by Nazri Noor
No, that stench came from the third corpse. The one that had a man’s body, but the unmistakeable dead red eyes, whiskered muzzle, and matted fur of a rodent. It was half man, and half giant rat.
Yeah. Just another day on the job.
Chapter 2
“It’s a god.”
No mistake. That was what one of the guys said, one of the team the Lorica had rushed over to the hillside house the moment I reported the corpses. And no joke, the very moment. The Lorica didn’t kid around with efficiency, and it put its best teleporters on the job.
But we’re burying the lede. A god. The thing-man-creature with a rat’s head was a plague god from the Egyptian pantheon, originally from the Canaanites. Resheph. That was his name.
The first surprise there, of course, was that it was possible to kill gods. The second was the fact that gods existed at all. I had a lot of questions for Thea, but that would have to wait until I got back to HQ. Until then I had to fake enough to pretend that I knew what was going on at all.
Close to twenty men and women had blinked into existence mere minutes after I called in the dilemma. The Lorica’s Wings – mages who specialized in teleportation and transportation magic – worked fast.
Then an hour slid by and the hillside house turned into the very picture of a regular crime scene, only – not at all. They were working double duty, collecting evidence, first of all, but also scrubbing the scene of any signs that might point to the crime being anything but achievable in the realm of humanity.
It’s not like magic was common knowledge in Valero, or the rest of California, the US, the world, for that matter. We still took pains to keep the wool pulled over the eyes of the everyday joe, the regular folk. The normals.
A small team worked on cleaning up and removing Resheph’s remains, because an oversized half human, half rodent was precisely the sort of thing we couldn’t have the normals finding in the late Pruitts’ household. A woman waved her hands and muttered over the Book of Plagues which had woken up and was angrier than ever, pages ruffling at an aggravated pace. I was pretty sure I could hear the thing growling from where I stood.
And where I stood was the very fringes of the scene. As a Hound, I was good at finding things, seeking stuff out for the Lorica. The rest of the work was best handled by specialists, the way things worked in the normal world. Get the right person for the job. Which is why I found myself wondering why the hell Bastion was even there to begin with.
“Heard you almost threw up,” he said, nudging me with one elbow. I grunted in annoyance.
I couldn’t stand the guy, with his fringe of impossibly perfect blond hair, eyes that seemed intent on reminding me how much better he was, and a smile designed to charm those he desired and infuriate just about everyone else.
Sebastion Brandt, known to a precious few as Seb, but to most everyone else as Bastion, was one of the Lorica’s most talented and most trusted Hands. Everything about his behavior and body language seemed designed specifically to remind everyone that he was at the top of the heap. I mean, I’m a little cocky, I’ll admit, but you’ve never met Bastion.
“Never seen a dead body, huh?” From someone else, that could have been phrased as a genuine, sympathetic question. Out of the sneering grin on Bastion’s lips, it was nothing less than a taunt. I just shook my head, eyes focused on everything but his face.
“Oh, leave him alone, Bastion.” The voice came from behind me, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that the mere sound of it made Bastion’s presence – no, his very existence just that little bit more bearable.
“He’s a newbie,” the voice continued.
The strong but gentle fingers attached to said voice rubbed me by the shoulder, and I confess, maybe I warmed a little at the gesture. It wasn’t like Prudence Leung to be very touchy, and I didn’t exactly have a whole lot of friends at the Lorica, so I took every morsel of kindness I could get. She patted me on the shoulder, then stepped up beside me, arms folded, lips curved in an empathetic smile.
“You spoil him too much,” Bastion said, eyes darkening.
“No she doesn’t,” I said.
Prudence chuckled, her eyes glittering as she did, her teeth sparkling. Okay, so maybe they didn’t, but she was the kind of pretty that was so disarming that it made you feel like you were watching a shampoo commercial, the kind that made you forget you were standing just feet away from some mangled corpses and several liters of blood.
She ran a hand through her hair, which stopped just short of her shoulder. I was drawn to her fingers, because they were lovely, sure, but also because Prudence was probably the most literal version of a Hand there was.
Like I said, everyone at the Lorica was especially good at something, and that something could get extremely specific. One lady at the scene was using her talent to make the plague-god’s body disappear. Whether she was only making it invisible or actually disintegrating the corpse into its basest components, I couldn’t really tell.
Bastion could move things without touching them, like telekinesis, which made him crazy useful for all sorts of purposes, but especially combat. As much as I loathed the guy, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a car being tossed through the air.
Prudence was a skilled martial artist, but that wasn’t her gift. I wasn’t sure which came first, but her magic complimented the way she fought, because she could concentrate blasts of energy into her strikes. There’s nothing quite like watching your coworker punch a hole right through concrete. It’s terrifying, and for reasons I can’t explain, kind of sexy.
“You’re too nice to him. He needs toughening up. Gets bratty because he knows he’s mommy’s special boy.” Bastion flicked his finger at my pendant, the opal dangling from the leather thong at my neck. “A Hound. He’s a good little doggie, isn’t he? Thea’s got him on a leash.”
“Quit it,” I growled. Bastion was enough of a jerk without all this intrusion into my personal space, and all those damn jokes about how I was my boss’s lackey. It wasn’t my fault that she trusted me and liked me because I was good at my job. Thea was a good boss, so I tried to be a good worker.
Prudence frowned. “Honestly, Bastion. There’s a line between teasing and outright bullying. Don’t call him a dog.”
“Oh come on, Prue.” Bastion threw his hands up. “He’s a Hound. That’s his actual job title. You know what? Forget it.” He stalked away in a huff, stomping in the direction of the Book of Plagues.
“You’ll get used to him.”
I sighed. “I’ve been with you guys nearly a month now. How much longer?”
Prudence just laughed.
“Why is he even here anyway?”
She pointed at the grimoire. Bastion had his hands above it, and the book had stopped its writhing once more. “Suppression is a polite way to put it. Who knows what that book can do?”
I thought back to how I had attempted to taunt the grimoire earlier, and chuckled nervously. “Yeah. Who knows?” I cleared my throat. “How about you?”
“Oh, just supervising. Plus it’s good to have a surplus of Hands around anyway, in case something goes down.” She bent in closer. “You never know. The killer might still be hanging around.”
“I wonder how this even happened to begin with. Who would want to kill a god?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I have way more questions than that, actually. I didn’t even know gods existed, to start.”
Prudence’s lips went tight as she considered her response. “We try to ease new recruits in slowly. It’s crazy enough for the newly awakened to discover they can wield magic, or that there’s an entire arcane underground separate from reality.”
The Veil, they called it, the masquerade us mages were bound to uphold, just to make sure that the world didn’t erupt into havoc when they realized that people walking among them could vanish into thin air, call lightning out of the sky, or bend time itself.
“But gods? Really?”
&nb
sp; “There’s a lot more to it than that. I think it’s best if we let Thea guide you through it. But take some friendly advice. You didn’t hear it from me, but I’m pretty sure the Black Hand is involved in this.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry. The Black Hand?”
Prudence bent closer, her voice dropping. “The Eyes have been at work, and they’ve picked out that it’s some kind of organization. A cult, very likely, that likes to play with the kind of dark magic they really shouldn’t have access to. Things like that book you had to retrieve. And murdering a god? Sounds like it’s right up their alley.”
My blood went cold. A cult? “Prudence. You don’t mean to say – this Black Hand. Do you think they were the same people who – you know, did a number on me?” My hand reached reflexively for the scar on my chest, just above my heart.
“It’s possible. The Lorica has reason to suspect that it might well be the same people responsible.” She glanced around, then touched me on the back of my hand. “I shouldn’t say more. Thea will fill you in the next time you speak, I’m sure of it.”
The Black Hand. It had only been weeks since my murder, since the entire incident that set my life down the path that took me to the Lorica. I’d done what I could to shove that all out of my head, but the trauma lingered. Dying wasn’t fun. But at least we had a lead, a name for that cabal of strange men in their black robes and their bronze masks. At least I was a step closer to justice. My scar throbbed, and my hand clenched.
I watched on as the Lorica team swept the premises. The house was so much warmer now that it was full of bodies in motion, sweatier, even, as my colleagues went about their business. A couple of Wings were talking about what they had planned for the weekend. Closer to the kitchen, two women spoke in a low murmur as they gesticulated over the Pruitt corpses, preparing their mystical energies for the task ahead.
The women – Hands, both of them, clerics with very specific and very important talents – bent over the Pruitts, each of them picking one of the couple and placing their hands in the air, just inches above their gruesome wounds.
Ever mixed up some mac and cheese from the box, or maybe some carbonara, right when you stirred it up with the raw eggs? That was the sound the corpses made when their flesh began to knit itself right before our eyes, squishing and squelching as muscle and fat and skin spontaneously regenerated to narrow the gaping holes in their bodies.
A faint, yellowish light permeated the space between the women’s hands and the Pruitts’ bodies, a manifestation of their magic, the way that Prudence’s fists glowed a vibrant blue when she punched things into oblivion. The Hands kept working, closing the wounds tightly enough so that they only resembled knife stabs and not – well, who knows what was even used to kill them in the first place? A cannonball?
“Still amazes me, what people can do,” Prudence muttered.
“Hmm? You mean how they’re closing the wounds, or are you talking about whoever murdered the Pruitts?”
“Both, probably.” Prudence shook her head. “All this work the team is putting into making it look like a murder. You know the sad reality of it? This happens in the real world all the time anyway, normals killing each other left and right. The news will go nuts for this, but that’ll fade. Nobody’s going to miss a couple of dead bodies.”
“Hey, we’re doing the best we can, too.” I patted her on the shoulder. “The normals have their police and their people to help them with this stuff. We’re just making sure they don’t have any reason to panic.”
And normally, they didn’t, but a spell book that could be used to create magical pestilence, and two normals dead? Not to mention a slain god. Something was definitely up. I wanted to reassure Prudence, but this was all making me a little nervous, too.
Like Thea always said, the Lorica’s purpose was damage control, to stop absolute chaos from happening. However bad it was out in the regular world, it could always go worse if some psycho, or hell, just someone who had no idea what they were doing got their hands on a deadly artifact. The Book of Plagues, for example.
Sure, medical technology has made it so that the plague is total peanuts to cure, but bungle an incantation, or throw in the wrong reagents? Amateur, unpracticed magic could easily create hellish epidemics. That was exactly the kind of scale things could fuck up on when spells went sideways: mass destruction, genocide, possibly even extinction. Whoever this Black Hand was probably had designs on setting off a new form of the plague, bioterrorism at its very worst.
Lights flashed, cameras flickering as the Lorica team worked to capture the scene. Everyone in that house was a magic user, sure, but magic still couldn’t beat the sheer convenience of recording images with a DSLR, or a good old smart phone. Technology came into play all the time at the Lorica, especially when it involved communication, though, as the opal at my throat began to warm gently, I recalled that there were a few exceptions.
And what perfect timing for Bastion to amble up to us again, his hands folded behind his head, eyebrow cocked and lips crooked like he couldn’t have been more bored. Prudence tapped her foot and sucked on her teeth.
“Really, Brandt? You done already?”
Bastion shrugged. “Easy peasy. The book put up a fight, but it’ll be safe enough to transport back to HQ.”
He jerked his head in my direction and snaked out one hand to flick at my pendant. And like that wasn’t enough, he hooked a finger under the leather cord, then tugged.
“Your rock is glowing again. Mommy’s calling. Shouldn’t you pick up?”
“Step off,” I muttered, swatting at his hand hard enough that it made a loud smack.
Bastion stepped back and sneered. “Watch yourself there, maverick, or you’ll find out what happens to bad little puppies.”
Prudence grabbed him by the wrist. “Jesus, Bastion, you started it. Just leave the kid alone. Honestly.” She shoved him back, and sure, maybe Bastion had several inches on her, and a couple dozen pounds of muscle to boot, but Prudence had this way of making people stop and pay attention to what she was saying. It might have to do with how she could crush skulls into powder with her bare hands.
“You really should pick up,” she said, nodding at my necklace.
“Yeah. Sorry. Gotta take this.”
I went into a corner, returning Bastion’s last dirty glance with one of my own, then touched a finger to my pendant. That was how Thea taught me to establish the connection. The gem was enchanted to enable an intently private form of communication between us. Telepathy, essentially.
Maybe Thea was especially mistrustful of cellphone technology, or maybe she just didn’t want anyone snooping. I just found it amusing how it felt almost exactly like picking up a phone anyway. The opal was how I reported the Pruitt situation to the Lorica – well, to Thea – in the first place.
I cleared my throat, then felt silly for doing so since we only ever spoke with our thoughts. “Thea,” I said, or thought. Bear with me. “What’s up?”
It wasn’t just words that got channeled when these conversations happened, and sometimes I could get glimmers of emotion, or flashes of imagery too. Something reddish pulsed in my mind’s eye, like a kind of concern, or a quiet panic. Maybe it was just our dynamic, but I knew what Thea was going to say before she even transmitted it.
“We need to talk.”
Chapter 3
Bastion zipped up his leather jacket, then paused as he held his motorcycle helmet just above his head with all the pomp and ceremony of a king at his own coronation.
“You can make your own way back, can’t you?” he said, barely containing his snigger. “I only have the one helmet. It’d be super illegal, not to mention irresponsible, to have you ride with me.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, doing my best to overlook his false concern. I didn’t want to be caught dead riding pillion on Bastion’s bike, because first of all, being in the same room with him was already too close for comfort, and second, that thing was a certified death trap. I wa
s willing to take a couple of risks at work, but I had no intention of meeting my second death in a flaming motorcycle accident.
Bastion shrugged, slipped on his helmet, then blew me a mocking kiss. Even through the tint of glass I could sense his eyes laughing at me. Then he revved the engine a couple of times – loud and hard, like the jerk he was – and took off on his motorcycle, looking for all the world like a massive asshole.
The cleanup had taken so much time and detail that the sun was already up. There were still a couple of people in the Pruitt house working on concealing the last of the supernatural evidence, but the rest of us were clear to head out. I was so looking forward to reporting to Thea, then possibly begging off for the rest of the morning to get some shuteye. I asked Prudence if she wanted to head back to the Lorica together.
“Sorry, champ. I’m actually off to another assignment.” She tapped at her cellphone, lips pursed as she called for a car. “And HQ isn’t on the way. You going to be fine?”
“Yeah. Sure. Don’t worry about it.”
“You should call a car, too. Put it on the Lorica’s dime.”
I shrugged. “I might just walk it. I could use the exercise.” I smiled and waved, stuffing my hands into my jacket pockets as I turned to go. “See you around.”
Prudence waved back, then turned her attention back to her phone. I could use the exercise? What the hell was I saying? I was exhausted. I’d been up the whole night, and I was still tired from breaking into the Pruitts’, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t eaten in hours.
I guess I didn’t want to hang around and wait for her car to show up, or for mine to come when I got around to requesting one. I mean I was generally great with people, but something about Prudence intimidated me a little. She was only a bit older than me, probably in her late twenties, but she had her shit together, whereas I had only just started my shit-togethering journey.
I had the Lorica to thank for that. Hell, I had the Lorica to thank for a lot of things, but especially how I had a better understanding of what it was that made me so different from any other idiot kid on the street. It was Thea who explained that we discovered the arcane within us at different paces, and through different means. Mine just happened to be triggered by extreme stress.