Winter was staring at Scarlet. Horrified. Trembling. But fierce.
Jacin’s hand whipped out, backhanding Winter across her face. She crashed against the building wall, but didn’t feel the force of it. Her focus was on Scarlet, only Scarlet, Scarlet and her knife.
Winter was crying and hating herself. She was wretched and cruel but she didn’t relent as she forced Scarlet into battle. Aimery stumbled back again and raised his hands to his own defense. Scarlet hurled herself at him. Aimery tripped over the leg of a dead civilian man and sprawled backward. Scarlet landed on her knees beside him and scrambled forward. Her eyes were confused, her mouth slack with disbelief, but her body was vicious and determined and sure as she plunged the knife into his flesh.
Eighty-Seven
Reality disintegrated. The world was a thousand cumbersome pixels tearing apart, leaving black spaces in between, then smashing back together in blinding sparks.
Winter had made herself as small as she could, huddled in the shop’s doorway off the main thoroughfare of Artemisia. Her own shaking arms made for a protective shield around her body and her feet were pulled in tight. She’d lost a shoe. She didn’t know how or when.
Aimery was dead.
Scarlet-friend had stabbed him nine times.
Winter had stabbed him nine times.
Dear Scarlet. Vicious, stubborn, weak-minded Scarlet.
Once she had started, Winter couldn’t make it stop. Nine times. It had been years since she’d manipulated anyone and never with violent intentions. Aimery, in his determination to subdue them all with his gift, had not tried to get away until after the second stab. By that time Winter was already lost. She couldn’t make it stop. She thought only of erasing forever that awful, charming grin. Of destroying his mind so she would not be forced to wrap her hands around Jacin’s neck again and finish what she’d started.
Now Aimery was dead.
The streets were full of his blood. They reeked with the stench of it.
“What’s wrong with her?” some far-off voice shrieked. “Why is she acting this way?”
“Give her some space.” This command was followed by a grunt. Jacin? Could it be her guard, so near, always so near?
Jacin had been the one to tackle Scarlet and rip the knife away, snapping the hold Winter had taken over her. Otherwise she knew she would have kept stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and stabbing until Aimery was nothing but chopped bits of flesh and smiles.
Winter’s head was full of distraction, too much to comprehend. The shop’s sign overhead swung on its hinges. There was a torn curtain behind broken glass. Bullet holes in the walls. Roofs caving in. Glass shattered beneath her feet.
“We have to find Cinder.” The voice was insistent, but terrified. “We have to make sure she’s okay, but I can’t … I don’t want to leave Winter…”
Winter arched her back and clawed her hands into her hair, gasping from an onslaught of sensation. Every inch of her skin was a hive of stinging bees.
Arms circled around her. Or maybe they had been there for a long time. She could hardly feel them outside of the cocoon she’d erected, even though it was covered in hairline fractures. “It’s all right. I’ve got Winter. Go.”
A cocoon.
An encasement of ice.
A spaceship harness strangling her, the belt cutting into her flesh.
“Go!”
Winter clawed at the straps, struggling to get out. Those same strong arms tried to hold her still. Tried to secure her thrashing. She snapped her teeth, and the body shifted out of her reach. She was pulled away from the door, their bodies repositioned, so the arms could restrain her without being in danger themselves. She struggled harder. Kicked and writhed.
And screamed.
stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and
Her throat was hoarse.
Maybe she’d been screaming for a long time.
Maybe the sound was imprisoned inside this cocoon, trapped like she was. Maybe no one would ever hear her. Maybe she would scream until her throat bled and no one would ever know.
Her heart split in two. She was an animal. A killer and a predator.
The screams turned to howls.
Sad and broken howls.
Haunting and furious howls.
“Winter? Winter!”
The arms around her were unrelenting. She thought there might be a voice, familiar and kind, somewhere far in the distance. She thought there might be good intentions in that voice. She thought that if she could follow the sound, it would lead her to somewhere safe and calm, where she was no longer a murderer.
But she was already suffocating beneath the weight of her crimes.
Animal. Killer. Predator. And the wolves all howl, aa-ooooooooooh …
Eighty-Eight
Cinder checked the gun’s ammunition, counting the bullets while she ran. She was breathing hard, but she didn’t feel tired or even sore. Adrenaline was pumping hot through her veins and for once she was aware of it only because she could feel herself trembling with the surge of it, not because her brain interface was telling her so.
The sounds of battle were echoing in the palace, dim and far away. Many floors below. They were inside, she could tell. There would be a lot of casualties, she knew.
She felt like they might be winning. She could win.
But it would fall apart if she didn’t finish what she’d come to do. If she didn’t find a way to end Levana’s tyranny for good, the people would be back under her control by morning.
She took the stairs two at a time. Her hair prickled on the back of her neck as she arrived in the fourth floor corridor. She peered down the empty hall with its artwork and tapestries and shimmering white tiles, listening for any sound indicating an ambush.
Not that ambushes came with warning sounds.
Everything was eerie and haunted after the chaos of the courtyard.
It was no comfort to Cinder that she had reached the throne room without incident. It wasn’t like Levana to make things easy for her, which meant that either Levana was so distraught from the video she was no longer thinking straight, or—more likely—Cinder was walking into a trap.
She held the gun with one hand, the knife in the other, and tried to calm her stampeding heart. She did her best to come up with some sort of plan for when she reached the throne room, assuming Levana was in there, probably with an entire envoy of guards and thaumaturges.
If the guards weren’t already under someone’s control, she would steal them away and form a protective barrier around herself. The moment an opportunity presented itself, she would shoot Levana. No hesitation allowed.
Because Levana wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.
She found herself standing outside the throne room doors, the Lunar insignia carved across their surface. She gulped, wishing she could sense how many people were inside, but the room was too well sealed. Whatever lay beyond these doors was a mystery.
An ambush, common sense whispered to her. A trap.
Licking the salt from her lips, she braced herself and kicked one of the doors open, wedging inside before it could slam back on her. Her body was tense, braced for an impact, a punch, a bullet, anything other than the stillness that greeted her.
Only two people were in the room, making it feel infinitely larger than it had during the wedding feast. The audience chairs were still there, but many of them had been shoved against the walls or crushed in the destruction she had wreaked.