Chapter 36
EMBER
THE AFTERNOON OF THE GALA
Lara and I left without saying goodbye. The Orphium Maere never said good luck, never said goodbye.
There was no need, after all. We were eternal.
But I could tell from the jittery way Lara tapped out a beat on the steering wheel of the Dodger that the Chioric weapon was on her mind, same as it was mine.
We were dressed similarly in close-fitting cargo pants, heavy combat boots, and warm sweaters. Lara wore a turtleneck, but I couldn’t stand to have anything so close around my neck on a day like today. The tall collar of my sweater was less constricting due to the zipper that I’d left undone.
Lara raised an eyebrow as I got back into the car with our breakfast sammies. Two jumbo biscuit-egg-and-cheeses with bacon from Little Jimmie’s on Fourth and triple shot lattes to go.
“Does Ares like it when you wear those pushup bras?” Lara joked, tweaking my zipper as I arranged our food.
I glared at her teasing face. “It’s not a pushup bra. It’s a sports bra.” I gestured to my tits. “So they don’t bounce all over the place while we blow up the National Gallery.”
Lara snickered, taking a big bite of her sandwich. “I’m so fucking glad we don’t have to dress up tonight.”
I didn’t answer her. I wouldn’t have minded dressing up with Ares.
It had seemed like he might say something emotional to me this morning, some profession of how he felt, or what he wanted from me.
I’d wanted him to, but at the same time, a superstitious beast lived inside me.
I avoided saying how I felt, because declarations felt like goodbye, like hedging. We could say what we needed to later.
Lara and I ate in silence. “You gonna choose the mixtape, or what?” she said as we tossed our wrappers into the to-go bag.
I flipped the glove box open, chose my favorite and threw it in the deck.
Lara turned the volume up as a sick drumbeat pulsed through the car.
Shivers skittered over my skin as I watched Lara drive.
Hoofbeats of the past echoed through me.
She shifted gears, the Dodger leaping forward as she wove through traffic. Her hand slid across the console.
Lara’s fingers wove through mine, and I squeezed her hand. She drew it to her chest, letting me feel her heartbeat, which was strong and steady. “Sing it, Verona,” she ordered me as the lyrics began.
Memories of our voices, lifted to Tanith and Amarante on an ancient battlefield, slipped through the atoms of the car, mixing past and present.
Lara’s heartbeat set the pace of my own.
She let go of my hand to shift and the familiar music swelled, taking me through memories of all the victories we’d ever had.
And there had been many.
In this lifetime and the last.
The Authority could fuck with us forever. We had the time to wait them out. They took Lara from me. Tricked Max and Sera into betraying us. Separated us at every turn. But we were here now, making our way towards the swords that would set things right.
We were very likely walking right into a trap, but the three of us were about to take back what was ours.
And tonight, after we had our swords back, I’d call Max and apologize one last time.
I’d figure out where Sera’s sword was, and whatever happened next, we would win.
I wasn’t going to let anyone keep us down from here on out.
Whoever did all this wasn't going to ruin us. I wouldn’t let them.
Lara grinned at me as the song changed, biting her bottom lip, her pronounced canines gleaming viciously as rain splattered on the window.
I laughed as she swayed to the guitar riff at the start of her favorite song, then unlocked my phone and sent Rhiannon the digital version I had saved of this mixtape with the note, Blast the shit out of this while you get pretty, and keep the necromancers safe tonight.
She sent back a positively filthy selfie, which I flashed at Lara, who shook her head. “I’ll never get over her.”
I laughed, tears pricking at the corner of my eyes. “You already are.”
She shook her head. “You don’t get over Rhiannon. She just lives inside you.” Lara sighed. “Deep… inside.”
I laughed so hard that I snorted. The two of them loved to make jokes about their breakup at the most inappropriate times. It felt like we were back. “We can do this,” I said, before turning the music’s volume up all the way.
As we crossed the bridge into uptown, strength filled me. I touched the medallions around my neck. One for Tanith. One for Amarante. I was sure about this. We could get the swords back.
Ahalf hour later and we were in. The first bombs to set were the ones directly under the swords in the Auction Gallery. From all of Avaline’s spying, we knew there would be guards on this level. But when we got there, the numbers were double what we’d anticipated.
The long hallway underneath the swords was packed with a dozen well-armed guards. To our advantage, there was no electricity on this level, so the hallway was dimly lit, only the glow of the guards’ personal neons in the murky darkness.
As quietly as possible, we stashed the backpacks with the bombs and drew knives.
I nodded to Lara. I wished to all the gods that Rhiannon was here instead of me.
Her famous silence would be a boon right now.
Lara brushed a kiss to my left cheek and disappeared, doubling back to come at the guards from the other direction.
I tried to channel Rhi’s silent movement as I approached the first guard.
My knife slid through his throat like his tendons were made of butter.
I covered his mouth while he shuddered in my arms, before laying him silently to rest in the grid of hallways that intersected this part of the passage, and moving onto the next.
At the opposite end of the hallway, Lara took one out of her own before the guards noticed us. We disappeared into the grid. It was a labyrinth down here, but I hardly cared. Senses I hadn’t used in years kicked in. I’d forgotten what it meant to be Maere.
Somehow I’d lost sight of the fact that while the swords gave us a fuller range of parapsych powers, I was not human—and never had been, in any lifetime. I’d let myself forget. But now, as my eyesight adjusted to the dark, I became the predator that Amarante and Tanith made me.
I slid through the darkness as though it were broad daylight, sensing the racing hearts of the human guards, and the steady heartbeat I knew was Lara’s. One by one, the guards fell. Knives slicing through flesh in the cursed dark. Heartbeats silenced in a macabre ballet of death.
When I met Lara back in the hallway, she wore a neon headband from one of her victims. “Keep watch,” she murmured as she unpacked the backpack she’d retrieved, setting up a folding step-ladder that she scrambled up to set the explosives.
I nodded, keeping my knives drawn, listening for movement elsewhere in the building. Above us, I sensed the kind of movement I expected, preparing for the Gala. I didn’t watch Lara work. There was no need. She knew what she was doing, after all.
When she climbed down, we packed up, retrieved my backpack, and made our way to the next level down, where we repeated the process. This time, there were fewer guards to kill, at least. By the time we arrived in the catacombs to set up the net, there was no one left to kill.
Lara set up our harnesses and the explosives, while I worked to stretch the net across the columns that dug deep into the subterranean lake beneath the National Gallery. Long ago, the aquifer that fed the Erydanos River, which cut through the center of Orphium, had created this underground lake.
Why anyone had thought to build a giant museum on top of a subterranean lake was beyond me.
Humans did make the oddest decisions. It made for an unsettling project, stretching the net above the dark water.
But it would ensure that neither of us had to dive for the swords if we couldn’t manage to catch them as they came through the floor.
When the other four had dispatched with the spirit traps, we would set off the explosives.
The swords would fall through the building and we’d have them back.
There was no need to hide who had done it.
The swords were ours. The Authority could hardly punish us for taking them back, despite the fact that they would surely want to.
With our swords back, Orphium would slowly return to balance.
And when we had Sera’s our cohort would be whole again.
Nearly impossible to stop. As I climbed into my harness to wait, I wondered if there was a part of Ares that was threatened by that strength.
My fears dissolved at almost the same moment they appeared.
The memory of him cleaning me, caring for me, after our public encounter at the Rosewood played in my mind.
It hadn’t just been aftercare, or a performance.
It had been a show of fealty. A way of understanding the push and pull of power between us that I hadn’t understood until now.
We would always be in some ways at odds. Our power was different. Never equal. But we needed each other. Somehow, we finished one another. He filled in my rough edges and I loosened the rigidity with which he approached life.
I clenched my jaw as Lara climbed into her harness, almost afraid to ask her what she thought. But I’d played scared long enough. “If me and Ares got together for real, would that be okay with you?”
Lara laughed, and for once it was a joyful sound, not sardonic or suspicious in the slightest. “Why the fuck are you asking me permission, Ember?”
I shrugged. “I just—”
She interrupted me. “Do you love him?”
I stared up at the place the swords would come through the ceiling in just an hour and nodded. “I do.”
She grinned, swinging gently towards me. “There you go, ya goose.”
Her shoulder bumped mine, and I grabbed her harness, keeping her close. I kissed her cheek. “I’m so glad you’re home.”
Her arm snaked around my waist in a hug, her head on my shoulder as we swung together in the dark, suspended in space. “Glad to be back.”