Chapter 21 #4
“Yemaya?” He squinted, letting the others run off without him.
She gave him a nod.
“Praise be!” He beamed, crossing the cobblestones to hold her about the shoulders and examine her.
She wondered what he noticed, whether there was anything new on the surface of her that indicated she was…
more. Better. And then his eyes drifted to the ghosts in her wake as they stepped into the courtyard. He froze. “Yemaya, what have you done?”
“I’ve come home.” She smiled coolly as he backed away.
“What you’ve done is… This is darkness!”
Yemi chuckled. “Oh, Lain, this is the holiest I have ever been.”
“This is not what I meant whe—”
“You and your order wanted a god, but without blood. I’m sorry I could not be perfect for you. Where is the Harpy?”
“I won’t aid you in this. I can’t.”
Yemaya sighed, though not surprised. She tied on the mask Derring had brought her. Its metal interior was cool and inviting against her face in the way fated, powerful things tend to be. Even her subarmor had stopped its chafing.
She was the daughter of the Bulletproof Queen.
She passed him, stepping inside with mouth watering and pulse racing. The scents of sweat and fear and the sounds of panic tickled her and drew her back toward the interior.
A trio of palace guards came flying around the corner, carrying munitions for the turrets in dark metal boxes, only to stumble to a halt before her and drop them. They were waifish, with unfamiliar faces. Certainly part of Dahlia’s changing of the guard.
“Such a small welcoming party. Didn’t anyone tell you the queen was coming home?” Yemi grinned behind the mask. She engaged her spear, letting the orange glow make her threats for her. “Disarm and kneel.”
Her muscles twitched. They would have one chance. She hoped they would deny her.
No one moved immediately or exchanged so much as a nervous look.
The palest of the three stood a bit to the rear between the other two.
Yemi couldn’t see his hands, but the shine of his sweat and a refusal to blink gave him away.
He had just enough time to pull a sidearm off his hip and raise it when Yemi launched her spear underhanded into his eye, sending the round fired off into the wall beside her.
The other two flinched and took off back up the hallway.
“Don’t run,” she called, collecting her spear and proceeding to follow them.
The hall was lined with armaments and crates being rifled through by soldiers who seemed unpleasantly surprised to see her as they raised their weapons to charge her.
Cutting them down was effortless. Her father’s spear made every cut clean.
“Dahlia!” she called out. “Face me so I can stop slaughtering your minions.”
She passed another guard cowering between stacks of crates, kneeling with his hands up.
“I yield, My Light, please,” he said quickly, pulling his face away from the tip of her spear.
“We’ll see,” Yemi replied. “Where’s the Harpy?”
“Last I saw her was in the throne room, but I don’t know now.”
Yemi was opening her mouth to advise him on what he could expect if she didn’t find Dahlia in the throne room when a bullet glanced off her mask. She peered back up the hallway to see a group of gunners backed by the two women from earlier with hand cannons aimed at her as she stalked toward them.
“Halt!” one of them shouted in warning.
“Or else what?” Yemi growled, holding out her arms as if daring them to do their worst. There was no cell in her body that believed she was anything short of invincible.
A strike of flint and a whiff of powder.
In a blur, Nova appeared before her, the edges of her iron fans dripping blood as she slammed them together in shield position. The hand cannons fired not half a breath later, and smashed into the shield with enough force to dent it, crushing Nova’s fist and pushing her back full inches.
“What the fuck are you doing!” Nova growled.
“Enjoying myself,” Yemi replied.
Nova grimaced as she attempted and failed to remove her hand from the bent well, the jagged metal drawing blood. She flexed her fingers seemingly just to prove she still could.
Yemi salivated behind the mask, leaning into the overwhelming, metallic—delicious—scent.
“This is Commander Grey,” Nova shouted at their opposition. “Surrender or you will be put down.”
“Can’t do it, boss,” came the reply. The voice was daring if unfamiliar.
“They can’t do it, Commander Grey,” Yemi repeated in a taunting voice.
“You can. And you should,” Nova called.
“Oh, but they won’t.” Yemi grinned. Nova smelled wonderful, the mild, fruity scent of her hair, the beads of sweat pooling in the hollow place where her neck and jaw met. She could make out the subtle throb of an artery just disappearing beneath the collar of her subarmor, close enough to taste it…
“Yemi.” Nova frowned at her. “Back up! What is wrong with you?”
Bullets began pelting the shield again before Yemi could answer.
“You know what? Fine. Fuck it,” Nova huffed. She pushed forward, taking advantage of the long reload time for hand cannons. Yemi followed closely, drawn more to Nova’s blood than the promise of violence ahead.
Nova picked up one of the discarded cannon rounds that had fallen at her feet.
It was heavy, and the size of a rough-hewn billiard ball.
Yemi heard the click and smelled the sizzle of a flint-lit fuse before Nova threw them both into a wall behind a stack of crates just as the hand cannons fired again.
The rounds passed them, hammering into the marble at the end of the hall, and Yemi and Nova charged their enemies.
Nova stayed behind her shield until the guns were empty, but Yemi launched herself from behind it, thrusting her spear into the first face she saw.
Bullets pinged off her subarmor, marking her chest, thigh, and gut with what promised to be phenomenal bruises, but she laughed as she slayed them all.
Nova punched one of the cannonmaidens with her shield and slammed the round in her free hand into another guard’s skull with a thud.
Nova roared in pain as she extricated her hand from her battered shield. Yemi moved herself away before she was drawn in to Nova’s injury again. Nova was a distraction, she reminded herself. For both her feral mind and her human heart.
“My hand’s broken,” Nova groaned, inhaling back to calm as she picked up a discarded spear. “Cutter and the Gold Guard are back this way. We’ll get one of them to escort y—where are you going?”
“Go. The Harpy is in my throne room.”
“I—I’ve found Orie and Enna. They’re alright,” Nova called, her tone one of futile disappointment.
“I’ll congratulate you all later.”
“Orie says they put the statue in a masons’ storeroom in the crypt. I circled back and got the door open, but it’s not there. It’s gone.”
“Fine,” Yemi shouted.
Bodies littered her route to the throne room. Cutter and the Gold Guard had been busy. Outside the front doors, soldiers still hurried about, either searching for a place to hide or stage their last stand. They were of little consequence.
The forechamber of the grand hall was dark and free of the night creatures who normally chirped alongside the water gardens.
The air was humid and smelled of home. The pools reflected the dark through the glass ceiling, the scant torchlight, and the long tapestries draped on either side of the throne room doors.
Dahlia had replaced the Bear Queen’s plants with red spider lilies.
The little fish took shelter beneath lily pads as the surface of the water trembled from the distant fighting still ongoing in the wings.
Yemi’s boots clicked quickly on the marble, and her grip on her spear tightened. There was no fear to smell here. No small army waiting for her behind those doors. But there was someone.
Before she could reach them, the doors opened, and Dahlia came storming out in regal plain clothes and her Harpy regalia.
She fired once from a glittering revolver and missed before angrily discarding her mask for better aim and stalking toward Yemi.
She looked exhausted, sweaty, and enraged.
Yemi smiled. She fired again and again, striking Yemi repeatedly about the torso, but the subarmor stayed their impact.
The chamber empty, Dahlia tossed her revolver into one of the reflecting pools and unsheathed the greatsword gripped in her other hand.
It was long and thin with a bit of a curve, and the blade glinted gold in the low light. A swordswoman’s answer to a spear.
Yemi clucked her tongue as she approached. “You seem upset. Did you get my gift?”
“I should never have let you leave here alive,” Dahlia growled, inviting her in with her blade.
“To err is human.” Yemi shrugged. She stood before her now, close enough to make out the whites of her eyes, the furious tremor of her lip.
“I don’t suppose you’ll surrender quietly now, faced with the eradication of your little sect, the timely demise of your father, and the terrifying shadows of all your life’s failures staring you down. ”
Dahlia spat in her face. It landed on the cheek of Yemi’s mask.
“Attagirl.” Yemi smiled.
The darkness covered Dahlia’s eyes again, and Yemi knew Ursla was in play.
Yemi whipped her spear but Dahlia parried and came after her instead with a speed and ferocity Yemi hadn’t thought her capable of.
She relished it—their fight was more a dance than the slaughter the night had been so far.
She applauded herself for having had the foresight to warn her.
Dahlia’s end would be more satisfying this way.
Yemi managed to strike the sword with the tip of her spear, halving the length of the blade, but Dahlia was unshaken.
The long shaft of metal clattered to the ground, and before Yemi could sweep back to victoriously loose Dahlia’s head from her shoulders, Dahlia punched her hard enough in the face to send her mask flying.
Startled, Yemi dropped her spear, sending it sizzling into one of the water gardens.
She recovered in time to collect the fallen blade, the sharp edge of it carving into her palm.
She didn’t feel it. It didn’t matter. She raised it and drove it through Dahlia’s gut.
The black disappeared from Dahlia’s eyes, and the hilt of her sword clattered to the ground. She went to her knees in the shallow pool. Blood pumped in thin rivulets into the water, dyeing it in splotches of crimson.
Yemi’s gums itched. All her inner voices screamed for flesh. This was victory. She’d earned a treat.
“Whatever you think you’ve done here tonight, the monarchy is dead,” Dahlia cried.
“It’s not the only thing,” Yemi said in a hollow voice. “Welcome to your martyrdom.”
A guttural groan escaped someone behind her, and despite herself, Yemi looked back.
Nova was pinned to one of the great doors with a spear in her side and her hands wrapped around the skull of her attacker, thumbs pressed into the inner corners of his eyes. Cutter arrived to cut down another one before they could finish her and sawed off the bulk of the spear shaft.
As if in slow motion, Yemi watched Nova pull herself forward and free of the weapon. Her empty gaze drifted in Yemi’s direction before she collapsed.
“Nova, no!” Yemi screamed as Nova fell. The words ran long, and her voice went deep and foreign. Despair rose within her like a tidal wave until—
Her blood stopped moving.
The stone in Yemi’s stomach grew its needlelike legs again, only there were more of them, growing longer, pricking her skin from the inside. She collapsed into the pool, barely able to keep from drowning in it.
Among the hissing voices now rose one more distinct. Familiar.
Let me in, little fish.
Nova’s voice played in her mind. Ursla got inside Dahlia somehow.
No. NO! Yemi shrieked inside her own head. But she was already feeling like a smaller presence in herself. A wisp of conscience, void of control and drowning in her own darkness.
When it seemed the stone’s tendrils had all but filled her body, she pushed herself upward, sputtering water and leaking black blood from the cut in her hand. Nova was standing again, barely, supported almost entirely by Cutter. They both watched her in horror, and at once she knew.
The bug in Helene’s ear.
Ursla.
It had always been her.
The pounding in her chest ceased, and the corners of her mouth began to twitch in a shark’s grin she found terrifyingly unlike her own in the reflective pool. A marionette now, she felt her hands move to the sword and raised it. Against Nova.
“That’s better,” Ursla’s voice sighed from Yemi’s lips. Her movements became less staccato and more natural. More controlled.
“Now. We have to go now,” Cutter was saying, his face riddled with heartbreak.
“Witch!” Nova roared as Cutter struggled to drag her away. Her shattered hand was pressed against her ribs. “I made you a promise when we met. Expect me.”
Yemi was desperate to know how Nova knew.
Was it something she could see or feel that told her Yemi was trapped?
She screamed inside herself and beat against the dark as if it were a cage.
She felt hoarse, panicked, tears streaming from the shadow of her eyes as she begged Nova not to leave her here, not like this.
None of it registered on the outside, though.
Ursla watched them back out of the doorway and disappear from sight.
She wiped an errant tear from her new face and turned her attention to the woman kneeling in the reflecting pool, hunched over with a hand pressed against the wound in her gut and breathing angrily through clenched teeth.
“What to do with Dahlia Drake?” The words came out in a singsong voice. “Toss her in the waves, maybe. A gift to the sharks. They’d love that. Know how I know?” She knelt and whispered to her captive, grinning. “We share the same taste.”