Doom Sayer (City of Crows Book 4)

by Coulson, Clara

  The Wolf goes limp immediately and collapses. A few seconds later, the Hispanic woman from the warehouse lies dead in the animal’s place, blank eyes staring up at her killers. The wraiths don’t even give her the dignity of a passing glance before they fly off to rejoin the main assault.

  Then the fireworks begin.

  Erica’s magic blazes through the air. She grounds herself in a protective shield and starts throwing rapid-fire spells, hitting three, four, five wraiths at a time with swirling balls of green energy that set the zombie creatures alight. High-pitched squeals fill the garage as the wraiths burn and disintegrate, but more appear to fill the gaps left by the fallen.

  Delos’ two remaining goons set their sights on Erica, the most powerful combatant on the field. They pelt her shield with everything they’ve got, throwing chunks of bent metal, fireballs, and lightning bolts, until the shield spell begins to fracture under the weight. Erica has to let off on the deluge of attack magic in order to reinforce her defense, allowing the wraiths to slip by her and go after Wallace and the two other Wolves.

  Three wraiths, directed by Delos with another sleight of hand, block owl man’s access to the main fight, and the man is forced to shift back into bird form and take flight in order to get past the blockade so he can help the others. The wraiths pursue him across the garage, swinging at him with their scythes, but he expertly evades every strike until he lands in the battle zone and retakes his human form. Unfortunately, Delos is waiting, and for the first time since the fighting started, the big boss himself starts slinging serious magic, and owl man has to fend off both the trio of wraiths and Delos simultaneously.

  My attention is abruptly wrenched from the battle as Bollinger drags me to the side, and I realize he’s going for the gun that owl man left lying on the floor. If he gets it, I’ll end up a hostage again, and once is enough for one day. So I summon all the energy I’ve been saving—and draining from Bollinger—by hanging completely lax in his headlock, and with a deep exhale, whip my head back into Bollinger’s face. The man’s nose implodes. He releases me in shock and staggers back into what remains of a black SUV. The grimoire slips out from under his arm and hits the ground with a dull thud.

  I collapse, unable to stand on my broken leg. But before I smack the concrete, I use my left hand to yank the spare gun from my waistband. I nearly drop it, and in so doing, give away my plan to Bollinger. And as I struggle to flip the safety off with my untrained left hand, the commissioner dives for the gun on the floor and recovers it. I point my gun at him, hand unsteady. He points his gun at me, his own hand smeared with blood.

  We fire in tandem. His bullet skims my arm and eats the concrete. My bullet slams into his shoulder and knocks the gun out of his hand. It skitters across the floor and vanishes beneath a vehicle.

  The commissioner yelps in pain, but he’s not on the ground five seconds before he rolls over, eyes me with absolute fury, and then lunges for me. I pull the trigger again, but my fading strength makes the shot go wide. He crashes into my chest, and indescribable pain surges through my entire body, all my injuries jarred by the impact. A fresh gush of blood spurts out of the hole in my chest, and my awareness whites out long enough for Bollinger to rip the gun from my hand and turn it on me.

  When I open my eyes, vision swimming, my head tilts slightly to the right, toward the main fight, and by complete chance, I bear witness to a tragedy. Owl man, distracted by the wraiths, accidentally steps out of Delos’ path just as the wizard unleashes a violent spell that looks like a cloud of magenta razor blades spinning through the air. The spell soars past owl man, whose shield would have blocked it, and obliterates one of Delos’ own people. The witch doesn’t even know what hit her; she’s cut into at least fifteen pieces. The spell then continues on straight toward Erica, whose own shield is cracked in a dozen places.

  Erica sees the spell coming, but she’s pinned down by four wraiths and the other remaining rogue. She can’t move out of the way. She’s stuck. All she can do is stare in terror as the razor spell whistles through the air, drawing closer and closer and closer, until—

  Vincent Wallace leaps into the path of the spell and takes it head on.

  The spell, weakened by its first impact, doesn’t dismember the Wolf. But it does enough. Wallace collapses at the base of Erica’s damaged shield, and he doesn’t get back up. As the battle intensifies around him, more magic singing through the air, the other two Wolves charging back into action, ripping wraiths to pieces, owl man eviscerating his own pursuers and turning his sights on Delos again, Wallace remains in animal form as his rapid healing factor desperately tries to fix the massive damage—and fails.

  Finally, the werewolf’s body gives out, and Wallace reverts to human form. For a moment, he looks directly at me, the sad, tired man who took a job in an unstable government that was always a little too much for him to handle, but who did that job to the best of his ability anyway.

  Wallace looks at me, mouths I’m sorry, and dies.

  There one minute, whispers a dark voice in my head, gone the next.

  “Oh, what a pity,” taunts Bollinger. “Look what you’ve done, Kinsey. Got a good man killed in a battle that wasn’t his to fight. That’s what you get for refusing to surrender, you know?”

  He forces my head back against the cracked concrete, the sharp edges biting my scalp, the gun’s barrel bruising my forehead. “You should’ve given up when Delos caught you the first time and just accepted your role. You should’ve given up when I caught you upstairs. Hell, if you’d given up after Ardelean killed your cop partner years ago, you wouldn’t even be here right now. And there’d be a different helpless pawn here instead of you. And you’d be off somewhere else, safe and sound. But you decided to meddle, decided to resist, and here you are. Now it’s time for you to surrender, unconditionally, and accept that you will be nothing more than—”

  A gun fires.

  Bollinger jerks back, a hole between his eyes, a spray of blood and brain matter where the back of his skull used to be. He wavers for a second, as if deciding whether or not to die. But you can’t fight mortality, no matter your title, and he eventually topples over, dead on arrival.

  With trepidation, I tilt my chin up until I catch sight of the entrance to the garage. On the cusp between daylight and shadow, a cane in one hand, a gun in the other, stands DSI Captain Nicholas Riker. And behind him, the rest of his team.

  The cavalry has arrived.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DSI agents flood the garage. Team Sing vaults over the low exterior wall, Naomi herself decapitating two wraiths in one brutal swing of her sword, her teammates launching a barrage of beggar magic at the rest of the horde. My team presses forward through the entrance, followed in short order by Teams Ramirez and Delarosa, every one of them armed, rings charged, ready for the fight of their lives.

  Ella blows by Riker, fists up, uses an overturned car as a booster, and takes a swing at one of the wraiths attacking Erica. When her fist is an inch from its head, she unleashes a force blast, shearing cleanly through the wraith’s neck. The creature falls as Ella somersaults to a stop, and before any other wraiths can turn on her, Amy and Desmond come barreling into the fight the same way, shooting bursts of fire at every wraith in the vicinity.

  Shrieks fill the garage as numerous wraiths burn away to nothing.

  With the wraiths preoccupied, Erica sets her sights on Delos and his last remaining minion, a wizard who looks scared shitless. The wizard, with shaking hands, tries to drum up a spell of some kind, but he doesn’t get the chance to discharge it. Erica picks up a car with a powerful telekinesis spell, swings it around, and launches it at the guy.

  He attempts to evade it with the super-speed spell I’ve seen practitioners use before, but he only slides a few feet to the right, and Erica’s not stupid enough for that move to work. She shifts the car to the right with a subtle hand motion, and by the time the guy realizes what’s happening, the misshapen lump of a vehicl
e is too close to evade. It collides with his shield, imploding it, and smashes into his chest, flinging him into the wall. When he peels off the wall a few seconds later, bones turned to mush, he’s already dead.

  The car comes to a screeching stop a few feet from Delos.

  Who is now extremely angry.

  His face is red like a hot poker, and his aura flares wildly in time with his heavy breaths. Fingers curling and uncurling, he surveys what remains of his forces, nothing but cooling corpses and a few wraiths now desperately evading streams of fire. Owl man lands a few feet in front of Delos, looking nonplussed as usual, and tucks his hands into his pockets as if to point out how utterly futile it is for Delos to keep fighting. But the wizard doesn’t take the hint. Instead, his aura grows even larger, licking at the ceiling like a blaze fueled by an accelerant.

  “Cal?”

  A shadow falls over me, and I turn my head away from the waning battle to find my captain staring worriedly at me. Riker drops to one knee beside me and gives Bollinger’s body a pained look before he rolls the man off my chest. Bollinger flops limply onto the concrete next to me, his dead eyes staring into my own. I shudder and set my attention firmly on my captain, who’s cataloguing my injuries, and trying to figure out how much time I have left before I end up as dead as the commissioner.

  Judging by his expression, I don’t have long.

  “Jesus,” Riker mutters. His hand hovers over the bloody hole in my chest as he debates whether or not to put pressure on the wound. On the one hand, he could stop me from bleeding to death, but on the other, there’s no telling how much damage the bullet did internally, and if he presses too hard, it could easily make something worse. Deflate a lung. Drive a bone shard into my heart. Rupture a blood vessel.

  “I’m sorry,” I suddenly blurt out.

  Riker looks taken aback. “For what? None of this is your fault.”

  “No, I mean…” I glance at Bollinger. “He was your friend. You’ve known him for so long. And you had to hear all those things he said, right? About helping Delos, about killing Navarro and the CDC team, as if he was some heartless villain.”

  Riker drops his head and takes a deep breath. “Yes, that, well…We can talk about all that later, Cal. What’s important now is that we wrap this fight up, arrest Delos, and get you to a hospital so—”

  The entire building violently shakes, and both of us whip our heads toward Delos, whose aura has now grown so massive it encompasses half the garage. Erica, wearing a look of horror, has grabbed Amy and Ella by the arm and is coaxing them to move away from Delos. Owl man, having dropped his nonchalant attitude, looks equally perturbed, and he too is slowly backing up, as if Delos is a sensitive bomb that could explode at the sound of a pin drop. The rest of the DSI agents take their cues from my team, huddling toward the entrance and front wall of the garage, as far from Delos as they can get. The two surviving Wolves respond likewise, ears flattened to their heads.

  Riker calls over the low hum of Delos’ still-expanding aura, “What’s going on?”

  Erica, who’s drawing closer to us, replies, “He’s siphoning all his magic into one massive burst. It’s a berserker spell. If he lets loose with that…” She looks at the ceiling of the garage, at the deep fissures in the concrete, and then to the support columns, many of which have been totally mangled. “He’ll bring the whole building down.”

  Panic cuts through my pain. The people in the infirmary can’t evacuate the building, and neither can anyone in holding—which almost certainly includes Cooper. They’ll all be crushed if the building collapses.

  Riker rises from my side and wraps his hand around the hilt of his cane sword. “How do we stop him?” he asks more quietly as Erica halts a few steps in front of him and releases Amy and Ella. Desmond slips into the group as well, from where he was hunched over the faint black ashes of a fallen wraith. Everyone waits with bated breath for Erica to respond. But when she finally does, her answer doesn’t inspire confidence.

  “I don’t know if we can.” She wrings her hands. “My power’s almost spent, and he’s wrapped in so much of his own magic”—she gestures to the thickening magenta fog around Delos—“I’m not sure I can penetrate it with even my strongest attack, at least not in the half second it’ll take him to discharge the berserker. All he has to do is let that built-up magic loose, and it’ll blast out in every direction, destroy everything in its path.”

  “I didn’t realize he had so much raw power,” Ella says. “I thought his magic was more subtle than that.”

  “It is.” Erica frowns. “A berserker is not a refined spell. It’s basically a self-destruct. He’s draining his reserves, all the way down to the foundation of his soul, life energy included. The second he throws that spell, he’ll die, and take us all out with him.”

  Amy eloquently replies, “Well, fuck. What do we do then?”

  Delos suddenly barks out a rough laugh. “Die, you idiots! That’s what you do. And that’s what you deserve, for ruining all my well-laid plans, for unwinding years of my best work.”

  “Best work?” Riker unsheathes his cane sword, activating the charm, and the red, laser-like outline of a much bigger sword encompasses the tiny blade. “You really have pride in all the chaos you’ve caused? All the people you’ve killed and sickened? All the destruction you’ve wrought?”

  “I have pride in how far I’ve advanced my goals,” Delos answers manically, “and those of the Methuselah Group. We’ve come so far because of my plans, my victories, my accomplishments. And if you think I’m going to let a few fucking Crows and a witch dumb enough to fight alongside them determine the outcome of all the effort I have put into expanding the ranks of Methuselah on this continent, then you are even stupider than you look.”

  His arms reach their peaks, fingers extended, as if he’s about to make a downward swinging motion, one that will unleash his spell and fell the entire building. “This is not a war you worthless pretenders can win. This is not a war you can even hope to survive. You should have run away when Charun barreled into this world. You should have surrendered when Ammit was summoned. You should’ve hidden in your holes like scared little mice when the curse started spreading through this city. But you didn’t. Because you’re idiots, thinking you can actually take on forces beyond your understanding and control. And so, here you are, doomed to die in your own goddamn building as it comes down on top—”

  “That,” says a booming voice, “is quite enough from you.”

  Delos stops. Literally. His entire body freezes in place, arms held aloft, mouth open, lips stuck on the first letter of the word he was about to say. His expanded aura ceases to fluctuate, becoming a stable sphere suspended around his immobile body, and the rumbling that had been growing ever louder as the aura expanded fades away. Only Delos’ eyes keep moving. They dart left and right in a panic until they locate the source of the voice, the person standing at the entrance to the garage.

  The tall black woman, dressed in a dazzling combination of dark leather and artfully hanging print fabric, stands before a disturbance in the air I slowly recognize as a portal. To where, I can’t say, the shimmering surface of the tear in space opaque. But the woman looks decidedly African, and her voice holds an accent that reinforces her appearance. So my guess is that she jumped to Aurora from somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic. And the purpose of her trip is not hard to discern. Without taking her eyes off Delos, she waves her hand at owl man, who bows his head, transforms into a bird, and flies across the garage, coming to rest on the woman’s wrist.

  The woman—the witch—is owl man’s mysterious master.

  She advances from the portal, which remains open, her right hand gripping a carved wooden staff faintly glowing maroon. From the base of the staff, tendrils of her aura root into the concrete, vanishing from sight, and when I flick my gaze toward Delos again, I realize that the magic has bored up out of the ground beneath his feet and spread into his body. He’s being held in place by t
his witch’s spell, rendered all but helpless.

  Erica makes a soft choking noise as the black woman marches closer to us.

  Riker whispers to her, “Who is that?”

  Erica stammers out nonsense twice before she manages to say, “High Witch Omotoke Iyanda.”

  Everyone stops in their tracks, including the Wolves. A practitioner of the High Court has not stepped foot in North America in decades, the leaders of the ICM content to rule from their European headquarters and dispatch underlings as needed to various parts of the world. Iyanda crossing continents to deal with Delos personally is a statement tantamount to declaring all-out war against the Methuselah Group, not to mention a grand overture on how far the Court is willing to go to put a stop to Methuselah’s plots. And the fact that owl man has been observing the situation in Aurora since last year means that this moment has been a long time coming. The High Court, unbeknownst to us peon Crows, has been planning to move for ages.

  This is how swiftly and easily they move.

  Iyanda lifts a single finger from her staff, and Delos’ grimoire flies across the garage and hangs in front of the witch’s face. It flips open to the last used page via what I can only assume is a mental command. Iyanda quickly scans the contents, backtracks a few pages, and translates in mere seconds what it took Erica all night to decode. When she has the instructions for the counter-curse memorized, she lifts her staff high, and magic pumped through her arm into the staff concentrates at the rounded tip. Iyanda then brings the staff down, slamming the base against the concrete.

  Magic blasts outward in a powerful gale, washing over everyone in the garage, in the DSI building, and beyond. As I watch, my magic sense singing like a struck tuning fork, the maroon wave passes over every building in the city in every direction as far as my eyes can see, before the colorful aura flickers out, the distance too far for my magic sense to keep track of it.