Page 175 of The Mask Falling

Before I could run, they had seized an arm each, and they were hauling me away from the blood-sovereign and her betrothed.

“Don’t think you’ve won this,” I shouted at Nashira. “We are everywhere now. Not just in London. Not just in Paris. We are under the ground and over your heads, on every street and rooftop. We will multiply, like the rats you claim we are, and bring the plague that will consume you—”

“No,” Nashira said, and turned to put her gloved hands on Arcturus again. “You will consume yourselves. As you always have.”

That was when I surrendered to it. The hopelessness, the terror and confusion and rage. I pulled it all in.

And let it allout.

It came exploding from my dreamscape. An unearthly flare of pressure, violent as the surface of the sun, that seemed to come both from within and without. I called, and in the distance, somethinganswered.

All four Rephaim stiffened. A windstorm raged in the æther—a storm charged by my wrath. Situla and Graffias dropped me as if I had burst into flame. Without so much as touching them, I had brought gods to their knees.

Hatred burned white-hot in my veins. I could barely keep hold of it. With what little control I had left, I concentrated it all on Nashira. Shockwaves slammed into her, one after the other, and for the first time since the colony, when I had briefly taken hold of her dreamscape, her composure slipped. Her eyes blazed as I forced her, at last, to take a step back.

Wetness ran from my nose and soaked into the collar of my shirt. I fitted my mask over my face.

“Tell Gomeisa the moths are coming,” I told Nashira, “and there are more of us than you can count.”

As I turned, Arcturus snared my gaze across the hall. And for a heart-stopping moment, I could have sworn his eyes became lambent and alive once more, and I could have sworn that—for a fraction of a heartbeat, a whisper of time—he looked like himself, and not a shell.

Then it was gone, and I ran for my life.

Out through the doors to a roofed balcony. On my right, scaffolding. I flung myself onto it and climbed, muscles screaming. The two Rephaite guards came after me, but I was already clambering over the top, onto a flat and icy roof. My arms shook with the effort.

Straight ahead loomed a sheer wall, no handholds whatsoever. Sensing the Rephaim follow, I drew the pistol Léandre had given me, pointed it to my right, and fired into the nearest window. Without so much as a breath, I hurdled through it.

Straight across a deserted room. I aimed my shoulder and smashed through another window, back into the frigid air, landing hard on my side in the snow. I shoved myself straight up, cleared a gap, swerved left, and pounded down a stretch of snow-covered roof. Behind me, a searchlight glared on at the highest point of the Forteresse de Justice and performed a slow rotation. It illuminated my footprints and caught up with me just as I climbed to a new section of the roof. The siren doubled in volume.

The Forteresse de Justice must be packed with soldiers. I ran as I never had in my life—not even on the night I was arrested, the night that started all of this. They had caught me that time. This time, thousands of lives depended on every inch I put between myself and the enemy.

He could always find me. Just like I could always find him. For the rest of my life, I would be chained to a traitor.

Sparks near my boots. The first hail of bullets. I was running out of roof, melted snow carrying me too far, too fast. I managed to twist at the last moment and grab hold of a window frame, the force almost pulling my arms out of joint. Desperate for breath, I scrambled down using sills and ledges and landed in a crouch on a tiled slope, only for ice to throw off my footing and send me over another edge. The snow on a lower rooftop broke my fall.

One spring took me down to a parked car. I hopscotched across two more, hit the ground running, and slammed out of the Forteresse de Justice. The wrought iron gate clanged shut in my wake.

My boots splashed into slush. I stumbled, bruised and dazed. People stared at me, and I realized how it must look for a masked figure to have just burst out of the home of the Inquisitorial Courts.

Somewhere behind me, a pair of doors crashed open. Voices roared at me to stop. I sprinted away from the gun-mounted lights, past frightened people, toward the dreamscape ahead. Soon I could see him as well as sense him, standing by his moto near the Pont au Change.

“Léandre,” I shouted.

His face flicked toward me. Seeing my pursuers, he snapped down his visor and flung me a helmet. The moto was moving before I had even fully climbed into the saddle.

“Where is he?” he called to me as I threw an arm around his waist. “Where is Warden?”

“Just go!”

He twisted the handlebar and gunned the moto over the bridge. Bullets ripped into the pavement behind us, and then we were speeding away from the Île de la Citadelle, back into the shadows of Paris.

****

Léandre abandoned the moto under an archway. We ran north, taking narrow streets and shortcuts wherever we could. All the while, I choked out tearless sounds, as if I was being ripped apart from within. He grabbed an umbrella from a hotel, pulled me close, and opened it against the snow.

Sirens echoed all across the citadel, and a helicopter shone its light onto a nearby street. Léandre knew his way. He walked me down to the river, into the shadow of another bridge. There was a set of steps beneath it that led straight into the swift-running waters of the Seine. He pulled me down to sit on them, so we could speak without anyone seeing our faces.

“Is Nadine safe?” I asked.

---