Gates of Thread and Stone (25 page)

“I’m not a fan of bargaining. And I’m fairly sure I didn’t leave room for it.”

“Why not? Afraid you’ll lose?”

He gave Kalla an amused look. I had almost forgotten she was there, still lounging on the sofa. To my surprise, she said, “What harm is there in indulging her? She can’t possibly win.”

“I think he’s afraid of a human girl,” I said, hoping Ninu’s grudge with Time would make him too proud to back down. “Daughter of Time, right? Bet you never beat my dad, either.”

Ninu began unbuttoning his tunic. A mix of triumph and anxiety shot through me. He shrugged off the sturdy black material, revealing a loose gray undershirt, and folded it neatly over the table. “I’m willing to play along. Feel free to use your powers if you think they’ll help you.”

The knife felt heavy against my side, but I didn’t grab for it. Not yet.

I planted my feet and waited as he approached. I would probably lose. But I would make sure to kick his ass in the meanwhile.

CHAPTER 37

NINU KNEW HOW
to fight me. Whenever I slowed time, I felt a vibration through my body and my grip slipped too soon. While he couldn’t affect the threads, he could still affect
me
, and I didn’t know how he was doing it.

He also knew how to take advantage of my powers. Because he was aware of time slowing, even for the mere second I could hold it back, he could calculate how to counteract the rebound. As soon as the threads flung us forward, he attacked, striking at my openings. I was trapped in that sliver of increased time, and I had a split second to react. It wasn’t enough.

My tailbone struck the floor, followed by my shoulder blades. I hissed in air, back arching. Biting down on a groan, I rolled onto my side and glared up at him. He was faster than his sentinels.

“I’ve fought your father,” he said. “He was more of a challenge.”

I stood, the knife jostling against my hip. I had to be patient. Wait for an opportunity. Movement to my right drew my eye, and I glanced at Avan. He was on his feet again. Reev had him by his upper arm. I wasn’t sure if it was to restrain him or hold him up. Avan watched me, a line between his eyebrows. He mouthed a word:
Mason.

End it quickly, Mason had said. My powers weren’t the advantage I thought they’d be, so how could I use my speed instead?

I charged Ninu, pulling at the threads but releasing them an instant later, this time without Ninu’s interference. I dived left, plucked at time again, and then cut right and aimed for his side.

Ninu caught my wrist and wrenched my arm up behind me. My shoulder screamed.

“Better,” he said, his voice low against my ear. “But still clumsy. Try again.” He laid his palm against the middle of my back and gave me a light shove, releasing my arm.

I stumbled for a moment but found my footing—and my knife. I spun, fist jabbing out. He stopped my punch again and then ducked. The knife in my other hand missed his throat.
Drek
.

I panted, forcing my thoughts to focus. Time slowed. I flipped the knife, blade side down. Again that vibration through my mind. The threads sprang free too soon. I swiped upward. His arm rose. The block jolted through my shoulder. His knuckles rammed into my gut.

All the air left my lungs. I hit the floor, curling around my stomach, gasping. Nothing else existed but the pain.

“Kai.” Avan’s voice. “Get up.”

My nails clawed against the smooth tiles as I pushed up onto my hands and knees. I rose unsteadily to my feet.

Speed is my ally
. Breathe. In and out. Focus.
Time is my power.

Ninu spread his arms wide in invitation.

I rushed him. I didn’t think about where to hit next; my body moved on instinct. Punch, duck, kick, block.
Don’t stop. Don’t stop.
Ninu’s head snapped to the left. My knuckles throbbed, but grim satisfaction fueled my next strike.

His hands snatched my wrists. His grip was unforgiving. His eyes narrowed. Then he let go, and I darted back to avoid the hit that barely missed my chin. His attacks came fast, pushing me across the room. I tripped. Pain stabbed my face. My vision went dark at the corners. I found myself back on the floor, looking up at the glass ceiling. I blinked rapidly, letting the rising heat in my face burn away the daze.

I let the humiliation feed my anger.
Think, Kai.

“You
are
your father’s daughter,” Ninu said. He tugged at the loose sleeves of his shirt and smoothed down the wrinkles. “But he was a better strategist. It’ll come with experience.”

I shut out the questions that rushed forward. I didn’t know what to believe, but whether Ninu was telling the truth or not, I couldn’t let him or anything else distract me.

It took me longer to regain my footing this time. As he waited for me, I trailed my mind along the threads, deliberating. Time flowed in a current that didn’t ebb or swell but was constant. I could push against it, slow it down, slip free of its net. But what would happen if I tried to break it?

“Giving up already?”

I ignored the taunt. I imagined my hands skimming the current the way I once had at the river’s bend in the North District. Then I slid my left foot back and sprang forward. Ninu blocked before my fist could land, dodged before the knife could find skin. He deliberately didn’t retaliate, and whatever powers he possessed, he wasn’t using them except to interfere with mine. His restraint was insulting.

I imagined pressing my hands against the threads, letting them tangle around my fingers. Around me, time slowed. I imagined digging my fingers in and pulling. Wrenching. Ripping. The threads were so tightly knit that they barely gave. But it was enough.

Time warped around us. Motion became a dizzying whirl. For one brief moment, the threads dragged me
backward
.

I immediately altered my attack. I dropped to my haunches and struck.

I think I was as shocked as Ninu when my knife sank into his stomach. Red bubbled up around the blade. His hand lifted to grab mine. I let go of the handle and twisted out of reach.

His fingers replaced mine around the handle. He regarded me with the same air of approval that Mason had after I’d managed to hit him.

So. Not his descendant then.
Drek!

I had stabbed him, but was this enough to win? I shifted my weight, considering another attack.

“Good job,” he said. “You’re a fast learn—” He stopped. His eyes lowered to the knife.

With a quizzical tilt to his head, he pulled the knife free. Blood rushed from the open wound, blossoming across his shirt like one of Irra’s roses.

In his hand, beneath the fresh coat of red, the blade glowed. He dropped it. Instead of falling, the knife hovered in the air. I watched, stupefied, as the blood on the blade thinned, then disappeared, as if the glowing metal had absorbed it. Light encased the weapon. I had to squint to look at it.

Avan called my name, but I couldn’t look away. The shape of the knife changed, elongating into a staff and then flashing brightly as a curved blade materialized at one end, translucent and shimmery like starlight. When the light receded, I realized it was a scythe.

I reached out tentatively, then flinched when it flew away.

There was a muffled smack as the staff hit its owner’s palm. Both Ninu and I looked at Kalla in confusion. Kalla rested her weapon against the floor and traced a glossy fingernail along her alabaster cheek. Her features shifted. Her eyes grew larger, chin sharper, red lips plumper. Her hair spilled down her shoulders in a tumble of white waves.

“You,” I said, backing up. The memory of her reeled through me—a nervous and pale young woman, half dressed, her thin arms offering me a battered knife and a map. “You’re from the Raging Bull.”

Ninu sank to his knees, his bloodied hand pressed against his stomach. Then his gaze lifted to meet mine.

“I wanted my life back,” he said. “It wasn’t a great life. But it was mine.” He closed his eyes.

Kalla twirled the scythe in her hand, and it vanished in a flare of light. She didn’t look at her brother.

“The Infinite are incapable of killing one another directly,” she told me, brushing her long hair over her pale shoulder.

“Your knife—”

“My scythe,” she corrected me. “I am the second oldest of the Infinite. My weapon can kill anything.”

“But why?” I asked, inching toward Avan and Reev. Avan looked as bewildered as I felt, but Reev hadn’t reacted in any way to seeing his Kahl stabbed. “You’re Ninu’s right hand. Why would you help me?”

Death smiled. “Time has ever been my ally.”

CHAPTER 38

I SKIRTED AROUND
Ninu’s body, now sprawled on the floor, and rushed to Avan.

“Are you—?” I cut myself off. It was an idiotic question. Of course he wasn’t okay. “I’m sorry.”

He gave me a rueful smile. “Why are you apologizing?”

His hand came up, fingers grazing my sore jaw. You’d think I would be used to getting punched by now, but the pain felt new each time. I leaned into his touch. I didn’t know what any of this meant, but I prayed Kalla was on our side.

Reev looked around, his eyes slow to focus. Then he hissed in his breath, reaching back to claw at his collar as if it pained him.

“Reev, stop,” I said, tugging at his hand.

Kalla’s heels clicked against the floor as she circled Ninu. He lay on his stomach, face angled away from me. No sentinels appeared to carry him away.

“Ninu held ultimate control over the collars,” she said. “Without him, Reev will recover shortly, although Ninu’s mark should be removed from the collar as a precaution.”

Relief made my body sag. I squeezed Reev’s hand.

Kalla cocked her head, a sudden awareness in her eyes. I searched the room. I felt it, too. The threads, the current, time itself—had stopped. The view from the window revealed the smoke from distant chimney pipes caught in still-frame, like a picture, and Grays fixed in place like figurines amid a miniature cityscape. The entire city, everything outside this room, had been frozen.

“Congratulations, Kai,” someone said. “You’ve liberated Ninurta.”

The voice was worse than Ninu’s, not because it burrowed beneath my skin but because I knew, deep down, that it was familiar. I knew it the way I knew the threads that currently snared the city like a giant spider’s web, inescapable even by me because, while I could manipulate them,
he
had woven the threads and designed their pattern.

The air in the room quivered, and then a man was standing next to Kalla. It wasn’t his presence that surprised me. It was the fact that I had felt him coming. Avan clasped my shoulder. I reached up to rest my hand over his.

“This is Kronos,” Kalla said. “Although I don’t think an introduction is really necessary.”

He didn’t look like anyone I remembered. But then I saw his eyes: watery blue like the icicles that formed on the tree branches in winter. He smiled. I didn’t smile back.

Any sense of relief I had before disappeared. I brushed away Avan’s hand and released Reev’s. My body tensed, waiting.

He extended his arm, the black folds of his cloak rustling in a current that only he and I could see. Kalla touched her fingers to his raised forearm, a simple but familiar gesture.

“You have questions,” she said to me. “But the answers have always been there. Ninu assumed that when R-22 disappeared, Irra had taken him for his hollows. So how did Ninu find Reev again?”

“The energy drive,” I said warily.

“And who do you think told Reev about the energy drive? Who decided to hold it there, practically on top of the Labyrinth?”

My mind ran through the possibilities. “But you couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have predicted that I would be attacked, that I would need to—”

I saw the face of the woman who’d attacked me that day in the alley. White skin, black-streaked Mohawk, and bright-red lips, the only splash of color against her pale features.

I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me again. “It was all you,” I breathed.

“You’re softhearted, Kai. I knew you wouldn’t leave me to die in that alley. And I made sure that the tax notice was delivered directly to Reev.”

I cupped my head in my hands. The attack; the energy drive; tricking Reev’s boss in order to send me to the Rider, the only person with the means of sneaking me into the White Court. So I could—

“You did all this,” I said, looking between Kalla and Kronos. “Why? To get me here to kill Ninu? How did you know who Reev was anyway? That he and I—”

“You know the answer to that,” Kronos said.

When he moved, his hair—as long as my own—rippled like water, its color shifting, liquid strands in constant motion. As with the rest of the Infinite, I couldn’t pinpoint his age. He was at once young and wizened. Looking at him was like trying to focus on stones resting in the riverbed beneath the swaying waves.

“Who am I?” he asked.

With absolute certainty, I said, “My father.”

Someone grabbed my wrist. I started, backing away only to realize it was Reev.

When our eyes met, I could see it was really him. A brief rush of joy filled me. “Reev.”

He opened his mouth, but Kronos cut him off.

“Welcome back, Reev.” He looked at me. “His final mission before his purification had been against me—Ninu needed his full force of sentinels to invade my palace. But I’d known at once that Reev was different from the others. His connection to Ninu had already begun to fray. I read into his past, his desire for freedom, and I granted it. In exchange, I’d left him a most precious charge.”

So he was the one who’d freed Reev. My dad. It felt strange just to think the words.
My dad
.

Reev’s hand tightened around my wrist. He had been meant to find me, to take me in. For some reason, knowing we had been designed to meet didn’t bother me. Reev was meant to be mine.

“To hide me,” I said.

“Ninu was one of the few Infinite with the power to, in a way, counter my own. You probably realized that in your duel.”

I nodded. It had been unbelievably frustrating.

“The blood of descendants who are not our own will not kill us, but it does weaken us. Ninu had managed to injure me in the battle before I could force him and his sentinels from my palace. But as long as I refused to reverse the River for him, I knew he would target you in my place. I couldn’t protect you.”

He had left me on a riverbank with no memory of who I was, no family, and no understanding of what I could do. The truth finally sank in. Ninu had been right. It was cruel. Letting me think I was human—the only thing I knew how to be because I sure as drek didn’t remember being one of them—it was too cruel.

I stared at Kronos. I could tell he wasn’t fully recovered. Irra wore the emaciated look like a perfectly fitted tunic, but Kronos looked ill. His cheeks were too wan, and his shoulders sagged beneath his cloak, as if all of time weighted them down. He might have been handsome if he’d been healthy.

“Why didn’t you tell me who I am from the start?” I asked Kalla.

She glanced dispassionately at Ninu’s body. “Ninu had few
mahjo
to begin with, but after Rebirth, he was especially careful not to leave any human descendants. Since we were incapable of killing him directly, we needed someone with the strength of a full-blooded Infinite—someone who could wield my scythe and not be drawn into death by it—but, at the same time, not bound by our laws. Kronos trapped you in a mortal body. You can age and sicken and die. It was a perfect disguise from Ninu, but we didn’t realize until recently that it was also the perfect weapon. And since Ninu wanted you, it gave you access to him.”

She hadn’t answered my question. They could have just told me all this. Instead, they had manipulated my every move—and now, recalling my conversations with Irra, I had little doubt that he’d been in on this as well. I had been as much a puppet as Ninu’s human decoy.

If they had told me what they wanted, would I have helped them? I didn’t hate my life. It wasn’t ideal, but I had Reev, a place to sleep, and enough food to keep me going. What did I care about their stupid immortal feud? I had always wanted to know where my powers came from, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be like them.

I didn’t want to be Infinite.

“Exactly,” Kronos said, watching me closely. “You wouldn’t have done as asked. Your humanity, your emotional attachments hinder you.”

I scowled. “You can read minds, too?”

“Your eyes give away your thoughts.”

“You wanted Reev dead,” Avan cut in.

I turned to him. He looked steadier, and he’d been watching the conversation unfold with an increasingly dark expression.

Reev added, “They probably expected Ninu to have me rebranded already. And once you killed him, there would have been nothing left—no
emotional attachments
—holding you to your human life. They would have used that to persuade you to join them.”

They thought Reev’s death would convince me to let my humanity go. They obviously knew nothing about humans.

From the moment Kalla attacked me in that alley, I had performed according to their script. But, because of Ninu, it hadn’t gone exactly as planned. Instead of just creating a mental block, Ninu could’ve begun Reev’s rebranding at any time, and he hadn’t. For that, I was grateful. They were out of their immortal minds if they thought I would want anything to do with them now.

“You screwed up,” I told them. “I’ll never be one of you.”

“I never intended for you to remain human, Kai,” Kronos said. “Ninu may be gone, but Reev’s life remains tenuous.”

I didn’t care that he was my dad. Reev was my
family
. I moved to put myself in front of both Reev and Avan, and silenced their objections with a glare. “If you hurt him, I swear I’ll never leave this body. I’ll find a way to bind myself permanently.”

“That’s impossible,” Kalla said.

“Then why do you look so nervous? I’d rather die human than be like you.”

A weak laugh pierced the room. It resonated in my chest. On the floor, Ninu stirred. It was the slightest movement, the most he could manage.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes. That’s the right choice. Don’t ever let them take that from you.”

I felt nothing but hatred for Ninu, but I understood his words.

Kalla’s perfect lips pursed. Even annoyed, she looked unnaturally beautiful. I should have realized it at the Raging Bull.

“Persistent, aren’t you?” she said.

“Well, it is rather difficult to pass on with our dear friend Time weaving his interference,” Ninu replied. “I stand now at the gates to your realm, Sister.”

I could sense all the tones and tremors in his voice. It conjured images of glass shrines that reflected the sunlight and billows of greasy smoke that reminded me of the market outside Zora Hall. Then he dragged in a shallow, wet breath, and the images dispersed.

“There are no more restrictions holding you. Help me along, won’t you, Sister?”

Kalla’s scythe appeared in a flash of light. She approached Ninu, weapon raised. I looked away, focusing instead on the stubble on Avan’s jaw. It was a good look on him.

Kalla’s blade whined as it sliced the air. I flinched.