Cultists. Ancients-be-damned cultists.
He left the note lying on his desk, took the finger gently in his hand, and walked down the hall to the scrying mirror. Ophelia picked up almost immediately.
“What is it?” she asked. She sounded concerned, but there was no tension in her. He didn’t even have it in him to take comfort in that right now.
“Augury,” he said. He held up the finger so Ophelia could see. “They…they left this on my desk.”
“Barghest,” Ophelia said, softly.
“I told her no one deserves to die,” he said. The words were coming out of his mouth before he even realized what he was trying to say. “I told her no one deserves to die, and then they did this to her.”
“We’ll find her,” Ophelia said.
“I damned right know we will,” he growled. “People are going to die Ophelia. People are going to die and I’m going to be the one to do it.”
“Ophelia, I have to tell you something before you find out some other way,” Joey said. He had his hat in his hands, threading the brim between his fingers. She was in her breastplate looking at her reflection in their bedroom mirror. She turned her head over her shoulder to look at him.
“Go on,” she said.
She extended a hand to him and he took it, stepping up beside her.
“The concubus that’s been causing all this trouble,” he said. “She might be blood of mine. Before we met, Zenith Haywood and I were involved. She…”
Ophelia slipped an arm around his waist and pulled him closer. They were within an inch of each other’s heights and he didn’t have to tilt his head to meet her eyes.
“You don’t have to tell me about this if you don’t want to,” she said. “It was before we met and I’m more interested in why you didn’t tell me before.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. That was all there was to it. “Zenith and I had a whirlwind affair that lasted a couple of months and then she skipped town. I thought some of her shady dealings had caught up with her, but apparently…”
“Apparently it was just you?” Ophelia asked, a hint of amusement on her lips. It didn’t reach her eyes. “Everyone has a past, Joey. You wouldn’t be who you are without it, and I love who you are. If you were expecting me to be angry, you were expecting wrong. But…it looks like you need to talk about this.”
“It’s such a bad time for it,” he said, dropping to sit on the foot of the bed. She sat behind him in an uncomfortable perch in her breastplate, leaving a hand on his knee.
“It’s the only time,” Ophelia said. “The only calm we have before the coming storm. If we wait until it passes there may be nothing we can do.”
“I keep thinking if I’d been there she wouldn’t be doing this,” Joey said.
“You aren’t a mind reader, love,” Ophelia said. “You were never given that chance.”
“What if she’s like Ely?” he asked. “What if that was my fault?”
“What if she is?” Ophelia asked. “I think Ely handles herself very well.”
“She had good examples,” Joey said.
“She had parents who burn their enemies at the stake and throw their bodies in the sea,” Ophelia said. “Lena is an adult. She can be held accountable for herself. And there is room to hear her out, if that’s what Callum wants to do.”
He nodded.
“I know,” Joey said. “She marked herself as his demon when she got him wrapped up in this. I just can’t help but feel responsible even if I’m not.”
“I think that’s normal,” Ophelia said. “You’re used to being in control of most situations. At least having an influence. We might still have the chance with her.”
That ‘we’ wasn’t lost on him. He laid his hand over hers and squeezed it tightly.
“I love you,” he said.
Ophelia smiled. This time, it did meet her eyes.
“I love you too.”
The compound was a glorified hole in the wall. A pair of broken wings had been painted onto the brick beside the entrance. The door was a bare pretext of surface screwed into place and hanging from its hinges and it came loose when Barghest’s boot collided with the wood. The time for subtlety had long since passed.
Several pairs of eyes raised to look at him. There was a small room, a table that was barely raised above the floor where five men sat. One of them dropped the cigarette out of his mouth and it went out in the drink in front of him. The others were laying down their cards and one went for the hold out pistol under the table.
Behind them, Barghest could see the doorway and nothing beyond. Every ounce of his training said to restrain himself. He had been through the drills a hundred times, had instilled these values in his students over and over again. Bad things happen but no one deserves to die for it. None of that mattered anymore.
He never stopped moving. In a single stride he’d closed the distance from the battered down door to the man with the pistol and brought his claymore down hard, severing the hand holding the gun at the wrist. With an agile turn of his blade he drove it into the man’s torso.
Gunfire. The flare of a sigil at his right side. Dark arterial blood sprayed against a hand of cards lying face up on the table. Death blood.
No turning back.
His arms burned as he brought the blade through the ribs, the crack he felt drowned out by gunfire at his right. He might have been shouting as he whipped the blade around; he couldn’t hear it over the roaring in his ears. There was a head on the floor. The thick tang of metal bit the air.
He had dropped three of them before the flames rose in the room beyond. He could smell the sulfur clawing at the air, the kind of scent that only came from a recent summoning. The other two men from the table were scrambling back and he let them.
He shoved the table aside with his free hand and with it two corpses. The gunfire continued at his back with glyphs lighting and pushing back, protecting his chest from the oncoming fire. Hot pain erupted at his ear and he felt something hot and wet drip down his neck. There was no time to worry about that now.
He was at the doorway when he got his first glimpse of the afrite, glowing in the dark like an ember. The demon had a tiger’s growl, a sound that would have driven fear like a spike into the heart of a man that had never heard it before. Barghest welcomed him.
His eyes were wide and gold, glowing with heat. His tusks curled outward from under his upper lip and claw-like fingers sent curls of wood falling to the floor as he propelled himself forward on all fours. A mane of fire streamed behind him, all around his furious face. Barghest had taken on afrite before, but never alone.
The claws came at him, a slash through the air. Barghest brought his claymore up to block and was driven back a few feet from the force of it. In an instant, he had lost sight of the beast. Losing sight of an afrite was a good way to die and they were too wickedly fast at the best of times.
A scream died in a coppery gurgle and Barghest whipped around to see the creature holding a man up by his lapel, tearing out his throat with a bite. Those fire-gold eyes met Barghest’s. He could hear the beast swallow, see the blood stains around his mouth as he grinned.
The floor was bloody slick as Barghest charged forward, his boots finding little purchase against the stone slab now that it was covered. He swung his sword anyway, aiming for the torso, aiming to bisect the beast where it stood. It planted its feet shoulder width apart and opened its maw wide, expelling a gout of flame at Barghest.
He had to stop in an instant, planting his own feet and letting his claymore dip point down on the stone floor. The flames licked around the blade, bisected and curling around either side of him as he ducked his head and the glyphs on his armor flared again. They worked hard, trying to protect him from the worst of it. He could feel burning blisters forming around the cracks of his armor. He weathered it.
Afrite were powerful, yes, but they had limits like anything else.
When the gout of flame ended, he swung his sword up
ward and caught it in the chest, drawing a line of blood as it passed. The beast reeled back and looked down at itself before cocking its head at Barghest and grinning that horrible grin again. His visage began to swirl and shift, as if distorted by the excess heat of a flame.
The catch with illusions was that if you believed in them, they became real. Knowing that, it was hard not to believe that whatever the afrite was manifesting for itself could hurt him.
It seemed to grow before his eyes, dominating the half of the room where it stood. Barghest brought his claymore up again, this time aiming for the root of the beast. His claymore caught it between the legs and ripped upward, rending.
Clawed fingers whipped out for Barghest’s throat. He raised his right arm to block and the claws peeled curls of metal away from his gauntlet. He felt the moment when the magic broke, reducing the gauntlet to ordinary steel.
He felt the moment when his claymore struck spine. His right hand clutched the hilt, and it was his right hand that felt the magic swell and break. The afrite snapped, biting at him, and unraveled an inch away from his face, leaving the rest of the room visible.
The sudden silence revealed the shadows left behind. Bodies and blood. A floor littered with battered and bent playing cards and broken glass.
He didn’t remember the decision to begin moving, only realized he was standing in the doorway when he arrived. The man in the back of the room had a younger boy by the hair and a gun pressed against his temple. He recognized the summoner in an instant.
There was a mad undertone to his eyes, a tremor in the hand that held the gun. His chest inflated with the intent to speak.
Whatever he thought was about to happen here, Barghest cut it off when he charged him. The gun didn’t fire. By the time the summoner realized he needed to pull the trigger none of the nerves or tendons required were attached anymore. One stroke of the sword to sever the arm, and then the plunge. The air he had taken in escaped in a bubbling hiss as Barghest pulled his sword free from the man’s ribcage.
The boy scrambled away in frantic tears.
“Are there others?” Barghest asked. He didn’t look at the boy. He’d gotten his look, it was burned into his mind now. Short brown hair. Deep red eyes that glowed like embers. Skinny. Terrified. He couldn’t have been any older than fourteen. Barghest was guessing there was rhakshasa in his bloodline.
“No,” the boy said. “There were the ones in the front, and Hector. There…are two others…like me…”
He spoke carefully. His voice trembled with the words, but he spoke them with measured calm. Some part of Barghest took note of that somewhere deep down. Not yet.
“Where?” he asked.
The boy scrambled ahead and lifted a door in the floor. Barghest brushed past him. There were eight steps that led down into a small square basement with a dirt floor, and a pair of women clinging to one another in the corner. They were cambion, both of them, but neither of them were Augury.
“Come with me,” he said. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
He walked up the stairs without looking back. Only when he reached the top did he spare another look for the boy. There were still tears on his face, but he had regained his composure and he met Barghest’s eyes without flinching.
“What’s your name?” Barghest asked.
The boy eyed him with measured mistrust.
“It doesn’t have to be your real name, just give me something to call you,” he said. He didn’t have it in him to soften the words.
There was a moment of quiet as the pair of cambion women came out of the square basement room. They gripped each other’s hands and surveyed the carnage with cool detachment.
“Shadow,” the boy said, finally.
“Where am I taking you back to, Shadow?” Barghest asked.
The next pause was strained. Almost painful. He glanced over and saw the look on the boy’s face, knew what it meant. Augury was still out there somewhere and he had more places to go and look into. More Fallen Angel haunts.
The boy had been taken by the same people. For the same reasons.
“You’ll come back with me to the station then, for now,” he said. “We’ll figure it out from there. You look like you could use a hot meal and a safe sleep.”
The boy nodded. Barghest looked to the pair of women.
“And you?”
“We can find our own way home,” the woman on the right said. She had pale hair and dark skin, the only real visible trace of her demonic heritage in the claws of her fingertips. She dipped into a shallow bow and the pair of them started for the door. One woman clutched the other’s hand tightly. He couldn’t blame them for not wanting to be here any longer.
Barghest looked at Shadow. Rhakshasa were some of the more temperamental demons of the world. They had a reputation. If this child didn’t belong anywhere he was going to have a hard time finding a place to go because of that.
He also had potential. And Barghest knew a cambion that might be able to nourish that if the boy didn’t like the idea of hanging around the Hellwatch. If he found her. If he was right.
If so many things.
“Come on,” he said. “We need to get moving, there’s a lot to be done tonight, yet.”
Ely came in through the window and was sitting at Dorian’s kitchen table when he got home that night. She should have gone home, she knew. She hadn’t been invited to Dorian’s tonight and Callum was home and this was a moment she uncomfortably realized she should have been present for, but did not want to be.
There would be a lot of love in that room. There would be a lot of grief and a lot of anger. She would be expected to express those things, and once again come up wanting.
They were probably better off without her there tonight.
The door opened and shut softly on the other end of the apartment, and she waited. Wisplight bathed the kitchen and Dorian made a startled little sound when he saw her.
Ely tried a smile.
“I happened to be in the neighborhood,” she said. The joke fell flat even to her.
“You know you can just ask, right? You don’t have to sneak in? How long have you been here?” he asked.
“Hours,” she said. “It was somewhere around noon. You weren’t home. I didn’t want to go home. I need to follow up with you anyway and…”
She sighed.
“This isn’t going to mean anything to you, but my brother’s home and I just don’t think I can handle the drama tonight.”
“Why would your brother being home cause drama?” Dorian asked.
“Callum,” Ely said. “Callum is home.”
“Wasn’t he dead?” Dorian asked.
“He was faking,” Ely said.
“I thought I was good,” he said.
“Yeah, well,” Ely said. “People are going to cry and they’ll be hugging each other and I’m emotionally dead inside and don’t need to remind them of that.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Dorian said. He sat across from her at his little table.
“Does it?” Ely asked, looking up at him.
“Yeah, no, I get family things,” he said. “Sometimes you just want to get black out drunk and do things you might regret instead.”
Her answering smile was genuine.
“Are you trying to seduce me, Asteri?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t it be suspicious if I weren’t?” he asked.
“It’s both exasperating and a relief at once, to see you so much yourself again after what happened. How are your fingers?” she asked.
“Well I’m still switch-hitting,” he said.
“Do they still ache?” she asked. She reached across the table to take his hand.
“I mean, they were pretty broken,” he said.
“The ache is good, it means they’re healing,” she said.
“I think it means they’re hurting, but sure,” he said.
“We should talk about that,” Ely said. “I know what you said at the time, but you w
ere under duress. And now you’ve had time to process.”
“So what’s there to talk about?” he asked.
“Are you sure you want me in your life?” she asked. “This is the kind of thing that happens to people who get involved with shoeshiners.”
“If I didn’t bail in the heat of the moment, why would I bail now?” he asked.
“Coming to your senses?” she asked.
“You act like this isn’t the kind of thing that happens to people with gambling and drinking problems,” he said.
“For what it’s worth, you hold up very well in public,” Ely said. “Very personable. My family will like you. Unfortunately it’s not a good time to introduce you just yet. What with the recently risen from the dead brother, the gang war, and half the city being on fire and all.”
“Yeah, I was wondering what happened with that,” Dorian said. “The fire. I can’t say I was entirely aware of the other parts.”
“Callum’s girlfriend lost control of a rhakshasi,” Ely said. “To be fair there was a good reason for it, but it’s a long story.”
“And I assume you don’t want to talk about it, so…what do you want to do?” Dorian asked.
“Why did your father send you here?” she asked. “I know you’re trying to sell your print circles, but a city like this is precarious. Either he trusts you a lot or he set you up to fail. Which was it?”
There was a beat of silence. She caught him off guard.
“Maybe he felt like I was uniquely qualified to handle the situation,” Dorian said.
“You don’t believe that,” Ely said. It wasn’t a question.
“Maybe it was the farthest away he could reasonably send me,” Dorian said.
“Your father certainly sounds like a winner,” she said, dryly.
“It’s an interesting family dynamic,” he said.
“I think my family wrote the book on that,” Ely said, sighing. “Between you and me, sometimes I think my parents are afraid of me.”
“I’ve seen what you’re capable of. It’s understandable,” he said.
“I know it is,” she said. “That doesn’t make it hurt less. Callum is an almighty screw up, but he’s Dad’s favorite and sometimes they look at me and I’m almost sure they wonder where I came from. Like I couldn’t possibly be theirs and they’re wondering what happened to their real daughter.”
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