31. Max
Max
Somewhere past the second checkpoint, a tug came in behind my sternum.
Missy.
I dropped my pack and jammed my feet into my skate shoes, Stormglass cores wound through with Coldiron, good on any surface. I hit the road and the shoes screamed up to speed, with the great wolf stretched out beside me, his nose full of the same trail.
The two of us left the whole search behind, past a town and its market stalls.
On the outskirts, a car ran flat out along the empty road, and beyond it, dropping down out of the high dark, came three flying mutants.
Extraction. They’d snatch her off the road and carry her south, and no checkpoint on any map would matter after that.
That car wasn’t reaching them.
I tore off my armguard at a dead sprint, and it split into twin chakrams in the air.
“Cut the wheel!”
The first ring left my hand shrieking, crossed the distance in a blink, and sheared through the car’s rear wheel like a scythe through wheat. The car lurched, fishtailed, and ground down in a fan of sparks. The wolf burst into a full charge with me half a stride behind him.
The driver’s door flew open before the car finished stopping, and Fake Frost came out of it with Missy in his grip.
Everything in me lunged, and I stayed where I was.
My sister hung against his chest, small and rumpled in her blue nightshirt. The cold road air hit her, and she stirred and yelped, sleepy eyes flying wide and finding me across the dark.
Caspian gathered to pounce.
“Stop there!” The blade came up along the small line of her neck. “One step closer and I’ll slit her throat!”
Missy’s face went from hazed to terrified, and the wolf and I stopped a dozen feet out.
“Don’t!” The voice that came out of me didn’t sound like mine. “Don’t hurt her. Please.”
Every muscle I owned howled to close the distance. I nailed my boots to the road and didn’t move.
Fake Frost’s eyes flicked skyward, where the three mutants loomed ever larger against the stars, their wings hammering.
“Let us go and your sister lives!”
I looked at the shapeshifter wearing Frost’s face. The colors were all wrong. The real Frost burned a cool silver-blue to my new sight, and this one wore Xander’s red and gold.
“Take his face off, Desta,” I said.
The wolf snarled, fangs out, his glowing eyes never coming off her.
“I have magic now. Just like you.” Still in Frost’s stolen voice.
“Don’t wear my friend’s face, you fucking bitch.”
She let it go. Her flesh rippled, Frost’s silver hair fading into brown, the borrowed height clicking away as her features flowed and settled. In under a breath my oldest living friend stood on the road with a dagger at my sister’s throat.
Missy went rigid. She’d been looking up at Frost’s jaw the whole time, and she watched it turn into Desta’s.
My sister didn’t make a sound. She held still under the arm across her ribs and the blade at her throat, wide awake now and watching everything. The fear had gone out of her eyes. What was left in them was aimed at me, and it was trust.
“There,” Desta said. “If my old familiar face makes you more comfortable.”
“How?” My eyes burned. “You had nothing. No magic. No power. They screened you twice.”
“I have power. The Saint gave it to me.”
I’d walked his Glass Tower, and there’d been an empty column in it with a plaque on the base. SHAPESHIFTER.
“He siphoned it out of somebody and poured it into you.”
A shifter had been drained to fill my friend.
I’d vouched for her. I’d sat beside her in that interrogation room and threatened to walk if they starved her, and I’d begged the heirs to give my friend a second chance. They’d never trusted her, but they trusted me, and so they obliged.
I’d carried the snake into our camp in my own arms, and now my sister was under a blade.
“What do you think?” Desta’s mouth twisted.
“You’re not the only one who ever caught a powerful man’s eye, Max.
The Saint saw my potential. He looked at me.
Me. And saw more than a mine rat, which is more than you ever managed.
” Her voice climbed, a decade of it coming up at once.
“It was always you. In the pit, it was Max the leader, Max the strong, Max the one everyone looked up to and Rogue sang to. He died with your name in his mouth and never even knew you had tits. Kaid followed you out of that mine, and when the mutants ate him, where were you? Getting carried off by princes. You never came back for me. And when I came to you, you stood in your palace and handed me charity like a beggar at your gate. Your shadow was my whole life. The Saint offered me the sun.”
“Let her go and I’ll spare your life, you spineless fucking traitor.” Caspian had shifted to his warrior form, nine feet of packed muscle, fangs, and claws. “Touch a hair on her head and I’ll shred you one strip at a time.”
“Your quarrel’s with me, Desta. Let Missy go.
” I lowered the chakrams against my thighs and let her hear every bit of what she’d taken out of me.
“You want me to beg? I’ll beg. You loved her like a sister once too.
Whatever you’ve got against me, take it out on me.
Missy’s a little girl. Everything that happened to you, to Rogue, to Kaid, to all of you, it’s on me.
I never should have talked you into running. ”
I hadn’t talked anyone into anything. I’d laid out every outcome and every risk, plain as ore in a cart, and they’d chosen with their eyes open. It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but the dagger at my sister’s throat.
“You know he wants me, not her.” I kept going. “She’s only how he gets to me. Bring me in and you get everything he promised you. So bring me in. I’ll come willingly.”
Desta hesitated. Her eyes darted up to the mutants, her ride out of here, then back to me, with hunger and hatred trading the ground between them.
Beside me, Caspian’s clawed hand had filled with death cards, held low, fanned and ready. The second those mutants dropped into range, his cards would take all three out of the sky.
Either of us could have killed Desta in our sleep. But she had a knife on my sister’s throat, and one wrong move or one flinch or one second too slow would put that blade in, so neither of us moved a hair. We needed a perfect opening, and nothing less bought a strike.
“Let my sister go and I’ll come with you,” I said again. “I promise.”
“I don’t want to hurt Missy anyway.” Desta’s voice cracked on it, the last live wire in her shorting out. “All he wants is you. But a promise isn’t enough. I want you to vow it on the lives of the heirs.”
“I vow—”
The words jammed in my throat. Not on their lives. Words had power and vows had teeth, and I wouldn’t lay my princes’ lives under any oath. Never. Not fucking ever.
A roar split the sky. Drakken came down out of the dark with Nikolai and Aelindor on his back and hit the mutant flock in a storm of fire and wings. The night above the road turned red and screaming.
Desta’s head snapped up, and her knife hand shook. Her ticket out was burning above her, and something drained out of her face while something else came in behind it. I knew it the way you know a mining roof is coming down in the half-second before it falls.
She was going to cut my sister’s throat anyway. Not for the Saint, but to spite me, to break me on her way out.
Caspian and I moved in the same instant.
Missy was faster.
While we’d bargained over her head, my sister had worked a pocketknife out of her sleeve, and the blade had been open in her small fist for a full minute of Desta’s ranting.
She slammed her head back into Desta’s nose.
She swung her arm up and back and drove the knife into Desta’s eye, all the way in to the little hilt, with her whole weight behind it.
The sound it made was soft and terrible.
Desta’s knife hand went slack, and the dagger hit the dirt.
She staggered back with the handle jutting from her socket and her mouth open on nothing, and then her hand flew up and stopped short of touching it, as if her body already knew there was no fixing what she’d find.
Caspian had lunged to catch Missy’s fall, but there was no fall to catch.
My sister had kicked off the woman’s chest and landed on the road in a crouch, one small fist planted in the dirt and her head down, a pose straight off the cover of the comic books Frost kept bringing her.
Then she looked up and hissed, and her other hand already had Desta’s dagger in it.
Shit.
Marco and Frost had trained her well. Maybe too well. She was the cleverest, quickest kid I knew, and she’d picked up every bit of it fast.
“No knife,” I’d told her, in a hallway in a mansion, with a paring knife from the kitchen in my hand. “You got me?”
“Got you,” she’d said.
And she’d carried one every day since, sewn into her sleeve where I’d never think to look. Somewhere in that sharp head, my little sister had weighed my rule against the world and decided which of us was right about it.
Tonight she’d been right.
Pride and heartbreak came up together. I’d known she’d be a target because of me, and I’d tried anyway, tried so hard, to buy her the normal childhood I never got.
That ship had sailed a long time ago, in wartime, and maybe it had never been in port at all.
My sister usually sweet-talked her way out of trouble.
Tonight the world had left her nothing but violence, and she’d used it without blinking.
She wasn’t even seven years old.
But Missy had never been a normal child. She’d survived Crimson Ridge. She’d been a slave once, the same as me, and she was only ever soft when it came to me.
“Shit.” Caspian stared down at her from nine feet of warrior form. “I’ll be damned.”
“You said a bad word, Prince Cas!” My sister came up out of her crouch and abandoned the superhero pose.
“Apologies, little viper.” Death cards twirled slowly through his claws. “You’re ready for the cards. Want me to teach you?”
Missy beamed up at him, bright as the beacons. “I’d like that very much.”
We all looked down at Desta on the hard dirt, her left eye a ruin of blood and gore. Her mouth tried to shape one last thing, a curse or a plea or a name, and none of it came. The breath went out of her and didn’t come back, and her good eye fixed on the sky, sightless and still accusing.
Out over the fields, the mutants had stopped shrieking, and Drakken roared once more as the last carcass tumbled out of the sky and hit the ground.
He banked toward us with Aelindor standing on his back, sheathing a longsword still filmed with green blood, his eyes already on me across the distance.
Nikolai had dropped off to pull his ax out of a mutant corpse, and he came at us so fast the road blurred behind him.
Missy and I ran at each other. I dropped to my knees and caught her, and she clung with both arms, her chin hooked over my shoulder.
“You’re safe now, little viper.”
“I’m sorry I gave you a scare, Max,” she said into my neck. “I didn’t know she wasn’t Frost. He came and got me and said he was bringing me to you and Prince Drak on the mountain. I wanted that so badly I didn’t think about it. Then he gave me a candy that made me so sleepy I forgot to bring Ross.”
She pulled back an inch, and her forehead creased.
“Josette said no.” She said it like a puzzle she hadn’t solved yet.
“She said nobody takes me out at night except you, not even a major, and she stood in the doorway. Frost said fine, they’d settle it downstairs, and she went with him.
” Her eyes came up to mine. “She didn’t come back up. Is Josette okay?”
I held on to my sister and couldn’t make a single word come out.
“She’s hurt,” I managed at last. “The healers are with her.”
Missy’s chin wobbled, but she nodded. Then her gaze slid past my shoulder to the body on the road, and I realized mine had gone there first.
My sister’s face changed. Her eyes shone with tears.
“It’s okay, Max.” Her voice came out older than it had any right to, and it broke my heart once again.
“I don’t mind doing it. I didn’t want you to hate yourself for killing her.
She was one of your oldest friends. Even if she’d stopped being one.
” Then it went fierce. “I hold the line, Max. Nobody gets past me to you.”
“Oh, little viper.” My eyes burned. “Don’t grow up so fast.”
Drakken had shifted back, and the heirs closed around the two of us with relief on their faces and the storm still in their eyes.
Then a small shape came tearing toward us across the plain like his life depended on it. The mutant lion cub had tracked us the whole way.
“Ross!” Missy screeched.
She bolted at him, and the cub launched himself past the heirs and hit her square in the chest and burrowed into her arms. Then his horned little head popped out and growled at everyone, an aggrieved lecture about being forgotten while the rest of us had all the excitement.