“You know him.”
A strange twinge of sympathy made Arden blink. She met Wright’s eyes. “It would be best if you believed he was dead.”
“But he isn’t dead.” Wright’s angry gaze bore into her. “My son is alive, and I want him back.”
“You don’t want what he has become.”
Wright shook his head. “You’re lying. You don’t know my son. He’s stronger than that. His sense of right and wrong is absolute. Darkriver could never twist him.”
Arden was silent for a moment. “There is no more zealous a sinner than a fallen saint.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Your son has a red birthmark across the palm of his left hand.”
“What’s this?” Drake tilted his hat back from his eyes and sat up to look at her.
“Where is he?” Wright demanded.
Arden clenched her fists on her knees. Couldn’t the man see she was being kind? She ground her teeth. “I will repeat. Your son is dead. You do not want what he has become.”
“I’ll be the judge of that!” Wright shouted. “Tell me where the Hatcheries are, tell me where I can find my son.”
“You agreed to do this,” Aniketos warned.
Arden inclined her head. “Fine.” She turned to Wright. “Your son isn’t in the Hatcheries.”
Wright’s gingery brows knit together in confusion and relief. “Darkriver hasn’t turned him into a killer?”
“On the contrary, Mr. Wright. Your son has become the very best of killers. He graduated early from the Hatcheries a year and a half ago. The mark on his left hand earned him his sobriquet, the Left Hand of Death, and the assassin who taught him to kill chose his new name.”
Wright’s pale skin turned a peculiar shade of green. “What did those bastards name him?”
“I named him Jack.”
Wright’s hands curled into fists. “You made him a killer.”
“I saved his life and I’ll take you to him. We need to get him away from Darkriver. He isn’t safe there.”
A vein stood out in Wright’s temple, and he plunged one hand into the interior pocket of his coat. “You’ve done enough.”
A puzzled expression flitted across the Englishman’s face as his hand closed around the object he’d been reaching for. When he withdrew his hand, he was holding a small gold statue of the Buddha that was roughly the size and weight of a pulsegun.
“Looking for this?” Aniketos set the disabled pulsegun on the glass table with a harsh clack. “I promised Arden my protection in exchange for her help, Wright. I will not allow you to make a liar of me.”
“How did you…?” Wright’s fury gave way to confusion.
The Thief loosed a snort of laughter. “Distraction, my good man. You were so busy looking daggers at Drake and Arden that you failed to notice when I relieved you of your weapon and replaced it with an item of similar weight.”
Wright’s gingery brows drew low over his angry eyes.
“Do not glower at me, Sir John. I am a thief, it is in my nature to take things.” Aniketos paused and looked at Drake and Arden. “Ms. Black, shall we fetch your former protégé?”
Arden nodded. “You have a plan?”
“Of course.” Aniketos retrieved the katana and wakizashi from the mantle above the fireplace and offered them to her. “I shall need you to kill me, one last time.”
Chapter Seven
London
Two hundred years, and one week from tomorrow
The newsfeeds were awash with the latest lurid tale. A billionaire found murdered in his Shanghai penthouse. He had been strangled and decapitated. Some of the more enterprising tabloid feeds had even managed to secure footage of the grisly crime scene. The dead man’s body sprawled across thick gray carpet. His head lay beside it, pale blue eyes clouded and cold, bronze skin bloodless.
Arden clicked off the newsfeed on her mobile comm and stepped into the shadowed doorway in the alley behind an unassuming London townhouse. She keyed her code into the pad beside the door. The light beside the keypad switched from red to green and the door unlocked with a click. That was a good sign. Darkriver hadn’t disabled her codes.
She stepped inside, trailing her hand along the doorframe, tracing a miniature version of the twisting pattern that was etched into the doors to Aniketos’ compound in the invisible powder that coated her fingers. The entrance to the forgotten heaven lay at the top of a building, Aniketos had explained, but the exit could be anywhere. Drake and the Thief would walk right out of the penthouse and into Darkriver’s compound.
The door swung shut behind her and she headed for the basement stairs. She descended the stairs, running her hand along the railing, marking her path in an invisible substance that Drake assured her he would be able to follow. She turned a corner and opened a listing wooden door to reveal an elevator platform. She took the elevator down, marking her trail by touch when she pushed the button.
The ride down in the elevator should have been torture. Her heart should have been pounding in her ears, her blood should have been rushing through her veins. But Arden felt strangely calm at the prospect of betraying Darkriver. She felt as though this betrayal had been a long time coming.
She stepped out of the elevator and into the sterile white halls of Darkriver’s London installation.
“Arden.”
Eden’s voice had always been as sweet as poisoned candy. Tonight, Arden thought she heard a bitter edge to the saccharine allure of her mentor’s voice—the slightest hint of murderous intent. She turned to face the smaller woman.
“Eden,” she said, inclining her head.
“You had quite an adventure in Shanghai, didn’t you? Three days locked in with a corpse.”
“No.” Arden smiled. “I didn’t kill him until I’d managed to find a way out past the security shutters.”
“And what did you do in the meantime?”
Arden stretched her lips into a closemouthed smile, but didn’t answer her old mentor.
Eden tilted her blonde head to the side like a bird. She studied Arden through wide blue eyes. Her fair brows knit together for the briefest instant. Arden could tell that her mentor didn’t know what to make of her, that Eden couldn’t read her as well as she used to.
Arden parted her lips to bare her teeth. The expression was as much like a smile as a crocodile was like a garden lizard. “Let’s go get a drink. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“No, thank you,” Eden replied. “There’s a group of hatchlings downstairs and I have paperwork to see to.”
Arden shrugged. “Suit yourself. It’s been a long week. I’ll be in the pub.”
Arden walked away, checking her watch. Three minutes left. The conversation had cost her time. She quickened her step and pushed through the dark-stained walnut door into the wood-paneled room that housed the installation’s in-house pub.
A rogue’s gallery of killers looked up at her from the bar. They sat side-by-side, silent and stern-faced, with their drinks resting lightly in their hands. These killers cared almost as little for human companionship as they did for human life, but they came to the pub to drink because no one—not even an assassin—likes to drink alone.
She smiled and gave a girlish wave before walking to the shadowed edge of the already dark room. She pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Hail the conquering hero,” a masculine voice that hovered somewhere between adolescence and adulthood greeted her from the shadowed corner of the table.
“Hello, Jack. How was the General?”
“Too quick and too easy.” Arden’s protégé spat out his reply. “One shot from the roof of a neighboring building. He didn’t suffer enough to make me happy.”
“They never do.”
“And what have you been up to? Rumor has it you finally went round the bend and sliced your kill up like a loaf of bread.”
“Rumors of my insanity have been greatly exaggerated.”
“I saw the pictur
es, Arden.” The boy leaned forward. At sixteen, his cheeks were still smooth, but his dark eyes had the same hollow shine as those of the killers at the bar. “He was strangled, stabbed and decapitated.”
“Yes,” she agreed with a smile. “But he’ll get over it.”
The boy’s eyes widened and his gloved hands clenched atop the rough wood table. “You have gone mad.”
She checked her watch, and stared her protégé straight in the eye. “No, Jacob, I have not. In one minute and nine seconds, there will be an explosion. If you wish to be free of Darkriver, to lead your own life, go to the west exit of the installation. If you wish to remain, stay where you are.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll go. I’ve traded Darkriver for a new master—one less likely to kill me for perceived failures.”
“You won’t be free, too?”
“I’ve been at this too long, kid. My choices are limited—do or die. And the Thief tells me that there is nothing worth dying for.”
“The Thief?”
“The man I killed. The man your father hired to get you back. The man who owns my loyalty and my life.”
“Arden, you aren’t making any sense. Would you—”
The room shook. The lights went out.
“Go!” she hissed. “Go, and I’ll be right behind you.”
A dozen killers drew their weapons and streamed out of the pub. Arden went with them. The hall outside was dark and smoky. It smelled of sulfur and ash. Something moved in the dark, and one of her fellows ran toward it. He barely screamed before he was dragged around the corner and into the darkness.
A puff of smoke. The wet squish of tearing flesh. The hollow pop of bone being ripped from joint. The crowd of killers slithered away, leaving Arden alone in the dark hall.
She took a tentative step forward. A scaly hand wrapped around her ankle, yanking her from her feet and dragging her around the corner into a mire of smoke and blood.
“Arden!” Jack screamed.
She felt herself suspended upside down. She opened her eyes and they watered from the sulfur smell of smoke. A citrine-yellow eye the size of her palm stared back.
“Scream for me, Arden,” the thing said. Funny how it had Tiburon Drake’s voice.
She screamed. She heard the same squishy sound of ripping flesh and tilted her head back in time to see a set of wickedly curved claws tearing into the body of the man who had gone charging into the hall.
Drake jostled her again, and she screamed again, fainter this time, as though the strength were draining out of her. “Aaaaahhh.”
“Good girl.” The grip on her ankle relaxed, and she barely managed to right herself before she hit the ground.
“Arden!” Jack came barreling round the corner. The temperature in the hallway dropped by twenty degrees.
“Don’t strike! You were supposed to go to the west exit,” she snapped.
Her protégé stopped in his tracks as he took in Arden crouched on the ground before a yellow-eyed creature wreathed in smoke with a dismembered body at her feet. His face still showed the expressionless mask she had taught him to hold, but the hunch of his shoulders conveyed his confusion.
“What?”
“It’s too late,” Drake hissed. The yellow eye turned to Jack. “Scream if you know what’s good for you, boy.”
Arden’s protégé gave a half-hearted scream. “Egads!”
She shook her head. The kid had never excelled at falsifying expressions of emotion. Arden blamed her training of him. Eden had once told her, “A teacher’s mistakes will always return to haunt her.” And once again, Arden’s mentor had been correct.
Drake tore into the body on the ground with those wicked claws. Squish! Splech! Rip! It was starting to look like hamburger meat with tiny shreds of cloth and bone mixed in. Arden swallowed her bile. Drake licked his claws.
“By the way,” she whispered. “I’m really sorry about…”
“About kicking me in the head and burning away half of my face?”
“Yeah. That. Let’s let bygones be bygones. I’ll meet you at the rendezvous point.”
“Take the boy with you. He’ll have to get to the exit via a different route. Can’t have him running around when people think he’s dead.”
Arden turned to Jack. “Come on.”
They took off running. White halls twisted into identical white halls. Bodies and smoke and the stench of sulfur marked the route that Drake had taken.
“About your friend,” Jack began.
Having met Sir John Wright, she knew where that oh-so-precise accent had come from. Despite all her efforts to teach Jack a less distinctive mode of speech, she had never been able to cure her protégé of it. He kept it even now, breathless and running full-tilt through blood-spattered halls.
“He’s not my friend,” Arden gasped.
“He’s a giant, fire-breathing lizard.”
“You noticed.”
“Would you be so kind as to explain?”
“Sure, as soon as you explain how you can drain heat from the air and move things just by thinking about it.”
“You don’t know.”
“You got it. Left here. There’s an emergency stair on the other side of this lab.”
They barreled through a white door, across a long, narrow white room, toward an identical white door at the opposite end.
“That’s far enough.” A dart whizzed by Arden’s ear and embedded itself in the wall behind her.
Arden whirled to face their attacker. Eden stood in the doorway behind them, her pale curls matted against her head, her round pink cheeks streaked with smoke. She looked like a Dresden doll that had been caught in a house fire.
“Go, Jack. There’s a heliplane in the square outside.” Arden issued the order without a second thought as she drew the pistol holstered on her hip and fired a shot at her former mentor.
Eden was already moving. Arden’s bullet buried itself in the wall.
The temperature in the room dropped and Arden whirled to yell at Jack, “I said, go!”
The boy obeyed out of reflex, darting through the door and halfway up the stairs before he even realized he had left the room.
She whirled back around to face Eden, but it was too late. The smaller woman had already launched another poison-tipped dart in her direction. No time to dodge, Arden swatted at the thing, hoping to turn its path before the needle could pierce her skin.
Her hand connected. The dart bobbled in its course and skittered into the wall before bouncing off. Arden leveled her gun for another shot. Her vision blurred. She squeezed the trigger but the shot went wide.
Her blood went cold in her veins. She raised her left hand and spied a pinprick of blood welling up from her index finger. Damn.
She wavered. She heard footsteps on the stairs behind her. She turned to yell at Jack again, but Aniketos was there instead. He was dressed in black, his ancient eyes alight with fury.
She raised her hand to show him the blood, to tell him she was a lost cause. She tried to whisper, “Go,” but she couldn’t make her mouth form the words. The world was rapidly shrinking around her. Her vision went black at the edges.
How strange that everything should get so small so soon after she had learned that the world was wider than her wildest imaginings. Telekinetics, dragons and immortals. Old gods and glass heavens. What wonders might she discover if only she had more time? She couldn’t see her watch, but she knew her time was up.
She had committed many ignoble acts to save her own life. How fitting that her one noble deed would be the thing to end it. She had been afraid of death, but now that it was here…she let her body relax and exhaled.
Aniketos caught Arden’s body as she fell and he laid her gently on the ground. Her breathing was faint. Her pulse was slow and sluggish in her wrist. He turned her hand over. A single drop of blood clung to her index finger—a pinprick of poison had killed her.
He licked the drop away and sucked the tiny w
ound, though he knew it was too late to draw out the poison.
“Didn’t she kill you?” A voice as sweet as sugar interrupted his grief.
He looked up to see a pale woman with flat blonde hair and cold blue eyes. She was dressed in a black stealthsuit, much as Arden had been. There was a dartgun in her hand.
He let Arden’s hand fall to the floor and stood to confront his lover’s killer.
The blonde launched a dart into his chest. He looked down at the thing, plucked it from his body and continued his advance.
“You’re dead,” the woman told him. “You have less than thirty seconds.”
“I have eternity,” he replied. Even as Aniketos spoke the words, he saw his life stretch out before him. Long and empty. He had filled his life with wanting and taking, but now the person he wanted most was forever beyond his reach.
He grabbed the blonde by her hair and shoved the dart into her throat. He caught the dartgun when it fell from her nerveless hands and emptied the remaining three cylinders into her neck and face. Her body shook and a fine film of foam built up at the corners of her mouth. Her blue eyes rolled back in her head and he let her body fall to the ground.
He returned to Arden’s fallen form. He cradled her head. He kissed her cooling lips. He breathed his breath into her and her unresponsive lungs let it leak right back out.
The room was filling with smoke. If he had needed to breathe, he would have suffocated, but Aniketos was beyond such human frailties. He stayed with her body, savoring the last warmth of her skin, smoothing the dark strands of her short hair away from her pale face.
He had lived eons, minutes meant nothing to him. But minutes had been life for her, time ticking away from a finite span of years. He had not expected the end to come so soon. He’d not had enough of her. He never would.
It might have been seconds or hours before Drake walked into the room. The one-eyed man was naked, his long, golden body smudged with smoke and blood. There was blood on his hands up to the elbow, and dried blood flaking away from the corners of his mouth.
“That was fun,” he mused, swinging the door shut behind him.
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