by Sara King
Then she thought of Herr Drescher, falling to the tarmac, half of his head blown apart. Imelda yanked her knife from her belt, drew it across her palm, and held it out under the Third Lander’s jaw. “Will that suffice?”
A slow smile spreading across its carnivorous lips, the creature cocked its head down at the ruby droplets forming upon her cut and smiled. “Oh yes. Are you giving it to me?”
“Are you getting the three of us out alive?”
The creature grinned at her. “I will endeavor to do my best.”
“Then yes.”
Immediately, the Third Lander grabbed her hand and ran a long pink tongue across her palm and his eyes rolled into his head, obviously savoring it. Imelda watched dispassionately. Once he had licked it clean, she said, “Are you finished?”
“Well,” the creature panted, still holding her hand to his mouth, “the brainless fool was right.” He cocked his head at Imelda. “This Padre you sought. He was a Seer?”
Imelda refused to show how much those few simple words drove stakes through her soul. “Just work your magic. If we survive, we can banter. If not, I will see you in Hell.”
The Third Lander cocked its head at her and gave a low chuckle. “As my Inquisitor commands.” He strode past her and squatted in the open hall, then spread the bloody napkin out on the floor. He began chanting in an eerie, unearthly sound that almost reminded her of a baying dog as he stood and sauntered across the room to a naga whose long, serpentine body was pinioned to the wall. Without prelude, he reached up and snapped off one of the naga’s long fangs, making the creature scream.
Then, as Imelda jumped back in horror, the Third Lander placed his hand on the top of the naga’s skull, his fingers digging into the monster’s eye-sockets, and ripped the cobra-like head from its shoulders and tossed it to the ground. Then he stood and watched the blood pump from the flopping neck for long minutes, seemingly enraptured by the crimson spreading down the dead creature’s scaly hide and spattering to the floor.
Upstairs, she heard the sounds of someone opening the door.
“Someone is coming,” Imelda growled.
The Third Lander ignored her, insane green eyes still fixed on the blood dribbling from the naga’s body.
Hearing footsteps on the metal staircase, Imelda tried to duck out of sight before she heard, “Freeze, ma mie.”
Jacquot’s words were like razors against her spine. Imelda knew he had a gun trained on the back of her skull. She also knew he wouldn’t miss. Very slowly, she turned to face him.
“What are you doing down here?” Jacquot demanded, glancing from the wide-eyed technician, to the bleeding naga. The Third Lander was nowhere to be seen.
“I am an Inquisidora,” she said, the little hairs on her neck tingling at the demon’s disappearance. “I can come down here as I please.”
Jacquot gave her a sad look. “We both know the truth, ma mie. You are to be excommunicated.”
Imelda’s chest tightened in shock. “Why?” she demanded. “For what crimes?”
“For aiding Satan, Inquisitrice,” Jacquot said. “For protecting a demon. For lying.”
“And what of Zenaida?” Imelda snapped. “What of her lies?”
Jacquot obviously didn’t understand. “What she tells the Holy Patron is necessary. She is doing God’s work.” Then he frowned. “Zenaida wants to put you on the rack, Inquisitrice. She’s waiting for you on the helo pad, and I have orders to bring you to her, but for everything you’ve done for me, I think I owe you a quick death.” Then, as if that decided things in his mind, Jacquot’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“Wait,” Imelda cried, suddenly dizzy with the number of Imeldas that began falling to the floor around her. “Zenaida has been poisoning you against me, Jacquot. She spews lies in the form of an angel’s wings.”
Jacquot’s eyes widened slightly, but he said, “She has shown me, ma mie. You have never beheld such beauty as the wings of God’s messenger.”
“She’s not a messenger of God,” Imelda snapped. “She’s a mass murderer, Jacquot.”
The Frenchman snorted, lowering the barrel of his gun a fraction of an inch. “If only you were to see,” he lifted his eyes heavenward, “if only she were to show you, you could never say such things.”
Imelda lifted her head to watch the stairs. Ahead of her, Jacquot was turning, gesturing up the stairs at the first floor—and he was also standing on the steps, his gun still leveled firmly upon her forehead. Taking her cue from the way Imeldas continued to fall at her feet, a hole in her forehead, while a few had stepped forward, following the gesturing Jacquots up the stairs, she said, “Perhaps she will show me. Perhaps I just don’t understand.”
And, in that moment, she knew she had him. As devout as Jacquot was, he fell prey to one of the many pitfalls of the Faith. He, in his zeal, was willing to err on the side of caution rather than let a lamb that could be saved wander from the fold.
For a long moment, Jacquot hesitated on the stairway. Then, very carefully, he looked up the staircase, then gestured with the gun. “I will take you to her. Climb the stairs. She’s outside.”
Imelda watched several versions of him turn, start up the stairs…
And then get ripped apart by the Third-Lander monster that suddenly appeared hunched on the staircase above him.
“Wait, no!” Imelda cried, holding up a hand and lurching forward.
Startled, the Jacquot still standing on the stairs pulled the trigger.
The bullet felt like a sledgehammer to her chest, like someone had punched her with enough concussive force to shatter ribs. As her mouth fell open and she looked down at herself, eyes finding the hole in her shirt, she heard a heavy weight land on the staircase, heard Jacquot scream, heard the rending of flesh.
Imelda slumped to her knees, her heart hammering like acid in her ears. She started digging through her pockets, looking for some emergency kit, some clotting agent… In a panic, she realized all of those things were in her coat, which was even then hanging in the front of the foyer, useless to her, because why would she ever have need of it inside the Order’s sanctuary?
Chuckling, the Third Lander slid down the stairs and went back to the dead naga, drenched in Jacquot’s blood. Swiping a taloned hand through the naga’s congealing lifeblood as he went by, the Third Lander squatted beside the stained napkin and the naga tooth.
Dead blood, Imelda realized, even as the edges of her world were beginning to dim. He needed dead blood…
A couple moments later, the Third Lander was resuming his incantations, drawing glyphs on the napkin with the blood-dipped naga tooth. The glyphs were heating up with an unearthly silver glow before they disappeared back into the paper.
It took only a couple moments, but the sudden, inhuman, ear-piercing shriek that Imelda heard echo down the hallway above was enough to tell her it had worked. It continued, on and on, like a siren, loud enough to drown out all else.
Carefully folding the napkin and tucking it into a fist, the Third Lander stood and came to stand over her, calculation in his insane green eyes.
He’s going to heal me, Imelda thought, relief coursing through her. He has my blood. He can heal me. A simple weave of seiðr…
For a long moment, the monster just peered down at her. Then, sounding thoughtful, he said, “I suppose I could save you.” Crimson saliva dribbled from his fangs to the floor beside her knee as he smiled. “But then, it was you who trapped me in this dungeon in the first place, and I think you deserve a taste of it, as you die.” He stepped over her and started up the gore-encrusted staircase, ignoring the technician that whimpered and crab-crawled away from him as he passed.
Then he was out of the basement and Imelda was lying on the floor, bleeding to death. All around her, completely impassive faces watched her demise, hating her, enjoying her death.
Desperately, she crawled toward the discarded beer-bottle that the Third Lander had left there, praying there was some of the elixir l
eft.
It took all of her strength to reach out and grasp the bottle, and it was like moving mountains to lift it to her lips. Nothing came. Not a drop. The Third Lander had drained it all. Defeated, Imelda simply slumped forward, staring at the concrete under her face in despair.
God help me, she willed. I can’t die here. I won’t. There must be something. She still had important work to do. She still had to stop Zenaida.
Yet, with her vision fading with each wretched slamming of her heart, Imelda knew that she wasn’t going to stop Zenaida. She was going to Hell, and everything she had done this night had been a failure. She felt herself relax against the floor and watched the concrete under her face darken with her own blood.
“Over here.” The words sounded awkward, as if they came from the lips of one unused to the intricacies of language. With a monumental effort, Imelda lifted her head to look.
A slender man sat balled in one of the temporary cages, his platinum-blond tresses dirty and ragged. He was watching her over his knees, his cerulean eyes so deep that they looked like the ocean.
Imelda remembered the ocean. As a child, she had slipped to the docks to play in the pristine white sands under a Barcelonan wharf, before her Padre had found her and taken her to the Order.
Fate is with you, child, he had said to her, as they sat in the sunny window of an oceanfront restaurant as Imelda ate the first real meal she’d ever experienced. Clam chowder, served in a bowl of bread, with little octagonal crackers to sprinkle in the soup and French fries on the side. She remembered it to this day, twenty-eight years later, the waves of the Mediterranean still as blue-green as if she were standing there, looking out over them today.
“Dammit, over here.”
Imelda hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep. She jerked, but it took all the willpower she had to open her eyes. When she looked, the blond man in the cage had moved closer, reaching his hand through the bars. He was about three feet away.
To Imelda, those three feet seemed like three miles. She strained to move closer, but her limbs felt so weak. And cold. She was shivering.
The creature’s cerulean eyes shifted to watch something move behind her, and Imelda heard the technician’s footsteps hurry up the steel staircase. Then the prisoner was again looking at her. “Listen,” he growled, with that odd, stiltedness of one who was unused to the human tongue, “I can help you, but not if you just lie down and die.”
Imelda heard the words seemingly at a distance, and they almost felt like a lullaby. She lowered her head back to the floor, the drowsiness coming back. Somewhere over the inhuman shrieking upstairs, she heard a helicopter taking off. It reminded her of her first experience with a helicopter. Small and tiny, but clean and in new clothes for the first time in her life, seated between two big men garbed in black. Two more had sat on the seat across from her, facing her, giving her flat, dubious stares, and she had felt so tiny and insecure… She had clung to Padre Vega’s hand for the next two hours, and had screamed herself hoarse when he had dropped her off at the convent, telling her he would return when he could.
You will change the Order, her Padre had said. All this time, she had believed him. Had he been lying to her? Had he been wrong?
The creature made a disgusted sound and retracted his hand.
That gave her pause. I have to help these people, Imelda thought, swimming back to consciousness. She had to fulfill her Padre’s prophecy.
Groaning, Imelda somehow lifted her head and forced her numb arms to move.
She saw the creature turn back to look at her, cerulean eyes curious.
Like the ocean, she thought again, using them as an anchor to stabilize her swimming world, a light within the dim sea of her vision. She dragged herself forward an inch, two, focusing on the man’s face. She felt her own blood wetting the cloth covering her chest and abdomen, cold against the stone.
“You can do it,” the creature urged softly, when she paused to regain her strength. “Come on.”
Imelda continued forward at a crawl, the dark edges of her vision encroaching until all she saw was the creature’s face. She made a few more inches, a foot, two…
The man strained a slender arm through the bars, reaching for her, and Imelda thought that he meant to heal her then, but when their fingers touched, he tightened his grip and dragged her the rest of the way to his cage. Immediately, he started ripping away her shirt.
What is he doing? she thought, finding herself on her back, staring up at his face through the bars as he worked.
Then he was crawling forward, jamming himself into an uncomfortable-looking position in the cage, his head lowered to get a good look at her torso.
He’s a medic, Imelda thought, laughing inside. A fey medic. She wanted to tell the poor fool he wasn’t going to be able to heal her with a little dab of clotting powder, but she couldn’t find the strength. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what her Padre had told her.
Follow your heart, little one, and not even the seat of the Holy Matron will hold dominion over you. Suddenly, she saw a new way that his prophecy could be taken.
The Holy Matron had no dominion over her if she was dead.
Angry with him for not telling her that, Imelda tried to laugh, but she knew her throat made no sound. Her Padre had told her to follow her heart…even if it meant to her death. He had Seen that she was going to die for it, and he hadn’t told her. Damn him.
But, she realized, would she have still done what she did if he had known it would lead to her—
A pinprick of searing, white-hot, crystalline agony suddenly bloomed in her chest, in the hole just beneath the left lung. Imelda cried out, despite herself, and writhed as the fire began to spread outwards in a concentric sphere, pushing deeper into her body, up her chest, down her stomach. A final torture, then? A prisoner finding vengeance on his executioner?
When she opened her eyes, she saw her blood on his forehead. Blood-magic. Seiðr. The most effective pain could be delivered through seiðr.
Imelda moaned and tried to pull away from whatever the man was doing to her.
“Shhh, be still.” She felt hands holding her down, keeping her in place.
The pain spread, so utterly agonizing that it felt like she was being turned inside-out. She felt every muscle, every cell, as if it were being yanked through a sieve, pureed, and then reconstructed.
…Reconstructed?
Imelda froze and looked down at herself.
The hole in her chest was gone.
Then the wave was traveling up her body, up her neck, into her chin. Imelda whimpered, knowing that, if it felt like what was happening was actually happening, her brain was about to become mush.
“You’ll be fine,” the man said. But his cerulean eyes were filled with understanding.
Then Imelda’s thoughts simply dissolved. She began having odd sparking sensations in the backs of her eyes, and her vision went dim, then too bright, then cut out entirely. Her heart stuttered, came to a stop, then started again. She lost all feeling in her body, lost her hearing, lost her control of her lungs.
Then, like the compound’s electronics re-engaging after a power outage, the sensations began coming back to her. She felt her heartbeat, first, then her fingertips, then her toes. When she opened her eyes, she was surprised she could see. And well. Her vision seemed clearer, sharper, less foggy. Her joints no longer hurt. Her sore throat, the remnants of a stress-induced cold, was gone.
When she sat up, however, Imelda was dizzy. She almost blacked out, just levering herself off of the ground. She grabbed the edges of the cage and clung there, her head pounding.
“You’ve lost blood,” the slender man in the cage offered. “You’ll be weak for awhile.” He had wiped her blood away from his brow and was watching her nervously.
He just healed me. Completely. Even her scars were gone. What kind of creature could heal scars? Imelda blinked at him, then looked up at the information tag that hung above his cage. Aside from
the line marked Collection Location—Kahiltna River—all of the fields were empty. That he was completely conscious, however, and bore no marks of blood-collection, meant that he had been marked as very low priority by Zenaida.
The man in the cage had returned to his fetal ball and was giving her a wary look. And, judging by the wide-eyed stares he was getting from those prisoners close enough to see what had transpired, he had just given his secret away. And if they knew, Zenaida would know, as soon as she resumed her inquisitions.
“Why?” Imelda whispered, clinging to his cage.
The man shrugged.
Imelda looked over to where she had dropped the keys in her fall by the stairs. Then she looked back at the creature. She wasn’t going to make it out of here today, but that didn’t mean he had to die down here with her, as well…
Very carefully, keeping her skull lowered toward the floor, her head throbbing, she crawled to the base of the stairs, fisted her hands around the keys, and crawled back. As she started fumbling with the lock on his front door, the man’s eyes widened and his arms slid from around his knees in what looked like shock.
Imelda found the right key, inserted it into the lock, and twisted it.
The door sprang open with a metallic click and she yanked it wide.
“Go on,” Imelda said, as the slender man just stared at her. Then, when she gestured impatiently, he timidly slid forward, towards the exit. Upstairs, Zenaida was still screaming, but the Fury’s cries were quieting. Imelda leaned against the cage as she once again fought blacking out, knowing she was not going to make it up the stairs.
Knowing also that, while she wasn’t bleeding to death now, she would be again, just as soon as Zenaida found her.
The man slid out of the contraption slowly, then uncurled cautiously, glancing between her and the stairs, looking like a deer about to bolt.
“Go on!” Imelda snapped, waving her arm at him. “Do you hear that? Zenaida’s recovering. Get! Before she comes back.” When he continued to hesitate, she reached out and shoved him. “Go, dammit!”