Seriously, what the hell is going on here? Why is everything different? Is this one of Delos’ tricks? Is he using this to distract me from his personality renovations?
No, I answer myself, that doesn’t sit right. That’s not how Erica described his work. She made it sound lightning fast, and I’m sure it would’ve been, with the way he was acting as he mined my memories for relevant information, as if he was gearing up to wipe blank the Cal Kinsey slate.
But if this isn’t Delos’ shtick, then what’s happening right now? What’s—?
The ground beneath my feet quakes violently, and Little Cal tumbles backward, scraping his hands on the pavement. He gasps out in pain, and I feel it too, the sharp sting of raw skin half-flayed by concrete.
Again, that’s not right. That’s not what happened in reality. There was no quake. The blackened building simply crumbled away, leaving nothing behind but ash and a few warped metal beams.
Before me, however, a very different scene plays out. One I can’t peel my gaze away from any more than Little Cal, who stares transfixed at the rumbling bakery he’s called home all his life. The weakened walls creak and groan under the weight of a force I can’t discern, and the shadows inside the building fling themselves at each other, as if fighting a brutal battle. The sounds of this fight are lost to the din of the blaze, but it turns out I don’t need to hear any words to find out what’s going on.
The front wall of the bakery caves in.
(That didn’t happen in reality.)
The gap reveals my mother, Maria Alvarez Kinsey, standing in the middle of the main floor, still wearing a dusty white apron, her long, dark hair, powdered white, slowly unraveling from its messy bun.
(That didn’t happen in reality.)
Opposite my mother, standing partially obscured in a hallway, is a creature from my most twisted thoughts, the kind of demon conjured up on acid trips gone wrong. It’s seven feet tall, at least, and four feet wide, hunched in between the hallway and the threshold of a door now burning on the floor.
(That definitely didn’t happen in reality. It didn’t. There was no monster in the bakery that day. Just a fire. Just a…It was just a fire, right?)
I watch, stupefied, as the monster thrashes through the doorway and swings one of its powerful arms toward my mom, trying to slash her down with hooked, foot-long claws. Mom doesn’t even budge, and the claws collide with thin air, only for magic to ripple outward from the epicenter of the blow, revealing a hidden shield. The monster recoils, bellowing in fury, but again, the sound is lost to the roar of the raging fire. Inside the disturbed bubble-shaped shield, my mother stands unperturbed.
She plants one foot into the rapidly disintegrating floor beneath her and takes an offensive stance, hands raised. A violet aura erupts around her hands. She makes a sharp yanking motion. And like god’s thumb just landed on the roof of the bakery, half the building comes tumbling down on top of the shaken monster, two stories’ worth of burning wood and plaster and steel. But even with the beast completely enveloped in debris, Mom doesn’t turn away from the collapsed side of the building. She keeps her attention trained on the spot where the monster stood moments before. Like she knows it’s not over.
Like she knows exactly what the monster is, and that a ton of debris cannot kill it.
Little Cal, still sitting on the sidewalk in shock, his hands a bloody mess, whimpers out a litany of “Mama,” the words tumbling over each other until the syllables are indistinct. Inside his head, I exist in the same state of shock, unable to process the scene unfolding in front of me. My mother, the baker, purveyor of donuts and cake and bread, just launched a powerful magic spell at a creature from the Eververse.
My mother is—was—a witch?
No, that can’t be. This has to be some kind of warped dream.
But I can’t bring myself to buy that excuse as the fight continues. The monster shakes off the blow like it was nothing, heaving up from the sunken floor and throwing heavy debris in every direction. A hundred pounds of building material bounces off my mother’s shield, and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t slide back an inch, as if physics is suspended inside her magic bubble. As if she’s just that strong.
It’s hard to see from this distance, across the street, but as the monster is shaking off the last of the debris, pulling metal poles and large chunks of sharp wooden shrapnel from its thick hide, grayish ooze weeping from its wounds in slimy rivulets, my mother’s lips appear to rapidly fire off an incantation. Faster than anything Erica has ever spoken in my presence, faster than I’ve ever seen any person speak, the individual words an audible blur.
As the words roll off her tongue, violet lines of magic etch themselves into the floor and what little remains of the walls of the bakery. They track beneath scattered debris, plow through the licks of flame undeterred, and surround the monster on all sides—and surround my mother as well. Before the incantation comes to a close, my mother begins breathing heavily, and I trace the lines back to their center: directly beneath her feet. Whatever she’s doing, whatever spell she’s about to throw, is siphoning a massive amount of power from her dwindling magic store.
The monster yanks one last bent metal pipe from its abdomen and casually tosses it aside. It then trains its eyes, shining black pools with no whites, on my mother, and opens its mouth. Its maw is filled with razor-sharp teeth like a shark, and an engorged, forked tongue lolls around inside a puddle of slimy brown saliva. Somehow, despite the skewed shape of its face, thick and corded on one side, drooping on the other, as if partially paralyzed, the monster manages a smile. A vile, vomit-inducing smile. A smile directed not at my mother, but me.
The monster flicks its gaze from Mom to Little Cal and then speaks in a rumbling bass almost loud enough to hear over the fire. I catch roughly every third word: “…can’t… save… forever… eventually… delaying… know… Maria… pointless… better… pitiful… waste…”
My mother spits out a response entirely lost to the roaring flames, then also turns her attention to me. In an instant, her expression shifts from determined and infuriated to loving and sweet and kind, the mother I remember, the one who held me and kissed me and tucked me in at night, the one who read me children’s books and fed me bakery leftovers as long as I promised to eat my veggies for dinner, the one who believed in fairness and justice and the inherent potential for kindness in everyone.
Mom gives me that look of love I haven’t seen in fifteen years, but it only lasts a moment before it melts into sorrow. A ghostly whisper caresses my mind—no, Little Cal’s mind, with me piggybacking on it—my mother’s soft voice calmly saying, Everything’s going to be all right, Cal. Just sit there until the firemen and the police arrive, and then tell them exactly what you remember. They’ll take you to a safe place, where people will care for you. I…
There’s an audible hitch in her voice, and I realize she’s crying, tears running down her face even while the scorching fire burns the building down around her and singes every ounce of water vapor from the air. I’m so sorry I couldn’t stay with you longer. So very sorry. If and when you find out the truth of all this, in the future, my beautiful boy, I won’t be upset if you blame me. You have a right to blame me, for everything that befalls you.
She takes a sharp breath and says more to herself than me, Gods know I was always the most disastrous liar.
The mind spell hits Little Cal like a speeding truck, and I feel his consciousness slipping away even before he loses muscle tension. My view of the world tips up in time with his own, his eyes my only vantage point, but he doesn’t fall fast and he doesn’t fall hard, so I still see what happens next. What happens to my mother. What happens to Maria Alvarez Kinsey, the witch.
She unleashes a brutally punishing spell. It engulfs the entire burning bakery in a bright circle of violet magic. The monster, already knowing there’s no way out, doesn’t bother to try and fight the spell. It simply stands there, nonchalant, that twisted echo of a smile on its f
ace, the promise of endless pain dripping off the end of its tongue. The ring of magic spreads out, like a stretching band, and then, with a mighty thunderclap that collapses the entire building and breaks every single window within two blocks, the band springs inward and explodes in a blinding flash of light.
When the light fades like a flashbulb’s burst, the monster is gone. And so is my mom.
But I don’t have time to dwell on her disappearance, on this dream-or-not, on the frothing turmoil in my mind that threatens to shatter me to pieces. Because the second Little Cal’s head flops limply onto the pavement, I wake up.
In Iron Delos’ dungeon cell.
Chapter Thirteen
The cell floor is damp and warm, and as my vision slowly coalesces from an out-of-focus lens to an intolerably smudged one, I realize I’m lying in a shallow pool of my own blood. At some point, when Delos’ spell backfired maybe, my chair overturned, and my head smacked the concrete floor hard enough to reopen the tear from my earlier fall. I don’t think my skull is cracked, but my thoughts are lagging and my senses are fogged, like I’m controlling my body remotely from a distance, so I figure I have a nasty concussion bound to get worse before it gets better.
At least I’m not Delos though.
Bastard wizard extraordinaire is crumpled in the corner of the cell, bleeding from his eyes, ears, and nose, staring blankly up at the ceiling. He’s not dead, unfortunately, but the mental whiplash from my bundle of memories clearly lashed his brain worse than hitting the floor pummeled my own. I don’t know if his mind is totally scrambled (now that would be some real justice, huh?) or if he’s only temporarily out of the game, but regardless, the fact he’s incapacitated means I have a chance to escape this hellhole.
Swallowing the tang of copper on my tongue, I tilt my aching head down to scrutinize the zip-ties around my wrists and ankles. The charms that were keeping them secure appear to have fizzled out—either they were Delos’ spells, and they collapsed along with him, or the backfire knocked them out of commission—which means I just need to break the ties themselves. What do you know, Kinsey? It’s your lucky day.
I laugh dryly, a scratched record in the quiet cell.
Remembering my academy lessons on freeing myself from enemy captivity, I focus on the weak points of the zip-ties securing my hands, twist both wrists awkwardly to put maximum pressure on those points, and then snap them both in a single tug. My upper body now free to move, I slide away from the chair, prop my back up against the wall, and quickly break the zip-ties on my ankles.
I brace myself against the wall as I stand up, dizziness undulating through my head. The first time I push off the wall and try to walk toward the door—the door Delos left unlocked because he was too goddamn sure of himself—I nearly trip over my own two feet. So I have to grab the metal table and shuffle along beside it until I can push off and literally fall into the door. I press my ear to the door, but it’s too thick for me to hear any activity on the other side. Which must be why nobody came to check on Delos after his spell ricocheted around the cell and took us both down.
I could kill Delos right now and get away with it. No one would hear him choking as my hands squeezed his neck. But I don’t have the strength to do it fast and efficiently, and the longer I linger here, the more likely it is I won’t escape. And if I don’t…
Goddammit.
As quietly as I can, I turn the knob and tug the door open. When a sliver of hallway appears, I peek out, searching for guards, but I can only see one direction down the dimly lit corridor. Beside me, still limp in the corner, Delos makes a soft gurgling sound. I don’t think he’s coming around, because he looks like death warmed over, but I don’t want to risk it either way. So I press one palm against the doorframe for support and then open the door far enough to slip out.
The whole trip down the hall consists of me leaning heavily against the wall and dragging my feet down the stone floor, pretending I’m not about to pass out. Underneath the growing headache from my concussion, there’s a persistent gnawing pain that feels more mental than physical, as if a part of myself has been gouged out, leaving a gaping wound behind. And as I pass four, eight, twelve locked cells just like my own—many of them housing practitioners who must be totally innocent, must’ve figured Delos out and paid the price of that knowledge with indefinite confinement or brain-wiping—I slowly come to understand just what that feeling is.
All the memories I acquired from Vanth’s execution attempt are…gone.
I have a funny feeling my frequent déjà vu days are over.
When I reach the end of the hall, an open stairwell that leads up to what must be the ground floor of the ICM headquarters, I hesitate and peer back at the rows of cells along each wall. The urge to free the wrongly accused practitioners wells up in my chest, followed by a stabbing guilt when I turn away. I don’t know what condition any of them are in, if they’ve been corrupted by Delos, if they’ve been starved and tortured. And between the wards on the cell doors, and going back for Delos’ keys, there’s no way I can free all of them in a reasonable amount of time. Someone is bound to come looking for Delos sooner or later.
So I have to leave them here, leave them to suffer, save my own hide, because the most important thing right now is that I get the truth about Delos out to the world, that I get his notes on the curse—and the counter-curse he’s already admitted exists—and save Aurora from his Methuselah plot to ignite a war between the vampires and the ICM. Sometimes, you have to sacrifice the little guys for the big picture, a truth I’ve learned the hard way in my first year as a DSI detective. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like shit as I trudge up the stairs and leave those poor people behind.
Halfway up the stairs, I’m winded. At the top, I’m ready to collapse, gasping like I’ve sprinted five miles. The door in front of me has no obvious lock, but that doesn’t mean it’s not rigged with a ward that’ll raise an alarm if an unauthorized person tries to open it. I blink on my magic sense and give it a hard look, squinting until tears threaten to pour down my face, but I see nothing except residual traces of Delos’ aura. He must’ve disabled the wards on the door when he came down to brainwash me, and neglected to raise them once he was through the door. Damn, that guy is arrogant.
But then, I rationalize, of course he’s arrogant. He’s been successfully reprogramming people’s brains for decades at the behest of the High Court. The unbeatable Iron Delos. The best fixer in the world. And since the inception of the Methuselah Group, he’s been an equally successful double agent, appearing to be the perfect ICM loyalist due to his public persona, while being the perfect traitor as a result of the hidden history beneath. A fucking Nazi who views himself as the wronged party because the vampires took his co-conspirators down. Fucking victim complex. Family or not, they were combatants on the wrong side of a war.
I bite back the desire to run downstairs and spit on Delos’ bleeding, unconscious body. If he doesn’t end up in a six-by-six solitary cell for the rest of his life, there will be no justice served. I can’t even imagine how many innocent people he’s permanently destroyed, how many puppets he’s created, empty vessels drained of all personality dancing to his strings. And he wanted to do that to me, make me his shiny new pawn, fashion himself a scapegoat used to start a war destined for an unfathomable body count, while he’d remain on the sidelines, grinning gleefully at his handiwork.
Fury rushes through my veins, reinvigorating me with a small burst of adrenaline, and I wrap my hand around the doorknob and push. The door pops open and swings outward to reveal what looks like the hallway of a standard office building. I look both ways like I’m about to run into midday traffic, and seeing no one, I slip out, shut the door behind me, and cross to a small alcove where a large printer/copier combo was parked some years ago. The machine is covered in dust and isn’t even plugged in. I’m guessing Delos’ lackeys don’t do much in the way of actual office work.
For half a minute, I listen carefu
lly, and catch a few voices drifting from somewhere on my right. They aren’t close though, so I peer out of the alcove and observe my surroundings, search for the nearest exit. Where the hall terminates on the left, just past a row of defunct cubicles, is a sign with several directions on it. One of the options is NORTH EXIT, with a large arrow pointing me toward said exit. Checking my right one more time—the voices aren’t any closer—I creep out of the alcove and hustle toward the abandoned cubicle farm.
Unfortunately, my hustle is a snail’s pace, and before I reach the last cubicle, having to brace my hand against the beige cube walls every three steps, somebody breaks away from the chatting group, plods heavily from wherever they’ve gathered, and comes to a sudden stop at the opposite end of the hall behind me, a sharp gasp breaking the air. I freeze, curse my weak, broken body, and then hesitantly look over my shoulder.
The black guy who confronted my team on the front steps the other day stares at me in utter disbelief. He looks from the door that leads to the cellblock, to me, and then past me to the exit sign. As he processes what he’s seeing, he quickly stifles his shock and sneers at me, hands flying up as his magic surges outward from his soul. I can tell from the darkness in his eyes that he’s an MG agent too, that callous look devoid of warmth and filled with cold, unyielding wrath. Hell, half the people in this building are probably rogues. Delos would’ve surrounded himself with his own. Plus a few extras, like Erica, to disguise his nepotism.
The Aurora ICM branch has been transformed into a Methuselah operations center.
Doom Sayer (City of Crows Book 4) Page 14