Chapter 6
He twists out of the grip on his shoulder with practiced ease, years of learning exactly how bodies come apart compressed into the half-second before the brain catches up to what's happening.
The man on his right is still looking at his companion when Emery's bound hands find the angle they need.
He doesn't try to break the cord. He doesn't need to.
He drives upward from his knees, using the momentum of the twist to bring his skull into the underside of the left man's jaw with a crack that he feels in his teeth and the man feels everywhere.
The man staggers. His hand comes off his sword hilt to clutch at his face, which is a mistake, because Emery is already pivoting.
The man on the right has the dagger. He is turning toward Emery with sluggish alarm, only now realizing that the half-dressed dancer on the floor was never truly contained.
Emery drives his knee into the man's face before he can get the blade up.
The crack of his nose breaking is sharp and satisfying and wet, and the man's head snaps back and his grip on the dagger loosens just enough.
Both men are reeling. Emery drops. His body folds in half with the fluid ease of weeks spent bending it for an audience, and he steps his bound wrists under his feet and brings them to the front.
The motion takes two seconds. It costs him a bruised heel and a wrenched shoulder. It gives him his hands back.
He doesn't go for the dagger. He goes for the desk.
Three steps, bare feet slapping stone. The desk is heavy and scarred and covered in papers and has, sitting beside an inkwell at its far edge, a letter opener. It is not a weapon. It is a thin piece of metal designed to slide under wax seals, and it is the most beautiful thing Emery has ever seen.
He vaults the desk with his hip, gracelessly, scattering papers and knocking the inkwell onto the floor where it shatters. His bound hands find the letter opener on the desk's edge, fingers closing around it, and he barely gets his grip settled before the left man is on him.
The man has recovered from the headbutt faster than Emery would have liked.
His sword is out now, a short blade with a dull edge that will still kill just as effectively as a sharp one if it connects with enough enthusiasm, and he's coming around the desk furious at being made to look stupid in front of his colleague.
Emery turns.
The letter opener goes into the man's eye.
It slides in with less resistance than Emery expects, which is a thought he doesn't have time to examine because the man is screaming and grabbing at his face and the sound is the high, animal shriek of pain he did not know existed.
Emery releases the letter opener because it's buried to the hilt and retrieval would take time he doesn't have.
The man collapses against the desk, clawing at the thin metal protruding from his eye socket, and his sword clatters to the floor.
Emery steps over him. The man with the broken nose is between him and the door, blood sheeting down his face, one hand pressed to the wreckage of his nose and the other reaching for the sword at his hip.
He is trying to do two things at once and managing neither, which is the fundamental problem with being injured and armed simultaneously.
You can hold your face together or you can fight. You cannot do both.
Emery doesn't give him the chance to choose.
He lowers his shoulder and hits the man in the sternum, driving him back into the door with enough force to knock the air out of him.
The man's hand comes off his sword to brace against the impact and Emery gets his bound hands around the door handle and pulls.
The door swings open. The man stumbles sideways. Emery is through the gap and running before the door has finished its arc.
He does not know where he is.
This is a problem he is accustomed to, which doesn't make it less of a problem.
The corridor beyond the door is stone, lit by lamps spaced too far apart so that the light comes in pools separated by stretches of dark.
It goes left and right and he picks left because the sounds, the crashes, the shouting, the deep percussive tremors that he can feel in the soles of his bare feet, are coming from the right, and running toward an unknown catastrophe while bound and barefoot and armed with nothing is a decision that even Emery's brand of recklessness does not endorse.
Left. The corridor narrows. The lamps thin.
He is running on stone that is cold and uneven and occasionally sharp, and his feet are going to be a mess by the end of this but his feet being a mess is considerably better than his throat being open, so he keeps running.
The cord on his wrists is chafing raw and his shoulder aches from the fall and his knee is throbbing from the impact with the man's face and none of this matters because none of this is fatal.
He turns a corner.
He slams into a broad, warm, achingly familiar chest.
The impact drives the breath out of him.
His bound hands come up between them and his bare feet skid on the stone and for one disorienting second he is pressed against someone who smells of smoke and iron and something warmer underneath, something that his body recognizes before his brain does. He pulls back, stunned, and looks up.
Bastian is standing in the corridor, and the timing of it is so precise it borders on theatrical.
His white hair is pulled back in its braid, loose strands framing the sharp angles of his face, and his black eyes are focused on Emery with an intensity that makes the lamplight feel inadequate.
He is wearing his usual: black open-chest tunic, gray pants, the red waist sash with its braided tassels.
There is blood on his hands. It isn't his.
Emery stares at him. His mouth opens and nothing comes out, which is a first, because Emery always has something to say.
He has weaponized his tongue as effectively as his blade and his face and every other part of himself that can be made useful, and right now his tongue is failing him completely because the most dangerous man in the Underground is standing in front of him in a corridor that belongs to the man who just had him on his knees, and the expression on Bastian's face is something Emery does not have a name for.
It isn't relief, exactly. It isn't anger. It is something more fundamental than either, something that rearranges his features into a configuration that Emery has only ever seen directed at him and that makes his chest do something stupid and inconvenient.
Bastian grabs his arm and pulls him behind him.
The motion is fluid and decisive and entirely instinctive, no consultation involved, which is infuriating in a way Emery would be more upset about if he weren't barefoot and bound and wearing dancer's pants in a hostile corridor.
Bastian's hand on his arm is burning with Vesper heat, and the memory of that heat from the Hollow, from the bedroom, from the hands on his hips and the mouth on his neck, is wildly inappropriate for the current situation.
Emery shoves it down with the brutal efficiency of long practice.
Two of Sander's men come around the corner.
They are armed and moving fast and they see Bastian and the one in front hesitates, just for a fraction of a second, just long enough for the recognition to register.
The hesitation of hearing the stories and now confronting the reality and finding that the reality is worse.
The man behind him does not hesitate, which means he either hasn't heard the stories or is too stupid to believe them. Either way, it doesn't matter.
Bastian opens his mouth.
The sound is not a word. It is not a scream.
It is something Emery does not have language for, something that exists in the space between sound and force, between voice and violence.
It rattles his bones. He can feel it in his teeth, in his ribs, in the marrow of him, a vibration that is not aimed at him but passes through him anyway, a wave moving through water.
It chills him to his core, a cold that is not temperature but something older and deeper, something that touches the animal part of his brain that knows when it is in the presence of a predator and has the good sense to go still.
He is not in the direct line of it. He is behind Bastian, pressed against the corridor wall, and the sound passes over him and through him and leaves him intact.
The two men are not so fortunate.
Emery watches them come apart.
It is not fast and it is not slow. It is thorough.
The sound hits them and their skin burns, blackens, peels away from muscle, curling back from bone.
The man in front opens his mouth to scream and the scream never arrives because his jaw is already gone, dissolved, ash falling where bone used to be.
The man behind him gets half a step backward before his legs give out, not because he's falling but because his legs are no longer there.
They dissolve from the ground up, skin to muscle to bone to dust, and the dust doesn't settle because the sound is still moving through the air and the dust is being unmade too, reduced to something finer than powder, something that doesn't have a name because it has been pushed past the point where naming things is relevant.
It takes seconds. It takes forever. Emery is pressed against the wall with his wrists bound in front of him and his bare feet on cold stone and he watches two men dissolve into nothing and he thinks about the mouth that did this.
He thinks about that mouth on his skin. On his throat.
Wrapped around him, taking him apart in an entirely different way, with the same unhurried precision, and the thought is so terrifying and so inappropriately arousing that his brain simply refuses to process it and moves on.