Ruby Callaway- The Complete Collection

by D. N. Erikson

  Aaron gave me a wolfish smile. “You’re not for hire, are you, Ruby?”

  I looked around the surroundings and said, “I don’t think you’d pay enough.”

  “What if I had the answer to your loop?” The page dangled in front of me like a chunk of meat in front of a lion.

  I didn’t appreciate that, and I let him know by raising the shotgun and racking the slide.

  Or what should have racked the slide.

  I pumped it again, but the mechanism refused to move, like someone had glued it into place.

  “Another way you remain leader,” Aaron said, draining the rest of his tea. “Anti-firearm wards in your home.”

  I set the useless gun down and considered strangling him. But he was still fit—most wolves were, unless they made a concerted effort to be flabby pieces of shit—and had about a hundred pounds on me.

  Maybe in the movies I’d win that fight, but in the real world, I was going to end up with a mouthful of broken teeth. It was one thing talking shit to Stevens when I was already cuffed. It was another matter entirely to initiate my own demise.

  “Should’ve guessed.”

  “Nicolette is a talented witch.” Aaron shrugged a little, as he listened to her moans. She’d been getting into it, but upon hearing her name, she’d decided to go full-on porno. Let big bad crime lord know about what he was missing.

  I liked her already, wards notwithstanding.

  “Passionate,” I said, keeping a straight face.

  “I wouldn’t disagree.” The ex-wolf placed the pamphlet down on his lap and stared at me. “So do we have ourselves a deal?”

  “I could just come back tomorrow,” I said.

  “But you lack the patience.”

  “Wow, you should tell fortunes.”

  “A blind dog could see that.”

  It was annoying when people were right. I wanted to get the hell out of this loop and away from the camp, Roark, the necromancer—everything. It wasn’t my damn problem. Like I’d told Marshall next to the tree, I had no love for politicians. He could string them all up and reanimate them for his little marionette ball.

  Because they sure as hell weren’t gonna watch out for me.

  So I said, “What’s the job?”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  And then Aaron Daniels explained what I needed to do in exchange for his assistance.

  19

  I got my ride into the city—and got to keep my first aid kit and rebreathers. Lucky me. I was headed back to the Fallout Zone.

  Madsen was still there, and more than willing to take a bribe to let me slip through. Recalling my little incident with the Elite Guard last time, I asked my driver how I’d get back through the gate.

  He just laughed his ass off and said, “You won’t.”

  That didn’t leave me feeling warm and fuzzy, but he assured me that the information would make its way to the other side if I did my job. Apparently you could hack the rebreathers, make them display coordinates and maps via their holographic outputs.

  I was told the location of The Arcana of Temporal Manipulation would be sent once the job was done.

  I didn’t see what the point of jumping through this hoop was. If Aaron Daniels believed that I was really in a time loop, then he’d also know that he’d forget anything I told him by tomorrow. So this was either for sport, or because he thought I was crazy and figured he could get some free work out of it.

  To be honest, the print quality of The Arcana of Temporal Manipulation had not been particularly inspiring. But there weren’t a ton of places I could go for help. My list of old allies had been a short list of one.

  Now zero.

  And Pearl had always been the networker. It was a trait of Seers: they didn’t have a Realmfarer’s intuitive powers, couldn’t read things as clearly. But they also weren’t nomadic, wandering assholes.

  Well, Pearl was an asshole. But she made contacts.

  I didn’t.

  Which left me heading into the Fallout Zone alone. Searching for some geneticist in hiding at Aaron Daniels’s behest.

  This time, instead of crossing through the steel gate via car, I did so on foot—security cameras be damned. As I passed the threshold of the massive gate, I felt the air change almost immediately. It was still breathable near the guard tower, but once I got about thirty feet out, my lungs began to itch.

  I reached into the pocket of my leather jacket and pulled out one of the rebreathers. Slipping it over my mouth was an instant upgrade. 60:00 flashed before me in holographic lettering before drifting off into the haze.

  Still carrying the first aid kit like a first grader would her lunchbox, I popped it open. I recognized only the pen and three small syringes of morphine, which were non-standard gear last time I’d checked the FBI’s protocol. But I guess times had changed. Roark didn’t strike me as a junkie, and the expiration date indicated it’d been manufactured a while ago.

  Morphine didn’t go bad, as best I could tell, so I kept the syringes around. Could be handy.

  I jabbed myself in the neck with the radiation inoculation, hearing the contents hiss as the gate lumbered shut. After a final glance toward the rest of the supplies, I let them drop by the wayside.

  This was the kind of place where you kept both hands on your gun at all times.

  I made my way through the radiation fog, a lone gunslinger strolling through a landscape like an Old West town. Back then, places would simply vanish, only the buildings left behind. No trace of what happened to the locals.

  Whether they left—or whether something came and killed them.

  The story was a little clearer here. Bombs from the mortals, some holdouts surviving amidst the fallout. Ghostly whispers shouted the truth from every scrawled LC2 graffiti tag.

  This place had been buried for rebelling against the insurmountable tide of progress.

  A hologram map floated from the rebreather, displaying my time—forty-three minutes—and instructions to turn left. The streets were narrowing, becoming claustrophobic in their ruined non-splendor. Decrepit buildings loomed, like they were ready to attack.

  I gripped the shotgun tighter, finger inching over the trigger. But this wasn’t the type of place where someone bothered a person with a gun. That was a good way to shorten an already terminally low life expectancy.

  My eyes scanned the wrecked street. A pair of rusted trucks blocked the sidewalk ahead, acting as a low-tech gate.

  “Aaron, you son of a bitch.” I bit my lip as I realized where the ex-wolf had sent me.

  This was someone’s territory.

  It shouldn’t have been surprising. Humans had nation-states, counties, corporations, property lines—a million imaginary ways of divvying up what was and wasn’t theirs. Creatures of essence were little different.

  Well, except for one thing.

  They were more territorial. Ever noticed how a dog has to piss on the same hydrant? Annoying if you’re the owner, getting dragged two blocks out of the way. But ultimately a trivial irritation.

  Now imagine a pack of vamps, or wolves, or shifters who feel compelled to protect their boundary lines at all costs.

  Lot of blood and spit starts staining the ground.

  The wisps began to dance red around the rusted pickups. But this time my intuition was late to the party. I already had this place figured from experience alone.

  I walked up to the front wheel well and kicked the splintered hubcap. It let out a lonely, hollow crack into the murk. No response came from the silent streets, other than the now-familiar backing symphony of the Fallout Zone: howls, screams, the occasional staccato burst of gunfire.

  The mask let out a little beep, indicating that I had thirty minutes of air remaining.

  “Haven’t seen you around here.” It was like the fog itself was talking to me. But I knew a warlock’s tricks by now.

  “So people keep telling me,” I said.

  “Bold.”

  I zeroed in on a window
about four houses down from the trucks. “You’re pretty close to the firing lines.”

  There was no response for a long time. Then, “How’d you know where I was?”

  “I’m here about the geneticist.”

  “I could kill you just for standing there.”

  I racked the slide and said, “You can try.”

  On cue, a stream of bats erupted from the window. Glass crinkled to the warped sidewalk as they screeched.

  I didn’t fire, understanding that it was mainly an optical illusion. There were creatures who could do impressive things in this world. But magic was energy intensive and generally wasn’t free. Tossing off inferno spells or summoning minions wasn’t exactly as easy as snapping your fingers.

  Newton’s laws.

  Something about entropy and equal and opposite reactions.

  It’d been enough to turn Marshall’s hair white.

  The bats screamed toward me, rabid fangs bared. I coolly stared them down, bringing the shotgun up to aim at their leader.

  One MagiTekk diamond-studded round later, and most of them disappeared. The real bats dispersed, receiving mixed signals from their dying master. I slid over the hood, feeling the rust scratch against my jeans as I watched a shifter contort back into human shape.

  Not looking away, I said, “You could’ve come down here yourself.”

  “But then what are the perks of being boss?” came the voice from the window.

  Looking at the bloodied man with his chest torn apart, arm broken in six places from the fall, I had to agree. From his aura, I didn’t think this guy was being mind-controlled. But I didn’t have time to figure things out before a series of doors slamming in succession caught my attention.

  Warily, I scanned the street. Where there had been nothing but crumbling steps and seemingly empty row homes were now dozens of creatures of various origins. Their auras blurred together, making it hard to determine what they all were, barring the more obvious candidates.

  “Welcome to my kingdom.”

  I took a step back as a deep-rooted survival instinct kicked into overdrive. The eyes peered back at me, unblinking, ready to serve their not-so-fearless leader.

  “Your kingdom could use better roads.”

  “I’m sure the mortals will get on that if I ask nicely.” A dismissive laugh. Not bitter or harsh, like one might expect. Then again, if you were a feudal lord, then things were good. Life was a game of relativity, not absolutes.

  Being slumlord king wasn’t a bad position.

  Wanting to get this over with—and brasher than usual, given the necromancer’s sordid gift of the time loop—I said, “Aaron Daniels sent me.”

  “And you were stupid enough to listen.”

  “I can always come back later if now’s not a good time.”

  “A sense of humor.” The hidden warlock cleared his throat. “Wouldn’t have expected that from looking at you.”

  I glanced up at the broken window but saw no eyes.

  “And here I can’t see you.”

  “But you can. You just have to look hard enough.”

  I kept my eyes focused on the broken window, waiting for the warlock to emerge. But, after a minute of inactivity, I realized that sleight of hand might have been the most powerful magic of all.

  And it didn’t even require essence.

  With slow, deliberate steps, I turned around, sensing the warlock more than I saw him.

  I tried to stifle my response, but there really was no hiding it.

  “I know,” the woman in the white lab coat said. “Surprise.”

  Then she blew a fistful of powder into my face, and I crumpled to the ground.

  “Hello,” the sorceress said. “Let’s see what secrets that beautiful body of yours is hiding, shall we?”

  20

  Almost 21 Years Ago

  August 4, 2018

  Phoenix, AZ

  An electric-blue burst surged from the shotgun’s barrel, reducing the man to a pile of ashen guts. Few things were certain in life, but as I went to reload, there was almost one surefire guarantee.

  Today was going to be the day I died.

  The essence-infused shell shimmered as I slid it into the chamber.

  “It’s over, bitch.” Outside, Jameson whistled a tune far too cheerful for the smoking carnage that lay outside the window. We’d reduced the nice suburban street to a smoldering war zone over the last half hour.

  Not bad for an upstart.

  Definitely not my usual style. I was a disciple of the Genghis Khan school of battle: burn one village, spare the rest. The former acts as a reputation builder and allows you to reap the rewards of your conquests without fear of reprisal from your enemies.

  But some enemies were more persistent than others.

  And the problem with burning villages—at least in the modern day—was more a matter of governmental intervention.

  Tasting smoke on my bloodied lips, I could hear the distant wail of sirens cut across the desert. Could be five minutes, could be one minute away.

  But they were coming.

  And I was as good as screwed.

  “Fuck you.” I racked the slide, ejecting the spent shell. Grime-covered fingers gripping the shotgun stock tight, I peeked out the ruined window. A supersonic burst of automatic weapons fire sent me straight to the floor.

  Plaster rained down from the ceiling as I crawled along the plush off-gray carpet. I paid the bodies ruining the fibers with their guts no heed. Survival and sentimentality didn’t mix. As I reached the stairs, sirens growing louder, I worried—admittedly not for the first time in two hundred years—that I might be truly fucked.

  I maintained a low profile on the steps to minimize the chances of being perforated.

  Having a shootout with the police wasn’t part of my modus operandi. No one would accuse me of possessing a particularly benevolent heart. But I kept to dispatching supernatural marks in my bounty hunting.

  Killing humans—particularly the law—tended to attract unwanted attention.

  That went double, now, given all the sanctions coming down from Washington. Laws were being considered about what the hell to do about this sudden supernatural problem flooding the streets. As if vampires were new. Just because everyone had refused to open their eyes for ten thousand years didn’t mean this was suddenly a hot-button issue.

  Try telling that to the news anchors. I caught a glimpse of the grainy dashcam film playing on the living room set, footage by this point burned into the world’s brain. There was Kalos, half-demon, stepping into the frame and cooking close to a dozen daywalking vamps in a towering pillar of flame.

  The police cruiser’s onboard cam caught everything. Never mind that he was saving the cops.

  Once incontrovertible proof was out in the open, a stream of vitriol poured from the floodgates. Kalos was number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Laws needed to be passed. Internment camps set up.

  Fear was a hell of a motivator.

  It rarely motivated good things.

  The gunfire outside ceased as the sirens approached. I expected for it to start up again almost instantly, this time directed at the cops.

  Jameson and I were both enemies of the state: essence running through our veins. A danger to the billions of mortals littering the planet’s surface, squeezing the life out of the environment like juice from an orange.

  I didn’t start burning fossils to power my luxury SUVs. Somehow, though, I was the asshole.

  Hidden below the living room table, I listened and waited. All I could hear was Pearl’s strained breathing from the first-floor guest room.

  Double-booking. A bounty hunter’s worst nightmare. That left you with two problems: the mark and a second party gunning for a payday. And most fellow hunters didn’t have any sort of qualms about putting you down to secure the coin.

  We’d done all the work. Then Jameson had shown up and shelled the house with a damn blitzkrieg, eager to cash in on the score.

>   Wasn’t the first time a rival had tried to put me down.

  This was new, though.

  Because instead of gunfire, I heard Jameson offer the squealing cruisers what sounded like a greeting. It was tough to tell with the sirens, of course, but the lack of gunfire really gave me all the information I needed.

  They weren’t here for him.

  My stomach twisted, vengeance clouding my mind.

  I’d been set up.

  A far bigger fish than Jameson wanted me out of the picture.

  A voice came over a bullhorn. “Come out of the domicile with your hands above your head.”

  I racked my mind. That wasn’t going to happen, but opportunities for escape weren’t exactly jumping out at me from the copy-and-pasted semi-furnished interior. It was a shame most of Jameson’s guys were lying in pools of their own blood. I could use a sounding board.

  But that’s what they got for trying to edge in on my mark after the job was done.

  Pearl let out a spirited groan. I dragged my ass toward the bedroom, stomach doing backflips. The battle had been my focus, distracting me from the bigger problem.

  I wanted to close my eyes as I entered, like a little kid making a wish. But that wasn’t the way real life worked, so I didn’t.

  Propped up against the single bed, ruining the sky-blue bedspread, Pearl sat, hands clutched over the gut wound. I wasn’t a doctor, but you see enough people die over the years and you become familiar with the concept of triage.

  This was looking like a black band situation, given her ashen complexion. If she wasn’t a Seer, the essence giving her a little extra resilience against death, a bullet in the brain pan would’ve been the kind move.

  Her black hair was more mussed than usual, her ageless face finally showing a few hints of the years.

  “You know what you need to do,” she said.

  “I’m not leaving.” I knelt, keeping one ear cocked outside. After I’d put down the initial assault with prejudice, no one would be storming the front door. But, sooner or later, impatience would win out over prudence. And I didn’t have enough ammo to mop up the rest of Jameson’s team and half the Phoenix PD.