“I have a kill them all plan? Will that work?”
He likely could kill them all too. “How about we go with less killing and more maiming?”
“I can do maiming.” Sota’s cold, hard machine tone made maiming sound as final as execution.
I glanced at the door. “I reckon we have about fifteen seconds before Earthens with guns overrun us.”
Sota buzzed higher. “Don’t worry, Marshal, I was made for this shit.”
The door hissed open, and a swarm of tek-eyes poured in. Sota fired something bright and sparkly. The eyes fell out of the air and bounced on the floor like a wave of ping-pong balls.
“Damn.”
“Obsolete, am I?” His twin laser ports dropped open, adding weight to his threat, and he flew out the doorway.
I flicked my claws out, relishing the freedom of having in-hand weapons, and grinned, making room for my lengthening fangs. Pure killing lust trilled through my veins, lighting them on fire. So, Plan B it was. It was about fucking time I got to cut loose.
They came at us with their tek-lasers, but none had been expecting a vakaru and an insulted wardrone. Their lines of attack buckled under Sota’s precision blasts, which took out their knees with cold precision. Those who escaped Sota’s lasers found my claws less accurate but just as damaging. They kept coming, and I kept cutting through them, tasting blood in the air and seeing fear ripple through them. All of me buzzed alive, and every breath fueled my need to kill.
A twitch tugged at my cheek. I had been made for this, for killing them, and it had been a long, long time since I’d let the beast inside loose. Something hot tore into my shoulder. I whirled, cut the weapon from the guard’s hand, and grabbed him by that smart Sol Alliance uniform. His blood would feed the hunger, a hunger that had burned inside me for hundreds of years, yearning to be sated. And I wouldn’t stop there. All these fools were mine.
An ache throbbed through my jaw, building pressure. I pulled him close, opened my mouth, and drew my lips back, exposing sharp, killing teeth.
A blast caught me in the waist. I swung my victim between me and the shooter and threw him, toppling them both into a pile.
“Path’s clear!” Sota announced.
We had cut down dozens. They lay against the walls, writhing and moaning. Not dead, and I’d hardly tasted a drop. Madness clawed at the inside of my skull, threatening to tear the beast free.
“Marshal?” Sota hummed.
I swallowed, long and slow, and waited for the bloodlust to fade. “I’m good.”
It wouldn’t take long before the Earthens overran us again, but we didn’t need long. We were about to free a weapon that could put an end to this fight before it began.
Sota handed the guards outside Talen’s cell their asses and stood watch as I grabbed a semiconscious man on my way inside and dumped him against the bars.
Inside, Talen’s only reaction was to arch an eyebrow. “Diplomacy went well?”
“Do your touch thing on this guy and have him open the cell,” I said, panting, and licked my fangs to ease their hungry throbbing.
Talen reached through the bars and touched the unsuspecting guard on the cheek. The man twitched like he’d been hit with a stun-prod and twisted into Talen’s touch, seeking more of it. His tek-enhanced eyes widened, and his pupils flooded with desire.
“There’s a good human…” Talen purred, taking on the honey-like musical tone that had lured humans to their deaths for millennia. “Free me and you’ll be rewarded.”
Had Kesh ever seen him do this? Did she know how easily he could fuck up a human? She likely wouldn’t care. She never had been sentimental toward humans.
The guard’s hopelessly human eyes spilled gleeful tears. He fell over himself in his rush to get to his feet and jab the code into the lock. The door retracted, and Talen stepped out. The fae rolled his shoulders, and drew in a deep breath. I knew what was about to happen, and didn’t like it one bit. At least with me, the guards got a chance to fight back.
The guard was on his knees, submissive, pawing at Talen’s legs, and the fae looked down at him, his face devoid of emotion. He placed a hand on the man’s cheek, reinforcing the touch, and Talen’s sharp silvery outline rippled. Magic pulled on the air, tightening it and spiking it with the taste of exotic flowers. “There now, take this gift of love and tell your companions how I mean them no harm.”
No harm, maybe. The not-Nightshade was about to turn the entire crew into mindless puppets, but he wasn’t technically harming them. I’d seen the aftermath of one of his sprees before, when his magic had ravaged the various prisons we’d tried to keep him in. But I’d never witnessed it firsthand. It was all kinds of fucked up and everything I hated about the fae and their ability to twist innocents to their whims. But it was our best option.
The guard was out the door and gone in seconds. Sota’s firing stopped shortly after, and then silence breathed out. I didn’t need to be out there to see Talen’s plague of devotion spreading from touch to touch. I could feel its calmness spreading ahead, feel it lapping at my senses, trying to get past my defenses.
“If you ever touch me like that, I’ll break your fingers.” I passed by him, his icy gaze tracking me the whole way.
“If I were to ever touch you, Kesh would break more than my fingers.”
Humans knelt in the corridors, their guns hanging at their sides. I couldn’t argue against Talen’s ability to turn a crowd to his whim. He could do worse than make them love him. With a word, he could make them kill each other so we wouldn’t have to.
Talen studied his small army of human puppets with well-practiced blankness. “It will not last,” he said, stepping around them.
“How long do we have?”
“Those with a strong will and more tek on their persons might resist the touch after a few hours unless I continuously reinforce it. Reinforcing it will be… difficult.”
He said difficult with a wince. None of this was easy for him.
“Then we’d better find Shinj and get out of here real fast. Sota…” I turned to the drone hovering behind me. “Can you locate Shinj?”
“Already have. And Hulia. I’m not leaving without her.”
Sota sailed down the corridor and through Talen’s mute army, ignoring their devoted gazes as it passed. I’d seen that look on my own people. I’d seen their tears fall when they’d thought their god had blessed and favored them.
And I’d heard their cries when their so-called god had turned against them. Seeing it served as a reminder of how dangerous Talen was.
At least we were on the same side.
For now.
Shinj hung limply in the blackness, tethered to the Sol ship, broken and barely alive. Her colors had always been vibrant and fluid, but now great patches of her hull were gray and dead, and her signal lights flickered chaotically. Talen, Sota, and Hulia—who we’d collected from the brig—witnessed it all through Excalibur’s dock observation window as though watching an enormous sea creature curl up and die in its tank.
“We have two choices,” I said. “Leave her and take Excalibur, or board Shinj and hope she can heal enough to be of use.”
Talen’s mouth twisted around words he didn’t want to say. Anger furrowed his brow. The expressions were subtle, but I knew what to look for. “If we return to Calicto,” he said, “to Arcon’s lifewell, and station her above it, she will heal.”
Calicto. Why did everything have to take us back to Calicto? I’d spent too long on that planet, and now I couldn’t get away from it. But if we left now, what of the Sol Alliance? Excalibur was a fine ship. It could make a considerable dent in Faerie’s. Her crew and the ship were ours for the taking and Talen wanted me to leave a perfectly good ship and crew for one that was dying?
“Shinj was free and chose to stay with us.” He turned and locked his glare with mine. “I cannot abandon her.”
I couldn’t keep Excalibur and its crew under control without him. A ship like this would
be vital in the war against the fae, but the Sol Alliance wasn’t interested in fighting the fae. Excalibur might be our only chance at fighting back. How could I walk away from it?
“Kesh would not want us to leave Shinj,” Sota said, swiveling that single lens on me.
“I know that, and I don’t want to leave her either, but there’s a difference between doing what you want and doing what is right. She would not want to leave Shinj, but she also understood it takes sacrifices to win a war. Sol has no intention of helping Halow. They’re locking their doors. They’re protecting themselves and nobody else. Halow needs Excalibur.”
“Then stay,” Talen suggested.
He knew I couldn’t control the crew without him. Plus, he probably wanted to get rid of me so he’d have Kesh all to himself. That wasn’t happening. Ever. She trusted him. I didn’t. And wouldn’t. I’d never trust a fae again. And with Kesh harboring part of a weapon that could turn the tide of this war, there was no way in all of Faerie’s systems I was leaving her unguarded with the I’m-not-the-Nightshade-but-kind-of-am. Not even to save Halow. But there was a difference between what I wanted and what I needed to do. Kesh could handle him without me.
“Take them both,” Hulia suggested after silently watching the exchange.
Talen turned his careful gaze on her. “Continuing to be this close to a tek ship will greatly weaken Shinj.”
She shrugged and came forward, moving like a snake in the grass. Her dark skin and large, sultry eyes held their own kind of magic. “Kellee can’t pass up the opportunity this ship presents, but he ain’t gonna let you leave without him either. Given how he’s been your jailor for a few hundred years, I figure he has plenty o’ reasons to keep a close eye on you.”
“You don’t trust me?” the fae asked us both.
Hulia didn’t dare answer. She planted a hand on her hip and looked him over. Her double eyelids flickered. Namu were fae slaves, just like saru, but where saru were designed to serve in households, namu were designed as pleasure-givers. She had plenty of reasons not to trust a fae.
“No, I don’t trust you,” I answered. “Never have. Kesh trusted you, and that was good enough for me, but she’s not here.”
Sota hovered in lower to my right. I liked to think he’d back me up. I still had my claws out and the bloodlust running through my veins. Like this, if Talen came at me, I’d fight back. Talen couldn’t sucker-punch a fully aware vakaru.
“And yet you knelt to me?” he asked.
“Because I am vakaru and I was made to kneel to power. But if you fuck me over, I’ll behave exactly like a vakaru and take you down.”
Sota’s motors whirred. Yeah, the drone was on my side. Hulia positioned herself closer too. Three against one.
A dangerous glint sliced through Talen’s gaze. “Do you honestly believe you three would succeed?”
I couldn’t tell from his mild expression whether he was taunting us or genuinely wanted to know. All fae wore that intrigued expression right up until the moment they tore out your throat or clicked their fingers to make you fall in love with them.
We had stuck together this long, but we’d always had Kesh. She was gone, and right outside the window was an opportunity for Talen to escape. He could take Shinj, go back to Valand and Hapters, rally his dark fae and even collect the vakaru spirits, and build himself an unseelie army. Halow was pretty empty, ripe for the taking. Maybe the Nightshade fancied himself a whole system to claim since he’d been kicked out of Faerie? I knew him well enough to know he was thinking about it. But I also knew we’d built something of an alliance over the centuries, albeit with bars between us. And as he claimed not to be the Nightshade anymore, what would be his next move? The Nightshade would take Shinj. We all knew it, but Talen didn’t seem inclined to admit it.
He sighed and turned back to admire the broken warcruiser through the window. “Whatever you think of me, I can’t leave her here.” Lifting a pale hand, he pressed it against the glass. “The humans will kill her.”
“They’ll kill you too.”
“I know.”
He would die for that ship, just so it wouldn’t be alone? Just when I thought I knew where I stood with Talen, he threw me a curveball. How could I leave him?
“We go back to Calicto with both ships,” I said. “You keep the crew subdued during the trip. Shinj can limp alongside us. Once she’s healed, we return the Excalibur crew to Sol or leave them on Calicto. They’ll survive, probably, and maybe they’ll get a taste of what it means to live in Halow. We can show them what they’d be shutting their doors to. I’ll hand Excalibur over to the resistance. Then we’ll take Shinj and go get Kesh.”
“We’re going to Faerie?” Sota bobbed in the air.
I let a small smile lift my lips. “I can’t think of a better use for a warcruiser and the unseelie’s most notorious warchief, can you?”
Talen’s hard mouth ticked into a semblance of a smile. “Are you the warchief, or am I?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“All right, Marshal,” Talen conceded. “We’ll do this your way.”
I retracted my claws, seeing as I wouldn’t need them to gut Talen. “Let’s turn this tek ship around, heal a warcruiser, and go get the Messenger.”
The fae all smelled like warm honey and silk. It was a scent that demanded to be breathed in, another weapon in their arsenal to control and manipulate others. On top of that sweetness, there was the additional lemony scent of magic. It always complemented the light fae, but the dark fae’s magic soured the scents.
Oberon smelled like Valand’s gardens, a strange mix of floral and sweetness with a tart lemony bite that should have been cloying but wasn’t. Eledan—I’d learned since my visit to his human office in Arcon where he’d cut my throat—smelled similar. I would have died that day had Kesh not been there. His scent was one I’d never forget, which was why I stilled now, in this new dream, with Valand’s plaza spread before me and its pyramids crowding around. I smelled the Mad Prince without seeing him.
I’d dreamed of my home every night since going back and waking its ghosts. I dreamed of Oberon clicking his fingers and my people turning to dust, of Kesh’s free laugh when we’d gotten tangled in the trees, and of the vakaru wraiths kneeling to the fae who was no longer the Nightshade. Now, I was dreaming of the moment right before Oberon took everything from me. The king and I stood at the center of the plaza. I would beg him to spare all these vakaru, and he’d kill them anyway.
“Oberon’s wrath,” Eledan said, deliberately keeping in my peripheral vision.
We watched the scene unfold, watched my people turn to dust, and watched a warchief lose his reason for living. The hurt had faded through the centuries, but it had never fully left.
“Beautiful to behold.”
“Get out of my head.” I hadn’t meant to growl the words, to give him the satisfaction of hearing the pain, but Valand’s demise was no beautiful thing.
“Oh, I would.” the Mad Prince smirked. “I no more wish to be here than you delight in seeing me. But I have a message for you…” His image blinked from my side and reappeared in front of me. The royal blue leathers wrapped around a warfae form shimmered in a curiously liquid way. Whatever he looked like beneath this illusion, it wasn’t this image of a warfae in his prime. “A message from the Messenger.” Madness sparked in his blue eyes like long-dead stars in a galaxy. Whatever hole they were keeping him in clearly wasn’t deep or dark enough.
His presence here with a message meant Kesh was alive. Oberon hadn’t executed her. Yet. I didn’t let my relief show. He’d given me a gift in that knowledge. I’d let him speak. “And?”
“We bargained, the Messenger and I. I am to deliver her message to you, but she didn’t say I couldn’t ask for something in return. How much are her words worth to you, vakaru?”
It happened fast. I didn’t need to think about running my claws through his flesh and being done with him. A vakaru’s actions were swifter than tho
ught. I had my claws in him—five in his back and five through his chest—before the wretched warfae registered I’d moved. Of course, none of this was real, so he simply dissolved like sand through my fingers. But I wasn’t done. My senses itched from magic charging behind me. I spun, and with a wide slash, I cut through his coalescing form, scattering him to the winds the same way Oberon had once dispersed my people. Victory sparked, making my heart race. It didn’t last. He shimmered into existence farther away, in the empty plaza, but cutting Eledan had been satisfying nonetheless.
“We can play all night.” Eledan laughed that sickly, smooth laugh. I wanted to choke off the sound. “But Kesh does not have that long.”
Fear stabbed me in the chest. “Why?”
His lips pulled into a half smile. “She is Faerie’s most despised citizen. How long do you think it will be before even my brother’s protection wanes?”
“Oberon is keeping her… safe?”
The thought of her beside the king summoned a vicious anger. It sat bitter and vile on my tongue. I’d worked so hard to free her from him, and so had she. She hadn’t been ready to go back. Arran and Sirius had taken that choice from her, and now Oberon had her all over again. Faerie would sink its poisonous claws in, and I’d lose her, if I hadn’t already. The glass cage, the people we had saved, and everything we’d fought for had been the beginning of something honest, something true and worthy, and now…
Eledan read it all on my face, and that bastard’s smile grew. “There’s only so much my brother can do before he must concede to the will of his people. The Wraithmaker must die.”
The fear sank its barbs in. The more I spoke with him, the more damage his words inflicted. I had to end this now. “Deliver your message, prince.”
“What is it worth?” he purred, like this was a menial game to him, a way to pass the time.
I locked my hands into fists. “If we survive this, I will hunt you to the ends of the known worlds and tear your throat out, even if it’s the last thing I do. Tell me Kesh’s message now and I’ll make your death quick instead of cutting off those pretty immortal pieces of yours one at a time.”
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