by Karen Chance
Because his father had known what he was, and what he could do, even as John himself denied it.
Just as Dagon had.
A familiar slither uncurled under his breastbone, silently begging, pleading, offering him a chance . . . to fight.
But how? he thought. And who? Every death was a win for their enemies, who were using their own people against them! Not to mention that, power or no, he’d need an army to have any chance at all. The triads were all but depleted, and the only true soldiers were on the other side!
Except for one.
Across the battlefield, John was treated to the surreal sight of a four-story, orange toddler peering around the side of a building, to survey the battlefield. Its features were floating around its half-formed face at random, making it look cross-eyed and worse. But when it somehow spotted daddy in all the chaos, it never even hesitated.
It started running, as fast as its stubby legs could carry it, and John flashed on something Zheng had said, about his creatures helping with the defense of the pagodas.
He shouldn’t have had any creatures; they had all exploded saving him from the Corps. But this one, at least, had somehow reformed, and had come to help him. And it had, John thought, watching it come in something like awe.
It absolutely had.
He looked upward at the rain still bucketing down, so hard that it felt like a thousand little strokes of a lash. He didn’t mind. It was his favorite element, the one sphere where his power worked quicker, easier, more naturally than any other, and it was everywhere, flowing over his shoulders, streaming down his face, and pooling in his hands as he slowly raised them to the deluge.
Help me, he whispered, but not to someone else. But to that other part of himself he’d never spoken to, for any reason, until today. The one who had lent him power he shouldn’t have had, throughout this whole ordeal. The one who had saved him in the alley, with a noxious spell he hadn’t thrown. The one who had popped out their shields in the fight with Dagon, and who was continuing it alone, fighting a battle in another realm to buy John time—
To say yes, he thought, as power spilled through him.
It felt so right, so good, so perfect, that it took his breath away. All that immense, sparkling power that he and Cassie had made together on that hillside in Wales surged through him, wave after wave after wave of it, buzzing under his fingertips, pounding with his heart, building in his throat until it spilled over into laughter, rich and vibrant and defiant. For the first time all day, for the first time in years, he felt strong, he felt clear headed, he felt alive.
Yes, Dagon, he thought. I believe I am going to play the demon prince with you.
In a mental arena, another John looked up, bloody, panting, disbelieving. Dagon, about to go in for the kill, looked around, those horrible eyes widening. Before he was thrown out, exorcised, washed back into the vampire he’d been possessing on a tide of sparkling, overwhelming power.
On a rain-washed pier, a beautiful woman paused, three huge tentacles framing her from behind, spearing down at a defenseless Caleb. And then she stopped, frozen in surprise, as a cascade of memories flooded from John to Caleb to her. Her eyes widened, the great arms floundered and fell, and she staggered back, falling to her knees and sobbing under the weight of her emotion.
In the skies far above John’s head, lightning crashed, thunder boomed, and the heavens opened—
But not with rain.
Not this time.
“What the—” Zheng whirled around, bloody and half buried in vampires, as something started raining down. Something that wasn’t water, although they were made from it. And not just a handful, as John had struggled to create before, not even a hundred.
But thousands, born out of the torrent in the sky and growing as they fell.
A translucent figure easily nine feet tall slammed onto the platform beside him, running with all the colors of battle. It was huge and bald, but perfectly shaped, a watery colossus. A muscular arm shot out, sweeping a vampire springing for John away and off the platform, throwing it back into a crowd of others, sending them scattering on the wind.
And it wasn’t alone.
All across the great, open expanse, an army of crystal clear manlikans slammed into the earth. They washed over the platform, sending the vampires slipping and sliding and plummeting off the edge. They cascaded down the makeshift mountain, causing the vehicles to scatter and the army to fall. They flooded across the open area like waves on land, surrounding the enthralled and trapping them in place. They ran together, their bodies merging like the liquid they were, making giants bigger and taller than Dagon himself, and then rushing into the burning buildings, to release their water and put out the flames.
“Yes, yes! Protect!” John yelled, laughing like a madman as power flowed through him, as thunder boomed and lightning flashed, and as Zheng stared at him as blankly as if he’d seen a ghost.
Or a prince.
Chapter Forty-Six
L et me see if I understand this,” Jonas Marsden said, half a week later.
John adjusted his sling to a slightly more comfortable position before looking up, to meet a pair of shrewd blue eyes. It didn’t help that Jonas had his Coke bottle glasses on, which greatly magnified the size of said eyes, and the look of suspicion in them. But John was prepared and kept his face blank and vaguely pleasant.
The eyes went a little squinty, and then fell to a sheaf of papers on a battered old desk.
It was almost the only thing in the room, other than the chairs they were sitting in. Jonas had a large, well-furnished office upstairs, which he used during peacetime. His war time surroundings, deep in the belly of Stratford HQ, on the other hand, were considerably more spartan, and with just the aforementioned furniture and a few pegs on the walls. One of them held a long leather coat, which was still stitching itself back together from some encounter.
John watched a large gash in one sleeve reknit, and waited.
“Let me see if I understand,” Jonas said again, pulling John’s attention back to him.
“Yes, sir?”
“A necromancer put together a force consisting of an allegedly dead demon lord and an unknown monster to destroy a city—”
“Not completely unknown, sir.”
A bushy white eyebrow went up. “Not unknown?”
John picked his words carefully. “After consulting with Caleb, who was inside the creature’s thoughts for a time, I believe that it may have been what the ancients called a siren—”
“A siren.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Buxom mermaid types who led sailors to their doom, that sort of siren?”
“Not . . . precisely. It would appear that sirens are shapeshifters, able to take on many forms, at least in adulthood. As infants, they appear as bird-like creatures, still quite formidable, but without the ability to change their appearance.”
“Birds.” It was flat.
“Yes, sir. We think that’s why they’re often depicted as a half bird, half woman in ancient illustrations. The Greeks who encountered them must have seen one in the midst of a transformation, and their mental abilities probably explain how they lured sailors to their doom. Or, more likely, defended themselves from any who came too close—”
“Birds!” Jonas said again, a fist hitting his desk hard enough to make the papers jump.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re telling me that a bird almost destroyed a major city?”
“Well, not alone,” John pointed out. “Sir.”
“No, I can see that.” The words had bite. “From what you’ve written here, it had the help of a member of the demon high council—our supposed allies!”
“Dagon wasn’t a member of council when they allied with us for the war,” John said, again very carefully. “His body was killed centuries ago, but his spirit escaped into this world, where it was captured and contained by the Corps.”
“Yes! And the damned demons didn’t tell us w
hat we had—nor bother to retrieve him themselves!”
No, John thought. Of course, they didn’t. Dagon had probably been right about the high council’s plans to allow him to slowly wither away, whilst they blamed John for his demise, cleverly rerouting the anger of his allies onto a scapegoat that they’d prefer to see dead anyway. It was the sort of thing he’d have expected from them, but Jonas hadn’t had as much experience with the council as he had.
Lucky bastard.
“No, sir,” he said, because Jonas was looking like he expected a response.
“No, sir,” Jonas repeated, in a mocking tone rather unlike the man’s normal good humor. Probably because, in the last two weeks, he’d had to deal with a major attack on the Corp’s headquarters, the escape of hundreds of dangerous magical creatures back into the world—many of which he was still tracking down—and now the near destruction of a major city. Two, really, since the demise of magical Hong Kong would have taken out the human version as well.
He had a right to be testy.
He seemed to agree, based on the look he was giving John, before abruptly getting up, striding around the desk and pulling open the door. “Coffee!”
“Y-yes, sir,” came a high-pitched bleat from outside.
Jonas slammed the door. But he didn’t go back around his desk. Instead, he sat on the front of it and leaned over, grabbing the arms of John’s chair and getting in his face in a way that would have been intimidating if not for the way John’s own week had gone.
As it was, he was mostly concerned with making sure that he didn’t accidentally bump his damned elbow. And cause the fast-knit spell on his abused arm to derail—again. And result in him being shouted at by the head nurse, who frankly made Betty look charming—
“Are you going to tell me what really happened?” Jonas demanded.
John looked up, slightly startled, and met the furious gaze of one of the most powerful mages on earth. And held it. “I have told you. Sir.”
And he had; his report, which he had finally gotten to make, had included almost everything that had happened. The only exceptions were things that would have been dangerous to himself to include, and which wouldn’t have helped Jonas anyway. Like where all those manlikans had come from, there at the end. And how exactly Caleb had convinced the mentalist to drop her assault. And what had happened to Dagon, something that John himself still didn’t know.
What he had discovered was the origin of the memory block he’d been battling for weeks, which that final rush of power had finished washing away.
After he fought Caleb to a standstill in that blasted cave, and finally cornered their enemy, he had been hit with a mental burst of fear, panic and childish whimpering that had stopped him in his tracks. The realization that he was dealing with a baby had stunned him. But its almost sobbing joy when he broadcast a message of calm and reassurance had made him ashamed.
It had never occurred to him that its wildly erratic fighting technique had come from blind terror, after two impressive magic users invaded its home and attacked it. The small feathered thing, looking rather like a chubby, human-sized owl, had eventually calmed down once it realized that John didn’t plan to harm it. And had hopped over to him with childlike trust, snuggling up against its former enemy like what it was—a traumatized child.
And promptly fallen asleep.
Leaving John with a dilemma. He obviously couldn’t leave it there, to do more harm trying to feed itself, but turning it over to the Circle wouldn’t be much better. If they followed protocol, they would contact the fey and demons, trying to find out what it was and who wanted to claim it. And neither choice was likely to go well.
Because that the strange familiarity he’d felt on arrival was due to the small creature having elements of both demon and fey in its nature, just as he did. That meant that the fey wouldn’t touch it, considering it tainted, and while the demons would, they would only enslave and use it. He had therefore taken it to Archaeus to identify, hoping to find its people.
It had been a good choice. The Goremish elder had known exactly what it was as soon as he saw it. It seemed that the sirens were an experiment the gods had done, trying to blend the strongest mentalists from two different realms. It had worked a little too well, turning the resulting hybrids into a threat that, once their godly protectors disappeared, had been hunted to near extinction.
Yet this one survived.
“John.” Jonas’ face was sober. “I need the truth. We lost more men in the last two weeks than in the last century! Meanwhile, we have two extremely dangerous enemies still at large. This siren of yours and a necromancer whom we strongly suspect to be one of the Black Circle’s leading members.”
“And a demon lord,” John said, wondering why he was having to point that out. A former high council member should have headed the list.
“No. Not a demon lord.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Jonas sat back and crossed his arms. “We were lucky there. The senate sent an operative they didn’t bother to tell us about to Hong Kong. That Basarab woman you encountered.”
“Dorina.”
Jonas nodded. “It turned out to be fortunate, however. After she left you, she set up a formidable line of defense in front of the last pagoda standing, with the help of one of the local triad leaders, someone named Hye-Jin.”
John’s eyes widened slightly. He thought about the combination of the crazy dhampir and the daunting Korean pirate he’d briefly encountered. On the whole, he rather thought he’d prefer to deal with Dagon.
“I take it they were successful,” he said.
Jonas scowled. “Yes, although the demon made an appearance near the end, and almost cocked it all up. But somehow—and the damned vampires refuse to discuss how—the Basarab woman killed him.”
John blinked, taking a moment to process that. When Dagon was washed back into his borrowed body, he must have taken off for the fight surrounding the last pillar, thinking that if he couldn’t kill John one way, he’d do it another. But the little dhampir had been in the way.
And done what, exactly? That was a story John would really like to hear someday. But it wasn’t in the cards at the moment, clearly.
“That leaves two,” Jonas said heavily. “Two enemies, one of which escaped the city before the damned gates closed, meaning he could be anywhere. And the other who has the ability to overtake even the mind of a war mage!”
“Not without help—"
“And if she gets help again? She could enthrall half the Corps at any time!”
John didn’t say anything.
The laser-like focus of those blue eyes ratcheted up another few notches, to the point that John was surprised they hadn’t burnt his skin. “I need to know where this thing went, John. I need to know that now.”
The hillside was one in Faerie, on a cliff above the River Arduin, one of the tributaries of the might Eirental. The forest in the distance was green, the sky blue, and the surrounding fields of grain, just beginning to turn brown at the approach of autumn, swayed and rolled like waves under a swift breeze. The small creature at John’s side fluffed up suddenly, as it caught a hint of salt in the air.
“Gull Harbor, just beyond the forest,” John informed it, even though he knew it didn’t understand. But when he let his mind fill with memories from his youth, and the wonders he’d seen here, the owl eyes brightened. “And the Shimmering Sea just beyond that, with a thousand little islands, half of them unexplored. It’s said that some of your people took refuge there, long ago, although few have ever set eyes on them. But they exist. And they’ll find you.”
“John!”
John started, and came back to himself. “I don’t know where she is,” he said, which was true. And, other than for the general area, the same was true for the child. His one request before leaving had been for the creature to use its mental powers to block that information from his memory.
He had thus reported another story entirely to the C
orps, about a nest of demons which had been dispatched by he and Caleb, and had been believed since—as far as he knew—it was the truth. But something about the recent reintegration of his body and spirit had caused cracks in the blockage the creature had made in his mind, or perhaps the Pythias that he and Cassie had encountered in Wales had had something to do with it. They had promised him that, once he returned to the present day, he would remember everything that had happened to him.
They just hadn’t realized how much that would be.
Jonas was still looking at him, so John cleared his throat. “But I don’t think you’ll have to worry about her again.”
“You don’t think.”
“She was coerced into this under false pretenses. Caleb saw that much in her mind when they were linked. She was deceived and she knows that now. If anything, it’s the other side who should worry.”
Jonas held his gaze for a long moment, and gave the impression that he might just hold it right on. But a knock came on the door. “Come in!”
“Caleb Carter, to see you, sir,” Betty said crisply.
“Send him in,” Jonas said, and thrust John’s report back into his hands. “Give this some more thought. See if you can fill in some of the holes. Any of them.”
John knew an exit line when he heard it. He wasted no time getting up, and out of the office. Where he met Caleb on the way in, along with the redheaded coffee boy carrying a tray.
“No! Not that one!” the coffee boy said, looking alarmed as Caleb reached for a cup of black syrup that smelled like heaven.
“Why?” Caleb demanded.
“I made that for Mage Pritkin.”
Caleb wrinkled his nose. And looked over John’s shoulder, to where Jonas was waiting, less than patiently. “How was it?” he asked John, sotto voce.
Good luck, John mouthed back, and watched Caleb silently swear. And then grab the mug John was reaching for, and belt it back. “Hey!” John and the coffee boy said, simultaneously.
“Give me something else to think about,” Caleb rasped, and pushed past.