Ties That Bind: A Muse Urban Fantasy (The Veil Series Book 5)

by Pippa Dacosta

  “Er, guys.”

  “As a test. She survived. As a demon of her caliber should.”

  “Only because I gave her the heads up. You can’t even see past your own BS, can you? You tried to kill Muse. Multiple times.”

  “I don’t try to do anything.” Akil’s responding growl rumbled the windows. “You have no idea—Prince of Mistakes—what it means to live as I do. You are but a quarter of a century old. If you had lived as long as I have, you would know how some desires must be sacrificed so that other needs live on. Life is a balancing act. You are not qualified to judge me or my actions.”

  “I may not be, but Muse is.”

  While they quick-fired insults, I leaned forward and narrowed my eyes at the blob of white light low in the sun-blushed dawn sky ahead of us. “What’s that?”

  “Muse knows me intimately—”

  Stefan made a disgusted sound at the back of his throat. “Only because she had no choice. She would never have agreed to an infusion with you. You had to coerce her into it.”

  The orb of light bobbed and then plummeted between the trees lining the roadside. When the beam reared up ahead of us, I caught the outline of a chopper before the wash of light flooded the car. I slammed my foot on the brake. The car hooked, slid to a sideways halt, and stalled just as the chopper swooped in low and fast, buzzing over the roof.

  “Drive!” Stefan barked.

  I started the engine and fished around for a gear. A pair of car headlights bore down on us from ahead. A glance out of Stefan’s window revealed the same coming in hot from behind.

  “Institute,” Stefan snarled, echoing my thoughts.

  Adam was still out cold, slumped at an awkward angle against the door. “Dammit,” I snarled, “how could he have told them?”

  “He couldn’t have,” Akil confirmed calmly.

  “Then how do they know?”

  “A tracker on the car? Doesn’t matter,” Stefan said. “We’re screwed unless Adam wakes up and tells them to stand down.”

  Akil clutched Adam by the shirt and backhanded him with enough force to make both Stefan and me flinch.

  “Damnit, Akil,” I said. “The idea is to wake him up, not make sure he never does.” A wretched little groan peeled from Adam’s lips. His eyes moved behind closed lids, but he didn’t wake.

  The metallic chink-chink of a Desert Eagle’s slide being cranked back drew my eye to Stefan. “We’re sitting ducks.” He peered through the window as the cars fanned out and blocked the road.

  “We can’t fight them.” I checked my own two incoming cars. They pulled to a stop a few yards away. The helicopter beat the air.

  “No?” Stefan asked. “Then how do you think we’re getting out of this? Last time I checked, I was at the top of their hit list.”

  “Muse is right.” Akil leaned forward behind me and braced a hand on the seat. “We’ll only appear more guilty if we emerge from this car as demons.”

  Stefan gave the Prince of Greed a dry look. “Right. As soon as it gets too hot, you’ll vanish, leaving me and Muse to soak up the crossfire.”

  The only outward sign of Akil’s frustration was the slight press of his lips. “I was charged with Muse’s protection while you were learning to walk. Don’t presume to anticipate my actions.”

  Stefan blinked, brow arched incredulously. “That’s wrong on so many twisted demon levels.”

  “Would you two stop? They haven’t opened fire. They’re waiting. If we just get out, nice and slowly, we can explain what’s happening.” Stefan muttered something about suicide and reached for the door handle. “Leave the gun,” I said. “It’s not like you need it.”

  “It’s not for them.” But he placed the Desert Eagle on the dash and cracked the door open.

  “On three.” I said. If the Institute didn’t fill us full of bullet holes before my boots touched the road it’d be a miracle. “One, two—” Akil was out in one swift movement. Stefan followed. “Three,” I said to myself, gulped a measure of courage, and climbed from the car.

  Chapter 24

  Sabine Sturgill, Adam’s boss, stood roughly thirty feet away, flanked on either side by enforcers with a demon-killing glean in their determined glares. Her light gray pantsuit complemented her dark skin. I’d only met her once before, when I’d entered the underground facility in search of Akil and Project Typhon’s half bloods. She’d seemed reasonable enough. But seeing her there, I wondered how much of her geniality had been an Institute guise. If she was anything like Adam, we were going to have a hard time convincing her not to shoot us up with PC34 and toss us in cells.

  I stood within arm’s reach of Stefan. Akil stood off to Stefan’s left. We all held our hands up at shoulder height, as though our lack of weapons meant we were harmless.

  “You have Adam Harper,” Sabine said. “Is he alive?” Her voice carried into the dark trees hugging the roadside.

  “Yes.” I replied before Akil or Stefan could land us in a world of trouble. “We’re protecting him. Will you hear us out?”

  A delicate breeze filtered through the spruces. The helicopter hovered high enough to remind us it was close by. It would have thermal imaging cameras. Stefan might have a chance of tricking its sensors, but I sure wouldn’t. Akil could vanish at any second, but he seemed to be playing along.

  Sabine took a long, evaluative look at Stefan, Akil, and me. She took her time and made her assessment without so much as a smile or frown on her professionally unexpressive face. “The three of you are protecting Adam Harper? I would have thought he’d need protecting from you, not by you. What do the Prince of Greed, the Prince of Wrath, and the Mother of Destruction want with our Head of Operations?”

  Oh, only to break Dawn out of your underground lair. I licked my lips, testing out various sentences in my head—none of then good.

  Akil slid his gaze to me. He could kill them all. So could I. Stefan might hesitate, given his past, but there was also a chance he’d impale them all without so much as breaking a sweat. The Institute could be armed with anti-elemental rounds. They would have learned their effectiveness on the battlefield. The outcome of this fight would depend on who pulled the trigger first. Stefan could freeze their weapons before they could fire. The Institute was outgunned. They’d know it too.

  “Ask Adam to step out of the car, please,” Sabine said.

  “Er… There’s a bit of a problem.” I cleared my throat. “You see, his ex, Stefan’s mom, got to him before we did, and…well… He’s had better days.”

  Sabine reminded me of a school principal, all smiles until she had to lay down some laws, and then we’d find ourselves at her mercy. “Ask him to step out of the car, please, Muse.”

  Stefan tensed beside me, which in turn had my pulse racing. “Well, I would, but… Look, we can stop the demons—all the demons, okay. Why else would the three of us be here? Together? There’s a way to restore the veil. We need Adam’s help. Your help.”

  She wasn’t stupid. She knew the three of us wouldn’t be in the same time zone unless we had a damn good reason to be. But there was also the fact Adam wasn’t moving in the back of our car.

  “This isn’t working,” Stefan whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Sure it is. Just smile, and look non-threatening,” I whispered back.

  He shifted. “I can’t do any less threatening.”

  I swallowed hard. What would Ryder do? He’d tell me there wasn’t a chance in hell the Institute would let us walk free. While we dallied, they’d probably called in back up. Before long, there would be snipers in the woods. This was on me. Whatever I decided, the two Princes of Hell would listen. Two enemies, united at my command. No pressure.

  One of the trigger-happy enforcers twitched. At least, I assumed that’s what happened. I heard a click and knew it was already too late. They would all die. Why? I thought, as a squall of ice blasted us from above.

  Stefan raised a vast ice shield in one dramatic thrust of his element. It bur
st open like an umbrella caught in the wind and arched around us both. Bullets pinched into the barrier. Ice chips exploded. I flinched, expecting the ice to shatter. But it held.

  Behind us, Akil summoned a wall of heat, invisible, but for how it warped the scene behind it. Bullets plunged into it on one side and vaporized. By the pinch of his pale lips and glare of absolute concentration, I could see it was no easy thing to control. Likewise, Stefan crouched behind his shield, hand out, funneling his element through himself into the shield. He quivered under the strain.

  “Now would be a good time to make a call, Muse. Anytime now… Their bullets aren’t getting any slower.”

  I cursed. “Don’t fight back, not yet.”

  Stefan gritted his teeth and hunkered down. Fractals shimmied beneath his skin, but he hadn’t yet turned full demon. They both had much more to give.

  I jogged back to the car, sandwiched between fire and ice, and yanked open Adam’s door. He tumbled into my arms, mumbling nonsense. His eyes rolled, but at least they were open. “Adam, you need to snap out of it.” I manhandled him, trying to lever his weight under my arms, and wedged his body upright, so I could at least look him in the eyes. Gripping his face, I leaned in close. “I don’t much like you. You’ve done some pretty nasty things—things bordering on evil—and you blamed it on science. But you know what? I reckon there’s a part of you—probably hidden so damn deep you may not even know it, but it’s there—and it knows you haven’t exactly been the best kind of guy. You’re a father. You loved your daughter, Nica. You have it in you somewhere to be good. You loved Yukki.” He flinched. His eyes glistened. He could hear me. “You told me as much.” The sounds of cracking ice and bullets ricocheted into the night. “You wanted me to be your hero. That was never going to happen, but you know what? You can be. It might never make up for the shit you’ve dealt me and Stefan, but it’d be a start.” Ahead, ethereal heat hissed and throbbed. Akil glared through his shield at the line of enforcers.

  Adam’s hand came down on my shoulder. He rolled his eyes to me and fixed his glassy glare on my face. “Muse, Yukki…will kill me.”

  “I know,” I said softly. “But before she does, you can save Boston from the netherworld. That’s all you’ve ever wanted to do, right?”

  His eyelids dropped and flickered. He forced them open. His head bowed, but he fought to stay conscious. His fingers dug into my shoulder, and his face hardened. He glared, breathing hard and fast. It almost looked like hatred etched into the hard lines of his face, but it wasn’t. It was a trait all the Harpers shared: stubborn defiance.

  “We need your help. Tell Sabine to cease firing. Ask them to help us. Please. Do the right thing now, Adam.”

  He dragged a broken gasp through his teeth and nodded. “Help me stand,” he wheezed. I wedged myself under his arm and heaved him onto his feet. Stefan flicked me a concerned glare. I couldn’t blame him for not trusting his father.

  “Ready?” Stefan growled, bowing under the strain of his melting shield.

  I nodded and faced ahead. The shield fractured. Cracks like webs splintered through the ice. The barrier thinned, and shattered. I flinched away from the ice, and the expected gunfire, but the retorts fell silent. Enforcers stared and cursed their now-frozen guns. Adam’s labored breathing sawed against the background of sudden quiet. He lifted his head, the effort enough to start a barrage of tremors.

  C’mon, Adam. Prove to me there is a good man somewhere inside all of that Institute BS.

  “Stand down…” He croaked, and then louder, “Stand down.”

  The enforcers looked to Sabine. She nodded, and her troops lowered their weapons. A glance behind told me Akil’s line had ceased their attack. He met my gaze over the roof of the car and inclined his head. A hopeful smile lightened my lips. This was huge. This was astonishing. The Institute wasn’t going to shoot to kill. Was it possible? Were they really capable of helping us?

  I helped Adam hobble forward, acutely aware of the stares from two princes burning into my back. Sabine approached, her face ashen as she took in Adam’s beaten state.

  “He needs medical attention immediately.”

  “No.” This from Adam, which surprised Sabine as much as me. “I… Until we arrive at the base, I stay with Muse.”

  “I could order you.”

  “You could.” Adam sounded like he really didn’t give a damn, and in his shoes, neither would I. Yukki wouldn’t stop until she’d found him. His chances of survival were greater with me.

  “Where are you headed?” Sabine asked.

  “The base,” I replied.

  Sabine’s scowl could have cut glass. I shifted Adam’s weight. “Look, we can sit down and discuss everything once we’re there, but this guy ain’t getting any lighter. Will you let us go?”

  “Yes. But Muse, I will need a full explanation of this as soon as you step foot on Institute grounds.”

  “Agreed.” I managed to get Adam back to the car. Akil took over from there and helped fold the big guy back into the passenger seat with surprising care. Stefan hung back, eyeing the enforcers, waiting for the next one to accidentally-on-purpose start firing. Watching the enforcers climb back into their vehicles also meant he could avoid eye contact with his father.

  As I was about to climb behind the wheel, Akil settled his hand gently over mine. “I’m going to take a more direct route. I don’t trust these people not to trap you on arrival.”

  It made sense, but it also meant he was out of my sight for the first time since his resurrection. That thought squirmed like something slippery and unwanted inside my mind. Whatever existed between us, it felt fractured, broken, and after his words in my apartment, I wasn’t entirely sure if I could or should fix it. Perhaps it was only to be expected. So much had changed. I was a fool to believe we wouldn’t have.

  The way he looked at me now, reserved, composed, but there was something… Something about him, something had been missing since his return that I couldn’t pin down. A smile feathered across his lips. “I’d suggest that you need not concern yourself with my wellbeing, but I rather suspect that is not the reason for the worry I see in your eyes.”

  “It’s nothing. I’ll see you at the Institute.”

  Akil searched my face, and for a few moments, neither of us moved or spoke. His dark eyes held the same infinite intelligence, his lips, the same sensuous curve. Perhaps, this feeling of change wasn’t from him. Perhaps it was all about me. Since the battlefield, I was a changed creature. Wholly demon, wholly human. I’d made peace with myself. And now, after his return, I was free. Entirely free. The control he’d had over me since petitioning my father for my guardianship had vanished. I looked at him anew on that road to Middlesex Fells. And I wondered, were we supposed to be enemies? Had we always been?

  He bowed his head, hesitated as though snagging on something unsaid, and turned away. Within a few steps, he vanished. I climbed into the car and met Stefan’s expectant expression with a sigh. Adam sat upright in the back, eyelids drooping, but awake. We followed the line of enforcer cars toward their base without a single word spoken between us.

  Chapter 25

  The Institute’s gates hung open and unguarded. The grounds, once clipped and manicured, now hosted bunches of weeds and sprouting grasses.

  “They’re winding the Boston operation down,” Adam said quietly from the back of the car. “There’s only a handful of crew here. Dawn was to be the last Project moved.”

  We rolled inside the perimeter and parked beside one of the single-story buildings capping the vast underground warren of tunnels and labs.

  Enforcer cars pulled alongside, unloading their cargo of armed bad-asses. There was no sign of Akil in the pale dawn light, but I couldn’t see much beyond the parked cars and humble buildings.

  Gripping the back of Stefan’s seat, I twisted and fixed my glare on Adam. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that Stefan and I are the only things standing between you and Yukki right now.” Ad
am’s weary eyes flicked to his son but quickly skipped away. They hadn’t spoken since Stefan had saved him from Yukki. Considering that Stefan hadn’t been shy with Akil, his silence was deliberate. “We need to get to Dawn. I’m assuming she’s locked down somewhere in the facility, locked away so damn tight that when Akil stayed here, he couldn’t sense her. Is that the case?”

  “Yes. She’s elementally protected in the high-security sub-levels. I have the access codes.”

  “That’s what I thought. Are you up to this?”

  Adam glanced at his son again, but Stefan faced ahead, muscles jumping in his jaw as he clamped his teeth together. Whatever Adam thought he could say wouldn’t suddenly fix his relationship with his son. Perhaps that thought crossed his mind because he made no attempt to engage Stefan. “I could do with a drink, maybe some fresh clothes.”

  “Sure, once we have Dawn, you can have whatever the hell you want, but until then, you’re not leaving my side.”

  Adam rubbed his red-rimmed eyes, fingers trembling. “How can I trust you, Muse? Dawn is our best hope at fighting back the demons. If the Institute hands her over, we have nothing left to fight them with.”

  “How can you trust me? One, you’re still alive, despite the entire demon population of two worlds wanting you dead. And two, if you search that one-track mind of yours, you’ll realize I’ve only ever wanted to help. Forget trust for a second, and let’s look at the facts. On this side of the veil, Dawn is a little girl with one hell of a talent for killing demons, but beyond the veil, she can be so much more. She’s chaos, Adam. Pure chaos. Only chaos and control together can reel in the netherworld. The king is there. He needs a queen if he’s going to stop the demons and restore the veil. He can do this. Dawn’s destiny is much bigger than yours or mine. She belongs in the netherworld.”

  Adam stared out of the car windows at the waiting enforcers. “I believed in the Institute. But it failed to protect the people, I failed.”

  I smiled. “Not yet.”