Darkness at Dawn (36 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Jennings
Tags: #Romance, #General, #Suspense, #Contemporary, #Fiction
“Damn, what did you tell them back there? I thought we were done for. Was already writing my obit and had just got to the part where it said
died a valiant death because his lady got into a fight with armed soldiers.
”
died a valiant death because his lady got into a fight with armed soldiers.
”
She wasn’t smiling. “I told them that I was going to be with my dear friend Paso at the moment of her greatest grief. I told them that their king had just passed away and that he was looking down on them from the spirit world. I told them the king was ashamed that his soldiers would hold a gun on a defenseless woman. I told them that the Merritt family had always been a friend to Nhala and that my parents died for their freedom.”
Well, the guilt trip had certainly done the trick. He’d thought they were going to die back there outside the lab but nope. She’d fucked with their heads and here they were.
He looked around as they speeded down another corridor. “Are we going to have problems with other soldiers? There were lots posted around the entrance to the Royal Chambers.”
“No. I told them to alert the other guards in the Palace, otherwise they’d be in trouble and have to answer to a higher power.”
“Buddha?”
“The princess.”
Another corridor, bright yellow this time, with altars every five feet or so. At the far end, almost a hundred yards away, two huge carved and gilt wooden doors with an enormous brass dragon head for a knocker. The entrance to the Royal Chambers.
And about twenty soldiers. Mike tensed by Lucy’s side as she slowed down, approaching the enormous doors. If they were going to have problems here, they were in deepest shit, because not even in super-Ninja mode could Mike hope to defeat twenty soldiers in an enclosed space. Unarmed.
But Lucy was in warrior mode. She marched right up to the door and the soldiers parted for her, like the Red Sea for Moses.
She reached up to that huge brass knocker in the shape of a dragon’s head and brought it down twice, two sharp cracks of sound. The door opened slowly.
Mike walked in behind Lucy, senses on alert. Again he was struck by the sheer size of the room. Soldiers were everywhere, though not standing to attention. The soldiers were evenly divided between the Royal Guards in their yellow and scarlet ceremonial uniforms, large swords sheathed at their sides, MP-5s on slings, and another group of soldiers, all with a similar cast to their faces, in black BDUs. The Sharmas. The mercenaries.
Grief filled the air, together with enough incense to fell a bull. Long sticks burned in elaborate brass holders at every altar and on the large table beside the bed. A group of women in bright traditional dress stood huddled in a corner, weeping.
A tiny figure swathed in saffron yellow silk lay like a cocoon in the middle of the Royal Bed, dwarfed by the proportions of the bed.
The king, dead.
All the members of the Royal Guard looked sad, except for the captain, who looked pissed. And dangerous. The Sharmas were stoic and expressionless. They found themselves, as is often the case with mercenaries, duty-bound and honor-bound to serve an asshole.
General Changa was holding the princess’s arm. She was arguing with the general in a low voice, unheeding of the tears that poured down her face. She turned at the huge doors opening and saw them coming in.
“Lucy!” she exclaimed and wrenched her arm free from General Changa’s grip. He started after her, and the entire Royal Guard snapped to attention, heels together, hands hovering over their sidearms.
Tense moment.
Lucy and the princess were embracing, both women crying. From somewhere close, the gong sounded again, three slow tolls. Like the mournful cry of a wounded animal.
Mike watched the two women for a second, then checked the soldiers again. The Royal Guard soldiers had all moved more closely together. So had the Sharmas.
There were ten sets of windows in the huge chamber, like the nave of a Gothic church. Nine of the windows had been covered in white silk, as had all the mirrors. Only one set, at the back of the room, was still uncovered. Needles of sleet pinged the windowpanes and Mike gritted his teeth.
He’d received a weather update. A huge snowstorm was headed their way. He’d hoped to get himself and Lucy out of Dodge before it hit Nhala, but it looked like they might be shit out of luck. Already, ice spicules were interspersed with the sleet. Heavy snow would be arriving soon.
There was enormous tension in the air. With the king dead, Changa was going to make his move to take over, backed by his mercs, but it looked like the Royal Guard, headed by the captain, was going to try to block that.
They were a minute away from being caught in the middle of a civil war, and the only way out was through a snowstorm.
Lucy and the princess were standing, foreheads together, conferring quietly in Nhalan. General Changa watched for a moment, then strode to them, soldiers scattering before him.
Mike came to attention in an adrenaline rush, superalert, combat-ready. The general’s body language signaled violence, and Mike was prepared.
All the details of the physical room faded, and what was left in his head was the position of every single soldier, the distance of every single hand from its weapon, and every detail of General Changa. His hearing became super-acute. He could hear the pinging of ice on the window and the dull roar of a rising wind. He could hear the rustling of the general’s uniform as he walked toward Lucy and the princess, the creak of the leather of his holster.
Mike edged closer to a Royal Guardsman who had his sidearm holster unsnapped; he calculated the time it would take the guard to draw from the holster. Half a second. Doable.
Changa gripped the princess’s shoulder, and every single Royal Guard watched while the captain stiffened. The general bent low and gave a command in Nhalan to the princess.
He looked at Lucy, his head turning like a reptile’s yellow brown eyes unblinking. He started speaking to her and she put up her hand.
“English please, General. You’re speaking much too fast for me to follow.”
It was nonsense. Words had come pouring out of the princess, and Lucy hadn’t had any problems. She wanted Mike in the picture and wanted the general at a slight disadvantage.
Smart girl.
The general’s mouth tightened, hooded eyes flat and cold. “The commencement ceremony of the Feast of the Snow Dragon will begin in an hour. The princess will be on the royal platform, and she will officially announce the death of her brother, the king, and her engagement to me. You will then come up on the platform and present the newly restored manuscript of the prophecy of the Snow Dragon to the princess and to the people of Nhala. And then you will go back to your quarters.”
The princess’s eyes flashed, dark yet full of light. She glanced briefly at her captain and drew herself up. “When the official mourning month is over, General Changa, I will become queen of Nhala. I will never marry you. You can kill me, but you will never become the Snow Dragon of Nhala through me! And as for Dr. Merritt, she will bear witness to all in the Great Hall that the manuscript of ‘The Legend of the Snow Dragon’ is a fake!”
Whoa. The tension in the room ratcheted up. Even the grieving court women fell silent. Every soldier in the room was at attention, eyes turned to Lucy. The room reeked of male sweat. Every man realized that there was the makings of a firefight right here. Royal Guards against the mercs. And the Royal Guards were outnumbered two to one.
Mike’s skin tightened, crawled. There was absolutely nothing he could do except follow Lucy’s lead. Only she could judge whether to testify to the manuscript’s authenticity or not. It was her card to play, and all he could do was remain on a hair trigger, ready to move.
Lucy looked up, face smooth and untroubled. “Unfortunately the princess is correct, General,” she said in her gentle voice. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you yet. While restoring the manuscript, I came across irrefutable evidence that it is, indeed, a forgery. I’m afraid it would be quite impossible to testify to its authenticity to the people of Nhala.”
Jesus. That took balls.
Adrenaline pulsed through his system and he felt sweaty and ragged. Lucy looked like she’d just come in from cutting flowers in the garden.
The general’s eyes narrowed. The skin over his cheekbones tightened, his thin nostrils flared. Murderous rage surrounded him like a cold wind. Two women, two slender, small women, were standing in the way of his plans to take over the country.
Two women he could kill with one backhanded blow.
Mike pulled in air, shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, moved even closer to the Royal Guardsman with the unsnapped holster.
There was something very bad coming down, the smell of it even more intense than the smell of the incense.
“I am afraid, Dr. Merritt, that you have misjudged the situation. Princess Paso will definitely marry me and you”—he snapped his fingers and a soldier handed him a small black case—“you will be imprisoned as an enemy spy. You will be put in our dungeon awaiting trial, and it might take years for this affair to come to trial. Your government will protest, but very soon it will have its hands full with its own . . . problems.” He stared at Lucy, then switched that black stare to Mike. “Both of you will rot and die in our prisons underground. Unless you come out into the Great Hall with the manuscript.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said quietly. There was no noise at all in the chamber. “I cannot do that.”
“You can,” the general growled, “and you will.” He walked behind Lucy, face a mask of evil. Mike’s hackles rose and he took a step forward, stopping when one of the general’s mercs drew his pistol. He wasn’t specifically aiming it at Mike, but the pistol was in his hand.
Fuck that. Mike took another step forward.
“Stop!” Changa’s voice rang out. He reached inside the black case and pulled out a small, silvery steel object, shaped like a gun.
“I found this in your room, which tells me all I need to know. You are enemy spies.”
With a snake-fast move, he hooked his left arm around Lucy’s throat and jammed the object against her shoulder. Mike’s heart nearly stopped. He froze, hardly daring to breathe. It was an exact replica of the injection gun for the deadly mutant virus.
“Ah.” Changa’s smile was ice cold. “Mr. Harrington. You know what this is. Say it.”
“An injection gun. For a virus.” Mike’s throat was tight, the words could barely make their way up out of his chest.
“But not just any virus.” The general was talking directly to the horrified princess now. “The cylinder will explode in exactly twenty-four hours, releasing the virus, after which Dr. Merritt will die the most horrendous death you can imagine. My men and I will take her to a village along the Indian border where she will die like a dog in the dirt, vomiting up her internal organs. And she will become a carrier. That village and in all likelihood the neighboring villages will be exterminated. That is what I will do, Princess, if you do not agree to come with me into the Great Hall and announce our engagement. If you do not, you will not only be the cause of the painful death of your friend here, but you will also be directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands, of villagers. What is it to be, Princess? Because the people are gathering in the Great Hall right now.”
This was—this was worse, much worse, than holding a gun to Lucy’s head. Her face was waxen. She’d seen the CIA operative’s death on that tape, too. She knew what the virus did.
Goddammit!
Mike turned to Princess Paso.
Goddammit!
Mike turned to Princess Paso.
“Announce your engagement to the fucker,” he said hoarsely. The princess had turned ash white. She was shaking, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“No, Mike.” Lucy was looking at him intently. “She can’t do that, can’t you see? It would betray everything the Royal Family stands for. There’s only one way out of this. You must be prepared.”
Prepared for what? Lucy was sending him some kind of signal, but what? Mike was ready. Ready for anything, but particularly ready to rip Changa’s fucking head off his shoulders. He was really ready for that.
He waited, weight balanced, hands ready, for the opening that Lucy was going to give him.
Come on honey
, he thought, bouncing on his toes.
Give me an opening.
, he thought, bouncing on his toes.
Give me an opening.
And then—and then Lucy did the bravest thing Mike had ever seen a human being do.
She shot herself with the virus.
E
IGHTEEN
IGHTEEN
IT hurt. That was her first thought. It was like a flu shot, only a hundred times worse.
And then her second thought was—
Will you look at that?
Will you look at that?
She’d never seen another human being move as fast as Mike. In a microsecond, a gun materialized in his hand from somewhere and then in the next microsecond there was a loud pop and the general fell down to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
The only thing remaining was a slowly dissipating pink mist in the air.
And one second later, all the rifles in the room were aimed at Mike.
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