Hearts of Darkness (17 page)

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Authors: Kira Brady

BOOK: Hearts of Darkness
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“No, thank you. Violence isn't my style.” She rubbed her arms. “I didn't believe you about the aptrgangr, you know.”
Grace gave her a pitying look. “Wraiths find people whose spirits are weak, whether from sickness or depression or lack of willpower.”
“Or from Dreki feeding,” Oscar added. “Some dark spirits follow Drekar around waiting for their leftovers.”
Kayla's knuckles whitened as she gripped her arms tighter. “Hart, that's what you meant when you saved me last night. If I had been left drugged in the alley, I would have been a prime target for a wraith?”
He nodded stiffly. She needed to stop looking at him like some goddamned hero. He hadn't explained that his boss tried to suck out her soul. Hadn't mentioned that tonight he would deliver the necklace to that same monster.
“I didn't think she'd get away with it,” Grace muttered, when Kayla finished the story.
“Who? Desi?” Kayla asked.
“You knew what she was planning?” Hart asked. Plotting against Norgard? Grace was smarter than that.
“I didn't ask questions. Told her not to tell me anything. Just helped her a bit with her mythology research.” Grace walked a fine line. Hart felt his stomach roll in a way that felt suspiciously like anxiety. Worrying for someone else? When had he become an old woman? He was growing soft. “And I can't tell you what happened either. I don't know, and I don't want to.” She set the necklace on the floor next to the cat, who swiped at it with his paws. She picked back up her needle and hammer.
“What was she studying? Norse mythology?” Kayla guessed.
Grace shook her head.
“Babylonian?”
A nod.
“And this necklace is Babylonian, right?”
Another nod. Grace buried her head in her work, carving Nordic runes in dragon's blood onto the Nisannu beads. Her needle carved a thin shaving off the bead, leaving a trace amount of blood to fuel the spell.
“So we can assume it's the right one,” Kayla said.
“What's this necklace do?” Oscar asked. “What's so important that the Kivati and Drekar would risk human involvement? You're the tracker, Hart. Is this baby worth a couple billion or—”
“Belongs to Kingu,” Hart said.
Oscar whistled.
“It's strongly connected to the spirit world,” Grace said. “Focus, and you can feel it almost vibrate with life.”
“It's sentient?” Kayla asked.
“Sort of. The Aether is alive with the spirits of our ancestors.”
“Aether—you mean the river of light you can see in the Deadglass?”
Oscar whistled again, this time a catcall. “He let you touch his toys?”
All eyes turned to Hart.
He shrugged. “What?”
“Yeah.” Grace drew out the word. “Aether is like the soul of the universe. You would be able to see it in the Deadglass, not that
I've
ever looked.” She finished the rune she was drawing and blew lightly on the bead. “Anyway. The markings on Kingu's stone tell part of the story of the founding of Babylon.”
“It's a piece of the Tablet of Destiny, isn't it?” Hart asked.
“Looks like it,” Grace said.
He had begun to suspect as much. Hearing it confirmed raised the hair on the back of his neck. Norgard had a piece of the Tablet of Destiny and had done nothing with it. He must have been setting events in motion for the perfect moment. With centuries at his disposal, he could afford to be patient. The Pacific Northwest was the perfect place to stage a Gate break, after Chief Seattle had laid his curse. Maybe Norgard's war with the Kivati had been deliberately planned to reduce the number of gatekeepers. Maybe . . .
It didn't matter. This job was in Hart's pocket. As soon as he finished one more, he'd be gone. He would lose himself in the deep dark wild of the frozen north. A Wolf—even a packless loner like him—needed territory. A place to call his own.
Kayla shivered. “Hart said Kingu used the Tablet to conquer the world. Doesn't that mean it's evil?”
“The Tablet is a tool,” Grace explained, “not good or evil by itself. What's important is the spirit of the person who wields it.”
“And it's the second day of Nisannu,” Oscar said, raising his flask in a mock toast. “Perfect timing.”
Kayla frowned. “What—”
“The Babylonian New Year festival,” Grace explained. “Coincides with the spring equinox. The god who defeated Kingu and slew Tiamat was Marduk. He sliced Tiamat down the middle, and her two halves became the heavens and the earth—”
“Her liver became the North Star,” Oscar added helpfully. “Her spittle the clouds and rain. Her tail the Milky Way. Her breasts—”
“I get the picture,” Kayla said.
Grace continued, “Marduk returned the Tablet of Destiny after he stole it back from Kingu, and was rewarded by the gods. He built his palace between the realms of heaven and earth and named it Babylon, or ‘Gate of the Gods.' Every year the King of Babylon performed a ceremony that reinforced the Gate between the worlds.”
“So the Gate is at its weakest until the ceremony is performed,” Hart guessed.
Grace nodded.
“Desi was researching the ceremony,” Kayla said. “I found an article about it in her things.”
Everyone looked at Grace. She buried her head over her hammer and bead.
“How is the ceremony performed?” Kayla asked. “Can anyone do it?”
“I don't know the details,” Grace said. “I just know what the runes say. Your sister wanted to learn them.”
“Can we destroy the necklace so no one can use it?” Kayla asked.
Enough was enough. Hart could feel the gold bands burning his biceps, as if his master heard the traitorous direction of this conversation. “You're going back to Philadelphia,” he told Kayla. “You found the necklace—your work is done. I'll take you to the airport.”
She blinked at him. “Who died and made you king?”
He raked his fingers through his hair. “Stubborn woman. Wouldn't you rather be alive?”
“I still haven't found out who killed my sister.”
She had a point. “What does it matter? She wanted you to find the necklace, not stick around and be buried alongside her.”
“My work isn't done. She wanted me to give it to Corbette.”
Silence settled heavily across the room, like cobwebs after years of abandonment. No one wanted to be the first to break it. He didn't look at Grace or Oscar. He knew what they were thinking. The necklace belonged to Norgard. There was no way in this world or the next that he would give it to the Raven Lord.
Oscar came to his rescue, laying his charm on thick and fast. “What makes you think Corbette should get it? The Kivati aren't the shining guardians they'd like you to think. Once upon a time, maybe. But now? The Kivati haven't done jack about the cracked Gate. Corbette's too wrapped up in protecting his precious people from dying out. Humans be damned.”
Grace only shook her head. She retrieved the necklace from the cat and handed it back to Kayla, pointedly ignoring Hart. He could practically feel the frost in the air. Screw her. She knew his orders. The golden bands tied her hands as much as the rest of them. The blood debt must be repaid.
“Anyway, you can't destroy it,” Grace said. She knelt once more in the center of her salt circle. Her shoulders were tense. “Everything is connected. The necklace to the Gate. The Gate to the Aether. The Aether to the volcanic core of the planet. Destroy the key, and it might blow us all sky high.”
 
 
Corbette stabbed the Norwegian flag that stood for his enemy's camp into the 3-D map of the Pacific Northwest spread out before him. The four Thunderbirds who stood around the table planning strategy looked up with various expressions of surprise. Usually he kept a better leash on himself. “The Ballard Bluff,” he said. “So close and yet untouchable if the humans are to remain ignorant.”
“Dynamite.” Kai leaned back in the leather armchair and stretched his booted heels toward the fire. He had taken off his suit jacket hours ago. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his cravat undone. His black hair curled around his shoulders like he'd just crawled out of some tawdry bed. Corbette knew he should reprimand the Thunderbird for his lack of decorum, but a migraine was building behind his temples, and for once, he couldn't cough up enough energy to care. “Smoke Norgard out and duke it out once and for all.”
Kai had a point. Corbette could order his army to decimate the entire cliff face, and Norgard would have nowhere to hide. Enough of this secretive cloak-and-dagger bullshit.
Jace nodded in agreement. Unlike his brother, Jace hadn't let a grueling strategy session take the starch out of his sails. Proper and sharp as a razor. Corbette wished he had ten more just like him. “The old warriors didn't worry about the repercussions when they annihilated the Unktehila. They answered to no man.”
“But the world isn't ready for us,” Corbette said.
“Will they ever be?” Theodore, head of the Eastern House, leaned his blond head against the mahogany bookcase in back of him. The same fatigue Corbette felt was mirrored in the tired lines of his eyes. “I'm not suggesting we come out now; the government would lock us up and throw away the key—”
“I'd like to see them try,” Will growled. The head of the Southern House moved the flag representing his aerial warriors to the choppy blue waves on the map. He and Theo were the only surviving Thunderbirds to have served under Corbette's father. They knew what Norgard was capable of. They knew the price of open doors and laissez-faire politics. The Kivati had almost been destroyed once. Corbette hadn't worked this hard to let it happen now.
“Maybe if one of the other races came out first,” Kai suggested.
Will scoffed. “Fledgling, you don't have a clue what the human government does to ‘others.'”
“It's different now, old man,” Kai said. “No one's going to hand us pox-infested blankets and stick us on a reservation. Minorities have rights.”
“Like hell. No one in his right mind would come out of the supernatural closet. Humans are just as fear mongering as they ever were. They're banning
Harry Potter
in the south, and that shit's not even real.”
“Gentlemen.” Corbette held his hands up. “Let's return to task: crippling Norgard's industrial capabilities—” An urgent rapping on the study door interrupted him. “Enter.”
Lucia's governess stuck her head in, her lined face pinched with worry. “It's Lady Lucia; she's run away. I found her window open. She can't have been gone more than twenty minutes, but I thought you should know—”
“Thank you, Ms. Harlow.” She nodded and ducked back out. Corbette turned to his generals, who were all suddenly alert. “Send out the sentinels. Jace, search the grounds. You three: Spread out. Find her.” Corbette stood. He let the anger wash over him and embraced its heat and vitality. Fire burned down his arms as black feathers burst through his skin. They sprouted and lengthened to touch the floor. His nose and mouth jutted out into a wicked sharp beak. Pain skittered over his nerves; he relished it.
A mental push of the Aether opened the French doors onto his balcony, and he shot into the air. Beating his massive wings once, twice, he sailed into the night. His Thunderbirds followed and split off to search. Heavy clouds hung low to the east like sodden cotton balls, pregnant with waiting water. The moon rose fat and bloated over Puget Sound, yellowed and pockmarked like old bone. The humid air slowed him down, and he added that frustration to his burgeoning anger.
What was the girl thinking? He couldn't wrap his mind around it. She didn't take her position seriously. Didn't she realize she was the savior of his people? Didn't she realize how close to extinction they were? Their survival depended on her, yet she chose to dishonor them time and again.
He sent a command into the Aether and ordered the crows throughout the city to rise up and search. He sailed over the gritty metropolis with its towering steel and dingy alleys. He tried to tamp down his anger so that he could focus on finding one small woman in the scurrying streets below.
It wasn't long before the crows located her. He swung west toward the aging seawall. The thick concrete barrier kept out not only the powerful waves, but also the darker spirits of the deep water. He landed near the new tunnel left by the deep bore machine and Changed. Tremors from the cracked Gate were strong here. He could practically see the tattered edges waving in front of him, dark spirits and demons pouring out into the dirty city street. He would have to do something to stabilize it. Would he ever find a permanent solution? These stopgap measures wouldn't hold it much longer.

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