Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  Barnett snorts. “And here I was going to suggest a secure magic solution.”

  “No need to use magic where a mundane solution will do.” I usher her out ahead of me, double-check to make sure the door is locked, and join her in the hall, closing the door softly behind me. “Also, I suggest we both minimize our magic use until the inevitable fight breaks out. We’re already tired thanks to that mess in the park. Let’s not make it worse. In fact, let’s make it better.”

  “How?” she says. “Magic stores replenish themselves at a set rate.”

  “But regular energy stores, which are also important for physical combat, replenish themselves at a rate determined by how much you sleep and how much you eat. We can’t get much of the first option right now, but we can get plenty of the second.”

  “Oh, so you want to grab a burger before we start this harebrained mission?”

  “Actually, I was thinking KFC.”

  Barnett and I walk from the Marriott to the KFC where I ate lunch just before all this chaos started yesterday. I don’t have my wallet on me; I left it in the glove box of the car Annette, Esther, and I took to the park, which, if DSI didn’t find and impound it, is still parked in the lot of a grocery store miles away from here.

  But I had enough cash squirreled away in a hidden pocket of my suitcase to pay for lunch and a cab ride to the exchange location. So I chow down like a death-row prisoner on the night before execution, savoring each piece of chicken and stuffing myself until I can’t stomach another bite.

  Barnett eats a more modest meal with more delicate manners, and spends the entire lunch staring at me in disgust.

  I play up the slob act by sucking the chicken grease off my fingers and making loud popping noises as I pluck each digit from between my lips. “Mm. That’s finger-licking good.”

  Barnett drops her half-eaten biscuit and pushes her tray aside. “I hate you.”

  “The feeling is mutual. But sometimes you have to work with people you don’t like in order to get an outcome you do like. So…”

  “Whatever.” She slips her phone out of her coat pocket and checks her messages. The phone is dented and scuffed, but it’s got a protective spell on it, some sort of miniature shield. Which I imagine is the only reason it didn’t get destroyed in the park battle.

  Neat trick. I should learn that sometime so I don’t have to keep replacing phones.

  “Our friend send over the confirmation?” I ask.

  “Reading it now,” she replies, scrolling down what I assume is a long text message. “Looks like your ‘friend’ Iyanda has agreed to render the assistance you requested, under the terms you specified. But she won’t be able to gather the ‘right people’ and send them this way until one thirty.”

  I wince. “That’s cutting it close. I was hoping to have at least an hour to plan the rescue operation.”

  Barnett tucks her phone away. “We’ll just have to make do with half that.”

  “All right.” I almost run a hand through my hair, then remember it’s greasy and covered in saliva. I steal one of Barnett’s napkins and wipe my hands off. “We’ll use the extra time to case the place more thoroughly and draw up all the possible attack strategies before the ICM team arrives.”

  She nods along to my words, but something in her expression reeks with wariness.

  “What?” I say. “What’s with that look?”

  “How did you know that High Witch Iyanda would agree to help you?”

  “I didn’t know for sure.” I toss the crumpled napkin onto her tray. “The fact that she agreed confirms a suspicion I’ve held about her, ever since the two of us had a rather interesting conversation.”

  Barnett’s eyebrows shoot up. “You’ve spoken to High Witch Iyanda in person?”

  “Once. In the immediate aftermath of the Delos debacle. You know, the debacle during which you handed me over to Delos to be magically brainwashed.”

  “Ah, that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  She looks anywhere in the restaurant but me. “What exactly was it that you suspected about Iyanda?”

  “That in this ever-worsening game of war the supernatural underground has been playing for the past decade, Iyanda has been using a very different strategy than the other members of the High Court.”

  Barnett frowns. “You’re being cryptic again.”

  “Intentionally so. I haven’t filled in all the blanks yet.”

  “Kind of sounds like you’re winging it to me.”

  “I’ve been ‘winging it’ all my life. Yet here I am, still kicking, unlike most of my enemies.”

  “How reassuring.” She flicks the napkin I used off her tray. It rolls off the table and onto my lap. “But I suppose I’ll have to take it as proof you’re not totally hopeless, since you’ve strong-armed me into being your sidekick on this mission to the lion’s den.”

  I smile. “Could be worse.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I could still be working for DSI. In which case, you’d be a Crow’s sidekick.”

  She curls her lips in revulsion. “Ugh. That would be worse.”

  “See? It’s not all bad.” I drain the rest of my soda, loudly, and set the empty cup right in the middle of her tray. “So, now that our reinforcements are on the way, let’s go grab a cab to the lion’s den.”

  The cabbie who chauffeurs us from a KFC in a nice part of town to the rundown neighborhood where the exchange point is located spends the entire ride giving us nervous glances through the rearview mirror. Which is understandable.

  Barnett is sitting in such a way that her holsters peek out from beneath her cowboy coat. And if you look closely enough at my knee-length pea coat, you can just discern the outlines of the handguns I was gifted from the “armory” back at the now destroyed Hyatt suite.

  Additionally, while I left the shotgun I was given, but never got to use, leaning against the nightstand in my Marriott room—just in case Trisha or Lucian have occasion to use it—the fact I have a duffle bag that obviously contains an object roughly the size and shape of a rifle is more than enough to convince anyone in this city on fire that my friend and I are up to no good.

  The cabbie is smart enough not to say anything that implies he’s “on to us.” But by the time he pulls up to the closed hair salon twelve blocks from our target location, he’s sweating like a pig despite the car’s struggling heater. To assuage the poor man’s fears, I tip him enough to show him that we’re grateful for his speedy service and expert driving across the city’s icy streets, but not so much that it looks like I’m bribing him to keep quiet about whatever he’s seen.

  Barnett and I climb out of the car, and as soon as Barnett shuts the door, the cab backs out of the salon lot, does an impressive three-point turn, and speeds off so fast that it’s a dot in the distance before Barnett and I even reach the sidewalk.

  “Wonder what that guy’s going to think after tonight’s news report on the ‘bombing’ of an abandoned building in the neighborhood where he dropped us off,” Barnett says.

  “Whatever he thinks, he won’t tell anyone. Cabbies don’t stick their necks out.”

  “True.”

  She brings up the city map on her phone and checks our position relative to the GPS coordinates Lucian gave me. According to the latest Google data, the exchange location is an auto repair shop that went out of business during the last recession. The building is wedged between two taller buildings and an empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Street-view photos show that the fence is largely covered by graffitied plywood boards, meaning that the interior of the shop can’t be seen at street level from three directions.

  On the one hand, it won’t be easy for the Children to see us coming. On the other hand, once we’re there, it’ll be hard for anyone else to see what happens to us.

  They want this confrontation to be private. And in all honesty, I want the same thing. We’ve done far too much damage to this city’s public attractions over the past thirt
y-six hours, and all for a conflict that has become far less general and far more personal since it began yesterday morning. This is no longer a free-for-all regarding an ancient sword somebody dug up in Iran. This is now a fight to save my friend against the people led by the man who killed my mother.

  This should be a private affair. Just me and my allies versus my enemies and their allies.

  May the best players win.

  “Think we should take this route,” Barnett says.

  With a finger hovering above the map on her screen, she traces a roundabout path from the salon to the repair shop. “About halfway along, we’ll reach a two-story office complex situated directly across from the front of the shop, but three blocks north. All the buildings between the shop and the office complex are one story, and there’s a two-lane road between the last building in the line and the repair shop. So if we sneak a peek from the second floor of the office building, we should be able to get a good visual on the front windows and garage of the shop.”

  “And then, once we’ve assessed the situation inside the shop,” I pick up, “we’ll take the second half of that route and swing back around toward the garage from the south. Where we’ll pick a sensible rallying point, which you will then text to your contact at Iyanda’s office. At roughly one thirty, our reinforcements will arrive at the rallying point in a discreet manner, we’ll share our observations with them, and together, we will all devise an effective attack strategy, which we’ll execute at exactly five minutes to two.”

  “Yup. That’s the gist of the overarching plan.”

  “Less concrete than I’d like, but it’ll do.” I sling the duffle bag over my shoulder, the weight of the sword both a comfort and a concern. “Lead the way.”

  Beneath our veils, we sneak through empty streets that should be teeming with people this time of day. The city is so unnaturally quiet as a consequence of the repeated “bombings” that you can hear the warbling sirens of the emergency vehicles at Izmailovsky Park and the Hyatt from miles and miles away. The muffled cacophony gives our approach to the north side of the repair shop a sinister backdrop, raising the hairs on the back of my neck and coaxing goose bumps to rise on my arms.

  I feel like I’ve stumbled into the beginning of a disaster movie, right before everything goes to shit.

  Barnett guides me along by holding on to my coat sleeve and tugging whenever I need to change direction. Because I can’t see her, I bump into her back several times. I can tell from her tightly wound muscles that the collisions get on her nerves, but she doesn’t complain out loud, and I do not apologize.

  Neither of us make a sound beyond the faintest crunch of boots on snow and the softest of exhales. We are both keenly aware that our enemies are mere blocks away, and until our ICM backup arrives, we won’t have an advantage in numbers. If we make a misstep now, reveal ourselves too early, we’ll end up dead. And Foley will die with us.

  Assuming they haven’t already killed him.

  We cut through four alleys piled high with dirty snow and trash bags leaking rancid liquid that taints the cold, crisp air. We skirt along the backside of Soviet-era buildings that bear the scars of time and changes of regime, weathered stone and rusted metal creaking and crumbling under the brunt of repeated winters. We make our way across a gravel lot littered with old cans and broken glass bottles, each step we take calculated so as not to disturb the smallest rock.

  On the other side of the chain-link fence that lines this lot lies the office building from which we’ll stake out the auto repair shop. Barnett leads me toward a hole in the fence so large that it looks like someone drove a car through it.

  The office building looks either closed or abandoned, so getting inside should be as simple as…

  The two of us come to a sudden stop at the exact same time, having heard the exact same thing. The sound of broken glass shifting under a heavy weight, a human weight. A critical mistake from someone sneaking up behind us.

  Barnett and I throw ourselves in opposite directions a split second before a force blast blows a chunk of gravel and concrete out of the ground. My eyes track the blast back to its point of origin: a male DSI agent partially hidden behind the wall of the alley Barnett and I emerged from no more than thirty seconds ago. From deeper inside the alley comes a line of moving shadows, the rest of the agent’s team rushing to catch up to him, having abandoned their tailing tactics now that they’ve blown the surprise of their presence.

  The agents in the alley are not the only team.

  A row of glass windows on the first story of the office building shatters outward. Ten more DSI agents pour out of the emptied windowsills, guns drawn and beggar rings charged. Leading this group is the blond female captain I’ve encountered twice before.

  She directs the nine agents accompanying her to spread out before two sides of the chain-link fence, blocking off our access to the office building. She comes to a halt at the left end of the blockade, her keen eyes scanning the area around the small crater blasted out of the gravel.

  The DSI agents can’t see us, but they know we’re here.

  How?

  The question bounces around in my head, impinging on all my other thoughts. I attempt to bat the question away, to save the explanation for later and concentrate on the solution now, to focus on how to extricate myself and my reluctant partner from this situation before it turns into a bloodbath that I’ll never forgive myself for not preventing.

  But try as I might, that little “how” keeps worming its way to the forefront, suffocating everything else, pushing harder and harder against my skull until it’s practically branded to the backs of my eyes. How? How? How?

  How did DSI find us?

  Barnett and I decided on the route that would take us to the office building less than fifteen minutes ago. Even if we somehow failed to notice any of the dozen obvious signs of being tailed by a large group of DSI agents, there’s no way on god’s green earth that multiple teams could have moved into the positions to cut off most of our egress points from the gravel lot without giving themselves away.

  As the glass crusher just proved, there are too many things in and around these rundown buildings that would have made noise as the agents were working to block us in. Barnett and I are invisible right now, but we aren’t deaf. We would have heard this many agents trying to surround us long before they successfully did so.

  That means they were here before we got here. They were here before we knew we were coming here. Because someone told them we were likely to break into the office building around this time. Someone who knew we’d try to get a good look at the auto repair shop before we approached it.

  Oh god. I was wrong. I was completely wrong. This whole time, I’ve had it backward.

  I spy movement to my left. It’s a fourth DSI team moving to cut off our last means of escape, the half-open rolling door of a loading bay for a small warehouse that abuts the office building. As soon as they spread out in front of the door and raise their weapons, our window of opportunity to escape without bloodshed completely closes. We have no choice but to fight our way out of this.

  “We know you are there,” shouts the blond captain in Russian. “Remove your veils, drop your weapons, and surrender!”

  It would be very handy if Barnett and I were under the same veil and could see each other to coordinate our response. But she wasn’t up for being that close to me for an extended period of time. So instead of staging an organized escape attempt with her cooperation, I make my best guess about what she’s going to do—pull out her magic revolvers and start indiscriminately shooting at the walls of the office building to produce a barrage of debris—and plan to complement that with some moves of my own.

  As if on cue, a hail of bullets breaks the quiet to my right, seemingly shot from thin air. Half the DSI agents whirl to face Barnett’s approximate position and prepare to fire back. But before any of them can get a round off, Barnett’s bullets cut a path over the heads of the agents in front
of the chain-link fence and bore into the cinderblock wall of the office building’s ground floor. A heartbeat later, the bullets explode, and the entire wall erupts into a vortex of molten stone, riding the front of a wave of fire.

  The DSI agents in front of the fence scatter. But the debris is moving so fast that it overtakes them like a volcano’s pyroclastic flow. Several agents get pelted in the back or head by chunks of glowing rock; they collapse onto the gravel and don’t get back up. Others fare better, but none escape unscathed, and all of them are driven so far apart from one another that a large gap opens up in the blockade.

  Barnett’s boots kick up gravel as she darts across the lot, the only visible sign of her position.

  Taking the hint, I set off after her.

  Going by the movement of the gravel, Barnett barrels through the hole she just blasted into the wall. Her trajectory is carrying her into the office building’s main hallway, which leads to the front lobby. I adjust my path to follow her. Based on my memory of the area’s map, we can exit through the front doors, cut across the highway, and lose the DSI agents in the tangled maze of backstreets on the other end of the neighborhood.

  Gunfire trails my every step across the lot, but all the bullets go wide, the closest one nipping at my coat sleeve. I slip through what remains of the fence and bound through the hole in the wall—only to sense an intense heat approaching from behind me. I launch myself to the side as a fireball hurtles through the hole and scorches its way down the main hall before fizzling out in the lobby.

  Reflexively, I jump to my feet and shoot a force blast back through the hole. The blast knocks down the blond captain, who threw the fireball, and five more agents behind her. They land in a heap of flailing limbs on the ember-strewn gravel.

  Before any more agents can catch up, I speed down the smoking hall and enter the building’s lobby. Just in time to see the double doors at the entrance shatter outward as Barnett plows right through them. I spin on my toes, my wet boots gliding across the tile floor, and follow her outside.

  There are three DSI SUVs parked in the street. Each blocks one of the routes out of the area. The only remaining way out means heading toward the…