“I guess that’s fair,” I say, trying to sound like a thief sulking over the loss of a high-dollar payout. “The message is in his coat. Can I touch it without burning my fingers off?”
The man gives me a dismissive wave. “Yes. It’s been exposed to the air long enough.”
I drop to one knee beside the suffering Lucian and rifle through his pockets, wincing as bits of his skin slough off and stick to my gloves. Pretending I don’t know which pocket he used to stow the papers from the flophouse, I make a show of pulling out and examining every item he’s carrying. Including a set of keys, a wallet, a crumpled wad of bloody tissues, a stack of business cards bound with a rubber band, and a fancy pen I’m almost sure contains a hidden flash drive. As I’m uncovering each item and tossing it aside, I piece together the fragments of a sequence of actions I hope add up to a successful escape from this nightmare.
The last pocket I check is the hidden one inside his coat, which I pretend to locate by patting him down. I lift up one side of his coat with my right hand and reach toward the pocket with my left. The motion requires me to stretch my left arm across my chest, and since I’m kneeling at a roughly ninety-degree angle relative to the bench, the cloaked man doesn’t notice that I bypass the coat pocket and press my palm against the ground instead.
You have one shot to get this right, Kinsey, I warn myself. Don’t fuck it up.
I take a slow, deep breath. On the exhale, I violently yank the cap off my magic energy, sending a storm surge of power through my body so fast that neither of my enemies can react in time to stop me from casting a spell.
Using my locked shoulder as an anchor point, I fire a concentrated blast of force at the cloaked man’s face. He easily blocks it with a shield, but because he’s so focused on the blast, he doesn’t realize I’m throwing a second spell through the ground via my palm until the energy erupts beneath his feet.
This second spell grabs the bench at three points and drags two of those points toward the center. The left and right sides of the bench bend with echoing screeches. They fold around the cloaked man, forming a circle of metal bars that conform to the shape of his shield.
The shield is so close to his body, thanks to the speed of my force blast, that the man can’t maneuver his arms. He’s forced to drop the shield to give himself an extra inch of room to slip out from underneath the warped bars. The moment he drops that shield, however, I mentally tug the third point of the bench that my magic grasped a second ago.
The seat of the bench fractures, pelting the man’s exposed thighs with large pieces of metal shrapnel. One of the biggest pieces punctures his femoral artery. That piece is then dislodged when he lands roughly on his ass, no longer having a bench to sit on. Blood spurts out of the hole in his thigh at high pressure, painting me, the ground, and the fallen Lucian a bright, morbid red.
After the first pump of blood hits me, I stick my fingers between Lucian’s teeth, tug his lower jaw open, and position his head in the thickest part of the blood spatter, allowing the subsequent spurts to land directly in his mouth.
I don’t know if he’s capable of swallowing at this point, but the best I can do is hope.
Because the monster whose kin killed my mother is coming to kill me.
Chapter Ten
A lightning bolt bursts out of my hand and strikes the golem in its concave sternum. At first, the creature’s sheer size keeps it moving forward despite the mighty impact. Then its skin boils and blackens, begins to flake away, organic armor peeling off piece by fleshy piece. Until the blinding arc of energy penetrates the golem’s exterior.
The bolt enters the golem’s chest cavity and seems to fill it like helium fills an empty balloon. The creature’s entire body flares brightly from the inside, white light shining straight through its leathery skin.
Physics finally kicks in, and the force of the lightning bolt’s impact launches the golem across the park. The creature spins as if pinned on an axis, around and around, dips into a shallow arc, and tumbles toward the ground. It slams into the ground the way a small meteorite would strike, blowing out a huge chunk of earth, throwing dirt and ice and snow high into the air.
For a second, I feel like I’ve been transported to an alien invasion movie, as I stand fifty feet away from a bulbous glowing object sitting inside an impact crater. But a hand on my leg ruins the effect, especially when that hand yanks me off my feet.
I roll as I fall, and narrowly avoid breaking my nose on the stone pathway. Kicking out with my free leg, my foot connects with a head. The cloaked man, tangled up in the remains of the wrecked bench, swears loudly. The swear is followed by a string of words I identify a moment too late as a spell incantation.
A targeted force blast strikes me in the chest. The blow sends me reeling backward. My hands lose purchase on the ground. I wind up flat on my back, with the cloaked man clawing his way up my legs until he’s in the right position to pin me down and wrap his bloody hands around my throat.
“You little shit,” he growls at me in Russian. “I ought to flay you alive for…”
A fluttering light off to the right catches his attention, and his death threat trails off. He maintains his grip on my throat, however, a warning he can break my neck at any time. So I’m forced to lie there on the icy ground and hope that whatever distraction is emerging in the glowing crater will result in a shake-up big enough to let me slip out of the cloaked man’s grasp, nab Lucian, and make a run for it.
The cloaked man’s head suddenly snaps back toward me. “Did you damage the seal?”
“What seal?” I croak out.
“The golem’s spirit seal.”
I make my best attempt at a shrug. “Look, man. I don’t know anything about seals, or golems for that matter.”
“Of course you don’t.” He removes one hand from my neck—and smacks me in the face, tearing my lip wide open and practically peeling off my left eyelid.
“A golem,” he shouts, the effect all the more terrifying because I can see nothing but darkness under his hood, “is created by sealing a spirit inside an artificial body made with a combination of mundane and magic tools. If you damage the master seal spell that keeps the spirit trapped inside its shell, then the spirit can get out. And since spirits don’t particularly enjoy being stuffed into a fake body and enslaved to a practitioner’s will, they have this habit of going completely berserk once they escape from the construct.”
He grabs my chin and forces my head to the right, where the glowing golem in the crater has now devolved into what looks like a malformed clay sculpture. Large pieces of the creature’s body have broken off, revealing that the center really is hollow, and in that empty space lurks something bright and burning that seems to be growing bigger with each passing second.
“Do you have any idea what that little firebug will do, will become, when it escapes from that crumbling golem, boy?” the cloaked man hisses in my ear. “Do you have any concept of what creature you have just unleashed?”
“No,” I reply, tasting blood. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”
He hawks out a laugh. “That, you stupid child, is an ifrit.”
I go very still and murmur, “Ifrit. As in the djinni?”
“Oh, so you aren’t completely ignorant.” He rams his fist into the stone next to my head, splitting it right down the middle. “Yes, ifrits are a class of djinn. The second most powerful class of djinn, and historically, the most destructive to the mortal world by an order of magnitude. Bind them the right way, and they can serve as extremely effective muscle for your cause. Allow them to break free from their bindings, and they will be your enemy for all eternity.”
A tremor shakes the ground, and both of us look at the golem again. Half of its body has crumbled away, and the underlying frame of spellwork holding the ifrit inside is now exposed, a complex network of golden lines and symbols. There’s a large dark spot in the chest area, right where my lightning bolt struck the golem, indicating part of the spell’
s construction has fallen completely inert. That damaged portion has jumpstarted a cascading failure, more and more of the lines and symbols flaring brightly and then winking out.
As we watch, transfixed, the ifrit punches a hole through the weakened bars of its prison. When a piece of its body passes through the gap in the spellwork, it grows from a tiny lick of flame into an enormous column of undulating fire shaped like an arm with a wide, four-fingered hand unfurling from its wrist.
The giant flame hand smacks the ground. Every inch of snow in a twenty-foot radius sublimates to steam in an instant. The cloud of steam, strangely enough, begins to circle the golem’s collapsing body, faster and faster with each full rotation, as if it’s caught in a strengthening vortex.
“Oh hell,” says the cloaked man. “It’s going to detonate.”
The cloaked man’s body blurs, the typical byproduct of a speed spell. Before I can react, he releases me, jumps over the bent remains of the bench, and sprints off across the park, his injured leg dragging behind him.
I stagger to my feet, massaging my face, and peer through the trees off to the left just in time to see the cloaked woman join her fleeing partner’s side. A second golem, this one sporting huge, veiny bat wings, flies into view behind the woman. The woman converses with the man for a brief moment before she gives the creature some sort of command.
The golem pulls away from the cloaked duo and soars toward the top of the illusion dome. When it’s a few feet away, it flashes gold, and a veil envelops its form, hiding it from sight. The dome ripples slightly as the creature passes through, and then it’s gone. Along with its masters, who cross the dome boundary on the ground a few seconds later.
Lucian and I are left alone. With an ifrit about to “detonate.”
Since I have no idea what level of power an ifrit wields, I have to assume this detonation will be the rough equivalent of a practitioner’s berserker spell. Meaning anything in the ifrit’s general vicinity will be completely obliterated. I’ve never fought any kind of djinn before—they’re notorious tricksters, and people don’t summon them unless they have a death wish—so I have no idea if this creature can even be reasoned with, much less defeated with the minimal magic skills I possess.
There’s nothing I can do, I think as I throw another look at the living inferno breaking the last shackles of its magic cage. Nothing I can do but hope the coming explosion doesn’t expand beyond the park.
Ruing my lack of magic expertise, I carefully grab Lucian and balance him on my shoulder. He’s no longer writhing in pain, and his skin isn’t falling off in rotten chunks anymore. But he’s still in a very fragile condition. So I try to be as gentle as possible as I bend my knees, pump energy into my legs and the soles of my feet, and slingshot myself into the air using a combination of a force blast and a series of manipulated wind currents.
I fly across the length of the park, intending to land at the edge of the dome, peek out to make sure no civilians are watching, and then hustle into the nearest alley to keep Lucian’s current state hidden from prying eyes.
Unfortunately for me, the vampire in my arms, and the entire park, the ifrit decides to blow its stack when I’m fifteen feet from the ground. There’s a dazzling flash of light behind me, bright enough to burn holes in my corneas. And on instinct, I raise my best attempt at a shield a split second before the shockwave wallops me in the back.
My best attempt at a shield, of course, sucks balls. It lasts long enough to carry us about thirty feet on the front of the shockwave before it shatters into a thousand violet shards. Then the turbulent forces of the explosion rip Lucian out of my grasp and fling him off to who knows where, send me into an uncontrolled spin, and slam me into the hood of a black SUV that chose a bad moment to turn onto the street leading to the park.
The vehicle comes to a sudden stop. I roll off the hood and flop listlessly onto the damp asphalt. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I can barely hear anything over the din of static. And my vision is blurred to the point where I can’t separate the city skyline from the sky itself. My entire world shrinks to a bubble of pain and the sensation that I’m choking on nothing but air, my traumatized lungs filling with blood or fluid.
Yet, even through all of that suffering, I’m able to recognize the nature of the events unfolding around me. Because all of those events are exceedingly familiar: Four doors of the SUV pop open. Five sets of heavy-duty boots hit the ground. The people those boots belong to approach the front of their SUV with caution, shuffling along through the ice and snow. In a coordinated effort, these people surround me, beggar rings sparking as they fill with environmental energy.
When I don’t respond to any of their movements, one blurry figure breaks away from the half-circle, pulling from their belt a clacking piece of metal that my memory identifies as handcuffs. The person stoops beside me, turns me over onto my stomach none too gently, and cuffs my wrists.
One of my dislocated fingers pops itself back into place as this person is tightening the second cuff, and they jump, startled, before they realize what happened. The person speaks a series of Russian sentences my damaged brain can’t translate at the moment. Through the ringing in my ears, however, I do recognize two things.
One, the person who cuffed me is a woman. And two, I remember her voice.
It’s the blond captain I electrocuted in the park beside the theater.
So not only did her team survive their run-in with the cloaked man, I think in the moments before I pass out, but now they also have a chance to take revenge on me. Some people just have all the luck, don’t they?
Chapter Eleven
The sound of a door slamming shut rouses me from a shallow sleep. Pain, dull and resonating, rides in on the back of my awareness. Instead of opening my eyes and alerting whoever might be waiting for me to wake up, I remain still and take stock of my aching body parts. All my bones feel intact, and nothing is twisted or bent in the wrong direction, a sign my healing factor did its job. But I can feel vast swaths of bruising, and the pulsing of numerous torn muscles, concentrated on the right side of my body. Which, I vaguely recall, made contact with the hood of a vehicle after falling a considerable distance at high speed.
Either I haven’t been out for long, or I was catastrophically injured by whatever…
My memory snaps back into place—the park, the ifrit, the explosion—and I open my eyes. Only to close them again and groan in dismay when the glare of a fluorescent ceiling light reveals in stark detail exactly what sort of room I’m in. Four bare metal walls. A heavy door that locks from the outside. A stone floor punctuated by a couple of drains. And a steel table complimented by a trio of uncomfortable chairs.
I’m sitting in one of those chairs, slumped forward with my cheek planted against the tabletop, and my hands are cuffed to the back of the chair. In one corner of the ceiling, a security camera records my every move.
So they already know I’m awake, and they’ll be here any minute.
DSI. I’m in a suspect holding room at the DSI Moscow office.
Oh hell, I moan inwardly, this is going to be a wild ride.
I peel my cheek off the table and lean back against the chair to ease the strain on my muscles. I then try to work through my jumbled thoughts before my interrogators arrive and start using their plethora of academy-taught techniques to throw me off balance. But my thoughts untangle about as easily as a pair of earbud wires. Especially after I realize that my lack of pertinent knowledge is going to make it difficult for me to sidestep the agents’ questions.
I don’t know how much DSI has figured out regarding Dawn Slayer. I don’t know if they’re aware of the Children of Enoch as a dangerous supernatural group, or if they just think the two cloaked practitioners are a pair of determined artifact collectors. I don’t know if they’ve discovered House Tepes has agents working in the city to recover the sword. I don’t know if they found out the Black Knights were the ones who brought the sword to Moscow in the first place. Hell
, I don’t even know if DSI picked up Lucian along with me, or if his limp body got flung somewhere out of sight after the ifrit’s detonation.
If I don’t play this very carefully, these DSI agents will use my ignorance to poke holes—
The door swings open with an ear-piercing shriek.
Standing in the doorway is a pale man of moderate height and build. His brown hair is heavily streaked with gray, his day-old stubble a patchwork of dark and light. He stands tall and straight, like a soldier, and his gait is careful and measured as he steps across the threshold into the dreary cell. His long black coat bears the insignia of an elite DSI captain. The expression on his face, hard and cold and unforgiving, speaks of a man who has spent many an hour in this dungeon, sitting across from the worst the supernatural underworld has to offer.
Never thought I’d be slotted into that category.
The man halts halfway to the table, allowing two heavily armed agents to slip in behind him and take up positions in different corners of the room, their guns and beggar rings aimed at my back. They’re not taking any chances with me, not after I bowled over a whole team during my flight from the satire theater. And while that’s definitely a smart move on their part, it does kind of hurt to see people wearing my uniform treat me like an existential threat.
But it’s not your uniform anymore, is it? whispers a voice in the back of my head.
The captain kicks the door shut behind him and walks over to his side of the table. He pulls out a chair, intentionally dragging the legs along the floor to produce an awful grating noise—a tactic used to discombobulate a suspect. As he rounds the chair to sit down, he smacks a thick manila folder against the tabletop. Pinned to the front of this folder with a paperclip is a printed picture of my face. The exact photograph that was used for my DSI identification card.
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