by Nazri Noor
“What?” Sterling shouted. “No fair. How come he gets to drink from everyone?” He smacked Asher on the shoulder. “And you. Traitor. I never get to drink from you, and now this?”
“Quit whining,” Asher said, his ears going red. And then, softly, he added: “Maybe later.”
Sterling shut up immediately, a pleased, if surprised little smile sealing his lips.
In the end, he didn’t have to give any blood to Scrimshaw after all. It just wasn’t how things worked between demons and vampires, I guess. Carver laughed when I told him it was his turn. I kind of spaced on that. He didn’t have any blood in his system at all. Period. Whatever kept his husk going certainly didn’t qualify as anything organic.
So Scrimshaw took his payment from me, and Gil, and Asher. He said the same thing he did about my blood as the first time: like wine from a gas station. Gil growled in a convincingly predatory manner when Scrimshaw described his blood as gamy. No complaints, unsurprisingly, when it came to Asher’s blood.
“Like champagne,” Scrimshaw said, kissing the tips of his fingers with exaggerated relish. “Delicious.”
Asher blushed, pressing a wad of paper towels against his inner elbow. “Thanks. I guess.”
“Okay now,” I grumbled. “That’s enough.”
“And I mean real champagne,” Scrimshaw added. “Not that Italian sparkling stuff. The real thing. From the source.”
“Okay, we get it,” I snarled. “Go find the people who cast this damn spell already.”
“Right,” Scrimshaw said, somehow managing to carry the entire paper plate loaded with leftovers over his head. “Here I go.”
“Um, Do you want us to keep those for you?” Trust Asher to be as helpful as ever. “We can pop them back in the microwave once you’re done, or – ”
“No need,” Scrimshaw grunted, straining under the weight of all his food. “It won’t take long for me to demolish this.”
I elbowed Asher in the ribs. “He’s not kidding,” I whispered. “I’ve seen what he can do.”
“Be back in a jiff,” Scrimshaw said, shortly before vanishing in a puff of farts.
As an imp, Scrimshaw was technically a demon, but I trusted him enough to do his job and complete his end of the bargain. The problem with commissioning entities and supernatural creatures to gather intel was that there was no telling when they would come back with results.
I packed up the rest of the leftovers, and after turning down the kitchen, we each of us headed to our separate bedrooms for the night. And Carver headed to – well, wherever it was he sat to stare out into empty space while the rest of us got our sleep.
And I truly did believe that I was going to get a good, solid eight hours for once, which I knew I’d need for the challenges that were inevitably going to come. I stripped down to my boxers, brushed my teeth, then slammed myself into bed, getting nice and warm under the covers.
From an adjacent room – Sterling’s, specifically – I heard the muffled strains of characters in a telenovela arguing passionately in Spanish. But Sterling was at least polite about that, keeping things at a volume that made it impossible to make out what anyone was really saying, a low enough level that it nearly passed for my own personal white noise machine.
I couldn’t tell you when I drifted off, exactly, only that I dreamed in Spanish. A woman with heart-shaped lips and an hourglass figure huffed, then slapped a leanly muscled man, striking him across cheekbones sharp enough to cut diamonds. “Hijo de puta,” she screamed, shortly before he grabbed her by the back of her head and began passionately kissing her full on the mouth.
Then the two ridiculously beautiful actors slowly morphed into Prudence and Gil, and my odd, relatively pleasant dream gradually transformed into a nightmare. Not that there’s anything wrong with them kissing, exactly, but who wants to watch their friends make out?
The scene shifted, and suddenly Prudence was carrying a baby. A really ugly one, with a hooked nose, metallic skin that shone like copper, and for some reason, a pair of horns growing out of its head. The baby stared directly at me, and with a frown, it said “Get up, loser.”
And it wouldn’t stop. I sputtered and scratched at my cheeks, annoyed by something that seemed to be fluttering there, which was when I finally realized that I wasn’t dreaming anymore. I opened one eye, staring blearily out of it at Scrimshaw, who was standing triumphantly on my pillow and nudging my cheek.
“Get up, loser,” he said, for maybe the fifth time.
“Jesus, Scrimshaw, I get it,” I moaned, ruffling my hair, hating to be woken up so soon. “What time is it?”
“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that I found the source of the spell.”
I sat bolt upright. Well. That woke me up.
“You did? So quickly?”
“I know, right?” Scrimshaw chuckled, his hands pushed into his waist, his little chest thrust out with pride. He handed me a tiny scroll of parchment that he’d seemingly produced out of nowhere. I took it warily, once again trying my hardest to overlook the fact that he had no pockets or pants to keep things in.
I delicately grasped each end of the scroll between thumb and forefinger and unfurled it. Written in shockingly beautiful cursive script was an address that identified the ritual’s origins as somewhere in the Gridiron, the city of Valero’s industrial district. But something else about the address seemed familiar. I blinked my eyes rapidly, and as the haze of sleep completely wore off, it began to dawn on me.
“Wait. I know this place.”
Chapter 10
Asher narrowed his eyes, his expression twisting into a scowl as he looked up at the house. “We all know this place. It’s the Viridian Dawn.”
It hadn’t taken long for me to round up the rest of the boys. We hopped into a car and headed straight for the Gridiron, all the while arguing that it simply made no sense. The Viridian Dawn couldn’t possibly have gotten back together again, and worse, moved back into the same damn house.
“Why,” Sterling said, rubbing his temples. “And I mean, why would these idiots come back to occupy the same house we raided them in before?”
“Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, maybe?” I shrugged. “Criminals don’t go back to the scene of the crime? Maybe they figured no one would come looking if they moved back in.”
“In a contemptuously idiotic way, it somehow makes sense.” Carver sneered, like he’d just caught a whiff of something that came out of a dog’s backside. “Pitiful miscreants. Who knew that they even possessed enough discipline or magical prowess to perform a ritual to the Eldest?”
I slapped myself in the forehead. “Oh my God. Now it makes sense. Remember, the Lorica arrested their leader, Deirdre. But most of her followers scattered. And remember, she managed to outfit her little army with a bunch of wands and crappy magical devices. Who’s to say she didn’t leave any grimoires lying around?”
A chorus of groans sounded from our strike team. They knew I was right. Deirdre Calloway was the druidic master of the Viridian Dawn, a doomsday cult with a very unusual and very specific objective. They’d originally located and picked Asher up off the street around the time his powers manifested, then kept him locked up in the house that was designated as the Viridian Dawn’s headquarters.
The plan was to use his necromantic power to trigger an overgrowth of vegetation so abrupt and intense that it would choke the very life out of Valero, and turn it into a massive living forest. We managed to stop the Dawn through the combined efforts of the Boneyard and the Lorica. I had the strangest feeling that we would be working with the Lorica very closely for the foreseeable future, and not just to shut down cults composed mostly out of idiot college kids with delusions of grandeur and way too much free time.
“That’s why these losers came back.” It was hard to keep my voice down, but I was getting riled up. “They must have known where Deirdre was keeping her toys. They didn’t need their leader, they just wanted any semblance of power that magic cou
ld give them.”
Gil cracked his knuckles. “So we move in. Smash some heads. We did it once, so we do it again.”
Asher lurched forward, his momentum only stopped when Sterling grabbed the back of his jacket and held on tight. “Let go,” Asher grunted. “Let me at ’em.”
“Not without a plan,” Carver said. One of his eyes pulsed with a dull glow as he stared at the house. I knew what was happening. He was scrying, his very gaze penetrating the walls. That same eye rolled towards me, and Carver gave a little smile. “Mister Graves. Perhaps you’ll enjoy what I have to propose.”
“Fire away,” I said.
Something passed between me and Carver then, a strange sort of understanding that we weren’t going to be as lenient with the Viridian Dawn as the last time. When they were working under Deirdre Calloway’s command, they were inefficient, mere nuisances who thought that magic was fun, that dabbling wasn’t at all dangerous. Times had changed, and clearly, so had Carver’s approach to minimizing human collateral damage.
“Smoke them out,” he said. “Like rodents out of hiding. Be creative. It doesn’t matter how you do it, only that it happens.”
I smiled. “Consider it done,” I said, entering the shadows at my feet to access the Dark Room.
This was going to be easy. I’d already physically been in the Viridian Dawn’s base before, so I knew my way around, which meant less risk of shadowstepping into the wrong place. I rushed through the Dark Room, aiming to emerge in reality in a spot in the house that I knew wouldn’t be occupied: the middle of the staircase.
And just as I suspected, I was right. I crouched to keep myself hidden in the house’s already ambient darkness, clutching at the bannister. From where I stood, I could see maybe a dozen of the Dawn’s cultists gathered on the ground floor, their faces shrouded in hoods, lit only by the flames of so many black candles.
On the ground glistened a circle drawn in blood. In the center of the circle was the carcass of some small animal I couldn’t identify. I didn’t want to. It would only make me angrier. The cultists chanted strange, mangled words in a language I couldn’t recognize, but even without understanding I knew that this prayer was meant to open a gateway. And the audacity, the utter nerve of the Viridian Dawn to experiment with something they couldn’t possibly understand filled my blood with a quiet, humming rage.
See, I knew that my soul was going through some sort of metamorphosis, a transformation that no one, not Carver, not even Hecate could cleanly explain to me. Over time, as I became more comfortable with my power, the darkness that pulsed in my veins grew stronger, taking hold of my head and my heart. I’d learned not long ago that I enjoyed inflicting pain on those who deserved it. I knew in some part of my bones that I enjoyed killing those who deserved it.
And everyone in the Viridian Dawn qualified.
I did nothing to telegraph my presence, not even the cool, smug lines I’d rehearsed so frequently in my head for just such an occasion. I summoned the flames as quickly as I could, hurling a globe of molten fire directly at the center of the ritual circle. It exploded with a crash and a hiss, catching the cultists in the area of effect – and lighting their ceremonial robes on fire, just as I’d hoped. With my other hand I launched a second fireball, directing it at a couch placed right next to a bookcase. Thank you for the kindling, I thought.
As the room filled with screams and with smoke, I sank back into the shadows, unheard and unseen. The Viridian Dawn’s collective cries of anguish rang in my ears, echoes that followed me as I sprinted through the Dark Room. Something bubbled up in my chest as I ran, something like laughter. I let loose, letting the joy spill from my lips, the music of my laughter going dull and numb as it entered the dead air of the Dark Room. I took one last step, my foot hitting the grass outside the Viridian Dawn’s house, landing gracefully.
The dark of night glowed with the brilliant amber of fire, and I turned to reposition myself and appraise my own work. Somewhere behind me, Carver grunted approvingly. Sterling clapped me on the back. Asher nudged me.
“You okay there?” he said, his tone uncertain, his eyes seemingly worried.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said, my eyes locked on the fires licking at the windows, on the front door as I waited for the Viridian Dawn’s survivors to stream out of it. The rats. The rodents.
“I think you’re enjoying this a little too much, Dust,” Asher said.
“Huh?”
He went silent and gestured at my face. I felt at my cheek, the tip of my finger finding the dip of one of my dimples.
I didn’t know I had been smiling.
Chapter 11
The air was thick with smoke. It didn’t take long for the cultists to come screaming out of the building. The smarter ones threw themselves at the lawn, rolling in the grass to smother the flames. The dumber ones ran like headless chickens, directly towards the bushes where we stayed hidden. Maybe there was a garden hose nearby that we hadn’t spotted. Whatever the case, the cultists came at us like lambs to the slaughter.
Carver hissed, then flicked his wrist, and the night filled with even more screaming as the sound of bones cracking shattered the air. Pale fire lanced from his fingers across the yard, his bone-breaker spell disabling and crippling the cultists that were still on their feet.
Gil rushed into the fray, choosing to use his fists over his talons, which were still deadly weapons despite their bluntness. He smashed his knuckles into the cultists, thoroughly relishing the violence. I watched impassively as the cultists, kids in their twenties, all of them, writhed and retched in the grass, reeling from agony. Sterling huddled over one of them, feeding from the throat of a boy who was crying. It was all I could do not to laugh.
And Asher, the one person in our group who had the best reason to detest the Viridian Dawn, walked among them, standing in the midst of the bodies twitching and tearing at the earth. He didn’t have to contribute to the fight at all, and it looked like he had no plans to. The rest of us had done enough to suppress the cultists.
As I watched him throw his head back, as faint threads of green mist streamed from the nostrils of the injured cultists and entered Asher’s mouth with every inhalation, I slowly understood what he was doing. Asher was feeding on their pain, on the ambient magic of agony. The question was what he was planning to do with that power.
I didn’t get a chance to ask. Just in front of the burning house, a scintillating white oval ripped open in reality, appearing right out of thin air.
“No,” I shouted, looking to Carver for guidance. “But we stopped them. I stopped the ritual.”
“Apparently not,” Carver snarled, his glare focused on the rift.
He raised a hand, his skin erupting with amber fire as he began muttering the same incantation he’d used at Heinsite Park. The rift began its horrible shrieking, the terrible whistling that heralded the widening of the black hole at its center, and the coming of the shrikes. With the same guttural words, that same unknowable language, Carver slammed his fist into the portal, shattering it utterly.
With the rift destroyed, the only sounds left in the night were the crackling of the house as it burned, and the agonized groaning of the surviving members of the Viridian Dawn. Sterling walked up to us, wiping his bloodied mouth with the back of his hand.
“I thought Dust stopped the ritual.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said, a feeling of horrendous dread building in the pit of my stomach. Wasn’t it enough to interrupt the prayer to the Eldest? Surely Scrimshaw hadn’t given us the wrong address. And why did the rift appear so close by? For that matter, what determined where these gateways were supposed to open in the first place?
But I had more pressing matters to attend to. I wasn’t even sure when he’d shown up, but suddenly, there he was: Royce, his hands stuck in his coat pockets, shaking his head as he watched the inferno.
“What the – Royce? What are you doing here?”
His shoulders rose, then sl
umped as he heaved a deep sigh. “Wondering whether I’ll still have a job to go back to in the morning.” He turned to me, the grimace on his face bathed in the fiery glow of the burning house. “Is this how you people deal with your problems? By setting everything on fire?”
“The hell are you talking about?” I bellowed. “Are you being serious right now? Do you even remember the warehouse?”
No fucking way he was going to pin this on my conscience. Once, on the same night I’d first met him, Royce had personally burned down an entire Gridiron warehouse to cover up the deaths of over a hundred normals at a pop concert, their corpses going up in flames in the bargain.
He waved his hand nonchalantly. “Right. Right. But those people were dead.” He gestured at the lawn, at the cultists sprawled across it, moaning and clutching at their burned and broken bodies. “This is different.”
“We’ve grown quite weary of doing the Lorica’s work for it,” Carver said, his voice dangerously even, his gaze lethal. “The bedlam was necessary. We came to put a stop to the opening of another of the Eldest’s rifts. We succeeded where you could not.”
Royce frowned even harder, but he said nothing.
“Why are you even here?” I said. “You’ve usually got a team traveling with you. A few Hands, maybe more Wings. I’m not used to seeing you without any lackeys.”
“About that,” Royce said. “I’m here for a different reason.”
He vanished, and in a flash, reappeared just inches from my face. Before I could dodge, Royce slammed his huge hand against my brow, gripping powerfully around my head. A spike of fear shot through my chest. This was how he controlled people’s minds. I struggled under his touch, but he was too strong.
“I told you to lie low, didn’t I?” Royce muttered.
From somewhere behind him I heard Sterling and Gil growling, animalistic and feral. The glow of green energy told me that Asher was prepared to brawl, having just fed on the power of pain. But it was Carver’s voice that rang loudest over them all.