Equites : Book 4 of the Heku Series (86 page)

Kyle stepped closer to them, standing
behind the heku.

“
Lift the lid,” Chevalier
said, and watched the heku pull the lid off of a pile of steaming
pancakes, drenched in butter and syrup. “Kyle?”

Kyle bent down and smelled the
pancakes and then stood up quickly, “Belladonna.”

The heku dropped the tray and tried to
run, but Kyle had him in a choke hold.

“
Don’t kill me! I had to do
it,” the heku yelled, and put his hands up, pleadingly.

“
Who told you to do it?”
Kyle asked, tightening his grip.

“
I don’t know! He
threatened to kill me if I didn’t bring this to the
Lady.”

“
Who did?”

“
Just a heku, I don’t know
him, please don’t hurt me.”

“
Take him to Zohn,”
Chevalier growled.

Kyle nodded and pulled the heku
roughly from the room.

Mark and Quinn blurred into the room,
“We heard.”

“
Just walked right in
here,” Chevalier hissed.

Emily was watching a heku clean the
floor, “Damn, those smelled really good.”

Chevalier turned to her, “You would
eat pancakes?”

Emily nodded, and tried to pull his
hand off of her arm, “You’re holding too tightly.”

“
I’m not letting go,” he
said, and turned to Mark.

“
One stack of pancakes
coming up. I’ll make them myself,” Mark said, and
disappeared.

“
I say we re-staff the
entire palace,” Quinn said, sitting down in a chair by the bed. “We
let everyone go, absolutely everyone, and rehire from trusted
sources.”

“
We may have to if no one
can be trusted. This had to take a lot of time to orchestrate,”
Chevalier said, and then turned to Emily. “Stop it.”

Emily stopped pulling at his hand and
looked up at the I.V.

“
We can set a time limit,
had to have lived in Council City for at least… say… fifty years,”
Quinn suggested.

“
Can we find enough help
though?” Chevalier asked.

“
No, probably
not.”

“
Can we just let anyone go
from the palace that has worked here for less than fifty
years?”

Quinn nodded, “Yes, that’d leave us
less to bring in.”

Quinn blurred around the bed and
caught Emily’s other hand as she tried to get to the I.V.
bag.

“
Em, leave it in.”
Chevalier frowned.

Emily stared at Quinn’s hand on hers.
She couldn’t look away. It was hard to breathe with him this close,
and her heart threatened to pound out of her chest. He frowned and
let go of her arm, and then moved the I.V. bag higher.

“
I’m sorry,” Quinn said,
and stepped further away from her.

Emily leaned her head against
Chevalier’s chest while they waited silently for Mark. He came in
finally, covered in flour with syrup on his shirt.

“
Did the kitchen attack
you?” Chevalier chuckled.

“
Ha-ha, it’s not as easy as
it looks,” Mark said, and sat the pancakes down on the
table.

“
I changed my mind,” Emily
told them, looking at the pancakes.

Mark glanced at them, “They aren’t
that bad.”

“
Take out my I.V. and I’ll
eat,” Emily said. The smell of the pancakes made her stomach
growl.

Chevalier grinned, “No, eat first and
then we’ll take it out.”

“
I don’t trust you,” she
told them.

“
Yeah, well I don’t trust
you,” Chevalier said, amused.

“
Let me go.”

“
No, now calm
down.”

Emily looked at the plate of pancakes,
and how the syrup dripped from the side, and the butter melted
slowly on top. She turned and glared at Chevalier.

He cringed and then smiled, “Stop
trying to ash me and go eat.”

“
Let… me… go,” Emily said
through gritted teeth.

Chevalier glanced at Quinn and Mark
when they were called to the conference room. They called for the
doctor to take Chevalier’s place, and he placed his hand over
Emily’s I.V. so Chevalier could leave and the rest left for the
meeting.

“
Were you going to eat?”
the doctor asked, looking at the pancakes.

“
No, I feel dizzy,” Emily
said, and collapsed back onto the bed.

“
Emily?” the doctor asked,
and pulled her eyelids up to see her eyes. When he moved away from
her, he saw her hand holding the I.V. and he gasped.

“
Here, this is yours,”
Emily said, and handed it to him.

“
You… you… oh my God,” the
doctor said.

“
I forgot to grab…” Mark
froze and looked at the I.V. in the doctor’s hand, “Well that
didn’t take long.”

“
She tricked me!” the
doctor said, still shocked.

Mark laughed and grabbed a notebook
and then blurred down to the council chambers. He walked in, still
chuckling, “She got the I.V. out.”

“
Already? I was sure it
would take her at least 10 minutes,” Chevalier said, shaking his
head.

“
We called this meeting to
go over the palace staffing,” Kyle said sternly. Chevalier knew he
was taking this attack personally.

“
We’ve gone through
staffing, and if we get rid of anyone who’s been in Council City
for less than 50 years, we will need to find 12 in laundry, two
cooks, sixteen housekeepers, and almost twenty guards,” Quinn
said.

“
Damn, we really have that
many new ones?” Zohn asked.

“
Yes, hard to believe, but
we do,” Quinn said.

“
I’m mostly worried about
the guards,” Chevalier said. “They are our first defense, yet she’s
been attacked by them.”

“
Even without Emily in the
picture, we still can’t have disobedient guards on staff. We
discussed briefly, with Mark, appointing the Cavalry to the palace.
They are the elite… but we decided it is their place to keep the
city safe,” Quinn explained.

“
So what did you come up
with?” Chevalier asked.

“
I suggested we stick with
the 50-year rule, but then I think we need to set up a… what shall
we call it… trap?” Quinn asked Kyle.

“
Sort of. What we want to
do is hold a kind of interview with the guards and give them some
alone time with Emily, completely controlled of course,” Kyle said,
and glanced at Chevalier before continuing. “We can weed out the
mortal haters that way.”

Chevalier sighed, “That could turn
bad, quickly.”

“
We’d be very close, I
swear, and watching every move. My days in prison gave me the idea.
Every time someone visited, we were watched from one-way mirrors,”
Kyle said, grinning slightly.

“
And the rest of the
staff?” Zohn asked.

“
We think if the guards are
doing their job, the others won’t matter as much. As long as we
have veteran city dwellers and… now… a butler for Emily, the same
person delivering her meals after checking them, without her
knowing of course,” Kyle said.

Chevalier nodded.

“
What do we do about the
Valle?” Zohn asked the Council.

“
Right now, nothing. We
still have to handle Ingram and
Selhman,”
Quinn said. “Once they are taken care of, the Valle may back
off.”

The Council turned around
when the back door opened.

“
Em? What’s wrong?”
Chevalier asked when Emily entered. She eyed the Council
suspiciously and walked to Chevalier, still weak and unsteady on
her legs. She sat down on his lap and glanced again at the
Council.

Emily put her hand up and whispered
into Chevalier’s ear, “I’m hearing things in the room.”

Chevalier sighed, “Like
what?”

Emily shushed him and whispered, “I
was in the shower and I heard mad voices and a loud
crash.”

“
Where did the doctor
go?”

Emily shrugged, “He wasn’t there when
I got out.”

“
So you’re alone up
there?”

Emily nodded.

“
The doctor wouldn’t just
leave her alone,” Zohn said.

Emily turned and glared at
him.

“
Doctor?” Quinn called
out.

“
We’ll find him. I’m sure
he was coming right back,” Chevalier said. Emily leaned against his
chest.

“
Kyle, Mark, find him,”
Quinn said when the doctor didn’t come. Kyle hurdled the desk and
they left in a blur.

“
What did the mad voices
say?” Zohn asked Emily, ignoring how she looked at him.

“
It wasn’t in English,” she
said to Chevalier. He had to fight to keep from grinning. He held
her while they waited for the doctor.

Emily looked up when an
alarm sounded. The council members blurred from the room, except
for the Elders.

“
What’s that?” Emily
asked.

“
Palace has gone on
lockdown,” Maleth said, sighing.

“
What? Why?” Emily
asked.

“
We will know soon enough.
When everyone’s in general quarters, we will be notified,” Quinn
told her.

“
So you just sit
here?”

“
That is our job as Elders,
to wait for information so we can make a decision,” Maleth said,
smiling at Emily reassuringly.

Emily crawled out of
Chevalier’s lap and sat on the chair of a council member she didn’t
even know. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them
and waited while the Elders sat silently. She started to get
irritated at how patiently they sat, not moving, not making a
sound. She was dying to know what was going on.

After what seemed like an eternity to
Emily, Kyle and Zohn came back into the room.

“
The doctor is dead,” Zohn
said coldly.

Kyle glared at him and then to the
Elders, “We found him on the back stairway.”

“
Is he really dead?” Emily
asked, panicked.

“
You’re the last one that
saw him, what was he doing?” Zohn asked her.

Emily frowned, “Am I getting
interrogated?”

“
Just answer the question,”
Zohn said, his voice quiet, yet menacing.

Emily gasped and looked at
Kyle.

“
Zohn!” Kyle
snapped.

“
He’s sorry, Dear,” Maleth
said turning to Emily. “We’d just like to try to figure this out.
You said you were in the shower when you heard voices and a
crash?”

Emily nodded, still staring at
Zohn.

“
You said they were
speaking in another language?”

Emily nodded again, “Something novus…
guber something.”

“
What was happening before
your shower?” Maleth asked softly.

“
We were
arguing.”

“
You and the
doctor?”

“
Yes”

“
About what?”

Emily finally turned to
Maleth, “He was mad that I got my I.V. out, and that I could only
eat a few bites.”

“
Did he leave the
room?”

“
No, he said he would have,
but he was afraid to leave me alone.”

“
Ok”

“
So I told him I didn’t
need him and went in to take a shower.”

“
Suggest we evacuate the
Elders,” Kyle said.

Zohn nodded,
“Agreed.”

“
It’ll be easier for the
Council to come to a conclusion about this, and what happened to
Emily, if we don’t have to worry about the safety of the Elders,”
Kyle said.

Maleth nodded, “He is
right.”

“
We leave in 20 minutes,”
Quinn said.

The Elders stood up and turned to
Emily.

“
What?” she
asked.

“
That means you, too,”
Chevalier chuckled.

“
No, I’m not leaving. If
there’s an attack, I can protect the palace,” Emily
said.

“
No, you can’t, you haven’t
been able to ash,” Chevalier reminded her.

Emily turned to Zohn and
looked at him as he took a nervous step back.

“
Stop, Em, you’re coming,”
Chevalier laughed and took her arm. “Let’s go.”

“
I don’t want to leave,”
Emily said as he led her out of the room.

Emily’s protests didn’t
help, and she didn’t have the strength to fight back, so she packed
hesitantly and then followed Chevalier, Allen, and Alexis out to
the helicopters. Kyle lifted her into Equites 1, and they were soon
flying out over the palace with Quinn as the pilot. The city looked
dead. Nothing was moving, and the houses and stores were all shut
up tightly.

Emily slept most of the
way. She woke up only the few times they had to stop for fuel.
Soon, she saw the dark colors of the mountains turn to white as far
as she could see in any direction. Chevalier handed her a warm
parka, and she slipped it on while he wrapped Alexis up in a down
blanket. Quinn set the helicopter down on top of a large mansion
out in the rough wintery tundra.