Path of the Horseman

by Amy Braun

  “What changed your mind?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I just had the incredible idea that I could use more people around here, since yours are too stuck-up to use their brains.”

  I froze. “You want to capture the humans at the haven?”

  Kade rolled his eyes. “It’s not kidnapping if half of them want to go. Besides, you really think they stand a chance out there in the desert?”

  “It should be their choice.”

  “Please,” Kade scoffed. “Humans have been making the wrong choices since they were dropped here. That’s why they sent us up in the first place.”

  I looked at the sad, hungry servers staring at us.

  “I’m guessing the Emperor’s leftovers don’t go to his subjects,” I muttered.

  Kade smiled at me like I was an impatient child. “What’s the point of having a personal chef if he doesn’t cook exclusively for you?”

  Kade snapped his fingers. Almost instantly, a pretty young brunette scurried to Kade’s side with a bottle of Glenlivet, bending at the waist to pour him another long drink. She was wearing the shortest black skirt I’d ever seen, and her tank top was cut so low I could almost see her navel. Kade stared at her with dark, greedy eyes, rubbing his hand along her back and moving lower.

  “How can you be like this?”

  Kade picked up his full glass of whiskey and sipped it, still stroking the girl’s ass.

  “Because I’m better than them. We all are.” His dark eyes went between my brother and me. “We all have theories about why we’re stuck on this piece of shit. Mine is that we were left to tend the flock. Humans can’t rule themselves. If someone strong takes them over, they play along for a while, then they overthrow that leader and wind up slaughtering themselves for another one. They can only be controlled by something that isn’t human. We fit the bill, brothers.”

  “You sound like Ciaran,” Simon pointed out tentatively.

  Kade shot him a harsh glance, and Simon went back to eating. “The difference between me and that asswipe is that I don’t need to steal souls to rule. These people come to me, and I provide for them. I worked my ass off to clean out this city of the dead, so I deserve to be praised. They treated me like a god when I saved their sorry lives, so why shouldn’t I act like one?” He locked eyes with me. I watched his eyes turn blacker than the deepest voids in space. “That’s how you two should be acting. You saved that group of humans, and what did they do? Two of them ditched to serve under me, and the other two would kill you if they had the chance. And how’d you respond, Avery? Like a fucking kicked dog. You tucked tail and ran when you should’ve torn their fucking throats out.”

  Power rolled in me. I clenched my fists around the steak knife and fork in my hand. “How is that supposed to help anything? How is that supposed to make the Second Coming–”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Kade erupted, shoving the girl away so hard that she tripped. “Enough with the Second Coming bullshit! I am so goddamn tired of you always falling back on that like it’ll make a fucking difference!”

  Kade rose from his chair, placing both hands on the table. Simon scooted back in his seat. The guards and servers moved as far away as they could.

  “You’re hoping that Paradise is just around the bend, that God and his angels will cast some kind of beacon and show you the new breed of humans living in some fucking cave. That isn’t going to happen, brother. We killed the human race. We’re the ones who have to look after this newly fucked up world. We’re goddamn royalty. Start acting like it.”

  I stood up, never breaking eye contact with Kade.

  “No,” I told him flatly. “I’m not going to abuse my power. I’m not going to become a monster.”

  Kade grinned maliciously, though his eyes were filled with murder. “Newsflash, Pest. You already are.”

  I balled my fists at my side. “Yeah, and my powers are fading. Soon I won’t have any. None of us will. Know what’s going to happen then, Kade? All these humans you’ve been stepping on will remember their history lessons. You’ll just be one more asshole they want to kick off the throne.”

  I knew it was coming, but Kade’s attack still hurt. The blast of blood-red fire smacked me full in the chest and knocked me onto the ground. Simon’s chair clattered and a woman screamed. No one moved to help me, even as I used my smoke to swat away Kade’s fire. My chest was raw and blistered, some of the burns spreading to my neck and chin. I had just gotten the fire out when Kade stormed over to me and hauled me up by the scruff of my neck. I grabbed his arms and tried to force a disease into him, but he punched me in the side of the head and screwed up my focus. Kade hit me twice more before he lifted me up and slammed me onto the top of a table. It cracked beneath my weight, leaving me bruised and dazed. Kade whirled around and looked at the people who’d watched me get my ass kicked.

  “Anyone else think they’d be able to take me off the throne?”

  No one said a word. They shrank back, wanting to run. Kade lifted his hand. Bloody smoke twisted out of his skin and shot like arrows into the chests of each human. They screamed as one, dropping to their knees or curling into fetal positions. They were lost in fear.

  As the humans screamed, Kade turned back to me. He reached down, grabbing a fistful of my hair and jerking my head up to meet his eyes.

  “Brother or no brother, if you ever disrespect me like that again, I’ll cut your little blonde into pieces and feed her to you.”

  Kade jabbed me in the face, breaking my nose in one hit. He dropped me in the pile of splintered wood, storming off. I rolled onto my side and clutched my nose, seeing Kade grab the young brunette out of the corner of my eye. She shrieked and cried, but he carried her toward the backroom. My heart sank, but I wouldn’t be able to stop him. It was rare for Kade to get this angry, but when he did, he was an absolute beast. In his state of anger, I had no doubt that Kade would carry out his threat. I hated myself, but the poor girl was one more person I wouldn’t be able to save.

  Getting to my feet with a sore grunt and a dizzy head, I turned around until I found the direction of the door. Once the world stopped spinning, I made my way toward it. Nobody stopped me. I didn’t know where I was going to go. My first instinct was to see Maddy. After what Kade had threatened to do, I needed to see her and know that she was all right. Even if she did try to hit me with a table again.

  “Avery!”

  I stopped and turned around, looking back to see Simon running out of the restaurant door to catch up to me. He stopped in front of me, concern filling his graphite eyes. At least I hoped it was concern. I was still trying to see straight, readjust my nose, all while working through the doubt that Simon had forgiven me for attacking him earlier.

  Then he asked, “Are you okay?”

  I glanced at him, then wiped blood from my lip and felt the crookedness of my nose. It was bent almost in half the wrong way. I sighed. “Hang on.”

  I gave my nose one sharp twist in the right direction. Pain spiked through my head. “Ah, fuck.” I gingerly touched the edges of my nose. It seemed like it was in the right place, and the pain was dulling to a throb.

  “There,” I said. “All better.”

  Simon laughed uncomfortably, then cleared his throat. “Look, I’m sorry. About all the shit I said before.”

  Surprised, I waited for him to continue.

  “I get what you’re trying to do,” he went on. “I do. It took me a while, but I get that your heart is in the right place.” He held his breath. “But that doesn’t make it safe for us to be around humans.”

  “So, what then? We leave them to be humiliated and beaten and raped by Kade?”

  “No,” my brother insisted. “No, of course not. If we can do something to help, we should try. But there isn’t going to be any safety at this haven, Avery. I can feel it.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  Simon tried to find a point to argue. He couldn’t.

  “I can’t let this go, Simon. All I
could think about after that last day was how many people were dead because of me. Back then, I thought there was nothing I could do to bring them back.” I exhaled, the burns on my chest swelling painfully. “But then we found some of them alive. They were about to die, and…” I looked at the ground. “I couldn’t let it happen again. Not when I had seen it a million times before.”

  I could feel Simon watching me, but I forgot about him. My mind was a tangled mess of memories. Watching my Plague spread from victim to victim. Seeing humans eat garbage to feed themselves. Having to step over charred bodies in a burning city. Listening to families shout and shake their dead loved ones, pleading for them to wake up.

  I wish I knew why the Bosses Upstairs had left us in human bodies. If we were truly weapons of destruction, we shouldn’t have to feel the pain of what we’d done. It wasn’t fair. Not a fucking molecule of it.

  “The most we can do now it watch out for them,” Simon finally said. “Be sure that Kade doesn’t get his claws in too deep. He was pretty pissed at you for chewing him out.” A ghost of a smile traced his lips. “I hope you don’t get mad at me for saying this, but it was pretty cool to see.”

  I tried to laugh. It was mostly a snort. “Yeah. I’m sure he’s just going to piss all that anger away and laugh about it in the morning.”

  Simon frowned. “Look, I know I’m doing a shitty job of it, but I’m trying to cheer you up, Ave.”

  “I know. Sorry, I’m just tired. We’ll deal with it tomorrow, okay?”

  Simon nodded stiffly. I took it as a sign that whatever had happened between us earlier was in the past. That was a good thing, especially since my list of enemies was starting to include my friends.

  Chapter 15

  After leaving Simon, I meandered to the guest floors and tried every door until I found one that was unlocked. I stumbled through the darkness, bumping into furniture as I healed myself. This room had clothes lying in piles on the floor, so I picked some of them up and put them on. They weren’t clean, but they weren’t in pieces and covered in blood. I took off my belt and weapons, dropped them by the bed, and collapsed on top of it. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and fell asleep.

  A wailing screech woke me two hours later.

  I shot out of bed, thinking the noise was someone’s truly atrocious scream. As I grabbed my machete and belt from the floor and buckled them on, I realized it wasn’t a human screaming. It was the fire alarm.

  I raced for the door and yanked it open, the sprinklers overhead splashing me with cold water. I blinked it out of my eyes and ran for the exits. I didn’t know where Simon was staying, but I thought he would make it out safely. I started to think the same of Maddy and Josh, then stopped.

  Kade used pyrokinesis to hurt people. What if he went to see Maddy and Josh, and used his fire to interrogate them? What if it got out of control, and he burned them because I’d made him angry? I flashed back to the image of Maddy in pain gifted to me by my sadistic brother, and went up the stairs instead of down.

  The room I’d slept in wasn’t far from the suite where the two humans were being held, so it wasn’t long before I started smelling smoke. I reached the top of the stairs and wrenched the door open.

  Heat billowed in front of me, hungry orange flames licking the open doors of the suite. The room where Maddy was being held.

  Heart palpitating wildly, I ran through the hall to the open door. The fire was consuming the whole room, smoke puffing out along the roof. The fire alarm screamed around me. The heat made my eyes water, and I couldn’t see anything. No bodies, no shadows, nothing.

  “Josh!” I shouted against the sounds of creaking wood and buckling furniture. “Maddy! Maddy!”

  There was no answer.

  I stepped back, the smoke in the air not the only thing that was making it hard to breathe. What the hell had happened?

  It didn’t matter. I had to go in there. I had to save her.

  My heel knocked against a body. I jumped and whirled around. I’d been so caught up in thinking about the people inside the suite that I didn’t think about the guards posted outside. All four of them were slumped on the ground. I checked their pulses. They were breathing, and they had bruises on their faces or cuts on their heads.

  Like they’d been in a fight. Or hit by an angry girl wielding a side table.

  I would have smiled, but if Maddy and Josh had escaped and set Kade’s prison suite on fire, he would know by now. And he would be even angrier with them than he was with me.

  There was no time to put out the fire, so I looked at the guard I was kneeling by and slapped him across the face. He groaned, so I slapped him again. The human blinked and looked at me, scrambling back.

  “Get your friends out of here,” I ordered.

  I didn’t ask what happened. It seemed pretty obvious that he’d been tricked, and there was no way he’d know where Maddy and Josh had gone. But I had a good idea.

  Leaving the guard behind to help his friends, I ran for the stairs. It was too dangerous to take the pulley system, but at least the body I was trapped in could handle a little extra endurance. I practically flew down the stairs, almost tripping over my own feet to get to the bottom of the hotel.

  I finally made it down, and almost kicked the doors off the hinges to get outside. I stumbled out toward the front entrance, stopping when I saw hundreds of humans huddling together in the dark. No one seemed to notice me, all of them looking up at the fire flickering out of the window near the top of the guest tower.

  “I don’t give a fuck! Get back up there and put it out!”

  Kade’s voice made me jump. I turned back and looked in the direction of the wall, where Kade was standing and shouting at his Vermilions. A group of them hesitated, but decided to follow their Emperor’s directions. Kade turned his attention to another group of soldiers.

  “You! Bring that piece of shit over here!”

  My heart skipped a beat. A pair of Vermilions were dragging someone over to Kade. I started walking in their direction, stopping when I saw that the figure was masculine. They shoved him onto his knees in front of Kade, holding him there by his shoulders.

  “Where’s the other one?” demanded my brother. “That blonde bitch?”

  “She escaped, sir. We think she’s headed for the Palazzo. We have men chasing her now. It won’t be long before they catch her.”

  Not good. I started backing away, knowing Maddy would have to go through the hotel to get to the Palazzo without running onto the strait.

  I jogged back into the shadows of the Venetian’s pillars when I heard the first thwack of fist hitting flesh. I stopped and looked at Josh, whose head was slumped against his shoulder. Kade pulled his hand back and punched him in the cheek, rocking his head to the other side.

  “Where were you going?” he shouted.

  Josh didn’t answer, and was punched again for his trouble.

  “Tell me where you were going!”

  The human said nothing. I didn’t like the guy any more than he liked me, but I respected him for standing up to my brother.

  Kade was less than patient. He kicked Josh in the chest, right under his throat. Josh buckled forward and roared in pain. A person would only cry out like that if their collarbone had been broken.

  I couldn’t stand by and watch Kade torture him any longer. I took a step forward, at the same moment my brother said, “I don’t have time to deal with him. Take him to the basement, then look for the girl. That’ll get the fucker talking.”