Shana Abe - The Sweetest Dark

“Where?” Armand was beside him, grabbing at my arm.

“What …” My tongue felt too fat. I tasted copper and salt; I’d bitten it in the fall. The words I wanted were jumbled around inside my head, all mixed up. I spat out a mouthful of blood and tried again. “What’s happening?”

“My father,” Armand said, clenched desolation and fury.

“He’s got an arsenal over there.” Jesse was much cooler; he had his fingers at my face, tilting my head to the purple light. “We can’t get near.”

“Right.” I knew what to do. I would just Turn to smoke. He couldn’t shoot that. The world would stop slurring around me, and I would Turn.

“No, Lora, we—” Jesse began, but too late.

It seemed like a good idea. It really did.

I surged past both of them. Armand actually thrust out his hands, trying to grab me to hold me back, but I sieved through his fingers and left him clutching air. Even as smoke, I still felt woozy—strange, because I had no body any longer, so all the physical pain was gone—but I knew I didn’t have much time. If either of them tried to follow me, they’d easily take a bullet. I wouldn’t.

The duke never saw what was speeding toward him. He was crouched at the edge of the battlement with the merlons behind him, blockaded behind an improvised fort of crates. I could see his hair puffed with the wind. His eyes gleaming. He had his arms braced atop one of the boxes so his hands would be steady for the next shot.

He was so close to the end of the roof that I couldn’t Turn behind him. So I did the only other thing that occurred to me.

I Turned back into a girl right above him.

We both went down hard this time, me on top and him too stunned to make more than a high, gargled sound in his throat. As soon as we hit the stone, I wrapped my arms around his head and held on tight, ready to fight him if he tried to roll, but His Grace wasn’t moving. His body had gone completely slack.

Armand towed me up and Jesse hustled me away. I staggered against him, looking past his shoulder just in time to see my nightgown dance over the rim of the roof, a twirling, empty ballerina blowing away to the stars.

“That was stupid,” I said loudly.

“Too right it was.” None of Armand’s fury had left him.

“No, I mean you. Both of you. Following me like that. You could have been killed!”

“We were doing well enough until you—did that! Went to smoke like that.”

“He couldn’t shoot smoke!”

“He could have shot the half-wit on top of him!”

“But he didn’t!” I swallowed, a lump of something sick rising in my throat. “I didn’t kill him, did I?”

Armand seemed to shrink a little. He looked back at the duke and shook his head. “No. I think you knocked him out. He’s breathing.”

“Has anyone a coat?” I asked, and found myself crumpling down to the roof, a leisurely sort of collapse. Armand grabbed me by the arm again and I managed to remain seated instead of prone.

“Dragon-girl.” Jesse was stripping off his shirt. “Bravest girl. I keep telling you to eat more.”

“Jesse!”

He was bleeding. The entire lower half of his left leg was covered in blood, wet and glistening.

“Clean shot,” he said, his weight on his other leg as he bent to hand me the shirt. “Went all the way through. Might not even leave a scar.”

Why hadn’t I noticed it before? Why hadn’t I smelled the blood? It was everywhere. All over him. All over me. I clambered to my feet.

He stopped my desperate groping of his thigh by cupping my face in his hands. “Truly, Lora. It’s fine. My fault. I should have spoken to him through the door before opening it.”

“I don’t understand.” I clutched his shirt to my chest, dazed. “What happened to him? Why was he shooting at us at all?” I noticed then that many of the crates were opened, shredded paper frothing over the edges of the wood, tumbling about. “What is all this?”

“The Vickers,” said Armand. He lifted his hand and pointed at a pair of large, evil-looking guns set out past the crates. They’d been attached to legs of some sort, narrow muzzles, round drums, lots and lots of bullets. Just like he’d described before. “If he’d aimed those at us, we wouldn’t be around to chat about it now.”

“But why?”

His voice began to climb. “Oh, well, it turns out he’s to blame for Aubrey’s death. He wasn’t able to leave well enough alone, to leave Aubrey to his goddamned glory in the goddamned war. He had gotten him reassigned back to England, even though Aubrey’d never have wanted that. Never would have agreed to that, so they must have forced him. But he was coming home. When his plane was shot down in that dogfight, he was on his way home. Because of Reginald.”

He threaded both hands through his hair, staring at his father; I could see the fury draining away. When he spoke again, he sounded just … confounded. Disbelieving.

“So he’s lured them here. The Germans. He managed—oh, God, he managed to somehow start a rumor that Iverson’s been turned into a secret munitions factory. That we’re building explosives or something out here. I found cables and cables about it, and everyone knows how—how easy they are to intercept. He wanted the Germans to come to blow it up, don’t you see? And he meant … I think he meant to shoot them first. With the Vickers.”

“I thought that ground fire couldn’t reach the zeppelins,” I said. “I thought that guns on the ground didn’t have the range.”

“Eleanore. Do you imagine for one particle of one second that he was thinking clearly enough to fathom that?”

“He was thinking clearly enough to fathom all of this,” I retorted, my hand flung out to encompass the roof. Blood stained my palm. “Clearly enough to have men haul all these crates into the castle in broad daylight all week long, so that everyone could see them and wonder what was actually inside!”

“I know!” Armand’s voice broke. He walked back to his father, going to his knees beside him. He placed his hands upon the unconscious man’s chest. “I know,” he repeated, beneath the screech of the wind.

Jesse left me to limp to them. The backs of his fingers grazed the top of Armand’s head, not quite a caress. “Grief can break a mind. He loved and loved, your father, because that’s his way. He couldn’t turn it off.”

“He shot at Armand,” I felt compelled to point out. I wasn’t in a forgiving mood; the duke certainly hadn’t minded risking me and everyone inside the castle getting blasted into oblivion to gain his revenge. And the smell of Jesse’s blood was becoming overwhelming. “He might have killed you.”

“Yet he didn’t. He had the opportunity to kill both of us when we first made it up the stairs, but once he saw he’d wounded me, he simply shot around us. I suspect the bullet that got you, Lora, was more of an accident than not. All he wanted was for us to go, so that he could finish his plan. Burn away his grief.”

Armand was shaking his head. “I don’t know what to do now. He’s the duke of all this. The duke of everything. If people find out … I don’t know what to do.” He rubbed at his eyes. “God, Dad.”

I had managed to get myself into the shirt, even past the throbbing ache of my arm.

“Right,” I said once more, because it sounded firm, and because Armand’s brittle desolation was beginning to eat at me. None of this, after all, was his fault. “We get him downstairs. We sneak him out of the castle, back to your motorcar. You take Jesse to a doctor and your father home. Lock him in a room, pour some wine down his throat. Laudanum. Whatever you have to do to keep him out while I get rid of the guns. None of this ever happened.” I looked at Jesse. “Are there hidden tunnels to use? So no one sees?”

“I’m sorry,” said Jesse. “It’s too late for that.”

“No, we can at least get him to—”

“Too late, Lora. Listen.”

I did, cocking my head to the wind. But I didn’t hear any voices. I didn’t hear people on the stairs. It was mostly schoolrooms over here; we were far from the populated part of the castle.

I held back my hair and shrugged at him.

Jesse glanced upward. Toward the eastern stars.

Thup-thup-thup-thup. It was hardly a sound at all, it came so faint.

“What is that?” I asked sharply, but I knew. Oh, I knew.

The Germans had believed the mad duke’s cables. The airships were coming.

“What is what?” asked Armand. “I don’t hear anything.”

I hadn’t taken my eyes from Jesse. “There’s more than one. Two at least, right?”

“Two,” he said. “I hear two.”

Armand stood. “Two what?”

I sent him a look. “Zeppelins. Headed this way.”

He stared at us, silent. And, really, what could he say? Sorry my father doomed us all? Nice knowing you?

“All right, all right.” I chafed my hands nervously up and down my sides, rumpling the shirt. “I can—I can fly up there. Turn to dragon. Claw them open, make them crash.” Instinctively, I turned to Jesse, almost plaintive. “Can’t I?”

He took up my hand. I swear I saw the stars brighten around him, a sparkling, silvered nimbus. “Perhaps.”

“Well, I have to. That’s all there is to it. I have to.”

“No,” burst out Armand. “They have guns! Bombs! They’ll fill you with holes before you can blink!”

“Not if I’m smoke.”

“Smoke can’t tear apart a dirigible! We need to wake the others and evacuate the castle. Get everyone out before they make it here.”

“No time,” said Jesse. “We’ve only a few minutes. Look.”