“So the stage is set,” Ankou said, pushing up the sleeve of my T-shirt. “Keep the gun to his head, please. Time to look in a mirror, Mr. Ballard. The hero, the hero here would keep his mouth shut, not give me the morsel of information I require. He would save the whore he sees as a fair maiden, save his loyal manservant who refused to betray him even as he was maimed, and sacrifice himself for the good of others. But the villain, ah, the true villain would never have gotten himself here in the first place. He would have done his job and been on his way, richer for his treachery. But you, Mr. Ballard, you as a bumbling villain, have a choice now to salvage this mess you have created for yourself. Tell me where my daughter is, tell me and I will release you, unmolested, and let you go on your way in the world, free to make up any lie you need to tell yourself and the world to preserve the illusion that somewhere in you is a good man.” He raised the needle, brought it toward my arm. “What will it be?”
No one was coming. I had worked hard for a long time to make sure everyone knew I didn’t need them, and now, at the end of it, I was going out alone. Ankou’s face was close to mine. He was smug and in control. He knew me, he knew the real me, and he loved the terror, the indecision in my eyes, like a trapped animal. The needle came closer, its cold steel touching my skin. Ankou’s thumb was poised to push the plunger once the needle was in.
I was going to lose me, lose all the parts of me I was proudest of, the things that mattered most, that made me special. Without them I would be nothing, no one. I could imagine the pity on my friends’ faces. I would exist at the kindness of others, and this world, even at its best was far from kind. And to have my story end this way? In a fight, in a blaze of glory, maybe, but not strapped to a chair, not a meaningless, common death, not me, never for me. I closed my eyes. I began to feel the needle rip into my skin. One second, one solitary second. It was the longest of my life.
“Stop,” I said.
The needle was taken away from my arm. I opened my eyes and looked into the prisms of Ankou’s. I told him, I gave him Caern’s address. He nodded, the arrogance slipped from his face like tension leaving, like he was forgiving a pet that shit on the rug.
“Now you understand,” he said. “You know who you are now, don’t you, Mr. Ballard?”
I began to answer him, answer myself, when the door exploded. Vigil, wounded, bleeding, pistols blasting, dove into the room. He shot one of Ankou’s other knights, a bloom of red spreading across the man’s chest as he fell and died. The other three were firing back almost at once; one of them pulled Ankou away from me and headed toward the back of the room.
Vigil took a bullet to the side of the chest as he tumbled into the middle of the knights, each trained as he had been, each equally as deadly. He drove a pistol’s barrel into one of the men’s faces with a crunch, and pulled the trigger. Burris fired at another of the shooters with his other gun, but the knight grabbed Vigil’s arm and jerked the gun to the side as it fired, blowing a big hole in the conference room wall. Vigil pivoted, bent his arm in and down, and shot the guy grappling with him in the side of the face. The third man, still standing, jammed his pistol low into Vigil’s gut and fired. The gunshot tore a hole clean through him, staggering Burris backward. Vigil returned fire as he fell against the wall and slid down onto his ass, winging his shooter in the shoulder.
Two of the men were still up, staggered and bleeding. Ankou’s bodyguard rushed the Fae noble out of the conference room, shouting for backup down the hall. Ankou looked back at me, a strange look of serenity still on his face, then he was out of sight.
I opened the furnace of my Manipura chakra, stoked it with unbearable guilt and rage and let it vomit out of me with almost no focus. The enchanted ropes flared green a second before they became ash. I stood as the guard Vigil had shot in the side of the face turned to shoot me. He turned to ash too, as did part of the conference table and the wall behind him. The last knight standing with a bleeding shoulder had me dead-bang, he raised his gun, began to squeeze the trigger. The message to pull the trigger never made it to his finger as his brain exploded. Vigil tracked the headless body with his smoking gun until it thudded onto the floor. Then he slumped, his eyes closing. I knelt by him, slapping his face.
“Come on, come on, we got to go before the rest—”
“No others,” Vigil said. “I took care of them, all of them. Grinner’s alive, down the hall. He’s … in … bad shape, but he’s…”
He drifted off.
“Come on, goddamn it, hang on! You’re supposed to be a badass knight!”
Vigil’s lips opened even though his eyes didn’t. “Not … anymore, burned it all down, not … anymore.”
He went silent.
I found a working cell phone in the carnage and called Anna. “Get over here,” I said when she answered. I gave her the mansion’s address. “Vigil and Grinner are down. It should be safe here, but get ahold of Dwayne and
