Old and young look at me hungrily. Waiting to be fed.
This is what it’s like being the alpha, the Primus. The others look to you for guidance. They can smell the tangy odor of blood on you before it’s even there. Age doesn’t matter. Experience doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I provide these sick sons of bitches with fresh kills.
Children cry around us, startling me. Such fragile things in a night like this. The sons and daughters of Augustus’s youngest sister. Their father strokes their hair to calm them. Snorting, his wife bends and slaps each child across the face till they cease their whining. “Be brave.”
Our Obsidians and Grays are not waiting for us on the ground. They’ve been taken somewhere. Neither are the Sovereign’s Obsidians or her Golds coming through the air. Which means she hasn’t yet decided what to do. Just as I thought. She can’t slaughter us. For a house to wipe out another house is one thing, but for the great leader to do it with the power and funds entrusted to her by the Senate? It’s happened before, and that Sovereign was beheaded by his daughter. The daughter who now sits on the throne.
Oh, she must hate me for this.
Below the lift, lights glow along the cobbled paths that cut through the huge forest of flower trees. The musicians no longer play. Instead, we hear shouts and screams and long periods of terrifying silence. Golds run beneath. Fleeing to the stone halls past the forest, where they can access their ships, fly home. Only, some aren’t fleeing. They are hunting.
Something has happened I did not expect. Other family feuds find satisfaction tonight. It felt the same at the Institute when the other students realized it wasn’t a game. That there weren’t rules. An eerie feeling, a notion that devils roam the grounds instead of men. Who knows what anyone will do now that the rules are gone?
There are four hunters in the distance. A pack of three men and one young woman dash silently through the forest. They hop a brook. Running with all the vigor of the hungry. All the ambition of youth. From House Falthe, it seems. I recognize raisin-eyed Lilath, the girl the Jackal sent to deliver the holo of me killing Julian to Cassius. With her is Cipio, the stout young man who once aided Antonia in and out of the bedroom.
We watch them in silence as our lift descends. Carrying death, the lean pack streaks through the trees toward an unsuspecting line of House Thorne family members, all in dresses and suits of red and white; too late they head frantically for the stone halls. Their standard is the rose. It falls as the killers burst from the trees. A family dies. Scary how quiet and fast it is with razors. Different from my duel. I took my time. They don’t. I see a boy of ten cut apart. There’s no mercy for Gold children. They are not seen as innocent. They’re enemy seeds. Destroy them or fight them years from now. A woman in a ball gown slashes back, manages to kill one of the Falthes before being cut down. Two children run. One is caught. The other escapes. She’s the only one.
Then the Falthe lancers dance. Taking large, exaggerated stomps. They turn in different directions, grinding their toes into the dark ground. They aren’t dancing.
“Goryhell,” Tactus curses, and rubs his face.
“The children …,” Victra whispers.
Augustus says nothing, his face as resolute as stone.
“The Thornes have fifteen children.” Tears bead in Victra’s eyes, surprising me.
“Monsters,” the Jackal whispers, sending chills up my spine, because his acting is so damn good. He couldn’t give a piss.
Children. Would Eo have sung if she’d known this was the chorus? We all carry burdens. And as the killers slip away from the murdered family, I know my burden will crush me under its weight one day. Just not today.
“Data jammer deployed,” says Daxo au Telemanus. He flashes me the datapad on his wrist. “Datapads are dead. They don’t want us contacting our ships in orbit.”
Augustus looks at his blank datapad and says that soon the other families will be summoning their Obsidian, Gold, and Gray attendants. We must be off planet and back in a position of strength before the tide turns against us.
“You made this chaos, Darrow. Deliver me from it.” He leans toward me and feels the pulse of the Praetor I carry. “Get rid of her. She’ll be dead in a minute.” He wipes his hands. “The children weigh us down enough already.”
The Praetor murmurs something to me as I set her on the floor of the lift. I don’t know what she says. When I die, I will say nothing because I know the Vale waits on the other side. What waits for this warrior? Only darkness. I didn’t even understand her last words, and we discard her like a broken sword. I close her eyes with my bloody fingers, leaving long, fading marks. Victra squeezes my shoulder.
Standing, I give my orders to the lancers and the other men of war. There are fifteen I would consider good killers. Some my age, others well into old age. Yet not one contradicts me. Not even Pliny. The Telemanuses in particular seem eager to follow. Each holds my gaze longer than necessary, nodding deeper than mere formality.
“I hope no one is bored.” They laugh. “We’ll have company if another family decides they may earn favor with the Bellona or the Sovereign by taking the ArchGovernor’s head,” I say. “We must kill that company, and carve our way to the hangars. Telemanus, you and your son are now the ArchGovernor’s shadows. Attend nothing else. Do you understand?” They nod their massive heads. “Hic sunt leones.”
“Hic sunt leones.”
When the lift reaches ground, forty men and women wait for us. Family Norvo of Triton and Family Codovan of Jupiter’s moons.
“Unfortunate odds,” Tactus sighs.
“Cordovan and Norvo are ours,” Augustus replies. “Bought and paid for.”
“Rapscallion! Codovan, you rapscallion!” Kavax thunders. “I thought you were a Bellona man!”
Augustus expected something like this.
I take command of the new Golds. Again, I thought someone would object. They just stand watching me, waiting for my orders. All these Praetors, all these politicians and sinewy men and women of war. I hold back a chuckle. Amazing the power you have when you’re bloody up to the sleeves and none of it is your own.
We escort the ArchGovernor out of the forest. Three times we’re assailed, but I have Tactus take Augustus’s cloak and lead some of the attackers on a wild-goose chase. Roses of a thousand shades fall from the trees as Golds fight beneath them. They’re all red in the end.