Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, & Magic

by SM Reine

  Doubt fills his face.

  After a pause, he shakes his head. No, Allie.

  Don’t argue with me, Revik, I send. I know this is true. Just trust me. Trust me on this, please. You’re one of the good guys. Don’t let yourself die...please.

  I slide my light into his, and feel him react as I show him the numbers. Even inside his confusion, his light connects with them easily, with a familiarity that is clear in the space. I watch him unlock the key to the succession order, until I can see it, too. It expands around us in clean, geometric shapes, rotating with a visual mathematical dance I cannot look away from.

  Relief fills my light. Awe, too. I see it. Do you?

  When the numbers light up around us, a faint wonder touches his eyes.

  Yes, he says.

  They’re ready, I tell him. Vash and the others. I think I can get a signal to them. Wait for me. I kiss him again. I love you. Wait for me...please.

  His eyes change. Then, before he speaks, his outline fades.

  Terror reaches me, that feeling of being ripped in half. I feel it fleetingly in my heart, that I may never see him again.

  Then I am alone, in an endless chasm of dark...but light lives in the tiniest of fragments, and I finally know exactly what I’m supposed to do.

  Drawing the numbers, Revik’s numbers, up and out of my light, I superimpose them over the model of the Pyramid itself...

  ...and imprint the succession order simultaneously into every seer in the Rooks’ network.

  As I do, I realize I know.

  I’ve known all along who the Head is.

  One seer watches quietly, from a dark, remote corner of the Pyramid where he hides.

  There are crevices even here, even in the group mind. Places to hide inside the inter-connectivities that the Pyramid cultivates. Places where the others don’t often go, where constructs live inside constructs and one can disappear into the silver strands, become a bare whisper inside the intricacies of the landscape.

  The structure rotates in a prismatic dance, every light connected to every light...from Galaith to Xarethe to Dehgoies to himself.

  He hides here, still as death.

  It is not easy to remain unseen while crouching inside these lit strands, yet the Pyramid is his home. It encompasses everything he knows, terrifying and magnificent. It keeps him from the void. The shining, silver strands play a slow, intricate dance, one he knows better than the beats of his own heart. Its music lulls him, singing to him in the dark.

  For the same reason, he feels it when she comes. Her music is different than his...so different, he knows the precise instant when she enters his home. He feels the conflict, the chaos she evokes...but at base, she is a tourist. Her husband is all that truly connects her to them.

  Then, out of nowhere, he sees it.

  The succession order is laid out neatly before him, a map of light connecting one Rook to the next, spread before him in perfect, beautiful lines. Like his brothers and sisters, he looks for the Head, tries to count how many steps he is from that highest, most coveted spot.

  The Pyramid shakes.

  Reflexively, he makes his light even more dim.

  It takes him another moment to understand the cause of that instability, too.

  They are killing one another. All around him, seers are attacking seers, hammering blows at one another, trying to destroy one another. Lower-level seers attack the lights they see above them, pausing only to defend against those seers who strike at them from below.

  He sees lights flicker and snuff out. He sees death and pain. He sees fighting and screaming...but also silence and rippled light, places where Rooks are dimming themselves as he has, trying to disappear. Already, though, more than half have joined the fray.

  Terian is lucky. Lucky he will not be missed.

  Lights flash brighter, then wink out. He feels the structure tremble, shuddering more seriously that time, more dangerously. He still cannot see the successor’s chair, but he is getting closer, rising higher all the time as he seeks it, ever-groping through metallic dark. He counts each place in the hierarchy, follows each place as one fits into the next. He ignores the chaos in his single-mindedness, as he traces them all the way up to where his light hovers...

  Until he can see no further.

  It is quiet there, and he is alone.

  Eventually, the reason dawns on him.

  Excitement flares his light, so that Terian makes himself briefly visible. He barely feels the ensuing blows, barely hears the cracking in several branches of his aleimi. They can’t touch him...not anymore. A smile lights up his being.

  He occupies the successor’s chair.

  He. Terian alone.

  As the realization hits, he is already giving the signal.

  31

  PYRAMID

  President Daniel Caine blinked to clear his vision.

  Frowning, he stared around at the mostly older faces. Something was wrong. He could feel it, with every particle of his living light. He needed someone else at the table who felt it, too. Someone besides Ethan, who was, for obvious reasons, in absentia.

  Caine barely noticed the silence as he surveyed the room.

  That is, until the Secretary of State broke it.

  “Sir?” As usual, the man sounded as if he were about to go into cardiac arrest. “Sir,” he repeated, as Caine knew he would until he turned and met the man’s gaze directly.

  Once he had, the Secretary resumed in the same, caught-breath voice.

  “The terrorists have been isolated, sir,” he said, flushing a darker red. “They no longer appear to be fighting back. The Prime Minister is asking whether you still recommend an air attack, sir. They now estimate twenty to fifty-five possible civilian casualties from that approach, sir, even with the evacuations...and they no longer feel it’s necessary. Their Home Office Security is now recommending gassing the top floors, prior to any gunplay. I really think you should consider this approach, sir. I really do...”

  Caine rose to his feet. Normally he would smile here, even tell a joke, but his ability to play that role evaporated about thirty minutes earlier, when the Pyramid network reported that his friend, Doctor Xarethe––meaning the real one––could not be located. He was now forced to assume that Terian, in one form or another, had killed her, too.

  The thought more than displeased him.

  To call Xarethe irreplaceable was an understatement in the extreme.

  Other complications remained as well. Alyson managed to evade him somehow within his own network. That left the outstanding issue of what to do with Dehgoies if Caine found himself backed into a corner, forced to kill yet another of Revik’s mates.

  Further, as much as he hated to admit it, Terian was right.

  The entire cycle would be disrupted if he killed the Bridge now.

  Making up his mind, Caine walked to a telephone sitting on an antique wooden cabinet to the right of the conference table. Without thinking, he picked up the old-fashioned receiver, held it to his ear and waited. Feeling eyes focused on the back of his head from the direction of the oval table, Caine realized only then that he could have used his earpiece to make the call. Or, more efficiently still, his newly implanted impulse-activated network receiver chip, or IAN.

  He ignored their collective stares anyway. At least, until it struck him that the old land line might be purely decorative.

  It was one problem with long life. Old habits had a tendency to return under stress.

  Caine lowered the handset to hang it up, when a voice rose, sounding tinny and far away. He returned the receiver promptly to his ear.

  “You needed something, sir?” the voice repeated.

  “James?” Caine felt his shoulders unclench. “Where’s Ethan?”

  “Sir?” His security chief’s puzzlement wafted through the line.

  “Ethan. Our Vice President. Where is he?”

  “The Vice President is still housed at his residence, sir,” James said. “You sai
d not to wake him.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve changed my mind. I want him brought here. At once. To the bunker.”

  The bunker. It was what his wife nicknamed the Cabinet’s main conference room when she first saw it, and the moniker stuck. She also called it the War Room, after that Peter Sellers movie mocking the 1950s paranoia about the Russians hoarding telekinetic seers.

  Like a faraway strain of music, Caine felt something crack. He knew it was another piece of the Pyramid fissuring off. He realized James remained on the line.

  “Wake him, will you?” Caine said. “As soon as possible. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

  He was in the process of hanging up the old plastic handle, when the door to the bunker slammed open.

  Caine’s eyes swiveled with all the rest. He found himself staring at the leaning, gasping figure in the door’s opening. For a long moment, nothing else broke the tense silence of the room. Everyone watched him clutch his chest, but like Caine, they didn’t move.

  “Ethan,” Caine said at last. He cleared his throat, recovered slightly. “Ethan...my god. You look terrible. What happened?”

  Ethan Wellington, the Vice President of the United States, gripped the door frame, leaving a smear of blood on the white-painted wood. He still breathed in pants, holding his chest with one hand, wearing a trench coat over what looked like bare feet and pajamas.

  How the hell he had gotten there, from the Vice Presidential mansion through security, Caine’s mind began...

  Then, in the same set of breaths, he dismissed the lingering doubt.

  This might work even better. Let the whole Cabinet see the terrorist attack with their own eyes. Whatever Ethan said at this point could hardly matter, when Caine could simply have his seers manipulate the memory of every human in the room.

  “Ethan.” Caine’s voice emerged stronger. “I just called James to fetch you. Are you all right? What happened?”

  Ethan gave a half-gasp. It resembled a laugh.

  He raised his head to stare at the President, and the expression on his face took Caine aback. A lot more of Terian lived inside that single body now, Caine realized. A lot more.

  Caine’s infiltrators had been busy.

  Turning from Caine, Ethan addressed the others, his brown eyes flashing amber in the reflected light.

  “I have ordered the Secret Service to arrest President Caine.” He gasped, forcing out words. “I’ve asked for him to be detained...”

  The Secretary of State laughed nervously.

  “What charge?”

  Galaith turned. Rogers had spoken, his Chief of Staff.

  “Attempted murder,” Ethan said. Wincing in pain, he clutched his side. “Conspiring with enemies of the United States.” His eyes flickered up like spotlights, meeting Caine’s. “I’ll probably know of a few more things he’s done by the end of the day...he’s mentally unhinged.”

  Caine shook his head in bewilderment. “What possible benefit can you see from this, Ethan?”

  The question meant more than anyone at the table could possibly know.

  Taking a step towards the door, Caine snapped his fingers at the porter standing at the back of the room. “What in god’s name are you waiting for?” he snapped at the man. “Call for medical help. Now! The Vice President’s obviously been hurt!”

  Caine walked towards Ethan, thinking he would just use the Barrier to knock him out...

  Ethan backed away with another short laugh.

  Before Caine could reach the door, Jarvesch, the Secretary of Defense, got to her feet and inserted herself between them. She approached Ethan’s bent form, touching his shoulder even as a kitchen staffer wheeled in their breakfast on a pushcart stacked with silver trays and crystal juice containers. Caine heard the porter ask for the White House physician over the central speaker as the wheels of the cart squeaked jerkily across the floor.

  The kitchen staffer brought everything to the long cabinet nearest Caine and began unloading trays laboriously.

  The secret service agent by the door clicked his fingers to get the staffer’s attention, frowning when the man didn’t turn.

  Caine only noticed this peripherally.

  Tensing, he watched Jarvesch take Ethan’s arm, looking into his face. Then she cried out, opening his coat.

  “He’s been shot!” She turned to the rest of the room. “He’s been shot several times! God, Ethan! What happened?”

  The kitchen staffer stood stock still, gaping, holding a towel in one hand and the handle of the cart in the other. He stared at the Vice President along with the others.

  Then he turned, facing President Caine.

  Before anyone could move, before Caine glanced at him really, the staffer raised the towel and squeezed off three rounds in rapid succession.

  Caine turned towards the sound, but too late. The slowed-down vision of the Barrier allowed him to witness the last shot, almost as an abstraction.

  It didn’t allow him to get out of the way.

  Smoke came from the gun’s end, the hand jerked, and then...

  Panicked yells fill the bunker.

  Caine is somehow on the floor.

  He fights to breathe, but he’s got a frog in his throat. He tries to clear it, chokes. He hears them, hears the shots echo in his ears well after the fact, but really all he sees is the towel, the blank look on the man’s face, the strange clarity in his eyes.

  Caine stares at the ceiling, wonders that he felt no warning from the Barrier. He breathes in labored inhales and stuck exhales, breathing as if through water. He hears a struggle, the breaking of glass, but that’s far away, too. He wonders how anyone could have gotten past his security, that of the Pyramid more than that of the human compound, although that’s not inconsiderable either.

  Then he remembers.

  Something was wrong. Something happened to the Pyramid.

  Liego disappeared, and then...

  Ethan is there. Ethan kneels heavily, still clutching his own side. Ethan Wellington, Harvard graduate and decorated soldier, is an entity almost separate of Terian in Caine’s mind. Their wives are best friends. Their kids go to the same school. They vacation together, stood up at each other’s weddings. As Ethan crouches next to him, Galaith and Caine bleed over as well; for an instant, he believes his friend is there to help him.

  Then he sees the gleam in Ethan’s eyes, the yellow glow behind brown irises, threads of those other fragments woven into the stable facade of his friend from Massachusetts.

  The Pyramid shudders in those eyes...and the threads cross.

  Caine feels grief. Fewer bodies exist in which Terian can hide. Fragments of his aleimi crystallized into darker stains weave in with the rest, looking through the same amber irises. Caine knows insanity lives there. He feels responsible.

  Ethan leans closer. Anyone watching would see a concerned colleague reassuring his mortally-wounded friend.

  “We may indeed prove to be the inferior race,” he breathes to Caine. “...But at least we can shoot straight.”

  Gazing up at the antique lamps hanging over the war room table, Galaith chuckles, in spite of himself.

  Then, emotion overcomes him, bringing tears to his eyes.

  “Feigran,” he chokes through fluid. “Forgive me.”

  He can no longer see the Bunker. Lying on the grass, he gazes up a dense clouds. He is surprised when an opening presents itself there, where for the barest instant, he sees the flames of a blue-white sun. But the sun does not brighten his eyes for very long.

  Through that same gap, a glint of asteroids beckon, cold but beautiful. Below, in a room filled with humans, the body Galaith used in this very long lifetime finally gives out.

  As it does, the Thousand roll over, claiming him for their own.

  I feel Haldren expel his last breath. A flurry of lines and pulleys unravel as he does, leaving with what remains of him. I watch the Dreng gather up those fragments, pulling him into the cold, flaming center of their silver clouds, claimin
g him as one of their own. I watch his aleimi...or soul, or whatever is left of him now...as they take it away, disappear him into those dense, metallic strands.

  I am shocked by a sharp flicker of grief.

  But I cannot dwell on that for long, either.

  His absence leaves a hole at the top of the Pyramid. The structure loses its silver sheen as the cold of the Dreng’s light evaporates. They disappear like inhaled smoke from the physical world, leaving an oddly full silence.

  I send up a flare.

  I don’t have long to wait. Vash and his seers: Yerin, Jalar, Mutkar, Fley, Maya, Itru, Tarsi, Samantha, Inde, Argo, Jet, Anale, Keeley, Maygar, Naomi, Hondo, Dorje, Tan, Inge, Derek, Ullysa, Mika, Chinja, Alex, Garensche, Tenzi, Cohen...they all come. They come separately and together, along with countless lights I don’t know, faces I’ve never seen in outside.

  Late to the party, Revik joins us, too.

  He is battered, beaten up, but he is there.

  They greet me and one another, lights interwoven, combining and recombining in new patterns. I flash the plan, the plan they created, and we unite in concert...a single vision.

  Human lights shine with us, too...Jon, Cass, Jaden, Sasquatch, Frankie, Angeline, Sarah, Nick, the man at the toll booth on the way into Canada, the couple who paused at the door of the diner because they were worried Revik would hurt me. The people on the Royal Faire cruise ship. My mom and dad. My uncle Stefan.

  Feeling them all there together brings a wash of hope, a sudden laugh.

  And then, in a flash, we disperse.

  “NO!” Terian screams.

  He watches the receding cloud of the Dreng, realizes the danger too late. He feels the shift below his feet, and struggles to counteract, to weave himself into the void above.

  “NO! NO! NO!”

  Out of nowhere, seers surround him.

  These aren’t the seers of the Rooks. These wield a sharp, white, painful light, one that burns everything in its path, everything it touches, ripping through strands and connections that hang dead and lifeless, temporarily inert without the Dreng.

  And not just seers...he feels humans among his attackers.