The Blood Gift, page 14
That fucker has evolved to no less than untouchable.
A thing Lythe must have gleaned too. From Grandfather and my academy studies, I’m knowledgeable enough about the federation of fierce warriors to guess with near total confidence at their next move: they’ve chosen not to yield, and to die independent and free when the time comes and the Emperor makes them pay for their pride rather than kneel to a despot. So my heart bleeds for them, too, and for the rest of the Minor Continent. Because, the stark truth is, I can’t even call the countries that have chosen to kneel cowards, or fools, or disparage them in any manner after seeing the images of what Nkosi did in Cara and continues to do in the Isles. It’s a clear message to the rest of the world that once held out against him, and that message worked.
If I helmed a country and was faced with the extermination of every one of my people or bowing to a tyrant . . . The ferocious part of me insists I’d choose the Lytheian answer and stand free, fighting and dying for the right rather than choosing to live chained to a brutal empire. However, the deaths of millions of people would be on my hands. And I don’t know. Is it better to find a way to persist, to survive, to keep your people and legacy enduring so that, maybe one day, those who come after you might find a way to set things right?
“What about the liquid iridium?! What about iridium, period?!” I cry, trying to make sense of how Accacia is decimating the Isles so thoroughly. Mareen has an abundance of war tech; the military possesses dozens of different kinds of weapons to use against an empire that primarily relies on magic. That fact combined with iridium’s ability to dampen magic—or completely sever it, in the liquid serum’s case—should’ve caused the news reporter to relay Mareenian forces were ferociously fighting back! My metal pendant may have been slow-acting, but Selene had me incapacitated in seconds and for a long enough time that if Republic armies are using it en masse, the attack on Cara shouldn’t have been a massacre.
“Accacia must have found some counteragent against it having a significant effect,” Dannica says hoarsely. “They’ve known about it since the war summit, and three months is a considerable time.”
I wince because I’m the reason Accacia has known about it for so long.
“I—we—have you talked to the others?” I ask about the rest of our team, pulling myself out of the horror of the unconscionable, devastating tragedy unfolding in real time. “They must have seen this too.”
Reed, like Dannica, has been constantly monitoring the newsvids for war developments and the planet-wide responses to Nkosi’s presence.
Dannica might as well be a statue in her seat. Tears prick her eyes. “I don’t know. That’s the third thing. I tried Reed first. Then Haynes. Then Greysen, Liim, and Dane. Nobody is answering my Comms.”
I suck in a breath. “If all of them are unreachable, they’re in trouble.” Somebody would’ve answered Dannica otherwise, or contacted us before we could reach out to them after seeing the newsvid.
I think back to our former attack. What if Sutton’s dispatched a fresh Praetorian-merc team that tracked us down? Or it could be an actual bounty hit this time. Either way, the squad is missing two people without Dannica and me, I think, spiraling with panic. Perhaps Sutton instructed Selene to hire several hundred mercs, learning from last time. Reed and the others could easily fight off a hundred. But an entire small legion by themselves? Even if I were there, I’m pretty sure our team isn’t that good.
“We need to get back to them,” I say, my heart thundering and my mind compartmentalizing out of necessity. The devastation in the Isles is gut-wrenching and the alliances Accacia is collecting are petrifying, but I can’t get ripped apart by that right now. Later, I absolutely will. At this moment . . .
“We need to find the others, STAT,” I tell Dannica again, snapping her out of her stupor before rushing out the name of Haynes’s brothel to the transport and telling it to calculate the swiftest route that will get us there.
We’re less than a kilometer away when a mass-carry transport rams into the side of us.
The impact sends our smaller transport spinning, and my head slams against the side glass with a force that makes my teeth shred my bottom lip. Wetness stings the side of my head where it’s pulsing with pain. I touch the spot, and my hands come away coated with blood. There’s a second brutal impact and then a third. Two mass-carry transports pin ours in place.
Dannica rubs her shoulder beside me.
“Are you all right?” she asks, jerking her chin at my bleeding head. Her blaster is already out and her finger’s on the trigger.
“I am,” I say as I yank one of my own off my hip.
What the fuck is going on?
I scan the scene outside the window I’m seated beside. Dannica does the same on her side. The transport pinning us on the left has windows tinted dark that I can’t see through. The street beyond it is vacant.
I focus past the ringing in my ears and my altered vision, which slightly blurs. I take my eyes off the transport on my side for a few seconds to see what’s going on with Dannica’s. It sits immobile too.
“Do you want to get out and shoot them up or stay in and let whoever the fuck is in them come to us?” Dannica asks, pissed.
“Out,” I growl. “Definitely fucking out.”
“Great. That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
There’s no doubt the dumb assholes inside the transports are bounty pricks looking for a payday. Praetorians, agents of their government, wouldn’t operate so conspicuously in a foreign territory. And I’m betting this is the same crew tying Reed and the others up. They were smart about one thing: ramming our transport at its doors. We’re not getting out the simpler way. But I’m in a mood to break some shit anyway.
I shoot out the back glass so Dannica and I can climb out through the opening.
We stand back to back, guns raised and pointed toward the suspiciously still vehicles. Nobody is filing out of them yet.
I brandish a second blaster. “Whatever this is,” I say to Dannica, “whoever is in those transports, they die. We don’t. We fight our way out of this.”
“You’re damn right,” Dannica says over her shoulder.
I step forward and let out a spray of bullets at the front window of the transport in my sight. I hear constant fire from Dannica behind me.
Unlike our transport, the glass doesn’t shatter. It’s bulletproof. Shit. I fire three shots into the metal hood of the transport. They don’t make a dent.
“They’re armored,” Dannica yells before I can yell the same thing at her.
Of course they are.
It’s useless, but out of pure fury, I empty the clips of both blasters into the front of the transport. Then I reload them since whoever is in the transports is clearly toying with us.
“Come the fuck out!” I scream. Bodies aren’t armored. Flesh, my bullets can rip through.
I yell again in frustration. But I conserve my ammo in case I need it because I don’t have an unlimited supply on me, and I have no idea what we’re up against.
Finally the side door of the transport swings up. I glance and see if its counterpart has done the same. Its door has raised too.
I swivel back to the one nearest me, knowing Dannica can take care of whatever comes out of hers, and I need to take care of whatever slithers out of mine.
I grip my blasters tighter, and my hands turn clammy around the gun when a familiar Accacian man with copper skin, dark hair worn short, and light ocher eyes steps out. I’m not sure if it’s the last person I expect to see, but it’s close.
It’s Ajani, the Red Order warlord I crossed paths with in Khanai.
His uniform, which is entirely death-black save for the bloodred collar, is as unnerving and ominous as it was back in Mustaph’s throne room. The man himself is more frightening. He stands staring at me, pitiless, with all the brutality the Blood Emperor’s loyal, deadly generals are infamous for exercising. My blood turns to ice in my veins. I recall how he wielded compulsion against me so easily, with merely a thought, the last time we stood face-to-face. I recall how I was entirely under his command and at his mercy until he decided for me not to be. It pisses me all the way off while simultaneously paralyzing me in place. I swore a vow in Khanai. I knew he’d come for me at some point after I broke it and fled. But I’d hoped he’d be too tied up with critical battles in the beginning to bother with me anytime soon. Clearly, I was wrong. I lock my knees and choose to let the fury lead our impending dance, not the fear. I aim both of my blasters at his fucking head and without any more hesitation empty their clips into his face.
At least, I try.
He moves quicker.
A shield, similar in appearance to Mareenian protective force fields except glowing red, not white, springs up around him before my UVs make contact. They ricochet off it.
I jam fresh clips into the blasters and shoot more. That color means it’s a blood shield, and it must have a max hit capacity. It’s how all left-behind Pantheon magic works. Every variety has a different limit, but no Pantheon blessing is boundless. A fail-safe the gods made sure of when they doled the powers out in the Pantheon Age so their flocks would have a harder time using their gifts against them.
The problem is, if Ajani is a warlord—one of the individuals of the Empire second in strength only to the Blood Emperor himself—I have no idea what it will take to shatter his shield. It very likely is a great deal more than whatever I can dish with the ammo I’ve got.
I keep firing, though, because I’ll be damned if I stand around and go down without fighting.
The bastard stares at me from inside his impenetrable, translucent sphere with a slow, taunting smile.
I reload and empty UVs into the damn thing again. It’s not the smartest move, but I’m pissed.
“How much ammo do you have to waste?” Ajani says smoothly.
“As much as I fucking need,” I growl, having sped a dozen miles past rational. Seeing him again, after the newsvid of what he and his liege and fellow Red Order are doing in the Isles, makes something inside of me snap. Something rabid and vicious that carries blinding, unreasonable fury.
I latch on and ride it for all that it’s worth because it’s exactly what I need. Bloodlust erupts with a vengeance that knocks the breath out of me. It ignites beneath my skin and in my veins, setting my entire being to boiling. The flux of power comes at the perfect time. I drop the guns and jerk free a knife that I cut the palm of my left hand with.
Ajani’s eyes track the movement; he shoots me a sabine’s smile.
“Now we get to interact like civilized adults.”
The blood shield around him vanishes. It turns to a red spray of mist that coats him and then seems to seep through his uniform and into his pores. If not for the situation, I’d marvel because how the hell does he have that level of control over his magic to make it do that?
But I have a more pressing aim to accomplish.
“Civilize this,” I snarl and hurl three blood spikes at his neck lightning-quick. He had started laughing, unfazed, but then the first one grazes the right side of his throat. A thin line of red streaks his brown skin, and all mirth is gone. The next two don’t come close to striking him. He snatches them out of the air, one swiftly after the other, and throws them aside. He touches two fingers to his nicked flesh. He looks at his own blood in amazement, as if he’s never seen it be drawn before. As if he’s completely thunderstruck that it has been spilled in a fight.
Mad with bloodlust, I toss my head back and laugh because oh, you’ve got to be kidding me? Is he really this gods-shitting arrogant?
He snaps his gaze to me, no longer even remotely amused. He stares me down with enough rage and insult to fill the cosmos. “I wasn’t going to inflict any injury upon your person when I came to retrieve you, but you’ve gone and made me mad. What you just did, you have to answer for,” he says as if I’m a child who has misbehaved and needs to be punished.
I shoot three more blood spikes at his neck as my reply.
He dodges them all and then a blood spike of his own buries itself in the center of my chest. I never see it coming. I swear I don’t even see it fucking form in his hand. One minute he’s standing there, not holding a thing. And the next, the blade-sharp spike is jutting out of the skin below my left collarbone. Pain erupts at the site. I grip it to yank it out, but it won’t budge. It stays firmly rooted in place. Ajani strides to me with a smirk, every inch a predator with trapped prey. It’s identical to the lethal swagger he moved with in Khanai. “That doesn’t budge until I want it to budge,” the bastard drawls as if giving me a lecture. “Another thing children in Accacia know.”
Dannica appears behind him. Her gleaming blasters are leveled at Ajani’s head.
“Fuck. You,” I rasp. He’s so focused on me, he won’t sense them in time to shield against the UVs about to shred the back of his skull. Let’s see if he has the juice to come back from that.
My cohort sister squeezes the shots off, but not before a scarlet uniform barrels into her from the side, knocking them askew. I watch the blood spike form in the legionnaire’s hand. My stomach plunges as time slows, stretches. When it snaps back into place, Ajani’s soldier, a dark-skinned woman with a tall, swanlike frame, only stands over Dannica with the weapon, shouting at her not to move.
“You pledged a vow,” Ajani says and I barely register it until he takes a second step in my direction. It was dangerous and stupid to have taken my eyes off the threat in front of me; I force myself to turn away from Dannica (if the legionnaire didn’t kill her, there’s a reason and she’ll be okay for now) and focus squarely on the warlord. “You swore a blood oath. Then you forsook it.” Ajani levels the accusation at me, disgust flashing in his eyes. “But the world over is aware that Mareenians know nothing of fidelity. Why do you think the entirety of your continent, your allies, are turning against you?” He takes another step in my direction and grips the blood spike in the center of my chest. He leans in close and whispers, “I don’t actually need to touch this to do what I’m about to do next, but it’ll feel better to have my hand on the spike when it happens.” That’s all the warning I get before he pushes the blood spike deeper into my chest. Agony and white-hot fire rips me apart. “You’re Accacian, girl, and you will learn our ways. You will submit to our ways. When we swear a blood oath, we don’t give it lightly, with the intention of never fulfilling it, and we certainly don’t run from it. Accacians don’t run from anything. Blood oaths are not lies to be traded or tools for playing games of intrigue that you were over your head trying to do in the first place. They are sacred, enforced by Amaka, the goddess of blood rites herself, and they are binding for as long as both parties live.” He pushes the blood spike deeper into my chest. I heave, choke, and cough up blood. “You want out of it, then you have to die. That’s the only way. Would you like that end?”
A savage smile accompanies his words, as if he’s said them in challenge. As if he knows I’ll submit, that I’ll collapse at his feet and choose otherwise.
He has no fucking idea who I am.
I cough up more blood then spit it in his face.
“Go to a hellpit. Feel free to kill me because I’m not serving you and the monster you call liege.”
Something dark flashes in his eyes, and for a second, the mask of urbanity that he likes to wear drops. He becomes every bit the monster, the brutal bastard who revels in cruelty that I know he, his emperor, and all of his fellow warlords is. As if he catches the slip and doesn’t wish for it to show just yet, he fixes his expression back into carefully cultivated refinement. I blink at the instantaneous shift. It’s another thing that’s terrifying about him.
“I don’t intend to kill you,” he says. “I said if you want out of it, you must die to attain it. I never said anything about me. Because what really matters is that I don’t intend to let you out. So I guess what I really should’ve said is, if you want out, you must find a way to kill me, and,” he shrugs, suffused with ego, “that is something that you will never be capable of doing. No matter how potent of a power you possess.”
“Conceited much?” I bite off around the pain pulsating in the center of my chest.
“Very,” he says. Then, casually, he notes, “The blood spike won’t kill you where it’s lodged.” He adds with a smile that makes me want to rip his head off his neck, “It will leave you in excruciating torment for the duration that it’s in.”
I do not give him the satisfaction, or display the weakness, of asking how long that will be.
Instead, I promise him, “Before we’re done with each other, you’re dead. That is an oath I intend to and will keep.”
“I’ll put you out of your misery once we arrive where we’re going,” he says, dismissing the threat. “That should be punishment enough for the offense you committed against me. If you were still a Praetorian, and you assaulted a higher-up, whatever the sanction is in Mareen, the penalty is worse in the Red Legions. Don’t do it again.”
If I were in better shape, I’d snort. Then I’d lob several more blood spikes—and knives behind them—at his jugular for good measure.
But I’m not in better shape. In fact, I’m pretty bad off. So all I can do is watch as he turns to the transport behind him and inclines his head.
In response, men and women in scarlet uniforms—more blood legionnaires—pour out of the transport.
“I’ve got this one myself,” Ajani says to his soldiers. “Bring the other one with us.”
Dannica.
I try to twist around to see her fully, but it hurts too fucking bad to execute the movement. Black swims before my vision with the exertion, and I’m left sweating and panting.
