Captive Soul

by Anna Windsor

  Mother Anemone put a long-fingered hand on Mother Keara’s shoulder, as if to persuade her to stop talking, and Mother Yana took over. “Vat she means is, Elana has as much knowledge as any Sibyl Mother. The likes of that in the hands of the likes of those—no. It cannot be. If ve cannot rescue Elana outright, it may be best that she perish before she’s tortured to give up our secrets and who knows vat else.”

  “Possessing her is like holding all the information in our archives and having it for their personal use,” Mother Anemone said. “She has enough elemental power to take down the city, and she’s knowledgeable enough to compromise every Sibyl fighting group and most of the Motherhouses, too.”

  “Do they have to be here?” John asked Jack, gesturing toward the Mothers. He didn’t care how his question sounded or that Bela and, surprisingly, Camille flinched a little at his disrespect. “I don’t see why they have a stake in this, Mothers or not. They haven’t done anything to train the fighters who can beat the Rakshasa. It’s Elana who’s been helping Camille.”

  His words seemed to strike all three Mothers as painfully as any slap. Mother Anemone actually hung her head. Mother Yana looked away. Mother Keara started to smoke, fingering the edge of her fold-out chair like she might find some prize under the edges.

  Jack Blackmore looked pretty miserable himself, but what he said next was pretty predictable. “You four are the target here, Bela, Camille, Dio, Andy—you specifically. That’s obvious. The Rakshasa leader Tarek has done this to get you four to come to him, so my math gets pretty simple from there. You can’t go anywhere near that aqueduct.”

  All four Sibyls started arguing at the same time, with Duncan, John, and even Ben stepping back from them.

  “We have to try,” Camille said.

  “Stupidest thing I ever heard.” That was Dio.

  Andy was still relying on “Fuck you,” but it was Bela who said, “Not your call, Blackmore, sorry. Elana’s a Sibyl, so in the end it’s Sibyl business.”

  “Which makes it our call,” Mother Yana announced. “And we side with Captain Blackmore.”

  John’s jaw clenched. They were old women. Old. Women. Power or no, it wasn’t okay for him to slug them or boot them out the door.

  “We’re simply not willing to sacrifice the four of you for Elana,” Mother Anemone said, gentling things down like John was realizing most air Sibyls other than Dio tended to try to do. “She’s had her time on earth. You’re young and powerful, and much more valuable—”

  She stopped, maybe understanding how hollow her words sounded to the four women standing like angry leather-clad statues in front of John.

  “Valuable to whom?” Dio’s expression fell somewhere between hurt and incredulous. “Sure as hell not to you. You discount us for our whole lives, and now you think you have some right to tell us when and where we’re most valuable?”

  John glanced at Duncan and Ben. Ben looked bewildered and distressed. Duncan’s face reflected what John felt—anger and concern.

  “You may be havin’ issues with us,” Mother Keara said, finally managing to look at Camille when she spoke. “I can’t fault you for that, but we’re still yer elders, and you still answer to us. We’re tellin’ you, let the OCU make this strike. If they can’t reach Elana, let her die before she hurts anyone else or kills us all. If you can’t abide that, we’ll pull you all out of fightin’, as you’ll have proved yourselves no safer than she and hers were.”

  This time, none of the Sibyls said anything, not even Andy.

  What the hell? John stood a little straighter himself, and his anger ratcheted up enough that the demon in his head thrashed around and made him wince.

  No. No way. These old bitches were not finally managing to cow Camille and the rest—were they? That was an empty threat. It had to be.

  And Blackmore and his “simple math.” The simple math was, Elana had hung herself out there for the Bengals, for John, for Camille, for all of them. Camille and her quad didn’t owe the Mothers the time of day, but he felt like they did owe Elana something.

  The rational part of his brain reminded him that he didn’t want Camille in danger or hurt—her or any of her quad. But it disgusted him to see them let the Mothers win a round, for any reason, and it hurt him to think about Elana, who had given him nothing but kindness and wisdom and trust, trapped by a monster like Tarek with no help coming for her.

  “Camille,” he said, touching her arm.

  She turned toward him, and the tears glistening in her eyes gave him a sinking feeling.

  “We have to talk about this,” she said. “The five of us—and not here.”

  The rumble of Strada moving in his head didn’t escape him, but he couldn’t help how pissed he was getting. “They’re full of shit. They’d never throw you out.”

  “Leave it alone,” Bela said through her teeth, keeping her gaze forward while Dio got up from her seat and Andy kept her eyes squeezed shut, probably to hold on to her temper.

  “Let it go, buddy,” Duncan echoed. “Let them figure it out. They always do.”

  The growling in John’s head got a little worse. He tamped the demon back as best he could when he was really starting to want to kill something, and he swept his glare back to Jack. “It’s not right, this assault. I won’t be a part of it.”

  “Nor will I,” Ben said. “My warriors and I will find our own solution. We’ll go after her ourselves.”

  Jack considered this. “Then you better get there first.”

  John’s neck twitched as Strada growled loudly in his brain. “Asshole,” he muttered.

  The Sibyls said nothing else, and Andy didn’t attack Jack with so much as a sprinkler head. The Mothers had gone quiet, too, obviously convinced they had made their point and won their battle.

  Ben glanced once at John, his dark eyes troubled, angry, and worried, then made his way toward the conference room door. With a last quick glance at Camille standing there in her tearful silence, John followed Ben. If the Bengals were going to try to save Elana, he’d damned sure be with them.

  Strada could keep up his snarl-and-howl routine. It didn’t matter. They were going after the Rakshasa culla and whatever he wanted to throw at them, and maybe they’d be able to take the bastard down.

  He’d made it a few steps into the hallway when the Sibyls spilled out the door behind him.

  “John, please wait,” Camille said, probably about to plead her case about how this was a big decision for her quad. Yeah, he got that, but he just didn’t want to hear it, especially not with Strada giving him such a fight all of a sudden. “Let me explain what just happened in there.”

  He intended to tell her it was okay, that they’d talk later, but when he turned to face her, what came out of his mouth was, “I can’t believe you’d listen to the Mothers after everything they did to you. And everything they didn’t do for you.”

  “Until my quad found each other, the Mothers and the Sibyls were the only family we knew.” The conflict on Camille’s face made her feel like a stranger to him. “It isn’t so easy to just walk away from everything that defines you—but we weren’t listening to them. We were just keeping the peace until—”

  Her words blurred in his mind, and his brain seized on the thing that pissed him off the most. John dug his thumb into his chest. “Ex-soldier. Ex-priest. Yeah, I do have a grip on having to walk away from what defines you to do what’s right.”

  Camille just stared at him. “You’re only hearing part of what I’m saying—literally. What’s wrong, John?”

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought she was getting pissed. Well, too bad. In the end, right was right and loyalty was loyalty, and she shouldn’t have had any conflict about this at all.

  “The Mothers never helped you,” he said. “They never even wanted any of you. Elana did.”

  Camille’s breath hitched and the tears in her eyes got a little brighter. “You’re making it simpler than it is.”

  “Sometimes things are just ex
actly what they seem to be, Camille. Elana’s expendable to them. Just not to Ben. Not to me. Not to Andy. And I thought not to you.”

  “Of course she’s not expendable to me!”

  “Then why aren’t you telling those women and Jack Blackmore exactly where to get off?”

  Camille started talking, something about how she knew what had to be done and she and her quad would do it, but it wasn’t worth starting an open war with the Mothers. They’d just take action and let the Mothers do or think whatever they chose—like always.

  John’s thoughts buzzed so loudly he didn’t catch it all, and he really didn’t think it was important. Something was breaking loose inside him, and he was afraid that when it finished fracturing, there wouldn’t be anything left for him and for Camille. He didn’t want her to die. He didn’t even want her to get hurt. To tell the truth, he was a little relieved Blackmore was ordering them off this battle. Still, he didn’t know if he could live with seeing them walk away from Elana in her time of need. He couldn’t live with himself if he did that.

  “We should let this go for now,” he told Camille, meaning the argument, but he saw instantly that she took it for more than that—and he just let that misperception stand. “You need some rest, and Ben and I have work to do.”

  He and Ben started for the door again, but Camille said, “Something’s wrong. Something’s happening in your head and I’m not sure what it is. Don’t go, John.”

  John hesitated. Doubted himself. He looked at the ceiling, doing what he could to keep Strada’s growling to a minimum. “I’m not running away, Camille. It’s not me who’s running out on anybody.”

  To that, Camille said nothing at all.

  He followed Ben out the front door. If Strada hadn’t been kicking around so hard, he might have looked back, but he doubted that Camille had followed him outside.

  ( 35 )

  Camille didn’t know how she got down to the basement or why she wasn’t sobbing her head off.

  Too tired to waste that kind of energy.

  Though she wasn’t too tired to care.

  The entire gym looked dull to her, even though she knew the stone floors were covered with colorful balls and mats.

  The mats. Damn. She didn’t want to think about John on the mats, the way they had made love down here with such total abandon.

  That was starting to seem like another person, another Camille, a lifetime ago.

  John’s gone.

  The thought tried to form, but Camille wouldn’t let it. She breathed in the stone and sweat and vinyl scent of the gym as Andy, Bela, and Dio came into the room and Dio bolted the door behind them.

  “Duncan’s trying to make Blackmore see reason,” Bela said. “Luck to him on that.”

  Camille let the words go into her mind, then let them roll right back out again. No room. For the first time in all her years of training and trying to overcome her fears and flaws, she was seriously considering walking away from the Dark Crescent Sisterhood, because she could not—would not—honor the Mothers’ instructions not to go down to the aqueduct. The fact that her quad would be walking away with her made things easier, but no less monumental.

  Why didn’t John know that? Why had he ignored her when she told him outright?

  “Am I mistaken,” Bela asked, rubbing a scorch mark on her battle leathers just above her heart, “or did John and his friend Ben the Bengal just blow us off and leave?”

  “He left?” Dio turned back to the gym door like she was considering going after him. Camille was pretty sure that would involve tornados, targeted lightning, and other unpleasant outcomes, so she spent the energy trying to explain.

  “I think he got pissed when we stopped fighting the Mothers and said we needed to discuss things privately.” Camille felt herself frowning but couldn’t stop it. At least the tears were gone. They had dried up all of a sudden, and she felt no hint of needing to cry. Weird. “He didn’t seem to get the fact that we just didn’t want to draw swords right there in the conference room and have to fight our own. Something—something wasn’t right with him.”

  Andy stared at Camille openmouthed. “He had to know we meant discussing what we were going to do about Elana, not whether or not we were listening to any of that hot air in there.” She let her head fall back and stared at the ceiling. “Fuck those old bitches. I’m a Mother myself, for shit’s sake. They can’t pull me out of anything.” She looked back at Camille. “John knew that, right?”

  Camille wished there were some ritual other than sleep to suddenly make herself less exhausted. “He wasn’t himself. Like I said, he wasn’t listening.”

  “He didn’t know,” Dio said. “Damn him.”

  A moment or two later, Camille came clear on the truth of that. “He should have known. I know he cares about me, and I know he’d never doubt me, or us. Not in his right mind.” Dread tingled in her belly, then spread upward in a cold wave. “Maybe Strada found a way to play with his mind or his emotions.”

  Andy banged her fist into her palm, and the sprinklers over the treadmill in the corner exploded and started raining all over the machine. She didn’t even try to stop them. “Great. Just when we need him most—but we can’t do anything about that right now. What’s our next move?”

  John’s gone. He was really gone, and he might be in trouble she couldn’t fix. Not yet. Not now. “Can you teach us those self-protections?” Bela asked, pacing now, like Bela always did when she was thinking hard.

  “Not in a few minutes, or even a day.” Camille wanted to sink down to the stone floor, bury her head in her hands, and maybe never even look up again. “It’s complicated and it takes practice.”

  Dio was starting to stride back and forth, too, but she always kept a more frenetic pace than Bela. “Can you put it in a charm for us? Something we could use immediately?”

  Camille gave this a thought for about two seconds. “Eventually, probably, but that would take weeks.”

  John’s gone. I might be losing him to Strada.

  And Elana. Poor Elana.

  Camille looked around at her quad as they burst into excited maybe-this’s and maybe-that’s, eagerly debating possibilities, and all she could think was, They’ll be killed.

  She didn’t just suspect that. She knew it for a fact. Whether it was instinct, the prescience she always wanted finally showing up, or whatever, she was certain at a level she couldn’t deny that if Bela, Dio, and Andy tried to use projective energy like they had in the park but on a larger scale, they would die.

  To honor her commitment to Bela and the rest about speaking her mind, she said. “You can’t do this. You just can’t. Aarif was young and probably less powerful than the older Eldest—and he only had a few Created. There may be hundreds guarding Elana. Trying to work at that level would tear you apart.”

  It may tear me apart.

  “The whole energy trap thing did great.” Andy looked at Camille like she was nuts. “It took the demons out and we walked away fine.”

  Camille gazed into Andy’s face.

  She had to save Elana for Andy, if for no other reason—and she had plenty of other reasons.

  “John and the Bengals are about to go after Elana without any prayer of succeeding and without any backup,” she told Bela, so that the earth Sibyl couldn’t accuse of her of not being open, of keeping too many secrets. She really was much better about the whole secret thing now. Mostly. “John might not even be stable or able to keep control of himself. I have to help.”

  Andy and Dio kept bouncing ideas around, but Bela focused on Camille enough to ask, “Then how can we help?”

  “Keep yourselves safe. If I screw this up, clean up the mess.” Camille managed a smile to try to soften her words, but Andy and Dio had gone dead quiet. They were both listening now, giving her their total attention. The gym seemed insanely small even though Camille knew the space hadn’t been shrinking when she wasn’t paying attention.

  Dio and Andy were crowding her, with Bel
a taking a position between them and the door like they thought Camille was going to make a sudden break for the basement door.

  “I’m serious about you not being able to use projective energy without better protections.” Camille looked at each of them, hoping like hell they believed her. “You have to learn them first.”

  “And you have to teach them to us.” Andy sounded less than patient.

  Dio was shaking her head, an almost amused smile on her face. “You can’t just think we’re going to let you walk out of here without us, Camille.”

  “Of course I don’t think that.” Camille smiled at Dio and loved her fiercely, like a best friend, like a sister. She loved each one of them like that.

  She loved John just as much, in a whole different way, and he was already gone. Maybe these three she could save.

  Ah. There were the tears. She had known they were in there somewhere.

  “Sorry about this secret I kept,” she told Bela. “It was just a little one. You can kill me over it later—I hope.”

  Bela’s gaze leaped to the dinar showing through the burn marks in Camille’s leathers, but Camille didn’t need the dinar anymore, not for this. She didn’t need anything at all.

  Her quad watched in absolute confusion and then disbelief as Camille, tears streaming, took one step back, only one step, because a little space would make it safer for Dio, who was standing too close.

  Then Camille opened her mind to the channels of energy flowing all over the earth, the tunnels, the ever-connecting tunnels, and she sank away from the quad, flowing off from the townhouse at the mind-blinding speed of fire.

  ( 36 )

  John stumbled into Van Cortlandt Park behind Ben, with the Bengal fighters following.

  Something was off in his head. Really off.

  He was walking like he was drunk. Couldn’t keep his balance. He hadn’t taken any major hits in the battle, so what the hell was this about?