Page 99 of Siege of Shadows

The shots and yells pounded my senses. My head screaming, I turned and saw Chae Rin grabbing a soldier’s gun and swiveling it around so it could shoot one of his comrades instead. Lake blew a group of them away with a torrent of wind as Belle sliced across a man’s chest with her sword, melting the ice around the living room to make it easier to move.

Rosa pulled me into the hallway. “Are they Sect?” I grunted in pain as I passed Naomi to her, the weight of her body lifting a bit of pressure off my bleeding leg.

“I can’t tell,” she answered. “Those aren’t Sect uniforms.”

They covered their faces with helmets, like police in riot gear. Black fatigues. Concealed identities.

“We did a perimeter sweep and even checked the room for bugs,” Rosa said. “We weren’t followed. Nobody could have known Naomi would be here. How did they find us?”

The Sect knew we’d be in Prague, but they didn’t know we were meeting Naomi, not even Rhys. And yet Naomi was clearly the target. They’d wasted no time taking her down.

Whoever they were, it was Naomi they wanted dead. And they’d come prepared. The assailants were down, but it wasn’t the end. One last attacker, before he fell, threw a metal ball across the room. It landed hard against the wet floor before I realized Belle was yelling at us to run.

A few seconds of silence, of shoes splashing and scrambling across the ground. The explosion that followed was just big enough to take out the living room. Belle’s warning and the others’ quick senses had saved them; they jumped with the blast, diving to the ground and avoiding the worst of it. Everyone made it out of the living room and into the entrance hallway safely, though Lake’s head was bleeding badly. She still clung to her knapsack’s strap as she sat against the wall we’d found shelter behind.

“Ugh...” My ears hadn’t stopped ringing. I could hear screaming and commotion on the other side of the door in front of us. “What do we do?” Getting on my knees, I pressed my hands down on Naomi’s chest, but the blood was swelling up too much. “We have to get her to a hospital.”

“No,” Belle said.

“She’sdying,” I yelled, staring at her incredulously.

“She needs medical attention, but we can’t be seen here,” she clarified. “It’ll raise too many questions. And it’ll make it harder for us to move.”

“Belle’s right,” said Chae Rin. “Whether they were Sect or not, they obviously wanted to kill Naomi before she could tell us anything important. If that doesn’t say we’re on the right track, I don’t know what else could.” Breathing heavily, she stared at Naomi, wincing from the sight of her quivering in her bodyguard’s arms. “Best thing we can do now is get to Prague before they do. But like Belle said, we can’t be seen here.”

Belle stood. “We can leave quickly. Cover our faces. But we have to find another way out of the city. We can’t take the jet that brought us here. The Sect will never let us stray from their sight the moment they find us.”

“No, you can’t.” Naomi’s second bodyguard, James, stood, his left arm bleeding from a gunshot wound. “But I can fly you out on the helicopter I used to bring Mrs. Prince here.”

“What about Naomi?” I said.

“There’re two of us,” he said, flicking his head toward his partner. “Rosa will get Mrs. Prince to the hospital.”

We didn’t have another choice, and time was running out. I took one last look at Rhys’s mother dying in Rosa’s arms before tearing myself away, my lips concealing a sob as we ran through the front door and into the chaos of bodies in the hallway.

•••

Everyone was too busy fleeing for their lives to notice that there were four Effigies among them. We kept our heads low, navigating down the stairs and through the emergency exit with the rest. Cop cars already lined the street. James took us around the back of the building, through the narrow alleyways until we came to the car he’d driven Naomi in.

“Get in,” he said quickly, and we did. Lake was moaning beside me, still dizzy from the blast. I tore off my sleeve and made a bandage out of it, tying it around her head as we zipped through the streets. The helicopter he’d flown Naomi in was at a private heliport at the edge of the city. Fully fueled. We hopped inside and strapped ourselves in.

“EMA activated,” came the feminine voice from somewhere inside my headset. The ringing in my ears got worse as the helicopter lifted off, as the gravity shifted around me. This would usually be around the time when I wanted to throw up. But my body had become so numb, I could barely feel the helicopter rocking from the turbulence. I let my head sink back against the chair.

I was squished between Lake and Chae Rin, with Belle in the front next to James. Lake was sleeping; her head dangled awkwardly as her languid body leaned forward against her seat belt. Her neck looked like it was going to break off, so I pushed her back up against the seat and positioned her head properly against it before settling back into my own stupor.

“No way this thing can take us all the way to Prague,” Chae Rin said, though with the intense helicopter noise, I could only really listen to her voice through the headset.

“We’ll need to refuel en route,” James said. “I know it’s not as ideal as taking the Sect jet, but it’s faster than driving and less easily followed.”

“Thank you for helping us,” I said. My sleeveless arm was chilly, but we’d left our suitcases at the rooftop bar. Lake was the only one who’d had the sense to take her knapsack with her. All my clothes were back in Madrid.

“It’s what Mrs. Prince wanted....” James’s voice tapered out as the question no one wanted to ask hung in the air. Rosa must have gotten Naomi to a hospital by now. I had to believe that. But when I closed my eyes, I pictured the look of devastation on Rhys’s face and my fingers curled on my lap.

“They’re going to know we had something to do with it,” I said. “They knew we were in the city when it happened. Then we suddenly disappear without telling anyone?”

“And they’ll track us.” I could see the knit in Belle’s eyebrows as she looked out the window. “We need to work quickly.” She looked at James. “And rely on whomever we can trust.”

There had to be a way to mask our frequencies like Saul could. If the Sect could just track us wherever we went, what would be the point? We didn’t know for sure who’d attacked us in Naomi’s apartment, but it had to be them. If they caught us, even if they didn’t kill us, best-case scenario would be that they’d lock us up and question us over Naomi’s attempted murder. Considering Saul was working on a timetable, both options were inconvenient.

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