I followed Ramses in silence out to the room of the twelve doors. He entered one that was four to the right of the conversion chamber. This door was royal blue, but I could have sworn they were all white the first time I'd entered the room earlier with Khalil. Did the Citadel change itself like fucking Hogwarts?
Maybe that's what Leo had said about me feeling my way through this, because my eyes were confusing the shit out of me. God, why was I still considering anything he'd ever said or done like it was sage advice?
More doors lined this hallway, and more flowers dangled down from the arched ceiling, trailing over my shoulders as I passed through them. They were caressing, grabbing, as if both enticing me forward and ready to prevent my retreat. The fresh fragrance and dreamy place might have lifted my spirits if I wasn't so far down the rabbit hole.
Ramses opened the last door where the hallway ended, went in, and stopped inside, waiting for me. I studied him, looking for signs that he was about to screw me over. He just watched me with those beautiful, unguarded eyes that relayed his regret and maybe hope. Was it a trick? Cautiously, I peered inside, making sure there were no more altars or shackles hanging from chains in the ceiling.
Finding nothing worrying, other than the maker of beasts, I stepped inside. "Leave the door open," I said. Leo had given me a new phobia of shut doors.
"Very well," Ramses said, glancing down the hallway to make sure nobody had followed us. "I'm about to break the rules for you, because you need to know the truth about what's going on in the world before you can understand what we all face."
"What we all face?" I said, incredulous. "You don't seem to falling on hard times right now."
"Look at what I have to show you, and you may change your mind about that." An image popped up in the middle of the room, like a hologram, and a large image of a world map appeared there. I moved closer, and like an impending collision between my forehead and a semi-truck, I didn't want to look at the carnage that was about to happen but was compelled to watch it bearing down on me.
There were outlines in different colors, some not following country borders or any land divisions pre-drawn on maps. Some of the areas were vast in size, like the red border around Russia and half of Kazakhstan, and another yellow one encompassing everything south of Russia, including China, the Middle East, and Australia.
A green one marked India, dipping up to grab parts of Spain and Turkey, and a purple one claimed everything north of India, including the UK and the Scandinavian countries. Pink marked South and Central America, the USA was blue, and Canada, along with Greenland and Alaska, had an orange border.
Squinting at the image, I moved closer still, seeing the finer details. There was a tiny turquoise border around Pennsylvania and New York.
Growing colder under the skin, I said, "These are all territories, and those little golden dots are Citadels just like this one."
"Yes." Ramses came in beside me, his arms inked together, sadness in the wilt of his posture.
"Your siblings are here, too."
He nodded. "And you remember what I told you about them."
"Power hungry assholes."
"That's putting it mildly."
I turned to him, terrified I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. "Leo said a war was coming, and you mentioned giving up your place in 'the rights' back at the restaurant. I feel like I'm looking at a giant playing board for the game Risk where the human race will be literal armies you're about to command. Are you about to duke it out with your siblings for what, power?"
A shaky breath came out of him. "For the right to ascent to the throne when my father passes into the evermore."
I stumbled backwards a few steps, taking in the map again, my heart in my throat. A thousand questions crammed my head full, and I scrambled to assemble them in order of importance. "But the others have territories vastly larger than yours."
"I told you I'm a disappointment to my father and the elders, so I was handicapped in a number of ways by the Marditsi, our governing body tasked with arranging and overseeing the rights."
"They don't want you to ascend." I shook my head, backing up more when confirmed it with a nod. "Then why the hell are you here?"
A lifetime of knowledge filled up his eyes, and I wished I could understand half of what I found in them. "If I thought it would have saved any of you from this, I would have withdrawn even though it meant that my life would be forfeit."
My heart clenched, and I clutched at my body armor in a useless effort to stop it. "What? You either play or die? What kind of messed up people were you born into?" And I thought my father was a bastard.
"They are more like your animals than your people. The strong survive, and the weak are slaughtered or banished. Our laws have the same two punishment options."
"So Leonidas broke the law, and you talked them into the second option. You saved his life." I frowned, wondering what Leo had done, and what their relationship had been before that.
Ramses snarled and drew up a fist, so I dropped it. I studied the map again, doing a mental tally on the populations of the other territories, my thoughts growing dark under the impossible odds of winning such a war. "Why haven't they attacked you yet?"
"There's a mandatory waiting period to give us all time to create our offenses and defenses." He moved his hand, and a count-down timer appeared in the upper right corner of the hologram.
Oh, shit. "Are you saying there are only six months left before the battle starts?" At his affirmative nod, I swallowed bile out of my throat and said, "And what happens to the people in this territory when time's up?" This couldn't be happening. Could it?
He swung around to face me again, his expression grave. "If we fail to hold the borders, then anyone who holds an echo will be killed, and anyone still human will be converted into whatever the sibling chose as his or her power of choice."
I closed my eyes against the images that wanted to fill them. "And you?"
"I will be ritualistically slaughtered at a ceremony when the Marditsi are satisfied that I have lost the territory, and all of my assets, resources, and domain will be passed to the sibling that has bested me."
My heart seemed to be imploding as I imagined Ramses on some sort of crucifix or hovering over a beheading block. Why did I feel like throwing up? Why was my blood on fire? God, no, I couldn't, I...
Drawing back from that thought spiral, I asked, "Why did your government choose Earth for this," I said. "You said there are other realms out there, I'm guessing many. How can your people be okay with exterminating a whole world full of people?"
"The Marditsi selects the world for the rights very carefully, Katharine." He seemed to be willing me to understand something with his eyes. "It's forbidden for the rights to alter the future of a planet in any way, only the means and perhaps the time it takes to see the same result."
I stared at him, the thought striking me like an uppercut to the diaphragm. "You're saying we were going to destroy ourselves in the near future anyway, so your annihilating us would have ended up the same way, only we'll be gone sooner."
He looked away, his shoulders wilting, which was answer enough.
Dammit, how was this happening? Why... "So you can see into the future."
"No, only the Marditsi can, except for one gift of foresight we're each given during our shift from youth to adulthood, when we're led into the crystal cavers in the Oaclite Mountains." He shifted closer, catching me by the wrists when I went to move back. I was too stunned to do anything but stare back, studying his heart-wrenchingly beautiful features, committing them to memory. Was he really going to die with the rest of us?
"I lied to you when I said I'd first seen you at the trial where David Fredericks testified. When I came of age, in the crystal cavern, I had a vision. I saw a striking woman with a heartbreaking smile, wearing a red dress and black fur, lifting her hands up to the snow as if it had brought her to life. I looked for you for you for ages, but I finally decided you didn't exist and the vision was just a pleasant dream. That was six hundred and forty-eight years ago, Katharine. The instant I saw you through Khalil's eyes after my arrival here, I knew you were meant to help me hold this territory, not because I want to rule, but so I can save as many of your people—including you—as I can."
All the rigidity went out of my bones, and I sank down to the floor, settling on my ass. Ramses came to his knees before me, the weight of his burden apparent in the depth of his stare. I saw all of our deaths there. The end of the world and the human race. If our demise didn't come about from Ramses and his siblings, then it would be from our own hands, either through war, epidemic, or environmental catastrophe caused by our own destructive habits.
I'd always known that would happen eventually, but centuries from now. I'd always been driven to take as much evil out of the world as possible, because I thought it would go on after I was gone. Now....
"I don't understand why you think I can help with anything," I said, holding onto my composure with white knuckles. "I take out the bad guys one by one. I'm a single human being, with regular human skills. Are you going to make me into whatever you are?"
"No, but I will change you in other ways, and if I explain any of that to you, my ability to take you as my Felliti will be nullified as part of my handicap, and then it's over, and we all die. I can't do this without you."
Floating in numb disbelief, I pulled the next question out of my hat, not sure if I wanted the answer. "If I was so damn important, then why did you wait so long to come after me?"
His lowered gaze said enough. "I had to wait until all of my siblings' Felliti were fully realized before I was permitted to approach you in any way."
"So your siblings have already taken their Felliti. Could they take whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted? Did they need the consent of the person they choose?"
"Yes, they could take anyone without the person's consent. I'm the only one who is still without, and we're running out of time, as the ritual take time."
So there was a time limit on that, too. God dammit. This was unbelievable. A nightmare I couldn't even have imagined. Saving the territory as a whole was not supposed to be on my life's to-do list. "I really hate your family."
He chuckled, cupped my face in his hands, and pressed our foreheads together, melting me into a languid puddle of flesh on the floor. "Me, too. I can't believe I've finally found you after all these centuries. It kills me every time I have to let you out of my sight, but I know who you are, and I'm trying to give you time to accept me."
I was momentarily lost in him, in the story he'd told me, in memories if the kiss that had lifted me out of my life for a few glorious moments. I opened my mouth to tell him yes, wanting, desperately, to take the pain out of his eyes, but I closed it again. My whole chest seemed squeezed, my lungs compressed. How could I let him any closer? He was going to die.
I shut down whatever strange hell had gripped me. "If all of your siblings have one of these mystical Felliti things, and theirs are already up and running, what's the point? We'd already be so far behind that underdog wouldn't even begin to describe our position. How can you think I could possibly help you against these odds? Because this job is so far out of my universe of capabilities I can't even see it with a telescope."
He swept his thumb across my bottom lip, making me shiver. "They chose their candidates for aesthetic purposes, and all of them combined do not come close to even half of who you are. I can't explain more than that. You are one of a kind on this planet, maybe in all the worlds I've ever visited. I need you to believe that you have power more than you know."
I couldn't wrap my mind around any of this. Growing warm under his touch, I asked, "What do I have to do?" God, what was I saying? That squeezed feeling came over me again, and I struggled to breathe.
His smile was both joyous and sad. "We're already promised to each other now that the courting ritual has been completed and confirmed. Simply say yes, that you accept my proposal to become my Felliti, and I'll do the rest. For however long we have, I promise you a meaningful life with me. Your circumstances have been hard on you, I know that now, but it has prepared you for this as if fate knew the task that you were destined to take on with me and has given you all the tools you need to help me. Our lives are in your hands." He brought my fingers to his lips and kissed the backs of them.
Shivering, I took them back and held them up. They were so much longer and stronger than they'd been that day on the church steps. Could I really do something so important with them? I thought of the last few weeks, the last few years, all the way back to my interrupted childhood. Was that really all part of some fateful path I'd been walking to give me the skills I'd need to protect this territory from a bunch of otherworldly pricks fighting to rule another planet?
Something Deon once said to me popped onto the whiteboard, as if it had been waiting for my brain to shut the hell up and see it there.
He has this way of making you think everything will be wonderful and safe as long as you stay close to him, like a hit of ecstasy at a never-ending psychological orgy. He's good at divining your deepest desires and using them to manipulate and control you, all the while you think they're your own thoughts and you love him.
I launched to my feet, glaring down at him, my breath out of control. "Oh my God, you almost had me. I'm guessing it's some giant coincidence that all I've ever secretly wanted was to do something my mother would have been proud of, and you suddenly tell me I'm the supposed savior of everyone in this territory? And you conveniently can't tell me what that means? Jesus Christ, Ramses, you can't even lie well enough to come up with a plausible story as to what this mysterious position at your side will entail."
Ramses was suddenly on his feet, coming at me. I backed away this time, because I didn't want him to touch me. "Stay away from me!" I stood there shaking, waiting for him to say something, anything to convince me I was being paranoid again, that he really did feel something for me, that he'd really seen me in a vision on some distant planet more than six hundred years ago, that I had some higher purpose than the daughter of a psychopath on a mission to murder.
But he didn't say anything.
Not a damn thing.
Why had I wanted to believe him so badly? Gods playing board games with the human race? Me somehow nailed by the fates to be their savior? A hired gun with a kill list as long as my arm, with no ambition other than murder? Was I really that naïve?
No one will ever be afraid of that pretty face.
Another psychic cataclysm rocked my inner sanctum, and I felt something drain away from me, the last shred of my mother's light, the last ounce of her moral compass I'd held onto with an iron grip beyond my conscious notice. My Hyde had finally destroyed my Jekyll, leaving me with nothing but cold, calculating purpose.
Ramses must have seen it in my face, because he twisted away, cursing.
"You are purely evil," I said, turning for the door. "You can't even deny it."
He sighed long and hard. "There's nothing I can say that you'll believe right now, I can see it in your eyes. I've told you the absolute truth while we've been in this room. And now I'll tell you another truth—I know why you run."
"I don't run from anything."
"Don't you? Because you're doing it right now. You're terrified, Katharine. Not of pain or death, or even this war that's about to break down our door. You grew up surrounded by love and safety that many children only dream of, myself included. Then it was cruelly ripped away from you. Every time someone tries to get close to you, you run. You're not scared that you'll never find that love again, because you've already found it in the loyalty and friendship of everyone around you."
"Stop it."
"No, the real terror is letting yourself feel it. If you let it in, that love could be torn away from you again, and you couldn't bear it. Instead, you shut everyone out, leaving your heart cold and alone. You're afraid to admit our connection for the same reason, so you're making up reasons why this thing between us is just me trying to screw you over in some way. That may be Leonidas's way, but it is not mine, and I don't scare away so easily."
I stared at him, distantly aware of a mental hurricane raging in the back of my head, but I'd become stone wrapped in steel wrapped in do-not-cross tape tied up in a bow. "Thanks for the Dr. Phil moment, Ramses, but I don't need your psychoanalysis or your destiny bullshit, and we sure as shit don't have a connection. I'm out of here." I headed for the door.
"You're still not listening to those thoughts in your head that know I'm telling the truth. If we had years for me to break down your walls and gain your trust gently, I'd give you the time you deserve, gladly. But we're out of time. You leave me no choice."
His speech bounced off the numbness in me, and I kept walking.
"I know where your father is, and I know what he did to your mother." The sadness in his voice might have made me cry if I'd been anyone else.
I stopped as if I'd hit the end of yet another unseen tether.
"Agree to become my Felliti, and I'll give him to you, though it may take time to arrange for his transfer between territories."
He knew where my father was. Not in this territory, but reachable. This territory was not my problem, but Pike was. It was the only way I'd find peace. The only way the raging emotions in me would finally quiet. I wasn't afraid, and I wasn't stupid enough to believe in love anymore, not from my people or from Ramses—they wall wanted something from me, and that was the only reason they tolerated me.
My mind was already spinning scenarios that would see my goals fulfilled. It shouldn't have surprised me how good Ramses's intel on me was, but it did. Perhaps Eve was right about one thing—a little acting could go a long way.
I turned and faced Ramses, searching his face for more lies, but he met my stare pound for pound without flinching. "Here are my terms," I said in my quiet voice. "First, you will give me fifteen minutes alone with Glam in his cell. Second, you will return my weapons and allow me and my crew, including my beast crew if they wish, to return to the building unhindered. Third, you'll find out if I have a traitor in my midst and give me their name or names. Fourth, and most importantly, you will deliver Pike to me still breathing, so he can see my mother's face in mine while I kill him."
He rubbed a hand down his face and stared at me. "Killing won't make the pain or the emptiness or the loneliness go away, Katharine. You're just chipping away at your own soul, piece by piece, and you're so afraid of becoming him you can't see what's happening to you. I hate your father for what he did to you, but I hate Leonidas just as much. But we can't turn back time. All I can offer is a way forward for you to become what you were always meant to, and the safety and affection we both need to get through the next year."
I laughed in his face, feeling absolutely nothing. "You really don't know anything about me. I don't feel pain anymore, and affection, seriously? I'll find that the same day I sit down and have a brew with God, not that I'm looking for either. This is who I am, and I can't be anything else while Pike's still breathing. You have my terms, now take me to Sloane and Mouse, then Glam, and then we're out of here. Given your supposed time limits, I'd suggest you work fast on the Pike front." Like he had any time limits or was using Earth as a game board. It was laughable.
His sigh was loud and deep. "If this is the path you have to walk before you'll come back to me, then I'll let you walk it. But know this—I'll help you through the other side of this, when they're all dead and you have to live with the consequences when you realize that gaping hole in you is still there."
If only he knew how wrong he was. There was no other side for me.
I must have followed Ramses through the maze of corridors again, because the sound of my name snapped my attention to him and the door he stood in front of. "Sloane is in here, and it seems she, too, holds an echo within her, which means she must have been more susceptible than most as she was only in the conversion chamber for a few minutes. I'm sorry, Katharine. I'd save you from this if I could."
I waited to feel something about that, but there was nothing. Nothing left in me at all. "Where's Glam's cell?"
"Two doors down on the same side. The door is only locked from the inside. Just push on it, and it should open."
"Then have the rest of my people, including Mouse, at the portal waiting for us." I glanced past him to find the round room with the twelve doors. "Wait for me out there so you can lead me back to them."
"Katharine—"
"Leave. Now."
Smoke wafted out of his nose as he turned and strode down the hall.
I opened Sloane's door only a crack so I could survey the room, which was a ten by ten square of more mirage walls and a moss floor. Sloane stood in the center with her arms wrapped around herself, dried tear tracks running the length of her face below each eye. Maggie faced her.
"Just stop fighting her, Sloane," Maggie said, running her hand down Sloane's arm. "Just let her in and you'll understand that this is the best thing that will ever happen to you."
Sloane made a sound of disgust. "Just open your legs, and it'll feel good. I've heard that before. Stop touching me, Mags!"
I opened the door and stepped inside. "Get out, Maggie," I said.
Two heads spun toward me. Maggie glared at me as she came striding across the moss. "You don't get to boss me around anymore, bitch. I'm more powerful now than you ever were."
I drew up my coldest Pike smile and pointed it at her, waiting until the heat in her stare froze over. "I've had my monster far longer than you, but I sure as hell don't need her to remind you where we stand in the food chain."
"He'll choose me over you," she said, her grey eyes flashing.
Ah, so that's what her problem was. "Oh, how the mighty Marine has fallen. You want him then fill your boots. I sure as hell don't. Now get out."
"Then you're a fool." She scowled at me, her red ponytail almost whipping me in the face when she marched out and slammed the door. I turned to Sloane, taking in the signs that she'd been damaged beyond repair. Her eyes had the glaze of a dead fish, her hair dull and tangled, her posture that of a broken doll. Like Alec, she was another reminder of the consequences of compassion, of feeling emotion toward the living, for giving a shit about anything outside of my purpose.
I'd seen her wandering the streets alone, and she'd quickly become one of the few people on my list of people I'd die to protect. And look where that had gotten her. Look where that had gotten Alec. Everyone I let close to me was destined for a life of agony. Compassion was a curse, especially when it came from me. Pike had been right all along, I just hadn't learned the lesson until now.
"I didn't think you'd come," Sloane said, her voice a shadow of her usual one. "You look as shit as I feel."
"Bad day," I said in a voice as dead as her stare. "I hear you've got a beast in there with you."
She twisted away, the first note of a sob escaping before she swallowed it again. I knew I should have felt something. Pity, sorrow, grief, guilt, but it drained out of me like everything else to leave me frozen under my skin.
"Jimmy told me what you said to Deon that night you fought him," she said, strength returning to her voice box and to the set of her shoulders and jaw.
"And what did I say?"
Turning, she set a determined stare on me, more certain than I'd ever seen her. "That you knew just where to stick a blade so that even a beast would bleed out in minutes. I know you have one on you somewhere, because there's no way you'd let them disarm you completely."
I regarded her as a problem that needed solving instead of a person—all I was capable of anymore. "You don't know what you're asking."
"Don't I? You warned me back at the safe house that I might end up in an inescapable hell. This is that hell. And I heard what you said to Deon the other day. You said after this job was done you weren't coming back. You said it because you knew that once you killed Glam and Pike, you were going to kill yourself if they didn't, so don't tell me what I don't know what I'm asking for. This is a thing I don't want to survive. This is my choice, the last one I'll ever get. Please, Kat. Please don't leave me here like this, because my mind won't survive it. I can already feel that thing slithering around inside me."
I stared at her for a long time, thinking that I should be telling her she can still have a life, albeit a new one, that she still has friends who cared for her. But it would have been a lie. The Sloane she wanted to be was already dead, most of her friends were gone, and I'd finally given into my own breed of beast. I wouldn't make anyone's choices for them, and I'd no longer let anyone else make mine.
"Kneel down," I said, letting myself slip backwards into the darkness, into the frost and now mile-thick ice that was mysteriously solid and perfect on my mind lake.
New tears trailed down her face as she dropped down to the moss, but her eyes never left mine, full of the same resolve I'd seen in Fredericks' face before he'd asked me to help him die. If I didn't do it, she'd do it by whatever means necessary, painfully, slowly.
I moved behind her and knelt on one knee, brushing her hair over her shoulder. I untied my boot and took out the small knife I'd hidden in there, then flipped the blade open silently. It was freshly sharpened.
"Tell me what makes you happy, Sloane," I said, slipping my left arm around her slender chest, pinning her arms to her sides and snugging her against my body. "No matter what happens, just keep talking to me." My mother forgot to mention there was another way to help those who needed it. Sometimes all you could offer a person was an ear and a sharp blade.
"My gran took me to this little shop in California once that had the best tea around, according to her," Sloane began, her tone slipping into a lighter one. "It tasted like old dishwater to me, but she started telling me stories about her life in China, when she was a butcher's daughter. Those were bloody times, she said." Sloane laughed, relaxing against me.
She continued while I stroked the right side of her neck, waiting several minutes until she tilted her head to rest on my left shoulder. I listened to her joy spilling into the room, her last thoughts of her gran, as I raised the blade to her throat. My strike was quick and only shallow enough to pierce the arteries below her ear, a momentary jerk her only reaction before her story continued.
I dropped the knife and wrapped both arms around her, my head tilted forward to connect with hers. Her warm life spilled down my arm in a crimson river, splashing onto the moss with a sound I was intimately familiar with. It didn't tear me apart this time; it was just a sound, one last mercy I had to offer this girl who'd grown strong enough to make her own choices at the end of all things.
Moments before she drew her last breath, the last words out of her mouth shattered the remaining piece of my soul. "My time with you has been the happiest in my life, Kat. You made me strong. I love you."
I held her for a long time, until she was nothing but a shell of flesh. Moving on autopilot, I lowered her to the moss, and wrapped her fingers around the gold cross at her neck. I pressed my hand into her life that had soaked the moss and dragged it down my face, so I could take her with me.
Back in the hallway, I counted two doors down, turned the knob, and went inside.