Page 10 of Swords of Soul and Shadow (Gate Chronicles #3)

DOWNPOUR

Jove

AIR WHOOSHED FROM JOVE SHACKLEY’S lungs as he leaped over the ruins of the wall surrounding his childhood home. Whether it had been hit by a dragon or taken out with some sort of massive weapon, he didn’t know; he only knew it hadn’t been short enough to leap over before.

Smoke and screams and orange fire painted the sky. A loud rumble knocked him off his feet, the impact wrenching his hurt shoulder. He pulled himself back to his feet, hissing through his teeth when his shoulder protested.

Ben Reiss and his dragon’s destruction of Kyvena hadn’t fully processed in Jove’s mind. One World had joined forces with the Cerls. As an intelligence agent, Jove had known they were connected, but he’d never dreamed they’d be able to pull off something on this scale.

Small demonstrations, a little violence, several arrests? That was closer to what Jove had anticipated. Why would he have ever thought otherwise? The Jaydian Hover Crews were the best in the world.

He looked back at the burning city below him just as an enemy hover dropped something from its cargo hold.

“ Get down !” Harlan Shackley shouted.

Jove and the Yalven emissary beside him, Saldr, hit the cobblestone so hard, Jove’s bones ached. The ground shook and rattled them further. He couldn’t hear anything over the screams and other commotions throughout the city.

Holy shocks, they were bombing the city.

His father had already recovered and sprinted for the manor’s entrance. Jove might’ve kept pace had he not been shot only minutes before. Instead, he stumbled to his feet only to fall again.

Blasted shoulder. Blasted bombs. Blasted everything.

Saldr helped him to his feet. “Are you all right, Master Shackley?”

No part of this was all right.

More violent, swearing shouts from Harlan; he was cursing at the looters trying to force their way into the manor.

Jove retrieved the stolen Cerl pistol from the ground, hitting the hammer too hard with his thumb.

Its stinging pain was more like an annoying wasp buzzing in Jove’s head.

He squeezed the slick trigger. Fiery blue bullets joined his father’s own shots into the crowd of criminals. Jove stumbled from the recoil.

They shouted. One man screamed as blood soaked the back of his light-colored jacket.

He fell in a crumpled heap. Jove’s chest heaved painfully as if something was sucking the lifeblood from his heart.

He fired again. Another wrenching sensation.

The bullet hit the side of the manor and ricocheted into another looter.

The rest scattered, running away from more blue bullets coming from Harlan’s weapon. Jove should have been up there with him, should have been at his side as he stormed the manor’s entrance, but…

Fire tore through Shackley Manor’s roof and busted out windows along the top floor. Chaos reigned everywhere he looked. If he broke into his home and found his family dead…

No. He could not do it. He could not go into that house and find his wife…his son —

The worn and weary cobblestones dug into his knees before he knew he’d fallen again. Not pain this time, but despair.

How could he have left his family? He was supposed to protect them, and he’d just…left.

The alcohol couldn’t shield him from this. The evening’s horrors had burned it out of him. The understanding of what he’d done pierced deeper than any bullet.

I left them.

I left them.

I left—

Enough.

He placed his hands upon the cobblestones, wary of the glass, and pushed himself to his feet. His stomach felt hollow yet full of lead at the same time. Bile waited at the back of his throat.

But he owed it to Clara to face what he’d done. If she was alive, he had to protect her. If she was not…

He couldn’t think about that. Not if he wanted to keep his feet moving.

By the time he got to his father’s side, Harlan had already kicked down the door, shouting “Celeste!” into the darkness beyond.

No response.

Jove stumbled into the foyer. The elegant family portrait on the wall hadn’t been touched. Nothing had been—yet. The looters would be back.

The figures immortalized in brush strokes stared back at him in the dim firelight filtering through the open front door. Jove had felt important that day. He’d helped wrangle his younger siblings just enough to sit still for it. Zeke was the only one who’d smiled.

Jove hated the painting. It was nothing but a pretty lie.

Harlan thundered up the stairs, Cerl pistol in one hand, sword in the other.

Jove didn’t follow. He trudged down the corridor to the chamber where he and Clara had been staying since Samuel had been born.

Hope bubbled in his chest when he realized the lower floor seemed untouched.

The fire raging through the upper levels hadn’t spread here yet.

But the unnerving quiet scared him into a sprint.

They’re all right. They aren’t hurt. Clara probably took Samuel and hid down one of the servants’ passages.

She wouldn’t have known about the Catacombs beneath their feet—a maze of tunnels and hollowed-out caverns that had been Jayde’s answer and preparation for another conflict on the scale of the Great War. Jove had been sworn to secrecy about their existence. Now he wished he’d broken that vow.

For how badly he’d struggled to force himself in, now his feet couldn’t go fast enough. He nearly stumbled over himself as he rushed into the bed chamber, the door banging against the wall. “Clara!”

The room was tidy and undisturbed. The aged bassinet still sat next to the large four-poster bed, the drapes flung wide. The bed overflowed with tasseled and embroidered pillows. A sheaf of parchment lay on the bedside table.

With heavy footfalls, Jove trudged over to the bassinet, guilt and dread filling his chest.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. He wasn’t certain if it was another bomb drop or the dragon or merely an early spring thunderstorm on the horizon. He didn’t care which.

When he grasped the letter in his war-soiled fingers, crusted flakes of blood fell upon the script crafted in his wife’s careful handwriting.

Jove,

We’ve gone to Crystalfell. Don’t come until you’re ready.

Clara

Jove let his head fall in his hands, his brow brushing the parchment.

Relief struck him first: they weren’t here. They’d left, hopefully before the city erupted into chaos.

Fear came next: if they hadn’t left soon enough, they might’ve been caught up in the riots or incinerated by the dragon flying through the city skies. They could be dead after all, and he’d never know.

Jove crushed the note in his fist and chucked it at the wall.

“They’re not here.” His father’s voice was hard and echoed in the empty room. “We need to go.”

“No.” The word came out slightly mangled. Even if Clara wasn’t dead or injured, she’d taken their son with her and fled.

He’d left them, so she had left him. Because he was a cancer infecting those around him with his grief until they could no longer function.

Harlan stepped lightly into the room. “With the fire on the upper floors, the Manor isn’t stable. We’ll keep looking, but they aren’t here. There’s no reason to stay.”

Jove heard the words as if they were spoken from the opposite end of a tunnel, but he got up and followed anyway. Harlan already thought him weak. He wouldn’t give him an excuse to confirm it.

As they rejoined an armed and unnaturally pale Saldr outside, Jove looked back one last time on his childhood home.

It hadn’t really been home for some time now, but watching destruction close in on it still hurt.

His mother’s library would be ash soon, as would the odd pairs of socks he’d not brought with him to the townhouse when he’d married.

The countless family portraits wouldn’t survive.

Odds and ends that had once belonged to Zeke, to Kase… even to Ana.

Yet, Jove’s soul was numb, and he couldn’t bring himself to care even as the first raindrops fell from the sky and soaked his bloodstained coat.

Don’t come until you’re ready.

Ready to…what? What could he do, what could he become that would make all of this right again?

The rain turned into a downpour. It might wash some of the ruin away, but it couldn’t cleanse what had been sullied in him.

His father led them back over the ruined wall and into the city of chaos.

Jove didn’t look back as the manor burned.