Evangeline

Spacious as Davidson's rooms are, there's hardly any room for me and Elane in the corner of his office, tucked away so that nobody can brush up against us.

We slipped in a while ago, undetected as our invisible selves strode in behind a pack of Tyton's hunters, though he himself wasn't along with them. Good, though we'd be fine if he found his way back here, too many Newbloods and Reds inside for him to possibly sense two extra brains.

The great Premier himself stands behind the desk, his chest hidden beneath war-torn arms. I wanted to come here for the hope that somebody or other would reveal where Ptolemus is being hidden, but to no avail have I stood here, listening ever-so-carefully for the last fifteen minutes. Other men and women shuffle about the office and his chambers, talking and strategizing amongst themselves. I'm surprised Davidson allows so many people in his rooms, though I suppose he knows all of them very thoroughly. The man wouldn't be so foolish as to let random soldiers in here.

Another band of soldiers enters through the doors, clad in bulletproof vests and guns. Except the one in the middle doesn't have a gun, white-haired with a titch of a scowl on his face.

An unsuccessful hunt in the tunnels, then.

"Nothing," Tyton says, the men around him dispersing from him. At first I tense, expecting that he'll feel my unwanted presence in the room, having just thought about it, even though there are thirty others in here. Maybe he counts them, counts their minds each and every time he enters a room. There's something about the way that he carries himself tonight that makes me wonder if my guess is true.

But he walks towards the Premier, shaking his head, though Davidson doesn't appear angry. He wasn't expecting that Tyton would actually be able to track us down. Smart.

"We looked through every tunnel that exists while guards still searched through the hallways and the grounds. Even the dustiest of the passages down there don't have any sign of them. Dust is too thick to be noticeably moved, if they were down there at all. Not to mention Jon's still out on the loose."

"Fine," Davidson says with steepled fingers upon his desk. "If there's no hope for hunting them down the old fashion way, then we'll use the traps we've deployed. Finding her brother will be almost too easy for the Magnetron, and hopefully she'll lead us to the others." I strain to hear, but Davidson's lips are unmoving, even as I'm sure that he has more to say about the traps he intends to set for us.

As if he feels my thoughts, Tyton glances around the room, fireplace nothing but ashes and more wooden paneling and rich color schemes. "Where's Mare? I thought you were keeping her here."

I nearly laugh as I see the slight glint of pity in Davidson's eyes. They haven't realized she's gone yet, but...

"While you were in the tunnels, we developed a plan to catch Cal. She and Maven went to Cal's old room to get some old maps. He seemed to think they'd help us. And then she was going to go back to Mareena's room, to lay a trap for him." I see now that Maven was quite vague in his reasoning to Davidson on why he needed to go to Cal's room. There weren't any maps he took, I know for a fact.

Tyton's gone still. Such a simple, elementary explanation, but it hits him hard nonetheless. "You sent her out there with Maven, not only without decent protection against them, but also with Maven, a two-faced bastard. But also to lay a trap. It could go horribly wrong, Davidson," he snarls, slapping his hands against the desk. "You're endangering her life. I'm going to get her."

"No, you're not," Davidson says with equal vigor. "She is not your liability, and neither is Maven, not when we attached manacles of Silent Stone around his wrists before he even left the tunnels. She didn't seem to have a problem with it, so I let her go, if only for this rebellion's sake, even if Maven's reasons for going to Cal's room were shaky, even if it's risky. Guards are constantly roaming the halls; we hardly had to send a troop with them. If anything, that would arouse suspicion. There are dozens of guards waiting to pounce on Cal in there. The Newbloods waiting in her room haven't even radioed in that she's arrived yet."

"She hasn't gotten there yet?" Tyton hisses, curling up his fists. Though even he isn't foolish enough to start a fight with Davidson. "Then it's not too late to end something this stupid. I'm going to check on her."

Anything that Tyton has in mind is dashed away as the door is flung open yet again, this time a black-haired boy waltzing in, with that silly and little arrogant mask he so delights in donning. There are indeed manacles encircling each of his wrists. I understand now why she hated them so much.

"Ah," Tyton says, approaching Maven. Though the Electricon could crush Maven's tormented mind in an instant, Maven hardly blinks as Tyton stops only a couple feet away from him, eyeing his manacles. Yes, the Silence will protect him. For now. "So you let him roam the halls alone, too?"

If he weren't a highly skilled general, Davidson would roll his eyes. "Where would he go, Tyton? The city is on lockdown and his own brother left him in a cage."

"Have you captured Cal yet?" Maven asks, looking past Tyton, hardly acknowledging him, to Davidson.

"Not to my knowledge," Davidson says. "They'll bring him here along with Evangeline and Iris if they decide to accompany him. Mare hasn't even arrived at her room yet. I hope those maps were worth it."

Maven looks...confused as Davidson responds. "What do you mean she hasn't arrived at Mareena's room yet?"

"She hasn't gotten into position yet. The guards haven't radioed in that's she's in position yet," Davidson repeats.

"But I left her over an hour ago. She mentioned that she was going to the barracks to shower... but she should've gotten there by now."

Davidson and Tyton raise their eyebrows in tandem. They don't ask what he's been doing alone in the palace for the past hour, but...

The Premier snatches a radio off his desk, punching in a few buttons before he raises the piece to his mouth. With wides eyes, he murmurs a few code words to the listener on the other end. Though the listener cannot see him, Davidson shakes his head several times over. I didn't ask nor question Cal's plans for what he plans to do with her, chained up to an immovable ring of Silence embedded into the wall. I cannot believe he will damage her. I wouldn't have let him go through with it otherwise.

He drops the little black box with a sickening clink. "They haven't forgotten to radio in and they haven't sighted Cal, Iris, or Evangeline."

Tyton looks about ready to vomit. Davidson's already patted two of his generals on their shoulders, indicated for them to go and find her.

"How could you send them out alone?" Tyton cries, his voice deep and ragged. He's livid as hell, and I swear my brain tingles for a moment. He turns to Maven, who doesn't open his stupid mouth for once. Maybe Maven believes he deserves whatever beating he's had coming for years. They're both pale, Tyton sheet white though nothing's been confirmed. She could very well be roaming the halls of the palace still, finishing business, for all they know. "You're not much of a fighter, but if you claim to love her in whatever sick way of yours, you wouldn't have left her."

The fire prince turns a bit grey in the face, some of that famous anger of his resurfacing. "I didn't leave her. And maybe I don't love her the way you love her, but we understand one another. I wanted to go to Cal's room to see if his flamemakers were gone; they were. I also wished to speak to her one last time before one of us winds up dead. There were no dire maps. But our conversations... oftentimes escalate. She left and I didn't dare follow her sorrow."

"We're moving," Davidson announces, picking up his other papers and radio. "Too many generals have arrived with their legions by now for us to all fit here. We're heading to the throne room, where these matters can be discussed over more properly."

We follow them like lonely ghosts throughout the halls, knowing things that they don't.

Tyton and Davidson lead the pack, two dozen soldiers on their heels. Somewhere near the front is Maven, wearing somber, blank eyes. He blames himself for what has happened, letting her go in the middle of the night, even if she is out there somewhere perfectly safe. Dangerous, vicious creatures prowl in the night. And he knows better than to hold out for Mare's safe return. He isn't as optimistically stupid as the rest.

Reaching a fork in the corridor that will take them down a floor with another turn and to the throne room, they move in unison, Elane and I keeping to the edges of the hallway, though close enough to the rest of the guards that Tyton doesn't sense an outlier.

"Have the Lakelanders reached out to us yet?"

"No," one of the generals near the front replies. "They've been completely silent, though they haven't exactly been attempting to be inconspicuous."

"If they don't speak up by dawn, we'll release our men. Enough Newbloods have been shuttled in by now that we have a fighting chance."

"What of the other cities?"

"They'll be fine, honestly. It seems that the Lakelander Queen has provided bare minimum forces for the rest of the cities. Harbor Bay, Delphie... I thought it was bad, at first. It's almost as though she doesn't care about the other cities, only Archeon."

"She's not trying to win the other cities. She's just using her pathetic and weak legions to draw away your troops from Archeon," Maven speaks up, tilting his head at the Premier. "She doesn't give a damn about Cal or his throne or any Nortan. Rosalyn only wants her sister back. She's just giving herself an advantage by taking your good men away from this city, distract them with men that would die on the battlefield of Archeon in five minutes."

The thronging whips around another corner, a familiar corner in the midst of the dozens of corridors that make up the palace. Ah, yes, I recall the events of a mere few hours ago so well, when I stood in one of the alcoves of the hallway. I was the shadow that darted past Mare Barrow's visions, causing her to turn just the right way so that Cal could come up from behind her as she saw Iris.

"How do you know that, Maven?"

"I know many things, Davidson," Maven states. "I have a great deal of time to think, these days. Even before the Lakelander troops made themselves known, it seemed like the kind of thing the queen might try. She's almost as bad as Ir-"

But his words are unfinished, unneeded as Tyton breaks away from the group abruptly. He swears violently and then some, and I feel that tightening in my head again, as if he's doing it to everyone. Out of control.

Elane and I shuffle around the crowd to see what he looks at, not particularly quietly as the rest of the guards and generals turn to look at it, too, shifting their bodies with whispers of horror.

A pane of glass. They look at a pane of glass.

Outside, rain still pounds against Davidson's forcefield, and inwardly I wonder how powerful he is. This must be why he was made the president of a country, because of his seemingly infinite ability. It's been up for ten consecutive days without reprieve, and Davidson doesn't look tired. He sleeps and can trust himself to keep a hold on the dome. Not the flashiest of talents, but still.

The wall of glass is mostly fogged over from the dampness outside, but one pane breaks the chain, human smudges written all over it. The outline of a small woman's body, waist to shoulders, is distinct, the places that she placed her fists each owning a smudge. Another marking is etched where her forehead went as Cal slammed her into the glass.

Most of them have crowded around the glass, examining it to understand what happened.

But Maven stands in the middle of the hallway, his eyes caught on something further down. He could run away and have a decent chance of escape if he wanted, with his guards distracted. Yet he only walks to the object resting on the floor, picking it up with a chained hand.

So I watch the little wheels turn in his head as he comes to a conclusion on how that photograph is possibly there, just lying on the marble.

The photograph of Mare smiling at some damn Silver ball, as she'd probably call it.

The flamemakers were gone by the time they came to Cal's room, but the photo was still there. Mare picked it up herself, kneeling ever-so-close to the foot of his bed. And Cal wouldn't risk a second trip to his room only for a photograph. Which means...

Maven stuffs the photo into his pocket with all the speed in the world, an indifferent, bored expression on his face, though the guards continue to examine the glass. They don't notice the small movement done by the forgotten boy.

And they don't need to know. Cal left that photo for Maven alone for a logic I cannot comprehend.

Even as the boy is encompassed by guards once again, he keeps that insufferable mask on.

He's scared out of his mind.

Tyton departs from Davidson with twenty men. They take the entrance to the tunnels nearest the hallway that the fogged window panes were part of, though it isn't the same entrance as we took on our way back down, risking ourselves for an extra hallway to throw any guards off that might've seen the glass soon after.

Elane and I follow the guards.

In my hand, there are twenty blades, all razor thin, but all perfectly capable of bringing each and every guard to their knees in an instant.

We follow them deep into the tunnels, once coming through a pass only a turn off from the underground safe room. But they turn in the other direction, refusing to cover more ground by splitting up. It wouldn't be wise though, if they stumbled upon us while we were all together.

We took out eleven guards while we were together. They won't risk it again, even if they're all Newbloods.

I let them travel a bit further from the safe room before I begin positioning my invisible knives throughout their ranks, at the left side of their backs.

All but two. The one that wears a cross-shaped patch at his shoulder I spare, recognizing him as a Healer. He won't fight back; the Healers are always too good-natured to harm us. And Tyton, rather than hold the knife at the backside of his heart as I do to the rest, I place the blade at his thigh, an inch off from his bone.

The knives are invisible to my eyes as Elane carefully maintains the illusion, but I feel them in the air, moving with the unwitting guards, aligned with their red-blooded hearts.

I count by fours, bringing the knives forward at the end of each count to keep up with their vigorous pace.

Even if they went right down the passage with the hidden door, they wouldn't spend an extra second to think twice. They're going too fast, not looking for what they don't think exists. For everything Whitefire has, Tyton's legion hasn't bothered to think that there might be a hidden safe room somewhere down here.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

I pull the blades forward with grace, the metal wheezing through the men's chests to come straight out the other side. The last blade whips through the air at an angle, bringing Tyton crashing to the rocky ground as the weapon shoves through his skin and sinks into the earth.

The Healer cries out, and I'm tempted to cut off his tongue.

The other men are dead, though, solidly and permanently dead. thin, clean wounds pierced through their hearts. Not a one of them had the chance to yell or weep. For that reason, I don't cut off his tongue, only put a blade at his chin. That shuts him up, the muscular, rugged looking man.

I put a blade at Tyton's throat, as well, and a second precautionary blade dangles from over him. If he tries to choke me off, he'll impale himself. "Careful," I muse, stepping over the fallen corpses one by one. I can't help but turn my nose up at my own work. "There's a blade hanging five feet over you. Should you try to kill me..."

With his thick military pants, my blade had no trouble slicing through Tyton's leg. He grunts, trying to pull himself upward, but realizing that I've trapped him, he slowly lowers himself back down, his leg moving against the iron. Ouch.

His breaths are shallow, though he's far from death. Paralyzed by agony, maybe, but not death. He cannot turn, but he knows very well what I've done.

So sudden and cruel. The Healer watches us wearily as Elane makes us appear again, and he cusses, despite the edge that I press into his neck more forcefully, drawing blood.

"Where is she?" he growls through his teeth, glaring at my feet as I crouch down beside him.

"You're not going to ask me why I'm here? Beg for your life?"

He swears at me, every bit of a man he can be staked to the ground, disarmed of his ability and troops. "Where is she?"

Giving him the satisfaction of an answer, I smile. "Chained to a wall with manacles of Silent Stone, left to Cal's will and whim." I should tell him that Iris and I are both away, but I don't. He doesn't need to know the Cal is without his allies.

"I'll tell you where your brother is if you tell me where she is," he begs, splaying out his fingers.

"What a desperate man, you are, Tyton. I can find my brother myself. And whoever said she wants to be saved?" I didn't trek all the way down here to barter with him. He has nothing to offer me but an excess of male testosterone and meaningless threats. "It wouldn't be the first time bad things happened while they were in a locked room together."

He tenses, not understanding. I smile again. No, I came here to tell him the truth that Mare never told him. He would've left her had she told him.

"Has she been distant, lately? Perhaps since the wedding?"

The swallow in his throat tells me yes. But he stays silent.

"It was my fault, I admit," I say, full-well aware that he'll kill me if he ever gets the chance. "I see the way that they still look at one another after all these months, still remnants of twisted love between them. I liked playing off that obvious crack, using it to torture Cal with if only to get out of my marriage to him. It didn't work.

"I assume you were camping out down here that night with your compatriots, otherwise you would've figured it out. Somebody must've told you, didn't they? How Cal missed hours worth of Anabel's wedding preparation because he fell asleep in his dear uncle's study? The fact of the matter that everybody seems to turn a blind eye to is Mare was missing that night, too. It was pure coincidence that nobody questioned it."

He understands, now. At least the worst of it. I could leave him here, simmering in his hatred for Cal, wherever the hell it originated from. Yet I wait for him to catch up in his thoughts. "What did you do, Evangeline?"

I shrug. "I locked them in a cold, dark prison cell. Elane helped me, of course, in dragging their bodies down to one of the old wings that isn't used anymore. No bars. Just solid iron walls. We put Mare into a dress and cranked down the thermostat." It's sound so animalistic when I repeat to Tyton, callous and targeted. "She would've been at Death's doorstep had she not let Cal warm her body. Anything after that, however, I cannot justify for you. They claim that they didn't, but... Elane told me that they were rather tangled together by the time she let them out in the morning."

Yes, that stings him far worse than the knife in his thigh does, scraping against his bone.

"Your relationship with her is based off heartbreak, Tyton."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Somebody had to, and Mare never seemed inclined."

I saw it when nobody else did, that Mare only fell in love with the Electricon because he was there, with his pretty eyes and lightning. If it could be called love. Maybe there was something there in the end, but any true feelings she felt for him were destroyed when she entered that room with Cal.

"And besides. I'd like to see you try and kill him. Why is it, by the way, that you hate him so much?" Aside from the obvious, boy.

His eyes go wide as if some age-old memory is resurrected. It has to be more of a reason than simply for the Silvers and Reds and five-hundred years of bloody history. No, it must be for a reason far more personal. "His family slaughtered my sister on public broadcast, at the gates of Summerton."

And that is all he says, nothing more and nothing less. I don't ask how or why, coming to conclusions on why she was in Norta, far away from Montfort. "When?" I ask.

"Five years ago, next month."

I fling the knife from over his heart down the passageway, and it lands with a quiet scuff at the end of the hall.

" I wish you the best of luck in your murderous endeavors, Tyton."

They said that they were laying a trap for me, just as Mare tried to with Cal. They said it would be almost too easy for me to find Tolly, sitting like a waiting duck for me. It'll be the second time eavesdropping has saved a Silver's tail tonight.

Where would they put him, my brother? They made it sound so obvious, so easy for me to find, only to be sprung on by a band of Newbloods. He must be out of the dungeons by now, put somewhere that the Scarlet Guard can better control.

"The Magnetron bitch hasn't shown, yet?" a soldier walking past us asks his compatriot. Elane has made us invisible again.

"No. You'd think she'd think to listen to the rumors that we've been spreading through the halls all night. He's in his old rooms, what a surprise. The Haven girl takes pleasure in lurking around these halls, looking for gossip. Tonight should be no different," another guard states, bitter and tired, it seems. Though for all of Elane's lurking, he doesn't seem to believe that she could be here right now.

Elane has spent the last hours first looking for me, then stalking Davidson and Tyton. She hasn't had time to listen to ordinary guards gossip.

Before tonight, I did not believe in the gods. But with Jon waking from a months-long coma, Cal, Iris, and me being in that room while Mare and Maven discussed dark things and secrets, and now this... the Gods haven't forsaken us.

The doors leading to Ptolemus's old rooms are not guarded, meaning however many highly-trained soldiers are all inside the room, his room. At least it used to be his.

Though I cannot see her, Elane surely smirks at the sight. They're not even trying to hide the fact that this is a trap.

I approach the door with quiet, deadly feet.

The feeling of my lover's lips brushing up to my ear quells me, though the words I will hear out of her mouth are not that of pleasure. Strategy and planning.

She whispers her idea into my ear, and I smile. "What a lovely plan, Elane."

Silencers are not like Tyton. The Electricon can feel brains, shut them down without so much as seeing the human. But Silencers cannot sense men. They must see them.

Elane cranks on the door, sending it flying open with rattling hinges.

We step back, pressing ourselves to the wall as Newbloods come rushing forward, Ptolemus's muffled cries in the background. A trap, he's trying to warn us. But really, who are the hunters and who are the preys?

A second later, Elane launches into a sprint, making her steps awfully loud. Almost too loud. The bloody blades twitch in my hand, begging to be used again as the men come rushing out from under the threshold. They're big men indeed, as big as Cal and my brother, carrying guns and knives on top of their abilities. I'm not foolish enough to try and take their weapons from them, undoubtedly laced with Silencer's blood.

I bring my weapons into the air as I break into a silent sprint behind the men, wondering if there are any who opted to stay behind in the room. But I count nine...ten...eleven guards chasing after Elane. The same number Cal, Iris, and I took out in the dungeons.

How poetic.

I slam the blades into their hearts once again, and the men die quick, clean deaths as their friends did downstairs.

Elane's clicks of shoes stop when the men come falling down on their stomachs, dead before they've hit the ground. Thirty-six men. Thirty-six men I've killed tonight, but I don't regret it, don't feel inhuman for it. Not when they have the intention of slaughtering us themselves and certainly not when my brother's in there.

"Tolly," I say, looking at my brother as I come back towards the room, away from the blood of Reds. Tied into a chair with a cloth in his mouth, his eyes aren't focused on me. He cannot see me, but he should've heard me. They're off-center, but not because somebody drugged him.

When we were young, we made up codes for battle, small indicators that nobody except us would ever know. Eleven men with the expectation of three, four, five of us coming to retrieve my brother. Though Cal, Iris, and Bart aren't here, they don't know that. No. There are more than eleven guards.

Hardly knowing what I'm doing, blinded by the eternal love I have for Ptolemus, I charge into the room, still masked by Elane's shadows. And I feel the metal in their blood.

And I pound it together, driving it into their hearts as they charge at me.

Elane shoots two more down with her gun, heading for Ptolemus in his chair.

More advance, and I'm keenly aware that every moment I spend here is another moment too long, more time for them to realize that we're here and send more guards funneling into this room.

I cut down another man, dodging his hand attached to an incredibly-powerful looking arm. Strongarm. I don't let them surround me, all of them seeming to come spilling from the room that Ptolemus looked at. It's just a sitting room, no beds to hide under. Knives are faster than the water one tries to force down my throat, faster than the seeds another throws into the air. Faster than the voice of the man that tries to serenade me with his poisonous voice.

But more than myself, I keep them from Elane, who works feverishly at Ptolemus's chains, using her clever pins to pick at the lock. Keep her alive, because I cannot fight them and undo his chains. Keep her alive, because I cannot live without her.

I slash another guard across the face, barely noticing that Elane's ability has been taken away from us, or that I can no longer fling knives through the air. There can't be more than-

Chains clatter as Ptolemus's bounds are broken apart, falling to the ground. The only advantage we have here is that they're not fighting for blood, unlike us. They hardly use their deadly abilities, going straight for our bodies as if to pin us down. When they do, it's too delicate, too slow to accomplish much of anything. They need us alive and conscious, because... we know where Cal and Iris are. More valuable alive than dead. Conscious than unconscious.

Davidson underestimates me. Because there's no way to control a Samos Magnetron without knocking her out.

I growl as another soldier bursts from the room off to the side, and I give up a knife, throwing the blade into his chest.

They'll be coming any minute. "Run," I growl at Elane and my brother. Just off Silence, he's in no shape to fight.

Then again, neither was I as I took down those guards in the dungeons. Ptolemus takes a fallen blade from the floor, throws it into the throat of the last guard that emerges from the door. "Now we can run," he says, slamming the door to the hallway.

We take the backdoor connecting to his balcony, disappearing into the night.

If only I didn't have to go back for Cal.