Eve of Destruction (13 page)

As it turned out, the water in the illustrious tub was somewhere between extremes. She, however, preferred it to be steaming. After experimentally dipping in a finger as it filled, Eve closed her eyes and reached out to touch the Fane. One of her favorite instructors had always compared weaving the Fane to commanding a hound—with time, patience, and a stern voice, you could convince it to do whatever you wished. Eve had personally always seen it as more like a cat: rebellious and independent, but willing to cede to your demands if you gave it something it wanted. In this case, the treat was a part of her own life-force. Such was the price of power.

Her hand flashed with a reddish glow as she fed the Fane’s hunger, and she gently pressed her fingertips against the water’s surface again. After a few seconds the temperature seemed right, and she released the spell.

Energy manipulation was a basic tenet of the sorcery discipline, and it could obviously be very dangerous. This basic spell, however, was something even krata could manage, and her mom had taught it to her years ago. By itself it wasn’t enough to invoke the Flensing.

She spent far too long lying near comatose and letting the heat soothe her muscles, but it felt so damn good. She even had to warm the water again before deciding to actually do some scrubbing and shaving. Her eyes fluttered closed a handful of times, and she caught herself nodding off more than once. Only then did she start to realize how long it had been since she’d gotten a full night’s sleep. She’d stayed up for much of the week at her parent’s place, or been so overwhelmed with grief that sleep had only followed hours of sobbing. Perhaps tonight would finally be different.

She rolled Danev’s words around in her head. She’d always considered mom to be the quiet type, but Eve really had no idea how true that was until today. It seemed like her mother had led multiple lives and never talked about any of them; imagining Tara DeShane as a youthful radical was utterly mind-boggling. Imagining her with Simon Chaval was heart-breaking.

Did her father ever know about that? He’d been a kind and tolerant man, so he probably wouldn’t have cared. Chaval also hadn’t been nearly the same menacing public figure ten years ago when her dad was still alive. But now…now Chaval’s Dusties were tearing apart the country, and her mother had been right there at the beginning of the movement. Perhaps she hadn’t always been the quiet type. Perhaps shame and regret had turned her into one.

Then there was the question of her longtime neighbor and friend. When her father had died, Mr. Maltus had almost been like a replacement. He loved her mother, and Eve always thought mom loved him, too, even if she didn’t remarry. But how much of that was true? Why had mom put up with him if she knew he was an agent of the Enclave? What was he even doing there in the first place?

Eve sighed and dried herself off. She tossed on her plain white nightgown before heading back into the main room. Given how riled up and borderline paranoid Zach had been the whole trip, she half-expected to catch him tipping over all the furniture just to make sure nothing was hiding underneath.

Instead he was unconscious in the middle of the bed, still fully clothed, and she couldn’t help but smile. She thought soldiers were supposed to be light sleepers, but he didn’t even stir when she slipped off his boots or pulled the covers over him. Finally she pressed up against him and slid her arm over his chest, then closed her eyes and let her mind drift.

She’d just fallen asleep when a thundering
boom
from outside the room wrenched her back into consciousness. Her breath caught in her throat and her eyes shot open.

Gunfire.

Eve tried to sit up, but Zach was faster. Before she could even move he was tackling her off the bed and smothering her on the floor.

“Stay down,” he warned, glancing towards the wall. The shots were coming from out in the hallway, along with the accompanying cries of wounded men.

Her instinct was to freeze. Were these assassins come to finish the job? Were they a lynch gang come to hang another magi? Could she hide? Could she stuff herself under the bed?

But all those questions burned away in a fire of indignant rage when Zach pinned her like she was a defenseless child. She was a screlling mage, for Edeh’s sake, not a despairing damsel.

“Get off me!” she growled, knocking him aside with a firm elbow to the stomach. She rolled away and peered over the bed towards the door. The gunshots kept coming, and she heard several dull thuds…then nothing. What in the void was going on out there?

Eve closed her eyes and called to the Fane again. Its energy coursed through her, and she wrapped a thin, nearly imperceptible barrier of kinetic energy around herself. Experienced magi could form a shield strong enough to dampen the force of a bullet, but she prayed to the Goddess that hers wouldn’t have to face that test. She reached out a hand to weave a similar barrier around Zach, but he’d already lunged over to the couch and drawn his pistol. He gingerly crept forward towards the door and held up a warning hand—he wanted her to stay put and be quiet.

She let herself be more annoyed by his overprotective brazenness than was probably reasonable. Anger was more useful than fear, and it actually managed to calm her nerves enough to concentrate. She’d been taught plenty of self-defense techniques at home and at school. If some torbo thought he was going to just waltz in here and gun her down, she’d be ready to teach him a lesson in manners—

And that was when a bullet blasted a hole in the door.

***

“You sure it’s late enough?”

Amaya glared at the moon-faced thug looming over her left shoulder. “They’ve been here almost two hours. It’s plenty.”

He said nothing and was apparently willing to accept her expertise on the matter. That was good, because these two dolts weren’t being paid to think. It was an unfortunate truth about the criminal underworld most outsiders didn’t understand in the slightest—even men as powerful and connected as Simon Chaval didn’t have his own people everywhere. Or rather, he didn’t have his own
muscle
everywhere. He had plenty of legitimate business contracts in a city like Vaschberg, of course, and even more illegitimate ones who had their hands in everything from drugs to guns, but those weren’t the type of men who got their hands dirty. For that, you had to dig into the local muscle, and that typically generated far less impressive results.

Here she was relying on two men with the cumulative intellect of a cockroach. They were big, though, and they looked at least reasonably convincing as bodyguards for her current persona as a wealthy businesswoman. She’d thrown on an elaborate blue evening gown, and the hotel manager hadn’t batted an eyelash when she had reserved a room for the night, or when she’d distracted him long enough to glance over the guestbook and find out where DeShane and her escort were staying.

Climbing in through one of the windows would have been a tempting, if conventional, option, but she’d already ruled that out. With the increase in street violence in the city over the past few years, upscale establishments in particular had made tempting targets like windows much more fortified. So instead she and her brutes were stuck with a more direct approach.

She signaled for the two men to keep their mouths shut as they walked down the corridor toward the suites. It wasn’t midnight yet, but it was late enough that the hallways were empty, and that was all that mattered. In all likelihood this was going to end up a quiet operation and her two cohorts would prove useless. From what little they knew about the young woman, DeShane wasn’t a particularly powerful or noteworthy mage, but she was still a mage—if they gave her the opportunity, she would be trouble. Amaya felt better having these two along in case this turned into a firefight.

One of the men stood in front of her while she leaned down to the door and examined the lock. She couldn’t hear anything on the other side, and with any luck their prey would already be asleep. She slid out a hairpin and set to work popping the lock open.

“Other way,” the thug above her said.

Amaya shot him a glare and started to scold him, but then she belatedly realized he wasn’t talking to her. She turned to her left and saw a tall, gaunt woman dressed in a body-length black coat slowly approaching them from farther down the hall. A chaotic shock of auburn hair with a streak of white crowned her head, and her face was covered behind a tattered crimson scarf.

It wasn’t until the woman stepped beneath one of the dim hallway lanterns that Amaya realized this wasn’t a wandering hotel patron. The light glinted off a dozen wicked-looking knives sheathed in a baldric around her chest, and she carried what appeared to be an ancient cavalry saber in a scabbard at her belt.

“I said turn around,” the thug repeated, pulling back the hammer on his pistol.

She stopped about ten meters away and sized each of them up in turn. Eventually her piercing green eyes latched onto Amaya, and the Talami woman couldn’t help but shiver. Something about that gaze…

And then the mysterious woman leapt forward. She moved with surprising speed, her hands outstretched in front of her—

Both thugs fired at nearly the same time. The woman’s body immediately flipped backwards and slumped against the wall.

Screams cried out across the hotel and echoed down the corridors. Amaya bit down hard on her lip. So much for doing this quietly. At this point they might as well just smash the door open and confront DeShane directly.

“Kreel,” the thug on the other side of the hall muttered. “What, was she drunk after a costume party or some—”

His voice caught in his throat when the mysterious woman abruptly and inexplicably pulled herself upright. Her hands flared out to her sides and a brilliant flash of magic sparked in her palms. Two whip-like cords of raw flame appeared in her grip, and with a subtle flick of her wrist, they lashed out towards her attackers. The men shrieked as the flaming whips coiled around them like a constrictor snake, binding them helplessly in the place and then literally burning them alive.

Amaya’s brain screamed at her to flee, but her legs refused to cooperate. She’d fought powerful magi before and understood their near-limitless potential for destruction, but it wasn’t a fear of magic that froze her muscles in place. Nor was it the sight of her associates being reduced to screeching piles of ash right beside her. She wasn’t even looking at them; her eyes were locked on the wall behind the mysterious woman. The wall…and the smear of luminescent blue blood dripping down it.

Vakari
.

The word echoed in Amaya’s thoughts and chilled the air in her lungs. She’d never actually seen one before, but every child in the world had been raised to fear the legend. She had heard them called everything from zombies to vampires, and perhaps both were fitting descriptions for these Fane-twisted creatures that fed off the lives of other beings and were practically impossible to kill.

This was DeShane’s mysterious protector. This was the same person who had killed their men in Lushden and then eliminated their assassins on the train. The Enclave must have sent her; it was the only explanation. It meant that any attempts to get to DeShane in the future would be nearly impossible.

And right now, it meant that it was time to run.

Shaking herself from her involuntary stasis, Amaya swept up one of her companion’s fallen pistols and sprinted in the opposite direction down the hallway. She fired a pair of shots into DeShane’s door—just in case the girl was stupid enough to stand next to it—before swiveling and firing her last bullet through the window at the end of the hall. She then tucked herself into a tight ball and flipped out through the shattered glass down to the street below.

The last thing she saw before dashing off into the alleyway was the shadowy silhouette of the Vakari standing in the window, featureless except for the glowing blue blood splattered across her coat.

***

Eve should have run and hid under the bed. It was the only sensible course of action when bullets started flying through your hotel door, after all, and it was probably exactly what Zach was expecting her to do.

But instead she found herself leaping forward towards him even as he rolled away from the doorframe. She grabbed onto his arm and wove the same protective spell she’d already placed upon herself. The air shimmered as the kinetic barrier formed a translucent shell around him, and then she turned her attention to the doorway. One of the spells from Maltus’s book flashed in her mind, and her palms began to thrum with Fane energy—