Shhh, she consoled him, checking him over and carefully channeling his thoughts. I am here, my love. I will take care of everything.
I know you wanted me to take his life, but I wanted to remember our ways first...I wanted to honor the life…
I understand, my love. You are a loving person, a strong child of our people. That is why you wanted to honor him first. Do not be sorry for your charity.
Now...I am tired. I want to rest.
No. You will live, she told him and let him see her determination. That one is out of reach now, too strong for us to take, even together...but, I have another...
Mother! he exclaimed, finally seeing her better. You are hurt!
His fear shot through her, burning her further. Nothing hurt like a loved one’s pain or fear. She steadied herself and then answered calmly, I am fine. I need only to finish one thing and then I will take the rest of our people and wake refreshed. You must trust mother.
He was silent, feeling a lie but wanting like every child to believe his parent’s reassurance.
I must work now and will need to separate from you for but a short time so that I may concentrate fully. Be strong and do not rest, no matter how tired you feel. She used a small amount of her power to make the last a compulsion and then released him.
Her arm wobbled and she let herself fall to the floor. Hunched on her side, her face inches from Mercy’s, she focused on the increasingly difficult task of breathing. Each breath shuddered its way in and hissed as it departed. Mercy lay motionless, closing her eyes when she had gotten her fill of Jaelyn’s hateful stare.
Finally, Jaelyn whispered, lacking the energy for anything stronger, “You have nearly killed my son.”
Mercy nodded.
Jaelyn didn’t have time for more, although she wanted to make the girl suffer...suffer!...for what she and Scythe had done. The thoughts of self loathing that she currently filled the girl’s head with were disgustingly inadequate. They were not what she deserved, but they were all that Jaelyn could manage at the moment. She moved forward with her new plan.
“Mercy, will you give your life?”
Tears spilled. As if that would change anything. Jaelyn had shed many tears. The fool was short a hundred years worth of tears. “Yes.”
“Do it now.”
Although Jaelyn had affixed a compulsion on her last words, the girl stubbornly resisted it. She was as difficult as her aunt. “If I do, will you see that my family…”
The girl thought she could bargain with her?
Sickened by her arrogance, Jaelyn spat at her, “Your family, and the next forty-eight of the sufficiently powerful Humans that I harvest from the bordertowns will give their pathetic, pointless lives for something greater than themselves. Do. It. Now.” She tried to make it stronger, but it was all she could do to put the light push on the thought. She was truly out of resources now. Her eyes closed and she breathed raggedly. She whispered, “You promised, Mercy Young.”
Then she felt the power next to her expand. She wanted to soak it up, but she resisted; she even had to suppress her body’s instant reaction, pulling back the energy field that arced toward Mercy instinctively. It had become her body’s habit to take power when it was depleted. But this power was not for her. It was for her son. She smiled at the thought that he would soon be well after all this time.
“You must put up your strongest shields, or they will try to stop you.”
The girl’s shield went up, and it was the most formidable one Jaelyn had ever seen. She basked in the glow of power right next to her. The experience at the chemistry lab had been more beneficial than she thought, boosting the vitality of Mercy’s power several levels higher than predicted. This was the power Jaelyn had wanted to have at her side, assisting her with her work, but that plan had been shattered by Morgan, betrayer of his people, so this would have to do. Her son’s life was well worth the exchange.
Jaelyn felt Mercy connect with her son, and his body instinctively began to draw on her rich essence. She was so pleased to be able to provide him with such an excellent host, a feast for a prince. Now she could rest a bit…
-----------
Scythe stood at the door.
He blinked.
It was taking a long time to open.
He waited.
He blinked.
Maybe the elevator was stuck on another floor. He put his hand on the door. There was no vibration. Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t hear a sound from the machinery either.
He frowned at the feeling of the door beneath his fingers. It was cold, but it wasn’t the smooth cold of metal. It was the rough cold of stone.
A stone elevator door? Wait, why was he waiting for the elevator?
He looked more closely. The “door” was a shallow alcove, a niche in the wall. The “button” he had pushed was a small crack in the stone.
His heart jumped in his chest and began beating frantically. He was standing in front of a blank wall.
Scythe stepped back and looked around. Where am I? He turned and followed his own scent back the way he had come. His mind pieced together the last few minutes...no it had been longer than that…
It had been much longer than a few minutes since he had left Mercy on that bench.
He started to lope down the wide hallway, cursing his lethargic, frail body and his even weaker mind. He had been manipulated by someone, probably Edillian, but he didn’t know when he had been deceived. He remembered leaving the laboratory…and she had quickly grown tired and thirsty…
That’s right. She had asked for water, and he had known where some could be found, but it was far back in the caves. He had passed a natural spring with water that had smelled amazingly clean on his way into the city. He had told her to sit and rest until he returned with it. Then he had gone looking for the entrance to the cave system. Using the elevator as a way in...the idea of an elevator must have been implanted in his mind, because he hadn’t seen any elevators...
Stupid. He grit his teeth. He didn’t even have anything to hold water in. He had been totally and masterfully controlled. He growled internally at the part of him that had to admire the ingenuity of the set up, had catalogued it for later use, and was already devising a few crafty variations on it.
Up here, he told himself, bringing his whole mind into focus. This is where she had assured him she would wait…
Not only was she not there, but her scent wasn’t there.
Thump. The heavy, loud beat was followed by three more, equally shuddering ones. Thump. Thump. Thump.
There wasn’t a trace of her scent anywhere, because she hadn’t been there.
Mercy had never sat there, even though he could clearly remember the look on her face when she had asked for water, the feel of her hand as he had released it, and the sound of her heartbeat as he had walked away.
He was already back on his own trail. He forced his body to move faster than it wanted to through the stone corridors, slowing only enough to make the sharp turns that kept him on the path made by his and only his scent.
She hadn’t gotten tired. She hadn’t even walked with him. His feet were carrying him back to the lab. She...he must have done it there...she was still back there, with Edillian!
“Scythe?” A voice called out to him, and he grabbed the corner of the wall to bring himself to a painfully quick stop at the intersection to a hallway he had never been down. At the far end, Smoke stood outside a closed door. Scythe started picking up the trace scents of other people he knew from his home. His old friend started walking toward him, but he turned back and opened the door, shouting to someone inside when Scythe gave him an old hand signal that he knew the man would recognize and returned to his hunt.
Within a minute, he heard Smoke catching up to him from behind. When he was close enough, he asked, “Where the hell did you come from?”
“I came from the Capital. How did you get here?”
“We followed Jaelyn...damn it. This is lik
e an insane dream...Are you okay? You look like hell...”
“Tell me.” Scythe didn’t know who Jaelyn was, but she had to be someone formidable if she could move his entire family, including the not easily fooled Lena, from their home to this remote place. He knew that the only way something like that could have happened was through the type of mind control he had just been subjected to.
He was already calculating. There were at least two people with gifts similar to but much greater than his and Cord’s…abilities that they had already been proven susceptible to. He cursed under his breath and gave his full attention to Smoke’s description of the attack on their home.
-----------
“I haven’t seen him since he left my family’s retreat days ago. I had assumed he was going home, but I was concerned because he was acting strangely. Also, he assured me he would contact me and then didn’t.” Heron said and blinked the sleep out of his eyes. He took a sip of coffee and glanced at the clock in his study, and then he looked back at the two women who sat across from him.
Aorin had called him at his home and had used the pretense of a Scere investigation to petition an interview with him, stating that it was of the utmost importance and insisting that it be conducted immediately.
It was the sloppiest, most poorly crafted excuse he had ever heard. His young niece had provided a better one in her efforts to get a chocolate bar from her grandmother. Naturally, he had refused. He encouraged her to review the procedures that everyone had to follow in the service of process, and referred her to a good legal firm if she had any questions.
He was in court every day now, since he had been forced to return from his family retreat by his legal council; he spent all of his time answering questions and providing documents and trying to retain as much of his family’s holdings and influence as he could. When she had called, he had told himself that he wasn’t about to start doing it at night as well.
He was in the process of hanging up when something caught his attention. She had yelled, “Wait! Just one question, then, please,” and the first bit of sincerity had shown itself in her voice. Sincerity and desperation.
He hesitated and heard another, quieter voice behind hers.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen stupid.”
“Shut up.”
Aorin shushed whoever was with her and continued, “Okay. Thank you. I know it was weird to call like this...I...I’m not good at the sneaky thing, okay? I know that. So, I’m just going to come out and say it…”
He couldn’t help himself. It was too bizarre to be real, which reminded him of the basic disorientation he felt when he had traveled with Scythe to the Capital. He was curious enough to listen for another minute.
“I am a friend of Scythe’s. You can verify that by looking me up. I worked with the team defending him four years ago. I’m trying to find him because he has gone missing. Were you the one who helped him escape?”
He almost hung up again. Everyone was looking for Scythe. What made her think he would just... But as his finger hovered over the disconnect button, he thought about his own concerns about Scythe’s strange behavior and lack of communication. He decided it wouldn’t hurt to give her a few minutes, if he could verify her claims about a close relationship with him.
“Alright, Aorin. Answer me this question, and I will give you ten minutes of my time.”
“Oh. Okay. Go ahead.”
“In what way would Scythe punish the one who wronged him? Would he quickly kill him or slowly torture him first?”
“That’s easy. He wouldn’t. And as a side note, he doesn’t do stuff slowly. Give me another one.”
Heron blinked.
“Ask me what he said when my brother thanked him for saving his life. ‘It’s our job.’ Ask me about what kind of books he reads. All, but he really likes anything autobiographical and old or unusual. Ask me how much payment he will accept for helping someone in need. None. Ask me how much he talks when he is nervous. Not at all. Ask me what he talks about when he has free time. Nothing, you have to start the talking. Ask me what he does all of the time. Watches. He watches everything. And he thinks. And when he talks, he has something to say. If he doesn’t tell you something, it’s because it’s better if you don’t know, and if he tells you something, you need to pay attention because there’s a reason he’s telling you. Ask me what he loves...well, there are other things, but I know he loves the hunt...”
“Alright. You can come over.”
“Great, but I just wanted to change my first answer…”
“I’ve already given you permission for the interview.”
“I know but I like to get the facts straight. My new answer is that he wouldn’t punish the person. He’d probably try to teach him a lesson.”
Heron asked, “What time can I expect you?”
She had brought a woman who Heron identified immediately as being akin to Scythe in at least one way: she moved and held herself like a soldier. She claimed to be a friend of his as well. He could tell before the ten minutes were up that they were genuine friends of Scythe. They knew things that only someone close to him would know, things about the man’s true character. So, he had trusted them with his account of Scythe’s escape from confinement and departure from Heron’s home.
“How was he acting strangely?” Anora asked.
“He was hearing things. I thought he was delusional, and he may have been, but he was convinced that it was a power of some type that was trying to influence him.”
“A power? What did it look like when he was acting strange?”
“We were in the middle of talking, and then he merely stopped. Not just stopped talking or listening. It was like he wasn’t there anymore. He stood there motionless for a minute and then walked to the balcony and looked out at the mountains. He started humming a little under his breath. Now that I think about it, he had been humming before that, too. In the car and then at the house. He told me that the music was calling him.”
“Music?”
“Yes, and it frightened him; it scared me, too. Whether it was delusional or not, he was shaken badly and was compelled to leave. I doubt I could have stopped him.”
They sat in silence for a moment, because no one knew what to think about that.
Heron made a decision. “I don’t know where he is, but I do know how to find my car. If it is with him, and the security system has not been disabled, you should be able to find him, assuming he is within range of the tracking system.”
“That is genius! Of course!” Aorin said, clenching her hands into two fists and smiling brightly.
He grinned. He could see clearly why Aorin was a friend to Scythe.
Anora smiled, too, at Aorin's enthusiastic response and then gave Heron a courteous nod, “That would be a lot of help, Heron. I thank you.”
He nodded, and spun his chair around to turn on his computer.
Chapter 47
Just as another deep breath was leaving her lungs, she felt a shift next to her. Jaelyn’s eyes popped open in horror. Mercy’s wall, the one that Jaelyn had taught her to build to protect the children, parted just enough for a surprisingly large swarm of poisonous threads to burst out of her. They flew out of her body, passed through Edillian’s cylindrical barrier as if it weren’t there and began to attach themselves to every child in the room.
“NO!” she screamed and pounded her weak, tiny fists on the enormous door that separated her from Mercy. Nothing. Her arm flew at Mercy, but it hit an invisible shield that popped up between them. She tried to put power behind her second blow, but it had no effect. She was worn too thin to do more. Words were all that she had to fight with. “Stop this! You’ll kill…”
Mercy’s voice touched her, calm, resigned and distant, as if she rested at the bottom of a deep ocean. No one else will need to die for your children. Then Mercy swam away.
Mercy’s body shuttered once and then sunk: every limb went limp, her head flopped to th
e side, and her eyelids lowered. Then something unexpected happened. The aura of power around her began to shrink. She shouldn’t have been getting weaker... Jaelyn examined the threads more closely. Mercy wasn’t drawing on the children, she was feeding them. Along every single string, the girl’s power flowed out of her, and, because it was flowing into so many, her enormous well was emptying quickly.
Jaelyn’s anxious wind switched in an instant from east to west. Stupid...Stupid...STUPID GIRL! She shouted and beat at the girl’s shield with both her physical and energy-created hands, trying to get through to her, but Mercy was submerged. She couldn’t be reached, and the shield that Jaelyn had admired and helped to reinforce was sufficient to keep not just Jaelyn, but everyone else out.
Finally, when her powerlessness became too much to bear, Jaelyn lay back and let the tears come. Her last tears.
Outside their refuge, she felt the stirring of power. Several people’s energy swirled frantically, trying to interfere with Mercy’s threads, but they were no match for her. Once a line was cut, she merely reestablished it again, flipping her ribbon up, swerving around the offending force, and bringing it back down again to continue pouring herself into the child. Even if they managed to protect one child, there were too many children and too few of them.
One formidable power brought itself to bear against Mercy herself. Scythe’s wave crashed against the multiple petals that made up Mercy’s shield, shaking Jaelyn and everything in the chamber. Everything except for Mercy, whose nearly lifeless body did not move. Others followed but none was successful.
An impenetrable barrier. Just as she had planned.
She contemplated the future that would result from her scheming.
Worse than death. Worse than death. Much worse. Than death.
She knew she didn’t have the courage to live through that again. She lifted her head, angling it until she could see the bottom of the tank above her. Then she reached toward it, inching her body forward until she could flip open the panel at its base. She input a code, initiated a few procedures and then looked up. The tank began to empty, and the body inside was lowered by the cables inside to the floor of the chamber. When the liquid was gone, the glass enclosure rose up, and Edillian’s warm, clammy hand spilled over the edge. She gripped it in her own and connected to him.
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