Fire Kin

by M. J. Scott

  “Did you catch the Beasts?”

  I nodded. “Caught three, killed one. The Templars will be questioning them soon, I’d imagine.” And I was going to be there when they did. Which meant I had something more to do after all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  BRYONY

  At first the summons to the Brother House was a welcome distraction. Until I realized what the likely reason for them wanting me at this hour of night was. We’d already dealt with the minor wounds resulting from the explosion at the gate earlier. I’d been filling in time, walking the floors of the hospital, making sure that all was in order and my charges were safe while I worried about Guy and his Templars and . . . Ash. Mostly Ash, if I was honest.

  I didn’t want to be honest.

  Didn’t want to admit that perhaps letting him into my bed wasn’t the simple proposition that I’d convinced myself it could be. Because with his touch came the connection we’d once had. As though his skin against mine sent fine invisible hooks sinking through my flesh to catch in my heart.

  Every time I passed a window, I looked out at the darkness, turned toward the borders, and worried whether he was coming back.

  Whether all of them—including Lily—who Simon had informed me with worry to equal mine clear in his eyes—had gone scouting for Guy that night.

  She, at least, was safe in the darkness.

  No one could reach her in the shadow. No one could slash her with claws or rend her flesh with teeth or break her bones by knocking her down.

  Still, Simon worried about the woman he loved and I worried about the man I—no. Not loved. That wasn’t the word.

  Not one that I was going to think about, anyway.

  But now it seemed they had returned and they had brought someone or several someones back with them.

  And they wanted me to help question them.

  I didn’t like doing such things. I was meant to heal, not harm. I tried to tell myself that really it was preventing harm. If I didn’t use my powers to make the captives speak, then the Templars would be forced to use other methods of persuasion that would be far less considerate.

  I hurried through the fading darkness, hearing the earliest sounds of the City waking around me as I kept pace with Liam, sent to fetch me.

  He looked strained as he always did these days when the Templars saw action. The frustration of being kept out of it scented the air around him, and I wished, for the thousandth time, that there had been something more I could have done for his arm.

  We reached the Brother House just as the sun started to peek over the horizon, which made the feeling of descending into the depths to the cells belowground feel even more unpleasant.

  A small circle of Templars waited for us outside the cells. Father Cho. Guy. Patrick and Brother Bartholomew, one of the other patrol leaders. And Ash. I almost went to him but managed to stop myself, studying him covertly to see if he was injured.

  Half-dried blood stained his leather vest, and a matching splotch of dull red brown smeared across one cheek, but he stood straight and easy and showed no signs of pain, so I had to assume the blood belonged to someone else. One of the prisoners perhaps.

  Fen stood with the group of soldiers, his face remote and set the way it got when he wished he was elsewhere.

  It seemed I wasn’t the only one with no stomach for coercion.

  But it had to be done. One of us had to find out what had been the purpose behind tonight’s attack so that we could try to figure out what was coming next.

  We were all alone now, no Fae queen to come to our rescue, so if we were to survive, we had to be more ruthless. Try to think like Ignatius.

  Which was a particularly unpleasant thought.

  “How many?” I asked as Father Cho greeted me.

  “Three,” he replied. “Beasts. Theissens and a Krueger, we think.”

  Ah. That explained some of Fen’s expression. His grandmere had been a Krueger before she was cast out from her pack for the sin of loving a human. Fen didn’t seem to like the Beasts, but he had little family and it couldn’t be easy to see someone from the pack he had ties to captured in a plot against the side he’d chosen.

  I put down the bag of supplies I’d brought with me. “Are they conscious?”

  “One is. He’s not terribly happy with things right now.”

  “Oh?” I turned toward the cell. I couldn’t hear anything from its depths.

  “I put an aural ward on the door,” Ash said. “He was making quite a racket, and the men need their sleep.”

  As if to prove the truth of his words, there was a sudden shudder in the wooden door. It was made of planks several inches thick and reinforced with metal bars and nails. There should have been an accompanying crash to go with the force necessary to make it move even slightly, but there was nothing. Ash knew what he was about, apparently.

  “Aren’t they restrained?” I asked.

  “They’re shackled. And chained to the wall. Apparently we should have used a shorter chain,” Ash said. He didn’t look particularly concerned.

  “What do you want to try first?”

  “Have you got something that will calm him down?” Guy asked.

  “If you can get him to drink it, yes.” I had sedatives and calmatives enough to drug several squads of knights. Beast Kind could be tricky to treat, given their rapid healing abilities, but I’d learned a trick or two over the years. I would be able to render the prisoners less excitable easily enough.

  “Well, let’s do that,” Guy said. “Then Fen can get close enough to try seeing what there is to see before we try anything else.”

  Fen’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t offer an objection, so I nodded.

  Ash dissolved his ward with a wave of his hand, and a sudden snarling crash echoed through the room.

  Guy walked over to the door and flipped open the little wooden shutter that covered a barred grille. “Shut up and stand back from the door.”

  “Fuck off, Templar.”

  Ash joined Guy. “We have plenty more silver bullets here,” he said, cocking his gun casually at the level of the bars. “Care to reconsider?”

  The Beast said something indecipherable. I spoke a little of their language, but I didn’t know that particular phrase. Probably just as well judging by the wince that crossed Fen’s face.

  “I’m going to give you some water,” Guy said. “You must have worked up a thirst with all that yelling.” He looked back at me. I took the cup Father Cho handed to me and then poured in a few drops of the mixture I thought would work best.

  Guy passed it through and the Beast drank noisily, then thrust it back. “More.”

  Guy obliged, this time without stopping for me to doctor the liquid.

  He looked back at me with a question clear on his face.

  “A few minutes,” I mouthed back, and we settled to wait.

  Sure enough, after a few more minutes, there was a sigh and the sound of someone sliding down the wall.

  “How much did you give him?”

  “Enough,” I replied. “Open the door and bring him out.”

  “Out?” Ash questioned.

  “You don’t want the other two to wake up and join in, do you?”

  “I can put a binding on them.”

  “Let’s not do that unless we have to.” Bindings were nasty things. Guy’s frown of distaste showed he agreed with me. Well, he would. He’d been on the receiving end of one once and also had had to deal with Holly being placed under a geas.

  Two of the knights brought out the Beast, who was now limp and smiling drunkenly. He had dark hair and olive skin, like Fen’s. And, like Fen’s, his eyes flashed green under the lamps as he gazed around at us. The Krueger, then. They chained him to a chair, anchored the chains to bolts set deep in the stone floor, and stepped to stand behind him. I moved closer, studying him, trying to judge how deeply the drug had affected him.

  He seemed quiet enough. And young. Too young to be here in what was really a du
ngeon, about to argue for his life.

  Too young to be setting explosions in the night and working for a Blood lord. Though in some ways that was how it was in the Night World, the Beasts doing the Bloods’ dirty work, so maybe for him it was all completely normal.

  I moved closer and, when he didn’t react, pressed fingers to his neck. His pulse was a little faster than I liked but within the range of what he could tolerate. The tincture I’d used did that sometimes.

  I stepped back and nodded to Guy. “Ask away.”

  It wasn’t Guy who spoke, though; it was Father Cho. “Son, we want you to tell us who sent you tonight.” His voice wasn’t loud, but it held a crack of command despite the pleasant phrasing of his request.

  The Beast smiled and for a moment I thought everything was going well as he opened his mouth to answer, but then he threw back his head and howled and launched himself forward. The chains anchored to the floor held him in place and he jerked to a stop with a snap that made me fear he’d broken something.

  Father Cho still had good reflexes, it seemed, and he’d moved smoothly out of the way, having not been too close to start with.

  I took a deep breath, trying to get my heart back out of my throat.

  “He doesn’t seem that calm,” Ash said dryly.

  I shot him a look. “Beasts are tricky. Hold him down,” I ordered the knights, and they obliged, even though the Beast struggled.

  I walked closer again. The Beast snarled but I ignored him, relying on the Templars to do their job and keep me safe.

  The man’s pupils were wide and dark. My stomach twisted. Damn. I knew what the problem was now. We weren’t going to be doing this the easy way. And I didn’t like the hard way one little bit.

  “Lune de sang,” I said. The Beast jerked and snarled and I smelled the strange peppery green scent on his breath that confirmed my suspicions. “He’s taken moon’s blood.”

  “What’s that?” Ash asked as the Templars muttered.

  “It’s a drug. I don’t know what it’s made of—the Beasts guard that information very closely. It’s used for some of their religious ceremonies.”

  “It makes them feel invincible,” Fen said. He came closer, one hand rubbing his right wrist, and peered at the Beast. “Makes them feel like they can’t be hurt.” He looked at me. “Like that stuff you gave me once times about twenty if what I’ve heard is true.”

  The potion I’d given Fen to combat the pain of his iron-induced headaches during a trip to a Blood warren had enough kick to fell Guy’s horse. And several others. “It also makes them resistant to other drugs,” I said. “It’s one of the few things that take a long time to leave their systems. I’d imagine the other two will have been dosed as well.”

  “What does that mean?” Guy asked.

  “It means that nothing I can give him is going to make him talk if he doesn’t want to. The only thing that’s going to get through to him is pain.”

  Guy’s mouth went flat. “That can be arranged.”

  I held up a hand, knowing what I had to do. The thought made me want to retch—being against everything I was trained to do—but I could do it without the Beast actually being physically harmed, unlike the Templars. “No,” I said, with another deep breath. “I’ll do it.”

  The men all stared at me.

  “You can’t beat up a Beast,” Fen said.

  “I don’t need to. I can make him hurt without touching him. Or without hitting him, at least.” I needed contact with his skin just as I would to work a healing.

  “Bryony,” Ash objected. “That will hurt you too.”

  I shrugged. “Not much.” No more than I could bear at least.

  “Let me do it,” he said.

  “No.” I wagged my fingers at him. “You don’t have a delicate enough touch. You proved that yesterday. You could damage him.”

  “I—”

  “I could ask Simon,” Guy said at the same time.

  I held up a hand. “No. I’ll do it. I’m not going to shatter into a thousand pieces from a bit of dirty work.” I shook my head at them. “Don’t forget who I am.”

  I had no doubt Simon would do it if Guy asked. He was almost as skilled a fighter as his brother and could be deadly when he was roused to anger, but he had fought hard to conquer his darker side and valued his healing powers deeply. I didn’t want to make him do something that would sully that for him. He was one of the humans I was closest to in the City, almost like a younger brother. And, like any big sister, I would protect him if I could. I would protect all of them, these men who fought so hard, but forgot sometimes that I was older and more powerful than any of them besides Ash.

  “You can use that binding now,” I said to Ash. I didn’t like bindings, which were one step away from the truly revolting magic of a geas, but they did sometimes have their use in medicine to restrain a patient. Or for times like these. I didn’t want to split my attention to hold a binding and do what I had to do. One tiny spill of power in the wrong direction and I would do more than hurt the Beast.

  Ash nodded and held out a hand toward the Beast. “Step back,” he ordered the knights. They did so with speed.

  Ash said several quick phrases in Fae, the words familiar to me, and the Beast froze in place, only his chest still rising and falling and his gaze darting around the room, sudden panic darkening his eyes further.

  “Stop,” he snarled.

  I looked at Ash.

  He shrugged regretfully. “I can’t take his voice if we need him to talk.”

  I’d forgotten that part for a moment. A bead of sweat rolled down my back as distaste for what I was about to do made my stomach turn uneasily.

  But I wasn’t going to let them see how much this disturbed me. Because then they really would try to stop me, and that would be bad for the Beast before me and the other two in the cells. I couldn’t save them from pain perhaps, but I could shield them from damage and that was what I, as a healer, would do.

  One last breath and I moved back to the Beast. He stared up at me and howled defiance again. But I merely reached out and pressed my hand to his forehead.

  “Tell us who sent you to set the explosion tonight,” I commanded, hoping that he might see reason. Hoping that there was some small part of him not drugged to the gills on lune de sang that might be able to decide that self-preservation was the sensible path to take.

  No such luck, though. He just snarled up at me, sending hot acrid breath into my face.

  “Have it your way,” I sighed. Then I set his nerves on fire.

  Just for twenty seconds to start with.

  When his scream died down. I asked him again. And again he refused to answer.

  I set my teeth and sent the power down into him again, sending the message to all those delicate pathways that something was wrong. That they hurt. That they burned. Burns hurt more than most injuries, so the sensation of them was most useful in this situation. I hadn’t done this before except once, when they’d shown us how to do it as part of our studies. That time, I’d thrown up afterward. I hoped to every inch of grace that any gods might wish to show me that I wouldn’t do it again now. The Beast’s screams rang in my ears and the echoes of his pain surged through me. Sweat slicked my back and I fought to remember to breathe as I counted down the seconds, letting him burn for longer this time.

  When I took my hand away and the Beast stopped screaming as though someone had thrown a switch, I wasn’t sure whether it was him or if Ash had added something to his binding to stop the noise. I twisted back toward the men behind me. Ash shook his head at me, his face set and grim. The others wore expressions that ranged from stoic to horrified to vaguely impressed. Fen’s face was grimly blank, his arms crossed in front of him. His eyes had gone flat and dark. I wondered what he could see around us at this moment. What effect were my actions here having on our possible futures?

  I turned back to the Beast. “Who sent you? I promise you, I can keep this up a very long time. And once the
moon’s blood wears off, it will hurt even more.”

  I saw him swallow, saw fear and struggle swim up through his wide green eyes. I waited. One heartbeat. Two. Three.

  Nothing.

  I reached my hand toward his head and saw in his eyes how much his body was screaming at him to flinch away. But he was held there, chained by Ash’s magic and being tortured—I had no illusions about what I was doing—by mine. “Who sent you?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice strong, not pleading.

  He blinked up at me. “No one, Fae bitch.”

  I heard Ash mutter behind me, echoed by a deep rumble from Guy. “That was stupid,” I said. I didn’t care what he called me. In his position, I’d call me a bitch too. But he was just delaying the inevitable and making the men behind me angry. I put my hand back down and started the process over.

  He talked after two more bursts. It was impressive really, how much he could bear, but I would’ve preferred that he had given in much sooner. Then I might not have felt so near to fainting by the time I finished.

  I stayed upright through force of will as the man first named Pierre Rousselline as the alpha giving orders, then said he’d been sent to bring down the gate and didn’t know more than that.

  It was a name at least. But it wasn’t enough. It might be all they knew, of course, but we had to be sure. I knew it as Guy moved to my side and stared down at me for a moment, as if trying to decide what to say.

  I held up a hand, forestalling anything he wanted to bring up.

  “I know,” I said. “Bring out the next one.”

  The second Beast knew no more than the first. Pierre Rousselline had sent them. They were to bring down the gate and then return. But the third, who was the oldest of the three, was a more fruitful source. Maybe the lune de sang had had time to work its way out of his system a little or maybe the sounds of the screams of his companions had been enough to scare some sense into him, but he came out of the cell without resisting and let the Templars bind him into the chair.