He runs his stylus down the ribs in his armor, coming closer so I can see the details. “My dear father thought a man’s deeds make him. I rather think it’s his enemies. Do you like it?” He steps even closer. One of the ribs shows a helmet with a spiked sunburst. Another rib shows a head in a box.
The Jackal is wearing Fitchner’s rib cage.
Anger roars out of me and I try to bite his face, bellowing like a wounded animal, startling Mustang. I strain against the men holding me, trembling with rage as the Jackal watches me squirm. Cassius stares at the ground, avoiding Mustang’s gaze. My voice croaks out of me, hardly my own. That deeper demon only the Jackal can summon from me. “I’m going to skin you,” I say.
Bored of me, he rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers. “Put the muzzle back on.” Tharsus binds my mouth. The Jackal opens his arms as if welcoming two long-lost friends to a party. “Cassius! Antonia!” he says. “Heroes of the hour. My dear…what happened?” He asks when he sees Antonia’s face. They were lovers during my imprisonment. Sometimes I’d smell her on him as he came to visit me before the box. Or she’d drag a nail along his neck as she passed. He goes close to her now, taking her jaw in his hand, tilting her head to examine the damage done to her. “Did Darrow do this?”
“My sister,” she corrects, disliking his examination. She mourned her face in our captivity more than she mourned her own mother’s death. “The bitch will pay. And I’ll have it fixed, don’t worry.” She pulls her head back from him.
“Stop,” the Jackal says sharply. “Why fixed?”
“It’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting? My dear, scars are what you are. They tell your story.”
“This is Victra’s story, not mine.”
“You’re still beautiful.” He pulls her down gently by her chin and kisses her lips delicately. He doesn’t care for her. Like Mustang said, we’re just sacks of meat to him. But while Antonia’s as wicked a thing as I’ve ever met, she wants to be loved. To be valued. The Jackal knows how to use that.
“This was Barca’s,” Antonia says, handing the Jackal Sevro’s pistol. The Jackal runs a thumb over the howling wolves engraved in the hilt.
“Fine work,” he says. He strips his own gun from his magnetic holster and tosses it to a bodyguard before holstering Sevro’s. Of course he takes my friend’s pistol as a trophy.
His datapad flashes and he holds up a hand for silence. “Yes, Imperator?”
The grotesque Ash Lord appears in the air before the Jackal as a disembodied, gigantic head. Dark Gold eyes peer out from beneath twin thickets of eyebrows. His jowls hang over the high black collar of his uniform.
“They’re coming for him,” Cassius says.
“How many?” the Jackal asks.
“Do you wish me to spring the trap?”
“You know the arrangement.”
The Ash Lord’s wide mouth makes a straight line.
“For Gold.”
The head disappears.
The Jackal glances over to the Obsidians who pulled me down the cargo ramp. “Slaves, attend to Praetor Licenus on the bridge. You are no longer needed.” The Obsidians leave without question. When they are gone, he eyes the thirty Boneriders. “The Morning Knight has given us an opportunity to win this war today. The Telemanuses will come for my sister. The Howlers and the Sons of Ares will come for the Reaper. They will not have them. It is upon our shoulders to deliver them to our Sovereign and her strategists in the Citadel.”
He addresses Antonia and Cassius. “Set aside your little grievances. Today we are Gold. We can bicker when the Rising is ash. Most of you lived the darkness of the caves with me. You watched by my side as this…creature stole what was ours. They will take everything from us. Our homes. Our slaves. Our right to rule. Today we fight to keep what is ours. Today we fight against the dying of our Age.”
They lean into his words, awaiting his orders hungrily. It’s terrifying to see the cult he’s built around himself. He’s taken bits of me, of my speaking pattern, and transposed it onto his own behavior. He continues to evolve.
The Jackal turns from his men as Lilath brings back my slingBlade, red-hot from engine’s heat, and hands it to him hilt first. “Lilath, you’re to stay with the fleet.”
“You’re sure?”
“You’re my insurance plan.”
“Yes, my liege.”
