Touch of Iron (The Living Blade #1) (31 page)

“Owen?” Nora’s voice was muffled by Shade’s arm.

He let her go and pointed.

“He’s here. Took a blow to the head.”

Nora’s heart leaped. Her brother lay on the ground next to a pile of rubble, his face covered in blood from a nasty cut to his forehead. She peeled his hand away from the wound and he groaned, curling up on his side.

“Gods, Nora. What’s going on?” Owen said, his head lolling a bit. He looked terribly pale. She’d get him back to the temple. Master Cumi would heal him with a flick of her finger. Everything would be all right.

She grinned.

“I thought you were the guy with the answers, Owen. Come on, Shade, help me with him.” Nora hoisted her brother’s arm over her shoulders into a better position. “Seen Calla?”

“No,” Shade said. “She was back at the fire, talking to grannies and women with babies all night. I saw Owen and thought I’d hold on to him for you.”

“It was so loud,” Owen groaned.

“Your brother doesn’t like parties.” Shade pulled a face. “So we came down here for a walk, when we heard the commotion and then suddenly these two guys jumped on us. Owen smashed the one over the head with a brick. I grabbed his sword. The other slashed Owen. You showed up. That’s all I know.”

Nora nodded. They kept walking with Owen between them, and then Nora yelled for Calla. A second later Shade did the same. They walked a few more paces and then repeated it. Families ran past them, heading to the relative safety of their houses, no time for the small group heading back toward the fight. Ahead, against the backlight of the fire, Nora saw men with swords herding a group of women into a house. The world went hazy for a moment. The sky fell, and the street became blacker. She heard the women whimpering and crying. Fear washed over Nora. Fear and panic filled the air. Then it was gone. She stared at Shade over Owen’s head. They pressed themselves against a wall.

“I think Calla’s with them.” Nora gestured ahead, trying not to heave.

“Not every blonde girl has to be Calla.”

“Only one way to find out,” Nora said.

“Are you kidding?”

They looked at each other.

“All right, I was just asking.” Shade held up his palms. “After you.”

They propped Owen up against a wall close by, and Nora looked him in the face, stomach churning.

“Hey, you all right?”

“Really bad headache,” Owen whispered, then grinned weakly.

“Stay here. We’ll be right back.”

“Don’t go, please.” He held her fingers tight. “Please?”

“I’ll be right back.”

N
ora squeezed Owen’s fingers, then
let go and nodded to Shade, who followed her, weapon held at the ready. She ducked through the shadows and pressed herself against the stone wall. Shade slunk down beside her. Panic tickled at the back of her throat as if to say, “I’m still here.” There was no window on this side of the house, so she circled her finger in the air, motioning to Shade that they had to go around. He nodded and, with one shoulder pressed to the house wall, moved on down. He stuck his head around the far corner and then nodded once more.

His mouth moved to form the word “window.” But Nora felt Calla’s fear again. It hit like a punch. A series of muffled gasps and sobs drifted out on the night wind, making her palms sweat. Shade ducked low and turned the corner. He was back at her side after a moment, wiping his brow. She wondered whether he felt it, too. Calla’s projected emotions. He motioned her closer.

He bent down and whispered in her ear.

“Have you ever had sex?”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“You want to discuss this now? Really?” Her whisper came through clenched teeth.

He rolled his eyes back at her.

“No. I’m just trying to gauge if you’re gonna freak out when you see what’s going on in there.”

He gestured with his thumb to the window. She crept around him, around the corner and under the stone windowsill. Slowly she inched her head over the windowsill. At first, Nora couldn’t see much—it was dark inside. Then the bits she saw didn’t fit together in her mind. She saw the white buttocks of a man jerking to and fro and thought he was having a heart attack or something. He was bracing himself against a broken table swaddled in a white tablecloth that groaned whenever he moved. Then she saw a woman’s red face in the “tablecloth” of her ripped dress, tear streaked, head grinding against the hard wood, arm twisted behind her back. A second man stood behind them, by a door. Then it clicked in Nora’s head and it all became one picture.

Shade gripped her sleeve and started pulling. Nora ducked low. What the fuck was wrong with these people? Down the street, by the light of the Solstice fire, the fighting was still going strong. But here, some men were already enjoying themselves. She tried to shake Shade off, but he kept tugging at her. She motioned for him to go farther around the house. They stopped beneath another windowsill next to the door.

“What’s your plan, Master Nora?” He spoke into her ear, his lips brushing against her skin in a tingle.

“We go in, kill the men, save the women.”

“That’s not a plan. That’s suicide.”

“I’m not leaving Calla in there. Besides, how many men could there be?”

Shade nodded, pulling a face as he moved in front of the door.

“Think it’s locked?” He smiled and then rammed his shoulder against the wood.

It wasn’t locked. The door opened and Nora ran past Shade into the dark room beyond. A few women were huddled into a corner, their scared faces turned toward the door. On the other side of the room, in front of a second door, two men were grappling with Calla. The whites of her eyes were showing and she was hyperventilating. One man held her arm. He was as white as a sheet.

A flurry of sensations flooded Nora: a baby wailing for its mother; the fear, panic, and despair of the women in the room, blending into a nightmare of darkness that pumped through her veins along with blood-red helpless rage. It wasn’t all Calla. She was simply the amplifier. Nora stumbled forward and tried to focus on the man holding a fistful of blonde hair. She slashed down with her knife and heard him shriek. An echo of his pain slid under her skin like splinters. She slammed into the second man, knocking him away from Calla, falling with him to the floor.

“The baby,” he groaned, still locked in Calla’s empathy. “Lara, Mother of Death! Mercy!”

“Did she beg you for mercy? Did you stop?”

Nora cut down blindly, opening the man’s cheek. He bucked under her, his heels drumming against the floor. The tip of a sword pushed past Nora’s shoulder and into the man’s chest. Nora looked up and saw Shade.

“Don’t touch Calla,” Nora warned him and crawled off the dead man to reach her friend, who was curled up into a ball.

The second door opened and another man burst out, sword at the ready. He charged at Shade. Nora rose and held her knife tight. As Shade warded off the blow, Nora stepped around the man and plunged her knife into his back, twice. She walked through the second door and saw the rapist, blood on his groin, trousers pooling around his feet. He was fumbling for his sword.

He never reached it.

The woman on the table was dead.

“Nora!” Shade called from the other room. “I don’t know what’s up with Calla.”

Nora went back into the first room, wiping the blood from her hand on her trouser leg. The women were still huddled into the corner. As she scanned their faces, she recognized a few of them from her rounds with Master Cumi. Shade crouched by Calla, careful not to touch her. She was rocking to and fro. A different movement caught Nora’s attention. She stepped over to the squealing man without a hand, who was trying to crawl toward his sword. Shade saw her gaze and with the tip of his foot, kicked the sword away. The man blubbered, clutching the stump of his arm. Nora’s eyes narrowed on him. The darkness focused, pinpointing the next step.

“Bend over,” she said, raising her knife and rolling up her sleeve.

“Nora, remember we’re here for Calla?” Shade said.

“Bend over!” she screamed, spit flying from her lips.

A hand gripped her wrist and she whirled around to see…Owen? He was still clutching his forehead.

“Don’t,” he said simply. “Don’t be like them.”

O
utside, the street was no
longer empty. An angry arm of the main fight had broken loose and branched out into the side street. People with raised swords were running across the cobblestones, kicking in doors of houses, their forced entry drawing out screams from within. For the most part, when Nora thought about death and what came after, she imagined Lara, the Dark Twin, waiting to pick up each individual and then walk down a gray and silent road into oblivion with them. It was what she had been taught happened, vague though it was. But some people believed that Lara also punished the wicked with hellfire and eternal suffering. And what Nora saw now came very close to that, making it much easier to believe.

She and Shade formed a small, pitiable vanguard while Owen held Calla upright. Behind them, the captured women were streaming into the night, making for the safety of dark houses and hiding places. Nora gritted her teeth.

“We’ve got to make it to the gates at least,” she said.

Shade nodded. Nora saw his knuckles whiten as he grasped the hilt of the sword tighter.

“Ready,” he said.

“Wait.” It was Calla’s trembling voice. They both turned to her. “There’s another way to the red gates. Through the backyards.”

“Can you lead us?”

Calla and Owen shared a look. Then Calla nodded.

“Into the alley opposite, first.”

“Let’s go,” Nora said.

And they moved, staying close together, following Calla’s hesitant voice leading them through the shadows. They crouched low through a desolate no-man’s-land of weeds bordered by knee-high boundary walls, then passed through the ruin of a house and found an empty washing line spanning the main room. Through an overgrown gateway, under the ivy, and suddenly they stood on a rooftop one street down from the square, overlooking the writhing mass. Garreth and Master Diaz were defending the open red gates. They had rallied the few sober men who were putting up a fight into a hasty line and met the attackers head-on. Steel clashed, men died. The ground before them was strewn with dead and dying. Other men started to run past the locked shields, looking for easier spoils in the side streets, while women and children fled through the gates and up the everlong stairs.

“Now what?” Shade asked as they carefully lowered themselves down from the roof. “We’re on the wrong side.”

Nora grinned.

“Now? We run with the crowd. Come on!”

She hooked an arm under Owen’s elbow, raised her knife, and charged into the broad causeway, dragging the others along.

“What are you doing?” Owen called.

“We blend in,” she shouted back, accelerating into a brisk jog up the causeway, following a group of attackers to the shield wall in front of the gates. “We’ll be pushed against the shields and Garreth or Diaz will let us through.”

“If they don’t kill us first,” Owen shouted, voice breaking.

“If they even recognize us,” Shade butted in.

“We’ll be breaking their shield wall,” Owen continued.

Shade swore.

“This is a very bad idea,” Owen screamed as they plunged head-on into the push-and-shove before the shield wall.

“That’s why it’ll work.”

Nora elbowed her way through the grunting, heaving mass of men that closed in around them, sucking them into the currents that moved them ever forward. She kept her eyes on Diaz. He wasn’t hard to miss, his black eyes narrowed in concentration. Nora pushed in his direction, following an invisible umbilical cord, never letting go of Owen’s arm. The next wave pulled her aside a little, and she saw Garreth’s white eye as someone shoved her onto his shield. Garreth turned his head after spearing a man in the gut.

“Garreth!”

He growled and lifted the spear above the rim of the shield. She flinched. He hesitated.

“Got Owen. And Shade. Calla, too,” she yelled into his ear, winded by another shove in her back. “Open up.”