by Mark Henwick
I’d known those Athanate organs would be sending the agents of change back into me at the same time, accelerating the process of becoming Athanate in me. But when faced with a choice of avoiding becoming fully Athanate for a while more or saving David, he’d won, hands down.
Once he was out of danger, I’d paid the price. A change had swept through my body, and I’d stumbled away from his house, weak from blood loss but finally, I thought, Athanate. Alex had come and rescued me, wandering around in the park in the early hours of the morning.
So, if I’d had the Were prions before I went to David’s? He’d mainlined a mixture of Athanate and Were.
We were already in trouble—he’d broken the confidentiality rules by talking to me while he was an Aspirant and I hadn’t yet met House Altau, but I imagined that paled into insignificance if I’d gone and infused him with Were prions.
I’d freak out about myself some other time. I had to check on David now. His house was just the other side of Wash Park. I drove quickly.
I parked outside of his white A-frame house. His car hadn’t moved since yesterday. One of the living room windows was open, but I couldn’t see anyone moving around.
I ran up the path.
David opened it before I could even knock.
He looked much better than he had yesterday. He hadn’t shaved and his thick black hair was still uncombed, but his eyes were clear. His color was good, too, even a bit flushed. I would have thought he was running a fever if he hadn’t been Athanate.
He seemed agitated, his wiry body bouncing on his toes.
“You okay, David?”
He nodded jerkily and stood aside for me to come in.
Well, so much for ‘thanks for saving my life.’ Still, he was probably just embarrassed about it all.
I was wearing the bracelet that had been given to me by Tullah’s mother. It was some kind of magic warning system, that tingled when someone close by didn’t have my best interests at heart. It hadn’t tingled for a while. I had a feeling that, in becoming tuned to me, it was only going to warn me when I wasn’t perfectly well aware that there was some danger around.
It tingled now.
I froze and looked around.
“David, someone’s here,” I whispered. “Is the back door open or something?”
His eyes went to the kitchen door. It was closed; someone could have come in through the back door and be waiting in there while he was distracted by letting me in.
Shit, my gun was in the car. I couldn’t go and get it now, but surprise would be almost as good as a gun. I crept towards the kitchen door. David picked up a baseball bat from a corner.
I could smell another Athanate scent in the house. I was expecting Matlal, but strangely it seemed to be more Altau, with a difference. It seemed familiar. Betrayal? Someone at House Altau? I crouched and put my hand quietly on the handle of the kitchen door, tensing up.
At that point, David hit me over the back of the head with the baseball bat.
Chapter 5
I came around feeling sore, uncomfortable and really pissed.
I knew just what had happened; there was no one else in the room when I was hit, no one else it could have been.
I tried to get up. No way. I’d been tied into the chair I was sitting in, very tightly, wrist and ankle. There was even a cord around my waist, holding me against the backrest. I wasn’t going anywhere and I was completely defenseless.
Crap. What the hell was going on? Had David betrayed me? Were Matlal or Hoben on their way here? I couldn’t believe that. Not David. Surely, not David? I’d trusted him completely.
I jerked the chair around to see if there was anything in reach I could use to free myself.
I wasn’t alone.
A naked woman lay on the bed, also tied up. Her skin was Persian olive and a thick curtain of wavy hair flowed over the sheets like black ink spilled across a fresh page. She was Athanate and Altau, and I guessed this was Pia. We were both prisoners; this was looking worse every second.
At the sound of my struggles, her head jerked up. She glared at me.
“What the hell did you think you were doing, you stupid bitch?” she hissed.
“Me?” Oh, that stoked me up. The little demon that lives in my throat let rip. “I saved his life after you nearly bled him dry last night. What’ve you done to him? What’s he doing?”
“What do you mean, what’s he doing? Oh, give me strength.” She banged her head on the bed in frustration. “He’s going rogue. You think you can just bind someone and walk away?”
“I what? I didn’t bind him. I saved his life. I gave him my Blood because he was dying. Because you walked away and left him to die.”
That hit home. “I was coming back,” she said. Her head lowered.
“Not anything like soon enough. And I went away because I didn’t want to bind him. I’m smart enough to realize I don’t understand what to do and how to do it. I’m smart enough to realize I’m in enough trouble with Altau.”
“You’re lying. You can’t—”
She was cut off. David burst in, carrying suitcases that he threw onto the floor. He looked across at me and cringed.
“Amber, I’m sorry,” he said, coming and kneeling down beside me. “I had to do it. We’ve got to get away, and I knew you wouldn’t agree to start with. You’ll understand when I explain. It’s the only option.”
“Untie me and explain right now, David.” I struggled against the ropes, but he’d done a good job of it.
“While we’re driving—”
“No. Right now. You’re never going to get me into a car like this.”
David knelt in front of me, his hands on my knees and his face pleading for understanding. “You’ve bound me—”
Oh shit.
“Get him to untie us, Farrell,” Pia shouted.
David struck the bed with his fist. “You can’t speak to her like that.” His face, already flushed, became darker, and I saw that he was keeping control of himself with a tremendous effort. His eyes were glittering and his face was twisting in conflict. In contrast to his earlier flush, his face was going pale.
He was in the critical stage of his transformation to Athanate, the crusis. It had gone wrong. I’d messed it up somehow for him. He was going insane; becoming rogue.
“How? David!” His eyes slowly cleared and came back to me. “David, focus on me. Tell me how I bound you.”
“Your Blood. Not just bound. I’m not House Altau anymore. I’m…I’m House Farrell.”
What had I done? Athanate are territorial. Denver was House Altau’s domain. I was accepted as a subsidiary House, but not if I went around stealing their Aspirants.
“You’ve bound me with your Blood, taken me from Altau,” said David. “That’s like treason, Amber. We’ve got to get away. All of us.”
“Oh God! No, no, no.” Pia squeezed her eyes shut and tried to hide her face in the sheets.
David’s face spasmed with effort, then gradually became calm as he looked at her.
“Pia.” He touched her shoulder gently. “You’ll understand. You’ll see.”
She shuddered.
He opened the suitcases and began throwing things from his drawers into them. “We need to go tonight. They’ll realize something’s happened when she doesn’t come back, and we need to be away from Denver by then.”
“If he’s bound to you, you can control him, Farrell!” Pia said. “Just make him untie us. There’s nowhere we can go and he’ll drive us rogue as well. We’ll all end up crazy. They’ll hunt us like rabid dogs. You’ve got to stop him.”
“Don’t worry, she’ll be all right,” David said dreamily, his actions becoming smoother, more relaxed. “We’ll all be House Farrell together.”
“Farrell!” shouted Pia.
I’d had enough. I needed to get through to David while there was still time. Every word from Pia was distracting him. She wasn’t getting us anywhere and I knew instinctively that dreamy look o
n David’s face was bad news. I was going to yell at her, but the old sergeant training took over and when it came, my voice was calm and distant, but authoritative. The sort of tone I’d had to learn to stop people in their tracks and make them listen.
“Shut up, Pia,” I said simply.
Damn, and it still worked. Blessed quiet for the moment.
“David, listen to me.” I waited until I had his attention. “No matter how far you take me away, I will come back. So let’s skip the car trip and stay right where we are.”
I spoke quietly, and he had to listen hard to hear me. His movements slowed and I could see his emotions fighting in him again. The dreamy look went away, replaced by a frown of concentration. That’s what I wanted.
Think, David. Think it through.
“This isn’t your fault, or Pia’s, or mine,” I said reasonably. “It’s just something that has to be dealt with. There’s no way I can run an Athanate House on my own, without help and support. I’m not going to try. We depend on Altau. I’m not going to use any compulsion on you. There’s no need. You understand what I’m saying and if you think for a minute, you’ll agree with it.”
He stopped and began to twist the clothes he was holding in his hands, but his eyes lost a bit of the craziness.
“Am I right, bro?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “It’s just…” his voice faltered.
“It’s just nothing,” I said calmly. “We made some mistakes, but they weren’t intentional. No one is to blame. You need help urgently. If they want to hurt you, they’re going to have to go through me first. Untie us.”
His face spasmed again for a second, his fists clenching, and my heart skipped a beat. But then the frown eased and he almost smiled. “Spoken like the Mistress of the House, sis.” He dropped the clothes from his hands. “It’s what I gave you the keys to my house for.”
Relief flooded through me. If he was talking like that, he was in control.
He knelt and untied me. He was working slowly, as if making sure he stayed calm, so I matched him. I stood carefully and let him move to untie Pia. When he turned his back, I did cast my eye at the baseball bat he’d tossed on the floor, but I left it there. He was going to get a hell of a kicking next time we sparred, but I wanted him upright and functioning tonight.
I was worried Pia was going to upset him again, but being shut up seemed to have had a positive effect on her. Her clothes were scattered around the room, some of them rather tattered. I gathered them up and got her to dress, replacing her torn shirt with one of David’s. It looked better on her than it did on him. She found a clip and unselfconsciously pinned her hair back into a dramatic, midnight waterfall.
I shepherded them out of the bedroom.
The cell in my hand and my heart in my mouth, I paused. I wasn’t looking forward to this call. I wasn’t even sure it was the right thing to do, despite what I’d said to David. My Blood going strange, not telling them about David, then binding him, and on top of it all, this was the week leading up to an Assembly hosted by Altau that was vital to the Athanate community as a whole. I couldn’t have picked a worse time. But I had to do what was best for David, long term. I had to take care of him. I’d given my word. And…it felt like even more than that.
Damn. Couldn’t it be easy for once? Or at least not hard.
I hit the speed dial.
“Bian, I have an emergency here.”
“Oh, Amber.” She sounded exasperated. “This is really not the time.”
“I understand and I’m honestly sorry. I’m at David Thaler’s house with Pia—”
“What the hell are you doing there?” Her voice was cold. “Do you have any idea—”
“Wait, I’ll explain. Listen, Bian. He’s had a setback. He needed blood last night, really urgently. I had to let him feed from me. But today he’s…he’s disturbed. I’m afraid without Diana or someone to treat him, he’ll go rogue. I can bring us all in, but—”
“No! Shit! Stay there. You stay with him. Do not go out.” I could hear her hold the cell away and issue a rapid set of instructions in Athanate to someone else before coming back to me. “Do not let him out of your sight. Keep it as calm as you can. Someone will come within the hour. Do not move from the house.”
She couldn’t slam the cell phone down, but the abrupt end to the call told me all I needed to know about how serious the situation was. For all of us.
Chapter 6
After about forty minutes, I heard cars stop outside and there was a heavy knocking on the door.
I looked through the window. There were three of them, caught in the porch light, a man facing the door and a man and a woman with their backs turned, all of them bulky with Kevlar vests over black uniforms, topped with coats. The one facing me I recognized from the group of four I’d met down in LoDo a couple of weeks back. I’d nicknamed him Fang 2. All of them were carrying the ugly, compact P90 guns, half-hidden beneath their coats. A prickle of nerves ran through me, an impulse to protect David and Pia.
I swallowed hard. The best way to protect David was to get him help, not stand here second-guessing myself.
I opened the door, partway. Fang 2 tried to surge past, lifting his gun. I refused to move, stopping him in his tracks, and the man behind him turned and raised his weapon. I held firm. If he forced the issue, this was going to get very bad, very quickly.
He didn’t. “Please, House Farrell,” he said politely. “Operational orders. We have to secure the building.” He paused. “We have clearance for lethal force.”
I swallowed hard, willing the knot in my gut to go away. I knew the drill from his side of it. I stared into his eyes, keenly aware of the P90 pointed at me and the position of the safety. They had a job to do, and they would do it. They couldn’t let anything get in the way of that. A misstep now would be fatal.
Taking a deep breath, I stood aside to let them enter. The other man was Fang 4. He nodded at me respectfully as he passed inside. At least they were being polite.
The woman was Mykayla, looking sheepish. “Hello, Amber,” she whispered, then turned on her heel so she had a view from the doorway down to a couple of cars that they had arrived in.
That shocked me. I recognized the type of security procedures they were running here, and to have Mykayla involved told me just how dangerously overstretched they were at House Altau.
I still felt Mykayla was another responsibility of mine. Maybe there was something in that old Chinese saying—save a man’s life and he’s your responsibility forever. I’d saved her from Tucker’s gang last week. Did that mean I’d always feel responsible for her? I’d handed her over to Altau, which was what she wanted. But in that short time, she couldn’t possibly have learned how to be part of this kind of team.
My sergeant’s training instinct took over. “You’re focusing on the cars, Mykayla. Your position here is to be visible to them and scan behind them. Watch the street.” I managed a wry smile at myself, even though the sounds of the others moving through the house were making my skin crawl.
David’s breathing was becoming labored and I went to stand by him. It seemed to help a little.
Fang 4 reappeared and turned the porch and hall lights off. The house was now in darkness. “Clear,” he said into a comms unit before turning to the three of us. “In the living room, please.” It wasn’t a request. His P90 wasn’t pointed at us, but it wasn’t far away. We were under arrest, and it was too late for second thoughts.
I took Pia and David into the living room, where Fang 2 was closing the curtains.
Pia and I silently arranged ourselves on either side of David. Other than the panting, he’d been calm, but now he started to shiver and twitch again. His eyes went from staring to glazed and back again, over and over. I was worried about him. How long did we have before the slide into rogue was irreversible? I knew how the Athanate dealt with rogues; Bian’s words had been—a quick and humane death. I needed to persuade them to help him quickly. Pia’s arms went ar
ound him and I felt much better about her than I had earlier. We might never be friends, but once she’d stopped being the drama queen, she was all right.
Fang 2 finished closing the curtains and turned the lights on.
Diana swept in, taller than me and swift as nightfall, her long coat floating with her stride. She dropped her hood and nodded to the two Fangs. Her face was serene, framed in tumbling dark hair, and her huge eyes gave nothing away.
Skylur followed her in. Anyone would have difficulty picking him out of a group photo. His face was regular, even unremarkable. But up close, his eyes were a startling blue. And they were icy sharp with anger tonight.
Bian came in last, shedding her cloak to reveal she was dressed in her own silk version of the black combat uniform. A Japanese katana in a matte sheath made an incongruous addition by her side. Her eyes passed over me without expression.
I edged in front of the other two. “House Altau,” I said formally to Skylur and bowed my head. My voice sounded loud in the silence. I wasn’t sure I had the right protocol, but that was the least of my worries.
Skylur stood staring at me for ages. “House Farrell,” he replied eventually.
I cleared my throat. Silence didn’t seem like a good option. “Quite an arrival,” I said. “I’m sorry to have caused a problem at this late stage before the Assembly.”
“We are at war with Basilikos, Amber,” Diana said. “Not yet declared, but begun. For the duration, any time Skylur and I move together from now on, we move like this. But yes, you have inconvenienced us, to say the least.”
Skylur sat down, elbows on the armrests of the chair, and steepled his fingers. His face was pale and his eyes continued to burn with their icy brilliance.
“Am I to understand you allowed this Aspirant to drink your Blood?” he said, his finger stabbing at David.