Page 301 of Interion

“The package is here. No tricks,” Kaori's voice came from somewhere beside him. He didn't want to believe what he was hearing.

Without warning, the beast crouched in front of him. Something moved in his peripheral vision, and then Breno felt a bite on his leg. He tried to scream, but nothing in his body worked. He was dragged up and thrown onto the back of the crouching monster. From where he lay, he could clearly see Kaori's face. She had set her blades on the ground and just watched. Breno was so shocked he could barely process the absurdity of the situation. Only one question echoed in his mind.

Why?

“Where is Akira?” she asked no beast in particular. They all stared at her, including Breno—it was the only thing he could do. One of the beasts walked up to Kaori and crouched down, just as they had done with Breno. Kaori hesitated, looked at him, then at the beast, then climbed onto its back as if she had done this countless times, as if it were perfectly ordinary. The monsters rose and Breno was carried away.

As they traveled, Breno wondered how his brother was doing. He couldn’t see whether Dominic had been carried too. The uncertainty was eating him alive. He thought he should feel hatred in a situation like this, but no—what had taken root in his body was fear. He was so afraid for Dominic that he couldn’t feel anything else. So he prayed and begged the God of Wisdom to help him, but then he remembered a conversation with Kyller: “I prayed, but everyone knows there are no Gods in the forest.” An avalanche of despair washed over Breno.

At some point the carniceals lined up, and Breno once again found himself facing Kaori, whose gaze was fixed on the darkness ahead. Sensing his stare, the woman turned to look at him. Her expression was unreadable—no sign of guilt or remorse.

He wanted to close his eyes, wanted to pretend none of this was happening, but the venom wouldn’t let him. For hours, he just watched the woman. His eyes red with tears and rain. He lost all sense of time and space, and when he thought he might fall asleep with his eyes still open, Kaori signaled for the small convoy to stop. She dismounted and appeared before him.

Their eyes met, words trapped. She extended her hand and Breno followed the movement. Finally, an emotion other than fear bloomed in his chest. Disgust. If he could have bitten her, he would have. She touched his eyebrow and he stared at her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but none of it seemed real. She wasn’t sorry, didn’t care—it was like watching someone apologize to the animal they’d sacrificed for dinner. Breno understood in that instant that he was just a means for her to get what she wanted. But why him? Was it the rings on his fingers? The blocking gift? He thought of Dominic, who was also a blocker and had absorbed a small part of the barrier.

“We agreed on just one,” he remembered her saying in the car. “You said you would take the boy from the center and all the energy he carried.” Breno’s heart raced as the information fell into place—Yugo was the blocker from the center. “Three boys for one?”

“Where is Akira?”

This was a trade. Three blockers for this Akira she had mentioned. Breno knew of a powerful blocker by that name—the one who had been lost more than two hundred years ago. But all the rumors said the boy had been killed in battle. How was it possible that the woman was talking about the same person?

Hatred prevailed over confusion, overflowing. Breno wanted to kill her, wanted to tear her to pieces. Tears filled his eyes, slid down his face, and flooded his heart. His breathing quickened, his throat tightened. When he thought he would be consumed by terror, the woman closed his eyelids to the world.

The darkness was not welcoming.

Chapter 74

The rain had turned into a storm, lashing against Serguei's skin and blurring his vision. He stood at the forest's edge, where the trees gave way to barren, open ground. In one hand, he gripped the Fury of the Fallen, the long sword that had been his companion in the Night Squadron. It was forged from iron—the only metal impossible to manipulate.

His gaze was fixed on a point about a kilometer ahead, where the gray outer wall trembled and shook, controlled by an extraordinarily powerful gift. Sections gave way, and concrete blocks tumbled down, making the trees shudder when they crashed to the ground.

The psychic never thought he'd live to see this, but here he was, witnessing the fall of one of the three walls. The ruin of an entire city hung in the balance, depending on how long he could keep his heart beating.

On his way here, he'd considered stopping the attack before the barrier collapsed, but the damage was already too great to ignore. Besides, fighting a psychic from a distance was about as effective as swinging a sword at the wind. So he chose to prepare for what lay behind the walls. He took a deep breath, centered himself, and dove into his reservoir of power.

Another resounding impact shook the beams, and this time the entire structure gave way, plunging downward all at once. Through the dust—swallowed by the rain—and the accumulated rubble, Serguei spotted a massive hole in the city's defense, large enough for ten people to walk through side by side. He swallowed hard as the metal foundation groaned, splitting open like the gates of hell and shoving aside the shattered remains of the wall to create a passage for the beings outside. For a moment, everything fell silent and still as he stared at the gaping breach.

Soon, the first beast set foot on Interian soil. It was black as an eclipse and reeked of filthy sewers. Its eyes swept the surroundings, searching for movement. Behind it came all the others, pouring from the black hole as if spat out by darkness itself. Their numbers swelled, and by the time they stopped coming, the psychic had counted roughly two thousand. They growled, eyes locked on him, clearly eager to attack but still awaiting an order. The psychic could read the simple command embedded in their minds: kill the girl in the cabin and feed on any living being they found in the outer area. Whoever commanded them had starved them, so today's feast would taste all the sweeter.

Atop the wall, something caught his attention. From where he stood, the image wasn't clear, but he didn't need to see to know what it was. He felt the rot and despair in his mind and bones. She steadied herself on a section of the barrier that remained intact. Serguei noticed the belt around her waist. Six metal chains hung from it, probably titanium or aluminum. The chains undulated around her like extensions of her own body. The psychic took in her form, her clothes, her hair. It was all as he remembered: every curve and angle, even the mole above her upper lip. It hurt to look.

She assessed him in turn, so regal and cold she might have been an ice statue silhouetted against the lightning on the horizon. They locked eyes in an unfriendly greeting as the carniceals spread across the territory, moving to surround the psychic.

Standing in the rain and mud, Serguei finally understood the queen's plan. For the last six months, he'd wondered why the Drutes forces had retreated into the gorge, allowing the Interian army to spread deeper and deeper into the forests. Here was the answer: the queen had been preparing her trap, positioning countless people around Drutes, setting up a spectacular feast for her minions. And Elitium had walked right into it, because now it was losing half its squadrons.

Serguei gathered a portion of his gift and sent a message across the entire continent, transmitting it to all the psychics strategically positioned to receive such warnings, alerting the nations about the carniceals. It was too late for Interion, but the other cities still had a chance to avoid losses.

When he'd done all he could, he faced the army of beasts and realized just how alone and outmatched he was. About five hundred meters behind him stood a cabin where his children fought against an evil as great as this one. He knew he couldn't fail—couldn't bear to add another failure to his already enormous list. Serguei had understood, since the day he found that creature in the tunnels, that this moment would come. That was why he'd sat in that damned chair all these years, put up with the idiotic king and his petty orders: to train Zion, prepare him for an evil even greater than his own father, and leave him in the safest place on the continent, as far as possible from the city of the descendants.

Because Serguei knew—had always known—that this thing would come to fulfill what it had promised in the tunnels and in Kyller's memories. And he didn't want the opening front of this battle to be the city of Insaad. He wouldn't allow more descendant blood to be spilled when the monster from the tunnels followed Zion toward his people. That was why he hadn't left the boy there, not with an attack so imminent. So he'd brought him to Interion, where he could keep him safe and wait for the queen to take the bait. The psychic had been preparing for this day; he just never imagined the trigger would be Kyller, not Zion.

The queen must have sensed his determination, because from where she stood, she raised her hand. Then her lips moved in a simple command.

“Kill him.”

It was like a dam breaking. All at once, the carniceals surged toward him. Serguei regarded them like a complex puzzle, calculating what this would cost him. He drove the tip of his sword into the mud. A blade would be worthless against that army. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, finishing the task of gathering all the power he'd managed to tap in the last few minutes.