“We have to outrun him,” I whispered. “Balder can do it. But we can increase our odds.” I stood and crept to Batman’s gear. Slowly I pulled my kukri blade from my thigh sheath and cut through the thick leather cinch strap. Maks would have to fix it first and that would slow him down. I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Batman or take a shoe off him, which would have been smart. If Marsum was controlling Maks now, then there was no telling how far he’d go to get what he wanted. As it was, Batman’s front left leg swelled off and on, an old injury that haunted him.
I took a step back, my eyes on the hills where Maks had disappeared. Lila squawked and I spun, my kukri raised by my head, ready to strike.
Maks stood behind me, the small crossbow raised, his eyes flashing that freaky fucking electric blue. He motioned at me with the bow. “Put the knife down, cat.”
Cat. Not Zam.
“Maks, this is not you.” I didn’t lower my blade and he didn’t lower his bow. “Please listen to my voice. You’ve got to fight whoever has a hold on you.”
“Come on, toad!” Lila yelled. “You have to fight Marsum!”
Maks’s face twisted into a snarl. “How do you know that all along my job wasn’t to take you to Marsum? How do you know that I’m not just a fucking amazing actor, unlike you? How do you know, Zam? You don’t. You don’t know. Do you?”
Horror of the deepest kind flowed through me and I fought it, but I couldn’t help the sensation that I was living my worst pain again. Betrayed . . . this time by my heart and a good act rather than another woman.
Lila snarled. “No, this isn’t you, Maks! Stop this stupid shit! This isn’t you! You stop it right now!”
He spun and pulled the trigger on the crossbow. I screamed and lunged, trying to intercept it with my blade. I missed.
The bolt flew through Lila’s right wing, tearing it open wide. She screamed and I launched at him while his eyes were on her, my blade going handle first. I hit him hard, and tackled him to the ground, barely holding back from driving the blade into his belly.
“You fucking Jinn!”
He slammed hard on his back and I pressed my blade against his neck until blood welled around the razor-sharp edge.
His eyes flashed that bright, strange blue again. “You are weak. Weak enough to think I loved you, that a Jinn could love anyone. We take what we want, and when we need something done, we make it happen. Any way we must. You’re a fool, cat, to have believed a single word that came out of my mouth.”
His words cut into me and all I could do was stare at him. Because it wasn’t Maks. Nothing about his words or what he was saying was him at all. “No, that’s not true. It’s not, Maks. I know you. Lila is right. This is not you.”
“You don’t know,” he growled. “If you knew me, if you understood who I was, you’d kill me now without hesitation. Do it! Kill me!”
I couldn’t move. I’d thought I was done with indecision, but I could feel nothing but uncertainty rocketing through me. Lila cried out from my right. Maks bled under my blade.
My two closest allies were injured, the two I loved the most, and I couldn’t help either. Maks glared up at me, his lips twisted in a cruel snarl . . . and a tear slipped from the corner of one bright blue eye.
The decision became easy with that single tear. This was not Maks talking to me. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t him.
I turned the handle of the blade fast and slammed it into the side of his head with a thick thud. His eyes rolled back and he slumped into the ground, a groan sliding from him.
“Lila, hang on, I’ve got to immobilize him first,” I said.
“He shot me! That piece of shit Jinn shot me!” Her whimpers tore at my heart, because they were heavy with more than physical pain. She sucked a shaky breath and cried out, a sob slipping from her.
I flipped Maks over and grabbed some of the leather binding from my gear, then wrapped it around his wrists with a slip knot that would only tighten more if he struggled, then did another set around his ankles.
For good measure, I covered his eyes with a blindfold and stuffed his mouth with a gag before I turned to Lila. Every movement to bind him broke another piece of my heart and I pushed it away. I had to—Lila needed me.
Her wing bled in tiny little drips across the hard ground. I picked her up. “I can stitch it, then we can use the hacka paste. It’ll heal if you don’t use it for a few days.”
She nodded, but her jeweled eyes were full of pain and hurt of a different kind. “He said he wanted me as a sister. He’s just like my other siblings. He tried to kill me, Zam.” She buried her face against my belly, her tiny body shaking with her sobs.
I bit my tongue while I worked on her wing. Steady hands were what I needed here, and Lila’s pain kept my own right at the surface.
I blew out a slow breath and threaded a needle, focusing only on the task in front of me. Using the thinnest line I had, I stitched the hole in her wing together, keeping each stitch as small as I could.
“There,” I snipped the end of the line. “Just the paste and you’ll be good as new.”
I reached for my bag and dragged it across the ground to me. It bumped into Maks and he groaned.
I flipped open my bag, my eyes on his body as he woke and realized he was bound and gagged. He grunted and thrashed, and I recalled all too easily how he’d been bound by the Jinn before. How they’d pinned him face down in the mud and left him to die and Lila and I had saved him. But how the fuck did I save him now?
I dug around, blindly found the hacka paste and opened it before I turned to Lila. Her eyes were on me. “You can’t save him. Not this time. If they have his mind . . . there is nothing you can do.”
I gritted my teeth as I smeared the red sparkling paste over the stitches, then grabbed a match from my bag and lit it with the flick of my thumbnail. “Hang on, Lila. This will sting a little.”
She closed her eyes and clamped her mouth shut as I put the match first to one side of the wound, then to the other. Bright sparkling puffs of smoke rose into the air that smelled like cinnamon. Lila twitched only once, then she slumped, her legs wobbling. I caught her up into my arms and held her tightly.
“We have to try to save him, Lila. This isn’t Maks. I’m sure of it.” I had to be sure. There was no other way for me to move forward. Even when I’d caught Steve with Kiara, I’d not been totally broken—I could look back and with perfect hindsight see that I’d always known Steve was not really for me. He’d been my first crush, my first love, my first heartbreak. But he had never been a part of my soul. He’d never understood me, never fought at my side. Instead, he had always fought me.
Maks . . . he was the other half of my heart and soul, and this pain was beyond deep. It ran all the way to the center of my bones, making me ache in a way I’d not felt since I’d been a child, since the Oasis and the loss of so much life, since my father’s death, since Bryce’s injury.
I turned to where Maks lay on the ground. He’d yanked the leather bands tight and his hands were going red with the constriction over his wrists. “You’ll end up with no hands if you keep that thrashing up,” I said.
He muffled something through the gag and slowly relaxed. Lila climbed to my shoulder and I carefully made my way to Maks’s side. I took the gag out and lifted the blindfold.
Maks raised both eyebrows. “What the fuck is going on?”
Lila glared down at him. “You shot me through the wing! Is your brain as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage?”
Maks looked to me. “I’m lost.”
“That’s from As You Like It,” I said. “That help?”
“No! I know what play the line is from,” he growled as he shifted onto his back. “Why am I tied up? Wait, I shot Lila?”
I shared a look with her. “This is what I was talking about. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing.”
She frowned and snapped her teeth at him. “You’re lucky I want cubs to play with, or I’d rip your balls off and eat them with my breakfast. Wrecking wings is only like the worst thing you could do to a dragon, you know.”