Selene

They laid him on the red-velvet bed, folding his hands on his chest. His face was charred up the left side, burned almost down to the bone, half his hair gone. The wound on his chest was still open and smoking, the ragged edges of muscle exposed, white broken spears of his ribs peeking out under peeled-back skin. All that was left of his clothes were a few scraps of the coat and his boots, and maybe a quarter of his jeans.

Selene coughed into her hand, engine oil coating the back of her throat. The smell of smoke twisted her stomach again. She dropped the pile of Kevlar by the door.

Jorge looked up from the bedside. “Selene?”

The red lace lamp glowed dimly. Selene shook her head, damp tendrils of her hair falling forward. Bradley, his dreadlocks wet with blood on one side, looked at her too. There were two others, she hadn’t asked their names.

She didn’t care.

They looked at her like she should know what to do.

“Get out.” Her voice was an awful choked rasp.

She stood aside from the door as they passed. Then she swung the door closed, and dropped the iron bar from her side into the brackets.

With that done, she waited.

There was a whispered argument right outside the door. Jorge saying something about her being the Mistress now. Bradley hissing that Nikolai had to be alive, that he would rise, why else had she brought him back here?

Selene waited until they had gone away. Her arms and legs shook, waves of trembling spilling through liquid flesh. There was no desire in the shaking now. It was cold ash and exhaustion, nothing more.

Dawn wasn’t far off.

She slid down the inside of the door, ending up sitting with her hands loose and limp to either side. “Nikolai,” she whispered. “Nik?”

The ride back from the docks had been grimly silent, Selene cradling Nikolai’s head in the back of the black van, Bradley stealing glances at them. Marina had been taken in a different car. The city howled with sirens, fires in different corners, chaos spilling out onto the streets.

If Nikolai didn’t wake up, it would all be for nothing. The City would become a free territory, and Nichtvren would spill in to take it. The strong would fight, the weak would die, and a new Prime Power would eventually rise.

And Selene. . .what would happen to her? What would she do?

Free. I’m free now.

“Nikolai?” she whispered again.

Nothing. No tingle of Power in the air. No sound of his pulse.

There is no comfort in alone.

She scrubbed at her face. Soot crackled, fell off, drifted on the floor.

Her black bag lay forgotten by the side of the bed. Selene stared at it, fixedly, for a few long minutes, her jaw slack and her pupils dilated in the dim light. She closed her eyes and swallowed convulsively.

Finally she pitched forward, her palms meeting the wooden floor with a grating shock that clicked her teeth together again. Her lip stung. Her shoulders ached savagely. Her wrists were twin bracelets of agony, and her legs refused to fully obey her.

She crawled across the floor.

Finally, she reached the bedside. She flipped the bag open with trembling hands and slid the athame free. The blade glinted, sharp steel undimmed by blood. There was an echo, or did she imagine it? A faint breath of Danny’s wards, lingering in the wood and steel.

Oh, Danny. Selene held up a fistful of her hair, set the knife close to her skull, and started sawing.

It took a while, but finally she finished. Each handful of hair she tossed over Nikolai.

His body, she told herself. Grigori had stabbed him through the heart. And Nikolai had been burned and dangerously drained even before that fatal wound.

She stared at the knife’s gleam, clasped in her hand.

The she jerked herself up onto her knees and flung the knife at the wall.

If it had cried out when it left her hand, she wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, it only made a thin whistling sound and buried itself, tchuk!, hilt-deep in the paneling.

Her tarot cards, in their hank of red silk, were next. She scattered them all over the bed. The Priestess landed on Nikolai’s unmoving, bloody chest. The Four of Wands landed on his right hand. A thick drift of cards slid down to rest in the crevice between his body and the mattress on either side.

When she flipped over the Death card she hesitated only a little before she laid it gently on his forehead.

She tore the flannel shirt into strips and scattered them on the bed too.

What the hell are you doing? she thought dimly.

The only thing I know how to do now. I’m giving him the best sendoff I can. In the camps they would just leave the bodies at pickup points for mass burial. The sendoff came afterward, with home-brewed hooch and filthy jokes, keening songs and fistfights.

But she was here. She would give what she had.

Finally, she dug out two quarter-credit coins—emergency payphone, help, my brother called me. . .he’s a shut-in, something’s wrong—and laid one on each eyelid. They glittered at her, winking.

Dawn’s approach weighed her down with lead.

Selene’s arms trembled. She braced them on the mattress and leaned over, pressed her lips to Nikolai’s charred cheek. The skin was cold and leathery. There was none of the cold pulsing Power that had hung over him before.

“Nikolai,” she said against his face.

What are you going to do? Danny’s voice, awed and reedy. She found she didn’t care if he was dead and really speaking to her, or if she was talking to herself. It didn’t matter. What are you going to do now, Lena?

Selene hitched herself up to her feet. She stumbled to the door.

It took her two tries before she could get the iron bar down from the brackets. They’ll come to bury him, or burn him. He’ll have planned something for this, of course he would.

The thin edge of numbness between her and the huge crashing blackness grew a little thinner.

I’m free.

She dropped the bar with a clang. Then she dug under her ruined tank top and pulled the medallion over her head. The chain caught in a tuft of hair and she yanked. There was a moment of pain, the chain ripping free, then she turned the medallion over in her hand, tracing the lion’s head with one soot-blackened, bloody finger.

Selene swayed on her feet. Her wet boots made little squeaking sounds.

She laid the medallion over his broken, laced hands. “I don’t know what this is,” she husked. “Isn’t that ridiculous? All this time, and I don’t even know what this is.”

The bed shifted, just a little. Selene put her hands around one of the bedposts and pulled. If the nest is attacked, you will find a safe passage out. It is hidden behind the bed, and will respond only to the medallion. . .I would ask that you stay.

Sure enough, behind the headboard and a fall of red velvet was a small wooden door. It swung back when Selene squeezed behind the bed and pushed on it with tented fingers.

The ‘passage’ was a tunnel carved out of solid rock. I had no idea, Selene thought through the soupy haze of exhaustion. She slid into the tunnel—it was only four feet high. As soon as she was completely in, the door shut and the green glow of total darkness descended on the tunnel.

I’ve got to get out of here, find a place to sleep for the day. Then, tomorrow night, I can find a bus, or even a transport. I’ve got enough money for that. Get out of here, go somewhere.

I’m free. He’s dead and I’m free.

Why do I feel like crying?

Selene hesitated for just a moment. She could stay here, take over Nikolai’s thralls, keep the city under control—except she had no idea of how to. She was tired and burned, there was a big gaping invisible hole in her chest, and going back into that room with a dead Nichtvren on the bed was the one thing she couldn’t force herself to do.

She was free now. She’d worked and prayed and longed for freedom, and now that she had it, she didn’t know what the hell to do.

It doesn’t matter. I’ll find something. I always have.

But she didn’t have a lot of time before dawn.

Selene raised her chin, settled the bag strap more firmly, and began to climb toward the thing that had eluded her all her life.

She didn’t bother wiping away the tears. They would stop when they were done. She couldn’t do anything about it, she needed all her failing energy to find a safe bolthole. She would sleep through the inimical day and wake when the sun slid below the horizon. When she did, she would be a new person, a Selene who didn’t have to beg or plead anymore. She would head to the bus station or the transport lodge, and get a ticket to anywhere.

And then, the world.