Killing Rocks

by DD Barant

  A javelin erupts from his chest.

  It soars right past me, spraying me with blood, and sticks into the far wall. My first thought is, That’s impossible. That thing’s way too long, it would never have fit inside his chest in the first place—

  Wilson coughs once. Blood trickles out of the corner of his mouth. The arrow thunks into the floor, and he crumples to the ground.

  I hear footsteps outside. Heavy footsteps.

  I dive for my gun, but I kicked it harder than I thought and it’s not under the table, it’s on the other side of the room—

  “Agent Valchek,” a deep voice says. “Get to your feet, please. Slowly.”

  I stand up, cautiously.

  Golem Master Sergeant Zayin stands over Wilson’s body. He’s got one of Gunderson’s throwing axes in one hand, and it’s got blood on it.

  “Good to see you, Agent,” Zayin says. “We were hoping you’d come back.”

  “You killed Wilson,” I say. Stupid and obvious, yeah, but seeing another officer killed right in front of you is not the kind of thing that inspires witty remarks.

  “Regrettable but necessary,” he says. He doesn’t sound crazy. “Things are not what they seem, Agent. We’ve got to get you someplace safe.”

  “We?”

  “Captain Epsilon and myself.” He strides over to the corner and picks up my gun and holster, turning them over curiously in his shiny black plastic hands.

  “Sure,” I say. “Can I have that back?”

  “I think it might be better if I hang on to it for now,” he says. “Follow me.” He strides out of the room without looking back.

  After a second, I follow him.

  He leads me out to the white panel van we had set up as a support vehicle, opens the passenger door, and motions me inside. I get in. I might be able to outrun him, but I wouldn’t take more than a few steps without a javelin in my back.

  “Where’s Epsilon?” I ask as he gets in the driver’s side.

  “Guarding the perimeter.” He starts the van.

  Of course—that’s where the javelin came from. Zayin prefers the collapsible bow he has slung over his back. Must make it uncomfortable to drive, but lems aren’t big on complaining.

  I don’t tell him about Azura.

  He won’t tell me what’s going on, just that he’s taking me someplace safe and that I’ll get an explanation when we get there. There’s comm gear in the van, and when it starts making that rumbling noise I heard in the cab he grabs the microphone and makes the same noise right back; I had no idea golems had their own language. It sounds like thunderstorms having a conversation, dipping down into the subsonic and making my back teeth vibrate.

  We head north, toward downtown. The only people I see on the street now are lems, and every one of them seems to be armed: bows, axes, swords, even shovels and sledgehammers.

  We pull into a police station, or—as they call them here—an area command. It’s a low-slung southwestern-style building, made of concrete and painted a sandy color that almost fades into the background of the desert behind it. The place is practically empty—I guess all the action’s someplace else. There’s not a single pire or thrope in sight.

  But there is a lem janitor in coveralls mopping up the blood on the floor.

  Zayin takes me straight through processing and down to the cells. That’s when I begin to understand why he brought me here.

  Every cell holds a human being.

  It’s funny how you can just tell after a while. Thropes or pires both look human most of the time, but there are always subliminal clues that let me know when I’m looking at a member of my own species. There are both men and women here, and more than a few children. Most look terrified; a few look resigned.

  Zayin takes me to a cell and motions me to step in. I haven’t been searched and still have my scythes; I wonder for a second if I can take him, and if I should. But there’s another guard with a nocked bow standing twenty feet away, and there’s no chance of me getting out of here without being turned into shish kebab first. I step into the cell, and he locks it in my face.

  “Okay, tell me what’s going on,” I say. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “For the same reason we brought the rest of the humans here. To protect them.”

  “Protect them from what?”

  Zayin shakes his head. “Vegas is too dangerous for all of you right now. Once things have settled down, you’ll be freed. I promise, no one is going to harm you.”

  “Yeah? Who exactly are you protecting me from, Zayin?”

  “The predators, of course. That’s why I had to kill Wilson—he was going to devour you.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Wilson was a federal agent—it’s against the law to even bite a human, let alone turn one into lunch—”

  “He was a beast,” Zayin says, his voice devoid of emotion. “As are they all.”

  And then he turns and stomps away, leaving me there with my jaw on the floor. I don’t leave it there for long; the floor is filthy.

  “What’s going on out there?” a woman in the cell next to mine asks. She’s in her fifties, looks like she should be parked in front of a slot machine feeding it nickels. “Do you know?”

  “The golems seem to have overthrown Las Vegas. A group called the Mantle is claiming responsibility. Don’t worry—I don’t think they plan on hurting us. In fact, they seem to be going out of their way to do the opposite.”

  “This just doesn’t make any sense,” the woman says. “Lems are always so … so hardworking.”

  “Looks like they still are. They just found something else they’d rather work hard at…”

  “Don’t surprise me none,” a raspy male voice calls out from farther down the cell block. “Lems, thropes, pires—they’re all the same. Just want to get rid of us once and fer all.”

  I should know better than to get into an argument with someone like this—even though I can’t see him, I’m sure this guy’s neck is as red as the Devil’s derriere—but it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. “Yeah, that’s it, Einstein. They’ve locked us up because they fear our spooky human powers of super-complaining and invincible stupidity.”

  “They got them some nefarious plan—”

  “Oh, shut up. You learned the word nefarious from Saturday-morning cartoons and you probably still don’t know what it means.”

  There’s a pause. “I do, too.” He sounds hurt. “It means dastardly. Evil. Real, real, bad.”

  “Congratulations, you’ll be getting your diploma in the mail. Now, unless you have an idea of how to get out of here, please keep your insightful comments to yourself—”

  The door at the end of the corridor opens. I’d recognize that silhouette anywhere; the fedora helps.

  “Charlie!” I say. “About goddamn time!”

  He stalks up to my cell, stops in front of the bars, and stares in at me. “Jace. Mind explaining to me what, exactly, is going on?”

  “It wasn’t me, Charlie. A shaman—well, she calls herself an Astonisher, but that’s a whole other deal—named Azura took my place. Glamour spell. Wolosky should have caught it—”

  “Wolosky’s in the hospital. In a coma.”

  “I heard. Gunderson and Brody are dead?”

  “Yeah.” He stares at me intently, then shakes his head. “You really didn’t know, did you? That explains a lot.”

  He believes me. I shouldn’t have doubted it—he’s my partner, I trust him with my life and he trusts me with his, but up until this moment I was deathly afraid that was all over. “Look, I got a call from someone who claimed to have the inside track on the deal. She wanted to meet with me, alone. I wasn’t going to do it, I swear—just scope out the situation, see if I could catch her in a mistake.”

  “How’d that work out for you?”

  “Just peachy. Next thing I know, I’m tied to a hotel bed in my undies and Azura’s doing a Jace Valchek Vegas act. She planned to impersonate me and get close enough to
kill Aha—Asher. I got loose and tried to stop it, but got there just as the roof blew off.”

  “It wasn’t pretty, Jace. Both Asher and Stoker had shown, and you were nowhere to be found. Then you suddenly burst into the ops room and tell us to hit them, hard. When we did—well, they fought back. I saw you—Azura, I mean—get blown right through the chapel doors.”

  “Good job protecting me, pal.”

  “You were the one who got herself captured. Twice, apparently.”

  “I left behind a note in my luggage in case something happened to me—go check, it should still be there.”

  “Did you give yourself up, or was there a giant shoe box propped up with a stick?”

  “I’m sorry, I was distracted by every member of your immediate family deciding to turn Vegas into Bedrock City—”

  “If you wanted a white flag for your birthday, all you had to do was ask—”

  We both stop. He stares at me levelly, and I sigh. “Okay, you win,” I say. “I, after all, am the one behind bars. So get me out of here already.”

  “Yeah, about that…”

  “What? Come on, Charlie. Fun’s fun, you can rib me about this for years, but I’m not going to do you a lot of good locked up.”

  “No, but you are safe. Well, safer. Actually, I’d prefer to lock you up in Fort Knox with a tank battalion around the perimeter and a death ray satellite orbiting overhead, but you’d just get into trouble on the Internet.”

  “Charlie…”

  “Here’s the thing, Jace. There’s a war going on. Not just an investigation, a war. You haven’t seen war before, but I have. It’s—” He looks away, his jaw set. “It’s hard enough to survive when you have supernatural strength or invulnerability. You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “I’m not planning on storming the front lines with a knife in my teeth, Charlie. Asher has to be involved in this somehow; I need to get out of here and find him.”

  “That’s just not going to happen, Jace. I won’t—I can’t—allow it.”

  Something’s wrong here. Charlie is pigheaded—well, T.-rex-headed, if you want to be accurate—but this level of protectiveness is out of character. Charlie and I put ourselves in harm’s way on a regular basis, it’s what we do. For him to be acting this way …

  “Charlie,” I say. “This war. Whose side are you on?”

  He stares at me for a second, then turns and walks away.

  The door at the end of the corridor clangs hollowly as it shuts.

  SIX

  I can’t believe it.

  Magic. It’s got to be magic. Asher has somehow laid a whammy on every lem in the city, probably using that myth-spell Azura was talking about. That’s why Charlie’s acting the way he is.

  Except—he didn’t seem like he was under someone else’s control.

  He busted my chops, same way he always does. He wasn’t irrational, either; Vegas is probably a very dangerous place to be in right now, no matter what species you belong to. And considering how often I put myself in situations hazardous to my health, maybe I should consider myself lucky he hasn’t locked me up before this.

  Sure. He’s just trying to teach me a lesson. Let me stew in my own juices before he shows up with an extra-tall latte in one hand and a key in the other. Won’t let me out until I promise to behave.

  But I keep remembering the argument we had on the flight here, when we were talking about the Mantle. Charlie seemed to agree with some of their points, and he reacted badly when I made a joke. This is something he takes seriously—maybe more seriously than I thought.

  I spend so much time dwelling on being one of the few human beings on this planet that it never occurred to me to think what it would be like to be a slave here.

  Maybe slave’s a little strong. They have rights, they’re legally people, they aren’t anyone’s property … are they?

  Tough question. They’re made, not born, and they pop into existence with an immediate debt to whichever company or government made them. Parents don’t charge their children for creating them, so why should a parent corporation? And wasn’t the right to procreate the most basic right there was? After survival itself, that is—and really, having children is just survival on another scale. Survival of the race as opposed to the individual.

  Survival of the race. The pires of this world have already proven how far they were willing to go for that one—they sacrificed six million human lives to an eldritch God in exchange for the ability to have children, an act so monstrous I can’t really fathom it. But in my world we were willing to use the atomic bomb to obliterate two cities’ worth of civilians to end a war, and I can’t honestly say that one atrocity is greater than the other. Both were monstrous, but both ultimately contributed to the side of life.

  So which side were the golems contributing to?

  * * *

  People talk about the terrors of jail, about getting shanked for your pudding or raped in the shower, but the ultimate truth of life behind bars is very simple: It’s boring.

  I lie down on the bunk and think about the situation. That gets me nowhere—unless I can get out of here or contact someone, I’m pretty much stuck. I could lure a guard within range and use my eskrima sticks—but it’s almost impossible to knock out a lem with brute force, and I don’t want to kill anyone unless I have to. Besides, that’ll get me about as far as the outside of this cell before I run into a wall of arrows.

  This isn’t my first time in jail. I’ve been in plenty in the course of my career, and even before that—though prior to joining the FBI, I was more likely to be enjoying the same view I am right now. Yes, that’s right, I have been arrested. What, no gasps of shock?

  The first time I was only sixteen. Okay, I shouldn’t have been in that bar in the first place, but the other guy started the fight. Well, other guys, technically. Seems they couldn’t believe they were getting their asses handed to them at eight-ball by a girl barely out of high school. And by “out of high school” I mean cutting classes to drink beer and raise hell.

  Okay, maybe I exacerbated the situation a little. But there were only three of them and I had a pool stick in my hands, which to my mind made me a Jedi Knight facing three stormtroopers wearing gimme caps and drinking Coors Light.

  Of course, pool sticks break whereas lightsabers don’t—but that just gives you two sticks to play with, and I’m more comfortable with that than a sword, anyway. In hand-to-hand I prefer a weapon that lets me break bones as opposed to severing limbs—it gives you more options in the long run. I’d rather face a lawsuit for dental bills than one for amputation.

  Anyway, I did that one guy a favor. His teeth were all bad to begin with—he looked much better with dentures. Well, marginally better.

  I have to shake my head and grin. Haven’t thought about that bar fight in years; I put all that behind me when I signed up for the Academy. Used to be I’d grab any excuse to get in a fight—an insult, a look, a careless remark—but since I joined law enforcement I’ve internalized most of that. I still get in fights, I just tend to attack verbally instead of physically. Wish I’d learned how to do that first, but better late than never.

  I was never good with a snappy comeback as a kid. I was taller and heavier than most of the other girls my age, and when they teased me about it I just shut down and tried to ignore them. Bad idea—kids can’t stand to be ignored, it just makes them try harder. So when they found out they couldn’t make me mad with taunts, they kicked it up a notch. Vandalizing my locker, stealing my gym clothes, that sort of thing. Then one day they decided to see what would happen if they actually hit me.

  What happened was I got yanked out of school for two weeks. Well, out of one school and into another one—two weeks isn’t enough time to master a martial art, but it is long enough to learn how to beat the crap out of someone. Especially when you train eight hours a day for fourteen days in a row.

  I was ten.

  I guess you could make a case for child abuse, but that’s
not accurate. What happened was my parents—both of them—sat me down and said, “This has to stop. We have an idea. How would you feel about this…”

  I love my folks. Both of them are gone now, but they gave me an approach to problem solving that’s stuck with me: If somebody’s pushing you around, push back. Hard.

  Which, inevitably, led to me getting into bar fights when I was five years shy of legal drinking age, so maybe it wasn’t exactly a flawless way to live life. Never got beat up again, though—and never beat up anyone who didn’t have it coming, either. Including those snotty bitches who used to rag on me in that way only schoolgirls can—the subtle put-downs, the gossip, the sarcasm.

  Yeah, you heard me. Sarcasm. Nasty little voices dripping with poison as they mocked my clothes, my body, my actions. You think I came by my ability naturally? Hell, no. I had to study at the feet of masters—it was like learning how to use the dark side of the Force from a bunch of elementary school Darth Vaders.

  “In order to defeat your enemy,” my old sensei Duane Dunn used to say, “you must master the same weapons.”

  “But isn’t that like, well, turning evil yourself?” I’d asked him.

  Duane was an ex-marine, an old friend of my father’s, with a fringe of white hair around a bullet-shaped skull. He’d chuckled and said, “No. Weapons aren’t evil—people are. And mastering a weapon doesn’t mean you have to use it; it just means you understand it and can make it do what you want it to. It’s up to you if and when to do that.”

  As it turns out, sarcasm is sometimes more appropriate than violence, though usually not as satisfying. Easier to practice in public, though, and Charlie’s the whetstone I’ve gotten used to sharpening my skills on. What am I supposed to do now—mock my dog? He’d just do the same thing he always does, stare at me with undying devotion, love, and absolutely no understanding. What fun is that?

  Thinking about Galahad depresses me further. There’s something about jail that makes you ruminate on harmonica music and miss your dog. I miss his big slobbery kisses, the way he rests his head in my lap when I watch TV, the way he makes me coffee in the morning …