With a roar of frustration, I lose the battle. The lights return, revealing a warzone of silk and death. When I try to scramble to my feet, to make sure the job is really done, a hand pushes me back down.
I say the words I must, playing my own part in all this. “I’m sorry—the lights—I can’t—” Overhead, the lights flicker again.
Cal barely hears me and drops to his knees next to me. “Where are you hit?” he roars, checking me in the way I know he’s been trained. His fingers feel down my arms and legs, looking for a wound, for the source of so much blood.
My voice sounds strange. Soft. Broken. “I’m fine.” He doesn’t hear me again. “Cal, I’m fine.”
Relief floods his face and for a second I think he might kiss me again. But his senses return quicker than mine. “You’re sure?”
Gingerly, I raise a silver-stained sleeve. “How can this be mine?”
My blood is not this color. You know that.
He nods. “Of course,” he whispers. “I just—I saw you on the ground and I thought . . .” His words trail away, replaced by a terrible sadness in his eyes. But it fades quickly, shifting to determination. “Lucas! Get her out of here!”
My personal guard charges through the fray, his gun at the ready. Though he looks the same in his boots and uniform, this is not the Lucas I know. His black eyes, Samos eyes, are dark as night. “I’ll take her to the others,” he growls, hoisting me up.
Though I know better than anyone the danger is gone, I can’t help but reach out to Cal. “What about you?”
He shrugs out of my grasp with shocking ease. “I’m not running.”
And then he turns, his shoulders squared to a group of Sentinels. He steps over the corpses, head inclined to the ceiling. A Sentinel tosses him a handgun and he catches it deftly, putting a finger to the trigger. His other hand blazes to life, crackling with dark and deadly flame. Silhouetted against the Sentinels and the bodies on the floor, he looks like another person entirely.
“Let’s go hunting,” he growls, and charges up the stairs. Sentinels and Security follow, like a cloud of red-and-black smoke trailing behind his flame. They leave a a blood-spattered ballroom, hazy with dust and screams.
In the center of it all lies Belicos Lerolan, pierced not by a bullet but a silver lance. Shot from a spear gun, like the ones used to fish.. A tattered scarlet sash falls from the shaft, barely stirring in the whirlwind. There’s a symbol stamped on it—the torn sun.
Then the ballroom is gone, swallowed up by the dark walls of a service passage. The ground rumbles beneath our feet and Lucas throws me to the wall, shielding me. A sound like thunder reverberates and the ceiling shakes, dropping pieces of stone down on us. The door behind us explodes inward, destroyed by flame. Beyond, the ballroom is black with smoke. An explosion.
“Cal—” I try to squirm away from Lucas, to run back the way we came, but he throws me back. “Lucas, we have to help him!”
“Trust me, a bomb won’t bother the prince,” he growls, moving me forward.
“A bomb?” That wasn’t part of the plan. “Was that a bomb?”
Lucas draws back from me, positively shaking in anger. “You saw that bloody red scarf. This is the Scarlet Guard and that”—he points back to the ballroom, still dark and burning—“that is who they are.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” I murmur to myself, trying to remember every facet of the plan. Maven never told me about a bomb. Never. And Kilorn wouldn’t let me do this, not if he knew I would be in danger. They wouldn’t do this to me.
Lucas holsters his gun, his voice a growl. “Killers don’t have to make sense.”
My breath catches in my throat. How many were left back there? How many children, how many needless deaths?
Lucas takes my silence for shock, but he’s wrong. What I feel now is anger.
Anyone can betray anyone.
Lucas leads me underground, through no less than three doors, each one a foot thick and made of steel. They have no locks, but he opens them with a flick of his hand. It reminds me of the first time I met him, when he waved apart the bars of my cell.
I hear the others before I see them, their voices echoing off the metal walls as they speak to each other. The king rails, his words sending shivers through me. His presence seems to fill the bunker as he paces up and down, his cloak flapping out behind him.
“I want them found. I want them in front of me with a blade at their backs, and I want them to sing like the cowardly birds they are!” He addresses a Sentinel, but the masked woman doesn’t even flinch. “I want to know what’s going on!”