by White, Gwynn
“No, that was you,” I snapped back.
“Hands up, where I can see them.” He pointed his gun at me.
“You have got to be kidding,” I growled.
“Now.” His voice was hard, uncompromising. There was no doubt in my mind that he was fully prepared to shoot me if I moved.
I scanned the vampires. There were over thirty of them. I couldn’t fight my way out of this one. So I lifted my hands over my head. Aaron moved quickly. In a flash, he was behind me, cuffing my hands together.
I looked over my shoulder at him. “You’re enjoying this too much,” I growled.
“No, I assure you I’m not.” He nudged me forward. “Now come with us.”
23
Trapped
Several of Aaron’s Diamond Edges escorted me to the police station on Lear while he led the search of Pegasus, looking for signs of Jason or anyone else. He’d sent a whole team—six elite soldiers—to keep an eye on me. He must have thought I was in a troublemaking mood.
He was right.
The doors of the prison block opened. The cold, smooth tip of a gun prodded me forward, a warning against escape. I snapped my head around to glare at the soldier behind me. His knees did not buckle. His hands, firmly holding to the largest gun I had ever laid eyes upon, did not shake. He did not retreat in terror. No, no. The cocky bastard had the nerve to wink and blow me a kiss.
My lips buzzed with a suppressed growl. Most people folded before a mage’s glowing stare, but not the Diamond Edges. They seemed to think their hotshot status as the Selpe Empire’s elite killing squad made them immune to having their arms broken. Not that I was in any position to deal damage. Not yet. Metal clinked and scraped as I twisted my wrists inside the handcuffs.
“Now, now. That’s quite enough of that.” The Diamond Edge poked me with his gun once more, harder this time. The glowing blue diamond at the center of his chest armor indicated that he was the man in charge of this friendly band of six. “Keep moving, sweet tush. The boss told us not to kill you, but if you cause trouble, we will knock you around till you settle down.”
“I hear Elitions can heal fast, Saren,” one of his colleagues told him.
Another soldier drew his knife. The corridor’s dismal green-grey light bounced off the blade as he flipped it around in his hand. “I wonder how fast.”
“You are not to touch her unless she attacks first. The boss’s orders,” Saren commanded, his voice saturated with authority. He shot a hard look at the man with the shiniest black armor on the team. “That goes double for you, Brokdon. Keep your hands to yourself.”
Brokdon’s face shield was open. He met my eyes and licked his lips, just like he would greet his next dessert. Gross. I drifted to the left, putting as much distance between me and Brokdon as was possible in the narrow hallway. I only hoped he wouldn’t be assigned to watch over my cell. If he ever came near me, I vowed to myself that I would not hesitate to break both his kneecaps. That would be a challenge with his armor on, but Father had always said I was resourceful.
We came to the end of the hall, and Saren tapped a series of buttons on his arm. A hollow mechanical grunt echoed through the empty corridor, and the door clicked open. Saren motioned me through.
“Ladies first,” he said smoothly.
I rolled my eyes. Ladies first indeed. They just didn’t want to leave their backs exposed to me. I assessed the situation.
Six men, all taller than I was and built wider. A lot wider. They were wearing power armor and were armed to the teeth. On the other hand, I had none of my magic-augmenting accessories or weapons. Plus my hands were bound. I was no match for them. They would shoot me before I made it two steps.
I looked up at an old overhanging lightbulb, mesmerized by its pattern of pulsing erratic flashes. Its feeble buzz hummed in my head, displacing the hollow echoes of the soldiers’ boots. I took a deep breath and stepped forward. I was feeling dizzy, lightheaded. Without my accessories, I couldn’t control my magic very well. I was yearning for Jason’s headband. I wanted it back. But they’d disarmed me of any and all magic-augmenting accessories. Without them, I was almost human—well, except for the uncontrollable foresights that hit without warning, spiraling me toward madness.
The soldiers pushed me into a cell. As I stumbled to the side, I tried to get my head around the flutter of images. Lowering onto the hard bench in the corner of the cell, I struggled to block out the building wave of foresights.
I heard a click, and the door to the cellblock swung open. Whoever it was, they were headed for me. I was alone here in this cellblock. The soldiers wouldn’t want to imprison a mage near any other prisoners. Mysticism and voodoo would surely ensue. Imagine that.
Footsteps marched down the narrow hall and stopped outside the bars to my cell. I didn’t move from the bench where I sat, holding my face, praying that my magic didn’t choose this moment to rear its ugly head. I turned my head to look my captor in the eye. It was Aaron.
“Are you ready to cooperate?” he asked, his stance one of relaxed confidence, his eyes radiating ruthless intelligence.
“Send your men away,” I said.
Aaron nodded to them, and they filed out. When we were alone, he turned an expectant eye on me.
“Are you having fun playing prison ward, Aaron?” I asked drily.
“Come here, Terra.”
I stared at him for a second, then stood. Without my accessories to tether me, I was struggling to adjust to the dizzying whirl of my own active mind. I strode up to the bars, trying to conceal the unsteady motion of my steps, but Aaron must have seen something. His hand twitched as though he wanted to lend it to me for support. He must have forgotten there were bars between us—and more importantly, that he had put them there.
“You know how I hate to see you like this,” he said in a lowered voice.
“Then let me out,” I challenged.
“I can’t do that. I don’t have the power.”
“Of course you do, Aaron. Who are you kidding? You are in charge of the galactic police. You could declare that I be released and that would be that. Which can only mean you don’t want to let me go.”
“It’s not so simple.”
“Then enlighten me.”
He reached out to touch my face, then he stopped. “You are very naive. Very idealistic.”
I just glared at him through the bars.
“This is bigger than either of us.” He showed me one of the portal keys that I’d brought to Pegasus. “This is not an official portal key sanctioned by the Galactic Assembly.”
I said nothing.
“We deciphered a secret location on it. We followed it to a world unknown to us, a location in the Wilderness. Don’t sound so surprised,” he said when I perked up. “We have a lot of experience decoding portal keys. My men found a group of mages from Pegasus there.”
I gripped the bars.
“They fought my soldiers. None of them survived.”
My pulse raced. “Jason?”
“He wasn’t there.”
I expelled a sigh of relief.
“But his parents were.”
A tear slid down my face. I thought that I’d saved them, that my foresight was wrong. But it hadn’t been wrong. Jason’s parents might not have died on Pegasus, but they’d still died.
“So many people have died,” Aaron said. “So many more will die. But you can stop this. You can end it now. Help us find Jason Chanz, and the people of Pegasus can go home. No one else need die.”
“No one but my best friend.” I shook my head. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t betray Jason. “I don’t know where he is,” I told him.
“But you could find him.”
“Not for you.”
“Don’t play games, Terra. You’re smart. You know how this one will play out.”
I folded my arms across my chest and glared at him.
A blinding splash of grey-green light spilled into the cell block. A door had opened down
the hall. Sharp, steady heel clicks echoed in the hall, followed by the heavier thunks of military boots.
“Don’t be a fool,” Aaron told me.
I pressed my lips together and shook my head.
I caught a flash in my mind of the man’s somber face before he came around the corner. He was dressed in a white coat. He carried a needle in one hand and a clear bottle of liquid in the other. The liquid was lavender-colored and flowed thicker than milk. Whatever it was, I knew two things. First, that man was going to inject whatever mystery fluid he had in that bottle into me. And second, the thought of that frightened me out of my wits.
Aaron opened my cell door. “Hold her,” he told the soldiers.
I retreated as the door swung open and the soldiers filed in. There were too many of them. And they seemed bigger than ever before. Their armored bodies filled my tiny cell, giving me no room to breathe, no room to fight. And my head felt like it would explode from the pressure of my magic.
One of the soldiers stepped forward, and I threw him into his comrades, toppling them over. I hopped along the top of their fallen bodies, rushing for the cell door, but there was no space and no time. They grabbed at my legs, upsetting my balance. Even as I fell against the opening in the bars, Aaron slammed the door shut in my face.
“Don’t fight,” he said.
The fierce fang of a needle bit into my neck, and if I’d thought my head had hurt before, it now exploded in volcanic agony. My legs collapsed under me as a tidal wave of images crashed through my mind, splitting into a million directions faster and faster. I knew this feeling. I had experienced it before.
Somewhere. Somewhere. I moved past the fog of my memory to those days of my ‘episodes’, as the mage priests referred to them—those moments I had lost control and my power took me away from myself faster than I could get a grip on what was happening. I could not tame them.
I didn’t want to be crazy, as so many Prophets were. It was inevitable, even after years of control, that they eventually succumbed to the madness within. Without my accessories to tame my magic, to channel it, the madness would drag me under.
And now the vampires were bringing me back there, back to the madness. No, I won’t let them!
Slipping, shaking, spasming, I crawled my fingers up the bars, pulling myself up high enough to stare Aaron straight in the eye.
“Help me,” I croaked through the bars.
“I…I can’t.”
“Tell them to let me go. You have the power,” I said with much difficulty. I was having trouble staying conscious. The prophetic mismatch of images was tugging on my mind, trying to pull me down into its turbulent stream.
“This will all be over soon,” he assured me.
Snapping my eyes open—they had begun to droop—I screamed out, “Aaron Pall, you get me out of here at once!”
And with that said, my mind slipped, and all distinctions between what was outside and inside myself came tumbling down around me.
24
Mind's Prison
I stood in a cell with stone walls and bars as thick as my wrists. I was underground. The air was stale and there were no windows—no light at all but the pulsing green-yellow bulb on the wall opposite my cage.
My stomach rumbled, and my pulse pounded hard beneath my sweat-drenched skin. My entire body was sticky and hot, and my hair clung to my back in a wet, heavy sheet. I’d been drugged. Drugged and trapped inside a prison, left to drown in my own mind.
Footsteps resounded, hard and hollow, off the stone walls. As they grew louder, I backed up until my shoulders hit the wall. Hot skin sizzling against cold stone, I clawed my fingernails against uneven rock. There would be no escape for me—I knew that—but still I continued on in hurried desperation, even as my nails split and cracked against the hard granite.
I felt a jolt hit me like a blast of lightning. My eyes were open, but the prison’s stony interior had been ripped away, replaced by a muddy battlefield. Images shuffled past, high contrast and overly saturated with the stain of blood. I saw myself standing on the battlefield, my eyes glowing with menacing energy. In my hands, I wielded two swords. There were enough other weapons strapped to my body to have made even Wrest, the Selpe Emperor’s behemoth of a bodyguard, take a second look.
Shadows swirled all around me, but that didn’t seem to bother me. I slashed and spun and struck with unrelenting energy—and a sick, delighted grin cracked my lips as I felled foe after foe. The Terra Cross of this foresight was a complete stranger, a killer without restraint or remorse.
A shadow moved in toward me, but rather than strike it down, I pressed my back to it. As our bodies met, Aaron faded in behind me.
“Get lost?” I teased him.
“No, just chatting with your friendly people here,” he replied.
The shadows around us evaporated, revealing that the warriors fighting us belonged to an army of mages. Dozens and dozens of mages filled the battlefield, their eyes shining out like twin stars of magic in the night sky. We were surrounded by an army of powered-up mages, and yet we looked strangely calm about the whole thing.
“They are not my people,” I said, giving the mage army a dismissive wave of my sword.
“Then you won’t mind if I kill the lot of them.”
“No,” I said coldly, my eyes phasing dark. “I’ll try to remember to leave you a few.”
I felt a second jolt, and when my eyes refocused, I was still there, in that muddy place. Overhead, the sky was cloudy and dark. Aaron stared at me from across a battlefield blanketed with dead Elitions. He strode toward me, full of purpose. He tossed down his weapons with each step as I quickly peeled layer after layer of blades from my body.
Then he stopped before me, smelling of sweat and blood and an ecstasy I longed to taste. I pulled his body roughly against mine, wanting to kiss him as much as I’d wanted to kill those Elitions. Aaron tugged me down, pinning my wrists to the ground with one of his hands. He grabbed my jacket zipper with the other, sliding it down.
The foresight bled away, and I jumped awake. I was back in my cell. I stood atop my hard, stone bench, my ankles twisted into a nest of blankets, the top of my head brushing the ceiling. I wrapped my hands around my body and shivered. They were still quaking from the foresight’s aftershock.
I took a few deep breaths, then freed myself from my blankets and hopped off the bed. The floor was cold. And the soldiers had taken my boots away. They’d been worried I had something hidden in them, something I could use to escape. The cold prison floor sent a chill through my body.
I saw Aaron standing outside my cell. My pulse was racing, half of my mind still reliving the foresight. How we’d killed together—and how we’d celebrated that bloodshed on the battlefield, wrath and lust all tied up into one destructive package. That couldn’t be my future. I wouldn’t become that hard, cruel person.
“What do you want?” I demanded, my voice cracking. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had something to drink. In fact, I had no idea how long I’d been trapped in this cell.
“To ask you a few questions.”
“You are holding me without cause,” I warned him. “Again.”
“Not this time, Princess. You are guilty of the possession of illegal portal keys. And of warning the people of Pegasus of the Galactic Assembly’s attack on their world. Because of you, Jason Chanz escaped justice.”
My heart hurt, thinking of Jason’s parents and all the other mages who had died. I only hoped most of Jason’s people had found their way to safety somewhere. My portal key gift had been a deathtrap.
“You have been charged as an accomplice,” Aaron told me. “For warning the people of Pegasus. Because of your actions, the Assembly’s justice could not be executed.”
“You mean, so they could not be executed. A world of people. Innocent people.”
“An example must be made.” From the look in his eyes, they hadn’t caught any more Pegasus mages. That meant Jason was still safe.
He frowned. “Yes.”
“They are out of your reach.” I shot him a triumphant look.
He sighed. “Yes, they are. But you are not. The Galactic Assembly has ruled that you will take Jason Chanz’s sentence as your own.”
My triumph didn’t last long. “Death.”
His face was cold, blank. “Yes.”
I slid to the floor. Death. “And so you’ve come to kill me.”
“We must all sometimes do things we don’t want to do.”
“Spare me the speeches, Major,” I snapped. “This has all gotten completely out of hand, this slippery slope of justice. Surely you see that now. Didn’t you say you preferred the threat right in front of your face, not the one stabbing people in the back? Well, you stab people in the back.”
“I argued for your life,” he told me.
“And spare me the lies.”
“It isn’t a lie. The Galactic Assembly has agreed to show you mercy. There is another option for you, another way besides death.”
“Oh?”
“You can come work for me. Ten years of service with the Diamond Edges. Work off your debt. At the end of it, you can go home.”
“And the Assembly approved this?”
“Yes.”
Wow, the Galactic Assembly really was in debt to the vampires.
I thought about my foresight, about that future Terra Cross, the one who enjoyed killing her own people. The one who was with Aaron. Was that what ten years with the Diamond Edges would do to me? Would I become that vicious, inhuman killer?
“I don’t want to work for you. I don’t trust you,” I told him.
“It’s better than death.”
I wasn’t so sure of that.
The cell block gate opened. My heart lifted a little when I saw my father walking down the hall.
Aaron stepped into his path. “You don’t have access to be here, King River.”