“I would have died for you a thousand times more, because you were my friend.”
Were. Something in his voice makes me look around. Over his shoulder, I see Victra whisper something humorous to Antonia and their skeletal mother. Lorn serves his grandchildren little plates of cake brought by a short Pink. But it’s after the server turns that I freeze inside. He turns haughtily. Ruthlessly. Unlike any Pink ever born. Breaking character only for half a second. I know that turn. I know that man. It’s Vixus. It has to be. My eyes dart to the Pink who brought me Lorn’s whiskey. Lilath. The Jackal’s girl who wore bones in her hair. Who allied with the Bellona. They’re dressed as Pinks. Golds with fleshMasks. Contacts.
Wolves playing lambs.
I pull back from Roque, about to shout, when I feel his grip tighten, and I realize he was saying goodbye. The needle from his ring pricks my wrist. Gentle, like the kiss he now plants on my cheek.
“And thus go liars, with a bloodydamn kiss.”
One word shatters a thousand lies.
Face colder than the marble statue behind us, Roque draws back and opens the ivory box’s lid. With the gentle creak of silver hinges, my world ends. Augustus gasps in horror at what’s inside the box. And a foot away, the Jackal, eyes full of long-dormant hate, smiles at me and cocks his head back like an animal to loose a manic, mocking howl.
A signal of the end.
Victra reaches for her razor. Antonia steps back. Pulls a scorcher from a waiter’s tray and fires two rounds into Victra’s spine. Two more into her mother’s neck before any can move.
“ARCOS!” Augustus screams, whipping out his razor. “TO ARMS!”
“HOWLERS TO ME!” Lorn roars, pushing back his grandchildren. “Protect the Reaper!”
Too late. Even as Lorn stands, Lilath pulls a pulseDagger from under her tray and sweeps it across his throat from behind. Lorn shoves his hand between throat and blade. Four fingers fall to the ground. He angles his body, strains against her, grasping her wrist with his bloody arm. Blade humming. Grunting. Intimate horror as chaos reigns across the clearing.
The poison spreads in me.
I slump to the ground, box in my lap.
Back against the blind statue.
Paralyzed.
The Jackal glides through the midst of this melee, a reptile over ice. He watches stabbing and butchery, and finds Lorn still struggling with Lilath as she tries to cut his throat. Lorn’s managed to take a shard of broken glass from the ground and is reaching to stab Lilath’s leg, when the Jackal bends, examines Lorn for a moment, and slowly puts a blade into his belly.
“They were wrong. Your side isn’t made of stone.”
Lorn’s face pinches with fear as the Jackal pulls the blade up the old man’s body. My razormaster’s eyes jump to me, to his grandchildren. He tries to stand, tries one last ounce of fury. Tries to say something. But his body has quit him. He will never see his island again. Never pet his griffin. Never hear his grandchildren laugh or see Lysander, the grandson I promised him. I did this to him. I brought him back from that separate peace he so wanted, but knew he never deserved. And soon his eyes gaze at nothing and the Jackal retrieves his blade and Lilath finishes her work with a slow sawing motion.
I loose a long moan. It’s all I can manage. Drool slithers down my throat. Victra crawls toward me, blood leaking from her. Amidst all this, Roque stands a statue apart.
Pulse weapons warble in the distance. Thunder rips the sky as dark shapes descend, cracking the sound barrier. They come from a stealthed ship. Something snuck in. Where are the patrols?
Obsidians and Praetorians land in the midst of the clearing, thumping down on the stone. They pursue those who fled the killing ground for the gardens, hunting them down with quiet economy. Antonia directs the slaughter, finishing heirs, clipping bloodlines half a millennium old. Taking hostages. Lilath is laughing with Vixus. They peel away electronic fleshMasks and shake free their golden hair. Behind them, Aja lands in splendor, her armor flashing in the lantern light. She surveys the carnage, face dark and content. I hardly notice her, because an old friend lands at her side. Cassius.
“Virginia?” he asks.
“Missing, I fear,” the Jackal says.
“Warned?”
“Angered. Lover’s spat.”
Victra manages to crawl to my ankle. A slick of blood shadows her path from where she was shot to the place where she now curls. Red on her lips. I can’t feel her touch.
“I didn’t know,” she whispers. “Darrow, I didn’t know.”
Aja bends over Lorn’s body taking his razor from his waist and closing her mentor’s eyes forever. He never even drew the weapon. Cassius comes close, stopping at my feet, where he goes to a knee and watches me.
“Can he move, poet?” he asks Roque.
“No. But he can hear.”
“You killed my family, Darrow. All of them. Me, Julian, that’s one thing. But the children? How could you?” I don’t know what he’s talking about. “I’ll find Sevro. I’ll find Mustang. There will be no mercy.” He touches the enameled hilt of his razor with his new arm.
“You can’t kill him,” Roque says from behind him. “You know what he is.” Roque puts a hand on Cassius’ shoulder. “Cassius, the Sovereign’s orders were clear.”
“Dissection,” Cassius murmurs. He watches me, and it seems that there was never a time when this man called me brother. Never a hope we could ever have been what we are now. Roughly, he takes my hand. I think, for a moment, he is shaking it. But instead, he steals the ring I earned. The iron wolf I killed his brother to possess. My finger is naked without it.
He rises from his bent knee to tower over me, more a beautiful vulture than an eagle. “Julian. Lea. Pax. Quinn. Weed. Harpy. Rotback. Tactus. Lorn. Victra. They deserved better than to die for a slave.” With that, he leaves me with Roque.
The world is silent except for sobbing and the sound of sirens. At my side, Victra watches Cassius leave, her life leaking from her. Those clever eyes of hers look up at me, lost.
“We must hurry,” Aja drawls in the center of the massacre. “They know we’re here. Bring your father and let us go.”
The Jackal nods. “A moment, if you please.”
Several meters away, Augustus lies pinned to the ground by three waiters. They hoist him up as the Jackal approaches, stepping over Lorn’s desecrated body.
“Is the Mask not as you like, Darrow?” he calls to me. “I made it just for you after you revealed your true self to me in Attica.”
The Jackal turns to his father. “What do you think, Father? Was this a ploy worthy your name?”
“You monster.” Augustus spits in his face. “What have you done?”
“So you’re not proud?” The Jackal wipes the spit away and looks at it. “Damn.”
“Stop this. My son, you’ve ruined us.”
“Adrius …,” Aja says impatiently. “We must go.”
The Jackal steps forward. “So now you call me son?” He clucks his tongue scoldingly and straightens his father’s jacket. “Was I your son when you put me on a rock for the elements to claim me? Three days. I was a baby. The Board didn’t even want an Exposure. But you thought I was so weak, and Claudius so strong. Was he strong when I had Karnus put him in the ground?”
His father’s lips tremble. “What?”
“I paid Karnus au Bellona seven million credits and six Pinks to sully Claudius’s girl. I knew Claudius’s honor would lead him into the ring. Funny thing is … it was your money. I asked you for it so I could invest in my future. And I did.” He frowns. “Father, did you really think a ten-year-old cares about the stock market? You should have paid better attention.”
“You killed Claudius.” Augustus’s voice breaks under the strain and he sags into the arms of those holding him, shaking from sadness. “You killed my boy.”
This would break Mustang’s heart.
“I am your boy,” the Jackal sneers. “I was a good son. I worshiped you. I feared you. I obeyed you. I learned what you wished me to learn. I went where you wished me to go. I did only as your will commanded. Yet I was not enough.”
Augustus shakes his head, drawing back his rage as the Praetorians cuff his hands together with magnetic shackles. His eyes rise to look at the monster he created. “I should have strangled you in your crib.”
“Come now, Father …”
“You are not my son.”
Adrius flinches. With those few words, Augustus releases something. And the small part of Adrius that held out hope to be loved disappears. He shakes off his humanity, leaving only the Jackal.
“Then farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear. Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost.” He whispers to some distant, fading part of himself as he lazily lifts the scorcher to his father’s forehead. “Evil, be thou my good.”
“Stop!” Aja steps forward. “Adrius! In the name of the Sovereign …”
The Jackal shoots his father in the head.
Eo’s killer drops to the ground, and I feel hollowness spread over my heart. Death begets death begets death. This is what Dancer warned me about. This is why Mustang said not to trust her brother. This is why my friends will die. Why I will die. Because I cannot match this evil.
Who can?
“You dumb little snake!” Aja shouts. “The Sovereign needed him to talk down the Outer Rim! Gorydammit.” She looks to the sky as flame trails blaze across the dark. Someone’s coming in hard from the upper atmosphere. Pulse weapon fire flashes across Citadel grounds as Praetorians encounter Augustus’s and Lorn’s first responders.
“I gave you this prize,” the Jackal says, nodding to me. “Do not whine now.” He references his datapad and points at the flame trails. “The Telemanuses are coming. Unless you want to play with them, I suggest we leave.”
Cassius agrees. “Lorn and Augustus are dead. This army will wither.”
Aja orders her Praetorians to their shuttle. They come to pick me from the ground. Victra’s hand on my leg slackens. Her eyes have closed.
“Roque,” I murmur through the thickness of the poison. “Brother …”
“No. No,” he says, not a monster, still himself, still quiet and tranquil, if dreadful in his sadness. “You are a son of Red. I a son of Gold. That world where we are brothers is lost.” But he comes close, bending, reaching with delicate hands to angle the ivory box in my lap toward my face. “And in this world, the power of Gold will never wane.”
I look into the box and my heart shatters.
All that has been, all that was to be, crashes down. Eo’s dream falls into darkness. Wherever you are, Sevro, Mustang, Ragnar, do not come back to this world. There’s too much pain. Too much sorrow to ever mend it.
I look into the box and see Fitchner’s head staring back at me through empty eyes, mouth stuffed with grapes. Ares, the one hope we had, the one man who picked me up when I was broken and gave me a chance for something better than revenge, has been butchered. And I know we are undone.
About the Author
PIERCE BROWN spent his childhood building forts and setting traps for cousins in the woods of six states and the deserts of two. Graduating college in 2010, he fancied the idea of continuing his studies at Hogwarts. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a magical bone in body. So while trying to make it as a writer, he worked as a manager of social media at a start-up tech company, toiled as a peon on the Disney lot at ABC Studios, did his time as an NBC page, and gave the term sleep deprivation a new meaning during his stint as an aide on a U.S. Senate campaign. Now he lives in Los Angeles, where he scribbles tales of spaceships, wizards, ghouls, and most things old or bizarre.
www.pierce-brown.com
@Pierce_Brown