“I owe money to Lunar Crown,” Onyx stammered.
Wilmington’s largest casino. People did screwed-up shit for three reasons: love, revenge, or greed. Greed far outnumbered the other two.
“I just needed to pay off the debt, that’s all…”
Barrett gave him an encouraging nod.
“I never did anything…”
The remaining undead still sitting on the sidelines moved so fast, he might as well have teleported. A dark blur shot past Onyx. The journeyman stopped in mid-word. His mouth hung open in a slack O.
His stomach split in half and his intestines fell onto the stone by his feet.
The journeyman gagged. Blood gushed from his mouth. He choked on it, coughed, sending a cloud of bloody spray out, and collapsed.
Barrett’s eyes turned distant the way they did when a Master of Dead spoke through a faraway undead. “Blue Team 7, your feed is in the arena.”
He had piloted another vampire through this entire conversation. Masters of the Dead who could control two undead at the same time were rare. Just that ability alone had guaranteed a ticket to the Golden Legion when my father was in power.
Onyx made a gurgling noise.
“What’s your name?” Barrett asked me.
“Kate.”
“A word of advice, Kate. Don’t come to my island again.”
For a second, I thought of doing things the way my aunt would’ve done them. And then I remembered why we had moved to Wilmington.
“I’ll do my best,” I told him, turned, and walked toward the gates.
Rimush fell in step with me. As we exited the arena, 5 undead galloped through the gates, streaming past us to the bloody body on the floor.
5
T he sunset slowly burned in the west, cooling to dark red and purple. Dusk had claimed the fields of Eagles Island. Thomas and I rode down the same road that had brought us here. A lone vampire was trailing us through the corn, keeping a lot of distance.
“I know where the Emerald Wave is,” Thomas said. “Never heard of Aaron though.”
And that was strange. If Aaron was a deity, a prophet, or an avatar, he would proselytize. That’s how their kind powered up. How was it that Thomas who, by his own admission, was born and raised in Wilmington, had never heard of him or the cult?
“When was the last time you saw the Emerald Wave?”
He thought about it. “Years. The ocean in that area is strange and dangerous.”
“When did that start?”
“About three or four years ago.”
“Since the Night of the Shining Seas?”
He nodded. “Yes, now that I think about it.”
Hm. “Have you heard of anything specific? Any incidents involving people around the Emerald Wave?”
“There are always stories. Supposedly, that ship has a hole in it that can only be seen from inside of it and it’s full of monsters.”
Peachy.
Thomas checked my face, trying to see what I was thinking.
“The important thing is that Darin is probably alive,” I said. “Water breathing is relatively rare. This Aaron needs him for something.”
Unless he was sacrificing water breathers to some weird deity, but that wasn’t a possibility I would raise with Thomas now.
“Do you think he’s really a god?”
“No. Gods can’t usually manifest outside of flares. Typical magic waves don’t pack enough juice. Also, if the magic falls while a god is in our world in the flesh, they would suffer a lot of damage. They can’t exist in physical form during tech. It would take them decades, possibly generations, to build enough power through faith to manifest again.”
“But they could? If the wave was strong enough?”
“Theoretically. They won’t though. Gods are cowards.”
The blueberry bushes ended. Marsh hugged the roadway, clumps of the smooth cordgrass blending together into a wall of green.
Watching Onyx slide around in his own blood on the floor of the arena bothered me. He was a child trafficker. The grimy cages at Red Horn said that he deserved everything he got.
It still bothered me.
He wasn’t mine to punish. My aunt would have congratulated me on finally learning some discipline. My father would have turned it into a deep examination of his own altruistic impulses and how they eventually led to his downfall and then lectured me to not repeat his mistakes.
I had to let it go. Obsessing about it would only pull me back onto a very dangerous road. It led to claiming territory, and building towers, and people who pledged their lives to me in exchange for a promise of power and immortality. That wasn’t the future I wanted. For myself or for my family.
Something rustled ahead in the marsh. I halted Cuddles. Thomas followed my lead.
The cordgrass parted, and three men emerged onto the road. They moved with the familiar, easy grace of shapeshifters. One of them carried a bucket. And the shortest of them carried a claymore on his back.
Gods damn it all to hell and back. Don’t see us. Don’t.
The three shapeshifters caught our scent and turned to look at us in unison. Three pairs of eyes caught the light of the dying sunrise and shone, one green and two yellow.
The green-eyed claymore user stood up straight. He was short but muscled like a wrestler. “Consort?”
Of all people in the whole wide world to run into.
“Consort!” The shapeshifter dropped to one knee and smacked his fist into his chest. “It’s you!”
Why me?
The shapeshifter on his right dropped to one knee as well. The other guy, the one with the bucket, stared at me, wide-eyed.
“Get up, Keelan,” I hissed.
The claymore guy jumped to his feet from kneeling position and trotted over, his eyes shining.
“We’ve been over this. I’m not the Consort. Dali is the Consort now.”
Keelan smiled at me with slightly deranged devotion, his blond hair, wet with Cape Fear’s dark water, sticking to his face and neck. “You will always be the Consort to me.”
My left eye twitched. I slapped my hand over it.
His real name was Caolan Comerford, but he’d changed it when he came to the States. Other Irish people pronounced it as Kaylin or Kwaylan, Americans called him Cowlan, and correcting people got in his way, so he settled on Keelan because it sounded cool and was something he could live with.
Keelan claimed to have descended from the werewolves of Ossory, a mythical Irish shapeshifter kingdom that was said to flourish in Ireland pre-Norman invasion. For a while, I wasn’t sure he was even Irish, since he played up the charming Celtic-rogue thing so much. But according to Curran, there might have been something to his Ossory claims, because Keelan was abnormally gifted as a werewolf. He had a huge warrior form, could keep it up for a long period of time, could talk while in it, and was absolutely lethal in a fight.
I’d interacted with thousands of shapeshifters in my life, and Keelan was the only shapeshifter who fought with a claymore. In the warrior form. The first time I met him, we were in the middle of a skirmish, and he just kind of waded into it. His claymore was 55 inches long, and he himself was 66 inches tall. He had pulled it off his back, looked around, and suddenly this enormous werewolf spilled out and started swinging the claymore, one-handed. It was all offense. He had zero sword training until me. He had just whipped the claymore around like it was a club, and it hadn’t hindered him any, because when a giant werewolf waved around 6 pounds of sharpened metal, it cleared his killing field in record time. It took me almost two years to make him into a half-decent swordsman.