Over and over until her panic was sufficiently dammed. Still in the thick of betrayal, she needed to keep her senses. It was unlikely Amrae was working alone. Kang had suggested the same.
The thought seized Dee, her eyes skimming the Soldiers who'd come to guard her in risk analysis. They could just as well be in on it as anyone else.
Dee stepped back.
Paused.
With no reaction to her movement, she took another step, followed by another, slow and precise despite the shouting in her head that asked her to bolt. Drawn-out seconds stretched frustratingly long as she made her way into the hall, then past Porrima's office and into the area beyond, the whole while tapping her surroundings to ensure she wasn't walking into another unit of Soldiers.
Out of sight behind a partition, she allowed herself to turn and see where she'd ended up. A weapon, or plan of where to go, would make her feel a lot better. An opening in the floor showed a narrow staircase that wound down into the belly of the plane. It was the only place to go, and she beelined for it without hesitation.
As her head disappeared into this new level, a startled shout informed her that her absence was noticed. In a burst of speed, she was down the steps, vision and perception flung wide to source out what might wait ahead. The existence of Porrima’s no-man attendant had her afraid to rely too much on her extra-sensory perceptions, but neither did she want to take too long scouting ahead and let those in pursuit catch her.
The narrow stairs landed in a room packed with seats. Those Soldiers not tasked with duties in the main sections of the plane did not ride in style or comfort. She almost felt sorry for them.
Hurrying through, disappointed no weapons lay unsecured, Dee moved on. Ahead, an opening in the wall mirrored the hall above. Hoping this floor was a copy of the other, Dee raced forward, fingers crossed there would be somewhere to hunker down, even as a part of her brain screamed the ridiculousness of her plan. Was she really looking for a bed to hide under?
-Find a weapon. Meet them in battle.-
But then what? When the plane landed, who knew where she'd be. How many would she have to fight then?
-Coward.-
A room mirroring Porrima's office above was stacked to bursting with black cases of unknown contents. Ripping the closest one open, Dee was disappointed they weren't filled with guns. The glass bottles that clinked quietly weren't enough to keep her attention. Rushing farther into the dark belly of the plane, the energy of approaching Soldiers pressed on her. While none had made it to this level, it was only a matter of time. Surprise none had gotten this far, Dee wondered if a lecture from Porrima halted their progress.
The idea lifted some of her tension.
Porrima would not be pleased by Dee's reaction, but she'd have no argument to hide behind. One of her people had almost killed Dee, and Dee felt more than justified taking off to hide.
Moving through blackness, paranoia seeped through the nooks and crannies of her mind to guide her thoughts. The darkness, moments before a helpful ally suddenly a menacing presence. Her decision to leave the safety of the group might have been hasty. If she hadn't panicked and run, there would have been plenty of others to ward off an attack. Not even her paranoia would allow her to think everyone on the plane wanted her dead.
-A Soldier tried to kill you. Kill them all.-
Accompanying the overused words was a vision of just how to accomplish this. Her steps halted. She turned to stare down the unlit corridor. Maybe it was time to force her independence.
She heard the rushed steps of Soldiers hit the landing of this floor. Eight pairs of boots not worried about stealth. Dee tapped the group to see what she could see.
Daniel wasn't among them. Curiosity overriding sense, Dee refocused on the floor above, easily pinpointing his rage.
A sudden snap in the air sent Dee's eyes wide, and she forgot about the group moving towards her. Intuitively she knew that snap was the death of Amrae.
Bodies bearing down on her kept her attention from analyzing this nuance of information her senses gave her. Light behind them cast them as nothing more than silhouettes pushing forward. Mostly sure they couldn't see her standing in the dark, it was time to make a decision. Take the violent advice of her ego, or continue to search for a place to hide.
The beam of a high-powered flashlight slapped across her face. Cowering against the assault of light, Dee brought a hand to her face as shouts that they'd found her raced through the plane. Whatever plans might have brewed were lost to this new chaos.
Behind her, a closed door was her only place of refuge. She stepped through, slammed it shut, and turned the lock as if it would stop the Soldiers from reaching her.
The room was dark, this time a blessing allowing the delusion of safety. Anchoring the door closed with her mass, she anticipated the coming struggle to keep herself from those she couldn't trust, the logic that told her not all of them were out to get her abandoned.
A familiar voice called through the thin barrier. "The threat is handled. It's safe for you to come back upstairs."
Dee laughed, a maniacal sound she cut off abruptly, embarrassed they would hear her mounting hysteria in the sound. "Safe, huh? You can promise me none of the others were working with her? None of them will try to kill me, too?"
"Look, Dee, I know this is all bad. You don't have to believe no one else is here to hurt you. You just have to believe not all of us are. There are enough of us here, all on full alert, to protect you if someone else tries to harm you."
It was the same logic she'd used with herself. Coming from Boots, they just seemed like pretty words used to lure her out.
She rested her head against the door. "How much longer until we land?"
"You can't stay in there until we land."
"Why not?"
The silence calmed her. She felt the Soldiers standing on the other side of the door. She knew, except for Boots', they had weapons trained back down the hall. While gracious for the protection, the maneuver didn’t incite confidence.
"Can I come in?"
"Why?"
"I need to make sure you're not hurt."
"I'm not."
"You might be in shock. Someone just tried to kill you."
Dee huffed, feigning brevity. "This isn't the first time someone's tried to kill me."
Daniel's voice, picking up where Boots failed, surprised her. "Dee, let me in. Please."
He added please as an afterthought, and Dee might have smiled if the emotion laced in his voice hadn't caught her off guard. The rage she'd felt from him at the moment of Amrae death lingered, mixed with something that might have been guilt or sorrow. It was this that had her open the door. Staring over the threshold, she met his gaze with a vulnerable expression she hadn't meant to show.
He raked her with a weighted look, absorbed the details of her behavior, noted her hand on the door, the other at her side, fist clenched.
"Dee, I—we—I'm sorry."
Some void in her core swallowed her, allowed her to peek into the world from behind the safety of a dampener, nulling the response of so many emotions. Her head tilted clinically, expression washed of anything but careful observation.
"I let my guard down. It never occurred to me to watch the inside."
Dee's eyes narrowed. Not at his words, but at what his words reminded her of: She didn't know who was after her. Didn't know which of them had sent Revenants to kill her. Didn't know who was behind this assassination attempt, and didn't know if she would ever be safe.
Her voice was impersonal. "I let my guard down. I trusted my surroundings. I won't make that mistake again."
Her words pulled more height from Daniel's posture, but the sound of Boots' knees hitting the floor halted whatever he might have said. Boots bowed, sword pulled to lay across his palms as he offered it towards her.
Dee looked to Daniel for explanation, but he offered none.
"We did fail you. I failed you. Maat wills it."
"Maa
t?" Dee wracked her brain for the little she knew about ancient mythologies. Maat sounded Egyptian, or maybe Sumerian. How old was Boots that he invoked a god as ancient as the most ancient of recorded history?
"My failing must be paid. It is yours to receive."
"You're not asking me to kill you, are you? That seems a bit excessive." She stared at the sword, emotionless tone allowing incredulity to surface.
"It is Maat. It is Bushido."
She shook her head. "Bushido? Like the Samurai?"
Her question was meant to distract the Soldier from this crazy plan, just as his crazy plan had pulled her from the dark pit threatening to claim her.
"Samurai follow a similar code as Africa's Maat. A Samurai would offer the same sacrifice to you."
"I don't need a sacrifice."
His head hung lower, and he pushed his sword further up to her while Daniel watched with a solemnity she'd never seen from him.
With an exaggerated sigh, she came into the corridor so she could put a hand on Boots' shoulder. Daniel, pressed to the side to allow the interaction stood tense, close enough to intervene if Boots had some nefarious plan.
Daniel's distrust blazed panic through her, stiffening her movements. Both Soldiers sensed it, but Daniel reacted to it. He wrapped her around the waist, pulled her aside while Boots prostrated further into the floor.
She balked from Daniel's grip, but he held her fast, pistol trained down the hall.
Shaking from the surprise of the action, fading adrenaline leaving her exhausted, Dee had only enough energy to whisper, "Daniel, I overreacted. I'm okay. No one tried anything."
His breaths came fast. His iron grip around her would leave a bruise, but she didn't say so. Instead, she focused on relaxing so he might do the same.
When he let her go, he didn't step back, remaining in contact with her, never taking his eyes from the Soldiers crowding the hall who'd maintained their sentry of the passage. If any had looked to see what happened behind then, Dee never noticed.
Boots was still on his knees, sword out. There was no way she could have held her arms out that long, with or without an ancient sword as long as she was tall.
Knowing better than to move from Daniel's protection, she hoped her words would be enough to appease Boots' insistence that she end his life. "Boots, please. I'm not going to take your sword. I'm not going to kill you, or take anything from you as reparation for what Amrae did."
The Soldier lowered his arms, resting the backs of his hands against his thighs, chin tucked to his chest, but it was Porrima's stern disapproval radiating from the other end of the plane that ended the crisis.
21
Daniel’s face pinched at the sight of the Rishi. There was still too much of Dee’s distrust and apprehension to get through before they forced her to move. There was no way Porrima would be empathic of Dee’s mental state. So he wracked his brain for a way to calm Dee down, to get her back to the girl who’d trusted him in those last days at Amaltheaum, to sway her from the paranoid creature standing so close he could smell the delicate scent of her skin.
Boots’ slow rise brought Daniel’s attention to the other Soldier, and they shared a glance, the same concerns reflected in the other’s face. At least the interruption allowed Boots to forget his insane display.
Amrae’s attack had taken Daniel by surprise. Him and Boots. His insides still roiled at the thought that Dee should be dead. If not for her prescient reaction to the attack, he’d be staring at her body pinned to the seat with a knife through her chest. As strong as Dee was, he was sure this would have killed her.
He pushed the thought away. She wasn’t dead. Amrae failed, and he wouldn’t give in to romantic what-if’s that would only lead him down a rabbit hole of distraction.
Still, he hadn’t managed to banish the fine tremble that continued along his nervous system or to gain control over the anger that clawed inside him. Even after personally killing Amrae, the rage clung to him. The excitement, at being involved with Dee’s travel, of being placed at her side had turned into his greatest nightmare.
When Dee left for the Twins’, distance had allowed him to realign his senses. Whatever irrationality had taken him in those days he’d watched over her were repressed in her absence. But word traveling down the grapevine about the anomaly resurfacing after weeks of no news reawakened those feelings. Daniel couldn’t ignore the source of his reaction, as much as he pushed for them to stay away. The relief, the relax of tension he hadn’t realized he’d held, was as impactful as the news itself.
His notoriety at being sent to aid her before anyone even knew she existed granted him the luck to be assigned to this mission. Since his task of escorting Dee from her house in upstate New York to Amaltheum, his reputation had grown by leaps and bounds. No longer just the youngest Soldier, he’d forever be known as the sole bodyguard working in enemy territory to the most exciting thing to hit their House in centuries. It wasn’t just this boost to his reputation he’d enjoyed. His cold reasoning easily tasted that lie. It was her. It was knowing her. Watching her had added some kernel of—something—to his life he’d long given up.
When Kanchi assigned him away from his team, who waited without him in the undergrounds of Zibanitu’s main estate, he’d hidden his excitement behind pride at the prestige of the assignment. As the only one who’d had first-hand experience with their VIP guest, he soaked up the attention that garnered.
Daniel’s bafflement at Hamal’s attachment to the girl had been a point for the Soldier to mess with Zi’s human pet. At least, until Dee got under his skin, too. Then, he’d wanted to talk with the human about how it started. He wanted to know the story of how Hamal’s mission of simple observation had turned so hands-on.
The turn of phrase caught him. Some primal feeling growled at the thought of them being hands-on. His memory raced through the interactions he’d witnessed between the pair to judge how far some physical relationship might have gotten. He recalled Dee ignoring Hamal when they’d piled into the SUV to leave Dee’s home. Then, the ambush on the road, set by the Ophiuchus, had set both Hamal and himself up in the infirmary. Dee and Hamal had barely any contact since leaving her home. He was sure of it.
That was, until the evening Hamal had come to check on her after a training session. Laid up from his near-death, Hamal had been denied visitors through his recovery. Daniel had used that moment to rile up Hamal by pretending something was going on between him and Dee. At the time, it had been a ruse to get under Hamal’s skin, to prove there was truth in the rumor that Hamal felt something he shouldn’t and to dig to see if Dee felt something in return.
The experiment a success, it also told Daniel the pair had never moved beyond their denial.
At the time, he could have cared less about their reciprocated feelings. His advice that it was a bad idea was real and true. He’d have said the same thing about any of them; about anyone Dee considered getting involved with. With her life in limbo, it was the worst time for a distraction like that.
Assigned to follow her around, watch over her in case The Ophiuchus breached Amalthea’s meager security, Daniel found he liked her attention, her casual flirting. He was glad Hamal got pushed out of the picture. Glad Hamal’s humanness sidelined him from the mission.
Still, Hamal had made first contact. The first to show Dee she wasn’t alone, that there was a place she could fit in. Hamal would always hold a unique place in her mind, if not her heart. Firsts were hard to compete with. Even if Hamal didn’t remember her, she would remember him, and Daniel got the feeling Hamal’s lack of memory wouldn’t keep her from him if she spotted him near.
All this tumbled through his head while he watched Porrima approach.
Still in protector mode, he drew Dee close, shielding her from the hall. When she flinched from his touch, he failed to keep the hurt from his face. Amrae’s attack would have her second-guessing all of them, even him. He couldn’t be surprised by her reaction, but understanding it didn�
�t make it easier to take.
He clenched his hand, remembering the killing blow he’d been allowed, even as he wished there were more to take. Amrae might not have killed Dee, but the repercussions of the attempt would hurt her long after.
Amrae was one of Porrima’s, where Boots and Daniel belonged to Zibanitu. The point wouldn’t matter to Dee. Not here. Not right after someone had tried to kill her and Porrima’s callousness was sure to take more of her trust.
Daniel considered whether the Rishi was behind the attack. If she were, Dee was in deep shit. They all might be. If the Rishi were behind it, there was nothing Daniel could do. Regardless that the Rishis allowed the Soldiers to act out their will, Soldiers were nothing more than accessories. The Rishis could take cities on their own.
The closer Porrima got, the more tense Dee became until Daniel risked taking his attention off the approaching problem to place his full consideration on her. Dee’s glazed stare dragged from its exhausted watch of Porrima’s approach to meet his eye. What he saw there compelled him to speak, but his words caught on the tip of his tongue, frozen by the frigid look of contempt that slid over her like some elaborate mask. It was an expression he’d never seen from her. He didn’t like it. His death, all their deaths, was painted in her eyes.
Then, Porrima was there, forcing his attention to the problem of mediating whatever fuel the Rishi would add to this fire. He maneuvered himself to Dee’s back, hand pressed subtly at her waist, pleased she didn’t pull from his touch. Boots did his best to become part of the wall.
“Rishi, I can take her upstairs where you can speak more comfortably.”
Porrima’s eyes flashed on him. “Oh, you’ll bring her upstairs, will you? Except, she should be upstairs, shouldn’t she? Why bring her there now that I’m here?”
He dropped his gaze with the appropriate amount of chastisement. Why Zibanitu allowed her sycophantic presence, he’d never understand. She was slow poison to everything his Master did, and many Soldiers pointed to her as the reason peace had never sealed between the Houses.
We Are Forever (Rishi's Wish Book 2) Page 15