Chapter Eighteen #2
Anna nods, understanding. Coney Island isn’t the closest to the water, but it is the closest public beach.
In the middle of the humid New York summer, its waters are sure to be full of people trying to beat the heat.
She thinks of how carefully he searched for a secluded stretch of beach back in Mumbai, the minutes she waited before the tide shifted, and frowns. “How will we avoid being seen?”
Khiran cringes, guilt flashing across his features. “We don’t.”
Her heart stutters over the implication. “It will cause a panic.”
“Let it.” The words are as tight and unforgiving as the line of his jaw. “If that is the cost of saving you, I will pay it a thousand times over.”
“Khiran—”
“We have done enough for this world. Sacrificed enough,” he snaps, his hand flexing against hers. “Let it save us for a change.”
It’s a terrible idea. The sea parting is bound to cause chaos of biblical proportions, but Anna swallows the weak protest sticking in her throat.
She’s not sure she believes the world owes them this—not convinced that kind of debt is something that is reimbursed so much as paid forward—but she loves him too much to deny them this chance.
She holds his gaze, offering the smallest of nods.
The world isn’t ready for proof of the divine, but she’s not ready to lose him.
Khiran hails another cab, pulling bills from his trouser pocket. “The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel is closer than the bridge,” he murmurs, subtly glancing up. “Marcia will likely take the high ground, especially since Dante is with her to stop the clock. It will offer us some coverage as well.”
As the taxi pulls up to the curb, Anna frowns at the sight of the American currency in his hand.
She suspects it must have come from the same place as their fresh clothing—magic spun into existence those split seconds between one continent and the next.
She’s relieved he had the foresight, because she certainly hadn’t.
They climb into the cab, Khiran handing the driver a generous wad of cash to take them to Coney Island and to keep the change.
Anna had heard about the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when it was built back in the fifties; the papers had celebrated it as a feat of American engineering.
The longest underwater tunnel. It’s disconcerting, driving down into the earth and under the bay.
Pale tiles line the walls and ceilings, reflecting the light cast by the twin rows of bulbs lining either side of the tunnel.
Anna grips the fabric of her skirt, trying not to think of the weight of the water above them.
The road levels out, a sign that they are fully beneath the bay.
Anna swallows, trying to find comfort in the fact that the tunnel is only a little over a mile long.
Then the taxi slows to a stop, the sound of horns echoing off the tiled walls as the traffic creeps to a standstill, and her pulse jumps.
She looks to Khiran, the tunnel lights casting shadows over his face. He looks as worried as she is.
The driver curses, voice raspy and his salt and pepper brows furrowed in irritation as he fiddles with his radio. “Oy, anyone got eyes on what the holdup is in the Battery Tunnel?”
Static fills the cab as they wait for an answer.
After a few seconds, a new voice filters through the speakers.
“Strap yourself in for a wait. There’s a five car pile up blocking the southbound.
” Another curse, this one longer and in Italian.
Anna chooses not to embarrass him by disclosing that she understands every filthy word.
Khiran opens the car door.
“Hey! Hey, you can’t do that!” their driver shouts, twisting in his seat. Khiran doesn’t spare him a glance, but Anna murmurs a soft apology as she slides across the leather seat and takes Khiran’s offered hand. He slams the car door behind her.
The sound echoes, sharp in the sudden silence.
Anna’s heart stills.
She ducks her head, looking through the passenger window, hoping to find movement. The cabbie driver stares past her, unblinking and lips pulled back in frustration beneath a thick mustache. She faces Khiran, his name a breath on her lips.
He isn’t looking at her, though. His eyes dart between the cars, searching for something Anna doesn’t have a name for. A sound, a rhythmic clicking, echoing off the tiled walls.
It sounds like footsteps.
There is no warning. One moment he’s waiting, the next they’re fleeing. Urging her, with his fingers on her pulse, to run.
Run and don’t look back.
A laugh, cutting and cruel as a nightmare, surrounds them like a flood. Filling her ears and drowning her hopes. She watches Khiran reach into his pocket, drawing the divine blade from its sheath. His lips pull into a sneered grimace, eyes electric and ready to draw blood as he turns—
And stops.
Snared in the web cast by the Timekeeper’s hand.
Anna falters, her hands ghosting over his arms, his chest, as if she could coax movement from him.
“No—no no no!” Her voice cracks, harsh in the silence despite how quietly she frets.
There’s a trembling against her palms, it takes her a moment to realize it’s not just the shaking of her hands but him.
Frozen as he is, he’s still fighting the bonds keeping him still.
A different set of footsteps, heavy and flat compared to the clicking of Marcia’s booted heels, sounds behind her.
Anna stills, pulse beating in her ears like an executioner’s drum.
A looming presence behind her, a deep voice accented with the graveled edge of time itself.
“So,” he drawls, his fingers trail over the ends of her hair escaping her scarf.
“You’re the one causing all this trouble. ”
Slowly, Anna’s hand slips down Khiran’s arm, carefully unfolding his fingers from the blade’s handle and taking it into her own. She wills her hand to stop trembling as his words breathe across the shell of her ear. “It will be fun, watching Marcia break you.”
The handle of the blade bites into the palm of her right hand, scar tissue brushing against the iron that put it there. Her eyes lift to Khiran’s frozen expression.
She isn’t ready to lose him.
Anna turns, barely registering the surprise flitting across Dante’s chiseled features, before she plunges the blade into the soft tissue of his muscular throat—feels the snap of bone as the tip drives into his spinal cord.
Blood coats her hand. Warm and wet. Anna can’t bring herself to look away from the face that stares down at her.
His thick, dark hair is past his shoulders, his beard a shadow around the full lips parted around a final breath.
She pulls the blade from his flesh, more instinct than thought.
He buckles, dropping to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.
All joints and limbs, splayed over the road and blood pooling beneath him.
Dead.
He’s dead.
She killed him.
Noise returns. Car horns and shouts swelling like a tide, but Anna already feels like she’s been swept under.
The blade slips from her fingers, the iron clang against the brick almost lost amidst the noise.
More shouting. She thinks she might recognize the echo of her name in the chaos.
A familiar arm wraps around her waist. The feeling of the universe folding—
A collision, arms slipping away from her and air whistling past her ears.
She’s flung from Khiran’s arms, body landing with bruising force.
Her fingers curl against the soil, dry grasses slick against her bloody palm.
They’re in a field, snow-capped mountains dotted with evergreens on the skyline and the air thin.
The sky is blue and cloudless. Blindingly bright compared to the dimly lit tunnel they came from.
It takes too long for her eyes to adjust. Too long to register the feeling of a body behind her, an unfamiliar arm caging her in, and a blade at her throat.
She’s caught—a fly in the web, unable to escape and waiting for death to descend.
Anna’s eyes find Khiran’s, the fear clamoring in her chest sharpening into regret.
He’s on the ground, paused mid crawl, as his terror rimmed eyes flit between her face and the knife at her throat.
“Don’t,” he says, the words strangled, “Marcia, please—”
“Reduced to begging now, are we, Liesmith?” Marcia mocks, pressing the blade closer and nicking Anna’s skin. She winces, feeling a bead of blood run down her neck. Marcia’s porcelain cheek brushes hers with enough friction to feel like a threat, her voice a venomous purr. “Try harder.”
“Take me.” Khiran pleads, his hand splayed over his heart. “That’s what you really want—what you’ve always wanted, right? She is nothing to you.”
A pause, and then Marcia laughs. The sound of it cutting through the mountain air. “You would have known better once.” The cruel curve of her mouth presses against Anna’s cheek as she gives a taunting hum. “Do you always make him so stupid, I wonder?”
“Please—”
“Dante is dead,” she croons. “His mistake, really. He was a fool to think your kitten didn’t have claws.
” There’s no grief in the words. No regret.
There’s a trilling note to her voice, like they’ve given her an unexpected gift wrapped in blood and sacrifice.
Her blade traces over Anna’s pulse, so close Anna need only swallow for it to cut.
The sadistic grin pressed against her skin feels just as sharp.
“Not that it matters. The First is going to be furious with both of you.”
Khiran could still run, Anna thinks. The only thing tying him here is her. He would get so much farther, move so much quicker, without her weighing him down. She wants to scream the word, but it catches in her throat.
She knows his heart the way she knows her own.
There is nothing she can say, nothing she can do, to convince him to save himself.
They had promised each other, in her garden under the summer sun, that they would face what came together.
Had the knife been pressed to his throat, had the opportunity to save herself been placed on her, she would do no different.
They are too tangled, too crucial to each other’s happiness, to walk away now.
Still, her eyes beg him. A silent, heart wrenching plea her parted lips can’t speak.
Run.
Even though she knows he won’t.
Run.
Because she has to try, anyway.
In his answering stare, she sees his answer reflected back to her.
I won’t. I can’t. And Anna feels her heart crack, her lungs burning around a sob she can’t shed.
She can’t let him see how much she hurts, can’t let him carry the weight of her heartbreak when he’s being crushed by his own.
Tears slip down her cheeks before she can stop them.
“Oh, she is a pretty crier, isn’t she?” Marcia croons, tongue dragging over Anna’s tear stained skin. “How delicious.” She shifts, the arm caging Anna in, extending out with a closed fist. “What will it be, Liesmith? Do you yield, or will you give me the pleasure of breaking you?”
There are apologies in his eyes when he looks at her. Anna doesn’t believe she deserves them. Softly, his answer leaves his lips with the weight of all their shattered hopes. “I yield.”
Marcia opens her palm, golden threads spinning from her fingertips like silk—coiling and twisting around his neck, his wrists, until they’ve braided into a rope as thick and heavy as chains.
When her fist closes, the rope tightens, binding his hands together and drawing them to the noose around his throat with enough force that Anna can hear the aching thump his fists make against his chest.
“Would you like to know something funny, girl?” Marcia’s mouth twists into a razor wire smile, her free hand sliding down Anna’s right arm before grabbing her hand with a bruising grip.
She forces it up until the scarred tissue of her missing finger fills her vision.
“I may need to touch you for my magic to learn your signature, but it doesn’t require your body parts to be attached.
You threw that finger of yours out to throw me off the scent, but all you did was give me another one to track. Like a bloody, fleshy breadcrumb.”
She drops the blade from her neck, spinning Anna around to face her, Marcia’s bruising grip goes from her hand to her face—cold fingers digging into her jaw.
She towers over her, pale blue eyes as hard and honed as ice as she holds up her hand, gold braided magic connecting her to Khiran’s bindings.
She pulls, and Khiran staggers forward, landing amongst the weeds with a grunt.
“I want you to remember that while you watch him suffer. Remember that his death and all the pain that leads up to it is entirely your fault.”