“You had your chance to walk away,” Grim commented, pointing with the leering scythe. “Don’t think I’ll feel an ounce of remorse for this.”
“Then how about a pound of asskicking?” A strange voice chirped, and Vorpal’s nightsight went straight to hell as lights clicked on to her left. She stumbled back, hit her wounded foot and choked down a scream as she fumbled with her mask, got the lenses up.
A redheaded girl stood on a smashed pickup truck, clad in an old-fashioned hoopskirt with a straw boater hat over her red ringlets. She had freckles, facial piercings, pale white skin, and an insolent gold-studded smile, as she stood with both hands on her hips, sneering down at the Graveyard Gang. Behind her, two gear-laden portable spotlights hummed and clattered, emitting little puffs of steam.
“Molly,” Grim rasped. “This isn’t your fight.”
“Beg to differ, bony dear!” she chirped, and Vorpal gaped as more figures emerged behind her. A lumbering hulk of brass and glass and muscles, a man dressed in Victorian-era foppery with a top hat and ridiculous mustache, and a short man hovering on a steaming jetpack, clutching an enormous brass and wood gun of some sort. “We’ve been paid well to see them clear!”
The Steampunks!
“The mission is done?” Vorpal asked.
“That one? Yes. But y’know, can’t get paid if your boss doesn’t make it home.”
“Twenty-eight thousand dead.” Grim rasped. “You okay with that, Molly?”
“Her top henchman says it ain’t so, Jo.”
“Not exactly an unbiased source.”
“I didn’t come here to talk!” Molly said, twirling and flaring her skirt out. “I came here to dance!” And with a leap she was bounding towards them, arms spread wide like a little girl coming in for a hug.
Behind her, the rest of the Steampunks looked at each other, shrugged, and charged the Graveyard Gang.
Forgotten, Vorpal slumped down on the ground, pulled out a roll of athletic tape, and went to work on her ankle.
She watched Molly dart in through the gunfire, then stagger as bullets caught her and seemed to snap back through the air with an audible ‘Pop!’ She’d be wounded one second with blood spraying and dramatic death wails, then ‘Pop’, and she was in another location, unhurt. And as the corpses ran low an ammo she chuckled and launched herself forward, scurrying as the Graveyard Gang broke and took cover... but they weren’t her target.
Molly launched herself into the mob of zombies, ripping a cord off her dress as she did so, and what had to be a dozen grenades dropped among the mob like seeds from a crushed pomegranate.
Scheisse! Vorpal hugged the ground, as the world shook, shrapnel screamed by overhead, and one of the spotlights blew to bits. Everything went quiet for a second, lost in the explosion, and when she poked her head up Molly was leaning against a nearby wall, laughing maniacally.
I may be in love.
Arms clutched at her back and Vorpal whirled on her good foot, whipped Der Schmetterling free and nearly skewered the buffoon in the top hat. He put his hands up, pointed at a reasonably intact alleyway, and made little shooing gestures. Nodding, she limped along until finally he grabbed her arm and she leaned into him, despising her weakness. Her job was done.
But if the Steampunks had made the handoff, why hadn’t the teleporter kicked in? Her blood was still circulating the tracer chemical. Perhaps the fight was causing interference? Maybe, she didn’t know how it worked.
Epitaph loomed out of the rubble and the two of them paused for a tense few seconds, before the Brass man charged out of the dust, grabbed her, and started running through walls. They watched her go, and Vorpal sighed a gasp of relief.
Ah, my hearing’s coming back. I heard that.
“Right this way, then, chop chop!” Top Hat’s accent was ridiculous, a parody of an Englishman’s way of speaking. Vorpal snorted, but let him guide her to the end of the alley. It got darker as they moved away from the remaining searchlight, and Vorpal twitched her lenses down again. He seemed to be accomplishing the same measure with goggles that he slid down, all grinding gears in the sides and multiple lenses whirring and flickering.
“Do the gears actually do anything?” she asked.
“According to Technomancer, they’re quite important. Ah, listen...”
She knew that tone. “I will not like this.”
“Well, no.” Ahead of them, the world shook. A building teetered, collapsed in a spray of old brickwork.
“Why are we going towards that?” she asked.
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Doctor Dire’s in a bit of a sticky wicket.” Another series of crashes ensued, along with what sounded to Vorpal like a metal suit of armor being thrown through a lamppost.
Ah. Right. Probably heroes. “Who’s she fighting?”
“Crusader.”
Vorpal stopped dead in her tracks.
Memories flooded back; the grain silo on the outskirts of Minsk, the titan in gold armor hurling himself against the dark shadow. The pure devastation that had resulted. The endless waves of corpses trying to bear him down, turned into waves of red liquid merely by the force of his hands punching Dark Harvest.
She took a breath, let it out. “Crusader.” It took effort to keep her voice from wavering.
“Yes. He’s, ah, a bit above our pay grade, you understand.”
She did. He was above her pay grade. And Minna was fighting him. And the teleporter hadn’t done its job. Something was wrong. Vorpal felt her hands start to shake, and buried them in her costume’s pockets.
“Well. He’s just up ahead. I’ll get back and make sure we’ve got the Gang checkmated. Ta!” Top Hat ran back down the alley, leaving her alone in the darkness, shaking and shaken.
She tried to step forward, and could not move. Her eyes flew open and she gasped, the pain from her ankle seeming to come in waves now. She clutched at the wall. She suffocated, drowned in sensation, feeling each little fleck of dirt or grime or rubble embedded in her skin with clarity, feeling the draft through the rips in her costume, and the deep exhaustion that went to her very bones. She’d been lucky to survive so far, lucky, she knew, to get away without a scratch. But this was Crusader, and he punched out gods.
She closed her eyes, tried to focus. Kirsten would be afraid, she told herself. Kirsten would be afraid, but Vorpal knows no fear. She told herself that until she believed it, more or less, then she fought to bring her good foot forward, and did. A hop, a light sizzling pain from her bad foot, and then she took another step, and another on that one. Barely knowing what she was doing, Vorpal drew Der Schmetterling as she went, clicking it into position. Focusing on that task helped, it was a drill she’d had to sweat at, and it turned her mind from the stupid thing she was about to do.
Another step, then another, and she was out in the open, barely noticing the low whimper that crawled out of her throat. She’d seen what Crusader could do, unleashed. She knew he was holding back now. Her eyes found the battered and cracked form of Dire’s armor with no trouble, as it pulled itself free of a pile of rubble. Minna was trying to fight him.
And then he was there. The golden man, the form she’d watched on television since she was a child, descending from on high, hovering above them both.
“Miss. It’s not safe. Please leave, now.”
Vorpal opened her mouth, but only a rasp came out. Her feet were lead, holding her to the street. She could not move, she could not speak. Every inch of her shook, helpless and afraid. The rasp turned into a sob, as tears gathered in her eyes, smeared the lens of her mask.
I can’t.
Minna blasted Crusader with a particle beam, golden energy slamming into him, bathing him in its glow, crackling off his armor as it surged and roared. A blast that would have turned Vorpal into mush and sent her battered remains hurtling into the atmosphere neither moved nor hurt Crusader. Finally the beam petered out, and Minna slumped, leaned against the stump of a lamppost.
“W
hy do you persist? What are you trying to prove?” He landed, turning his back to Vorpal. “If I have to, I’ll peel the armor from you piece by piece. I didn’t want to risk hurting you, but you’re not leaving me much choice.”
He turned his back on me. On me! Vorpal felt outrage flare up, and shut her mouth. She blinked her eyes clear, and glared at Crusader’s back. He does not consider me a threat! Some saner part of her mind gibbered that yeah, well, this was Crusader, and she wasn’t a threat, but she ignored that. The outrage bloomed, and she found she could move again, shaking with rage instead of fear. The dark energy flared around Der Schmetterling, and before she could doubt herself for even one more second, she moved.
Vorpal charged him, screaming a high, wordless peal of raw noise as she brought the sword up above her head, and crashed it down upon his shoulder.
A bellow of pain. A clap of thunder, a searing pain along her arms and the rest of her front, and a sudden slap as if a god had reached down and knocked her back and as she felt herself flying through the air, she wondered if Crusader had hauled up and hit her out of reflex, because she was dead if he had.
It seemed like an eternity. It was nothing more than a split-second, at most. She hit the street, rolled, screamed as jagged metal drove through her armor, into her stomach and legs and arm, and fetched up against the tilted remains of a sideways truck.
Across the way, through the cracked view of her one functioning nightvision lens, she saw Crusader fall to his knees, clutching his shoulder. The armor around it was blown outward, as if a hand grenade had gone off under it. And blood poured from his wound, so much blood.
She’d hurt him. The part of her power that let her blade cut through anything, had cut Crusader. Maybe not all the way, his arm was still attached, but Vorpal had hurt Crusader.
Her lips parted, and she gasped, coughed as a rib ground loose in her chest, and then she was chuckling, laughing.
Vorpal lifted her hand to brush her hair back, still laughing, and stared straight at the bloody and charred stump where her hand wasn’t anymore. And suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. She screamed instead, screamed even more as the pain hit, and her arm throbbed, and blood fountained out to splatter on the shattered asphalt, screamed as she twisted and writhed, clutching it, and the pieces of what had once been Der Schmetterling that were embedded into her flesh tore into her. She screamed until broken metal gauntlets scooped her up, and Minna flew, in starts and fits, into the shattered and uncaring night.
At some point she blacked out, she must have, for she was in a different place when she opened her eyes again, but she still screamed, still fought, but now there were hands restraining her, and the smell of sizzling flesh wafting up her nose. She’d hoped never to smell that again, not after Minsk, but here she was, and the thought made her scream and thrash until everything went black again.
This time the black stretched on into eternity, and leering Dire Masks swam out of the darkness, shouting vague orders at her, commands that turned into pleas as the masks shattered one by one, and the Dire armor strode out of the darkness, reaching up to its face, and lowering the mask to reveal nothing but hollow blackness behind it. Vorpal writhed as it strode nearer, and nearer, and nearer....
She woke to pain, but it was dull now. Everything was dull, even her thoughts, and especially her muscles as she turned her head, stared around at her surroundings. A stained room, with the window boarded up. Daylight seeped through the boards... had she been unconscious for so long? Yes, she thought she had.
Her hand.
She looked down at it, ignored the sheet and the bandages across her chest and legs, and stared down at the mass of bandages around her stump of a wrist.
How was she to fight without her sword hand? All her training, all her practice... all gone, now. She let her head fall against the pillow and everything swam. Blood loss, she knew. Or whatever painkillers she was on. Or maybe both. It didn’t matter, her life was over. In the next room, behind a dented wooden door, voices rose in argument, Martin and Minna arguing with words she couldn’t make out.
“WELCOME BACK,” Dire’s voice boomed into her ear and she twisted, glared into the flickering holographic light of the smartframe, projecting itself on a laptop screen.
“You owe me,” Vorpal rasped, and the smartframe chuckled.
“NO... actually.” Her voice changed mid-speech, and the smartframe's graphic shivered, split, fell into millions of pixels, and reformed into a spiderlike robotic face. “I don’t owe you a thing.”
Tired, battered, and beyond the point of giving any fucks, Vorpal kept on glaring.
“Yeah, it’s me. I finally ate the Smartframe, with your idiot friends none the wiser. Gulp, slurp, and everything’s me now.” Arachne whispered. “Oh, the data I’ve gotten from this thing!” She sighed. “Not as much as I was hoping. Dire prepared for this eventuality. Dire. Pah. Hiding in plain sight. Should have realized that Dire wasn’t a name to begin with.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Look, let’s cut to the chase. You, you’re different. The Bobbsey twins over there in the next room? They’re wannabes. Henches. Minions. Poor schmucks out of luck. But you? You hurt Crusader.”
Vorpal blinked. She had? Oh. Yeah, she had. She looked down at her stump again.
“So I was originally going to kill you with the other two, but you can hurt Crusader. You know how valuable that makes you? How badass you are now?”
“Badass.” Vorpal blinked again. Yes, she was, wasn’t she? What did the world think of her name now? She had beaten Crusader, in a way.
This was a game-changer. She could beat Crusader. Could have killed him, if she’d aimed for the head.
“So hear me out. I want you now.”
“I have seen how you treat your people. Not too interested in that.”
“What? No, I don’t want you as WEB. You wouldn’t be a good fit anyway, too smart, not loyal enough. I want to pay you gobs of money when I need mercenary work done that suits you. Gobs of money, maintenance on any high-tech devices you have, more devices as you want’em, and your own, top of the line, robotic hand.”
Vorpal looked at her stump. “I don’t know if my power works through prosthetics.”
“So I’ll find somebody to clone and graft you a new one. I can do that. I know people. There’s this Vector guy who’s pretty good—”
Vorpal laughed, but it hurt too much and her rib twinged in pain, sending her coughing instead. Then everything hurt. Arachne waited until she was done, then leaned in, smiling. “I’ll even let Bunny go.”
Bunny. “You have her?”
“Mm-hm. Along with Anya. Cute kid. She might live through this. Bunny... nah. Not unless you help me out here.”
“What do you want?”
“Dumbasses next door are going to hatch a plan. Go along with it. But when the time comes? Walk way. Just walk away. I’ll contact you later, after this thing with Dire is settled.”
Vorpal put her head back again, tried to think through the haze of pain and drugs. She would be betraying Dire. Betraying the people she’d lived with, the last year. Betraying Bunny.
Bunny has cancer. She didn’t tell me.
She closed her eyes, took deep breaths even though it hurt.
She betrayed me first.
More breaths.
I owe Dire my life.
She studied her new stump.
I might as well be dead without this.
Vorpal made her choice.
CHAPTER 13: DIRE – WHOM GODS WOULD DESTROY
“Loge. Whoo boy, Loge. Yeah, we had a problem with Coyote once, ended up saving the world from one of his schemes gone awry. But Loge? He makes Coyote look like a pup. A lot more brutal, and a lot more wicked. Same general dickishness, though. Trickster gods, amirite?”
--Agent Kingsley of the MRB, during an emergency briefing to an anti-supernatural joint services task force during the Tulsa manifestation.
The powder sprayed across the
room, some of it hitting the god’s face, and he blinked. His hoary, chiseled face was a mask of confusion, and somehow that settled my nerves. I’d thrown him for a loop, and that meant that he was neither omniscient nor something I couldn’t relate to.
Overcome by anger I'd freed a god from his binding circle, in hopes of turning him against his master. But the job wasn't done, yet, and so much depended on the next minute.
“Doctor... what the.. what are you... you imbecile!” Bryson roared, his own confusion plain.
I held up a hand in his general direction, keeping my eyes on the god.
And then he changed. One second he was the stonelike giant, clad in dirty hide breeks and wispy hair. The next second he was my size, much more handsome, and with a full head of braided red hair, complete with neatly-trimmed beard and mustache. Dark leather whispered on his body as he tugged on the collar of his greatcoat and wiggled his fingers in calfskin gloves. His face was less distorted, more human, with sharp cheekbones, a thin nose, and a downright vulpine smile.
The god turned that smile my way. “I appreciate the sentiment. Alas, I am still bound to your enemy. But I can speak to you now, so that’s something.” His voice was like honey mixed with syrup, deep and dark and full of calories.
Bryson shut up. Good man. Then again, he’d been playing second fiddle to Tesla for how long? Though it was unkind, he was used to dealing with superior intellects, and I found his deference in this case useful. We had minutes, at most, judging by the gunfire and shouts that echoed distantly from the main room.
“Loge,” I said, and the air in the room seemed warmer, seemed to close in bringing the darkness with it. The god nodded, the smile never leaving his face. “How are you bound?”
“I fear I cannot even tell you that. And when my binder comes in here, he’ll be within his rights to tell me to kill you. Pity.” He brought his hands up from his side, palms upward, in a ‘what-can-you-do’ gesture. But his smile gave fewer fucks than a nun at a celibacy festival.
DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3) Page 23