by Anna Windsor
“Yer last triad fared poorly.” Mother Keara let fire flash along her skin to punctuate her statement. “What makes you think I’ll waste another fire adept on yer questionable skills?”
Pain hotter than any flame lanced Bela’s very soul. She swayed on her feet but somehow managed not to close her eyes or let loose with a heart-deep scream.
Unfair words. Bald and awful. But true. Even after three years, the loss still cut so brutally Bela thought she’d die from the sharpness. A Sibyl without her triad was orphaned by the universe itself, severed from the spirit of life and fighting and battle. Months spent in meditation and retraining at Motherhouse Russia melted into nothing, and all Bela could think about was the first time she’d come here searching for a good fighting match.
Nori’s smile had been so bright, and her fiery power had surged through Bela, joining Bela’s earth energy so completely. Bela ached at the memory as if she were bleeding to death inside—and she almost wished she could will herself to do just that, here, now, to atone for whatever shortcomings had led to the deaths of her original triad sisters.
What kind of mortar loses her pestle and broom?
And what kind of monster uses that pain to gain advantage in an argument?
Bela glared at Mother Keara, who glared right back.
Even though Bela had expected a challenge, her rehearsed defenses caught like dry bread in her throat.
I fought for Nori and Devin.…
I’ll tear off my own arms before I lose another triad sister.…
Lame.
Completely inadequate.
Mother Keara was honest. Merciless, but telling the truth. How could Bela argue with that? But Mother or no, mean was mean, and Bela wasn’t about to be out-nastied by some sawed-off flamethrower. She squeezed both hands into fists. “A lot of triads lost Sibyls when we kicked the Legion’s ass. You suffer through those damned remembrances just like I do—so why are you being such a bitch?”
Fire crackled in the air over Mother Keara’s head and singed Bela’s cheeks, but Bela didn’t move an inch. So much for her eyebrows. Who needed eyebrows anyway? They’d grow back fast enough.
Without breaking eye contact with Bela, Mother Keara gestured to the adepts in the stone chamber. The younger women immediately broke ranks and filed out of the arched wooden doorway, trailing smoke behind them as they returned to the upper reaches of the castle.
The door once more swung shut, and an unusual chill grabbed the quiet space.
Mother Keara’s smoke faded to a light fog. She faced Bela with a calculation and coolness Bela never expected from any fire Sibyl, even a Mother. “Yer air Sibyl, Devin, went down in battle. For that, I won’t be faultin’ you. But Nori was murdered. You let her down.”
The ground beneath Bela’s feet trembled as a burst of her own dangerous elemental energy escaped. She couldn’t hold back the quake of earth power and she didn’t want to, even if she tore open a canyon beneath Motherhouse Ireland and the whole damned castle crashed all the way to the planet’s molten core.
Feeling like she could breathe fire herself, Bela leaned down until her face was only inches from Mother Keara’s wrinkled cheeks and angry green eyes. “You think I don’t live with Nori’s death every second of my life, old woman? You think I don’t miss Devin, too—that I don’t know my triad is dead because of me?”
Mother Keara’s lips pulled back in a snarl, and Bela matched it. She met Mother Keara’s explosion of fire energy with a crushing wave of earth energy. Growling like the Russian gray wolves that roamed the halls and forests of Motherhouse Russia, they locked in combat, earth to fire, fire to earth, energy broiling between them, shaking the air itself.
Bela’s fingers twitched above her sword hilt. She wanted to draw the serrated blade and beat the stone wall over Mother Keara’s head until sparks flew, until the stones broke open and turned to dust.
I’m an earth Sibyl.
All the months in silence, trying to relearn control despite the pain and grief and loss—did that effort matter?
Damnit!
She couldn’t turn loose her temper—it was wrong. Dangerous. But that’s exactly what she was doing. If Mother Keara’s energy hadn’t been battling Bela’s earth power, Bela really would be tearing a hole the size of New York in the ground beneath them.
“You’re weak.” Mother Keara’s eyes gleamed like green fire as her words knifed through the radiating elemental energy. “Draw yer sword. Give me the pleasure of riddin’ the world of an unworthy Sibyl.”
Bela kept a wall of earth power plastered against the orange sheet of flames spilling off Mother Keara. Her hand moved outside her own bidding, ripping her serrated blade free of its leather guard and raising the blade so close to Mother Keara’s nose she might have drawn blood.
Control.
What was that?
Who cared anyway?
Motherhouse Ireland started to shake with the earth beneath it.
Three years of trying to move on from her losses, and not a day of it mattered. She’d never get over them. Mother Keara was right. To hell with this. She had no chance of beating a Mother in a sword fight—especially not this Mother—but Bela really, really didn’t give a shit.
“For Nori, then,” Bela said through her teeth, hearing her Bronx accent surge over the neutral inflection her mother had taught her. “She never liked your scrawny ass anyway.”
Mother Keara stepped back, drew her hand-and-a-half sword in a fluid movement so fast Bela wondered if she imagined it—and the old woman started to laugh.
At the same second, a blazing wall of heat slammed into Bela, singed off a half inch of her hair, and smashed her against the chamber’s rock wall. Her sword went clattering across the stone floor. Pain exploded through her shoulders and back. She tried to swear but only wheezed as the blow bashed all the air out of her lungs. The communications chamber faded from view, and bright lights flashed in the corners of her eyes.
She couldn’t hear a thing but laughter.
She couldn’t do a thing but wait for Mother Keara’s sword to take her head or the old woman’s fire to burn her into nothingness.
A moment of agony, and all the hurting would be over.
Heat bore down on her. Her leathers had to be melting. Any second her skin would dissolve.
“You want to kill me.” Mother Keara’s words slid into Bela’s ear as if she were standing over her, bending down, whispering into her very consciousness. The tip of a sword pressed into Bela’s chest through a hole in her jumpsuit, hot metal branding the skin between her ribs. “But you didn’t even shield against my fire, because you’d rather die than live another minute without yer triad.”
“Yes!” Tears streamed down Bela’s cheeks. She struck out blindly with her fist, hitting nothing but air. “So kill me, you hateful old bitch!”
The heat torturing her entire body evaporated like steam on a griddle. Gone. Along with the fiery kiss of metal on her flesh. Cold air rushed over Bela, jarring her back to full awareness.
In the next instant, Mother Keara had sheathed her sword, grabbed the front of Bela’s leather bodysuit—which was intact despite a few smoldering holes—and lifted her to her feet like she weighed nothing at all.
“You underestimate yer own heart, child.” Mother Keara’s green eyes remained bright, but now Bela saw nothing but kindness and approval in the stern gaze. “Did yer own Mothers never teach you how strong you are?”
When Bela just stood there mute and trembling from the force of her remnant fury and despair, Mother Keara sighed. “They get distracted. As do we all, I suppose. You weren’t Motherhouse-born, were you?”
Bela shook her head. “My mother was Russian, born and raised in the Motherhouse, but my father was from New York City. We were living in the Bronx when my talent manifested.”
“So you boarded during the week, yes?”
Bela nodded. “Then I worked with my triad in the Bronx until—”
Until I lost e
verything.
Mother Keara seemed to ignore the catch in Bela’s voice. “We have our share of boarders.” The old woman glanced upward toward the castle. “They don’t get as much attention as those born to our care or given over to us completely.”
Bela chose not to comment. That was an old anger and, relatively speaking, a small one in her life now.
Her silence drew a second sigh from Mother Keara. “I miss Nori, too. I miss all the fire Sibyls who lost their lives fightin’ those Legion bastards.” The old woman seemed to grow smaller as she spoke, and Bela actually had an urge to piss her off just to ease her obvious pain. “Our numbers are still low, but we have a few adepts ready for consideration. I’ll arrange for quarters and provisions. You can begin attendin’ battle trainin’ tomorrow and—”
“No, thanks.” The words burst out of Bela’s mouth before she had a chance to consider them.
Damn, damn, damn!
Was she out of her stupid mind?
She had known this would be the hardest part of what she came here to do, and she had just blurted it out instead of working her way up to it.
A thin column of smoke rose from Mother Keara’s shoulders. The chamber heated up again as the old woman once more grew wary—and looked freshly angry. “You’re not plannin’ to live with us until you determine which girl makes the best match with yer energies?”
Bela swallowed despite her dry throat. When she trusted herself not to sound like an idiot, she said, “I know which fire Sibyl I want.”
This time it was Mother Keara who remained silent.
Even though Bela’s earth energy had gone still as she calmed down, an earthquake rattled in her belly.
Knock it off. Bela realized the voice in her head sounded like a blend of her dead fighting sisters. You’ve seen more battles than some of the Mothers.
Mother Keara was staring at her like she might be judging the temperature necessary to roast her for breakfast.
Suck it up! screamed the ghost voices of Nori and Devin.
“I claim the only fire Sibyl here who knows as much pain as I do,” Bela shouted, just to be louder than her hallucinations. “I claim Camille Fitzgerald.”
Thicker smoke rolled off Mother Keara, a startled wave of it, and Bela knew she had shocked the old woman. It took Mother Keara a full minute to recover enough to growl, “No. She’s not stable. And she’s not reliable in battle.”
“I don’t care.” Bela’s anger came flowing back, and the ground shook for a few seconds until she got herself under enough control to add, “Camille lost her triad just like I did, to murder and in battle. We’ll have grief as a starting point, and we can help each other heal.”
Mother Keara kept up her intense scrutiny, but she obviously hadn’t considered that reality until Bela brought it up.
Point for me. Bela was still shaking, but she almost gave a victory shout—way too prematurely.
After a time, Mother Keara said, “Camille’s been locked away here since she lost her triad. No visitors, no datin’, no socializin’—just trainin’, and too much work inside her own head.” Her tone grew more reflective. “Much as you were doin’ at Motherhouse Russia … but Camille might refuse you.”
Bela folded her arms. “She’s a Sibyl. Some part of her heart wants to fight, just like mine. Stop dicking with me and let me talk to her. If she says no, I’ll back off—for a little while.”
Another few seconds of silence passed between them, during which Mother Keara’s fire energy built, and built, and built. Her stare burned into Bela, and Bela could almost taste flames and soot.
Could death by fire be slow and torturous?
Probably.
Would a Mother really bake a fully trained Sibyl on the spot, just for being a disrespectful asshole?
Possibly.
Bela kept her arms folded and her eyes narrowed. No way was she backing down.
You’re nuts, whispered the ghosts in her head.
Without warning, Mother Keara’s fire energy ebbed. “You have a problem with rules. I can see that. If you never do what you’re told, if you never take the calm, easy roads through the world, it’s no wonder those old hens in Russia don’t give you the time of day.” She let out a breath laced with smoke and sparks. “I suppose next you’ll be going to Greece and asking Dionysia Allard to be yer air Sibyl. She’d as soon blow you to Athens as look at you, since you let her sister die.”
Bela didn’t flinch, at least not on the outside. “You think I’m scared of a little wind? Damn straight I’m going after Dio, because I owe Devin that much. It’s the only amends I’ll ever be able to make, if I can convince Dio to fight—and I’m not stopping there.” She held out her right forearm and jabbed a finger at the subtle, wavy lines connecting the tattoos of mortar, pestle, and broom—the lines that signified the recent reemergence of the fourth and perhaps most dangerous type of Sibyl, those who controlled the powerful element of water. “I’m going to Kérkira to get Andy Myles. We’ll be the first fighting quad in twelve centuries.”
The expression on Mother Keara’s face shifted from intrigue to ridicule to stunned vacancy. Bela expected the old woman to argue, but she stayed quiet instead.
That was probably bad.
The silence got longer and wider. It lasted so long that Bela wanted to sing or scream or throw a punch—anything to smash the motionless, heavy quiet.
At last, Mother Keara averted her eyes and seemed to be studying a point on the wall over Bela’s left shoulder.
“You are strong, child,” the old woman said, as if to affirm her previous judgment. “That I won’t be denyin’, to you or to myself.” She brought her green eyes back to Bela’s, and her voice dropped to a rough whisper. “But now I’m speakin’ a darker truth. You are also insane.”
(2)
August, three years after the fall of the Legion
Duncan Sharp gripped his Glock and edged toward a darkened brick corner of the Tobacco Warehouse in DUMBO—Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Over his head, vehicles whizzed across the old suspension bridge connecting lower Manhattan with Brooklyn. The bass rumble of suspended subway cars blocked the rush of blood in his ears. The smoke-gray twilight weighed against his shoulders and face, cool and heavy at the same time. The East River slapped at its banks, but from Duncan’s vantage point at the edge of the shell of the warehouse, his world went dead quiet.
His focus narrowed to the few yards of shore and concrete and brick making up this edge of Empire–Fulton Ferry State Park.
I’m coming for you, John.
Duncan’s back scraped against rough, aged brick as he inched toward the building’s edge. Three intact walls. One concrete floor.
No place to hide, John.
Duncan had tossed his jacket near Central Park. His overshirt had been pitched on one of the Manhattan Bridge’s pedestrian walkways. His badge hung around his neck, resting against his sweat-soaked T-shirt. His jeans were just as wet, and his heart was still punching his ribs. It had been one hell of a chase, on foot, across parts of two boroughs, but it would end here, now.
Taking down a buddy was the worst thing any cop ever faced, but Duncan Sharp had been a homicide detective for four years, a street cop before that, and a soldier for the eight years prior to hiring on with the NYPD. He could do this. He would do this. No request for backup. No courtesy call to the Eighty-fourth Precinct or the park police. If John Cole died tonight, it would be Duncan’s bullet that killed him.
It was the least he could do for the son of a bitch who had been his best friend since he was seven years old.
For one long gut-kicking moment, Duncan remembered being a grubby scrub-kneed kid in rural Georgia, playing hide-and-seek with John Cole in his grandfather’s endless cornfields. Fun. Innocence. Freedom.
All gone now, wasn’t it?
Here in New York City, the time for games was long gone. Five women had been murdered, a bloody trail almost six years in the making. Duncan had found John Cole�
�s latest squeeze, the heiress Katrina Alsace Drake, in pieces in her penthouse apartment. And he had found Cole beating it out the window and down the fire escape holding on to some weird, curved dagger. No way Duncan could risk a shot into the crowded streets, so he had kept visual contact and humped it across miles of city streets—and the bridge.
To the psychotic bastard he had last spoken to on the slopes of the Hindu Kush near Kabul, Duncan said, “Can’t hide, sinner.”
It was a line from an old gospel song, from the music that formed the soundtrack of their childhood, before the Army at eighteen years old, and the war, and everything that had gone so unbelievably wrong in Afghanistan.
“I’m not being chased, Duncan.” Cole’s desperate voice echoed through the warehouse shell. The sound of it made Duncan’s insides tighten. “I haven’t been running from you. Damn it, don’t you get it? I’m doing the chasing—of the creatures who slaughtered Katrina. Get out of here before they use you against me.”
“Bullshit.” Duncan reached the corner and tensed for action. “Hit the concrete, hands over your head.”
Cole spoke again, closer now, maybe on the other side of the bricks from Duncan. “I can give you contacts at the Pentagon. They’ll explain. Water slows them down, but not for long. Get out of here.”
Duncan swore to himself and tightened his grip on the Glock.
Fuck. He didn’t want to do this.
“Don’t make me shoot you, John.”
Please.
Duncan pivoted and swept around the corner of the building weapon first, moving from grass to the warehouse’s concrete floor—and came face-to-face with John Cole.
Cole eyed Duncan, then the gun.
He got down on one knee, arms over his head. “Christ, Duncan. You never stop, do you?”
Cole still had hold of that curved dagger. Duncan thought it might be Roman. It looked old as hell, but lights from the Manhattan skyline played off the polished blade.
No blood.
Must have wiped it off while he was running.