Chapter 37

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Silas, if you’re leading me into a torture dungeon, please just say so. I won’t be mad, I promise.” Petra’s grip on his hand tightened as he led her down a flight of rickety, old, hand-hewn stairs.

“I don’t have a dungeon,” he replied, matter-of-fact.

“Then why do you have so many high-tech locks on the door of this basement?”

“It’s a root cellar, actually. Or it was before I expanded it.”

He descended ahead of her. As he crossed the halfway point of the stairs, lights came on. Trying to reassure her in his own twisted, Silas-y way, he said, “I don’t have the patience for torture. It’s messy, loud, and unreliable. Any answers I can get from torture aren’t going to be better than what I can get through blackmail or, when I have to, a bolt to the knee.”

It said a lot about her that his easy explanation actually made her feel better. She wished she could say that it was because he was being frank with her, but the more honest answer was that she would always be a criminal’s daughter, and it was better for her to know exactly what kind of violence she was dealing with than something unknown.

As Max used to say, “A man who shows you who he is will always be more trustworthy than the man who hides himself, even when what you’re shown is ugly.”

Just to be sure, though, she asked, “Do you like killing people? Causing pain?”

“Nah,” he answered, easy as you please. “I don’t feel much of anything when I do it. Worried the shit out of the clan for a while, but I guess they decided that was better than me liking it.”

All things are relative, she thought. Silas probably had no idea how lucky he was to have a family who accepted him, more or less, for who he was. The world was lucky, too.

Gods only know what he might’ve become if he’d been left to his own devices.

It was an odd thing, realizing that she was coming to know Silas so well. Some essential facet of who he was had clicked into place the previous night, when she discovered he could be wounded and didn’t even know it.

Now she felt like she was picking up a foreign language, her understanding snowballing until she could actually understand him — mostly.

It was ironic that at the moment when the world made the least amount of sense to her, she finally understood Silas.

She knew she was pushing him when she asked him to talk to her, but she didn’t expect him to stand up from his chair, grab her hand, and lead her to a glamoured door with more locks on it than Rasmus’s sex dungeon.

Not that she knew Rasmus had one of those, of course, but one could only assume.

She winced at the thought, recalling what she’d given the were in exchange for the meeting with Silas. At the time she hadn’t felt any remorse throwing him some information about the woman he’d been hunting, but now that she was tied to her own undomesticated man, she felt a little chagrined.

Good luck, Healer Mason. You’re going to need it.

Petra braced herself as they descended. There were walls on either side of the steps, clearly newer than the steps themselves, and what could only be described as a vault door at the bottom. She waited on the second to last step as Silas paused at the door. He waved a hand.

Magic rippled with a nauseating lurch. She had to brace herself against a wall to stop from swaying.

Silas glanced over his shoulder and used their linked hands to gently pull her away from the wall. “Shoulda warned you. When I took over the house, it needed a lot of work. It was basically left to rot after the war. Meant I could build the wards and sigilwork right into the beams and foundation. In the areas I really want to keep people out, it’s a bit stronger than you’re probably used to.”

In other words, the reason the house nearly hummed with his magic was because it was built into the house itself. She’d only felt wards that strong once before, when she got a vanishingly rare invitation to have tea with the extremely busy new Sovereign’s Consort.

The hallway that led to the private floor of Solbourne Tower was guarded by a mesh of wards painted onto the ceiling — in blood.

“Did you use sacrifices?” she croaked, not entirely sure she wanted to know.

Silas entered an extremely complex coded pattern of dots and triangles into a sleek glass panel to one side of the door. After a moment, the device he always wore on his wrist beeped. That beep was echoed by the panel. The door unlatched with a hydraulic hiss.

“I don’t need sacrifices or blood to make my sigils stick,” he answered, a touch waspish. She’d pricked his professional pride, apparently. “Only the unskilled need a crutch like that.”

Her necklace felt a little heavier than it had a moment ago. It occurred to her once again that a man like Silas shouldn’t have any use for her magic. She was all raw power, sure, but this… The hair on her arms lifted in a wave as she followed him through the door.

Cold, smooth tile met the bare soles of her feet. Lights, tastefully set into the ceiling all around the perimeter of the room, lit the sprawling open space without casting an antiseptic glow over everything.

The room was split into four rough quadrants: One side of the square room was dedicated to a massive wall of computer servers. A desk was set up in front of it, decked out with a single massive, curved screen that nearly spanned its length. Another wall and the space before it was dedicated to what looked like a cross between a workshop and a high-tech, glass-enclosed cleanroom.

Another corner was all movable wire racks holding just about every sort of gadget, metal pipe, wire, and tool known to man or god. Finally, on the far side from where they stood, was a huge stainless steel work table covered in what could only be described as metal body parts.

He was right. It wasn’t a dungeon.

It was a lab.

“It might surprise you to learn that I consider my criminal career to be my day job,” he explained as he pulled her toward the wall of servers and its single, sparsely decorated desk. Petra’s attention refused to settle in one place, which explained why it took her so long to notice the line of red leather trunks arranged on the floor there.

“I like making money and I like doing things I shouldn’t. That runs in the family. Anti-authoritarianism is baked into my clan’s DNA, so I think someone like me was always bound to come ’round sooner or later. Crime filled both my need for money and kept me entertained. It’s never been the goal, though.”

She was almost too afraid to ask, but there wasn’t really a choice. “What’s your goal, Silas?”

They stopped by the desk. Somehow alerted to his proximity, the massive, curved screen came to life. A ribbon of changing color undulated across its transparent surface.

Silas waved his hand in front of the screen. A wild array of windows replaced the colorful ribbon: cascading lines of code, math equations, several download progress windows, and sprays of organic-looking sigils that moved on their own. They separated and recombined to some end she couldn’t even begin to guess.

He squinted at the download progress, grunted to himself, and then turned back to her. “I’m a sigilhacker first,” he finally answered. “I’ve been doing it since I was old enough to draw sigils in the dirt. I started with mastering wards, then I moved to combining magic with computers. But this shit is expensive, so I needed a quick way to make cash.” He shrugged. “Blackmail, murder, and mayhem is fun and pays well.”

Maybe a dungeon would have been better. Then she would have known what to expect, at least.

Petra watched the sigils curl and expand, split and reform, and felt a little bit like she was dealing with a complete unknown. Not because she was surprised he was a master sigilworker — Shade was famous for his wards as well as the price he demanded for them — but this was something so far above what she knew that it evoked a sense of vertigo.

Because Petra was no expert, but she knew her way around a sigil or two. She was rusty, of course, after so many years of not needing to use that knowledge, but she knew the standard western sigil alphabet.

The sigils scrawling across his screen like infinitely multiplying fractals weren’t that.

Their shapes were foreign, jagged. When she looked at them, a tremor erupted from an atavistic place in her brain, a warning to stay still, to not look too closely at a thing that was beyond what her mind could safely comprehend.

This was not the work of a man who tinkered. This was something much, much more powerful.

The cool, filtered air of the lab brushed her suddenly clammy skin. Pieces came together. She glanced around the workshop area, took in the metal parts. She thought of his terrifying skill. She remembered their negotiation in her office, when he made his demands.

He wanted access to the m-generator.

He needs my bond.

She watched those sigils move until her eyes blurred and they became insects skittering across the screen, threatening to burst out and spray across the floor.

He needs power.

So many pieces. So many new connections. She could almost hear them clicking together in her mind. It was the sound of a gun being disassembled, cleaned, and put back together again — the music she used to go to sleep to whenever her father was home.

Petra’s fingers went limp in his hold. “What are you making?”

Silas watched her closely, but it was impossible to say whether he picked up on her distress or not. “I could make almost anything with the right amount of time, equipment, and power,” he answered. “And I have.”

Petra could feel the skin around her eyes and mouth going tight as the first sparks of panic made it through her shock. “But you have a goal. You have a plan. All of this has been for something. You need me for something. Tell me what it is.”

The only thing she could equate her sudden, acute dread to was what it might feel like to walk into a friend’s house to discover they spent all their spare time learning how to make poison. It was like opening up their kitchen cabinets, their dressers, and their linen closets to discover that every single one of them was full of deadly chemicals.

No, it didn’t necessarily mean they were planning on killing scores of people, but they could. They had the stuff for it. The know-how. The opportunity.

It was one thing to sit down and tinker with sigils, to even be a genius with them. People and governments did it all the time. The gods knew what went on in the shady R&D labs of the EVP and other territories. She imagined it was a bit like this.

However, this was Silas, the terrifying free agent criminal known as Shade, and there was a reason behind everything he did.

The possibilities were as endless as they were nauseating. Was he making weapons? Bombs? Something powerful enough to destabilize an entire territory, if not the UTA as a whole? If so, was he acting on his own or was he doing it for someone, some thing, else? The territories had been at peace for only a little over a century. It would take so little to destabilize that — money, an opportunity, and fire power. All things that could be manufactured with relative ease, given just a dash of luck.

And if one territory fell…

Gods, it’d be war all over again.

“Bodies.”

Petra fought to get enough air in her lungs to ask, “What?”

Using her limp hand to drag her to his chest, he repeated, “Bodies. That’s what I’m making. That’s what I need power for. Bodies.”

She had to brace her hands on his chest to steady herself. “For— Bodies for who? For what?”

“I made a promise to a friend,” he answered, molten eyes so intense his gaze threatened to burn her. “I’ve only made two real promises in my life, Petra. First to him, and then to you. You asked me to be honest with you, so this is it. This is what I do, and this is how far I’ll go for the people who belong to me.”

Her dread turned into cold, sickly anger. “That doesn’t explain shit and you know it.”

His lips quirked. Gods, even now she loved the way that little smirk highlighted the beauty mark above his lip.

“I’ve adapted and improved experimental m-droid technology to make mechanical bodies for wraiths. The only part I’m missing is enough power to bind them to the machinery. A fuckin’ shit-load of raw, unfiltered magical power. The kind of power only a gloriana has.”

Wraiths? Petra mouthed the word, but it didn’t make any more sense than when he said it.

Wraiths were an urban legend. They were the boogeymen in the dark parents used to keep their children from wandering the house past bedtime. They were the stars of ghost stories told around bonfires and the harbingers of doom in tales of the gods. They were myth. And even if they weren’t, nothing else about what he said made any damn sense.

Well, almost nothing.

She understood the part about needing magic. She understood that part very, very well.

“You need me, my bond, to make… bodies. For wraiths.”

“Yes.” He beamed at her with the full force of his wolfish delight. Heavy hands settled on her hips and drew her in a little closer, until she was forced to tilt her head back to keep his face in her eyeline. “You get it.”

I don’t, no. But she also didn’t feel like he was lying, either, which meant that he was being deadly earnest or he was very, very insane.

Probably both.

“It’s not bombs.” She had to say it aloud to confirm it, or else she’d never get it out of her head. “Guns?”

“No bombs and no guns,” he assured her.

“I don’t like guns. I don’t want you to make them.” It felt like a stupid thing to say — what control did she have over him or what he did? — but the words came out in a rush anyway.

Silas’s mouth creased in a deep frown. “You were shot. Of course you don’t like guns. They’re on my shit list right now, too. I always carry one, but I don’t like using it. My claws are more reliable.”

She shook her head. Right. She’d almost forgotten that she was shot. Was that her brain trying to protect her from something traumatic, or was that a sign that she was finally losing it?

The world just kept spinning and spinning. Every time it felt like she might have her feet under her again, there it went. She was tired of it. So tired. “No. I mean, yes, but also no. I really don’t like guns, Silas. My dad ran weapons and it got him and my mom killed. I can’t stay here if you?—”

“I don’t make any fuckin’ guns and I’m sure as shit not gonna start now,” he snapped.

Startled by his harsh tone, Petra looked away. She cursed the way her eyes prickled with reflexive tears. Silas had been far crueler to her than this in the past, but something about this moment felt particularly cutting. Like she’d exposed her soft underbelly to him and he’d barely given it a glance. Guns were a tender spot he had no way of seeing, and with her nerves strung as taut as they were, his dismissive tone hit her harder than was probably fair.

Buck up, buttercup, she silently urged herself. This isn’t a normal relationship. You can’t be this sensitive.

They’d had their tender moments, but she had to remember that Silas wasn’t a normal man. She wasn’t his girlfriend. For a moment there, when she first saw the shadow around her neck, she thought maybe… But no, she wasn’t anything but a means to an end, really. One she firmly believed he’d developed some form of affection for, but a means to an end nonetheless.

Silas blanched. “Are you crying? Stop that. I said I don’t do guns. I don’t make them and I don’t sell them. And I don’t like it when you cry, so stop.”

Petra took several steadying breaths and tried to reorient herself now that her initial panic had begun to recede.

Okay, so he’s a mad genius making robot bodies for ghosts. Okay. Okay. I can deal with that.

It was better than someone making bombs in their basement by a mile. Weirder? Sure, but she could handle weird. She wasn’t exactly normal or well-adjusted herself.

But would I leave if he was making weapons?

Petra dropped her gaze to Silas’s bare chest and the cheap gold necklace that hung in the divot between his pecs. Her eyes moved from one pale scar to another, like she might find the answer to that heavy question somewhere in their grisly constellations.

No.

She couldn’t picture herself leaving him. Even knowing he needed her for something potentially nefarious, she couldn’t. It wasn’t just because he was her only friend in the world at the moment — what a deeply troubling thought that was — but because she just… couldn’t.

Didn’t want to. Wouldn’t.

Silas could be cruel, but he was hers. He was essential to her wellbeing now, like a new, more potent oxygen. If he disappeared now, she’d slowly suffocate.

Because she was starting to understand him, and she knew he understood her. He understood her right away. He saw past the masks, the desperation, the fear. He saw every fucked up inch of her and he asked for more.

Whether he truly cared about her or not, whether he wanted to use her or not, they were connected by more than a bargain. They knew each other.

Oh Glory, save me. I think I’m falling in love with Silas.