Chapter 8
Diana sliced through Augustine’s shirt. It came apart, and she pulled it all the way open. A narrow horizontal slash gaped across his abdomen. Woodward’s knife had cut through the muscles of his stomach. She could see the angry bulge of intestines soaked in blood.
Panic whipped her. She took off, limping toward a small room in the corner, partitioned off from the rest of the Menagerie by temporary office walls and a flimsy door.
She knew she was bleeding, but she didn’t care.
She rammed the door with her shoulder. It burst open, revealing a small room with a refrigerator, food dishes in the sink, a stack of white towels. She grabbed one of the latter. Her nose caught a hint of bleach. Clean. She shoved the towel under the faucet, wet it, and raced back.
He was exactly where she’d left him. She dropped next to him and plastered the wet towel over the wound.
“Diana…” he said.
“Your stomach is lacerated,” she told him. “If we don’t keep it wet, your intestines will dry out.”
Red spread through the towel, and she almost cried.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
She tapped the towel in place, trying to push it tighter against the wound without hurting him.
“You have a deep stab wound on your thigh. You need a tourniquet or you’ll bleed out.”
She ignored him.
“Diana!”
“Not yet!” She couldn’t walk with a tourniquet.
Diana took off again, making a frantic circle around the Menagerie.
A few minutes later she landed next to him again, this time with a canvas sack, a pair of scissors, and an oversized metal spoon.
Augustine was right. The wound was deep, and the stream of blood was too fast. It would soak though a makeshift bandage. She had to cut off the flow.
He watched her cut the sack into five-inch strips and fold them into one thick, long bandage. She stripped her pants off. The deep hole in her leg gaped like a red mouth. Blood ran down her skin.
She looped the improvised dressing above the wound and tied it into a half knot in a flash of pain. The spoon was next; she placed it on top of the knot and tied the strips again.
“Let me.” He pushed himself half-upright.
“I’m fine.”
He gripped the spoon and rotated it, winding it like a clock. Pain squeezed her leg. Diana cried out.
Another turn. Another. The flow of blood stopped. Augustine looped the tails of the dressing over the spoon, tied it in place, and collapsed.
She lay flat on her back. The adrenaline had worn off, and she had nothing left. Kitty, who’d been trailing behind her during her frantic search, padded over, sniffed at her blood, and flopped on the floor between them.
“Any way out?” Augustine asked.
Diana wanted to lie to him but couldn’t. “No. There is no way to open the door, and there is no cell service.”
“That’s to be expected.” His voice was quiet. “We’re in a bunker with four-foot-thick concrete walls.”
Woodward’s death must’ve triggered some sort of failsafe, because the steel door blocking their exit had no lock.
She couldn’t find any mechanism to open it.
It was just a wall of metal sealing them in.
There were no windows, no exits. Nothing in the Menagerie could breach the reinforced concrete walls.
She’d hoped for a landline in the little room where she found the towels, but there had been none.
They were truly trapped.
If they didn’t get to a hospital in the next hour or two, Augustine would die. She didn’t know if his intestines were perforated. Even if they weren’t, they would dry out. He could go into sepsis, and he was still bleeding.
If she didn’t get medical treatment soon, she would lose her leg, and then she would die.
She could almost hear Woodward laughing. They would all die here. Together. Eventually someone would open that door and find three human corpses.
She forced herself to reach for the pocket in her jacket, pulled out a pouch filled with liquid, unscrewed the lid, revealing a rubber nipple, and offered it to Kitty. The cub sucked on the pouch, making greedy growling noises.
Diana waited until all of Celeste’s milk was gone, typed a message on her phone, removed the password, and put it down next to her.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“It says House Harrison will give five million to whoever brings Kitty back to my House alive. She just had her milk. That gives her a couple of days. I left a dish of water on the floor.
“It will be fine,” he told her. “We will be okay.”
It would not be okay. There was no escape.
“Stay with me, Diana?” he asked.
She turned to him and forced a smile.
His eyes weren’t wholly green. They were a light, beautiful hazel, a ring of greyish green with a starburst of golden brown around the pupil.
It hit her. His magic was gone. Augustine was spent. She was seeing the real him, and she looked at him, really looked at him.
His shoulders were broader. She’d caught a glimpse of his true body during the fight with the Hesters, but now the hard muscle cording his frame was obvious.
An old scar sliced through his left cheek, cleaving his upper lip in the corner.
Stubble roughened his jaw. His features had lost their flawless perfection, but somehow that only heightened their impact.
She’d always assumed he had reshaped his face with his illusions.
She was wrong. Augustine still looked like himself.
Her deadly prince was truly that beautiful.
She sat up, pulled off her jacket, rolled it into a wad, and gently tilted him up to slide it under his head.
A massive scar scoured his back. She gasped. An arcane circle, not just drawn but burned into his skin, so deep the lines of the sigil were shallow trenches in his flesh.
“Who did this to you?”
“I did it to myself.”
She slid the jacket under his head and lowered him. “Why?”
“I was weak. I needed power.”
Sometimes magic users drew sigils on themselves to boost their magic.
Very rarely, they tattooed themselves, a process that was inherently dangerous.
Arcane circles and sigils required incredible precision.
A tiny mistake could cause one to lose their magic and even their life.
She had seen statistics somewhere, and the survival rate of those who resorted to tattoos was tiny, less than one percent.
This wasn’t a tattoo. This was so much worse, a seal permanently burned into his flesh. There were no statistics for this because nobody would be foolish enough to try it.
She slid next to Augustine, so close they were almost touching.
Kitty padded closer. Diana felt the familiar insistent push of the cub’s magic.
Like a persistent kitten booping her hand with her head, demanding a pet.
Kitty was looking for a bond. As always, Diana forced herself to ignore it.
The cub tried again, then gave up, and tucked herself into the crook of Diana’s body. She wrapped her arm around Kitty.
She had failed her and Celeste. Thinking about it would only unravel her further, and she didn’t want that. She wanted to spend these last minutes with Augustine.
“Tell me about the circle,” she whispered.
“My father and I never got along. He thought I was irresponsible and na?ve, and I thought he was rigid and controlling. A man without dreams, who settled for mundane drudgery and kept trying to drag me down with him. I wanted to be free. I had plans. I wanted to be a spy. Someone who kept my country safe.”
“You would’ve made an exceptional spy,” she told him.
“I would have. When I was in my early twenties, my family was attacked,” Augustine said.
“They were well prepared. I found my mother, Verena, and my brother bleeding out on the floor, next to three corpses. My other sister, Seraphina, my aunt, and my father did not survive. We couldn’t afford to look weak.
If it became known that the attack had succeeded, our enemies would rip us apart.
Half of my family was dead. I had to keep my mother and my remaining siblings safe.
So, I became my father. I cloaked myself in illusion, put on his face, and went to work the next day. ”
How horrifying.
“For two years I was both him and me, pretending to lead MII, giving myself orders and carrying them out, trying to keep the ship that was our House and our firm afloat in the storm. Except that Primes can see through each other’s illusions.
For the deception to succeed, I had to be stronger than any other illusion Prime.
I needed the kind of power nobody could match. ”
“Did it hurt?”
“It did. It still does every time I use it.”
“You lied to me,” she told him.
“When?”
“You told me your illusions weren’t corporeal, but I saw them hurt Woodward.”
He sighed. “That was a House spell. The seal makes it possible for me to access them without needing to draw a circle. It is called Doppelganger. When I create phantoms, I can infuse them with my magic. Each of them was a supercharged manifestation of my power, so when they came into contact with Woodward, his magic recognized them as a genuine threat. They hurt him, but they can’t actually injure him. So you see, it wasn’t a complete lie.”
“Just a partial one?”
“Yes.” Augustine was looking at her, and his eyes were so warm. “Why is it I tell you all my secrets?”
“Because you like the way I look draped over a tree branch?”
He tried to laugh, coughed instead, and grimaced.
She reached over and caressed his face. She was so bold now, because it didn’t matter. They were dying.
“How did you know it was me?” he asked softly. “When you saw me on the street this morning?”
“I always recognize you.”
“How?”
She shrugged, ignoring a slash of pain from her wounds. “I just know. You are the one. My special one.”
“Why me?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is it about me you like?” He sounded so puzzled.