33 Brothers #2
And this is the cost. She looked away. With beshaz, she could tear tendons and capillaries, but this drug would have her killing with a touch. She’d be as powerful as Kadra. Her fingers clutched her elbows, suddenly unwilling to inject the liquid into herself. I’d never want to stop.
She peered down the hallway as Noceo bundled more vials and needles into a satchel. Dalvia was more skilled than she had ever expected, to have concocted something of this magnitude. At least Komis’s patients were in good hands—she paused in sudden confusion.
“Where are all the plague infectees?” She stuck her head back into the room.
Noceo’s brow wrinkled. “I told you. I had no part in that.”
“But Dalvia’s been treating the victims.” Sarai strode down the hallway, opening the rest of the doors on either side.
They parted easily, revealing empty pallets, smothered in a heavy layer of dust. “Praetor Ythras said so. Many were carted here after that godsdamned lightning strike of yours too. I saw them leave.” She reached the end of the hallway, an insidious fear clawing at her gut. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know.” Noceo looked hounded when everyone’s eyes flew to him. “I never took an interest in what she did.”
What if…She caught Kadra’s cavernous eyes, gooseflesh pebbling her skin. His gaze altered and grew sharp. We never considered her as a possibility.
His jaw tautened. “Spread out and search the hospital for them.” He pinned Noceo with a knife-sharp stare. “Come with me.”
Méherre hastily took the cellars, while Sarai and Anek prowled the upper floors.
“It’s been over a month.” They raked a sweaty, reddish curl behind their ears as they ran, slamming doors without a care. “What if she healed them all and sent them home?”
“These beds haven’t been used for months.” Sarai grimly ran two fingers through the dust atop a mattress. “There isn’t so much as a bloodstain on the tiles either.”
Anek exhaled through their teeth. “We could be jumping to conclusions too quickly. She’s a weak sort.
All those gods I mentioned, Dorcone, Hwiliath, and Faragathe, are powerful and dangerous.
As difficult to Summon as the Elsar and twice as cruel because they have no obligation to listen to mortals.
You were mad with grief, but it’s impossible for a lower-Tier magus to pull that off in cold blood. ”
Sarai’s gut clenched, fear raking it with vicious swipes. “I don’t think it was coldblooded. Gods! I was so focused on Noceo! I didn’t think—” She stiffened at a scream from below.
Méherre. She moved without thought, Anek racing downstairs with her. Kadra and Noceo joined them from the uppermost floor. They congregated in the now-empty atrium. The Bridger was gone.
“There’s no one upstairs,” Noceo panted.
“Then, they’re down there.” Anek jerked a thumb toward the open door to the cellars where Méherre’s scream had come from. “I’m going.” They darted in before anyone could stop them.
Sarai followed them down a narrow flight of stairs, gripping Kadra’s hand as a hallway loomed at the bottom. “Are you thinking the same thing?”
“Yes.” His austere features had never looked more forbidding.
Shit. Kadra had shades of homicidal looks.
Bored but murderous. Amused but murderous.
Disgusted and murderous. A predator playing with its food, aloof and uncaring.
But she knew this look, had once provoked it herself months ago when he had discovered her wearing an illusion rune in his fiercely guarded tower.
It was the face of a man who’d learned that someone had slipped past his guard and would do anything to avenge it.
It was all there. Dalvia’s apathy, her hatred that Noceo had forcibly bound her to him, while still caring for the man.
“Power like yours doesn’t have freedom. And freedom like mine, didn’t have power,” she had said when they’d had dinner.
I spent so much time battling Noceo that I didn’t see it.
“You can’t really believe that she’d be behind this,” the same asshole said incredulously. “Drenevan, we grew up with her. She’s only ever tried to please—”
“You don’t understand what that does to someone,” Sarai bit out. Ahead, Anek’s footsteps had halted as they entered the hallway. “Breaking yourself over and over again for others because you’ve no other choice. All you’re left with are pieces.”
Sometimes, people rearrange them in the wrong way.
She hit the landing right as the door to the cellars slammed shut behind them. Turning in surprise, she jumped at Anek’s terrified gasp. They stood in front of her, blocking her view as they backed away slowly.
“I think I found her patients,” they whispered.
All breath left Noceo in a strained moan.
Sarai peered past Anek and froze at the endless line of barred cells lacing both sides of the hallway.
Crimson, gleaming wings buzzed inside the cages, tunneling into groaning human flesh, yellowish sacs overblown with venom.
The people inside twitched, some bearing the waxy bloat of the dead, others long decomposed. Few alive.
Bile rose in Sarai’s throat. She cast a terrified look at the now-shut door through which they’d come. She had little doubt that it was locked. Likely by someone loyal to Dalvia.
Wrath and Ruin. We’re trapped.