Lord of Unkindness Ch. 28

 Notes: Back to the den of iniquity we go!

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 28

***

Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

In the end, they don’t wait around after starting the fire. Nephele decides she’d rather head back to the private airfield where their jet is waiting for them—“It’s not like I’m letting this girl go, after all.” Ciro doesn’t try to convince her otherwise. Engaging with Nephele is a delicate thing—she’s as likely to go off the rails when she’s being argued with as when you’re trying to be passive and ignore her, and being in Maria’s body makes her invulnerable to him right now. Once Maria is on her own again, Ciro might be able to do something, but he’s not going to risk damaging her by trying to force his cousin out.

Instead they stay just long enough to watch the flames really catch on Angelo’s family house. This refuge, this beautiful home that his parents left him, a place of ethereal music, his connection to his people—it goes up in fire and burns down to ash, and it feels like Ciro’s heart does the same inside his chest.

I should have run. I knew it. It’s too late to indulge in those sorts of regrets, though. He’s got to armor up before he sees his family again.

Nephele is oddly quiet all the way to the airfield, her control of Maria’s body herky and jerky. It’s bad enough that they almost go off the road several times, but Ciro doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing for him to say; he won’t offer to help, and antagonizing her will only mean more pain for himself later on. Instead, he sinks into a form of meditation he perfected as a child; awake and aware, but drawing in on himself. He tucks his emotions deep into a box in his head, along with all his most vulnerable thoughts. Angelo goes into the box, and so does Annette. He can still think about them, but it’s dispassionate, and anyone scanning him with mental magic will see the same.

His family will know what he’s doing, of course. They’ll try to break him down, drive him out of cool distance into their suffocating heat, but he’s not going to make it easy for them. He closes the box with the magic from one of his sole raven’s feathers, binding it in an intricate pattern that reminds him of some of the textiles in Angelo’s safehouse. When he thinks about the destruction Nephele wrought with only the slightest pang, he knows it worked.

One hurdle down. Only a hundred or so more to go.

The airfield is surrounded by a chain-link fence. There’s an office and a series of hangars attached to it, but the place feels deserted. The only plane there is a very familiar jet, painted red and black and stupidly ostentatious against the desert landscape. They park the car next to it, and Maria gets out and takes all of two steps before falling to her knees with a gasp.

Ciro doesn’t run to help her. He barely even glances at her; he can’t afford to give anything up now, not with the welcoming committee coming toward them across the tarmac. There’s Nephele, tall, upright, and skinny as a twig. She looks gleeful but exhausted—controlling another person’s body for that amount of time is no easy task. At her feet, a whole pack of rats is running alongside her, welling and falling back again like a brown, furry wave. And beside her is…

Richard, Uncle Magnus’s bodyguard. His cougar familiar is beside him, but she’d walking with a nasty limp. He looks grim, and is hands are working like he’s imagining breaking all the bones he promised Ciro he would.

“There’s the man of the hour!” Nephele says as she gets close, slurring the words. It’s part fatigue, part the result of the soft palate deformities in her mouth. She’s gone through dozens of surgeries to correct the results of generations of inbreeding, but there’s only so much you can do when your family tree is as twisted as the Hapsburgs. Her hands are twitching as well, but it’s with a desire to grab. As soon as she’s in range, that’s what she does, reeling Ciro in and clamping on to him like a lamprey. “Baby, it’s been so long,” she whispers against his ear before pressing a kiss to the skin right below it.

Her lips are wet, her hands clammy. It’s the last thing Ciro wants to feel, but he doesn’t let on. He doesn’t hold her back, either; capitulating won’t do him any favors.

“Miss Hambly,” Richard grinds out. “We need to get going.”

She giggles and jumps up and down a little bit. Her grip is so tight her nails are digging through Ciro’s clothes and leaving marks. “Ciro,” she whispers, “Ciro, my Ciro, I missed you. Tell me you missed me.”

Ciro doesn’t say anything.

“Ciro. Tell me you missed me.”

“Miss Hambly,” Richard tries again.

Nephele pulls back just far enough to look into his eyes. “Tell me you missed me,” she hisses, “or I’ll have my rats eat that girl alive, right now.”

“We need the girl, Miss—” Richard grunts with pain as half a dozen rats suddenly swarm his familiar, biting viciously. He holds the cougar in check; no one lashes out at a Hambly unless they have a death wish.

“I missed you,” Ciro says dully, not for Richard’s sake as much as Maria’s. Maria must have been conscious while Nephele was hag-riding her, because she’s not trying to run—she knows there’s nowhere to go. She’s on the verge of hyperventilating, though, so Ciro needs to keep her calm. He can’t help her if she loses control now.

Nephele melts against him. “I knew it,” she says with satisfaction. Ciro stares at her and wonders, for the thousandth time, why a person as smart as his cousin constantly deludes herself when it comes to him. Their relationship is her most consistent lie. “I told Uncle Victor he was too hard on you. I knew he was going to make you run.”

You killed Annette’s familiars, not my father!

“I told him not to beat you,” she continues. “You’re too delicate for that.”

Ha. Where’s the woman who was threatening to amputate his legs an hour ago? But that’s Nephele—burning one moment, freezing the next.

“Miss Hambly,” Richard finally speaks up, and now he’s less brimming with an urge for vengeance and more hoping to get through the next few minutes without taking more damage. “We should go. Your uncle is expecting you.”

“Mmhmm,” she says, finally pulling away from Ciro. “Okay.” She glances at Maria. “Put her in the cargo hold,” she says contemptuously. “With my rats.”

“Ciro,” Maria whimpers, turning big, scared eyes on him. “Don’t—”

“Don’t what?” Nephele asks, getting in her face. “Don’t let me do that to you? Bitch, has he been able to stop me from doing anything I want so far?” She laughs. “This is what you get for messing with powers you have no business knowing about.”

“I—but I—”

Dispassion, except Ciro can already feel it breaking. He reaches absently up to pet his raven, and a tiny feather comes loose in his hand. It’s a second’s work to waft it over to Maria and tuck it into her hair. Protection. She’s nothing to you. You barely even notice her.  The charm seems to work, because neither Nephele nor Richard say a word when the rats turn their backs on Maria like she isn’t even there.

Good. Hopefully it will last her all the way back to New York. Then…well, Ciro will have to have another plan in place by then. Angelo will never forgive him if he lets Maria get killed.

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part One

 Notes: I'm back, baby! And being very fucking careful about how I sit, how often I get up for breaks, how to stretch my spine...arg. I'm not at 100%, but I've got story for you, so I'll take it ;)

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part One

***

Chapter Thirteen, Part One

 

Photo by Nadiia Ganzhyi

 

“Talk to me about layout,” Kieron said once Carlisle was able to breathe again. “Entrances and exits, weapons systems, transport.”

“That’s all classified,” she snapped at him from where she was pacing back and forth. Her arms were crossed over her chest protectively, but at least that meant she wasn’t preparing to shoot him at the drop of a hat.

“I don’t give a shit about this place,” Kieron told her bluntly. “Nobody gives a shit about this place.”

She scoffed. “You gave enough of a shit to try and take out the General.”

Momentary madness. Lapse of sanity. Impaired judgement. Stars, Elanus was never going to let Kieron out of his sight again after this. He might even be persuaded to go back to therapy, if it meant he didn’t so stupid shit like that. “That was a mistake,” he admitted. “And I’m pretty sure you know why I made it—” she flinched, but he didn’t press “—so let’s move on, all right? What’s the layout of this compound?”

Carlisle sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Every hall is recorded, every room has cameras. You’re not going to be able to sneak out of here.”

“How about you stop assuming things about what I can and can’t do and start telling me something useful?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Fine. Let’s see what you can do with this.” She slapped the top of the coffee table, and the glass turned opaque. “It’s a standard rectangular compound with star turrets in each corner.” She sketched it all out in quick lines. “Training and medic halls here, barracks here, mess here, supply and storage here. Weapons systems on each tower and lining the walls. They’re solar powered, so not at peak efficiency right now, but more than enough to blow you away in under a second. All ships are kept here, under heavy observation.” She sketched out a round building adjacent to the main one. “And all land vehicles are kept in the center of the compound, with only one entrance and exit, here. Also under heavy observation.”

“Huh.” Okay, that was… not ideal, but not insurmountable either. “Sewage system?”

“Gravity powered over porous rock.”

Gross. It had to come right back up through the rocks they shit on during rains like this. “That’s lazy.”

“It’s efficient,” Carlisle said stiffly. “And also none of your business.”

“It’s my business if it means I can’t use it to escape,” he pointed out. “Water?”

“Cisterns, attached to the roofs. Also under observation.”

Not helpful, then. Time for a different tack. “What are your total numbers?”

“You don’t need to…” This time Carlisle stopped herself. “Just under a hundred.”

A hundred people. The colony had once held thousands of them. Thousands of people, and all but six of them were supposed to be dead. “Any more originals?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not anymore.”

Kieron wanted to ask about it. Who else survived? How did you? How did he? Why didn’t you go out in the pathetic blaze of glory that everyone else did? But it would only hurt to know at this point, not help. “Working in shifts?”

Carlisle rolled her eyes. “What kind of idiots do you take us for? Of course, working in shifts.” She went on to describe a system very similar to the one he’d grown up with—triple shifts, mandatory PT and scut time, a bullshit favoritism system when it came to getting off-planet…the most surprising thing about it all was that any of these people were willing to abide by the rules.

“Why?” Kieron finally asked once she’d laid it all out.

“Why what?”

“Why do people listen to him. To you? Why do they stay?”

She blinked. “Why do you think? He gives them a place to belong.”

“That’s a bunch of—”

“No, listen to me.” She leaned in, staring at him intently. “That’s how he works. It’s how he’s always worked, and it’s always worked. Some people have a kind of…charisma, a way of presenting themselves and saying things that makes people want to listen to them. The General has that. He says a lot of terrible things—truly horrific things, stuff that would make a sane person run the other way.

“But the people who stay? They’re not insane. Most of them just want to belong. They wanted a place that would give them a second chance, or would give them the ability to indulge in beliefs and actions that wouldn’t be permitted in their home societies. He gives them an excuse to be monsters, and they take it.” Carlisle rubbed a hand across her temple. “The comfort rooms? That’s the least of it. Trust me, once they find out who you are…”

Yeah, nothing good was going to come of that. “We won’t be here by the time they do.”

She smacked the table and the image disappeared. “Have you missed everything I’ve been saying? You’re stuck here, we’re all being watched, and it’s controlled by a computer system in the General’s own quarters. He’s got the best protection, and we’ve got nothing to get past it with now.”

“That’s not true, actually,” Kieron replied. He pulled the single unit of Blobby he’d kept ahold on out of his pocket.

“You’re not going to be able to threaten him with an explosion the way you could on the ship,” Carlisle said. “Whatever that thing of yours is, right now it’s being stored in a bunker beneath the center of the compound. We keep all our excess ammunition there as well—it’s been designed for explosions to go down instead of up. Even a nuclear device won’t be enough to scare him.”

“It’s not a nuclear device.” Kieron smiled down at the smooth, black oval in his hand. Then, very deliberately, he tapped out a message in MORSE. He tapped it once…twice…three times, then waited.

“What are you—” Carlisle went quiet as the piece suddenly began to vibrate in his hand.

Long…short short…long… Kieron closed his eyes and concentrated. “A few seconds’ delay in communication,” he murmured. “But he’s able to configure himself, and he thinks he can get out of the place he’s been shut into.”

“Who is he?”

Kieron ignored the question. “Pull up the schematic again so I can pass them on. We’ll let him see how well he can get the lay of the land before I ask him for anything specific.”

Carlisle looked furious. “Any transmissions will be picked up for sure! You’ve just doomed us before—”

“Not these ones,” Kieron assured her. He was almost sure he was right, too. If tech on Gania couldn’t pinpoint communication on the level Catie and Lizzie operated on, then this Podunk fucking compound wouldn’t be able to detect Blobby. “I swear. Now pull up the schematic, then let’s start brainstorming our next step.”

“Which is?” she asked skeptically.

“Weapons for the two of us.”

Missing a day because...

 I've got a persistent health problem I'm trying to keep from becoming chronic, and today's a bad day. I'm sorry, darlins! I'll try to have Lord of Unkindness on Thursday :(

Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Twenty-Seven

 Notes: Oooh, we're not playing around now. Things are about to get very messy for Ciro.

Title: Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Twenty-Seven

***

Chapter Twenty-Seven

 

 

Photo by Madelynn Woods

He comes back to himself in fits, his hearing resurfacing before anything else. Stupid, so stupid, I should have set up guardrails. Ciro knows how to defensively disengage from his magic; it’s almost an unconscious reaction to potential threats for him at this point. He was so flustered and so worried about Annette that he didn’t even think of it, though. Jesus Christ, Annette, what is she—

“—take to leave us alone?” That’s her, teary and fragile. Ciro vaguely registers arms around his body. Annette is holding him close, protective.

“More than you’ve got,” Nephele says in Maria’s voice. Everything about her is grating like this; Ciro can’t believe he didn’t realize the switch immediately. Then again, what could he have done even if he had? She had Annette at gunpoint. “I’m quite impressed you and your family managed to fake your death so well, and trust me, my uncle will be getting back to your parents about that, but you better than anyone should realize that there’s nothing that can keep me and Ciro apart. Nothing and no one.”

“He’s not going to be happy with you,” Annette tries.

Nephele just laughs. “Who cares about happiness? None of us are in this for happiness; happiness is a chemical trick of the brain. I can order him a dose of happiness in a syringe every morning if it means he’s mine.”

“Don’t you care that he doesn’t love you?”

Nephele’s voice drops to a growl, hard to force out of Maria’s petite frame. “What the fuck would you know about it, huh? Did you care that he didn’t love you? Did you care that he’d rather screw boys in bathrooms or go for joyrides on your friend Angelo’s cock in the back of a limo than give you his loyalty, huh? Did you care that he only ever thought of you as a friend, never a fuck?”

Ciro feels Annette tense. It’s a tension he recognizes, the kind that comes from holding the truth inside rather than spewing it like venom at your target. She sounds appropriately cowed when she murmurs, “I thought love would come over time, like it did between his parents.”

Nephele laughs. “Who’s been feeding you fairy tales, huh? One of the cousins? Maybe my dad? He loved to play pretend, but it’s all bullshit, Annie. Ciro’s parents married for the same reason mine did—to make powerful children who would help expand our family’s empire. But Aunt Mei’s family didn’t let on that she had a history of cystic endometriosis. She was lucky to get carry Ciro to term; she lost half a dozen pregnancies, I think.” She hums, and Ciro can hear the leer in it. “You know what would have been great? If good ol’ Uncle Victor had married you instead of promising you to Ciro. Then he and I could be together without worrying about making weird babies, while you and his dad pumped out a new generation of Hamblys.”

Annette pounces on that, but she seems a bit distracted too. Not physically—magically. She arrived at the house with just one familiar, but Ciro knows she has more. Where are they? “You just said it yourself, it’s not safe for you and Ciro to have children together. Surely his father won’t let you two marry.”

“Eh, I’ve had my eggs plucked out already and frozen. We can do IVF, test the little brats for abnormalities before putting them in a surrogate. We’ll get enough good ones that way. Besides, I’m not marrying Ciro because I want to have his babies.” Her voice sounds closer, like she’s leaning in. “I’m marrying him because he’s mine. From the second I saw him, I knew he was going to be mine. One single fucking thing in this world is going to be mine, and I decided it was going to be Ciro when I was five years old, so don’t even think about trying to screw me out of it now.”

Maria leans back again. “You’re just a bonus, bitch. A means of keeping Ciro in line. Maybe you’ll get lucky and Victor will let you become his concubine after all, instead of killing your whole family as punishment for your filthy lies, but I kind of doubt it.” She’s satisfied by that, Ciro can tell. “Now, be quiet until my actual body gets here and I might even let you travel in a seat on the plane instead of in a pet carrier in the hold.”

“I wondered why you looked like this,” Annette murmured. “Is she magical?”

“Nope,” Nephele says with a pop to the “p.” “Not that it matters, since bullets can kill a familiar just as well as a spell. Now how about you be a good little girl and guuuhhhhhh…” Her voice drops a full octave, going lower and lower until Ciro hears the thud of her hitting the ground.

“Ciro!” Annette pats his face, gently at first, then harder. “Ciro, c’mon, I can’t get you out of here without your help. We don’t have much time!”

Ciro forced his body to remember he’s got eyes. They blink, scratchy and painful, but a few more and he can see well enough to catch sight of Annette’s fearful but determined face. To the right, he sees Maria lying on her front, face blank, as one of Annette’s cats sits heavily on her back, teeth buried in her neck.

“I can’t keep her down for long,” Annette warns as she gets up, three more cats happily curling around her feet. Ciro has a raven perched on either side of the couch, unnaturally still, but they begin to stir as he does. “We’ve got to leave, now.”

He shakes his head with a wince. “I can’t go without Maria,” he says.

“She’s working with Nephele!”

“No, she’s being compelled. She’s important to Angelo, I can’t…” He can’t believe he’s about to say this, but he’s still reeling from magical aftershock and there’s no Angelo to talk him out of it right now. “I have to stay.”

“With Nephele?” Annette couldn’t sound more horrified. “Are you crazy? Did you hear any of what she just said? She’ll destroy you! She wants to marry you, she wants to leash you. She’ll never let you go once she gets her claws into you.”

Ciro knows all that. He also knows that he can’t let someone else pay for the mistake he made in making himself known in the first place. Maria doesn’t deserve that; if he goes along, he might be able to bargain for her release, or to force his family to leave Angelo and Annette alone. If he runs, though…if he runs again, if he runs with her, there will never be any chance of reconciliation. Just death. Given the resources the Hamblys can bring to the table, probably the deaths of the people he loves instead of the ones he loathes. He won’t do it. He can’t.

“Leave,” he insists. “You can make it. Leave now, go to…go to Angelo, or…”

“I’m not leaving you!” Annette insists, her chin trembling even as her voice firms.

“You have to. Please, you have to.” He grips her hand as tight as he’s able. “You’ve got to warn Angelo. Tell him what’s happened. Tell him I’m…I’m working on getting back to him.”

Maria stirs. Annette’s familiar bites down harder, but it’s clear the spell is losing its potency.

“Go now,” he says, pointing at the door that leads to the garden. “Over the wall. Hide yourself however you have to, just go, and don’t stop until you’re with someone safe.”

Annette shakes her head, tears falling now, but she knows he’s right. “I want you to come.”

“I wish I could.” But you know them as well as I do. They found me. They’ll never let me live any other way. Go while you can.

She helps him up onto the couch, stifling sobs, then kisses his forehead before recalling her familiar. One of Ciro’s ravens takes its place and he bears down, down, down with it, until Maria  has a hard time breathing. “I’ll find a way to help you,” Annette promises.

“Be safe,” Ciro says. “That will help me most of all.”

“What do I tell Angelo?”

Tell him that I love him more than I ought to, and I’m so grateful for him, and I’m so sorry that I ruined everything. “Tell him I need him to be safe too.” God, he’s going to be so mad. Hopefully Annette can quell the worst of it. “Now run for it.”

She runs. Ciro watches her go until he can’t anymore, and finally the potency of her spell vanishes as her familiar is called back to her, evaporating like mist. Maria sits up with a groan, looks around, and settles on Ciro. When she smiles at him, it’s pure Nephele—huge and toothy. “And here I thought you were dumb.”

“And here I thought you were smart,” Ciro parrots back. Maria chuckles.

“Smart enough to make you stay. You’re all levers, baby.” She crawls over so that she’s practically in his lap. “I look forward to pushing them,” she murmurs. “One by one.”

“You can try.”

“Oh, I will. It’ll be a lot easier once I convince your daddy to let me go ahead with the operation this time.”

Ciro suppresses a shudder. “One of us needs to be mobile.”

She laughs. “Oh Ciro, you’re underestimating just how furious your father is. You’ll be lucky if he lets you keep both your legs after this shit.” She grabs him by the arm and stands. “Time to go, baby. I can’t wait to see you again…in the flesh.”

This time the shudder breaks through. Maria just laughs and hauls him toward the door. “Hope you didn’t leave anything you like in here,” she says as they leave. “Because I’m going to burn this place to the ground.”

Ciro pulls back against her grip. “No! You can’t do that, it’s—”

Maria pulls him in close and shoves the muzzle of her gun against his gut. “You don’t dictate terms anymore,” she growls. “I do. So you can sit and watch, or you can sit and watch while bleeding from the stomach, your choice.” Ciro doesn’t so much as twitch. “That’s what I thought. Now be a good boy for me and get the gasoline out of the trunk.”