by Cate Morgan
“There has to be a way.”
“Say we find some poor bastard willing to sacrifice everything. Then what?”
Declan lifted the chain from around his neck and held it out to her. She took it gently in her hands. The cross flirted with an opalescent shine. “I’ve been working on this program—virus, really. But it needs upper-level security clearance to spread.”
“And what is this wee cough of yours supposed to do?”
“It takes down the biosphere. Spread far enough, it takes down the others as well.”
She stared at him.
He warmed to his subject. “Think about it. We know what Dreamtech’s info mongers say is out there. We know the popular rumors, the conspiracy theories. But where’s the proof of any of it? Nothing that can be independently corroborated.”
“So we just take it down?”
“Why not? What have we got to lose?”
“How about everything? If there’s even a kernel of truth in any of it, we’re all dead.”
He scooted over. “Come see this.”
She watched as he accessed his files, one right after the other in rapid succession, images and reports and who knew what else. “These are studies I managed to siphon from the lower levels. Soil samples, oxygen tests—a whole gamut over the last ten years.”
It took a moment for her to realize what he was saying. “Are you saying there’s a way beyond the biosphere?”
“That’s not all.” He pulled up more reports. “Sometimes it’s in the little things that slip through. In 2012 the world population was marked at something like seven billion. It was predicted to grow by twenty percent by now.”
“Did it?” She knew the answer, but wanted to hear him say it.
“We have forty-two major cities left in the world. The population is marked conservatively at five hundred million worldwide. London is number forty-two at about six and half.”
“Not including the dregs.”
“Ah, but they don’t count, do they?” He leaned back, all long limbs and sly smile. Jamie’s smile.
“We’ll make them count.” She forced her reeling mind to focus. “Tell me more about the population.”
He spun through more reports, flicking them up on separate monitors. “Instead of growing by twenty-two percent, we’re down thirty-seven from non war–related deaths. Birth rates alone have dropped significantly.”
“How significantly?”
He watched her avid face in the light of his monitors, phosphorescent light leeching what little color blushed her skin to give her a lovely, if eerie, spectral glow. “Significantly enough that if they continue to drop at the current rate in twenty years’ time there’ll only be a few thousand births a year.”
Aika heard the words he didn’t say. In fifty years, would there be any births at all? “Keep working,” she said softly, turning away. “I need to think.”
He had to be content with that, for the time being.
Aika awakened with her head and heart pounding. After an unsteady moment she grasped it was actually the door. She looked around for Declan but he had apparently dematerialized. She made it to the door on the second try and tugged it open. She blinked stupidly at the person on the other side.
“Carl?” It was a strange time to realize she was standing in her socks. What the hell happened to her boots?
“There’s trouble,” Carl said. “In the market.”
She didn’t think. She just went.
After she found her boots.
Aika expected a Catherine Wheel of chaos when she stumbled out of between and sprinted to the black market. Instead she found business as usual, a few customers giving her odd looks. She stepped along the main stretch on the balls of her feet as though it were landmined, searching for the trouble Carl described. He had refused to travel by her methods, so she decided to confer with Bobby. Despite appearances she felt the wrong note, the string trembling right before the inevitable snap. Her gut instinct sensed the shadow stalking her, felt the eyes marking her path.
She should have gone to the gate, even if it meant walking.
Aika breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Bobby at the entrance to his vault workshop, realigning an axel chain and up to his elbows in grease, tools scattered across his counter with distracted abandon. He hadn’t even put his hammer away from the day before.
“Bobby—
The mechanic priest unfolded his lean frame, wiping his hands. His cornflower eyes shifted from her to a point over her right shoulder.
A figure half in silhouette flickered past the corner of her eye. Without thinking, she snatched the nearest object from the counter and pivoted to face the threat.
Topaz eyes in a satin chocolate face slid like water from her careful expression to the gleaming object balanced in her hand. “Perhaps I was remiss in not keeping in touch,” he said in the deliberate, precise tones of one who has worked at it, “but I hardly think my negligence justifies assault by…” A bemused smile twitched his full mouth. “Whatever that is.”
Aika glanced down. A slender metal cylinder protruded from her fist, cool metal against the sweat damp heat of her fingers. “Socket wrench,” she answered with a mental groan. “Want to see how it works?”
“Perhaps another time.” He clasped his hands behind his back, still smiling. The Viking and his small dark companion from the alley the previous night appeared at either side behind him. “None of my…sockets…require wrenching at the moment.”
Two lithe, loping shadows lumbered around her in a crescent-moon formation. Shimmering tawny eyes, long jaws, long everything. Postures awkward in the way of animals not accustomed to standing upright on two legs. Startled, frightened cries went up around her.
Carrion demons. Half hellhound, half reanimated corpse of one of the lower forms of filth who stripped battlefields and their victims of valuables. Slavering, slathering trackers who didn’t sleep or eat or stop until they found their prey. Impossible to shake until their master ordered otherwise. Aika’s grip tightened. Nothing short of decapitation or pure light would banish a carrion demon, but she could make it more difficult to follow orders. “Sure? It’ll only take a moment, and you can impress your friends at the next office party.”
The Agent opened his mouth to make some pithy response.
Carrion demons were fast. Aika was faster. “Bobby!”
Moving the entire lot of them into the between was beyond her capabilities. Even if it weren’t, she needed a destination with a safe buffer between them and innocents. Mechanic priest Bobby may be, right now she needed his more seraphic skills. When the socket wrench struck one demon between the eyes like bit of localized lightning, searing white light flooded their tiny patch of hell. The demon toppled back into the light, its aura of black mist shredding like burnt feathers. A sonic boom wavered the boundary around them, causing all but the Agent to stagger.
She grabbed the next tool a bare moment before it was too late. The remaining, snarling demon launched for her like a striking panther. She put her shoulder down and the demon in a headlock, weapon hand swinging the heavy wooden length up and around. It stuck.
The Agent put a palm up to stop his companions. They looked one another in the eye. With the deliberation of a samurai sliding their sword from its sheath she pulled the claw end of the hammer from the demon’s face with an eye-popping squelch.
A refined chuckle. “You always were resourceful.”
Aika dropped the howling demon at her feet and stepped over it, kicking it back into the light with another aural explosion that shook the ground. Angelic light had that effect on demon kind. “Apparently not enough. What are you doing here?”
He offered his hand, manicured and pristine. “Offering you a job.”
Aika raised an eyebrow. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
He lowered his hand again, tucking it with the other behind his back. “Before I hadn’t the appropriate motivation.”
“By which you m
ean leverage.” Her eyes took note of the men behind him, the smoking demon corpses. “All this for little ol’ me?” She clucked her tongue. “Seems a little overkill. I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.”
“Flattered, by all means. We’re not taking any chances.”
“You’re taking a chance with my temper. You have no right to this place, and these people don’t matter to you.”
“Ah, but they mean everything to you, don’t they?” His expression was pitying. “It must be lonely, with only these…dregs…mewling about your heels like a pack of stray cats.”
“I’m hardly alone.”
“How is the old man these days?”
“Keeping well, as always. Shall we pay him a visit?” She smiled. “But of course you can’t, can you? You have harm in your heart.”
“Not for them, I assure you. At least, not at the moment.”
“Don’t tell me you’re still rankling about that, all this time? You don’t half carry a grudge, do you?”
“The past is past. However, I do have my orders.” The milky light shielding them from the black market turned his glittering eyes colorless, as though he looked at the world through diamonds. “It’s best you come quietly. We wouldn’t want a panic when the shield fades, do we?”
“And if I say no?”
“Let’s not waste time playing games. We know all too well what the other is capable of, and you can’t manage your little parlor trick within the Zone or your friend’s shield.”
“I have more than one trick up my sleeve.” Of course, he had probably come up with ways to use her second best even she hadn’t considered. He could think his way through a child’s crazy straw without once bumping his elbows.
Which left her last resort.
“I have no doubt. But while you’re marshaling your resources it’s only a push of a button for me to summon more carrions. While I have no intention of harming anyone at this juncture, intentions can change. I know where they are now, and they don’t stand a chance without you.” His eyes sparked. “This is the one time you shouldn’t endeavor to play the hero.”
She filled every syllable with as much contempt as she could manage. “I’ve never played the hero. I’ve only ever done my job.”
His gaze flickered once more to the bloody hammer in her hand. “No real weapon, I notice. It’s not like you to be without your dance partner.”
“I’ve retired the act. Haven’t needed it in years.”
“Shame. You were always at your most lovely with a naked blade in your hand.”
“Funny. I never felt lovelier than when I was tearing your security system to shreds. Did you ever manage to get it right?”
“Why don’t we find out?”
“Why don’t you go to hell?”
A sigh of genuine regret. “And we were getting on so well too. Almost like old times.” The corner of his full mouth twitched up, reveling in a secret shared. “Don’t concern yourself with your new friend. I’m not the jealous sort.”
Aika spared one fleeting thought for Declan before she was knocked unconscious from behind, the hammer slipping from her hand.
Chapter Three
Declan shouldered his way past the front door, his hands full with bags of takeaway curry. A certain echoing nothing told him the loft was empty. “Aika?” he called, despite the evidence of his own eyes.
The couch where she’d fallen asleep was unoccupied, her boots gone from the floor where he’d placed them side by side.
He dropped the food and bolted as if all the demons of hell snapped at his heels.
The black market appeared to be just coming down from some sort of crisis, its patrons and vendors calmed but still anxious. He recognized a familiar blond head bobbing above the discord with the aplomb only a priest could manage in the circumstances.
“Where is she?” he demanded by way of greeting.
Bobby turned. His bleak expression told him everything he needed to know.
“They found her.” Declan wanted to bite off his own tongue in an effort to catch back the words. He followed this winner for statement-of-the-obvious award with the second runner-up. “Why didn’t you do anything?”
Bobby’s eyebrows lifted. “And risk all these people? She wouldn’t thank me in a hurry.”
“Have you any idea where they’ve gone?”
An infuriating shake of the head. “None.”
If he weren’t a priest, Declan would have knocked him flat. “You’re bloody useless, you know that?”
Declan navigated his way through the troubled crowds to the pub and through its door, the lights dim, its tables crammed with bodies and voices and all the stink this state of affairs implied. He elbowed his way to the bar and the old man.
“They’ve got her.”
He glanced up from his knitting through lowered bifocals. “Well?”
Declan wasted a precious moment in gaping. “We’ve got to do something.”
The old man recounted interrupted stitches, continued working with his large hands. “What do you suggest?”
“What do you think I came to you for?”
This elicited a put-upon sigh as he knotted his current section of emerald yarn and picked loose the end from a spool of fuzzy white. “Look around you, lad. I can’t leave them.” He pointed at the younger man with one of his steel needles, its point gleaming good-natured malevolence. “Did you really think you were still in the world here?”
Declan gritted his teeth. “I’m only human. What can I possibly do?”
“You underestimate yourself, my boy.” A fatherly chuckle. “You are one of the few to find her, in all this time. Is it really out of the realm of possibility that you might be able to find her again?”
He stared at the old man, breath coming hard and harsh. “What are you?”
“Neither angel nor demon.”
“I guessed that much, thank you.” A flash of electric blue eyes reminded him to keep a respectful tongue in his head. “I need to know.”
The old man regarded him as though wondering if he could knit Declan’s mouth shut. “Our family comes from a time—and a place—” he waved his free needle about to indicate the pub around them, “—before such neat classifications. A time when a man’s deeds revered him to his people, and our dear Brighid was a woman of uncommon compassion and wisdom, but a woman nonetheless, rather than a saint.” A nod toward the pendant dangling from Declan’s neck. “I’d gather your mum knew something of it.”
This confused him more than anything else. “What has my mother got to do with anything?”
“She was a healer? I imagine she was an extraordinary woman in her own right, with an extraordinary gift?”
Declan swallowed. “She could make pain seem to disappear with a touch and a smile.”
The old man nodded sagely. “And you inherited her mark.”
“Are you saying my mother was…” He tried to form the words from thin air with his hands.
“Human, but gifted. Touched by a saint, you could say.”
“Wait. You knew her?”
He held his knitting to the light. “I’m an old man, with entirely too much time on my hands. It’s my job to know what my family is up to, otherwise there’d be no respect.” He lowered the afghan, eyes striking Declan’s numb brain back into action. “I should try Westminster, if I were you.”
Declan ran all the way home, swearing every step of the way. He only hoped his surveillance systems had succeeded once more where it had been pure chance they had done the first time.
After this was over, he vowed to mind his own bloody business, and steer clear of women with crotchety, nosy old relatives and secret smiles.
Aika came to slowly, neck and shoulders strained with the inordinate heaviness of her head. The cool, dry musty odor of unclean tile filled her sinuses until she longed to sneeze, while chill metal numbed her hands from wrist to fingertip. Icy metal froze through the plain cotton of her underwear. She stretched ba
re toes experimentally against the filthy floor. Water dripped delicately in the deep dark. Otherwise all was silence.
“And so we begin again.” The Agent strolled from the shadows, hands still clasped behind his back as though they lived there. He stood a pace or two before her, admiring the sight of her stripped and shackled to the metal chair, illuminated by a weak shaft of watery moonlight.
She lifted her head with infinite care as it pounded from one side to the other. “Where are my clothes?” Her voice barely made it past her dusty throat, her swollen tongue. How long had she been out?
He extended elegant fingers to the burning stickiness at the side of her head. “I told them they must take care with head injuries. I must apologize, it seems you have a minor concussion.”
Grand, just what she needed. “My clothes?”
“They’re right here for when you’re ready to leave.” He patted the neatly folded pile on a folding table she could just make out as her eyes adjusted.
She swallowed. Always obliging, he lifted a glass of surprisingly fresh water to her parchment lips. “All that’s left then is for you to unlock these manacles, and I can be on my way.”
He pulled a second chair forward with a head-splitting shriek and sat across from her as though taking his rightful seat at the opera. “I rather thought you’d have no trouble freeing yourself.” He crossed one leg over the other and brushed imaginary lint from his pant leg, waiting.
When she remained silent, he continued in conversational tones. “This does take me back. I’d have a chess set brought, but I’m afraid I don’t have time for a game.”
Aika endeavored to shrug in her awkward hunch. “I never had much patience for it anyway.” She looked around with polite interest in an attempt to gather a better sense of her surroundings. “Are your masters here, too, or are they monitoring the situation from a safe distance?”
He gave her an enigmatic smile that would have been at home on the face of a sphinx. “No need to be shy. Other than my assistants and a few cameras we are quite alone.” He cocked his head to one side. “Do go on, please.” Pause. “Just one little ascension?”