Light collapsed in on itself. Garret grasped the weapon again. Timon vanished. Only Artemis remained, a small, blue point of radiance nearly overwhelmed by the shadows.
He tried to push her out, but she resisted. The blue began to spread. It crept into the dark corners, invaded the crevices, exposed the monsters. And as she advanced, she absorbed the bitterness and rage and need to destroy. She took them into herself. The blue became a crystal, ever-expanding, threatening to crack with the pressure building inside it.
Too late, Garret turned against his darkness. Too late, he reached for the blue, strove to hold the pieces together.
The crystal exploded, hurling shards toward the source of pain. A roar deafened Garret, and he felt blindly for Timon. He wrapped his arms around the small body and curled himself over it.
Then the shadows were gone. He opened his eyes. Kronos lay on the ground before his throne, staring, mouth ajar. He was still breathing, but there was nothing behind his eyes. No emotion. No mind.
Artemis knelt a few feet away, rocking slowly, tremors working through her body. Garret swept Timon up and carried him to her side.
“Artemis?” he whispered.
Pericles ran into the room, panting heavily, and skidded to a stop when he saw Kronos. He leaned over his knees, catching his breath.
“I... Is he...?”
“He can’t hurt anyone else now,” Garret said, crouching beside Artemis and lifting her chin.
Pericles straightened. “I just found out...that there’s an army on the other side of the ridge.”
“An army?” Garret asked, tearing his gaze away from Artemis’s face.
“Soldiers from three Enclaves are here looking for the children,” Pericles said, “and they’ve trapped the Freebloods who’ve been escaping from the camp.”
“Human soldiers?”
“Not only humans,” Pericles said. “Some Opiri, too, from the colonies, but they’ve all come for the same thing. They blame all of us for the kidnappings.”
“You are to blame,” Garret said coldly. “How many Freebloods are trapped?”
“Hundreds. I don’t know how many are still in the camp, but the ones who escaped were trying to get out of the valley when they were surrounded. Kronos sent most of his soldiers to deal with the deserters, but the soldiers and refugees are outnumbered fifty to one.” He swallowed. “Daniel is down there, too. He’s trying to keep the humans from attacking, but it’s only working because some of the humans and Opiri don’t want to cooperate with each other.”
Daniel, Garret thought. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised.
“Artemis,” Pericles said, moving toward her, “I know you came here to get Timon and free the children. But you care about our people, too. You know they’re not all bad. You believed in me. A lot of them were misled as I was. You were, too. You can help us.”
Artemis didn’t answer. Garret cradled her face in his hands.
“What’s wrong with her?” Pericles asked.
“I don’t know,” Garret said, stroking Artemis’s temples with his thumbs. “She doesn’t seem to hear us.” He stared at Pericles. “She can’t help you now.”
Pericles backed toward the tunnel. With a low moan, Artemis stirred. Garret’s attention snapped back to her, and he tried to feel her mind.
It was as if they’d never had any empathic bond at all. He remembered how she had tried to absorb his fury and hatred. He remembered a blue crystal of pure emotion, remembered trying to hold it together as Artemis struggled to control the forces he had unleashed within himself.
He had not defeated Kronos. She had. And she had paid a terrible price for her victory.
He glanced at Timon, whose eyes were shining with tears. “She’s very far away,” Garret said. “We have to help her until she can find her way back.”
Timon nodded, biting his lip. “What should we do?” he asked.
“I want you to stay with Artemis. Take care of her.” He kissed Timon’s forehead. “You were very brave. Now be brave for her.”
He left his son with the woman his rage had nearly destroyed and went in search of the children. Around the corner he found a long corridor punctuated by cell doors that seemed to stretch far into the distance. All the soldiers were unconscious, sprawled across the floor like puppets with cut strings.
The doors were unlocked. One by one he opened them and released the children inside. Nearly a hundred half-bloods of all shapes and sizes emerged, most under ten years old, frightened and hungry and bewildered.
With a few words of comfort and a promise that no one would hurt them again, he ushered them to the main room. They hesitated when they saw Kronos, but Garret showed them that the Master was unable to move or speak, and they scurried past him. With all the natural resiliency of children they began to talk in low tones, staring around the room as if to confirm the bewildering fact that they were free.
Artemis was on her knees, Timon pressed close to her. They both looked up at Garret as he went to them.
“Artemis,” Garret said, dropping beside her. “Are you all right?”
“The children...are well?” she asked, ignoring his question.
She can’t feel them, Garret thought. He suppressed his despair and smiled.
“They will be,” he said. “Like you.”
Her smile was a mask over a hollow space. “The empathy...it’s gone,” she said. “For so long I lived without it. I pushed it away. But now that I don’t have it...”
“You’ll get it back,” Garret said, holding her gently by the shoulders.
“I don’t know what you’re feeling,” she said.
“Don’t you?” He pulled her close to his chest with one arm and hugged Timon with the other. “You don’t need to see into my thoughts, Artemis. You saved me and defeated Kronos. You need time to heal.”
“Can you feel me?” she asked.
He realized that he still registered some of her emotions: anguish and fear and a tiny mote of hope buried deep underneath.
“I know you’re hurting,” he said, “and that I’m to blame. But you will heal. I promise.”
She touched his face. “I heard Pericles,” she said. “About the army. He wanted me to help.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“But they are my people, whatever they have done,” Artemis said. “Kronos would have given them an evil purpose. They must find a better one.”
“But it’s not your responsibility to find it for them,” Garret said, mastering his anger.
“A war is about to begin,” she said. “The war we never wanted to see happen again. If it starts here with slaughter, it will not end here.”
“But I know what Pericles would have asked you to do...use your empathy to influence the soldiers threatening the Freebloods. It would have been wrong then, and it’s impossible now.” He lowered his voice. “We’re taking the children someplace safe until their people can reach them. That’s all that matters.”
Supporting her weight against his body, Garret helped her to her feet. Timon huddled close, shyly reaching for Artemis’s hand.
She half turned to stare at Kronos. “We can’t leave him here,” she said. “What if he wakes?”
“He won’t,” Garret said. “Your empathy was damaged because of my emotions, but what he suffered went far beyond that. If he recovers at all—”
He stopped, thinking about the children. They’d suffered enough horror without knowing that a powerful man’s mind could be broken beyond repair.
“The children,” Artemis murmured. “You’re right. We must get them away.”
Together, they gathered up the children again and moved among them, speaking personally to as many as possible. Artemis was as easy with them as she had been with Timon, but Garret knew she was rely
ing on her own natural goodness and not on what their feelings told her.
They were discussing what to do with the children when Pericles returned.
Artemis went to him at once. “Has the war begun?” she asked.
“Artemis!” Pericles said, flashing a grin. “You’re all right!”
“Has anyone been hurt?”
Pericles’s smile faded. “No, but—”
“Find Daniel,” Garret said, sensing Artemis’s plan. “Tell him to keep talking to the humans and Opir who have come for the children. Tell them that we’ll bring the children to them by sunset, but that they must not attack.”
“You don’t understand,” Pericles said, panic rising in his voice. “They’re already coming. They’re outside the castle now!”
Chapter 26
Garret listened. He’d become something more than human, and now he could hear what he’d been too preoccupied to notice earlier: many voices and hundreds of marching feet. He smelled the dust kicked up by their boots, their perspiration, their fear.
It wasn’t only the invading army approaching the castle. The Freeblood deserters were with them.
“They have prisoners,” Garret said to Artemis. “If you want to save the Freebloods, we have to show the humans and Opiri that the children are all right.”
“Can we go?” a dhampir girl asked from among the crowd of half-blood children. “Is it safe?”
Safe, Garret thought. Anything might happen with passions burning hot and humans afraid for the abducted half-bloods.
“I still look pretty human,” Garret said. “I’ll go ahead and find Daniel.” He touched Artemis’s cheek. “I need you and Pericles to stay and take care of the kids until I give the signal.”
“Garret—”
“If the humans see you, they may act before they think. You must stay here, Artemis.”
She met his gaze. “You cannot protect me from everything.”
“No,” he said bitterly. “Not even from myself.” He dropped his hand. “Please look after Timon. I promise I’ll return as soon as I can.”
He turned to go.
Artemis called after him. “I am sorry about your wife,” she said. “So very sorry.”
Unable to find his voice, Garret entered the tunnel and retraced the route back to the bailey. The covered courtyard was deserted, as were the battlements. He paused to listen to the increasingly agitated voices outside the high gates. Someone was demanding that the hostages be punished if the Master did not appear. Others were debating an assault on the gate or suggesting scaling the walls.
Garret found several daycoats hanging along the wall inside the gate, thought about the sunlight and what it might do to him, and decided to risk exposure. The less he looked like a Nightsider, the better.
He took a deep breath, thought of Artemis and the children, and threw all his strength into opening the castle gates. He stepped out into the sunlight, wincing at the sudden discomfort.
“Daniel!” he shouted.
The human soldiers surged forward, weapons bristling, threatening to trample Garret beneath their booted feet. The Freeblood prisoners, many of them trapped among the forward troops, faced the same danger.
“Stop!” someone shouted. Daniel emerged from the packed line of men and women, and stood between them and Garret, a lone figure holding the wolves at bay.
“Garret,” he said, gripping Garret’s forearms and staring into his changing eyes. “Pericles told me what she’d done to you.”
“Artemis did nothing but help me,” Garret said. “We have the children.”
“The Master—”
“—can’t hurt anyone now.”
“He’s dead?”
“Even if he recovers, he’ll never have the full use of his mind. Artemis made sure of that.”
Daniel didn’t ask any awkward questions. “Is Timon all right?”
“He’s inside with Artemis and the other children.” Garret peered over Daniel’s head. “Get them to back off. I won’t bring the kids out if there’s any threat to them or Artemis.” He met his old friend’s gaze again. “Do you understand, Daniel? Whatever you may think Artemis has done, she’s on our side. And she’s not well.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Garret closed his eyes. “She lost something,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’s permanent. But Timon and I will both be there for her.”
“She was never your wife, was she?”
“Not yet.”
Daniel nodded. “I’ll get the human troops to back off so the children can come out.”
“You’ll need to do more than that,” Garret said. “You have to persuade the armies to let the Freebloods go. They were under the influence of a Bloodlord who lied to them and backed up those lies with power you can’t begin to imagine. Killing them will be murder, and there’s still a chance they can change.”
“How?” Daniel said. “No mixed colony will take them in. They’ll go back to scavenging and raiding, as they’ve always done.”
“No,” Artemis said, coming up beside Garret. “I will see that they do not.”
Garret looked at Artemis in her heavy daycoat, knowing he’d been a fool for thinking she would stay inside just because he wanted to keep her safe.
But it was her words he found most alarming. He didn’t get the chance to ask her what she meant, because there was a great heave in the crowd on the causeway as Daniel passed on Garret’s message about the children. The human soldiers dragged the Freebloods back with them, leaving a clear space in front of the gate. A moment later the children emerged, Timon in the fore. He ran to Garret and put his arms around his waist. The other children, blinking in the sunlight, drifted out behind him.
There were cries of recognition and relief scattered among the troops, and currents of movement as parents tried to shove their way toward the gate. Running feet, happy cries, weeping. Joy.
But there was also fear. Kronos’s deserters were still trapped, and not all the anger was gone, not from the parents and kin who wanted revenge.
Revenge that would destroy everything it touched.
“Timon,” Garret said, touching his son’s soft red hair. “You were too young to remember my friend Daniel, but he came to help the children. He would very much like to talk to you about them.”
Timon subjected Daniel to a grave, assessing examination. “All right, Daddy,” he said. “Will you take care of Artemis?”
“I’m going to talk to her now.” Garret nodded to Daniel, who knelt to Timon’s level, and then left them to guide Artemis back into the bailey.
“Artemis,” he said softly, “you need to rest. You shouldn’t have—”
“I am not ill,” she said. Her eyes were focused, no longer shadowed or dazed with loss. “My mind is clearer than it has been in a very long time.”
“You’re temporarily disabled. No one expects—”
“Not disabled,” she said. “Only different. Better able to serve my purpose.”
“Your purpose is to live your life fully,” he said. “Live it with me, with Timon.”
“No. I have a duty, Garret.” She looked out the gate at a group of cowering Freebloods. Terrified and angry, remorseful and defiant, women and men. Those who had been Opiri for many decades and others who had been changed only within the past year. They were, Garret thought, no more alike than any given set of humans.
“Look at them,” Artemis said. “I searched for a way to help my people make a new life, and now that chance has been given to me. Kronos betrayed these Freebloods. They must have something to replace the false dreams he gave them. Peace is still possible, but only if they can truly learn another way. And now that I have lost my empathy, I will never be tempted to misuse it.”
Suddenly Garr
et realized that he was truly on the verge of losing her. She had suffered a severe mental trauma with Kronos’s defeat, and her convictions had been shattered by his betrayal of everything she had held dear.
If he couldn’t make her see that they belonged together...
“Artemis,” he said, “no matter how brave you are or how well you can lead, you’re only one woman. You’ve done enough.”
She met his gaze with deep sadness. “When you left your colony, did you truly believe that you would find Timon? Did you imagine that you would help free all the stolen children and destroy the Opir who caused so much suffering?”
“I didn’t do any of it alone,” he said. “You were there.”
“But you would have fought to do those things even if you had never met me,” she said. “If I let doubt stop me now, I will always know that I failed.”
“No.” He took her by the arms carefully, desperate to make her listen. “There are other ways you can make a difference. If you were to join a mixed colony, you could help Freebloods acclimate and understand how their lives will change as functional members of a peaceful society. Admittedly it would be on a smaller scale, but you would be contributing something truly valuable to our future.”
“Our future,” she said. “Kronos... I always believed that the only safe way for Opiri and humans to coexist is to live separately, apart from corrupting temptation.”
“Kronos was wrong. Living apart isn’t a lasting solution. We have to find a way to exist together, Opiri and humans. Free and equal. As you and I have been.”
He didn’t have to feel her emotions to know how much she was struggling, torn by conflicting desires. But one of those desires was to stay with him.
To love him.
“Think, Artemis,” he said. “You saw how Timon responded to you. I haven’t seen him this way since his mother died. He needs you now, as much as he needs me.”
“I want only happiness for you and Timon.”
“Then you’ll have to help us find it, Artemis.”
“I can never be what Roxana was to you.” She gazed across over the massed humans and Opiri to the mountains. Snow began to fall, settling gently on her hood. “Accept what must be, Garret. Return to your people.”
Night Quest Page 27