Raffmir admired the vials in his hand. "Driven by fear, the power of human ingenuity knows no bounds. Such a shame – it will mean the end of the pact between the Feyre and humanity. This is more than we ever asked for and more than you deserve. I am giving you the chance to rescue as many of the mongrels as you are able and take them somewhere else. It doesn't matter where you take them. Take as many as you please or none at all, only do not return once the virus is in the human population. It will spread and every visit will carry greater risk. You only need to carry the contagion back into exile…" He left that thought unfinished.
"You are breaking your oath, Raffmir. You swore not to harm me or my daughter."
"On the contrary, my oath remains sound. I am saving you and granting you the opportunity to save as many others as you choose. There's nothing in my oath that says that I must remain in exile, nor that you must remain in this world. If I had released the virus without telling you, then I would be breaking my oath. As it is, I am giving you the chance to be their saviour. Without you, doubtless they will all die." He shook his head in mock sadness.
There was a dull boom, then another in quick succession. I raised my sword.
Raffmir stood. "Yes, let's settle it now, blade to blade – only mind that my grip does falter and dash these vials to the floor, and if by some mischance you should best me-" He grinned, acknowledging that we both knew he was the better swordsman. "-then the vials will fall and break and all will be lost."
He watched me doing the calculation, while the conflict approached behind me.
"I believe the phrase is 'check' and 'mate'." He grinned. He had me and he knew it.
The battle in the corridors grew ever nearer. Still I hesitated. There must be a way out. Once he left with the vials, there would be no way to stop him. All he would need to do is break the vial on a railway station, or an airport, or a busy supermarket. After that it would be simply a matter of time. There was no way to find all the part-fey humans within forty-eight hours, let alone persuade them to leave our world for an uncertain future, and his smile said that he already knew that.
"Move out of the way, Dogstar. You have your daughter to save and I have business elsewhere. I have kept my promise and brought you to her. It is time for me to…"
He shuddered and faltered. Then he coughed. Mucus leaked from his nose while his eyes bulged in their sockets. Perspiration beaded across his brow and then ran in droplets down his face. Sweat rained from his jawline as he hiccoughed and spewed. He coughed again, a belch of liquid welling up in him, running from his mouth.
Behind him, winding coils like the tentacles of a black anemone extended out behind his head, long delicate fingers slid gently under his chin, cupping it like a lover's caress. Tremors spread through his shoulders, arms, chest and hands.
Slowly Alex rose behind him on the bed, her hair a winding mass of tentacle curls, moving as if washed and tugged by an unseen swell. Her eyes glowed intensely with a blue so deep it was almost purple. Her hands clamped under his chin as she looked down on his head with an expression of feral hatred. He jerked and spasmed, his hands flicked open, and the sword flew out of one hand and the vials flew out of the other.
I dived. I couldn't know which vial had the serum and which the weapon, but I dropped the sword and dived. They were too far apart to catch both. My hand stretched out and reached the floor just before the first vial hit. It bounced on the flesh of my hand and rolled on to the floor intact. The second vial smashed with the tiniest sound of tinkling glass.
I held my breath. I dare not breathe. But then I realised that if I survived I would have to watch my daughter die before me. I blew out a long slow breath and inhaled.
Nothing happened. How long would it take? How long did I have to wait before I knew it was safe? My hand reached out and grasped the unbroken vial, wrapping my fingers around it, firmly enclosing it. I rolled on to my back. Above me, Raffmir was leaking fluid from every orifice. His eyes, his nose, his ears, all ran with clear liquid. He jerked and twisted, and then with a mighty effort he swung his arm around and smashed it into my daughter's side. She flew sideways like a discarded doll, arms flailing, crashing into the wall and sliding down out of sight.
Raffmir staggered forward, reaching down for his sword. I summoned gallowfyre, filling the room with dappled light, reaching into the core of power within me. I focused the power, determined to end this now, oath or no oath.
Beyond Raffmir, the glass wall exploded in a shower of scattering fragments. Bright shards hailed all around, forcing me to shield my eyes from the glass. There was another boom, and another. Shotgun blasts echoed in the confined space. Plaster dust and concrete fragments ricocheted off me amid a stuttered cadence of dull reports. I was deaf and blind. There was a screaming, screeching sound, a series of yells and cries and then a deathly quiet punctuated by falling fragments of glass and the moans of the injured.
Emergency lights flickered into dim illumination. In their dubious light I dragged myself from the floor, stung by the fragments of iron from the dispersed shot. All that remained of the glass wall was limp crazed fragments hanging from the walls. Across the floor were the remains of bodies in combat uniforms, hacked to pieces or simply flung up into unnatural poses from which they would not recover. Some stirred vainly, but did not rise. I searched the carnage. None of the bodies was Raffmir.
Back in the room I found a small plastic container. I wrapped the vial with cloth, made sure that the top was tightly secured, placed it inside the container and capped it. Only then did I slip it into my inside jacket pocket.
From down the corridor came another series of dull reports, more shotguns. There was a bright flash, illuminating the scene in sudden and awful colour, then fading, bleaching everything back to a merciful monochrome – Raffmir.
I went to where Alex had been thrown against the wall. Her body lay sprawled at the bottom, unmoving.
Kneeling down beside her, I could see her pale cheeks dusted with plaster, her eyelashes sparkling with glass fragments. I lifted her gently and moved my leg under to rest her head in my lap.
"Sweetheart?"
She looked so small, so fragile, amid the destruction. My gut twisted at having come so far and failed. What kind of world would put such a gentle soul in such a place? I bent over her and placed a kiss on her forehead, brushing debris from her skin.
She was warm.
Of course she wasn't dead; what was I thinking? If she had been dead then her fey power would be released and it would consume her body, just as it would have done had the drug been administered to her.
I held her hand between mine, rubbing it firmly. "Come on, Alex, come back to me. I need you awake, now. Come on, sweetheart."
In response, her eyelids fluttered and then she began coughing, then rolled over on to her side and retched. I held her and stroked her back until the fit subsided.
"Are you with me now?"
She lay in my lap for a moment, just breathing. "Dad?"
"It's me, honey."
She raised herself on her elbows. "What happened?" She sat gingerly and began brushing dust and debris from her clothes. I got up with her and stood between her and the room. She peered sideways and I leaned to block her view.
"Is that Doctor Watkins?" It was impossible to keep her from seeing so much carnage.
"It was, sweetheart. Try not to look."
A slow smile spread across her face.
"I need to get you out of here."
I took her hand, brought her to her feet and led her carefully out between the bodies. None looked as if they were recovering. Weapons were scattered over the floor amid severed limbs and broken bodies. The stench of iron was over them all where it had been blasted into the walls and ceiling.
Where the corridor narrowed, the double doors were hanging askew from the hinges. I stood to the side, pressing Alex into the wall behind me, and leaned around the doorway. In the corridor, a black cat the size of a tiger was chewing on something that looked as if it might once have been human.
"Wait here," I said.
Walking forward slowly I edged along the corridor. The cat looked up at me, its eyes gleaming momentarily red in the dark. It growled softly, almost below the level of human hearing, and then resumed its meal. The cell with the blood smeared on the glass and the one with the young woman in it were empty, the doors wide. Had someone let them out? Beyond, the corridor was dark and appeared empty.
I went back to Alex. When I reached the place, she was stepping back over the bodies.
"What were you doing?" I asked her.
"Nothing." I could hear the lie clear in her voice.
I grabbed her hand. It was sticky and wet. Lifting both her hands in the dimness, I could see they were slick and black with blood.
"I'll ask you again. What have you been doing?"
She looked away, not meeting my eyes. It brought to mind, then, what Garvin had said: The person you get back may not be your daughter.
I had to know.
She dragged along behind me back to the room, not pulling away, but not going willingly either. When I reached it I saw what she had done. In the centre of the medical table, on the spot where she had been laid, was the head of Doctor Watkins. Sticking out of it, cleaving it partly in two, was my sword. It wasn't a clean cut the way a Warder would have done it. It had taken her several attempts. There were fragments of bloody bone and a wicked gash where an earlier attempt had failed.
I looked at it. "Why, Alex?"
She stood there, bloody hands in front of her, a defiant expression on her face.
"I asked you…" I stopped and took a deep breath, realising I was shouting.
Calming my voice, I tried again. "I asked you, why?"
She turned away and would have left the room.
"Sweetheart, I'm asking because I need to know you're OK."
She stopped, her back to me still.
"I need to know you're going to make it. So tell me, why?"
She turned slowly. In her eyes, blue fire glowed. There was a latency, a sense of something being held back, something huge. A tiny tinkling sound started, spreading through the fragments of glass until the whole area echoed with it.
"Don't tell me what to do," she said quietly.
"I'm not telling you, I'm asking you."
"You don't know. You'll never know what it was like."
"I need to know."
She stood there and slowly the tide withdrew. She bottled it up and pressed it down. The shine on her cheeks and the beads of sweat across her forehead told me what it had cost her, but the tinkling sound ceased. Then, when the glow finally faded from her eyes, she spoke.
"He would sit outside the glass and watch while they poke and prod you, trying to get a rise out of you." She shook her head, denying the memory. "They don't stop, no matter what you say, no matter how you plead."
She was breathing hard now.
"They keep going and going until you well and truly lose it and you scream and it boils up out of you."
She was gabbling, her eyes wide and unfocused, and I knew it wasn't me she was seeing.
"Or if they can't do that, they drug you so you piss and shit yourself, until you can no longer hold it, and then, when finally you let loose, they shoot you up with stuff that burns through your veins until you scream and scream. That's when they dump you back in the goldfish bowls and watch while you squirm."
She was breathing hard.
"Then, when the heat has finally gone from your veins, when the burning stops… that's when he-" She stabbed a finger at the mutilated head "-would tell them to do it all over again."
She walked over to the head and spat wetly on to the dead doctor's face. She grabbed the end of the bloody sword hilt and levered the blade out by sawing it up and down. She pried loose the blade and then hacked it down again in a heavy wet slap. Tears were running down her cheeks, but her grip was firm.
"I'm only sorry I couldn't do that to him while he was alive," she said, and hacked at it again.
I laid my hand on top of hers, "Enough, Alex. That's enough."
"It's never enough!" she shouted, her voice cracking. "Don't tell me it's enough!"
"He's dead, Alex. He can't feel anything."
"No," she said. "But I can." She let out a scream and hacked down again, and this time the head split, leaking gore on to the table, the two halves wobbling crazily, one eye staring askew out of each half.
I waited while the heavy blade swung from her hand, watching her breathe, waiting for the focus to come back into her eyes. Kneeling gently beside the rest of Watkins's body, I ripped the tail from his lab-coat. I stood and offered the blood-spattered rag to Alex.
"Wipe your hands."
She dropped the blade with a heavy clatter on the metal table and opened her palms and looked at them, smeared with gore. She did not take the rag.
"Alex, you've done what you meant to do. Wipe your hands."
She looked up, horror on her face, whether at what she had done or at what she remembered, I didn't know. Edging forward, I moved the sword out of her reach, then did my best to gently wipe what was left of Doctor Watkins off her hands. She stood there while I cleaned one hand and then the other, eyes screwed shut, tears leaking from them down her cheeks.
The sound of automatic gunfire brought her back to me. Her head jerked around at the sound.
"We have to go," I told her, picking up my sword and wiping the hilt with the remains of the rag.
She let me take her hand and lead her through the debris and bodies and out into the corridor. The big cat had gone, along with whatever it had been eating. I opened the well of power within me and wrapped us in glamour, turning eyes away and avoiding notice, extending it as far as I could to include both of us.
The corridors were strewn with slashed and broken uniformed bodies. Many of them appeared burned, with blistered faces and blackened hands. It looked as if a group of soldiers had tried to ambush Raffmir. It had clearly not gone as planned, though there was none of the finesse that Raffmir had shown before. He had simply hacked his way through them and left them to die.
Beyond them the iron gate was wide open, the lock blown where they had broken in to reach the labs.
It was only when we pushed past the shattered doors into the office area, the glass scraping and crunching under our feet, that I heard the 'chink-chunk' sound of a shotgun reload. I shoved Alex backwards, dodging away from the noise.
A boom sounded far too loud echoing inside my head. I spun around as if I had been sideswiped by a truck. My shoulder went numb, my arm slapping uselessly against the wall, the sword flailing from my hand. I collided with the wall and rolled to the floor, scattering shattered glass. In slow motion I heard the chink-chunk of the shotgun reloading.
Alex shrieked, "Dad!'
At the sound, the figure in the darkness twisted towards Alex as I got my feet under me and kicked off, launching myself at the shooter. As the shotgun swept around, my wounded shoulder collided with his torso in a jolt of searing pain. He careened backwards and there was a bright flash and another boom as the shotgun erupted in a hail of broken glass, falling plaster and smoke.
The man went down beneath me, landing heavily on his side. He tried to roll away as I crawled up him onehanded. He shouted and screamed, trying to beat me back with the butt of the shotgun. Flickering moonlight washed out into the room as the well of power opened up within me, sending out prickling sparkles of refracted moonlight from glass fragments. With a hand as black as empty night, I wrenched the gun from him and tossed it away. He beat at my head with gloved fists but my fingers found his throat.
Power surged in me, making the nerves in my shoulder sing in agony from the iron embedded in it. Black tendrils sank into him while he thrashed and bucked beneath me; they sucked the life from him until he kicked and struggled no more. I straddled him, draining the last dregs of life from him while his corpse withered beneath me. Under my shirt there was heat in the wound and a sense of wriggling, squelching life as the shoulder knit back together. As I watched, little black specks of shot were squeezed to the surface and popped out of the wound, smarting where they touched my skin and falling like patters of rain. Some fell inside the ripped shirt, and I had to wriggle out of the jacket and shirt to get rid of them, shaking the tattered remnants of the shirt to free them.
I looked up. My daughter stood among the debris, watching me, her face intent, her eyes bright, an expression of curiosity and horror on her face. As she watched, the red gore on my shoulder rippled into smooth lightless black while the ribcage beneath me crumbled, no longer able to support my weight.
I staggered to my feet.
Alex shook her head. "I don't understand. Where does the light go?" She stepped forward and reached out a hand to touch.
"Don't!"
She snapped her hand back.
"Don't touch me. I don't know what will happen."
"Nothing will happen."
She sounded certain, reaching out again and placing her hand gently where the wound had been. "Does it hurt?" she asked.
I shook my head, quelling the gallowfyre, calling the power back within me. The moonlight faded and the emergency lights paled back into dim illumination. My skin paled to normal under her hand. When she removed it, there was not even a scar.
"I'm sorry you had to see that," I said, looking down at the corpse where it lay like a desiccated mummy in uniform.
"I'm not."
I looked at her.
She hugged her arms around herself. "It means you're like me."
I thought about that for a moment. "I guess it does. A daddy's girl after all." I stepped forward and hugged her to me. She unwrapped her arms and clung for a moment, her hands cold against my bare skin. She stepped back, disengaging herself so that I could slip back into the ragged shirt and pull on my jacket. I reached into the inside pocket, reassuring myself that the vial of serum had not been broken in the fight. It crossed my mind that I should have destroyed it, but it was the only evidence remaining of what had been done here.
Alex collected the discarded shotgun from the floor, the weight of it clearly more than she was expecting.
"Do you know how to use that?"
She shook her head. "I've seen it done," she said, "and I can learn." She pumped the reload, chambering a round and resting the butt against her thigh, pointing it at the ceiling.
I pressed the barrel aside, gently. "Leave it. It will only weigh you down."
She appeared to consider for a moment and then dropped it on the corpse. "Didn't do him any good," she said.
I bent down and retrieved my sword.
"Do you know how to use that?" she asked.
It was a cheeky question, one that would have drawn a rebuke from me only a short while ago. I looked at my daughter and for the first time I realised that whatever had happened to her in this place, it had changed her. She had been on her own, beyond rescue or reprieve, and she had endured. The little girl I lost could not have done that. She had been forced to become something else.
Garvin said that the person I got back might not be the person I knew and maybe he was right. It didn't mean she was mad, though the incident with Watkins's severed head left me wondering, but it did mean that things would never be as they were. My little girl had gone, and I was going to have to find out what had replaced her. There would be time for that later. Her challenge remained, though.
"I'm told that I am competent with it," I said. "Though probably no more than that."
She must have heard the truth in my words, because she raised one eyebrow very slightly.
"I've been having lessons."
That was another thing. We routinely lie to our children. We tell them what's good for them, what we need them to know, and what it suits us to tell them. I was going to have to get used to not lying to my daughter. She would know as soon as I did.
I wrapped the glamour around us again, this time being careful to dampen any sound. We established a rhythm: me moving forward, then Alex following when I had established that all was clear. We found a trail of bodies. Raffmir had been busy. Most of them were in military uniform. The soldiers must have been moving the staff and patients out as they worked their way down. The place was deserted.
Once we were past the doors to the stairs there was less debris and fewer bodies. I retraced our route, passing up through the building, taking one stair flight at a time with Alex following. As far as I could tell, the building was deserted. We were the only living things left, which left me wondering what they planned to do next. Alex and I needed to be out, and quickly.
As we rose through the building a pervading vibration turned into a persistent thudding. By the time we reached the stairs to the rooftop and our escape route, I realised they had a helicopter circling the building. As we climbed the stairs its noise became a voice-drowning clatter. I had to shout to be heard.
"Wait here until I shout for you. I'm going up to get a clear view of our way out. When I shout, come up and grab tight hold of me. Don't hesitate. We won't have long."
She nodded her understanding and I took the steps up to the roof access. As I emerged on to the roof, the helicopter swung around the building, a huge thing with twin rotors which thudded through the air as if it was eating it in gulps. From a hatch in the side, a long gun swung sideways, aiming straight at me. I threw myself backwards.
The gun erupted in flame, sending a stream of bright fire in an arc across the access door. As I fell backwards through the hatch, the door was carved in two, sending splinters flying like needles through the air. I tumbled back down the stairs into Alex, rolling into her, the deafening roar of the gunfire rattling in my ears. Then it ceased.
I found myself lying head down on the steps, looking up into my daughter's face.
"Are you hurt?" she shouted.
I shuffled around, so I could sit, patting myself down, looking for fresh wounds. The only blood was where I had taken the shotgun blast. My instinctive reaction to throw myself backwards down the stairwell had saved me.
"No, I'm OK. I can't get to the roof, though. We can't leave if we can't see where we're going."
"Back down," she said. "We can break the windows in the offices below. They can't cover all of them."
It was my turn to nod. I led the way back down the stairwell. At the bottom I heard shouts. As I thrust the door open, gunfire echoed in the corridor. I slammed the door shut again. It was not built to withstand an assault, but it would slow them down. Placing my hand on it, I used my magic to seal it shut. It was the first trick I ever learned, and they would not get through it easily. I propelled Alex back up the stairs ahead of me. Within seconds a burst of bullets pierced the door below us, ricocheting off the metal steps.
"We're trapped," shouted Alex over the thudding of the helicopter.
She was right.
The noise from below as the men in the corridor tried to break through the door was almost drowned out by the helicopter circling above the roof. Even though I had sealed the lower door with magic, it would not take them long to break through it. They only needed a small hole and they could toss through a hand-grenade. In the confined space of the stairwell, the blast would kill us both. We had no time and nowhere to go.
"We're going up," I shouted to Alex, leading her away from the banging at the doorway. Thankfully the door was delaying them longer than I had hoped.
"What about the helicopter?"
I looked up the stairwell. Every thirty seconds or so, the helicopter circled around. Whatever I did would have to be done in that time.
I looked down the steps, wondering how much time we had. Not long.
"Get down on to the middle steps," I shouted to Alex. "Be ready to come up when I call you."
"You're mad! You can't go up there!" shouted Alex. She grabbed my arm, her fingers clinging to the jacket sleeve.
"No. Trust me. Shield your eyes."
"My eyes?"
"Just do as you're told for once, will you?"
She looked up at me and I could see the words forming on her lips: Don't tell me what to do.
Instead, she nodded and released my sleeve.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead, then took the steps up as far as I dared. I could hear the giant helicopter, the rhythmic thudding of the twin rotors, the whistle of the engines. I waited until I had the cycle in my head and then drew all the power I could.
The air chilled instantly, frost riming on the rails for the stairs. I heard the chopper engines falter and then whine with renewed force as the helicopter swept past the open doorway. I opened the dark well of power within me, feeling the prickle as white fingers of light crept around my hands. The world fell into a smoky veil. I could see through the walls of the small stair enclosure to the dark blocks of the air conditioners arrayed around the roof. I could see the insubstantial shape of the helicopter, wheeling around above me, its rotors too fast to perceive, the heavy steel of the machine gun poking inelegantly from its side.
The light from my aura must have attracted their attention, because another burst of fire swept across the open doorway above my head in a rattling crescendo, peppering me with brick fragments and concrete shards. I did my best to ignore it.
I cupped my hands in front of me. I had seen this done only once, but I thought I knew how it worked. The space between my hands was empty and not empty. It contained only air. I was a creature of the void. Blackbird could do things with air and fire, but that was not my element. My element was the void, the space between things. It was what kept matter from collapsing in on itself. It was what kept everything apart from everything else.
What happened, though, when it didn't? What happened when the space between things contracted, so that they came together in ways they were weren't supposed to?
I took the tiniest part of space and pulled the void from it. There was a fizzle and a pop.
Concentrating, I tried again. I reached in with my will, keeping it small, drawing the void into itself from the area between my hands. A spark fizzed into life and then crackled with energy. As the space around it bent, it grew brighter until it threw my shadows on to all the walls.
Another burst of gunfire hit the access, showering me with dust and brick chips. Where they fell into the spark, they vanished and it grew.
Opening my hands slowly, I allowed it to float, splitting my concentration between maintaining the spark and timing the helicopter's circles. If this was to work, I would have to get it right. Its noise grew as it thudded past the open doorway and then circled away.
I walked up the steps.
The helicopter circled round behind me, its view momentarily blocked. My spine itched with tension as I lifted my hands and let the spark rise and grow. I concentrated on feeding it, collapsing it into itself, seeing it brighten into an arc-light and then into a tiny star.
The chopper thudded into view. I heard the motor of the machine gun whine up to speed. If I left it any later I would be sliced in half.
I sent the star arcing into the sky into the path of the helicopter. The reaction was instant. The chopper tipped sideways and banked hard, klaxons screaming raucously from the open hatchway, The machine gun sent a stream of tracer out into the empty sky as it tipped wildly. Flares streamed out in pulses, bursting from the sides, aiming to distract a heat-seeker from its target.
This was no heat-seeker. The star rose ever brighter, unerringly following as the helicopter banked hard, the rotors chopping into the air. Everything stood out in harsh brightness, walls bleached of colour, shadows etched in black, sliding over surfaces as the star flew, chasing its target. The helicopter tipped and banked again, aiming to turn away. The star buried itself deep into it.
There was a flash, brighter than daylight, brighter than anything. It streamed from every doorway, every pinprick hole in the helicopter, outlining it against the blistering light. I covered my eyes with my hands, clearly seeing the bones outlined through them. A screaming, squealing, grinding clash of metal echoed across the sky.
The chopper exploded.
The shockwave thudded through me, a low pulse of destruction. Fire and metal rained down. Chunks of fuselage, scything lengths of rotor, metres long, strewed themselves out. The sky filled with a boiling cloud of thunderous fire, rolling ponderously upwards.
I was thrown backwards, sliding down the metal stairs, sheltering in the access as fragments rained down. When I opened my eyes, Alex was standing over me, looking down. I could not interpret her expression. It might have been fear.
There was a dull thud from below. The doorway had finally given way. I got to my feet. Opening the well of darkness within me, I drew energy into me until I glowed with an aura of white fire. I tugged my daughter out on to a rooftop scattered with burning debris, acrid with smoke and burning oil. Focusing on the distant hill, I hugged her close to me, pressing her skin to mine. The world faded before me and I stepped behind it, emerging through the flash on to the distant hilltop.
Looking back, we could see the plume of black smoke rising over the buildings and drifting out across the darkened moorland. Sirens wailed and blue and red lights flickered. Tiny figures ran around, shots echoed out, but there was no one left to fight.
We were free.