flushed with sympathy as he turned to Francesca.
“Miss Francesca,” he said, solemn yet triumphant. “The last time it snowed in Rome was over five years ago.”
Chapter 50
“I’m afraid that this l
eaves us with only two possibilities, Francesca,” said Renalt as his guards cracked their knuckles, and I tensed while they started to slowly spread out to either side to cut me off. “One, is that you’re simply trying to impress us here at this table. The other, of course, is that you’ve been tricked. And should this be the case, which I find highly likely, someone quite devious is trying to either steal your fortune or your hand. Neither of which I stand by in good conscience.”
He rose, Blake standing with him, diamond rippling across his entire skin. Francesca half turned, her mouth dropping open again, her eyes widening as realization flashed over her face. I cursed Lucio again in my mind —why couldn’t he have just made me bland? This entire plan, fragile as it had been from the start, now shattered.
Around the room, I felt more eyes on us as Blake advanced. Thirty feet away, two waiters paused, frozen and staring at me with serving forks in their hands, the sharp points glinting as lights from the dance floor passed over them. The sound booth manager had turned, the shadows hiding him, pausing from his activity of fiddling with volume and effect knobs. At the door, the coats boy peered out from within his closet, ignoring an annoyed customer trying to hand him a ticket.
Each of them would be high powered in combat abilities. Blake had known I was coming and would be prepared, but at the chance to find out more information about what they wanted from Francesca, we’d decided to take the risk. But that was also why I had not come alone either.
Ennia froze from where she was still taking pictures with Ann and Marshall, casually abandoned by Blake in the first few minutes of our discussion. And two dark shapes shifted outside the window in the courtyard, ones that would be impossible to notice unless you looked directly at them in the darkness.
“I thought you wanted a fair fight,” I said, my voice low, stepping away from Francesca for enough room to move. “Did you really need this many people to take me down?”
Blake simply laughed, spreading his arms. And I heard that same shrillness enter his laugh as in the Amazon, an unsteadiness he’d held masked under his current guise. “You knew what you were walking into. But when I see a roach, I don’t care which foot squashes it, so long as it does not escape.”
“I’ve overcome better odds before,” I answered. “You’ll still be hard pressed.”
“One against four?” he asked, gesturing to the table. “And a room full of bystanders who will side with us? I like those odds. Maybe I’ll just sit back and watch.”
Four? I wondered, He must think I haven’t noticed the others.
“Or maybe not.”
He darted forwards, but a voice cut into the air, one powerful enough to make him freeze. “Stop!” commanded Francesca, power imbued in the word. For a moment, that voice washed over the entire table, a pacifying wave that fizzled out the pent-up energy. We faltered, our abilities still ready, but no one having the activation energy to act. But Francesca simply did not possess the same level of power as Siri—our emotions were merely dulled, not eradicated. Our decisions slowed, not eliminated.
And for someone like Blake, whose mind had already been so far mangled by Siri, her Silver Tongue effect dissipated in an instant, his voice rising to a yell as he slashed forwards again in the first move. He brought his forearm down in a motion like a karate chop, the edge along his radius and ulna razor sharpened in a blade resembling a sword. I leapt sideways as it crashed through the chair behind me, cleaving the wood easily in two, leaving it split down the middle. My thoughts shocked, because Blake’s power was now different, evolved.
Where I had injured him last time, taking a chunk out of his hand, diamond now replaced the disfigurement, filling in the gap of muscle and bone I had cut away. In the past, his outer layer of skin had been the limitation of his diamond, but now it appeared to grow slightly outwards from him, augmenting the shape of his body. Extending outwards to form sharper edges, widening the blade of his forearm by at least an inch. Forming hooks at the end of his fingers like bestial claws, and short spikes that cut directly through his shoes. I cursed, wondering if I had been the one to show him how to do that, when he realized he could heal over his missing flesh with diamond.
Francesca screamed as I danced away again, and I ripped out the two dark orbs from above my wrists. To my side, I sensed one of the guards shifting, gathering power in his stance as he released a concussive wave that blasted outwards like a thunderclap. It clipped my shoulder, sending me spinning back and away, numbing my entire right arm. Had it caught me square in the chest, I doubted my heart would still be beating, stopping it like a reverse version of CPR as it shattered my ribcage.
As I recovered, the second guard gathered up the plates from the table in his hands, the disks growing red hot until they started to melt, the magma running down past his fingers into cords he grasped in each hand. He lashed out with them, the ropes crashing down to thud onto the carpet, spraying up flecks of molten ceramic that sizzled into my left arm. Enough for pain, but not enough for severe damage as I avoided the blow with a roll, bringing up my dark orb to sever the rope at their connection point. He howled as the darkness consumed the fingers of his right hand, blood sizzling into the magma to immediately evaporate in an iron-smelling mist.
To my left, I saw Renalt pulling Francesca away as she struggled. She bit his hand as he tried to lift her, and his howls mixed with the guard's as he dropped her but still tried to corral her away. Given time, he would be successful, and I knew I had to end the fight fast.
The ceramic from the plates had enlarged my orbs, and a quick crash course across the floor made them swell even larger, so big I worried that they would escape my control. But from my encounter on the streets of Rome, I had an idea—one I wasn’t sure if it would work, but would cause enough mayhem even if it failed. The guard with the concussive blasts was preparing another attack, his feet starting to pull apart in a bracing stance as Blake held back to wait for me to try to defend myself and leave an opening. Near Blake, I ripped down gravity then released it in a trampoline effect, bouncing him down then upwards in space, rage ripping across his face as he rose up towards the ceiling. My aim was slightly off, and he flew over me, swiping downwards with the tip of his fingers that caught the edge of my arm, immediately ripping through the sleeve at the bicep and leaving four red lines across my skin. Deep, but not so deep that I couldn’t move it.
And as predicted, the guard chose that moment to strike.
Just like in the streets, I slammed my two orbs together, feeling them elongate into something resembling a dark tube. There, steam had entered one side and left the other, remarkably similar in both appearance and function to a smaller version of Peregrine’s machine in the subway. And now, I angled the front of the tube directly towards the guard as he activated his power, and bent the other end to where Blake still flew in the air.
The concussive blast rushed inside, taking my entire focus to keep it from ripping the tube completely apart, the darkness swelling to nearly burst under the pressure. Then the wave exited at full force, catching Blake square in the chest in midair and launching him across the room to slam into the far wall. There was a crack as he connected, a chip of his diamond chest coming loose as he held his hand over it, tumbling down to fall to the floor. He ran his fingers over the seam, and while not fully healed, his diamond pieces fused back together to form a spiderwebbed hole as he climbed back to his feet, staggering and shaking his head.
Just then I lost control of the dark tunnel, and it exploded in a flash of light and sound.
Chapter 51
Every window in the room shattered, and those who were approaching to break up the fight were thrown backwards by the force of the explosion. Already, half the room had fled —but now, even those who advanced cast me a wary look, and those who had paused with indecision turned to the door. Two figures leapt inside from the broken window, Lucio and Slugger dressed in all black, sprinting across the floor towards me.
“We didn’t expect it to be
bulletproof!” huffed Lucio, brushing off glass dust from his shirt. “Slugger couldn’t bash it in, not even with a car!”
“I told you,” said Slugger. “If I can lift it, no matter how heavy it is, it loses weight. That car weighed as much as you did when I was holding it, and not much more when it smacked glass.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re here now,” I said, then pointed at Francesca. “At this point, we stall until the police arrive. We can’t let her get away.”
I stole a glance at Blake, where he had just started moving again, his balance recovered and his fury burning hot. But as he stepped forwards into a run, an army of chairs turned across the ballroom, swiveling on legs that clattered like drumsticks. Bone white streaks ran with the wood grain across their backing, and red muscle fibers grew across their struts, the edges where the legs met the base now resembling kneecaps. Like something out of a horror movie, they marched forwards, swarming as a mound of insects, the wood clacking together as mandibles. The first of dozens reached striking distance to Blake, reared back on its hind legs, and leapt forwards, using them like those of a cricket.
It smashed into him with enough force to splinter, the wood fibers still held together with tendons that wrapped around his sharpened limbs. With a shriek, he started cutting them loose, the organic material no match for diamond but tough enough to provide a delay. Before he could extricate himself, the second chair leapt forwards, smashing against the remains of the first, only adding to the pile he would need to shred to break free.
Between us and Blake, and standing on a table, Ennia raised her arms upwards like a puppet master, condemning the third chair to its death. The table underneath her wobbled, scuttling along on its own supports, nearly a dozen chairs wedged in support, providing it with the appearance of a millipede. It dashed left as Blake threw the remains of a seat at her, easily avoiding the debris, and continued moving until it reached the wall. Tendons reached up from its surface as if they had been carved from the wood itself, wrapping themselves around her ankles as the table started to crawl up the wall like a spider, until she hung upside down from the roof with her hair trailing down towards the floor and safely out of Blake’s reach.
Titan Song (Star Child: Places of Power Book 3) Page 18