Fractured (Guards of the Shadowlands, Book Two)

  We crept through the narrow alley, and then along a gap between two rusty chain-link fences, emerging about a block from the lot. I poked out my head to make sure we weren’t emerging at the exact wrong time and peered back at the abandoned lot, now full of official vehicles and lit by spotlights. Detective DiNapoli was standing outside the building, watching over the swarm of activity with an impassive expression. The sight of him made my stomach hurt. I hoped Henry was okay—and that he’d gotten the knives we’d lost in the fight.

  Knowing that if I had been caught there, I’d have some serious explaining to do, we stuck to the alleys until we were several blocks away and then turned toward downtown. We had survived, and we had eliminated several Mazikin, without being arrested or taken. It sent a message to the Mazikin—we could take a lot of them out, even if there were only a few of us. It should have felt like victory, but to me, it felt like the opposite. If the Mazikin numbers kept growing, if they kept coming at us like this, it was only a matter of time before our lucky streak snapped. We were running out of time to root them out. They were winning.

  I glanced over at Malachi, who was walking with a slight limp. His hands were in the pocket of his hoodie. And his faraway, sorrowful expression told me he was probably thinking along similar lines, especially because he felt responsible for some of it. Defeat did not sit well with him.

  My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and looked at the screen. A text. From Henry.

  Pick up at Eddy and Bay. Prisoner to deliver.

  I held up my phone so that Malachi could see. “Looks like Henry got out in time. And our evening is far from over.”

  It was the first time I’d seen Malachi smile in a long time.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE MAZIKIN STARED AT me from across the mat, with his teeth bared, revealing filed, nasty little points. It was Clarence. His skinny thighs sported identical crossbow wounds, small round holes that oozed blood through the fabric of his filthy pants. I had tied his arms and calves to the heavy chair while Jim and Malachi held him down, but as we watched our enemy strain against the ropes, none of us let down our guard.

  Henry had handed Clarence off to us in the alley and then disappeared into the darkness again, saying he hoped the thing would tell us where the nest was, because he hadn’t been able to track any of them back to it yet. He’d told me enough to confirm my suspicions that the street kid had played us. The Mazikin had recruited human allies, which filled me with dread. It would be so much easier to get to us that way. We wouldn’t be able to see them coming. We wouldn’t be able to trust anyone.

  Malachi walked over to the side table. Not thirty minutes before, he’d refused to summon Raphael to heal him, saying it would take too long. So I’d explained who our prisoner was while I tweezed slivers of glass from the palms of both his hands and bandaged them, leaving his fingers free. Now he was running them over the array of knives in front of him. “That was a nasty little ambush at the warehouse, Clarence.”

  The old Mazikin laughed, a quiet, hooting chuckle. His lips were cracked, and his skin was deeply weathered. His smile created a maze of wrinkles on his cheeks and brow. “Wait until you see what we do next,” he snarled.

  Malachi flipped a serrated knife into his bandaged palm with a single deft movement, his expression betraying nothing, though I’m sure it must have hurt. “We have no intention of waiting. You’re going to tell us.”

  “It doesn’t have to go this way.” The Mazikin inclined his head in my direction. “If you give us what we want.”

  Next to me, Jim shifted restlessly. I gave him a sidelong glance, and he took a few steps back to lean against the wall, his face a bland mask.

  Clarence was still staring at me, ignoring Malachi. “You haven’t called Sil yet. He waits for you. He’s getting tired of waiting.”

  Malachi stepped in front of me. “He needs a lesson in patience, then.”

  “Malachi,” I said softly. He stiffened, but then moved out of the way.

  Clarence watched the exchange with amusement. “How things have changed. This girl with the hair is your master now?”

  I shook my head before I remembered we didn’t owe him any answers. I wanted to apologize to Malachi but forced myself to save that for a private moment. “If we let you go tonight, Clarence, where would you run?”

  His eye twitched, like I’d poked him with a needle. “I wouldn’t run. I’m yours to kill now.”

  I took a few steps forward, close enough for me to smell the sweat and incense on his clothes and skin. “We’re not going to kill you,” I whispered.

  He sat back a little, and his lips formed a tight line.

  “You were counting on death, weren’t you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I walked a slow circle around him and managed not to flinch when he stretched his neck toward me as I came near. “Do you miss your family, Clarence?”

  He dropped his top teeth over his bottom lip while he stared at me, no doubt imagining the things he’d do if his hands were free.

  “We could hold you here for a long time.”

  “He could be like our pet,” Jim added, and then laughed to himself when everyone else responded with silence.

  “We’d have to disable him,” Malachi added. “I could amputate his hands and feet if you like.”

  Malachi’s cold, utterly sincere words reminded me that he had decades of experience interrogating Mazikin in the dark city. He always killed them in the end, but he’d tried to get information from them as well. It was probably out of desperation and fear that a Mazikin prisoner had told him that story about how killing a Mazikin liberated the soul of its victim. Better to die quickly than be held indefinitely at the mercy of the Captain of the Guard.

  I raised my head and met Malachi’s eyes. There was no apology there. Only a brutal calm. If I told him to do terrible things to Clarence, he would. Without hesitation.

  Clarence obviously knew it, too. He hissed at Malachi and then squealed when my Lieutenant feinted toward him and pulled back just as quickly. I would have had to use a scimitar to cut the thick haze of hatred between them. Clarence’s fingers curled into fists as he glared at Malachi. He opened his mouth and closed it again, clamping down on whatever words he was about to spew. Then he hitched a hideous grin onto his face and looked at me.

  “You can do what you want with me, girl, but we won’t leave your friends alone unless you come to us. You can’t stop us. You can only postpone the inevitable. But the longer you wait, the worse it will be.”

  This time, I stepped in front of Malachi before he reached Clarence, who started to giggle. “Oh, dear, things have changed, haven’t they? Is it her soul, Captain? Or her body? Will you miss her when she’s gone? Or will you still crave her when the Queen is wearing her skin?”

  The knife zinged over my shoulder before Clarence finished his sentence. He shrieked and threw his head back. His left ear plopped to the ground next to him. I spun around and stared at Malachi, whose gaze was riveted on Clarence.

  “Do that again, and you’re going upstairs,” I said quietly. I firmly reminded myself that Malachi was protective because I was his Captain, and for no other reason, and then turned to face Clarence again. “Sorry, dude. Here you go.” I picked up the ear and dropped it in his lap, trying to make it look like it was all part of the plan.

  “When you’re in our city, I will return this favor,” he growled, staring at his bloody ear.

  “You’re not going back there,” I said. “Ever.”

  His head jerked up. “Humans are so stupid. This body won’t hold up.” He chuckled grimly. “It won’t last long at all. Your idea of forever is very limited.”

  I talked directly to the monster hiding behind his gray eyes. “At first, you don’t know what’s happening. The dark tower is only a building, after all.”

  Clarence’s eyes narrowed.

  “It seems simple enough. Just walk through the lobby. It shouldn’t take more than a minute, right?
” I closed my eyes and tensed against the shudder. “But then the doors disappear. It’s the funniest thing.”

  I listened to the snuffle of his breath as it became rapid and shallow. “You still think you can make it through. Until the first memory comes at you. It’s the smell. Or, at least, it was for me. The scent of it. The feel of it. All around you. Inside you. And then it all hits you at once. Your pain, your humiliation, your fear. The memories you’ve spent your entire existence trying to scrub from your mind. Before you can fight them off, they’re crawling up your spine. Into your brain.”

  I opened my eyes and looked down at him. He was paper-white. “And you get to fight not only your memories, but the memories of everyone you’ve ever possessed. Isn’t that right?” I smiled. “It’s okay, Clarence. You won’t face it alone. They’re all around you, the other people who didn’t make it out. Some of them have probably been there for centuries. Maybe longer. It eats them, see. It sucks them down, holds on tight, and digests them slowly.”

  There was a solid ring of white around the irises of his eyes. “You’re right,” I said softly. “Forever is a long time.”

  “The dark tower is not in this realm,” he snapped, blinking quickly.

  He was right. I was kind of bluffing, but what the hell. “You’re mistaken if you think we’re alone here,” I said.

  “The angels will not interfere. They are not allowed to.” But now he was sweating. It beaded on his brow, dripped through the blood crusting on the side of his face.

  I looked over my shoulder at Malachi. “Call Raphael. Get him to open a door to the dark city.”

  Malachi’s expression was stony, and his face was pale, probably because he knew the terrors of the dark tower intimately. But he immediately pulled his phone out of his pocket.

  “No!” squawked Clarence. “No!”

  “Then give me what I need!” I shouted at him.

  “No!”

  “Malachi, dial! Tell Raphael I need him to summon two Guards from the dark city!”

  Clarence strained against the ropes, the tendons in his neck making his throat look webbed. Poisonous spit flew from his mouth as he screamed, “We will destroy you, girl! If you think you have bad memories now, they are nothing compared to what we will do to you!”

  With a hard shove, I upended Clarence’s chair and sent him crashing to the floor; then I nudged his head with my boot. “What about your memories, Clarence? Got any good ones in there? How about the time I killed you?”

  Clarence groaned and struggled as I lowered my knee onto his chest. “Where’s the nest?”

  He glared at me. “If I tell you that, it’s better if you send me to the tower. If you destroy the nest, they will know I am a traitor. The Queen will eat my heart in the square.”

  “Then give me something else. Information I can use.” I glanced back at Malachi again. He had the phone to his ear. “He’s talking to Raphael now. You’d be amazed at how quickly angels get from place to place.” I had no idea if Malachi was actually talking to Raphael or not.

  Clarence tore his eyes from me to stare at Malachi. His chest was heaving. I could feel his fear through the soles of my boots. He believed my threat. And he feared the tower more than death or torture. He looked back up at me and flinched when he saw me glaring down at him.

  “Your dance,” he whispered. “This ‘prom.’ That is when we will strike. When we will take you and all your friends.”

  “How do you know about that?” I snapped.

  His smile was wistful, with a serial killer edge. “You look so perfect in your dress. The Queen likes dresses.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Malachi’s head jerk up. The Mazikin must have been tracking Tegan and me when we went shopping, and the thought made me want to scream.

  Clarence’s breath wheezed out of him, and I realized I was leaning all my weight on his rib cage. “I’m not going to prom, so don’t bother,” I said automatically.

  Clarence shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll be there anyway. Such beautiful young people. Perfect.” He rolled his eyes like he was savoring the idea. “Sil promised me I could have a new body. Maybe the tall one with the shoulders and the green eyes, the one with the bat.”

  Ian. I stood up and kicked Clarence in the side before I could stop myself. Waves of nausea rolled over me. They knew too much about us. Way too much. How the hell did they know so much?

  I sucked in a deep breath and took a step back from the wheezing, bug-eyed Clarence before I made another mistake and kicked him again. He blinked up at me. “I think you broke me, girl. Good for you. Do it again.”

  “Give me more information.”

  “Captain,” Jim said quietly.

  Clarence grinned. “Captain, girl? You are the Captain?” The laugh boiled up from inside him, phlegmy and thick, and rolled out hysterical and shrill. “The mighty Guards of the Shadowlands, led by the girl with the hair.” He could barely get the words out through peals of wild laughter.

  I sank down next to him, feeling ice crystals form along my spine. “I know. It’s hilarious, isn’t it?” I nudged his leg with my elbow. “There. See what I did for you? Try to hold on to that funny memory when you’re sitting in the mouth of the dark tower. I’m sure it’ll help.”

  His laughter cut off like I’d chopped him in the windpipe. “I gave you information,” he squeaked. “Important information.”

  I got to my feet. “Meh. Not enough. I need to know how you guys know so much about us. Now that would be worth something. Maybe even a quick death.”

  His eyes glinted with eagerness. “We have many ways.”

  “You’re going to have to be a lot more specific than that, Clarence. Do you guys have anyone else at our school?”

  He nodded, smiling, his pointy teeth sticking out over his bottom lip.

  “Who? Who is watching us?”

  He winced and shook his head. “She would know. She would eat my heart.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Then what can you tell me?”

  He lifted his head off the mat. “Your mother misses you. Rita wants you so badly, girl. You are deeply in her head. So deep that my poor sister cannot get her mind off you.”

  “Shut up.” I took a step back.

  “Your mother didn’t even scream when we took her. No struggle. Her soul slipped free like it had been hanging by a thread. I wonder if your eyes will look like Rita’s did as the Queen takes hold of you. So wide. So perfect.”

  “Enough!” Malachi roared.

  I snapped to, realizing with disgust that there were tears on my face. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how they had tied my mother to a table and torn her soul away from her. I couldn’t shake that vision of her wide gold-brown eyes, of the ropes around her wrists.

  Jim touched my arm. “Raphael’s here.”

  I opened my mouth, gasping in a shuddering breath. I brushed my sleeves over my cheeks and turned around. Raphael stood against the wall. “Do you know why I called you here?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Will you open the doorway?”

  His eyes lingered on my face, solemn, unreadable. He nodded again.

  Without looking away from me, he ran the flat of his palm along the concrete wall of the basement, and a door appeared. He turned the knob and opened it, and beyond the threshold I could see one of the stone corridors of the Guard Station in the dark city, lined with gas lamps giving off that melancholy greenish light. Malachi’s gaze flitted toward it, and then he turned away, like it hurt him to think about going back there. In the distance, I could see two of the enormous, inhuman Guards striding toward us. One of them was carrying the thick leather muzzle and mittens made especially to protect from Mazikin teeth and claws.

  “Tell them to take him straight to the dark tower,” I said to Malachi, my voice hard and cold and frighteningly steady.

  As Clarence began to shriek and writhe, I headed to the stairs, seeing nothing in front of my face but my mother’s eyes,
feeling nothing but a restless tug in my chest, making me wonder if my soul was fastened as tightly as it needed to be to get me through whatever was coming.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FOR A SINGLE DAY, I wondered if we could cancel prom, avoid the whole thing, but then I realized that the Mazikin were watching, and that no matter what we did, they would know. Better they come after us in a way we could plan for than to come up with something we couldn’t anticipate.

  I talked to Henry once or twice over the next few weeks. He was lying low after the Jewelry District Massacre, in which twelve individuals were murdered in what was thought to be some sort of turf fight between vigilante groups. The police were apparently seeking connections between these killings and the attacks on the homeless camps, seeing as some of the individuals killed in the warehouse had been survivors of the earlier raids. Nancy, my PO, and her pals on the force came to talk to me informally a few times, but seeing as there were no witnesses, no physical evidence, and about a million other, more plausible perps, they eventually decided to leave me alone and spend the taxpayers’ dollars elsewhere.

  The Mazikin were lying low, too, though we weren’t sure if it was because they didn’t want to draw more attention to themselves or because they were busy planning something horrific. We patrolled every night, but the streets were eerily quiet. We began to wonder if human informants were alerting the Mazikin to our movements, making it easier for them to avoid us and more human attention.

  Along with Jim and Malachi, I obsessively watched every student at Warwick High, wondering which of them was on the wrong side. But whenever I could, I avoided the cafeteria, preferring to eat outside with Ian and let him distract me for a half hour each day. Seeing Laney with Malachi made me want to hurt her. Even the idea of them together added fuel to my training sessions with my Lieutenant, which left us both spent and aching. More than once, I hit him harder than I should have. More than once, he made me pay for it. More than once, Raphael had to be called in to fix us up afterward so we didn’t go to school the next day looking like we’d participated in a prison riot.