Kissed by Death - Book three of the Trueborn Heirs Series

by Queen, Nyna

  Yes, because you will make sure of that by bribing and threatening every single person involved in such an investigation. Alex balled her hands into silent, furious fists. Such a smooth operator, Lord Roukewood. Nothing to hide, have you?

  “This so-called ‘recording’,” the senator added with a small, indulgent smirk, “is clearly nothing but a forgery. And not even a good one, I should add. The sound effects were a nice touch, but that voice?” He shook his head. “Why, it didn’t even really sound like me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Roukie,” Alex drawled, slipping out from behind the curtain in all her battered, bruised glory. “I think it sounds a lot like you.”

  Startled shouts rang out all across the courtroom and several fingers—and weapons—were pointed at her chest.

  Roukewood spun around. His eyes widened in shock. Ah, the look on his face—it was worth a hundred billion dollars.

  The senator’s skin turned from sallow to a seething purple within the space of a breath. “You!” he spat and his features contorted with rage. “What are you doing here, you dirty little shaper bitch? You should be dead!”

  Someone gasped.

  Roukewood clamped his mouth shut, but there was no way to take the words back.

  “No further questions,” Alex said coldly.

  A sharp, deafening silence fell over the entire courtroom, thick enough to be cut with a knife.

  Roukewood wheeled toward the Tribunal. “This woman—she is part of this plot to demean me!” he proclaimed wildly, desperately trying to catch the reins that were slipping through his fingers. “She’s working with Dubois-Léclaire and his brother! You—you can’t believe a word she says. She’s a lying shaper mongrel.”

  “Two out of three, sugar,” Alex agreed sweetly. “But the only one lying here, is you!”

  Roukewood’s nostrils flared. He took a step toward her and opened his mouth.

  “Milord!” Delormes’ voice was soft but it cracked like a whip. “I strongly suggest you consult your lawyer before you say anything else.”

  For a blistering second, nobody moved. Everybody just stared at one another, completely rigid with shock.

  Roukewood was the first to break from his stupor. Before anybody else could so much as move a finger, he whirled around and burst out of his row, knocking the chair of an elderly lady over in his passing and causing a knock-on effect. People hollered as they toppled to the ground. Within three seconds, the senator was in the aisle, pelting toward the door at full tilt.

  Oh no, you don’t! Alex hissed and gathered herself to jump.

  Magic brushed against her skin, a soft tingle that quickly turned into a sharp, furious bite, startling her so much that she lost her grip on her true skin.

  She whirled toward the judge’s bench, the source of the power surge, and her mouth dropped open. High Judge Delormes had leapt from his seat once again and towered over the other judges, his eyes glowing brightly with blue magic and hardly-controlled fury.

  An ear-deafening clap of thunder rolled through the courtroom and magic pulsed from his outstretched hands. Small glyphs flared on the floor along the walls and doors, and wards snapped up, sealing the entire room with rippling blue magic.

  “Nobody leaves this courtroom until I say so!” His voice thundered just like his magic.

  Roukewood barely managed to skitter to a stop inches before bumping into the pulsing ward headfirst. Touching it probably wouldn’t have killed him, but it most likely wouldn’t have been a pleasant experience either.

  He swirled around, eyes deranged, teeth bared, looking very much like a lone hyena cornered by a pack of wild dogs. He glared around frantically as if looking for a gap in the ward.

  “Milord,” Delormes said sharply. “Calm down and surrender.”

  Alex glanced over her shoulder. Darken had left the witness box and come to stand protectively beside the dock. In the front row, Tyler had risen halfway out of his chair and was leaning toward his brother, saying something.

  “Milord!” Delormes implored Roukewood again, his voice gaining an even more cutting edge. “There is no way out of here. Surrender peacefully, or I will have to order hostile action.”

  Another precursor of magic raked over Alex’s skin, this one even stronger and sharper than the one before. Only this time it wasn’t coming from the direction of the Tribunal.

  Roukewood!

  Alex flipped around. The senator was completely ignoring the court marshals swarming toward his position with spellguns raised. Instead, he was facing Stephane inside the dock, an expression of pure loathing etched into his rough features. He jerked his arms up.

  Oh shit!

  Shouting a warning, Alex bounced off the wall and catapulted herself over the heads of the audience at Roukewood.

  Not fast enough.

  Magic pulsed.

  Still in the air, Alex saw a white-blue burst of pure magical energy leave Roukewood’s fingertips and zing in a wide, destructive band right toward the prisoner’s box.

  The sharp crack of exploding glass split the air.

  Wood burst. People screamed.

  Alex slammed into the senator’s side. Roukewood went down under her weight with a grunt. His head hit the arm of a chair, and he crashed to the floor, knocked out flat.

  Alex rolled up in a crouch and dashed down the aisle toward the front of the chamber with her heart pounding, squeezing herself through the wall of men and women who had swarmed forward and were blocking her view.

  Big, silvery shards of glass littered the ground everywhere. More screams and shrieks rent the air. Someone whimpered in pain.

  Alex’s eyes found the prisoner’s box—or what was left of it. A hot knife of terror slashed at her chest. The violent impact of the magical blast had reduced most of the bulletproof glass wall behind the dock to splintered rubble and molten the rest to a blackish clump. Stephane was nowhere in sight.

  Alex pressed forward, shoving people out of her way. Through the legs of those in front of her, she spotted a prone body on the floor. Black pants. A lock of dark hair. Her heart missed a beat.

  No!

  Alex roughly pushed a tall woman in a cherry-red suit aside and stumbled into the open space before the judge’s bench, every inch of her skin prickling with naked terror.

  But it wasn’t Darken lying on the floor.

  Nor was it Stephane.

  It was Tyler.

  Alex whipped to a halt on the tips of her toes. Mother’s mercy and Jester’s grace!

  Tyler’s chest was a scorched mess of burned flesh and singed clothing. The stench rising from the wound was nauseating and brought tears to Alex’s eyes. She pressed her sleeve over her mouth to keep from gagging.

  All the blood-vessels had popped in Tyler’s eyeballs, turning them into two shockingly red orbs. A thin line of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

  He seemed to have gotten the full blast of Roukewood’s magic discharge, but whether he had accidentally come into the firing line when it rebounded from the glass wall or whether he had jumped forward to save his brothers, she couldn’t tell.

  Darken was kneeling on the floor beside him, frantically pressing his jacket against the hole in his brother’s chest. The helpless look in his eyes said more than a thousand words. The wounds were beyond healing. There was nothing to be done.

  Stephane’s head appeared over the cracked wooden wall of the prisoner’s box behind which he must have ducked when the blast hit, his gold-green eyes slightly dazed. A small cut on his forehead oozed a trickle of blood, but otherwise, he seemed unharmed.

  The moment he spotted Tyler’s body on the floor, his cuffed hands grabbed the door of the box, shaking it furiously. “Let me out!” he roared, rattling the entire box with his force. “Damn you all to the bowels of hell! Let me out! Let me out!”

  High Judge Delormes, who’s face had turned ashen with shock, nodded curtly at one of the court marshals. A moment later, the door sprang open and Stephane staggered
from the box and crashed to his knees on his brother’s other side, grabbing his charred fingers in his.

  Tyler’s erratic gaze fixed on him, his pointed features contorted with pain. “I … m … sorry…”

  “Shhh.” Stephane gently touched his brother’s cheek. “Don’t talk, Ty. Everything will be fine. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Tyler swallowed under obvious effort. His voice was thick and raspy. “I … n-never … wanted the children t-to get h-hurt … I … n-never … m-meant for t-this … to h-happen…” His gaze lost focus and slipped toward the ceiling. “I … never…” he whispered. “I…”

  His eyes rolled back into his head. His entire body sagged, and his head lolled to the side.

  “No. NO!” Darken grabbed two fistfuls of his little brother’s sweater vest and pulled his lifeless body toward him while Stephane threw back his head and keened in anguish.

  Alex bit the inside of her lip. Tyler had betrayed them but this was just awful. Nobody deserved to die like this.

  Unable to keep looking at Darken and Stephane slumped over the mutilated body of their dead little brother, devastated and grief-stricken, while the crowd of onlookers was still trying to figure out what had just happened, Alex retreated a few steps down the aisle and made sure that Roukewood was still where she had dropped him.

  The senator was out cold, and it would likely be a while until he came around again, considering how hard he had knocked his head. He definitely wouldn’t like the headache that would come with it. If she had been alone with him, she would have kicked him in the guts a couple of times for no other reason than that it would have made her feel a bit better about this entire messed up situation, but she didn’t think the Tribunal would tolerate it.

  She realized with a twitch of bitterness that the trueborn lords and ladies around her were giving her a wide berth, many watching her fearfully, whispering to each other. Her presence seemed to throw them even more into a dither than Roukewood’s conspiracy.

  Looking down, she noticed that her claws were unsheathed. Well, nobody could blame her for showing some nerves, right? She pulled them in, hiding them underneath her human skin and fought the strong urge to stuff her hands into her pockets. She wasn’t ashamed of her heritage. Not anymore. Roukewood was the real monster here, but if they wanted to look at her as if she was the one—fine!

  It was, most unexpectedly, Marlène de Chevalier who eventually broke the brittle, murmur-filled silence in the chamber.

  “Should—” She cleared her throat a couple of times before continuing in a feeble voice. “S-should Lord Roukewood be brought over to the Black Rock Prison for initial questioning?” Her gaze darted over to the unconscious senator sprawled in the aisle, and she blanched under her make-up.

  High Judge Delormes considered it for a minute, then shook his head. “No. As long as we do not know for sure who can be trusted and who can’t, no one leaves this courtroom, including him.”

  Turning to the court marshals, he gestured to a mother-of-pearl circle on the floor beside the witness stand. “Put him into the confining ring and activate the ward.” He lifted his voice, addressing the crowd, “The rest, please return to your seats.”

  The marshals didn’t need to be told twice. While the lords and ladies obediently shuffled back into their rows, four of them rushed forward, grabbed Roukewood’s prone body, being none too gentle about it, slapped tempering rings on him, and heaved it over to the confining ring.

  The rest of them advanced on Alex.

  Darken’s head snapped up, eyes on fire. Alex had always thought that seeing murder in someone’s eyes was a figure of speech, but she saw it there, crystal clear. Tempering rings or not, if someone laid hands on her, he would rain hellfire on this courtroom. Being assured of this kind of backup gave her a warm, fuzzy feeling, but at the same time, her heart clenched. If he killed someone to protect her, the court would show him no mercy. She had to surrender herself. Too much blood had been spilled already.

  “Not her,” High Judge Delormes’ voice rang out harshly, stopping the men in their tracks.

  “But … she’s a shaper,” a voice at the other end of the judge’s bench muttered.

  Delormes’ head whipped around. Nobody owned up.

  The presiding judge’s eyes turned glacial. “If there is a law that states that all shapers are generally to be treated as suspects—or, may the Great Mother help us, can be tortured and killed without repercussions—do show me now. Otherwise we will treat everybody to the same basic rights in this courtroom, is that understood?” He glared at his colleagues. “So far, I see no reason to take this woman into custody, except perhaps that she unlawfully gained entry to this building. However, considering the wider circumstances, I think this minor transgression can be ignored for the time being.” None of the other judges protested.

  Beside Tyler’s body, Darken relaxed the merest bit. Alex exhaled softly, wondering if Delormes had any idea how narrowly he had prevented a full-scale slaughter.

  “But if you want to take someone else into custody,” High Judge Delormes addressed the marshals again, “please, be so kind as to arrest Lord Fitzgerald. There is sufficient reason to believe he is severely biased and a co-conspirator in a plot of treason against Arcadia.” He glanced left and right at the bench. “Who agrees?”

  Eleven hands rose in the air. That made all judges, except for Fitzgerald himself, who, during the past minutes, had sunken deeper and deeper into his chair, clearly hoping to be forgotten.

  Now however, he puffed himself up, loudly proclaiming his innocence, and how could they possibly take the word of a shaper and a Forfeit over his own?

  Ignoring his protests and continued exclamations of innocence, two marshals towed him into the confining ring next to Roukewood and shoved him to his knees. The security ward snapped up, forming a half-transparent, milky-white barrier around the two men. It had to be equipped with a soundproof sigil, too, because although Alex still saw Fitzgerald’s mouth continue to move, no more sound came out.

  Alex flashed her teeth at him in a tiny grin. He furiously threw himself against the barrier and pounded on it with his fists, to no effect.

  “So far, so good.” Delormes straightened his small, round glasses on the tip of his nose. “Now. Who is next on the rooster as substitute judge for this trial?” he asked no one in particular

  Paper rustled, followed by one of the court clerks zealously waving a sheet of crystalline paper. “That would be High Judge Trillington.”

  “Very well.” The presiding judge pushed back the long sleeves of his judge’s robe. “I will call her myself, and then I will confer with the Tribunal on how to proceed in this matter.” He paused, glancing first at Darken, then at Alex. “She is not on that list, I assume?”

  Darken shook his head. “Not to our knowledge, no.” Alex mumbled a confirmation.

  Satisfied, Delormes nodded his head. He leaned forward over his table. “I am sure the two of you understand that I will need you to stay for further questioning.”

  Alex nodded, although she was suffering another bout of nerves. Questioning sounded a lot like interrogation and torture to her, and she’d had enough of that for a lifetime, thank you very much. Not that she had an actual choice in the matter. Being at the mercy of this Tribunal felt only slightly better than being at Roukewood and his torture master’s.

  Delormes’ gaze swiveled to Stephane, who was still hunched over Tyler’s corpse, silent tears streaming down his face. “As for you, milord… Of course, I cannot make any definite assurances on the Tribunal’s behalf until all of the evidence has been thoroughly evaluated. However, I think it is justifiable to say that things have looked worse for you.” His eyes twinkled kindly. “You might get out of this a free man after all.”

  Stephane managed a shaky, tear-soaked smile before pain ravished his features once more, and he bent back over his brother.

  Leaving him to his grief, Delormes called to one of the court mars
hals who wore a badge marking him as the highest ranking officer in the room. “Levenstein, please remove the Enforcer’s tempering rings.”

  The man’s eyes turned as big as saucers. “But … your—your Honor,” he stammered, taken aback. “The—the Forfeit Act … it clearly states—”

  The presiding judge drew himself up to full height, choking off the protest. “By virtue of this office vested in me by the Parliament, representative of the people, I hereby declare the Forfeit Act passed under martial law null and void and temporarily place the Forfeits under the authority of the High Court.” He made sure the court clerks were writing everything down before he continued. “All Forfeits shall be removed from their current assignments and are to return to their home base convents until the Tribunal can decide how to deal with them.”

  Silence followed these word.

  “Can he do that?” someone in the audience wondered loudly.

  Delormes sniffed pointedly, his hawk’s eyes piercing the crowd, searching for the speaker. “This Tribunal is the highest authority of this country. My only authority is the law, and the law invests me with this power. I just did it. And now”—he gestured to the chief marshal—“under the eyes of the Blind Child, remove his tempering rings. Pronto.”

  The marshal did as asked. Darken rubbed his wrists, staring at the presiding judge in complete disbelief. As if he had heard the words but couldn’t quite trust his ears. He wasn’t the only one.

  Alex wasn’t entirely sure what this repeal of the Forfeit Act entailed, but judging by everybody’s reaction, it was huge.

  High Judge Delormes didn’t give anybody time to chew it over. He was still fixated on Darken. “You see, Enforcer, you’ve put me in a serious predicament here. You’ve made me aware of this giant conspiracy, and now I don’t know who to trust and who belongs to the conspirators.” His gaze roamed meaningfully over the audience as well as the court marshals. “It is clearly not without a certain irony that you, milord, are one of the few I can be sure are not part of this conspiracy, and that is why I trust you.”