Harley Merlin 15: Finch Merlin and the Everlasting Vow

by Forrest, Bella

  “Well, for starters, I had to attend—”

  He didn’t get to finish. The door burst open and the guard slumped forward, the warded forcefield holding him up at an unnatural angle, since it couldn’t let him pass without the spell he’d performed. His eyes stared vacantly at us through the shimmering veil, his skin starting to smoke as the hexes gruesomely picked him apart. Behind him, a trio of masked Atlanteans leered into the room, just as more of the suckers dropped onto the terrace, appearing out of nowhere. They booted open the French doors, but again found themselves out in the cold. Kaya’s powerful protection measures were holding.

  “What the hell?!” Nash reeled in shock.

  “Looks like we need to add more names to the list of folks who want to kill… uh… you.” I quickly remembered that right now, he was me and I was him. “What did you do while I was gone? Did you piss someone off?”

  Nash rolled his eyes. “This isn’t my fault. And now really isn’t the time.”

  Right on cue, our ninja assailants whipped out some crossbow-looking weapons. I had no idea what they thought they could do with them. They couldn’t get in, so how did they plan to shoot us? I realized I really needed to stop asking dumb questions as the first volley of super-thin arrows pierced the forcefield. One landed in the wall behind my head with a blood-chilling plunk—subtle and deadly quiet.

  “That’s not good!” Nash hissed as he dove behind an armchair. “They must’ve modified the arrows to sneak through the hexes.”

  I shot him a look as I hid behind the other armchair. “You don’t friggin’ say.”

  Huntress managed to slide beneath the bed on her belly, letting out a sharp bark. Nash paled, his eyes targeting his loyal Familiar. I figured they were having some kind of telepathic conversation while another round of arrows whizzed over our heads from both angles—ahead and behind.

  “Thank goodness she’s okay. I thought she got hit.” Nash crouched lower. “She smells poison. I think the arrows have been dipped.”

  “Like guac?”

  “Are you seriously cracking jokes right now?” Nash hit me with a stern glare. “She smells powerful poison. And I don’t think it’s the kind that’ll just knock us out, Finch. These guys are trying to kill us.” He flinched as an arrow cut straight through the back of the armchair and thunked into the ground beside his hand. Way too close for comfort.

  I made myself as small as possible. “So according to Huntress, we get hit, we die?”

  “Pretty much.” Nash kept staring at the arrow in the ground while dragging a table onto its side and using it to defend our rears.

  “What do we do?” I was using some resources to keep my Mimicry going, but I had enough Chaos in the tank to at least try and take these ninjas down. And Nash would stay looking like me until the Mimicry in his Ephemera canister ran dry. The trouble was, I didn’t know how much trouble we’d be in if we wiped out a few locals. Then again, right now, I didn’t actually care. We had to live, end of story.

  Nash cast me a glance. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Blaze these cretins?”

  “Uh… if that means take them down, then yes.” He cursed as another barrage of arrows hit the armchair and the turned-over table.

  “Can you fight without your knives?” I asked. An innocent question.

  “Kid, I was fighting long before I had my knives. Don’t you worry about me. You just worry about getting yourself through this in one piece.” Nash waited for a moment, listening for something. Apparently, he heard what he wanted to hear, because he jumped up without warning and launched a barrage of Air at the enemy on the terrace. It swept right through the forcefield, knocking them back. One toppled right over the balcony, leaving the others to gather themselves.

  I wasn’t about to let him have all the glory. Staying behind the flipped table, I sent out tendrils of Telekinesis and grabbed two of the ninjas on the terrace. With a sharp tug, I yanked them through the forcefield. The wards strained against my pull, putting the attackers in a weird limbo—they couldn’t escape my tendrils, and they couldn’t come through the forcefield. The hexes took care of the rest. All I had to do was hold them there while the magic got to work, sending furious sparks through their bodies until they started to singe. They spasmed wildly, as if being electrocuted. A moment later, they lay still. The hexes had done what we couldn’t.

  “Nice work!” Nash called. He was dealing with the trio by the front door. He’d launched a torrent of Air at them, which delayed them for a moment or two. Seeing an opportunity, I sent a flurry of fireballs at the trio. They slammed into our would-be murderers, one of them catching fire and disappearing down the distant hallway in a haze of flames.

  With the ninjas scrambling, I emerged from my hiding place and threw out more Telekinesis lassoes. Grabbing the remaining two by the door while Nash hurled Air at the terrace guys, I did the same thing to them I’d done to their unfortunate counterparts. I dragged them into the forcefield and let the wards do the dirty work. I never felt good about hurting or killing anyone. But old Finch wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, and if we wanted to get out of this alive, then I couldn’t, either.

  “Three left!” Nash shouted as he lashed out with another barrage of Air.

  I sprinted past him and skidded to my knees in a power-slide. I flung out three strands of Telekinesis and grabbed the last of our enemies around their waists. One hard pull and I had them careening toward the forcefield before they knew what’d hit them. Clearly, they’d underestimated us surface dwellers.

  One of them glowered at us through the warded shield. “Your old friends… sent us.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out who he meant. Davin and Erebus. The tag team from hell. They usually swore their underlings to secrecy under pain of death, but that was a little redundant for this guy. He must have been miffed about getting sent on a job where he’d watched his entire team die—I knew all too well that working for Erebus meant hazardous work on inadequate information. Or maybe Davin had pissed him off, in the way that Davin usually did. I appreciated his minor betrayal, whatever the reason.

  His hand slipped into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a hex ball, something I’d seen in that pawnshop. Before he could do anything with it, I sent out another tendril of Telekinesis and swiped the hex ball right out of his hand. I tossed it over the balcony and finished what I’d started, keeping the attacker against the forcefield until the hexes smoked him like the rest of his masked buddies.

  Only when I was one hundred percent certain he was dead, or as good as, did I let go.

  “You’ve really got to stop getting on people’s bad sides.” Nash stooped to catch his breath. Across the room, Huntress crawled out from under the bed and padded over to her soulmate. She licked his hand and whined, clearly worried about him.

  “Who says it was me?” I wheezed, my muscles aching from the strain of what I’d just done. “You said you’d been through some stuff while I’d been gone. Maybe you caused this.”

  He frowned. “Did that guy say we could thank Erebus and Davin for this?”

  “Something like that, yeah.” I sank onto the nearest chair and dispensed with the Nash disguise. Taking my lead, Nash took the Ephemera off and stowed it in his pocket. With a ripple of energy, he returned to his usual handsome self. Normality had been restored, if you ignored the sizzled dead guys at every entrance.

  “Maybe it was me, then,” Nash said quietly.

  “Huh?”

  Nash sighed and stretched out his limbs. “Oh, Kaya decided to take me to some suitor lunch while you were out. Davin was there, and I think he’s gotten the picture that he won’t be the one the princess picks. Perhaps this was his attempt at upping his chances. Or maybe Erebus is getting desperate.” He paused. “One thing’s for sure, pretending to be you comes with a whole heap of baggage. The murderous kind.”

  “She took you to a lunch?” I’d have given anything to have been a fly on the wall at that little soirée
. Nash pretending to be me, in front of a bunch of suitors—man, he really had survived a tough couple of hours.

  “Yes, she did. If I’d known she was going to do that, I’d never have let you leave when you did.” He pulled a sour face, no doubt remembering the awkwardness. “Tell me you found something, so that lunch can seem like it was worth it.”

  I smiled. “Actually, I did find something.” I patted my pants pocket. “I found out who tried to kill Kaya. Brace yourself, you’re going to be shocked.”

  “Who?” Nash didn’t take the hint.

  “Davin.” I waited for the gasp, only to be disappointed when it didn’t come.

  Nash balled his hands into fists. “We should’ve known.”

  “He bought the daggers from that pawnshop. I’m guessing he wanted to make himself look like the big hero, resurrecting Kaya after she’d been skewered. Plus, it would’ve served his purpose to convince Atlantis that Necromancy is A-Okay and approved for general consumption.” I rubbed my hands together in an attempt to stop them from jittering. As it turned out, fighting a forcefield had some pretty weird side effects—the main one being a sudden tingling in my palms, as if I’d fallen asleep on them. Major pins and needles.

  Nash stroked Huntress’s fur. “I’m guessing you’re going to tell Kaya about this?”

  “You bet,” I replied. “Davin is long overdue a taste of his own medicine. And Kaya isn’t the sort of person who’ll just let him wriggle free. Maybe it’ll stick this time, since he has no way out of this city.”

  As if summoned, footfalls approached the open door of the bedroom. Kaya appeared a moment later, flanked by a squadron of royal guards. As they were accompanying the princess and all, they didn’t have the same problem of not being able to step through the forcefield. Kaya strode in without hesitation, stepping over the trio of slumped bodies on the threshold—the poor guard and the two downed assassins, since their third member had gone running off with his pants literally on fire.

  “Finch? What is the meaning of this?” Kaya’s face looked deadly calm. “We heard a commotion. Would you care to explain why there seem to be several dead Atlanteans?”

  No way am I taking the flak for this…

  “They tried to kill us, Your Highness. I was in here, minding my own business with my old pal Nash, when they came out of nowhere. They busted open the doors, killed that poor guard over there, and then started on us. They had crossbows with poisoned arrows, and I don’t think they were trying to give us a little tickle,” I blurted out, talking a mile a minute.

  Kaya didn’t give much away, but a subtle tremor in her bottom lip suggested she was rattled. “Assassins.”

  “Looks like it,” I agreed.

  “They must have been well-organized, if they knew to use artillery thin enough to pass through the barriers,” she went on, her tone surprisingly steady. She wasn’t too shabby at hiding her emotions. If only she’d been so good at hiding her true feelings for Erebus.

  “Well, Davin sent them, so they were probably given detailed instructions. Davin has been trying to get in here, so he’d know what they needed to get through—even if only the arrows could actually pass through the forcefield.” I followed Kaya’s gaze around the room, her eyes resting on each of the dead men.

  Kaya’s gaze flitted to me. “How do you know it was Davin?”

  “One of the assassins told us Davin sent his regards, before he tried to launch a hex ball at us.” I deliberately kept Erebus’s name out of it, due to the issue of my enduring servitude. If he’d found out that I ratted on him, he’d have hit me with some cosmic fury.

  “A hex ball, you say?” Kaya still sounded remarkably calm.

  “But that’s not all.” I took the rare coin from my pocket and brandished it at her. “Davin was the one who tried to have you assassinated, Your Highness. And this coin can prove it. Davin used it to buy a certain pair of daggers from a pawnshop in the Trench—one of which nearly made a lollipop out of your heart.”

  Kaya’s lips curled up in a smile. Something I definitely hadn’t expected. “Good.”

  “Come again?” I was waiting for the penny—or rather, the coin—to drop. “You did hear me, right? Davin tried to have you killed, and he tried to have us killed.”

  “I heard you, Finch. And in my opinion, this is excellent news,” she replied, cool as a sea cucumber.

  “Okay, clearly I’m missing something. Or you’ve lost your marbles.” I didn’t understand why she wasn’t flipping out.

  She offered me a dry smile. “This is excellent news because it will make this evening’s festivities even more tantalizing. Oh yes, it shall be a very interesting night, indeed.”

  And just what in the name of Poseidon’s trident was that supposed to mean?

  Thirteen

  Finch

  After Kaya swept away to deal with the evening’s preparations, Nash filled me in on what had happened while I was in the Trench, getting scratched and scraped and pummeled by an invisible Muhammad Ali. Fortunately, the assassination attempt had provided the perfect cover for all the card-game injuries that had appeared on this silky skin of mine.

  “So tonight’s the night?” I felt sick again, my buzz about exposing Davin rapidly fading.

  Nash put a hand on my shoulder. “Seven o’clock, outside the palace. That’s what she told the other saps. I still haven’t forgiven you for that lunch, in case you were wondering.”

  “We were just comrades in battle, Nash. Doesn’t that buy me any leeway?” I tried to keep it light, even though my guts were churning. “Wait—did you say seven o’clock? That’s in a couple hours!”

  “Okay, maybe I can give you some leeway, since you’re about to have the worst evening of your life.” Nash offered me a sympathetic look. “Yeah, it’s seven. Sorry. I’d have told you sooner, but, you know, you weren’t here.”

  “She’s going to make the engagement announcement. She’s actually going to do it. Chaos help me, why is everything happening so fast?” I smacked myself in the forehead. “For a society that claims to be logical about marriage, they’re not shy about rushing into things.”

  Nash grimaced. “Sorry, kiddo.”

  I took a deep, measured breath, then released it. “I knew it was coming.” And it wasn’t over yet.

  “What’s the plan?” Nash focused on Huntress, scratching the perpetual itch between her ears.

  I shrugged. “I still need to find loopholes, but she’s determined to keep me busy.” Irritation bristled in my chest. “All I can do, for now, is point fingers at Davin and hope that keeps Atlantis distracted long enough for us to get out of here, one way or another.”

  “When Kaya comes back, I’ll rendezvous with Melody and Luke and see if we can do some espionage of our own while you’re away. The palace should be pretty empty, if everyone’s going to be at this engagement shindig.” Nash had his military voice on, which I found oddly comforting. “It’ll give us a chance to get into some rooms and libraries that we haven’t worked our way through yet. We’ll get you out of this, Finch. You can count on us.”

  “What about Ryann?” Just saying her name hit me like a ton of bricks. Come seven o’clock, I’d be engaged to someone else. And man, that hurt. I didn’t want anyone else. I wanted to be back in that weird holding room, kissing her senseless. Stupid princess. Stupid Atlantis. Why couldn’t it have stayed a myth, drowned under the ocean?

  Nash paused his scratching. “We don’t want Lux getting a sense of what we’re up to. Ryann’s been compromised, Finch. I know it sucks, but it’s the truth. If you’d like, I can have a chat with her and let her know when things are going down. That might keep Lux happy and off our tails for a while.”

  “Thank you. I don’t want her being alone all night.” My heart felt like someone was trying to wring juice out of it. “She said she understood, but it’s easy to say things. It’s harder to mean them.”

  “She’s a tough cookie, Finch, and she’s not about to let some other woman have
you. Even if she can’t directly help us, she’s keeping Lux busy.” Nash straightened up. “Now, you’ve got an engagement to prepare for. You want to look pretty, don’t you?”

  I shot him a dark look.

  “Right. Too soon?” He smiled, and I almost felt better.

  * * *

  Suited and booted and feeling as awkward as a swordsman in a gunfight, I stood at Kaya’s side before the palace. A stage had been erected, with trestle tables lining the long white marble road that led to the grand building. A street party had sprung up, with tea and cakes being served—the kind of civilized street party British folks liked to throw when the queen had a jubilee. I wasn’t entirely sure what a jubilee was, but apparently it had some significance.

  Talk about a quick turnaround. Kaya had only decided I would be her husband the day before, and yet this party had the kind of organization that should’ve taken weeks. The Atlanteans might’ve even beaten the Germans for efficiency.

  If only the atmosphere had been a little more festive. I jittered at Kaya’s side, avoiding the glare of suitors standing below the stage, like grumpy metalheads in the mosh pit.

  “It is a beautiful night, is it not?” Kaya said, turning to me. She wore the same weird smile she’d had since she’d picked me up from my warded prison. I knew that kind of smile. It was the smile of someone who was up to something. And I should’ve known—I’d invented it, back in the day.

  “It doesn’t seem so different from every other night.” I waved a hand at the fake sunset dimming slowly overhead. “I guess that’s the benefit of having a weather system you can control. Every night’s a nice one.”

  “I was not referring to the weather.” Kaya sighed as though I’d disappointed her. She definitely had some irons in the fire, so to speak.

  I glanced away from her. “What were you talking about?”

  “Never mind,” she said quickly. Her behavior didn’t exactly put me at ease. Trouble was sparking in the air, and I was pretty concerned about what this tinderbox might ignite.