What Dawn Demands

by Clara Coulson

  McCullough had mishandled the report. There was no other explanation. Somehow, after that meeting, McCullough had let the report out of his sight. In his absence, someone had made a copy of it. Maybe he left it on his desk, and a vampire who’d slipped into City Hall quickly made snapshots of the whole report with a camera. Maybe he took it outside City Hall, to his quarters at the temporary barracks, and one of Vianu’s agents gained access to it there and jotted down the most important bits.

  I didn’t know the specifics, and probably never would. But I now knew for certain that McCullough’s incompetence was the reason the lives of so many good, hardworking people had just been flushed down the drain like meaningless waste.

  I’m going to kill that son of a bitch. I’m going to fucking kill him—

  My right leg jerked as my newly re-formed fibula slid back into place.

  —as soon as my six thousand bone shards finish unscrambling themselves.

  I pressed my bruised cheek against the wet floor and sighed deeply.

  Can this day get any worse?

  As if some omnipotent god was playing a prank on me, the moment after I asked myself that question, I heard the sound of approaching footsteps. Someone in this hellhole had finally decided to check and see if I was alive. When whoever it was found I still had a pulse, I’d either be killed on the spot or dragged to Abarta for a tortuous end.

  Cursing under my breath, I made one attempt to stand. I didn’t even reach a sitting position before my back gave out on me and I flopped back onto the floor. My ribs and vertebra were too damaged. They couldn’t support my weight.

  The footsteps stopped in front of the cell door, a hefty metal panel slotted into one of the stone walls. There were a few brief flashes of magic energy as the person deactivated the wards, and then came the sound of a key being jimmied into a lock. Finally, the door began to swing open, inch by creeping inch, a widening sliver of dim hallway light spilling into the dark cell.

  I was about half a second away from lashing out with what little magic I could muster, when the person entering the room called out, “Yo, Whelan, you alive in there?”

  The vaguely familiar voice didn’t sound like it belonged to a person who planned to kill me. And as the door swung all the way open, revealing the silhouette of a man whose shape and size I remembered well, whose billowing cloak was etched firmly in my memory, I realized my chances of dying in the immediate future had dropped all the way to fifty-fifty. Either this man was here under orders to reluctantly drag me to the feet of his vampire father, or he was here of his own free will to let me go.

  Drake the dhampir stepped into the cell and scrunched his nose. “Ugh, it smells like a day-old feeding frenzy in here.” His gaze swept the room until it landed on my crumpled form near the wall. “Oh, that explains it.”

  I kept a close eye on him but didn’t respond to his running commentary.

  He meandered across the cell, checking out the cracks in the wall left behind by my collision, and squatted beside me. “Damn. You half-sídhe really can take a beating, can’t you? If a human lost this much blood, they’d be toast already.”

  He tapped his foot in the red puddle that had spread nearly three feet from my body, only to hit something obscured by the blood. Curious, he plucked the object off the floor and held it up to the beam of light cast through the door. It was a piece of my helmet.

  “So, what?” he said. “Your SWAT gear saved your ass?”

  I remained silent, waiting for him to get to his spiel. He always had a spiel.

  Drake frowned at my lack of response to his friendly jabs. “You want me to get to the point of my visit, don’t you?”

  I raised my eyebrow. At least I thought I did. It was hard to tell with a chunk of my goggles still embedded in my forehead.

  “You could be a bit more amiable, you know? I am here to save your life after all.” He tossed the jagged piece of plastic aside and rummaged around for something in his pants pocket, eventually tugging out a small metal flask. When he unscrewed the cap, a flowery scent wafted out, mixed with hints of citrus and something very bitter.

  “I brought some good juice and everything,” Drake added for emphasis, shaking the flask and sloshing the contents around. “A few sips of this will fix you right up.”

  “Very generous of you,” I spoke at last. My words sounded like they’d been run through a meat grinder, thanks to my damaged vocal cords. “Good healing potions don’t come cheap.”

  “No, they do not. My wallet’s still crying from this one.” He held the flask out to me. “You need help taking a swig?”

  “I can manage, but…” I eyed the flask skeptically. “This come with strings attached?”

  Drake scoffed. “Of course it does. I want the fae off my ass, man. Clean slate.”

  “You’re a dhampir necromancer. The fae are always going to hold a grudge, even if I manage to quash any formal charges against you for aiding an enemy of the sídhe. Which is a big if in and of itself, given how little political pull I have in the courts.”

  “Grudges I can handle. It’s writs of execution by the queens that freak me out.” He gave me a lopsided smile, one of his small fangs peeking out. “And I’m not expecting you to be a miracle worker, by any means. I’m just expecting you to try on my behalf. Because I didn’t sign up for a war against the sídhe. I didn’t sign up to enslave humanity. I didn’t sign up for any of this shit, as I’m sure you recall from our last conversation.”

  Our last conversation had taken place three months back, when Drake and I coincidentally crossed paths while I was patrolling one of Kinsale’s industrial sectors after an informant reported possible vampire activity in the area. I spotted the dhampir in an abandoned lumberyard, grabbing a bite—of a regular meal, not a person-shaped one—and got the drop on him. We scuffled for a few minutes, blasting the lumberyard to hell, before I got the upper hand and prepared to ram an ice spike through his skull.

  The fear of impending death loosened Drake’s lips, and over the course of sixty seconds, he spilled his entire life story. Which turned out to be so sad I actually elected not to kill him.

  The short of it was that dhampirs, due to a biological quirk, were immune to vampire venom and compulsion. This made vampires uneasy because someone with vampire-based abilities who couldn’t be controlled was a liability. Therefore, they magically bound each dhampir at birth with an old and powerful spell that forced the dhampir to commit ten major acts on behalf of their father.

  These “owed” acts were called debts, and they were physically represented with tattoo-like marks on a dhampir’s back. When a dhampir fulfilled a debt, one of the marks disappeared. When all ten debts were fulfilled, the spell automatically lifted and couldn’t be reapplied.

  Theoretically, this setup meant that dhampirs could eventually escape from vampire servitude. In practice, however, the erasure of the last debt mark usually coincided with a dhampir’s murder at their own father’s hands.

  Drake had spent his whole life planning his escape from Vianu, but before he could bring that plan to fruition, he’d had to fulfill his debts. If he’d tried to escape before the spell dissolved, his disobedience would’ve triggered a failsafe, and he would’ve spontaneously caught fire and burned to death. The same thing would’ve happened if he’d attempted to defy any of the orders that Vianu laid on him using the binding spell. So Drake hadn’t been lying to me when he said he had no choice but to be the big bad necromancer and set his zombie army on Kinsale. Because his only other option was a painful death.

  Now sure, I could’ve faulted him for choosing his own life over the lives of countless others, could’ve decided his status as a necromancer under vampire employ simply made him too dangerous, could’ve rammed that ice spike through his skull and eliminated any chance Drake had of being a threat to Kinsale again in the future. But that day, when I had him pinned to the ground, the tip of my ice spike pressed to his skin, when I looked into his citrine eyes wide with fear
and self-loathing, looked at the pain of a life lived in chains etched deeply into his face, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to end him.

  He was just a kid. A kid who’d lived his whole life under Vianu’s thumb. A vampire’s tool.

  The least I could do was give him a chance to redeem himself, right?

  And what a glorious idea that turned out to be, I thought as I reached up with a hand sporting three broken fingers and grabbed the flask of healing potion. Contrary to Unseelie beliefs, mercy does have a place in the world.

  “I have an influential contact in the Unseelie Court.” I brought the flask to my lips. “I’ll see if I can get him to nudge M-A-B to cancel the bounty that got put on your head after the zombie invasion. That won’t legally absolve you of all the crimes you committed at Vianu’s behest, but as long as you keep your head down from now on, you won’t have any fae actively pursuing you.”

  Drake let out a sigh of relief. “I guess that’s a fair trade.”

  I tipped the flask toward him, a mock toast, and chugged the contents down. The slushy brew tasted like some kind of herbal tea mixed with bitter medicine, and it left a faint tingle of magic on my tongue. About ten seconds after it settled in my gut, an intense sensation of warmth spread outward from my abdomen until it engulfed me head to toe, and a dense sweat broke out across my skin. A wave of nausea rolled up my throat, and I bit my tongue to stop myself from projectile vomiting.

  The most effective potions always have the worst side effects, I reassured myself. This one’s going to be good.

  And it was indeed an excellent healing potion.

  All the spells woven into the liquid hit me at once, not unlike the way a speeding train would hit a car stalled on the tracks. My every broken body part lurched back into its proper place simultaneously and instantly fused with its appropriate neighbors. Every bone shard. Every organ shred. Every tendon string. All of them triggering my tenderized nerves at the exact same time.

  I didn’t remember screaming, but I must have let out a sound loud enough to break glass. Because when I came down from the most intense second of pain that it was possible for a person to experience without losing their marbles, Drake was sitting on his ass in my blood puddle with his fingers stuffed in his ears, grimacing. One of his little fangs had nicked his bottom lip, and a small bead of blood welled up and dribbled down his chin.

  His tongue poked out and swiped the blood away before he said, “You, uh, done shrieking?”

  Rolling over onto my back, echoes of pain still bouncing through my bones, I replied, “What, you didn’t like my banshee impression?”

  “I’ve heard better.” He chuckled dryly.

  “I bet.”

  Drake rose in a smooth motion and examined his pants and cloak, both of which were now soaked with my blood. This didn’t seem to bother him much, which wasn’t surprising. He’d grown up in a vampire coven. Copious amounts of blood came with the territory.

  “We should get going pretty soon,” he said as he wrung out the wet hem of his cloak. “The guard shift in this dungeon changes once an hour, and when the next batch comes in, they’ll find the mess I left at the entrance and raise the alarm. I’d prefer to avoid fighting my way out of this place. It’s got cramped hallways. Lots of bottlenecks. Ancient architecture that’s not super stable.”

  “Sounds like one of Abarta’s typical hideouts.” I tested all my fingers and toes. Ghosts of pain radiated from all my joints, but everything moved like it was supposed to. “What realm are we in?”

  “Tír na nÓg. But this place isn’t part of the main landmass. It’s some weird underground cavern. It’s got a name, but I can’t remember it. Maige something?”

  Startled, I sat up, wincing as another bolt of pain shot down my spine. “Maige Mell?”

  Drake scratched his head. “No, not that one. A different plain. Some really, really old plain that predates the Tuatha, where a great battle took place at the dawn of civilization in Tír na nÓg…or something like that. Vianu spewed a whole history lesson about the place when we visited Abarta’s crew here a few months ago, but he spoke in such a condescending way that I didn’t really pay attention.” He gave me a sheepish look. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. As long as it’s not Maige Mell.” I rolled an ounce of tension out of my shoulders. “Though I am curious about how you knew I was in this ‘old plain.’ Last time we spoke, you said, and I quote, ‘Vianu never tells me important shit because he knows I’m not loyal.’”

  “And I wasn’t lying.” Drake backtracked three steps, leaving bloody footprints on the floor. “Thing is, Vianu loves to gloat. So after the bombs went off in Kinsale—which I didn’t know about ahead of time, by the way—he kept on monologuing about his ‘great triumph’ against you and the Watchdogs. At one point, he let it slip that you’d been targeted by an intercept spell in the void and sent here for ‘additional punishment.’”

  It took me three tries, but I managed to brace my hands against the cracked wall and haul my trembling body to my feet. The potion-accelerated healing had totally zapped what little energy I’d had left. But I didn’t have time to nap away the fatigue. I had to return to Kinsale as soon as possible and mitigate whatever damage Vianu was inflicting in my absence. He’d already had almost half a day to wreak havoc.

  “Does Vianu know you escaped?” I asked Drake.

  He rocked back on his feet. “By now? Definitely. Vianu got a sort of mental ping whenever I fulfilled a debt, and I fulfilled the remaining terms of my tenth and final debt while I was on the way here. Vianu tried to make sure I couldn’t do anything like that outside the reach of the coven”—a grin tugged up one side of his mouth—“but I’m not a complete idiot. I managed to get him to present the terms of the tenth task in a way that created a loophole that allowed me to portal out of Kinsale and complete the task in Tír na nÓg.”

  “How very fae like.” I straightened my posture and removed my hands from the wall. I wobbled a bit, but my legs didn’t buckle. I was strong enough to walk, but not much else. “What was the tenth task exactly?”

  His grin wilted. “Can I just…not tell you? Because I feel like you’re starting to warm up to me, and I don’t want to ruin it.”

  I shot him a glare.

  Drake sighed. “I was ordered to ‘ship’ a bunch of people to this place. Very discreetly.”

  “People? The people the coven have recently been kidnapping?”

  He nodded. “About half of those.”

  “I thought they were going to be used as blood slaves.”

  “No. Coven’s got plenty of those already.” He scowled. “Far more than they need.”

  “Then what are the new abductees for? And why did Vianu have you bring some of them here?”

  He looked off into the corner of the dingy cell, guilt shadowing his eyes. “I wasn’t explicitly told, but I’ve grown pretty good at snooping over the years, so I gleaned a bit of information. Abarta’s got some kind of big spell in the works. A game changer, Vianu called it. I don’t know all the specifics, but I do know what the casting involves, because Vianu and a few of the other vamps were chatting about the details yesterday.”

  I reached out with my blood-covered hand and placed two fingers on his chin, forcing him to turn his head back toward me. “What does the casting involve?” I asked, even though I was sure, deep down in my churning gut, that I already knew the answer.

  Drake swallowed thickly and replied in a whisper that traveled no farther than the blood beneath our feet, “It’s a two-step summoning ritual. The first step is meant to be performed in this realm, where the creature being summoned was born. And the second step is meant to be performed on Earth, which is the creature’s ultimate destination. I have no idea what this creature is, but from the construction of the spell, I know it has an awful, voracious appetite…for mortal souls.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “Are you telling me Vianu and Abarta are going to ritually sacrifice some of the citizens a
bducted in Kinsale?”

  “No,” he said solemnly. “I’m telling you they’re going to sacrifice them all.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “What the fuck are they summoning?”

  “Beats me.” Drake gave me a helpless look. “I’m pretty sure Vianu never told anyone about the subject of the summoning, just in case the coven, you know, sprung a leak.” He pointed at himself. “But I can tell you this much: Whatever they’re summoning is hella bad, hella strong, and hella old. Some of the ritual elements are positively ancient, and there’s a lot of dark shit in the mix. Like vivisection dark.”

  I asked over the burning lump of bile in my throat, “When’s the first part of the summoning going down?”

  “Could be anytime now. The first part needs to be completed eighty to ninety minutes before the second, and the second part needs to be completed no more than ten minutes prior to dawn in Kinsale.”

  “So there’s no time to plan an elaborate sabotage.” I shook the remains of my helmet and goggles off my head. “The first part of the ritual is taking place on this plain, right?”

  “Yeah. A few miles north of our current location. Some creepy, overgrown ruins. The exact sort of place you’d expect a god to perform a powerful ritual.” He tipped his chin up at the ceiling. “We’re in an old castle now. Most of the aboveground stuff is nothing but loose stones, but Abarta’s crew restored this basement level, dungeon included, so they could store prisoners and supplies while they were stationed here.”