Eclipsed (Heartstone Book 3)

by Frances Pauli

  “I need her alert.” Gervis’s snarl joined the chorus. All her old allies teaming up against her. “If he told her about the bitch in Wraith, I need to know what she knows.”

  “She has the information,” Niels said. So calm. She should have heard regret there, possibly, some pale echo of remorse. “He told me at the bottom. Said he’d given her everything he knew.”

  “Then it’s only a matter of time until she gives it to us.” Gervis’s tone she knew. That level of self-satisfaction she’d come to expect from the man. “Good. Restrain her and let her come all the way round. We can take our time with her. But I want her conscious enough to actually give me what I need.”

  “Bastard.” Corah rolled the word off of a tongue that felt swollen and dull. It earned her a round of chuckling, a mocking greeting from the demons who owned her now. Who’d owned her all along it turned out.

  “Good morning, darling.” Niels’s face centered in her vision first. His eyes darkened with something now, not the shame he’d earned but possibly embarrassment. “Play nice, will you? Follow orders like a good girl.”

  “Fuck yourself.”

  “So crass.” Gervis joined him, leaned out almost enough. If she lunged, if they loosed their grip a little, Corah might bite out his throat. “Then again, what else could we expect from the streets, from the offspring of slaves?”

  Corah bared her teeth and jerked against the hands that pinned her down. The image of Gervis Dern, wide-eyed in fear, soothed away the failure, the pain as they threw her back to her cot and tightened hard fingers against her arms. The shed spun at the sudden movement, the after effects of a lot of sedatives.

  “Bitch!” Gervis howled and stomped away from the cot. “She meant to bite me.”

  “I told you she wanted you dead,” Niels said. “Did you think I exaggerated how hard it’s been keeping her from offing you all these years.”

  “You do have a tendency to be dramatic.”

  “Not in this instance.”

  “I see.”

  All these years. Every time Niels had ordered her to stand down, every opportunity she’d reported that had been brushed aside as bad for the movement—all covertly to keep her enemy alive. His ally alive. They’d been playing her from day one. There was no such thing as a rebellion on Eclipsis. The reasons she’d been trained, ordered to serve as Gervis’s psychic, continually prevented from seeking her vengeance…were all Gervis Dern’s doing.

  Niels and Gervis. Which one did she need to kill more now?

  Except she’d never sensed it once. How had she worked so closely with them both and never felt their duplicity? Her probing of Gervis’s mind never gave it away, and Niels…Niels had always read as a zealot with a heart for nothing aside from his beloved rebellion. A fiction, in the end.

  “She’s confused now,” Mawl said. “She’s trying to sort you two out, and she wants you both dead.”

  “Of course she does.” Niels leaned over again, higher up than Gervis had, a safer distance from a smarter foe. He waved one arm toward the walls, and more hands grabbed Corah’s limbs. More minds joined the invasion into her thoughts. “She’s working out that she’s been played. And if Corah hates anything more than you, Gervis, it’s admitting any fault at all of her own.”

  “Why?” Her lips felt swollen, dry from the drugs and the dust in the air. Her throat burned as much as her eyes, and try as she could, Corah could not stop those from leaking a stream of slow tears. “Why me?”

  “Because you are a very good psychic, Corah, though of course, not nearly as strong as I am. Not as strong as we let you believe. You were given enough skill to be useful, dear. But you were blind when it came to us. You were wrong, Corah. Doesn’t that just infuriate you? Doesn’t it make you just want to kill someone?”

  “It does,” Santel said.

  “I know that,” Niels snapped back. “You think I can’t read her? She’s broadcasting like a damn beacon. She always did. Too much emotion, Corah. You play cold well, but you have always hidden an inferno under that tight veneer.”

  “The whole time.” Corah closed her eyes and willed him to stop existing. If he could read her so easily, let him see his own demise, let him feel the pain she wished upon him.

  “You lived only for revenge, my dear. What did you expect? If that made you a fool, it’s your own doing as surely as it is ours. We used you, but you made it so easy.”

  “And now she has information I need,” Gervis broke in. “If we could get to that eventually, please.”

  The hands of his psychics pressed her down. Niels, the phony rebel leader, produced the straps that would hold her there, tightened thick bands around her body, and, poor psychic that she was, even Corah could read how much he enjoyed that. They’d work together next, mine her thoughts the way they’d stripped Banshee, the way they’d destroyed everything in the world that might have loved her. Her parents, him.

  Dead and buried.

  Her vengeance might have dulled her wits, left her open to their deceptions, but now Corah knew it. She had nothing left now. No cause, no rebellion, and no Mofitan. She had nothing left to do but fight them. And if it made her into more of a monster, into a bigger fool, it was too late to stop that now.

  She’d bring her mind down on them the same way they’d brought the rocks down. She’d cave in on them, bury them, and then, if she managed to get out with a breath in her body, she’d kill Gervis and Niels on her way out.

  The Chromians had tunnels all over Eclipsis. As it turned out, they hadn’t needed Vashia’s little block of land any more than they’d needed her protection. That they appreciated both came through loud and clear, but her pale friends had much bigger plans than she had ever guessed.

  She should probably feel ashamed for assuming they were peaceful. If she got the time later, she’d make a point of reevaluating her interspecies strategies. Tonight, she was busy admiring their strategic handiwork.

  Her friend had produced maps. He’d also produced friends of his own, not all from outside the governor’s mansion in fact, and she made a second note to examine the basement levels later. At the moment, her parlor crawled with doughy aliens, and her security guards were sweating like a rain forest under glass.

  They had tunnels into Spectre. Tunnels into all the major holdings on the planet, into many major political buildings in fact and, as Dolfan quietly pointed out, that sort of pattern only suggested one thing. Her friends planned on taking over. From the look of it, they’d been working on just that for quite some time.

  Vashia nodded at the spot a plump white finger tapped and had to suppress a giggle. If the Chromians wanted the whole Shroud-ing planet, she’d happily hand it over. So long as they treated the people living here with more respect than her father had, which wouldn’t exactly be difficult.

  “That’s Dern’s home.” She nodded, recognized the layout from her own surveillance photos. “But he’s got firepower there. Too much for us to go head to head against. We needed a different angle, which is why we sent…”

  He reached for the card on the table, the black fist sitting atop yet another stack of tunnel maps. His head shook from one side to the other, and Vashia’s stomach tightened. Not talking about Mofitan, or else something she didn’t want to contemplate. She shared a look with her heartmate, recognized the same fear on Dolfan’s face.

  But the Chromian rattled the map of Spectre, and his fingers danced, making an X across Dern’s home and then sliding down and away to one of the remote, less productive of Spectre’s mines.

  “Banshee?”

  Fat fingers tapped against the paper. The black eyes blinked and tried to tell her something.

  “If we take out something so minor,” Dolfan offered, “it won’t do anything but tip Dern off and possibly scare the other governors just enough to jump to his side.”

  The Chromian shook his head and tapped at Banshee. His fingers traced imaginary lines on the map. Not Spectre. Not his home. Not at home.

&n
bsp; “Dern’s not in Spectre?”

  “Mofitan is,” Dolfan argued. “Or was.”

  The Chromian blinked and tapped.

  “Gervis is in Banshee right now?”

  She’d never seen anything like a smile on a Chromian face. Their mouths were too small, barely a crack in the puffy surface. This one didn’t move his face an inch, didn’t do anything visible, but she knew he smiled somehow, that she’d gotten it right. Or else, possibly, she needed to spend some time in a mental facility.

  “Dern’s in Banshee.” She stated it like it were a fact. “If we attack the mine, we can take him.”

  “Are you sure?” Dolfan loved her. He trusted her with the faith that only a couple bonded in front of the Heart could possess, but even so, she heard the concern in his voice now.

  “No.” She couldn’t even reassure him. “I’m not, but he is. If Dern is afield, he might not have as many men. And his main forces would take time to get to Banshee.”

  “If he’s not expecting us.”

  “Yes.”

  “If they’re not with him already.”

  “Exactly.”

  He tossed one lightning-fast nervous glance at the Chromian and then shrugged. “Great.”

  “You okay?”

  Dolfan leaned across the maps, took her face in his hands, and kissed the very tip of her nose.

  “I love this plan,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  It didn’t matter in the least that they both were lying. Mofitan, if he lived, depended on them being right. He depended on the Chromians being trustworthy, on her judgment.

  Vashia smiled and stared into black eyes, blinking, telling her something, and prayed like she never had that her judgment here would not fail their other friend, the one they’d sent alone into the bowels of Spectre, a sacrifice to Gervis Dern and justice.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mofitan woke to soft shuffling and the total absence of light. Pressure around his chest reminded him. Cave-in. Explosion and rocks and Corah’s friend turning up as the bad guy. He tried to move at that, but his body resisted, ached, and pinched in places where the stones had taken chunks of his flesh. Corah.

  She was in danger. Niels and—Mofitan tried to remember, but his head swam with the complaints of his wounds. He’d left her above with Niels. The rebel leader who, it turned out, worked for Gervis Dern. Dern! That was it. The bastard lived.

  He groaned and pushed against the planet on his chest. This time it gave.

  Mofitan sat up, and a pile of thick blankets tumbled off of him. Blankets. He squinted at them, fished with his hands in the darkness, and snatched the quilted edge of one. Shipping blankets. He’d been wrapped in a stack of, from the smell of things, used shipping blankets.

  His body ached, but someone had wound rough bandages around his ribcage, slathered the scrapes with something sticky, and even, on one deep cut, applied a healing patch. He could see a little, which told him he hadn’t woken in the bottom of the shaft, buried as he’d originally thought. A soft glow surrounded the space he lay in, and beneath him, he found a pad of foam.

  He’d been rescued, but he didn’t understand how until a rain of dirt fell from the far darkness. The walls around him had been formed of stone and soil. The light came through cracks near the floor, and a Chromian dug a fresh tunnel in to visit him. Those little devils.

  This Chromian pushed its way into the open, rolled, and dropped to the floor and then stood and caught Mofitan watching it. The fat tail thumped against the stone floor. Black eyes blinked at him and the short legs shuffled a step away. It pressed against the wall again, and for all he knew, prepared to vanish back into it.

  “Hi. Wait.” He put up his hands too fast, winced at the flames the motion drove through his broken chest. His voice wheezed the next words. “Please, stay.”

  The tail thumped again, but the Chromian remained where it was.

  “Thank you.” Mofitan pointed at the blankets and then at his wounds. “You guys did this, right?”

  The Chromian blinked and tilted its head. Cute, but hardly helpful. Somewhere over their heads, Corah was at the mercy of at least two villains. Mofitan needed to get his ass up there as fast as possible, and he had no idea how much time he’d wasted snoozing in the dark already.

  “Can you help me get back to the surface?”

  Nothing. The angle of the little man’s head didn’t even change. Mofitan sighed and eased his legs over to the side of the pad. If he was going anywhere, it would have to be with Chromian assistance. He’d examined the walls, ceiling, and floor and no exit aside from the freshly dug tunnel manifested.

  “I need to get back as fast as possible.”

  That hole might not go where he wanted, but sitting here definitely wouldn’t work. Before he could get to his feet, however, another Chromian popped out of the wall. The first one thumped its tail, and the newcomer shuffled toward Mofitan.

  “Uh, hi.” How many of them lived down here? “Can you help me get back to the mine?”

  The puffy alien scooted right up to him, blinked, and then reached for his bandages. Mofitan sighed and stayed put. Time itched at him, told him he’d already been down here too long, that fussing over his wounds wasted too many moments. He meant to tell them that, but the black eyes stole the thought away, and every time he opened his mouth, his words died unspoken.

  They would let him out when they were certain he was healthy enough. They’d help him, and he could help them in return. But Corah first. His heart sang of that. Get to Corah. His heartmate in danger, maybe already—

  No.

  His heart beat too strongly for that to be true. He breathed in rhythm to the pounding, closed his eyes, and let the Chromian examine him. The man’s fingers were firmer than they looked, and he cringed more than once when they probed too close to his bruises. When he moved, his chest flared and tightened his lungs. Possibly, something in there had broken. Shroud, he’d have doubted anything could live through that cave-in. If he’d come out without something shattered, he’d have to suspect he had died after all.

  Injuries or not, however, the Chromian had finished with him. The original intruder—and there was little to distinguish any of them from the other—had gone back to tunneling, this time near the floor and in a different location. He’d bored a larger divot in the wall and now only his fat tail still poked out. The dirt flew in a spray behind him, piling on top of the packing blankets.

  “I hope that’s the exit,” Mofitan told the healer Chromian. “I can’t wait any longer.”

  A white hand tapped him on the knee, reached, and pointed toward the rapidly growing tunnel where dirt churned so fast now that no single creature could be responsible. More had come to help, from the walls or the ceiling or Shroud only knew where. He didn’t care so long as they got him nearer to the surface and saving Corah.

  He pushed to his feet, using the fear for her life to counterbalance the pain of that motion. Grinding his teeth together, Mofitan lurched up and forward, side-stepping the blankets and the pile of loose dirt. He peered into the hole and saw a blur of pale limbs and flying soil. Like a mag cushion collision in there. He’d hate to be caught in that crossfire. Still, they definitely worked at making a large enough hole for him to use.

  From what he’d seen, these little guys swam through the planet like pale, plump fish through a pond.

  “Thanks again,” he said. “I’d have been a rubble sandwich if it weren’t for you guys.”

  The doorway opened in front of his eyes. One minute, he stared into dark chaos, and the next he saw light, no doubt the source of the glow easing through the floor cracks. The Chromian healer scuttled into the gap, and Mofitan followed, trusted the white aliens to clear the way for him, to lead him to safety and even more so, to Corah. He stepped into the new tunnel and it continued to clear ahead of him. The light grew brighter. The dirt pattered against his arms and legs and then, suddenly, he stood in the open.

  If ever he�
��d entertained the desire to rule the world, Mofitan thought this just might be the army he’d choose for himself. The Chromians had dug a massive cavern beneath the surface of Eclipsis, big enough to house the entire palace complex of Shroud and still have room around the edges. They’d filled the city-sized vug with pockets, hollows, and crevasses and those had been stuffed to overflowing with weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and if his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, at least one anti-orbital cannon.

  A complete hodgepodge of military and civilian vehicles alike parked in haphazard rows along the cavern floor. Tarps covered some of them. Packing blankets and crates made piles between, and everywhere he looked the Chromians shuffled through the detritus of warfare by the scores. They fiddled with lines and tested tires and moved piles of supplies from one bolt hole to the next.

  Here in the bowels of Eclipsis, Mofitan had found the real rebels. Or more accurately, they’d found him. He surveyed their handiwork and had to laugh, loud enough that it echoed to the high dirt dome and turned at least a few hundred round heads in his direction. A sea of eyes blinked at him.

  “Yes!” He grinned back at them and knew, somehow, they understood his words. “I seriously love you guys.”

  Beside him a tail thumped. Another followed it, and another. The cavern thundered with Chromian caudal applause and Mofitan growled along with them. Go time. An army of aliens and the tools to take half the planet. He might be lost, and he certainly was broken, but by the Shroud he was ready.

  Time to save the girl.

  So many minds whispered inside her head that Corah couldn’t tell which thoughts were hers. Memories rifled forward and back, reviewed and replayed her last moments with Mofitan until her eyes burned and ran out of fluid. She fought them, threw up wall after wall only to have one of them bat her defenses aside. All the while Niels’s voice chanted to her of her own inadequacies. Not as good as she believed. Wrong. Not as good as me.