Riven (Mirus 2)

“Didn’t have to. She left something behind. The Hunter can use it to track her.” The Nix pulled something long and narrow from his pocket.

Ian held out his hand for the thing, frowning as he studied the pencil. No eraser. Some kind of charcoal thing. Arty. His breath seemed to clog in his lungs as he ran the pencil beneath his nose and inhaled the delicate scent of hothouse orchids.

Marley.

It took every ounce of his training to keep his face impassive, to hand the pencil back, though his hand wanted to fist and break it.

"Did you see anyone else on your way here? Anyone from our world?”

The Nix shook his head. “No, after that I kept it on the down low.”

It would be easy to kill him. Ian could strike faster than this idiot could turn his head, long before the fucker would manage to get his neurons firing enough to phase out of his solid state. His race returned to their liquid form upon death, so not even a body to dispose of, just a big ass puddle to mop up. The security tapes would be a bigger issue. The local files would be easy to tamper with, create a loop to cover the gap of missing footage. But the files were backed up off site, and finding out where, doing reconnaissance, and getting in to wipe them would take time he didn’t have. Which meant he couldn’t just scrub this dumb son of a bitch for materializing in front of the one person in this god-forsaken place he gave a damn about.

He needed a plan B.

“You should report in,” Ian said, gesturing to the bank of computers set up in a corner of the kitchen.

Rather than crossing to the terminal, the Nix pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed. “Klaus Zimmerman for Councilor Richter.”

What the hell is he doing? This isn’t protocol.

“Yeah, hey Mom. It’s me.”

Fuck.

Ian listened in horror as Zimmerman recounted his encounter with Marley directly to the ruling body who would order her execution.

I should have killed him when I had the chance.

Their conversation turned to family matters. Ian forced himself not to hurry, not to draw attention as he turned away and headed for the stairs. Hurry meant mistakes, and he couldn’t afford to make any when it came to this. His window was narrow. The Council would dispatch a Hunter within the hour. Unless he intervened, Marley would be dead by nightfall.

Methodically, he finished stuffing the last of his things into his duffel, brain turning over other options. He was a strategist for fuck’s sake. He should be able to find a solution for this.

He could go to her, tell her she was in danger, convince her to run. But she wasn’t trained in how to disappear. Nothing a civilian human could do would evade one of the Council’s Hunters for very long. And that aside, she didn’t know him, had no reason to trust what he said.

He could lie in wait for the Hunter, take him out. But even in top form, he’d have difficulty taking on one of the Council’s finely-trained assassins. And even if he were lucky enough to pull it off, they’d just send another.

Which left him with exactly zero options.

Except to allow things to run their course. Abide by the laws of his world. Do nothing, as he’d always done nothing, and keep living the life he’d been trained for. What was she to him after all? A veritable stranger. Just a woman he’d saved once, who made an impression of beauty in an otherwise unpalatable existence. She had no family, no real friends. Her death would leave few ripples behind for the Council to contend with. The smart thing to do was leave her to her unfortunate fate. A bloom crushed beneath the careless boot of a thug.

Chapter 4

Marley wasn’t crazy. She hadn’t had some kind of psychotic break or hallucination. That thing had come out of the fountain and morphed into a man.

She’d known monsters were real. As a child, she’d talked about the bad things in the dark. All the well-meaning social workers and psychologists had talked of trauma and coping, attention seeking and psychosis. They’d called her a troubled child. She’d spent twenty-five years trying to say the right thing, doing what people expected to avoid the labels and the drugs. In the back of her mind, she’d known it hadn’t been a figment of her imagination or a cry for help.

The sudden pounding on the door made her jolt and press a fist to her mouth to hold back the scream.

No matter what happens, you must stay quiet. As the thought echoed through her head, Marley clutched the sketchpad to her chest like a shield.

“Marley!”

For a second she stared at the door, which shook under another barr

age of pounding. The thing knew her name?

“Marley! Are you okay? It’s Ian.”