THE EQUINOX STONE (Knights of Manus Sancti Book 2)

by Bryn Donovan

  “Valentina, angel, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  His raw emotion pierced through her own fear. She kneeled to face him, laying a trembling palm on his cheek. “It’s not your fault.” How could it be?

  Still, he looked at her as though she were a merciless judge. “One of them hit me in the head from behind.” His voice cracked. “They must’ve been waiting by the car, behind the tree. I didn’t see them—I was watching the police cars. I’m so sorry.”

  Blurred memories flickered through her mind. She’d seen him fall to the ground. Strong arms had grabbed her from behind. A sharp pain in her arm… “They injected me.”

  “Are you hurt? Did they—”

  “I’m not hurt,” Val said quickly.

  “I’m so sorry—”

  “You have to calm your thoughts,” she begged, her voice tight. “Your emotions on top of mine, I can’t take it.”

  A shocked look crossed his features. Then he took a deep breath, emptying his mind. As a Knight, he’d been trained to do that.

  He’d also been trained for interrogation.

  “Hurry, tell me what to do,” she said.

  He nodded, focusing. “I’ll try to get them to start with me. They might do something terrible at first. To start us talking. You understand?” His gaze bored into her. “Like with Lucia. If they do, you still can’t say anything.”

  She covered her face. Could she be that strong?

  “Or they might hesitate. Be careful. If you go in someone’s psyche and anyone realizes what you’re doing, you might get shot.”

  Val took in the impact of the words. “So maybe I can drop.”

  Michael’s eyes widened. “Please, please, don’t think about it. I want you to project. You can do that, right?”

  “Yes.” Val couldn’t hold back hot tears.

  “They might not start with you if you’re out. They know some of us can do that.”

  Val nodded. It was part of the lore of the Inquisition: some so-called witches’ ability to make themselves unconscious and insensate. For the torturers, it’d been maddening. “I don’t want them to start with you, either.” A sob squeezed her last word.

  “If it’s bad, I’ll start talking. Remember all those lies they gave us in the brief.” He’d found the strength inside him; Val was trying to do the same. He cupped her face with his hands. “I love you, almeris. No matter what.”

  Almeris. The word meant one who owns my soul, and one only used it in speaking to a husband or wife…or someone you wanted to pledge your heart and your life to.

  Married couples told the stories, though only to their closest friends and loved ones, of when their life partners had first used the word with them. It was usually first spoken in a blissfully happy moment—not a moment of bleakness, when death hung over them, and worse—excruciating physical agony and, likely, utter dishonor.

  Her heart broke. She thought of Samir and Lucia. Not all love stories were happy. “I love you too, almeris,” she whispered. “I wish there was something I could do.”

  He opened his mouth to reply—to say something soothing and meaningless, she could tell—and then he stopped, something dawning on him. “Maybe you can.”

  “What?”

  He looked reluctant, but he couldn’t avoid answering her, not when she was in his psyche. “If you’re in their psyche, is there any way you could make them do things?”

  “I can’t.” Taking control of another person’s actions was a completely different kind of magic, one aided by demons, and it was too evil for Manus Sancti to touch.

  “Okay. But what about… You remember when my psyche was coming apart? And you put all the pieces together?”

  “Yes—”

  Noises on the outside. She slipped out of his psyche, keeping her eyes shut as footsteps advanced. What had he been trying to tell her? That if his psyche fractured, she could repair it again? Surely his physical wounds would be the pressing issue.

  They were coming closer. Oh, Goddess, please, she prayed with all her might. Help us. How many men? Once she projected, she’d be able to see, and get a good look at them.

  Part of her didn’t want to do it. It felt like leaving Michael behind. But she’d asked him what to do, and that was what he’d told her.

  She concentrated. Sparks of energy lit inside her body, like a thousand fireflies. When she’d first learned to do it, as a girl, this had made her giggle and had delighted her. The moment of lifting out usually filled her with euphoria, a feeling of utter freedom. Even now, as she ghosted upward, she felt relief.

  She found her place perhaps six feet above her body. She’d never had the strength to go far. Although the body had its own wisdom, enough to keep air moving through the lungs and blood pumping through the veins, there was a limit on how long she could remain out of it—and no one knew exactly how long that limit was, since it varied from person to person. Once a person passed the boundary, whether it was one day or three, they couldn’t get back in. It was a rare way to became a ghost.

  If one of the men seemed about to kill her quickly, she’d try to make the jump back into her body in time. She’d want to move on to the next world, not get stuck here.

  She could see the four men now. Unlike Kevin and the priest, they were casually dressed: jeans and T-shirts. They were all white, three with dark hair, one bald. Three of them looked to be in their thirties or forties, and two held guns. The other one was younger—twenty-five at the most, Val guessed. His dark hair was cut very short, and he had sharp cheekbones and narrow eyes.

  “Thought they’d come around by now,” said the bald man. He walked over to Michael and kicked him in the face.

  Val let out a silent scream.

  Michael looked up at them, blood spattered on his nose and cheeks, a dazed look in his eyes that might’ve been partly acting. He’d taken plenty of kicks in the UFC. “Please don’t hurt me.” He put desperation in his voice. “What do you want? I’ll give you anything.”

  The bald man asked, “What’s your name?” Though unarmed, he was clearly the leader.

  “Jake Lewis—Jacob.” A common name. There would be hundreds of them, maybe thousands, in the United States. “Please, my wife doesn’t know anything about this.”

  The younger man glanced at Val’s inert body and then turned away quickly. Val took a longer look. Her head had sagged back against the square pillar. A metal plate with a loop had been bolted to it to hold the chain, she could see now. They’d outfitted the warehouse, albeit sparsely, in advance. Maybe they’d intended to take a few hostages at the ambush on Anantara.

  The young man asked, “She’s your wife?”

  Michael gave a disgusted huff. “Her? No.” A flicker of defiance crossed his face. “I told my wife if I didn’t make it back in time, they needed to take the boat. Good luck finding her on the ocean.”

  “Who’s they?” the bald man asked, following the misdirection. Michael glared at him.

  “When that Hammons woman gets here, she can find out about the boat too,” one of the men with guns said.

  “If she gets here,” the other gunman said. “Where is she?”

  Lori had called these men. It was stupid of her and Michael not to realize she would. But they’d been preoccupied with getting the stone.

  “She’s late. It’s insubordination,” the bald man said. He took a good look up and down Val’s body and then told Michael, “We don’t mind punishing women. We enjoy it.”

  One of the gunmen was staring at Val now, as though his boss had given him tacit permission to do it. Michael kept glaring.

  “We can always interrogate the old-fashioned way,” the bald man said. “I’m sure he’s noticed we got rid of his escape hatch.” He looked to one of the men with the guns. “How should we start?”

  “He had a lot of balls, coming after us,” the man replied. “I say we cut off one of them.”

  No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening.

  “I don’t know,” the ot
her gunman said. “The eye worked with the Greek bitch. That’s why she offed herself. She knew she was about to break.”

  The bald man took a few more steps over to stand directly in front of Michael, his crotch close to Michael’s face. Michael’s rage flared in response to the dominant move.

  The bald man pretended to study Michael—who had the presence of mind to swallow and turn his head away. It was all pretense. His fear had been burned away, at least for now, by fury.

  But someone was scared.

  The young guy. It was coming from him. He didn’t want to torture anyone. Or to witness it.

  “This one looks like a Knight,” the bald man said to one of the gunmen. “Even though he’s not on our list.” He crouched down so he was in Michael’s face. “Why didn’t we know about you before?” Their psychometrist must not have made a report for a while, before he’d gotten killed. Michael said nothing. The bald man straightened again. “Knight for sure. And these bastards are trained to resist interrogation.”

  They knew a lot. Because of her. And the stone. They had the stone again now and might find Sophie Karakov or someone else who could use it.

  The entire mission had been more than a disaster. Val thought of her parents losing her. Of Jonathan losing Michael yet again.

  “We can do our best,” the gunmen suggested, chuckling again. The man apparently had a sense of humor.

  The bald man said, “I think we’d do better by questioning the girl.”

  “She knows more than I do, anyway,” Michael said.

  Val was shocked, and then she understood. If they thought Michael cared about her, they’d start in on her, for sure.

  The gunman who thought things were funny laughed again. “So much for the legendary Manus Sancti code of honor.”

  The other one said, “You didn’t really believe that bullshit, did you?”

  “I’m not saying you should torture her!” Michael protested. “I’m just saying they don’t tell me anything.”

  “We’ll see about that,” the bald man said. He handed the nylon pouch to the more serious gunman. “Start with the testicle. He’ll lose consciousness, but he’ll be ready to talk when he wakes up.”

  “I’m ready to talk now,” Michael said.

  “You’re ready to feed us bullshit now,” the bald man rejoined. It chilled Val. He was one hundred percent correct.

  “You think I’m going to risk lying?” Michael asked. “We’re nothing to them. My mother died on one of those missions. A demon made her disembowel herself. I saw it.” Real grief and bitterness edged his voice. He swirled facts into fictions to give them the ring of truth. “I didn’t even want to be in this stupid group. My parents were in it, everyone else was in it, and I had no choice.”

  The young man’s emotions meshed with this. He felt the same. Michael might’ve guessed that. At every turn, he proved himself much cleverer than he or anyone else gave him credit for. But would the young man’s sympathy do them any good? He wasn’t likely to turn on his elders and, anyway, he didn’t have a gun.

  “Didn’t stop you from killing our men,” the bald man said.

  She needed to do something. Anything. Michael was doing the only thing he could: talking a lot without giving them what they wanted. And if they hurt him, he’d seem to reveal actual information afterward, with real pain and fear, but the information would still be fake.

  “It was the job. I’ll tell you what you want. When I did interrogation training with them, I went into cardiac arrest. You think I want to go through that again? This is my fourth mission in a row. I was supposed to get a break. I was going to go to Atlantic City.”

  “With your wife?” the bald man asked.

  “Oh no, they banned her from there,” Michael said without a beat. “She likes the poker tables a little too much.”

  “I’m guessing that isn’t your game,” the bald man said. “Because you’re terrible at bluffing.” He looked at the humorless gunmen. “Let’s do this.”

  The other man unzipped the nylon case.

  What could she do? What had Michael been about to tell her before she’d had to get out of his psyche?

  The man pulled out a surgical instrument with what looked like a small ice cream scoop at the end. Michael’s jaw locked, and his face went pale. Along with his fear, she felt something else from him—resignation, or determination. Both.

  No! She couldn’t watch this…

  Michael’s gaze darted from one of them to the other. He could still kick. He was probably thinking about how to bring one or both of them to the ground. Her mind raced. Should she go into one of their heads, even though he’d told her not to? Killing her would, at least, be a distraction. But if she died for Michael, he’d never be able to live with it. And by far the most likely scenario was that he’d be tortured and killed, anyway.

  Watching the man she loved get maimed and doing nothing was not an option. She was going to do something.

  “Grab his legs,” the man with the castration tool said to his companions.

  The young man moved as if to obey. He’s still scared. In her own horror, for a moment, she’d lost sight of his feelings. It was his fear, as well as Michael’s, filling the room. Most emotions were nuanced, individual to the person feeling them, but a few, at their extremes—rage, terror, grief—registered in almost the same way in every person.

  She didn’t even know what she was doing yet, but she knew she had to do it quickly.

  She slipped back into her body—her bare ass on the concrete, the cold steel biting into her neck, all the sensations letting her know she was grounded—and then squeezed the time frame as tightly as she could. They wouldn’t notice the young man freezing for a couple of seconds, and if they were about to castrate a prisoner, they would attribute it to that.

  His psyche smelled like rotten eggs. They stood in a bumpy, barren landscape under a sky of heavy gray clouds, with little pools around them of bubbling mud and boiling water.

  She was still naked as she faced him, and his eyes widened. He’d barely looked at her body before, although the others had leered over it. “You don’t want Jake to be maimed,” she said, grateful that she could remember the name Michael had given.

  “I can’t stop it!” he answered. He looked wildly around him.

  “Buy us time. Say you want time alone with me. I’m an enemy. They won’t think it’s a sin.” It was all she had time for—one second in real time, so no one would notice. She got out again.

  One of the men sat down near Michael. Michael didn’t kick when he had the opening; why not? His gaze fixed on Val.

  The young man said loudly, “Wait.”

  All three of the other men turned to him.

  “What?” the bald man asked, a challenge in his voice.

  He hesitated and looked at Val. “Mr. Fluekiger said it’s not a sin to do it with a Manus Sancti girl.”

  The bald man shrugged. “Sure, go ahead.” He was standing close to Michael.

  Michael moved to one side and lifted his whole body so he was suspended by his shackled wrists. Val heard a crack, and Michael let out a scream as he wrapped his legs around the bald man’s thighs, yanking him hard to the floor on his side. He followed up with a vicious kick straight in the man’s face that made his head rock back on his neck so hard, Val thought it might pop off.

  It had been so fast it’d almost been a blur. Michael’s helpless fury was overwhelming, enough to make Val dizzy. The gunmen had reached Michael in the next moment, and one delivered a hard kick at Michael’s privates. Michael twisted away so it didn’t connect as directly as the gunmen intended, but the impact still made him cry out and made Val shriek. The other dragged the bald man, now unconscious, out of range.

  “Devil!” the man who’d kicked Michael yelled at him. Michael’s body convulsed, and he gagged. His left hand in its shackle bent at a strange angle. The crack… He broke his wrist! He’d thrown all his weight onto his wrists to lift his body off the floor and ta
ke the leader down.

  “You’ll get worse in hell,” the man growled.

  We’re in hell now. Michael was in agony, and there was worse to come.

  But the young man didn’t want to hurt them. He was cowering at Michael’s pain too.

  The one who was half carrying his boss looked from Val to Michael. He gave a wolfish grin. “These two are sweet on each other.”

  The other one nodded, realization dawning on his face. “They are.”

  “Let’s leave the kid alone with her. Perfect way to start things off.” Their shared humor and contempt enraged Val. They thought she was a joke. That she was worth nothing and could do nothing.

  You have no idea what I can do. Even I don’t know what I can do. Her mind snagged on that last thought. Was there something else…?

  The man closer to Michael set the instrument down very deliberately next to him, just out of his reach. He asked the young man, “What do you need, one, two minutes?” He grinned, looking to his companion for approval.

  “We’ll give him a few,” the other one said.

  They retreated and the doors closed. Val opened her eyes.

  Michael fixed on the young man in a gaze that looked like it might bore a hole straight through them. “If you do this, you will burn in hell.” Pain roughened his voice. “You know that.”

  “He doesn’t want to,” Val said quickly, and not too loudly. Maybe they were still listening outside the door, for fun, for all she knew, though more likely, they were tending to their injured boss. She couldn’t help but notice that Michael had taken the only tactic left to him that might’ve actually worked: appealing to the young man’s fear of eternal damnation. Impressive strategy, especially from someone wracked in pain and fearing the worst.

  Michael’s eyes widened. Then he asked the young man in a low voice, “Are there cameras on us?”

  “No—”

  “Where did they go?” Michael asked.

  “There’s a house in front of this—”

  “How many in the house?”

  “Just the ones you saw.” The young man licked his dry lips.