The Mime Order (57 page)

This
was it, then. He was going to take my head off and be done with it.

But Jaxon didn’t turn the sword on me. Instead, he pushed up his own sleeve and set to work. White score marks had scarred the underside of his right arm. When I saw the letters that he carved there, my heart jolted into my throat.

Paige

I stared at him, frozen. His eyes shone with the arch delight I’d once admired in him.

Once that name was finished, I would be unable to use my gift without putting myself in terrible danger.

In the æther, as a spirit, I was vulnerable to Jaxon’s binding. He could trap me for as long as he liked. Clever, clever Jaxon, always thinking . . . turning my own gift against me . . .

The knife slid through his skin, creating the next letter. Forcing the last of my strength into the jump, I leaped out of my body and into his dreamscape, aiming for the heart.

Jaxon had immense defenses. Not quite as tough as a Rephaite’s or an unreadable’s, but stronger than any other I’d ever seen. They threw me out at once, as if I’d hit a wall. My body buckled and collapsed again. Fresh blood dampened my side, and my skin glinted with mingled blood and sweat. Raucous jeering boomed from every corner of the vault.

“Look at the little dreamwalker! She’s
tired
!”

“Put her to sleep, Binder!”

But there were some cries for me. I couldn’t tell whose voices they were, but I heard a distinct shout of “Go on, Dreamer!” My legs were like straw. It didn’t feel as if I could lift a single coin from the gutter, let alone dislocate my spirit again.

“Dreamer! Dreamer!”

“
Come on! Give him what for!”

Blood is not pain
.

“Get up, girl,” shouted one of the mime-queens. “Get up!”

My hand pressed to my injured side, wetting my fingers. I could survive this. I could survive Jaxon Hall.

The balls of my feet pushed against the floor. I lunged for the fallen candlestick and ran at him, ignoring the screaming burn in my shoulders. Jaxon laughed. I attacked again and again, but he blocked each blow with ease—and worse, he only used one arm to wield his cane. The other was behind his back. He was so much stronger than I was, this man that never raised a finger.
Don’t use anger
, Warden called from my memory.
Dance and fall.

But the anger was already there, overflowing from all the parts of myself I’d locked away: anger at Jaxon, at Nashira, at the Abbess and the Rag and Bone Man and everyone else who had corrupted the syndicate. The syndicate I loved, in spite of everything. I hit him an eighth time. A split second later, his fist collided with my stomach. I doubled over, gasping for air as my diaphragm went into spasm.

“Sorry about that, darling.” He turned the blade on his arm again. “You mustn’t interrupt. This is delicate work.”

Every muscle in my abdomen was reacting to the blow, but there was only a small window of opportunity to stop him. I dragged in oxygen. The tank must be empty.

The pommel of his cane struck my forearm. I didn’t scream. I didn’t have the breath left in my lungs. Weak, but still fighting, I picked up a chair and hurled it. Jaxon let out a shout of anger and fell, dropping his cane. It rolled. I made a grab for it. He clawed it back into his hand. The blade swung over my head. We were spitting and snarling like animals now; any pretense of a duel had dissolved. The cane came flying at me again, striking my elbow. Crackling agony burst from the point of impact, sending prickles to my fingertips.

I
was running out of time. Gathering my strength, I shucked my battered flesh and shot through the æther, right into his dreamscape. My dream-form’s feet fell on frost and grass. Jaxon’s midnight zone.

In meatspace, the window of opportunity slammed shut. Outside his dreamscape, the æther trembled. I launched myself back out and into my body.

And couldn’t breathe.

My fingers went straight to my neck. A creak of sound escaped me, edged with panic. This had only happened to me two or three times before. Nick had called it
laryngospasm
, a sudden constriction in the larynx when I dislocated. It always resolved itself within half a minute, but I was already starving for oxygen after the jump. Eyes watering, I looked up at Jaxon.

Too late.

The name was carved.

The oxygen tank had run too low to help. While I drowned without water, Jaxon smiled down at me. Blood seeped from his cut eyebrow. He added a little curl to the “y” at the end of my surname, just for good measure, but it was done. It had been finished while I was still in spirit form. His influence was already gripping my limbs, keeping my knees locked and my head held stiffly upright. Sweat dripped into my eyes. He held out his arm for all to see, and the letters glistened in the candlelight.

Paige Eva Mahoney

All I heard was my own thin breaths, the air whistling through a tiny space between my vocal cords.

“Stand, Paige,” he said.

I stood.

“Come to me.”

I went to him.

The
mime-lords and mime-queens were chuckling. This was a first. No binder had ever snared a living person’s spirit. The dream-walker was a sleepwalker now, defeated by her own pride, by someone two orders lower than she was. Jaxon took my arm and turned me to face the audience. I was limp and pliant. A puppet.

“There, now. I believe this counts as unconsciousness, mistress of ceremonies.” He curled his fingers into my hair. “What do you say, my boundling?”

I touched my finger to his arm, letting my lips part a little, as if I were mindlessly fascinated.

“Yes, my lovely, that’s
your
name.”

Howls of laughter.

I didn’t say a word. All I did was jump, thanking every star that my father had changed my birth name.

His defenses were weakened by vanity and premature thoughts of triumph. They snapped up just an instant too late.

Inside his dreamscape, I stumbled over snarls of weeds and twisted tree roots, whipping branches out of my way. Each branch dripped bloodred leaves. As I sprinted, I caught glimpses of the lichen-covered slabs that surrounded me. They radiated out from the center, right into the depths of his hadal zone, embossed with numbers that blurred as I passed them. Jaxon’s dreamscape was an enormous graveyard. Nunhead Cemetery, perhaps, where he’d mastered his gift for the very first time.

I didn’t stop. He could correct my middle name, if he didn’t mind making a mess of his arm. It wasn’t too tough to guess its Irish counterpart. But as I sprinted towards the very heart of his dream-scape, I strained my dream-eyes to see the names on the graves, but there were none.

Specters were scuttling from his hadal zone, tall and translucent, creatures made from memory. Their fingers reached for me.

“Back,” I shouted.

My
voice echoed endlessly through Jaxon’s mind. One of them gripped my dream-form in its arms, and for the first time in my life, I looked into a specter’s eyes. Two yawning pits gaped back at me, full to the brim with fire.

In another person’s dreamscape, they determined what my dream-form looked like—but only if they were focused. Just as I had with Nashira, I imagined myself growing larger, too large for the specter to hold. Its arms fell apart, and I tumbled free. My dream-form fell into his twilight zone, where the grass was thick and living and the smell of lilies hung on the air. The specters gave chase, but I was faster. I jumped over another grave and ran toward the light.

At the center of Jaxon’s sunlight zone was a statue. Carved into the shape of an angel, it was slumped over a burial vault as if in grief. As soon as I was close enough, one of its hands lifted the lid of the tomb. Jaxon’s dream-form was inside it. Its eyes opened, and it climbed out.

“There you are,” he said. “Do you like my angel, honeybee?”

He put his hands behind his back. The dream-form’s face wasn’t quite Jaxon’s; it was softer, older, almost plain. Cold black eyes stared at me with odium. The curling hair that grew from his scalp was like beaten copper, and strands of silver fingered out from his parting.

“You look different,” I said.

“So do you. But you’ll never know what
my
Paige looks like.” He looked up. “Or will you?”

An X-shaped shadow hovered over my head. When I tried to move my wrists, I realized they were bound, as were my ankles.

“Poor puppet,” he said. “You have no idea of anything, do you?”

“Neither do you.” I pulled my wrists downward, and the strings evaporated. “Good thing I never told you my name, or that trick might have worked.”

A smile touched his lips. “I see that you can change the natural
state
of your dream-form within my dreamscape. Your talents continue to impress.”

I paced around him. His dream-form stood with its hands behind its back. Black eyes watched me.

“What are you going to do now? Make me dance around the ring? Make me cry and beg and whimper, just to show how powerful you are? Or perhaps you mean to force my spirit out, though I doubt you have the strength to do that now.”

“I’m not going to kill you, Jaxon,” I said.

“It would make a grand denouement. What a show it would be,” he said. “Prove them right. Prove you’re a destroyer, darling.”

“I’m not your darling, or your lovely, or your honeybee. But I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to take your crown.”

That was when I ran.

He was slow. The specters couldn’t breach his sunlit zone, and his injuries had weakened his focus on his dream-form. I threw myself into the burial vault, and the lid slammed down on top of me.

My vision was sucked into Jaxon’s sighted eyes. Colors flared up everywhere, each like an electric storm. Nerve systems in the æther, outstretched for any spiritual activity. The faces of the audience blurred and spun. My vision—Jaxon’s vision—slid in and out of focus. Everything felt oddly light, as if I hadn’t quite possessed him. Like his body was too loose. Like I wasn’t quite filling it.

Then I saw why. My body was still standing, straight-backed. A thin line of blood had seeped from my nose, and my eyes looked vacant, but I was upright. The silver cord was holding me in both dreamscapes.

I could still do this.

Jaxon’s body fell to its knees. I reached out a hand and saw a white silk glove. “In the name of the æther,” I started in his voice, and this time I didn’t slur.

Wait.
His dream-form’s voice was a whisper in my ear.
Stop.

“—
I, the White Binder, mime-lord of I Cohort, Section 4—”

Stop. No, no, get out, GET OUT!

“—yield—”

STOP IT! SHUT MY MOUTH!
Jaxon’s suppressed spirit was fighting me, kicking and screaming, banging on the lid of the burial vault. His body’s hand slapped against the floor.
Damn you to hell! I fed you! I clothed you! I took you in! You would be dead if not for me. You would be nothing. Do you hear me, Paige Mahoney? YOU WILL BE THEIRS IF YOU ARE NOT MINE—

“—to my mollisher,” I finished, gasping the last words, “the Pale Dreamer.”

Rigid fingers seized my consciousness. My vision flickered back to Jaxon’s dreamscape, where the statue of the angel had me in its grasp. Jaxon’s dream-form was on its knees, howling with rage. With a crunch of ancient stone, it pitched me into the darkness. I went hurtling into the æther and back into my own flesh, just in time to hear Jaxon regain control. I raised my arms, but the cane was blocked by another pair of hands. Eliza was standing over me, pushing Jaxon back, but his hands clawed at my throat.

“Stop it, Jaxon, stop!”

“The scrimmage is over.” Minty Wolfson stepped into the ring. “Unhand her, White Binder!”

His hands were wrenched away. My knees folded beneath my weight. A pair of arms came around my waist, lifting me back to my feet. Nick. I gripped his forearm with white knuckles, heaving.

“You did it,” he whispered in my ear. “You did it, Paige.”

It took six people to restrain Jaxon. His nostrils were flared, his eyes wide with rage, and blood dripped from his chin. The I-4 tables were divided. Some were booing, but they were drowned out by clapping hands and stamping feet and roars of “Black Moth! BLACK MOTH!”

But the undercurrent of murmuring still set my nerves on edge. I let Nick and Danica pull my arms around their necks and help me
to
the other side of the ring. The other two had gone to hold Jaxon back. Eliza joined us at the edge and clamped a padded dressing over my side.

My ears rang. I couldn’t think straight. It seemed impossible that I’d just defeated Jaxon Hall.

“Order,” Minty called. “Order!”

She clapped her hands, but it took a long time for the audience to settle down. Jaxon stood with Nadine, who was offering him a handkerchief for his bloody nose, and Zeke. He stayed close to his sister, but his throat bobbed as he looked at Nick, who said nothing as he pressed a pot of fibrin gel into my hand. I daubed a generous amount on to my ribcage, but my front was already soaked with blood. They’d be calling me the Bloody Queen by sunrise at this rate.

Eliza came back with adrenaline. I caught Nadine’s eye across the room. She didn’t smile, but she gripped Jaxon’s shoulder to steady him.

“Bring forth the crown,” Minty commanded, to deafening cheers. “We have a winner!”

“Wait.” The Abbess strode through the ash and blood. “What is the meaning of this?”

“The White Binder has yielded to his mollisher.”

“Mime-lords do not yield to their mollishers.”

“This is a first, then.”

“It is clear,” the Abbess said, with a stare at me, “that the great mime-lord of I-4 did not yield out of choice. The girl is a cheat.”

“She is a dreamwalker. The scrimmage allows for
unlimited
use of an individual’s clairvoyance. If the æther has gifted the Pale Dreamer with any ability, then it was, and is, her right to use it.”

“And what of her blatant treachery? What of her contempt for the love and authority of her mime-lord?”

“There is a
lex non scripta
regarding a mollisher’s loyalty, but no
written
laws about the nature of combat. You’d know that if you’d read a single book about this syndicate and its history. And if we cared about morals, I doubt you’d be a mime-queen, Abbess.”