No Promises, page 27
But I wouldn’t let myself think about that right now. I stumbled drunkenly around the room, searching for something I could wear. Maybe a spare set of clothes someone from Arkanica had left lying around, or—more likely—something they had stripped from the dead.
I found something even better. A plastic box, neatly labeled with my name and the date I had been captured. Inside, in individual vacuum-sealed bags, I found the shirt and pants I had worn to my meeting with Dominic. His blood was still spattered across the shirt. I didn’t care. At least the only corpse whose clothing I would be wearing was my own.
At the bottom of the box, I found my shoes. And below them—my breath caught. Yes, that was what I thought it was. They had saved my watch. Probably intending to use it for some experiment or other, along with the rest of the box’s contents. I slipped it onto my wrist. A second later, I almost regretted it when the ache in my arm returned. Almost. But the familiar weight of the metal loosened a little of the tension in my shoulders. My lips parted to let out an involuntary sigh.
I slipped on the clothes. They smelled of dried blood, along with some sharp chemical I didn’t recognize. But they would keep me covered, and that was good enough for me.
I continued my search. In a small closet, I found the final thing I was looking for—a spare lab coat. I slipped it on over my shirt. It could work as a rudimentary disguise, unless someone looked at me too closely. After all, nobody would be watching for me—they thought I was dead.
Time to go. I didn’t know how much time had passed since my death, but the one thing I did know was that it had been too long. I had to tell someone what I had learned—and keep Skye from doing something stupid.
I reached for the door, then paused. What was my plan? Make a beeline for the front entrance, steps fast and head ducked, and pray I wasn’t noticed? It was my best option—anything more complicated than that increased the risk of discovery. And I knew better than to think they would be so careless with me a second time.
But… the other prisoners. I couldn’t leave them here, knowing what I knew.
I knew those thoughts were just the sickness rearing its head again. Not the iron sickness, but the other. That wasn’t the only reason I hesitated, though. Rescuing the prisoners now, instead of waiting, would be to my advantage. If I got them out, I would be halfway done. My obligations to Vicantha would be satisfied. After that, I would only need to find a way to destroy Arkanica entirely, in order to take care of the Skye half of the equation.
Right. Find a way to destroy the place that had just killed me and stripped me of my power. That was all.
Everything in me—my selfish rationality and my diseased, inconvenient heart—rebelled at the idea of leaving without the captured fae. But I knew, deep in my aching bones, that if I tried to get them out now, I would end up in a cell alongside them. I had no magic. No weapon. If I was lucky, they would let me live. If not, they would bring me back to that iron room, and Phoebe wouldn’t make the same mistake a second time. Or maybe it was the other way around. I wasn’t so sure staying alive in this place would constitute any sort of luck.
If I died, I would have no chance of getting the prisoners out. That was what I told my father’s heart as it protested from within me. The prisoners would die. Skye would die. Vicantha… she would live, out of pure spite. But she would never find out what had happened to the fae she had come here to save.
So I opened the door, and hurried down the hallway to the stairs, one hand on the wall. I dragged myself up flight after flight, turning my head away when anyone passed. I didn’t look back.
I got occasional brief glances from passing humans or fae, a few wearing lab coats like mine, others carrying stacks of files or tapping out messages on their phones. I tensed every time, and tried to convince my wet-noodle legs they could get me to the door if I had to run. But nobody stopped me. One fae woman with summer-green eyes stopped to give me a long look of concern, when she entered the stairwell to find me bent over the railing, struggling to find the strength to take another step. But my wan smile was enough to reassure her, and she passed without saying a word.
I emerged from the stairwell and stumbled toward the door to the atrium. The hallway was busier now, but still no one gave me a second look. The Arkanica scientists must not have gone to cut up my body yet and found it missing.
I kept my head angled away from the front desk as I passed. There was a woman at the desk this time; she gave me only a perfunctory glance. It made sense—her job was to keep people out, not keep them in. Still, I had to fight to keep from letting out an audible sigh of relief as I hurried past her.
The light from the doors beckoned. I strained toward it, ant tripped over nothing as I pushed myself to go faster than my legs could handle. I barely noticed, my eyes fixed on those squares of light. Daylight—real daylight. Not the false warmth from those enchanted windows.
I had to stop myself from breaking into a run. And not just because it would have attracted attention. My legs were having enough trouble with this measured pace, and falling on my face wouldn’t help me get out any faster. Instead, I took labored step after labored step, and finally reached the outer doors. I pushed them open and flung myself out into the light, stooped and trembling, like an aging warrior after his final defeat.
I didn’t let myself look back.
I ditched the lab coat in a trash can a block away. Out here, the disguise would make me more conspicuous, not less. My legs were still weak and trembling, my breathing harsh and ragged, but my body held on long enough to get me back to the bed and breakfast. I still didn’t know how long it had been. I had been taken prisoner in the afternoon, and spent a couple of hours unconscious from the bullet wound. Then another few hours in the cell. Then… I didn’t know. Was it the next day? Or the day after? Or maybe longer. A week. A month. I shook my head sharply, trying to clear it of those thoughts. If a month had gone by, it didn’t matter what I did next. Skye was already dead.
The owner of the bed and breakfast was nowhere in sight as I heaved himself through the door and up the stairs to our room. Or what had been our room when I had left. I hesitated, hand raised, afraid to knock. What if no one answered? What if someone opened the door, and I found myself staring into the face of a stranger, a new guest who had never heard of Skye?
But I hadn’t dragged myself all the way here to stand in the hallway until I starved to death. I knocked.
The door opened a crack. A single eye peered out. The eye looked familiar, but I didn’t dare to hope.
Abruptly, the door flew open. “Kieran!” Skye screeched. She grabbed both my hands and yanked me into the room. I pulled away out of reflex, adrenaline flooding my overtaxed muscles. She didn’t notice. Her arms were already around me, squeezing the life out of me as she made muffled happy noises against my chest.
My body had only just gotten used to living again. It wasn’t prepared for this kind of assault. But it wasn’t the pain that made me pull away. It was the touch of a human. Having her in my space had been bad enough before. Now, though… humans had just killed me all over again. Humans were what they were, always and forever, and they had proved it to me one more time.
Skye frowned as I drew back. She met my eyes, then hastily dropped her gaze and took a step back. “Kieran?” The joy was gone from her voice. Now she sounded nervous. “What happened?”
I wondered how I looked to her, with my blood-spattered shirt and my eyes that had stared into the face of my murderer only a few minutes ago—at least by my internal reckoning. “How long?” I croaked.
“Since you disappeared? Almost two full days. I didn’t know what to do. The sun went down, and you didn’t come back from your meeting, and Vicantha was still on the other side of the portal. It wasn’t like I could go to the police. All I could do was stay locked away in here and imagine what they…” Her voice got higher and higher, locked in a tight spiral, then trailed off.
At least she *had* stayed locked away in here, instead of going out looking for me. If Arkanica hadn’t found her yet, there was a good chance she hadn’t even given into the temptation to break into their systems again looking for clues about my disappearance. I had to admit, I was impressed. Maybe she cared more about keeping herself alive than I had given her credit for.
“She shouldn’t be the one answering questions here,” said a sharp voice from the corner of the room. Before my sluggish brain could process what I had heard, Vicantha strode toward me. “I returned half a day ago. You weren’t here. Your human was moments away from returning to her previous work and drawing Arkanica to us again. I have been here in this room, trying to calm a hysterical human, for *hours.* Her normally-sleek hair was tangled around her face. She brushed it away as she stared at me with crazed, furious eyes. “*Where have you been?*”
“I was *not* hysterical,” Skye protested before I could say a word. “My reaction was totally justified, after I saw his face on the news as a murder suspect!”
At the words “murder suspect,” Vicantha’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, you owe us an explanation for that, as well. Why did you kill someone in broad daylight and attract the attention of human authorities? And after you dared to lecture me about secrecy?”
“I didn’t,” I said shortly. I stumbled to the bed and sat down before my legs could give out under me. “Arkanica did. Then they posed as cops—or maybe the real cops were working with them, I don’t know—and took me away. That’s where I was. With them.”
Even that terse explanation was enough to bring the memory of the past two days crashing down on me. My voice tightened. My hands—finally healed, along with the rest of me, in the surge of magic that had brought me back to life—curled until my nails dug into my palms.
Skye caught the motion. “What did they do to you?”
“I know what Arkanica is doing,” I said, in lieu of an answer. “They’re not forcing the Winter fae to work magic for them. Or to create some magical substance. Instead, they’re cutting out the middleman.”
I took a breath, trying to figure out how to break the news to Vicantha as gently as possible. Then I decided it didn’t matter. This was ugly business. It was fitting for it to have an ugly explanation.
“This ‘faelight’ is fae blood,” I said. “The ultimate in renewable energy—it regenerates as long as the source is alive. They have their prisoners locked in iron cells, and take them out every so often to drain another few pints from their veins.”
I didn’t get a chance to tell her about the transplant experiments. Or about the fae across the lab from me who had been too broken to make an effort to fight. “Say that again,” she said, every word precise. She stood as still as an ice sculpture. The only color in her face came from her eyes, shining like cold flames.
“They’re using the prisoners’ blood,” I said. “They—”
I didn’t get any further than that before Vicantha whipped her daggers out. Moving faster than my eye could follow, she sliced open a pillow with deadly precision. Feathers flew everywhere, like a fat bird had exploded in the center of the room.
Then she spun to face us, vibrating with tension, clutching her weapons in front of her chest.
“Magic is sacred.” I had thought I had seen Vicantha angry before. I hadn’t even come close. “It is the innermost being of the fae. The thing that separates us from the animals—including humanity. And now those same humans dare to profane what they cannot hope to understand, by drawing it from our bodies to fuel the very technology that forced us into exile?” Another slash of her daggers sliced a curtain in half on the diagonal. Light flooded into the room as fabric puddled to the floor. “They took our world from us. But that wasn’t enough. Now they want to reach into our bodies to take that which is so far beyond them they should fear to simply touch it?” Her voice, which had started out low and dangerous, escalated into a scream.
Skye started to speak. Vicantha whirled on her, daggers raised, and for half a second I thought I would have to throw myself between them.
But she didn’t attack. As Skye clamped her mouth shut, face white, Vicantha turned to me. “The prisoners. Where are they?”
“Exactly where you thought they were,” I said. “Locked in iron cells, underneath the Arkanica building. I shared their prison, for a few hours. They’re…” I tried to find something encouraging to say about their condition, and failed. “They’re alive,” I finished, knowing she would hear it for the pale consolation it was.
My words only seemed to make Vicantha angrier. Her eyes narrowed to slits. She took a slow step toward me, without lowering her weapons. “You were there with them,” she said, not quite a question.
I answered anyway, with a nod. “I talked to them. I told them you were coming.”
“You *told them I was*…” Vicantha’s arm whipped past me. The second pillow exploded. “You were there. You saw them. And then you escaped. So tell me, Oberon’s son, hero and protector, *where are they*?”
“I wanted to save them.” I tried to meet her eyes, and couldn’t. I knew it had been the right decision. Even so, the sickness in me told me I deserved every bit of anger in her gaze. “I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t? Or didn’t try?”
“From what I saw of them, they wouldn’t have lowered themselves to accept help from me even if escape had been a sure thing. And even if they had, more likely than not, none of us would have made it out. I wouldn’t have survived—not without my magic. And I had to get out of there, if I was going to tell you what Arkanica was doing, and if I was going to—” To save Skye. I cut myself off before I could finish the sentence. Vicantha knew my priorities. She had seen me sacrifice her people for Skye once before. But for the sake of the rest of the furnishings, I wouldn’t remind her of that fact.
“You wouldn’t have survived?” Vicantha spat. “That never stopped you when you were saving humans. Again and again, for hundreds of years, you’ve died for them.”
I couldn’t argue with what she was saying. Not when a voice in the back of my mind whispered that it was true. So I said nothing.
Tension thrummed through Vicantha’s body. Her daggers quivered. For a second, I thought she would lunge for me. Then, abruptly, she turned away and strode to the door. “I’m leaving. Come if you like. It isn’t my concern. Your work is done.”
I doubted she was getting ready to retreat through the portal. “Are you going back to Arkanica?” I pushed myself up off the bed to block the door, shaking my head. “We’re not ready. I haven’t told you anything about the building yet, and what I do know won’t help us much. And… I don’t have my magic.” I hurried to continue before either of them could ask questions. “We’d never make it to the prisoners, let alone make it out again.”
“Maybe not.” Vicantha stepped forward, until her weapons were less than an inch away from my chest. “But we can at least kill the humans responsible.”
“We won’t even make it that far.” I called up an image of the building in my mind, trying to figure out Vicantha’s odds of getting the futile revenge she was craving. But my imagined version of the Arkanica building grew and grew, casting an oversized shadow like the castles Skye had imagined from my past. In my memory, that place was an endless maze of iron and pain.
Vicantha studied my face, like she was trying to decide whether I was telling the truth. She set her jaw. “Then I will take my revenge on the humans I *can* reach.” She shot an arm out past me, going for the doorknob.
I shifted before she could reach it. She studied me through slitted eyes, like she was weighing her chances if she decided to attack. I regretted telling her I had lost my magic.
Before Vicantha could make a move, Skye walked up to stand beside me. “What are you doing?” she asked Vicantha, with what I could have sworn was genuine confusion. “You must know that won’t help anything.”
“Move, human,” Vicantha growled. “I have no more attachment to you than to the others of this city. It would not burden my conscience to carve the blood price out of your flesh along with every other human who calls Arkanica their neighbor.”
I shoved myself between Skye and Vicantha, so quickly that one of Vicantha’s daggers ripped a jagged line through my shirt before she could yank it back. “Is that your plan? Forget about Arkanica, and instead kill every innocent human you can? Have you given up on rescuing the prisoners, then, or do you just not have the self-control to wait for a real plan?” I let her hear every bit of the cold contempt I was feeling. I had been through too much today to worry about sparing the feelings of a ruthless Winter fae.
I tried to focus on that contempt. It was easier than letting myself feel the fear that lay underneath. Looking at her, at the fierce lines of her jaw and the gleam of the daggers in her hands, I could believe her words were literal, or close to it. Maybe she couldn’t kill everyone in the city, but she could make a decent try. She was Mab’s right hand. I was willing to bet most of the humans in Hawthorne had never even fought a fellow human before. How many would die, if she forced me away from this door? Dozens? Hundreds? Caught in the blast of her cold stare, I believed the answer could be thousands.
And despite everything I had told Vicantha since she had first found me, I ached to save every single one of them.
Vicantha knew it, too. Her mouth twisted into a cruel sneer. “Do you fear for the lives of these humans, son of Oberon? Are you searching for a way to save them? You could have done it, by saving the lives of my people. But you would never risk your skin for the fae.”
“These humans are responsible.”
“That doesn’t make them worthy of survival. Isn’t that what you believe? Humans are rotten to the core—your words. So why shouldn’t I remove them from this world, before they can prove their nature the way all humans do?”
