We flew commercial, which surprised me. I would have thought the taskforce kept its operatives separate from the general population, but apparently not. Wu explained the private jet and, more often, helicopters, were deployed only during missions. Not for the sake of comfort or expedience.
For once, I didn’t mind being flown. The ride was much smoother via machine than charun.
Our ultimate destination was Butte, Montana. I had never been this far west, and the scenery was breathtaking. Right up to the point when the plane landed, we got shepherded into a waiting SUV, and Wu blindfolded me.
In hindsight, I should have expected something along those lines. I had no doubt he wouldn’t have clued me in at all if he could have avoided it, but plane tickets and check-ins made it impossible for him to conceal our location entirely.
“How very cloak and dagger of you.” I mourned the loss of my view more than anything. “How far . . . ” I let the sentence trail into nothing. “You can’t tell me. It would give me a means of pinpointing the location.”
“I do regret the necessity.”
“I bet,” I grumbled. “What do you think I’m going to do? Storm the castle and free Famine and Sariah?” A kernel of anger flared at the insinuation. “I helped put them there. The last thing I want is either of them to escape.”
“The cadre plays a long game,” he said calmly. “I know you well enough to believe you would never betray humanity for the sake of your sisters, but the others know only what previous cadres have taught them.”
Having met two out of Conquest’s three siblings, I couldn’t fault them for being wary. “I understand. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“There’s too much at stake to make allowances.” He exhaled into the quiet. “We’ve never held the advantage over the cadre, and that’s thanks to you.”
“Let me guess.” I sighed. “It makes them even more suspicious of me.”
“No Otillian has ever aligned with a foreign terrene, and none—in all our histories—has betrayed her cadre.”
“You keep using betrayal like it’s going to wound me. I chose my side. I’m loyal to my people.” The cadre had singled out my human family and brutalized them. “The cadre aren’t my kin. I don’t know them, and what I do know about them only cements my belief this is the right course.”
“Forgive me.” Apology lingered in his tone. “I don’t mean to needle you. It’s . . . difficult . . . even after having spent time with you, to believe you’re genuine. It’s like praying for rain during a centuries-long drought. You convince yourself the first drop must have been your imagination, that salvation can’t be at hand.”
An uncomfortable weight settled on my shoulders. I shifted on my seat, but it didn’t budge. “I’m no savior.”
“Yes,” he said, his elegant fingers draping over mine in a brief caress, “you are.”
The curious intimacy of being alone and blindfolded with Wu raised chills down my arms.
“That would make the coterie my disciples.” I forced a laugh. “I can picture the murals from here.”
“There were murals, statues, on other terrenes.” Leather creaked beside me as he withdrew to his side of the car. “Evidence trickled through to this one. Small shrines, pieces of art older than civilization. The cadre is worshipped in Otilla. They’re revered throughout many of the lower terrenes, their appearance viewed as a blessing.”
The almost clinical recitation had me wondering. “Have you ever left this terrene?”
Wu let the question hang for a few minutes, so long I almost forgot what I had asked him when his voice startled me to attention.
“Not since I arrived,” he said softly. “I was a small boy then.”
“Your father brought you here.” Wu claimed to be following in his footsteps, so it fit. “What about your mother?”
This time the quiet stretched longer, and there was no end to it.
As I settled back against the seat and dozed, I sensed his eyes on me. Whenever I lowered my defenses around him, it made him twitchy. Last time I blamed my willingness to nap in his presence on Thom having my back. The truth was more along the lines that I believed if Wu wanted to do me harm, he would give me the courtesy of stabbing me in the chest and not in the back.
After all, hunts are more satisfying when prey knows it’s been cornered.
*
Fingers sliding through my hair woke me. I jolted awake and clamped my hands over wrists too thin to be Cole’s. A punch of fear kicked my heart into high gear, but the blindfold slid down my nose to reveal Wu’s face—much too close to mine.
“We’re here,” he said, not fighting back. “You can release me now.”
“I’m not used to being touched.” I let him go. “It’s not my favorite thing.”
Coterie was the exception.
Flecks of gold sparkled in his eyes. “The others touch you.”
Busted.
“The others are coterie.” I kept from wiping my hands on my pants, but barely. It wasn’t that touching Wu offended me. It was . . . Honestly, I’m not sure what it was. All I could do was chalk it up to the biological changes I was undergoing and make a mental note to ask Cole what it meant when I called him later. “It’s different when they touch me.”
“Comforting?” His gaze dropped to my lap, to my hands. “You’re changing.”
There was no use denying what he would discover soon enough. “Yes.”
“Interesting.” He opened his door and slid out, then offered me his hand. “We’re late.”
Avoiding his touch would validate whatever he wanted proven, so I took his hand, ignored the wrongness, and let him guide me out of the car. The sensation was no worse than before, when humans touched me. I could deal with discomfort if it wiped the smirk off his face.
The vastness of the space we had entered swamped me, and I wobbled on my feet. “Where are we?”
“Officially, the facility’s location and name are classified.” A smirk twisted his lips. “Unofficially, we call this place The Hole. It’s where charun who are too valuable to be killed—or who can’t be killed—are tossed and forgotten.”
“I’m guessing Sariah falls into the former category.” A feral pleasure swept through me when I recalled, “She bled like a stuck pig. I couldn’t take her down, but a member of my coterie could have finished what I started.”
“You really are changing,” he murmured, and it didn’t sound like a judgment.
The cavernous room where we stood appeared to be a docking bay/parking lot/checkpoint. Rows of vehicles filled one corner while semis with fading chain store logos backed against walls stood waiting to receive whatever passed for cargo around here.
Against the back wall, carved into the rock, was a guard shack manned with six armed men. They snapped to attention when Wu got within a few yards, their gazes reverent. One’s knee kept buckling as if he were fighting the overwhelming urge to kneel.
To borrow from Wu, Interesting.
“Thank you for your service,” he told them and pressed his clenched fist over his heart. “You do your people proud.”
His praise caused their chests to swell, their eyes to brighten, and their chins to jut. It was clear that they knew him and respected him. But what could have drawn Wu here often enough for the guards to be so familiar with him? Perhaps there were more interesting inmates besides Sariah that warranted his attention. Famine, for example.
“This is Luce Boudreau.” Wu gave them a moment to digest this, and the glow on their faces locked down as their gazes fell to me. “She is mine.”
“I’m his partner,” I clarified.
The guys looked ready to faint when I rebuffed Wu’s claim of ownership, and the one with the shaky leg almost collapsed in his shock.
A commotion near the rear had me skimming their heads for the source. They parted to reveal an older woman, late fifties or early sixties, with snow-white hair and obsidian eyes that fastened on Wu.
“Adam,” she purred, the effect not sensuous but distortive. “You kept me waiting, chala.”
“Apologies, heri.” He bowed at the waist. “Luce’s coterie was reluctant to part with her.”
“I doubt that.” The woman fastened her eerie focus on me. “What slave wishes for its master’s oversight?”
A hot flush raced up my nape. “I’m not their master.”
“Consider Miller,” Wu all but whispered, and I understood what I said to have been wrong in their eyes.
The NSB wanted to know I had ironclad control over my people, Miller in particular. The old woman was baiting me. She wanted to trap me. And I was locking the door behind myself.
Eyes the flat black of a shark’s, she studied me. “You were saying?”
“My coterie is well in hand,” I grated from between clenched teeth.
Her soft laugh told me she didn’t buy my change of heart for a hot minute, but she let it pass. “Come.”
She led the way past the guard shack into a wide tunnel twice my height. Wu fell into step beside me, his knuckles brushing mine to catch my attention. Or annoy me. Letting him know his touch bothered me had been a mistake. But he simply looked at me as if asking Are you all right? without risking the acoustics revealing our conversation to our guide.
I plastered on a fake smile and mouthed, “Just peachy.”
If the point of entry hadn’t driven home the fact we were underground—far underground—then the trek even deeper into the earth made it clear they had spared no expense in creating a prison worthy of holding cataclysmic inmates.
Butte, Montana, was an old mining town. This facility must have started life as a warren of mine shafts. The remoteness of the area, combined with a head start on excavating, must have added to the appeal. For all I knew, some mineral in the walls acted as charun kryptonite. There was no point in asking when they wouldn’t tell me, so I saved my breath.
The incline leveled off about the time my pulse started jumping in response to the steady drop in temperature and the oppressive weight of so much rock overhead. The tunnel spit us out into a circular tower identical to what human prison guards used to keep watch over mundane inmates.
Upon our arrival, the dozen officers present snapped their heels together and saluted. I wasn’t sure, at first, if the respect was meant for the woman or for Wu. But Wu returned their salute, and they resumed their duties.
I cut my eyes toward him, the question in them clear. Who are you really?
He pretended not to understand and gestured for me to follow the woman into an elevator rated for cargo, which had me questioning exactly what types of charun they kept sequestered here. We could have spread our arms to either side and not brushed fingertips, but Wu stood close enough for his body heat to warm me.
The smug bastard was getting his money’s worth out of his claim on me.
The room we exited into was a hub. Doors lined the curved walls, leading to who knows where. The woman took the direct route—the door in front of us—and it opened onto a white room with a box in the middle. Hello, sensory deprivation. The lack of color in the empty room made it difficult to guess the size of the cube, but I decided it was a twelve by twelve solitary confinement cell by the time we walked up to the clear door that stretched a head taller than Wu. Within, Sariah lounged on a cot bolted to the wall.
“Auntie.” She beamed at me. “You came.”
The woman beside me curled her lip, but I couldn’t tell which of us it was meant for. “I’ll leave you to it.” She hesitated before Wu, her head bent. “Your father sends his regards.”
Whatever manner of beast lurked beneath his skin rose to the surface and stared out, his eyes blazing gold, and his multilayered voice hit me with the force of an uppercut when he snarled at her, “Leave us.”
The woman staggered back, clutching her head, palms glued to her ears. “Yes, my lord.”
That’s what it sounded like she said, but it couldn’t have been. My ears must have still been ringing.
She left before I could ask her to repeat herself, and Wu was gazing at me with such naked hunger I had to break our staring contest first. Had the look simply been desire, I could have dealt with that. Had it been a craving for flesh, well, I could have compartmentalized that too. The same way I did for Miller. But I wasn’t sure what the look meant, and I didn’t like the way it made my nape sting like ants were marching down my spine. The sensation reminded me too much of my birthday, of Ezra, and I shivered.
During those long years of wondering who and what I was, those annual calls from Ezra had sustained me. His voice banished the ache in my bones, cleared my head, kept me from bursting out of the skin Wu was so eager to peel away and look beneath. “You’re not what you pretend to be,” Sariah mused in his direction. “You must fit right in, eh?”
Happy to ignore Wu while he wrapped himself in faux humanity again, I glowered at her. “What do you want, Sariah?”
“World peace,” she deadpanned.
“Cute.” I turned on my heel and started back toward the exit. “Have fun with that.”
“Wait.” She slapped her palms against the plexiglass. “Just—wait.”
Heaving a dramatic sigh, I paused within reach of the door. “You’ve got thirty seconds. Make them count.”
“Get me out of here.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have that kind of power.”
“He does.” A growl entered her voice. “They worship him like a god around here.” She must have shifted her focus onto Wu. “Why is that? Who are you? What are you?”
“Adam Wu,” he said, his power a faint echo.
“Yeah. Right.” Sariah scoffed. “And I’m the Easter bunny.”
“Fifteen seconds,” I called. “Can you hurry this up? We skipped lunch, and I’m starving.”
“I’ll give you something of equal value,” she blurted. “I’ll give you the location of War’s coterie.”
Slowly, I turned to face her. “Why would you do that?”
“I want out.”
“That’s it?” I approached her cell. “You’re willing to roll over on War to save your own hide?”
“She would do the same to me.” A frown gathered on her brow. “She has done the same.”
Knowing Sariah had survived because she was a stone-cold pragmatist cast in her mother’s mold was one thing, but watching her thought process in action drove home how very broken their coterie must be to produce such a child. “Do you think she’s noticed you’re missing yet?”
“Doubtful.” She considered that. “I wasn’t scheduled to check in with her for another month.”
“Famine was captured. She must know that by now.” There could be no hiding Uncle Harold’s death. The cover story Kapoor cooked up about a B&E gone wrong made all the papers. Paired with Aunt Nancy’s death, the story had been too juicy for the vultures to let lie. They were still picking those bones clean. “You were the one in charge of cleaning up after her. Don’t you think War will summon you to get answers about Famine’s whereabouts?”
“She’ll assume I’ve gone underground.” A snort escaped her. “And I have.” She ducked her head, swallowed. “She’ll know I won’t answer any summons from her. Not after I lost Famine. She was my responsibility, and I failed. Only a fool would come when Mother called under such circumstances, and I haven’t lived this long by being stupid.”
Here was War’s pride and joy, her heir, and yet Sariah would turn on a dime if it meant her freedom. With a sociopath like War for a mother, Sariah’s ability to sacrifice family to further her own agenda might very well be the reason she was so beloved by her parents. “What about your father? You’re not worried she’ll send him to hunt you down?”
“No.” Her lips twisted into an ugly smile. “Father would never lower himself to perform such an errand.”
“Your father won’t help you.” It wasn’t a question but an observation.
“I’m his firstborn but . . . ” Sariah shook her head. “Only those who help themselves survive.”
Hmm. That might be the family motto, but it sounded like she wanted to be a daddy’s girl. Maybe that was the relationship to exploit and not her bond with War.
“I’ll have to discuss this with my partner.” Wu, who hadn’t moved or spoken since she addressed him directly, still wasn’t quite right. “He’ll set the terms.” Sariah was wary of him, and that could only help our cause. “You’ll have to agree to them and to cooperate when we enforce them.”
“All right.” Her gaze cut to Wu. “I accept.”
“We haven’t laid down terms,” I protested.
“It doesn’t matter.” She turned her back on us and flopped down on her cot. “I’d agree to anything to get out of here. Do you know they pipe in Muzak? I thought elevator music was dead, but I swear I heard a synthesized version of ‘MMMBop’ last night.”
Yes, fear a pop song from the late nineties but not the wrath of War.
Good to know our turncoat had her priorities straight.