Spread out?
Right ahead in a group.
Guess they’re waiting for us, I said. Well, game time. We came to a door; Trey opened it without knocking and led us into the room beyond.
It had been a long time since I’d visited Morden’s mansion, but when I had I’d done a pretty thorough mapping and the layout hadn’t changed. The room we were walking into had originally been Morden’s ballroom, a wide room along the mansion’s west side with parquet flooring and chandeliers above. Onyx, though, had done some redecorating.
Chairs and side tables had been pushed up against the walls, leaving most of the floor clear. Many were knocked over or broken: the ones that were whole were cluttered with rubbish and half-eaten meals. The parquet floor itself was cracked and burned, and there was a splintered crater in one corner that looked like it had been made by a hand grenade. One of the chandeliers had been shredded, and the lights from the remaining ones mixed with the daylight through the windows.
The people that Anne had sensed were scattered around the edges of the room, and they were not the most attractive-looking crowd. Lots of visible weapons, not much attention to personal hygiene. One had what looked like an AK-47 propped up against his chair; another was cleaning his nails with a flick knife. Ages ranged from teens to thirties, but as Anne had said, they skewed young. Taken as a whole, they had an undisciplined, wolfish look; all were watching us as we walked in, and I didn’t like the looks in their eyes.
Out of all the people in the room, only two didn’t turn to face us. One was the only girl in the room, a thin dark-haired figure near the back wall. She was sweeping up some debris with a dustpan and brush and kept her head down. Something about her body language told me she was trying not to attract attention.
The second was one I recognised instantly: Pyre. He looked younger than his age, with short, tousled blond hair. There was a long dining table at the centre of the room, and he was sitting near our end of it, leaning back in his chair and playing with a lighter, apparently absorbed in the flame as he clicked it on and off with long white fingers. He was good-looking, in a boyish, almost feminine way; he might have looked delicate if I hadn’t known more about him. I didn’t know if he recognised me; we’d never come face to face, and it was possible that he’d never figured out that I’d been involved in that business a few years ago. I hoped not.
And then there was Onyx, sprawled in a high-backed chair at the end of the table so that he was facing the door. He hadn’t changed much since I’d last seen him; he never does, really. Same whip-like, slender build; same dangerous stillness. The only difference I could see was a bit of gold jewellery to offset the black of his clothes. He watched us from beneath lowered brows as we drew closer, and his eyes were opaque.
Trey peeled off as we entered, withdrawing to one side. I kept going, stopping in front of Onyx’s table. Half my attention was on Onyx and Pyre, the other half on the futures, and I could sense the possibilities of violence, not close, but not far away either.
Onyx didn’t speak, watching us with his flat, deadly eyes. The silence dragged out. ‘Well,’ I said at last. ‘You seem to be doing well for yourself.’
‘You wanted to talk,’ Onyx said.
‘Great, let’s skip the pleasantries,’ I said. I nodded at the people around us. ‘I’ve got an offer to make. It’s confidential.’
‘So?’ Onyx said.
‘As in, you might not want an audience.’
‘What’s the matter, Verus?’ Onyx said. ‘Feeling shy?’
Several of the guys leaning against the walls laughed. They weren’t nice laughs. ‘I don’t think you’re going to want this spread around,’ I said.
Onyx withdrew his feet from the table and placed them on the floor, leaning forward slightly. The laughs from the audience cut off abruptly. ‘I don’t care what you think,’ he said softly into the silence.
I stood still for a moment. Every one of my instincts was telling me that discussing something like this in front of this kind of a crowd was a really bad idea, but arguing seemed worse. ‘The Council want to make a deal,’ I said.
‘Of course they want to make a deal,’ Onyx said. ‘That’s all they ever want to do, talk and make deals. Just like you.’ He tilted his head. ‘So what are you offering?’
‘Help,’ I said. ‘Items. There’s a lot on the table. Question is if you’re willing to work with them.’
‘Yeah?’ Onyx said. ‘That’s funny. Because I think the question is why I shouldn’t just kill you right now and have what’s left thrown out of my mansion to show the Council exactly what I think of cowardly little shits like you.’
There was a rustle of movement around the room. I didn’t turn to look. ‘Because if you try,’ I said, ‘you won’t have a mansion, or any followers. And maybe not a life either.’ Without taking my eyes off Onyx, I undid the button on my coat and opened it.
I felt the people against the walls stop moving. Beneath my coat and over my armour I was wearing a vest with a series of long rectangular blocks hanging off it that were connected with electrical wire. I don’t know how many of them could identify plastic explosives, but they recognised what the set-up meant, and all of a sudden no one seemed very keen on getting close. Pyre looked up from his lighter and paused.
‘You think a bomb’s going to scare me?’ Onyx said.
‘I think it might make you think twice.’
Onyx gave a single contemptuous glance at my vest. ‘You didn’t bring enough.’
‘To get through your shields?’ I said. ‘No, but enough to kill everyone else in this room. Oh, and by the way? This isn’t a conventional explosive. You might survive it. Maybe. But I guarantee you, once it’s done, you’ll need a new place to live, because neither you nor anyone else is going to be using this mansion ever again.’
‘That’s your plan?’ Onyx said.
‘That’s about half of it,’ I said. ‘But honestly? It’s also just meant as a kind of general “fuck you”. If you’re going to pull the same shit you tried back in the Vault, then this time you’re going to pay for it.’
Onyx rose to his feet in a smooth, graceful motion. He walked around the table, holding my gaze. ‘Know what, Verus?’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’ve got the balls.’
I unfolded my left hand and saw Onyx’s eyes flick down to the detonator that had been concealed within my fingers. I’d taken it out before we’d even stepped through the front door. ‘Come try me, you little shit,’ I said calmly and clearly.
I’d known from the beginning that the big danger of this plan was the possibility of Onyx calling my bluff. There are a lot of people like Onyx in the Dark world, and it’s a very bad idea to assume that they’re stupid. They might not be book-smart, but they have an instinctive understanding of brinkmanship and how to use the threat of force to get what they want. Trying to bluff someone like that is dangerous – they can sense immediately when someone is too scared to go through with their threat. Besides, in terms of simple destructive power, Onyx was right: I wasn’t carrying enough explosives to get through his shields.
Which was why I wasn’t bluffing at all. I hadn’t loaded this vest with high explosive. If I had, with Anne next to me, I would have been too reluctant to pull the trigger, and Onyx would have smelled that fear like a wolf sniffing out prey. So instead, I’d loaded the vest with the most lethal chemical weapon I could find. Anne would survive it just fine, and I probably would as well, providing Anne could treat me fast enough. The other people in the room … not so much. Even Onyx might not make it if he didn’t see the danger and adjust his shields before the stuff touched his skin. I still didn’t give us good odds of both making it out, but we could do it, and if he tried what he was thinking of doing right now, then I was going to push this button and take my chances.