Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (7 page)

A bit like me going from being human to Athanate. Suck it up, girl.

“Pia, sit by me, please,” I said.

She folded stiffly, as if her joints needed oiling, kneeling at my side.

I unthinkingly raised my hand to rest it on her and stopped. Maybe later, when we’d all gotten used to it. If there was a later for us.

“Well?” repeated Diana.

Concentrate.

“I’ve known David since he became an Aspirant, long before I first met you. We’ve become close, like brother and sister. He talked to me about Athanate in general, without really giving anything away.” I cleared my throat. “There didn’t seem to be an appropriate time to tell you.” It sounded pathetic to me.

“And you think this is an appropriate time?” Diana asked.

“No, of course not, but—”

“This is the worst time possible,” she said. “Skylur has calls from the Warders on an hourly basis, all being held at the moment. When we get back, what should he say to them? He’s lost control of his mantle?”

I couldn’t answer that.

“Go on,” Skylur said. He was back to steepling his fingers, but at least his face looked less angry now. If only I could figure out what he was thinking, I might take some reassurance from that. But I’m familiar with the military concept of expendable assets, of course, and that’s what I suspected he regarded me as. In which case, he was simply pondering how best to get the maximum return from my sacrifice.

“I worked with David on his physical preparation, and on his telergy. It was while we were experimenting with that, projecting images, we had some mixed signals and, well, we ended up kissing.” I blushed and Pia stirred. “That’s all that happened, but David said that there was some transfer to him in the kiss. Some of my prions.”

I paused to let them ask questions, but they were just watching me like a pair of cats around a mouse hole.

“I guess that changed his marque,” I went on. “I understand it started to be more like me than House Altau. He and Pia fought over it. I don’t know what happened exactly. When I came in last night, there wasn’t any time. I just wanted him to survive. He seemed to recover okay, but I also felt that I had completed the change to Athanate.
Then
I really wanted to bite him, make him House Farrell. That’s why I left.”

I licked my lips nervously. “Today, he was manic. I had to talk him down. But he was still okay. He listened. I called you.” I had to say something more. “I have no intention of setting up a House in opposition. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t realize what was happening.”

“And now, what went wrong, Pia?” Diana gestured to me. “You’ll need to release her, Amber.”

Had I really compelled her that strongly? I was going to have to be so careful with this control. How did I turn it off?

“You can speak, Pia,” I tried.

“Thank you M…” she stuttered to a halt. “Mistress,” she finished in a whisper.

“You acknowledge her?” asked Skylur. Pia nodded, keeping her head down.

Before she could say any more, Bian raised her head from David’s throat. She turned with an eerie, inhuman grace, her mouth wide in a snarl, bloodied fangs showing. Her eyes were glittering, and when she breathed out, it hissed in her throat. I could barely recognize her.

Diana was there in an instant, a hand on her shoulder. She’d moved so fast, it was as scary as Bian’s transformation.

Bian shuddered at the touch, but her pupils gradually contracted and her eyes lost the glittering edge. Her fangs shrank, became normal canines again. She licked her lips and looked like Bian once more. Unnervingly, her eyes had never left me.

“Awesome, Round-eye,” she whispered. “I said you were freaking tasty. Even second hand.” Still moving with an oiled precision, she got off David and walked out the living room like a cat. He lay slumped across the sofa, pale and unmoving.

“She’s taken too much,” I said.

Diana shook her head. “Bian’s drunk deeply, but no, she’s good. And it’s just the first step.”

Bian returned with Mykayla, leading her by the hand. I understood then what the next step would have to be. I would have gotten up, but again, Diana had anticipated me. I hadn’t even seen her move and she was beside me, her hand gripping my shoulder like a vise.

“
Not
your responsibility,” she said tightly.

I forced myself to keep still. She was right. I had done what I could for Mykayla. Her decisions were hers to make, and she was only going to do something that I’d done. She was trembling as she straddled David, but she wasn’t behaving as if she were under duress. With shaking hands she stripped off her Kevlar vest and opened her shirt. Bian’s hand rested on her back as she leaned forward and rested her throat against David’s mouth. I could tell the exact moment he bit, the memory of the fangs making my neck twitch. Mykayla flinched, but stayed put. Bian knelt on the sofa and spoke softly in her ear.

“She’s not ready—” I began.

“Hush, Amber. This is our work.”

Fang 4 came in, listening to his comms and scribbling a note which he handed to Skylur.

“If we’re finished with the floor show,” Skylur said coldly, bringing us back. He folded the note into a pocket after a brief glance. “Pia, your side of it.”

Pia tore her eyes away from David and sat straighter. “He wasn’t doing well,” she said. “He’d finished all the physical tests easily but we had problems with his telergy development. He couldn’t sustain a connection, let alone compel someone. I couldn’t seem to get through to him.”

Pia took a minute. “Then his marque changed, just slightly, and suddenly he was handling connections as if there had never been a problem. I tried to fix it. It was like…wrestling a ghost. It got worse and worse. I felt I couldn’t bring him in to Haven. I didn’t want to add to everyone else’s problems.” She closed her eyes.

“Yesterday, he became manic. I could barely calm him. I tried to shock his body back.” Tears leaked down her cheeks. “I went too far. I took too much. The hunger…” she was trembling and her mouth moved without speaking for a second. “I can’t describe it. For a while, I was afraid I was going rogue. It was so difficult. I thought if I just went away and rested for a bit, I could come back and handle it.” She buried her face in her hands, her voice muffled. “I was a good assistant, but I wasn’t ready to move up to Mentor. I failed everyone, especially David. I’m so sorry.”

There was a silence broken only by Mykayla’s sighs.

“So.” Skylur turned to me, angry again. “I might accept that you changed David’s marque accidentally, but then you thought you’d keep Pia in line by taking her too?”

Before my mouth had time to fall open, Pia’s head snapped up.

“No!” she yelped. “You thought…” She twisted to look at Mykayla. “Oh, God, no! She’s not Aspirant?”

Everything seemed to lurch into motion at the same time. Pia leaped towards Mykayla. Bian came snarling out of her crouch to intercept her. I tried to get between them. Fang 4 turned and lifted his weapon. We all collided. Pia was ignoring Bian, trying to get past and as for me, I was very conscious of the fact that the cold metal ring pressing against my neck was the muzzle of Fang 4’s P90, and a twitch of his finger would blow enough high velocity bullets through my neck to decapitate me.

“Stop!” Diana’s voice lashed out, and we all came to an abrupt halt. “Everyone, take a step back.”

She slipped in between us. “Pia. What’s the matter?”

“David! That girl! The girl is not ready.” Pia could barely speak for her urgency, pointing at Mykayla.

Bian was rapidly disentangling Mykayla from David’s semi-conscious grasp. Diana turned and swooped low over both of them.

She stood back up and shook her head. “There’s nothing, no agent of change. What are you talking about, Pia? David’s barely started crusis, his bite can’t be active yet.”

“No, no! Listen to me. You think Amber bound me. She didn’t. I know David’s not supposed to have progressed yet, but you’ve got to believe me. His behavior today was late phase crusis mania and his bite
was
active.
He
bound me to House Farrell.”

Chapter 7

No one moved for a long, breathless minute. For the first time that day, Skylur’s face registered something other than anger—he was deeply shocked. So were Diana and Bian.

Diana bent her head over Mykayla again. After a while, she came upright and shook her head. “His bite definitely isn’t active now. Maybe Bian lowered it below the key level just now.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I’ll grant you, he did seem like he was in late stage crusis mania. And for that matter, Amber shouldn’t have even been able to change his marque in the first place.”

 “I don’t understand,” I said. “Are you saying I’ve passed through crusis?”

“I would have said that you were pre-crusis when we met last week. Your Blood acquires its strength during crusis, and that’s what gives you the ability to change a human by bite.” She gestured to David. “Or change a marque.”

“But I didn’t bite him.”

“He drank deeply from you. After you had given him some preliminary agent of change in a kiss. Prions, if that’s what you want to call them. That might achieve the same thing.”

“But it felt like
he
changed
me
,” I said. “Before he bit me I was almost struggling against becoming Athanate. By the time he was recovered, I...well, I can only tell you how it felt in my head, but it felt like I could bite him and make him House Farrell. That’s when I ran away.”

“A resonance between Bloods?” said Bian. She held Mykayla against her.

“No, I don’t think so.” Diana turned to Skylur. “You realize what this could mean?” Her face stayed calm, but her eyes were starting to gleam with excitement.

“If you’re referring to another of Tolly’s unverifiable assertions, yes.” Skylur made a curt dismissive gesture. “I don’t believe any of it.”

Diana took pity on me. “Amber, David wasn’t due to enter full crusis for at least two months. The fitter you are, the stronger your body’s defenses, the longer you will hold it off and the better your chances in the end. That’s why our Aspirants are prepared so thoroughly, and why we work up to the full dose of the agent of change. And then, once an Aspirant is in crusis, it might last for two more months. That’s why the process is so slow, why we transform so few.” She stared intently at me. “Your Blood appears to have reduced his crusis to a few days.”

Days instead of months? How?

“This is impossible,” Skylur said.

“But
if
. Do you see the importance?” Bian said to me. “The crusis is the choke point, the bottleneck. With such a long period and such uncertainty, a Mentor can only safely handle a few Athanate going through crusis and with the physical and mental training, the whole process takes a year or more. If your Blood truly makes crusis quicker and easier, imagine what that means to the Athanate as a whole.”

“If it’s easier, then those that fail the Aspirants’ tests, those that become our kin instead, they now have a new chance,” Diana said.

“But it’s not easier. David’s reaction—”

She puffed dismissively. “That was worse because we weren’t here at the start. It would have been nothing.”

“Enough!” Skylur got to his feet. “You’re speculating wildly.” He grew quiet. “And I understand why, Diana.” He crossed to David and made his own inspection before turning back to us.

“Imagine if Basilikos heard so much as a rumor of this. They’d do anything to get hold of Amber and test this theory of yours.”

I shivered at a fragmentary memory of the windowless cell in Obs, strapped down, unable to move. They’d been testing their theories too. I got a sudden, vivid recollection. There had been a voice one time. I couldn’t see the speaker, but I’d heard him call me ‘it,’ like I was a piece of meat on a slab. And Basilikos would be worse.

“No word of this outside.” Skylur glared around at us.

I let a trickle of hope warm me. He’d let Diana save David, and he wouldn’t do that just to kill him. They even seemed to accept Pia had made a genuine mistake. And now he seemed to be concerned for me and my wellbeing. At least all the shocks had displaced that cold fury. We might just get out of this in one piece.

There were, of course, a couple of other ‘little’ matters that hadn’t been touched on yet. Maybe I’d get away with it tonight…

Diana came and stood in front of me and my heart sank.

“Amber?” Her voice was soft, slightly puzzled. Her hand slipped over my shoulder and gently pulled me towards her. I felt as if I was falling. She came to rest against my neck. The sigh of her breath rushing in was as loud as the frantic thudding of my heart.

Her head came back up almost immediately.

“What?” said Skylur, registering her shock. “What now?”

This wasn’t good.

“Her marque has changed,” Diana said.

“She’s changed her own marque?” There was something in the way he said that. That was very bad.

“I don’t think so,” Diana said hurriedly. “But her marque has picked up something of the Were. Amber?”

I cleared my throat. “Everyone said it wasn’t possible for Athanate and Were to cross-infuse.”

Skylur came over, brusquely pushing my head back as he bent over my neck. I forced myself to stand still for his examination.

“How did you do this?” he asked. His voice was back to its icy worst again.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand anything about what’s going on. I’m not trying to
do
anything.” I tried to calm myself. “I met with Alex Deauville, the contact you gave me for the werewolves.”

“And?”

“And nothing! A bit of kissing and cuddling.
You
didn’t tell me it wasn’t safe.”

“One thing after another,” Skylur snapped, returning to his seat. “Sit.”

I went back to the stool, Diana to her chair. Bian perched on the edge of the sofa behind me.

“It should have been safe,” Diana said. “Any ideas on how this infusion happened?”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “A complete guess, but when I left David’s, I was passing out from blood loss. Alex came and picked me up. Maybe it happened then, when I was weakened.”