Black Knight Read online

Nothing could be worse.

  But again, I’m given no chance to grieve.

  Somehow I manage to catch Marc and pull the top half of his body out of the icy water and into my lap. He’s not breathing! Why isn’t he breathing? His skin is so cold. But before I can warm him up, even give him mouth to mouth, Viper stalks toward me.

  Li continues to stand uselessly. Granted, Li’s psychologically shorted out but I wish she could at least wake up long enough to give Viper a kick in the ass and knock her in the water.

  Li does nothing and Viper keeps coming.

  Viper stands over me and nods at Marc’s frozen body.

  “I’m not the one who put him in the water,” she says.

  “Who did?” I ask.

  “Sam told me he crawled in before I arrived.” Viper shrugs. “That poison makes a person so hot they’ll do anything to cool off.”

  “You’re lucky you were able to find it on this island.”

  “I heard stories about the Field growing up. I knew where to look.”

  “Like I said, you’re a lucky girl.”

  Viper stares down at me. “I was sure you’d put up more of a fight. I had no idea the loss of Romeo would take the heart out of you.”

  I stare back at her. “Marc knew what he was doing when he climbed in the freezing water. And I know how to kill you with a mere flick of my wrist.”

  Viper feigns amazement. “Pray tell, Syn Killer.”

  “Funny you should bring Syn up. I took her down the same way I’ll take you down.”

  “How?”

  “With knowledge. You’re sweating, your hands are shaking, your eyes are bloodshot. You’re a mess.”

  Viper fumes. “I was strong enough to fry Sam and I’m strong enough to defeat you! You coward—sitting there holding your dead lover like he’s going to save your ass! You make me sick!”

  I smile. “In a way I’m the one who made you sick. When I chopped off your left hand.”

  Viper hesitates. “Huh?”

  “You honestly don’t know why you’re falling apart, do you?”

  “I’m not falling apart.”

  “It started when you lost your bracelet. It was right in front of you. You picked up your hand but left it for me to find.” I pull the red bracelet from my pocket. “That was a mistake.”

  She hesitates. “That thing is useless.”

  “When I told you I didn’t know any secrets about the wall, I lied. I know a few. One is that it makes this island a pretty weird place. A place where we can’t even walk around and kill each other unless a piece of the wall is in contact with our skin.” I show her the dark stone on the inner lining of her bracelet. “Be honest with me, Viper. I’ll bet that since you lost this little piece of rock you’ve been stumbling around in a daze.”

  She sucks in a breath. “You’re babbling.”

  “I’m being insightful. I don’t know what this rock and that wall are made out of, but the material has a powerful effect on our minds. I even suspect that wearing a piece of this rock next to where the veins in our wrist pump our blood around and around every few minutes synchronizes our mind and body with our bracelet.”

  “You’re making this up!” Viper cries.

  I continue in a calm voice. “Not at all. To test my theory, I tried your bracelet on my right wrist for a few minutes and got a whopping headache. That tells me these bracelets are like dog tags. Once one’s been made for you, it’s personal and without it you’re bound to get lost.”

  Viper loses it; she screams. “You’re full of shit! I’m still here!”

  “Not for long,” I say casually as I toss her bracelet into a pond of lava six feet off to my left. The red plastic flares as it ignites and begins to melt before sinking from view.

  Viper tries to inhale but gags as if she’s got a rock stuck in her windpipe. Her black eyes bulge and she shuffles backward like a broken robot. Then she raises both her arms above her head and dances like a demented marionette before crumbling to the floor. Dead.

  Jumping up, I pull Marc the rest of the way out of the stream and begin mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But he doesn’t respond; he doesn’t start breathing. Putting my ear to his chest, I listen for a heartbeat but there’s nothing. I finally sit back and cry.

  Li touches my shoulder. “I can help,” she says.

  “Go away.”

  “Jessie, I can save him. I have my powers back.”

  I turn and give her a long look.

  She just said more words than she’s said all day.

  “Why are they back?” I ask.

  “Lula is inside me again. I can heal.”

  I gesture to Marc’s dead body. “Do what you can.”

  Li searches the area. “I need to study the poison she put inside him. Where’s the knife she stabbed him with?”

  “There,” I say, pointing to the knife that spilled from Viper’s belt when she dropped dead.

  Li picks it up and kneels beside me, staring down at Marc’s peaceful face. She reaches for my hand. “Our power will be greater if we work together like we did before,” she says.

  I stare at her and in an instant I understand everything.

  Absolutely everything.

  Every piece of the puzzle suddenly fits together and I see a face.

  The face of my true enemy.

  Since arriving at the Field, I kept checking my own cards but never the dealer’s. That’s why Russ came to me when I contacted the wall. It’s what he tried to teach me over a game of red queen. Of course Russ loved me. Like Jimmy and Cleo, he was desperate for me to survive the Field.

  Yet there are more important things in life than survival.

  There’s what’s right and wrong; and then there’s love.

  Love. Love. Love.

  Despite what I know, I decide not to change my bet.

  I offer Li my hand. She takes it, squeezing it hard.

  The physical contact links me to Li in a profound way. It’s like two wires have been crossed; I can feel her body almost as well as I feel my own. Her touch reminds me of a trick Syn taught me while she grilled me on how to mimic another person’s appearance. If you can touch the one you need to copy, Syn had told me, you can copy them so perfectly even another witch will have trouble telling you from the real thing.

  If nothing else, Syn has been an excellent teacher.

  “Let’s close our eyes and concentrate on saving Marc,” Li says.

  I close my eyes. I know what comes next.

  Li doesn’t surround us with white light.

  Nor does Li invoke her sister.

  Instead, she tries to stab me in the lower back with Viper’s poisonous knife. She aims for my kidneys, with good reason. The kidneys filter a person’s blood and if she were to shred them, and fill them with poison, then I’d start to burn immediately, much worse than Marc. And the pain would be unbearable.

  But I catch Li by the wrist before she can touch me.

  I open my eyes and stare at her. “I don’t blame you,” I say.

  Her face twists into that of a rabid animal and she fights me, struggling with all her strength to force the tip of the blade into my body. But her effort is wasted on me and I finally tire of her futile attempt and snap her wrist, breaking the bone. Viper’s knife falls from Li’s grasp and bounces on the floor.

  Li stares down at the knife as if it were more important to her than her broken wrist. She reaches for it again but before she can get to it I pick it up and slide it in the back of my belt. Li crumples as if shot.

  “I honestly want to help you,” I say.

  She stares at me with hollow eyes, empty eyes.

  “Is Kyle dead?” she whispers.

  “Yes,” I lie. “You don’t have to think about Kyle any more. Do you hear me, Li? He no longer has any power over y
ou.”

  Li is a mass of confusion. She keeps blinking, looking around in short jerky movements, avoiding my eyes.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to . . . ,” she begins, before breaking off into sounds that can only be described as psychotic babbling.

  I want to pat her on the back, embrace her, tell her it’s not her fault. But I suspect if I so much as touch her she’ll scream bloody murder. Her programming runs deep.

  I speak gently. “Li. Listen to me. You don’t know what to do and that’s understandable. You’ve been subjected to a terrible form of psychic attack. But the person who attacked you can no longer harm you. You no longer need to listen to what he told you to do. You’re free now, do you understand?”

  “Free?” The word seems to catch in her throat and in her brain and at last she looks in my direction. “Free?”

  I smile warmly, feeling a wave of relief.

  I reach out and squeeze her hand.

  “Yes, you’re free to do whatever you want,” I say.

  Li recoils in horror, jumps to her feet, stares at her hands as if they’re soaked in blood, then stares at me as if I’m the one who forced her to commit the bloodshed. She moves so fast, like a witch, probably as fast as her sister in witch world, and I’m not given a chance to stop her, to save her.

  “Free!” she screams, her eyes no longer empty but filled with the anguish of everyone she saw tortured to death in the prison camps in North Korea, her sister included. Her pain is suicide pain, the type that cannot be borne; and she won’t bear it. Turning, she leaps into the pool of lava that swallowed Viper’s bracelet and I hear one final scream, loud and short, and a massive flare rises to the ceiling but it doesn’t last. In seconds there’s no trace left of Li.

  I wish I could have stopped her.

  But maybe there was no point.

  Maybe she was too far gone.

  Leaning over, I kiss Marc on the lips and speak softly to him. “It’s you. It was you from the start,” I say, and even though his body is colder than ice, and his heart no longer beats, and he no longer breathes, I know I can heal him.

  Impossible, you think? Think again. . . .

  Only one will survive.

  Which is another way of saying one MUST survive.

  I kiss Marc again and whisper in his ear. “I want it to be you.”

  Standing, I close my eyes and visualize Li in my mind’s eye. Once again, I feel her body as if we’re still holding hands, every nerve and muscle and inch of skin that made her look the way she looked. Then I feel a wave of power sweep over me and know that from the outside I look exactly like her.

  I stagger outside and find Kyle waiting behind the boulder where I left him with a spear poking out his front and back, and a tourniquet tied tight to his leg to stop his bleeding.

  Only, the spear is missing because it never struck him.

  Clever Kyle. He never forgot my instruction to duck.

  The impaled spear had been an illusion.

  Yet his leg is still bleeding and I realize that Nordra did wound him, after all, and seriously. The wound has caused him to pale. He stares up at me, or rather at Li, and nods without surprise.

  “Did you take care of them?” he asks, his voice flat.

  I nod mechanically. “Viper killed Sam. I killed Jessie.”

  “And Marc?” Kyle asks.

  “He’s dead.”

  Kyle gestures to a spot beside him. “I need your healing touch. Come, sit here and invoke your sister’s power.”

  As Li, I sit beside him but act like I’m hesitant to touch him.

  “What will become of me after you’re healed?” I ask.

  He acts annoyed, for a moment, before he focuses on my eyes, locking his gaze on mine. He speaks in a soft, persuasive tone.

  “When you’ve healed me, you’ll return to the cave and jump in the lava. You’ll die but in dying you’ll be reunited with your sister. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Kyle lies his head back on the boulder. “Heal my leg now.”

  I reach out with my left hand to touch his leg, while with my right hand I pull Viper’s poisonous knife from my belt, the blade that had been designed by Kyle to kill me.

  I raise the knife to stab him.

  But to my dismay his relaxed victorious demeanor suddenly vanishes. I’m confident he hasn’t penetrated my disguise, but it doesn’t matter. He’s seen my raised knife, and his reflexes are staggering, faster than my own. The instant I move in for the kill he grabs his machete and raises it above his head to strike.

  Yet I still have the advantage; his machete is still above his head when I bury Viper’s poisonous knife in his diaphragm, six inches beneath his sternum. Above me his machete trembles and falls from his fingers as I push the blade in deeper, making sure his system absorbs every last drop of the burning pain the poison will bestow on him. Indeed, that’s why I don’t just stab him in the heart and end it. I want him to feel the kind of pain he has caused all of us.

  Kyle gasps as I yank out the knife.

  “Feel all better now?” I ask. I’ve dropped my disguise, although I can’t say when I did so.

  The rear of his head falls back on the boulder with a thump.

  “Fuck you,” he mutters.

  “Are those to be your last words? You’re dying, Kyle.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  I crouch by his side. “You’re a master hypnotist, aren’t you? That’s what you were trying to tell us when you bragged about having the cloaking gene. But you’ve also got the telepathy gene, which you didn’t tell us about. That’s why you can stare someone in the eye and get them to do pretty much anything you want. True?”

  Kyle grimaces. “That sort of sums it up.”

  “You killed Pierre and Keb to make me suspect Sam.”

  “Sure.”

  “How?”

  Kyle feigns boredom. “There was a back entrance to that cave none of you knew about.”

  “They meant nothing to you?”

  “Gimme a break,” Kyle says.

  I nod. “You started your attack on our group when you took Li with you to heal your buddies. It was then you planted the time bomb in her to kill me when all your other enemies were dead. That means you were banking on me being the last one alive.” I pause. “I suppose I should feel flattered.”

  “I knew you had it in you,” Kyle says.

  “Maybe. But you thought I was too naive to figure out your plan until too late.”

  “I was a fool. I underestimated you.”

  I reach out and squeeze his arm. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You have no idea how close you came to fooling me.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  I lean over and whisper in his ear. “I finally took a good look at your hole card.”

  He’s bitter. “You didn’t know. I had you fooled. It was that wall, that damn wall, it warned you somehow.”

  I wipe the blood from the blade on my pants leg. “In a sense it was the wall. In another sense it was the love of a dear friend I lost in Las Vegas that came to my rescue.”

  The burning is already beginning to spread through his blood. He shakes with pain and trembles with fear. His bitterness appears to grow and I realize that this is a first for him. No one has ever defeated him before.

  “Too bad you’re not going to have a chance to celebrate your victory with your lover boy,” Kyle chokes, managing to flash a satisfied grin. I stand and slap him in the face.

  “How little you understand love,” I say.

  His whole body is suddenly racked with tremors as blood leaks from his gut and sweat drips off his face. The real pain from the poison has finally hit, I realize. His cocky attitude vanishes in an instant. Suddenly he is just a pathetic beaten asshol
e, and I pity him. But only a little. . . .

  “Jessie, please, at least stop the pain. Kill me,” he begs. “I can’t bear it.”

  Leaning over with the knife, I use the sweat dripping off his face and his shirt collar to wipe away any last remaining residue of poison from the blade.

  “Do it!” he cries, thinking I’m about to cut his throat.

  “I will, I will,” I say, even though I have no intention of stopping his pain. I hold up my naked wrists for him to see. I actually smile. From reading, I know the best way to open the veins is to cut from the wrist up the center of the inside of each arm. Feeling not a shred of fear, I press the blade deep into my flesh and swiftly make the incisions in front of Kyle and then toss the knife over my shoulder.

  “Do you understand love now?” I ask.

  Kyle gasps in disbelief. “Why?”

  I smile. “Because only one can survive.”

  I walk away without another word. My destination is the wall and I know it will be a hard hike at the rate I’m losing blood. I’d like to bury Chad, although I doubt I’ll have the strength, and I’d like to have another quiet chat with Russ before I go. I always loved Russ and wish he hadn’t left my life so soon.

  But Chad is already half covered with ash by the time I reach the wall, and a stream of molten red lava has spilled over from the volcano’s crown and is slowly creeping toward Nordra’s body and the black wall. Nordra being the warrior he was, I doubt he’ll mind having his remains incinerated.

  I’m not surprised the volcano has sent out lava to cover the area. It will probably pile up against the wall and cremate me as well. But it’s only a narrow stream and it will take time. The one thing the king of the island has, though, is time. I was right to mistrust it. I knew it would claim me for its own in the end.

  I’m only ten feet from the wall when I stumble and fall and can’t get up. Rolling onto my back, I stare up at the stars and the edge of the wall and try to figure out if it really has a top. The pain in my wrists has subsided and I no longer feel as if I’m squirting blood onto the ground. Considering that I don’t have long to live, I feel pretty good.

  Time goes by and I think of everything that has happened in the past few days. As the old song says, “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” I’m pleased that in the end I had the courage to do what I thought was right. The only thing that makes me sad is that I’d like to shake the hand of the winner of the Field. Maybe even give him another kiss.