Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  And here he is, that taskmaster, right now, peering at me through his golem’s eyes.

  The man who must be the leader of the Children of Enoch.

  The man who started all of this. Who killed my mother and left me an orphan. Who bankrolled the Black Knights and destroyed the Vampire Parliament. Who spurred the formation of the Methuselah Group and destabilized the global practitioner community. Who is now watching the son of a woman he murdered lie helpless on the ground three feet away from a sword that could damage the balance of power in the supernatural super-community far beyond repair.

  Comprehension dawns. I can deal this man a blow. A major blow.

  I just have to get that goddamn sword, and it’s right in front of me.

  A growl rumbles in my throat, a tumultuous mix of all the words I cannot say to this man I’ve never met yet hate so much. I dig my nails into the ice and heave myself at the sword, reaching out, out, out with my hand, straining my joints to the limit. But the golem doesn’t budge, even as my fingers descend for the scabbard, even as the fabric of my gloves brushes the ancient leather, chips away flaking pieces of the gilt. The golem doesn’t move at all. Because the man behind the golem doesn’t need to move it.

  The instant my hand touches the sword, the golem smiles an awful smile.

  And then its seal vanishes—not broken, but released.

  The golem’s body breaks apart on the front of a mighty inferno, the enslaved ifrit breaking free from its confines in a moment of triumphant wrath. I activate the shield charm on my belt in the nick of time to stop myself from being roasted alive. But the shockwave of the blast hurls me across the pond. I lose my tenuous grip on the sword, and it goes spinning through the air.

  The cloaked woman, riding the cusp of the explosion with a vortex of wind acting as a buffer, makes another run for the sword even as the end of her cloak catches fire. She almost takes it, but another bullet cuts through the air between her fingers and the scabbard and discharges a targeted blast of force that knocks the sword away from her.

  Barnett, running at super-speed, vaults off the ice ahead of the explosion and attempts to intercept the sword.

  An energy blade nearly slices off her arm.

  She recoils, and the sword falls past her, straight toward the cloaked man. He’s flying in low, inside the bulk of the ifrit’s inferno, protected by a shield of ice he carved out of the pond. Annette and the other vampires are nowhere to be seen, either vaporized by the blast or fleeing it at their preternatural speed.

  Which means the only person who can stop the cloaked man from claiming the sword is me. Problem is, I’m still flailing through the air in an uncontrolled descent. I have to choose between stopping myself from slamming into an oncoming tree and stopping the bad guys from winning.

  It’s a good thing I heal fast now.

  Shooting a short burst of air from my palm, I turn myself in the cloaked man’s direction and fire off the most powerful force blast I can manage with my largely depleted magic store. The blast strikes the surface of the pond between the cloaked man and the sword at a sharp angle, causing a thick wedge of ice to lurch upward.

  The cloaked man slams into my makeshift barrier. His shield of ice shatters against the stronger wedge, and he rebounds back into the fire, protected only by his basic energy shield, which quickly begins to fracture under the heat and pressure.

  The sword bounces off the top of the wedge, gets kicked up by the roaring fire again, and conveniently comes sailing my way.

  Unfortunately, this is the point where I hit that tree I mentioned.

  My shield collapses under the impact, and I smack the tree, cracking the trunk and half my ribs. Still buffeted by the shockwave of the explosion, my body is dragged around the side of the tree, the bark tearing at my skin and clothes. I’m flung off the trunk and into the woods beyond, where I finally come to a rough stop in a deep snowbank.

  Fire follows me into the woods. I dig myself deeper into the snow as intense heat washes over me, singeing my hair and the back of my neck, burning holes into my clothes. But after the initial wave of fire passes, nothing else assaults me.

  The air echoes with the thunder of the blast. Smoldering wood crackles all around me. Charred debris rains down from above. But the ifrit doesn’t attack again.

  Through my protective blanket of half-melted snow, I hear a loud zipping noise, followed by a change of pressure that pops my ears. Curious, I hesitantly pull my head from the snow and look across the pond—the pond that is no longer frozen but is now a stew of bubbling water and melting chunks of ice.

  I discover that the ifrit is nowhere to be found. All that remains is a faint distortion in the air, visible only to my magic sense, that reminds me of something I’ve seen before: the entrance to an Eververse Bridge.

  The ifrit has fulfilled its need for revenge by burning everything in sight. Now it just wants to go home.

  I understand that feeling, I think as I wriggle out of the snow, all too well.

  One of my legs is stuck under what feels like a heavy branch covered by a dense layer of snow. Giving the leg a few strong tugs, I manage to pull it free. But the sudden release unbalances me, and I tumble down the bank. As I come to a stop at the bottom, my elbow rams into a hard metallic object sticking up out of the snow.

  I roll over onto my knees, rub my tingling elbow, and prepare to take my anger out on the piece of litter some asshole left in the woods. Only to find I didn’t hit some random piece of metal. Dawn Slayer, buried almost to the hilt, is sitting right beside me.

  Stunned by my stroke of legitimate luck, I don’t pick up the sword immediately.

  Which is what allows the cloaked man, bursting out of the snow in front of me like the rising dead, to snatch the end of the scabbard and attempt to pull the sword out of my reach. In a panic, I grab the sword’s hilt and yank it with all the strength I have left.

  The cloaked man loses his footing but doesn’t lose his hold on the scabbard. We both end up on our knees, tugging the sword back and forth between us like a couple of children fighting over a toy they don’t want to share.

  Both of us are so spent from the battle that we can’t loose any spells on the fly. Instead, we spit out a stream of increasingly creative swears at each other. I admit that, with his voice modulation, the cloak man’s cursing sounds far more menacing than mine, especially when he says he’s going to burn my bitch of a corpse after he skins me alive and drowns me in boiling oil. But I think I win the insult contest by the sheer imagination that goes into calling him “a pretentious shadow with a bad attitude playacting a cartoon supervillain.”

  This ridiculous contest goes on for so long that we gain an audience, as other people begin recovering from the ifrit’s detonation. The cloaked woman digs herself out of a snowdrift about twenty feet to my right, a dislocated arm hanging limp at her side. Barnett emerges a moment later, bleeding from several cuts, one eye swelling shut. On the opposite side of the pond, the surviving vampires rise. Most of them are in more than one piece.

  The other two golems also survived the explosion. The one on this side of the pond, pinned underneath a toppled tree, is quickly regaining its bearings. If I don’t get this goddamn sword out of the cloaked man’s grasp and make off with it in the next fifteen seconds, the battle is going to pick up right where it left off. And with most of my allies bloody and broken and barely hanging on, the golems will quickly turn it into a slaughter.

  I redouble my efforts, pulling on the sword as hard as I can. You’d think it would slip right out of the scabbard, but it must be locked in, either with a physical mechanism or a spell, because it doesn’t budge. And the cloaked man doesn’t let the scabbard go no matter how much force I exert, even though I have more leverage. His fingers must be threatening to pop out of their joints, but he doesn’t express any pain. He just keeps on swearing at me and jerking the sword back in his direction.

  Okay, this is absurd. I have to end this. Now.

  Dre
dging up the scraps of magic energy I have left, I prepare to shoot a small force blast at the man’s chest. But he senses my play before I have a chance to deal it out and…lets go of the sword right when I pull on it. The hilt rebounds toward me, and the pommel drives itself into my sternum, knocking the breath from my chest. I lose my footing, fall on my ass, and fumble my grip on the sword.

  The cloaked man dives forward to snatch the sword away, but I reaffirm my hold on the hilt with one hand just before he touches it. And in so doing, I make a critical mistake.

  When the shockwave from the ifrit’s explosion sent me careening into the tree, the trunk tore a bunch of holes in my clothes. At one point, my glove got caught on either a strong piece of bark or the pointy stub of a broken branch. That sharp piece, whatever it was, sliced a small hole through the leather but stopped just short of cutting my skin. And because there was no pain involved, I didn’t realize there was a hole in a place that was liable to come into contact with the sword that turns people into piles of salt.

  So when I make that desperate final grab for Dawn Slayer, I grip the hilt of the sword in such a way that the torn leather of my glove parts to either side and my palm lightly brushes the burnished metal. A fraction of a second later, while I’m still in the middle of processing the terrifying fact that I can feel the sword against my bare skin, the cloaked man takes hold of the sword by the middle of the scabbard and tries to wrench it out of my grasp.

  The seraph blade partially unsheathes.

  Light like fire shines off the surface of the blade, bathing everything in a half-mile radius with a radiant golden glow. The cloaked man reels back and screams, lets go of the sword as the blackness of his shadow spell burns away while the skin of his face burns black. I catch only the barest glimpse of his appearance, nothing but white skin and a hint of dark facial hair, before he staggers away.

  He trips over a charred branch at the edge of the pond and goes over, lands with a splash of cool water and freezing ice. Even as the water engulfs him though, he clutches at his face with his blistering hands, the pain so bad he writhes like an animal being devoured beneath the surface of the water by a larger and deadlier creature.

  Strangely, the light doesn’t harm me, and despite its brightness, I can see straight through it without squinting. What does harm me is the hilt of the sword. A bolt of buzzing energy stabs my hand, causing my fingers to tightly contract around the hilt.

  Fingers immobilized, I can’t let the sword go. I end up wildly shaking my arm in an attempt to dislodge the blade as a rolling burn inches up my fingers, pools in my palm, and creeps halfway down my wrist. It feels like my skin is engulfed in acid. I grab the scabbard with my other hand and yank it twice, but all that does is unsheathe the blade a few inches more.

  Just when I start to think my hand is going to melt off, the bright light flickers out, and the electric buzz fades with it. My fingers release, and the sword falls to the ground in front of me. I cradle my burning hand to my chest, a quick glimpse revealing reddened skin dotted with rising blisters.

  “Stupid fucking angel sword,” I grumble. “Why can’t you make anything easy?”

  The barrel of a gun presses against the back of my head.

  “No need to badmouth the sword, Kinsey,” drawls Barnett. “I’ll happily take it off your hands.”

  I slowly look over my shoulder, not at her, but at the figure descending from the sky like a diving hawk. “You can take it if you want, but you won’t have it long.”

  Annette lands on this side of the pond, having jumped all the way across, brings up the sniper rifle she borrowed from Esther, and pulls the trigger. Barnett throws herself backward, and the bullet skims her cheek. She hits the ground in a controlled somersault and springs back up behind a tree. She tries to swing around the edge of the trunk and fire her revolvers at Annette, but every time she so much as twitches, Annette instantly fires off another rifle round. Barnett is totally pinned down.

  A good thing, since we have a bigger problem incoming.

  The cloaked woman, once again in the air, swings down to the pond and scoops up her comrade, who’s curled into a fetal ball, mewling at the pain from his burned face. Behind the cloaked woman, storming around the edge of the pond, is the golem I damaged with the lightning bolt. The other golem is also heading this way, but it’s taking the long way around, I assume because it can’t swim. In twenty seconds, we’ll have one golem on us. In forty, we’ll have two. And the cloaked woman is already here.

  Despite my reservations, I use my foot to sheathe Dawn Slayer, check my left glove for tears, and grab the sword by the scabbard. I look to Annette for guidance. “Time to make a strategic withdrawal?”

  She shoots another bullet at Barnett, splintering the bark of the tree. “Yes. Get your ass up and go. I’ve already given the retreat order to the others.”

  I don’t need to be told twice.

  The prospect of leaving this awful scene gives me an extra burst of adrenaline. I clamber up the snowbank that cushioned my landing earlier and set off at the fastest pace I can manage with all my bumps and bruises. Annette fires a few more potshots at Barnett before she uses her vampire speed to catch up with me. Before Barnett realizes she’s no longer under fire, Annette unclips a grenade from her belt, pulls the pin, and chucks it over her shoulder.

  It lands somewhere near the edge of the pond, spurring cries of alarm from Barnett and the cloaked woman. A moment later, the grenade goes off, shrouding our retreat with a cloud of snow and ash.

  For a while, as we dash through the trees toward one of our predetermined exit points, I hear the irregular thumping of the golems’ footsteps echoing through the woods behind us. But eventually, as we near the edge of the park, those sounds fall away, the cloaked woman unwilling to send the golems somewhere that normal humans might see them. I imagine the park is already surrounded by cops and other emergency personnel, given how many large-scale explosions have occurred in rapid succession.

  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Russian military showed up with tanks and fighter jets.

  It’s that kind of day.

  “The veil spell in your medallion,” Annette says. “Time to turn it on.”

  “Right.” I sound out the unfamiliar activation word before I say it. “Go—”

  There’s a bright flash of light behind us, and as my lagging brain labels it “huge explosion,” Annette tackles me to the ground behind a fallen tree. The shockwave blows past us and kicks up half an inch of snow, filling the air with a dense miasma. Even from this distance, hundreds of feet from Krasny Pond, my nose still catches a hint of smoke and my skin still feels the edge of heat.

  One of the remaining golems just failed. Either that, or it was intentionally set off like the one—

  Yet another explosion rocks the park, driving Annette and me deeper into the ditch behind the tree trunk.

  The cloaked woman must’ve released both seals so the golems would self-destruct. Guess she didn’t have a way to sneak them past the first responders.

  When the debris settles, Annette rolls off me and helps me up. We climb out of the ditch and survey the area for any signs of danger. The first thing we find is Delilah Barnett, lying in the snow ahead of us. She’s not badly burned, so I guess she wasn’t at the epicenter of either explosion. She was probably running away from the first golem when it blew and got caught by the shockwave.

  As we watch, she starts to stir, groaning in pain.

  Annette stomps over to the witch. For a second, I think she’s going to kill Barnett—which at this point, I wouldn’t mind, since the woman remorselessly shot who she thought was me in the head. But instead, Annette digs around in a pouch on her belt, removes what looks like a sticker with a weird symbol on it, and slaps the sticker onto Barnett’s forehead. A spell activates with a faint flash of light, and Barnett chokes for a second before falling limp.

  Ah, a sleep spell.

  I should get me some of those stickers.


  Annette picks Barnett up with one hand and slings the woman over her shoulder.

  I hobble up beside her and ask, “What are you going to do with her?”

  “Interrogate her,” Annette answers coolly. “I want to know who exactly hired her and how much they know about Dawn Slayer. It pays to know the identities of your enemies in all situations.”

  “Because if you can identify your enemies, you can identify their weaknesses?”

  “Precisely.” She gives me a wry smile. “So you aren’t a total…”

  Her words trail off, and her short-lived smile falls away.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “We have company.” She rakes the haze with her keen eyes. “A lot of company.”

  A moment after she says that, my ringing ears manage to pick out a sound: dozens of pairs of boots crunching through the snow at a quick but controlled pace.

  “DSI,” I say under my breath.

  “Almost certainly.” Annette squints. “I can see their line. There are many. Five teams at least.”

  “Can we squeeze past them using the authority of House Tepes?”

  “Not without Lord Tepes or a diplomat here, no. They have the authority to arrest us on suspicion of committing a crime not covered under current political agreements. Lord Tepes may get us released after the fact using legal loopholes, but…” She glances at Barnett, and the sword under my arm. “They’ll retain a claim on the sword as evidence, and will be able to hold the witch until Moscow’s ICM chapter leader, or a representative of the High Court, swings by to retrieve her. We will lose all that we’ve gained if we allow them to take us in.”

  “So, we should pull up our veils and sneak past them?”

  “Their line is too tight, and I have no doubt they are sweeping the park from all sides with similarly sized groups. If we make any noise and get caught…” She shakes her head. “No, I don’t want to risk it. I’ll break the line by causing a distraction. You pull up your veil, take the witch and the sword, and return to the Hyatt. Don’t use one of our cars. It’s possible DSI has tagged them. Just steal one off the street and dump it in an alley somewhere.”