6
“IS THAT ONE DEAD?”
The voice, familiar but not, swam through my head, and I roused slowly, certain I was dreaming, for I didn’t feel real.
Hazard dan Domitrian leaned in above me.
For a moment I stared up at the face that couldn’t be there looming above me. Cygna’s Diabolic. Another face appeared in my sight. Anguish.
Then I remembered.
Then I noticed what was so wrong and why the world was off.
All I could feel was my face. My neck. . . . My neck!
Horror swamped me in a great sickening crash and I was suffocating, for I couldn’t feel my own breathing and the Diabolics were above me and free and this was it, the end, my fatal mistake.
Oh. Oh no, I’d freed Anguish, so he’d freed Hazard. . . . And now I was as good as dead. Hazard stared down at me, and Anguish told him: “I severed below the fifth vertebrae.”
“You did not paralyze her respiration?”
“Not yet.”
Raw panic flickered through me, clawed at me, and there was nothing I could do as the world swam above me, and even the scream I fought to voice wasn’t rising, and it was a nightmare come to life. How were they even here? How were they alive? How was this happening? The thought came to me. Cut through the storm of terror. Tyrus spared them. He spared them. But he didn’t tell me.
I had just freed them.
I was dead. I was dead, I was dead—and Tyrus. Helios, Tyrus. . . . What would happen to Tyrus? The air was too thin. Anguish’s heavy footfalls moved him out of my sight, and then I heard a voice in the distance. . . .
“Not another word after this,” Tyrus said. “You have your instructions. Not one word more.”
He knew how good their hearing was. He still underestimated it. And the silence was thick and terrible and how I wished I were already dead, for anything would be better than bearing helpless witness to what was to come.
“Go outside the force field,” Anguish rasped, “and close it about us. Security bots won’t be able to fire on us.”
They didn’t know Tyrus had none to command. Tyrus had no scepter.
Hazard’s boots thumped away.
Then Anguish was above me. He reached down, gripped the back of my neck, and sat me up. He kept my neck steady in place, though it was already broken.
A futile voice of hope within me pointed it out—it can be fixed if I am treated soon.. . .
But oh, I had to survive and Tyrus had to survive. I strained my eyes to the side, searching his face desperately for some hint of his plan. His dark features were set with a cold, lethal resolve. I wish I’d been conscious to hear whatever he’d said to Hazard.
Now that I could see, I ascertained that we were within an animal pen. And then Hazard flipped up the force field to surround us, locking the two of us in the cell while he remained outside it.
A humming mounted on the air, and then, above us, a platform slid into view.
And standing alone on top of it was Tyrus.
Just Tyrus.
Sickness churned through me. Sickness and dread. He was too close. Eight meters above us at most.
“Your Supreme Reverence.” Anguish’s voice flared out.
“Hello, Anguish.” Tyrus entered my line of sight. With his light blue eyes and hair, his lashes pale, his skin perfect for the coronation, he appeared almost a creature of ice. No emotion touched his face or colored his tone as he said, “She is still alive. You spared my cousin as well.”
“We had no use for her. We drove your pets back to their pens. This one is another matter.”
Devineé is still alive, I thought with despair. I should have risked the opprobrium of murdering her outright.
“They told me you were holding Nemesis. What is it you want?” He spoke with a preternatural calm, and folded his arms so he might exhibit the Imperial Scepter, loosely grasped in his hand.
Although Hazard gave a growl at the mere sight, Anguish remained calculating, calm. He tilted his head, assessing the foe above him. “You remind me that you spared us as though you expect gratitude. Surely you know better, Your Supremacy.”
“Tell us of our master!” Hazard roared.
He was not so calm as Anguish. He jerked back and forth in restless steps, as though desperate to rip something apart. The one stroke of good fortune for me was the fact that Anguish was in here with me, not out there with Tyrus. . . .
Leave here, Tyrus. Please!
“You know exactly what happened to my grandmother,” Tyrus said, eyes on Anguish.
“You killed her!” rasped Hazard. “And we will tear you limb from limb—”
“Quiet,” said Anguish.
Hazard fell silent.
Anguish gathered me closer to him, keeping my neck carefully steady as he angled me into Tyrus’s sight. The indignity of this! Why hadn’t he simply killed me?
“Strange,” noted Anguish, “how no security bots are mobilized.”
“I have no wish to escalate this situation,” Tyrus said calmly, in such a fine show of confidence, I began to think there had to be a reason. . . . Or was he simply so skilled at faking it?
“Really.” Tyrus spread his arms. “You don’t think the Emperor stands here alone above you, defenseless, do you, Anguish? Be realistic. Now tell me what you want.”
“Your blood.” Hazard’s voice shook. “Your pain. Your life.”
“Surely you understand,” drawled Tyrus without looking at him, “my reluctance to offer that. There must be something else.”
Anguish shifted his gaze to me, studying me with an intent, predatory interest, and with a jolt I knew—he was trying to gauge from my face the emotions he could not read from Tyrus’s.
“Perhaps,” he said, lips breaking into an eerie smile, “I simply want you to watch her die.”
Above us, Tyrus’s hands flew forward, seizing the railing. It was his only reaction—but enough of one. Enough of one to betray that Anguish had hit upon a point of vulnerability, and no Diabolic could miss that.
Anguish stroked his finger over my cheek. “A pity,” he said, “that she has no sensation below the neck. What pain I could inflict before she dies. . . .”
I glared at Anguish, wishing my rage could lacerate him, for I was a Diabolic. Just as he was. I could bear pain just as he could. Yet he meant these words for Tyrus, for the human and unwisely-in-love Tyrus, and my mind, attentive to all tiny details that relayed distress, noticed Tyrus’s knuckles white where his hands still gripped the railing. He attempted to show nothing and in doing so, revealed everything.
And he must have realized it, because Tyrus suddenly changed tack: “Look at her, Anguish. Just look into her face. She is so like Enmity. She could be her twin.”
“She killed Enmity.”
“No,” Tyrus said, face lighting up with hope at this single route of appeal.
Don’t tell him this! DON’T!
“No, Anguish,” Tyrus said, “I killed Enmity. As I killed your master. Your quarrel is entirely with me.”
My view jolted, as though shock had loosened Anguish’s grip on me. I could have torn Tyrus apart for telling him this, for giving him this! And yet Anguish looked at me swiftly, and I could see he was less willing to kill me now.
A bitter trade-off for increasing his incentive to murder Tyrus.
And Hazard’s.
I’d forgotten him until he roared out, and even Anguish’s shout couldn’t stop him. A scuffle, and then he flashed into the corner of my vision as he leaped up onto a panel and propelled himself from there. Tyrus’s eyes flew wide, and he jerked back as Hazard careened toward him. . . .
A frantic swing of his scepter crashed into Hazard’s face. Hazard’s own momentum turned his enemy as he hurtled, spinning, back to the floor. I didn’t see his impact but heard it, the ugly thunk . . . his skull. The silence that followed, and a low sound in Anguish’s throat . . . a cry aborted.
Tyrus gasped raggedly for breath.
Then Anguish pressed us against the side of the force field. “Hazard. HAZARD!” I saw it now—Hazard’s leg. No movement.
I cast my gaze up frantically, and Tyrus’s face seemed to electrify with an idea.
Don’t, I screamed inwardly at him.
But he hurled himself over the railing and hit the ground in a roll. He was on Hazard in a moment, and Anguish bellowed at him. If Hazard stirred, Tyrus was dead. He was dead.
Yet Tyrus’s face was wild as he dragged the unconscious Hazard into our sight, a blade at his throat, pressed so hard blood welled at its bite. “Here’s the incentive now, Anguish,” he rasped at him. “One for one. Let her go, I let him go. One wrong move and I open his throat, I swear.”
“Why should that concern me?” rumbled Anguish’s voice. His hand warningly brushed my neck. “Your Supremacy doesn’t realize just how much blood loss a Diabolic can endure. And besides that—why would that ever prove an equal trade?”
“He’s all you have left,” Tyrus said quietly. “You have passed decades side by side. I know you care for him. I’ve seen it. Let her go, he lives. You live. We are all satisfied.”
“You believe I love him, do you?” said Anguish in an odd tone. “As I did my master? As you love this one?” A strange, ominous note in his voice. “As she loves you . . . ?”
Silence. Then, “I do.”
“Prove it. Walk in here.”
Tyrus didn’t say anything.
“Prove yourself by coming in here and retrieving her, Your Supremacy.”
No, I thought furiously.
Tyrus swallowed. “You’ll kill me,” he said hoarsely.
He will. HE WILL.
Anguish’s voice dripped with the taunt of his words: “You believe we Diabolics love. Then show me. If I love Hazard—if I am capable of that much—then I will have reason to spare you and you will have gambled correctly.” His grip tightened. “If you are truly certain she loves you—then you must be certain I can love him.”
Don’t, I thought. Tyrus, do not do it. Back off. Regroup. Think of another plan. . . .
Tyrus withdrew from my sight. His jagged breaths reached my ears, and I hoped he was figuring something out, I hoped he was leaving, anything, anything but do this. . . .
Then the force field dropped about us.
Anguish would kill us both.