War had dressed for the occasion in what might have passed for a wetsuit if she had need of one. I was betting on it being a catsuit in a color that wouldn’t show all the blood she planned on spilling while accentuating her curves for any male dumb enough to look at her twice while Thanases was present.
“Where is your mistress?” War cried, indignant, beseeching. “Where is Death?”
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Shit,” Wu agreed.
I cranked my head toward the second boat, expecting smug victory to paint Sariah’s mouth, but the blood had rushed from her cheeks. For the first time in our acquaintance, she appeared young . . . and afraid. She kept the strongest emotions wiped from her face, but the tightness around her eyes told another story.
A reckoning was coming, a demand for payment equal to the loss of the nests we’d razed, and Sariah must have seen her death in her mother’s eyes. She stumbled away from the edge of the deck and almost fell onto Miller’s coils.
But if she hadn’t outed us to War, then who betrayed us?
A good half of the skull-faced eels surfaced, hisses escaping their bony jaws that rose to manic screams. They thrashed, churning the water, and pink foam spittle gathered on their lips. The Drosera roused, a few snapping the flailing eel people in half with their spring-trap jaws.
“What the actual hell?” I murmured. “Are they all dead?”
The few not being eaten floated belly-up between us and War, who looked speculative. She had the look of someone who knew something no one else had quite figured out yet. Try as I might, I couldn’t work what that expression meant, but since she wasn’t calling the wrath of her coterie down on our heads, that worked for me.
Miller’s broad head rose out of the water, almost startling a squeak out of me. I was ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure he was bigger now than he had been in the mall. Much bigger. Each rotation seemed to have caused him to thicken and lengthen.
Rixton would have cracked a joke about Miller being a grower, not a shower, but he wasn’t here. And Wu wouldn’t appreciate my gallows humor. Portia might, but it’s not like I was going to call out to her. It was the kind of thing you whispered behind your hand, not shouted for all to hear.
Damn it.
Focus, Luce. Hold your shit together.
“Have you spotted Santiago or Cole?” I wiped clotted duckweed from around his eyes. “They’re still down there with Death and Janardan.”
The snake ribboned his tongue at me, which was no answer at all.
“Please tell me this was some type of acclimation sickness.” I grimaced at the carnage. “That you guys aren’t in danger from being in the water with them.”
Miller studied the bodies, the feeding Drosera, and hissed in their direction.
Gotta say, it wasn’t the most loquacious answer to my question.
Bubbles drew my eye behind Miller, and I leaned over the edge, fingers crossed.
The murky waters parted over Cole’s head as he surfaced with Janardan held limp in his arms.
“Thank God,” I breathed. “I was getting worried.”
Cole spared me a soft look before indicating Janardan. “He’s wounded.”
“He’s not the only one. Famine’s coterie just kicked the bucket. All of them.” I hooked my hands under Janardan’s armpits, accepting his weight from Cole, straining to haul him onto the deck. Wu watched my back while I knelt beside him. “Shit to the third power. This is bad.”
A Drosera had taken a bite out of him. His thigh was nothing but splintered bone and stringy meat.
Cole heaved himself up beside me and settled into a crouch, scanning the deck for the pod. The tension seeped from his shoulders when he spotted it safe and sound where he left it.
“Sorry, partner.” Pivoting on my knees, I reached up and unbuckled Wu’s belt. “He needs this more than you.”
A scowl cut his mouth. “That’s the second belt of mine you’ve ruined.”
“You’ll live. Without this, he might not.” I used the leather to encircle Janardan’s upper thigh, near his groin, and cinched it as tight as I dared without snapping the thick band. “How did this happen?”
Janardan hadn’t gone all tentacled dolphin when he hit the water, so I had no clue if that meant he didn’t want to lose his host, or if the injury was too severe for him to make the change. Though I would have expected him to revert to his natural form, not cling to this weaker one.
Odds were good that meant Iniids couldn’t manufacture their own skin, or they would have started mimicking us already. No matter their designation, his coterie could shift. They would just lose their host in the process. To survive this world undetected, they would have to let go of these eel creatures regardless.
A high-pitched treatise drifted past Janardan’s lips, ending on a series of clicks that made me wince.
Skull-faced bodies writhed in the water, sinking low and staying down until fountaining to the surface in the nightmarish configuration Wu had warned me about earlier.
Therapy would probably help with the mental picture. Maybe. I really ought to ask Kapoor for his guy’s number. At the rate I was going, I was in for one hell of a psychotic break if I didn’t get help gluing my psyche together soon.
“Join me, sister,” War belted out. “Together, we can conquer this terrene as we have all that came before it. Famine’s name will be our battle cry, and we will present her with this new world as a gift for her loss.”
Ah. There it was. The reason she had kept her mouth shut when Famine’s coterie started pushing up daisies. Or duckweed in this case. It had taken her a few minutes, but she had spun the loss into a gauntlet to throw down before Death.
“I stand with Conquest,” Death screamed in her shrill voice that made my eyes water.
“You can’t be serious.” War drifted closer on Thanases. “She’s a human sympathizer. This is not Conquest as you’ve known her. She thinks she’s one of them. She’s weak. How can you trust her?”
“Your coterie attacked Janardan without provocation. How can Death trust you? If you would kill him, what’s to stop you from killing her too? Death would hardly be the first of your sisters to suffer at your hands.” Cole raked his merciless gaze over War. “You set Famine up to be Conquest’s first victim. You have your own agenda, as all the cadre does, but this was a malicious strike against your sisters. Death would be foolish to side with you when there’s a better option.”
“Peace?” War curled her lip. “That’s your better option? Making nice with the humans? Bowing down to them? Hiding as all the remnants do? Pretending to be human when we’re so much more? We deserve to rule, Nicodemus.” Her glare sliced through me though she still spoke to him. “Grow a spine. End her while you still can. She won’t allow her coterie to roam this world any more than she’ll allow the charun in hiding to remain. She wants to give Earth back to the mortals.” She pointed a finger at me. “She will be the death of you, all of you.”
“Luce is my mate,” he said, emphasizing my name. “I would be proud to die by her side.”
“Remember that when she comes for your head. Fool. Love has blinded you. Such a weak, human emotion. You spent too long here, and this world has infected you. You are a disgrace to your true mate.”
“I am his true mate,” I snarled, the resonance in my voice multilayered as Wu’s had been.
Conquest was speaking through me, I felt it, and I allowed it, knowing War respected her more than me.
Cowed by the slip in my mask, War turned her attention toward an easier target. Sariah.
“This is who you have chosen to follow?” she demanded. “This is who has won your allegiance? What of blood? What of family? What can she offer you that I have not?”
Their family dynamic made my head ache. No wonder Sariah was mommy’s little sociopath.
“I am what you made me,” she said, jutting out her chin. “I played the game better than you expected. That was your fault for underestimating me, not mine for fulfilling my potential.”
Bubbles flurried through the water as a single laugh escaped Thanases.
Even War failed to conceal her flash of pride beneath her deepening scowl. She might be pissed, but she was also impressed.
“How did you know to come here tonight?”
Perched on one of Miller’s coils, Santiago stood in a pair of skintight briefs I really wish hadn’t been so white or him so proud of that fact.
“Sariah didn’t tell you,” he continued. “I had her farts under surveillance. You couldn’t catch a whiff of her.”
Portia snorted until I scowled at her, but even the reprimand didn’t wipe the grin off her face.
“How did you know we were going to meet Janardan?” He paced down Miller’s spine. “Scratch that. You’d be a fool not to keep tabs on him. The real question is how you knew to come here tonight.”
War snapped her fingers, and a mammoth Drosera glided through the water carrying Lorelei on its back. She huddled in a ball with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes cranked wide with terror when she cast them over Cole, and naked pleading sparkled in their liquid depths.
“This darling little birdie told me,” she cooed. “I didn’t even have to rip off her wings to make her sing.”
Shock rendered Cole mute as he stared at Lorelei and then at me. “She must have followed me.”
Dragons did stealth well. Better than any charun I had met so far. Hard to top invisibility.
“Go on,” War coaxed. “Tell him what you wanted from this bargain.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.” Fat tears spilled down her damp cheeks. “I only wanted—”
“—for me to be unfaithful.” A slow anger burned through his words. “You might stomach breaking vows to your mate, but I will not break mine.”
While I didn’t comprehend the mechanics of our bond, or grasp its full spectrum, or even know whether Cole could get physical with another person while we were together, I didn’t care. How did the fine print matter when what he was saying amounted to he didn’t want to be with anyone else? A vow he would never utter to Conquest, an admission he had just made—to me.
“For a child,” she pleaded. “I have nothing of Convallaria. I wanted that one small piece, a remembrance, and you denied me.”
“How did you imagine this playing out?” I tasted frost as the words formed. “Did you think if you got me killed he would knock you up over my cooling body?”
Fine, fine. That last bit spun out farther than I meant to throw it, but in my defense, Cole recounting how she propositioned him had fractured me enough to allow Conquest to seep through the cracks. If he had acted on her offer, and if she had shown up swollen with his child, I don’t think I would have come back. At all. Ever.
I believe Conquest would have ripped me straight down the middle and made Lorelei regret having been born with ovaries. As much as she fought with me over control, over Cole, at least I was a sliver of her. Or she was a sliver of me. Our pasts and futures were so intertwined I had trouble picking the end of her from the beginning of us at times. Me, she would suffer under the illusion I was temporary. I didn’t have to shout into the void to hear that answer ricochet back at me. But another woman? Another Convallarian? Touching Cole? Bearing his children?
Flickers overshadowed my vision, black spots danced in front of my eyes, and the cold place nipped at my consciousness, vicious and hungry and focused across the way.
“Your obsession with him disgusts me.” War leaned forward, palms braced on Thanases. “I wish that I could blame your humanity for this disease, but the truth is Conquest was never the same once she saw him. All her desire to conquer, all that hunger for glory and thirst for power, got twisted up in her need for him.”
The harder she tried to shame me, the more familiar the sensation became until I knew she had hurled these words at me, at an earlier version of me, many times. Each insult was a brick in the foundation of certainty that I was building around a theory, one I might never share with another soul, because who would believe me?
Way down deep, scraping the bottom of who I was and might be again, I had no choice but to accept the truth. Conquest loved Cole. But she hadn’t been raised to know what to do with it. And she hadn’t understood how to show it, how to protect it.
Instead of wooing him, she did as her training dictated. She saw, she wanted, and she took. At first the lack of reciprocation intrigued her, but over time her anger honed to cruelty, and there was no wound she could inflict on him deep enough to make him bleed as much as her heart wept each time he turned his hate-filled gaze upon her or bowed his proud head to follow her orders—no matter how depraved. His very resilience frustrated her until breaking him became an obsession she indulged at every opportunity.
Blinking free of those hazy-edged recollections, I yanked my focus back to our current predicament and away from the thin skin of memories coating the surface of my mind like pond scum.
“Cole,” Lorelei pleaded, softer this time. “Please.”
“You betrayed my trust.” The muscles in his spine rippled. “You put my mate and my family at risk.”
A sob hitched her shoulders as her reality sank in. Cole was not going to save her. She had dug her hole, and he was going to let War bury her. Despite the fact I was more interested in hating her guts than spilling them, I almost let it go. Let War remove an obstacle from my path. But that was a Conquest thing to do, and I might be picking up on her frequency more often these days, but I was still me.
Lorelei might not be an innocent, but I wasn’t willing to let War play with her food if I could help it.
There was one more variable I had yet to pin down, and it took all I had to stop my eyes from rounding into saucers when I located her sweeping up beside War with the promise of vengeance in her eyes.
Death had yet to shuck her eel skin, the better to inch closer to her target using the minefield of corpses as camouflage. I don’t know how War and Thanases missed the burning coals boring into their spines as she advanced. I felt sunburnt from here, and she was nowhere near me.
An understanding passed between Cole and me when he did the same math as me and found our missing cadre member within arm’s reach of her sibling.
Behind us, Wu snapped out his wings, and all eyes shot to him.
The lust sparkling in War’s eyes as she made some mental calculation had me wondering what she thought he was, who she thought he was, and how she could twist that information to her whims.
His distraction worked perfectly.
Death splayed a hand on Thanases’s spine, casual as you please, and shoved her upper body out of the water. She perched behind War, draped one arm across her collarbones, and yanked War back until her spine pressed against Death’s chest, and then she ripped out War’s throat with her claws.
On my periphery, Sariah clamped her hands around her own throat like that might staunch the flow of blood for her mother.
War’s gurgled shriek roused no immediate help. Hands fastening over the wound, she couldn’t slow the blood pumping down her chest. Her knees squeezed Thanases, but he didn’t twitch an eyelid to zip her out of harm’s way. In fact, his eyes . . . They were filming over as I watched, vacant as all things were in death.
Sariah collapsed to her knees, a keening moan dragged from the depths of her soul as comprehension dawned.
Her parents were dead. She was alone. All she had left was . . . me.
A quick scan of the surrounding area had me zeroing in on Drosera bodies floating lower in the water, bobbing among the remnants of Famine’s coterie.
“She killed them,” I whispered. “A half dozen Drosera, and Thanases, and she killed them.”
That explained the leisurely stroll up to her sister. Death, it seemed, was an ambush predator.
I would do well to remember that.
“Traitor,” War burbled. “How could you?”
“I warned you once,” she said, then plunged her fist into War’s chest, “that if you let your jealousy off its leash, and my mate paid the price the way Nicodemus so often has, I would kill you.” A wet sound accompanied the sharp jerk of her elbow. “You forget yourself. Wars begin, and they end, but Death is eternal.”
The pulpy mass of War’s heart was clutched in Death’s talons, and I couldn’t stop staring.
“Sleep well, sister.” Death took a bite as if from a ripe apple then tossed the remains into the water for her coterie to feast upon before easing back among the dead. “I pray that the bright hatred in your heart extinguishes, that you spend your eternity in peace, that you never again raise a hand or voice in anger but only know happiness.”
Blood still wept down her chin when she glanced back at Lorelei, huddled in a quivering knot an arm’s length away.
“Giving birth isn’t a requirement for motherhood,” Death intoned as the sleek tentacles belonging to her coterie breached the water around her, caressing her, and she stroked them back. “You would do well to remember that.”
Tears welled in Lorelei’s eyes, but she nodded then shifted on the back of her dead captor before flying away.
Death, escorted by her children, halted outside the protective ring of Miller’s ever-increasing coils. He was like one of those capsules you tossed in water that expanded until the foam surprise emerged from within. Only those were finite, and this one—he was infinite.
“How fares my mate?” Her hands clutched at the water, a visible effort not to tear through Miller to reach Janardan. “I smell his blood in the water and on the air.”
“He’s stable,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “Our healer was injured by War’s coterie in battle.” I gestured toward Wu. “He’s done the best he can, but we need to get back to land, to one of the taskforce clinics if you want to save his life.”
“The clinics are no longer safe,” Wu reminded me. “Father will be monitoring them closely.”
“What about Dr. Norwood?” Cole brushed his fingers down my arm. “His clinic is a half hour away if we leave now. Less than fifteen minutes if we airlift him.”
“I hadn’t considered him.” I worried my bottom lip with my teeth. “He’s trying hard to stay off the taskforce’s radar, but he’s going to be reluctant to leave the facility he’s built.” Ratty as it was on the outside, the inside was pristine and modern. He was hiding in plain sight and doing it well. “Do you still have his number?”
Santiago pivoted toward the second airboat. “I’ll text him a warning we’re coming in hot.” He walked down Miller’s spine and hopped onboard with Portia, who dug a phone out of the waterproof compartment. “We’ve tossed a lot of business his way over the years. He owes us this much.”
“There’s a doctor in town,” I explained to Death before she decided that poisoning my coterie was the quickest route to her mate. “Cole can fly him there if you’ll give us your permission.”
“Granted.” She reached out, stopping shy of Miller’s sleek scales. “Please, let me see him before you go.”
“Miller.” I reached out and touched the back of his neck. “Give her room.”
He did as I asked, and Death shot through the opening as if afraid he might close it before she got past. I offered her my hands, and her talons bit into my wrists as I hauled her onto the deck. She scooted toward him on her side, her gills flexing, and pressed her cheek against his. Their low conversation was impossible for me to decipher, but each caress telegraphed their love for one another.
After meeting the other cadre members, observing how War interacted with her mate and children, witnessing how unhinged Famine was—or had become thanks to War’s machinations—I wouldn’t have expected a sister of mine to have . . . heart.
“We need to move,” Cole said gently. “Luce will bring you to him once you’ve assimilated.”
Death bobbed her head then toppled over the edge into the water where she dragged in gulping breaths. Her fingers curled over the edge of the bow, crimping the metal, while she waited for Cole to shift.
After sharing a lingering glance with me, he slid from one body into the next. His tail coiled around my ankle, squeezing tight and then releasing. Gathering Janardan against his chest, he unfurled his wings and leapt for the sky.
Movement among the bodies caught my eye. The remaining Drosera were huddling closer.
“Your mistress is dead,” I told them, “and your master is too. You’ve got three choices as I see them. You can join us, you can turn yourselves in to the NSB, or you can die here and now.”
“I’ll take them,” Sariah rasped. “I can control them.”
A chill swept over me, a premonition that I might have done what War failed to do by making her daughter heir to her title, but I wasn’t Conquest. Murder solved a lot of problems, almost as many as it created, but I had enough blood on my hands.
“Will they follow you?” Without a leader, they would look to the strongest among them. Sariah was that and then some. “Can I trust you to stand with us? Or will I have to hunt them down and kill them later?”
“I can’t promise we’ll fight with you.” Her throat worked over a hard lump. “But we won’t fight against you.” Her haunted eyes swung to me then slid over to Wu. “You won’t survive what’s coming, Luce, but we might. If we keep our heads down.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said dryly then gestured at her wrists. “The bangles stay on. For now.”
“That’s fair,” she allowed, voice soft as a whisper.
Freed from War’s legacy, Sariah had a lot of thinking to do about how she wanted to shape her future.
Assuming we all survived, I was game for letting her try to rehabilitate the coterie. But at the rate we were going, that might not be an issue.
“Take your people and go,” I told her. “You’ve got twenty-four hours to gather the rest and go underground, or you’re going on my shit list, and that means the next time I see you—or any of the Drosera—it’s open season. I can’t afford to have more enemies at my back, particularly ones masquerading as potential allies.”
“I understand.” She loosed a shrill whistle, and one of the Drosera approached. She propped her legs under her then stepped onto its back. “I’ll touch base with Santiago when it’s done.”
“I’ll be waiting with bated breath,” he promised as he shot her a mocking salute.
All in all, she didn’t do a bad job of saving face. And the coterie didn’t put up a fuss. Eight, by my count, had survived to follow her. Some of War’s best fighters had died here today, but War had others. How many I couldn’t begin to guess, but I would bet money that Sariah knew each remaining nest and its contents.
Again that chill swept my spine, a foreboding that I had set into motion an unstoppable reaction, but I couldn’t see my way to a better resolution. We needed the Drosera gone so we could focus on Death, her coterie, and her mate. As far as I was concerned, Sariah was doing me a favor by taking a third of the charun off my hands.
For the moment, I was counting this as a win. She still wore the bangles, and none of her coterie knew what they meant. War hadn’t known to out her, or she would have demanded her release instead of speechifying about her treachery.
The silver lining here was, so long as Sariah wore the bangles, we controlled her. Through her, we controlled the remnants of War’s coterie. That meant, with Death’s continued cooperation, we might have just won this war in an almost bloodless coup.
I stood there, waiting for the relief to sink in, for the thought to manifest the reality, but a gnawing sensation in my gut called me a fool for thinking it would be so easy.
Massaging my temples, I put the most pressing question left to Death. “What do you need to adopt a human form?” I gestured down my body. “Are you viscarre or emocarre?”
“I am neither.” Death exhaled, a hitch in her breath. “I need a wider sampling of the humans to fashion a proper body. Give me that, and I can handle the rest.” She gazed across the water at her people. “They require a . . . different . . . type of host. I will see to that as well.”
Corpses.
The truth hit me with the force of a memory.
She was Death, the dead her domain, and her coterie were fashioned from corpses and given new life.
“Miller.” I patted the snake to get his attention. “I need you to drive us out of here.”
Between Santiago and Portia, the other airboat had a surplus of captains. This one, not so much.
“Offer them the bunkhouse,” Portia called. “We can figure out someplace else to stay for a while.”
Canton was home, and that made me an easy target for anyone who came looking.
“We’ll need to clear out our toys.” Santiago glowered. “Don’t let them in my room until I get there.”
“Follow us,” I told Death, ignoring Santiago. “We have a safe place where your family can acclimate.”
While Miller climbed on board, I went to check on Phoebe.
I sank onto the deck and rested my back against the seats. The pod was silky smooth beneath my fingers, the wood polished by time and touch. It was too large for me to haul into my lap, so I tucked it under my arm to hold it steady. A faint vibration reminding me of an egg preparing to hatch shook me, and I crossed my fingers that baby dragons didn’t wake up hungry.