Hatred Day

by T S Pettibone

  “Do we have a deal?” Hadrian prodded.

  She squeezed the rock shard. “If I do this, I want my brother to be given his honor back, too.”

  “That’s not part of the offer.”

  “Make it part of it. Otherwise, no.”

  Hadrian stalked to his desk and removed her phone from the drawer. “Release Lycidius after the Sky-Legion attack and you and your brother will be pardoned. But if you break your word—”

  “My word is good, Commander. I don’t need Covenant Spells to keep me honest.”

  His temper diffused, as if the world had just been lifted off his shoulders. “Then we have an agreement.” He cleared his throat and offered her the phone. “Use it sparingly. The battery is low.”

  “How low?”

  “8% lower than when I took it.”

  She panicked, a knee-jerk reaction, and checked the screen. The battery quivered at 4%, which was even lower than low. On top of this, the inbox displayed seven missed calls from Desya, twenty-seven missed calls from Jazara and six missed calls from Fergus.

  “The Coyote will wake you at 0400 hours,” Hadrian said, moving around his desk. “May we meet again.”

  Snofrid returned a hasty farewell and then left. On the way to her room, she skimmed through messages from Desya and Jazara—which had been sent before Hadrian had told Lycidius that she was safe. It was easy to hear the worry in their words. Initially, they thought she’d been kidnapped or arrested. Their fear chafed at her conscience, but only until two missed calls from Atlas caught her eye.

  She powered off the phone, needing to think. The battery would probably only support one phone call, but it could allow a few messages. In her room, she sent a quick reply to Atlas. To her delight, he responded almost right away, so she began a dialogue.

  Snofrid: “Hi Atlas. Sorry I didn’t answer sooner. Don’t have battery for phone call. Tried to get in touch earlier because I need a favor.”

  Atlas: “The kind of favor that requires a phone call, or the kind that requires a personal effort on my part?”

  Snofrid: “Both. Lucian threatened to knock me if I don’t deliver your safe-deposit in Forsberg Bank and Trust. Deadline is tomorrow. Please talk to him.”

  Atlas: “Lozoraitis won’t give you trouble. But now, it’s my turn for a favor. I need to see you.”

  Snofrid: “Why?”

  Atlas: “My reasons are of the sensitive sort. You’ll know when I see you.”

  Snofrid took a moment to ponder his request. She was curious, and even a little mistrustful at what he could want to talk about. She replied: “Can’t see you, a little tied up at the moment. But maybe Saturday morning?”

  Atlas: “I’ll make it work. 8:00 a.m. I’ll send a bird.”

  Snofrid halted at a sudden insight. She couldn’t make this meeting. The Sky-Legion would be taking down the energy shield by that time and she’d be preparing to flee the city. But maybe she could call him quickly beforehand. She sent a reply: “Okay. Need to go. Talk to you Saturday.”

  Atlas: “Just one more thing, Snofrid. Your location?”

  Snofrid: “Pick me up at home.”

  Exiting the conversation, she switched to the messages from Desya. Just as she opened the first message, her phone screen went black. “Shoot.” Snofrid slapped the phone onto her mattress. Her tantrum petered out the second she realized that Lucian was no longer a danger. Even though Lycidius and Desya didn’t know this, it hardly mattered. They were safe.

  The door swung open, and she sat up in a start. Rhode stood in the doorway, wearing a wet apron. “I’m here for my phone,” he announced. “But first, how did it go?”

  She tossed him the phone. “Good and bad. But really, I don’t think the pitch works.”

  He caught the phone with a low chuckle. “Well, it would’ve been amazing if it had worked. I meant to tell you: I made up everything about the pitch’s powers. Must’ve slipped my mind before.” He slammed the door and strolled down the hallway, laughing.

  The Hangman’s Noose

  Thursday, 3 Hours before Midnight

  What time is it?” Rhode demanded. “I can’t feel my butt it’s so cold.”

  “You don’t need your butt to tell time,” Coyote informed. “Suck it up.”

  “Just tell me the time.”

  “2112 hours.”

  The boy grumbled. “It was 2104 hours an hour ago.”

  Snofrid stared over her shoulder where Rhode was perched in a tree. She sat alone in the center of the hunt site, wishing she could disconnect from the bug dial pool, at least until the welx showed up. In all imaginable ways, being plugged into Rhode’s every sporadic thought was a special kind of torture, particularly because he thought in images.

  Jacked into all the Dracuslayer’s minds, she had twelve different viewpoints that supplied a vantage of the site from every angle. The soldiers’ noisy, crude conversations cluttered her head, and she could almost feel the sweat of their eagerness trickling down their necks.

  Presently, Hessia was sustaining an Isolation Spell that acted as a protective mantle over Hadrian, the Dracuslayers and Hessia herself; the spell masked three of the five senses, ensuring that they couldn’t be seen, heard or scented by anyone outside the bubble, except for Snofrid.

  Oddly enough, she had a view of herself through the scopes of the Dracuslayer’s rifles; she sat on her calves beside a snowdrift, too numb to shiver anymore, a ghost in a white parka picking apart pine needles. A black-tail deer carcass was scrunched against her knees; for theatrical effect, she was supposed to gut the carcass upon the welx’s advance.

  Having ten sniper barrels trained on her gave Snofrid a burning sensation, as if smoldering matches were being ground into her skin. This wasn’t exactly the way she’d pictured the hunt would go down—her sitting in the snow, so cold she could scarcely move—waiting to be attacked or shot. Maybe it was the weeks of anticipation, or maybe it was just the cold, but she barely felt any dread at the welx’s coming.

  Brushing pine needles from her gloves, she zipped up her parka over her bulletproof armor. She felt more and more weightless with each passing hour, like a snowflake lost in the sky. Each moment carried her farther from the Covenant and closer to freedom. Since she’d awoken, she’d checked the clock almost as many times as she’d breathed. She was ready to see Lycidius, Desya and Jazara; to leave Hollowstone; and to begin again. She hadn’t given much thought to what beginning again entailed; she only knew that she wanted to finish college, start a career, and live a more peaceful life.

  “Who wants to hit a Short Stop and grab some coffees?” Rhode asked, chewing his nails under his gasmask mouthpiece. “What do you say, Nethers?”

  “Nah. I don’t want to miss anything.”

  “Darling?” Rhode questioned.

  “Don’t want to miss anything either,” a gruff voice responded.

  “Narwood?”

  “You go,” Coyote broke in. He was rolling cigarettes in his perch, using baked herb leaves from a tin box. Snofrid glared when she noticed the acid grenade he’d swiped from her dangling from his belt. She’d probably need it in the battle to come, especially if the All-Steam Hunters made an appearance. “If the welx shows up, and you aren’t here, you’ll be labeled as the guy who missed out on saving Inbornkind,” he added.

  “Never going to happen,” Rhode snorted. He was positioned almost a mile out, with the post of his anti-material rifle nestled at his shoulder; it had a 4-chamber muzzle brake with an attached suppressor, which Snofrid assumed would make his location more difficult for the welx to determine. His side-mohawk was plaited into a fishtail braid, and the silvery fur mantle he wore glowed orange in the moonlight. “Okay,” he announced. “I have another joke.”

  “If this is another pun about Seers, I’ll paralyze you,” Hessia warned.

  “It’s not,” Rhode promised, sounding like he was smiling. “Okay. Want to know why I broke things off with my courtesan?”

  “Which one?” N
ethers asked.

  “The one with the lazy eye.”

  Nethers spit a stream of pepper tobacco over the side of his perch. “Why, Vortigern?”

  He busted into laughter. “Because she was seeing someone on the side.”

  Rhode’s laughter reverberated through Snofrid’s mind, shaking her head until she thought it might split open. She drew up her hood with a sigh.

  “Okay. Okay. I have another one,” he said. “Why did the cross-eyed teacher get fired?”

  Coyote blew out a column of smoke. “What is it with you and crossed-eyes?”

  “Come on! Guess.”

  “She didn’t get fired. She quit because you were in the class.”

  “Nope.” Rhode’s voice quivered, before he broke into another fit of laughter. “Because she couldn’t control her pupils.”

  “What’s rocky and bad for your teeth?” Coyote swiped up a stone and bounced it in his fist.

  “You’re 400 feet out. Make that throw and you’ll be…”

  Whizzing stroked the air. Rhode’s head snapped up, just as the rock smacked his gasmask. “Ow!” he shouted, clutching his skull. “Bourkan, you bastard!”

  Snofrid saw violent images leaking into the bug dial pool from Rhode’s mind—Coyote being punched, being dragged behind a car by his neck, being grilled over a red hot grate. Unhooking from Rhode’s perspective, she focused on Nether’s viewpoint—which was always peaceful—and rifled a pouch of dried venison from her satchel. As she unbuttoned the pouch, Hessia’s melodic voice poured into her mind.

  “It’s a shame you missed the formal salute,” she said.

  Snofrid narrowed her eyes as she thought back on the day. She recalled nothing about a salute, unless Hessia was referring to the curt speech Hadrian had given about how mistakes were unacceptable, before they’d left the Spyderweb. “What formal salute?”

  “Oh, you didn’t know?” Hessia plucked a beetle from the dirt, humming cheerily. “The Lords contacted us and gave us their approval, as well as their profound admiration for acting as saviors of Inbornkind. They’re calling us the Noble Twelve. All the Governors were present, too. It was quite something.”

  Snofrid chucked the venison pouch back into her satchel as disappointment coursed through her body. “When did this happen?”

  “An hour before we left the Spyderweb.”

  Snofrid used Coyote’s gaze to hone in on the Seer’s position. She fought to ignore Hessia’s baiting, but she felt hurt nonetheless: she had no plans to travel to the Empyrean City, so the salute would’ve been her best chance at seeing her uncle in person.

  Using the bug dials, Snofrid zeroed in on Hessia where she squatted inside a rotted log a half-mile north of the site, where Hadrian would be when he’d returned from his reconnaissance. The Seer looked hungrier for a fight than the Dracuslayers. A halter-neck breastplate of tarnished silver encased her lean ribcage, and brown leather gloves ran all the way to her knobby elbows; her faded green mullet-skirt left the front of her twill trousers bare.

  “What did the Lords say?” Snofrid asked. Before continuing, she focused her thoughts, so as not to betray any information about her past. “Or, what did Lord Drakkar say?”

  “Oh.” Hessia stroked the beetle’s shell. “I don’t remember, exactly. But I think it was something like: failure won’t be tolerated.”

  Snofrid frowned. “That’s all he said?”

  “Lord Drakkar speaks through non-verbal commands as powerful leaders generally do,” Hessia explained. “His administration has learned to translate his body language, particularly his PAWN. He doesn’t open his mouth unless he has something specific to relay.”

  Snofrid turned away, hiding her disenchantment. She checked out of Coyote’s viewpoint and performed her routine sweep of the site. Wind purred through the branches; on her left, a bony badger trotted through the undergrowth. Not a single snowflake filled the sky, giving place to the rusty copper moon.

  Above, the city buzzed with machinery; hundreds of construction workers were trying to repair the damage from the RP bombs. In the morning, the humans would wake to war, but for now, the night seemed to tick on without violence. Knowing what sunrise would bring made the moment eerily similar to the calm before riots broke out in Gehenna. Countless humans would be slain. Being aware that so many would die and having to stay silent made her feel like she had a role in their deaths.

  Two hours lagged by, peppered with jokes from Rhode, discussions about offensive strategies for the war on Hollowstone, a massive trade route bombing in Paraguay, and a legendary Empyrean City event called the Midnight Game. Nethers, Rhode, Coyote and Narwood began a trivia match while the rest of the Dracuslayers took turns sleeping or traded shifts luring hydrocop patrols away from the site.

  Snofrid didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, even if she had a feather mattress. Tension had taken a swan dive behind her calm exterior. Waiting. It was something she’d never been good at. At each rustling leaf and snapping twig, she scanned the forest, expecting to see the welx. Coyote had explained that it stood over four meters high—it was the largest land beast in existence, even bigger than the African Elephant. Moreover, the welx had an armored shell, and a tail that could shish kabob a man.

  She looked to the tree line at the sound of cracking branches. Hadrian broke from a netting of trees. Fog puffed from his white bull-head gasmask as he approached; his enchanted boots left no footprints in the snow. He’d been absent for hours, off on one reconnaissance, and then another. This was the first she’d seen of him since leaving the Spyderweb, though he appeared no different than he had then. He had the confident swagger of someone who saw his destination shining on the horizon; he’d been lively all day, as if battle was a thing that put him in a good mood.

  His sweeping cassock, flapping in the wind, was pale as a shroud, and was cinched at the waist by a series of brown leather belts. The grey mantle that warmed his pauldron bristled like raised fur and hobnailed tailbone-armor crusted his spine; on both hands, his raptor-claws beamed with fresh polish.

  “Do you even know how to gut a deer?” he asked through the bug dials.

  “Yes.”

  He slid a folder knife from his sleeve. “Gut it on the Coyote’s signal. The welx needs to think you’re a hunter, not bait.”

  “Maybe it will figure it out anyway.” She slipped the knife into her pocket, and then said, “Why didn’t you tell me the Lords contacted you? We had a deal that I’d be given recognition for the hunt.”

  He closed his arms across his chest. With the force of a bulldozer, he shoved everyone out of the bug dial pool, leaving only their two minds connected. “When you deliver your end of our deal, I’ll deliver mine,” he told her. “Free Lycidius and you’ll be given recognition. Not before.”

  “You don’t trust I can keep my word?”

  “I trust no one at their word, especially halfbreeds.” He flicked a claw. “Stand up. I need to check your vest.”

  Snofrid rose and stumbled, gripping onto Hadrian’s arm for balance. “Shoot,” she muttered. Glancing at her boot, she found the sole was glued to some sort of yellow mucus. She crouched and wiggled the boot, then stopped abruptly when a twinge pained her ankle. “It’s caught in something. I can’t get it out.”

  “I’ll do it. Step back.”

  “I will, but don’t rip it out.”

  He prodded the earth around her foot with his palm. Then he tilted his head and listened. “Take the shoe off,” he ordered. “You’ve stepped in a mud-tusque nest.”

  Her heart knocked against her ribcage in alarm; at any moment, her leg could be sucked into a carnivorous pit. Hastily, she moved to unlace her boot. Upon seeing the goo crawling up the laces, she froze and sucked in her breath. “It’s trying to take my whole shoe.”

  Hadrian grabbed her ankle. “Shift your weight back.”

  Snofrid shifted her weight backward and checked their perimeters. More nests flared across the glade like widening mouths. “Oh my he
ll,” she breathed, jerking her leg faster. “This area is infested with nests”

  He did a quick scan of the dirt. “How didn’t we see this during the environmental sweep, Bourkan?”

  Snofrid cut in. “Mud-tusques are impossible to track. They burrow through the ground until they settle on a nesting place. Then they shoot up through the ground like moles.”

  Hadrian grunted. Unable to budge her shoe, he rocked forward on his toes and yanked hard.

  “Ow!” She smacked his gasmask. “That hurt! You’re going to break my ankle.”

  “The bone will heal.”

  “Don’t you dare,” she warned. Snatching up a twig, she poked at the laces and unwound them slowly.

  “Nine seconds until you lose the foot.”

  “I only need five.” Snofrid continued with profound focus. When she’d unlaced three ties, she jiggled her foot; it was looser. She wrenched her foot free.

  “You’re lucky it was just a fledgling,” he told her, getting to his feet. “Step in a mature nest and no one can help you.”

  She was well aware. In one of her studies, she’d read that a mature nest had swallowed a man and his entire transport. Before taking a new position, she combed the ground and found several un-infested areas. “I’m moving.”

  Hadrian kicked the deer carcass. It slid across the ice and stopped on a clear spot. Then he aimed his horns down at her. “Move there,” he said. “And remember—stay in the dome.”

  She hunkered down beside the deer. When he started to walk away, she called after him in confusion. “What about the rest of the nests?”

  “The nests stay. They could be useful.”

  Once he’d vanished into the trees, her mind reconnected to the pool, like a plug clicking into an outlet. The Dracuslayer’s rough voices and wandering thoughts mingled with her own. Bored, Rhode was chucking pine cones at squirrels; Coyote smoked his herb leaves; Hessia focused on sustaining the Isolation Spell; Nethers rubbed his eyes tiredly; and the other Dracuslayers shifted restlessly in their perches.