What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  Chapter Seventeen

  Another light on the bomb faded, leaving only six. Six seconds to detonation.

  As a cacophony of panicked yells broke out across the com feed, I commanded Indira to go and dashed into the hall, sliding to a stop next to Gunner. His gear had been thrown into disarray when he hit the wall, and many of the items on his utility belt were covered in blood from a dozen lacerations on his back. I swiftly picked through them anyway, searching for his RTP talisman. I didn’t know if Gunner’s injuries were survivable, but I wasn’t going to leave him here to get vaporized.

  Back in the stairwell, Indira smacked her palm against the bronze medallion strapped to her own belt, activating the rapid-transit portal spell. A bright yellow circle flared to life beneath her feet. She shouted for me to hurry up, her voice breaking beneath her fear, just before the spell yanked her into the void and carried her off to safety. As her circle began to fade, I finally located Gunner’s talisman and punched it. A new circle appeared beneath his crumpled body and whisked him away in the same manner.

  I spun on my toes and looked at the bomb attached to the wall. Two seconds left.

  Activating my own talisman, I sank to my knees, eyes slipping closed as the massive weight of an impending disaster dropped onto my shoulders. Our RTP talismans, reverse engineered from Tom Tildrum’s own spellwork, contained the fastest portal spell ever designed by Earth-based practitioners. But I knew in my heart that no matter how fast the spell was, people were going to get left behind, and people were going to die.

  Some would be too injured to reach their talismans in time. Some would freeze up in confusion and fright. And some, preoccupied by a battle with one of the young fledglings Vianu had used as sacrificial pawns to lure us into a false sense of security, wouldn’t realize the gravity of what I’d said over the feed until it was too late.

  This is a tragedy in progress, I thought as the floor dropped out from beneath my feet, and it’s all my fault.

  The portal spell tugged me off the edge of the Earth and into the void between worlds. Through my eyelids, I caught a faint violet flash, and a bare hint of heat wafted over my face. But the portal spell resealed the veil before the bulk of the explosion could follow me through.

  Even so, I imagined the force of the blast rattling my bones, boiling my blood, searing my flesh from my muscles in one blackened sheet. I imagined my body turning to ash in the space between blinks, the remnants of myself mingling with the cloud of smoke that billowed upward from the crater where Bowler and Sons had once sat. I imagined my ghost, bitter and angry, riding the peak of that roiling smoke column, and staring down in dismay at the city below, as the shockwaves from ten identical blasts toppled every building within a four-block radius of their epicenters.

  There was a reason Watchdog R&D had shelved that bomb design before a working prototype had even been produced. Its projected yield was far too high to be used in urban warfare…unless you didn’t care how many people died.

  How did this happen? I bit my tongue until it bled, droplets dribbling past my lips and falling into the nothingness, lost forever. How did Vianu sneak a spy so far past our intense security? How did he steal a weapon design only a handful of people had access to, which was locked around the clock in a warded vault? How did he—?

  My body jerked to a stop so fast my neck nearly snapped. Before I could register what the hell was happening, an unseen force gripped me tight and wrenched me in a different direction than I’d previously been moving through the void.

  My eyes snapped open, and I hunted for an approaching enemy. I thought a vampire practitioner had somehow located me mid-transit and was drawing me toward them so they could slash my throat before the talisman spit me out in a random place in the Endless Sea, where I could no longer be tracked.

  But there was no vampire. In all directions, there was only empty space.

  Which meant someone had hijacked my portal spell from outside the void.

  My heart leaped into my throat. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit!

  This was part of the trap. The spy had learned our emergency escape plans involved portaling to the Endless Sea and then back to a predetermined safe place in Kinsale. So someone—Abarta, it must’ve been, given the amount of power required to cast through the veil—had set up some kind of portal intercept spell to snatch us on our way to the sea.

  I was now hurtling at great speed, far faster than you usually fell through the void, toward an unknown realm where my worst enemies were likely waiting to butcher me. Whoever was there would be on me the instant I landed. It could be Bismarck, with her deadly spear. It could be a whole army of angry svartálfar. It could even be Abarta himself, elated to at last have the opportunity to crush the half-sídhe thorn in his side.

  I was screwed. I was totally screwed. And so was every other Watchdog.

  This is it. I lost. We lost. It’s over.

  Resignation and fury collided in my mind like two storm fronts. A ripple of power surged through my skin as my imperfect variable mind glamour tilted firmly toward my sídhe side, as it always did in moments of great and awful emotion. The cold fae fury stomped the human resignation beneath its powerful boot and rose up from within the depths of my soul, not unlike a blizzard sweeping across the land. A sense of utter calm mixed with grim determination snaked up my spine, and as it singed each nerve in my body, rendering me a callous thing, patches of frost spread across my skin.

  Magic steamed from the frost, leaving white comet trails in the darkness of space.

  If this is going to be a fight to the death, so be it. I released a frigid breath and let the invocations of a hundred spells spill into the forefront of my brain. I’ll kill every bastard I can get my hands on before—

  The spell holding me like a vise began to vibrate wildly. Up ahead, a hole in space tore open before my eyes. The hole looked more like the face of a rip portal than anything else. And if it had the same attributes as a rip portal, then I wasn’t going to hit the edge of the veil, stop gracefully, and flip up into the new realm, like I usually did at the end of a void transit. I was going to fly straight through the hole and careen at speed into whatever was waiting for me on the other side.

  If I had to guess, I’d say I was currently moving at around three hundred miles per hour.

  My magic surged in response to the threat, but when I attempted to wrap it around my body in a protective cloud, I found that it wouldn’t coalesce. Perplexed, I tried to activate a shield bracelet instead, only for the shield to collapse when it was half formed.

  As the dispersed energy uselessly rolled over me, I noticed that the vibrations from the spell that was holding me strengthened wherever the energy touched my form. The vibrations were a physical byproduct of a secondary spell that was tacked on to the portal intercept. A secondary spell meant to disrupt concentrations of magic in close proximity to the primary spell’s target.

  I couldn’t do any defensive magic right now. And I didn’t have enough time to attack the secondary spell’s construction and break down the critical elements.

  Frustration washed through me like icy waves breaking on a cold shore.

  Abarta had thought of everything. He was miles ahead of me.

  I could do nothing but watch the tear in space approach at an ever-increasing speed. I tried to see what was beyond the portal, but the face moved like a disturbed pond, the images beyond a jumble of color and indistinct shapes.

  Most of those shapes and colors, however, were dark, and there was no ambient light that indicated a star or moon in the sky. I took that to mean the portal was about to sling me out into some kind of structure with no windows, probably an underground prison cell. No, a dungeon cell.

  Where I would either be slaughtered immediately, or slowly tortured to death.

  Depending on how large the room was though, I could potentially use a long-range magic blast to create an opposing wind or force wave that would decelerate me in time to prevent—


  The magic vise around my body tightened painfully. Right before it doubled the speed at which I was falling.

  As if shot from a cannon, I blew past the sound barrier, the thunderous boom muted by the not-quite-atmosphere of the void. The tear in space met me so fast, I didn’t have time to cast a single spell before I soared past its boundary and into the gloomy dungeon cell on the other side.

  For about two milliseconds, my stinging eyes, dried out by the insane speed, saw nothing but darkness. Then I made the mistake of blinking, at which point a large wall decided to erect itself directly in my path. The solid stone wall said, “Hello,” to my head, and my head, upon rebounding off the wall, replied, “Goodbye.”

  I was out cold before I hit the floor.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By some bizarre combination of ironic luck and fate’s atrocious sense of humor, I survived hitting a wall while traveling faster than the speed of sound. But for about eleven hours after the fact, I really wished I hadn’t.

  Everything was broken. Everything.

  Abarta’s defense magic interference spell hadn’t affected my protective gear, so the charms laced through my helmet, goggles, vest, knee pads, and elbow pads had taken the brunt of the impact with the wall. However, as Gunner had so horribly demonstrated when that vampire kicked his chest, even our best gear had limits. And I’d blown far past that threshold.

  So while my head hadn’t exploded and splattered brain matter everywhere, the helmet had fragmented under the force of the impact, and my skull had been fractured in several places, badly jostling my brain. My goggles had snapped right down the middle, one half shifting up and lacerating my forehead, the other shifting down and slicing deep into my cheek. My vest had insulated my organs well enough to stop them all from bursting, but my bones were another matter.

  Every single one of my ribs had cracked, and a large shard had shaken free from the ribcage and impaled my right lung. My elbows and knees had survived, but all the surrounding bones, shielded only by my lightly charmed uniform pants and jacket, had completely shattered. My pelvis was in at least two pieces, and one of those pieces was twisted so far in the wrong direction that it had taken the bits between my legs along for the ride. That was okay though. The similarly awkward angle of my broken neck balanced them out.

  Long story short, I was wrecked.

  I spent the first five to six hours after my impromptu meeting with the wall in a fluid state between sporadic awareness and troubled half-sleep. My swollen brain would drag me to wakefulness, only to inundate me with such excruciating pain that I would dig myself back into an unconscious burrow, where I could be safe from the all-consuming agony of a badly broken mortal body under the influence of a nonhuman healing factor. Because as much as it hurt to injure literally every part of myself, what hurt even worse was the speed at which my body healed critical wounds not made by iron.

  Bits of bone moved beneath my skin like skittering bugs, leaving thousands of tiny cuts behind, as they reclaimed their correct places and soldered themselves back together. Blood vessels pinched themselves off to stop internal bleeding long enough to stitch their jagged tears, and in so doing, starved non-vital body parts of blood until the associated nerves screamed themselves to death.

  That scored flesh and those non-vital parts could always be regenerated later, when my life didn’t hang in the balance. The fact that this strategy caused unbearable pain and risked degrading my sanity didn’t matter to an autonomic process. It would heal me quickly and efficiently, whether I liked it or not.

  So I lay there, on a cold, damp stone floor, suffering for what felt like eternity.

  Eventually, the worst of my brain damage healed, and I snapped back into full alertness. I used every ounce of willpower I possessed to stop myself from bawling at the pain. Not because I was afraid of looking pathetic to whoever might’ve been observing me. But because crying involved gasping, and my chest already hurt enough from the shallow breaths I was currently taking.

  Mentally, I put a dozen calming mantras on replay and let them lull me into a state that resembled composure. One where I could think logically enough to rearrange the jumbled pieces of this disastrous puzzle into their proper order. I wouldn’t be able to move for a while yet, so the best thing I could do for the time being was figure out just how badly my missteps had fucked over Kinsale and determine if any action in my power could walk back those mistakes.

  I reviewed my memories of the raid from start to finish a dozen times, picking out every overlooked clue that something was seriously wrong before the vampires sprung their trap. In hindsight, it was easy to see we’d been duped.

  If the vampires were truly hoarding blood slaves to ensure an adequate blood supply during an upcoming offensive, they would’ve had the entrances to Bowler and Sons heavily guarded and they would’ve posted numerous lookouts across the neighborhood. At least one of those lookouts would’ve seen through our veil ruse and sounded the alarm.

  With the vampires alerted to our impending raid, my team should’ve met extreme resistance as soon as we blasted in the door. But only a few inexperienced fledglings had thrown themselves into our path. They were puppets who, unbeknownst to themselves, had been set up by their own master to die at our hands.

  Their token resistance had been just enough to reaffirm our mistaken belief that we were on the right track, that the abducted humans were still in the basement, under vampire guard. But in reality, those people had been moved out of the building long before we arrived.

  Vianu had used Project Watchdog’s every strength to play to its every weakness. Our keen-eyed informants had seen only what he wanted them to see, and our top strategists, Saoirse and me included, had drawn from those false observations the conclusions that Vianu wanted drawn. The vampire lord had then utilized a magic bomb design he’d somehow stolen from us to wipe out the bulk of our fighting force and leave whoever survived scrambling to pick up the pieces, while he skipped off into the twilight to deploy whatever his true scheme was.

  And there was a true scheme. There had to be. Else he would’ve waited longer before he took us out of play, to ensure we couldn’t recover in time to prevent him from achieving his ultimate goals for Kinsale. Whatever Vianu was plotting had been set into motion the second those bombs went off. Kinsale was in peril right now, and the only people left standing in Vianu’s way were the dysfunctional McCullough and his disgruntled underlings.

  How? I asked my beleaguered mind. How did Vianu manage to execute this so flawlessly?

  My original assumption, that there was a spy in our ranks, made less sense the more I thought about it. Project Watchdog was a machine of many moving parts, and most of those parts didn’t come into direct contact with all the others. Therefore, the chains of information between most parts in the machine were quite short, and few parts were allowed to wind more than a handful of chains. This organizational setup was due in part to an intentional compartmentalization strategy. The less each individual Watchdog knew, the less they could give the vampires if captured and interrogated.

  Only about ten people, the “inner circle,” knew enough to critically damage the Watchdogs the way Vianu had. And out of those ten, none had gone missing, none had adopted any of the habits that usually accompanied magic brainwashing, and none struck me as capable of betraying us under their own volition.

  We had been very thorough when we set up Project Watchdog. So how had Vianu managed to circumvent all of our security measures without being discovered?

  Something was nagging at me. Something about the raid operation. Something about the Bowler and Sons building itself or the fledglings or the…

  My attention drifted back to those frantic final seconds in the hallway, when I was scrambling to find Gunner’s RTP talisman. I’d located the talisman and activated it, and as Gunner was ferried off across the veil, I looked up. I saw the bomb. Up close and personal. A device roughly the size of my torso, with a rectangular, metallic black casing an
d a set of magic lights notched into the outer edges…

  The revelation smacked me in the face so hard I almost jolted all my broken bones.

  That’s it. That’s the detail that doesn’t fit. The bomb design isn’t right.

  That particular bomb had gone through three design iterations before we shelved it. The last redesign resulted in a bomb that was roughly the size of an average man’s head. It was lightweight, blended in with the rest of our raid gear, and could be planted just about anywhere inside a building.

  It was that design that had ended up in the blueprints we’d secured inside the vault at Watchdog HQ, while the specs for the previous iterations were trashed due to critical design flaws. Flaws that would’ve resulted in issues like premature detonation and unpredictable payloads.

  If we had a spy in the inner circle, they would’ve given Vianu the final design specs; they wouldn’t have risked giving faulty plans to a vampire lord with a penchant for holding grudges. But the bomb on the basement wall of Bowler and Sons didn’t match the final design. It matched the first design instead.

  There was only one place outside Watchdog HQ where the blueprints for that first design had made an appearance: at a City Hall meeting between the Watchdog founders and the fae government, including McCullough’s contingent. A meeting that had taken place over five months ago. At the time, Project Watchdog was just starting to find its legs, but McCullough, ever the demanding asshole, had ordered us to give a thorough presentation about the organization’s plans for combating the vampire scourge.

  Back then, Watchdog R&D had literally been eight people working in a closet. But they’d done their best to whip up a bunch of prototype designs for their theoretical anti-vampire weapons and defenses. Almost all of these designs had later been scrapped, but they looked good enough on paper to convince our sídhe overlords to give us the resources we needed to make Project Watchdog flourish.

  And when I said “on paper,” I meant that literally. McCullough had demanded a physical report he could review independently after the meeting, to double-check we hadn’t duped him in some fashion. I’d provided one under the condition that it be destroyed no more than six hours after the meeting. I’d embedded a time-delayed self-destruct spell in each and every paper in the report to make sure nothing fell into the wrong hands. I’d also added every anti-spying spell I could think of, so that Vianu and friends couldn’t use magic to sneak a peek at our tactics while the report still existed.