“Below.” Her eyes searched mine. “I promised them safe passage.”
“No harm will come to them unless they move against my coterie or me.” I held her stare as she watched me closely, curiously. “Do you need any help?”
God that made it sound like I was inviting her to invade my world, which, I guess I was.
“I find you much changed, sister.” Death tilted her head at an angle that would snap human necks. “I look forward to exploring this new facet once my people are secure.”
Cole hauled the pod to the surface while I watched the first of many more eels zip through the water. A portion of them belonged to Famine, and I felt their ink drop eyes on me. Following his example, I kicked off the ground and swam toward the surface. The seal pulled at me, unwilling to surrender me, and when I escaped its tug, darkness bathed my eyes once again, and my lungs burned for oxygen.
A dozen heartbeats passed where I was certain I would die in the same swamp where I had been reborn.
A silken body brushed alongside mine, nudging me higher much faster than I could have propelled myself. I broke the surface gasping for air and took the hand Wu offered to pull me over the side onto the deck of the airboat. Cole had hefted the pod over his head, too focused on his task to have noticed my struggle.
Panting softly, I collapsed near him. “Did you get nudged?”
Cole shot me a questioning look as he placed his burden down gently.
“That would be me.” Santiago’s head broke the water, his shoulders bare and his hair slicked back from his face. “I figured you might need a hand up to the surface.”
Except a hand wasn’t what I’d felt. “Thank you.”
“I accept monetary donations as well as payment in highly illegal gadgetry.” Santiago beamed. “I accept wire transfers, or you can just pat Wu down. I’m cool either way.”
The glare Wu shot Santiago belonged on a playground between two boys who didn’t want to share their super cool next gen toys.
Mildly surprised, I grinned at Santiago. “Thanks for having my back.”
“I was checking the ADCP and noticed you flailing. You were close to one of my lines, so I figured it would save me a future headache to bring you up before you wrecked all my hard work. You’re welcome for me saving your life.”
While that sounded more likely than an act of altruism on his part, I chose to be grateful all the same.
“Maybe you ought to head back down and monitor the situation.” I rounded my eyes like a terrible thought had occurred to me. “Who knows how many of those Iniids will pour out of the seal? The whole pod could get tangled in your cables, and you’d be out here for weeks fixing it all.”
Much to my amusement, Santiago clutched at the heart I wasn’t convinced he had and vanished.
“That was cruel,” Portia chided between snorted laughter from the other boat.
“Come on,” I called back to her. “It was at least a little funny.”
Behind me, Janardan had gone predator-still, his silvery eyes devouring the dark corners of the swamp.
“Every life sparks with its own energy, some brighter than others.” He brought his arm up where I could see the hairs standing on end. “I’m crackling with it.”
A chill seeped into my bones. An influx of energy could mean several things. None of them good when you were floating over a breach site like sitting ducks. Though his sensitivity to lifeforce might explain his connection to Death. Opposites attract and all that. “Miller, can you check the traps?”
Quick as a flash, he retrieved the laptop the coterie kept tucked in a dry compartment and got to work.
“I’m not picking up any signs of a disturbance.” He tapped a few keys. “The camera feeds are normal.” A few more clicks had the color draining from his face. “They’re too normal.” He stood in a rush, and the laptop thudded onto the deck. “We’ve been hacked. The feed’s running on a loop.”
“You said War wasn’t tech-savvy,” I snapped at Sariah as I scanned the area for signs of the disturbance Janardan was registering. “Are you shitting me right now?”
“What? No.” Her mouth thinned at my accusation. “She must have recruited for the job.”
That smacked of advanced planning when War couldn’t have known about tonight without an inside man.
“Remember Janardan? Death’s mate? The guy you knew about all along but didn’t say boo to us?”
“That’s different,” she protested. “You didn’t ask.”
“There were other charun working with War’s coterie in Alexandria,” Miller reminded me, his puckered expression confession enough that he wasn’t thrilled to come to her rescue. “She might be telling the truth.”
“Hello?” She lifted her arms and rattled her bangles. “What choice do I have?”
Honesty wasn’t a side effect of wearing the bangles, at least not without me demanding it from her, but I wasn’t about to admit that if she thought otherwise. Especially not when she was already applying logic to get around telling us the whole truth.
A dozen skeletal heads floated in the waters surrounding us, summoned by Janardan’s tone.
How many of them must be Death’s children? And what did procreation mean for her, exactly?
I looked to the pod containing Phoebe, to my own coterie, and experienced an uncomfortable revelation.
Fertility was not an issue among the cadre. They bred like rabbits and let their children run into snares for them. But Conquest . . . She only birthed one child, a daughter, her legacy, and she left Phoebe behind on her father’s terrene where she would be safe. A nod to his culture as well as hers? The rest of her coterie were recruited on different worlds, all of them outcasts or damaged in some way. She had collected her motley crew with a deliberateness that spoke of her intention to keep them. She had created what I had inherited—a found family.
The uncomfortable acknowledgement that she must have loved Cole, in her way, that she must have refused to twist the knife in his heart a second time with a second child, didn’t make her any less of a monster or her crimes any more forgivable. But it did give me a new stick with which to measure her against her siblings.
The boat rose under my feet on a gentle swell that had my stomach cramping. I recognized the sensation, as if the water level in the swamp was on the rise.
“War.” I met Cole’s eyes as understanding flooded them. “If not her, then her coterie.”
Janardan swung his head toward me. “We have no quarrel with her.”
“She wants me,” I confessed. “Since she can’t have me, she wants me dead.”
“I must locate my mate.” He stood and stripped, leaving a mound of colorful fabric puddled around his ankles. “She has yet to surface and must not be caught unawares.”
The water welcomed Janardan without a splash. He vanished from sight, and several of the skulls did too. For once, I was thrilled about charun taking on human aspects. We needed a way to tell the coteries apart stat.
Assuming these were emocarre and not viscarre, that is. Cohabitating with humans was fine, so long as the symbiotic contract between charun and host was spelled out for them. Parasites, however, would present an issue for me.
I should have asked, but my brain was punch-drunk on the influx of fresh information, and I was still reeling from the overload. I hoped I gave the appearance of knowing what the hell I was doing, because one look at Cole and that pod caused the world to drop out from under my feet.
I’m someone’s mate.
I’m someone’s mother.
Shut up, brain. Now is not the time.
It never seemed to be, but oh well. War wasn’t exactly taking scheduling suggestions.
The screams didn’t register at first. The species Death’s coterie had emulated was too alien for me to do more than wince as brain-melting shrieks ricocheted through my skull. The blood clouding the water as it churned in a feeding frenzy was easier to recognize, and it set my heart galloping.
“Pr
otect her,” Cole barked as he touched the pod. “I’m going to check on Janardan.”
“Cole—” I bit the inside of my cheek as his head disappeared. “Goddamn it.”
A sleek Drosera surfaced three yards away, its eyes pinned on Cole’s back.
I unsheathed the falchion and leapt in after him, no thought required.
The water slowed me down, muted my force, but not so much I couldn’t shove the blade through the bottom jaw of the super gator who dared hunt him. The tip shone where it emerged through its thick skull. I shoved its twitchy corpse aside where two others nosed it with interest.
All too soon their attention shifted toward me. I slashed at them while I backpedaled. Across the way, Miller hit the water, carving through super gators, and met me halfway. He escorted me back to the stealth airboat and joined me onboard. I spun to search out the other boat and found Portia glaring a hole through his spine.
Without Santiago at her back, Miller had clearly grounded Maggie. As much as I sympathized with Portia’s frustration, I agreed with the call. And not just because it protected my best friend from what prowled beneath the boats, scraping the undersides with their armored hides.
Standing on the deck made me an easy target, but I was worthless in the water. Even if I could access the dragon under my skin, she wouldn’t be much help down here. This wasn’t the time or the place to test the theory that I might be able to shift and might be able to hold onto my inner charun. There was too much at stake.
But Cole was down there. He hadn’t come up yet. Neither had Janardan. Neither had Death.
“This rescue mission went to hell in a handbasket.” I looked to Miller and Wu. “Ideas?”
“I’ll secure the area around the boats until Cole and Santiago return.” Miller, already soaked, kept his clothes on as he reentered the water. He stared at Portia, but I knew he saw Maggie. “Keep her safe.”
“I will,” I promised as the enormous snake burst from his skin. His dusky coils surfaced in the water as he swam menacing circles around us. I cranked my head toward Wu. “Are you waiting on an engraved invitation or what?”
“I’m not leaving you alone.” He shrugged out of his jacket and shirt, leaving himself bare from the waist up in case we needed an emergency exit. “You can’t take on all of them. Water is the natural habitat for Drosera and Iniids. We can’t let them trap us out there where they hold the advantage.”
Portia, Maggie, and Sariah in one boat, Wu and me in the other. Still not great odds.
“We’re sitting ducks if we stay here.” Wu could fly out, but not with all of us. I would strap Maggie to him if it came down to it, and Portia would have to deal. “Portia and Maggie are as vulnerable as we are without a charun form.”
Portia was all human. More strength, better reflexes, but that was about it. No inner monster lurked within her. That was her job. She was Maggie’s inner monster now.
And then there was the pod we had to prevent becoming a coffin.
Commotion shot our gazes to the water, and I spat every curse word I knew and some I might have invented on the spot. Thank God Dad wasn’t here, or I would have been tasting soap for months.
War rose from the swamp, riding a massive Drosera sidesaddle. Its scarred sides heaved, and ravenous hunger burned in its eyes. She commanded the attention of all the gathered Iniids, and I knew what she was going to say before she opened her big, fat mouth.
Aw, hell. We were going to need a bigger handbasket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
War had dressed for the occasion in what might have passed for a wetsuit if she had need of one. I was betting on it being a catsuit in a color that wouldn’t show all the blood she planned on spilling while accentuating her curves for any male dumb enough to look at her twice while Thanases was present.
“Where is your mistress?” War cried, indignant, beseeching. “Where is Death?”
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Shit,” Wu agreed.
I cranked my head toward the second boat, expecting smug victory to paint Sariah’s mouth, but the blood had rushed from her cheeks. For the first time in our acquaintance, she appeared young . . . and afraid. She kept the strongest emotions wiped from her face, but the tightness around her eyes told another story.
A reckoning was coming, a demand for payment equal to the loss of the nests we’d razed, and Sariah must have seen her death in her mother’s eyes. She stumbled away from the edge of the deck and almost fell onto Miller’s coils.
But if she hadn’t outed us to War, then who betrayed us?
A good half of the skull-faced eels surfaced, hisses escaping their bony jaws that rose to manic screams. They thrashed, churning the water, and pink foam spittle gathered on their lips. The Drosera roused, a few snapping the flailing eel people in half with their spring-trap jaws.
“What the actual hell?” I murmured. “Are they all dead?”
The few not being eaten floated belly-up between us and War, who looked speculative. She had the look of someone who knew something no one else had quite figured out yet. Try as I might, I couldn’t work what that expression meant, but since she wasn’t calling the wrath of her coterie down on our heads, that worked for me.
Miller’s broad head rose out of the water, almost startling a squeak out of me. I was ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure he was bigger now than he had been in the mall. Much bigger. Each rotation seemed to have caused him to thicken and lengthen.
Rixton would have cracked a joke about Miller being a grower, not a shower, but he wasn’t here. And Wu wouldn’t appreciate my gallows humor. Portia might, but it’s not like I was going to call out to her. It was the kind of thing you whispered behind your hand, not shouted for all to hear.
Damn it.
Focus, Luce. Hold your shit together.
“Have you spotted Santiago or Cole?” I wiped clotted duckweed from around his eyes. “They’re still down there with Death and Janardan.”
The snake ribboned his tongue at me, which was no answer at all.
“Please tell me this was some type of acclimation sickness.” I grimaced at the carnage. “That you guys aren’t in danger from being in the water with them.”
Miller studied the bodies, the feeding Drosera, and hissed in their direction.
Gotta say, it wasn’t the most loquacious answer to my question.
Bubbles drew my eye behind Miller, and I leaned over the edge, fingers crossed.
The murky waters parted over Cole’s head as he surfaced with Janardan held limp in his arms.
“Thank God,” I breathed. “I was getting worried.”
Cole spared me a soft look before indicating Janardan. “He’s wounded.”
“He’s not the only one. Famine’s coterie just kicked the bucket. All of them.” I hooked my hands under Janardan’s armpits, accepting his weight from Cole, straining to haul him onto the deck. Wu watched my back while I knelt beside him. “Shit to the third power. This is bad.”
A Drosera had taken a bite out of him. His thigh was nothing but splintered bone and stringy meat.
Cole heaved himself up beside me and settled into a crouch, scanning the deck for the pod. The tension seeped from his shoulders when he spotted it safe and sound where he left it.
“Sorry, partner.” Pivoting on my knees, I reached up and unbuckled Wu’s belt. “He needs this more than you.”
A scowl cut his mouth. “That’s the second belt of mine you’ve ruined.”
“You’ll live. Without this, he might not.” I used the leather to encircle Janardan’s upper thigh, near his groin, and cinched it as tight as I dared without snapping the thick band. “How did this happen?”
Janardan hadn’t gone all tentacled dolphin when he hit the water, so I had no clue if that meant he didn’t want to lose his host, or if the injury was too severe for him to make the change. Though I would have expected him to revert to his natural form, not cling to this weaker one.
Odds were good that meant Ini
ids couldn’t manufacture their own skin, or they would have started mimicking us already. No matter their designation, his coterie could shift. They would just lose their host in the process. To survive this world undetected, they would have to let go of these eel creatures regardless.
A high-pitched treatise drifted past Janardan’s lips, ending on a series of clicks that made me wince.
Skull-faced bodies writhed in the water, sinking low and staying down until fountaining to the surface in the nightmarish configuration Wu had warned me about earlier.
Therapy would probably help with the mental picture. Maybe. I really ought to ask Kapoor for his guy’s number. At the rate I was going, I was in for one hell of a psychotic break if I didn’t get help gluing my psyche together soon.
“Join me, sister,” War belted out. “Together, we can conquer this terrene as we have all that came before it. Famine’s name will be our battle cry, and we will present her with this new world as a gift for her loss.”
Ah. There it was. The reason she had kept her mouth shut when Famine’s coterie started pushing up daisies. Or duckweed in this case. It had taken her a few minutes, but she had spun the loss into a gauntlet to throw down before Death.
“I stand with Conquest,” Death screamed in her shrill voice that made my eyes water.
“You can’t be serious.” War drifted closer on Thanases. “She’s a human sympathizer. This is not Conquest as you’ve known her. She thinks she’s one of them. She’s weak. How can you trust her?”
“Your coterie attacked Janardan without provocation. How can Death trust you? If you would kill him, what’s to stop you from killing her too? Death would hardly be the first of your sisters to suffer at your hands.” Cole raked his merciless gaze over War. “You set Famine up to be Conquest’s first victim. You have your own agenda, as all the cadre does, but this was a malicious strike against your sisters. Death would be foolish to side with you when there’s a better option.”
“Peace?” War curled her lip. “That’s your better option? Making nice with the humans? Bowing down to them? Hiding as all the remnants do? Pretending to be human when we’re so much more? We deserve to rule, Nicodemus.” Her glare sliced through me though she still spoke to him. “Grow a spine. End her while you still can. She won’t allow her coterie to roam this world any more than she’ll allow the charun in hiding to remain. She wants to give Earth back to the mortals.” She pointed a finger at me. “She will be the death of you, all of you.”
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