Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  He drops his hand to his side. “In short, they basically have a degenerative disease from the moment they are born. It’s quite the tragedy, considering how magnificent they used to be.”

  Volkov and Irina shift on their feet, uncomfortable at having their dirty laundry aired.

  “That’s appalling, and disgustingly unfair, punishing people for something their ancestors did,” I say. “But if you think I’m going to let my sympathy for those who face injustice overpower my anger for how horribly you’ve all wronged me and my friends…”

  “Of course not,” Azazel replies. “I didn’t tell you that backstory to alter your feelings toward us, but rather to give you some context.”

  “If you say so.” I move one knee a foot to the right, an adjustment that appears to be an effort to stabilize my balance. “Please continue.”

  He clears a throat he probably doesn’t need to breathe through. “As I was saying, the first thing my colleagues and I did, once we were able to establish ourselves on Earth in these somewhat pitiful forms, was recruit the nephilim to our cause. You see, we have more than enough power necessary to remove the blood restraints and restore the nephilim to their former glory, but we can’t use all of it while possessing mortal shells. We can only free the nephilim from their curse once we free ourselves from our prison.”

  “So it’s a tit-for-tat deal,” I cut in. “They help you stage a jailbreak, you help them get their health back.”

  “Precisely.” He snaps his fingers for emphasis. “To that end, nearly a century ago, we began plotting with the nephilim to set into motion a series of cascading events that would allow us and them to gradually and covertly accumulate a great deal more power and influence among the many supernatural and mundane factions of this world. With this growing power and influence, we have been able to obtain, over the last few decades, the things that possess the qualities we need to bring us closer to our goals. People with certain skills. Objects with certain powers.” He nods at the duffle bag.

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Yes, but even the best-laid plans can be thwarted,” he counters. “And sometimes, they are thwarted by accident. Which is where your mother comes into the picture.”

  My stomach starts doing flips, threatening to expel its bubbling acid. “What do you mean?”

  His eerie smile returns. “Your mother, Mr. Kinsey, was a bit of a maverick witch. She and a number of likeminded associates, all of them young and powerful, reckless and stubborn, frequently bucked the rules of the ICM in favor of exploring areas of magic that most practitioners shy away from. One of the taboo areas they explored the most was travel to and through the many realms of the Eververse.”

  “My mom went adventuring through the Eververse?”

  “Oh yes. Many times. A habit that eventually cost the woman her life…in an indirect fashion.” He sighs, expressing an emotion somewhere between irritation and respect. “During one of their excursions, your mother’s little group—the Midnight Coalition, they called themselves—just so happened to cross paths with the newly minted combat arm of the reformed nephilim shadow nation, whose name I suspect you already know.”

  “The Children of Enoch.” I slide my left foot back and brace the toe of my boot against the concrete. “It was the Black Knights who gave you away.”

  “So I figured. Those rebel vampires are not nearly as smart as they pretend to be. I’d dump them into the ditch where they belong if their natural physical abilities did not make them so useful.” Azazel rolls his eyes. “Anyway, the Midnight Coalition ran into a team from the Children of Enoch while the latter were working on something that shall remain unspecified in a realm that shall remain nameless. This encounter occurred entirely by chance, and it changed the course of many things, most notably the lives of the Coalition members. Because they learned information through that encounter they weren’t supposed to know.”

  “You put them on your hit list, didn’t you?” I adjust the duffle bag so the sword is lying horizontal, its hilt pointed toward my right hand.

  Azazel shrugs, as if to imply there was nothing else he could do. “They learned too much about the Children of Enoch, and their origins, far too soon. So yes, I sent my people after them. And most of the members of the Coalition were killed within a year of that fateful encounter.”

  “But not my mother?”

  “No, not your mother. She was smart. Too smart for her own good.” He shakes his head. “Your mother managed to track down a seraph, a free agent who has staked no claim in the modern politics of the Heavenly Host, and inform him of what she and her friends had discovered. This agent, much to my chagrin, happened to be one of the key players in the final war. And he was so interested in the supposed resurgence of the cursed nephilim that he recruited your mother and the remaining Coalition members as his Earth-based informants.”

  “This man,” I sputter out, “this seraph…”

  “Is your father,” Azazel answers plainly. “Yes, Calvin Kinsey, you are in fact a nephilim. Half human. Half seraph. And wholly a complication I did not need.”

  The remaining pieces of this story fall into place.

  “You found out about my mother’s pregnancy,” I say.

  “Indeed. To say I was shocked to learn that man fell into bed with a human woman is a grave understatement. Somehow, your mother charmed him, him, so much that he violated the unspoken taboo all seraphs have followed since the final war: don’t have children with humans.” He huffs. “Of course, I assume your conception wasn’t intentional. But the fact that he would even risk it…Well, however it happened, it happened. And all of a sudden, I had you to deal with.”

  “You sent a golem to, what, kill me?” I maneuver my right hand, inch by inch, toward a small opening in the zipper that Volkov unintentionally created when he tried to rip the bag out of my death grip.

  “Oh no,” Azazel answers quickly. “That would have been a dreadful waste, killing the only untainted nephilim on the planet. My original intention was to take you and raise you as one of the Children of Enoch, a trump card none of my enemies would see coming. But your mother complicated that plan the way she complicated all things. She was so wily a witch, so crafty a woman, that I spent years sending out golems to every corner of the Earth and every realm of the Eververse in search of her. And I never found her of my own volition. I found her only because she made a mistake after eight years of perfect performance.”

  Azazel runs a hand through the graying hair on his stolen head. “She took an Eververse Bridge home from a trip to Croatia, where I suspect one of the remaining Coalition members was hiding, and accidentally set off a ward left there by the faeries. At that exact moment, I coincidentally had a golem near that Bridge’s position in the faerie realm. I sensed the ward’s activation, and sent the golem to investigate. Imagine my surprise when I discovered it was her of all people.”

  “You had the golem follow her home through the Bridge.” I slip my fingers into the bag and wrap them around the hilt.

  “I did, yes.”

  “Then why weren’t you able to send another, after that one was defeated?”

  He barks out a bitter laugh. “Because I didn’t actually know where the Bridge emerged. I had a tracking spell written into the golem’s construction, but travel across the veil made its function sluggish, so I wasn’t able to pinpoint its location on Earth immediately. Your mother, realizing that I would hunt you down if I found out where you were, used an admittedly impressive dimensional translocation spell to drag the golem right off the face of the Earth. Problem was, I fought the spell by projecting my magic through the golem’s seal, and in order to overwhelm my greater power, your mother had to anchor the translocation spell to her own soul. And so off she went to oblivion, along with the golem.”

  My bottom lip trembles despite my best efforts. “Was there no way to come back from wherever she went?”

  “There are many pocket dimensions in this universe
, and exponentially more in the Eververse. Some of them can sustain life, and some of them cannot. I lost my connection to the golem after it left the Earth, which I took to mean the environment where it ended up was too hostile for it to survive.”

  I lower my head. “I see.”

  Azazel says, almost sympathetically, “If it makes you feel better, I doubt she suffered long, if at all. And she went to her end knowing that she saved you from me.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

  “It should make you feel proud. She was the worthiest mortal opponent I have ever had.”

  I glance up at him without raising my head. “Do you even know her name?”

  He smirks. “I received a tip about her given name at one point. ‘Maria.’ But I was never sure if it was her legal name or not, and regardless, there were far too many Marias for me to sort through.”

  “So that’s why you never found me. Because you didn’t actually know who she was.”

  “Untrue. I knew who she was, just not the name she went by in her normal life,” he replies. “During the bulk of her period of conflict with me, I knew her by the moniker she used as a member of the Midnight Coalition. All of them had codenames they went by so if one of them got caught by the ICM practicing forbidden magic, the entire group wouldn’t be compromised. Most of their codenames were silly things like ‘Peacock’ and ‘Wayfarer,’ but your mother gave herself a very peculiar name. She was called the ‘Witch of All Eves.’”

  I blink rapidly to beat back unshed tears. “Her real name was Maria Alvarez Kinsey.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “But without her name, how did you figure out I was her son? What tipped you?”

  “Your interference in the recovery of Dawn Slayer,” he answers plainly. “You came out of nowhere, a powerful magic user with a cover story full of holes. I knew you weren’t a faerie the moment I saw you, when they were dragging you into the holding cell at the DSI office. But if you weren’t fae and you weren’t a human practitioner, which you couldn’t be with that healing factor, then what were you? After I reviewed some of your DSI case files, and realized there was no way you had magic until recently, I got an inkling of what was going on. So I slipped into your interrogation room while you were out cold and took a quick peek at your soul.”

  “And found the life seal.”

  “Your mother’s last gift to you. And what a gift it was,” he muses. “Masterful work for a witch of her age. There are those among the High Court who would envy such spellcraft. It’s a shame all that effort will go to waste in the end.”

  He rolls his shoulders back, and with the motion, all his faux friendliness falls away. “Because your path in life has set you so intently against us, it would be a fruitless task to try and recruit you now. And because you hold such power underneath that fraying life seal, you are too great a threat for me to let you live. The first untainted nephilim since the Watchers fell from Earth, and you’re a threat to our cause instead of a boon. A bitter irony, for all involved.”

  “You sound so broken up about it,” I spit.

  He raises his hands, palms out. “I don’t have the luxury of brooding over things I cannot change. I haven’t had that luxury in almost ten millennia. A life so long you cannot fathom it, little boy. So you don’t get to criticize me for doing what is necessary to restore me and mine to the status we deserve.”

  Azazel motions to Volkov. “Get the sword. And put some effort into it this time, will you?”

  Volkov jumps to attention, but doesn’t immediately approach me. “Um, sir, about that.”

  “What about it?”

  “Last time I took hold of the sword, it…” Volkov touches his face. A piece of his cheek sticks to his glove and peels off when he pulls his hand away. “I don’t think it likes me.”

  I give him a curious side-eye. “You make it sound like the sword’s alive.”

  “It is,” Azazel says, “in a way. Seraph blades are forged in the fires of grace, in the ever-burning hearth of the absent god of the Host in the Goldlands. Grace, which dwells in abundance in the souls all of seraphs and to a lesser degree in the souls of nephilim, is a power that possesses a low level of sentience, a faint echo of the mind of the god from whence it came. Seraph blades retain this echo to some degree due to the contact they make with the fires of grace during their creation. As a result, the swords are able to think for themselves, after a fashion.”

  “Is that why it turns people into salt if they touch it with their bare skin?” says Barnett, the first time she’s spoken a word since we entered the garage.

  Azazel gives her a passing glance. “Yes. A seraph blade will lash out at anyone it doesn’t approve of, if they attempt to wield it without permission. And that blade in particular approves of very few. Dawn Slayer, the blade of Shamsiel, Watcher of Earth, He Who Taught Man the Signs of the Sun, and who perished in the final war. That blade is as volatile as the sun itself, and as cantankerous as the man for whom it was forged.”

  Barnett looks at me without turning her head, a judgment hiding in her frown.

  Azazel clicks his tongue in annoyance. “I do wish we’d stumbled upon a more agreeable blade, but Dawn Slayer will do well enough for our purposes once I’ve worn down its defenses.” He snaps his fingers again, louder this time. “Now stop stalling and take it, Volkov. And make sure you don’t touch it with your bare hands this time. It may spare your life out of respect for your seraph heritage, but it will not be nice to you just because you are nephilim.”

  “I didn’t touch it with my bare skin last…” Volkov shuts up at a harsh look from Azazel.

  “Um,” Irina says hesitantly, “I don’t mean to sound impertinent, Lord Azazel, but why can’t you take the blade from Kinsey?”

  “Because that particular sword has a long-standing grudge against me, and if I get within five feet of it, it’ll vaporize this body to get back at me.” He scowls. “I would prefer not to have to find a new skin quite yet. Petrov still has his uses.”

  Irina bows her head. “Of course.”

  Volkov eyes the duffle bag with trepidation, not keen to risk the sword’s ire a second time. But he must weigh the risk of getting burned against the risk of getting killed if he disobeys a literal fallen angel. Because he shuffles up to me and holds out his hand, gesturing for me to give him the bag. “Hand it over. This will go better for you if you stop being so obstinate.”

  “And by ‘better,’ you mean you’ll kill me quickly instead of torturing me to death?”

  “Since those are your only two options, yes,” he says. “If you didn’t want to die, you shouldn’t have stuck your nose into our business—”

  I throw the bag at his face.

  In the same moment, I yank the sword out through the hole in the zipper. With my knee, I pin the scabbard to the floor and follow through on the pull of my arm, unsheathing the blade completely for the first time. The same blinding glow as before fills the entire garage, but this time, it’s emanating from the full length of the blade.

  Volkov recoils in a panic, trips over his own two feet, and falls. Irina ducks for cover behind the sentry golem to her left. Barnett throws herself out of her chair, flipping it over in the process, and hides her face behind the seat to block out the intensity of the light. And Azazel, seeing the world through a human skin, is forced to shield his delicate eyes.

  During the five seconds where the blade flares brightly, no one but me able to see through the light of a god’s grace, I put my last-ditch plan into motion.

  This is what you get for underestimating me.

  Pushing up from the floor using one knee for balance and one foot for force, I shift into the stance of a javelin thrower. I lift the shining sword high, aim it at the human puppet standing directly in front of Foley, and throw it as hard as I can.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The sword seems to launch itself from my grasp, as if shot from a cannon. It cuts through the air with a gu
nshot’s report, moving so fast it’s nothing but a golden blur, and strikes what was once Fyodor Petrov dead center in the chest. The sword goes straight through him, buries itself all the way to the hilt, the bulk of the blade now covered in blood stretching out from his back.

  With a bellowing roar, I rip every ounce of magic energy from my soul, feeling my will slam into the life seal like a battering ram, funnel that energy down my arm, and eject it from my fingers. A powerful lightning bolt arcs from my fingertips to the hilt of the sword, runs straight down the blade, through the impaled body, and then arcs a second time, zipping right over Foley’s head and striking the enormous golem in the sternum.

  For the briefest moment, as the sword’s light flickers out, the garage falls into darkness and deathly silence. And then the golem is torn off its feet and flung across the room. It plows right through the back wall and keeps on flying, and flying, and flying, until it lands three whole blocks away. Where it promptly detonates into a giant ball of fire that resembles a small nuclear blast.

  The shockwave ripples back into the garage. I drop to my knees and curl into a ball just before it hits. Volkov is tossed into the rolling door, the sound reverberating underneath the roar of the explosion. Irina, hiding in a golem’s shadow, becomes the first person unlucky enough to be crushed by a falling golem as the force of the shockwave knocks the hulking beast off balance. Barnett, already cowering behind a chair, gets dinged in the head by said chair but is otherwise unscathed. Foley, on the other hand, is chained to his chair, so the chair comes along for the ride as the vampire is flung to the floor.