Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(69)

She moved toward him and plunged her knife between his ribs, just to the right of his heart. Someone in the audience screamed.

“Sir Albin Aldrich,” she said loudly, “I’ve come to glean you.”

The man grimaced but did not break character.

“Et tu, Brute?” he said. “Then fall, Caesar.”

Then she shifted the knife, slicing his aorta, and he slipped to the ground. He took one final breath and died, on schedule, just as Shakespeare had written.

The shock rolling from the audience was electric. No one knew what to do, how to react. Someone began to applaud. Scythe Anastasia knew instinctively that it was Scythe Curie, and the audience, seeing her applaud, joined in nervously.

And that was when the nature of Shakespeare’s tragedy took a terrible turn.

? ? ?

Acid! Greyson cursed himself for not being quicker on the uptake. He should have figured it out! Everyone always worried about fire or explosions. People forget that a strong enough acid can end someone just as effectively. But how would Purity and her team accomplish it? How would they isolate the scythes and subdue them? Scythes were masters of every weapon, able to take out an entire room of people without a scratch. Then it occurred to him they would not need to isolate the scythes at all. One did not need to aim acid if there was enough of it . . . and a way to deliver it. . . .

He pulled open the side door and went in, finding himself in a narrow hallway lined with dressing rooms. To the right, stairs descended into a basement, and that was where he found Purity and her team. There were three large barrels made of the same white Teflon material that the wine bottle had been made of the night Greyson and Purity first met—there must have been a hundred gallons of fluoro-flerovic acid in those barrels! And there was a high-pressure pump that had already been connected to the water line that fed the theater’s fire sprinkler system.

Purity saw him immediately.

“What are you doing? You’re supposed to be outside!”

She knew his betrayal the moment she met his eye. The fury in her was like radiation. It burned him. Seared him deep.

“Don’t even think about it!” she growled.

And he didn’t. If he thought about it, he might hesitate. If he weighed his options, he might change his mind. But he had a mission, and his mission was not hers.

He raced up the rickety stairs to the theater’s backstage area. If those sprinklers were triggered, it wouldn’t take long for them to start spouting acid. Five seconds, ten at most, until the water in the line was purged—and although the copper pipes would eventually dissolve like the iron bars of his and Purity’s cell, they would most certainly hold long enough to deliver the lethal deluge.

As he emerged from the basement to the backstage area, he heard the audience release an audible gasp, like a single voice, and he followed the sound. He would go onto the stage, that’s what he would do. He would run out there, and tell everyone that they were all about to die in an acid bath that would dissolve them so completely there would be no way to revive them. They would all be ended—actors, audience, and scythes alike—if they didn’t get out of there now.

Behind him he could hear the others bounding up the stairs—Purity and the goons who had connected the acid tanks and pump to the sprinkler system. He couldn’t let them catch him.

He was in the wings now, stage right. From here, he could see that Scythe Anastasia was onstage. What the hell was she doing onstage? Then she thrust her knife into one of the actors, and it became very clear what she was doing.

Suddenly, someone eclipsed Greyson’s view. A tall, thin man in a tuxedo and a blood-red tie. There was something familiar about his face, but Greyson couldn’t place it.

The man flipped open something that looked like an oversize switchblade with a jagged, serrated edge—and all at once he knew who this was. He hadn’t recognized Scythe Constantine without his crimson robe.

And it seemed the scythe didn’t recognize him, either.

“You have to listen to me,” Greyson begged, his eye on that blade. “Somewhere in the theater, someone’s about to start a fire—but that’s not the problem. It’s the sprinklers—if they go off, this whole place will be soaked in acid—enough to end everyone here! ?You have to clear the place out!”

Then Constantine smiled, and made no move to avert the disaster.

“Greyson Tolliver!” he said, finally recognizing him. “I should have known.”

No one had called him by his given name for quite a while now. It threw him, made his mind stumble. There was no time for a single misstep now.

“It will be my immense pleasure to glean you!” Constantine said—and all at once Greyson realized that he might have made the gravest of miscalculations. A scythe was at the bottom of this attempt. He knew that. Could it be that Scythe Constantine, the man in charge of the investigation, was actually behind it all?

Constantine stormed toward him, his blade poised to end the lives of both Greyson Tolliver and Slayd Bridger. . . .

. . . And then his entire world flipped upside down with such a violent lurch, it left him reeling from vertigo. Because at that moment, Purity emerged onto the stage, brandishing some terrible sawed-off weapon. She raised it, but before she could fire, Constantine threw Greyson down, and with impossible speed, grabbed the shotgun, which fired into the air, then in one smooth move ripped his knife across her neck and plunged it into her heart.