Chapter 32
My blades are in my hands, but I know this is not a fight us two can win. Even Deacon, with all of his otherworldly strength. Finn is the son of the High Thane, and he has twenty men with him. I’m still recovering from my burns at the hands of the naga, and we are outnumbered.
“How sweet, cousin.” Finn’s grin is hungry. “Taking your whore on a moonlit walk?”
My heartbeat thunders in my ears. “How did you find us?”
Finn clicks his gnarled claws together in thought and I imagine a young Peter, only eight years old. Watching this rancorous creep take his mother’s soul. “Does it matter? I’m here now.”
But images are coming back to me. From the dream that woke me up in my blood-lusted state. Finn. His sick games of chess. And Nicco—
“What did you do to Nicco?” I seethe.
“He said you showed him mercy. Never thought I’d see the great White Stag grow soft with old age.”
It’s worse than guilt, what swims in me. I didn’t let Deacon kill Nicco, and whether he’s helped Finn willingly or was tortured into giving us up…I compromised not only myself, but also Fever Dream. Ward, Penny, Baz…I compromised Deacon’s home.
I don’t dare glance at Deacon beside me. I can already feel the fury leaching off him.
“Can you imagine my father’s shock to hear his own nephew was harboring the aeon girl?”
“Bullshit,” Deacon growls, his face giving nothing away. “You didn’t tell him. It would only prove your incompetence. She was right under your nose and you missed it.”
Finn’s mouth forms a grim line. “When my father kills you both, and the Chasm is finally unburdened, I’ll celebrate by bathing in your blood and ashes.”
I cut my eyes up to Deacon as my lungs begin to constrict. The Brood has us surrounded. The buildings on either side of the street might as well be closing in on me like a trash compactor. There’s no way out—
The next gleeful jolt of laughter slips out between Finn’s clenched teeth, mania making his eyes bulge. “Enough foreplay. Hand over the girl.”
Deacon growls. A sound of stunning viciousness. Ash-white scales ripple over his hands and forearms. Black claws pierce out of his fingertips.
“Your black cat’s already roadkill.” Finn’s tongue slides over his teeth as his wild eyes roam the exposed skin of my neck and arms as if he can see into my shriveling soul, slowly being sucked dry by the dark magic in my back. “Let my father finish his work before the syrabraxa drives her mad.”
My heart beats so hard it slices. Deacon takes a slight step in front of me. “You attack me, you’ll undo two hundred years of this pact. Shatter the deal your father and I struck. And when, not if, I live, you know what I’ll do.”
Finn’s smile disappears. He turns to his men, face like stone. “Kill the Stag. Leave the girl breathing.”
The Brood races toward us. Snarls and grunts and claws extended.
Deacon catches the first one around the middle and tosses him into the wall outside Fever Dream.
Another, he hefts out of my way and slams into the ground until a bloody splatter paints the street.
But a vampire is on him just as fast, teeth bared over his neck, and I’m nearly to them with my daggers when another Brood takes me down and my chin sings in pain against the asphalt.
Deacon’s there a heartbeat later, hoisting the Brood demon off me with a snarl—more beastly than I’ve ever heard him. The Brood thrashes in his grip, driving a ragged claw through Deacon’s side. For a split second—when I can’t see where the claws have hit—I am empty of air.
If it’s his heart—
If he dies—
No waking up in the underworld, like when a mortal’s soul is taken. Just true, punishing death. Void of existence. I’d never see him again.
But he only doubles over, eyes bulging as he grasps at his gut.
The scent of his blood fills my nostrils and I aim to drive my silver into the demon’s throat.
But I’m not fast enough. Finn gets his claws around my shoulder right where the naga’s welts are and yanks me back.
The pain is as ripe as when the skin was seared in the first place.
I let loose a breathless shout. Finn cackles against my ear.
As he releases one hand from my neck, I’m struck with the image of the night I watched him kill his own lackeys. His overgrown claws through their eye sockets. The sound of sharpened enamel plunging into wet tissue.
On instinct, I bring my hand up to block my eyes just in time for his claw to scrape through the flesh of my forearm.
I grunt through the pain as Deacon pries Finn off me and throws him into the windows of the building next door.
I hear every bone break—every fissure—as the impact of his body sends glass shattering.
Breath ripping in my lungs, I cut my eyes to Deacon.
His shirt is torn, but the slash through his side is already healed.
I hold his eyeline and know what he’s thinking.
We might not be able to fight Finn and all of his men, but we have a shot right now to outrun them.
When a lone taxi rolls by, I take the out.
I leap into the street and stop the car, urging the driver—a young, bewildered man—out so I can jump in.
I point him toward the nearest bodega and tell him to get as far away from here as possible.
Finn’s men hurtle toward us, but Deacon is faster.
He takes out two with blows a battleship couldn’t withstand and tosses himself into the taxi as I gun it and screech off.
“What’s your game plan here?” Deacon pants. The car reeks of weed, and Oasis is playing on the radio.
“It’s not perfect.”
“Try me.”
I swerve through an intersection, grateful for the late hour.
There’s nobody on the road. But that means not much separating Finn and his Brood.
When I crane my neck back, I see half of them get into cars of their own.
Fury ignites in me as one Brood tosses a cabbie brutally into the road and runs him right over.
“Harker is the only place they physically can’t get in.”
I expect Deacon to tell me it isn’t safe, with the Citadel hunters searching for me. That when the Elders find us—“Fine,” he grunts, eying the Brood hot on our tails through the rearview mirror. “Good.”
“Really?” My voice ratchets up into something hysterical. I’d kind of hoped he’d have something better in mind.
“Yeah. Left here, take the alley.”
“That’s a one-way—”
“Left here—”
“Don’t backseat drive!”
“Just do it,” he barks, shoving the steering wheel just in time for us to miss Finn’s Mercedes as it slams into the butt of our cab. Our car skids down the narrow alley, too small for more than two of Finn’s men to squeeze in behind us.
“They’ll be waiting for us at the gateway,” I breathe, still thinking about the Citadel hunters.
It’s the only way for students to come in and out.
They’re likely manning the entire rotunda.
We sail over the Erebos Bridge and I cut around a sluggish sedan surely filled with the elderly.
Or perhaps sloths. Windsor’s not too much farther now at this hour. “Unless—”
But Deacon’s already beaten me to it, fishing his coin out of his wallet. “We’ll go through the thicket.” Citadel hunters guard that too, of course, but fewer of them. And they won’t be expecting us.
As we speed through the wide Main Avenue of the Half City, my heart stays permanently lodged in my throat, eyes constantly darting back to the herd that follows us.
Which means I’m looking in the rearview, not at the road, when a Brood demon in a stolen cab catches up and rams into the driver’s side, sending us skidding like bumper cars.
I strain to pull the wheel back in the opposite direction. The Oasis song breaks into a guitar solo. The demon snickers from his open window, and when he moves to do it again I slam on the brakes, allowing him to drift into a storefront at eighty miles an hour.
I thank the overlords of Astera car chases that due to the hour nobody was shopping inside.
“Well done,” Deacon breathes, impressed.
“Is this a good time to tell you I don’t have my driver’s license?” I flash him a manic smile and am shocked to see he’s grinning right back at me. Two sick adrenaline junkies, running from the Brood. I never thought I’d relate to Bonnie and Clyde.
But we’re in NTC now. Nice boutiques, traffic cameras. No more seedy neighborhoods where car chases are as common as muggings. Sirens wail in the night. Red and blue lights flashing.
My palms are slick on the steering wheel, my foot nearly pushing the gas pedal through the floor, when I hear the sound of gunshots pinging off the back of the cab.
The noise scares me so much I almost hit a street lamp, and Deacon yanks the car back into its lane. When he spins around to the Brood behind us another shot rings out, shattering the back window and nicking his arm. Demon blood scents the car. Black cherries and iron.
“Shit!” I scream. Shit, shit, shit—
“We’re fine.” He grimaces. “Focus on the road.”
But as he unbuckles his seat belt and crawls into the back, I find the road is the last thing I can focus on.
I’d been holding it together pretty well up to this point.
Finn, the Brood—I’d not been angry, I’d been scared.
No syrabraxa madness to speak of. My recent vampire kill helping, I’m sure.
But the scent of demon blood is famously not great for bloodlust. I’m like a shark in open waters.
My back begins to ache. I should not be behind the wheel.
But before I can tell Deacon as much, I hear the sound of fabric ripping.
“What are you doing back there?”
“The road, Viv,” he roars, wind and glass whipping at us both.
I adjust the rearview mirror to see he’s yanking the leather headrests off the back seats of the taxi—and pelting them at lightning speed into the cars that are shooting at us. With the strength he’s employing to throw them, they land like missiles, taking out heads and windshields.
And when he’s out of headrests I hear him rummage through the back of the cab for anything else he can find.
I crane my neck just in time to see him launch the cabbie’s weed-filled backpack into a Brood on a motorcycle and send him flying into an unmanned hot dog stand.
He wrenches the plastic driver’s registration on the back of my seat to send one car careening into another. It’s like Mario Kart.
Still, Finn swerves around the carnage to gain on us. His Mercedes’s engine revving, his hair slick in the night’s wind. I can hear his cackles from here.
I watch in muted horror as Deacon wrenches the entire back door free from its hinges.
Sparks fly. Metal shrieks. I keep the taxi on the road despite the inertia and the wind funneling inside.
Deacon hangs out the side of the car, door in hand like a giant Frisbee.
I’m careful to curve around a stoplight before he’s knocked out.
Finn draws nearer. Nearer still. But I cannot push down the gas pedal any harder—
At the last second, before Finn rams his Mercedes into us, Deacon tosses the door like a Frisbee.
Bull’s-eye. Finn’s car goes skidding.
And just in time.
I screech to a stop before the Windsor’s wide, moonlit steps and yank Deacon back in. “Hurry!”
We bolt from the cab that now more closely resembles scrap metal, engine still running, and sprint down the alley outside the Windsor.
This car chase will surely be on the news, so it’s best to avoid all potential CCTV footage.
There are many security cameras pointed at those famous front steps of the museum but almost none around the back.
We race inside with my keys, our feet thudding on the lobby floor, drowned in darkness.
The silence, save for our footfalls and racing breaths, is deafening.
Finn and his men—however many are left alive—can’t be more than a minute behind.
The Brood has broken into the Windsor before. We aren’t safe yet.
Deacon and I get into the room with the broken kiosk and slam the door behind us. I’m still panting, my arm still oozing blood where Finn sliced me. Deacon slips his unique coin inside the machine. I shudder out my first real exhale as the light of the gateway flashes and swallows us up.