“Spoken like one of Midnight’s pawns. What do you want right now?”
Her green eyes were eerily intense.
“I don’t know,” I said. A little space would be nice.
She stared at me a while longer before saying, “I guess that’s the best answer we’ll get, for now. But you should think about it occasionally. The answer might surprise you.” She sat back, cross-legged and no longer hanging over me, which immediately made me more comfortable. “Now on to the rest of the world. Where is Malachi?”
Didn’t these people have a leader? Why was I talking to someone my age? “Where’s Farrell Obsidian?” I asked. Jaguar and Malachi had both said that he led this group.
I yelped as strong, pale hands dragged me to my feet and then shoved me hard enough to send me sprawling to the ground. I twisted, preparing to defend myself, and found Malachi’s sister staring down at me.
“You are not allowed to even speak his name,” she spat. “Kadee may like philosophizing, but I know what you are. Filthy bloodtraitor. Bleeder. What did you do to my brother?”
Kadee stood up and spoke to Misha, not quite softly enough to keep me from hearing. “Malachi says he’s innocent.”
“Malachi may be a prophet,” Misha snarled back, “but that doesn’t mean he can’t be a fool. The trainers trust this one. That means we—”
“The trainers are sick,” I said loudly, interrupting the madwoman’s rant before she could continue her argument against me. “Jeshickah blamed Malachi. She wants him to use his magic to fix it. He says he doesn’t know how. He kept asking her to bring in a real witch to help her, but she doesn’t trust them.”
“With good reason,” Kadee replied. “Most witches come from cultures that have fought for independence from Midnight for … I don’t even know how long. Centuries, I think. The only witches who work for Midnight are mercenaries, as likely to accept payment from Jeshickah’s enemies as from Jeshickah herself.” She met my gaze meaningfully and added, “That’s why Midnight has been trying to raise a witch of its own.”
“Malachi says he’s freeblood,” Misha mused. “If he’s not a slave, there’s no law saying we can’t kill him just to make a point.”
“Where’s Fa—um, your leader?” I asked again, desperately. I hoped he was less bloodthirsty than Malachi’s sister and could rein her in.
“Farrell brought us all together, but he isn’t our leader,” Kadee answered. “We’re children of Obsidian.”
“Who’s Obsidian?” I asked.
“Not who. What,” Kadee replied. “Obsidian is an idea. Children of Obsidian believe in free will, individual power, and community strength that doesn’t involve kneeling and calling another creature master or king. Originally it was just white vipers, but Farrell made it a place for anyone who was willing to live by Obsidian’s ideals.”
“Jaguar said you’re outlaws,” I said.
“That’s because the serpiente are ruled by a king,” Misha broke in, “and that hypocritical coward of a king bows to Midnight.”
“What’s the other option?” I asked. Stupidly, probably, but I really didn’t know. “I understand, you say you’ve chosen not to follow anyone, but isn’t the alternative chaos? You’re outlaws. Malachi has given me the impression that you’re constantly on the verge of being caught by serpiente guards, or freezing, or starving. Why would anyone choose that?”
“Because …” Kadee started to speak, then paused, staring into the embers. “Because the body isn’t the only thing about us that can starve. I had a chance once to live with servants and tutors and all those things, but it would have meant ignoring things that I knew were wrong. It would have killed something in me to do it.” She looked up at me once more, this time with sadness in her gaze. “I’m not sure that’s a decision you can understand yet.”
At the moment it wasn’t my decision to make. If the trainers died, I wouldn’t be welcome back at Midnight even if I was able to stand walking inside those walls with Jaguar and Taro both corpses beneath the ground. Whether I could stand the placid, vacant eyes of the broken slaves around me was irrelevant, since Jeshickah wouldn’t give me a chance.
“Can he help us rescue Malachi or not?” Misha demanded, clearly impatient with my questions.
“Don’t you want to make sure he wants to rescue Malachi before we ask him?” Kadee snapped back. “Or do you want to put yourself back in a trainer’s cell, at the word of a boy who we know nothing about?”
Silence like an axe falling. Suddenly I could hear my own pulse in my ears.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Kadee whispered. “I didn’t mean …”
Misha spun on her heel and walked off, shoulders tight.
“I would help you save him if I could,” I said to Kadee, “but I don’t know how. I can’t use my magic. I don’t know anything about this plague.” Because they deserved to know, and I didn’t think Kadee would kill me instantly for saying it, I added, “It isn’t just Malachi who’s in danger.”
I reiterated Jeshickah’s threat about what she would do to Misha and the Obsidian guild if one of “her men” died.
“Misha doesn’t have a mate,” Kadee protested, with the tone of one who was objecting to minutiae because the larger problem was too big. Her whole body shook, a violent shudder, and then she focused on me again. “Yet, anyway. It doesn’t matter. She still means us. Misha, Malachi … me. Farrell. We have to do something.”
“You!”
I spun around, expecting to see Misha, but instead I faced another hostile woman. Claw marks across her face scarred her tawny skin, and her eyes flashed sapphire blue in the firelight. She stormed toward me, until Kadee stepped forward and put herself between us.
“Aika, calm down! What is it?”
“Do you have any idea what he’s done?”
Her shouts were gathering others, who seemed to form at the edges of the clearing like flickering candle flames, sometimes visible from the corner of my eye, sometimes hidden by the Obsidian guild’s magic.
“That notice he posted?” Aika snarled. “It nearly started a riot. Midnight is accusing the Azteka of poisoning several of their slaves. They are demanding blood price for those who have died or become useless.”
“God help us,” Kadee whispered before I could protest that it wasn’t my fault—that I hadn’t known what was on that paper! I hardly even understood what Aika was saying now. It can’t be good, though, I thought as Kadee continued. “Aika, I understand you’re afraid, but this is not Vance’s fault. He’s trying to help us.”
I felt utterly useless, but I wasn’t going to argue with the one person who seemed to be on my side. “What does blood price mean?” I asked.
“For however many slaves Midnight has lost, it is demanding that the Azteka replace each one with something of equal or greater value,” Kadee answered. “If they were broken slaves, or second-generation slaves bred in Midnight, the vampires will demand a higher price for them than just one human in exchange.”
“That’s … sick,” I whispered, thinking of Felix or Elisabeth being assigned a price, as if they were pieces of furniture.
“Midnight is asking for one shapeshifter for each lost slave, or one healthy, trained bloodwitch for every ten human deaths,” Aika added. “With ‘greater recompense demanded if further deaths occur,’ whatever that means.”
“If the trainers die,” I whispered. Mistress Jeshickah didn’t want to announce to the world that the trainers were sick, but she wanted the culprits to know the punishment would be severe.
“Midnight wasn’t specific about what kind of shapeshifter the Azteka needed to give them,” Aika said. “They could save a lot of their own skins by handing over anyone else they can catch. The members of an outlaw guild no one cares about would be terribly convenient.”
Others had drifted up behind her and were sharing what news they had heard.
“The market is emptying out,” one young man said. “No one wants to be around when the pochteca g
et back. We should probably clear out, too.”
“I heard some talk about trying to catch and sell in a bloodwitch on their own,” another said.
“What does Midnight think it’s going to do with a bloodwitch?” Kadee asked. “They’re scary. I’ve seen them start fires by touching bare stone, without even kindling. The trainers could control you because they had you from infancy, Vance. Any adult, trained bloodwitch sold in to Midnight is going to go there fighting. Does Midnight really think they can handle that?”
I have to ask how you expect to break someone who can in fact boil your blood with a touch.
The trick is not to let them touch you.
“Yes, they do,” I answered, recalling the odd conversation I had overheard between Jaguar and Nathaniel the first time I ever saw them. That had been long before this illness. Had they been talking about controlling me, or already speculating about other ways to get a bloodwitch in their power?
“We should pack up and get out of here,” Aika said. “Kadee, send the bird away.”
“We can’t just run,” Kadee protested.
“That’s what we do,” someone else replied. “We’re not an army. If we fight Midnight, we will lose. If we fight the Azteka, we will lose. All we can do is get out of the way.”
Around us I saw the shadows of serpents packing up camp. They didn’t know that, this time, running wouldn’t help. They didn’t realize how bad it was.
Across the camp I saw Misha standing, staring at her fellows as they prepared to flee. She looked up and met my gaze, then started picking her way across the clearing toward me.
I braced myself.
“I won’t leave my brother in Midnight,” she said as she reached me.
“Neither will I,” Kadee said.
“Malachi can take care of himself,” Aika said. “He always does. Just watch. He’ll show up in the shadows any moment, grinning as if nothing has happened. Getting ourselves killed or sold into slavery won’t help him.”
“He always takes care of us.” That argument came from Torquil.
“This is why Farrell didn’t want us to come here,” Aika objected. “Misha, he knew you can’t think clearly when Midnight is involved, and you, Kadee, are too headstrong and optimistic to think rationally about anything. I’m going back to the main camp. I hope you’ll come with us.”
“You know I won’t,” Misha answered.
Aika shrugged. “You’re Obsidian. You’ll do what you feel you need to do. Just remember we need you, too.”
She turned, shrugged her pack onto her back, and started into the woods. When the bustle of exodus died down, only four of us remained: Misha, Kadee, Torquil, and me. Four lost souls, standing in the forest, needing a miracle.
“TELL US,” MISHA commanded.
So I did. I described everything that had happened lately, from the blood dreams to the illness among the slaves, and finally to what I had seen in that cell. I had to fight back bile in my throat as I described the fluid that had poured from the sick slave’s wound. Misha paced as I spoke, occasionally gritting her teeth or tightening her hands into fists, but she listened without interrupting or threatening. Once more I explained what Jeshickah intended to do if her trainers died.
“She doesn’t know who started the plague,” Misha said. “She’s blaming the Azteka because they’re the most powerful magic-users in the market, and Jeshickah knows that cornering them will force everyone to respond. She’s threatening us because the Obsidian guild tends to do whatever it needs to do. We’re a versatile tool, if she can force us to work for her—which she can, in this case.”
“How many are dead so far?” Kadee asked.
“Twelve,” I said. “Eight more are sick, though, and will probably die soon.”
“And then the trainers,” Kadee said. “That’s a lot of flesh to repay.”
“I didn’t know vampires could die,” Torquil said. “Isn’t there a chance they’ll recover?”
“Everything can die,” Misha said. She walked away from us to poke listlessly at the fire.
“Misha shouldn’t be here,” Torquil whispered fiercely. “Whatever we do, we cannot let her go after Malachi if that means entering Midnight.”
“What did they do to her?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Torquil answered. “She won’t talk about it. When they first gave her back to us, she didn’t speak for days … just woke up screaming in the middle of the night. Malachi stayed with her day and night, until she finally spoke, and her first words were to send him away. She said she couldn’t stand to look at him. Now I’m sure she blames herself for his being captured. It’s only been a few months since then, and if we put her back in there, back around the trainers … I don’t think we can predict what she might do.”
“Agreed,” Kadee said. “Whatever our plan is, we must keep her far away from Midnight.”
“Do any of you have magic?” I asked. “You’re talking as if we have options.”
“We have options,” Torquil answered. “We just haven’t figured out what they all are yet.”
“Malachi will not want us to turn in the Azteka to buy him out,” Kadee said.
“As if we could,” Torquil replied. “Forgetting that selling Midnight a bloodwitch would mean giving them an unstoppable weapon, and ignoring all the pesky ethical questions, an Azteka magic-user would make a bloody smear out of any of us if we tried. I hate to say it, but unless we want to become the next generation of trainers, I think our only choice is to try to save them.”
My heart leapt in multiple directions. I had wanted to rescue Malachi, if I could do so without sacrificing myself. I hadn’t expected this group to suggest rescuing the trainers, even if it did appear to be in their own self-interest.
“That is not going to go over well,” Kadee answered softly. “Misha—”
“Misha is standing right here,” Misha interrupted, making us all jump. I didn’t know when she had come close to us again. How did these people move that way? I always stepped on things that cracked and crunched. Misha moved like mist, soundlessly. “And I can be very practical, when I need to be.”
“Can’t we all?” Kadee asked dryly. “A little too practical, I think.”
“Unfortunately, practicality won’t fix this problem,” Torquil said. “We need power we just don’t have.”
“Malachi kept saying we needed someone more powerful than him,” I said. “Did he mean someone specific?” I thought of the spells I had seen around Midnight and in the greenhouse. There were obviously some powerful witches on Midnight’s side. “I know Jeshickah doesn’t want the wrong person to know the trainers are ill, but risking the wrong person knowing has to be better than doing nothing, right?”
“I like that idea,” Kadee said very softly. “Jeshickah is afraid that if the wrong people know the trainers are in such rough shape, they will turn on her. So … let’s tell the wrong person,” she said, her voice more confident now. “Who do we know? We must have some kind of contact. We—”
“No,” I interrupted, horrified. One minute we were talking about saving the trainers, and the next Kadee was suggesting we actively betray Midnight. Torquil spoke the same word, though with less horror and more resignation.
“Malachi will die in that cell if Jeshickah wants him to,” Kadee said. “We can’t force her to release him, and we don’t have the power to bargain, even if we wanted to damn all our souls even further. So let’s—”
“Let’s all lose our freeblood status by trying to betray Midnight to a witch who might be every bit as much of a tyrant?” Torquil interrupted.
“Freeblood, freeblood, freeblood,” Kadee echoed. “We do everything to keep this ‘gift’ Midnight claims to give us. If we don’t cross them and we pay what they ask and occasionally give up a little flesh or a little soul or a child or a brother, Midnight graciously allows us to continue doing so. They call it freeblood, but it’s just slavery in an invisible cage. Right, Vance?”
She loo
ked at me, and I flinched.
My cage hadn’t been invisible. It had been beautiful, even once I started to see the bars.
“This is too big,” Torquil said. “I don’t disagree with any specific point you’re making, Kadee, but look at us. If any one of us had ever had luck with making the right choice or trusting the right person, we wouldn’t be here, yet we’re talking about deciding the fate of our world. The four of us cannot be responsible for making this decision.”
I nodded. I was definitely the wrong person. I wasn’t even sure I wanted the trainers dead. I knew what they did, but that didn’t mean I could stand to play an active role in their executions.
Though she looked deflated, Kadee still asked, “If not us, then who? Diente Julian of the serpiente? Or Tuuli Thea Miriam of the avians? King Laurence of the Shantel? They already made their choices. They obey and keep their heads down. Even the Azteka, who actually have the power to fight, choose to avoid the conflict.”
“Fate is like the wind,” Misha said. She was standing right next to me, but her voice seemed distant. “We can face it or we can ride it. In this case fate has handed us four dying trainers and a little bird whose blood is poison. What kind of fools would we have to be to fight that kind of wind?”
“We should ask Farrell’s opinion,” Torquil suggested. “He might—”
“Farrell is two weeks away,” Misha interrupted. “By the time we spoke to him, much less made it back here, the trainers would either be dead or have recovered, and Malachi would be in whatever state Jeshickah felt was appropriate.”
“But …” Torquil trailed off, pierced by her glare.
“What about you, little bird?” Misha asked me. Her voice had a tone to it that was both familiar and unsettling, but which I could not immediately place. “You could run back to Jeshickah to report us, or you could just run and hide, or you could help. What kind of man are you?”
“I’m fourteen!” I objected, rising to my feet to move away from her. I looked to Kadee, who hadn’t seemed much older than I was. We were a bunch of kids, talking about destroying an empire of immortals. “Like Torquil said, this is too big for us.”