The Inquisitor's Mark (18 page)

JAX GAVE EVANGELINE
a moment to marvel at the brownie tunnel. She ran her hands along the silky, translucent walls and peered out at the park. Tegan might've still been standing where they left her, but if she was, they couldn't see her. “It's another timeline?” Evangeline asked.

“It's
outside of time
, according to my cousin Dorian.” Jax took Evangeline's hand. “We need to move together, or we might get separated.”

“How does it work?”

“I wasn't totally clear on it before, and I'm even less sure now. The past two days are pretty fuzzy.” Jax remembered hurrying through the tunnel on the night he discovered it, wanting to return to the Ambrose apartment before anyone noticed his absence. He hadn't
asked
to return eight minutes after he left. He just wanted to avoid being caught.

“They said Riley would be unconscious for hours,” Jax recalled, “and they couldn't question him until he woke up. We can't carry him, so we've got to focus on arriving after he can walk, but before the Dulacs get to him.” He led Evangeline out of the park and onto Central Park West. He was so busy concentrating—
Get us to a time when we can help Riley—
he only belatedly noticed how Evangeline's fingers tightened convulsively around his.

He looked back. She was chewing on her bottom lip and blinking back tears. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled. He'd gotten Riley shot up with tranquilizers. What if they'd been bullets instead?

“You were under the influence of magic. I don't blame you for what happened.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand.

“
He
will, though,” Jax said glumly. “He's not going to forgive me for this.” Betraying Riley felt like a nightmare, except Jax wasn't going to wake up and realize it hadn't really happened. This
had
happened.

“Don't be silly.” Evangeline squeezed Jax's hand again, this time to comfort him. “Why do you think he insisted on waiting for you at the dog statue, even though A.J. begged him to let the Donovans check you out first? Jax, you said you didn't have a brother, but you
do
, in a way.”

At first Jax didn't know what she meant. Then he remembered what he'd said to her under the Dulac manipulation.
If I had a sister—or a brother—nothing would stop me
from going to them.
And here he was, leading his liege lady into their enemy's stronghold to rescue Riley.

Central Park West was eerily empty of all the cars that Jax had seen stuck there when he crossed this street earlier on Grunsday. Jax started to point out this oddity of the brownie tunnel to Evangeline—and then froze.

Someone was walking through the tunnel toward them from the direction of the park. “C'mon!” Jax yanked Evangeline forward.

She glanced backward. “Who's that?”

“A Dulac vassal. Maybe he hasn't seen us.” That was wishful thinking. If they could see him, he could see them. Jax started running. But the Dulac scientist, the Transitioner with the black ponytail and the Kin-blue eyes, quickened his pace, catching up with them so quickly, Jax had to stop and put himself between the guy and Evangeline.

The man spoke directly to Evangeline. “You must be Jax's liege, the sister of Adelina Emrys. How lucky for both of us that I encountered you here.” He raised his hand to show his tattoo. “But perhaps it's not luck. It's fate. Events are being manipulated by a force greater than any of us.”

“I don't recognize your mark,” said Evangeline, “but I see your family is branched off from the Mordred line. That doesn't commend you to me.” Her voice had taken on the haughty tone she used with adversaries, but her hand was pumping Jax's urgently, telegraphing a
message:
danger, danger, danger
.

“My name is Morder, and I'm no enemy of yours.”

“That's a lie,” Jax said. “He's one of the people holding your sister prisoner.”

Morder shook his head. “I'm the one who gave Adelina's blood access to the brownie tunnels so I could help her escape. You would not be able to pass through here otherwise.”

“Don't believe him!” Jax exclaimed. “He's a Dulac vassal.”

“There are ways around a loyalty oath, if you know the right spells,” Morder countered.

“They must be dark spells,” Evangeline said with a frown, taking a step backward. “Loyalty oaths don't break easily.”

“Dark and light is a matter of perspective.” He smiled, and Jax thought his smile was as creepy as his ponytail. “You are very young,” he said to Evangeline, “and probably not trained to reach your full potential. Come with me. I'm on my way to rescue your sister.”

“You're rescuing her out of the goodness of your heart?” That seemed unlikely. Jax reached for his honor blade. “What are you planning to do with her?”

“No need for your magic, Jax,” Morder said. “I'll speak freely. I've risked much, defying my liege lady, because I oppose her plan to kill the Emrys heirs and destroy the eighth day and the entire Kin race.” Casually, Morder
reached inside the pocket of his lab coat to remove a pouch as he addressed Evangeline. “Your sister provided me with the means to contact people invested in your family's cause. I've just come from meeting with them, and they are eagerly awaiting my return with Adelina. They will be even more pleased to find themselves reunited with
both
Emrys heirs.”

“
Reunited?
You must be talking about the conspirators in my father's plan to overturn the Eighth-Day Spell,” Evangeline said coolly. “I have no interest in meeting them and no interest in their plot.”

“Don't be foolish.” Morder slipped his fingers into the pouch and withdrew a pinch of powder. “The spell that binds the Kin in the eighth day
must
be properly countermanded before Ursula destroys the timeline. Our people are too vulnerable, with only the lives of two Emrys heirs standing between us and annihilation.”

“
Our
people?” Evangeline repeated. “You may have some Kin blood in you, but you're a Transitioner. If you think the Llyrs or the Arawens would ever consider you their equal—”

Jax's eyes were on Morder's hands and the pouch of powder, and he remembered the guard lying unconscious in the park by the tunnel entrance. “Watch out! He's got a sleep spell.” Jax pushed Evangeline away and braced himself to block Morder from reaching her. Jax didn't know if the guy was a double agent or a triple agent, but
he was bad news all around.

Dr. Morder raised his hand and started muttering a spell, only to be interrupted by a high-pitched shriek—then a chorus of shrieks. Morder looked over his shoulder. A brown mass surged toward them like an ocean wave breaking on the shore. Seconds later, a herd of brownies filled the tunnel from side to side.

Evangeline clutched Jax in alarm, but the brownies swarmed around them and kept going. Morder wasn't so lucky. Squirrel-sized brownies clambered up his pants legs, clung to his arms, and leaped onto his shoulders. He batted them away, but they bit him with their sharp teeth and yanked on his ponytail with their nimble little fingers.

Jax backed up. The brownies were attacking Morder, but they didn't touch Jax and Evangeline except to brush past on their way to the Dulac building.
Why are they going
there
?

One brownie with a white-tufted head leaped out of the seething mass and landed on Jax's shoulder. Evangeline screamed, but Jax reared back his head to stare at it. This was the same brownie Jax had let out of the cage, the big one who'd shaken the bars and looked at him expectantly. Now it grabbed Jax's shirt in its little fist and stuck its flat face into his, chattering in agitation.

“What is it?” The swarm of brownies was stampeding toward a place they ought to avoid. Jax peered at their point of origin just as a huge mass shimmered at
the extreme end of the tunnel. Something big was coming behind the brownies—so big the tunnel had to stretch to accommodate it. If Jax didn't know better, he'd say it looked like a . . .

“The brownies are running from something!” Evangeline exclaimed.

But at that moment, the brownies all stopped, stood up on their hind legs, looked back, and let out a high-pitched screech in unison. The dark shape at the end of the tunnel barreled forward as if drawn by the noise, and the brownies started running again.

“No!” gasped Jax. “They're
leading
something. Oh crap!” As much as Jax disliked animal experimentation, he bet the animals hated it more.

It was payback time, and the Dulacs were in for a nasty surprise.

Morder seemed to realize what was going on at the same moment. With a last swipe at the brownies clinging to him, he turned ninety degrees, lunged forward, and vanished.

Jax felt for an exit where Morder had disappeared, and there wasn't one.
Dang! How'd he do that?
Was this the “hyperspeed” Dorian and Billy had been yammering about? Whatever it was, Morder obviously knew how to use this tunnel better than Jax did. With no other choice, Jax grabbed Evangeline's hand and dragged her toward the building. The brownie on his shoulder chattered
unhappily, ears flat against its head. It gestured at the walls of the tunnel. “Yeah, well I don't know how to do what he did,” Jax yelled. “And besides, my friends are inside!”

The tunnel shuddered and convulsed. Jax stumbled and went down on one knee. He glanced over his shoulder—and someone outside the tunnel caught his eye.

A girl stood among the trees on the sidewalk in front of Central Park.

Jax shouldn't have been able to see anyone outside the tunnel, but there she was. Dark hair whipped around her face, obscuring her features. She wore something like a short white dress, her legs bare, and when she raised her hands to the air, crows circled her head.
Crows?

“Do you see that?” he yelled at Evangeline.
Riley, you were wrong . . .

Evangeline hauled him to his feet. “Yes, I see it! Come on!” But her eyes were on the terrible gift the brownies were bringing to the Dulacs. Jax grabbed Evangeline's hand and dashed through the outside wall of the apartment building with her in tow.

Forget the Morrigan, if that's what she was.

Who needed a girl with crows to foretell destruction and chaos when a dragon was rampaging toward them?

THE TUNNEL WOUND ITS
way through the basement, twisting and turning. Jax and Evangeline struggled to keep pace with the brownies, running as best they could on the spongy floor and stumbling against the walls when they couldn't turn fast enough. Finally, they pushed through the hole into the Dulacs' laboratory—and back into real time.
What
time, Jax had no idea. He'd completely lost track. Even discounting his internal confusion, the tunnels were capable of depositing them anywhere: morning, afternoon, or evening. He only knew it was still Grunsday because Evangeline didn't vanish.

The white-headed brownie jumped off Jax's shoulder, scurried through the lab, and popped through the wall on the other side. Jax took the more conventional route, opened the lab door, and looked outside.

The hallway teemed with brownies. Several yards to the right, Ursula and Sloane Dulac were besieged, just as
Morder had been. Ursula picked the creatures off her body by the scruffs of their furry necks and flung them against the cinderblock walls, while Sloane flailed her arms over her head, squealing like any girl with rodents in her hair. Farther down the corridor Jax saw Dorian, also under attack, and Billy, who wasn't, but who was trying to beat them off Dorian.

And Riley was wrestling Uncle Finn in a brownie-free patch of floor for control of a gun.

“Riley!” Evangeline cried as soon as she saw him. That was a mistake. At the sound of her voice, Riley looked up, and Uncle Finn used the distraction to kick Riley backward and scramble to his feet with the gun in hand.

But as soon as he was free of Riley, the brownies swarmed him. One bit his hand, and he dropped the weapon. The white-headed brownie snatched up the gun and scampered away.

The sound of falling bricks and breaking glass came from the lab. Jax glanced back. The wall that used to contain the brownie hole was now a gaping hole into the furnace room. He scanned the corridor full of people he cared about—and some he didn't—and screamed at them all. “Run! Everybody run!” He pulled Evangeline down the hall to the left.

The brownies lifted their heads and screeched in unison, just like they had before. The monster that had followed them through the tunnel turned toward the
sound. Then the brownies all poured through a wall like a river, vanishing in seconds.

Riley must've spotted what was coming, because he started cursing and ran toward Jax and Evangeline, clearing the lab entrance just in time. He grabbed one of them in each hand without breaking pace. The three of them rounded the nearest corner together, then skidded to a stop and looked back from a safe vantage point. Uncle Finn and the others—Billy, Dorian, and the Dulac women—hadn't reacted quickly enough to get past the door of the laboratory and were now trapped on the dead-end side of the corridor, their escape route cut off by the emerging creature.

The head ventured out first—a head nearly as big as Jax's whole body—breaching the doorway and surveying the corridor on the end of a sinuous neck. Sloane screamed, and just like the high-pitched shriek of the brownies, the sound seemed to attract the creature. When its body didn't fit through the door, it reared back and battered its way through.

“What
is
that?” Riley gasped.

“I think it's a dragon,” Jax whispered.

“It's a wyvern,” Evangeline said.

“They're extinct!” protested Riley.

“Not to mention make-believe,” Jax added.

“You,” Riley said gruffly, hauling Jax closer by a handful of shirt. “You sound like Jax, but you're not really him.
Evangeline, they've turned him.”

“No! I'm fixed,” Jax protested. “Tegan knew a guy with a talent—”

He was interrupted by a crash. The creature unfurled a pair of wings, wiping out a section of the wall between the lab and the corridor. Its tail, barbed on the end and curled like a scorpion's, cracked a hole in the warding symbol painted at the back of the lab.

Riley looked Jax directly in the eyes. “Whatever they've done to you, you're still bound by your oath. Get Evangeline out of here before that thing knocks out a load-bearing wall and buries us all.” He let go of Jax and drew the honor blade Evangeline wore at her side. “Let me borrow this back. They took mine.”

Jax felt the sting of Riley using the voice of command on him, but he grabbed Evangeline's arm obediently and started tugging her down the corridor. “What about Billy?”

“I'm going for him now.” Riley ran back the way they'd come.

“Wait!” Evangeline cried. “You don't even know what you're up against!”

Jax pulled on Evangeline. “C'mon. There's stairs this way.”

Evangeline shook off his grip. “Riley can't fight a wyvern alone, and what about my sister and Thomas? I'm not leaving any of our people behind.”

Jax took her arm again, compelled to make her leave. “Riley ordered me.”

Evangeline wrapped her fingers around the tattoo on his left wrist. “And I'm your liege. I'm countermanding him.”

The feeling of compulsion left him, like water draining from a sink.
Wow, does Riley know she can do that?

“I'm going to help Riley.” Evangeline marched back around the corner. She muttered a spell under her breath and clenched her fists. Jax put a hand on his honor blade and followed her. She was his liege, and besides, she was right. He didn't want to leave Riley to fight a monster alone in the lair of his mortal enemies. Taking a deep breath, Jax forced himself to get a good look at what they were facing.

The wyvern had the head of a giant lizard, with a long snout and eyes on the sides of its head. A flexible neck thickened into a body mounted on two powerful legs, like a rooster on steroids. Wings too short for flying sprouted above its legs, and leathery scales armored all of its body except the head, which was covered in sleek, gray feathers. It had shaken loose from the rubble of the laboratory wall and was orienting itself in its new environment, cocking its head to survey the five tasty morsels bottled up in a dead-end corridor.

Jax's dagger was no weapon for this kind of monster. But what else could he use? Cinderblock fragments? This place was sadly lacking in wyvern-fighting materials. It
seemed that Riley reached the same conclusion, because he sheathed his blade and darted into the ruined lab.

Meanwhile, trapped on the other side of the beast, Uncle Finn opened a door and waved Sloane and Ursula inside. “Stay in here until I tell you to come out,” he said. Then he called back over his shoulder, “Boys, use that door behind you.”

The wyvern hunkered down, its head low and its tail arching over its body. It made a keening sound, and automatically Jax looked up. Billy, too, stopped just inside the doorway of a room at the end of the corridor and turned to stare, while Dorian stood transfixed in front of the creature, his face blank.

“Don't look at its eyes!” Evangeline shouted, turning her face away. “It has magic! Don't let it trick you into looking at it!”

The warning came too late for Dorian, who stared into the wyvern's eye, unblinking.

“Dorian!” Jax yelled. “Move!”

Evangeline threw out one of her hands, splaying her fingers wide, but the wyvern scuttled forward, and her spell missed. A ball of blue fire fizzled uselessly against a cinderblock wall.

The wyvern's tail darted over its own head and toward the helpless boy.

Uncle Finn barreled into his son, throwing him out of the way. The barbed tail of the beast slashed across
Uncle Finn's forearm, knocking him to the floor before curling upward for a second strike. At that moment, a ball of fire from Evangeline's other hand nailed the wyvern's head. The creature roared in anger, its tail uncurving as it tried to shift its body in the narrow corridor to face a new enemy.

Riley emerged from the wreckage of the lab, gripping a cage in his left hand and a long rod in his right. “I told you to get her out of here!” he yelled at Jax.

“We're not leaving you!” Jax hollered back.

At the end of the corridor, Dorian shook his head dazedly while Billy pulled him to his feet. Uncle Finn lay on the floor, writhing in pain and gripping his torn arm.

“Avoid its eyes!” Evangeline called to Riley. “It'll call to you and hypnotize you. And I think the tail is poisonous!”

“Of course it is,” grumbled Riley, holding the cage up like a shield. “Why not?” As the wyvern turned, he whipped the rod around, knocking the tail away. The end of the rod crackled, sparking with electricity, but it bounced off the armored creature harmlessly.

The thing Riley held was a cattle prod. Jax wondered why there'd been a cattle prod in the lab, and then it dawned on him. No wonder the brownies were
ticked
.

The wyvern continued its slow turn, no longer having the space or momentum to knock walls out of its way. It let loose its keening call again. Jax couldn't help looking
up in response, but the wyvern wasn't aiming its predator eye at him. It was after Riley, who struggled to keep his face averted.

This is useless,
Jax thought. They couldn't look directly at its head, and every other part of it was armored with scales. Uncle Finn was down. Sloane and Ursula were hiding, and what could they do anyway? Change its memory? Evangeline's fireballs and Riley's cattle prod only annoyed it. Jax could run from it if he wanted to—and so could Riley and Evangeline—
if
they were willing to abandon Billy and Dorian.

What can
I
do?

“Keys!” he shouted. “Billy, does Uncle Finn have keys on him?”

“I have keys!” Billy yelled back.

A set of keys skidded across the cement floor, between the wyvern's legs, and smack into the cinderblock rubble. Jax snatched them up and ran away from the monster.

“Find Thomas and Addie and get them out of here!” Evangeline shouted after him.

But that wasn't Jax's plan at all. He had somebody else in mind.

Somebody big and strong and deadly—and immune to magic.