A warrior’s deeds live on after his death. Our deeds were the only way that we could ever be immortal. What would my legacy be upon my death? That I let everyone I loved fall because I couldn’t fight? That I burned up a train bound for London because I couldn’t keep it together?
I held the blade in my hand, feeling the familiar weight and heft of it. I ran my finger along the edge. Already, a sense of relief rushed over me, and the fire inside me simmered down.
Control, that was what I needed.
No, Arthur.I could practically hear Corbin’s voice admonishing me.You haven’t hurt yourself in so many years. Why would you go back to this now?
What you need is me to be strong and brave. I’m not that. I’m falling to pieces. Just one cut, and I’ll be in control again.
I placed the blade against my skin.
Maeve’s face floated in my vision. What would she think if she knew I was doing this? She kept asking about the scars on my arm. Luckily, when we fucked under the dark of the desert night, she hadn’t noticed the fresh cut.
I didn’t want her to know. She wouldn’t understand. Of course she wouldn’t, especially not after she’d seen her sister try to hurt herself. Corbin never understood, either. He saw the cuts and they made him think of Keegan. I couldn’t explain that this was different in a way that would make sense to either of them.
Warriors bleed. Our blood makes us strong.
Maeve deserved the best of me. She needed my strength right now. She needed me to be ready for action, and not this sniveling mess coming apart at the seams.
If this was the only way I could be her warrior, then I didn’t have a choice.
“I’m sorry, Maeve,” I whispered as I pressed the dagger to my skin and drew it back. “I’ll be strong enough again.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MAEVE
“Wow,” I breathed as we pulled into Charing Cross Station. All around me, trains clattered into the different platforms and thousands of people bustled between them while a snooty English lady on the loudspeaker admonished us all to ‘Mind the gap’ with that air of polite uncaring that the British excelled at.
So many people going to so many places, completely unaware that in just fourteen days their entire world was going to be overrun with the restless dead.
Don’t think about it, Maeve.If I started to contemplate the Slaugh in too much detail, I forgot to breathe. Panic wasn’t going to get anything done. Panic and stress meant mistakes crept in, and even the tiniest mistakes were disastrous, like when engineers rushed to put together NASA’s Genesis probe and installed the accelerometers backward, so the probe crashed in Utah upon reentry, contaminating its precious solar wind samples.
Our coven needed a reasoned, sensible leader who didn’t letanythingget installed backwards, which meant I needed to focus on the next tasks in front of me – discovering the secret of the painting, meeting with the other coven leaders, and keeping Kelly from learning about my powers and how I produced them.
Totally easy. No problem at all.
“They had light rail in Phoenix,” Corbin reminded me as we swept up a narrow escalator to another platform. In proper English fashion, everyone diligently obeyed a sign requesting pedestrians to keep left, so that anyone in a hurry could run along the right without obstruction.
Everyone, that was, except Blake, who stood beside me with his hand on my hip and a growing line of disgruntled commuters gathering behind him.
“Yeah, we did. But it was nothing like this.”
We hopped on the Northern line, which would take us into Camden Town station, where Corbin had booked an apartment for our stay.
After an uneventful twenty minute journey during which Flynn’s blaring drum and bass music earned him no less than sixteen withering glares and one long-suffering sigh, we emerged into the street. I couldn’t help but gasp at the transformation.
London.A proper city – all gleaming glass skyscrapers and zipping black cabs and Victorian and Georgian facades.
I’d flown in to London, of course, but I’d hopped straight into a taxi and had been too nervous and jet-lagged to take anything in. And there was so much to take in.
Everywhere I turned, new sights and smells assailed me. Street vendors on every corner sold tabloid newspapers sporting lurid headlines about the royal family or the long-irrelevant Spice Girls. Horns blasted and tinny renditions of ‘God Save The King’ blared out of the windows of tourist buses. Pigeons fluttered across the pavement, chasing down a kid who was struggling his way through a bag of salted nuts. Blake practically floated around with his nose in the air, picking up the scent of curry houses and kebab joints mixed with the familiar aged-wood-and-urine scent of British pubs.
Camden turned out to be an interesting mix of funky shops and eateries and buskers and unhoused people sitting on the curb. At one street corner, a scrawny teen ran up to Rowan and asked him if he wanted to buy drugs. Rowan’s eyes bugged out of his head in an adorable way and he hid behind Arthur until the dealer ambled away.
It hit me once again that I’d seen only a very small corner of the world in my life, but right now we were fighting for all of it – for the noisy cities and desert plains and the curry shop owners and the drug dealers. We were fighting to preserve all of humanity in her messy, imperfect glory.
Corbin marched us through a sprawling market selling club wear and gothic corsets before turning off down a narrow cobbled alley to an unassuming brick building. “It should be down —ah, here we are.” He stopped in front of a red door and plugged in a security code. Inside we found a narrow flight of stairs and a lockbox. Corbin plugged in another code to the lockbox and retrieved a key from inside.
