Druid Bond

by Brad Magnarella

  “When are they expected to reach the city?” I asked.

  “Tonight.”

  Hence the no time for pizza look Malachi had given me inside the safe house. And with that, Tony’s parting words came whipping back through my head.

  That’s what Dad’s always saying.

  Was this a recent development? The word always suggested history. So why hadn’t Vega told me? Naturally, I’d been curious about Tony’s father, but I figured he was Vega’s business. Things were different now. She was carrying our child. If Tony’s father was in the picture, I needed to know.

  Realizing Malachi had just said something, I turned toward him. “Sorry, I missed that.”

  “I said this will be our first chance to strike back against the gathering forces of the apocalypse.” A kind of messianic passion seemed to inflame his eyes. This was his life mission now: preventing his visions from manifesting.

  I nodded, but between Vega and Tony, my thoughts were other places.

  The cab dropped us off in front of the East Side townhouse whose basement unit served as the Upholder’s headquarters. As Malachi bolted the warded door behind us, Jordan Derrow looked up from a map spread over the table.

  I raised a hand in greeting. “Jordan.”

  The druid was about my age, handsome with a stylish fade cut and thin beard that traced his angular jaw. Faint sigils adorned the brown skin at his temples. He nodded once and went back to consulting the map.

  “Thanks for answering the call.” He said it as if in afterthought, his tone suggesting he’d had his doubts that I would show. I wondered now if that’s why Malachi had come for me instead of just activating the bonding sigil. Jordan hadn’t been thrilled about me getting safe house spots for Vega and Tony before proving my commitment to the Upholders. But he had a lot on the line: a Stranger had not only infiltrated his druid circle, but his wife was among the possessed, present whereabouts unknown.

  “I knew he’d come,” Seay Sherard said, appearing from the kitchen.

  The half-fae was fully glamoured, a sweep of preternaturally blond hair gracing the front of one shoulder like a Hollywood starlet’s. It glittered as she strode toward me and air-kissed my cheeks. I reciprocated the best I could. Since meeting Seay, I’d learned she worked in the city’s garment district for a top designer.

  “Because if you didn’t,” she whispered, “we would have hunted you down and done all sorts of naughty things.” Green light flashed from her wink, and her lips pinched into a lush smile that would have sent most men into a love-struck jig. It didn’t mean anything, though. This was just her manipulative fae half coming out.

  “Noted,” I said neutrally.

  “Ready to get some calluses on those soft professor hands?”

  “Me?” I took hers and turned them over to reveal baby-pink palms.

  She jerked them from my grasp. “Smartass.”

  And that was her scrappy human half.

  “What’s poppin’, Everson?” Gorgantha called.

  The massive, turquoise-colored mermaid was reclined in a claw-foot tub in the room’s sunken corner, her fishtail riffling the water between eight webbed toes that hooked over the rim. She regarded me from dark orbs for eyes.

  “Did Malachi give you the 4-1-1?” A fan of early hip-hop, Gorgantha had learned English from WBLS radio and block parties in the Bronx.

  “The highlights, yeah,” I said, removing my coat. “Your pod’s coming down the coast.”

  “I dig a brawl as much as the next mer,” she sighed, tucking a ragged length of hair behind a finlike ear. “But I’m sure as shit not looking forward to this one.”

  “Why doesn’t everyone gather around,” Malachi called from the table.

  As Gorgantha stood from the sloshing tub and stretched a hand toward a cotton robe hanging from a wall peg, Jordan yielded his position in front of the map to Malachi. I joined Seay opposite them, draping my coat over a chair back. Now that I was here, I resolved to focus on the matter at hand rather than my own problems. After all, the Upholders had gotten sanctuary for the two people I loved most.

  “Gorgantha’s pod left Maine’s waters two days ago,” Malachi said. “They rounded Cape Cod yesterday. That puts them here.” He pointed off the eastern end of Long Island.

  “How do we know?” I asked.

  “I saw it in a dream vision,” he said.

  “And it was that specific? Coordinates and everything?” I didn’t mean to sound skeptical, but divinations were often symbolic, requiring skill and experience to interpret, and Malachi had only been at this for a year or so.

  “It checked out,” Gorgantha said, arriving at the opposite side of the table, water from her dank hair soaking into the robe. “When the ones of us who escaped made it down here, we set up watches along the coast. There’s a narrow current closer to shore that moves against the Gulf Stream. A gutter current, we call it. Yesterday, the watch picked up the mers’ scent in the gutter current.”

  “They’ll reach Lower Bay tonight,” Malachi continued, “presumably in search of Gorgantha and the other escapees.”

  “How did they know you were down here?”

  Gorgantha shrugged. “Spies? One or two could’ve escaped our noses. That we’re smelling them now tells us the whole pod’s rolling out. Or most of it, anyway.”

  “The Stranger is no doubt being compelled by his master to harvest more souls,” Malachi said, which reminded me of the morning’s encounter with the demon pack and Despus. “But that gives us an advantage.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “In water?”

  My skills had grown to the point where I could cast reasonably well in a driving rain, but a body of deep water—and salt water, no less—was another story. I imagined the same was true for Jordan.

  “The plan is to draw them onto land.” Gorgantha pointed out Lower Bay with a talon that looked like it was made of the same material as a fish fin. “Here’s the reef of junked cars where we’ve been crouching. Over here is Staten Island. This green part? Great Kills Park.” She indicated a two-mile stretch of coast along the island’s southern shore. “That’s the spot.”

  “Great Kills, huh?” I said, hoping that wasn’t an omen.

  “Gorgantha’s group will leave a scent trail up into the park,” Malachi explained. “We’ll be waiting for them there. Jordan and Seay will entrap them with magic. Then you and I will move in and exorcise the possessed.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “If all of them roll up,” Gorgantha said, “about fifty.”

  My eyes roamed the pencil markings on the map showing the plan. It looked too easy.

  “You don’t think they’ll suspect a trap?” I asked. “Your whole group leaving the water like that?”

  Gorgantha shook her head. “They’ll think we came up to forage in the salt marshes. Crazy shellfish in there.”

  “Our main target is the Stranger,” Jordan cut in.

  “Yeah, Finn,” Gorgantha said with no shortage of venom. “Talk about a janky-ass dude.”

  “We need to learn who he’s working for,” Jordan continued, “what the connection is to the Strangers who infiltrated my group and Seay’s, and where they are.” Though he managed to control his voice, I could see the cold rage in his eyes. I didn’t doubt his commitment to his teammates, but he’d ultimately joined the Upholders to recover his wife.

  “I actually have some info,” I said.

  The three listened intently as I shared what I’d learned from Despus and how he’d claimed that a single demon master controlled the three Strangers. “This Despus didn’t seem to think much of the master,” I said. “But before he could give me a name, something intervened. Tore him from our world with so much force that it killed the host.” En route to Vega’s prenatal appointment, I’d called in the death to Detective Hoffman on my flip phone. He was not happy about having to write up a supernatural case.

  “That suggests two things,” I continued. “One, that the demon master is m
ore powerful than the other demons on the block believe, and two, that he or she wants to remain incognito. For lack of a name, I’m calling him Demon X.”

  Malachi nodded gravely. “The arrival of the Strangers is the first sign of a coming demon apocalypse. It stands to reason the master would be powerful.”

  I still didn’t see Demon X’s game plan, though. It was going to take a lot more than the possession of a few small groups to launch a full-scale apocalypse. But Malachi and I had been over this, and “how doesn’t matter” was his answer to everything. To him, his visions were proof enough.

  Jordan turned toward me. “Are you going to be able to make this Stranger talk?”

  “I’ll try.”

  His nostrils flared over his compressed lips. “We need better than that, Everson.”

  I felt my defensiveness kick in. “There’s a good chance Demon X will just pull him back to the Below before we get a name or the whereabouts of the other Strangers. I’m not going to promise something I can’t deliver.”

  “You can’t disrupt that connection?” he challenged.

  The answer was not without making myself really vulnerable to possession, but I just shook my head.

  “Then what’s the point?” Jordan muttered.

  “Excuse me?” Gorgantha drew up her six-and-a-half foot frame in front of him. “How about getting my pod back?”

  “All right, everyone,” Malachi said, holding out his arms for peace.

  “I meant interrogating the Stranger,” Jordan growled. “Better just to decapitate and burn him.”

  Gorgantha glared at him another moment as if to make sure he wasn’t dissing her pod before standing down. I turned to Seay, who had remained mostly silent. She was coiling and uncoiling a strand of blond hair around a finger. Though her face remained a picture of fae composure, the gesture suggested worry.

  “Any updates on your Stranger?” I asked.

  The one targeting the half-fae worked differently. Rather than infiltrating the group and turning its shared beliefs against them, this Stranger was possessing them one at a time. Possibly because the half-fae in the city were agnostic at best, many working in the fashion district. After the group had used their magic to reclaim several of the possessed, the Stranger changed tactics, disappearing his half-fae victims entirely.

  Seay shook her head. “No more disappearances since Darian.”

  Darian, short for Phidarian, had been a half-fae who worked for the same fashion designer as Seay. He’d gone missing last week.

  I glanced around the table before returning my attention to the map. Jordan had a point. To catch a Stranger only to banish him would be a wasted opportunity, especially if he could give up the location of the other Strangers or the identity of his master. With that level of info, we’d have a direction, a plan. Without it, we’d be pawing around like the blind. Plus, Malachi’s visions bothered me.

  “All right,” I said, exhaling. “I’ll prepare something to disrupt the connection between the Stranger and his master so we can get him talking.” Jordan’s eyes seemed to yield slightly before hardening again.

  “Then let’s go over the entire plan,” he said. “This has to go flawlessly.”

  I nodded. The druid wasn’t kidding.

  5

  Arnaud Thorne cocked his head as he sized up the young man sitting in the antique armchair opposite him. He had the build, yes, the almond-shaped eyes, the straight black hair. The cut wasn’t right, but that could be remedied. An inch off the bangs, and the resemblance would be truly striking.

  Still staring, Arnaud swirled his snifter of scotch, causing the ice to clink. The young man, Stefan, shifted in his chair as he peered around the lavish hotel suite overlooking Central Park, his discomfort competing with his evident wonderment. Arnaud took a long sip, relishing the cold burn over his tongue almost as much as the power he held over this young man in the ill-fitting suit.

  So much like the old days.

  “And where did you say you were from?” Arnaud asked.

  Stefan’s eyes snapped back to his. “Romania, originally. I came here as a boy. My parents wanted better opportunities for my sister and me.”

  “Hmm.” Arnaud was hoping for Bulgaria, but the accent was close.

  “I-I need this,” he stammered. “I’ve been out of work for four years. I’ll be the best assistant you’ve ever had. I’ll run through walls for you.”

  Arnaud adjusted the yellow-tinted glasses that cloaked his demonic eyes and appraised the young man again. He had spotted him sitting on a park bench just across the street. Even from his penthouse vantage, Arnaud had been struck by the similarity. The potential. And so he’d gone down to have a chat. Like so many New Yorkers, Stefan had been out looking for work. But even though the economy was starting to crawl from the morass, there were still a hundred job-seekers for every new opening. Arnaud had only to dangle the prospect of work in front of Stefan to lead him to where he now sat.

  Arnaud angled his head slightly. Yes, with a few modifications, he would be a close match to his faithful servant of so many centuries, the voice in his head taking form and structure once more. But would close be good enough? He pondered the question with his next sip, stroking the scepter that spanned his knees.

  “Please,” Stefan said. “I have a family. Two little girls.”

  Arnaud set his drink on the end table and stood. “Then fortune is smiling on you, my good friend.”

  Stefan blinked. “Do you mean—?”

  “Congratulations. The position is yours.”

  The young man seized Arnaud’s hand in both of his, not seeming to notice their iciness, more likely not caring.

  “Oh, you won’t regret this,” he said.

  “I hope you’re right,” Arnaud answered honestly.

  “When can I start?”

  Such ambition. Arnaud’s smiling lips broke from his teeth, but Stefan seemed not to notice their sharpness. He was watching the demon-vampire’s eyes, his own eyes bright with expectation. Arnaud could all but read his thoughts. The sooner Stefan started, the sooner he would be paid, and the sooner he could become the man of the house once more.

  “How does today sound?” Arnaud asked.

  As far as he was concerned, the sooner the young man started, the sooner he himself might have his old companion back.

  “Yes, yes, whatever you need me to do. I’m ready.”

  “Well, first there is the matter of your official hiring.”

  “Sure, sure.” Stefan hadn’t stopped nodding.

  And Arnaud had never released his hand. Drawing the young man closer, his eyes crossed toward the lovely pulsating groove in his neck. He could already taste the warm blood that would wash over the lingering bite of scotch.

  And that’s when Arnaud shrieked.

  Stefan’s eyes started wide and he jumped back.

  The hooks tore through Arnaud’s gut a second time, and he fell forward, nearly knocking down his new hire. On the floor, Arnaud curled into an agonizing ball, one hand clawing up tufts of rug. Stefan backed away with a meek sound, then turned and fled.

  Arnaud’s tinted glasses had come off, he realized, along with his wig of dark hair that hid his grotesque head. The sight had been too much for the young man who was to have become the next incarnation of his beloved Zarko. The penthouse door opened and slammed.

  Damn you.

  The psychic hooks that bonded him to Malphas slackened enough for him to grasp his scepter and stagger to the bathroom. His master had no doubt waited until he’d been on the brink of consummation to summon him.

  “Damn you,” Arnaud dared to hiss this time.

  He fell to his knees near the pool-sized jacuzzi and drew a talon across his wrist. Precious blood from his last meal two days earlier splattered over the tile floor. Arnaud smeared out the symbol for the Dread Council and fell to his forearms. With hatred filling the void left by the receding pain, he gargled Malphas’s true name.

  Infernal smoke gus
hed from the blood circle and took hovering form. For a long moment, his master only stared down from a pair of menacing red eyes. But if his aim was to intimidate, he only provoked irritation.

  “What is it?” Arnaud demanded at last.

  The force that wrenched him to the floor was the most savage one yet. Arnaud gasped through the pain.

  “You dare use that tone with me?” Malphas said. “Have you forgotten who’s in charge?”

  “No, my master,” Arnaud managed, remembering to whimper. “But what have I done that you would treat me so harshly?”

  Arnaud knew that Malphas had timed his request for maximum inconvenience. Then he had hovered there, waiting for Arnaud to express his irritation so he could deal more punishment. The bond tightened as if Malphas were preparing to yank again, but he let out the tension with a dark chuckle.

  “Considering it’s me, many would deem my treatment of you tender.”

  “You understand my meaning,” Arnaud groveled. “You can sense my thoughts.”

  “Yes, and they suggested you were growing too comfortable. A little reminding now and again doesn’t hurt.”

  “Y-yes, my liege.”

  “And you damned me twice,” Malphas added.

  Rather than deny the charge, Arnaud kept his forehead to the ground, fully expecting more punishment.

  But after a moment, Malphas grunted. “What are your updates? You may kneel.”

  Arnaud pushed himself from the bloodied tiles, his new silk suit ruined, and pulled in his legs until he was perched on his bony knobs for knees. Malphas’s smoky form loomed over him, filling much of the large bathroom, red eyes glaring down. Arnaud felt like a child—which was exactly what his master wanted, lest he forget his place.

  “I have been watching the wizard,” he reported.

  Malphas scoffed. “Just watching? You have the means now to destroy him.”