Chapter 30

Chapter Thirty

LYRE

Of all the places where the Gaians could have holed up, they’d chosen a defunct Consulate. The irony would’ve amused Lyre if the situation hadn’t otherwise been so unpleasant.

The two-story manor was about half the size of the Brinford Consulate but still significantly larger than the houses lining the residential street that led to the former Consulate property. Its worn stucco exterior and crumbling roof tiles suggested it’d been abandoned decades ago, along with all the neighboring structures, but the ex-Consulate’s barred windows glared brightly. It wasn’t uninhabited anymore.

An assortment of vehicles were parked near the front door—jeeps, pickup trucks, and a dozen yards away, a ten-foot metal shipping container on a trailer bed. Two men in gray clothes were sitting on the hood of a truck, looking bored as they gazed around at the abandoned street.

“Well?” Lyre whispered.

Crouched on his left side in the long grass at the edge of the property, Ash shrugged. On Lyre’s right, Piper scowled at the two guards watching over the vehicles. Such amicable company.

“We need to know if these squatters are actually the Gaians,” Lyre pointed out.

“ And if my father is in there,” Piper added, more aggressively than needed.

Ash’s glare cut to her before he swung it back across the property. His eyes were darker than they should’ve been, and Lyre stifled a sigh. This had all gotten very messy.

“I’ll scout around the back,” Ash said. “Wait here.”

Without a backward glance, he slipped into the trees that bordered the lawn, and the darkness swallowed him. The property was surrounded on three sides by dense trees, and the faint silvery light of the crescent moon did little to hold back the shadows.

It was a perfect night for an infiltration—not that Lyre was pleased to be undertaking an infiltration of any kind. Getting tangled up with the Sahar was bad enough, and the more this dragged out, the more dangerous it got for him. Drawing the attention of the Underworld’s elite was the last thing he needed.

“Lyre,” Piper began in a low voice. “What’s really going on with Ash?”

He glanced at her questioningly.

“On the rooftop, you said I didn’t know the whole story.” She leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Did Samael Hades send Ash to kill my father and steal the Sahar?”

“Obviously not.”

“How is it obvious?”

“Because Quinn didn’t die at the Consulate.”

“But Ash stole the Sahar,” she said, as though Lyre might have forgotten that detail. “Was that on Samael’s orders?”

Lyre braced his elbows on his knees, his ankles aching from crouching for so long. Even if he wanted to share, how could he explain the nightmare of power and oppression that he and Ash came from? A privileged girl like Piper could never understand.

He tilted his head, taking in the stubborn set of her jaw and the ferocity in her green eyes. Maybe she needed to understand.

“In the Underworld,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “the price of failure is steep. Being killed for screwing up is getting off easy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That assassin at the medical center who tried to kill Ash also works for Samael.”

She drew in a sharp breath. He waited for her to put the pieces together.

“Ash said he can only take the Sahar if no one knows he has it.” She frowned. “Is Samael trying to kill Ash because the prefects and who knows who else think we stole the Stone?”

Lyre nodded.

“Ash wants the blame to fall on the Gaians,” she said slowly. “Then he can steal the Stone with no one knowing… and Samael might forgive him?”

“Samael might not kill him,” Lyre corrected. “The Warlord of Hades does not forgive mistakes.”

She bit her lower lip. “Did Ash tell you all of this?”

“No. He keeps me out of it as much as he can.”

In the five years they’d been friends, Ash had never given Lyre so much as a hint about why he obeyed the Hades Warlord. There was a reason. Lyre just didn’t know what it was.

“If Samael had ordered Ash to kill my father, would he have done it?” Piper asked quietly. “What if he’d ordered Ash to kill everyone in the Consulate?”

She waited for Lyre to respond, as though hoping he would assure her that of course Ash wouldn’t do something like that. The silence stretched, and Piper exhaled unsteadily before turning her attention back to the former Consulate.

A minute later, Ash emerged from the darkness and gestured for Lyre and Piper to follow him. They crept through the trees with Ash in the lead. When they’d circled all the way around to the back of the property, Ash crouched behind a concealing shrub. Zwi dropped off a tree branch to land on his shoulder.

Lyre peered at the house. No guards were stationed on this side, but crossing thirty paces of open ground to reach the back door would be risky. Shuffling closer to Piper, Lyre surreptitiously pinched the back of her shirt to weave a cloaking spell over her. Again. This was all feeling very familiar.

“Uh… Ash?” Piper whispered hesitantly. “Is something wrong?”

Lyre snapped his attention to the draconian. Ash seemed to be staring at the house, but his expression was oddly blank. He twitched his head sideways, like a fly was buzzing around him. He jerked his head again and pressed both hands to his ears for a second.

“What’s wrong?” Lyre asked.

“Weird sound,” Ash muttered as Zwi whined plaintively from his shoulder.

Piper frowned at him. “What kind of sound?”

Ash clamped both hands over his ears again. He bowed forward, one knee dropping to the ground, and swore under his breath.

Tension vibrated through Lyre. No mere sound could make Ash show visible discomfort. Something else was happening—something bad. Was it a magical attack? Had Ash stumbled into a weaving? Lyre touched Ash’s shoulder, searching for foreign magic in his body, but he couldn’t sense anything.

Zwi whined again, the sound even more pained, then leaped off Ash’s shoulder and bolted into the trees, fleeing whatever was tormenting her and Ash.

Piper rose partway out of her crouch to peer through the top branches of the shrub. “There are people coming!”

A harsh beam of white light flickered across the overgrown grass from around a corner of the house, briefly touching their hiding spot.

“We need to get away,” Lyre hissed.

“Get away? What about my father?”

Lyre seized Ash’s arm, stealing a glance over his shoulder. Half a dozen people had appeared, marching in a tight formation. They walked along the tree line, shining flashlights into the bushes.

Piper grabbed Ash’s other arm. She and Lyre tugged Ash away from the lawn, but he was moving with none of his usual stealth. Twigs snapped and leaves rustled with each step they took. Ash’s face was tight with pain, his eyes narrowed to slits.

“Stop,” Lyre whispered. “They’re too close.”

Ash probably hadn’t heard him—he was crushing his hands into his ears.

Piper clung to Ash’s arm, listening intently. Lyre held his breath. They’d only moved half a dozen paces from their previous spot. He couldn’t hear the group’s footsteps.

The flashlight shone over the foliage around them, glaring in Lyre’s eyes. Had they been seen?

Ash went rigid. His eyes snapped wide open, then rolled back. His legs buckled, and he collapsed with a dry crackle of crushed leaf litter, his limbs shuddering and twitching. He was still trying to cover his ears, but Lyre couldn’t tell if he was fully conscious.

Piper’s wide, alarmed eyes met Lyre’s. Flashlights whipped across the foliage around them—then figures crashed through the underbrush toward them.

Lyre plunged his hand under the collar of his shirt. He touched two gemstones on the chain around his neck and activated a pair of skintight shields—one for magical defense, one for physical defense.

He sprang to his feet as the attackers appeared and found himself staring down the barrel of a rifle.

Two more armed men had their guns pointed at Piper, and another pair were aiming theirs at Ash, who was still on the ground, limbs locked in agony. The last member of the group, a woman, stood behind the others, holding a black plastic box.

Lyre could sense faint magic from them—haemons. Were these the Gaians?

“Don’t move,” the woman ordered.

Lyre bared his teeth but obeyed. Of all the things he hated about the human realm, guns ranked high on the list. The haemons couldn’t see his defensive spells—haemons couldn’t perceive magic the way daemons could—but that didn’t matter because he didn’t know if his shields could stop bullets.

“What are you doing to Ash?” Piper demanded, crouched beside the draconian and glaring at the rifles in her face.

The haemons ignored her.

“Put a collar on this one,” the woman ordered, pointing her chin at Lyre. “Then collar the daemon on the ground as well.”

Lyre bit back a curse, unable to do anything as one of the men shouldered his rifle and pulled a silver collar from a pocket of his black cargo pants. Also near the top of Lyre’s list of most hated things: magic-dampening collars.

The man clicked the collar shut around Lyre’s throat, and his sense of his power evaporated, leaving a hollow emptiness in his chest. His shields, however, were unaffected.

No one else moved as the same haemon collared Ash. The draconian’s breath hissed through his clenched teeth, fast and uneven.

“You collared him,” Piper said, trembling with either fury or fear. “Now stop whatever you’re doing to him!”

The woman glanced at Piper. “It’s not killing him. It’s only sound.”

“ Only sound?” Piper looked at the box the woman held. “Is that a speaker?”

“Yes. Some daemons are sensitive to air pressure, and the ultrasound pulses from the speaker are very painful.”

“Very painful” was clearly a gross understatement. Lyre had never heard of ultrasound waves, let alone imagined they could be weaponized against some daemon castes.

“Turn it off.” Piper rose onto her knees, and her voice cracked. “Please.”

The woman gestured at her haemon team. “Let’s bring them inside.”

With two gunmen dragging Ash after them, their unmerry group marched across the lawn to the front of the house. The woman with the speaker threw open the doors and strode into a dust-coated foyer marred by muddy boot prints.

There were even more haemons insides. They cast flinty looks at the prisoners as they passed, moving through the house with hurried purpose. Lyre trailed after Piper, his gaze skimming across their enemies. At some point, he hoped to get a chance to act—one that wouldn’t result in him, Ash, and Piper being riddled with bullets.

The woman in the lead opened another door and gestured for Piper and Lyre to go first. The two men dragging Ash came in on their heels. Inside, the furnishings had been pushed against the walls and boxes were stacked neatly in one corner. A few more haemons were taking boxes from the pile and carrying them out. It looked like the Gaians didn’t plan to stay much longer.

A long table, covered in papers and files, had been set up at the far end. A woman stood with her back to the rest of the room as she studied a document. Five people loitered around her, watching the prisoners enter.

The two haemons carrying Ash dumped him on the floor beside Lyre. On his other side, Piper sucked in a shaky breath. Lyre glanced at her. She was staring at the people around the table, her face pale.

“We found these three in the woods out back,” the leader of the gunmen announced. “What should we do with them?”

The woman at the table turned around. She was older, her face softened by fine wrinkles. Her auburn hair was tied in a simple bun that matched her plain gray shirt and jeans. Lyre narrowed his eyes. Something about her seemed vaguely familiar.

Her gaze went straight to Piper, and a smile stretched across her face.

Piper trembled, her breaths coming fast. Her throat worked, and in the moment it took her to force out a sound, Lyre realized who the woman resembled.

“Mom?”