Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  Azazel stands frozen, his stolen mouth open in shock, as if time has crawled to a stop in the space around him, the world within unaffected by the violent forces tearing through the world beyond. And then, as if time itself begins to fight the fallen angel, the area around the sword that has skewered his chest begins to dissolve into pure white salt, the grains falling to the floor in slow motion. The eyes of Fyodor Petrov peer down at his disintegrating chest for a solemn second, before the eyes of Azazel, Fifth to Fall, land on me, their burning pinpoints visible as a shadow that almost seems to writhe beneath the skin.

  “So a seraph blade has chosen a nephilim master just to keep itself away from me,” he says, more in the voice of that marble goliath than in the voice of a man. “I would be offended, Calvin Kinsey, if I didn’t find you an intriguing opponent.”

  The rest of his chest collapses into salt, and the sword slips out and clatters to the floor, the sound like shrill bells in the silence that follows the roar of the ifrit’s detonation. Azazel doesn’t appear to feel any pain from the imminent destruction of the body—unsurprising, since it’s not his body—so he continues talking even as the arms and legs fall to pieces. “I hope you don’t think you’ve won any sort of great victory here. All I have to do to wrest the sword from your dominion is take your life, and nephilim though you may be, on my level you are not. So the next time we meet, I will have that blade, and you will have your death.”

  He raises his remaining arm, even as it’s actively turning to salt, and snaps his fingers one last time. “Assuming we do meet again, and you don’t find your death today.”

  At his command, six more golems crash through the ceiling of the garage.

  Azazel smiles at me with the dead commissioner’s white-ringed lips, and says, “Goodbye, Calvin Kinsey. And good luck.”

  With that, the rest of Fyodor Petrov’s body crumbles into salt. And the shadow of a fallen angel retreats to his prison beyond the veil.

  The six new golems attack without reservation. They ignore Foley, who’s stuck in a tangle of chains and chair parts on the floor, and split into two groups of three. One group determined to stamp out Barnett and her gunslinging ways, and the other intent on ripping me to pieces for the slight I dealt their master.

  Injured and exhausted, I don’t have many magic or mundane options available for fighting so many golems—another massive lightning bolt is out of the question with my magic store running on fumes. So I dive toward the pile of salt that used to be Petrov’s body and swipe up the sword.

  I’ve never wielded an honest-to-god sword, but I have used a baseball bat before. I figure the principles of swinging a sword can’t be that dissimilar, and accordingly, I move into a batter’s stance. The first golem to reach me swipes at my head with its massive claws. I duck underneath the claw, its sharp edge nicking my ear, and then drive the sword up through the golem’s thick arm.

  The sword doesn’t turn the golem’s body to salt—that feature must be reserved for living flesh—but it does let out a pulse of power that reduces the golem’s faux skin to its original clay concoction. The damaged arm breaks off at the elbow and thumps to the floor, and the golem recoils with a bellow that rocks the foundation of the building.

  Behind me, Barnett pulls both her revolvers and lets loose with a hail of bullets using an option from her variety of gun spells that doesn’t involve setting off huge explosions in a cramped garage. This new “setting” appears to crease the kinetic energy of the bullets. Each one that makes contact with an oncoming golem disintegrates a huge chunk of its body. Shards of broken clay litter the floor, and by the time three golems close in on her, they’re missing so many pieces they can barely walk, much less attack.

  But Barnett doesn’t have infinite ammo, and neither of us have infinite strength. So as the six golems come at us again and again, rotating their efforts to preserve their stamina while draining our own, we both begin to wear down, begin to make mistakes.

  I manage to nick one golem’s knee with the sword when it tries to crush my head between its fists. But as the knee crumbles away and the golem falls, it rams its other knee into my chest. The hit sends me sprawling across the floor. To my misfortune, I land right next to one of the original sentry golems, which has now shaken off the effects of the shockwave that sent it reeling into a rusty metal rack a couple minutes ago.

  The golem takes one look at me, lying prone on the floor, and lifts its large misshapen foot. I try to roll away from the foot as the golem positions my head in its shadow, but my body doesn’t respond. The whack from the knee cracked my sternum and stunned my lungs. I can’t do anything but watch in terror as the golem brings its foot down with the singular purpose of crushing my skull and everything inside.

  A steel girder rockets through the hole in the garage wall and shears the golem’s head clean off its shoulders. The golem’s stomp goes wide, the foot smashing the concrete an inch to the left of my head. The headless body then begins to jerk wildly, as if the creature is having a seizure, until all its limbs lock up in a distinctly mechanical fashion. The body then tips over sideways and smacks the floor with a resounding boom.

  The steel girder pierces the wall above the ruins of the metal rack. The golem’s head slides over the top edge of the girder, bounces across the pile of metal, and rolls to a stop a few inches away from my face.

  The disembodied head gives me an angry look, and growls.

  I lift the sword with one hand, prepared to stab the head until it stops moving. Only for a familiar voice, emanating through the hole in the back wall, to shock me still.

  “Looks like you started the party without us, hot Crow,” says a blast from the past.

  Erica Milburn stands atop the pile of broken cinderblocks that used to be a wall, her hands aglow with her earthy green aura. Around her, four more steel girders hover in the air, prepared to seek out targets. Behind her, eight other ICM practitioners dressed in sleek black combat gear look ready for the fight of their lives. All their auras flaring brightly. Dozens of spells on the tips of their tongues. And dozens more already primed in the charms hooked to their belts and the weapons clutched in their hands.

  Erica whistles, and the other practitioners streak by her in a flurry of blurs. In pairs, they launch coordinated strikes against the golems. Chunky limbs go flying. Deformed heads go rolling. False flesh on chests is peeled away to reveal the complex seals beneath. With spellwork far beyond my level, the witches and wizards quickly dismantle the parts of those seals that allow the golems to maintain their fleshy forms. The golems revert entirely to clay, and their damaged bodies lose integrity.

  When all is said and done, the garage floor is strewn with cracked brown clay, and the golems are nothing but faintly glowing cages of pure energy with angry little figures made of fire bouncing around inside them, desperate to escape.

  It’s a miracle. We actually survived, I think as a bud of sweet relief blossoms in my chest.

  Then someone tackles me from behind, knocks the sword out of my hand, rolls on top of me, and pins me to the floor. Volkov. Blood drips down his face from where his head hit the rolling door, warping the features of his burned face into something downright demonic. He raises his fist, primed with energy, and prepares to drive it into my face hard enough to splatter my brain across the concrete. “You think you’re so fucking clever, Kinsey,” he snarls as his fist begins to swing, “but I’ll teach you—”

  Volkov disappears, there one moment, gone the next. And for a second, I stare at the space where he was, perplexed. Before I catch the sound of him hitting the floor to my left, and turn my head to find he didn’t move of his own volition.

  Foley is sitting on top of him, one hand grasping the man’s throat. Foley’s face is still red and peeling from the effects of the golem poison, but his crimson eyes are alight with a brutal rage that shows no signs of weakness. Fangs bared, he makes the perfect picture of a predator, all hints of his mild-mannered demeanor shunted to the wayside i
n favor of the true ferocity that lives in his nonhuman blood.

  “You,” Foley says in a calm voice so at odds with his savage expression that I swear the whole room shudders in fear. “You’re the one who hurt Luc, right?”

  Volkov, eyes wide, sputters out, “I was just…I didn’t mean to…I didn’t know…”

  Foley tightens his grasp on Volkov’s throat, cutting him off. “I didn’t ask for excuses. I asked a yes or no question. Answer it.”

  Volkov knows exactly what’ll happen as soon as the answer passes his lips. So he makes an attempt to save himself by throwing the fist meant for my head at Foley’s instead. But this isn’t the Volkov of yesterday morning, the cloaked man in the satire theater, whole and healthy and in control.

  This Volkov has a bum leg and a burned face. This Volkov just watched his boss get booted back across the veil. This Volkov is slow. This Volkov is weak. This Volkov is desperate. And desperate people make foolish decisions.

  When his glowing fist is only halfway to his target’s face, Foley spots it coming. And with a graceful flourish that only vampires possess, Foley plunges his fingers deep into Volkov’s neck, wraps them around the trachea, the esophagus, the arteries, and rips everything out in a massive spray of blood that paints the floor and ceiling, and Foley himself, the deep red of death by exsanguination.

  Volkov lets out one faint gurgling gasp, and his entire body jerks, a death throe, before he loses consciousness from the massive blood loss. His heart stops pumping a moment later.

  As he dies, I catch a flicker of something in the corner of my eye, a flicker not the color of rust but the color of gold. Volkov’s soul departing from this world and shedding the blood curse on its way out.

  Though I hate Volkov for everything he’s done, to my friends, to my allies, to the world, I still find myself hoping that he gets a better lot in the afterlife than he did in this life. Because I seriously doubt he would’ve become such a terrible person if he hadn’t been born with that awful curse already eating him alive.

  The seraphs were shortsighted, I think ruefully, if they didn’t realize that cursing an entire bloodline for eternity would come back to bite them in the ass. They practically handed Azazel and his Fallen friends an army, ripe for revenge and ready to fight. And now I have to fight that army, an army that consists of the only other people on this planet whose heritage is similar to mine. Essentially, I’m going to have to kill all my cousins in order to save the world…

  Someone gently shakes my shoulder. “You all right, Cal?”

  I pull my gaze from Volkov’s mutilated body, and almost jump at the sight of Foley. His entire face is coated in blood, and streams of it are running down his neck and soaking into his shirt. Between that and the crimson irises, he looks like every person’s worst nightmare of a vampire, a bloodthirsty creature of the night whose only objectives are to maim and murder.

  Or at least, he would look like that, if his predator’s eyes weren’t creased in sincere concern and if his fangs weren’t hidden by a fretful pout. Foley’s floating somewhere between person and predator, his viciousness receding now that the threat has passed and the vengeance has been fulfilled.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I finally manage to answer after my brain stops pinging the primal flight response and figures out Foley is a friend. “I mean, my ribcage is in pieces and it hurts to breathe, but I’m sure my healing factor will take care of that soon enough.”

  He leans closer to me and whispers, “Think you can stand up? I have a feeling I’m going to have to embroil myself in some political negotiations with the ICM in the coming minutes, and I’d feel better if the one person on my side wasn’t lying on the floor.”

  A wave of anxiety rolls through my gut. “Actually, the political negotiations have already occurred.”

  His brows furrow. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I knew I needed some backup in order to rescue you, so I bullied Barnett over there”—I point to the cowboy witch, who’s rubbing the knot on her head while she chats with two of the newly arrived wizards; they’re discussing what to do with Irina, who’s lying unconscious beneath one of the exposed golem shells—“into contacting Omotoke Iyanda’s office so I could set up a deal.”

  Foley’s eyes narrow, and he starts looking more like a predator again. “A deal between you and Iyanda, or a deal between House Tepes and Iyanda?”

  I grimace.

  “Cal!” He whacks me upside the head. “You do not have that authority.”

  “Look, I know I overstepped, but I didn’t have any other choice.” I explain to him how every other Tepes agent in the city was arrested by DSI after the Izmailovsky Park battle. “The two who weren’t there, Trisha and Lucian, were injured during your abduction. The only person I had to work with was Barnett, and she’s a backstabbing bounty hunter with a grudge against me. I did the best I could. I swear.”

  Foley’s brief burst of anger melts away, and he rubs his blood-streaked temples. “You’re right. There were extenuating circumstances. I understand that. But still. Making deals, no matter the terms, with any of the High Court practitioners, has serious political ramifications. The other house elders will see this agreement as an insult to their authority and possibly contest its validity once the Parliament reconvenes. If they determine House Tepes violated the boundaries of its solo executive powers, I’ll be publicly censured.

  “Meanwhile, the rest of the High Court practitioners will view House Tepes as a potential threat to the integrity of the Court, under the belief that we’re trying to sway Iyanda’s opinion about some important topic in our favor. Regardless of your intentions, Cal, once the news about this deal proliferates through the ICM and the Federation, I’m going to have one hell of a storm to navigate through.”

  “I apologize for that, but I did what had to be done.” I sit up slowly, putting as little pressure on my ribs as possible. “You heard most of what Azazel said, yes?”

  Foley bites the inside of his cheek. “I heard it all.”

  “So you know we’re in deep shit if the entire supernatural community can’t form a united front against the Fallen and the Children of Enoch. And if we want to form that front in time to stop them from repeating all the kinds of chaos they’ve caused in this city over the past two days, on a global scale, then we’re going to need to start making a lot of political agreements very, very soon.”

  He drags his hands down his cheeks, leaving finger-shaped smears of blood. “I’m aware of that.”

  “Then you must also be aware that every complex web of political negotiation must start with a single thread.” I place two fingers against his bloody chin and turn his head toward Erica, who’s striding toward us. “Start here, with someone we can implicitly trust.”

  Foley registers Erica’s appearance. “Your friend, Witch Milburn? The one who was pressed into service at Iyanda’s office?”

  “Yup, that’s her.”

  “You requested that she lead this mission to assist us?”

  “I didn’t have to,” I say. “Iyanda’s been waiting months for me to call her office for help. She straight up told me she meant to put Erica in a position to help me again in the future.”

  “But why? What is Iyanda playing at? What does she know about all of…this?” He gestures to the garage filled with the broken bodies of our enemies.

  “She knows a lot more than we do, that’s for sure. And if we play nice and share intel with her, she’ll share some of what she knows with us.”

  “Ah, so that’s what you bargained with? Intelligence?”

  I nod. “I set up a policy that encourages a continual exchange of information regarding the Children of Enoch between House Tepes and Iyanda’s office, along with a mutual agreement for agents of the ICM under Iyanda’s purview and agents of House Tepes to perform joint operations whose purpose is to undermine the Children’s goals, insofar as they present a threat to any segment of the supernatural super-community.”

  “Iyan
da agreed to that?”

  “She’s a lot more agreeable than you might think,” Erica cuts in. “So agreeable, in fact, that she’s set up a permanent taskforce, led by yours truly, whose singular goal is to hunt down and thwart any active agents of this ‘Children of Enoch’ group. And instead of squirreling us away at ICM headquarters, we’ll be stationed at a place of your choice, Lord Tepes, so that we’ll always be nearby to assist your agents in apprehending these criminals.”

  Foley rises, a little unsteady on his feet. “Iyanda has put ICM practitioners at my beck and call?”

  Erica smiles wryly. “In the interest of intercommunity cooperation regarding the handling of a significant threat to both magic and mundane society, yes, she has done exactly that.”

  “That’s”—Foley spends a moment searching for the right word—“unprecedented.”

  Erica makes a sweeping gesture, indicating the whole of the garage. “This is unprecedented.”

  Foley stares at Volkov’s body lying a few feet away. “Huh. I guess you have a point. But do understand that this isn’t a done deal yet, despite what Cal may have hastily told you over the phone. We will have to work out the particulars and draft formal documents detailing—”

  The rolling door to our left blasts inward, barely misses Foley, and lands with a mighty clang on the floor. Outside, fifteen DSI agents led by the blond female captain aim their guns and beggar rings at the gaggle of ICM practitioners in combat uniforms, the one ICM bounty hunter with a cowboy coat, the lone noble vampire covered in blood, and the literal half-angel (me) sitting on the floor with a seraph blade lying next to him.

  The agents slowly drink in the sight of the eight golems reduced to energy prisons with ifrits inside, the dead elite captain whose nearly decapitated head is staring at them, the unconscious female DSI agent, who’s now handcuffed and being manhandled by a couple wizards, and finally, the pile of salt on the floor that used to be the DSI Moscow commissioner.