Marked Read online

  One of them held a rifle barrel to my chest as the other two dragged Ivan back out onto the catwalk. By now the three others, all of a similar ilk, had caught up. One of them brought a rifle butt up to the side of Ivan’s skull.

  The action was abrupt enough to make me forget my position. Almost involuntarily, I lurched forward to intervene. Then something hard collided with my own skull, sending everything into a pain-fuzzed blur.

  FORTY

  I NEVER LOST consciousness, but for a time I lost awareness of everything except the throbbing in my skull. Not that I had any great options, unarmed and being manhandled by three large men. I don’t know how long I was stunned, but I doubt it was very long. When I could focus on my surroundings, not much had changed. We were still in the airship’s interior, amid the support struts and the catwalk. Something wrenched my shoulder, and everything snapped fully into focus.

  They had bound my wrists with a heavy rope and had hauled me up by a crossbeam between two gas cells so my feet dangled uselessly about six inches above the catwalk. The ache that inspired in my shoulders made me forget my throbbing head.

  Well, that was one way to prevent me from Walking anywhere.

  I heard someone curse in Russian, and I looked up to see them doing the same thing to Ivan, about twenty feet down the catwalk from me. Behind him, toward the front of the airship, I could still see the shredded remains of the biplane half-blocking the catwalk.

  I suppose we were lucky that we hadn’t been killed out of hand.

  A woman walked onto the catwalk, leading another anachronistic armor-clad man, distinguished from the other six by the elaborate braids in his hair and his fur-lined cloak. As she approached, I couldn’t restrain a small gasp, and not just from the eerie familiarity of her Mark as she neared.

  Looking at her was like staring at a twisted mirror. She had long blonde hair the same shade as my own, lightened slightly by a hint of gray. Her face bore lines and creases from about fifteen or twenty more years, but the major landmarks—the jawline, the nose, the shape of her cheekbones—were all echoes of my own. All except the eyes, which smoldered green and harbored a darkness I hope had never crossed my own expression.

  She strode past Ivan without a glance and spoke as she drew a dagger from her belt. “Why does she still live?” The woman’s voice was cold and distant, much calmer than the fury in her eyes seemed to warrant.

  The man with the braided hair answered her, “On my orders, my lady.”

  Her murderous gaze didn’t leave me as she said, “You know my purpose is to remove Father’s bastards.”

  “As you wish,” he said, “but I thought it wise to give you the choice.”

  “What alternative do you propose, General?”

  “Taking her has cost you many Shadows, forces you need to take the throne.”

  “You’re suggesting she might serve?”

  “Look at her Mark, my lady.”

  The woman lowered her dagger and walked around me as I dangled. The great coat had disappeared while I’d been knocked senseless, and my party dress was so much shredded fabric. The upper part of my back was exposed, and apparently that was enough to satisfy the woman. “More a sibling than I had thought.”

  “I had thought, my lady, that with so little of the boy’s skin remaining—”

  “Say no more, General. Fully grown as well. Enough for an army.”

  “What are you talking about?” I finally said.

  “Mind your words, woman!” snapped the man she’d been calling General.

  “She speaks the mother tongue,” the woman said. She stepped in front of me, a ghost of a smile on her lips that I did not find at all comforting.

  “She speaks insolently,” responded the General.

  The woman waved a hand in a dismissive gesture, as if such a thing was beneath her concern.

  “What do you want of me?” I asked.

  “Until a moment ago? Simply your death. I spent much to achieve it. Dear Uncle Tobin thought he’d escaped his dungeon as my brother’s house fell, but I let him slip through the ranks of my Shadows. I knew the sentimental fool would lead me to you, if you were still reachable.”

  The name, Tobin, hit my memory like a brick into a clouded window. A flood of disconnected memories bubbled up, all of the old man who had pounded on my car window, decades younger. All the memories came in a jumbled flash, him carrying me on his shoulders, telling me a story at bedtime, leading me on a pony through a field overgrown with wildflowers, him wrapping me in a blanket and slipping out of the cold walls of the castle into a night that evaporated into the boiling gray of Chaos.

  The woman smiled evilly. “I see, from your expression, you share our uncle’s sentimentality.”

  Our uncle, she’d said.

  More a sibling, she’d said.

  “You’re my sister?” Even in my current position, the words still blocked a well of emotion.

  “We share our father’s blood, but do not go so far as to claim that manner of kinship from me. You’re just another of his bastards.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  She shook her head. “So I can claim the throne of House Wealcan. Why else? I will not make Father’s mistake of leaving rivals about to threaten me. Even Uncle Ulmar made the same mistake after wresting rule from Father, preferring to imprison his siblings rather than eliminate them.”

  “Uncle Tobin,” I whispered.

  “Imprisoned in his nephew’s tower for supporting Father over Ulmar. He always claimed, even under torture, that you and your mother were lost to Chaos during his flight. The fact that his assassin never returned from his hunt for you convinced Ulmar. It never convinced me.”

  Assassin . . . My thoughts turned to the anachronistically dressed body that had been found in my mother’s apartment.

  I felt torn between grief and rage knowing this was the family I’d been born to, and how poorly it compared to the one that had adopted me. I snapped my next words in a tone that must have displeased the General. “Why don’t you just kill me, then?”

  “Because I did not know how fully developed the Mark you wore was until now. It is just what we require to create the Shadows we need to take on my brother’s defenders.”

  “Create the Shadows . . .” The thought was appalling enough that my breath caught.

  “All we need is a piece of skin with the Mark. Well, with the Mark of Wealcan. Some other Mark and I cannot control the Shadows birthed from it, which makes them worse than useless. As the General has noted, you have much more skin than the boy we’ve near used up . . .” She trailed off and turned to the General. “Why is the ship listing?”

  I’d been largely unaware of it, between my throbbing head and being suspended, but now I realized I was hanging almost fifteen degrees off of true, my feet dangling toward the nose of the airship.

  “I know not, my lady.”

  They don’t know how an airship works. My sister and her minions didn’t understand that the gas cells kept the ship aloft, so they didn’t realize that the damage caused by the biplane would unbalance the whole thing.

  That raised the question of who was driving.

  “Come, you and your men, to the bridge.” She pointed to the man who had shoved my pseudo-Luger into his belt. “You guard the prisoners.”

  Everyone but the lone guard marched off past Ivan and the biplane wreckage, the tilt on the catwalk now enough to make their steps somewhat clumsy. Our guard slung his rifle over his shoulder and watched them go.

  “Ivan,” I called to him in English, “are you okay?”

  “Conscious,” he grumbled.

  “No talking!” snapped the guard in Old English. His expression betrayed nerves as much as anger, and it gave me an idea.

  “How much time before we hit the ocean?” I shouted at Ivan.

  “No id
ea. Don’t know how fast we’re descending.”

  The guard looked from us, one to the other, obviously with no clue what we were saying. “I said, no talking!” he repeated in his language.

  “I suppose you’re going to make us?” I said in English. “You pathetic little troll,” I repeated in Old English, just so he’d focus on me.

  He cursed so rapidly and so violently that I could make no sense of the words. One of them might have been “whore.” He raised a hand and stomped up the canted catwalk toward me, just as I’d intended.

  I work out a lot. In addition to my normal daily runs, I am no stranger to pull-ups. I might not have the upper-body strength of Ivan or Jacob, but I can manage my own weight. I hadn’t been dangling long enough for fatigue to set in, so my muscles could respond, albeit painfully.

  As the guard charged, I swung my legs up to meet him. He was too surprised to back up, and the way he leaned toward me on the canted deck made it that much easier for me to wrap my legs around his neck. He beat at my thighs, but I locked my ankles together and concentrated on strangling him. By the time he had the presence of mind to draw a dagger from his belt, he was already too weak and too badly positioned to do more than deal some superficial cuts to my legs.

  Eventually, he just dangled there.

  Out of caution, I held the pressure on for another full minute. Then I dropped him on the catwalk with a clatter, my legs tingling from lack of circulation.

  “That’s impressive,” Ivan called to me in a low voice. “But what’s your plan to get us out of our bonds?”

  Yes, that was a good question.

  Our unconscious guard had a dagger out, but it was on the catwalk. It was ten inches from my dangling feet, and it might as well have been a mile. I looked up and wriggled my hands. The knots were hasty and not very tight, but there was no hope of me pulling my wrist through without any leverage. Some action heroine would be able to swing her legs up on the strut I dangled from, but that was easily a foot or two above my wrists, and I didn’t have that much upper-body strength.

  But that gave me another, more dangerous thought.

  I could swing.

  I started swinging my legs back and forth until my whole body was tracing an arc.

  “What are you doing?” Ivan croaked.

  I wondered myself. I knew that all that mattered for the Mark to move me was the motion. If I could do it while jumping to clothesline a Shadow, I could do it here. Couldn’t I?

  I had never done so while attached to something like this. I remembered the sensation of the Métal Stationnaire, how it felt as if it chained me to a wall when I tried to Walk with it. So that could be all that would happen, the rope holding me in place. But what if the pull into that unnamable direction was stronger than the rope’s hold on me? That was what I counted on. But a nasty part of my mind wondered, What if the pull is stronger than my wrists?

  No, if the Métal Stationnaire didn’t yank off a limb when I tried to Walk, neither would this.

  I still swung back and forth three more times before I pushed my Mark.

  FORTY-ONE

  MY SHOULDERS AND wrists burned with such flaring agony that I was barely aware of the sudden cold wind cutting across my whole body. Again I was in midair, my eyes watering as much from the wind as the pain. I barely had the presence of mind to push myself back into the airship.

  I slammed ungracefully onto the metal of the catwalk, rolling down the slope a couple of feet until I came to a crumpled moaning stop.

  A Russian-accented voice came from far away, “Are you all right?”

  “No,” I groaned. I blinked my eyes and looked at my wrists. Fortunately, my hands were still attached. But they were covered in blood, and the skin was badly abraded where they had been torn free of the ropes. It took three tries before I got my pained arms to support my weight and push myself up.

  No time to recover. My evil sibling would have sensed my use of the Mark. Her people were probably already coming back here. The moment I could get my arms to obey me, I scrambled to the guard’s body. I pulled my sort-of-Luger from the man’s belt with one hand and retrieved his dagger with the other. Then I ran to Ivan. The ropes suspending him ran over the strut above and down to tie to the railing of the catwalk.

  “Get ready to drop,” I told Ivan as I started sawing through the rope with the dagger. It didn’t go well. The dagger may have been sharp, but it wasn’t designed to hack rope apart, and the effort was made worse because the grip from my injured hands was poor and slick with smeared blood. I was barely a third of the way through the rope when I saw movement by the wreckage of the biplane. I dropped prone before I heard the crack of a rifle.

  “Shit!”

  I dropped the dagger and got my gun up in a two-handed grip in front of me. Flat on the ground made me less of a target, but that wouldn’t faze someone who took time to aim, especially since the floor of the catwalk tilted toward the enemy. I fired one of my five shots simply to pin them down and deny them that chance for a moment. The gunshot seemed an order of magnitude louder than the rifle crack.

  They hesitated just a fraction too long before returning fire, time for my hands to stop shaking, time for me to aim down the length of the catwalk. The first guy sprang from the alcove of pipes and struts where Ivan had hidden us shortly after the crash. He was using a rifle and had to swing it around to bear on me after leaving his cramped cover. Time enough for me to place a single shot into his center of mass.

  The explosive gunshot set the surface of the catwalk ringing under my arms, not that I could hear it because I was already half deafened. My injured wrists stung from the recoil from the massive pistol. The sound had barely faded from my noise-ravaged ears when the next guy tried to shoot me. I saw the muzzle flash, but barely heard the shot. This guy used the biplane for cover, but that meant he was mostly hidden by fabric. I fired a fraction of a second after he did, aiming at a point about five inches below the flash of his rifle. The shot blew through the body of the biplane, and the gunman dropped behind it.

  I saw another flash and felt something hot and stinging against my leg. It took a moment for me to zero in on the new shooter, enough time for him to get off another shot that, thankfully, missed. I found him past the biplane, using the stairs downward for cover. He was twice as far from me as either of his fallen comrades. Before he managed a third shot, I fired, striking the catwalk in front of him. He ducked below the level of the catwalk.

  Damn!

  I only had one shot left; it needed to count. I held my breath and aimed at the small area at the top of the steps he needed to take a shot. I waited and waited.

  And waited.

  I exhaled. Did I actually get him? I doubted it. My shot had hit the ground maybe three feet in front of him. At best he’d been stung by a sliver of shrapnel. Did he retreat?

  Another few breaths, and the airship seemed to shudder beneath me. “What was that?”

  I barely heard Ivan through ears that felt packed with cotton. “Ballast.”

  No more shots came, and I scrambled back, grabbing the dagger and sawing frantically at Ivan’s rope. I finally cut through it, and Ivan dropped. He crouched and rolled as if he did this all the time. When he came up, he held his wrists out. I approached with the dagger when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.

  “Down!” I shoved Ivan, and we both collapsed to the deck as a bullet sparked the handrail next to us.

  Our friend had circled around to come up behind us at the other end of the catwalk. Like before, he used the stairs for cover, but from that direction, without the wreckage half-blocking the catwalk, he had a much clearer field of fire. Prone, I brought my gun to bear again. My position was even worse now. Given the still tilted airship, the gunman had the high ground. He was also twice as far from us, not a huge amount for the rifle but enough to impact the accuracy of my handgun.


  And I only had one shot left.

  He’d ducked down the stairs, so I couldn’t see him. I did my best to aim, waiting for him to pop up. When he did, I fired. The shot missed him entirely, shredding the edge of a gas cell three feet away from him. I watched helplessly as he levered his rifle in my direction.

  I dimly heard the rifle shot, but I saw no flash from his gun. Instead, I saw his head snap back in a fog of red mist. I looked off to my right and saw Ivan. He had managed to get one hand free and had liberated the rifle from the guard’s body next to us.

  Ivan’s voice sounded far away. “By my count, that leaves three, plus the woman.”

  After we untangled the rope from Ivan’s other wrist, we headed up the catwalk toward our last attacker. I was beginning to realize how beat up I was. My wrists burned and throbbed. As the adrenaline ebbed, I could feel the two wounds on my left leg, one slice from our guard’s dagger, and one graze either from a rifle shot or wayward shrapnel. I limped now, and my bare foot was slippery with a slick of blood.

  We stopped by the body by the stairs and I picked up the dead man’s rifle. As I did, the whole airship seemed to shudder around us. “More ballast,” Ivan said, his voice a little clearer now that my ears had stopped ringing.

  “Can they keep this thing airborne?”

  He shook his head. “I doubt it, especially now with all the bullet holes.”

  “We have to stop her,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I swallowed. “I’m sorry for dragging you into my fight.”

  “It is my fight once they attack the Empire.”

  I nodded. I still felt guilty, but I didn’t want to argue the point. “I don’t think any of them know how to fly an airship.”

  “Someone’s flying.”

  I nodded. “She must have the crew hostage. She was taking her people to the bridge.”

  “Then we should head to the bridge.”

  * * *

  —

  WE climbed down from the catwalk into the stern of the airship. As we made our way down, we passed signs of fighting beyond our own gunfight; bullet holes marred bulkheads, smears of blood covered the walls, and the smell of smoke filled the air. We passed a few corpses that had been left where they had fallen. Two were Shadows that had taken bullets to the head. The remainder appeared to be normal humans who had taken wounds from things more gruesome than gunfire: skinned, disemboweled, dismembered.