by Peter Hartog
We stood across from one another, a human and a Vellan. Despite her greater height, she looked diminished, a fragment of the vibrant creature I’d come to know over the past few days. What the future held for her, I had no idea.
And right now, I really didn’t care.
“Then I guess this is goodbye.”
“Indeed,” the Vellan said. She walked back to the window, hands behind her.
Conflicting emotions warred in my chest. There were so many things I wanted to say, but each one of them led to a different kind of madness. And I was just too damn tired. Instead, I removed the wine bottle I had kept inside my blazer. I studied it, noting the dark liquid inside, and the secrets it contained. Placing it carefully on the table, I made my way to the elevator without another word.
The door opened at my approach, spilling soft white light into the foyer.
“Guardian,” Besim called out.
I didn’t answer.
“Tom?”
Her voice was hollow and distant, bereft of its customary resonance and depth. About as far apart as our two worlds.
I hesitated, then stepped into the elevator.
“Thank you,” she said.
The door closed behind me.
THE END
Epilogue
Alan Arthur Azyrim pondered his reflection in the window. He was an imposing man, with thick, dark hair and a double widow’s peak flecked with silver. However, it was to Azyrim’s eyes that most were drawn. One blue patterned with gold, and the other amber rimmed in gray, his heterochromia was unique to anywhere, and not just Empire City. The blue called to mind the deep oceans of the world, an unclaimed vastness the depths of which had never been fully explored. The amber was savage, the feral light of an unbound predator, its iris refracting the light.
Some claimed each eye bore a mind of its own. One brightened while the other dimmed in response to Azyrim when he laughed or grew angry. And some whispered of a third eye, hidden from the waking world, possessed of an unnatural sorcery, which might explain his company’s unprecedented success. Financial pundits always bet on Azyrim Technologies. When Azyrim bought, the market followed. And where Azyrim sold, unemployment lines swelled.
His was the tallest building in Empire City, dominating two blocks of the most sought-after real estate in the enclave. Azyrim Technologies employed thousands, maintaining satellite offices in all the major enclaves around the globe. The man himself was a fixture in the news, attending or hosting enclave fundraisers and upper crust social gatherings. He dated fashion models, athletes, and holo-stars. Whether cutting ribbons at the newest medical center he built or advocating support for the enclave’s war against drugs and child prostitution, Azyrim had secured himself a place as one of the most influential people in Empire City.
“Orders, my Lord,” Reaper One stated, static accompanying the words.
“Patience,” Azyrim replied in a voice deep and rich, full of a resonance and timbre that some found musical, and others intoxicating. Tall and strong, Azyrim’s broad, tanned face was accentuated by a full mouth accustomed to laughter.
He wasn’t laughing now.
“Truthseeker,” Azyrim called.
A sleek, black table made of glass sprawled behind him. Light bled into its surface swallowed by the darkness. The piece was large enough to seat two dozen, yet only thirteen chairs surrounded it. It was an antique by all standards, lacking any of the puritan lines and rounded edges of modern technology. To the casual observer, the table bore neither blemish nor scar, and seemed perfect in every way.
But Azyrim knew better. He had discovered its weak point. A gossamer, thin thread, the faintest of cracks, that ran through its center.
An imperfection.
A flaw.
His lips curled in a tight sneer at the memory of how the crack came to be.
Something on its surface flared to life. Sapphire lettering skittered across in straight lines. He didn’t turn from the window.
What is it that you desire?
“Reveal to me their words,” he commanded.
As you wish.
“Do you have any idea why Orpheus was involved in all this?” a girl asked, her youthful voice projecting into the room as if she were standing in the office with him.
“Not this,” Azyrim growled, irritated. “Forward.”
“Patricia Sullinger has been sent to Vellas,” a woman said.
Her voice contained an intricate tonal quality and complex inflection intimating layers of meaning that would be lost on most human ears.
But not his.
“Forward,” Azyrim scowled, crossing his arms while raising a hand to stroke his chin.
“Without this formula, Patricia will die,” the same voice said. “And thus far, I have been unable to replicate it.”
“Pause,” he said.
Azyrim’s blue eye glittered as his mind worked. A search of the Wrigley-Boes warehouse in Hoboken had revealed nothing. Blakely’s other safeholds were much the same. The wretch had cleaned house. Azyrim held little doubt that his people dispatched to recover the data had been thorough. Their lives depended on such things. Blakely had either kept the research on his person or destroyed it. With nothing of value gained, and nowhere else to search, the warehouse and Blakely’s other nests had burned.
As had Blakely himself, although not by Azyrim’s hand.
“Why not tell them the whole truth?” a new voice asked. This time, a man, the one he had seen through the golem’s eyes before it was destroyed. His was all-too-human, but within the weft of his voice, something else.
Something old, and familiar.
“Forward,” he ordered again.
A memory niggled at the edge of his consciousness, a fragment from a distant sun he had buried long ago.
“She haunts my dreams, and is my greatest loss, and greatest shame,” the woman’s voice said. “I do not wish to share it. With anyone.”
“End,” he said, the words laced with contempt.
As you wish.
His blue eye closed. Angry amber glared at his reflection. Suffused with fury, this eye imagined a world ravaged by fire. He suppressed the desire, crushing it behind a will that would not be denied. The amber eye closed, reluctant, like a stubborn child.
“She is lost, then,” Azyrim muttered. “Another solution must be found.”
He exhaled, resisting the urge to shatter the window with a glance. He laced his fingers behind his back.
The blue eye opened.
“Reaper One, status,” he said.
“We are in position, my Lord,” Reaper One replied. The faint hum of rushing air interrupted the transmission. “Terminate?”
“Withdraw,” Azyrim growled.
He was unaccustomed to the bitter taste in his mouth. For a moment, he imagined another place, on a different world. There, those who opposed him had met their fiery end, but not before allowing others to escape his wrath. Something splintered in his mind’s eye, the cracking of sapphire, the glitter of emerald, the sparkle of ruby, the depthless swirl of onyx.
“My Lord?” Reaper One asked.
There would be a reckoning.
But not today.
“Withdraw,” Azyrim repeated, his calm restored. “The Guardian has returned, and with it, the Game has changed.”
He turned away from the window.
“Well played, sister. Well played.”
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Acknowledgments
The long and winding road has finally reached its end. It took a village, and I’m very fortunate mine tolerated its idiot. From Arlen, Christopher (the real Deacon), Dan, Derek, Michele (the real Leyla), Nigel and Thomas, who were my beta readers, and provided me with essential feedback while I shaped the story and characters into something that made sense. To Mook, for his first round of copy and line edits of the manuscript. To the incomparable Liz Heijkoop at ARC Editing, who did a tremendous job pointing out all the major flaws in story, characters and structure, and transformed BLOODLINES into the story it is today. To the Brandeis Connection of Jon and Scott, for educating me about dialysis, Latin phrases and the other religion. To Lance Buckley for his incredible re-imagining of the book cover. So many thanks go to Christopher, Michelle, Sean, Scott and Wendy, who allowed me to breathe life into our role-playing misadventures, something that has spanned the decades, and without whom I wouldn’t have had the inspiration to write this novel today. And last, but never least, to my wife Traci, who still puts up with my constant soul-searching, and the long days of doubt and self-pity. She reminded me I do have talent, and that Tom Holliday’s story needed to be told.
Also by Peter Hartog
Detective Tom “Doc” Holliday and the Special Crimes Unit will return in
PIECES OF EIGHT (Book Two of the Guardian of Empire City Series)
Find it here: Mybook.to/PiecesOfEight
In the UK: my book.to/PiecesOfEightUK
Read on for a preview.
And available NOW!
Copyright © 2021 by Peter Hartog
Pieces of Eight
The red and blue flare of emergency and law enforcement illuminated the scene as the pod settled to a stop. EVI fed the chatter of the onsite personnel through the internal comm system, but it was background noise to me.
I stared out the window at a massive stone edifice, its tall walls alit with the scurrying shadows from the activity below. The Holy Redeemer Church hunkered along Brighton Beach Avenue within a few blocks of the waterfront. Made of thick wood and solid stone, its origin hearkened back to the late nineteenth century, and held a storied reputation in the surrounding community for its educational, social and religious outreach programs.
I’d grown up several blocks from the church. Despite my mixed religious heritage, the Redeemer had been a safe harbor for me, one of the few places where I’d felt welcome. Back then, my education choices were limited. There were no active synagogues in Brighton Beach, or many other neighborhoods throughout Empire City for that matter. Those had shut down decades ago from rampant antisemitism and both the half-hearted and futile attempts by local authorities to combat it. Eventually, a lack of funds coupled with disinterest from a dwindling and fearful Jewish population made any brick-and-mortar institution a thing of the past.
But thanks to my grandfather’s job as the Redeemer’s gardener and custodian, I had attended the church’s parochial school. The church was also the home of Father John Davis, a man who had helped shape the paths of hundreds of families over the years, including my own. I’d always known him as Father Jack. To me, he wasn’t just a teacher. He was family, something that I’d had in short supply throughout my life.
I shrugged on my blazer and stormed from the hatchway into the brittle morning, making a beeline for the main entrance. Despite the cold and the early hour, several uniformed officers had created a cordon to keep the gawkers and media swarm at bay. EVI registered me with the attendance log, but I flashed my silver SCU badge at one of the officers. The strange, ambient glow it produced shrouded me in an argent nimbus as I passed through the translucent yellow holo-tape ringing the perimeter.
“Captain Mahoney is awaiting you,” EVI announced.
She provided me his location as well as a layout of the church, although I didn’t need the latter. Heart racing, I crossed the entrance broad steps and through the double doors.
A small command center had been established in the vestibule, but I veered sharply to the right, then moved along a broad pillared aisle past the nave toward a flight of steps leading into the basement. The air down here smelled musty and warm, mingled with the sickly-sweet metallic tang of blood. The sounds of activity above were muted by the dense stone of the church.
Mahoney stood in the hallway conversing with a tall, thin man wearing a heavy winter coat. My heart unclenched at the sight of them.
“Detective,” Mahoney said in his gravelly voice. The captain resembled everyone’s grandfather everywhere. He was medium height, with close-cropped white hair and deep crow’s feet around the eyes. A twin to the badge I carried rode on his breast pocket. I nodded at him, then turned my attention to the other man.
“You okay?” I asked.
Father Jack had a widow’s peak at both temples, and salty gray hair. His brown eyes, normally brimming with good-natured humor, were wide and apprehensive.
“No,” he replied. “But I am better than poor Gus in there. He—"
“You should go upstairs,” I interrupted gently. “I’ll be along in a bit.”
I wanted to reach out, provide some sign that everything would be all right. But I couldn’t. Not in front of the captain. Not while I was on the job.
The old pastor was about to protest, then thought better of it, and excused himself. I watched him go, crushing my roiling emotions in favor of the need to be dispassionate and professional.
“What do we have?” I asked.
“The room’s clean,” Mahoney began. “Dispatch contacted me after Father Davis made the nine-one-one. The description was, well, you’ll see for yourself. I’ve appropriated it, Tom. I knew you’d want to be here.”
Mahoney’s voice faded as I moved past him to study the room beyond.
I hadn’t noticed the Insight’s presence until now. The magic seethed around my eyes, its effect tingeing everything I saw with its silver haze. I’d been told the fickle clairvoyance was a living magic of an ancient order, but I still had no idea where it came from. It also represented a destiny I refused to accept. Because I kept telling myself that I lived in the real world, and not some fairytale where the concepts of good and evil were living, tangible things.
Then I joined SCU, uncovered an ancient magical conspiracy orchestrated by a mysterious woman named Orpheus, and destroyed a shadow parasite with consecrated bullets that had never been consecrated. I tried not to dwell on that, or Besim, the individual who had clued me in on my unwanted destiny in the first place.
Grinding my teeth, I focused on the present. My vision responded to the Insight’s magic, sharpening with intensity. Everything around me had slowed to a crawl. Dust motes clung to the air, suspended between time. I saw the current of heated air propelled through the vent high on the far wall opposite me, undulating in rhythmic waves. I knew the thread count on the old sheets of the twin bed just by glancing at them.
The room was simple—bed, footlocker, closet, virtual workstation, chair. One thin window ran horizontally along the upper wall, barred and secured from the outside. Nothing adorned the walls, other than an eggshell coat that had been applied within the past six months.
“Jesus Christ,” I swore quietly.
The body slumped in the chair, arms and legs splayed wide. Blood stained the floor, covering the walls, the ceiling, the workstation, behind the open door and the bed. I couldn’t get too close without stepping in any of it, although my preternatural senses were already swimming in the stuff.
“Stentstrom’s arrived,” Mahoney announced, breaking me from my trance.
“Good,” I said absently. My eyes shifted f
rom the corpse back to the desk.
The workstation was active. A darkened holo-window floated dormant above it. An open book lay atop the desk, but no holo-picture frames or other personal items.
I needed to get in there.
“Who’s our vic?” I asked.
“Gustavo Sanarov,” the captain replied. The name meant nothing to me, but something in the captain’s voice drew my attention. “He was the soup kitchen super for the church. Father Davis said he’d only been staying with them until he could get back on his feet.”
I nodded, and as I did so, the Insight evacuated from me in a rush. I staggered against the doorframe. Bill stepped forward, but I waved him away. He watched me with wintry eyes. I was about to ask him a question when a sing-song voice greeted me.
“Ah, Detective Holliday!” gushed Doctor Gilbert Stentstrom, chief medical examiner for Empire City.
The skinny little man was covered head to foot in a bulky white overcoat, gloves and matching ushanka with the earflaps down. He carried a steel briefcase. A sticker was affixed at an angle on one side displaying a symbol of two poodle heads back-to-back, one black and the other white, with the tagline “Loud and proud member of the PC of EC”.
Stentstrom was the only other person inside ECPD that knew the specifics about Special Crimes. I’d known him years before when I was a cadet at the academy. He was one of the good guys, brilliant with just the right dose of crazy.
I filled him in on what little I knew. His bulbous eyes widened with interest.
“Good,” the medical examiner enthused. “With all the garden-variety murders that have come through my office lately, it will be refreshing to work on something with meat on the bone! No pun intended, of course.”
“Um, sure,” I remarked, my smile faltering.