Bayou Moon (The Edge #2)(34)
Author: Ilona Andrews

She matched his accent. "I have no doubt of that."

Her grandfather must’ve been a noble and from the East, too. She stretched her a’s. William filed it away for further consideration.

"That’s really impressive," she said.

Ha! He’d broken bones, killed an altered human, carried her rhino of a cousin, and she didn’t blink an eye. But the moment he said two words in another language, she decided to be impressed.

Cerise dropped into Adrianglian again. "People like Clara don’t like it. She thinks we ‘put on airs,’ as she says, as if what we can do somehow makes her less. She is right, you know. You’re heading straight into the den of cut-throats. You should’ve taken her up on her offer and gone back to town."

She’d heard their conversation. William shook his head. He had a mission to complete, and if he walked away now, he would never see her again. "I said I would come with you. If I don’t, who’ll protect you?"

Her lips curved a little. "You saw me fight. Do you think I need protection, Lord Bill?"

"You’re good. But the Hand is dangerous, and they have numbers on their side." He waited for her to bristle, but she didn’t. "Besides, you’re my ride to a safe, warm house, where it’s dry and I might be given hot food. I have to take care of you, or I might never have a decent meal again."

Cerise tossed her head back and laughed softly. "I’ll make an Edger of you yet, before this is over."

He liked the way she laughed, when her hair fell to the side and her eyes lit up. William looked away, before he did something stupid. "You have a plan about the sniper?"

She nodded at the corpse. "I think we should let the dead man do the work."

William glanced at the hunter and bared his teeth at the corpse.

Chapter Ten

THE door opened silently under pressure from Spider’s hand, admitting him into the hothouse. Fifty feet of glass sheltered a narrow strip of soil divided by a path in two. During the day sunlight flooded the hothouse, but now only the weak orange radiance of the magic lamps nourished the greenery. The previous owner of the mansion had used the hothouse to coax cucumbers out of the Mire’s soil; he would’ve been shocked to discover the oddities that filled it now.

Spider surveyed the twin lines of plants and saw Posad’s misshapen form, hunched over by the roots of a vernik midway down the path. A large bucket and a wheelbarrow sat next to him.

Spider strode toward the gardener, the gravel crunching under his feet. Posad dipped his small, almost feminine left hand into a bucket and administered a handful of black oily mud to the soil around the roots of a young tree. Translucent blue, it stood seven feet tall, spreading perfectly formed leafless branches.

The blue branches leaned toward Spider. Tentatively, like a shy child, one touched his shoulder. He offered his hand and the branches nuzzled his palm.

He plucked a bag of feed from the wheelbarrow and offered a handful of grainy gray powder to the tree. A small branch brushed it, scooping the powder up with tiny slits in its bark. Its fellows reached to his palm, and the entire tree bent closer to the food.

Posad continued working the mud into the soil with a three-pronged garden fork. "You spoil him," he said.

"I can’t help it. He is so polite." Spider fed the last of the feed to the tree and shook his hands to the remaining branches. "Sorry, fellows. All gone."

The branches brushed his shoulders as if in gratitude, and the tree righted itself. Spider watched the grains of feed float down the trunk, opaque and glowing like snow-flakes turned into tiny stars by light.

The tree was vital to fusion. Only with it could John combine Genevieve’s body with the plant tissue. The process would destroy her will and ensure complete compliance. The fusion carried its own dangers, Spider reflected. Genevieve could lose all cognitive ability, which would make her useless to him. She could retain too much will, and then she would try to murder him. But he had little choice in the matter. The diary was simply too important.

Posad swung the rag over his shoulder and pushed the wheelbarrow forward. The growth on his back and right side had gotten larger in the last few days, the way it always did when the colony was about to split. Thick purple veins clasped the flesh of the hump under the pink, glistening skin. It drew the eye.

Like most of the Hand’s altered humans, Posad had been conceived as a weapon. He was meant to be the Bee Master, commanding swarms of deadly insects. In combat conditions the idea proved grossly impractical, but Posad found his niche, taking care of the plants that provided them with chemicals for alteration.

"I can’t find Lavern," Posad said, brushing the dirt from his pants with his shovel-large right hand.

Spider pondered that for a moment. Lavern was one of their strongest hunters but more unstable than most. He showed cannibalistic tendencies, which meant he was close to being replaced. He was deployed only under strict supervision, and as far as Spider knew, Lavern shouldn’t have left the house.

"Do tell," Spider said.

Posad grimaced. "Karmash said to keep an eye out. Lavern was fine last night, but he isn’t fine now."

His second in command had sent Lavern out. Spider felt a wave of fury begin to swell and counted to three in his head. "Are you sure?"

"The Goldmint isn’t picking him up. Come, see for yourself."

They walked down the path. The wheelbarrow creaked with steady regularity, the sound of worn wheels mixing with the dry scratch of gravel.

The stench of old urine hit Spider’s nostrils. The path turned, and they halted before an enormous blossom. Seven feet wide and pale yellow in color, it hugged the ground, rising to Spider’s waist. Boils, as big as his fist and filled with murky liquid, covered the thick flaps of the meaty petals. A network of pale false stamens rose to the ceiling, anchoring itself to the wooden framework of the greenhouse roof.

Up close the reek of sewage squeezed moisture from Spider’s eyes. He stared into the tangled web of the filaments, seeking the true stamens among the mess of the false. He counted thirty-one. The thirty-second stamen drooped to the side, its antler thick with white fuzz. The stamen had matured and produced pollen. The link between Lavern’s magic and the flower no longer suppressed its development.

"Lavern is dead," Posad said. "I thought you should know."

Spider nodded. The gardener reached over and hacked the stamen off with a short thick knife. The second man they had lost in the Mire since Cerise had left the Rathole. First Thibauld, who failed to report in and whose stamen had been cut yesterday. Now Lavern, who should have been safe at base.