The Road to Bedlam: Courts of the Feyre, Book 2 (51 page)

    Beyond them the iron gate was wide open, the lock blown where they had broken in to reach the labs.

    It was only when we pushed past the shattered doors into the office area, the glass scraping and crunching under our feet, that I heard the 'chink-chunk' sound of a shotgun reload. I shoved Alex backwards, dodging away from the noise.

    A boom sounded far too loud echoing inside my head. I spun around as if I had been sideswiped by a truck. My shoulder went numb, my arm slapping uselessly against the wall, the sword flailing from my hand. I collided with the wall and rolled to the floor, scattering shattered glass. In slow motion I heard the chink-chunk of the shotgun reloading.

    Alex shrieked, "Dad!'

    At the sound, the figure in the darkness twisted towards Alex as I got my feet under me and kicked off, launching myself at the shooter. As the shotgun swept around, my wounded shoulder collided with his torso in a jolt of searing pain. He careened backwards and there was a bright flash and another boom as the shotgun erupted in a hail of broken glass, falling plaster and smoke.

    The man went down beneath me, landing heavily on his side. He tried to roll away as I crawled up him onehanded. He shouted and screamed, trying to beat me back with the butt of the shotgun. Flickering moonlight washed out into the room as the well of power opened up within me, sending out prickling sparkles of refracted moonlight from glass fragments. With a hand as black as empty night, I wrenched the gun from him and tossed it away. He beat at my head with gloved fists but my fingers found his throat.

    Power surged in me, making the nerves in my shoulder sing in agony from the iron embedded in it. Black tendrils sank into him while he thrashed and bucked beneath me; they sucked the life from him until he kicked and struggled no more. I straddled him, draining the last dregs of life from him while his corpse withered beneath me. Under my shirt there was heat in the wound and a sense of wriggling, squelching life as the shoulder knit back together. As I watched, little black specks of shot were squeezed to the surface and popped out of the wound, smarting where they touched my skin and falling like patters of rain. Some fell inside the ripped shirt, and I had to wriggle out of the jacket and shirt to get rid of them, shaking the tattered remnants of the shirt to free them.

    I looked up. My daughter stood among the debris, watching me, her face intent, her eyes bright, an expression of curiosity and horror on her face. As she watched, the red gore on my shoulder rippled into smooth lightless black while the ribcage beneath me crumbled, no longer able to support my weight.

    I staggered to my feet.

    Alex shook her head. "I don't understand. Where does the light go?" She stepped forward and reached out a hand to touch.

    "Don't!"

    She snapped her hand back.

    "Don't touch me. I don't know what will happen."

    "Nothing will happen."

    She sounded certain, reaching out again and placing her hand gently where the wound had been. "Does it hurt?" she asked.

    I shook my head, quelling the gallowfyre, calling the power back within me. The moonlight faded and the emergency lights paled back into dim illumination. My skin paled to normal under her hand. When she removed it, there was not even a scar.

    "I'm sorry you had to see that," I said, looking down at the corpse where it lay like a desiccated mummy in uniform.

    "I'm not."

    I looked at her.

    She hugged her arms around herself. "It means you're like me."

    I thought about that for a moment. "I guess it does. A daddy's girl after all." I stepped forward and hugged her to me. She unwrapped her arms and clung for a moment, her hands cold against my bare skin. She stepped back, disengaging herself so that I could slip back into the ragged shirt and pull on my jacket. I reached into the inside pocket, reassuring myself that the vial of serum had not been broken in the fight. It crossed my mind that I should have destroyed it, but it was the only evidence remaining of what had been done here.

    Alex collected the discarded shotgun from the floor, the weight of it clearly more than she was expecting.

    "Do you know how to use that?"

    She shook her head. "I've seen it done," she said, "and I can learn." She pumped the reload, chambering a round and resting the butt against her thigh, pointing it at the ceiling.

    I pressed the barrel aside, gently. "Leave it. It will only weigh you down."

    She appeared to consider for a moment and then dropped it on the corpse. "Didn't do him any good," she said.

    I bent down and retrieved my sword.

    "Do you know how to use that?" she asked.

    It was a cheeky question, one that would have drawn a rebuke from me only a short while ago. I looked at my daughter and for the first time I realised that whatever had happened to her in this place, it had changed her. She had been on her own, beyond rescue or reprieve, and she had endured. The little girl I lost could not have done that. She had been forced to become something else.

    Garvin said that the person I got back might not be the person I knew and maybe he was right. It didn't mean she was mad, though the incident with Watkins's severed head left me wondering, but it did mean that things would never be as they were. My little girl had gone, and I was going to have to find out what had replaced her. There would be time for that later. Her challenge remained, though.

    "I'm told that I am competent with it," I said. "Though probably no more than that."

    She must have heard the truth in my words, because she raised one eyebrow very slightly.

    "I've been having lessons."

    That was another thing. We routinely lie to our children. We tell them what's good for them, what we need them to know, and what it suits us to tell them. I was going to have to get used to not lying to my daughter. She would know as soon as I did.

    I wrapped the glamour around us again, this time being careful to dampen any sound. We established a rhythm: me moving forward, then Alex following when I had established that all was clear. We found a trail of bodies. Raffmir had been busy. Most of them were in military uniform. The soldiers must have been moving the staff and patients out as they worked their way down. The place was deserted.

    Once we were past the doors to the stairs there was less debris and fewer bodies. I retraced our route, passing up through the building, taking one stair flight at a time with Alex following. As far as I could tell, the building was deserted. We were the only living things left, which left me wondering what they planned to do next. Alex and I needed to be out, and quickly.

    As we rose through the building a pervading vibration turned into a persistent thudding. By the time we reached the stairs to the rooftop and our escape route, I realised they had a helicopter circling the building. As we climbed the stairs its noise became a voice-drowning clatter. I had to shout to be heard.

    "Wait here until I shout for you. I'm going up to get a clear view of our way out. When I shout, come up and grab tight hold of me. Don't hesitate. We won't have long."

    She nodded her understanding and I took the steps up to the roof access. As I emerged on to the roof, the helicopter swung around the building, a huge thing with twin rotors which thudded through the air as if it was eating it in gulps. From a hatch in the side, a long gun swung sideways, aiming straight at me. I threw myself backwards.

    The gun erupted in flame, sending a stream of bright fire in an arc across the access door. As I fell backwards through the hatch, the door was carved in two, sending splinters flying like needles through the air. I tumbled back down the stairs into Alex, rolling into her, the deafening roar of the gunfire rattling in my ears. Then it ceased.

    I found myself lying head down on the steps, looking up into my daughter's face.

    "Are you hurt?" she shouted.

    I shuffled around, so I could sit, patting myself down, looking for fresh wounds. The only blood was where I had taken the shotgun blast. My instinctive reaction to throw myself backwards down the stairwell had saved me.

    "No, I'm OK. I can't get to the roof, though. We can't leave if we can't see where we're going."

    "Back down," she said. "We can break the windows in the offices below. They can't cover all of them."

    It was my turn to nod. I led the way back down the stairwell. At the bottom I heard shouts. As I thrust the door open, gunfire echoed in the corridor. I slammed the door shut again. It was not built to withstand an assault, but it would slow them down. Placing my hand on it, I used my magic to seal it shut. It was the first trick I ever learned, and they would not get through it easily. I propelled Alex back up the stairs ahead of me. Within seconds a burst of bullets pierced the door below us, ricocheting off the metal steps.

    "We're trapped," shouted Alex over the thudding of the helicopter.

    She was right.

    The noise from below as the men in the corridor tried to break through the door was almost drowned out by the helicopter circling above the roof. Even though I had sealed the lower door with magic, it would not take them long to break through it. They only needed a small hole and they could toss through a hand-grenade. In the confined space of the stairwell, the blast would kill us both. We had no time and nowhere to go.

    "We're going up," I shouted to Alex, leading her away from the banging at the doorway. Thankfully the door was delaying them longer than I had hoped.

    "What about the helicopter?"

    I looked up the stairwell. Every thirty seconds or so, the helicopter circled around. Whatever I did would have to be done in that time.

    I looked down the steps, wondering how much time we had. Not long.

    "Get down on to the middle steps," I shouted to Alex. "Be ready to come up when I call you."

    "You're mad! You can't go up there!" shouted Alex. She grabbed my arm, her fingers clinging to the jacket sleeve.

    "No. Trust me. Shield your eyes."

    "My eyes?"

    "Just do as you're told for once, will you?"

    She looked up at me and I could see the words forming on her lips:
Don't tell me what to do.

    Instead, she nodded and released my sleeve.

    I leaned down and kissed her forehead, then took the steps up as far as I dared. I could hear the giant helicopter, the rhythmic thudding of the twin rotors, the whistle of the engines. I waited until I had the cycle in my head and then drew all the power I could.

    The air chilled instantly, frost riming on the rails for the stairs. I heard the chopper engines falter and then whine with renewed force as the helicopter swept past the open doorway. I opened the dark well of power within me, feeling the prickle as white fingers of light crept around my hands. The world fell into a smoky veil. I could see through the walls of the small stair enclosure to the dark blocks of the air conditioners arrayed around the roof. I could see the insubstantial shape of the helicopter, wheeling around above me, its rotors too fast to perceive, the heavy steel of the machine gun poking inelegantly from its side.

    The light from my aura must have attracted their attention, because another burst of fire swept across the open doorway above my head in a rattling crescendo, peppering me with brick fragments and concrete shards. I did my best to ignore it.

    I cupped my hands in front of me. I had seen this done only once, but I thought I knew how it worked. The space between my hands was empty and not empty. It contained only air. I was a creature of the void. Blackbird could do things with air and fire, but that was not my element. My element was the void, the space between things. It was what kept matter from collapsing in on itself. It was what kept everything apart from everything else.

    What happened, though, when it didn't? What happened when the space between things contracted, so that they came together in ways they were weren't supposed to?

    I took the tiniest part of space and pulled the void from it. There was a fizzle and a pop.

    Concentrating, I tried again. I reached in with my will, keeping it small, drawing the void into itself from the area between my hands. A spark fizzed into life and then crackled with energy. As the space around it bent, it grew brighter until it threw my shadows on to all the walls.

    Another burst of gunfire hit the access, showering me with dust and brick chips. Where they fell into the spark, they vanished and it grew.

    Opening my hands slowly, I allowed it to float, splitting my concentration between maintaining the spark and timing the helicopter's circles. If this was to work, I would have to get it right. Its noise grew as it thudded past the open doorway and then circled away.

    I walked up the steps.

    The helicopter circled round behind me, its view momentarily blocked. My spine itched with tension as I lifted my hands and let the spark rise and grow. I concentrated on feeding it, collapsing it into itself, seeing it brighten into an arc-light and then into a tiny star.

    The chopper thudded into view. I heard the motor of the machine gun whine up to speed. If I left it any later I would be sliced in half.

    I sent the star arcing into the sky into the path of the helicopter. The reaction was instant. The chopper tipped sideways and banked hard, klaxons screaming raucously from the open hatchway, The machine gun sent a stream of tracer out into the empty sky as it tipped wildly. Flares streamed out in pulses, bursting from the sides, aiming to distract a heat-seeker from its target.

    This was no heat-seeker. The star rose ever brighter, unerringly following as the helicopter banked hard, the rotors chopping into the air. Everything stood out in harsh brightness, walls bleached of colour, shadows etched in black, sliding over surfaces as the star flew, chasing its target. The helicopter tipped and banked again, aiming to turn away. The star buried itself deep into it.