Death Knell

by Hailey Edwards

  “The effects will wear off within a few days after separating her from Death’s influence.”

  “Why did they keep her in stasis? Surely lugging the pod around raised questions.”

  “The others would have noticed her if she’d been allowed to mingle with the coteries. They had to isolate her to protect her. They told the others the pod was critical to Death’s rebirth cycle for the coterie to avoid questions.”

  “Sleeping Beauty,” I murmured. “They let her sleep away the time like a fairy tale princess.”

  “Yes.” He sounded conflicted. “I’m grateful for the chance to raise her, at least in part, but we won’t know what we’re dealing with until she wakes.”

  Worrying my bottom lip between my teeth, I had to ask, “Can you deal if a maternal bond doesn’t spark?”

  “Your relationship with Phoebe is yours to define. I will support whatever feels most natural to you.” His arms formed a warm cage around me, like I might escape if he let go. He really ought to know better by now. “I’m sorry I kept this from you.”

  “I understand why you did. You had no way of knowing if you could trust me. I even get why you didn’t tell the coterie. You did the exact thing my dad would have done, so I can’t hold it against you.” I relaxed into his strength. “With that in mind, I have a confession to make, and I hope you’ll show me the same consideration.”

  With a tight nod, Cole guided me outside where we took a short walk that allowed him to keep an eye on the van while giving us privacy. Aware how precious time was to us now, I kept my confession brief while explaining when Ezra entered my life and my suspicions about the bond War had identified.

  “This Ezra called you every year on your birthday?” Cole scratched his jaw. “That’s the only contact you had with him? You never met him? You only ever heard his voice?”

  “Yes.” I cut him a sideways look. “Does that matter?”

  “Bonds work in myriad ways.” He hesitated. “Their effectiveness relies on proximity or a talisman.” He lifted his wrist, and the rosy metal band there glinted. “Conquest implanted us with a part of herself. She’s the only person who can break the bond, and she can exert her will through it.”

  Hardly breaking news, but I regretted the reminder of the control I wielded over them.

  “Less powerful charun have built coteries using their ability to mesmerize, but that requires daily contact. Voice works, but touch is best. Psychic connections fade without regular feedback, and so would any bond requiring blood or sacrifice to reaffirm it.”

  A purest flame of white-hot fury ignited in me. “You’re saying Ezra gave me an implant to control me.”

  “Assuming Ezra is responsible, yes. That seems most likely.” Cole slowed his pace. “The calls might have been maintenance, checking to ensure you were still susceptible to him.”

  “You mean the episodes might not have been a thing he saved me from, but conditioning. Inflict enough pain that my eyes crossed, that I was so desperate I would take any help to make it stop, then dial me up and heal me with a magic phone call.” I thought about it. “It would reassure him I was still under his thumb while stockpiling my goodwill and preserving his anonymity.”

  “I wish we had known,” he said, and I understood he saw it as a failure that someone had gotten to me first, that they had kept a bead on me all that time while my coterie was unawares.

  “I kept it to myself at first. Any one of you might have been Ezra, and I wasn’t sure what he might want if he revealed himself. I thought it was smarter to wait him out, let him come to me. But he didn’t.” I scuffed the soles of my shoes. “Later, I wanted to tell you, all of you, but I kept thinking I would gain access to the NSB’s database soon. I could pin him down, figure him out, and then present the problem and the solution.”

  “That’s not how this works.” His fingers tightened around mine. “You’re not a liability, Luce.”

  “You haven’t seen me around my birthday.” I laughed hoarsely. “I come apart at the seams, Cole. It ain’t pretty.” I shut my eyes for a heartbeat. “I wanted to believe that being with the coterie might be enough, like all I needed to get my head on straight again was contact with my own kind, but I can’t be sure. None of us can be sure what Ezra was doing for me—to me—all those years.”

  We reached the farthest point where we could keep the van in sight then paused together.

  “All this time we were planning for the wrong war.” Cole’s breath tickled my cheek. “I hope Wu finds us answers.” A giddy flutter accompanied the word us, a thrill that we were in this together by his choice. “We need the whole truth about his father. We have to know what we’re up against, and we must be certain of his loyalties.”

  I quelled the knee-jerk response to defend my partner. “You think he might turn on us?”

  “He could have pitched saving the world to you ten different ways, and you would have jumped on any of them. It’s who you are, it’s what you do. But he chose to go with the version we would most easily accept, the one we anticipated. He didn’t warn you about his father until he was cornered. He didn’t do a lot of things that would have proven his allegiance to a shared cause.” Cole shook his head. “I believe he wants this to end. I’m just concerned what acceptable losses look like to him after all this time.”

  “Collateral damage,” I agreed, understanding what he meant. “That’s us, all right.”

  “His Utopia will be built upon the bones of all the cadres who came before this one.” He released me. “We have to be careful, or he’ll add ours to the pile.”

  As much as I wanted to defend Wu, say he wouldn’t use us like that, I didn’t know him well enough to swear that was true. He had opened himself up, shared his home and family with me, but he hadn’t done it out of the goodness of his heart. He saw an opportunity, and he took it.

  “We have to get Dad away from the taskforce clinic.” Until I spoke the words, I didn’t realize I how long I had been holding them in. I could have raised the issue with Wu at any time, but I had kept my mouth shut. Relocating Dad meant facing him, and it was easier being a coward, but it was time to woman-up. “The issue is where do we put him? The enclave is a solid option. I’m not hypocritical enough to say it’s good enough for Thom but not Dad.”

  Cole read me with ease. “But you aren’t sure if you can trust Wu to protect them.”

  The usefulness of the information Wu had entrusted to me hinged on finding a receptive listener willing to bargain. From what I could tell, his dad wasn’t the chatty type. And I doubted he would deal with me. That meant Wu’s secrets, while damning under other circumstances, might not be worth the oxygen he used to share them. There was no leverage there, and I wouldn’t use innocents in that way. I couldn’t if I wanted to stay in the saddle on my high horse. Falling off meant I was just as underhanded as Conquest.

  “Thom is their guest, for now,” I admitted, “but Knox already views him as an insurance policy.”

  Cole picked up on my meaning. “You’re worried Knox might sacrifice them to spare his family.”

  “I’m more worried Wu might let him.” All his careful plans were crumbling, and I didn’t want my people getting smooshed in the process. “Where do we go from here?”

  “We let Santiago live his prepper dreams. He purchased safe-houses and cached supplies for the coterie all over the country.” A shrug rolled through his massive shoulders. “We fall off the grid for a while, get our affairs in order.”

  The fine print, as I read it, was get my affairs in order. Set up long-term care for Dad and arrange protection for the Rixtons, things I might not be around much longer to guarantee.

  “We’ll gather intel and rally our allies,” Cole continued, “and then we’ll make our move.”

  “I wish things were different,” I whispered more to myself than to him. “I wish we could just live.”

  “I’ve had different,” he murmured back. “I’ll take this life—take you—over that any day.” />
  And when his lips brushed mine, sealing the vow, I believed him.

  EPILOGUE

  Ensconced in his high-rise apartment, a glass and steel work of art that pierced the clouds, Adam dialed up Kapoor, filling the seconds between hitting send and the call being answered with the myriad ways he had fucked up his operation. Underestimating his father had bitten him on the ass too many times to count in his youth, but he liked to think he had long ago accepted the hard truth his father was capable of anything.

  Anything, yes, but he still hadn’t expected The Hole.

  No war was won without casualties.

  Two hundred inmates. Three dozen civilians. Over three hundred guards. All gone.

  And it was his fault. His careless words had ended in an execution . . . and in mass murder.

  “What fresh fuckery do you have for me?” Kapoor rasped. “I’m goddamn finished with today.”

  “Luce wants to meet Ezra.” Adam kept it blunt. “She wants to hold him accountable and turn him to her cause.”

  “I don’t have enough fingers to count off the reasons why that’s a bad idea, but damn if I have a better one.” Kapoor shut a door, probably to his office, to give them privacy. “Adam, this has gone on too long. You’ve got to come clean with her, or we’re going to lose her.”

  “She’s mated,” he said softly. “They have a child.”

  “Half of that you already knew.” Kapoor wasn’t pulling punches, probably why Adam called him in the first place. “The kid changes nothing.” Bitterness weighted his words. “You have to focus on Conquest, or Luce, or whatever the hell you sleep better calling her at night. We need her to seal the breach, or the Otillians will just keep coming. Earth is already on the brink. We can’t keep taking in charun refugees while pretending they don’t exist. This needs to end. She can do that for us.”

  “Farhan,” he allowed himself the brief intimacy of acknowledging their friendship. “She’ll die.”

  “There’s only one way to plug a hole between worlds, and she’s it.” He sighed. “We’re never going to get another chance like this one. There will never be another Conquest willing to sacrifice herself for the sake of this world. Either Luce Boudreau dies, or we all do.”

  Adam disconnected without saying goodbye and padded into his library. A portrait hung over the fireplace, a reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction. The original was in a climate-controlled storage unit safe from the ravages of time in a way his human wife had not been.

  What he recalled of her was not a flesh and blood woman, but the sweep of paint on canvas. He had memorized each brushstroke, absorbed each detail with rapt fascination, until it all blurred in his mind.

  Marrying her had been forbidden, mating her biologically impossible.

  Humans simply lacked the depth of soul required to forge a bond that weathered eternity.

  Love was not enough. That wasn’t the first lesson he learned, nor the hardest, but it left an impression.

  Adam should have died with her. She should have lived with him. But neither of those things happened.

  His kind mated only once in their very long lives.

  He had mated twice.

  First, he gave away his heart, and then he gave away his soul.

  Luce wasn’t the only one condemned by his scheming. Adam had finally succeeded in what he failed to do all those centuries ago. Adam had damned himself too.

  Kapoor listened to the dead air and sighed. Wu was fraying under the strain. He’d been holding together fine until his father got involved ahead of schedule. Then again, maybe it would have always gone this route. Maybe his old man really was divine, and they had all been doomed from the start.

  A pulse of energy swept through the room like a spring breeze, and Kapoor shut his eyes and prayed to any gods who might hear. But the trouble with living in the shadow of fear cast by one was you didn’t have much faith that any others might be roused to lend a hand.

  Heart slamming against his chest, he watched as the knob turned, and the door swung open. The man who entered his office was tall and lean, dressed in pressed jeans and a white button-down shirt. His shoes were brown loafers, and they matched his belt. Looking higher than his collar—that was the problem.

  Ezra was the most beautiful person Kapoor had ever seen. You had to look and then look again to be certain you were seeing what you thought you saw. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. He was compelling, emitting his own gravitational pull that had Kapoor rising from his chair to greet what amounted to certain death.

  The would-be god just smiled, benevolent, used to the attention he commanded from either sex.

  Square jaw, bladed cheekbones, aquiline nose. He was the whole package. The curtain of wavy blond hair that brushed his wide shoulders didn’t hurt things either. His eyes, though. That’s what trapped you if you were dumb enough to meet his gaze.

  As it turned out, Kapoor wasn’t half as smart as he thought. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Just the word—pleasure—and the throaty rasp that passed for his voice left Ezra chuckling.

  “I need to have a word with my son.” He strolled over and shook the hand Kapoor didn’t remember extending. “I was told you could make that happen.”

  The touch of skin on skin was electric, and Kapoor shuddered from the wash of power across his nerves. “Adam doesn’t report to me, but I’m sure I can locate him.” The oxygen punched from his lungs when he severed the contact, a small death that reminded him how alive Ezra could make you feel. “He was out in the field last I heard, so it will take a few days.”

  “A few days,” Ezra mused. “Are we going to pretend you didn’t end a call with him before I arrived?”

  Only his mastery in the art of lying, a job requirement with the NSB, saved him from stumbling.

  “Big difference between answering a call and arranging for a meeting between the two of you.” He flicked his hand toward the mountain of paperwork on his desk. “Adam heard about The Hole. He was calling in to confirm the casualties.”

  “Famine is dead. I snapped her neck before the charge detonated.” He stared at Kapoor and let his inner monster slip its leash. Just a bit. “The cadre must be eliminated. They are foul creatures bent on destruction. They are not pets to be fed and watered and kept in cages.”

  “We had hoped to develop more effective weapons to use during the next ascension by allowing scientists access to a live specimen.”

  The way things were going, there would be plenty more to come.

  Goddamn, he was tired of the subterfuge. How Wu survived playing both teams this long mystified him.

  “Otillian biology makes the creation of effective weaponry impossible.” He steepled his fingers. “They’re too altered when they arrive to be taken down by anything but brute force. The standard protocols don’t apply.”

  Since Kapoor’s best chance at survival was keeping his mouth shut, that’s what he did.

  “I’m aware of my son’s perversions.” The monster in Ezra wet its lips when it looked at him. “I have made the same mistake as so many parents before me. Indulgence. The time for such leniency has passed.” He tucked it back out of sight. “I want you to arrange a meeting with my son, and I expect Luce Boudreau to be in attendance.”

  Ezra didn’t lower himself to explaining what would happen to Kapoor if his demands weren’t met.

  “I’ll get right on that.” Kapoor’s hand trembled when he reached for a pen. “Where can I reach you?”

  “There’s a converted warehouse in Summit, near Lake Bevin.” A smile tugged at his lips, and the effect almost struck Kapoor dumb. “I’m going to pay the inhabitants a visit.”

  The enclave.

  The fucker knew about the enclave.

  “Leave the address with me.” Kapoor kept his expression blank, his soul dark. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “See that you are.” Ezra pivoted on his heel. “I am not your god, but I’m not without my wrath.”

&nb
sp; Whatever magic had strung Kapoor upright during his conversation with Ezra got cut once the door closed. Knees buckling, he collapsed in a limp heap, his tailbone driving into the hardwood floor. Hidden behind his desk, panting like he’d just run a marathon—or for his life—he dialed Wu. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Talk about the understatement of the century.