by S. M. Reine
James sat down. Yasir ibn Omari had two pictures taped to his monitor: the first, a portrait of himself in Marine uniform, and the other of him seated with friends wearing Iranian army uniforms. The second photo gave off a strong sense of camaraderie, of a trusted team, men who would fight and die for one another.
He ripped the picture off so he wouldn’t have to look at it.
James searched through the database. This commander appeared to have limited security credentials; records pertinent to Malcolm’s arrest came up “locked.” He ran queries on other keywords, searching for anything that might tip him off to Malcolm’s location. Punching in the room number only yielded another locked record.
Yasir might not have had access to arrest records, but he did have access to the general Union news feed, which occupied the right sidebar. And an item on the feed caught James’s eye just when he was about to give up searching: “Former Commander Malcolm Gallagher Transferred to Italy Headquarters.”
He clicked through and skimmed the article. In two terse paragraphs, it explained that Malcolm had been tried for sedition and found guilty. Now he was being transferred to Italy to serve his sentence.
“Hell,” he muttered.
James couldn’t let the Union take Malcolm out of the country.
He was just logging off when a reminder flashed on the desktop. Yasir ibn Omari was meant to guard a hall in the southern building from sixteen hundred hours until midnight—a hallway labeled “the Vault.”
The chill of shock settled over him like the icy spray of a frozen waterfall.
James had listened in on Union men discussing the Vault while they patrolled in Fallon. He knew what it was, and what kind of treasures it held.
He typed a short query into the database, and her name came up. It wasn’t a locked record. There was no reason to protect the secrets of corpses.
But she was there. She was in deep freeze.
Which meant that her killer would be there, too.
A ruckus in the hallway snapped him out of his reverie. James noted the freezer number and pressed his back to the wall beside the door. He watched through a crack as a pair of women ran past. They were shouting about an unconscious man they had found in the locker room.
James slipped into the hall and headed downstairs. He glimpsed the young commander’s body sagging between the two women as they tried to carry him to the infirmary.
He turned in the opposite direction and walked calmly away.
Inside, his heart was pounding.
Once James knew what was waiting for him in the Vault, he felt drawn toward it by unseen hands. He drifted through the base, invisible in his uniform, oblivious to the chaos surrounding him.
Voices buzzed on Yasir ibn Omari’s earpiece. Control was panicking. All of the security cameras had gone dead—not just those in his cell, but those around the perimeter, too. They believed it to be his doing. Allyson Whatley’s name wasn’t mentioned even once.
He wondered how much they would panic if they knew that Allyson was the one messing with their security system.
The Vault was in the basement of the main building. The only way to access it was via an endless concrete tube, lit every few feet by bare light bulbs. It was a place of death, cold and hostile and empty.
With all of the manpower directed to the surface, there was nobody to stop him on the long walk.
But the endless hallway did eventually end.
James peered around the corner to see a Union kopis standing in front of a steel door. He was playing on his cell phone with the rifle slung over his shoulder—he’d be easy to drop. But James didn’t need to attack when he was dressed as a commander.
He strode around the corner, imagining himself with the air of intimidation that Elise carried like armor. “What are you doing?” James demanded.
Guilt struck the kopis’s features. He tried to hide the phone behind his back. “What? What are you talking about?” He chuckled nervously.
“Your shift is over. Report to Zettel.”
The laughter turned to a quick intake of breath. “But…”
“Now.”
The kopis rushed down the hall, leaving James alone with a very large steel door.
Pushing up his sleeve, James twisted his arm to look for a particular spell. There was a fireball waiting on the inside of his elbow, a great wind on his forearm, and instant death at his bicep. The unlocking charm was near his wrist.
James touched the spell. The ink burned like a brand pressed to his flesh.
The lock clicked.
He entered a cavern of stainless steel. Rows of refrigerators filled the room, labeled only by incident number—like a cold, gloomy library occupied by the dead. The Union had been busy lately; almost every slot was filled.
The ink had vanished from his wrist, leaving an angry red burn in its place. He hadn’t been able to figure out how to avoid those burns yet. He also hadn’t been able to figure out how to make the ink stay on his body so he could use the spells again. Hopefully, none of the refrigerators would be locked.
James pulled his sleeve over the burn and stepped through the aisles.
The air grew colder as he moved through the aisles deeper into the room. The only light came from the eerie glow of the status lights on each drawer, like fireflies that had died without putting their lights out.
When he reached the seventh row, he knew that he had found her. He could feel it.
James stood in front of a wall of drawers, trying to decide which one he wanted. Three of them were labeled with the same incident number, but their windows were iced over so that he couldn’t see inside.
He opened the first drawer. The light turned red, and a chill fog sighed out the sides of the door.
Pale feet emerged first, and then slender legs, narrow hips, and an impressively proportioned organ that made the body’s sex immediately obvious. James’s eyes widened a fraction despite himself.
Well, that must have been Yatam. His body had been severed into two parts at the waist, and the Union had piled his organs between the segments. It was a mess of freezer-burned meat caked with ichor.
He didn’t care about that body. He slid the drawer shut again.
Two to go.
He knew who was inside the second drawer the moment that he opened it. James recognized those feet. He had bandaged her blisters and massaged the muscles when she was sore. He continued to pull the drawer out, and he saw the familiar shape of her thighs, the bony spur of a hip.
Stop. Don’t look at her.
Yet he couldn’t resist the urge to continue extending the table.
Elise never looked at peace when she was sleeping, and she didn’t look peaceful now, either. Her head was slumped against her shoulder. Her face looked sunken; her skin was gray.
He didn’t pay attention to the mortal wounds marking her flesh. He only saw ice crusting her auburn curls, her frosted eyelashes, blue lips.
James sank to his knees beside her, folding his hands in front of his face.
One arm was placed next to her body, palm-up, glove off. There was no ethereal mark on her skin. She had taken that with her when she died. The other arm terminated at the elbow, and the bone jutted an inch beyond her ragged flesh.
His fingers trembled as he curled them around her remaining hand.
James remembered holding her hand as they ran together, fleeing enemies, pursuing others. He remembered her hand curled into a fist, striking at demons.
He remembered her hand snaking between their bodies, seeking out the warmth of bare flesh beneath his belt. The burn of her lips against his. The low groans she had made as she pulled him tight against her, so close that they might have been one entity.
But that was a different body. A different life.
James released her hand and straightened. Even dead, even frozen in perpetual anger, Elise was beautiful.
He pressed his lips against her forehead. Her skin still carried the faint musk of her sweat.
Guilt remained lodged firmly in his throat as he turned to open the third and final drawer.
The woman inside looked very much like Yatam. Her sexual characteristics were just as pronounced as her brother’s. She had the kind of hips and breasts that would have been well suited to ancient fertility statues: a gently curved lower belly, huge breasts, a small waist.
Yatai also had an angel’s wing at her back, hanging lopsidedly from one shoulder. As he pulled the drawer out the rest of the way, it flopped off of the table, limp and lifeless. The feathers were tattered.
It wasn’t the only stolen appendage. One hand was a different color than the rest of her body. It had scarred knuckles, a bony wrist, and a black mark tattooed on the center of the palm. Elise had spent so long trying to hide those marks that it was strange to see one of them so casually exposed.
James took the razor out of his pocket, turning it over in his fingers as he contemplated that mark. The wicked edges glinted in the dim light of the Vault.
The anger he felt at seeing Yatai with Elise’s hand was as powerful as his guilt.
Yatai had killed Elise. That demon was the reason that James’s kopis no longer had red hair, peach skin, and freckles. Yatai had stolen her hand, bled the life from her body, and left her to rot.
James kneeled by the table. He lifted the human wrist and peeled back the fingers.
And then he began to cut.
6
Zane St. Vil had been through worse weeks than this one, but not many.
He couldn’t keep up with the doctors when they rattled off a laundry list of his injuries: minor fractures, major fractures, lesions, concussion. None of those fancy words meant anything to him.
When he got back to base, they said that they were going to move him to HQ in Montana, where they had the best medical care. They also said he would get some kind of commendation for helping to arrest James Faulkner.
Whatever.
None of that bullshit changed the fact that Faulkner had fucked with him, and Zane wasn’t a guy that liked to be fucked with.
He thought a lot on the ride out to HQ. There wasn’t much else he could do while strapped to a backboard, of course, but all the thinking was a novel experience anyway. Mostly, Zane contemplated all the things he’d do to that bastard as soon as he got a chance.
Witchdoctors received him when the helicopter set down in Montana. Zane signed a flier, and they cast some kind of weird voodoo over him.
He slept a lot. He had nightmares—more than usual.
When he woke up again, the backboard and splints were gone, and he could stand up to take a piss. The witches said that blood in his urine was normal. He felt dizzy watching the red-tinged fluids swirl down the drain of the urinal.
By the time he got back to bed, there was a personalized letter from Gary Zettel thanking him for his service, folded nicely underneath a medal. A medal . Like a gold star for effort.
Zane tossed both of them in the trash.
There was only one prize he wanted in thanks for his “honorable service”: James Faulkner’s severed dick on a platter.
“Did they get him?” Zane asked Spencer, who had gotten a photocopy of the same letter that Zane did. Of course they had stuck him in a room with that fat bastard. The Union had a sick sense of humor.
“You mean the witch in Fallon?” Spencer asked. He was polishing his medal with the corner of a bed sheet.
“No, the fucking Easter Bunny.”
“I heard that he’s being detained here. The witch, Faulkner—no rabbits that I know about. If you ask me, I’d strongly suspect that they’ll try to recruit him. You saw what he does. We could use that.”
Zane was about as hot on the idea of recruiting Faulkner as he was on the idea of the “good job” medal. But Faulkner was on base. That made Zane’s job a lot easier.
He got out of bed, using his IV pole for support.
“What are you doing?” Spencer asked, glancing nervously around the room like he expected Zettel to appear and court-martial both of them on the spot.
“It’s rabbit season,” Zane said, staggering for the door.
That was when the alarms went off.
Every door in the hospital ward swung shut, and Zane was moving too slowly to get out in time. His fists battered uselessly against the door.
Spencer hauled his fat ass out of bed, too. “What’s going on?”
Zane’s mind whirled with possibilities. Only one of them seemed to be likely, and it didn’t involve any fluffy-tailed woodland creatures.
He watched out the window as units mobilized, pouring from the other buildings in the compound.
“We’ve gotta get out there,” Zane said, opening the cabinets in search of a uniform. He didn’t find anything but a blue bathrobe and slippers. The kind of flimsy crap that was meant to keep him warm in the bathroom, not outside on a wet spring day. Better than going outside with his ass hanging out, though.
“Think about it,” Spencer said. “You’re dragging an IV pole. What are you going to do, beat someone with it?”
Tempting thought. But he had a point.
So Zane waited, watching through the window and thinking murderous thoughts.
He managed to wait for a good half an hour.
Then he noticed one man walking separately from the others. He wasn’t in formation, and he also wasn’t rushing, even though he was dressed like a Union commander in a uniform that didn’t quite fit.
The last time Zane had seen that face, he had been trying to pump it full of bullets.
James Faulkner.
Zane ripped the IV needle out of his hand. Saline and blood spattered to the floor.
“They would want us to stay,” Spencer said.
“So stay,” Zane said.
He pushed the window open and climbed outside.
The hall outside the Vault was still empty when James left. He took the elevator to the surface and exited the facility through the front door. Nobody stopped him.
James had made plans to get arrested and rescue Malcolm, but it got somewhat hazy at this point. He had a glamor tattooed on one shoulder blade that would disguise him for an hour. If he could get on one of the SUVs heading out—or, better yet, one of the helicopters—he could overpower the driver and steal it. Then he could catch up with Malcolm before he got shipped to Italy.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but he didn’t have any other ideas.
James headed for the front gate, hands in his pockets, head down. He passed the R&D building, a garage, the medical ward.
There must have been a thousand cameras on the Union base, and if Allyson brought them back online, James was confident that someone would notice that the escaped prisoner was walking around in stolen clothing. But the cameras must have stayed offline, because nobody looked twice at him.
He slipped his hand into the neck of his shirt, searching for the glamor spell on his scapula.
The squelch of footsteps on damp grass behind him caught his attention. “It is you,” said a man. He was a young skinhead with bulging eyes. Zane St. Vil—the kopis that had shot James at the Fallon motel.
So much for the quiet escape.
He shoved St. Vil into the shadows behind the medical ward. “Be quiet!” James hissed.
St. Vil began to shout wordlessly, trying to attract attention. His eyes bulged dangerously from his skull.
James punched him across the face. St. Vil dropped. More importantly, he shut up.
But it was too late to avoid notice.
“You don’t disappoint, that’s for sure,” a woman said.
James turned. The space behind the medical building was empty. It looked like some kind of training field, which had become a mud pit after the recent rain. The guards that were swarming the front gates were nowhere in sight.
Allyson Whatley watched f
rom the shadows behind the ward. Her arms were folded, and a spark of smug pleasure lit her face.
James extended his hands to show that they were empty. “You disabled the cameras so I could escape, didn’t you?”
“I can’t admit to that,” Allyson said.
She drew a pistol with a magical rune stamped on the side. It buzzed with power.
“Shoot him,” St. Vil said from the ground.
“Shut up,” she said. She returned her attention to James. “Empty your pockets.”
He tossed Yasir’s badge to the ground, along with the bloodied razor. He didn’t need either of those anymore. But he left Elise’s plastic-wrapped skin in his pocket—Allyson would have to kill him to get that.
“The Union has two lists: first priority and second priority,” Allyson said. “The latter, we want to arrest, detain, interview. The former, we are authorized to execute at the first sign of trouble. You’re on the first priority list, Faulkner.”
With his hands still raised, James touched a finger to his neck. “Then shoot me,” he said, feeling for the mark that he had drawn at the base of his skull.
“Lower your hands,” she said. “Slowly.”
Damn. James obeyed.
“While you were distracted with St. Vil, I activated wards on this patch of lawn,” she went on. “We’re invisible to the naked eye, as well as every camera on base. Nobody will see what’s happening in here from the outside. Nobody will hear anything. We’re alone.”
Which meant that the Union couldn’t intervene in a fight between them.
Allyson was weaker than James, both physically and magically. If she didn’t want the Union to interrupt their fight, then her arrogance was even worse than he expected. Or she knew something he didn’t.
She holstered the gun. “As soon as you’re back in Union custody, you’ll be on the next flight to Italy.”
James stepped to the side. Allyson mirrored him, as though they walked along opposite edges of a disc. St. Vil was still on the ground between them.
“What do you want from me?” James asked.
“Information. What makes you special? Why are you stronger than everyone else?” Her cheeks flushed, eyes wide with hunger. “And how do I take it from you?”