The Viper's Queen

Chapter 24 — The Blood Pact

The war room was cold and the maps were still spread across the stone table from before the Parley and the shell casings were still holding the corners down like nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

I sat in the chair across from Varek and looked at the city etched into the black obsidian and thought about what a night it had been. The Parley. The Latin. The blade in the table. Silas in the courtyard. Syris's voice through the phone was cold and tight and not knowing yet that his inside man was face down on wet stone.

One day.

I had done all of that in one day.

With a chest tube. With cracked ribs. With blood that had been moving slowly into my bandaging since the Parley room. In a dress that weighed twice what it should and heels that had no business being on anyone's feet in a gunfight. I had done all of it and I was sitting in a war room at whatever ungodly hour this was with my hands around a cold cup and my eyes on a map and the only thing I felt was the specific alertness that came after something enormous and the quiet understanding that it wasn't over yet.

It was never over yet.

Because Syris was still out there.

Because losing Silas would make him move faster, not slower. Because frightened vipers didn't retreat... they struck from a different angle. Because every hour we spent not moving was an hour he spent planning and I had stopped being willing to let Syris do his planning undisturbed.

Varek sat across from me.

He had changed his shirt. The one with my blood on it was gone. He looked almost like himself again except for the mark on his cheekbone from the slap which had come up properly now and was going to be there for a few days.

I didn't feel bad about it.

He had earned it.

"The Parley settled things politically," I said. "The Tokyo woman stepped away from Syris... that's significant. She's going to make calls tonight. The neutral banks are going to make calls tonight. By morning the shape of the city will be different."

"Yes," Varek said.

"But that doesn't solve Syris," I said.

"No," he said.

"And it doesn't solve the board members," I said. "Cresswell and Aldric. They're still out there. Still running the money. Still the reason any of this started." I looked at the map. At the northern coast where Cresswell's compound sat behind its walls and its private security. At the upper district where Aldric had her quiet firm and her regular Thursday lunches. "We need to move on. Soon."

"The timing needs to be right," Varek said. "If we move too fast before the political situation settles"

"If we wait too long Syris gets to them first," I said. "He knows we have the locket. He knows I've been asking questions about my mother. He knows what the board members know and he knows what it means if we get to them before he does."

Varek was quiet.

"He'll warn them," I said. "Or he'll use them. Either way if we're not moving on them in the next forty-eight hours we're going to find they've become someone else's leverage."

Varek looked at the map for a long time.

"Forty-eight hours," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He reached the center of the table.

A blade sat there. Old Damascus steel, the folded metal rippled and dark. The leather hilt worn smooth from decades of being held. It had been sitting on the stone like a paperweight over the etched lines of the inner ring.

"Before we plan anything else," he said. "There's something that needs to happen first."

I looked at the blade.

I knew what it was.

We had tried this once before. In the room on the rock. Before Silas had coated the blade and the black veins had climbed my wrist and I had woken up three days later with Varek in a plastic chair and the ports gone.

We had never finished what we started.

"A blood pact," Varek said. The words dropped into the quiet war room with their full weight. "No contracts. No neutral bank witnesses. No secrets. You share the enemies. The hits. The wars." He held my gaze. "Everything I've built, you hold half of it."

I looked at the blade.

I thought about the arithmetic. The survival math I had been running since Sector Four. The part of me that had grown up knowing you allied with the most dangerous available thing or you didn't survive.

Then I thought about the plastic chair.

About thirty-eight minutes on a bleeding leg.

I'll be here quietly in a bright medical room.

About behind me. His boots behind me in the courtyard.

I thought about all of it and I put my hand in his.

Not because the arithmetic said so. The arithmetic had been saying for a while and I had been ignoring it. I put my hand in his because somewhere between a dead man's ring rolling across black marble and a gun pressed to my face through a two inch gap and his voice saying my name in the dark of a moving car... the arithmetic had stopped being the thing that mattered. What mattered was simpler than that. What mattered was that every single time things had gone completely wrong he had put his body between me and it without being asked.

That was the only math that counted now.

He cut his own palm first. Clean and without hesitation. Dark red came up immediately.

He turned the blade toward me.

"Sanguis imperat," he said. The dead language sitting differently in his voice than it did in mine. Heavier. Something learned rather than inherited.

The cut was sharp and real and bit through the last of the medication's warmth.

He dropped the blade. It hit the stone and spun slowly over the map.

He pressed his bleeding palm against mine and locked his fingers through mine and the warmth of his blood against my blood was the most real thing that had happened all night.

"Meum et tuum," he said quietly. Mine and yours.

I opened my mouth to speak to the seal.

Something happened.

Not pain exactly. A sensation starting in the cut on my palm and moving. Fast. Much faster than anything had a right to move through a body. It hit my bloodstream and my diaphragm locked and my lungs stopped and the lights overhead went wrong... too bright, then flickering, then the gray came in from every edge simultaneously.

I knew that gray.

I had seen it before.

Maevia.

Varek's voice. Somewhere above me. Saying my name in the voice he only used when he wasn't managing anything anymore.

I tried to answer.

My jaw had locked. My back teeth were grinding. And on my left wrist... visible even in the dim light of the caged bulbs... thick black lines were moving upward from the cut on my palm. Branching. Fast.

I looked at the blade on the stone map.

The rippled metal. The faint oily sheen on the edge.

Silas had Level Five access.

Silas had been in this room.

I tried to tell him.

My mouth wouldn't work.

The last thing I felt was his hand on my face. Both hands. Holding me toward him. His voice saying my name over and over like saying it enough times would keep me there.

Then the room went dark.

The blade lay still on the map.

The shell casings held their corners. The city stayed etched in black obsidian exactly as it had always been, indifferent to the blood spreading slowly across the stone.

His voice kept saying her name.

The room gave him nothing back.