Siege of Shadows

by Sarah Raughley

  “That would take too long!” Lake said. “You said Marian was the first fire Effigy, right?”

  Belle had told me once during training that I would have to go through each Effigy. But I couldn’t even get past Natalya, not when she was still plotting to take me over. I held my head in my hands.

  “Belle, let’s get the special volume,” Chae Rin said.

  “No.”

  “Damn it!” In one quick movement, Chae Rin pushed Naomi out of the way with her elbow and with her great strength broke the sword’s blade. It dissipated—cold frost into the air. She’d pushed Naomi so hard, the woman had tripped and fallen to the floor, her hand grasping the window ledge as she tried to reorient herself, but Belle was already stalking toward her.

  “I said stop.” With her bloody hand, Chae Rin grabbed Belle’s collar and pushed her against the window, but Belle’s fingers were already curled around her shirt. The tension was palpable, as chilling as the air around us. My feet wouldn’t move. I was too scared to even tell them to.

  “Oh, come on!” Lake gripped the straps of her knapsack, her voice trembling with fear.

  “You know what, Belle? I’m getting real tired of your crap,” Chae Rin spat. “You want to kill a woman because she blames herself for someone’s death. Clearly she didn’t murder anyone, but you still want to cut her open. What the hell is wrong with you? It’s not like you—”

  “To be this cold?” Belle’s lips curved into a small smile. Not a nice one. “Surely you of all people know better than that.”

  “Yeah, you’re a bitch,” Chae Rin said. “And that’s usually fine. But you’re not a murderer. You’ve been acting freaking bizarre since we got back from France—no, since Natalya’s death. Like what you did in that desert hideout? And that wasn’t the only mission where you jumped the gun. You’ve been good at hiding it so far, but you’re slipping, Belle. I know it. They know it too.”

  She flicked her head toward us. It was true. Belle had been off since Natalya’s death—especially once she found out her mentor’s suicide was a murder.

  I thought back to that night in France by the river. Belle had taught me to scry, but it wasn’t to reach Marian. The way she’d shaken me, pleaded with me. The desperation.

  She was still desperate.

  “So what are you going to do?” Chae Rin tightened her grip. “You’re going to kill a director’s wife? And then we all get stuck in a jail cell while the Sect continues to fall apart when we have less than seven days to stop whatever Saul is planning?”

  “Why not?”

  “I want to go home.” The word sounded as if it’d been somehow mangled coming up Chae Rin’s throat. She was shaking. “I want to see my family. My mother.”

  “Me too,” Lake whispered. “I’m an only child. I’m all my parents have, and they’ve been so patient this whole time.” She sounded close to tears.

  “We can’t do that until we get Saul once and for all,” Chae Rin continued. “And your selfish shit is going to get in the way of that.”

  “But you all have families,” Belle whispered. “That woman took mine. She admitted it.”

  Naomi held in her sobs. She couldn’t speak. So I did.

  “Belle . . .” I swallowed hard, glancing at Naomi, who shook her head ever so slightly. She was begging me. I balled my hands into fists. “I know what it’s like to lose people. My family died, remember?”

  But even I had Uncle Nathan. Most of my grandparents were still alive. I wasn’t completely alone. But Belle was. She didn’t even know where she’d come from.

  “Getting revenge isn’t going to change anything. Please. I hate this.” Tears trickled down my cheeks. “We’re supposed to stick together. You guys are the only friends I have. My sister’s gone. . . .”

  I felt Lake’s comforting hand on my shoulder. The thought of June made me suddenly feel faint and weak. It was that phantom pain again, like I just found out I was missing an arm. “Don’t fight. We have to stay together. I . . .” I inhaled. “I don’t want to lose anyone else.”

  That was enough. It felt like the tension was finally starting to dissolve. Belle’s body relaxed, and Chae Rin let her go. We stood awkwardly in silence, pairs of eyes avoiding each other. I walked over to Naomi and helped her stand.

  “Belle,” Naomi started.

  “Quiet,” Belle hissed, brushing herself off and stalking away from the window.

  “No, I need to say this.” Naomi kept her hand firmly around my wrist. “As a member of the Council, I watched Natalya, I’ve watched you—all of you—swear allegiance to the Sect. And then I’d sit in my ivory tower and let you all fight and die for the cause we gave to you.”

  It was hard to forget the vast emptiness I felt as I knelt before Blackwell and the seven members of the Council in Ely Cathedral. Naomi’s had been the only soothing voice among the cacophony of judgments. Maybe this was how she’d felt that day, when she alone had tried to give me something to hold on to.

  “I never understood just how heavy that burden was until I learned of the death of one Effigy, Jemma Moretti. One of the Effigies of wind before you, Victoria. Suicide.” Naomi gripped my wrist tighter. “Perhaps it was the funeral. I can still hear her mother’s wailing. And since then I’ve wanted to do right by you. By all of you. When Natalya first became an Effigy, she used her power to kill a mobster who’d held her family in debt.”

  “What? I didn’t know that,” I said. And by the way Belle frowned, it didn’t look like she did either.

  “I covered it up. I thought doing little things like this would help ease my guilt . . . help me feel useful again. Maybe that’s why, when Baldric suggested that there could be corruption in the Sect, the very organization that marched little girls to their deaths, I wanted to do what I could. But in the end, nothing’s changed. I sent Natalya to her death like all the others. And now I could be sending you straight into danger.”

  Finally, she let go of my wrist and moved toward the other set of windows, her black hair glimmering under the moonlight streaming through the blinds.

  “I may never be able to atone for anything I’ve done,” Naomi said. “But there’s nothing I can do on my own other than this. I have to lean on you again, Effigies. I’m sorry, but please . . . please find the volume. There’s a secret passageway beyond the museum that only Baldric knows, but he told Natalya, which means he’s told you, Maia.” Naomi looked at me meaningfully. “Get it before the Sect does. If what Baldric said is true, it could be the key to stopping all of this. I have to believe that. I just—”

  She was looking at Belle, the pain of too many lives lost sinking into the wells of her eyes. “My only wish is that we could find a way to stop this painful cycle. Girls being trained and sent to the slaughter. Fighting and dying. Pain and revenge. If only it would end.”

  “End . . . ,” Belle said as if the word were foreign to her.

  Naomi closed her eyes. “It needs to change,” she said. “All of it. Baldric said so himself before he disappeared. The Sect. Humanity.” Her lips trembled. “Our world needs a revival. If only . . . if only we were . . . free.”

  A deafening round of shots exploded through the window, but only three pierced Naomi’s body. None of us moved. None of us could figure out what was happening. Not until Naomi hit the ground.

  24

  I WAS ALREADY ON THE floor, the blinds falling, glass shattering around my head. Lake was shrieking something. Naomi. I had to get to Naomi. Heart racing, I pulled myself up to my knees swiftly, keeping myself low to avoid the next barrage of bullets. Carefully, painfully, I crawled on my knees atop the broken glass until I reached Naomi’s twitching body. One in the shoulder. Two in the chest. Her eyes were fluttering, rolling to the back of her head.

  I scooped her up and made a run for it. My heart pounded in my ears as I tried to stop myself from slipping on the ice. I managed to get past the couch just as a group of men in pitch-black strike-team gear swung through the broken windows from ropes
.

  As she crouched on the ground, Belle melted the ice wall closing off the hallway with a sweep of her hand. Naomi’s bodyguards, James and Rosa, ran into the room shooting.

  “Give her to me!” Rosa said, diving to the ground.

  James ran past me, still shooting, just as I felt a bullet pierce my leg. Screaming out in pain, I doubled over and nearly dropped Naomi, but Rosa caught both of us.

  The shots and yells pounded my senses. My head screaming, I turned and saw Chae Rin grabbing a soldier’s gun and swiveling it around so it could shoot one of his comrades instead. Lake blew a group of them away with a torrent of wind as Belle sliced across a man’s chest with her sword, melting the ice around the living room to make it easier to move.

  Rosa pulled me into the hallway. “Are they Sect?” I grunted in pain as I passed Naomi to her, the weight of her body lifting a bit of pressure off my bleeding leg.

  “I can’t tell,” she answered. “Those aren’t Sect uniforms.”

  They covered their faces with helmets, like police in riot gear. Black fatigues. Concealed identities.

  “We did a perimeter sweep and even checked the room for bugs,” Rosa said. “We weren’t followed. Nobody could have known Naomi would be here. How did they find us?”

  The Sect knew we’d be in Prague, but they didn’t know we were meeting Naomi, not even Rhys. And yet Naomi was clearly the target. They’d wasted no time taking her down.

  Whoever they were, it was Naomi they wanted dead. And they’d come prepared. The assailants were down, but it wasn’t the end. One last attacker, before he fell, threw a metal ball across the room. It landed hard against the wet floor before I realized Belle was yelling at us to run.

  A few seconds of silence, of shoes splashing and scrambling across the ground. The explosion that followed was just big enough to take out the living room. Belle’s warning and the others’ quick senses had saved them; they jumped with the blast, diving to the ground and avoiding the worst of it. Everyone made it out of the living room and into the entrance hallway safely, though Lake’s head was bleeding badly. She still clung to her knapsack’s strap as she sat against the wall we’d found shelter behind.

  “Ugh . . .” My ears hadn’t stopped ringing. I could hear screaming and commotion on the other side of the door in front of us. “What do we do?” Getting on my knees, I pressed my hands down on Naomi’s chest, but the blood was swelling up too much. “We have to get her to a hospital.”

  “No,” Belle said.

  “She’s dying,” I yelled, staring at her incredulously.

  “She needs medical attention, but we can’t be seen here,” she clarified. “It’ll raise too many questions. And it’ll make it harder for us to move.”

  “Belle’s right,” said Chae Rin. “Whether they were Sect or not, they obviously wanted to kill Naomi before she could tell us anything important. If that doesn’t say we’re on the right track, I don’t know what else could.” Breathing heavily, she stared at Naomi, wincing from the sight of her quivering in her bodyguard’s arms. “Best thing we can do now is get to Prague before they do. But like Belle said, we can’t be seen here.”

  Belle stood. “We can leave quickly. Cover our faces. But we have to find another way out of the city. We can’t take the jet that brought us here. The Sect will never let us stray from their sight the moment they find us.”

  “No, you can’t.” Naomi’s second bodyguard, James, stood, his left arm bleeding from a gunshot wound. “But I can fly you out on the helicopter I used to bring Mrs. Prince here.”

  “What about Naomi?” I said.

  “There’re two of us,” he said, flicking his head toward his partner. “Rosa will get Mrs. Prince to the hospital.”

  We didn’t have another choice, and time was running out. I took one last look at Rhys’s mother dying in Rosa’s arms before tearing myself away, my lips concealing a sob as we ran through the front door and into the chaos of bodies in the hallway.

  • • •

  Everyone was too busy fleeing for their lives to notice that there were four Effigies among them. We kept our heads low, navigating down the stairs and through the emergency exit with the rest. Cop cars already lined the street. James took us around the back of the building, through the narrow alleyways until we came to the car he’d driven Naomi in.

  “Get in,” he said quickly, and we did. Lake was moaning beside me, still dizzy from the blast. I tore off my sleeve and made a bandage out of it, tying it around her head as we zipped through the streets. The helicopter he’d flown Naomi in was at a private heliport at the edge of the city. Fully fueled. We hopped inside and strapped ourselves in.

  “EMA activated,” came the feminine voice from somewhere inside my headset. The ringing in my ears got worse as the helicopter lifted off, as the gravity shifted around me. This would usually be around the time when I wanted to throw up. But my body had become so numb, I could barely feel the helicopter rocking from the turbulence. I let my head sink back against the chair.

  I was squished between Lake and Chae Rin, with Belle in the front next to James. Lake was sleeping; her head dangled awkwardly as her languid body leaned forward against her seat belt. Her neck looked like it was going to break off, so I pushed her back up against the seat and positioned her head properly against it before settling back into my own stupor.

  “No way this thing can take us all the way to Prague,” Chae Rin said, though with the intense helicopter noise, I could only really listen to her voice through the headset.

  “We’ll need to refuel en route,” James said. “I know it’s not as ideal as taking the Sect jet, but it’s faster than driving and less easily followed.”

  “Thank you for helping us,” I said. My sleeveless arm was chilly, but we’d left our suitcases at the rooftop bar. Lake was the only one who’d had the sense to take her knapsack with her. All my clothes were back in Madrid.

  “It’s what Mrs. Prince wanted. . . .” James’s voice tapered out as the question no one wanted to ask hung in the air. Rosa must have gotten Naomi to a hospital by now. I had to believe that. But when I closed my eyes, I pictured the look of devastation on Rhys’s face and my fingers curled on my lap.

  “They’re going to know we had something to do with it,” I said. “They knew we were in the city when it happened. Then we suddenly disappear without telling anyone?”

  “And they’ll track us.” I could see the knit in Belle’s eyebrows as she looked out the window. “We need to work quickly.” She looked at James. “And rely on whomever we can trust.”

  There had to be a way to mask our frequencies like Saul could. If the Sect could just track us wherever we went, what would be the point? We didn’t know for sure who’d attacked us in Naomi’s apartment, but it had to be them. If they caught us, even if they didn’t kill us, best-case scenario would be that they’d lock us up and question us over Naomi’s attempted murder. Considering Saul was working on a timetable, both options were inconvenient.

  We flew in silence, each of us lost in the dark of our thoughts. We were out of the comfort of the APD tower protecting Madrid and the satellite cities. We were low enough in altitude for me to see a Spanish mountain range. Darkened earth covered in thin sheets of snow at the highest peaks, everything blanketed in night. Even in the dark, I could see something shifting and scuttling across the rocky domain, too fast to be human. Phantoms. It’d be impossible to describe them; it was too dark and we were too high. But there were enough of the tiny specks climbing up the rock for me to feel their menace.

  “Dead Zone,” I said as we flew over them. “Down below.”

  “From what I know, some of these mountains are protected by the mining industry,” James said. “But there’s one prominent barrier to expanding their territo—”

  His word cut off with a grunt as the helicopter began to struggle with turbulence.

  Or maybe it wasn’t turbulence.

  I could see it out of the window to my right: th
e beginnings of a snarl forming out of the cloud in front of us. The white mist shivered and sank into a gaping hole, black as the night around us; round, soulless eyes shimmered bright like white jewels as the rest of the phantom’s face shook itself free from the cloud. A demon snout, black steam smoking through its long, jagged jaws and off its scaly, leathery hide. A single horn stretched back from the crown of its head. This one had wings, tiny ones, on its back, and short little arms that dangled uselessly from its torso. Its long tail flitted behind it as it began slipping through the air toward us.

  “It’s okay,” said James, though he clearly looked more spooked than we did. “Our electromagnetic armor is still operational.”

  “Better be,” Chae Rin whispered as the phantom swooped under the helicopter and then curved itself around until its long, spindly body was parallel with us. For an uncomfortable few minutes, it followed beside us. My eyes tracked its body’s mesmerizing undulations, its form silhouetted in the night. It was shadowing us like a faithful pet, waiting for its chance.

  Four more descended from the sky and sank below us; they were making their way toward the mountains instead. Something else had caught their attention.

  I gasped and held my seat belt to keep myself stable from the sudden convulsions of the helicopter.

  “Ugh,” James grunted. There really was turbulence. “Hold on.” He gripped his controls even tighter. The helicopter shook so violently, Lake shuddered awake. “Just let me get this under control.”

  He didn’t get the chance. Two shots were fired from below, and they were too close for comfort. The helicopter swerved dangerously, tilting us over with a violent jerk. I held on to my seat belt for dear life, my body half raised out of my seat as James tried to get the helicopter level.

  “What’s happening?” I screamed. “What was that?”

  James shook his head, his jaws clenched. “I don’t know!”

  Belle was trying to see where the shots had come from, but soon another two rang out. The haunting, whalelike cries of a phantom pierced the air as one of the bright flares blasted into the sky in front of the cockpit.