The Humvee’s engine roared, heading down the road as fat raindrops splashed on the hood and windshield. She craned her neck, trying to get a look at the gathering storm. When they’d emerged into the forest, there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, but the coming darkness over the horizon made that seem a distant memory.
The pattering raindrops turned into sheeting rain, and the driver cursed. The soldier beside her was too busy flipping through a small notebook. When he found the page he’d been looking for, he held it up so that he could study it and Cassie at the same time.
He shouted over the roar of the storm. “Cassandra Hatcher?”
Helen’s command to ‘do whatever they say’ seemed to have overridden everything else because she found herself able to speak and react normally. “Yes, that’s me.” The soldier nodded, then hit a radio control attached to his vest.
“Captain Gardiner, confirm that we’ve got subject two. Ma’am, can you identify your companion?”
The ma’am threw her for a moment. When she realized that the soldier was speaking to her, Cassie stammered. “Yes, she’s Helen Locke, you need to be careful, she’s dangerous—”
“Yes, yes, we’ve got it under control.”
She wanted to shout at the idiot, to tell him how wrong he was, but she was too shocked to do so. Before she could muster the will to speak, the driver of the Humvee pulled into the parking lot of a brick building with tan siding. Large letters affixed to the side read ‘Randolph Town Office.’
More Humvees flanked a large tent. Dozens of men and women in camouflage uniforms ran through the parking lot, moving equipment and seeking shelter from the sudden downpour.
Someone opened Cassie’s door from the outside, and the bedraggled officer who’d met them out on the road pulled her out into the lot. He gave Cassie a shove, and she turned sideways as she staggered forward, catching the look of serene pleasure on Helen’s face. Her hair hung in sodden strands, and the rain had turned her blouse scandalously transparent. Which was a problem, Cassie realized, because most of the men around them were more intent on the wet t-shirt contest than the fact that the witch in their midst had plucked the leather-bound book from her satchel and cradled it in one hand.
Gardiner must have seen Cassie’s horrified look because he turned and saw what the others had missed. “Drop the book!” He pulled a pistol out of a holster and aimed it at Helen. “Drop it now!”
Too late, she thought, as Helen stabbed her free arm into the air, fingers spread wide. Above them, the black storm clouds roiled, thickening and swirling in a spiral centered above the witch’s outstretched hand.
White-hot lightning crashed down into the parking lot, and the ensuing thunder drowned out Cassie’s screams of terror—but not the screams of agony from the soldiers as lines of fire descended from heavens and into the gathered National Guardsmen.
Chapter Thirty
Paxton—Wednesday afternoon
Outside of Randolph, Maine
Flying in airplanes didn’t faze me.
Riding in the jump seat of a helicopter, treetops whizzing by beneath our feet, right outside the open doors? My knuckles were white on the grab handle mounted above the row of seats.
Across the way, Valentine gave me a confident wink. Beside him, Eliot had his eyes closed, his head leaned back against the bulkhead. How he could sleep at a time like this was beyond me, but I tried to tell myself to try and relax.
It wasn’t like I could get hurt in a crash—all I had to was phase out and drift to the ground.
That was the logic, but it didn’t help much—particularly given the dark blot of storm clouds in front of the helicopter.
“Crosswinds are getting to be a bitch,” one of the pilots complained. I heard him, clear as day, through the headphones Valentine had passed out as we boarded the helicopter. After the engines started up, I’d figured them for mere ear protection, but they at least gave us the means to communicate with one another without exaggerated hand signals.
“Get us as close as you can,” Valentine ordered. “We’ll go in on foot the rest of the way.”
When Prince and the rest of the Oversight Committee forced us to stand down, they’d pulled the drone—but forgotten about the other cameras we’d wired in place. It had been a boring few days, but as soon as Cassie showed up on the screen, things got exciting.
We’d lost visuals in the torrential rain and ensuing lightning storm, but we’d seen enough. Captain Gardiner and his troops had captured Cassie and a woman that Roxanne confirmed was my Mother. Not long after, the entire Guard contingent stopped responding via radio and telephone, and the video feed from the cameras and drone went out in a flash of static.
We’d assumed as much would happen, and we were ready. As soon as I shouted out at the sight of Cassie, Valentine ordered the team into vehicles and headed toward the airport. Gardiner’s unit had brought a quartet of Black Hawk helicopters along for support.
They weren’t all that interested in helping us out at first. I was ready to offer to push them into it when Morgan stepped forward and handed the senior warrant officer her cell phone. From the “Yes, sirs,” and “No, sirs,” that followed, she had someone high up on her speed dial, ready to dance, but when I gave her a questioning look, she shrugged and smiled enigmatically.
The pilots maintained a standoffish demeanor, but they’d allowed the team to load up, at least. The man sitting in the copilot’s seat turned around and waved wildly.
With a nonchalant air I couldn’t imagine taking, Valentine hit the release on his restraints and moved closer to the front of the chopper. I couldn’t see what had the men up front so concerned, but we all heard their conversation on the headset intercom.
“Got what looks like a chewed-up police blockade on one side of the ME-27 bridge and our boys on the other—why the hell would Guardsmen open up on cops?”
Valentine’s tone was grim. “Someone told them to, I’d imagine.” The helicopter jerked to one side, and he reached out to seize the bulkhead to stabilize himself. Roxanne didn’t have any such concerns, but she did roll her eyes at me as his hand plunged through her torso. Wonder if she actually feels that. My ghostly companion hadn’t been as chatty over the last few months, but she was more than ready to head to Randolph when the time came.
The other pilot screamed, “Ground fire! Evasive!”
The repetitive sparking of impacts drew my eyes to the helicopter flying in formation on our right side. The other aircraft seemed to freeze in midair before smoke boiled out of the upper half. Wobbling, it sagged out of view.
“Mason’s going down hard! We’re out of here!”
Valentine stole a glance over his shoulder. George and Beatrice took up a helicopter of their own, and the other thirteen of us had spread out across the remaining three. I wasn’t sure who’d been on the downed craft, but it looked like we’d just lost a big chunk of the tac team.
“Morgan,” Valentine called. “You’re with Eliot.”
Before I could open my mouth to ask what was happening, the senior agent crossed the passenger compartment of the helicopter, pausing long enough to hit the release button on my safety harness.
I knew Valentine was fast, but when he grabbed me by my body armor, yanked me out of the seat, and pulled me out of the helicopter after him in an awkward swan dive, I saw little more than a blur of blue sky, green trees, and the lazy murk of the Kennebec River below us.
We were low, but it wasn’t like we’d been flying nape of the Earth—I had a few seconds to contemplate my sudden change of circumstance.
A few months ago, I might have panicked. But the delay had given Valentine and the other agents of Division M the opportunity to sharpen my instincts. Agent Andrews was particularly fond of sneaking around the office with an Airsoft gun. I’d taken more than a few painful welts before magical muscle memory kicked in.
Which was the point, of course.
Valentine had a fierce hold on my right arm. I curled my le
ft into a protective position in front of my chest and envisioned a bowl-shaped shield, large enough to catch both of us. A split-second after it snapped into place, we—on top of the shield—slammed into the surface of the water.
I grunted at the sensation of the impact, but water sprayed up around us, and I felt the shield strengthen as it siphoned the kinetic energy of our fall to power itself. We floated, but the effect didn’t last long—as the juice from the impact faded, I had to choose between dropping the spell or powering it myself.
With a pop of displaced air, we dropped into the water. I kicked my legs, trying to keep my head up, then my feet found the bottom. We’d landed close to the bank, in the shallows.
Beside me, Valentine stood, soaked and bedraggled. “Really?” he growled. “You couldn’t, you know, float us out of here?”
I need to hang out with these guys more often, Roxanne laughed. She’d drifted down and settled onto the bank.
Score one for being incorporeal, I guess. Ignoring her, I snapped at Valentine, “Maybe if I’d had more than two seconds notice!”
He started to reply but the booming sound of machine gun fire cut him off. “Fair point,” he conceded after they fell silent. “Let’s go.”
We climbed up on the bank and headed for the bridge. Intentionally or not, we’d ended on the opposite side of the river from the town, and by the time we made it to the State Police roadblock, Morgan and Eliot had found us. The other two agents were dry as a bone, and I gave the sorceress a suspicious look.
“You have a clothesline spell you didn’t tell me about?”
“It helps not to land in the water,” Eliot said dryly.
Morgan actually giggled. “When we get out of this, we need to practice free falling.”
“I can’t wait.”
The police had fallen back, leaving the burning ruins of two patrol cars in the center of the bridge. The National Guard Humvees on the other side had stopped firing, but the half-dozen cops seemed content to huddle behind their own armored vehicles. A burly black cop in body armor much like our own looked us up and down with a scowl as we approached.
“Who the hell are you supposed to be?”
“Homeland Security,” Valentine said absently. He had his eyes on the opposite side of the bridge. “You got this covered?”
“Hey, man, at this point I’m just trying to keep those nut-jobs from turning any civilians into hamburger. What the hell’s got into those boys?”
“Classified,” Eliot and Valentine said, simultaneously. The latter smirked, then tapped on his radio.
“These things are waterproof, right? Radio check, anyone out there? Arlan? Georgie?”
I fished my own earpiece out of my vest and hooked it into my ear. I gave Roxanne a look and jerked my thumb to the opposite side of the bridge.
She sighed theatrically. Aye aye, Captain.
Static hissed in my ear. “This is Agent Andrews. We managed to set down north of the bridge on the Randolph side. What’s the plan?”
“Who’s with you?” Valentine wanted to know.
“Wallace, Hopper, Landry, and Sharps. Did you see what happened to the other choppers?”
“Frank’s went down.” That must have been the one that I’d seen hit—Agent Luke, the former Chicago SWAT member who’d helped welcome to me Division M and his team had been aboard. The loss hit me, and I grimaced. I’d only known them for a few months, but once we’d gotten the initial strutting out of the way, every member of Andrews’ team had accepted me as one of their own. Much like the De La Rosas, they’d become the equivalent of older brothers—sisters in the case of Landry—almost overnight, and even more quickly, some of them were gone.
Damn it, Mother. No more.
Valentine’s shoulders sagged. Composing himself, he said, “Understood. Georgie? Come in, Georgie.” Silence.
“There’s another fire between us and the bridge,” Andrews said. “I’m thinking it might be the last helicopter.”
Valentine spat a curse. “Move forward and check for survivors. Hold position when you get there, I’ll let you know when we’re ready to link up.”
Andrews didn’t reply for a long time, then came back with, “Understood.”
Turning to look at the three of us, Valentine said, “You ready? Let’s do this little thing.”
The local cop stepped forward and inserted himself into the conversation. “I don’t care what agency you’re from, you’re not getting any support from us. And if you go out on that bridge with some sort of armored vehicle, it’s your funeral.”
Morgan patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks for your concern, officer. We’ll be fine. You’re doing a marvelous job.” She glanced at me. “You and I are leading the way, Pax.”
The cops had left a narrow opening between their angled SWAT vehicles. Long range or not, I felt more than a little exposed as we passed through and stepped out onto the bridge deck. “Shields up?”
“Indeed,” she said. “Pitch it, like a roof—it will send the ricochets to either side. Just like we practiced.”
“Got it,” I said. Unlike the invisibility spell, the shield was quite noticeable. It appeared as a slight blur in front of me, though it remained clear enough to see through.
“Excellent,” Morgan proclaimed. “We’re taking this slow. It’s a walk in the park.”
Sure. It’ll be fun.
Eliot and Valentine filtered through and took up positions behind us—the senior agent behind me, and the other behind Morgan. Valentine put his hand on my shoulder, hesitated, then said, “Game face, Eliot.”
“That bad?”
“Gut feeling.”
Eliot winced. “You get stomach trouble, wars tend to break out.” He took a deep breath. “All right.”
I’d long stopped wondering why Agent Eliot tended to wear baggy clothing. And, frankly, there was enough mind-blowing stuff going on at Division M that one agent being a slob was a minor curiosity.
As his shoulders broadened with repetitive clicking pops and new muscle swelled along his extremities, I got it.
It was more than mere muscle. Eliot seemed to almost take a step back along the evolutionary ladder. His forehead jutted forward as his brow thickened with heavy bone, and the hair on his forearms and the back of his hands thickened and turned ink black.
I’d have called Eliot a steroid-jacked Neanderthal Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I could see why Roxanne had described him as a werewolf. It was hard to make out in the daylight, but I thought I detected a faint green glow to his eyes.
Eliot growled, his lower jaw something more like a steam shovel than anything typically found on the human body, and clenched his massive fists. “Oh, yeah, I can smell the ozone.”
Valentine winced. “Blitz soldat?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s that?” I interjected. “Sounds like a fancy pastry.” The attempted joke fell flat.
“Lightning soldier,” Morgan said, quietly. “The bodies of the recent dead, reanimated with elemental spirits. Cruel and cunning.”
Zombies, Roxanne said, appearing at my side in a blur. There are zombies with guns over there and—she noticed Eliot and jumped. Holy shit!
“Yeah, he’s been working out,” I said to her. “How do we fight them? Shoot them in the head?”
Valentine had a pistol in his hand. He confirmed the magazine was full and slammed it back into place. “Sure, if you want a headless corpse to disembowel you. Ice, fire, or explosion. Wreck the body bad enough, the elemental will get frustrated and head home. Until that point, watch your ass. They’re nasty little fuckers.” He looked at me. “How many?”
I raised an eyebrow at Roxanne.
Twenty? Should I go count?
“That’d be nice,” I said. She blurred away. “Twenty, maybe more. She’s working on an exact count.”
“Start walking,” Valentine ordered.
The patrol cars in the middle of the bridge still smoldered, but the smoke had cleared enough to ge
t a good look at the other side of the bridge. I could make out flashes of camouflaged fabric behind the pair of Humvees parked on the road, but I didn’t see anything close to twenty people if I could still them that. Cunning, as Morgan had said—and smart enough to hide out of sight until they could spring their trap on us. It might have been easier to spray us with the heavy machine guns mounted on each truck, but something told me that wasn’t quite as fun for them. Wasn’t that a happy thought?
Of more concern was the sight beyond the roadblock. I’d have found the black clot of storm clouds unnatural even without the blood-red streaks of lightning crackling through them. The pulsing mass seemed only to be a few miles across. While wisps of gray surrounded it, for the most part, the sky surrounding it was clear and blue.
We reached the patrol cars, and Valentine murmured, “Hold here. Let’s see if they get antsy.” He plucked his cell phone from a pocket in his body armor and pointed the camera over my shoulder in the direction of the unnatural clouds wheeling over the center of town.
“What are you doing?” Eliot said. The transformation lent a gravelly bass to his voice and made it hard to determine his mood, but he sounded irritated.
“Sending Senator Prince a text,” Valentine said. His fingers flew over the touchscreen. “Nice … job … asshole. Send.”
I laughed, but there was a little hint of hysteria there. If the others picked up on it, no one said anything.
Roxanne returned, and I flinched.
Twenty-three. I counted twice.
Valentine grinned when I reported the number. “That’s six for us and five for you, kid. Here we go.”
We resumed our slow march, and I couldn’t help but wonder what the cops behind us made of it.
If they found this impressive, they hadn’t seen anything yet.
“Roxanne,” I murmured, eyes intent on the Humvees. “There’s nothing more you can do here—check the rest of the town. See if you can find us a clear path to my Mother.”
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