A Citadel of Captives

  Kallisto shook her head slowly. “Yeah, right. Give her a couple of days. Her mind is still young and malleable. She’ll see the truth, like I did.”

  “Okay! So, what’s the plan?” Dmitri asked, suddenly energized.

  “Hold on,” Amane replied, then fumbled through one of her pouches and took out two small devices, which she shoved inside Douma’s ears.

  “No, don’t!” Douma protested, but it was too late. She blinked several times, while Amane watched her expression carefully.

  “She can’t hear us anymore,” she said. “Now, we can talk.”

  “Well, first we prepare another message for GASP, we start reaching out to the Faulties, and we talk some sense into the one Perfect we’ve got in our possession,” Rose said, then looked at Ben, who nodded in agreement. “I doubt we’ll be able to get our people out on the first try, based on what we’ve seen and experienced so far. Once we find out where Ta’Zan’s compound is, we’ll have to find a way to infiltrate and get Amal out, first. The less leverage that Ta’Zan has on Amane, the better for us.”

  Following that plan, I could see a clear path forward.

  “And, after that, we get our people out,” I said. “Provided, of course, we get some Faulties to help us. In an ideal world, the plan should also include shutting down the Perfect mass-production, getting the blueprint out of Ta’Zan’s possession, and finding a way to kill the Perfects before they get off the planet. Time is not on our side on this one.”

  “Yeah, we clearly have our work cut out for us,” Vesta replied, still settled against Zeriel’s chest. “But, like Rose suggested, Ben and I will try to reach out to the Hermessi, too, and see if we can get them to help in any way. I mean, remember the battle on Mount Azure? It was a Hermessi who disabled Shaytan long enough for Harper to kill him.”

  Amane frowned. “I haven’t heard of the Hermessi. Are they gods, or what?”

  “Elements of nature,” Rose explained. “Entities of some kind. They generate and control the basics—water, fire, air, and earth. They’ve been around for eons, but were somehow forgotten. They used to be worshipped. Their powers were mentioned in legends and old folktales. We hadn’t even heard of them until one of our own had an experience with one of them. It’s a long story, but the short version is that we may be able to get nature itself to intervene. Provided, of course, that we manage to establish some kind of dialogue with the Hermessi.”

  Amane and Kallisto looked at each other, both equally surprised by what they’d just heard. Douma was quiet, watching us all like a hawk. She was a powder-keg waiting to explode, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give her any opportunity to screw us over. We’d been burned one too many times, already. Fortunately, she couldn’t hear a single word we said.

  “So, nature may take action against Ta’Zan’s… unnatural work, you think?” Amane asked, somewhat incredulously.

  “That’s what we’re thinking, anyway. I mean, you were here. You saw what happened to Douma. That wasn’t any of us,” I replied. “That must’ve been the Hermessi. We know it’s happened before, albeit on another planet. We know it’s possible.”

  “Well, it’s better than nothing.” Amane sighed. “I wouldn’t say no to any kind of assistance, going forward. We’ve got a rocky road ahead. I hope you’re all ready for any possible outcome.”

  We were. One look at Nevis, Zeriel, Vesta, Kailani, Hunter, Dmitri, Rose, Ben, and Ridan, and I knew. We were totally ready. My grandparents and our GASP founders were Ta’Zan’s prisoners. My brother was missing. Dozens of our fighters had been captured by the Perfects. Hundreds had been killed. And we were being hunted like animals.

  Damn straight we’re ready to fight back.

  Amane then exhaled. “Oh. I didn’t get to tell you this earlier, given all the fighting, but… your people’s message said they’d retrieved the corpses of four Perfects from Strava’s orbit.”

  My blood ran cold, as I immediately remembered and realized the implications of River and Caleb’s message, based on what we’d seen so far—particularly with Araquiel, Douma, and the rest of their crew.

  “Oh, no,” Rose murmured, her eyes wide with shock. “They’re not corpses, are they?”

  Amane shook her head. “You need to hurry up with that message.”

  Rose took the phone that Caleb and River had sent with their videos and files, and prepared to record another one. I worried about Harper and the others, with four highly trained and extremely dangerous Perfects in their midst. It was one thing for us to be in enemy territory here, but it was something else entirely for the enemy to be right in their midst on Calliope. Without knowing that the Perfects were still alive and just regenerating, our people were at risk over there.

  Harper

  We monitored the situation on Strava as best as we could, using the two telescopes we had. One scanned the entire planet, giving us the ability to screen progress as the Perfects continued to build their diamond colosseums. The other telescope followed Ben and Rose’s team, now reunited with Ridan. Serena and I caught glimpses of them, wherever the view permitted it, including fragments of a couple of fights with both Faulties and Perfects. We didn’t see the outcome of those encounters, but we spotted our people moving through a clearing at one point, and found ourselves gasping with astonishment.

  Our people had managed to capture a Perfect, from what we could tell, and had drawn two Faulties to their side. We didn’t yet know who they were, but we were able to observe their movements around Ben and Rose’s crew, and label them as allies, not foes.

  They were all alive and well, despite the constant fighting. That gave me a reason to breathe a sigh of relief.

  We didn’t have much to do, for the time being. Our parents and uncles were busy managing GASP and Shade operations. Serena, River and Vita had helped Aida send out a list of those who’d gone missing from the starships—there were hundreds of them. It broke my heart that we had to do that, but we couldn’t keep the families in the dark for much longer.

  It was bad enough that we didn’t know which of them had survived.

  Hell, we barely knew anything about anything, at this point!

  Caspian, Patrik, Scarlett, Caia, and Blaze also got involved, helping Aida’s team with the flurry of incoming messages from the missing fighters’ families. As expected, there were hundreds of them, all bombarding us with requests for updates and whatever reassurance we could give them that their loved ones could still be alive.

  Of course, we had no way of guaranteeing that, making our responses even more difficult to draft. And to think this had all started with a friggin’ vacation.

  “Avril and Heron are on their way back,” Serena said, frowning as she stared at one of the telescope screens. We could see the pond and the waterfall on the mountainside where Rose and her team had taken cover.

  “Did she speak to you via Telluris?” I asked.

  Serena nodded once. “Heron is fuming, after he heard about Jax and Hansa. They sped everything up on Persea. It was crazy, but they actually managed to capture the culprit,” she said. “It was a Sluagh.”

  “Whoa, what?” I replied, chills running down my spine. “Ew. I thought they were all dead.”

  “Some survived here and there,” Serena explained. “They’re all going to die out, eventually. Their numbers have dwindled; they’re killed on sight. This one, however, managed to sneak inside a Mara, shortly after the war with Azazel, and made it through the portal to Persea. He blended in with the locals and kept a low profile, while whacking Druids as revenge for the obliteration of his people.”

  I groaned, my eyes rolling. “That’s rich, coming from a Sluagh.”

  “Yeah, he was in complete denial. Until they torched him.”

  “Well, at least it’s settled now,” I replied. “Rose and her crew seem to have survived another very hostile night on Strava, too. I think we’ll get a message from them, soon.”

  “Yeah, I suppose they’ve gathered more data and they’ll
tell us more about what happened in the pond,” I said. “I saw the Perfect get out and fall into the water. Then she drowned.”

  “That was weird,” Serena murmured, massaging the back of her neck. “I didn’t think you could drown one of those bastards. Heck, I thought they were impossible to kill!”

  “Well, unless you throw them into space. That seemed to do the trick,” I replied, crossing my arms as I leaned back in my chair.

  A few moments passed in silence, as Serena and I let our thoughts roam through our heads. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and sleep for a decade. I had a feeling Serena was on the same page here. We were both exhausted, drained by the hours of constant stress, fear, and grief that had burdened us since the fleet attack.

  Personally, I was still reeling from what I’d seen.

  The observation room’s double doors burst open. Arwen came in, looking quite pale and alarmed. Serena and I sprang up from our chairs, startled not only by her abrupt entrance, but also by her expression.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “What happened?” Serena added.

  “Um… Good news and bad news, I guess,” Arwen replied, her voice trembling. When neither of us said anything in response, Arwen took a deep breath and let it out slowly, in a bid to calm herself down. “The Perfects we got from Strava’s orbit are not dead.”

  “Whoa,” I managed, my hands instinctively reaching for the swords mounted on my back. Arwen raised a hand, gesturing for me to stop.

  “That was the bad news. The good news is that they’re restrained,” she said. “Lumi was there. Viola and the Daughters were with us, too. The Perfects were too dazed and weak to cause any serious damage. We knocked them out pretty quickly. This is the Daughters’ territory, after all.”

  Serena and I briefly glanced at each other. Her aura felt a lot like mine—sad and scared, angry and in a lot of pain, but determination and the need to do the right thing kept us both from falling apart. They also helped us spot the advantages of having four living Perfect specimens on our hands.

  “You can study them,” I said, looking at Arwen.

  “Yup, that’s the plan,” Arwen replied. “I’ll need some backup, though. A couple of Dhaxanians, to begin with. Their frost is good in combination with Lumi’s swamp witch magic, apparently. And that’s just to keep the Perfects down.”

  “I suppose they’ll stay in a controlled environment until we figure out their anatomy and full range of abilities,” Serena said. “After which we’ll keep killing them until we find a method that sticks? I mean, if they were able to regenerate after being frozen in the vacuum of space, I’m inclined to believe that these bastards have some insane healing functions.”

  Arwen nodded. “We’ll need to prepare another message for Rose and the crew, with these findings. I’ll have Lumi write down her instructions for those Dhaxanian frost cuffs, too. They’ve got Kale and Nevis there to make it work. How are they coming along over there?”

  “They captured a Perfect and seem to have made two Faulty friends, from what we could see,” I replied.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” she said, genuinely surprised.

  “Yeah, I doubt we’ll have them over for tea later,” I grumbled, crossing my arms and turning my head to take another gander at the screens.

  “Harper, Serena, I need you both to stay strong,” Arwen said, her voice low. “This is a crisis like nothing we’ve seen before, but, in all honesty, we said the same whenever we found ourselves and our world under attack. We’ve been faced with all kinds of enemies, all of them with some kind of advantage. We made it out of each crisis alive. We grew stronger. We got better at this.”

  “This isn’t just another crisis, Arwen.” I sighed. “And you know it.”

  “Yeah. But we can’t give up. We can’t let despair twist our minds and cloud our judgment. There’s no way back for us. Only forward,” she said, her brow furrowed. “We’ve got four Perfects strapped to our slabs in the medical ward. We’ve got eyes on our search crew. We know Derek and his group are alive, albeit in Ta’Zan’s possession. We’ve got something to work with. Let’s focus on that.”

  Arwen made a good point. As much as we’d tried on our own, both Serena and I were quite broken after everything that had happened. The only way out of this mess was to keep digging, keep moving onward and upward. Avril and Heron were on their way back, too, and both were brilliant strategists.

  All we had to do was keep our eyes peeled and start devising several plans, based on the current circumstances, the factors and creatures involved, and the desired outcomes—from least to most. That had to include the destruction of Strava, preferably after we got our people out of there. It required a lot of power and some insane logistics to pull off.

  Either way, we had our hands full.

  “I suppose you’ll prepare a message for Rose and Ben after you poke around inside the Perfects. Right?” I asked.

  “Yes, the more data I have to give them, the better,” Arwen replied, then looked at Serena. “Any word from Draven?”

  Serena shook her head. “Not yet. They landed on the fire star and had Sherus and Nuriya’s son, Taeral, help them on their quest to find Bogdana,” she said. “But I haven’t spoken to Draven in two, maybe three hours now.”

  “Bogdana’s an old bat,” Arwen grumbled. “She probably doesn’t want to be found that easily.”

  Serena chuckled softly. “Maybe, but Draven is as stubborn as they come. He’ll find her, even if he has to turn that entire fire star inside out.”

  She wasn’t far from the truth with that statement. Draven had Shayla and Bijarki by his side, too. Combining one of the most resilient Druids I’d ever met with a powerhouse white witch and an extremely capable incubus was a surefire way to find pretty much anyone, anywhere.

  Draven

  Two thirds of our journey to Red Canyon were rather uneventful and smooth. Bogdana’s small house was located deep in the patch of woods that had grown in the middle of the canyon over the past millennium. That, in itself, wasn’t going to be much of a problem—with the exception of whatever traps and riddles the old fae had put in there.

  The problem was the scorching desert surrounding Red Canyon, which we’d just entered. The air was dry and hot. The temperature soothed my inner serpent nature, but the lack of humidity made me terribly uncomfortable. Taeral and his four guards didn’t seem bothered, as he was still half fire fae. Bijarki and Shayla, on the other hand, were covered in sweat and breathing heavily, as they tried to adjust to the sudden heat spikes.

  The sky above had a reddish hue, most likely due to the dozens of lava rivers flowing nearby. The underground volcano belched out its fiery liquids at least once a day, according to Taeral. The nearest stream of lava was five hundred yards away to our left, and a wonder to gaze upon, despite its potentially deadly nature. The lava had crystalized the sand into a riverbank made of black glass, bubbling as it flowed toward the fields we’d left behind.

  There, it cooled down and solidified into piles of uneven obsidian, which the fae broke down and gathered for their buildings, their tools, and their weapons. Straight ahead, the Red Canyon rose in the distance.

  “You know, though it’s hot as hell, this place is beautiful,” Shayla said, gazing around. “I’ve never seen lava streams flow through deserts like this before. I’ve seen them under, on Neraka, but never on the surface.”

  “Yeah, the fae tend to steer clear of this region, in general,” Taeral replied. “It’s not the heat or the fire or the lava. None of those affect us. But the underground volcano expels some pretty toxic fumes, too,” he added, pointing in the distance to our left. We could all see the puffs of black smoke coming out from between the sand dunes. “That stuff is poisonous. The longer we’re exposed to that, the sicker we’ll get.”

  “Oh, not to worry.” Shayla sighed. “I didn’t plan on dragging my ass through this entire frying pan to begin with. I just wanted to see what it looks like, from up close.” br />
  Bijarki smiled. “So, zappy-zap-zap?”

  “You’ve been around Jovi for too long.” Shayla chuckled. “Only he talks like that.”

  Their grins faded, however, as they both remembered that Jovi was still missing in action. My heart twisted itself in a painful motion inside my chest, but I had to set that aside and do whatever was possible to find out as much as I could about our enemy, Ta’Zan, and his creators, the Draenir.

  Shayla took my hand and Bijarki’s. I took Taeral’s, who looked at me with both eyebrows raised.

  “Trust me, you’ll like this part,” I said, nodding at him to link hands with his guards, too.

  Once we were all touching each other, Shayla made everything disappear.

  A second later, we were all standing on the edge of Red Canyon’s bowl-shaped valley. Below, the deep and thick woods unraveled in bright shades of green, yellow, and orange. Somewhere in there was Bogdana’s house.

  Taeral exhaled. “Oh, wow,” he breathed. “That was the first time I was teleported by someone other than me. It felt different.”

  “Different how?” Shayla asked.

  “Well, for starters, I wasn’t in control,” he replied, grinning. “But it was just as smooth. You clearly know your way around this… zappy-zap-zap thing.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. Even from afar, Jovi had already left his mark on Taeral.

  Bijarki

  The trek through the woods was relatively easy—at least for the first mile. Then I caught the scent of blood, and my soldier instincts went into overdrive.

  “We need to be more careful from here on,” I said, looking around.

  The trees were all sturdy and tall, with a rough, dark brown bark and drizzles of amber all over. Their crowns hung heavy with a plethora of bright green, yellow, and orange leaves, obscuring the reddish sky. There were plenty of animals nearby; they all kept their distance. Most of them were rodents and some kind of deer, but I’d spotted some larger predators with crimson-colored fur, about two hundred yards to our right.