Shattered Read online

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  GENESIS

  Chapter One

  Screams cut through the air filling it with a horrifying mix of terror and jeering jubilation. It pierced every corner of the city, filling it until there was nothing left but a wall of sound. A wall she could not breach, no matter how loudly she cried out, her voice lost among the commotion.

  Payton fought madly against her captors as she watched the self-titled Templars drag her mother atop the city gallows. “You can’t do this! Let her go! She’s done nothing to you!”

  Over and over, she shouted those words in different variations. Some were threats. Some were pleas. Nothing was heeded. Nothing was heard. She was forced to stay there, suspended between two of the armored brutes who had attacked her city, her home, and were helping raze it to the ground. All in the search for mages.

  And now they had her mother.

  “You know why you have been brought here. You know the crimes you have committed. The wretched poison that is within your veins. The darkness that you practice,” the leader, a man with muttonchops and a mustache who towered over her mother, proclaimed. Her mother looked so small under him, kneeling in front of an executioner’s block which had been placed on the platform. “You and others of your kind have brought destruction and devastation upon the innocent and for this, the sentence is death. You will be a plague on this world no longer.”

  Same lines. Same speech. New person. And the crowd still stood there. Some were motionless – clinging to loved ones, tearful and afraid. Some were cheering the appalling events on. But all of them doing nothing. All of them just standing there with no intention to stop this slaughter of innocents.

  Her mother was simply going to become another victim. Another corpse atop the ever-growing pile.

  No.

  No!

  A surge of adrenaline burst through Payton. Her foot shot out, angling a kick against the man on her right. She leaned into his stumble before driving her boot down on his kneecap. Through his guard, she heard a crunch and he bellowed in pain. Instead of releasing her, he gave a sharp tug. Her shoulder was nearly wrenched out of place with the added force of his weight. Refusing to let it slow her, she pretended to collapse, forcing the other captor to compensate. The moment he moved, she hooked her foot around his ankle causing him to topple over. She rolled out of the way so he fell on his partner rather than her. And in the same motion, she twisted out of their grip.

  Panting in pain, she grabbed the dagger off the man’s belt and raced for the stage. Her heart pounded in her ears with each step. Her vision was obstructed by the blood dripping down her forehead. The wound that had dazed her enough for capture had yet to stop seeping and still throbbed with pain. But it did not stop her. She would not let it.

  She lost count of the number of people she barreled past – armored or otherwise. Ducking and dodging their grasp became a sort of dance with that one lone dagger redirecting their weapons onto each other before she slipped out of reach. All that mattered was that Payton had made it to the steps. Only two more guards before she reached the platform. Before she reached her mother. Before she reached the bastard leading this massacre.

  “STOP!” Payton did not even know she had a voice left to scream. But the sound burst from her as the bloodied axe behind her mother began to descend.

  She drove the dagger into the neck of one of the attacking guards. Yanking it out in the same fluid motion she turned and buried it into the gut of the other, barely able to sidestep the first’s collapse.

  Only… she was too late.

  In that moment, the sound of the executioner’s blade hitting the cutting block was the loudest in the world.

  A guttural cry of agony wrenched from her as the body dropped. Bile rose in the back of Payton’s raw and aching throat. She was too late. Too late to save her. Too late to stop it.

  Simply too late…

  Her gaze shifted to the lead Templar, the blue of her eye turning dark with the rage that made her physically shake. Payton’s hand clutched the hilt of her stolen dagger. She hadn’t been able to save her mother, but she would be damned if she would let that monster take anyone else.

  And with that, she charged.

  Or tried to.

  Payton did not make it more than a step before something struck her from behind causing her to fall, blinding pain overwhelming her. She hit the gallows’ stage hard. Desperately she tried to hold onto the dagger, but someone ground their boot onto her hand, forcing her to release it. She was still trying to clear her vision when she was picked up by her arms and dragged forward.

  It took all she had to keep from crying out when her injured shoulder was jarred. She was reduced to gritting her teeth to bite back the scream. But that pain soon took second place in her mind when she realized they were holding her in place beside her mother. Payton’s pants began to soak in the fresh blood which was still oozing from her mother’s headless corpse.

  “You are quite the troublemaker,” the simpering sound of the lead Templar’s voice gave her something to focus on besides the bile watering in her mouth.

  “I get that way when mass murderers come to town.”

  Her head snapped to the side as she was roughly backhanded. She could feel her cheek split open as the edges of the metal gauntlet dug into the skin. Just as suddenly, that same hand grasped her chin and forced her to look up, gazing straight into those cold eyes.

  “We are not murderers, girl. We are the righteous. Righting this world—”

  “You’re madmen who lust for blood and have taken up a mantel that you think no one will stand against,” Payton shot, cutting him off before he could spew his dragon shit again. The last thing she needed was more zealots turned to his cause.

  For several long moments, he held her still, an internal debate playing across his face. Then, with what appeared to take deliberate effort, he released her and instead leaned forward, his lips brushing her ear as though he meant to whisper a secret. “If we were such, then I would very happily end you for the trouble you have caused.”

  Payton glared at him as he straightened, turning back to the crowd who had gathered – or been forced to gather – to watch the horrors.

  “We are not brutes or barbarians. We only seek to help and have no intention of harming those that are not guilty.”

  “The crime you convict them of is only that they were born with magic!” Payton objected but was silenced with another blow to the head.

  “We wish to root out those who can harm us, harm the world, as they have already done, and put an end to the danger. Nothing more.”

  He motioned to the few remaining prisoners they had. One was dragged onto the platform: an old man who Payton recognized as the city sage, Thomas. He had worked to protect the city’s collection of tomes for as long as she could remember. She watched as Thomas was pushed to his knees and his arm was forced forward.

  “A test. One simple test was devised to prove the guilty from the innocent. To show the poison in the blood.”

  “This is wrong! He has never done anything! None of these people have!” She struggled in her captor’s grip but was gagged with a meaty hand to her mouth.

  The mutton-chop Templar drew his blade across Thomas’ forearm. A thick line of blood appeared. The leader poured something glimmering and green on the cut. In an instant, a rain of sparks drizzled down in conjunction with Thomas’ blood.

  “There is the poison that taints his very soul. There is the magic that doomed this world to an ice age. There is the magic that took the land of Calaphine away from us.”

  Suddenly he looked at one of the men holding Payton and nodded. She stubbornly swallowed a whimper of pain when her injured arm was thrust upward; presented like a prize t
o the brown haired leader of the Templars. The sleeve of her shirt was shoved up to her elbow revealing the cut they had given her when she was first captured.

  He ran his blade along the same spot, carving a deeper groove into her. Fresh blood pooled up and spilled over, soaking her arm and dripping down to mix with the river of red that stained the gallows’ floor.

  Satisfied, he tipped the green liquid on her arm. If anything it burned more the second time than it had the first, sizzling and tingling its way through her veins until it reached her heart. But in the end, it was all very anticlimactic. There were no sparks, no glimmer, no light. Unlike with Thomas’ blood – which still shone with an eerie unworldly glow – hers was only red.

  The leader pressed his lips together and then inclined his head. “She has proven to be innocent. Once we are finished in the city, she will be free to go.” He then waved his hand. “Take her somewhere out of the way until we finish with this place.”

  Payton was hauled to her feet, her boots sliding in the pools of blood she had been soaking in. “Pretty it up all you like, you’re still murderers.”

  The man either ignored her or did not bother with a response. He merely turned his back as the two Templars who had a firm grip on her pulled her away. Part of her wanted to struggle and break free of the captors but the fight had drained from her. Drifted away until she barely had the strength to stand and the men were resorting to half dragging, half carrying her away.

  She did not know when she closed her eyes or when the tears had started. Perhaps it was an attempt to block out the crowd. Block out the sight of all the people who had just stood there, doing nothing while so many where murdered. People they had known. Like her mother. As they passed the crowds and buildings that burned, Payton tried to block it all out because facing it was so much worse.

  But it did not work.

  She could not block out the cries. The sound of buildings collapsing under the heat of the flames which consumed them. And most of all she could not block out the vision of her mother’s death that played in her mind.

  It wasn’t until the brutes hauling her stopped moving, she finally looked to see where they had taken her. Her brow furrowed in surprise when she saw the front of the path to the Lord’s estate. The surprise quickly abated, when she saw the monstrosity the Templars had created in front.

  Propped against the wrought-iron gates were giant beams of wood, held in place with rope and affixed several feet apart from each other. And on the beams were people. Men, women, guardsmen, a few of the Lord’s protectors, even a couple people she knew from the city… All were strung up on the posts. Each tied with their wrists above their heads and their feet bound at the ankle, leaving them in a perpetual state of suspension. Such a punishment had not been used in at least a hundred years.

  A rope jerked around her wrists, pulling tight and pinching her skin, startling her. “No… no!”

  The men already had her by the arms again and were pulling her toward a free post. With renewed vigor she began to fight, twisting about and elbowing them, trying to kick and claw, anything to get free but it did not work. They picked her up with ease, as though she weighed nothing. Hoisting her, her arms were forced above her head and she was dangling in the air. She managed to get one of them in the nose with her boot but she was rewarded with a punch in her gut. It left her winded. By the time she got her breath back, they had stepped away and she was secured to the beam, dangling in agony by her arms, her ankles pinned together and feet against the post, barely able to move.

  “Stay out of trouble,” one of them chortled.

  Payton spat at them which only earned her laughter as the two sauntered away, leaving her to her fate.

  At first, she tried to squirm free of the cords around her wrists only to stop when blinding pain made her go limp, blacking out for a few seconds. When she came to she began again. Huffing in pain, she tried to brace her feet against the beam, tightening her muscles in an effort to take the pressure off her hurt shoulder but she could not hold the position. Almost instantly she slipped and the fall caused her to cry out as she heard a pop and agony spread through her shoulder.

  “M-moving… makes… it worse…” a breathy warning came from her left. One of the women strung up was looking at her. Her head had lolled to the side as though the effort to hold it was too much. She was bleeding from a gash on her forehead and another on her side that was steadily making a puddle beneath her.

  So this was it? Payton leaned her head back against the post, staring up at the smoke-filled sky. She was just supposed to give up. Surrender to the pain, to the anguish, to the… nothing that awaited her? Surrender to the Templars? Surrender to the fact she was helpless? Tears burned her eyes just as readily as the ash that was gently raining down on her.

  She wasn’t ready to give up. She couldn’t give up. She had lost her mother. But her father, her brothers, they could still be alive. Somewhere… If she could only— once more her footing slid in its placement and everything vanished into darkness and pain.

  When she looked about again Payton could still hear the screams in the distance. Blearily she tried to clear the fog from her mind. Her arm had gone numb. She was not certain that was a good thing. How long had she been unconscious? The woman next to her was either dead or out as well. Swallowing hard, Payton struggled to think.

  The smell of the fires was much closer now. Part of her wondered if that would be how it ended for her, for all of them hanging there. Surrounded by the flames the Templars had set upon the city in order to root out the mages. The Templars could claim they never killed the troublemakers, that they had spared nonmagical people, and yet they would still be eliminated. She was morbidly hoping the smoke would suffocate them before the flames would reach them when a commotion caused her to raise her head.

  People. A small group of six people in blood-splattered, soot-smeared armor, had rushed toward them. Orders were being shouted, the group dividing and immediately dispersing to go to the people on the posts. One of them was coming closer to her. If they were the Templars going back on their word there was nothing she could do but meet her fate.

  “Payton?!” The person who had been heading toward her neighbor – the bleeding out guardswoman – abruptly shifted direction, exclaiming her name in shock.

  She blinked, trying to focus her vision. He was a tall and lanky man with black floppy hair, dressed in leathers that held a sigil she could barely make out. It was the seal of the city. Her gaze shot back to his face and found two familiar blue eyes shining from beneath thick black brows.

  “Sammy?” She could scarcely believe it.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” her youngest brother demanded, leaning his staff against the gate before beginning to cut her ropes.

  She whimpered when her feet were freed and sagged down, unaware of just how much of her weight had been relieved off her shoulder by that small perch. When he sliced through the last of her binding she collapsed into his arms.

  “You look terrible.”

  “You sure know how to charm the ladies,” she muttered as he helped her right herself. Letting out a shaking breath of air, she stared into his chiseled yet youthful face. “Creators, it’s good to see you, Samuel. I thought…” She was not certain she wanted to finish the fear that had torn through her when her father had not returned with her brothers after the city had come under siege.

  “We’ve been getting as many people out of Aodhan as we can. Anyone that resists is either slaughtered or carted off. We’ve found four other installations like this.” Samuel was fumbling at his belt for something. A second later he pulled out a vial filled with vivid red liquid, pushing it into her palm. “It’s my last aloeroot potion.”

  Payton hesitated before nudging his hand away. “Others need it more.” She nodded toward the woman who was being helped down, the wound on her side serious enough to need immediate attention.

  Samuel opened his mouth and then closed it, any objections fa
lling to the wayside. He called out to the guardsman helping the woman and the vial was passed off. Payton, however, was never more relieved when she saw the last of her family coming toward her after the remaining prisoners had been freed. Her father and twin brother.

  “Where’s your mother?” her father demanded.

  The silence between the four of them hung in the air, thick like the billows of black smoke rising from the city around them.

  “Payton, where’s mom?” Isiah asked, his voice tight.

  “I… we made it to the south sewer gate but… they overpowered us.”

  Her father’s shoulders sagged, part of him seeming to die right then and there and only Isiah’s presence kept him on his feet. Her twin just stared with a stony expression, a storm of denial and pain swirling in his eyes And Samuel kept shaking his head. Over and over, like the action could prevent it from being true. It all cut into her like a knife.

  “How?” Samuel barely seemed to be able to get the word out.

  “Their alchemists created something that stopped magic. Bombs of smoke reduced mom to her knees. I was left to defend her against a dozen men and we were captured.”

  “You let them take her?” her father, Leon’s voice was strangled as he asked.

  “I didn’t let them do anything!” Payton argued. The sound, that awful sound of the executioner’s axe hitting the block echoed in her mind again. “I tried… I tried everything I could but I was alone and there were too many of them!”

  “Guardsman Clark?” one of the people who had been part of the six approached. Payton watched her brother shift into what she used to tease him was his ‘proper guard’s pose’. Now it seemed more a mask than ever before. “We have only a short window before the Templars make another culling of the city. We must take those we have found and leave.”

  “Yes. Yes, agreed. You and the others get them mobile.” Isiah turned back to them and ran an assessing gaze over her, noting how she was wavering where she stood and holding her arm at an awkward angle. “Can you walk or are you going to fall to pieces?”