Chapter 15 Ares #2
For Fairchild to have the use of not one, but two hex boxes, confirmed he was not what he appeared to be.
Who was he? Before I could ponder it further, an Authority guard appeared from the slender alley that separated the safe house from its neighbor, bully club in hand.
Two more rushed out behind the first, their own guns drawn, equipped with silencers.
“You’re not leaving here alive, Necroline.” Fairchild laughed again. “And neither is that girl. I just wish I could make you sit and watch.”
Eryx launched himself at the guards. I turned back to Fairchild, but he squirmed out of my grip. Without thinking, I reached for his aura, whispering a prayer to St. Tanith for forgiveness. A necromancer should never touch the aura of the living, but I couldn’t let him get away.
But Mike Fairchild slipped away, without a hint of auric energy for me to grasp onto.
And then he blinked out of reality in much the way a spirit might.
My gaze darted around me, but I couldn’t find him until laughter coming from inside the house caught my attention.
Fairchild was inside, with the girl and the torturer, and I was stuck outside.
I rushed up the steps, gripping the doorframe, trying desperately to remember if there were any tricks to disabling a hex box.
“Get the car ready,” Fairchild told the torturer. “I’ll bring her out in a minute.” He drew a switchblade from the pocket of his tweed jacket. “Would you like to keep a little piece of her, Necroline? A pinky perhaps, or an ear?”
I snarled with rage, pounding the door frame with my fist. There was no time in recent memory that I had felt so helpless.
Fingers closed around my shoulder. I flinched, ready to fight, but when I turned, I came face to face with an ice-cold stare. Lara Achilles.
“Move,” she said, her voice deadly soft. Then she stared at Fairchild. “I’d run, if I were you.”
Fairchild just smiled. The expression faltered when Lara Achilles walked through the force-field of death the hex boxes generated, completely unscathed.
In fact, her skin seemed to glow, having absorbed some essential power from the force field.
She glanced back over her shoulder, her icy eyes glowing with an almost neon light. “Get to the back.”
I didn’t hesitate. I sprinted down the steps, moving impossibly fast towards the narrow alley, my legs pumping as hard as I could, with only a glance to spare for my brother and Av.
They both stood in the garden, surrounded by bodies, mouths gaping open at a statuesque blonde woman, who frowned at the speck of blood on her gorgeous wool coat.
Rhiannon Bronte was back, and she’d dispatched the Authority guards in the blink of an eye.
Even Eli Cabot’s miracle was no match for one of the Maere, swordless as she might be. A flurry of movement rushed by me, Ember Verona’s familiar scent filling my nostrils. I put more energy into my miracle-fueled speed and reached the back of the house at the same time Ember did.
Without a word of hello for me, she burst through the kitchen door, a dagger flashing in her hand as she slit the torturer’s throat and tossed him out the back.
The movement was so quick and clean, I barely saw it.
In only a moment, she’d dispatched a man so evil he’d haunted my dreams since I was a child.
We raced through the kitchen and through the narrow hall towards the front room.
The old wallpaper in the hall was peeling, revealing layers upon layers of other patterns, other choices made and rejected over the years.
Dimly lit sconces flickered angrily as we moved through the house.
The safe house’s spirit guardians were furious.
They’d been shut out of the front room, unable to help the Phoenixes, or the girl.
Ember reached the parlor door and pressed a hand to it. “More hex boxes,” she muttered, then glanced at me. “Stay put.”
I nodded as she pushed through the door, ripping the hex boxes from the door frame as she went, crushing them in her delicate fingers. It had been ages since I saw the Maere for what they truly were: lethal weapons.
I stepped into the parlor, not knowing what I would find, but Lara Achilles had the teenage medium in her arms. Fairchild was gone.
The girl had lost consciousness. I could do nothing more than stand and watch as Achilles nodded to Verona, who reached down and pulled the hex boxes from the front door frame.
Her voice was so soft, I almost didn’t hear her, but Lara whispered to the girl, her dark head bent over the child’s, “The Angel hears your plea.”
The child’s eyes fluttered open, a faint smile on her lips. “My guardians said you’d come for me.”
“And I did,” Lara murmured back. “You are safe now, sleep.”
The girl relaxed in Lara’s arms, her head nestled against the Maere’s broad shoulder as she disappeared from sight.
Lara looked back at me, a tenderness in those icy eyes that defied everything I thought I understood about what she did.
She didn’t kill those parapsychs out of rage; she did it for the same reason I did anything.
For the same reason Verona did: devotion.
Her devotion was just bigger than mine or Verona’s. Lara Achilles saw a vision of what we could be, not what we were. The hope in her eyes nearly choked me. I tore my eyes away from the Angel, shame roiling within me for all I could not be for my people.
“Clear,” Ember said, before glancing back at me.
Outside, Eryx had pulled a van around to the front of the house.
There was no way this hadn’t all been caught on CCTV, but he and Av piled the bodies of the guards and the torturer into the van.
Rhiannon Bronte pulled our people off the garden gate, gently closing their eyes, her lips moving in silent prayer to Tanith.
These Maere surprised me. I knew I’d been wrong not to talk with Ember all those years ago when we suspected Lara of the murders.
But now I saw that I’d underestimated them all.
That I’d seen them as Authority collaborators, when what they truly were was the hairline between us and the entities of power that wanted nothing more than to suck our people dry and discard them.
Ember Verona had held that line alone for twenty years.
No wonder she was tired.
Lara Achilles walked out of the safe house, the little medium in her arms. As she walked down the steps, I knew why they called her the Angel. There was a nobility in her countenance I hadn’t seen in centuries. I stood next to Ember as Lara spoke to Rhiannon in the garden.
“Thank you,” I murmured, watching the two warrior women speak to one another.
My brother stepped forward, and vaguely I heard him ask how Lara had known what to say to make the girl invisible. Lara’s tight smile told me the words were a secret she’d kept for a long time. “I have always said it to the ones I helped. I did not realize it would make her invisible tonight.”
Lux. She’d known that Lara would be here, that they would come. I cursed the Seer silently, but it wasn’t her fault. Visions were tricky things. Sometimes, if the subject knew what was to happen, it changed things too quickly. All too often, a Seer’s visions were useless.
Av and Eryx stared at the Maere the spirits had called the Angel with awe in their eyes. For the briefest of moments, I understood what the world had once been, what the Maere and the Trinity were before the Authority—and before the Consulate.
There was no way for me to say if it was better.
I hadn’t lived quite so long as all that.
The Consulate was formed hundreds of years before my birth.
History told us that those had been dark days.
But history was written by the Authority.
Written by those who hated us. Roman’s accounting of it had been that those were halcyon days, but I knew better than to wholly believe in his nostalgia for the days he was King.
Ember’s frown interrupted my rumination.
I was far too attuned to her moods and when she spoke, all other thoughts flew out of my mind.
“Don’t thank me just yet. We need your help.
” My heart beat faster as she held out a hand to me, her back straightening and her shoulders rolling back, as she spoke the simple ancient words.
“You are called, Ares Necroline. Will you answer?”
The past I’d just been imagining melted into the present, the days of knights and kings reborn.
My hand went around her forearm as I sank to one knee in front of her, a chill going through me as I bent my head.
The feel of her long fingers wrapping around my forearm was so delicious as to be distracting, but took nothing from the solemnity of this moment.
Whatever happened here tonight, it was bigger than anything the Necroline Dynasty could handle on its own. I knew what Ember Verona would ask, and I would gladly pledge all my aid. Orphium needed its Maere back.
So I spoke the ancient response without hesitation. “Your call is answered. The Necroline Dynasty pledges fealty to the Orphium Maere. Use us as you will.”