“Just sit tight, honey,” Jewel said, then put the walkie-talkie back in her pocket. She peered at me pensively. “Maybe I should let Westley sit this one out,” she said, more to herself, I thought, than to me. “He has been terribly difficult about Damon, and after all Damon’s got Darling in there for moral support. Shame about Darling — Ginger thought she might be persuadable, but she called me a psychopath and said she was going to tattle, so I had to break her legs and put her in the vault. Don’t know what I’m going to do with her.”
Could I run? There were doors — with boards across them. Windows too high to reach. There had to be a way for the graffiti-painters to get in and out. Could I find it before Jewel caught me? Could I make it across the room before Jewel caught me?
No, as it turned out. She hit me from behind before I had gone six steps, and my head hit the marble floor, stunning me immobile for a minute.
“You think you can outrun me?” Jewel hissed, wrenching my hands behind my back and tying them — not with rope, but thin, biting plastic that made a zipping noise as she tightened it around my wrists. “You are a human, Naomi, a daughter of Eve, a daughter of dirt!” She was heavier than I expected; it was hard to breathe with her crushing me to the floor, especially when she started pulling my head up by my hair. “Besides, there’s nowhere for you to go. The whole place is boarded up. Only a Tenebri can get in or out without power tools.”
The walkie-talkie sputtered from her pocket, “Jewel, are you listening to me? Let her go, Jewel, let her go, and I’ll—”
Still straddling my back, Jewel pulled out the walkie-talkie. “You’ll what?” she said, sounding amused. “There’s only one thing I want from this situation, Damon, and it’s rather the opposite of letting her go.” She petted my hair absently.
Why hadn’t she killed me already? Not that I was complaining, but what was she waiting for? Did she just want to toy with us for a while first? Well, I wasn’t averse to playing along. Delay could only be our friend, here.
“The other Lumii you killed,” I said. “They deserved to die.”
“Yes,” she hissed.
“But what did I do? I want to understand. Maybe I could fix it.”
“Fix it?” She laughed. “It can’t be fixed. The Lumii I’ve killed, they were the worst of the worst, but no one is innocent. Every Lumi is a tyrant with a kingdom of one. You choose to be kind to him? So what? You don’t have the right to make that choice!” She was pulling my hair harder now, and I could barely hear her over the breath scraping my constricted throat. I tried to speak, and could only manage a croak. She eased her grip.
Jewel had left the channel open on the walkie-talkie, and Damon’s rustling-static voice cut in.
“Your Lumi,” he said. “He must have been awful to you.”
“I could take it. I understood what he needed. I could take anything Jason did to me, because he was doing it to me. It was when he got another punching bag, that’s what I couldn’t tolerate.” She laughed, possibly a little hysterically, and the pressure on my hair relaxed a little further. “Then I realized what I was saying, what exactly I was jealous of, what he had turned me into. I had to stop it, somehow, I had to make it stop!
“But I was afraid to breach. Afraid of dying, afraid of the pain, afraid of… being without him. How could I be without him? Then I heard about you, Damon. The Orphanage. I went to Miami to hear you speak. You said we didn’t have to just take the scraps we were given. You said we were people, not toys. You said we could leave our Lumii if we wanted, if we were willing to take the risk. It was a risk. Lots of orphans die. But maybe it was better to die free than live a slave.” Her voice hardened, and her grip on my hair tightened again. “She enslaved you again.”
“I didn’t ask for this!” I said.
“But you befasted him.”
“I didn’t try to stop him from breaching, he chose not to—”
“Chose? You brainwashed him! No, he can’t choose. I have to help him. Like I helped the others. Like he helped me.”
“No, Jewel, I don’t want this kind of help!”
“Well, there’s what you want and what you need, Damon. Now don’t you worry, I’m going to take care of you. You’re going to need blood, lots of it — Naomi will be fresh enough for the first few minutes, though you might have to fight Darling for her—”
Damon made a choking, incoherent sound, and in that moment I hated Jewel with a focus and intensity that I hadn’t known I was capable of.
“She’ll last you long enough for me to fetch the next one—” Jewel continued, oblivious.
“I’ll breach,” Damon gasped, and Jewel paused. “I’ll breach, Jewel, I’ll do it myself, there’s no need to kill her. I’ll be just as free. Let me do it myself. Please.”
No! I wanted to scream, feeling cold and panicky in an all-new way because this, this could actually happen. Getting murdered, of course, was also looking increasingly possible, but my mind refused to truly accept that. Breach, though — that was real. Don’t, Damon, please, I thought miserably, but if she killed me he’d be just as breached, wouldn’t he? Shouldn’t I let him save me if he could?
A flicker of movement caught my eye, a figure in the shadows of my peripheral vision.
Westley.
Jewel had cocked her head, considering Damon’s proposal. “I admit,” she said, “it would be easier on both of us. You’d have a better chance of surviving.”
“Then let me.”
Westley. Westley had been helping her kill people. But he didn’t want to hurt me, didn’t want to hurt Damon. He had saved me and Jonathan from Ginger. I remembered what I thought I had heard, half-conscious in my hospital room. “You promised me you would wait.” He’d been trying to buy time, make Jewel wait until the baby was born.
“I’d have to let you out, though,” Jewel said thoughtfully. “It could be a trick, I’m not dumb enough to think you wouldn’t lie. Plus, you did already try this, you know. You couldn’t make it work then, I don’t think anything’s really changed.”
“I’ll make it work, I swear, I can make it work.”
Westley was just standing there, looking from me and Jewel to the vault door and back, eyes huge, chest heaving. He wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. Please help us, I shouted inwardly. He’s your best friend. Help us.
Jewel was shaking her head. “It’s really better if she’s dead, Damon. You won’t have to worry about her anymore, you’ll never have to wonder if she still owns you on some level. That’s why I killed Jason, you know, so I’d know I was free. Well, that,” a disturbing little laugh bubbled in her voice, “and he deserved to be punished.”
“Let me try, Jewel, just let me try!”
She thought another moment, then let out a firm, decisive breath. “No, it’s really better this way.” The knife tightened against my throat, a cold thin pain. “Brace yourself, Damon.”
Damon’s voice didn’t come only through the walkie-talkie now; I could actually hear him in the vault, screaming and crashing at the door.
It covered the sound of Westley’s fingers on the keypad.
DAMON
When the vault door swung open, I staggered and nearly fell, fought to orient myself — dim, empty room — graffiti — teller windows, marble floor.
And in the middle of the room, in a circle of weak sunlight, Jewel holding a knife to Naomi’s throat.
“Westley!” Jewel cried with a mix of surprise and anger, and I realized, yes, Westley was still holding the door, his eyes and hair a little wild. I had no time or attention to spare wondering about it.
“Let her go, Jewel,” I demanded, my knife already clutched in battered, bleeding fingers. My muscles shook with the effort of not rushing her then and there. I couldn’t afford to screw this up. If I could talk her down—
“Where’s Darling?” Jewel craned her neck, trying to see behind me into the vault.
“Where do you think? You left her bleeding for three days.” I gestured at the swa
th of my clothing that was now stiff with Darling’s blood.
Jewel’s hand around the knife trembled. “She’ll be okay.”
“No, she won’t, Jewel. She’s gone.”
“This has gone too far, Jewel,” Westley said. “We need to stop, now. We’ve gone too far.”
We. I wouldn’t have thought anything could cut through my terror for Naomi, but that did. We. For a single freefall second my eyes shifted from the middle of the room to Westley. He didn’t look at me.
Jewel shook her head, looking bewildered, overwhelmed. “No. We can’t stop now. We have to save Damon. We have to finish this.” Her hand tightened on the knife.
Westley and I rushed forward, and Jewel shrieked and scrambled to her feet, yanking Naomi upright before her as a human shield. Westley’s interference, I thought, had thrown her off her game, or she’d have simply killed Naomi then and there.
“If either of you comes one step closer, she’s dead!”
I tried not to look at Naomi, it would only distract me — I had to be focused now, clear-headed — but nothing else in the room seemed to fully exist. Her breath dragged against the knife at her throat, pluming in the cold air, and her eyes were glassy with fear, locked on mine — her lips twisted in some sickly attempt at a smile. Trying, insanely, to comfort me. It was all I could do not to scream.
“Jewel, listen to me,” Westley was saying, easing forward, hands lifted in a gesture somewhere between warding-off and surrender. “Naomi’s not like the others. She’s never hurt Damon, never hurt anybody.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jewel snarled.
“Damon,” came a whisper from behind me, and I suppressed an instinctive attack, recognizing Paris’s voice. I turned my head an inch or two, hardly daring to look away from Jewel, but Westley seemed to have all her attention.
Paris stood with his back to the wall in the shadows of the vault, a pistol in his hand. “So it really is Jewel?” he asked, voice pained.
I nodded. “How’s Darling?”
“She’ll be okay if Lincoln doesn’t double-tap her for taking a gallon off his Lumi. Priscilla gave me this before she passed out.” He waggled the gun. “I know, I’m shocked too. How we gonna do this?”
“Do you have a shot?”
“Without hitting Naomi? Doubt it, and if I did, Jewel’s last twitch would take that knife all the way to her spinal cord.”
“Paris?” Jewel cried. “What are you doing here?”
Paris shot me a look, walked calmly past me toward Jewel — slipping the gun into my hand as he passed. I tucked it into the back of my waistband.
“Jewel, honey, you’ve gotten yourself in quite a mess here,” he said. “How do you plan to get out of it? You know we can’t let you hurt Naomi.”
“Why not?” Jewel’s voice was perilously close to a whine. “You know what she is, what they all are—”
“All those others, Jewel — they did need to be punished,” Paris said. I began easing around to Jewel’s right, feeling hideously exposed. Surely she wouldn’t let me drop from her attention for more than a few more moments.
“And you were the only one brave enough to do it,” Paris continued. “You were braver than me. But Naomi, she’s not like them.”
“Yet,” Jewel said. “It’s only a matter of time. No human can have that kind of power and not abuse it.”
“She’s been kind to us, Jewel, all of us, even you. Even though we’re kathairna. Our own parents won’t look at us, but she’s been nice to us, hasn’t she? She helped me hide from the Formyndari, she protected Darling—”
“It doesn’t matter!” Jewel shrieked, squinching her eyes shut as if Paris’s words were something she couldn’t bear to look at. For a half-second, the knife lifted a hair’s-breadth away from Naomi’s skin.
I lunged, snatched Naomi by the arm, kicking at Jewel’s knee. She staggered back with a yelp, and Westley grabbed her from behind. She turned on him, slashing with her knife and snarling, and twisted away to launch herself at me.
The three of us went down. I curled myself around Naomi, who couldn’t break her own fall with her hands bound, tried to rotate her away from Jewel’s grasp. Jewel simply grabbed her by the throat and pulled, fingernails buried in skin, and I had to let go or watch Naomi’s throat be torn out.
Paris leaped on Jewel from behind before she could quite stand up, and I came at her from the other side. My knife went under her arm, glanced off bone, but it didn’t seem to even slow her down. She sent Paris staggering back with a gash from throat to navel. I stabbed again, while her back was turned, but it didn’t go deep; she was already dodging, running for a dark hall at the other end of the lobby, dragging Naomi with an arm around her neck.
Paris, bleeding on his hands and knees, shouted, “Go!”
I was already running.
NAOMI
I couldn’t breathe enough to scream, and struggling only made Jewel tighten her arm around my neck. I struggled anyway, kicking, straining at the plastic tie around my wrists until I thought I’d dislocate a shoulder. Jewel paid no mind, only dragged me deeper into the dark.
I bumped and slid over marble, then carpet, then down a few stairs — more stairs! may I never see another stair! — where she finally lost her grip and dropped me. I tried to get up, only to flop like a fish, handless.
We weren’t in a corridor anymore, but a maze of shoulder-high cardboard walls; the remains of a cubicle farm. In the dusty shaft of light from a partially-boarded window, Jewel bent double, wincing as her hand went to her side and came away bloody.
“Fortunately,” she said, “I have a snack handy.” She reached for me, and I tried to shuffle away; she chuckled, pinned me to the wall with one hand, and with the other grabbed my hair, pulling my neck into view.
And Damon dropped on her from the wall of the cubicle.
In the storm of snarls and hisses, I tried to burrow into the side of the cubicle. Damon grabbed my shoulder, spun me and hacked at the plasticuffs. He mostly got my arm. Jewel tackled him into the wall, and it collapsed into a heap of rotting cardboard, the three of us tumbling with it. Damon was back on his feet almost before I hit the floor, a gun in his hands. The sound was quick, sharp, so loud and Jewel screamed, like metal on metal, but despite the new blood on her chest launched herself at Damon’s legs, knocked him over, took the gun for herself. Brought it to bear on Damon’s right eye.
I sank my teeth into her leg.
The gun fired but it went wide, Jewel already turning to snatch me up by the hair and kick me across the room. My back hit the wall, knocked the air from my lungs and a rain of dust from the boarded window. For a minute I couldn’t move, like a bird flown into a window.
Breathe! Breathe!
The gun went off a couple more times but the catfight noises didn’t stop. My chest didn’t feel right where Jewel’s foot had hit. Something was moving around that shouldn’t, every time I breathed. But I had to breathe. When I could move again, I looked up to see Damon stomp-kicking the gun from Jewel’s hand, sending it skittering across the floor. Toward me.
Jewel head-butted his stomach, he threw her off, they circled each other for a moment, both breathless and bleeding, before tearing into each other again.
I couldn’t get the gun. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even stand up. If only my stupid hands weren’t tied! My wrists were slippery with blood now, but I couldn’t quite wriggle them out of the cuffs. Good grief it hurt. Was there something I could use to cut the plastic? I could see glass sparkling on the floor, a gleaming soda can, a broken bottle. Bottle! I tried to inchworm my way toward it.
I had only made it a few feet when I found something else. A cigarette lighter.
Plastic melts.
Ungracefully, I maneuvered the lighter into my hand and flicked it on.
And this, children, is why curse words were invented.
I tried to strangle the shriek of pain, but Damon’s head whipped toward me anyway, a moment of distraction t
hat brought Jewel crashing down on top of him. I screamed again in pure frustration. Well, that and mind-boggling agony. The plastic was melting, all right. And dripping, molten, down what remained of my skin.
Nine seconds/eons later, the pressure in my shoulders vanished, making it a little easier to breathe. The slagged remainder of the cuffs fell to the floor. I dropped the lighter and scrambled across the floor toward the gun. My hands were half-numb from captivity, half-dead with pain, but I fumbled the gun into them and stood.
Damon and Jewel were a whirlwind of flashing metal, darting arms, kicks and leaps. Nothing human could move that fast. And nothing human could aim at just one of them.
Shouting was going to really, really hurt. I drew in as deep a breath as I could.
“Damon, drop!”
Without so much as a startled glance at me, he dropped to the floor.
Even more amazingly, I hit my target, more or less. I aimed three shots at her chest, missed twice, but the third one glanced off her head. She turned a fall into a scrambling, skidding run, making for the far corridor.
Oh, yeah. Harder bones than humans.
I didn’t realize Damon had moved until he grabbed me, hands on my face, kissed me bruise-hard. “Go. Run. Find Paris and get out of here.”
I tried to hand him the gun.
“Keep it. I don’t know if Westley… keep it. Go.” Another kiss and he shoved me toward the corridor to the lobby, and ran after Jewel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Liberty or Death
DAMON
“Very few mongooses, however old and wise, care to follow a cobra into its hole. You never know when the hole may open out and give the cobra room to strike.”
I hadn’t thought of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi in years; perhaps the dark halls of the abandoned bank put me in mind of a snake’s burrow. The analogy fit; Jewel had had months, if not years, to explore this building. And she was certainly a snake.
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