Hearts of Chaos Read online

  It was the most honest thought he’d ever shared with her. She rocked his world? Or she wrecked it? She’d finally tasted Corbette and all she wanted was to do it again. It was heady to know this intense attraction wasn’t one-sided.

  He stood silhouetted against the dark sea. So alone. Stepping forward, she took his hand. He turned into her, blind, and his other hand came into contact with her breast. A sharp frisson of energy sparked through her. Gods. It wasn’t even the Aether this time.

  “Corbette—”

  His hand moved out to her shoulder and down her arm to squeeze her hand. He brought it to his lips. “Emory,” he said. “My name is Emory.” His lips were soft, gallant.

  “Emory.” She tried the name. She would never have called him that, not even in her dreams. This person, “Emory,” had been an enigma until this trip. He’d always been the Raven Lord. Untouchable. Unmovable. Overprotective. Emory. The word twisted inside her mind like an eel. Kivati kids were taught to fish in the old way. She remembered being taken to the rivers when she was five. Summers in the Pacific Northwest were a crapshoot; damp more often than not, except that one glorious month of sun in August, when a person could finally dry the mold from her bones. That summer her mom had taken her to the river and shown her how to wade in to her knees, stand still as an oak tree, and wait for the little fish to tickle her toes. Quick as a thunderbolt, her mom’s hand had flown into the water to clamp around that slippery fish. Lucia had practiced for hours, but still the little fish with their rainbow bellies eluded her.

  Emory was like that. Emory, a first name, as all Kivati had first names first, the totem added on only once they reached adulthood. She’d never been able to imagine Corbette as a young person before. He seemed dominant and domineering straight from the womb. But since they’d met Halian, all that had changed. She couldn’t help piecing together the slivers of truth she knew about him—him, not the iron mantle of the Raven Lord.

  “Emory,” she said again. It started to feel right on her tongue.

  The ghost of a smile flickered over his face. “Lead on, fair lady.”

  He might have been the blind one, but she was the one who stumbled across the sand.

  “The boat is just this way. Watch the log . . . step up here.”

  “What does this beach really look like?” he asked.

  “Black sand as far as the eye can see, and”—she startled as she stepped over another barrier of logs and saw the other side—“the bodies of birds.”

  “Just the bodies?”

  “No movement, if that’s what you mean.” He seemed to move more easily when he could follow the sound of her voice, so she forced herself to describe the grizzly shore. “All kinds of birds. Their feathers are matted.”

  “With blood?”

  “No.”

  Corbette nodded. “I can’t smell any, but I’m not used to relying on my nose. Smells oily. Tainted.”

  “Their wings are too sticky to fly, and they’re all pretty thin. Bony, like they starved waiting for help.” The black boat was large enough for two. It bobbed in the water, attached to the shore by a single golden chain. “Maybe they were waiting to be ferried across?”

  “No boatman?”

  “No.” She helped Corbette into the boat.

  His mouth thinned.

  “I can row,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have to do this alone. My arms work fine.”

  But he couldn’t row them straight without his eyesight. “We’ll get there quicker if I do it.”

  “How will you know which direction to go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How will you—”

  “I don’t know! Maybe we’re not meant to know at this point, ever think of that? We’re both blind in that way.”

  “Faith,” he said flatly.

  “Your father said it. Maybe he’s right.”

  Corbette was silent.

  Lucia touched the edge of the gold chain to unleash them from the beach, and it sparked, slithering back from the sand and untying itself from the prow of the boat. The chain lifted into the air and seemed to melt, gold undulating, reforming itself into a metallic heron. The bird flapped its golden wings and flew west. Taking a firm grip of the oars, she followed, rowing the little boat until the line of dead birds and sand disappeared behind them and all that was left was endless turquoise sea.

  Grace pressed her back to the cement wall and willed her breathing to be silent. The Drekar guards passed by on the other side in a cloud of cinnamon and the heavy stomp of boots. Three . . . two . . . one . . . go! She took one more sweeping glance and dashed across the street to the next shadowed niche in the wall. There were no cries of alarm, just the scream of her own heart. Hunting aptrgangr had never been as challenging as evading Tiamat’s Drekar and Kivati troops. When a wraith took someone over, it wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. She’d had it easy when Tiamat’s Heart still rested inside her body. Now that she was only human, her reaction speed had decreased. She almost missed the days when it was just her against a newly possessed aptrgangr—one debilitating kick took down the body and all she had to do was brand the banishing runes into its skin to send it back through the Gate where it belonged.

  But the days of aptrgangr hordes and their black-and-white, good-versus-evil status had given way to a much more dangerous gray. The lines between humans, Drekar, and Kivati had blurred, true loyalties hidden. Some were loyal to Tiamat, some to the resistance, but it was impossible to tell which were which. Spies were everywhere. Grace had no chance against Drekar or Kivati—she had to run. It wasn’t a game anymore but a fight for a life free from slavery to the Babylonian Goddess of Chaos. The Drekar who hadn’t joined Tiamat depended on her to reclaim their land. The Kivati who had escaped Tiamat’s occupation of Queen Anne looked to her as the face of the resistance. Most importantly, her mate, Leif, her heart, needed her to survive. If she died, he died. Two bodies, one soul. They would travel together into the Land beyond, but she wasn’t ready for that yet.

  I’ve got plans for us, Grace thought. We’re going to finish this thing once and for all.

  She snuck across another street perilously close to the gardens being dug along the edge of the boulevard along the sea. Scores of humans labored in the hot midday sun. She wiped her forehead on her sleeve. Who’d have thought she could miss the rain so much? It was unnatural, this heat. The land thirsted. Tiamat had Kivati Aether workers turning Seattle’s cool gray skies into the hot desert of the Middle East.

  Closer to the base of Queen Anne, where the Needle Market still supplied food, scavenged supplies, and questionable magic remedies, Grace slid into the crowd and let herself be swallowed up. She could lose a tail as easily as tying her own shoe. Weaving in and out, hood over her blue-black hair, she eventually found her way out of the mob of downcast people to an empty alley. She stopped and watched for the messenger. This was as close as she dared to come. The crow sat on a broken pipe that stuck out of a wall six feet up. The wall used to hold half an apartment building; now it simply waited for its inevitable crumble back into the earth. She eyed the crow warily, and it tilted its head quizzically. With a little jump, the crow fluttered into the air and landed on a bent trash can next to her. It had a small scrap of paper tied to its foot.

  She approached. “Blackbird, blackbird, bake me a pie.”

  The bird held out its foot, and she untied the note. “One for the little girl who hides in the lane,” she said, dismissing the messenger, who flew off. Kivati could pass messages by piloting the consciousnesses of the birds, but Tiamat could sense that ripple in the Aether. The resistance was reduced to passing messages like this. High risk . . . typically low reward.

  On the note were two words: She knows.

  Grace felt a rush of fear, an icy sea swell over her head. She scanned the surrounding buildings for eyes and rifles aimed in her direction. Sun glinted off empty glass. The cut of shadow hid ghosts of memory. She slipped back into the c
rowded market and held her breath. Stalls sold sacrifices for Tiamat and less lavish offerings to Ishtar. Honey sticks, parasols, and hashish packed next to flower bulbs and divided plants that had been scoured from the surrounding countryside. Tiamat wanted to re-create the great hanging gardens of Babylon, and the people were eager to please.

  She knows. The word repeated with each step as she dodged through the sea of shoppers, not too fast to draw attention, not too slow to draw the ire of the guards. Left foot, she. Right foot, knows. But what? What did Tiamat know of their plans? That the resistance existed? The location of their camps outside the city? They hardly knew their own plans at the moment. Taking in exiles and gathering enough food to feed the camps took most of their manpower. They didn’t have the means to raid the city. They didn’t have the weapons to free the human slaves.

  They had to hold out until Corbette returned with the Scepter. There was no other hope, no other means of defeating Tiamat and handing her her final death. How many would die before Corbette came back? Grace couldn’t think that far ahead. She just had to keep as many refugees alive as she could. Tiamat would wipe them out if she knew.

  Grace slipped the incriminating paper with its elegant cursive into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed. No one would learn the identity of her informant by the slant of his handwriting.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Lucia glanced up at Corbette in the stern of the rowboat. His face was tilted up to the sky, and the angled light washed his face with a soft glow. His eyes were closed. He’d been quiet for a long time. Nothing but the splash of the oars and the creak of the planks beneath the onslaught of waves. And the birds. The birds circled overhead and called and played across the sky. She was grateful for their noise, for the sheer joy of their flight. The ocean stretched out to every horizon. It would be easy to feel lonely in a place like that. Hopeless with the endless sea. But the birds were watching, keeping her company as she followed the golden heron, and she found a certain courage in their presence. There was no point wringing her hands. She couldn’t go back; she could only go forward. Corbette couldn’t take care of everything; he couldn’t even see. That was a lot of pressure for one soul to take and not bend and warp like wood in the flame, so she didn’t take it. She let it go into the Lady’s unending sea. The fear that seemed so all-encompassing to Lucia was nothing but a drop of rain when added to Her swirling waters.

  Lucia cleared her throat. “There is nothing but water below and birds and sky above.” She had no watch, if such a human contraption would even work in the Land of the Dead. It seemed like they’d been rowing for days. Hunger was a soft gnaw in her belly. Thirst was just another clue that she was still alive.

  Corbette cocked his head to the side. It was the way he used to study the world when he was Raven, but now his eyes were closed. His brows furrowed. “I sense—” He broke off and clenched his fists against his knees.

  She wanted to comfort him, but this thing between them was too new, too raw. Instead she squeezed her blistered hands around the wooden oars and pulled harder.

  The gulls overhead cawed. She looked up to see a large black bird pelting through their wheeling flock. “A raven. Is it—?”

  Corbette’s head shot up, but his face blackened in frustration. “She’s made me helpless as a newborn,” he growled. “Does the Lady wish Tiamat to win? Is that it? She wants to see me fail.” His body vibrated with anger. The boat rocked unsteadily.

  “Now you know how I felt.”

  He stilled. The boat stopped rocking. He opened his mouth, but just then the raven called. Turning toward the sky, he strained toward the sound. The yearning on his face she understood all too well. He’d been bonded to his totem much longer than she had, but still, when one had dual souls bound in one’s breast, it made little difference whether a century or a day. The loss of her totem was a hole in the fabric of her universe.

  She turned to look over the bow of the boat. The horizon was no longer a smooth line of blue; emerald-green mountains rose straight from the sea like the spines of giant serpents. Steep, tall, and narrow, they could have been plucked from a traditional Chinese painting or the Irish’s Tir-na-nog. The air thickened with melancholy. She picked up speed, pushed through the pain in her shoulders and hands, because they were so close. She was so ready for it to be over. The Lady could give Corbette his sight back and banish Tiamat with her Scepter and everything would go back to the way things had been before the Unraveling.

  Her right oar caught wind and chopped across a wave. The boat jerked sharply left.

  “What’s wrong?” Corbette asked.

  “Nothing. Just got distracted. We’re almost there. The gold heron is leading us to some islands. The Palace must be somewhere up there.” When they got back, she wouldn’t be so willing to let Corbette marry her off. She wouldn’t be satisfied until they explored this spark between them all the way until it burned to ash. She had until the end of the journey to find out if they had something worth fighting for. “It’s an archipelago,” she told him. “The islands are mountains—sheer cliffs that rise straight from the sea up into the clouds. Bonsai trees cling to their faces. And birds. Lots and lots of birds.” She pulled faster. The boat skimmed through the choppy waves. “I think I see a passage between the islands opening up. I’m going to steer us through.”

  The boat slipped between two steep walls into a narrow channel where there was no light but a pinprick of sky directly above them. Water dripped from the walls. The splash of her oars echoed. The birds were suddenly silent, but she could hear the rustle of a great host of wings. She was almost grateful for the dark. “This must be the Valley of Death,” she whispered. Her voice bounced off the tight passage, splintered and rose as it ricocheted up and out into the heavens. She winced. The boat hit something, and she was thrown forward into Corbette’s lap, facedown. Memory ignited: heat and skin and sweat and the heady feeling of closeness. He grew hard against her cheek. His hands tightened on her arms to steady her. She wriggled out of his lap, but his hands kept her close against his chest. He pulled her up to where their lips almost met, and her breath hitched. She could close that distance and sink back beneath the waves of pleasure with him.

  Lucia’s breath kissed his neck. Her body was a tangle of willing woman in his lap, and there was no power on earth that could stop him from grabbing the lifeline she offered except his own stubbornness. Corbette had walked this precipice—one side reason, one side ruin—many times, but never had the latter been so tempting. He could sink into her, like his cock wanted to do, and never leave, never climb the steps, storm the palace, and finish the quest.

  Now he knew how she felt?

  His teeth ground against each other. With his heightened hearing, it sounded like the whirr of a stonecutter. He pushed her away from him. The boat had stopped bobbing, but the waves still knocked it against whatever was holding them back—a dock or rocks. Sounds didn’t come from a single direction; everything bounced and played back, no right or left or up or down. He was dizzy with it. First sight, now sound. What would the Lady take from him next? Did She want him to crawl to Her?

  He still had touch—the soft skin of Lucia’s arms beneath his calloused fingers and the inviting press of her lips only inches away. He was afraid to let go.

  “The gold heron has turned back into a chain. We’re at a dock,” she whispered with a hundred repeating voices. The boat wobbled as she pulled her arms from his grasp. The boat jerked again, tipped as her weight left it. He felt her hand on his shoulder. “Stand up slowly. Here’s the dock.” She took his hand and placed it on a smooth wood plank next to the boat. “Step over the side. Hold on to me.”

  He climbed out, leaning on her more than he should, feeling impotent. Gods, he hated this. The boat splashed down behind him. When he regained his sense of balance, she pulled her hand away. He was immediately lost. Grabbing for her, he missed the mark and ended up tackling her around the waist. Pullin
g her to him, he found her face. She had such elegant bone structure.

  “I’m here. I’m not going to leave you.”

  Never. “Good.” He pressed a kiss to her, catching half her mouth at the corner.

  She didn’t say anything, but he felt her relax in his hold. She took his hand again and tugged him forward. “There are stairs here. Watch your step. We’ll go slow.”

  He counted. One. Two. Two hundred. She paused now and then, and pulled her hand from his. He thought she was scouting the way, but when they started again it was still up, up, up. Three hundred. Four hundred. His toe caught a niche in the rock, and he lost track, trying not to fall.

  “Let’s rest for a moment,” she said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, I’m tired.”

  They sat, his hand in hers resting in her lap. He ran his thumb over her newly chapped skin and the blisters across her palms and the pads of her fingers. Scrapes from the rock were there too—they were no longer the delicate hands of a Kivati lady. She was roughened. Each mark told a part of their journey. It was a beautiful map. His fingers moved to her wrists, where not long ago Rudrick had slashed her arteries with a sharp jade blade. He was surprised the skin was so smooth. “Your scars have disappeared.”

  She curled her hands into a fist, shutting him out.

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “We never talk about it.”

  “I should have been there to protect you.”

  “Even the Raven Lord can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “Sadly true.” The wind brushed through his hair and played over his face. He smelled the salt sea and incense—cedar, lavender, and myrrh. Their voices didn’t echo as much, and his sense of direction had improved. “Tell me what you see.”

  She took a long breath. “We have passed some of the shorter edge mountains. The one we are climbing is the biggest. I still can’t see the top in the clouds. There are small pruned trees clinging to the side of the stairs. Gold cages hang in them.”