by Amy Braun
I eased away from Gemma and Nash, slowly making my way to the beaten man. He practically shook with fury. I was determined to make the handshake a very short one.
We stood facing one another in the middle of the makeshift ring, our blood dotting the rough, dusty road. Everyone seemed to be waiting on a knife’s edge for the next blow.
Crosley glared at me with wild, furious eyes.
I took his hand and shook it once––
He yanked me forward, nearly ripping my arm out of its socket. The sudden jab to my face dazed me.
“No!” Nash screamed.
Shouts where everywhere. My head was still spinning as Crosley’s arm captured my throat. He swung me around and trapped me against his chest.
“Now, Tom!”
Crosley’s shout ripped the rest of the cobwebs from my brain. I saw a man shove his way through the crowd and into the circle. He had a furious snarl on his face, and a knife in his hand.
Nash ploughed into him like a train, sending the much smaller man crashing into the ground with a heavy thud.
I threw my head back, smashing it into Crosley’s nose. The defense sent another spike of pain through my skull, but really, what was one more wound?
It caught him off guard. I hammered my left elbow into his ribs and tore his arm from my throat. I spun around and slugged him in the jaw.
Gemma was at my side an instant later, shoving my flintlock into my hand. The crowd of marauders surged toward us.
I raised my flintlock and fired a shot into the air.
The commotion stopped with the crack of gunfire.
I dropped my arm until the barrel of the pistol was pointed directly at Crosley’s heart. Fresh blood seeped from the corner of his mouth, but he wasn’t making another move for me.
“I came here looking for respect,” I said, loud enough for all of them to hear. “I fought for it and won. But clearly I wasted my time.”
I shifted the angle of the flintlock ever so slightly. Then I pulled the trigger.
The bullet ripped through the meat of Crosley’s right arm. He roared in pain and gripped his bicep. Red swallowed his vision, and he ran for me. He stopped when I cocked the gun.
“We’re leaving now. If anyone wants to come with us, earn back what they’ve lost instead of pissing it away under this bastard’s lazy boot, you’re welcome to. If you don’t, then stay here. I don’t have time to care.”
I shifted my eyes, taking in as many faces as I could without leaving Crosley far from my view.
“If you follow us and intend to put a knife in the back of me or anyone on my crew, we’ll know. And there won’t be a scrap of you left when we’re done with you.”
No one responded to my threat. I let it linger, let it fester like poison in a wound. I meant it. No one would hurt the people I loved without paying for it tenfold.
I kept the pistol outstretched as I eased for the street, away from Crosley and the cluster of confused, intimidated marauders. We weren’t accosted or wounded as we walked out. I still refused to lower the gun. I would put my flintlock back when we made it to the far side of the street where we hid the skiff, and not a second before. The marauders had barely flinched from where we’d left them, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.
Once we turned our backs to the market district square and the ruined Behemoth, I let myself relax. Sort of.
I slumped against a wall and groaned, pressing one hand to the side of my aching head. I hadn’t felt this bad since my last fight with Davin.
Nash was at my side in an instant.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine,” I muttered. I pushed myself off the wall and started walking again, though the only thing I wanted to do was lie down and sleep until the pain was gone.
Nash hovered, watching me like he thought I was going to keel over at any second.
I didn’t know how much time had passed before we reached the alley where we’d landed the skiff. Nash and I grabbed the edge of the black tarp and began pulling it off the skiff. Once the small, rusted ship was revealed, we began folding the tarp back up. The skiff had a sharp, cone-shaped figurehead and oil-black sails held on a spear-tipped mast, but it wasn’t very big. Despite its appearance and the memories it brought me, I never regretted taking the Hellion skiff. It’d been highly useful, and I took satisfaction in knowing that I stole from the Hellions and was flying again.
“Uh, guys…” Gemma said.
Nash and I dumped the tarp in the skiff and looked down the alley entrance that Gemma was facing. To where a crowd of fifty people was standing.
I stared, trying to figure out how they snuck up on us. I hadn’t heard a peep from them, but then again I wasn’t expecting anyone to follow us. The marauders had made no effort to offer their support, and no one in this rabble was one of them. They were thinner, dirtier, more desperate. They were a collection of lost souls, the leftovers that had nowhere to run, who wouldn’t be accepted.
The ones who refused to quit.
All of them– men and women anywhere from fourteen to fifty years old– were looking at me.
One of the men at the front, a stocky fellow with tan-gold skin, cropped black hair, gritty stubble, and sharp brown eyes walked forward. He was dressed in a grey work shirt smeared with dirt stains. A leather shoulder holster was draped over his torso. Dust circled the edges of his pants and the tips of his boots.
As I watched his sturdy, confident march, I instantly knew one thing about him:
He was a soldier.
I glanced at the holsters, seeing the ends of a pair of flintlocks. Below them, I could see the hilts of knives on either side of his hips. I was willing to bet he had more weapons hidden somewhere on his body. Even if he didn’t, he had the muscles to do serious damage with his body alone.
The man didn’t slow down as he got closer. He probably would have walked right past Gemma if she hadn’t drawn her flintlock and pointed it at his face.
He stopped and gave her a quick glance. He didn’t immediately disregard her as a threat, which earned him a little more of my respect. The man’s eyes riveted back to me.
“Quite the display,” he said in a deep, growling voice. “I liked the speech at the end.”
“You’re too kind,” I replied, resting my hand on the skull-face embedded in my cutlass hilt. “Now who the hell are you?”
“My name’s Beck,” he announced. “Former sergeant of the twenty-sixth Aerial combat division in the Sky Guard.”
Gemma thumbed back the hammer of her flintlock. Its echo carried like a wave. Beck glanced at her again, but only for a moment, like having a gun pointed at his head was commonplace.
“Current Captain of the Aon Forest Brigade,” he added.
My jaw dropped a little at that. I’d heard of the Brigade, a group of former Sky Guards who supposedly made it over the barricades the Hellions put down during The Storm. Rumored to be the only ones who made it out from under the Behemoth’s ever present eye, they were the legend that Claire used to try and talk me into staging an assault on the Hellion warship.
Even though I eventually followed through with her request, it wasn’t because I believed the myth she told me. Until this moment, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the Brigade was real.
If Beck were telling the truth, then I had no idea why he would leave the neighboring province of Sage Grove to come back here.
When none of us responded, Beck shifted his gaze to Gemma again. “Can you tell her to put the gun away? It’s hard to talk with her waving it in my face.”
I walked to Gemma’s side and stood next to her. Nash jumped out of the skiff and did the same.
“That depends on what you want to say,” I said.
“I thought it was obvious,” Beck remarked. When I just stared at him, his shoulders sagged and he turned. He swept his hand out across the mouth of the alley, showing me the fifty people observing this strange exchange.
“All
of us want the same thing.” Beck began to turn to me. “Exactly what you offered that band of degenerates in the market plaza. We want to bring the fight to the Hellions. We want to find out how to attack them, then wipe them from the skies, permanently.”
I couldn’t argue the appeal. But he seemed to be the only fighter in the group. I went searching for marauders because the only thing they loved more than partying was fighting. The two usually went hand in hand. Against Hellions, I didn’t think this crowd would stand a chance.
“You lead this group?” I asked.
Beck shook his head. “Not this one.”
“What does that mean?”
He held my gaze. “I just met them. But if you’re wondering, I’m guessing most of them aren’t fighters.” He gave another glance to Gemma, sharper than the last. “I’ll warn you one more time to get the gun away from me.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Or what?”
Beck kept his eyes on her. Then he snapped out his hand and smacked his fist against her wrist.
Gemma yelped in pain and lost her grip on the flintlock. Nash launched from my side to tackle Beck, but the solider stalked closer to me. His hand curled around the butt of his own, oil black pistol.
Nash pulled his fist back in a punch that would shatter more than one bone in Beck’s face if it hit. As experienced as Nash was, he just didn’t have the discipline or professionally honed skills that Beck did. I knew this the moment I saw the man move.
He drew a knife from the sheath at his ribs and pointed it at Nash’s throat. My friend jerked to a halt not a moment too soon. In the same motion, he pressed the barrel of the gun to Gemma’s head. It had all been so fast, so efficient, I barely had time to register it all.
But when I did, I was furious.
“Get your hands away from them before I kill you,” I growled.
Beck sighed and lolled his head in my direction. His hands never faltered.
“I came here looking to be civilized, you know.” The levity left his gaze. “If you really have a ship, if you’re really looking to attack the Breach, we need your help. And you need ours.”
He was sincere. Filled with conviction. Whatever he was doing, he believed in it to his core.
“You said you were part of the Aon Forest Brigade,” I said after a moment. “They’re supposed to be a story. How do I know that they’re real?”
Beck read my face, looking for something. I didn’t know what, and before I could guess, he dropped his hands and stepped away from my crew. Nash stormed his way in front of Gemma, barely containing his rage. If Beck said the wrong thing, I didn’t doubt that my best friend would hammer him into the ground.
Beck’s eyes stayed on mine. “If I say it’s better to simply show you, would you believe me?”
I grinned. “Not for a second.”
Surprisingly, Beck smiled back. “Smart man.” He took a step toward me. No one tried to stop him.
“You went to the marauders because you wanted an army. I can give you one. Every man and woman trained. All of them eager to fight. Whatever hatred you have for the Hellions, we have it in tenfold.”
I doubted that, but my suspicions about him were starting to become clear.
Beck said he used to be in the Sky Guard. I was willing to bet his so-called-army– the supposed Aon Forest Brigade– were more of the same.
Wonders never ceased.
“All right,” I said. I pointed over his shoulder. “But they’re coming too.”
Beck glanced at the eager rabble, then to the skiff behind me. “Don’t think they’ll all fit on that boat.”
“Not on that one, no. But my other ship?” I grinned, feeling hope and pride for the first time in a month. “That one can hold significantly more.”
Chapter 6
Claire
Davin’s smile unnerved me when he came into my room three days later.
“Dreams come true, darling,” he taunted, taking slow steps toward me. “You’re going home today.”
If the news had been spoken by anyone else, I would have been overjoyed. I was missing the ruins of Westraven, the sight of the grey clouds, the only home I knew now. But more than that, I missed the people I’d left behind. Nash. Gemma. Abby. Sawyer. I would do anything to get back to them.
Now I was going back, under the ever watchful leer of Davin Kendric and the Hellions he commanded.
“Not excited?” Davin asked. He stopped in front of me and reached out to grip the chain shackling the restraints on my wrists. “Don’t you want to see the sights, get away from all this darkness?”
I wrenched my hands away. I had no doubt that he would just grab me again, but any moment where I could feel like my nerves weren’t trying to crawl out of my skin was a moment I valued.
“I don’t see the appeal of going anywhere with you,” I retorted. It had been two days since the Vesper fed from me. I was feeling more confident than I probably should have. I was determined to hang onto this strength with all my might.
Davin made a clicking sound with his tongue and stepped closer. “There’s that attitude again. It hurts my feelings, you know.”
I stood my ground, though really, I wanted to be on the opposite side of the Dark Spire. “Why do you think I do it?”
He grinned and towered over me. “Because you like being difficult. It gets you off.”
I scowled and turned away, disgusted.
Davin’s hands latched onto my arms and wrenched me back around so quickly my head spun. He was still smiling.
“I bet you give my brother the same treatment, don’t you?”
“Let go of me,” I warned, unable to control the tiny shiver of fear that went through my voice.
Davin acted like he didn’t even hear it. “You want him to chase you. You want the danger. You crave it.” He leaned in closer. “I can smell it on you. And darling, you have no idea how delicious it makes you.”
Suddenly, he crushed his fingers into my arms and yanked me into a brutal kiss. Davin shoved his tongue into my mouth, a leech slithering along the flesh it wanted to bite. I tried to force my lips closed, to push away from him, but he didn’t relent. I couldn’t move my hands, couldn’t even scream.
But I could still fight. After all, he made the mistake of letting me too close.
I jolted my knee up, ramming it between his legs as hard as I could. Davin ripped his mouth free of mine and let out a cry of pain. I twisted away from his arms and brought my fists together like I was holding a club. I smashed both fists against his cheek. Davin’s head twisted to the side, and I sprinted for the door.
I got maybe five steps before he suddenly darted in front of me. I didn’t even have time to stop running, he was too fast. I screamed when he curled his arms around my waist, picked me up, and threw me across the room. I was certain that I was going to hit the wall and feel something break inside me. Instead, I hit the plush bed, bouncing on the mattress at impact. I scrambled to get off, but he was disturbingly fast. Davin pounced on top of me, grabbing the link between my shackles and looping it over the bedpost. I panicked and tried to lift my arms free. Davin pushed down on my chest, sending a sharp lance of pain down my shoulders.