Page 138 of Swords of Soul and Shadow (Gate Chronicles #3)

JOVE HARLAN SHACKLEY

Clara

EVEN THOUGH THEY HADN’T LEFT the capital, the landscape was utterly foreign to Clara after so much time spent in the Catacombs.

It was almost as if she’d been living in another world, and the city that had been her home for the past five years was now a barely remembered dream.

It took her too long to navigate the streets she’d once traversed by motorcoach.

Debris littered the alleyways and lanes.

Entire buildings had been blown apart, their white and wooden bones scattered like dead leaves across her path.

As she guided her mother through the city and held her son close to her chest, she just wished it would all end.

It still didn’t seem real that she’d survived the first attack; that the graves she now walked on could have been hers. Her son’s. Her husband’s.

She’d been fortunate not to Burn loved ones in the last weeks, but she wasn’t sure if her luck would hold out much longer. Tragedy seemed to follow her like a hawk to its prey.

Adrenaline was the only thing keeping her on her feet as her lips burned with the memory of the last kiss she’d given her husband. She hadn’t wanted to leave him there amid such danger and uncertainty. She’d done that before, and it had nearly killed them both.

But even after everything, she trusted Jove with her whole heart. Samuel needed her, and she would protect him at all costs. She would deal with what came after as best she could, for everything would come together as it should—whether she were in the line of fire or not.

“Why are we leaving?” her mother asked, her skirts billowing around her as she ran through the streets behind her daughter. Even in the face of a refugee camp, her mother refused to wear more practical trousers.

Clara couldn’t explain, not really. Her mother had been immensely helpful these last weeks while Clara searched for Jove or helped where needed, but that didn’t mean she would understand the fear and dread thrumming through Clara’s veins.

“I need to get Samuel out of the city—get you out of the city. Jove says something dangerous is coming. We need to go to Father.”

Her words were true, but they still felt hollow.

“We won’t find a carriage to take us anywhere,” her mother pointed out, her breaths ragged.

She’d been a proper lady before the attack on the capital.

She wasn’t alone in that description; Clara’s lungs also burned with the effort of climbing toward the city gates, but at least she wasn’t tangled in her skirts.

The doors hung open, unrepaired from the destruction wrought weeks ago.

Just past them, a green valley riddled with cave-ins and detritus from the bombing awaited.

Would they even survive if they left the city? Who knew what waited for them out there? Her father and her family estate were far to the south, but they could find a carriage in one of the outlying villages. She hoped.

Yes. They had no choice. They would survive. Her son would survive.

“If we can make it to one of the outlying villages before nightfall, then…” Clara trailed off as a bedraggled soldier stumbled into view out of the gatehouse, one arm reaching up to shield Samuel, the other out to stop her mother. She sent up a quick prayer for favor, for mercy.

She hadn’t thought the gates would be manned. Not now. There was too much going on, and something was happening down in the Catacombs—something Jove had gone to fight.

She’d left him.

Clara breathed through her nose, trying to calm her racing heart. They had both made logical decisions. They would find a way. Clara put her trust in a higher power. He was in control—not her.

There wasn’t anything alarming about the man other than the state of his uniform, but she couldn’t blame him for that. It was a miracle enough she could recognize the emblem on his chest.

“No one’s to leave the city,” the man’s deteriorating voice ground out. It sounded as if he hadn’t drunk water in weeks. His leg dragged behind him as he hobbled closer. “Word went out not two hours ago.”

Clara tightened her hold on her son and blocked her mother from view best she could.

She wasn’t a fighter, but she would do whatever was needed to make sure her son was safe, and at the moment, that meant getting him out of the city.

She would talk this soldier into letting her out.

And if she couldn’t talk, she’d fight—however she could.

She had no weapon.

Maybe she should find another way over the wall. She could certainly find her way back to the Catacombs and leave through another entrance or even one of the holes.

“Who gave those orders?” she asked.

It hadn’t been Harlan. He’d been busy with Kase’s attack and then interrogating Benjamin Reiss in the hospital ward. He’d been trying to solve the mystery of the sword in Hallie Walker’s sketchbook.

The man limped closer, and Clara stepped back, turning to protect Samuel.

Her eyes darted to the right and left, looking for anything to defend herself with.

She wasn’t sure if she should tell the man who she was.

Using her husband’s name might allow her passage, but there was something abnormal about the man’s eyes.

They seemed darker than they should be, but he was mostly shaded by the gatehouse.

His skin was too pale even for a white man. Possibly a byproduct of living underground the last few weeks, but something about the color reminded her of spoiled milk. Suspicion sent her stepping back as the man crept closer, his head tipped oddly.

“Orders from the top,” was all the man said.

Clara’s back met a wall. The brick pressed into her shoulder blades as the man approached, lurching like a drunkard.

Her mother stepped in. “My name is Lady Miravel Davey, noble of this country, and my daughter is the wife of Jove Shackley, son of the Stradat Lord Kapitan. We have all the authority we need to leave this city.”

Brave woman, but Clara gritted her teeth against the fear now flowing freely through her body.

The man sneered, sticking a hand inside his jacket. “Don’t listen to him anymore.”

Clara slid herself across the wall. To the right, the lane was mostly clear.

To the left, blocked. Whether this man was a deserter or a traitor or simply out of his mind, she didn’t know.

All she knew was that they needed to either keep him talking long enough to distract him or run the other way, back to what semblance of civilization still existed. His leg injury would hinder any chase.

“Then who do you answer to, young sir?” her mother asked, not cowed one bit. “Because I don’t believe harassing women for simply trying to find safety is approved by any surviving members of the City Council. I’ve read the decrees myself.”

He didn’t answer. He lunged, whipping out a dagger from his jacket. Clara screamed.

Her mother gasped as the knife bit into her side. “Run, Clara!”

But all she could do was stare as the blood blossomed on her mother’s skirts. As she collapsed.

Then the man turned on her, his knife slick with blood.

A spiderweb of blackened veins licked up and down his neck.

One of the patients who’d encountered the Yalvar fuel.

Clara’s chest caved in on itself. Samuel’s cries split the air.

Blood pooled on the cracked cobblestones beneath her mother, whose eyes were shut tightly in pain, her hands holding in what life she had left.

“Run, love, run!” her mother gasped.

A sob escaped her lips, but Clara did.

She sprinted toward the open right, clutching her baby to her chest. Footsteps pounded behind her. The man’s leg had been a ruse or he simply didn’t care about pain. Maybe there’d been another assailant waiting in the shadows. It didn’t matter.

She was too slow. She was too slow. She was too slow.

Her body screamed with the effort of sprinting, but she didn’t stop.

Whipping to the right at the first opportunity, she careened down the other lane. More debris lay strewn across it, but people were ahead, cleaning it up.

Her throat was tight with tears and exertion, but she managed to scream, “Help!”

One young man nearby, his warm bronze skin lighter than her own, looked up. His dark eyes, one of which had been recently blackened—probably in one of the numerous fights that had broken out in the Catacombs with all the feelings running high—found her, hand going to his waistband.

Clara sprinted toward him. Footsteps still pounded behind her, and a hand grabbed her shoulder, tugging on the wrap holding Samuel to her. She screamed, but the young man flew past her, flash pistol out and pointed at the man behind her.

A sharp, deafening crack shattered the air, the burning smell of metal hot and heavy. The hand left her shoulder. Clara hunched over her screaming son.

Her ears ached with the echoes of the pistolshot. Tears cascaded down her face. Her hands and legs shook.

The young man came back, a hand out to help her up. “He’s…”

His wrist. Black veins.

Clara shook her head, scrambling backward only for her hand to fall into the hot puddle of blood from her earlier assailant. She staggered to her feet, scrubbing her hand frantically on her trousers.

She turned and ran.

The city burst open with a roar, thundering chaos in the form of amorphous gray forms shuttering into existence to her right and left.

Maybe she’d left the realm of the living and entered some sort of horrible nightmare, but she didn’t stop.

Each pounding footstep she took, she prayed harder.

Her body obeyed, its primal instinct to flee overtaking any thought of stopping.

She needed Jove.

Her mother was dying or dead.

She couldn’t get out of the city.

Her ankle twinged, the one that she’d twisted the night of the attack, and it sent her listing sideways into the nearest wall. She twisted just in time to keep Samuel from slamming into the charred whitewashed stone.