Emerald Blaze

by Ilona Andrews

  Leon fired a two-bullet burst from each gun. Four bloody holes gaped where the creature’s beady eyes used to be. It roared, stumbled, and crashed to the ground.

  I halted. Cornelius ran past me to the lot.

  The female MII agent rose slowly. Her tall friend stared at a bright red gash in his bare thigh. His left pant leg hung in bloody shreds around his ankle. He shifted his weight. Blood poured from the wound and I saw a glimpse of bone inside. The agent gaped at it, wide-eyed, clearly in shock.

  “Holy shit,” the shorter MII agent muttered and snapped a new magazine into his HK45.

  At the edge of the parking lot, Cornelius spun around and waved his arms toward the river. “Don’t stop! There’s more! More are coming!”

  Green beasts poured through the weeds, a mass of scaled bodies, finned tails, and fanged jaws, and in the center of their pack, buried under the creatures, a dense knot of magic pulsated like an invisible beacon. The knot’s magic splayed out, touched me, and broke around my power, like a wave against a breaker. A sea of violet eyes focused on me.

  The pack turned toward me and charged.

  Whatever was emanating magic in the center of the pack was also controlling them. If I had a second, I could’ve fought it with my magic, but the cluster of bodies was too thick, and the beasts came too fast.

  I turned and sprinted toward Rhino. The thing’s magic followed me, pinging from my mind like radar. I didn’t need to look back to know the entire pack chased me.

  Ahead Cornelius jerked a car remote from his pocket. The lights of his BMW hybrid flashed. The hatchback rose and a massive blue beast tore out, a tiger on steroids, with glossy indigo fur splattered with black and pale blue rosettes.

  Zeus landed, roared, flashing fangs the size of steak knives, and bounded across the parking lot. The fringe of tentacles around his neck snapped open, individual tendrils writhing. We passed each other, him sprinting at the creatures and me running in the opposite direction to Rhino.

  Gunfire popped behind me like firecrackers going off—Leon, thinning the pack. He’d run out of bullets before they ran out of bodies.

  I jumped into Rhino, mashed the brake, and pushed the ignition switch. The engine roared. Cornelius flung the passenger door open and landed in the seat. I stepped on it. Rhino’s custom engine kicked into gear. We shot forward and jumped the curb onto the grass.

  In front of us the lawn churned with bodies. A trail of scaled corpses stretched to the left, piling up at the curb of Allen Parkway. Across the street, Leon methodically sank bullets into the creatures in short bursts, using traffic as cover. Zeus snarled next to him. A corpse of a scaled beast lay nearby and Zeus raked it with his claws to underscore his point.

  On our right the female agent and the leader had put their arms under the injured man’s shoulders and staggered toward the parking lot. He hung limp, dragging his bleeding leg behind him. The leading beasts on the left snapped their jaws only feet behind them.

  No more people would be mauled by these things today if I could help it.

  I steered right, cutting the creatures off from the MII agents at a sharp angle. The enormously heavy bulk of Rhino smashed into the closest creature with a wet crunch. The armored vehicle careened as we rolled over a body. We burst through the edge of the pack into the clear. I put my foot down on the accelerator, tearing down the lawn. Behind me the pack thinned out as the creatures got in each other’s way trying to turn to follow us. For a moment, the cluster of bodies dispersed. Something spun in their center, something metal, round, and glowing. The strange magic knot.

  “You see it?”

  “I see it.” Cornelius pulled the tactical shotgun from the floorboards and pumped it.

  “Can you reach their minds?”

  “No. They’re too preoccupied.”

  Asking him what that meant now would distract him. I made a hard left, clipping what was once the back of the pack, knocking the stragglers out of the way.

  “Ready,” Cornelius said, his voice calm.

  I hit the button to lower the front windows and cut straight through the pack, mowing a diagonal line to the left. The churning rolling thing spun on our right, drawing tight circles on the grass. Cornelius stuck the barrel of the shotgun out the window and fired at the metal object.

  BOOM.

  My ears rang.

  BOOM.

  “One more time,” Cornelius said, as if asking for another cup of tea.

  We flashed by the pack, smashed head-on into a beast, and I veered right and jumped the curb back into the parking lot. In front of us, the MII vehicle, a silver Jeep Grand Cherokee, peeled out onto Allen Parkway with a squeal of tires. The stench of burning rubber blew into the cabin.

  “You’re welcome,” Cornelius called after them and reloaded.

  I made a hard right onto the parkway. The pack of beasts streaked by on our right.

  BOOM.

  BOOM.

  “Didn’t get it,” Cornelius said. “The slugs bounced off the metal. There’s something alive inside that spinning shell.”

  “Animal?”

  “Not exactly.”

  If it was alive, we could kill it.

  We could drive around until the pack tired enough to slow down, grab Leon and Zeus, and drive off, but then these things would rampage through Houston. There was a group of kids playing baseball just a quarter of a mile down the road. We had passed them and the adults who were watching them on our way in to retrieve Rosebud.

  Rosebud!

  “Where’s the monkey?”

  “Safe in the BMW.”

  Oh good. Good, good, good.

  I pulled a sharp U-turn and sped down the street back toward the parking lot. The beasts scrambled to follow. The gaps between the bodies widened to several feet and I saw clearly the source of the magic. Two metal rings, spinning one inside the other, like a gyroscope. A small blue glow hovered between them.

  We passed Leon. He pointed to the glowing thing with his SIG and pretended to smash the two guns in his hands together. Ram it. Thank you, Captain Strategy, I got it. That thing had survived the river. If I hit it with Rhino, it might just bounce aside, and if it was arcane, there was no telling what sort of damage it would do to the car. No, this would require precision.

  “Rapier?” I asked.

  “One moment.” Cornelius turned and hit the switch on the console between our seats. Most SUV vehicles had two front seats and a wide backseat designed to seat three. Rhino’s backseat was split into two, with a long, custom-built console storage space running lengthwise between them. The console popped open, and a weapon shelf sprang up, offering a choice of two blades and two guns secured by prongs.

  I pulled another U-turn. A white truck screeched to a stop in front of me. The driver laid on the horn, saw the beasts, and reversed down the street at breakneck speed.

  “Got it.” Cornelius turned back in his seat, my rapier in his hand.

  I aimed Rhino at the gyroscope. Bodies slammed against the car.

  “This is foolhardy,” Cornelius advised. “What if it explodes?”

  “Then I’ll be dead, and it won’t matter,” I quoted.

  “Using Leon as inspiration is a doubtful survival strategy.”

  I slammed on the brakes. Rhino slid across the lawn and stopped. I grabbed the rapier from Cornelius and jumped out of the SUV. The rotating thing spun only fifty feet away from me. I sprinted to it.

  A beast lunged at me. I jumped aside and kept running.

  Behind me Rhino thundered as Cornelius revved the engine to distract them.

  The air turned to fire in my lungs. I dodged a beast, another . . .

  Thirty feet.

  The shining object pinged me with its magic.

  Twenty.

  Ten.

  The metal rings spun in front of me, a foot wide, splattered with slime and algae. Inside a flower bud glowed, a brilliant electric blue lotus woven of pure magic and just about to bloom.

  My family�
��s magic coursed through me, guiding my thrust. I stabbed it.

  The bud burst, sending a cloud of luminescent sparks into the air. Its glow vanished. The rings spun one last time and collapsed.

  The beasts around me froze.

  For a torturous moment nothing moved.

  The creatures stared at me. I stared back.

  The pack turned and made a break for the river.

  It was over.

  Relief washed over me. A steady rhythmic noise came into focus, and I realized it was my heart racing in my chest. My knees shook. A bitter metallic patina coated my tongue. My body couldn’t figure out if it was hot or cold. The world felt wrong, as if I had been poisoned.

  The ruins of the device lay in front of me. I tried to take a step. My leg folded under me, the ground decided to spontaneously tilt to the side, and I almost wiped out on a perfectly level lawn. Too much adrenaline. Nothing to do but wait it out. Some people were born for the knife-edge intensity of combat. I wasn’t one of them.

  Focusing on something to distract myself usually helped. I crouched and scrutinized the rings. The metal didn’t look exactly like steel, but it might have been some sort of iron alloy. A string of glyphs ran the circumference of each ring.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket and snapped a pic.

  The rings fit inside each other, the inner about three inches smaller than the outer one. The flower stalk was attached to the bottom of the inner ring. No, not attached. It grew from the inner ring, seamlessly protruding from the metal.

  How?

  I picked up the ring and tugged on the stalk. It held. I ran my fingers along the flower. Toward the severed end, where the flower bud had been, the texture felt like a typical plant. But the lower I moved my fingers, the more metallic the texture became. A true biomechanical meld. To my knowledge, no mage had yet achieved it.

  Rhino rolled up next to me and Cornelius jumped out. Pale purple blood splattered the armored vehicle’s custom grille guard. Bits and pieces of alien flesh hung from the metal.

  “Are you all right?” Cornelius asked.

  No. “Yes. I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I know this was very unpleasant for you.”

  Animal mages formed a special bond with a few chosen animals, but they cared about all of them, and we had just mowed down at least a dozen, maybe more.

  Cornelius nodded. “Thank you for your concern. They weren’t true animals in the native sense of the word. It helped some.”

  “Is this a summon?” I asked.

  Cornelius shook his head. “I don’t think so. They feel slightly similar to Zeus. Not of Earth but not completely of the arcane realm either.”

  “Earlier you said they were too ‘preoccupied’ to reach?”

  Cornelius frowned and nodded at the rings and the bud within. “This object emitted magic.”

  “I felt it.”

  “The emissions were so dense, they effectively deafened the creatures. They couldn’t feel me. I tried to contact the object itself, but the biological component of it is so primitive, it was like trying to communicate with a sea sponge.”

  The House lab scenario looked more and more likely. If these proto-crocodiles had come out of the arcane realm, we would have seen a summoner and a portal. Massive holes in reality were kind of hard to miss.

  Linus would just love this.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed his number. One beep, two, three . . .

  At the other end of the lawn Leon jogged across the road, Zeus in tow.

  The phone kept ringing. Officially Linus Duncan was retired. In reality, he still served the state of Texas in a new, more frightening capacity, and I was his Deputy. He always answered my calls.

  Beep. Another.

  Linus’ voice came on the line. “Yes?”

  “I was attacked by magic monsters in Eleanor Tinsley Park. They were controlled by a biomechanical device powered with magic.”

  Leon ran up and halted next to me.

  “Do you require assistance?” Linus asked.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Show me.”

  I activated FaceTime, switched the camera, and panned the phone, capturing the device, the corpses, and the fleeing creatures. On the screen, Linus stared into the phone. In his sixties, still fit, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, he always had the Texas tan. His features were handsome and bold, a square jaw framed by a short beard, prominent nose, thick dark eyebrows, and dark eyes that looked either hazel or brown, depending on the light. He smiled easily, and when he paid attention to you, you felt special. If you asked ten people who just met him to describe him, they would all say one word—charming.

  The man looking back at me from the phone was the real Linus Duncan, a Prime, former Speaker of the Texas Assembly, focused, sharp, his eyes merciless. He looked like an old tiger who spotted an intruder in his domain and was sharpening his claws for the kill. A dry staccato came through the phone, a rhythmic thud-thud-thud, followed by a mechanical whine. Linus’ turrets. He was under attack.

  Who in the world would assault Linus Duncan in his home? He was a Hephaestus mage. He made lethal firearms out of discarded paperclips and duct tape and his house packed enough firepower to wipe out an elite battalion in minutes.

  They attacked me and Linus simultaneously. The thought burned a trail through my mind like a comet. Was someone targeting the Office of the Warden?

  “Disengage,” Linus said. “Go straight to MII and take over the Morton case, use the badge. Repeat.”

  “Go straight to MII, show the badge, take over the Morton case.”

  Usually Linus brought me in after jurisdiction had been established. In the last six months, I’d had to use my badge exactly once, to take over an FBI investigation. To say they had been unhappy about it would be a gross understatement.

  “I’ll send the files.” Linus hung up.

  “That was turret fire,” Leon said.

  “It sure was.”

  My cousin grinned, no doubt anticipating another fight. “What are we doing?”

  “You’re driving me to MII.”

  “I’ll follow.” Cornelius sprinted to the parking lot, Zeus on his heels, bounding like an overly enthusiastic kitten.

  I grabbed the device. The metal rings were slick with mud and slime. I walked to Rhino, threw the device into the bin in the back, and jumped into the passenger seat.

  In the distance, police sirens wailed, getting closer.

  Leon peeled out onto the street. In the rearview mirror, Cornelius’ BMW glided out of the parking lot. We’d likely lose him before long. Cornelius’ top driving speed usually stayed four miles over the posted limit. MII was roughly thirty minutes away but knowing Leon we would get there much faster if the traffic let us.

  “Call Bern.”

  My cousin answered on the second ring, his voice coming from Rhino’s speakers as the phone synced with the car’s control panel.

  “I was just attacked by some magical monsters. So was Linus.”

  “Was he with you?”

  “No. He was at his mansion. Lock us down, please.”

  “Done. Do you need help?”

  “No. Is everything okay there?”

  “Everything is fine.”

  “I’m fine too, Bern!” Leon yelled.

  “That’s debatable,” his older brother said.

  “I’ll call you in a bit,” I told him and hung up.

  My phone chimed, announcing a new email. I clicked my inbox. A message from Linus with a video file attached. The file was huge. Linus didn’t optimize the video. I tapped it to download. This would take a while.

  “Let me get this straight. Linus is attacked. You don’t ask him if he needs help. You just drop everything and go to MII to take over some case you never heard about before.” Leon shook his head.

  “Yes. If Linus required my help, he would tell me.” The Morton case was likely connected to the attacks somehow.

  “One day you’ll have to tell me what you do f
or Linus Duncan,” Leon said.

  “But then I’d have to kill you, and, as you often point out, you’re my favorite cousin.”

  Leon snorted.

  Most of my family had no problem with secrecy. Grandma Frida and Mom both served in the military, Bern naturally kept things to himself, and Nevada was a truthseeker. She could fill her and Rogan’s mansion with other people’s secrets and kept them to herself. But Leon and Arabella thrived on gossip. They knew I was doing something confidential for Linus Duncan, but they had no idea what exactly, and it was driving them both up the wall.

  I dialed Augustine’s direct number. Voice mail. Getting to see the head of MII on short notice could prove to be a problem. He was busy. But like Leon and Arabella, he loved to collect information—the more exclusive, the better. I had to bait my hook and dangle it in front of him just out of reach.

  “This is Catalina Baylor. I have critical information regarding the Morton case. I must see you in person. I’ll be at your office in twenty minutes.”

  I hung up.

  “Who is Morton?” Leon asked, taking a corner too fast.

  “Most likely Lander Morton. A Prime geokinetic, very old, very rich, one of the prominent developers in the state.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I knew that because I did my homework. Linus Duncan had had a long and eventful career and he made no effort to conceal the close relationship between our two Houses. I wasn’t sure if we would inherit his friends, but we would definitely inherit his enemies, which was why I had built a biographical database around Linus complete with charts profiling his relationships with various Houses.

  “After Linus retired from the Army, he went into politics. Lander Morton used to be Linus’ political rival. The first bill Linus tried to bring to the floor of the Assembly involved zoning restrictions for various Houses. Lander Morton opposed it. A lot of people owed him favors, and he called them in to kill the bill. It got ugly. Morton gave an interview to Houston Chronicle and told them that he would trust Linus with governance as soon as he took ‘his mama’s titty out of his mouth.’”

  Leon choked on air. “How old was Linus, exactly?”

  “Forty-two.”