Méherre.She moved without thought, Anek racing downstairs with her. Kadra and Noceo joined them from the uppermost floor. They congregated in the now-empty atrium. The Bridger was gone.
“There’s no one upstairs,” Noceo panted.
“Then, they’re down there.” Anek jerked a thumb toward the open door to the cellars where Méherre’s scream had come from. “I’m going.” They darted in before anyone could stop them.
Sarai followed them down a narrow flight of stairs, gripping Kadra’s hand as a hallway loomed at the bottom. “Are you thinking the same thing?”
“Yes.” His austere features had never looked more forbidding.
Shit. Kadra had shades of homicidal looks. Bored but murderous. Amused but murderous. Disgusted and murderous. A predator playingwith its food, aloof and uncaring. But she knew this look, had once provoked it herself months ago when he had discovered her wearing an illusion rune in his fiercely guarded tower. It was the face of a man who’d learned that someone had slipped past his guard and would do anything to avenge it.
It was all there. Dalvia’s apathy, her hatred that Noceo had forcibly bound her to him, while still caring for the man.
“Power like yours doesn’t have freedom. And freedom like mine, didn’t have power,” she had said when they’d had dinner.
I spent so much time battling Noceo that I didn’t see it.
“You can’t really believe that she’d be behind this,” the same asshole said incredulously. “Drenevan, we grew up with her. She’s only ever tried to please—”
“You don’t understand what that does to someone,” Sarai bit out. Ahead, Anek’s footsteps had halted as they entered the hallway. “Breaking yourself over and over again for others because you’ve no other choice. All you’re left with are pieces.”
Sometimes, people rearrange them in the wrong way.
She hit the landing right as the door to the cellars slammed shut behind them. Turning in surprise, she jumped at Anek’s terrified gasp. They stood in front of her, blocking her view as they backed away slowly.
“I think I found her patients,” they whispered.
All breath left Noceo in a strained moan. Sarai peered past Anek and froze at the endless line of barred cells lacing both sides of the hallway. Crimson, gleaming wings buzzed inside the cages, tunneling into groaning human flesh, yellowish sacs overblown with venom. The people inside twitched, some bearing the waxy bloat of the dead, others long decomposed. Few alive.
Bile rose in Sarai’s throat. She cast a terrified look at the now-shut door through which they’d come. She had little doubt that it was locked. Likely by someone loyal to Dalvia.
Wrath and Ruin. We’re trapped.
There was an inherent violence to the process of Death, no matter now benign. A stoppering of a heart, an expulsion of life through a breath. The sight before him lacked that elegance. It was turmoil, hatred, and glee, enacted without conscience.
Young and old, most lay half rotted in their cells, eyes and portions of their nostrils missing. They may not have been beyond hope before this place, but they were now. Those with eyes had begun slowly swiveling to them, taking in the newcomers with the hungry interest of the delirious. Invisible to everyone else was the gaping maw at the end of the hallway. Arms with teeth rising from the floor to tear into all in their path.
Ten fucking hells. I should have seen it.
Dalvia had learned the same lessons at the same knee that he and Noceo had. She had watched them deceive and butcher throughout their childhood and been taunted for her inability to do the same. Yet, he had hoped that one of them had emerged sane from Clan Kader’s manor. Instead, she had used his guilt and thoroughly insulated herself from suspicion.
“She was never helping these people.” Sarai vibrated with rage beside him. “She brought them here as cattle.”
The beetles stirred at the timbre of her voice, and she clapped a hand over her mouth as a small cloud rose in the air in search of prey. Their yellow venom sacs quivered eagerly. He strode in front of her and Anek andplaced a finger to his lips just as one of the infected spotted him. The man opened his mouth. A stream of nonsense came from his throat that other prisoners echoed, shoving at their cell doors.
Kadra closed his eyes on a curse when they clanged open. Anek mumbled a horrified plea to the Elsar as a group of infected tottered out of their cells.
“She didn’t lock the doors.” Noceo sounded as though he were in shock. “By the gods—”
“Help me break down the door,” Sarai bit out as more infectees began racing forward with surprising speed. “We don’t have time for fatalism.” She gripped his sleeve. “Kadra—”
“I’ll hold them off.” His hand covered hers. She squeezed it, terror flaring in her golden eyes for a second before she steeled herself and ran upstairs with Noceo and Anek, slamming her weight into the door.
This would be unpleasant.
A wave of infectees neared. Delirious and half dead, they ran at inhuman speeds.
He raised a hand, fingers swiping the air. Pressure dropped like an anvil within the hallway. A net of lightning stretched over the doorway, dividing him, the beetles, and the infected from Sarai, Anek, and his brother. He sank into the familiar liminal calm of anticipation before a fight.
