Chapter 44
Bait on the Hook
The worst part wasn’t being cuffed with Flame-blessed metal.
It was hearing her cry his name, over and over, as she was carried into safety.
Everything in him wanted to surge from his knees, snap the irritating bracelets like the fictions they were, and kill them—kill them all, if that was what it took.
If that would keep her safe.
Instead, he stood right where he was, shivering and sweating like a horse run too hard, and glared, nose down but eyes up, at the Son in front of him.
Blue-eyed, toffee-haired, the guy was built wide instead of with Jake’s leanness, and had the faraway, listening look of an Elder. “Name?”
“Erik,” he said, crisply, and added the long string of his numerator as if he wasn’t longing to leap on this fellow and put him down quick-like. That was only the first step; he would have to take out the two Youngers on the other side of the stolen blue Suburban next. “My lirai—”
“Yours?” Wheat-colored eyebrows rose, and his fellow Son examined Erik in a long, leisurely sweep, from stained boots to torn jacket and the ribbons of his T-shirt. At least his jeans were mostly whole, except for the long tear on the inside of his left thigh.
One of the spiders had been going for his femoral artery.
“She’s new,” Erik managed. “She’s terrified. I have to report.”
“He’s clearly one of us, or was.” A Father, not wearing a cassock, his iron-colored hair combed back from a ferocious widow’s peak, clapped the toffee-blond on the shoulder. “Take him to the Chamber. We’ll debrief you there, Elder Brother. Where were you trained?”
“Erik,” he said again. Chapter and verse.
“528-Alpha-X Ray-3840. My Father is Ignatius, my Younger Brother is Jacob. I was trained at Nightshade House of Belmont Temple, ’28 to ’33.
Sent to Islington satellite in ’54, and stayed there since.
We found a potential a few weeks ago, but we were chased—”
“Erik?” Another voice, this one vaguely familiar, came from his left. The Younger there was slim and coal-eyed, his woolly hair cropped close and guns vanishing into their holsters. “By the Dreamers. It is you.”
“Someone you know, Stan?” The Father nodded, slightly, and his brothers’ hands weren’t rough, but they weren’t overly gentle either.
Stan? He vaguely remembered the boy, lean and smiling before his mark, somber and big-eyed afterward, just prior to Erik and Jake’s departure.
“Stan. You took your mark in September. We went out drinking afterward.” Slipping the leash.
It wasn’t a good thing to admit and the alcohol didn’t do anything to a Son’s enhanced metabolism, but it was kind of expected—and it was something nobody else would know except Stan, Jake, and the other Elder present that night. What was that asshole’s name?
I can’t remember. That’s a bad sign.
“It’s him,” Stan said, grimly. “But, Father Grigori…”
“Spit it out,” an Elder in braces, jeans, and a natty dark leather jacket said, softly. “We still have patrols to run tonight.”
“All in good time, Tannis.” Grigori gazed at Stan, but it would be foolish in the extreme to think he wasn’t fully aware of—and prepared to handle—Erik’s capacity for violence. “What is it, Stanley?”
“It’s him, without a doubt.” There was a time when Stan would have rolled his eyes at being called Stanley; now he just shook his head slightly. “But he and his entire trio were reported dead over a decade ago.”
What the hell? Erik might have said something, but another Father, this one with a deep, ugly scar down the left side of his face—a bad wound, healing slowly despite closeness to lirai—stepped closer.
“Peace,” the man breathed, the collective sorcerous force of the Sons all around channeled for a bare, stinging moment.
The world fell away on a tide of thick darkness, and the only mercy was that there were no dreams.
* * *
He surfaced briefly when they clipped him, naked and shivering uncontrollably with need, into the restraints.
The Truth Chamber wasn’t a place any Son liked to visit; the light was bright, the stainless steel tables along one wall were chilly, and the apparatus in its center was a confection of spun metal and whipped-cream glass, dreamstones—each one retrieved and set in the old way—glowing along its spines, a beautiful mosaic.
There was a lirai there, too, but not the one he wanted. There was something very important Erik had to remember, as he was carried—not violently, but not with the care they’d handle a Dreamer—to the apparatus and buckled in.
They would never subject a precious, irreplaceable Dreamer to this.
The lirai was a slim dark young man with bright hazel eyes and a shock of floppy chestnut hair, his hands—a little too big for his wrists, he hadn’t finished growing when he’d met the Flame—clasped before him.
He wore a blue T-shirt with a red and white shield on the front, the star in its center wavering slightly as cloth moved, and the setting of his oneiros wasn’t bulky as the one Erik had made.
It was finer, more delicate, probably a Younger’s work.
That was what he’d forgotten, and Erik began to struggle, knowing he shouldn’t but helpless not to. Where is she? Is she hurt?
“It’s all right,” the lirai said, a soft, easy tenor. The peace flowing from the words enfolded him, but Erik continued to twist and jerk, the table’s dreamstones lighting with a rill of bright, undeniable power. “Everything’s fine, I’m just going to take a look. You’re okay.”
“My lord?” Grigori plainly wanted to tell him to get on with it, but you didn’t hurry a lirai.
“I know,” the Dreamer said, his gentle tone never altering.
“I just wish this wasn’t so hard on you guys.
” He stepped forward, and the shadows around him did too.
He had two full trios, but it was the Younger on the right who touched the Dreamer’s shoulder with two fingers, silently offering comfort.
Probably sealed. Where is she? Is she all right? Traitor could be anywhere. What had Stan said?
Declared dead over a decade ago. But they still received gear and funding, they still ran patrols, and Ignatius was still in contact with a control liaison.
The lirai nodded, stepped forward once more. His gaze turned distant, and other shadows against that warm, forgiving light were Sons closing in to protect him if Erik had been stuffed full of venom and sent by an old, foul intelligence.
Bait on the hook.
“Lirai,” he gasped. “My lirai.”
The Dreamer glanced at Grigori. “Is he…?”
“Unlikely.” The Father shrugged, spreading his hands. “The young lady is active, she has an oneiros—fine work, really—and Lady Sara says she’s recently been in the Flame. They’re caring for her now, but she’s a little—”
Erik surged against the restraints. The whole room rattled and the Sons tensed, ripples running through preternaturally strong flesh. The light didn’t dim, electric glow like a honeyed summer afternoon. “Lirai,” he heard himself moan, helplessly.
“Erik?” The Dreamer’s voice took on fresh, sonorous depth.
The stones along the arms and studding the base of the table would add to his force, channel and filter it—and impede anything Erik might throw at him, too.
Or anything had been set inside a Son’s flesh and bone and breath, snuck through a temple’s protections to strike at those the Mad God hated most.
It didn’t matter that Erik was innocent—or that he thought he was. He had to endure, before he could rest.
Always. First came the suffering, and afterward a breather if you were lucky.
If you weren’t, well…
The pain arrived, a spiked wave tearing and digging through his skull.
It wasn’t as bad as the mark, his essential self torn free of his body and hung upside down, the sleeping world vibrating underneath him as glowing cities—some transient, lasting only a mortal night while a normal slept in the grip of humanity’s most ancient magic, others eternal, full of cathedrals and avenues added to by generations of Dreamers—spun and slid fast as wet ink upon a greased plate.
It certainly wasn’t as bad as the glimpses of the Mad God’s home, cyclopean blocks of stone quarried from unspeakable cliffs and hauled with much suffering before being lifted by invisible, bleeding fingers and rammed together to make a whole of geometry no mortal mind could stand, with the black tower in its middle and the yellow gleam at its top—
“Just a little more,” the Dreamer crooned, invisible fingers stroking the inside of a Son’s skull.
Fighting to keep the god out meant you reflexively battled any breach in your mental borders, even a Dreamer’s soft, skilled touch. It meant that the amount of force necessary to dig through a Son’s head and find innocence was extreme.
And very painful.
“He’s coding,” someone said. There were other callused, ungentle hands on him now, invisible force humming through his bones, shocking his heart, forcing the dumb meat to squeeze its cargo of blood.
The scar on his chest, pink and shiny, flushed a deep angry red.
So did the other imperfectly healed wounds from the last forty-eight hours. “Look at that. Is that a—”
“Sarnaki,” the Dreamer hissed, his head tipping back. “And others. All of them. Sent, not summoned.”
“Is he clear?”
The lirai shuddered, his hair rising and eyes widening. His hands darted for his face but both Youngers of his trios intervened, grabbing his arms. The Dreamer clawed at empty air, his throat swelling with a terrible, rising cry.
There were things in a Son’s head no lirai would deal comfortably with.
The young man stiffened. Invisible force swelled and crackled in the room.
One of the dreamstones on the table popped, shards flying, and a wall of Sons closed before the vulnerable, bow-arched lirai.
His feet, in glittering red high-top sneakers, drummed the tile floor, and his trios grabbed whatever they could reach of him—Fathers, Elders, and Youngers all seeking to bleed off the excess force, to comfort and restrain.
The Dreamer’s cries were white birds above a golden shore, ringing like crystal bells. Erik’s spine curved, crackling as a convulsion hit, and he began to scream as well, a low, guttural cry rising behind the Dreamer’s, both repeating over and over in strange, disjointed tandem.
“Liv! Liv! Liiiiiiiiiiiv!”