“Majesty,” the guard murmured, throwing a dark glance in Morgan’s direction. He stepped near and hesitated a few respectful feet away. “Are you unwell?”
“Fine,” Jenna said, cross, waving him away. “I’m perfectly fine. It wasn’t her,” she added, knowing they suspected Morgan of some nefarious Suggestion, akin to the little scenario with the viscount yesterday. The Queen pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers and muttered, “Always this
hovering
. It’s enough to drive you mad.”
“Yes,” Morgan said, very softly. “It is.”
The guard retreated to his place with the other men, and Jenna opened her eyes and leveled her with a look so clear and compassionate it made her want to shrink away in shame, so undeserving was she of the kindness there. But she couldn’t shrink away; all she could do was close her eyes to avoid it.
“I’m so sorry,” Morgan whispered. Her face grew hot; tears threatened behind her closed eyes.
“I’m so sorry for what they did to you—that I’m responsible—for
that
.”
With a rustle of fabric, Jenna leaned forward in her chair. A gentle hand touched Morgan’s knee. “I know you are. I know you didn’t mean...I know that wasn’t what you wanted.” Almost as an afterthought she added, “I can See it, you know.”
Morgan opened her eyes, looked into the pale, somber oval of Jenna’s face, and endured a moment of self-loathing so gut-ripping it felt like she’d swallowed a grenade. “Why are you doing this for me? Why not just let them kill me?”
She didn’t think it possible, but Jenna’s face went a shade paler. She removed her hand from Morgan’s knee and leaned slowly back, settling into her chair with the barest of melancholy sighs. It was a sound with a lifetime of pathos behind it. Her gaze drifted over Morgan for a silent moment before she began, low and halting, to speak.
“I made a promise to you once. Not that long ago. Do you remember?”
Yes
, she wanted to say.
I remember. Of course I remember. My freedom for my silence.
But she didn’t say that. There were others here—men, guards, unquestioning loyalists—who would never understand how the seed of friendship can take root and flourish in the dark soil of a shared secret.
“But that was before...” she began in protest, then trailed off, unwilling to even speak it aloud.
Jenna’s lips quirked, and for some bizarre reason, Morgan thought she might be hiding a smile.
“My father used to tell me, ‘A promise made is a promise kept.’ He never went back on his word and neither will I. All I’m offering is a chance, Morgan. A chance for us to gain the upper hand and for you to make things right. If it pans out, you’ll be pardoned. You can come back to Sommerley or move to one of the other colonies and start a new life for yourself. Realistically, it’s not much of a chance—Rome is a very large city. I didn’t see anything specific from the Expurgari who tortured me”—she said it,
tortured
, unflinchingly, and Morgan’s face again—“that would lead us to their headquarters there. No address, no outstanding landmarks, not even a general idea of neighborhood.
Only that hideous room full of...”
Heads
, the Queen didn’t say. Heads preserved in formaldehyde, row after row of them in glass jars lining an entire wall in a large, windowless room of dark stone and antique furnishings and colorful, crested flags hung near the ceiling. Heads of their kin, murdered
Ikati
, a few from only months back and desiccated, shrunken others from God only knows how many long centuries ago.
It was the enemies’ trophy room. And Morgan’s targeted, nearly impossible-to-find destination.
Jenna cleared her throat and lowered her gaze to her hands resting on her lap. “You only have two weeks. Half a month to find a needle in a haystack isn’t really that much of a chance, but it’s all I can do. It’s a...compromise. Find them and all’s well that ends well. If, however, you don’t find them in time...” She trailed off just as Morgan had done moments before, not needing to articulate the obvious.
If she didn’t find them in time, she would die.
Jenna must have seen how she blanched, because she leaned forward suddenly, grasped both of Morgan’s hands between her own, and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “Fate will have its way with all of us, Morgan. I can’t predict how this will end because that is out of my hands, but I
can
give you a chance for redemption.
Everyone
deserves at least that. The rest is up to you. Find the Expurgari and let the tribe get their vengeance somewhere else.”
Mute, Morgan gazed at her while the hovering guards began to mutter and rustle and move forward, alarmed at this new contact. Two of them swooped in and pulled Morgan roughly back by the shoulders, dragging her chair back several feet.
Jenna shot to her feet. “That’s not necessary,” she hissed as one of the guards wrenched Morgan’s hands behind her back and twisted a pair of biting cold handcuffs around her wrists. She clenched her teeth against the sudden pain and—worse—humiliation of being bound. The guards hauled her to her feet, shoving aside the chair with a kick.
“Lord McLaughlin’s orders, Your Highness,” the larger one answered, surly, breathing his malty breath down Morgan’s neck. “No contact except for the transfer—”
“Release her this instant or
I’ll have your head
,” Jenna shot back, bristling, and the guard stiffened in what should have been terror but was more probably outrage. She could quite literally have his head, quite easily, but no one in this patriarchal society as yet was used to a woman wielding that much power. Especially since Jenna hadn’t flexed those particular muscles since becoming Queen. Morgan knew it would only take one bloody instance to have them all cowed and toeing the line, but she didn’t want to be the cause of any more bloodshed.
“It’s all right,” she said to Jenna between her clenched teeth. “You’ve done enough. Please, you’ve done enough.” She flicked her gaze to the smaller guard, the worried-looking one with soft eyes and a turned-down mouth. “We’re done. I’m ready.”
He nodded and curled a gloved hand around her upper arm, careful to lean as far away as possible while still holding on to her.
“Morgan.” Jenna stepped forward with an outstretched hand, but the two guards had already begun to lead her away, tripping backward in the same heels and gossamer gown from the day before, rumpled now because she’d slept in it. The other guards came up to surround her in a booted knot as they made their way toward the door with their prisoner.
“I’ll be back,” Morgan said over their shoulders, her voice not quite even, not quite strong. She watched the lone figure of Jenna recede among the clustered palms and rioting birdcages, pale hair and skin stark as snow against the gray, rainy day. “I’ll make it right. I
promise
,” she added, just as they reached the door.
“Good luck,” Jenna called. But in the heavy, doleful undertone of her soft voice, Morgan heard the farewell and knew what
good luck
really meant.
It meant
good-bye
.
The guard with the malty breath—Matthew was his name—was the one who knocked on the carved oak door of the East Library. Somehow he fancied himself in charge, though Morgan and all the other guards knew full well he was unranked and the least Gifted of the group. His only advantage was a clumsy kind of strength, which he used judiciously to drag her through the crypt-quiet shadowed halls of the manor, yanking her along by her elbow when she slowed or stumbled on a bump in a thick-pile rug.
She’d known Matthew all her life, of course, just as she’d known everyone in the tribe since the day she was born. She’d been there the long-ago day his mother had dropped his newborn sister—tiny, puling, and deformed—into the yawning black mouth of the Drowning Well, then turned and walked away without even shedding a tear. Waist high and frightened among the somber, gathered adults, Morgan had clutched her father’s hand and felt terrified and proud there was nothing wrong with her, no deformity or weakness that would compel the tribe to shun her, compel her own mother to make a trip to this unholy place or risk death for all her other children and herself.
But her mother was dead by then. And Morgan had no weakness.
Well, no weakness they could see.
She recalled another memory of Matthew, leering at her with two sloe-eyed friends from the leafy shadows of a twelve-hundred-year-old yew on the eve of the Equinox Festival one winter when the snow was ankle high. She’d been fifteen then, at the brink of her first Shift, only just beginning to notice she was different from the other girls of the tribe, uninterested in boys and marriage and whispered, giggling talk of what happened after the Matchmaker and the Keeper paired you off in a proper Blood match and you were allowed to be alone together.
Wandering aimlessly off on her own as she almost always did, she found herself far away from the bonfire and the dancing in the town square and amid the dark cathedral of trees and crystalline silence of the woods. They came up on her silently as she was inspecting the bristled perfection of a pinecone hanging from a snow-dusted bough and knocked her to the ground with a shove from behind.
She didn’t have a chance to run or even get on her feet before they were on her, grabbing at her clothes, laughing and growling and egging one another on like the young savages they were.
She had a weapon, though. A sharp, double-edged letter opener, stolen from her father’s desk.
She was different but she wasn’t stupid. She’d noticed how they watched her.
After that they left her alone, Matthew and his two friends, one of whom had to wear an eye patch for the rest of his life to hide the gaping hole in his skull.
She stood now behind him, surrounded by the phalanx of guards, staring at the back of his head and wishing she had the unheard-of but very convenient-seeming Gift of Enemy Skull Exploding.
“Come,” barked Leander from behind the closed door. Matthew pushed it open. Not satisfied to merely enter the room with her trailing behind, he turned, grasped her by the arm, dragged her over the threshold, then released her abruptly, as if he’d been burned by touching her.
So of course she fell. Of course she did.
Caught on one of the heels of her shoes, the hem of her dress tangled beneath her feet. The delicate fabric gave way with a soft ripping noise, and she pitched forward, unable to throw her arms out for balance because they were cuffed tight behind her back. She fell to her knees on the cold marble floor with a bone-crunching jolt that startled a pained gasp from her lips, but just before she fell flat on her face, something stopped her.
A pair of hands. Strong and warm at her shoulders.
She was caught and steadied, pushed gently back to her knees, where she rocked, finding her balance. Then she lifted her head and looked up—
—into a pair of eyes, brilliant amber rimmed in kohl, that stared out from a sun-darkened face of such cold, savage beauty it sent a thrill of pure fear humming along every nerve. Adrenaline lashed through her body, primitive and chemical, and abruptly awoke the animal inside that bristled and hissed and screamed
danger!
at the top of its lungs.
He was huge—tall and thickly muscled, far larger than any of her lithe, sinewy kin—and had shoulders so wide she crouched in a pool of thrown shadows at his feet. His black hair, tipped on his wide forehead to a widow’s peak, was cropped close to his head. His clothes were black as well, simple and form-fitting, made for ease of movement. On his back was a pair of crossed swords, sheathed in leather scabbards. On his belt and boots were more weapons, gleaming wicked in the light.
But all this paled in comparison to the more imminent threat of his eerie, amber eyes.
They fixed on hers, unblinking, unfeeling, and she realized with another jolt that this man staring back at her in absolute stillness with that beautiful face and those scorching, firelit eyes wasn’t anything she’d ever seen before. He was alive, his
body
was alive, but behind that mask of perfection, there wasn’t a shred of humanity or mercy or kindness or feeling. There was nothing. He was dead.
Soul dead.
Next to the Furiant, he was the most terrifying thing she’d ever seen.
“Xander,” said a voice from her right. Leander’s, she supposed, aware on a molecular level of her thundering heart, her frozen muscles, the stranger’s gaze, which had dropped to the pulse beating wildly in the hollow of her neck. His nostrils flared with an inhalation, and for one wild, horrified moment, she thought he might lean down and tear out her throat with his teeth.
But he didn’t. He only lifted that piercing gaze back to hers and, in a motion of fluid, predatory grace, drew her to her feet. He released her and stepped back, never blinking, his attention never wavering, those piercing dead eyes never leaving her face.
“Xander,” Leander said again. “This is Morgan. Your flight for Rome leaves at one o’clock.”
5
Morgan was fairly sure the assassin was plotting the details of her death at that very moment, though he wasn’t paying her the slightest bit of attention and hadn’t spoken a single word to her the entire flight.
She chanced another glance at him from beneath her lashes. He sat still as death in a seat opposite hers at the front of the luxurious cabin, just as he’d been for the last two and a half hours, large hands spread over his muscled thighs, head tilted back against the seat, eyes closed. His chest rose and fell in a calm, steady rhythm, but she knew he wasn’t sleeping; his forefinger tapped a silent beat against his leg, and every once in a while a muscle in his sharp jaw would flex. She had the impression he was barely restraining himself from leaping from his seat.
Plotting her death. Definitely.
When Leander had spoken his name she’d known instantly who he was. What he
did
. Infamous throughout all four colonies of
Ikati
, Alexander Luna was called The Shadow or The Hammer or, in his native Portuguese,
Ira de Deus
, The Wrath of God. He was a killer, a very good one, sent on special assignments all over the world by the Alphas to track deserters or eliminate threats.