Between Kings, page 19
part #10 of The City Between Series Series
“Flaming heck,” I said softly, because even if North had saved Tuatu’s life, she was now very likely to die herself—along with everyone else in the group. With my eyes darting back and forth to make sure that JinYeong was still moving, still alive, I couldn’t blame her. She was protecting her own.
I saw the boiling of more brawlers at the far end of the crevasse and caught the brief look upward that JinYeong sent me. I jerked my head vigorously at him. Get out of there. I couldn’t see if the fallen lycanthropes were still alive, but I had a cold feeling that they weren’t.
I knew that unless they retreated now, they would probably all die, and I still hadn’t been able to complete my part in the enterprise.
JinYeong, snarling, held back the crawling mass of brawlers while North pulled Tuatu into the wall, the lycanthropes dragging their fallen with them while Five slashed with sword and bow alike, out of arrows some time ago.
I looked across at the king with sweat on my temples and saw that he was watching me thoughtfully.
“You’d better go and help your friends, don’t you think?” he said. “It doesn’t look like they’re likely to last long without you. Or are you depending on the vampire to even things out? Things aren’t looking very good for him—even vampires have a limit to how much punishment they can take.”
“This one can take more than you can dish out,” I said, but there was a cold feeling in my stomach because JinYeong was flagging. I saw him disappear beneath the masses of brawlers twice before he emerged again, fighting desperately to get back to the others.
“Perhaps,” said the king, shrugging. “But I haven’t got a stake in this battle: it’s a matter of indifference to me whether or not he lives. I don’t think you can say the same, and it makes me very curious about why you’re still here.”
He knew that something was wrong. He knew that something was happening, even if he didn’t know what it was. He was edging back from the precipice even though on paper, it would have looked like he was winning.
He was moving back, and the tenuous link I had with him was verging on either failure or discovery.
In the last moment that I was near enough to do so, I frantically slipped that needle of Between back out of his mind and magic, out of sight and out of detection; then I turned and ran for it.
There was a sickness in my stomach that wasn’t fear; it was a sickness of failure and dread that said I had gambled with my friends’ lives—worse, that I had gambled with those lives and lost. I leaped down, fell down, tumbled into a brawler, and then I was fighting with no way out and no one beside me or behind me. I don’t know where the swords came from, but they were in my hands and there was blood on my face, heat in my ribs, and a dreadful coldness in my legs while whiteness danced in front of my eyes, decorated with brown spots.
I stabbed and slashed and ducked, never quite quick enough to avoid injury but never slow enough to die, and then somehow I had broken free. I sprinted along the edge of the rivulet, my heart pumping dizzily in my ears, in my skull, and caught sight of the others ahead of me—too far ahead of me.
I saw the massive wave of brawlers spilling into the tunnel behind them too. They had to cross the rivulet to get into our hidey hole now, and it didn’t look like I was going to make it in time to get in there too.
I ran anyway, because it’s not much use saying things are impossible without trying. I ran because there were only three lycanthropes walking. I ran because all I could see of JinYeong was his head as North and Tuatu carried him with a trail of blood pattering out behind them as they ran.
And I stopped running when they began to cross over the rivulet, because another wave of brawlers was tumbling from the walls in front of me as though being birthed from the stone. Five saw me and yelled, but I couldn’t hear what he said. Daniel caught sight of me too, and his jaw tightened—it looked as though he was trying to decide for a brief moment whether or not to acknowledge my frantic arm movements that meant get in the wall right now, you wally!
To my relief, he nodded at me a moment later. He would make sure that everyone who was still alive would live, even if it meant me being shut outside. He had already lost people today, and I didn’t think he was willing to lose any more, especially with the amount of brawlers between me and them. Not when so few of the group were still in fighting shape.
Tuatu and North were still on their feet, but barely, and all I could see of JinYeong as he was carried in with them was torn clothing and blood fairly dripping from him. Even a vampire shouldn’t lose that amount of blood.
I would have leaped the rivulet and made a good go of getting in with them if the water hadn’t boiled up with something big and toothy as Five crossed over last with a bleeding half-wolf, half-human Kyle. Daniel grabbed Kyle as the leprechaun was pulled under, and when Five resurfaced, gasping, there were hands to drag him out before anything could pull him under again. Bereft of his pegleg and roaring, they carried him into the side of the tunnel with them, and I grinned a bloody, encouraging grin at Daniel when I caught his eyes in the last second before he shut the door in the faces of the approaching brawlers.
Those brawlers saw me from across the rivulet, and I ran. I ran, but I didn’t go far—or anywhere too hard to find—because there was no need. Even if there had been a need, I had no more strength and I was running pretty short on blood, too; it was far better that the king find me now, while I was still alive, and take me back to his side of the concrete escarpment so that I could finish the work I had started and failed to finish earlier.
This time I was going to do the thing my own way, without putting anyone else at risk. This time, I was going to—well, it was pretty likely that I would die. But at least I would manage to do what I came to do.
That was if I could stop myself from dying in the meantime.
I couldn’t stop myself from falling. I hit the concrete hard but it didn’t hurt, and from the sound of the rivulet, I was in just the right position: if I lived for long enough, either the leeches or the brawlers would find me—and when they found me, the king would also find me.
Hopefully he would find me quickly enough, I thought, and passed out.
The world was dark and cold around me when I was irresistibly drawn back into it by a familiar voice. “Dear me!” it said softly. “What do we have here?”
I managed to crack my eyes open and Athelas’ face swam above me.
“Heck,” I said, laughing around the ache in my throat. “You actually came. I didn’t see you while I was looking around last night—I was worried you were long gone.”
“Where else would I be?” he asked, laying a cool hand on my forehead that dripped with magic. “I didn’t go through so much effort to keep you alive only to leave you to die before you achieve what I need you to achieve.”
“Figured,” I said, almost gasping in relief at the release from pain.
More than physical pain, I felt as though my heart was lighter. I hadn’t been wrong. Athelas had never meant to kill me—he had very carefully done his best to kill me while I was still protected by a contract that wouldn’t allow it and had taken the proof of his attempt back with him to Lord Sero.
I gave a snuffly sort of laugh and added, “Didn’t see you sneaking around until now, so I thought I must have got it wrong. You better get moving if you want to live; there’s a good few of the king’s brawlers coming for me, not to mention the rivulet leeches. They’re pretty nasty when they make skin-to-skin contact.”
“I moved you from your somewhat perilous position,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about that for now.”
“The heck you did,” I said angrily. “Put me back! They’re supposed to find me!”
“I shall certainly not allow you to die now that you’re so close to achieving my revenge for me. You’ll have to put up with being healed and hurled back into the battle at some later stage, I’m afraid.”
“I thought you must have been after the king as well,” I said grumpily, feeling tingly about the legs. I had the feeling they would start to hurt soon, which was probably as much of a good thing as a bad thing. It meant my body was healing, even if I’d prefer the kind of healing that came from vampire spit. That thought brought with it a sick kind of panicked feeling, so I pushed myself into speech again. “Once I figured out that you preferred me alive to dead, it was easy enough to see that. Reckoned you had Zero earmarked for being the next king, though.”
“That is something I cannot control,” he said. “This much—the absolute fall of the king, the order, and the ruling powers—is enough.”
I sat up dizzily with Athelas’ support. “So that’s why you weren’t too upset when Upper Management started killing all those fae VIPs. Figured you just liked to see people getting their hearts ripped out as a matter of business.”
“One can always learn a few new tricks, even if one is an old dog,” he said coolly. “It was interesting to me on a professional level. On your feet, Pet. Where are the others?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “There’s only one way to get to them, and it’ll involve cutting through about fifty-odd four-armed blokes. They need to get out and then get back to the bridge—the king can’t get to them if they’re there, and they can get out safely from there once the arena opens. I don’t think the king can even sense past it as part of the arena.”
Athelas said, “They’re badly injured, then?”
“Two of the lycanthropes are dead—the girls, I think—and I reckon Kyle and Dylan are close behind,” I said flatly. “North tried a bit too hard to make sure Tuatu didn’t die, so she’s a lot weaker than usual, too. Five is still doing well, but I think he lost his pegleg when they crossed the rivulet before the power station—reckon they ran into something with a lot of teeth that didn’t have a chance to grab ’em. Five went under for a minute, though.”
“The mosquito?”
“They carried him in with them,” I said, and an involuntary shiver spread through my body. “I don’t know.”
“And yet,” said Athelas, observing me closely, “here you are.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the bait.”
“I see,” he said. “And what is the trap, if you are the bait?”
“That’s me, too,” I told him, feeling the strength grow quietly and surely inside my legs and my lungs both. “The king’s being a bit too free with his magic, and I need to get closer to him to be able to do anything about that.”
Athelas glanced toward the rivulet as it bubbled with the scum of the passing of leeches. “I see; you intend to go back to him. Will you present yourself to him half-dead, then? These creatures won’t drag you to him—they’ll kill you and leave your carcass for the rats.”
“Yeah,” I said again. “Maybe. It was a calculated risk. That’s where you come in now, though—with flamin’ good timing as usual. You’re about the only one the king would trust to drag me in by the scruff of my neck without thinking it’s a trap.”
Athelas’ grey eyes once again rested on my face, their expression hard to read. “You expect me to bring you captive to the king?”
“Got it in one,” I said. “You flamin’ owe me—you know you do! The least you can do is take a couple of orders from me so that we can finish up this nightmare.”
“You might recall, Pet,” he said, “that we’ve had this conversation many times before.”
“The one where you tell me not to trust you and I trust you anyway? Yeah, I know.”
“Then might one inquire why you persist in doing the same things and making the same mistakes all over again?”
“Because I know you didn’t kill all those people and spend so much time scheming just to keep the king on the throne. And because I know you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t here to help.”
“I came to see my work through,” he said coldly. “I’ll see it to its end, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent that. I’ve killed again and again to stay alive and undetected long enough to bring it about—you can’t imagine that I’ll balk at a few more deaths to see it through!”
“You can’t stop me trusting you,” I said. “And you know you owe me.”
“There is no legal obligation—”
“I’m not talking legal.”
“And no fae obligation—”
“I’m not talking fae obligations,” I said, my voice tight and choked. “I’m talking about my dead parents and the fact that you can’t ever make up for killing them!”
“A fine recompense,” he said. “To take you to torture or your death. I’ll go with you and set the others free; we’ll regroup and find another way to get at the king.”
“Nope,” I said. “You’re going to hand me over to the king, and then you’re going to go and get the others out—they’re going to need some help and some healing, and I’ll be busy being bait.”
“Why should I do any such thing? If you’re not willing to take my revenge for me in the way that I choose, what would stop me from handing you over and taking it myself? Do you think I’m willing to throw away everything I worked so hard for just for your friends?”
“Can you just stop trying to make me think the absolute worst of you all the time? I’ve seen too many of your bloody memories! You never tell me an outright lie, but you lie all the time and I’m flamin’ tired of it!”
A faint touch of amusement came to Athelas’ eyes. “I suppose it’s a little much to expect you not to think I’m trustworthy when I followed you in here. It’s always been my best weapon against you, after all.”
“Why do you think I let you out?” I said impatiently.
This time it was shock in his eyes, utter and complete. “I beg your pardon?”
“I let you out because I figured you’d either run for it or try and see everything through. You came to see it through so I’m expecting you to flamin’ listen to what you’re told and do what needs to be done!”
“Pet, am I to understand that you arranged for the detective to enter the room in which I was awake, fully understanding that he was still bound to me in bargain?”
“Why the heck else would I have sent him in there alone! I knew you’d use him, and I knew you’d be here when I needed you.”
He gazed at me for a very long time, then opened his mouth to say not quite steadily, “Pet, I wish—I would give a great deal—”
There was no time for him to finish that sentence because I already heard the slick, wet sound of leeches coming up from the water.
“Save it for later,” I said. “We’ve gotta get going to hand me over to the king so that I can distract him while you get the others out. Reckon I’m in bad enough shape, or do you need to stab me?”
I saw the frozen, blank moment where no emotion at all showed in his face, then Athelas smiled humourlessly. “I believe I’ll decline that particular job. You’re in sufficiently bad shape outwardly to allay most suspicions, though I rather think my touch has done its work on your inner injuries. Perhaps we can agree at least to get you to the king in as good a shape as necessary to complete your no doubt very clever work.”
The tunnel never felt so cold as it did on the way to the king. Part of that coldness was probably the fact that my blood wasn’t quite flowing properly again yet—some of it could have been the poison from the brawlers’ knives—but it was likely that the awful dread sitting in my stomach was from the very simple fact that I didn’t know if I really could trust Athelas, despite what I’d said to him.
I glanced across at him, seeing shadow and blood mingling in his eyes as the water reflected in them, and even though I’d said otherwise, I felt the coldest fear I yet remembered suffering. Because there was no way to know for sure that he would actually help me—no way to know for sure that he would give up his final chess piece and trust and wait—no way to be sure that what I thought of him was the truth this time when it hadn’t been last time.
Athelas was right; he knew all the best ways to manipulate me, all the most effective ways to appeal to my judgement and my trust. He knew enough to be capable of showing up here with the sole intention of turning me in to the king for real—and my friends along with me now that he knew where they were. If that was the case, I’d given up myself and my friends for absolutely no benefit, and everything we’d done here in the tunnels was for nothing. Chelsea and Chantelle—and possibly JinYeong—had died for nothing.
Colder and colder it became, until I was shivering with every step, lead in my stomach and fear in my heart. There was still time to choose differently, said a small, terrified voice. I could make a different decision.
I would have given a great deal not to have to make that decision at all, in fact. But I had to choose, and if there was only one choice to make, I was going to choose to hope. To hope that I could see clearly enough. To hope that I was right in my estimation of Athelas. To hope that in all the darkness and twistedness of his heart, there was still a part of him that was as righteous and justice-seeking as the original desire he’d had to bring down Lord Sero, the king, and the entire order of the world Behind. To hope that he wasn’t so far gone after the execution of that plan as to make him part of the system that needed excising.
The brawlers all stood back and let us pass through as we went. I hadn’t expected anything else, and I don’t think Athelas had, either. They didn’t just stand back, either; they actively avoided Athelas, though they looked as though they wanted to hiss at me. And when we reached the crack in the wall once again that led to a bigger, more concrete version of itself further Between, they didn’t follow us through.
“Here we go,” I said, and I was happy I could say it without my teeth chattering. “He’ll know we’re here now. You better be flamin’ convincing.”
“Tell me that you have a plan, at least!” he said softly, pushing me along as the ground seemed to move beneath my feet.
“I wouldn’t go right to plan,” I said, a curious coil of laughter curling in my stomach as we drew closer to the king’s side of the cracked concrete. “It’s more of an idea.”
