Lumina blinked lazily, smiling as if returning from a pleasant dream. But then her eyes flew wide, wide open, and she froze, grasping what had happened.
Instantly, the fire was extinguished. The roaring flames disappeared. The floating boots and books and all the other weightless flotsam fell to the floor with a clatter and a thud, and all that was left was a strong scent of smoke and a curl of gray fume rising from the sheets.
In the silence, his heartbeat was thundering loud.
“Are you hurt?” Lumina’s voice was a terrified whisper, a tone that perfectly matched the look on her face.
“No.” He gazed in wonder down at her naked body, wrapped around his. There wasn’t a mark on either of them. Carefully, he moved his head and looked around the room. It was in shambles, but miraculously, nothing looked burned. He looked back at Lumina. “That was new,” he said, trying for a nonchalant tone. With interest, he noted he was still buried deep inside her, and still hard. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. No. Do you think the rest of the house . . .”
“I think it’s probably fine, but I’ll check.” He paused. “In a minute. Right now I’m too busy having a heart attack.”
A tiny laugh escaped her lips, verging on hysterical. “Well. We gave new meaning to the phrase light the bed on fire, didn’t we?”
Sobering, Magnus said, “You’re a miracle. Do you know that? A miracle. There’s nothing else like you in all the world.”
She made a sound that could have been humor or horror. “Lucky me.”
Magnus took her face in his hands, and gently kissed her lips. “No,” he murmured, flush with wonder. “Lucky me.”
She returned his kiss, first tentatively, then with growing hunger. He shifted his weight and brought them both down to the mattress, displacing a soft pouf of smoke from the sheets. Propping himself up on one elbow, he ran his open hand over her skin, caressing the dip of her waist, the curve of her hip. His hand came to rest on a few words in delicate, slanting cursive tattooed on her rib cage on her right side, and he traced them with his fingertips.
I listened to the bray of my heart; I am I am I am.
“It’s a quote from The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath,” she said quietly. “I was a huge book hound when I was young. Still am, I guess. It kept me sane, reading those words. It was validation for me. Like, I’m here, even if no one wants me to be. Even if I’m pretending to be something I’m not. Even though I’m hiding, even though I’m unseen, I still exist. I am. And no one can ever take that away from me. No matter how hard the world tries to crush it, my heart just won’t give in. I won’t give in. Ever.”
Magnus was gripped with fierce admiration. He leaned down and gave her a passionate kiss, his hand wrapped around her jaw. When he broke the kiss, she was breathless and wide-eyed beneath him.
“I had no idea talking books could get a man so worked up,” she said, laughing. “If you like I can recite a little poetry next.”
“You told me I was courageous,” he said gruffly, brushing aside her comment. “But the things I do, I do to make amends. That’s not real bravery. Of the two of us, you’re the brave one, not me.”
She looked up at him, tenderly stroked a lock of hair away from his eyes. “You don’t always have to be so hard on yourself, Magnus. Sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning is an act of courage.” Her fingers lingered on the scar tissue on the side of his face, and he looked away, jaw tightening.
She didn’t ask, though he knew she desperately wanted to. He could feel how hard she tried to hold her tongue. It wasn’t as if he would’ve answered, anyway, but he appreciated her restraint, appreciated how hard it must be for her to let the moment slide, to leave the question unasked, though they’d just shared every intimacy a man and woman could share. He closed his eyes and breathed, then turned his head and pressed a kiss to the center of her palm.
“I’ll go check to make sure they’re all right,” he said, meaning their hosts. He guessed there was no imminent danger, guessed the house had taken no more damage than their room, but he suddenly needed to get away from the unspoken words that lingered between them, silent as ghosts.
What happened to you?
What, indeed.
He swiftly rose and dressed. He left her on the bed, bare and lovely, watching him with her angel eyes, and he’d never felt such desolation. Such endless, aching loss.
He already knew the end to this fairy tale. There would be no salvation by faith, no eleventh-hour reprieve. He walked, however willingly, toward his own death, and the thing that made it more than tragic was the knowledge that he’d finally—finally—found the thing for which he’d been searching for years.
A reason to live.
He checked on the elderly couple; they were fine, if spooked by the noise and the smell of fire. The house had taken no damage, and he assured them everything was all right. When he came back in the room he shared with Lumina, he found her dressed and waiting.
“We have to go now,” she said, her voice hollow. She avoided looking directly at him.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
When finally she did meet his eyes, her own were filled with dread. “I’ve heard from Honor.” There was a long, terrible pause. “We don’t have as much time as we thought.”
And so they left. They rode as fast as the bikes would take them to their next stop, pausing only to recharge the batteries and wolf down some food, then were on their way once more, betting against the odds they could make it to their next-to-last stop before sunrise. They did, but barely. They were welcomed by more kind-faced strangers, fed again, shown to another cramped bedroom. They slept. And when they awoke, they made love with feverish, desperate hunger, both of them knowing that tomorrow would change everything. Tomorrow would be both an end, and a new beginning.
Tomorrow they would arrive in New Vienna, and the wheel of Fate would spin once again.
PART FOUR
TWENTY-NINE
Sebastian Thorne was a man used to getting his own way.
Even as a child, he’d been fearlessly single-minded, permitting himself only one day a week when he didn’t study his beloved molecular biology. On that day he studied biochemistry instead. He’d developed an unnatural passion for both subjects and could, by the age of twelve, best his professors at school with theories so far advanced his elders merely looked at one another with raised brows and shrugged shoulders, admitting their precocious pupil was an anomaly whom they had little idea how to handle.
Knowing as he did that almost ninety-nine percent of the mass of a human body is composed of just six elements, young Sebastian Thorne became obsessed with the question of why. Why is a dangerous question, even for the most learned and wise of adults, but for a child with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a moral code one could only describe as flexible, the question of why led to a brief but intense interest in religion, and the ultimate meaning of life.
He soon dismissed religion as the tool man used to manage his existential terror of death. God, Allah, Yahweh, Satnam, whatever name you used, in essence they were all the same thing: manufactured punishment and reward systems for weak-minded people. To live without believing in God was, in Sebastian Thorne’s opinion, true courage. Only cowards needed to ascribe divine power to the chaos of the universe, and he was no coward.
He was a visionary. Or so he liked to think.
So religion went by the wayside, as did anything else that interfered with his ruthless intellectual curiosity. He grew to a man, he built a successful company, he married, he had a child of his own.
Then the chaos of the universe paid him a personal visit, and Sebastian Thorne’s carefully controlled world was turned upside down.
His wife fell ill. She was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic defect that caused abrupt, coordinated failure of the major organs of the body, as if a timer had been set,
and counted down to zero. Technology in the form of life support kept her functioning, but in reality his wife was dead.
Several years later, his daughter fell victim to the same malady, courtesy of her mother’s genes.
It was then Thorne was gripped by a new obsession: finding a cure.
On a safari he’d taken years prior in Africa, he’d heard a local legend about creatures who looked like humans, but were stronger, faster, altogether better. More intriguing was their purported ability to change shape as they desired, shifting from animal to human to the mist that was a constant of the rainforests from whence they came. These creatures were called Ikati, meaning cat warrior in ancient Zulu. When his wife and daughter fell ill, Thorne remembered the story, and his search began.
It would lead him down a road that would ultimately devour what little conscience he had to begin with.
He began to play his own version of God, tinkering with human DNA. He recruited scientists and doctors and most important, hunters, whom he sent out into the world to find evidence of the mystical creatures known as the Ikati. He found, to his great surprise, the Church had been hunting the same creatures for millennia, using fanatical assassins who called themselves Expurgari, or purifiers. The irony wasn’t lost on Thorne that he and the most powerful religious institution on the planet had such a thing in common, even if their endgames were different. The Church wanted only to exterminate the Ikati. Thorne wanted to put them to good use, then exterminate them.
So the godless man and the pope became business partners. It didn’t work out so well for the pontiff—he was slaughtered on live television by one of the creatures with a taste for dramatic flair who’d infiltrated the Vatican. Then the Expurgari were slaughtered en masse when they landed in the Amazon the day of the Flash. Shortsighted to put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. But the Church wasn’t known for doing things by halves. Good/evil, black/white, saved/damned . . . their entire history was built on a philosophy Thorne liked to call Full Bore or Bust. You were in, or you were out. Shades of gray did not exist, and so the Expurgari went the way of the dinosaur. It wasn’t as if they had an army of willing new recruits banging down their doors, either; by that point, the Church was bleeding the faithful like a hemophiliac after a bad fall.
But for Thorne, things had worked out well. He’d not only captured thousands of the creatures, including their Queen, he’d learned how to harvest their stem cells and manufacture a host of medicines that helped everything from acne to cancer.
It was far too late for his family, though. By the time he’d made the breakthrough, his wife and daughter were long gone.
It was the only failure of his life. In his darkest moments, Thorne sometimes wished there was a God, so he could curse Him, so there could be someone else to blame. But there was no one else. The blame was all his.
Regret can play strange games with a man’s mind.
“What’s the update on the team who went to Wales?” said Thorne, seated behind his massive desk in his massive office, staring at a massive screen on which was projected a massive image of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. What used to be Tennessee, the state where he was born.
Standing at attention on the other side of his desk, his third-in-command answered. “No update, sir. The signal went offline just after the distress call two days ago, and no contact has been made since.”
Thorne wasn’t exactly sure where Three was looking. His cast eye inevitably wandered off like some wayward pet. Combined with the ingrained habit of a former Marine to avoid direct eye contact with his superior, the walleye lent Three a furtive air that Thorne found alternatively fascinating and irritating. Topped by a thatch of wiry black hair, his head was oblong in the extreme, and his mouth was filled with an array of discolored and disheveled teeth. He had a nose that looked as if it belonged on a human-elephant hybrid. Overall, the effect was startling, and Thorne found himself wondering on occasions such as this why he’d never invented a pill to cure ugliness.
“No contact,” mused Thorne, “means no survivors.”
“A probable outcome, yes, sir.”
Thorne strummed his fingers atop the polished wood desk. He’d read the transcript of the helicopter pilot’s last transmission, and was intrigued by how quickly and dramatically the weather had changed during the flight. One minute, their equipment registered nothing. A clear day. Sunny skies. The next minute: a storm of biblical proportion.
Interesting. Also interesting was the loss of the collar’s signal immediately after the pilot’s last transmission. Granted, the signal had been weak and intermittent, possibly a decoy or a trap, but . . .
“Three, when was the last time we did a scan of the islands?”
Surprise registered in Three’s left eye. The other eye seemed to be perusing a Blue Period Picasso on the far wall, and was indifferent. “I believe the last registered sat scan of the British Isles was six years ago, sir. It was clear; no bipedal life forms detected.”
“Six years!” repeated Thorne, displeased. A lot could change in six years. Scanning technology, for instance. “Run another scan, Three,” he said, rising from his desk. “Divert the satellites from the nearest assets. I want the results back no later than zero six hundred.”
“Yes, sir!” barked Three. He saluted, executed a spin on his heel, and marched out of the office with a stiff-legged gait that would have made Hitler proud. Thorne tried not to roll his eyes. It was men like Three, after all, recruited from the various militaries of the world, who made such wonderfully unquestioning employees.
Men like his second-in-command, Two, who lay broken and burned in a hospital bed, fighting for his life.
Thorne sighed. Casualties, always casualties in war. Nothing to be done about it.
He leaned over and depressed the button for the intercom on his desk. “Yes, sir?” came the eager voice of his male secretary.
“Bring subject four-nine-six-two into the interrogation room, along with the Breast Ripper.”
The secretary’s voice didn’t waver. “Yes, sir!” he said cheerfully, and Thorne congratulated himself on hiring a man to the position. He doubted a woman would have quite the same reaction to those words.
Whistling, Sebastian Thorne left his office, on his way to another invigorating chat with the Ikati’s formidable, and quite delectable, Queen.
Perhaps today she’d have something useful to tell him.
If not, there was always tomorrow.
“This can’t be right. There’s nothing here,” said Magnus, frowning at the GPS coordinates glowing softly green on the windscreen display of the motorcycle. He looked up and around, and Lu followed his gaze.
They’d passed the deserted Czech border fifteen minutes ago, and were now headed south on the 6, a major north-south artery through Austria that connected with the defunct A22, which, if followed, would lead them directly into the heart of New Vienna. The GPS coordinates given to them by Nola had them navigating off the highway, however, onto a small collector road in what used to be perhaps an agricultural area, due to its parcels of flat land divided by even smaller roads than the one they’d followed off the highway. Now it was utterly desolate, with nary a leaf in sight, bald and ugly in the dim carmine light cast from the lurking cloud cover. Far in the distance, away on the flat horizon, Lu spied the glow of the grow fields outside New Vienna, and a shiver of dread coursed down her spine.
“There was nothing where we landed in France, either,” Lu reminded him.
“Yes, but Jack warned me about that; I knew Nola would be coming. I thought these coordinates would take us directly to the last safe house.” He was frowning, on edge, not liking the ambiguity of the situation. Lu had to agree. She felt like a sitting duck out here in the middle of nowhere.
“Well,” she said lightly, squinting up at the sky, clotted as congealed blood, “maybe we’ll get a sign.”
As if on cue, a pair of headlights cut through the darkness, perhaps a kilometer away.
“Magnus!”
“I see it.” He’d gone still as stone, his gaze sharp and calculating. “All right. There’s only one car. Most likely it’s the rendezvous, but just in case,” his gaze flicked to hers, “keep frosty.”
Lu raised her brows. “That might be more appropriate for my sister, don’t you think?”
He reached out and grabbed her hand, pulling her against him, winding his arm around her back. “It’s old military slang for ‘keep alert.’ In your case I suppose we could change it to ‘keep toasty.’” He pressed a warm kiss to her neck, and she laughed, in spite of her nerves.
“That won’t be too hard, if you keep pawing at me, mister!”
“You like it,” he said, tightening his arms around her.
“No,” she said, sobering. She pulled away to look into his eyes. “I love it.”
They stood there like that for a moment, the words hanging in the air, until the car drew closer and Magnus gently pushed her behind him.
“Really? You still think I need protection?” Her tone was sarcastic, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Everything precious needs protection,” he answered, gaze trained on the car. He gave her hand a final squeeze, then dropped it so he could cross his arms over his chest and glower in an appropriately sinister manner at the long black vehicle approaching slowly over the dirt road.
The car rolled to a stop. It was by far the most luxurious vehicle Lu had ever seen, and she tried not to gape too obviously. The driver’s door swung open and a uniformed driver appeared, bowing and tipping his hat. A brisk, diminutive man with a conquistador’s narrow black beard, he went to the back of the limousine and opened its rear door. He gestured inside.
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