Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
Arcanthus’s heart went several moments without beating, and his breath remained caught in his throat. The slightest twitch of Vaund’s hand would cause immense pain and damage to Samantha. Consuming rage and chilling fear warred for supremacy inside him.
“Drop the weapon, sedhi,” Vaund said.
There were only a few meters between Arc and Sam, between Arc and Vaund, but he couldn’t take a shot. There was too much danger to her. Too great a chance that Vaund’s helmet was armored against blaster fire.
Gritting his teeth, Arcanthus dipped his central eye to Drakkal; the azhera appeared to be breathing but was otherwise still. His left arm lay on the floor a meter away from his body, severed cleanly just above his elbow. That sparked fresh anger in Arc’s gut. It was too close to what Vaund had done to him all those years ago.
Arcanthus slowly shifted his finger off the blaster’s trigger, angled the barrel down, and tossed the weapon toward Vaund. It clattered to a stop near Vaund’s feet .
“If you hurt her, Vaund, I’ll—”
“You’re in no position to make threats, sedhi.” Vaund inclined his chin toward the door behind Arcanthus. “Tell your people to come out.”
“They’re not in there,” Arcanthus replied. He could only hope they’d moved fast enough—and that they’d closed the hatch behind them.
Vaund was silent but for the strained sound of his breaths.
An explosion boomed inside the workshop—near Arc’s desk, by the sound of it. It was followed by the sounds of raining debris and crackling electricity.
“All of you get in there to support the other team. Kill anyone you find,” Vaund said.
The Syndicate goons hurried forward, keeping to the sides of the partially open blast door. Arcanthus held his gaze on Vaund as flash grenades went off in the workshop; the detonations left a ringing in Arc’s ears that almost drowned out the sound of the Syndicate gunmen storming into the room.
Vaund maintained his hold on Samantha, whose eyes were wide and fearful. The energy blade was impossibly steady in his hold.
“Release her,” Arcanthus said.
“I should kill her.” Vaund tipped the blade infinitesimally closer to Samantha’s pale skin.
She cringed and whimpered softly.
Arcanthus’s insides knotted, and he clenched his fists.
Vaund’s laugh was like electricity arcing out of a broken power casing. “But I’m not going to. I’ll hurt her—you can be sure of that—but I’m going to keep her afterward.”
“No one’s in here, boss,” someone shouted from inside the workshop.
“Where are they, sedhi?” Vaund demanded.
“It’s just the two of us, Vaund,” Arc said, struggling to keep his voice steady. He couldn’t allow himself to forget one of the lessons he’d learned long ago—a battle could be won before the first blow was thrown if you could get into your opponent’s head beforehand.
Arcanthus focused his rage into a tiny point, into a powerful, controllable shape, and let his instincts and fear make it cold; it would be a weapon to wield deliberately against his foe, a deadly tool. He could not allow it to control him, or he’d lose.
Vaund laughed again and shoved Samantha aside. She stumbled half a dozen steps before crashing heavily to the floor. To Arcanthus’s relief, her head snapped up immediately, but there was a concerned look on her face. Her shoulders heaved with her quick, shallow breaths.
“The two of us and twenty of my men in the room behind you,” Vaund said.
“I thought this was meant to be a fair fight,” Arcanthus said. “Or is it that you still can’t beat me without a gang to hold me down?”
Vaund reached up with his empty hand and tore off his shirt, tossing it aside. His bared torso was lean, with hard, irregular ridges of muscle, and armored plates jutted from beneath the ashen skin of his forearms. Tattered flesh, smeared with dark blue ichor, dangled from his chest. He looked more skeletal—and less alive—than ever before; his chest didn’t even move with the wheezing breaths flowing through the damaged tube on his mask.
“I don’t need any help killing you, sedhi.”
“Good. I just wanted to ensure we had an understanding.” Arcanthus lifted his arm, engaged his neural link to the auto-canons mounted on the workshop’s ceiling, and flicked his wrist to enable their automated threat elimination mode.
The heavy whumps of the canons’ rapid firing was joined, for a few brief moments, by the shouts and screams of the uninvited guests in the workshop. Flashes of light pulsed from under the open blast door, casting strobing shadows around Arcanthus. It was over within seconds; the only sound remaining after the canons fell silent was Vaund’s strained respiration.
“It doesn’t matter how many more you have outside,” Arcanthus said. “You’ll be dead before they get here.”
Vaund released a buzzing growl. “I’m going to cut off your limbs again, one by one, and your terran is going to watch. She’s going to be haunted for the rest of her miserable life by what I’m about to do to you.”
Arcanthus opened the compartment on his left forearm, dropping the hilt of his hardlight sword into his waiting hand. He activated the weapon, and the translucent yellow blade materialized, extending from the hilt.
Vaund circled slowly to his left; Arcanthus mirrored his foe’s movement, maintaining the distance between them as Vaund neared the big door and Arcanthus approached Samantha, who had moved to Drakkal’s side.
“You could’ve just accepted my offer all those years ago. We could have avoided all this. All this pain and strife,” Arc said. But he didn’t regret the way things had happened—didn’t regret having been forced to flee Caldorius—because that chain of events, that long, torturous road, had brought him to Arthos and, ultimately, his mate.
“And you could’ve just died .” Vaund pointed the tip of his energy blade toward Arcanthus. “You had no right to be on top. No right to act like any of us should’ve bowed down to you and fallen into what you thought were our places .”
“ Our place was on top.” Arcanthus rolled his wrist and halted his legs as soon as his body was between Samantha and Vaund. “That was my point all along. My goal. We brought in all that money, and it should’ve been ours. ”
“My place is on top. Yours is face down in an alleyway puddle.”
He was never this much of a talker before a fight. He’s fueled purely by hatred.
“Samantha,” Arcanthus said softly, “stay with Drakkal. We’re going to leave as soon as this is done. It won’t take long; I don’t have the patience to toy with him this time.”
“I love you,” she said firmly, though her voice was hoarse. “Be careful.”
“Love you, too, little terran.” He raised his voice to say, “Now, Vaund—which side of your face do you want me to remove first?”
With another robotic growl, Vaund took his weapon in a two-handed grip and charged. Arcanthus rushed forward to meet him; he needed to keep the battle as far away from Samantha and Drakkal as possible.
Their blades met with a flash and an instant’s resistance; that fleeting clash was enough to throw Arcanthus’s mind back more than a decade. He could almost feel the roar of the crowd sweeping over him, could almost feel the floor vibrate with the stomping of their feet. Fighting in the arena had always been a thrill—even as a slave, he’d enjoyed it—but now he had so much more to fight for than glory or a victor’s purse. Now he had so much more to lose.
He had Samantha.
Their blades separated, and the dance began in earnest.
Energy crackled through the air, tracing blue and yellow arcs as the combatants swung, thrust, parried, and dodged, their movements faster than conscious thought could enable. More than once, Vaund’s energy blade passed close enough for Arcanthus to feel its heat on his skin.
Vaund’s performance had to be attributed to more than another decade of experience—he was immensely faster and stronger than he’d been the last time they’d battled.
Arcanthus’s rage intensified, sharpening to a finer point; despite his cybernetic prostheses, he and Vaund were a near match as far as their physical capabilities.
But there was a key difference between them—despite his cunning, despite his coldness, Vaund still fought with the same savagery as before. His attacks were meant to be overwhelming in force and speed, were meant to overpower rather than outmatch his foe.
“You seem out of breath,” Arc said, deflecting a powerful blow from Vaund’s blade. “We can pause for a moment to rest, if you’d like.”
Vaund snarled and launched into a succession of rapid, heavy-handed strikes, his movements too quick to leave Arcanthus time for an adequate counterattack but too sloppy to land a blow.
“Wouldn’t want you at a disadvantage, Vaund.” Arc swayed aside from a downward swing, narrowly avoiding the blade.
Vaund recovered, twisted his hand to reorient his blade toward Arcanthus, and swung backhanded. The sharp angle of the attack—aimed at Arc’s face—left Vaund overextended, with his chest exposed for an instant.
Arcanthus swatted the energy blade aside with the flat of his sword and twisted his hips, throwing significant power behind a punch that connected with Vaund’s ribs. The jolt of the impact ran up Arc’s cybernetic arm and into his flesh; his hand struck with a dulled metallic clang, like he’d punched a padded metal plate.
Vaund stumbled aside from the force of the blow but kept on his feet. His immediate, frenzied counterattack had Arcanthus once again on the defensive, backpedaling toward the stairs.
When Vaund drew back for an overhead swing, Arcanthus retorted with a quick slash.
Vaund released a choked sound and abandoned his attack to leap backward. The hardlight blade grazed his chest, leaving a long, horizontal cut that split wide and oozed dark blood. Backing away farther, Vaund hissed through his open respirator valve and lifted a hand to the wound, digging his clawlike fingers beneath the damaged flesh to peel it back—revealing not muscle and bone beneath but dark metal.
“My dying flesh has forced me to make a few changes over the years,” Vaund said. “A small price to pay for another chance to kill you.”
Arcanthus kept his blade up and ready. He’d not had a fight like this in a long while—he’d never really met his match during his time as a gladiator, though a few had come close. He turned his head slightly, keeping Vaund in sight while shifting his center eye to look at Samantha.
She stared at him with those big, dark, frightened eyes, her skin pale but for the blotches of red on her cheeks and the dark bruises already forming on her throat. She’d positioned herself in front of Drakkal, as though to shield the big azhera with her little body.
The sight made Arc’s chest tighten; he was so proud of her, so fiercely in love with her. She should have fled into the workshop with the others, but she’d gone back to help Drakkal. So foolish, but also so brave, so loyal, so selfless.
Arcanthus could learn so much from her.
For Samantha, for Drakkal, for all those who yet lived and all who’d been lost, Arcanthus needed to finish this.
“You talk too much,” Arc said. He leapt into an attack of his own, pushing himself beyond the limits of his strength, speed, and agility. Blade, fists, feet, elbows, knees, and tail blended together in an unrelenting, blistering assault.
Vaund released more grunts and growls as Arcanthus’s strikes broke through his defenses; the hardlight blade sliced off chunks of pale flesh and bit into the underlying metal, and Arc’s unarmed blows hit with resounding force, steadily beating Vaund back toward the partially open blast door.
Arc caught Vaund in the chest with a side kick; Vaund flew backward a few meters, slamming into the blast door. With a bestial growl, he raised his empty hand, directing his palm at Arcanthus. The armor on his forearm slitted open, pouring out a wave of heat and an intense red-orange glow. An energy blast of the same color burst from the center of Vaund’s palm.
Arcanthus dove aside. The blast struck his left forearm, and an electric jolt raced through the nerves connected to the prosthesis. He rolled onto a knee and glanced down with his center eye; the outer casing of his left arm glowed with residual heat, and wisps of smoke wafted off it. His hardlight blade was gone. When he bent his fingers into a fist, the digits moved slowly, stutteringly.
Vaund tossed his energy blade aside and straightened his other arm. Its heat vents opened.
Curling down into as tight a stance as he could, Arcanthus threw up his right arm and formed his shield. Vaund’s blast struck the hardlight barrier dead center. The shield flickered, and heat flowed around its edges, but it held; after a moment, the energy blast subsided.
Arcanthus sprang forward, swinging his arm and releasing the shield’s tether to throw it at Vaund. The hardlight disc hit Vaund as he was charging another shot, knocking his arm aside and sending the blast into the nearby wall. Arc struck an instant later, driving his knee—with all his weight and momentum behind it—into Vaund’s chest .
Caught between Arcanthus and the blast door, the subdermal armor beneath Vaund’s skin buckled, and he released another choked grunt. Vaund swung a fist at Arc’s head, but Arcanthus raised his damaged left arm and blocked the blow. When Vaund angled his other palm —the circular opening at its center still glowing orange—at Arcanthus, the sedhi caught his wrists and forced them up.
Vaund shoved off the blast door, forcing Arcanthus back a few steps before the sedhi braced his feet and halted Vaund’s advance.
Their bodies trembled as they struggled against one another, and Vaund’s wheezing breaths intensified. Not for the first time, Arcanthus was grateful that he’d undergone the expensive and painful procedures to reinforce his bones and muscles; his flesh would not otherwise have withstood the immense strain placed upon it in these moments.
The heat vents on Vaund’s arms flared, making the air around them waver. Arcanthus lost a centimeter of leeway on either side. He gritted his teeth and forced more out of his already overburdened muscles and prostheses.
Vaund snapped his head forward. Arcanthus dipped his chin, blocking the headbutt with his horns. The blow sent a jolt through his skull and down his spine.
“I was going to cut off your head,” Vaund said, “but I think I’ll rip it off with my bare hands, instead. Just for the satisfaction of watching your blood ooze from your tearing flesh.”