Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (52 page)

“They’ll be back,” Allie said. “They will.”

Sarah’s eyes swam. Seeing her smile was like watching the end of a long winter. “Men always come crawling back.”

Lucian crouched amidst ferns, his breath caught in his throat. The stunted pistol in his hands felt flimsy, liable to snap if he manhandled it too much, but it was better than nothing. The others would have to make do with the knives.

It felt wrong, holding back like this while the others crept forward from the cliff edge toward the tent. The canvas structure was much larger than it had looked from below; more of a tepee, at least twenty feet across and ten feet high.

His fingers burned with inaction, and the muscles in his legs felt wound up tight like springs. He had always been in the thick of things, been the first to jump. Sticking out back and waiting for somebody else to do all the hard work ate at him by the second.

But that was the way it had to be. If they were lucky they would have one shot from the pistol. They had to make it count.

He didn’t trust the others to sink the round into its target. He didn’t care how tough they were or what hellholes they were from. There were too many lives hanging on whether the little metal ball in the pistol’s chamber found its mark. He didn’t trust anybody to do it but himself.

The sun had risen some time ago, but there was still plenty of cover thrown down by the gnarled trees lining the cliff. Zigzagging between slate and mottled heather and twisted shadows, the dozen hulking men crept toward the canvas tent like leopards slinking closer to a grazing gazelle. They were ten metres away, then eight, then seven …

Max’s last words to him reverberated in his head. “You wait until we’re in and I give the signal, you hear? And don’t give me that look. Stubborn as bloody anything, you are. Don’t make me come back out here and kick your arse.”

Lucian grunted—what passed for a peel of laughter in his book. His jaw ached from the tension. He made a conscious effort to keep breathing; every scrap of concentration was going to count. As soon as they were inside and the guards were down, he would have to move fast. He picked out his route to the tent’s entrance over and over, tracing every inch, imagining the precise movement of each step. There was no room for failure.

Four metres, three …

Max turned, low to the ground, and gave Lucian a last nod.

Lucian nodded back, though he knew there was something wrong. But they all knew something was wrong. They had felt it since they had first slunk away from the forge. It had all been too easy.

But there was nothing they could do about that. A case of the willies was no excuse for losing your bottle.

He could see the acceptance in the glint of Max’s eyes. Whatever was about to happen was beyond their control.

One metre …

Lucian’s finger touched the trigger, and he braced to spring forward.

The rest happened in the space of three seconds. Max pulled back the canvas flap, revealing the orange glow of a crackling fire inside, and the others spilled inside silently, blades glinting. Max followed after, and the flap fell back behind him. Flickering shadows were thrown against the tent walls, caricature silhouettes of odd proportions and exaggerated gestures: men with sickle-like machetes raised over their heads, bearing down on their victim; tussling brutes tearing at one another’s faces; torsos impaled and limbs disfigured in real time.

The rumble in Lucian’s ears was deafening. He listened for the tiniest sign, the one that would release him, the slightest let-up in the shuffling of feet and sloughing of clothing that would mean the tables had turned. He waited as long as he dared, then launched himself from the thicket. Every footfall made its mark, every inch of him coordinated for balance. His last reserves of strength all went into that last dash.

It went by in a flash and he tucked up into a ball in mid-air, rolling through the canvas flap and into the midst of a silent bloody brawl. A blurred vision of torn flesh, faces twisted into snarls of fury and pain, and undulating flames flashed before his eyes. Then he was standing again with the pistol raised, at the ready.

He’s here!
The thought rang like a gong through Lucian’s mind.

Sitting right in front of him was a figure draped in a long cloak with a balaclava around his face. Lucian had seen the very same man back at New Canterbury the night Rayford Hubble had been killed, when he and Norman had chased the culprits into the woods to exact revenge. He had seen the man by the firelight then, but it had been Norman who had gotten close, trying like a fool to make peace.

Lucian had been covering him from the treeline. He had been the one to put a bullet in one of the slimy bastards. He had never stared the masked man in the face.

If he had, he would have known him immediately. He would have recognised him just as he recognised him now. James Chadwick’s emerald eyes glowered behind the layers of cloth. Sat on a stool with one leg crossed over the other and a book in hand, as though the riot erupting around him were distant and immaterial, he had been staring at Lucian even as he had first entered the tent, as though he had been waiting for him.

It’s true. God, it’s really true. He’s here.

In the split second he had to react, while aiming the pistol between myriad struggling shadows, Lucian realised that while he had been scheming and plotting all this time—while he had assumed ever since Max had first walked by his side that the one behind all this really had been his brother—he had never truly accepted that James could still be alive.

You’re dead,
he thought.
I saw you die.

Max’s voice bellowed from the other side of the world, made sonorous and inhuman by the slowness of time’s passing. “LUCIAN, NOW!”

Those emerald eyes flickered to the pistol, then up at him. James didn’t speak a word, but the meaning was clear.
Well?

Lucian gritted his teeth and steeled himself. But those eyes had a hold on him; it was as though they gripped his fingers and bent them back away from the trigger. Lucian’s hand shook violently and he willed his finger to squeeze—

Damn it, damn it!

“LUCIAN, KILL HIM!”

Do it or they’ll die. Alex, Norman, Agatha, all of them.

But he’s your brother
, another voice whispered insidiously.

I have to!

Alex lied once. He could have lied again. It could all have been a lie.

“LUCIAAAN!”

Lucian bellowed with the fury of a stabbed bull. He felt all the hurt and pain from all his days would pour out through his mouth. Something in his throat tore. All the while the pistol trembled.

Then, with a gasp and a screech of rage, he dropped it. The pistol clattered to the ground, and all the fight drained out of him. He collapsed on his haunches in front of James’s stool and looked up at him.

He closed his eyes, sighed, and hung his head. “Damn it,” he muttered.

The battle inside the tent came to an abrupt end. The hulking brutes he had dragged up here, though they still had the sudden and dangerous strength of kicking mules, couldn’t defy physics; none of them had eaten anything more than thin gruel for days, and after the long walk north and forging by the fires, their energy levels were depleted. Under the prolonged struggle in the tent, their captors had gained the upper hand fast.

They hadn’t realised how weak they were, how tired and uncoordinated. The element of surprise hadn’t been enough. The floor of the tent was painted with blood. They had fought to the last breath and taken at least four men screaming with them to the floor, but those who remained flagged even in the few scant moments Lucian sat crouched on the ground.

Then it was all over: the tent flap was cast wide and at least a dozen more men piled in. The light filtering through the tent walls was cut off by yet more shadows surrounding them on all sides. Only the weak embers of the dying fire illuminated the last-ditch struggle. All the while Lucian squatted immobile on the ground in front of James, and James in turn kept his eyes fixed on him, unmoving, unspeaking.

The men were screaming now, roaring in wordless protest at their fate, even as they were eviscerated and dismembered with brutal, hacking blows, tackled and strangled and wrestled to the ground, covered in streams of hot vital blood. Only Max and two others stood. The beast of a man had three dirt-ridden men hanging from his neck and shoulders like parasites, beating and pulling at him—yet still he swung to and fro, knocking back yet more ragged figures, staggering and weak, but vicious to the last. He fought with such vehemence that his attackers couldn’t land a blow. He was flagging fast, but for now he was holding them off.

Lucian might have been able to help him if he had the strength to stand. But all will, all control, had abandoned him.

He finally roused when Jason appeared at the tent’s entrance. He stood there for a mere moment, an apparition that moved between places without traversing the distance between—he was that fast. Lucian only had time to register the joyful malice in his glittering eyes, then he vanished from the flap. He reached Max before Lucian could yell a warning.

Max stopped turning and yelling at once. He blinked rapidly and his face paled. Frank, childish surprise crossed his face as he looked down at the foot-long, curved knife embedded in his thorax. Crimson spurted down his shirt front as he looked up into Jason’s eyes.

The other two men had fallen, and in the monster’s presence, everyone had frozen and grown silent. For a moment the only sound was a gurgle deep in Max’s throat.

“I remember you,” Jason whispered to his victim. He smiled, a hyena’s bloodthirsty grin. A bandage plastered over his cheek stretched taut—

So the fucker is mortal, Lucian thought distantly.

—and he leaned in close to Max’s ear. “I remember sticking your mate just like this.” He twisted the knife with a brutal jerk, and blood spurted from Max’s lips. “Say hi to him for me.”

Max grunted a final time, the tendons on his neck standing out as he lost his battle with gravity. Then his knees buckled and he slammed to the ground. His eyes were glassy and dead before he hit the floor, completing a carpet of gristle and torn flesh surrounding Lucian and James.

Jason sighed and flexed, his face vested with gratification that looked all too sexual. He wiped a trickle of blood running from his bandaged cheek and sucked it off his fingers, looking Lucian square in the eye. He winked.

He was alone.

Far away, an agonised cry rang out from the forging fires as some poor wretch was whipped. All around him the ragged men and women who had vanquished his motley crew stood staring down at him, their eyes flitting between him and James.

At first he thought they were silently begging permission to finish him. But then his peripheral vision began to gather the full meaning of those stares: they seemed awed.

“This is him?” Jason said finally. He snorted. “This one?”

James nodded. The balaclava over his face remained firmly in place, but any doubt that it was really him had long since faded. His eyes, though, they were different.

The very sight of them made Lucian’s heart skip a beat. When they had been kids, those eyes had been soft as pudding. Now they could have belonged to a psychopath.

Jesus. Jesus.

Jason sauntered around behind James, wiping Max’s blood from his curved knife on the seat of his trousers. The last spitting embers of the fire threw his matted hair and blackish-brown skin into harsh relief. He looked Lucian up and down as though appraising a disappointing mare at an auction. “Short-arse McGee, here?”

Lucian bared his gritted teeth at him. “Let’s say we go outside and see if you can stick me with that thing before I cut you in half. We’ll see who ends up shorter.”

A muscle jumped in Jason’s jaw as he smiled. He looked energised rather than insulted. Lucian couldn’t help but frown; how did you browbeat a man who treated death threats like a dog playing fetch?

James flicked his head to the side, and Jason in turn waved his hand lazily at the others. The pathetic creatures all around them grunted and muttered, but none of them spoke up as Jason’s eyes widened the slightest degree. They filed out hurriedly, tramping over the corpses of those who had been slaughtered, rolling the bodies like sacks of meat and kicking them out into the forest.

Then it was the three of them: Lucian, Jason, and James.

It took Lucian several attempts to say, “How? How are you here?”

James leaned forward. He was still holding the book in his hand. Now he closed it with great care, and Lucian groaned aloud. The book was green, inset with golf leaf.
Alice in Wonderland
.

Alexander had given that to James when they had just been kids. He would have known it anywhere.

“He lied,” James said.

Lucian flinched at the sound of his voice. It was too real, a glimmer of a past he’d rather have forgotten—hell, he had tried to forget, stamped it down into the dark corners of his mind.

Lucian opened his mouth, and his dry tongue rasped against his mouth like sandpaper. “Alex?”