Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) (8 page)

Filling his mind’s eye with her face, he burned every detail into his memory forever. The way she moved and spoke. Her accent, her grace and dignity. Her courage. He scalded them into his memory banks as quickly as he could process the details, terrified that he’d forget a single mannerism or word.

He filled his heart to overflowing with the love his mother had lavished on him across a shaky camera, a tinny speaker and time. He banished all anger and weakness and filled his soul with the strength that only comes from knowing you are loved. The certainty of who and what you are that only a mother can give to her child.

Standing, Joey felt new strength: strength he badly needed to endure. He was filled with a peace he never imagined was within his grasp. Her words and her presence, artificial it may have been, had filled a crater in his soul he hadn’t even known existed.

For the first time in his short life, Joseph Macleod knew exactly who he was and what he had to do. He was Michelle MacLeod’s son and he had a man to destroy.

Chapter 9

Alys

“There’s simply no trace of her, Aunt Fiona. I’m sorry. I followed her trail for hours, but it disappeared and reappeared several times between here and The Meadows. Wherever she was going, she didn’t want anyone following her.”

Alys looked down at her aunt’s tear-streaked face, her own eyes dry but puffy from lack of sleep.

Jennifer put an uncharacteristically warm arm around her sister and pulled the weeping woman in close to her. For that moment, Alys’s mother, the strong matriarch, the saviour, the preternaturally confident mother to a whole society, was simply a woman comforting her sister.

Pain was etched across their faces. Alys’s heart seemed to lurch sideways in her chest at the momentary exposure of tenderness in her mother and the vacuum her cousin’s apparent death had left in her chest. Each of them, though none said the words, knew that after three days alone in the city, the teenager they loved
 
would most likely be dead or one of The Ringed.

“I can keep looking, Aunt Fiona.” The meaning was implied:
I can find her, if she’s one of them, and silence her.

Fiona didn’t open her eyes, but pressed closer to her sister’s breast.

“No,” she blurted. “Leave her be.”

Alys slept fitfully, regaining little of the sleep she’d lost the previous few nights tracking her cousin. As the dawn began poking its fingers through the open slit of her tent, Alys sat and watched her breath fog on the morning air as she considered her options. Joey had been expecting her days before. He hadn’t come to The Gardens looking for her, which was odd, so God only knew where he was now. Fiona and Jennifer were still holed up in Jennifer’s tent, crying, processing.

It continued to surprise Alys how hard her mother had taken Steph’s disappearance and her death. She hadn’t considered before now that Jennifer cared that deeply for anyone. Locked in a decades-long cycle of strict discipline, her mother had kept their community safe – thriving even – but had shown little attention or need for her immediate family.

Alys scolded herself for imagining that her mother was simply a warrior and nothing else. Only recently, as they’d visited The Sick Kids, she’d chided Joseph for assuming the same of her. Still, death and danger were constant companions for her and the people of the dead city. Deaths were not rare and although Alys grieved for her cousin, she could already feel the acceptance for the girl’s departure growing in her heart. Yes it hurt, and yes, she would do anything to bring her little cousin back home, but death, even Steph’s, was simply part of their world that she’d become practiced in processing.

The realisation disturbed her and she spent the next few minutes conjuring up images of Steph as a child in an effort to squeeze a few tears. None came. Whatever grief she felt had already ebbed away. She did feel a surge of sadness at the realisation, but it was fleeting and meaningless.

She snapped herself back into the moment and left her tent to pay her respects to her family and to pick a fight.

Poking her head through her aunt’s doorway, Alys was relieved to find that Fiona was not present in the main part of the tent. Jennifer, eyes red and puffy, moved around the tent’s living area, mechanically picking up items and tidying up. Her mind was clearly elsewhere.

Alys watched her mother for a few seconds; really watched her. A few seconds were all she needed. The dip of Jennifer’s shoulder. The length and placing of her sideways step. The bunching and flexing of muscles as Jennifer moved smoothly across the room. Every breath or movement or minor tic of a muscle fed a stream of information to Alys.

Reading these signs was a second language to Alys and something she did without consciously realising it, most of the time. Here, at this moment, she utilised all of her senses and her gift for interpreting physicality to fully decide on her course of action. She mechanically scanned her mother, the person she knew best in the world, mentally ticking boxes, assessing the effects of age, grief, lack of sleep.

Something had shifted in Jennifer’s physicality. A half-step of speed lost. An ounce or two of strength gone from those deadly legs.
 
Maybe tendons and bones finally succumbing to the effects of decades of brutal use. Her mother was in terrific shape for her age: not many people in their fifties had Jennifer’s flexibility, speed or strength. But time and hardship takes a toll on everyone. Even her.

A humourless smile tugged at the corner of Alys’s mouth. Lips parting, she practically growled through gritted teeth.

“Practice ring. Now.”

Jennifer whipped around to face her daughter, eyebrows furrowed. She was angry at her daughter’s disrespect but something else flashed in the stare she stabbed at Alys.

Excitement?

Jennifer sent bolts of authority from her eyes.

“Go away, Alys.”

Alys allowed her tight grin to spread across her face.

“Want some time to limber up?” Alys asked.

Turning her back on her furious mother, Alys strode softly, swiftly, to the training ring in the centre of the main lawn of The Gardens. She did not look back to see if her mother followed.

Reaching the sandy pit, Alys continued to keep her back to Fiona’s tent and stood staring up at the castle’s esplanade. A vivid flash of memory lit through her. A scene of herself watching the boy with the bow, watching Joey, and dreaming of leaving The Gardens and being as free, carefree, as the boy seemed from her vantage point.

She blinked hard, hoping the small motion would chase the memory away. Now wasn’t the time. Switching her eyes to the blooded sandy surface at her feet, she allowed a few memories of fighting her mother in this very ring to surface and cause a surge of renewed determination through her muscles, readying them.

The wind was light, but persistent and cutting cold. An Edinburgh wind.

It did not mask the sound of her mother’s approach. Jennifer’s steps were a fraction heavier than usual. She was angry and she was tired, but so far she had kept her composure. Arrogance did that to people. She was unhappy with her daughter’s apparent disrespect, but was simply not concerned about engaging with her in the ring.

For Jennifer it was another opportunity to re-establish her dominance and push her daughter further along her combat education.

As they exchanged some half-hearted greetings, a group of women, mostly Rangers and kids in Jennifer’s combat programme, began to gather.

As Alys turned to face her mother, the older woman cocked an eyebrow.

“What’s this about, Alys?”

The question took Alys aback somewhat. It wasn’t her mother’s usual style at all to wonder about motives. Shaking off the moment of doubt, Alys steeled herself once again and re-entered the fighter’s zone: the cool, calm certainty of mind before and during a fight that allowed the sequences to flow and the fear to fuel rather than burn.

“I’m going to kick your ass, Jennifer. And then you’re going to tell me why you forced the men out of here. After that, we’ll discuss my plans for The Gardens.”

Jennifer’s eyebrows rose and the corners of her mouth turned down.

“Took you long enough.” The words were delivered coldly. She was mocking Alys.

Alys was unaffected.

“Aye. I got talking to Uncle James recently.”

Alys watched her mother’s expression change to one of open-mouthed shock.

“We decided that it was time for you to tell me the truth,” Alys said.

Jennifer’s right cheek twitched as she struggled to control her temper. She was simply too experienced to allow her anger to grow and affect her fighting calm, but it was apparent to Alys that her mother was badly shaken at the mention of James.

“So, you beat me,” Jennifer smirked at the notion, “and I agree to tell you anything you ask. That right?”

Alys gave a sharp nod.

“What’s in it for me?”

Alys hid a smile. She knew that she had her.

“Well, Jennifer, you get to put me in my place and show everyone here you’re still the big woman. I’ll also need you to assist me in organising a defence strategy. Uncle James told me Somna will be heading this way in the spring.”

Jennifer had moved from shocked anger to dismissive disdain at Alys’s presumption.

“Not much left to discuss then, is there?” Jennifer spat, half an instant before sprinting at her daughter.

In the Zone

I watch for a full second, which lasts an eternity, as the woman who brought me into the world charges, a streak of shadow come to life, across the bloodied fighting ring towards me. Any shock I might feel at my mother launching a vicious jumping kick at my upper chest is batted away by cold calculation and by the memory of hundreds of moments when we’ve done this dance before. She’s looking to end this quickly. It will, but not in the way she wants it to.

She doesn’t understand. It’s been eighteen months since we last sparred. She can’t understand.

Her movement, her kick, her speed and her strength, once so unfathomable, so impossible to me, have lost a faint sliver of power. Not much, but just enough.

Mother hasn’t fought one of the infected in years, much less a group of them. I can’t recall the last time she ventured outside the fences of our home. She never learned from fighting in a team, and if she did, back in the early days, she’s forgotten how it feels to trust and to learn from a fighting partner.

She’s vicious and unchallenged and completely sure of her vast experience and flawless technique, but she hasn’t placed herself in a real-world combat situation in far too long. This has cost her her edge. She’s too accustomed to fighting people less skilled than herself. Too arrogant.

Too slow…

She hasn’t fought someone like me in a decade.

 
My own skills have been honed in countless battles with the living and the dead. My speed, technique, power and accuracy have all been enhanced with every battle as her own have faded. On my own, with Joey, against hordes, madmen, strong men.

All I do is fight. I’m exactly what she intended for me to be and more.

I try really, really hard not to enjoy myself too much.

Her kick is deadly. Aimed at my sternum, it’s intended to knock the wind and the fight from me. To put me on my back and end the fight in a single second. I watch her come to me and drop my left shoulder a tenth of a second before the sole of her boot connects. My left hand grips her leg like iron and I pull hard on it, using and increasing her momentum. I flash my right hand out and stab an open hand chop she taught me when I was eight years old into her throat.

All one hundred and fifty pounds of my mother crash to the sand as I turn my back on her one last time and leave the ring.

“When you get your breath back, I’ll be waiting in your tent.”

I manage to stop myself from skipping or running as I pad calmly across the grass to Jennifer’s tent.