The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [228]
The sound grew louder, rising into a hungry chorus of growls. Aryn scrambled on the floor, eyes wide, backing away from the side door through which Durge had come. Lanky shadows moved beyond.
“Listen to me, Durge,” Grace said. “I know you're still in there—you've got to be. Please, don't do this.”
“Shut up, Malachorian whore,” he said and struck her cheek with the back of his hand.
There was a crunching sound inside Grace's skull. Pain sizzled outward from her jaw. She reeled, then caught herself and looked up to see spindly gray forms stream through the side door into the hall, one after the other. Feydrim. There were feydrim inside the keep.
Gravenfist was lost.
51.
Travis opened his mouth, but whether to speak a rune, or to tell Jace he was sorry, he wasn't sure. It didn't matter; either way he was too slow. Jace gripped the gun in a small, steady hand and fired.
Thunder roared through Travis's skull, then rolled away. Before him, Jace lowered the gun. Travis lifted a hand to his chest, groping, but there was no blood, no gaping hole.
Jace's eyes gazed past him. Travis turned around. Marty sprawled on the floor, his gangly limbs tangled together, his brown eyes dull, empty. The bullet had torn a fist-sized chunk of bone and brain from his skull.
Travis staggered around, staring at Jace. Why? He didn't manage to speak the word, but Jace answered all the same.
“He was an ironheart.” She lowered the gun and holstered it with a precise motion.
Travis looked back at Marty's corpse. He knelt and unbuttoned the man's shirt. A thick bandage was taped to the center of Marty's chest. Travis pulled it aside, revealing a long incision just to the left of the breastbone. The wound was fresh, but it had been neatly sewn together.
Travis shut his eyes. I was too late, Jay. I should have taken care of him, but I was too late.
It wasn't the usual placidness Travis had seen in Marty's brown eyes. It was the flatness of death. Marty—or the thing that had been Marty—would have killed him. If it hadn't been for Jace.
He opened his eyes and turned around. Jace still stood in the doorway. Her expression was stern, but there was something in her eyes—a haunted light—that made his breath catch in his chest.
“I don't understand,” he said.
Jace took another step forward. “I saw Deirdre Falling Hawk on the monitor at my guard station. Just for a moment, but it was enough, and I knew if she was here, you had to be close by. So I left my station to look for you.”
So Jace had been the woman Vani had seen on the monitor, standing guard at the station in the maintenance hallway.
“You were following me,” he said.
“I wanted to see what you were up to. I thought maybe I had an idea of what it was.”
“So why aren't you stopping me?”
Her hand did not move back to the gun at her side. “Because someone has to stop them, and I'm pretty sure you're the only one who can do it.”
It was too much. Travis had to catch the wall to keep from falling. The last time Travis was in Denver, Jace had betrayed him and Grace to Duratek, and it had nearly cost them their lives. What she had just said made no sense.
Jace tucked a lock of hair behind her ear; the gesture made her look vulnerable despite the uniform and gun. “I don't expect you to understand, Travis. I'm not sure I do myself. Nothing made sense to me after Maximilian died. It was as though the world had been turned inside out, and all the rules and laws that had mattered one moment didn't the next. I blamed you for that, for bringing that madness into Castle City. And when they came to me, they offered a way for me to find order again. They gave me a new set of laws to follow.”
Travis clenched a fist. “Duratek.”
She looked away. “For a little while it was enough. If I followed their rules, if I didn't think about them, it was almost like