“We need to leave soon,” I added. “I wish we didn’t have to rush, but we do.”
“I won’t leave him,” she said hoarsely.
She wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t make her, even though removing the body was more or less a shot across the Hanged Man’s bow. It would reveal we’d been here.
“Okay,” I said, and walked back to Brand and Addam.
“What attacked you, and is it dead?” Brand asked immediately.
“Ifrit. Ancient creatures—they’ve been around for millions of years. It won’t attack when it’s outnumbered. Probably. I don’t know what sorts of commands have been laid on it. Max, why did you and Quinn come upstairs?”
Quinn was staring toward Corinne, who was kneeling by the crumbled form. He gave no sense at having heard me.
Max reached up and nudged Quinn. “I started asking him questions about the unicorn, because it seemed stupid that you’d fight one. When you ask the right questions, it makes his visions sharper. So we Googled the details and there’s something called a Siberian unicorn. It’s, like, extinct. Then Quinn—Quinn!”
Blood had started pouring from Quinn’s nose. It bubbled over his breath, created stripes on his chin. But when a panicking Addam reached up to Heal him, Quinn shook his head and pushed away unsteadily.
He touched a disc on his belt and released a spell. His burgundy eyes—so much like Addam’s—flashed with light.
“What have you done?” Addam asked. “Quinn, I do not like this.”
“It’s an Eidetic spell. I need to remember this. I . . . see him,” he whispered, and turned in drunken circle. “I see all of them. This is an . . . an abattoir. A compost pile. Food for his fancies below. I see them. Broken lines. Apple pies and Sunday football, and then nothing. A love for poetry, and then nothing. Fastest runner on his academy track team, and then nothing. Red hair and blue eyes; a mole on his right cheek; pink beads in her pony tail; a badly healed foot that hurt in the rain; and then nothing, all nothing, dozens and dozens of lifelines that break off into nothing!”
“Brother, this is not good for you,” Addam said desperately. “Why must you remember all this?”
“Because Rune will know what to do with it, when the time comes, and it’s coming soon. But . . . wait. Not there.” He pointed to Corinne.
“Not what? What’s there?” I asked.
“Two lifelines. Neither is broken.”
For a second I stared at him dumbly, and then I was sprinting back across the lawn to Corinne’s side. I threw myself to my knees, startling her stone-like vigil. I pressed my hands against the dried blood on Layne’s wrist, but couldn’t feel a pulse. I started to look for one on his neck, but it didn’t matter, because the moment I touched his flesh I felt the heat of the infected skin.
Infected.
“Immolation magic,” I whispered. “Corinne, he’s not dead. Layne’s not dead. He’s burning off the infection to keep himself alive. We need to get him to the hospital immediately. Brand!”
“I heard,” he said, coming up behind me. “Addam, help me pick him up.”
I almost missed it—the shushing displacement of air. I ripped the Shield off my body and projected it above our heads like a buttress, just as the ifrit came at us with clawed hands outstretched. I had leverage this time. The monster slammed into my Shield like a hammer against rock. It shrieked in pain and pushed off, trying to retreat.
Brand aimed his gun and fired. The bullet caught the retreating creature in its fleshy wing. It veered off course and fell at an angle, thudding into the lawn about seventy feet away. It scrambled onto all fours, lifted its furry head, and shrieked at the sky.
The magic force shield above us trembled and broke. The ifrit leapt into the sky and soared off the building.
I figured it out. “It may be under a compulsion—fight if you can, flee and give alarm otherwise,” I said quickly, because that’s what I would have done. “It’s going back to the Hanged Man.”
Brand tried to sight it with his gun, but the creature had already glided below the edge of the skyscraper.
“It only has limited teleportation,” I said. “I can catch it.” No one else could do this. I had at entire suite of spells ready for just something like this. I looked at Brand and said, “I can do this.”
“Yeah,” Brand asked, swallowing his own unease, which vibrated along our bond. Concern. Trust. So much trust. He said, “You trained for this, right? It can’t always be me in the spotlight killing everything. Slacker.”
I coiled my sabre back into a wristguard, and zipped up my leather jacket. It had impact wards that would keep me from crushing myself. The boots had to go, though—they wouldn’t help me on slippery surfaces. I ripped them off.
Then I touched my ankh. I touched my white gold ring. I touched my emerald ring, and my platinum disc, and focused on the thin gold chain around my angle.
The release of so many spells at once caused me to sink three inches into the turf. Magic whipped my bangs across my forehead, made the blood pop in my ears. My feet burned as the small bones and tendons in them thickened and toughened.
Through the roar of magic, I saw that Addam’s lips were moving. Max looked terrified. Brand just stared.
I turned, ran a few feet, and leapt.
The Jump spell carried me in a soaring arc off the building.
There were always consequences with magic. Always.
Did you want super-speed? Or super-strength? Fine. But in the absence of ancillary spells, you’d end up ripping muscles away from your bone with the first punch; or blister and shred your skin with the friction caused by breaking the sound barrier.
So you needed spells to supplement spells. Spells to toughen your skin, fortify your bones, protect your tendons and ligaments—a spiral of cause and effect that required a lot of practice.
I had practiced moves like this—something I called urban stealth. Brand made sure I had.
I had Air and Fire. Shield and Jump. I had spells to protect my skin and skeletal structure. Everything I needed to leap between buildings like the little god I was supposed to be.
The Jump magic was not flight or levitation—it was a wild and uncontrolled burst of movement tainted by the omnipresent requirement to land.
The first leap took me in a massive, block-long arc off the building. At the peak of my trajectory, I spotted the ifrit, wobbling on a wounded wing.
A slanted copper roof loomed ahead of me, its penny shine long gone green with verdigris. I screamed a challenge into the roaring wind, hit the slant at a run, and felt magic absorb all impact. I kept running along the rough, weathered surface, and flung myself into the air.
The running start tripled my arc. I soared over a street, the world beneath me a neon river. The ifrit was just ahead, resting on elevator housing, a small cement square bare of anything else except a tall brass weathervane.
I threw Shield in front of me. The invisible panel dragged at the air and altered my descent. In a sequence as quick as instinct, I grabbed the weathervane and swung my knees into the back of the ifrit. I felt the barest brush of coarse fur along my pants legs, and then the impact sent the monster tumbling off the edge of the platform. It had time to throw its wing into the air current—not enough to soar, just enough to keep it from slamming into a penthouse patio beneath us.
I swung counterclockwise around the weathervane, which bent but didn’t break. I pumped my foot off the ground and leapt, throwing Shield above my head, now shaped as a hard parachute.
The patio was filled with people in tuxes, gowns, and Celtic masks. The ifrit had landed against a bar, its clawed hands digging into the surface, sending bottles of liquor shattering to the tiled ground. People had just started screaming when I landed in a crouch.
There were a million nasty moves I could make to end this fight now, none that favored a panicked crowd.
“Find cover!” I shouted. “Now! NOW!”
The ifrit backed away from the bar and threw its hands w
ide. Oh, no, you fucking don’t. Behind it was a towering decoration of fronds and dry reeds. I reached out with Fire and made the straw-like material burst into flame. The edges of the small conflagration licked the ifrit’s fur and caught fire.
One of the scions on the roof took advantage of the creature’s thrashing to make a bum rush with a short sword. The scion’s mask was an intricate whorl of green ink. I’m not sure which of us was more stupid—him for ignoring me, or me for more or less warning the ifrit that I cared what happened to a crowd. The anonymous scion found his first and only sword thrust dodged. The ifrit grabbed the man’s tux collar in a clawed grip and tossed him off the edge of the roof. Then the creature crouched and sprang straight upward, using his wings to glide away.
I was at the edge of the roof a heartbeat later, pulling Air magic around me like a coiled whip. I spotted the scion—already one story down, heading toward a distant alley floor—and lashed out with hurricane winds. Dozens of windows shattered in the building directly across from me. The scion was tossed through one, carried by my blast. I heard him scream as he raked along the glass. A violent rescue, and hopefully he was smart enough to store Healing spells in his sigils.
I turned, ran a few feet in the direction of the ifrit’s glide, and jumped. He was already on the far side of another adjoining building. Its roof was lower than the penthouse. I hit its gravel-strewn surface at a run. The sharp stones were barely a pressure against my toughened soles.
I jumped again and flew over another main road. A truck-sized video marquis, scrolling movie names, passed under me. I landed on the roof of a skyscraper mall. No open patios, at least—no people to tie my hands.
The ifrit had crashed into a candy cane—shaped air duct. I’d burned a bald patch on the wing that Brand had shot. It didn’t have many flights left. I saw the exact moment it decided to turn on me and hold its ground.
An air vent blew the smell of fresh popcorn at me. I felt the low rumble of Hollywood gunfire through the cement slabs under my feet.
Ifrits are creatures of air, elementally opposed to water. Lightning sparked on its clawed hands as it prepared to send a bolt of electricity toward me.
I called on my Aspect. Fire erupted along my arms, fluttered up my chest. My fingernails burned like coals as I reached up and let the lightning burst against my fist. The white stream of energy deepened to amber, and became a massive tongue of flame.
The creature shrieked as its hands began to burn.
“I’m the Day Prince, ifrit,” I said, striding to it. My Aspect carbonized my footprints. “I’m the last of the Sun Throne, and you would do well to respect my mercy. Yield.”
The ifrit’s scream became a broken, hurt chitter. It lashed out with a current of wind. The Air wrapped around my arm at the same second I sliced it apart with the edge of my Shield. I turned the monster’s tactic back on it, sending a spiral of my own Air to latch onto its thin ankle. I whipped the ifrit off its feet and sent it slamming onto the stone roof.
“Come on,” I said. “You haven’t lived millions of years to die on the roof of a bloody mall. I will not offer you clemency again. Yield.”
It drew itself to its bony knees and screamed. Power burst from it like a cyclone. I threw my Shield in front of me and dropped to one knee for leverage. The cyclone broke, and when it had cleared, I saw that the ifrit had leapt into the air.
It was too wounded to fly. Too weak to teleport. It sunk fast toward a low, rooftop garden across an alley separating buildings.
I ran and jumped after it. My Aspect fanned the air behind me with a roaring crackle, extinguishing itself.
The ifrit tried to meet me in the garden with claws outstretched, but I threw a burst of Air underneath me and did a backwards somersault, landing roughly on the edge of a fountain several yards away.
With a quick glance, I mapped the terrain: fountain, hedges, flowering bushes, a water tower that likely held rainwater. I half-stepped, half-jumped off the rim of the fountain, as if to dodge behind the water tower.
The creature was already upon me when I landed. Its talons raked the edge of the Shield I’d thrown up.
I brushed a finger along my gold ring, aimed my arm upwards, and unleashed Exodus.
Once, the gold ring had contained a version of Exodus that I’d reinforced for years. I’d used it in a cathedral and took the building down around me. Months later, the new version was weak, but more than enough to hit the underside of the water tower like dynamite.
Metal sheered free. Seven hundred gallows of stagnant rainwater flooded down. My Shield left me anchored, while the ifrit—who had few natural protections against water—was washed toward and over the side of the roof.
I ran to the edge and jumped, using Shield and Air to slow my fall. A burst of Air at the dirty asphalt, one story off the ground, bled off all remaining momentum.
Trash and debris spiraled away from me as I landed. I saw that the ifrit had broken its spine on a dumpster. It lay on dirty newspaper. Its claws scrabbled for purchase, but its legs did not move.
I transmuted my sabre from wristguard to sword hilt, and built a glowing garnet blade. Fat, red sparks fell down from the forged metal, onto the ifrit’s terrified face.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
NEW SAINTS HOSPITAL
New Saints Hospital, the largest hospital on the island, had been translocated from North Brother Island off the coast of New York.
Built in 1868, the former Riverside Hospital spent much of its existence as quarantine for the mentally ill and contagious. Riverside had been the site of the 1904 General Slocum disaster, in which eleven hundred souls had been lost as the ship burned and foundered on the shore of North Brother.
It had also been the final home of the infamous Typhoid Mary, an Irish immigrant and asymptomatic carrier of the typhoid pathogen. Her death count had been relatively tame, from modern perspectives, but her spread of illness among New York’s elite was the stuff of tabloid legend.
Psychic residue is a potent, tangible source of power. And power isn’t good or bad, just like one body of water can’t be wetter than another. Healers are just as able to plug into the remains of tragedies as death ritualists are.
It went a long way to explaining why we’re a city stitched together from asylums, hospitals, temples, and palaces.
I bounded across the rooftops of New Atlantis, turning a twenty-minute car ride into a full-throated straight line that barely cost me ten minutes.
A rooftop entrance at the hospital took me down a stairwell to the first floor. I cancelled the spells on my way, all except for the one that toughened my skin and kept me from tearing up my feet, now covered in tattered socks. As the Jump magic drained, I spent a few wistful seconds remembering the sensation of soaring through midnight lights.
My phone regained cell phone reception as I entered the first-floor lobby. I was halfway through dialing Brand when I spotted them in the general waiting room. They’d staked out a corner to themselves, protected by an invisible boundary formed by Brand’s glare.
Anna Dawncreek was braiding his hair.
They hadn’t noticed me, so I paused in the stairwell door and relished the image. I honestly hadn’t thought the night could get stranger.
I spent a few seconds trying to find the camera on my phone. Without even turning to face me, Brand raised his voice and said, “Allow me to explain why that’d be a mistake.”
I put the phone back in my pocket. Hopefully Max had been quick enough to get a snapshot. He and Quinn were huddled on a padded bench. I also spotted Addam, Corbie, Queenie, and Diana Saint Nicholas, Addam’s aunt, who had been roped into babysitting duty. The only one missing was Corinne.
“Do you need a scrunchie?” I asked Anna. “I’d like to volunteer to pick out a scrunchie for his pony tail.”
“It’s a war braid,” Anna said in outrage. “He needs to keep his hair out of his eyes during a fight.”
“Maybe we can find a scrunchie with little
daggers and guns on it,” I said.
Diana was giving me the sort of look I deserved, because, hospital. My humor drained. I said, “Layne?”
Brand’s eyes—and Addam’s too—were sweeping me from crown to feet, looking for damage. “I’m okay,” I said. “How’s Layne?”
“With the healers,” Brand said. He flicked a glance at Anna, who sat down in her chair and stopped messing with his hair. “Corinne is watching him. Addam put in a call to his security team—they’re going to head here as soon as they’re done sweeping the Dawncreek’s house. You?”
I cast a quick look around me, then said, quietly, “It’s been handled. I’ve bought us some time. But sooner or later, he’ll figure out we . . . took something from his building.”
Queenie rushed over with my boots and a fresh pair of socks. I have no idea how she’d found fresh socks, but it was Queenie, and I’m fairly certain there was an entire pantry-sized dimension in her purse.
I put my boots back on, drumming the heels into place. There were many things we needed to talk about, but I didn’t want to spend an entire conversation evading nouns for the sake of eavesdroppers. “Why are you here?” I asked Brand.
“Where should we be?” Addam asked. “The hospital is well protected.”
“I know, but Arcana have their own private waiting room. Don’t they know who you are?” I asked Brand.
“Why the hell would I want that?” Brand said.
“Because the Arcana waiting room is a more easily protected space,” I said, thinking of its soft sofas, plump cushions, and free coffee service.
I went over to the nurse’s center on the other side of the room. There were two men and one woman, and the woman’s name badge had the word “supervisor” on it. “Excuse me,” I said.
“Yes, my lord.”
“I’d like an update on—” I bit off the sentence. I wasn’t entirely sure Layne had been admitted under his real name. It was the sort of detail Brand wouldn’t have overlooked. “I’d like an update on a patient, but first, please escort my party to the Arcana’s waiting room.”
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