Path of the Horseman (26 page)

“Anyone else think they’d be able to take me
off the throne?”

No one said a word. They shrank back, wanting
to run. Kade lifted his hand. Bloody smoke twisted out of his skin
and shot like arrows into the chests of each human. They screamed
as one, dropping to their knees or curling into fetal positions.
They were lost in fear.

As the humans screamed, Kade turned back to
me. He reached down, grabbing a fistful of my hair and jerking my
head up to meet his eyes.

“Brother or no brother, if you ever
disrespect me like that again, I’ll cut your little blonde into
pieces and feed her to you.”

Kade jabbed me in the face, breaking my nose
in one hit. He dropped me in the pile of splintered wood, storming
off. I rolled onto my side and clutched my nose, seeing Kade grab
the young brunette out of the corner of my eye. She shrieked and
cried, but he carried her toward the backroom. My heart sank, but I
wouldn’t be able to stop him. It was rare for Kade to get this
angry, but when he did, he was an absolute beast. In his state of
anger, I had no doubt that Kade would carry out his threat. I hated
myself, but the poor girl was one more person I wouldn’t be able to
save.

Getting to my feet with a sore grunt and a
dizzy head, I turned around until I found the direction of the
door. Once the world stopped spinning, I made my way toward it.
Nobody stopped me. I didn’t know where I was going to go. My first
instinct was to see Maddy. After what Kade had threatened to do, I
needed to see her and know that she was all right. Even if she did
try to hit me with a table again.

“Avery!”

I stopped and turned around, looking back to
see Simon running out of the restaurant door to catch up to me. He
stopped in front of me, concern filling his graphite eyes. At least
I hoped it was concern. I was still trying to see straight,
readjust my nose, all while working through the doubt that Simon
had forgiven me for attacking him earlier.

Then he asked, “Are you okay?”

I glanced at him, then wiped blood from my
lip and felt the crookedness of my nose. It was bent almost in half
the wrong way. I sighed. “Hang on.”

I gave my nose one sharp twist in the right
direction. Pain spiked through my head. “Ah, fuck.” I gingerly
touched the edges of my nose. It seemed like it was in the right
place, and the pain was dulling to a throb.

“There,” I said. “All better.”

Simon laughed uncomfortably, then cleared his
throat. “Look, I’m sorry. About all the shit I said before.”

Surprised, I waited for him to continue.

“I get what you’re trying to do,” he went on.
“I do. It took me a while, but I get that your heart is in the
right place.” He held his breath. “But that doesn’t make it safe
for us to be around humans.”

“So, what then? We leave them to be
humiliated and beaten and raped by Kade?”

“No,” my brother insisted. “No, of course
not. If we can do something to help, we should try. But there isn’t
going to be any safety at this haven, Avery. I can feel it.”

“But you don’t know.”

Simon tried to find a point to argue. He
couldn’t.

“I can’t let this go, Simon. All I could
think about after that last day was how many people were dead
because of me. Back then, I thought there was nothing I could do to
bring them back.” I exhaled, the burns on my chest swelling
painfully. “But then we found some of them alive. They were about
to die, and…” I looked at the ground. “I couldn’t let it happen
again. Not when I had seen it a million times before.”

I could feel Simon watching me, but I forgot
about him. My mind was a tangled mess of memories. Watching my
Plague spread from victim to victim. Seeing humans eat garbage to
feed themselves. Having to step over charred bodies in a burning
city. Listening to families shout and shake their dead loved ones,
pleading for them to wake up.

I wish I knew why the Bosses Upstairs had
left us in human bodies. If we were truly weapons of destruction,
we shouldn’t have to feel the pain of what we’d done. It wasn’t
fair. Not a fucking molecule of it.

“The most we can do now it watch out for
them,” Simon finally said. “Be sure that Kade doesn’t get his claws
in too deep. He was pretty pissed at you for chewing him out.” A
ghost of a smile traced his lips. “I hope you don’t get mad at me
for saying this, but it was pretty cool to see.”

I tried to laugh. It was mostly a snort.
“Yeah. I’m sure he’s just going to piss all that anger away and
laugh about it in the morning.”

Simon frowned. “Look, I know I’m doing a
shitty job of it, but I’m trying to cheer you up, Ave.”

“I know. Sorry, I’m just tired. We’ll deal
with it tomorrow, okay?”

Simon nodded stiffly. I took it as a sign
that whatever had happened between us earlier was in the past. That
was a good thing, especially since my list of enemies was starting
to include my friends.

After leaving Simon, I meandered to the guest
floors and tried every door until I found one that was unlocked. I
stumbled through the darkness, bumping into furniture as I healed
myself. This room had clothes lying in piles on the floor, so I
picked some of them up and put them on. They weren’t clean, but
they weren’t in pieces and covered in blood. I took off my belt and
weapons, dropped them by the bed, and collapsed on top of it. I
took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and fell asleep.

A wailing screech woke me two hours
later.

I shot out of bed, thinking the noise was
someone’s truly atrocious scream. As I grabbed my machete and belt
from the floor and buckled them on, I realized it wasn’t a human
screaming. It was the fire alarm.

I raced for the door and yanked it open, the
sprinklers overhead splashing me with cold water. I blinked it out
of my eyes and ran for the exits. I didn’t know where Simon was
staying, but I thought he would make it out safely. I started to
think the same of Maddy and Josh, then stopped.

Kade used pyrokinesis to hurt people. What if
he went to see Maddy and Josh, and used his fire to interrogate
them? What if it got out of control, and he burned them because I’d
made him angry? I flashed back to the image of Maddy in pain gifted
to me by my sadistic brother, and went up the stairs instead of
down.

The room I’d slept in wasn’t far from the
suite where the two humans were being held, so it wasn’t long
before I started smelling smoke. I reached the top of the stairs
and wrenched the door open.

Heat billowed in front of me, hungry orange
flames licking the open doors of the suite. The room where Maddy
was being held.

Heart palpitating wildly, I ran through the
hall to the open door. The fire was consuming the whole room, smoke
puffing out along the roof. The fire alarm screamed around me. The
heat made my eyes water, and I couldn’t see anything. No bodies, no
shadows, nothing.

“Josh!” I shouted against the sounds of
creaking wood and buckling furniture. “Maddy!
Maddy!
”

There was no answer.

I stepped back, the smoke in the air not the
only thing that was making it hard to breathe. What the hell had
happened?

It didn’t matter. I had to go in there. I had
to save her.

My heel knocked against a body. I jumped and
whirled around. I’d been so caught up in thinking about the people
inside the suite that I didn’t think about the guards posted
outside. All four of them were slumped on the ground. I checked
their pulses. They were breathing, and they had bruises on their
faces or cuts on their heads.

Like they’d been in a fight. Or hit by an
angry girl wielding a side table.

I would have smiled, but if Maddy and Josh
had escaped and set Kade’s prison suite on fire, he would know by
now. And he would be even angrier with them than he was with
me.

There was no time to put out the fire, so I
looked at the guard I was kneeling by and slapped him across the
face. He groaned, so I slapped him again. The human blinked and
looked at me, scrambling back.

“Get your friends out of here,” I
ordered.

I didn’t ask what happened. It seemed pretty
obvious that he’d been tricked, and there was no way he’d know
where Maddy and Josh had gone. But I had a good idea.

Leaving the guard behind to help his friends,
I ran for the stairs. It was too dangerous to take the pulley
system, but at least the body I was trapped in could handle a
little extra endurance. I practically flew down the stairs, almost
tripping over my own feet to get to the bottom of the hotel.

I finally made it down, and almost kicked the
doors off the hinges to get outside. I stumbled out toward the
front entrance, stopping when I saw hundreds of humans huddling
together in the dark. No one seemed to notice me, all of them
looking up at the fire flickering out of the window near the top of
the guest tower.

“I don’t give a fuck! Get back up there and
put it out!”

Kade’s voice made me jump. I turned back and
looked in the direction of the wall, where Kade was standing and
shouting at his Vermilions. A group of them hesitated, but decided
to follow their Emperor’s directions. Kade turned his attention to
another group of soldiers.

“You! Bring that piece of shit over
here!”

My heart skipped a beat. A pair of Vermilions
were dragging someone over to Kade. I started walking in their
direction, stopping when I saw that the figure was masculine. They
shoved him onto his knees in front of Kade, holding him there by
his shoulders.

“Where’s the other one?” demanded my brother.
“That blonde bitch?”

“She escaped, sir. We think she’s headed for
the Palazzo. We have men chasing her now. It won’t be long before
they catch her.”

Not good.
I started backing away,
knowing Maddy would have to go through the hotel to get to the
Palazzo without running onto the strait.

I jogged back into the shadows of the
Venetian’s pillars when I heard the first
thwack
of fist
hitting flesh. I stopped and looked at Josh, whose head was slumped
against his shoulder. Kade pulled his hand back and punched him in
the cheek, rocking his head to the other side.

“Where were you going?” he shouted.

Josh didn’t answer, and was punched again for
his trouble.

“Tell me where you were going!”

The human said nothing. I didn’t like the guy
any more than he liked me, but I respected him for standing up to
my brother.

Kade was less than patient. He kicked Josh in
the chest, right under his throat. Josh buckled forward and roared
in pain. A person would only cry out like that if their collarbone
had been broken.

I couldn’t stand by and watch Kade torture
him any longer. I took a step forward, at the same moment my
brother said, “I don’t have time to deal with him. Take him to the
basement, then look for the girl. That’ll get the fucker
talking.”

Josh surged forward, but Kade kicked him in
the face. Josh’s head rocked back, and then he went limp.

As much as I hated to admit it, there was
nothing I could do for Josh right now. I had to find Maddy. If Kade
or his Vermilions got to her first, they would use her as a tool to
make Josh do or say whatever they wanted. Kade would have complete
control over me. He would destroy her.

I couldn’t be in two places at once. So I
made the only choice I could, and ran past the pillars to get back
inside the Venetian. As soon as I was inside, I found a staircase
on the left that led me through the Venetian into the adjoining
building. As I ran, I looked out from between the arches of the
bridge and saw two men chasing a girl through a restaurant patio
and onto the street. One of Kade’s walls was in front of her, and
she wouldn’t be able to climb it before they grabbed her.

I pushed myself faster, looking for the first
staircase I could find and pretty much vaulting it.

When I made it outside again, Maddy was
trying to scale the wall that had been erected eight feet above
street level, blocking any view of the Strip. The guards were right
behind her, weaving through the patio tables. Physically, I wasn’t
going to reach them in time. But I had other abilities.

I came to a sharp stop and held up my hands.
Thick black smoke twirled out of my fingertips and rocketed toward
the guards. The smoke struck them in the back and caused them to
pitch forward. They face-planted onto the ground, unable to move
thanks to the minor cases of Landry’s paralysis I gave them. I
manipulated the infection so it wouldn’t spread and cause permanent
damage. It would keep them there for a couple hours, and then
they’d wake up with pins and needles in every joint. But at least
they would live.

Maddy jumped and tried to reach the top of
the wall, but her fingers missed the edge and she slid down again.
She cursed angrily, looking over her shoulder. She froze when she
saw me. I approached carefully, holding out my hands, now free of
smoke, to show her I was unarmed.