Oathbound Read online

  Oathbound

  Ramy Vance

  S. W. Clarke

  Keep Evolving Studios

  Contents

  Bonus Content

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Bonus Content

  Fatebound Series © Copyright <<2018>> Ramy Vance

  Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  For more information, email: [email protected]

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  Chapter 1

  I knew they would come. I just didn’t know when.

  Every night, the four of us slept in the living room. Well, all of us except me.

  I didn’t sleep.

  I’d kept it a secret from the others—Hercules, who snored as he sprawled over the couch; Cupid, who snuggled into the crook of his arm; and Justin, my boyfriend, who curled to my missing form on the air mattress—because it was better this way.

  I was the reason we were all here. I was the one risking their lives. This was my vigil.

  Since we had arrived at the resistance’s headquarters in Brooklyn three days ago, I spent my nights drinking coffee and sitting in the window seat overlooking Bainbridge Street.

  Every night I sat in that window and listened to Roger, the head of the resistance, make love to his wife, Selene the succubus. Or more accurately, she made love to him. It started about midnight, the crystals on the living room light fixture tinkling, and rolled right through into the truly dead of night—the hours when no one should be awake.

  Roger must have been a terrible accountant; he never slept.

  Lucky for me, he liked good coffee. Tonight I wrapped my hands around one of his pineapple-shaped mugs, pulled my knees up and felt a thin sheet of comfort overlay the anxiety in me. Outside, through the blinds, nothing moved but tree leaves.

  “Isa?”

  My heart leapt for no good reason. I knew who it was.

  I turned my face, found Mari the centaur shadowed in the hallway. “Hey,” I whispered. She was young, her human half (and her horse half) equally trained for combat. I’d sensed immediately why she remained here at the townhouse day and night.

  Trouble. If trouble came, Mari would meet it.

  She gestured for me to follow her before clopping down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  When I emerged into the pineapple-themed kitchen, she looked from the french press to me. “Do encantado not need sleep?”

  I ran my thumbs over the half-empty mug between my hands. “Well, not as much as most mammals.”

  “But you need it.”

  “I’ve slept.” I slid into one of the chairs at the table. “Just not much.”

  “You know why I’m here, Isabella,” Mari said. “To protect you. You’re with us now.”

  I met her gray eyes. “So I can sleep easy?”

  “So you can sleep easy.”

  I touched a finger to the side of my head. “Tell that to my brain.”

  “All right.” She opened a cabinet, retrieved a box of Nyquil. “Isabella’s brain, I’ve got a present for you.”

  I leaned away. “No.”

  She slid the tablets across the table toward me. “They aren’t coming to this house, Isabella. It’s been three days.”

  “They always come.” My fingers slid across the table to touch the edge of the packet. I was too afraid to say the World Army—ever since we’d arrived, I’d only referred to them as they.

  “How?” she said. “You said you got that tracer out of your arm.”

  Got it out wasn’t exactly the right phrase. At once, I felt a phantom ache in my shoulder from where I’d been hit by one of the World Army’s darts. Afterward, Justin had used a pocket knife to pry out a tiny capsule planted beneath the skin—a tracking device. In five hundred years I’d rarely felt that kind of pain.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’re right—they have no way of tracking us. But we haven’t stayed three days in one place since …”

  Since we’d fled Montreal, I realized. It had been a month since Justin and I had left the city where we’d been college students. It had been six months since all of this began. It felt like another life now.

  Mari filled a glass of water in the sink. She set it on the table next to the Nyquil. “We leave tomorrow evening. You need the sleep.”

  I broke open the foil and released one tablet into my palm. I tossed it into my mouth, and had just lifted the glass of water when I heard the scratching.

  It could have been a rat. It could have been a tree branch on the window. But I knew it wasn’t either of those things.

  Mari and I met eyes. In the same moment, I spat the tablet into the glass of water and she thundered out of the kitchen, slapping a red button on the wall as she did.

  Metal panelling clanged down over every window in the kitchen, and when I followed Mari down the hall—“Roger!” she bellowed up the staircase—and emerged into the living room, I found the bay window shielded, too.

  Upstairs, I heard movement. Roger and Selene, probably getting dressed in a hurry.

  Justin, Hercules and Cupid were all in various stages of waking. Nix that—Hercules was still snoring on the couch. Justin, on the other hand, was already pulling our belongings together into our backpacks, yanking his jacket on.

  On the couch, Cupid tugged on Hercules’s limp arm. The cherubic demigod was always ready to go; he never took off his bow and arrow. And his loincloth—which I’d secretly begun to think of as his diaper—was just about all he ever wore, anyway.

  His wings flicked into motion, and he flitted to Hercules’s head. “Herc buddy!” he yelled. He snapped his fingers by the demigod’s ear. “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey.”

  Hercules’s eyes snapped
open. “Eggs?”

  Mari had already yanked aside the edge of the large rug, revealing an outline in the floor. I came to her side as she grabbed a metal handle in the floor. “The panels on the windows,” I said. “Will those keep us—“

  “No,” Mari grunted as she yanked. The panel didn’t move. “They won’t last for more than a few minutes. They’re just buying us time.”

  And not much of it, at that.

  With a yell, Mari pulled the trap door open. A cloud of dust rose in a square around her, and she pointed. “All of you, down there. You’ll see a door in the far wall with a route behind it. Follow it as far as it goes. First manhole you see, climb the ladder and exit onto the street.”

  None of us said a word of objection. Mari handed me a flashlight, and I took the lead down the wooden steps. I descended into a cluttered basement, shone the flashlight over the boxes and past the wine rack to the far wall.

  The door. I came to it just as Hercules dropped—not climbed, but dropped—into the basement behind me. Everything rattled, even my bones.

  I expected a joke, but he only said, “Hurry, Isa.” Somehow he and Justin appeared by my side, pulling aside the wine rack partially blocking the door.

  I grabbed the knob and turned it, and the door swung wide. A breeze hit me, carrying the scent of decay. Before us, the flashlight revealed a two-foot-square landing and, past that, a vertical stone tunnel some six feet around. As I stepped forward and angled the flashlight below, a metal rung gleamed back at me from the edge—a ladder down into pure darkness.

  “Phew,” Cupid said beside me. “That’s the sewers for sure.”

  “Isa,” Mari yelled from the square hole in the ceiling. “Penn Station, like we talked about. When you get off in Phoenix, tell them what happened in New York.”

  I caught a glimpse of her yellow hair before she threw the trap door shut. My heart thudded in my ears—thump-thump-thump—for two, three, four seconds before the explosion threw everything in the basement on its side.

  ↔

  “Isa,” came a voice. Cupid, muffled as though we were separated by glass. “Isa, get up.”

  My right cheek hurt. I couldn’t breathe right, my throat coarse as a rapping cough overtook me. When I opened my eyes, I found that my flashlight had rolled away, the cone of light revealing the bottom half of an old movie poster on the far wall.

  Casablanca.

  A warm hand gripped mine, and I was being pulled to my feet. Justin. He wrapped his arms around me, and I melted into him. But I couldn’t stop coughing long enough to speak.

  The light shifted, and Hercules’s face came into the flashlight’s cone as he climbed over the detritus toward us. “All good?”

  “She’s OK,” Justin said.

  “Mari,” I croaked. A powerful part of me wanted to throw open that trapdoor and find her and Roger and Selene. The other part of me knew what to expect.

  There was a reason she had thrown that door shut between us and her. That was an Army-grade explosion, and whoever had set it off knew exactly who was inside this rowhouse.

  Us.

  Well, us until Mari sacrificed herself to get us down here.

  “We can’t go back up there,” Justin said.

  “I know.” We only had one choice: follow Mari’s instructions. Get to Penn Station. But that didn’t make it any easier to accept our inability to help her. Above us, a banging started. It sounded like a ram, its rhythmic thud jangling the wine rack beside us. “Let’s go.”

  “I’ll float down first.” Cupid retrieved the flashlight from Hercules. “Light the way.”

  Justin stepped toward the door. “I’ll follow Cupid and test the rungs.”

  “And I’ll follow Isa,” Hercules said. “If anyone comes after us, my fist will greet their face.”

  We proceeded into the sewers, the three of us following Cupid’s voice as it echoed down and down. The rungs were cold, narrow. It didn’t help that I was shaking with adrenaline and trying not to breathe through my nose.

  After that first whiff, I suspected just the smell down here could kill me. Then the World Army’s job would be done for them.

  “Get ready for wet,” Cupid called. A second later, I heard the sound of Justin hitting the water.

  I paused, staring down. The flashlight’s beam flitted over concrete walls and dark, sitting water some five feet below me.

  “It’s a short drop, and only about six inches of water,” Justin called up. The flashlight’s beam lit on me. “Drop down.”

  And because I trusted him so fully, I did so at once. Justin eased the drop with his hands at my waist.

  “Make way,” Hercules boomed. A second later, he dropped so hard into the water that it cascaded over all of us.

  “Shit!” Cupid’s wings darted him back—not in time to avoid the wave.

  “Make that plural.” I slapped my wet hands against my soaked pants.

  Above us, the distant sound of automatic gunfire. It was unmistakable, the echo of it ricocheting down the tunnel.

  “Those are AR-15s,” Justin said. “We need to move.”

  I didn’t question it; I knew the World Army had trained him as one of their own, and he understood their tactics and their weaponry better than any of us. But it was still strange, to have known him six months ago—a normal college student—and to catch glimpses of what he had been Clockwork Orange-d into.

  A super soldier. A weapon.

  Cupid spun the flashlight around and flew off down the long length of sewer. Justin started after him, and I followed, with Hercules at the back. The tunnel was about six feet in width and twelve feet up; I felt grateful the darkness didn’t permit a good look at what surrounded us—just the scent was enough to know.

  We splashed through the water, and I couldn’t stop the thought: This wasn’t supposed to be how it went down.

  We were supposed to ride in Roger’s Miata to Penn Station where we would catch a cross-country train to San Diego. He promised to see us off with coffee to-go, supplies, weaponry, maps. Most of all, he was supposed to return home to his wife, Selene. They were supposed to make chandelier-tinkling love that night, like they did every night, and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

  Now, all of it—the house on Bainbridge Street, the New York resistance—resided in our heads. Our memories.

  Because they had found us. Me.

  How? I could have screamed.

  I didn’t want to imagine what was happening to Roger or Selene or Mari right now, but I did anyway. And that was why, when Cupid shone the flashlight straight up toward the manhole whose tiny gaps allowed the streetlight to shine down over our faces, mine was contorted.

  “That cover’s going to be a bitch,” he said.

  “Cupid of Eros,” Hercules chided. “Inappropriate.” He waded past Justin and me and climbed straight up the ladder rungs. At the top, he used one hand to slide the manhole cover aside as simply as we would press curtains away from a window.

  Hercules, son of Zeus. The strongest Other I had ever met, and he had chosen to follow me. I still didn’t know whether I deserved his loyalty—or Cupid’s—but after Pythia’s death, I had resolved to earn it.

  Those brown curls swept back from his face as he stared up into the street. When his green eyes returned to us, one hand gestured up. “Come on.”

  The four of us emerged from the sewers into relative silence—a sleeping, peaceful street in Brooklyn.

  Cupid jerked a thumb behind us. “The house is about four blocks back that way.”

  When I turned, my hand went over my mouth. A narrow plume of pure, black smoke rose into the sky behind us. “Nossa Senhora.”

  “Bastards,” Justin said. “Absolute, pure bastards.”

  My other hand found his, and lacing my fingers with his I found a tiny bit of comfort. “They blew it up?”

  Justin didn’t say anything, which I knew was confirmation. I saw it in the way his lips folded so hard they turned white under the streetlamp
.

  “What now?” Cupid said.

  I raised a finger for silence.

  I had heard something. A vehicle. A heavy vehicle.

  “They’re tracking us,” I said. “Somehow, they’re tracking us.”

  Chapter 2

  “Move!” Justin yelled.

  He didn’t need to say it again. We all started at a jog down the sidewalk away from the rowhouse.

  “They’re still tracking us,” I whispered as I gripped Justin’s hand. It felt like wherever we were going was doomed—just another place where they would locate us. Inevitably. Always. Every time.

  Then it hit me. “It’s me.”

  “What?” Justin veered us into someone’s yard, where we came to a high fence. Cupid set two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and his little cloud sailed down from the sky. He settled into it and floated over the fence.

  “Uh, Cupid?” Justin called.

  “Hold up,” came Cupid’s voice from the other side.

  They’re tracking me, I thought. Not the rest of them—just me. In the next second, a vehicle accelerated as it turned down the street we were on.

  The latch unlocked and the gate swung open. On the other side, Cupid cocked his head at us. “You thought I was just going to leave you hanging?”

  The three of us darted through the gate and pushed it shut as the vehicle neared. When it rolled on past without braking, I felt us all breathe again.

  Maybe I was wrong.