Chase the Dark (10 page)

Knuckles gave Piper a dismissive sneer and focused on Ash. “So,” he rumbled like that one word said everything.

Mohawk licked his lips. “Figured you’d show up here, dragon-boy. Come to finish the shmuck off? You shoulda killed him right the first time.”

“What are you doing in that room?” Piper demanded.

They ignored her. “You’ve blown it,” Mohawk went on in his gravelly voice. “Were you actually stupid enough to steal it and get caught? Damn, that’s amateur. Tempted, were you?” He shook his head in mock sadness. “The boss ain’t happy, dragon-boy. He wants it. And he especially didn’t want the damn prefect-patrol involved. You’ve screwed things up royally.”

“You’re on our hit list now, buddy,” Knuckles added with another leer.

“Maybe if you give it to us,
we
won’t kill you,” Mohawk said. “But unlikely. Either way, you’re dead.”

Piper swallowed hard. As she’d known would happen, rumors had leaked into the daemon community that they had the Sahar. Ash was well known; of course would-be thieves of the Stone would track him down first.

“I didn’t steal it.” Ash raised his eyebrows. “Do I look like I possess infinite power?”

“That don’t mean a thing,” Knuckles said. “We hear it’s hard to use. Still figuring it out, ain’t ya?”

“Besides,” Mohawk said, rolling his shoulders to loosen the muscles, “even if you didn’t steal it, everyone still thinks you did. Just as bad, wouldn’t you say? You fucked up. Boss doesn’t tolerate anyone who fucks up his business. You know that.”

Piper looked back and forth between Ash and Mohawk. The conversation wasn’t quite making sense anymore. Had she missed something?

“But I think you did steal it. Couldn’t resist a bit more power, could you? Hand it over now and I’ll kill you quick and clean—better than what the rest of the boss’s beasts have planned for you.”

Ash exhaled. He angled closer to Piper and brought his mouth to her ear. “I’ll take care of these two,” he whispered. “You get in there and talk to your uncle. I’ll meet you outside.”

“Can you handle them?” she whispered back, eyeing the two goons. They oozed cruelty, but more than that, the air around them was already crackling with magic. They weren’t minor daemons.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, sounding grouchy.

“What will it be, dragon-boy?”

Ash turned to the goons, looked at them for a long moment—and then walked away.

“If you give us the—hey!” Mohawk yelled. “I’m talking here!”

Ash kept on walking. Both goons started after him with angry snarls, striding right past Piper as though she didn’t exist. She stared after them. Wasn’t it customary to
taunt
your enemies to make them follow you? Remembering what she was supposed to be doing, she rushed through the open door and snapped it shut behind her. She then turned to the lone bed in the room and her heart squeezed in her chest.

The man on the bed was wrapped in so many bandages he was unrecognizable. Beeping equipment surrounded him, made up of chunks of mismatched machinery patched together. New hospital equipment was scarce so repairs were made with whatever was available. The overhead lights were dimmed, leaving everything layered in shadows.

Piper crept to the side of the bed. Bandages were wrapped around his head and over his left eye. In typical Uncle Calder fashion, he seemed to sense her presence and his right eye cracked open. The green orb, exactly like hers, gazed at the ceiling before drifting over to her. It widened in shocked recognition.

“Uncle Calder,” she gasped, and to her horror, she burst into tears.

With shaking fingers, she found his hand under the blankets and clutched it, weeping like a little kid. It took her several deep breaths to get under control. Sniffling, she tried to smile.

“Sorry,” she gasped, swallowing repeatedly against the lump in her throat. “I was so afraid you’d died . . .”

He managed a bit of a smile, impressive with tape all over his face and a tube in his nose. She squeezed his hand and sniffled again. Okay, focus.

“Can you talk?” she asked.

He twisted his lips into something like a grimace. No, apparently.

“Okay,” she muttered, thinking fast. “Okay, just listen then.” As succinctly as she could, she outlined everything that had happened since the explosion in the vault. “And we can’t clear our names unless we find out who did this first,” she finished.

Calder’s mouth hung open, whether with shock or horror she couldn’t tell. Piper paused, then swallowed hard. “Did—did Father kill everyone in the vault?” she whispered.

He blinked rapidly and his lips formed a silent “no”.

She slumped in relief. “I knew it,” she breathed, then quickly straightened. “So do you know who attacked you?” She twisted her hands together. “Did you recognize them or . . . or something?”

Calder didn’t respond, staring at her with the strangest look. Almost like he was afraid to answer. Finally, after what felt like a full minute, he gave the tiniest nod.

She squeezed his hand and leaned forward, her heart pounding. “Who?” she demanded. “Who was it?”

He stared back at her helplessly, his lips forming silent words. She’d always sucked at lip-reading. She swore under her breath and looked around the barren room. Leaping to her feet, she grabbed the clipboard off the foot of his bed, tore off a sheet, and flipped it to the blank back.

“Okay,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll recite the alphabet. Close your eye and when I hit the first letter, open it. We’ll spell out a name.”

He smiled his agreement. She began, making it all the way to S before his eye opened. She wrote it on her paper and started again. The next letter was A. Then F. The letter E followed, but Calder wouldn’t close his eye after that.

“Safe?” she read. She held up the paper. “‘Safe’ is the name? That’s not a name!”

He stared at her, frowning. Apparently she wasn’t getting the message.

“Are you telling me to be safe? Or go somewhere safe instead of trying to find these people?” Fury launched her to her feet. “Don’t you get it? There is nowhere safe for me anymore. I’m a fugitive. If the prefects catch me, they’ll lock me up forever. And if they don’t get me, some daemon or haemon is going to skewer me and steal the Stone.”

Calder closed his eye again and Piper almost screamed at him she was so mad, but then he opened it and gave her a “get on with it” look. She realized he wanted to spell something else. Forcing herself to sit again, she started the alphabet. O-F-F-I-C-E.

“Office?” she repeated blankly. “Safe and office? Your office is not safe!”

His brow furrowed. Safe. Office. How did those two words equal the attackers? Then it clicked.

“The safe in Father’s office,” she said triumphantly. Calder smiled. “You have information in there? I don’t know the combination.”

Calder closed his eye and they started the spelling game again, this time with numbers. 14-25-9. The combination.

“Thank you, Uncle Calder,” she whispered, leaning down to give him a gentle hug. “We’ll find out who these people are and we’ll get Father back. I promise.”

He slowly mouthed two words: Be careful.

“I will, don’t worry. Ash and Lyre are helping me.”

Instead of appearing comforted, Calder’s face scrunched with worry. He looked at her chest, then back to her face. His mouth moved again, forming a single word—oh! Sahar. He was asking about the Sahar.

She patted her chest. “It’s right here, I still have it.”

He squinted at her hand over the hidden box and gave her an imploring look.

“You want to see it?” She huffed and muttered about him not believing her, but she still stuck a hand in the front of her t-shirt and pulled out the little black ring box. She flipped it open, glanced at the little gray stone, and held it out for her uncle to see.

He looked at the Sahar and paled so fast she could almost see the blood draining from his face. His expression was unmistakably horrified.

“Uncle Calder?” she yelped, jumping up. “What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”

His mouth opened—and the hospital exploded.

Piper hit the floor, clutching the ring box to her chest as the floor quaked. Equipment fell off stands and crashed to the floor. A wave of low-level electricity rippled through the air in the wake of the explosion—magic. She lifted her head, realizing the building hadn’t exploded. But something had.

She launched to her feet, stuffing the box back into her shirt, and dashed to Calder’s side. Seeing he was okay, she grabbed him in a brief, intense hug.

“I have to go. I love you.”

When she burst out the door of the room, she found a medical center in chaos. Nurses were running everywhere. Patients had come out of their rooms and all the missing security guards had finally materialized. With people screaming and running around like idiots, no one noticed Piper. She looked around wildly, trying to remember which way the stairwell was.

A piercing scream cut through all the noise and a woman came tearing down the hall at full pelt.

“Monsters!” she shrieked hysterically. “Monsters in the lounge!”

Another boom shook the building so hard half the people crowding the hall fell over. Piper grabbed a wall for balance, breathing fast. “Monsters” meant daemons without glamour. She knew of only five daemons in the building—Ash, Lyre, Mohawk, Knuckles, and Doctor Daemon. Piper was pretty sure she knew which three were having an all out battle in the lounge.

She ran down the hallway in the direction the screaming lady had come from. Come to think of it, why was that daemon impersonating a human doctor? No matter how good at healing magic they might be, daemons weren’t allowed in medical centers that treated humans; some castes liked to feed off pain and suffering.

At the end of the hall was a large open room full of chairs, sofas, and tables with magazines—a lounge for visiting family members to wait. As she barreled up to the opening, a sofa came flying out. Piper ducked and it crashed into a medical cart behind her.

Something roared inside the lounge—something big, mean, and completely inhuman. Before she could decide if she dared enter, ten feet of hairy minotaur stalked out. It had hooves like cinder blocks and massive bull horns. Its black eyes scoured the hall, mad with fury and, judging by the blood gushing from the deep wound across its belly, pain. Piper gaped. How had that
thing
been disguised in a glamour? It wasn’t possible.

After a moment of dead silence, the hall behind Piper erupted in a cacophony of terrified screams. The minotaur flinched at the sound then roared. The force of the sound knocked her back and she clamped her hands over her ears. The people behind her stampeded down the hall, trampling the slow and weak in their panic.

Maybe she should’ve been running away too.

The minotaur looked down and spotted Piper standing there like a dimwit. Even armed to the teeth, she wouldn’t have been a match for this beast. Maybe a haemon who had magic, but she had nothing but her own strength and brains—not enough against a ten-foot mutant bull.

Another massive crash sounded from somewhere behind the minotaur. He flicked one cow ear backward. The fight was still going on in the lounge. Was Ash battling the second daemon? She snapped a glance past the beast’s legs, trying to see into the room beyond.

The minotaur charged. Piper leaped forward and the beast’s fist smashed into the floor where she’d been standing. Tiles shattered and the cement beneath split. She landed between its massive hooves. Collapsing into a compact ball, she rolled out from under it and sprang up. It took all her willpower not to look into the lounge for Ash. The minotaur was already turning. She grabbed a nearby metal chair and swung it into the back of the minotaur’s knee.

It grunted angrily and spun around. She dove between its legs again, landing in another roll that carried her farther away from it. She came out on her feet and ran. She made it three steps before she realized she wasn’t going anywhere. A wall of a dozen armed prefects, rifles raised, blocked the hallway.

“Fire!” someone yelled.

Piper threw herself onto the floor. The minotaur howled as twelve bullets tore into its flesh. Not enough to kill it, but as she craned her neck to look over her shoulder, it staggered backward into the lounge.

“Is that the Griffiths girl?” a prefect exclaimed.

Piper shoved herself up in a panic. Twelve guns turned to point at her. She slapped her arms in an X across her chest: the universal sign of surrender.

“Hayes, Coffey, arrest her.”

Two guys in the front passed their rifles to their neighbors and unhooked handcuffs from their belts. Not being a daemon, she supposed she wasn’t scary enough to warrant firearms. They were average-sized guys but prefects were never average fighters, meaning Piper had about a ten percent chance. Lucky for her, she was tough too.

She tried to look meek and defeated as they approached. When they were a step away, the closest one reached for her wrist.

Magic exploded from the lounge like a bomb going off, the shockwave blasting past them and making everyone stagger. Something inside the lounge shrieked in pain. The minotaur roared. Piper’s fist snapped out and hit the nearest prefect in the diaphragm. He dropped his cuffs and doubled over. She whirled around, foot flying, and slammed her boot into the thigh of the second guy. He stumbled but didn’t fall. He lunged for her. She pivoted to the side, caught his arm, and twisted it. With a yelp, he went down, yielding to the pressure she was putting on his arm before the bone snapped. She stomped her foot on his belly. He rolled over, spewing his supper.