Page 59 of Soothsayer

Rolf came back a moment later, dragging Andre with him. Andre looked…oh boy, he looked the worse for wear, with two black eyes and what was probably a broken nose, but he was still standing. He glared at me like this was all my fault, and—okay, fair, he was pretty much right. But I was going to fix it.

“Hey, man.”

“Fuckyou, Kelly.”

“Cillian…” Sören looked confused. “I don’t think this will work.” Sören was primed to take the best offer, and Ólafur was right, his son was a way better sacrifice than my unwilling kind-of-friend.

“You have to let me try,” I said. “Let me make the sacrifice before you decide, okay?”

Ólafur smiled broadly. “Oh, by all means. Kill your friend for nothing, and then we can finally dispense with the formalities and get into the matter of punishing you for your presumption.”

That would probably involve slow dismemberment, knowing Ólafur. I took a deep breath and stood up, firming my resolution. This was it. No going back after this.

I walked over to Andre. “Look, I’m really sorry about this. I never meant for you to get involved this way.”

Andre wearily shook his head. “Best of intentions don’t count for shit now.”

“Your family is all right, I made sure of it.” I took off my Buddha necklace and hung it around his neck. Very faintly, I heard the slightestclick. Andre seemed to as well, because his eyes widened. “Sometimes you’ve just gotta take the cards Fate deals you and run with them, you know?”

“Get on with it,” Ólafur snapped. “If you need to borrow a gun—”

I shook my head. “I don’t need a gun for this. I do need a smoke, though.” I reached into my pocket and took out the lighter. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Jakob start to back away. Smart guy. I primed the microgrenade, looked at Andre, mouthedRun, and then tossed the grenade at the chair I’d just been sitting in. Two seconds later, it exploded.

The thing about a microgrenade was it had more bang than boom. Some decent concussive force, lots of smoke, but it wasn’t going to do any serious damage. It probably blew the chair to pieces and likely did some damage to everyone in its immediate vicinity, but I didn’t stick around to watch. I was already running, booking it through the door that Rolf had left open and out into the warehouse itself.

In front of me, stretching for half the length of a football field, was an enormous plastic tub reinforced with wooden beams that held still, black water, its shore edged with jagged gray boulders. At the far end of the lake was a small grove of white-barked birch trees, with one huge specimen in the center, twisted andbranching, its long arms hovering over the edge of the water. That was the one I needed.

Behind me I heard a roar, an actual, honest-to-godroar, and the sound of ripping cloth. Ólafur was changing, going berserk. Well, better that than him keeping his head and shooting me in the back, but that meant I needed to be faster. I sprinted toward the tree, unbuckling my belt as I went and whipping it off my waist. I worked the buckle free and stuffed it in my pocket and then kept racing toward my goal.

Twenty yards…ten…

I’d almost reached the grove by the time the heavy footsteps caught up to me, so fucking close to where I needed to be but still too far away to act. I threw myself to the right at the last second while Ólafur continued forward, out of control in his rage and unable to keep his bulk from running him straight into the little grove. The smallest tree shuddered and split under the force of his impact, and Sören screamed.

Fuck,that wasn’t supposed to happen! I glanced back and wished I hadn’t, because Sören was running toward us now, and he looked wrathful. Purple mist spilled from his eyes, and the water of the lake began to froth. Ólafur would have some groveling to do if he lived through this. Speaking of that?the man’s rage still drove him, and he was already stumbling out of the wreckage of the broken tree. I needed to go, fast.

I hoisted myself up into the biggest tree, high enough that even stretched out my feet didn’t touch the ground. I sat on a branch, fastened my belt around my bent knees to hold me up when my muscles gave out, and then leaned back and let my body hang against the trunk. It was traditional when making a sacrifice of yourself to offer it like this, if Odin’s legend was anything to go by. Plus, I’d bleed out faster. I fumbled in my pocket for the buckle, my hands already gory from handling its supremely sharp edges.

Ólafur and Sören grappled not two feet away from me, driven to combat out of pain and hurt and rage. If I was going to do this, I had to do it now, before either of them came to their senses.

“Sören!” Purple eyes glanced over at me and then did a double take. I smiled at him, trembling but for once completely sure of what I was doing. “Remember what we talked about last night, okay?”

“Cillian, what—”

I didn’t hear the rest; I was too busy jamming the edge of the belt buckle into my jugular. The angle was weird, and I didn’t trust myself to have the strength to cut my entire throat, but one straight shot into the vein—I could do that.

I did it. It hurt, but not as badly as I thought it might when I’d been considering it last night. Strange, that the end of my life should almost feel comfortable, like a muscle slowly unknotting, instead of the stark pain that so much of my life had been. Hot blood flowed over my chin and down my face, and the world went fuzzy and started to gray out. I let it go with a sigh of relief.

The last thing I heard before I died was Sören calling my name.

Chapter Thirty

The first thing I felt as I began to wake up—and some little part of me was incredibly pleased to be feelinganything, I remembered enough to be sure of that—was a hard slap across the cheek. Not quite hard enough to make my head turn on the pillow, but it definitely wasn’t a friendly caress. I groaned and slowly blinked my eyes open.

“Ah good, you’re awake. You fuckingfool.”

That wasn’t Sören’s voice. That was—“Jakob?” I asked hoarsely.

“Correct.”

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