Beta (34 page)
Deirdre Tombs was dead.
Stark stood over her while his body finished rearranging into its human form. The asylum was quiet now that the unseelie assault had ended. All he could hear was the dripping of melting ice and the muffled snapping of bone.
Metal sighed against metal as Vidya stood. She glared at the wall where the portal had been, empty hands hanging at her sides. There was nothing more pathetic than a valkyrie who had failed.
Vidya wasn’t strong enough to take the unseelie queen. Neither was Stark.
He needed to retreat, seek shelter with allies, and make a new plan.
But Tombs was staring blankly at the ceiling as her body cooled, blood caked to her destroyed nose, and he didn’t want to leave the asylum. Not yet.
Stark scooped Tombs off of the floor. Her chest, stomach, and legs were drenched in her own blood. The smell of copper filled the air, sickeningly strong.
Just in case, he wrenched the silver dagger out of her body and let it clatter to the floor.
Stark held her, waiting to see if she would respond.
No healing fever came.
“Damn,” he said.
He still didn’t know why he had kissed her on the airplane that day. Rescuing her had been part of the plan. Kissing her hadn’t. He’d thought about it a dozen times before that—every time she fell asleep in his room, and many of the times she defied him—but he’d never planned to act on those fleeting temptations. Tombs was beautiful, irritatingly so, but he had never been stupid enough to succumb to the temptations of a woman. None but Rhiannon.
It was her beauty that made her dangerous. It was her strength. He’d admired Tombs’s defiance, recognizing in her many of the qualities that had made him fall in love with Rhiannon.
In a way, Stark supposed that he’d kissed Tombs because he missed his wife.
He didn’t love Rhiannon anymore.
And Tombs would never be defiant again.
Vidya was watching Stark. Her usual calm had frayed and tears glimmered in her eyes. “Deirdre,” she said softly.
The pain in his compatriot’s voice made his fists clench on Tombs’s body, clutching her hard to his chest. “Niamh did this to her,” Stark said, trying to control his voice, trying not to lose his temper until there was someone nearby worthy of the pain he wanted to inflict. “Niamh and Kristian. A harpy and her unseelie boyfriend. Niamh and Kristian. Remember them.”
Vidya ingested this information as a tear rolled down her cheek. “Niamh and Kristian,” she echoed. “A harpy and her unseelie boyfriend.”
Valkyries weren’t good at many things, but they were excellent at vengeance. Stark wanted to be sure those names had imprinted themselves on Vidya’s memory. It would make tracking them easier. And once she tracked them down, she would kill them.
Stark planned to be with her when that happened.
But first things first.
He caught himself stroking the hair out of Tombs’s wrecked face and forced himself to stop. If he had been alone, he would have grieved. He would have let himself feel whatever he needed to feel.
Stark wasn’t alone.
Even now, he couldn’t allow himself to be weak where others would see him.
He carried Tombs’s body through the asylum. The floor was slick with blood, both shifter and sidhe. His footsteps echoed in the absolute silence. Tombs’s hair and legs swayed as he moved.
He took the stairs to the mortuary. It wasn’t far from the medical bay. Two halls and one short stairwell.
Stark waited as Vidya lit the oven. It was an old thing, and slow to reach a full burn. The smell of gas filled the air. Minutes passed until it was hot enough to radiate through the room, leaving Stark with nothing to do but glare at Tombs, angry at his dead Beta, angry at Niamh, angry at Rhiannon and Melchior and the entire damn world.
He couldn’t wait any longer. Stark pulled the door open, set Tombs on the conveyor belt, and pushed her into the oven.
The flames engulfed her in white-hot arms.
“Should we hunt?” Vidya asked.
“Not yet,” Stark said.
He watched as Tombs’s clothes and flesh melted away, charring her muscles to black flakes, exposing bone.
His Beta.
Stark was unfamiliar with the feeling growing in his gut—this sense of anger and regret and hatred. He had sent his last Beta, Sancho, to his death with no such pain. He had only thought of Sancho in passing when considering whom he would enlist as his new Beta. He certainly hadn’t mourned.
But Sancho hadn’t been Tombs.
He’d had plans for her. More than just plans, he might have had something resembling hopes.
Now her ashes would mingle with those of the berserker. Tombs would be satisfied with that, he suspected. She had never really stopped pining for Gage. Her feelings for him had been her greatest weakness, but one that would have soon been forgotten. If she’d survived.
The intake bracelet on her wrist turned white from the heat. Her bone crumbled long before the metal could melt, allowing the intake bracelet to fall to the bottom of the oven.
There was so very little of Stark’s Beta left.
As much as he wanted to blame Niamh for it, the truth was that it was all his wife’s work. Rhiannon had done this. And she had done it to punish him for being too weak.
Everton Stark.
Weak
.
Choking anger seized him. He slammed his fist into the end of the conveyor belt with a roar. And then he punched it again and again until the metal crumpled.
Vidya only watched. Silent, without judging.
Stark wrenched his hand free of the wreckage. “Shut the door,” he said, turning from the oven. “We need to relocate and make a new plan.”
She did as he ordered. Then she joined him on the stairs, and it took great strength for Stark not to look back at the oven where he had left Deirdre Tombs behind.
He was almost to the top of the stairs when flames flared behind them.
Stark turned. “What…?”
The oven exploded.
Vidya’s wings snapped out to their full length, sheltering both of them from the worst of the blast.
Blazing heat punched him in the back, and the shockwave forced him to the stairs belly-down with the valkyrie on top of him. Shards of metal and smoldering coals sprayed over the mortuary. Each strike of the debris stung his flesh, burning a blister onto his skin and healing within instants.
The vibrancy of the light subsided within seconds, though the heat didn’t fade. Flames leaped where the oven had stood. They crawled up the walls, licked the ceiling, and spread across the floor in a river.
It was oppressively hot. The smoke cloyed.
Vidya lowered her wings slowly. She sat up, eyes widening as she stared into the flames.
“Gods above,” she said.
“What?” Stark asked.
The valkyrie pointed.
There was a human figure in the flame, a shadow in the brilliance. The fire didn’t hurt her. Most of it was coming out of her body, pouring from her flesh like a cloak, spreading from her back in arms that reached for the ceiling. Sheets of black hair were kept aloft by the radiating heat.
Her chest was unmarked. There was no sign of injury on her entire body.
Deirdre Tombs stepped over the remnants of the oven and glanced around at the destruction with her eyebrows furrowed. “What’s going on? How did I get down here?” She looked down at her naked body, eyes widening. “And where the hell are my clothes?”
War of the Alphas Book 3
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