Semiautomatic Sorceress Boxed Set One: includes: Southwest Nights, Southwest Days, and Southwest Truths

by Kal Aaron

  “I know all that, but that’s my point,” Lyssa said. “He probably shouldn’t have been poking around in an old mine, but that’s why this doesn’t work as terrorism. Most people aren’t going to be poking around in old mines. Effective terrorism relies on everyone believing it might and could happen to them no matter what they’re doing. Anything that smacks of bringing it on yourself doesn’t work.”

  Lyssa craned her neck up to look into the higher tunnels. The roofs of the hatchery and the queen’s room chamber were both smooth.

  She frowned. Those roofs were also much higher than the queen’s maximum height. The smaller monsters could climb the side walls. That might explain how they’d carved out the space, but the more she considered that, the more unlikely it seemed.

  Creature hives, regardless of species, tended to be functional. Extra space meant wasted energy, but two chambers had been blessed with huge voids overhead. The monsters might have gotten lucky, but a Sorcerer also might have carved out the space for them.

  “My time with you suggests the average criminal lacks foresight,” Jofi said. “Even in situations involving more serious intentions than petty crime, foresight is a key problem. The criminal shard users you killed recently were a good demonstration of that. They should have anticipated that the heavy use of shards would lead to their deaths.”

  “The average criminal isn’t so bright, sure, but the average rogue Sorcerer?” Lyssa replied. “And someone who could pull this off is far from the average rogue. I’m ninety to ninety-five percent sure a rogue’s involved. They might be long gone, though.”

  She moved back to the wall and ran her hands over it, feeling for anything odd. There was no way she was going to take her gloves off. It was bad enough she could feel all the water and grime that’d made it in from the bottom and pooled in her gloves.

  Something caught her eye, and she knelt. It was half a driver’s license covered in filth and grime. The picture was gone, but the name Jake Colmes was legible.

  Lyssa pulled it out of the mud near the edge of the pool. It’d been bitten in half. She shook her head and tucked it into a pocket.

  “This isn’t a small operation.” Lyssa stopped at what looked like a handle protruding from the wall. She squatted and realized it was nothing more than a rock that’d cracked and been chipped away. “Even if that queen was plopping those things out, somebody had to get her in here to begin with. And that had to happen without anyone noticing.”

  “Could a smaller creature have been grown inside here?” Jofi asked.

  “Possibly.” Lyssa blew out a breath. “I don’t know the reproduction cycle. There are too many unknowns in this whole thing.”

  “Illuminated population density is low enough that it wouldn’t be likely for another Sorcerer to stumble upon an operation away from a population center,” Jofi replied. “This is a remote location, from what you’ve said.”

  “Sure. I’m not saying I’d expected Samuel or me to come strolling along and sense a bunch of sorcery.” Lyssa chuckled at the image of the white-suited Elder wandering the Arizona desert, hunting slimy monsters. “But using sorcery to do something big might be detected by Shadow tech. They’ve got all sorts of sensors and gizmos looking around, and not always for what you think. Seismographs, cameras, drones. It’s hard to hide, even for Sorcerers. That’s allegedly one of the reasons the Tribunal had us come out of the top hat after M-Day.”

  “The EAA didn’t have more information than they provided,” Jofi said. “That implies there was nothing unusual to detect, or whatever was done was done in a way that it put it beyond their means of detection.”

  “That’s a good point.” Lyssa nodded. “But you know what Damien is always saying, they are underfunded and understaffed. It’s a theory anyway, and it’s heavily dependent on what kind of sorcery they used. It doesn’t do me any good to run around shaking down every scientist or government employee in Arizona, asking them questions if I don’t even know if I’m asking them the right ones.”

  “I imagine Elder Samuel would take a dim view of such a plan,” Jofi said.

  “Probably. We need this incident downplayed as much as possible.” Lyssa kicked a rock out of her way. It splashed in the pool. “But we need to be sure, so this doesn’t come back and bite someone else in the ass. I mean that literally.”

  She’d half-hoped to find the victim alive, even though her rational mind told her it was unlikely. Part of her believed a rogue who understood the usefulness of a hostage was sitting in the cave, exercising direct control over the monsters. But hope wasn’t a strategy, and she hadn’t felt anyone else’s sorcery since entering the mine.

  “How will you track other potential monsters without asking Shadow scientists?” Jofi asked.

  Lyssa stood. “Good question. I’m not willing to just poke around a couple of caverns and declare it over. I need to be sure.”

  “Wouldn’t more monsters have come during the fight against the queen? Your gunshots and explosions were likely heard all over this tunnel system.”

  “We don’t know they would have automatically shown up.” Lyssa headed back toward the hatchery. “The queen didn’t bust on through until I shot the egg. There could be a bunch of queens in hidden caverns for all I know. That’s what’s bothering me. It’s like somebody set this up that way on purpose.”

  “This immediate area appears to be a dead-end,” Jofi said.

  Lyssa nodded. “There are no monsters left, and I don’t think crawling through tiny tunnels on my hands and knees is the smartest way to go about things.”

  “You claim there are no monsters left, but you don’t sound convinced.”

  Lyssa chuckled. “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s called being thorough. One person is dead, and another might die. I want to make sure no one else dies.” Lyssa sighed. “There’s another thing that bothers me about this, now that I think of it. Some rogue creating monsters makes sense, but it’s not like my public profile is low after the Houston thing. This wasn’t an overnight operation, which means this guy was risking me coming after him. Samuel didn’t make a big public announcement that I wouldn’t be taking on jobs.”

  “This is an abandoned mine,” Jofi replied. “He might have suspected no victims would come until his plans came to fruition. Without victims, there’s no reason to send a Torch. The EAA staffing is grand compared to the amount of territory individual Torches must traverse.”

  “Good point.” Lyssa tapped the remains of a small snake-roach with her baton. “It’d be nice if they branded these, but the victim thing makes me wonder more than before. Either Adams is wrong, and Lucky Nardi is the unluckiest guy out there, or they knew there might be something here when they decided to come.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Jofi asked.

  “My job.” Lyssa gave a firm nod. “We’ll sweep the mine, and if we don’t find anything, I’m thinking we’re done here for today. This will require a follow-up investigation before I’m willing to say we’re done forever.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to travel through tunnels? How do you intend to sweep the mine?”

  “I’ll do what’s needed to ensure there are no more unfortunate surprises,” Lyssa replied. “Trying to make an internet video shouldn’t be a death sentence. I would have preferred to find the guy behind our new monster friends, but that looks like it’ll be the hard part.”

  Lyssa fished her phone out of her pocket and wiped gunk off the screen. Fortune smiled on her; it had survived. She checked the time. Three hours remained before sunset.

  “Remind me to grab one of the smaller monsters on the way out.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lyssa emerged from the mine with a corpse of a small snake-roach in her arms and Jake Colmes' half-chewed driver’s license clutched in a hand. Adams and Ortiz were sitting in their cruiser, chatting. Ortiz laughed at something. Neither had looked her way yet.

  They finally glanced in
her direction and threw open their doors, wide-eyed. Ortiz stopped midway to grab a shotgun from a cradle above the dash. Adams pulled his pistol and swallowed.

  “Halt!” Ortiz shouted. “Cochise County Sheriff’s Department! This is a restricted area!” He narrowed his eyes. “Wait. Is that you, Hecate?”

  Lyssa stopped. She stank more than hurt, and a shotgun blast wouldn’t take her down, considering how little damage she’d suffered other than to her sense of smell. That didn’t mean she would prefer to end her day by getting shot and having to talk down two scared cops.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said, staying in the shadow of the mine in case she needed to assume wraith form. “Sometimes I don’t clean up well, especially when I have to fight monsters in a dank hole in the ground. So, can we calm down now? Don’t worry. This thing is beyond dead.”

  Ortiz lowered his shotgun. “Sorry. You kind of look like a zombie with that skull mask and that stuff all over you. Just to be sure, you’re not, like, dead, are you?” He looked at Adams, who shook his head before turning back to Lyssa. “Can Sorceresses come back to life?”

  “I’m still alive, and no, we can’t come back to life,” Lyssa replied in a weary voice. “This is mostly monster guts, blood, and water from some big pool a monster probably vomited in, and who knows what else. So, yeah, I’m not dead, but they all are, at least every damned one I ran into.”

  “All?” Ortiz shuddered. “It was a lot of them, then?”

  “Wow. That sucks.” Adams stared at her. “The sheriff said from the beginning, ‘Don’t screw with this crap. Call the EAA and get somebody. There could be a dragon down there for all we know.’”

  “Good for him,” Lyssa said. “Re-elect that man for his wisdom. And I wish it was only one giant lizard to deal with. That would have been a lot less annoying.”

  She was too tired and annoyed to offer grand, intimidating speeches about the power of Hecate, sorcery, and darkness. Sometimes being a Torch meant she represented the epitome of the Illuminated Society’s combat prowess and conducted herself accordingly. In such cases, she needed to be a powerful symbol of what could happen when an Illuminated was sent after someone who threatened order and peace.

  Other times, she was a woman who deserved a Mike Rowe voiceover about how dirty but necessary her job was. Glamor wasn’t required for respect or contract completion. Killing monsters rarely ended with their hunters remaining spotless.

  Given the way both men kept wrinkling their noses, she smelled as bad to them as she did to herself. And she was at a decent distance.

  At least they were polite enough not to point it out. Another two points for her new favorite deputies.

  Adams looked sheepish and holstered his pistol. “Sorry about getting spun up.” He gestured at her. “I thought something was coming out of your chest. Too many movies, but you know, these days, it’s hard to say what’s crazy and what’s not with you all out there. Five years ago, if somebody had mentioned a monster in the mine, we would have thought they were on drugs. Now we have written procedures on how to handle those kinds of incidents.”

  Lyssa frowned. M-Day marked when Sorcerers went public, but that didn’t mean it was the first time sorcery had been used against the Shadows. How many incidents like this one had been covered up in the past? Innocent people had died because of rogues, and their relatives might never know.

  Adams let out a nervous chuckle. “So, is that it? The monsters? We ready to pop some champagne on a safe county?”

  “Oh? This?” Lyssa glanced at the dead monster. “I’m calling them snake-roaches. It’s one of the monsters, the smallest type. I didn’t spot anything smaller in there other than some bugs, and those were the all-natural kind that couldn’t take a kid’s shoe.”

  Adams grimaced. “That’s the smallest? You mean there were bigger monsters?”

  Lyssa nodded. “There was an entire hive of these things, including a queen laying eggs. I don’t know if she hatched all the rest or they were set up with her, but she was making more. It was only a matter of time before that entire place filled up, and they might have been able to dig toward a town.”

  Adams paled. “A queen? Like a giant monster queen?”

  Ortiz shuddered. He stared at the dead monster with his face taut and made the sign of the cross.

  “Yeah. Exactly that.” Lyssa gave a quick nod. “In this case, we’re talking an actual giant monster queen and a lot of medium-sized snake-roaches. They weren’t that little, but they were tiny compared to the queen, and they died a lot easier when I shot them. She took some major effort.”

  “And to be totally and completely clear on this, you killed them all?” Adams asked, sounding confused. “Or are there more down there?”

  “I wasn’t about to put them on a TV commercial playing a sad Sarah McLachlan song and asking for people to adopt them.” Lyssa shook the body.

  Adams waved his hands in front of his face. “I wasn’t saying it’s a bad thing you wiped them out. It just sounds dangerous. It’s not like there’s a pile of eggs still waiting to hatch and I’m going to wake up tomorrow with my dog missing, is there? That’s what I’m getting at.”

  “I blew all the eggs up,” Lyssa replied. “Except for the ones I shot. Your dog’s going to be okay. Give him some extra kibble tonight in my honor.”

  “You fought and killed a giant monster queen!” Adams shook his head. “If I hadn’t already gotten your autograph, I’d ask for it. That’s crazy. This is the most exciting thing to happen around here in a while.”

  “She was annoying. I had to burn a hole through her body to take her down, but don’t worry. I made sure she was dead, and I checked around the mine to make sure no others were hiding. I can’t say where they came from, but the ones in there are finished.”

  “Man, I always figured you Torches were just, like, souped-up assassins. I never thought about you fighting a bunch of weird-ass critters.” Adams made a face. “No offense, but I’m glad you were down there fighting the giant monster and not me.” He motioned toward the corpse. “That thing is bad enough. I’m going to have to watch a funny movie tonight before I go to bed to get it out of my head.”

  “No offense taken.” Lyssa shrugged. “That’s what Torches are for. We’re somewhere between cops, mercenaries, and exterminators for the Society. It’s been a while since I did a monster hunt, but it’s not like it’s my first. I’m like you, though.”

  “You are?” Adams asked.

  “Yeah, I prefer the two-legged kind of problem. It’s more straightforward because you can generally find out something about their motivations. These guys weren’t exactly up to chatting.”

  “Did you find the other victim?” Ortiz asked, sounding hopeful. “It wasn’t that long. If it’s too hard to carry him out, we could go in there with you. Since the monsters are dead and all.”

  Adams shot him a panicked look and swallowed. “Maybe we should talk to the sheriff first. He said we’re not to go in there without his orders.”

  “You don’t need to because I didn’t find him,” Lyssa said. “I did find a trail of blood. I’m not sure if the little ones eat people, but the queen could easily gobble down a person. I looked around the whole place, too. There’s no way he survived, and there was nothing in there to reason with but mindless monsters.” She flicked the driver’s license to the ground. “This is all that’s left of him, and it was near the queen. I think it’s a pretty safe assumption he’s dead.”

  “Damn.” Ortiz sighed. “The department’s been dragging its feet on the official report because the sheriff didn’t want to officially record a monster killing. No choice now.”

  “Understandable,” Lyssa said. “But the thing is, we know now this wasn’t a covered-up murder or some rabid coyote or crazy snake. We had real-deal monsters down there. That clarifies things for the follow-up investigation.”

  “I thought you just said you cleared them all out?” Ortiz replied, casting a nervous glance at the mine. “What
follow-up investigation do we need?”

  “I blew away a lot of monsters down there, including a queen. Then I spent hours checking around that place looking for more.” Lyssa hissed in frustration. “I didn’t find any, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. I didn’t sense any sorcery down there, but that also doesn’t prove anything. There could be more to this, and we need to be sure before I walk away and dust my hands, saying, ‘Welp, that’s enough of this.’”

  “You’re saying there might be another giant sorcery monster down there?” Adams shivered. “Maybe it’s time to move to Wyoming. I haven’t heard about any giant monsters there. If it’s not the snakes and scorpions here, it’s the monsters. Geeze.”

  “I don’t think there are more monsters down there, though I also can’t be sure, which is why I’m concerned.” Lyssa glanced at the mine. “I’m also worried about whoever was responsible for this threat, whether it was recent or not, and there’s a good chance I’ll perform another sweep after I coordinate with the EAA and my Elder to report on the situation.” She held up the body. “I wanted to test if they are harmed by sunlight. That’ll let us know our options and how much of a threat they are half the time.” She nodded at the edge of the shadow cast by the mine entrance. “Back up to the car.”

  “Why?” Ortiz asked, eyeing the body.

  “I’m not sure if it’ll explode,” Lyssa said. “Unless you want to look and smell like a Sorceress dipped in monster sewage, I’d step back. Your choice, but let me tell you, this crap on me smells even worse close up.”

  “Oh. I get it.” Ortiz sprinted back to his cruiser, followed by Adams, who shook his head.

  Lyssa tossed the corpse out of the shadow into the waiting Arizona sun. The skin sizzled and burned, flaking off in smoky streams that rose above the body. The odor intensified, making her regret the test.

  “That answers that.” Lyssa tried to not breathe through her nose. “Any enemy that can only operate half the time is one we have a decent shot at managing.” She squatted next to the sublimating body. “But unfortunately, that brings up more questions.”