by Nazri Noor
Prudence appeared next, burning like an azure torch in the artificial darkness. “I don’t care who you people are. We have no issue with you. Let us take what we came for, and we’ll leave you well enough alone.” She reached out a hand. “Give us the boy.”
“What?” I threw my hands up. “You wanted the sword, and now you want the boy, too?”
“That’s right,” she said, her eyes narrowing as they settled on my face. “Give us the boy. And give us the sword.”
Wordlessly, Gil hurled himself at Prudence with supernatural speed. He threw the first punch, talons bursting out of his hand mid-swing. Prudence barely ducked in time to dodge getting her face raked off.
“Hiya,” Gil said. “Remember me?”
“I remember kicking your ass the last time,” Prudence said, parrying another slash by blocking with her forearm, then returning with a kick to Gil’s gut that sent him stumbling backwards across the lawn. He growled, gathered his bearings, then charged again.
Bastion seemed to be sizing up the rest of us, his gaze flitting between myself and Carver, somehow having written Asher off as a threat. Something twitched in the corner of his mouth, and he raised his hand, gesturing at the veranda. He closed his fist.
I knew what was coming before it happened. The veranda exploded into dozens of splinters. Bastion flicked his wrist, and the broken shards of wood zinged in flight, each powered with enough arcane strength and velocity to tear the human body apart several times over.
He really wasn’t fucking around this time. I threw myself to the ground, entering the shadow on the grass as I went, repositioning myself so that I had Bastion between myself and Carver. Maybe we stood a better chance of neutralizing him if we flanked him. Asher was huddled on the grass, his duffle bag held feebly over his head as a shield.
“Oh please,” Carver muttered softly. I really should have known that he wouldn’t need any help at all. He flicked his wrist. The wooden shards and splinters turned into sawdust mid-flight, about as lethal as a puff of talcum powder.
“Interesting,” Bastion said, eyes and teeth gleaming as he grinned. I wondered, briefly, why he hadn’t brought any backup, but I knew deep inside myself that this was a matter of pride for him. He’d been beaten once before, by Sterling, specifically, and the true victory lay in getting his revenge by crushing the vampire into so much quivering mulch.
And dishonorable it may be but I knew that the best way to gain the upper hand was to attack him while he had his attention focused on Carver. It was intense watching the two of them duel it out, tossing lawn furniture and ripping up the earth in an extended stalemate. I needed to tip the scales.
Somewhere off to the side of the house, flashes of blue light accompanied the grunts and groans of Gil and Prudence’s melee. It stung a little to realize that I was probably seen as the least threatening target, which was why nobody was really paying attention to me. That was mitigated by the small benefit of knowing that I wasn’t immediately at risk of total obliteration.
Fuck it. I had the key to ending this and enabling Carver to send us all home. I opened my backpack and drew Vanitas, completely forgetting that he was back to his animated self outside of Amaterasu’s domain.
“The hell are you doing?” Vanitas said. “Let me go.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. Don’t kill anyone, okay? Just rough ’em up.”
“Ugh,” Vanitas groaned, the disappointment thick in his voice. It had been a while since he’d been blooded, I knew. I hadn’t realized just how much he enjoyed laying a smackdown, and I was starting to believe that, like Sterling, the sword would need its stipend of blood to keep fighting.
“Okay,” I thought to him. “A cut here or there if you must. But no severed limbs or fingers. None of that shit.”
“Say no more,” Vanitas said, exploding into action, scabbard and sword both assaulting what appeared to be their favored target.
Bastion’s eyes went wide as he caught the streak of green and gold, but he raised a hand and erected a shield just in time. Sparks flew as Vanitas collided with the shield with enough momentum to send Bastion skidding across the ground.
“Not this shit again,” Bastion shouted. “Prudence, you seeing this? Fuck, man.”
“Shut up,” Prudence said, narrowly missing Gil’s head with a whiffed roundhouse. “Shut the fuck up and hold the dome.”
Things were going about as well as they could. Bastion’s cockiness had finally gotten the best of him. I considered picking up a rock and smashing him in the back of the head with it, but I still felt bad about how he’d been knocked out during our last encounter, and frankly, I wasn’t too keen on what he had in store for me if his greeting for Sterling was death by Corolla.
Screw it. I had to end this before anyone got seriously injured. Both Gil and Prudence had taken some near-fatal swipes at each other, their equivalent skill probably the only thing preventing anyone from getting their head exploded.
Plus I was confident that Bastion was going to start running out of things to use as projectiles, or to shield himself from Vanitas and Carver. I didn’t want him to turn to using the unconscious bodies of the Viridian Dawn as meat shields and cannonballs.
I picked up a fallen beer bottle and gripped it firmly in one hand, careful to creep on the periphery of the fight so Bastion wouldn’t spot me. We should have all been so lucky for his arrogance, honestly. I still couldn’t believe that Prudence even agreed for the two of them to attack our group alone.
Sure, there was the distinct possibility that they were doing this incognito, that maybe they had reasons for not letting the Lorica’s higher-ups know that they were going out on their own little excursion. But even then, they would have needed an Eye to tell them where to find us.
An Eye. Oh. Oh shit.
There was a third. And I knew who it was.
Chapter 18
Call it good fortune, call it intuition, but that last-minute twist of my body as I dived for the ground was what saved me from the massive fireball that soared past, scorching the air in the space where my torso had just been.
I spat out bits of grass, the taste of fresh lawn now mingling with the traces of blood from my bitten tongue, and I sprinted for the far end of the yard, putting plenty of space between myself and the third member of the Lorica strike team. I should have known.
“Hi, Dusty,” Romira cooed, a second ball of flame already rolled up and ready to launch waiting in the palm of her hand. She twiddled her fingers at me with the other hand, flirtatious and friendly as ever, as if she hadn’t just tried to burn me off the face of the earth.
Romira worked in reception at the Lorica. She was always insanely sweet to me, making suggestive little comments, or playing with her hair and making these weird giggly noises when I was around. None of that had changed, even as she was preparing to cremate me.
The thing to remember about Romira was that in addition to her work at reception, she was both an Eye and a Hand. She was the only person I knew who worked double duty in different departments, and while that meant that she had the skills for reconnaissance and surveillance, it also meant that she was really, really good at killing stuff.
“Romira,” I said, panting, clutching at my knees. “Hey. Caught me at a bad time.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, twirling her hair around one finger. “You guys are being naughty and everything. Just give us the kid and we’ll be on our way.”
“Can’t. We need him. Because reasons.” How the hell was I so winded? I really needed to get more cardio in. All I did was run across the yard.
“Lame. We’re going to have to take him from you then.” She lobbed the fireball with all the speed and skill of a pitcher, and if I hadn’t picked that exact moment to melt into the shadows she would have burned me into a greasy, black stain on the grass.
I reappeared behind her, weighing my options. Both halves of Vanitas were busy, as was Carver. See, this was exactly what he always meant about sharpening my talent, abo
ut mastering the honing. I had to have some way to defend myself that didn’t involve calling out the Dark Room and bleeding to death, or alternately, popping up behind someone and whacking them in the head.
That wouldn’t have worked anyway, as it turned out. Romira knew very well what I could do. She spun on her heel, the perfect waves of her hair tumbling in cascading locks over her shoulder as she tutted at me. Who knew how, exactly, but it was like she had eyes in the back of her head. Hah. A Lorica Eye, through and through.
“I really don’t want to hurt you,” she said, pouting. “You’ve gotten so cute, too, all that stubble you’re growing.” She grinned and cocked her shoulder. “Have you been working out?”
My stomach did the tiniest somersault, but what the hell was I thinking? There I was getting giddy over a pretty girl’s possibly false compliments when I should have been way more concerned about how she was shaping another ball of flame between her fingers.
“Maybe a little,” I said. I watched for her next move, slowly becoming aware of snatches of conversation and snippets of heated exchanges happening around me.
“Just a matter of time,” Carver said. “Give it up, boy. Lower the shield.”
“Do you like pasta?” Gil said over the whistling of his claws. “I know a great Sicilian place just off the Gridiron.”
“Who the hell are you people?” Asher was clutching a lawnmower for dear life, as if that could be enough to save him.
“Someone get this fucking thing off me,” Sterling screamed.
And above it all, Romira’s voice. “We can end this, Dusty. Just give us the boy. We’ll take real good care of him. We promise.” She raised two fingers in a peace sign. “Super promise.”
Think fast, I told myself. A breaking point was coming, and someone was going to get hurt in a very real way. I patted at my body. Surely there was something I had that could help. My fingers found it, tucked into my jacket pocket. Amaterasu’s mirror.
Maybe this thing could absorb heat the way it absorbed sunlight. Somehow I wasn’t too confident about testing that, because failure meant being burned alive. Romira was already preparing another of her flame grenades, only she was shaping this one with both hands. It was already the size of a bowling ball, and it still wasn’t done growing.
“I’m curious, Romira. You don’t just make fire, right? You can manipulate it, too?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” she said. “I’ve put out entire house fires before. It’s not the easiest thing, but you do what you can to save lives, you know?” She looked down at the beach ball-sized sphere of flame in her hands, then laughed softly. “Look at me, talking about saving lives when I’m just about to incinerate you. Last chance to surrender, Dusty. Please? Then we can go for lattes. Or mojitos. Your choice. My treat.”
So she could control fire, even if it wasn’t hers. Fuck it. I had one shot. What goes in, must come out, right? If Amaterasu’s mirror worked anything like those lightning bottles Herald kept at the Lorica, then what I had planned could really only have one effect.
“Bastion. Catch!”
I hurled the mirror with all my might. It sailed across the lawn, catching the light of raw arcane energy as it flew, here blue, there orange, and there again white with the glimmer of the stars. I knew exactly how Bastion would react to the sight of a threat, or a thrown projectile as innocuous as an ornamental mirror. He sneered at it, then clenched his fist.
The goddess’s mirror splintered into pieces, and the concentrated light of the sun rose like a phoenix as it fought to return to its mother. The sound of the sun-fire roared like the end of days, the flames spreading over and across the house, licking and scorching: foliage, grass, shingles, nothing was safe.
Bastion cried out, his first instinct to erect additional shields around both Prudence and Romira – which meant that he had no magic left to power his dome. The telltale glimmer of glass fading around us meant that my gambit had paid off. His force field was down. But there was still the question of the ungodly solar flare Bastion and I had just unleashed in the heart of the Gridiron.
That was where Romira came in. If there was one knee-jerk the Lorica was programmed into, it was saving innocent lives above all else, and not one of them would have risked allowing the cultist normals still slumped unconscious across the lawn to die.
With every muscle in her body tensed, Romira strained with her arms outstretched, struggling to contain the sun-fire. Prudence and Gil had stopped fighting, staring mouths agape at the miniature sun that had formed above us. From somewhere nearby I heard Sterling screaming.
Letting out one final shout, Romira pushed away the last of the sun’s energy, sending its beams returning to the sky. She fell to her knees, forehead glazed with sweat, retching into the grass. The sun came out again, the darkness of an artificial night fading as if it had never existed.
Carver spoke a single word, but it echoed across the compound clear as a bell.
“Home.”
Streaks of pale amber energy snaked towards each member of the hideout, snagging us like lassos. Vanitas whizzed through the air, slamming against my chest and throwing me off my feet in his hurry to return. He made it just in time.
The compound, the yard, Romira and the others began to fade as our bodies gave in to the sending. The veins in Bastion’s neck were on the verge of popping, and his eyes bulged as he shouted.
“I’m going to kill you next time, Graves, I fucking swear it.”
Real talk: I believed him.
Chapter 19
“Stupid,” Carver said, his nose lifted so high in the air I swear he could have poked a hole in the ceiling of Mama Rosa’s restaurant. “Incredibly stupid, and arrogant, and risky.”
He was talking about what I’d done with the mirror, of course. Gil had echoed his sentiments out of a sense of duty, or loyalty, but the moment Carver turned his back and stalked to the kitchen to activate the portal into our hideout, I caught the little wink he gave me.
Gil snuck in another approving gesture, the tiniest thumbs up he could muster, then turned to follow Carver. He patted a still-quivering Asher gently on the shoulder, ushering him towards the refrigerator. I guess whatever I did had constituted a good job, and I’m sure Sterling thought so too, if only he had the strength, or the lips to say so.
Mama Rosa was very dutiful about helping the vampire out back to the kitchen. She appeared from behind the counter with one of those dollies you use to push around stacks of soda or huge boxes of frozen pork, then wordlessly, single-handedly loaded the pulped, incinerated mass that smelled like burned meat onto it. I offered to help, but she shooed me off.
The pile of half-dead vampire burbled gibberish that could have been his thanks to Mama Rosa, or something very rude towards me. Partway through the kitchen, she retrieved a tub of something liquid and red from her refrigerator. I knew it was pig’s blood, which she kept around to prepare dinuguan, a Filipino dish where the main ingredient is, you guessed it, lots of blood. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, that shit’s delicious.
It looked like she was prepared to sacrifice her stock for the sake of Sterling’s recovery. I knew that animal blood wasn’t his favorite, but without his strength, he probably didn’t have much choice. Say what you will about Rosa’s thoughts on Sterling smoking inside of her restaurant, she still gave a shit about the dumb idiot.
I let everyone walk ahead into the hideout portal, Mama Rosa trundling along like she had a delivery to make, completely unbothered by the swirling amber gateway. Asher, it seemed, had reservations.
“It’s going to be okay,” Gil said. “Go on. It’s just like a door going someplace else.”
Asher looked at him questioningly. “Is it going to be like that teleportation thing your boss did? Because I don’t think my mind can take another tumble like that one.”
“Nothing like that. Promise. Head in.”
That was enough to get Asher moving. I followed as soon as Gil had passed through, realizing that we
’d left the restaurant empty and undefended just as I narrowly missed bumping into Rosa. She stared me in the face as I passed.
“Closing the restaurant today,” she said gruffly. “Cooking for you.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks.”
She nodded. “New boy is too skinny. Must be hungry.” Mama Rosa ambled out of the portal, jaw still set like she was in a state of perpetual fury. It was nice to know that there was a tender heart sitting somewhere underneath, even though the woman had the countenance of a gargoyle.
And just as I thought that the afternoon’s obstacles had been overcome, I found Carver on the other end of the portal, arms folded, foot tapping impatiently.
“Stupid.” That was all he said, and he turned on his heel again, heading down the corridor to his office. Well. That was petty. “Follow,” he called out. Oh shit. Just when I thought I was safe. He was going to flay me alive.
The others must have fled to their respective quarters, because the halls were empty. I followed as closely as I dared. Something about Carver’s annoyance was so palpable that I didn’t dare walk too close. Either that or I was worried about him whipping around and stopping abruptly to yell at me again.
We reached his office, that bizarre room that had no walls, its stone floors reaching out into black void. It had no furniture apart from a smooth stone desk in the center, set with amber and ocher jewels that matched those he liked to wear on his fingers. He arranged himself stiffly in his chair, then thrust his finger at one of the two velvet-lined seats set across from it.
“Sit.”
Like a dog, I did as I was told. Huh. It only occurred to me then that the title of Hound truly was so appropriate in my previous occupation. All those times Bastion made fun of me finally made sense.
I twiddled my thumbs and watched as Carver pinched the bridge of his nose. Any minute now. Any minute. I steeled myself, and in time, his eyes flickered open, each one smoldering like an ember. I couldn’t even tell which one was fake. Both of them burned with very real anger. This had to be the point where he asked me to turn in my badge and my gun.