Seeker (49 page)

The corridor was smoky and dark from her own gas canisters as Quin made her way toward the enormous room up ahead. Her mask had also fogged on the inside, further obscuring her vision. Through her feet she felt erratic vibrations from the engines, and a deafening alarm was going off all around her.

Ahead of her, on the right-hand wall, loomed a large open doorway from the corridor into the great room. She could see figures inside that huge space, four of them beneath the glass canopy at the bow. There were two guards in gas masks, and near them was a figure slumped in a chair. Quin caught a glimpse of red hair—Fiona. Her mother was only yards away.

John was there as well, also in a mask and with a disruptor strapped to his chest, which gave him the look of something out of a nightmare. Would he really use a disruptor on her or her mother? Quin thought of that night on the estate, and a spasm of fear shot through her.
Yes, he might
, she thought.
He is desperate
.

No one in the great room had yet seen Quin, who stood outside in the corridor, her back pressed against the wall. She glanced down
the hallway behind her. Where was Shinobu? What was happening to the engines?

The alarm stopped, but the vibration coming through the floor was now more jarring. Then a deep, unsettling tremor shook the entire vessel, and suddenly
Traveler
fell aft.

Quin was thrown to the floor as the lights went out again. For a moment, the ship teetered back into a level position, then was rocked by an explosion from one of the engines.
Traveler
began to dive, its nose tilting toward the London streets below.

She was sent rolling down the corridor, past the open doorway to the great room. She caught a glimpse of falling chairs, books, tables, all sliding toward the bow of the ship, with the four human figures flailing among them. A flash of light, then a swarm of multicolored sparks twisted through the air. John’s disruptor had gone off.

Quin grabbed the edge of the doorway, heaving her body up the tilting hall, and crawled into the great room. With relief, she saw the disruptor sparks gyrating and dispersing along the glass canopy above—if the sparks were loose on the ceiling, no one had been hit. Not yet.

There was another roar from the engines as the ship caught itself, arresting the downward dive into a slow drift.

A figure was struggling up the slanted floor. Quin saw the red hair again. It was her mother, conscious, though she was without a gas mask and was coughing violently. Quin slid toward her as Fiona crept to the wall, arms and legs shaking, and hit her fist against something. There was a hum all around the room as vents opened up. Cold, wet air streamed in, quickly dispersing the gas.

Quin took a last deep breath of filtered air, then pulled off her foggy mask to see into the darker, lower corner of the room. John and his two men were tangled among the piles of furniture against the
bow wall, but they were digging themselves free. The dancing light of the disruptor sparks was still moving on the glass ceiling. Except these sparks were all one color—in fact, they were the color of Shinobu’s plasma torch.

Fiona was still on her hands and knees, breathing in the fresh air now. Quin was breathing it too. She grabbed hold of her mother, and together they slipped through an avalanche of books and crawled toward the door.

Halfway there, she looked up to see their path blocked by four figures—the Dreads and her father. They stood firmly on the tilted floor, taking deep, long breaths. Then all four pairs of eyes went to the athame and lightning rod at Quin’s waist.

She pulled her mother in the other direction, toward the far doors, but one of John’s men already stood there, blocking that route.

John himself had worked free of the piled objects and was climbing up the floor toward her, his hands busy searching for the disruptor controls on his chest. She knew she must act now, before he fired that weapon.

“John!” Quin called.

She pulled the athame and lightning rod from her waist and sent them spinning down the floor toward him.

The Middle Dread and the Young Dread turned immediately, following the path of the stone dagger. Shots rang out then, thunderous, the bullets caroming off the walls behind her. John’s men were shooting at the Dreads.

To Quin’s surprise, Briac didn’t follow the athame. Instead he began walking toward Quin. He was injured, in a leg and a shoulder, but his whipsword was in his hand, and he looked ready to die as long as he could punish her. He slashed out with his sword, and Quin ducked.

“You have shown yourself worthless, girl,” he said to her, his voice both soft and deadly, like the oily substance of a whipsword. “Why did your drunken mother provide me with a girl? You’ve weighed me down with your lack of skill. Your faithlessness.”

Quin cracked her whipsword out and blocked his next blow, but she found herself hesitating. Years of training had taught her to follow Briac without question. Instead of stepping forward and striking him, she took a step back, into her mother.

Briac became aware of Fiona then, and like a spotlight, his anger tilted and focused upon her.

“You, Wife! Cowering as usual. All your training, and you were too cowardly to take the oath. Scared of what you saw in my mind? Frightened of a bit of blood and screaming. I should have rid myself of you both!”

Quin saw her mother staring at Briac with wide eyes, unable to move, an expression that said,
Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me
.

And that was enough.

The look her mother wore—Quin had seen it countless times as a girl, and she’d tried to ignore it, had hoped she was mistaken. But hadn’t she always known, somewhere in her heart, that there was no mercy or love behind Briac’s eyes? Hadn’t she sensed that if she crossed him, there would be no forgiveness? Even if she hadn’t been as submissive as her mother, hadn’t she also thought,
I’ll believe in you, Briac, I’ll do what you say, if only you won’t hurt me
.

“Stand aside, Quin!” he ordered, gesturing her away so he could strike at Fiona. Even now he assumed she would obey him without question.

Quin stared at her father, with his sword raised, his face, his whole being, full of malice. And the spell was broken.

“Go ahead,” she yelled at him. “Try to kill us!”

And with that she struck at him hard, her motions quick, fierce, and without warning. Briac caught her blow with his whipsword but stumbled back a pace, looking shocked that she would attack. She stepped forward, swinging at him again.

This time, Briac didn’t hesitate. He slashed out to block her, then struck again. But Quin raised her sword viciously, throwing off his blade.

“You tried to kill me on the estate,” he said, his voice acid, his whipsword hitting at her again, hard.

She caught the blow on her own blade, one of her hands at the hilt, one at the tip, the force of his strike bending the middle of her whipsword until it almost touched her nose.

“What kind of a daughter kills her father?” he asked, his sword pressing harder against hers, his face close. “What kind of monster did I raise?”

Hatred welled up in Quin like a tidal wave. Looking into his dark eyes—so like hers on the surface, and yet entirely different underneath—she wondered,
How could I ever have followed you?

“You’re the monster,” she said. “And I’m through with you.”

She twisted her shoulders and thrust her hands forward, her whole body behind the sudden motion. Briac’s sword slipped to the side, and then he fell, off balance, sprawling onto the floor.

His head hit the ground hard enough to stun him, but still he was coming after her. Quin lifted her whipsword high, ready to strike down and split her father’s head in two.

Before she had the chance, Briac disappeared in a blur of limbs as something large and flailing dropped through the air directly onto him. Someone was on top of him, punching him again and again, in a fury equal to Quin’s own. Briac was twisting his body and cursing beneath the rain of blows, clawing at the floor to get away.

Then the punches stopped abruptly, and Briac crawled off, scrambling out of Quin’s reach as quickly as he could.

His attacker rolled over, clutching a bleeding gash in his side.

It was Shinobu. He’d fallen through the ceiling. He looked up at Quin, his eyes full of pain but also triumphant.

“I really hate him!” he whispered to her.

Along the slanted floor, the Middle Dread and the Young Dread approached John and his two men. She could see the athame and lightning rod several yards behind John. The stone objects had come to rest against an upturned desk.

John’s men were firing guns. The range was close, and the Dreads should have been easy targets for the bullets. Yet the Young and the Middle had slowed their sense of time to that point she often felt in battle, when a heartbeat took a minute, and a breath an hour. She saw the bullets as they left the barrels of the guns, and her body was no longer in their path by the time they reached her. They themselves would appear as blurs of motion to the others in the room.

The Middle cracked out his whipsword and stabbed forward at the first of the men. The Young’s sword was already out, preparing to engage with the second man. She swiveled to the side as a bullet tore by her head, then she raised her sword. This would not take long.

Before she struck the man, she spared a glance at her master, who was standing behind them, keeping himself apart from this fight. As the Young met the Old Dread’s eyes, her mind shifted even higher.
Images poured through her. He had trained her for years, been a father to her, taught her about the hum of the universe. The athame was to move a great mind beyond the bounds, but there were no great minds, only good hearts. Was she a possession? It takes only one hand to place an athame. Only one mind to decide. Where was the justice of the Dreads?

She saw it then. Her master could not rid himself of the Middle Dread. The reason was a mystery, but the fact remained: her master was tied to the Middle. He had been looking, for a thousand years perhaps, for a Young Dread who would do what was right.

Without another moment of hesitation, she turned her sword away from John’s man and thrust it straight through the Middle Dread’s back, as she had imagined doing so many times. As he lifted his own sword to deliver a death blow to John, she neatly pierced his heart.

The Middle reeled backward, her sword all the way through him, and the Young Dread caught him as he fell. John was staring at her, eyes wide, shock and gratitude chasing each other across his face.

Her master was by her side now. He leaned his head close to her ear.

“That was right,” he whispered.

John was seeing the moment of his own death. The Dreads had boarded
Traveler
with Quin, and though they didn’t seem to be helping her, their presence had destroyed any hope of avoiding a fight.

The athame and lightning rod were on the floor some yards behind John, and the Dreads were out for blood to retrieve them. In a cloud of motion, the Middle Dread was raising his sword to kill John.

Then something long and thin sprouted from the man’s chest, covered in red. As John watched, it snaked its way back into the Middle’s torso and disappeared. Then the man fell backward into the arms of the Young Dread.

For the briefest moment, John’s eyes and the Young Dread’s eyes were locked upon each other. She had saved him, she had helped him. Then the Young was gone, dragging the Middle away.

John turned toward the athame and found Briac Kincaid heading right for him. Briac was limping, and his face was bloody, but this didn’t seem to be slowing him down. The bright light of revenge was burning in his eyes.

A gun went off, and John’s shoulder jerked back. He could see
the gun clutched in Briac’s left hand. The man was going to kill him. Except that John had something worse than death in his own hands. Ever since that day, so long ago, when he’d glimpsed the flash of rainbow-colored light from his hiding place beneath the floor, he had been waiting for this. Ever since that day in the old barn, when Briac had stood before the withered figure in the hospital bed, lecturing the apprentices about the dangers of disruptors, he had been waiting for this.