Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  “Luc!” Foley shouts. “What the hell are you doing? Get back in bed.”

  Lucian, breathing hard, replies, “No can do. Too much work.”

  Foley storms across the room. He braces one hand against Lucian’s bare chest and applies steady pressure, forcing Lucian backward. Lucian is so weak that he offers almost no resistance. His legs quickly give out, and he falls back onto the mattress. Foley’s hand follows him down and pins him to the bed, holding him in place to drive the point home.

  Foley says, “You aren’t going anywhere. You aren’t doing anything. You will rest until you are fully recovered. Is that clear?”

  Lucian blinks wearily at Foley. His eyes have regenerated like everything else, but his pupils are blown and his sclera are bloodshot. “I can’t do nothing. We need all hands on deck. Our enemy is too strong, and we don’t have enough…”

  Something softens in Foley’s face as he registers Lucian’s desperation. “If you can do it while lying in this bed, and without hurting yourself,” he says, revising his previous finality, “then I’ll allow you to do it. But you will do nothing taxing to your body, or your mind, or your soul. Is that clear?”

  Lucian closes his eyes and presses his lips together, seemingly fighting off a wave of nausea. “I can work with that,” he forces through his teeth. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to try.”

  He cracks one eye open, and after a period of aimless wandering, his gaze lands on me. “What we talked about yesterday, Kinsey. Remember? About your father?”

  Annette, looming over Lucian on the opposite side of the bed, cocks an eyebrow at me. “Father?”

  The memory of the awkward “daddy issues” conversation I had with Lucian yesterday smacks the front of my skull, and I groan inwardly. Not this again. “Um, Lucian told me that it might be possible to contact my father using some sort of blood connection spell. He thinks if we send a message across the veil, where my absent father presumably lives, and request his help, that maybe he’ll decide to show himself and do something useful for once.”

  Annette runs her tongue over her fangs, perturbed. “Let me get this straight. He wants us to contact your father, an Eververse being of potentially awesome power, whose character, motives, and goals are totally unknown to us? That’s a major gamble, and could backfire on us tremendously if the man turns out to be less than friendly.”

  I ground my heels into the carpet and look anywhere but Annette.

  Trisha, seated at a nearby table, catches my eye instead. She says, “Unless you’ve learned something about your father that makes you believe he won’t react in a hostile manner.”

  Foley turns to me. “Is that true? You’ve learned something about your father?”

  “Learned for certain? No.” I cross my arms, uncomfortable. “But Lucian speculated that there was only one logical reason I ended up where I did after I died.”

  “Ah,” Foley says. “You think your soul was drawn to the man on the island, that he acted as a beacon your soul inherently recognized due to a spiritual connection between you. A familial connection.”

  “Don,” Lucian sputters out. “That’s his dad. Don the grumpy guy.”

  “That’s the man you told us about yesterday, Lord Tepes?” Annette asks. “The one Kinsey encountered during his brief afterlife visit to the Eververse?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Foley finally removes his hand from Lucian’s chest and addresses me. “What do you think, Cal? You were the one who saw him, who overheard him speaking to his friend. I know you didn’t have the time or the wherewithal to form a complete opinion of him. But based on your first impression, do you think he’s reasonable enough to respond positively, or at least neutrally, to a message received out of the blue from his estranged son?”

  Forced to confront my dreamlike memory of the island once again, I run over all the details I remember about Don. He was in a bad mood, and according to Pell’s anecdote about the headless horseman, is frequently in a bad mood, but that doesn’t mean he’s a cruel or violent person. It sounded to me like he’s been under a great deal of stress for a long period of time, and learning about the recent upheavals on Earth rubbed off even more of whatever amiability he originally possessed. Beyond that, the man’s never done anything to physically hurt me. He’s just never shown up to help.

  So I figure the worst he’ll do if I send him a psychic phone call is ignore me.

  That’ll hurt my heart, but it won’t hurt my allies.

  Releasing the tension in my shoulders, I say, “I don’t think it’ll do any harm, so I guess it’s worth a shot.”

  Annette checks her phone. “We need to head out in the next two minutes, so if this spell requires any substantial input from Kinsey, it’ll have to wait.”

  “Just need some of Kinsey’s blood,” Lucian says.

  “What about magic energy?” Annette asks. “You need a substantial amount of that to cast across the veil, and it seems like you’re running on empty.”

  “I’m sure I can cast it,” Foley says.

  Annette shakes her head. “You need to conserve your energy, my lord. Just in case.”

  Trisha raises her hand. “I can do it. I’m not a magic powerhouse, by any means, but I’m sure I can manage to throw a blood-based communication spell across the veil.”

  Lucian gives her a thumbs-up.

  “Well, now that that’s settled…” Foley grabs Lucian’s legs and swings them back up onto the bed, turning Lucian’s entire body in the process. Before Lucian can protest, Foley draws the sheets up to Lucian’s chest. “You can instruct Trisha from the comfort of this bed.”

  Lucian winces. “You’re not my caretaker, you know?”

  “And you’re not mine,” Foley retorts. “But if you get to act like one sometimes, then so do I.”

  Lucian’s mouth opens and shuts several times, but no words emerge.

  Annette fakes a cough to cover a chuckle, and Trisha bites her hand to hide a smile. I just smirk openly at Lucian, and when he scowls back at me, I wink.

  Don’t dish it out, I impress on him, if you can’t take it.

  Once the amusement in the air dies off, I ask him, “Do you need any other input from me for this spell?”

  Lucian holds his scowl a second longer before he answers, “No. The message will carry a sort of spiritual imprint of you, but it won’t manifest in the recipient’s mind with a voice or image. It’ll just impart an impression of meaning.”

  “Cool,” I say in a vain attempt to shrug off how uneasy I am with contacting my father in any way. “Then I guess we can go?”

  “We can.” Annette gestures to Esther, who’s been loitering near the bedroom doorway this whole time, eavesdropping on our awkward conversation. Esther returns the gesture with one of her own and grabs a bag of supplies she left sitting on the sofa earlier.

  Foley glances from Esther to Annette to me. “Be careful, please. I would strongly prefer it if no one came back in a body bag.”

  “Don’t be silly, Foley.” I give him a cheeky grin. “If any of us die, it’s far more likely there won’t be anything left to put in a body bag.”

  He punches me in the arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. “Don’t be a smartass, Cal.”

  I come so close to saying, “Would you prefer I be a dumbass?” A callback to a conversation I had with Riker once upon a time. But Foley isn’t Riker, and this isn’t DSI, and I’m not yet comfortable enough with my new status in Foley’s house to casually throw around the same audacity that defined the first few months of my life as a rookie detective.

  The scars left by Targus’ obliteration of my old life have not yet faded, and the wounds this new life will inflict on me are as yet too poorly defined. I still exist in the space between two places, between a shadow of what was lost and an echo of what will be. I’m drifting from one side of a purgatory to the other, and sooner rather than later, I will reach that opposing side and be forced to accept whatever reality exists there.

 
But since my journey across that void hasn’t ended yet, my acceptance can wait another day.

  For now, I say, “Not so much being a smartass as a realist. If another ifrit blows up in our faces, we might all end up dust in the wind.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hays arrives at Krasny Pond wearing a duffle bag—and my skin.

  From my squatting position behind a prickly bush, I observe the man who started this chaos as he walks toward a nearby bench. His gait is casual, meandering, his posture relaxed. But even with his face partially blocked by the hood of his coat, I can tell he’s on guard.

  His head moves the same way mine does when I’m subtly checking my surroundings. A twitch of his chin when he looks left and right. A flaring of nostrils when he takes a deep, measured breath. Hays knows that the theft of the sword set this city’s underworld on fire, knows that if he slips up in the next thirty minutes, it’ll cost him his life. And his death won’t be pretty.

  My gaze drifts away from the target as I spot-check my teammates. Annette is hunkered down behind a tree twenty feet to my left, sending hand signals to the closest person from the team positioned next to ours. Esther, her bright-red hair bundled up beneath a hat, is perched high in an evergreen tree fifteen feet to my right, a sniper’s position.

  I have a brief flashback of Harmony Burgess shooting paintballs at my ass in academy training as I rake the thin foliage in search of the vampire’s petite form. But she’s so well hidden among the branches that I only glimpse one of her boots as she adjusts her stance.

  This whole setup—me in a city park, my knees aching from maintaining one pose for too long, my cheeks burned red by the frigid air, waiting for a signal from my team “captain” to attack—reminds me so much of a DSI operation that my chest physically aches.

  I take a mental timeout from our impending ambush of Hays to wonder what the remaining members of Team Riker are doing right now, halfway across the world. With Riker himself stuck in the commissioner post, probably for the rest of his career, and me permanently barred from ever returning to DSI, the team is now down to three members, too small to meet the recently revised field team standards.

  In the coming days, Ella will have to replace me, whether she likes it or not.

  That may hurt her more than my sudden unexplained departure.

  If only I could have told her the truth, or at least had enough time to come up with a plausible explanation…But then, that was the point of Targus’ short deadline, wasn’t it? If I’d had more time to prepare for my resignation, it wouldn’t have hurt me, or my teammates, or DSI as a whole, nearly as much as he wanted it to. He wanted everyone to suffer as much as possible. Because he’s a massive asshole.

  The sound of crinkling ice draws me out of my internal rant. Hays is clearing the bench of ice and snow, some of it frozen in place by the repeated thaw cycle over the past few days. Once there’s a clear spot big enough to fit my frame, Hays tugs the duffle bag off his shoulder, sinks onto the bench, and places the bag on his lap with both arms resting atop it in a distinctively protective fashion.

  Since the bench faces the frozen pond, Hays’ new position puts his back to most of us. Even if his ears are keenly tuned to pick up faint noises, like the distant snapping of a twig or the softest crunch of a shoe on snow, the fact that he won’t be able to see us move will give us a huge advantage. That is, it’ll give the superfast vampires a huge advantage, while my much slower half-human ass brings up the rear with my mediocre track-and-field best.

  (After my godawful performance during the escape from the flophouse, I’m not willing to use that speed spell during a critical confrontation. I need more practice first. A lot more.)

  Not that my speed, or lack thereof, will be an issue. Annette’s strategy is to use my key strengths, primarily my large magic store, as the group’s first line of defense. While the vampires are preoccupied with blocking all of Hays’ possible escape routes, my job will be to ensure that no one sneaks up on them and ambushes our ambush. At the first sign of an attack from the Children or their golems, I’m supposed to throw my biggest magic punch and deal as much damage as I can to any and all hostiles in a single blow.

  If we’re lucky, that will slow down our enemies long enough for us to retrieve the sword and skedaddle, so we won’t have to tangle with the Children or their poison-spitting puppets in a lengthy battle. I don’t anticipate being lucky in fights though, not anymore. So as Annette passes me the set of hand signals that indicate we’re moving into the “prepare to engage” phase of the operation, I clear my head of all the baggage that’s been weighing on me and focus on the task at hand.

  Peel your eyes. Clear your ears. And keep your magic dancing on your fingertips, Kinsey. Your margin for error here is very small. You cannot screw this up.

  I signal back to Annette that I’m ready and waiting, and pass on her own prep signal to Esther, who I assume is paying enough attention in her perch to catch it and send it down the line of agents to her right. Annette sits tight and waits for an additional twenty seconds, the estimated time it takes to pass a signal to both ends of our line.

  Then she tugs up her coat sleeve, revealing her seemingly cheap digital watch, and presses a button on its side. The identical watches that were handed out to every member of the team simultaneously produce a weak, soundless vibration, and the numbers on their faces begin counting down from thirty.

  Using the mental techniques I developed over a year of periodic DSI raids, I even out my breathing, tense my muscles, put my thoughts in a simple order, and split my attention between the shapeshifter sitting on the bench and the woods plagued by the haze of snowfall.

  At the twenty-second mark, I reach that state of perfect focus. Every action I may take over the next few minutes mapped out into a neat and clean decision tree. Every fear and worry securely locked away in a place where they can’t plague me in the middle of a fight. Everything except the mission, its goals and its perimeters, out of sight and out of mind.

  My watch hits ten till go time, and I flex my fingers, feel the sparks of magic ready to fly.

  I start counting down with my watch. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four—

  And that’s where everything goes wrong.

  Without warning, Hays jumps up from the bench, duffle bag clutched in one hand. For a heart-stuttering moment, I think he’s going to turn around and zero in on one of the vampires in our line, having heard a sound or caught a flash of movement.

  But he doesn’t turn. His attention lands on the adjacent shore of the pond, where a small municipal building sits half buried in the snow. His free hand drops to his belt and tugs up the hem of his coat to reveal several cylindrical objects etched with symbols that glow faintly to my magic sense. Bombs. The same kind he used to disrupt the exchange at the satire theater, I bet.

  Hays scans the woods behind that building, searching for whatever it was that tripped his alarms. His fingers slowly wrap around one of the cylinders, and with a deft motion, he palms it in a way that would be invisible to anyone who’s watching him from his area of concern. Pretending he grabbed nothing, he drops his arm back to his side and rolls his shoulders as if he’s relaxing. To the untrained eye, it would appear that Hays is convincing himself whatever he sensed was a false alarm, especially as he steps back toward the bench.

  But just before he bends to sit down, he shakes the bomb out of his sleeve and hurls it over the pond, past the building, and into the adjacent woods. A moment before the cylinder hits the ground, it comes into contact with something else. And with a red-orange flash of magic energy, the cylinder is batted off to the west at lightning speed. It travels roughly forty feet before it explodes and obliterates a dozen trees.

  In the wake of the earth-shaking boom, someone fires a gun. The bullet hits Hays between the eyes and blows out the back of his head. He falls as if in slow motion, and I’m treated to the nausea-inducing sight of my own body dropping to the ground, my head surrounded by a halo
of splattered brain matter. The duffle bag lands on the snow beside the shapeshifter’s corpse, and the movement causes the bag to unzip a couple inches, revealing the barest hint of a piece of metal. The sword’s pommel.

  As the echoes of the explosion fade away, a new sound reaches my ear: someone running through the woods. Approximating the location of the sound’s origin, I push my magic sense to its highest point and punch right through the nearly perfect veil surrounding the fast-moving form of Hays’ killer. All I can gather is the general outline of her appearance, but it’s enough for me to tell that she is not the cloaked woman. This woman is much too tall.

  Either Hays’ client double-crossed him and hired a human practitioner to take him out, or…another party has joined the fray. And I bet I know exactly which party it is.

  “ICM witch!” I yell as loud as I can.

  I leap out from my hiding place and unleash a brutal force wave twenty feet wide and just as tall. It rips the bench out of the ground and slings it forward like a battering ram. The witch narrowly dodges the bench and raises a shield from a charm on her wrist, but the force blast is so strong that it cracks her shield and clotheslines her.

  Her veil collapses, revealing the visage of someone I hoped to never see again.

  Delilah Barnett, ICM bounty hunter.

  The High Court didn’t want to send one of their own agents to tussle with an unknown enemy like the Children, so they hired a freelancer to retrieve the sword instead. Typical.

  Annette lets out a piercing whistle, the signal to abandon the plan and attack as we each see fit.

  The next thing I know, everything is moving double time. Including me.

  Annette blows past me faster than I can follow, the blur of her figure heading straight for the duffle bag. But she only gets halfway there before Barnett recovers from my blow, flips to her feet with the help of a wind spell, and yanks two antique six-shot revolvers from a pair of holsters strapped to her thighs. She takes aim at Annette with the gun in her left hand, and a complex, octagonal configuration of energy appears at the end of the barrel.