The long hallway underneath the swords was packed with a dozen well-armed guards. To our advantage, there was no electricity on this level, so the hallway was dimly lit, only the glow of the guards’ personal neons in the murky darkness.
As quietly as possible, we stashed the backpacks with the bombs and drew knives. I nodded to Lara. I wished to all the gods that Rhiannon was here instead of me. Her famous silence would be a boon right now. Lara brushed a kiss to my left cheek and disappeared, doubling back to come at the guards from the other direction.
I tried to channel Rhi’s silent movement as I approached the first guard. My knife slid through his throat like his tendons were made of butter. I covered his mouth while he shuddered in my arms, before laying him silently to rest in the grid of hallways that intersected this part of the passage, and moving onto the next.
At the opposite end of the hallway, Lara took one out of her own before the guards noticed us. We disappeared into the grid. It was a labyrinth down here, but I hardly cared. Senses I hadn’t used in years kicked in. I’d forgotten what it meant to be Maere.
Somehow I’d lost sight of the fact that while the swords gave us a fuller range of parapsych powers, I was not human—and never had been, in any lifetime. I’d let myself forget. But now, as my eyesight adjusted to the dark, I became the predator that Amarante and Tanith made me.
I slid through the darkness as though it were broad daylight, sensing the racing hearts of the human guards, and the steady heartbeat I knew was Lara’s. One by one, the guards fell. Knives slicing through flesh in the cursed dark. Heartbeats silenced in a macabre ballet of death.
When I met Lara back in the hallway, she wore a neon headband from one of her victims. “Keep watch,” she murmured as she unpacked the backpack she’d retrieved, setting up a folding step-ladder that she scrambled up to set the explosives.
I nodded, keeping my knives drawn, listening for movement elsewhere in the building. Above us, I sensed the kind of movement I expected, preparing for the Gala. I didn’t watch Lara work. There was no need. She knew what she was doing, after all.
When she climbed down, we packed up, retrieved my backpack, and made our way to the next level down, where we repeated the process. This time, there were fewer guards to kill, at least. By the time we arrived in the catacombs to set up the net, there was no one left to kill.
Lara set up our harnesses and the explosives, while I worked to stretch the net across the columns that dug deep into the subterranean lake beneath the National Gallery. Long ago, the aquifer that fed the Erydanos River, which cut through the center of Orphium, had created this underground lake.
Why anyone had thought to build a giant museum on top of a subterranean lake was beyond me. Humans did make the oddest decisions. It made for an unsettling project, stretching the net above the dark water. But it would ensure that neither of us had to dive for the swords if we couldn’t manage to catch them as they came through the floor. When the other four had dispatched with the spirit traps, we would set off the explosives. The swords would fall through the building and we’d have them back.
There was no need to hide who had done it. The swords were ours. The Authority could hardly punish us for taking them back, despite the fact that they would surely want to. With our swords back, Orphium would slowly return to balance. And when we had Sera’s our cohort would be whole again. Nearly impossible to stop. As I climbed into my harness to wait, I wondered if there was a part of Ares that was threatened by that strength.
My fears dissolved at almost the same moment they appeared. The memory of him cleaning me, caring for me, after our public encounter at the Rosewood played in my mind.It hadn’t just been aftercare, or a performance. It had been a show of fealty. A way of understanding the push and pull of power between us that I hadn’t understood until now.
We would always be in some ways at odds. Our power was different. Never equal. But we needed each other. Somehow, we finished one another. He filled in my rough edges and I loosened the rigidity with which he approached life.
I clenched my jaw as Lara climbed into her harness, almost afraid to ask her what she thought. But I’d played scared long enough. “If me and Ares got together for real, would that be okay with you?”
Lara laughed, and for once it was a joyful sound, not sardonic or suspicious in the slightest. “Why the fuck are you asking me permission, Ember?”
I shrugged. “I just?—”
She interrupted me. “Do you love him?”
I stared up at the place the swords would come through the ceiling in just an hour and nodded. “I do.”
She grinned, swinging gently towards me. “There you go, ya goose.”
Her shoulder bumped mine, and I grabbed her harness, keeping her close. I kissed her cheek. “I’m so glad you’re home.”
Her arm snaked around my waist in a hug, her head on my shoulder as we swung together in the dark, suspended in space. “Glad to be back.”
CHAPTER 37
ARES
THE EVENING OF THE GALA
Ares Necroline,who was seen at notorious sex club, the Rosewood, with Ember Verona, has been confirmed to be attending the National Gallery’s annual auction and gala with his associate Avaline Reyes. We have no confirmation that Verona is attending at all…
“Turn that off, please,” I said from the back seat of the cab. Avaline’s sympathetic glance was enough to turn my stomach. I didn’t want her pity tonight, so I shook my head once. Like the great friend that she was, her face smoothed instantly into a calm, neutral expression.
“You look lovely,” I said, hoping I hadn’t glared at her. And she did look lovely, in a simple, elegant black gown that was probably vintage couture of some kind.
Now she smiled a little, her red lipstick accentuating her mouth in a rather charming way. “Thank you, Ares. You look lovely, too.”
For the briefest of moments, she took my hand in hers and squeezed it. We didn’t hug or hold hands much, but her kindness was much appreciated. The cab driver glanced at us in the rearview window, and I justknewthat this encounter would appear in the paper, or some magazine, in the next week.
