The pain had subsided, but the echo of it was still in my bones. I swallowed hard against the vomit souring my throat and the brighter scents of pain and fear.
“Maybe she’s allergic to the masking pheromones?”
“No, I tested the solution on a small patch of skin before I applied it. They’re a perfect match.”
It didn’t feel perfect, I wanted to say, but a tongue of swollen sandpaper inhabited my mouth. It was as if I’d been denied drink for a week instead of imbibing only minutes before.
Then the roil in my gut again, a tight coil of fear that wasn’t really mine. I couldn’t understand it. It was like the core of my body belonged to someone else. I managed to sit up with Micah’s help, his large palm warm and supporting on the small of my back.
“Maybe she—”
The door to the cantina swung open with a resounding bang. A figure was silhouetted in the shadows of the hall; a man of great bulk, middling height, and only one arm. The dim lights of the cantina made him appear a ghost, and bent at the waist, he wavered like one as well.
“Gregor!” Vanessa abandoned me for him. “God! What happened?”
“Ajax,” he managed, before bending over himself. My body froze, even my shuddering stopped for an instant, and my eyes darted to the hallway behind him, half expecting to see Ajax there, the tip of his flaming javelin already pointed at my heart. “He found me last night, just after dusk. I don’t know how…I didn’t do anything…I didn’t—”
“Shh,” Vanessa said, arm over his shoulders. “Of course you didn’t. Come sit down.”
“I can’t…” He looked up at us with as pained an expression as I’d ever seen on another human being. “I can’t keep them in.”
I glanced down, unprepared for what supernatural beings could do to another nonmortal. His guts spilled forward, bulging from the hollow of his body, pink coils of twisting organs snaking from the cavity. His one good arm was plastered with blood.
“Oh, my God!” Micah left me so quickly I wobbled, then puked again, this time with shock and revulsion.
“I’ll take care of you,” I heard Micah say over my retching. “Don’t worry about a thing.”
“Did you see Warren?” Hunter asked. He was the only one who appeared remotely calm. I wondered if he was still reclined in his seat, ankle crossed over his knee, a detached observer. I couldn’t look, though. My eyes—like everyone’s—were fastened on Gregor.
His face collapsed upon itself, and red-tinged saliva bubbled from his mouth. “They used me as bait. He tracked my pheromones.”
The room fell dead silent.
“And Warren wouldn’t listen.” He was sobbing now, mouth wide. “I tried to tell him no, not to do it, but he never listens.”
“What? What did he do?”
“He traded himself for me.” Stunned by this news, nobody moved. Another helpless sob escaped him. “They let me go, but I was followed. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t close off the entrance to the boneyard by myself. And there was nobody to close it behind me.”
I gathered it was no small thing for a Shadow agent to infiltrate the boneyard. Still, what did it matter? Any enemy who tried to enter the sanctuary would fry, right? I opened my mouth to say as much, but another fiery assault wracked my body. My eyes bulged painfully from their sockets, my throat stretched and burning in a soundless cry. And I no longer cared about the sanctuary.
“They’re torturing him,” Micah said, kneeling next to me. “He and Olivia are linked, remember? She must be experiencing the residual effects.”
If this was residual, I never wanted to feel the real thing. Another slice, and I squeezed my eyes so tight spots danced there. I came out of it in time to catch the end of Gregor’s words. “—because he knows her true identity. We have to hand her over at dawn—”
“Or they’ll kill Warren,” Hunter finished for him. This time I did turn, arching my neck to find him. He sat back in his chair, eyeing me dispassionately, sizing me up like I was a sow to be sold at the country fair. I closed my eyes, wondering how I had ever thought him handsome.
“We can’t send her up, even if we wanted to,” Vanessa said. “She’ll incinerate herself before she even breathes fresh air.”
“Wha…?” Gregor grimaced. Felix quickly filled him in, and Gregor dropped his head back, groaning. I doubled over again.
“Stop it!” I screamed, to the sky, to Warren, to the torturers, and to a God I didn’t even know existed. I screamed until my throat was raw, and when I finished, a chuckle whispered like a heavy, bouncing wind across the room. Then the torture stopped. We all stared at one another.
“Your voice,” Hunter said quietly, eyes narrowed on my face. “Ajax heard it.”
“They’re linked,” Micah repeated.
I thought of Warren, the way he’d left that afternoon; agitated, angry, afraid. I won’t lose another! And I realized this must have been foretold. Of course, a man who believed the good of the troop came before that of the individual would do just that. He’d have known, and he’d have gone anyway.
“Oh, my God,” Micah said, realizing the same thing. He lowered his head into his hands, Gregor’s blood staining his temples and forehead and ears. “Ajax has been one step ahead of us the whole time.”
I conjured the image, my last, of Warren striding down the hall, trench coat billowing at his ankles, the need to do the right thing driving his limbs. My heart sank as I looked at everybody’s face. If this was a game, I thought, clutching my gut, we were one move away from losing it all.
23
Felix and Micah helped me back to my room, where Greta lit candles and some spicy incense to thicken the air, and gave me a pill to block the connection between Warren and me.
“You need your rest,” she told me as I swallowed it, feeling both relief and guilt as I did so. “Concentrate on building a mental wall between Warren and yourself. Protect your thoughts and feelings from those who are probing at him to get to you. That’s more important even than blocking the pain.”
Easy for you to say, I thought, eyes following her from the room. But the smoke from the incense interceded after that, floating between the synapses in my brain, taking the edge from my worries.
“Warren would want that,” Rena added, and I glanced over to where she sat in the corner, rocking in a chair she’d brought in from her own room. “You can bet he’s doing the same.”
The destroyed craters where her eyes should have been had turned to black pools in the candlelight. All her other charges were tucked in bed for the night, and she’d offered to tend to me while what remained of the troop convened in the briefing room. I knew what they were doing; talking about me, around me, but—once again—not to me. I wondered hazily which of them would cast the deciding vote…and how soon before I was kicked out of the sanctuary. Sacrificed for the sake of their leader.
“You should be meditating,” Rena said, as if that would solve everything as she leaned back in her chair.
“The meditation exercises aren’t working,” I told her, managing to work up a snarl, but paid for it when my intestines filled with fire.
“That’s because you’re not doing them,” she said lightly as I pressed back into my pillows, writhing until the burning subsided.
When it finally felt like all I had was a mean case of heartburn, I glanced back at her with watery eyes. “They’re going to vote me out, aren’t they? They hold me responsible for Warren’s capture.”
She shook her head, but it was a defeated rather than reassuring gesture. “No, Olivia. The Shadows orchestrated this, just as they’ve orchestrated every heartbreak we’ve ever had to endure.” She dropped her head back, seeming to deflate where she sat, before adding, “And Warren did this too. He always does.”
This last bit was said with a sort of long-standing resignation, and I’d have tried to read her aura, but I was too tired, groggy with the smoke rising in the air between us, and too afraid it would cause me more needless pain. I also wanted to ask what she meant, but was afraid I’d get more mumbling about Warren’s secrets—as Micah had done—or protestations that it wasn’t her story to tell, as Greta had claimed. So, instead, I asked a different question.