Winter

Eighty-Six

Jacin was holding her hand, his fingers strong and tense, like he was afraid she would vanish if he loosened his grip. They emerged with the flood of people out of the maglev tunnels into Artemisia Central. Winter’s childhood home. Jacin’s too. She felt like a ghost. She felt like a conqueror.

It had taken hours for them to traverse Luna’s terrain, visiting dozens of the nearest sectors, spreading the word of Selene’s survival and the call to arms and asking the people to stand with them. It had taken less coercing than she’d expected. Already spurred on by the first video Cinder had broadcast and incensed by Levana’s attempt to have the princess murdered—again—the people were in a frenzy by the time Jacin and Winter arrived to tell them their news. Many were already on their way to the capital.

No sooner had she and Jacin broken onto the surface than the people took off sprinting toward the palace, roaring and gripping their weapons. Winter tried to keep pace with them, but Jacin’s grip tightened and pulled her to the side, keeping her sheltered from the teeming crowd.

The courtyard in front of the palace was already a graveyard, though there were still people struggling to go on fighting. A battalion of thaumaturges and countless wolf soldiers wasted no time launching themselves at the new arrivals, and those brave war cries from the front lines were quickly turned into screams. There were more coming still, pouring out of the tunnels and into the streets, and Winter recognized many of her own soldiers trying to rip the mutants away from their allies. Confusion reigned. Thaumaturge-controlled civilians turned into enemies, and it was sometimes impossible to tell which of the wolf soldiers were on their side.

Claws ripping open a person’s chest.

A bullet tearing through the side of a woman’s face.

A spear impaling a man’s abdomen.

Howls of pain and victory, indistinguishable. The tangy smell of blood. Still the people came and came and came. The people she had brought there.

Winter’s head rang with it all. Her feet were rooted to the ground. She was glad Jacin had stopped her.

“The palace will be soaked through with blood,” she whispered. “The waters of Artemisia Lake will run red, and even the Earthens will see it.”

Jacin’s eyes flashed with alarm. “Winter?”

She barely heard Jacin over the din inside her skull. Prying herself away from him, she stumbled forward and collapsed over the body of one of the wolf soldiers. There was a familiarity to the set of his jaw, the dead eyes staring upward.

Brushing a lock of bloodstained hair away from the man’s brow, Winter began to wail.

It was Alpha Strom.

And it was her fault, her fault he was here. She had asked him to fight for her and now he was dead and—

Jacin took her elbow. “Winter, what are you doing?”

She collapsed, sobbing over Strom’s body. “I’m dying,” she whimpered, digging her fingers into the filth-crusted fabric of Strom’s shirt.

Jacin cursed. “I knew this was a bad idea.” He tugged at her, but she ripped her arm away and scanned the raging battle around them.

“I am destroyed,” she said. Tears were on her cheeks, mixing with all the blood. “I do not know that even a sane person could recover from this. So how can I?”

“Precisely why we should leave. Come on.” This time he didn’t give her a choice, just hooked his hands under her arms and hauled her to her feet. Winter slid against him, allowing him to fit her to his body. A surprising cheer called her attention toward the palace and she saw the thaumaturges fleeing back inside. Many had fallen and were lying dead or dying on the palace stairs. They were overwhelmed. There were too many people now for the queen’s minions to hold their own, just as Cinder had hoped.

Armies were falling—on both sides.

So many deaths.

Spurred on by their victory, the people rushed the palace, streaming in through the enormous doors, chasing the thaumaturges.

Winter spotted a flash of vivid red hair and her heart leaped.

“Scarlet!” she screamed, struggling against Jacin, though he held her firm. “No, Scarlet! Don’t go in there! The walls are bleeding!” Her word turned into shudders, but it worked. Scarlet had frozen and turned. She searched the crowd for the source of her name.

Jacin dragged Winter beneath the overhang of a dress shop and pressed her into the alcove.

“It’s not safe!” Winter screamed, reaching past him for her friend, but she could no longer see Scarlet in the swarm. She met Jacin’s panicked eyes. “It isn’t safe in there. The walls … the blood. She’ll be hurt and she’ll die and they’re all going to die.”

“All right, Winter. Calm down,” he said, smoothing back Winter’s hair. “Scarlet is strong. She’ll be all right.”

She whimpered. “It isn’t just Scarlet. Everyone is going to die, and nobody knows, nobody sees it but me—” Her voice cracked and she started sobbing. Hysterical. She started to collapse, but Jacin caught her and held her against him, letting her cry against his chest. “I’m going to lose them all. They’ll be drowned in their own blood.”

The sounds of fighting were distant and muffled now within the palace walls, replaced in the streets and courtyard with the moans of death and bloodied coughing. Winter’s vision was blurred as she peered over Jacin’s shoulder. Mostly bodies and blood, but also some stragglers. A few dozen people picking their way through the destruction. Trying to tend to those who were still alive. Pulling bodies off other bodies. A girl in an apron—surprisingly clean—pulled the buttons off one of the thaumaturges’ black coats.

“I should have left you with the lumberjacks,” Jacin muttered.

The girl in the apron noticed them, startled, then scampered off to the other side of the courtyard to rifle through some other victims’ pockets. A servant from the city, Winter guessed, though she didn’t recognize her.

“I could have been you,” Winter whispered after her. Jacin’s fingers dug into her back. “The lowly daughter of a guard and a seamstress. I should have been her, scavenging for scraps. Not royalty. Not this.”

Sandwiching Winter’s face in both hands, Jacin forced her gaze up to his. “Hey,” he said, somehow stern and gentle at the same time. “You’re my princess, right? You were always going to be my princess, no matter what you were born, no matter who your dad married.”

Her eyes misted. Reaching up, she folded her fingers over Jacin’s forearms. “And you are always my guard.”

“That’s right.” The faintest touch. His calloused thumb against her temple. Winter’s whole body quivered. “Come on. I’m getting you out of here.”

He started to pull away, but she dug her fingertips into his arms. “You need to help Selene and Scarlet and the others.”

“No. Either she’s winning or she’s losing. My presence won’t sway it at this point. But you—I can take care of you. For once.”

“You always take care of me.”

His lips tightened and his attention dipped toward her scars, before he looked away altogether. He was about to speak again when Winter’s eye caught on movement.

The servant in her apron had sneaked up on them and now had an empty look in her face. She raised a bloodied knife over her head.

Winter gasped and yanked Jacin to the side. The tip of the knife slashed through the back of his arm, ripping through his shirt. Snarling, he spun to face the attacker and grabbed her wrist before she could swipe at him again.

“Don’t hurt her!” Winter screamed. “She’s being manipulated!”

“I noticed,” he growled, prying the woman’s fingers back until she dropped the knife. It landed with a clatter on the stone ground. Jacin shoved her away and she fell, collapsing on her side.

In the same movement, Jacin yanked the shoulder straps that held his gun and knife over his head and threw them as hard as he could toward the obstacle course of fallen bodies. Before they could be used against him. Before his own hands could turn the weapons against him.

“I hope you don’t think that will make a difference.”

Whimpering, Winter pressed herself back into the doorway.

Aimery. He was standing in the street—not smiling. For once, not even pretending to smile. Not smug or cruel or taunting.

He looked unhinged.

The servant girl, released from his control, scrambled away on her hands and knees and escaped as fast as she could into an alleyway. Winter heard her crawling turn into the hurried beat of running. Aimery let her go. He didn’t even look at her.

Jacin placed himself between Winter and Aimery, though she didn’t know why. Aimery could have forced Jacin to move aside with a tiny little thought. Aimery could toy with them as easily as pawns on the queen’s game board.

“As you are useless with your own gift,” Aimery drawled, dark eyes burning, “perhaps you do not understand that we do not require guns and knives to do damage. When you have been given the power that I have, all the world is an armory, and everything in it a weapon.”

Aimery tucked his hands into his sleeves, although he was lacking his normal composure. His expression was frazzled and angry.

“You could be strangled with your own belt,” he continued, still speaking slowly. “You could impale yourself with a serving fork. You could plunge your own thumbs into your eye sockets.”

“You think I don’t know the sort of things you can do?” Jacin’s body was taut, but Winter didn’t think Aimery had taken control of him.

Not yet.

But he would.

There was Aimery’s nightmare smile, but it was crossed with a snarl. “You are as inferior to me as a rat.” His attention switched to Winter. His lip curled in disgust. “Yet she still made her choice, didn’t she?”

Winter’s heart pummeled against her rib cage, Aimery’s words echoing inside her frazzled skull. Strangle. Impale. Plunge.

He would. Not yet. But he would.

A chill crawled over her skin from the pure hatred she saw in Aimery’s face.

“You should have accepted me when you had the chance,” he said.

She tried to swallow, but her saliva felt like paste. “I could have,” she said, “but it would have been no more real than the visions that plague me.”

“So you chose a pathetic guard.”

Her lips quivered. “You don’t understand. He is the only thing that is real.”

Aimery’s expression darkened. “And soon he will be dead, little princess.” He spat the title like an insult. “Real or not, I will have you. If not as a wife or a willing mistress, then as a possession to be displayed in a pretty bejeweled case.” His eyes took on a hint of madness. “I have waited too many years to let you go now.”

Jacin’s back was to Winter, his shoulders knotted. A line of blood curled down his elbow and dripped along his wrist. Splattered to the ground below. He was powerless to do anything but stand there and say cold and callous things and hope no one detected how afraid and frustrated he really was.

But Winter knew. She had lived her life with that fear too.

Aimery looked pleased as he focused again on Jacin. “I have been waiting for this since you were brought before the court. I should have watched you bleed on the throne room floor that day.”

Winter convulsed.

“That must have been such a disappointment for you,” said Jacin.

“It was,” agreed Aimery, “but I do think I will enjoy this moment even more.” His cheek twitched. “How shall it be done? By my hand? By your own?” His eyes glistened. “By hers? Ah—how inconsolable she would be then, to be the instrument of her own beloved’s death. Perhaps I will have her bash in your skull with a rock. Perhaps I will have her choke you with her pretty fingers.”

Nausea rolled over her.

Jacin—

Jacin.

“I rather like that idea,” Aimery mused.

Winter’s hands stirred. She did not know if they would be strangling or choking or bashing or impaling. She knew Aimery had her now and Jacin was in danger and this was the end. There was no gray area. There were no winners. She was a fool, a fool, a fool.

Winter kept her eyes open against the hot tears.

Jacin turned to face her as her hands wrapped around his neck. Her thumbs pressed into the flesh of his throat. There was a gasp, and if he wanted to push her away, Aimery wouldn’t let him.

Winter couldn’t look. Couldn’t watch. She was crying uncontrollably and the awful feel of Jacin’s throat under her thumbs was too awful, too fragile, too—

A flash of red sparked through the pooling tears.

Scarlet, creeping behind Aimery. Inching over the fallen bodies. A knife in her hand.

Seeing that Winter had spotted her, Scarlet raised a finger to her lips.

Aimery turned his head.

Not toward Scarlet, but toward an enormous, roaring figure.

Aimery laughed, waving one hand through the air. Wolf was steps away when he collapsed, howling in pain. “I am the queen’s own thaumaturge!” Aimery yelled, eyes blazing as he snarled down at Wolf’s twitching body. “You think I cannot feel you sneaking up on me? You think I cannot handle one pathetic mutant and a weak-minded guard and an Earthen?”

He pivoted to face Scarlet. She was still half a dozen paces away from him and she froze, her knuckles clenched around the knife handle.

Aimery’s smile faded. His brow twitched as he realized that the bioelectricity around Scarlet’s body was already claimed.

His eyes narrowed and he searched the graveyard they stood on, but there was no one there to be controlling Scarlet. No one who could have undermined his own powers. Except …

Scarlet lumbered closer to him. Her gait was stunted and awkward. Her arm trembling as she raised the knife.

Aimery stepped back and his attention turned and locked on to Winter. In the moment he’d been distracted by Wolf—poor, tortured Wolf—he had released Winter’s hands and mind. Jacin was still rubbing his throat and struggling for breath and Winter …

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.