What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  As it came down from my final toss, I snatched it from the air and examined the weblike fractures. One of them ran halfway through, and if I’d kept on throwing the apple, it would have eventually broken in half and then come down in two pieces. One of them probably would’ve jabbed me in the eye, given the luck I’d been having lately.

  The bang sounded off again, louder this time, and a small section of one icy wall subtly quivered. Someone was beating on the door of my favorite walk-in freezer.

  I threw the apple aside and hauled myself up, brushing the collected ice shavings off my clothes as I shambled over to the door. I was exhausted after three straight hours of practice, my limbs like rubber, but I still managed to punch a hole through the ice sheet, locate the handle, and heave the door open. The ice sheet fractured as the door pulled away from the wall, and the pieces shattered when they hit the floor.

  The sound grated against my eardrums, but since I hadn’t restored my sensory glamour for the better part of a year, I’d gotten used to a barrage of loud noises. I’d had to. Because I needed to be able to hear quiet noises, like the light steps of an approaching vampire.

  Standing in the hall outside the door was Captain Saoirse Daly. She shivered as a wave of bitterly cold air wafted out of the room, and took an involuntary step back. “You do realize it’s colder in there than it was on that mountaintop in Hel, right?” she said with a faint chuckle. “How in the world are you not a popsicle, Vince?”

  “Unseelie physiology is weird like that.” I exited the freezer and tugged the door shut to stop the cascade of frigid air. “So, what news does the good captain come bearing this fine evening?”

  “What makes you think I have news?” She quirked an eyebrow.

  “If you didn’t, you would have sent one of your grunts down here. You hate coming down here yourself.”

  “Can you blame me?” She gestured to the hallway, which was lit by dim, flickering bulbs whose light cast odd shadows off the exposed pipes that snaked across the walls and ceiling. There were splotchy patches where the floor met the walls that were likely black mold, and a stale stench that screamed decay seemed to seep up from beneath the cracked floor tiles whenever you took a step. Somewhere in the distance, a leaky pipe dripped water onto the floor in a steady cadence. The subbasement was so devoid of activity the sound actually echoed. Twice.

  “I admit it’s not the most scenic factory subbasement hallway”—I patted the freezer door with my palm—“but it serves its purpose well enough.”

  “On that note, how’s that ‘quick freeze’ spell of yours going?”

  “I can instantly freeze small, room-temperature objects now, but warmer objects roughly the size of a human body still take me up to a full second.” I sighed. “That’s way too long, even if I get the drop on a vampire.”

  Saoirse playfully punched my arm. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve vastly improved your freeze time since you started practicing. I’m sure you’ll get there eventually.”

  “Well, I know I can get there eventually. The question is whether I’ll run out of time before I have the chance to get there. Clock’s been ticking for six months, and it’s bound to hit zero sooner rather than later. Could be next week. Could be tomorrow.”

  I kicked a broken piece of tile halfway down the hall. “I figure the only reason Vianu hasn’t come knocking at my door yet is because he’s been too busy turning his vampire fledgling army into a formidable fighting force, and reorganizing the extensive mob assets he recently acquired, courtesy of Bismarck. As soon as he gets his ducks in a row, he’ll pull out his hit list and get to work. And I’m pretty sure I’m at the top of that list.”

  “That’s kind of flattering, when you think about it. Means he considers you a legitimate threat.”

  “More like an unrepentant nuisance.”

  “I don’t know. Rumor on the street is he flew into a rage after your successful raid of the flophouse on Zimmerman last month. You’d think an elder vampire would be more composed about something as minor as a nuisance.”

  I tucked my hands into my pockets and exaggerated a shrug. “Either way, I’ve got a target on my back, and Vianu’s bound to aim for a bull’s-eye the moment a good opportunity arises.”

  “Then you might want to check over your shoulder tonight.” Saoirse slipped a folded piece of notebook paper out of her coat pocket and offered it to me. “This came in through the Network twenty minutes ago.”

  My pulse quickened. “Confirmation on the Bowler and Sons office complex?”

  “Yep.”

  I snatched the paper and flipped it open to reveal a short message from a member of Project Watchdog’s rapidly expanding informant network. The message was coded, but since I was among those who designed the cipher, translating the seemingly random string of letters and numbers and symbols only took me a few seconds. I read the message three times over, and a chill that had nothing to do with temperature crept up my spine and settled as a heavy weight in my chest.

  The first sentence of the message claimed that multiple vampires had been seen entering the old Bowler and Sons law office on Normandy Road three times over the past week. The second sentence stated that the first time the vampires were seen, they’d transferred “person-sized bundles wrapped in sackcloth” from a wagon into the basement level of the building. And the last sentence confirmed my worst fears: during the vampires’ third visit to the building, while the door had been propped open to facilitate the unloading of some cardboard boxes, the informant had heard faint sounds of human distress coming from inside.

  I closed my fist around the paper. “This is the ninth report we’ve received that points to a growing blood slave ring.”

  “The tenth,” Saoirse countered. “We received another from Pillory Lane not five minutes after this one came in. They’re definitely ramping up their pace.”

  “Which means they’re preparing for some kind of major offensive. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need such an enormous supply of blood.” I skirted past Saoirse, heading for the stairwell door. “Even the largest covens can survive on a handful of blood slaves for several weeks before the poor people finally tap out from blood loss complications. But the rate of abductions we’ve been seeing over the past month suggests they’re hoarding close to fifty victims on top of their regular blood slaves.”

  Saoirse trailed a few steps behind me. “What do you think they’re up to?”

  “I have no idea.” At my tug, the stairwell door shrieked open on its rusty hinges. “I am, however, concerned it’s part of a larger scheme.”

  She entered the stairwell but paused on the bottom step. “You think this is leading up to Abarta’s next big play?”

  “He’s been quiet for six months. I can’t help but think he’s been using that time wisely.”

  “Utilizing whatever information he gained by interrogating Kennedy with Fragarach?”

  “That would be my guess.” I let the door scream shut behind me. “He had the sword for weeks, and if it worked as intended, he could’ve gleaned tons of damaging information from Kennedy. Not only methods for awakening the other Tuatha Dé Danann, but also critical information about the faerie courts, like modern army combat strategies and defense arrangements, the underlying constructions of the barrier spells that protect the major cities, the architectural weaknesses and poorly secured access points of important buildings in those cities, like the palaces—”

  “I get the picture.” Saoirse started marching up the steps two at a time. “So you think the vampires might be in on whatever he’s planning?”

  “They were in on it last time, and as the most formidable creatures on Earth, next to the sídhe temporarily stationed here, they’d make excellent foot soldiers for a god who’s currently hurting for an army.” I caught up to Saoirse at the next landing, and we continued up to the main basement level side by side. “Out of all of Abarta’s confirmed associates, only the vampires pose any considerable hurdle for the sídhe. He’d be
a fool not to make use of them, and we know Abarta is no fool.”

  “The vampires wouldn’t agree to work for him without receiving a considerable payoff though, right?”

  “Right, and the vampires are no strangers to haggling for a good bargain. The neamh-mairbh invasion cost the Pettigrew coven nothing but the efforts of their dhampir and the foresight to infect some refugees with their blood. But Bismarck had to sign over most of her business assets to entice them to agree to that plan, even though it posed minimal risk to the coven as a whole.” At the top of the stairs, I came to a halt, one hand on the door’s push bar. “So if Abarta is making a sort of play against the sídhe directly, a dangerous proposition for any creature, you can bet the vampires wheedled him into promising a payday of epic proportions.”

  “The kind of proportions that spell disaster for Kinsale?” Saoirse asked softly.

  “The kind of proportions that spell disaster for the human race.”

  “Wonderful.” She rubbed her temples. “Think the other covens are involved?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. But vampires are so territorial that if Abarta did recruit multiple covens for his new plot, he probably did so without informing any of the covens that more than one was involved.”

  “A compartmentalization strategy. To optimize the performance of his vampire pawns.” She shook her head. “You know, I could’ve sworn I signed up to become a cop in a small city, not the ringleader of a mortal resistance force working to thwart a multidimensional magic terrorist organization led by a god. Talk about responsibility creep.”

  I flicked the gold bars on her collar. “Hey, you volunteered to be captain of the expanded Paranormal Crimes Division.”

  “I think you mean you tricked me into accepting the position by schmoozing me with a ‘romantic dinner,’ getting me boozed up on too much wine, and then portraying the whole Project Watchdog concept as a small, elite paramilitary force meant to be deployed to take out high-risk paranormal targets.” She batted my hand away from the door and pushed it open herself. “When in reality, I got passed the reins of this.”

  Beyond the door lay the haphazard sprawl of Project Watchdog.

  To the right of the door was a line of three training gyms, each walled off from the bulk of the basement space by two layers of plywood with pink insulation stuffed between them. With such poor soundproofing, you could always hear when a class was in session. Some classes concerned mundane endurance and strength straining, and were characterized only by grunts and dampened thuds, whereas others were centered on magic practice and could involve anything from the roar of fire to the boom of thunder.

  When Saoirse and I stepped into the basement, I caught the telltale wails of terror and loud bangs that emanated from the second gym in the lineup every time Odette got rotated in to teach a magic combat class.

  As Saoirse led the way across the floor, we passed an open office space on the left. The humble collection of desks represented the reception half of the Watchdog Network, the magic-based and heavily “encrypted” communication system twenty of Kinsale’s smartest practitioners had slaved away three months of their lives designing. A system we now almost exclusively used for citywide intelligence-gathering efforts via our multitude of informants.

  The office space was easy to mistake for an IT floor at first glance. The workers seated at the desks intently monitored desktop-sized glass screens with silver backs. Every now and then, words of various colors would flicker into existence on those screens, and the workers would either jot the coded messages down onto pads of paper, or type them up on 70s-era typewriters that someone, I knew not who, had salvaged from a long-forgotten storage room in an old office building.

  For security purposes, the coded messages would disappear after less than a minute, so the workers had to be quick and efficient at their jobs. Most of them were former secretaries, paralegals, personal assistants, and the like, who had quick hands and excellent memories. Half of them were over the age of fifty, and more than one should’ve been a happily retired grandparent sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch, calling kids “young whippersnappers.”

  Sometimes I felt a little guilty that the Watchdog recruitment drive had plucked these people out of their post-collapse lives of simple jobs and modest means, and thrust them into a dangerous position pitted against a worsening vampire scourge. But then I would remind myself that they were all volunteers. They were a hardy bunch, and determined to do their part to save their city.

  I had massive respect for them.

  While Saoirse unlocked the warded door to her personal office adjacent to the “typing pool,” I watched as a woman named Beatrix, who was crocheting a scarf out of pink yarn, perked up at the faint buzz of a new message coming in. She dropped her unfinished scarf onto her lap, scooted closer to her typewriter, and knocked out the entire twelve-line message on the screen in under ten seconds. She then double-checked that her typed characters exactly matched the ones on the screen, gave herself a nod of approval, tugged the paper free from the typewriter, dropped it into her outbox for the next round of message collection, and finally went back to her crocheting as if nothing had happened at all.

  Got to give her major props for that WPM rate, I thought. I can’t type half that fast.

  Saoirse finagled the poorly fitting office door open and walked into the darkness, feeling around for the dangling string of the single bulb that lit the entire room. Kinsale had very little in the way of excess power production right now, thanks to the widespread fires during the zombie attack, so we had to skim as little off the grid as possible. After some extensive negotiation (aka arguing) between me and Connolly, we’d agreed to split the lighting about fifty-fifty between electric fixtures and magic-powered ones. That way, we lowered the risk of overtaxing the grid and reduced the possibility that the vampires would be able to pierce the illusory magic hiding our presence in this building by homing in on aura clusters.

  The light clicked on at last, the bulb swinging to and fro as Saoirse rounded the desk she’d pilfered from an abandoned middle school and sank into an old leather rolling chair she’d repaired with strips of duct tape. The desk was missing anything reminiscent of a modern workspace, but it had all the cop necessities, like a mountain of manila folders with oddly sized papers sticking out from the edges, a cup full of assorted pens and pencils, and an industrial-grade stapler that could nail your hand to the desktop.

  After I entered the office and closed the door behind me—several of the wards reengaged when the door latched, including a soundproofing spell—Saoirse opened a desk drawer and withdrew a rolled-up map of Kinsale. Ignoring the two other chairs in the room, I leaned over the desk to help her clear a space for the map, and together, we unrolled the large paper and pinned each corner in place with various paperweights.

  The map was heavily marked, and each notation was color coded to represent different events that had occurred in Kinsale over the past six months.

  The red triangles represented direct encounters with vampires by members of Project Watchdog. There were five of those on the map. Four of those marked successful raids. One marked a raid that had unfortunately gone off the rails and resulted in three casualties: a wizard, a mundane woman, and a Seelie half-fae.

  I’d gotten back at the vampires for those deaths, taking down three of Vianu’s vicious fledglings by collapsing a building on top of them. But returning to headquarters with the bodies of the fallen had still hurt, especially since two had family members that were also involved in the organization. I’d had to give them the bad news myself before they heard it through the grapevine.

  I pulled my attention away from the triangles and placed it instead on the blue circles: the locations of interest that we’d been watching for the past several weeks. The buildings we believed the vampires were using to hold people they’d snatched off the street for use as blood slaves to feed their steadily growing numbers.

  Controlling large groups of vampire fledg
lings, who were often emotionally unstable and struggled to rein in their bloodthirst, was a monumental task, but Vianu was clearly no novice in this role. As one of his coven’s elders, he’d probably spent centuries training up fledglings into disciplined soldiers and servants. And with Bismarck’s vast mafia resources at his disposal, he had all the buildings, money, and human capital he needed to keep his coven expansion efforts under the radar.

  So despite the fact we had eyes and ears all over the city, constantly hunting for critical clues that could be used to demolish the foundation of the vampire infestation before it grew too large, our progress had been painfully slow and incremental.

  Like that wasn’t already a big enough problem on its own, now we had another probable Abarta scheme in the works.

  Saoirse grabbed the blue marker from her cup and circled the two new addresses that had been confirmed as holding pens for the unlucky abducted humans. “What do you think our play should be here? Should we continue as we have until we’ve mapped the bulk of their occupied locations”—she tapped a few orange stars on the map to indicate the businesses, some of them in critical industries, whose proprietors had suffered mysterious deaths over the past few months and whose ownership had then passed into “unknown” hands—“and then launch the preemptive strike we’ve been rigorously training for? Or should we redirect some of our limited resources into undermining what appear to be preparations that will enable the vampires to assist Abarta in his next move against the fae?”

  “Not to sound melodramatic,” I replied, flicking the edge of the map with my fingernail, “but if Abarta gets his way, we won’t have the chance to face down the vampires because we’ll all end up collateral damage during the resulting war between the sídhe and the Tuatha. So I say we go with the second option. Take some time out of our day to raid the holding locations and free as many of the humans as we can. The tighter the coven’s blood supply rations become, the harder it will be for Vianu to keep all the fledglings in line, and the more likely it’ll be that they fail to properly execute whatever it is they’re planning to do to help Abarta.”