ONSET: Stay of Execution

by Glynn Stewart

  “After all, if we train for the end of the world and the world doesn’t end, well…I can live with Black Echelon having been an insurance policy after all.”

  28

  Late that night, David was woken up by a sharp rapping on the hotel room door. He waited for a moment, still entangled with Kate, checking to see if the alert app they’d installed on his phone was going off.

  His phone remained determinedly silent, meaning this wasn’t a major emergency, but whoever was at the door knocked again. An authoritative rapping, from someone who was determined not to be ignored. He couldn’t quite See who was there…but he knew they were after him.

  Sighing, he unwrapped himself from Kate and traded looks with his lover.

  “It’s for me,” he told her quietly.

  “Advantages of dating a Seer,” she mumbled with a sleepy smile. “Enjoy. I’m going back to sleep.”

  He gave her a quick kiss and got up, throwing a robe over himself as he padded to the door and opened it a crack.

  “It’s White,” he said resignedly to the young man outside. He wore the uniform of one of the hotel staff, but with the silver oak leaf of a member of the Elfin.

  “Ms. Walker sent me,” the man told him instantly. “She said to come get you, that it was urgent.”

  David nodded crisply, coming a bit more awake.

  “Did she say why?” he asked.

  “Nothing I could understand,” the messenger admitted. “She said you’d know.”

  Which he did, suddenly. It was time. Walker had warned him that her sense of her impending death would grow more accurate as the hour approached.

  “Of course,” he told the youth. “Give me a minute to dress.”

  The messenger led David up onto the roof of the hotel. There was apparently a rooftop lounge and bar reserved for the VIP guests of the hotel, though no one had been using it and it was unstaffed.

  Leila Walker had apparently opened the liquor cabinet and helped herself. It was quite possible it had been locked, but David was starting to become aware of how little most locks would slow him down now.

  She’d rolled her wheelchair up to the edge of the roof, looking out over the lake with a glass that appeared to contain just whisky. A black-suited attendant-cum-bodyguard hovered nearby, a concerned expression on the Mage’s face.

  “Please, Lyle,” Walker said as David approached. “I’m not going to fall. I’m not going to slip. I’m not going to give myself alcohol poisoning. Please stop hovering like a mother hen.”

  “Ms. Walker…”

  “Lyle, I have about an hour left to live,” she said pointedly. “For whatever reason, there is nothing you or I can do to change that.” She took a gulp of the amber liquid.

  “Grab yourself a drink, David, and a seat. Lyle, you may as well do the same.”

  “Ms. Walker, I shouldn’t…”

  “Lyle, I know how I’m going to die,” Walker said with grim certainty. “No bodyguard or hovering nurse is going to save me now. So, my young friend, sit with me now. At the end. Please.”

  The Elfin Mage sighed but poured himself and David glasses of wine and helped David set up seats next to Walker’s wheelchair.

  “How are you feeling?” David asked.

  Walker snorted.

  “Depressed,” she told him. “A little drunk. About as well physically as I have in years. Not that it’ll matter.”

  The blind woman smiled.

  “Look over the water, David, and feel the world. You can sense it, I know you can, but you’re too busy to have noticed.”

  It wasn’t a criticism, just a statement. David followed her instructions, looking out over Lake Michigan with all of his senses.

  He inhaled sharply as he picked up what she meant. There was a thrumming tension to the night, like nothing he remembered feeling before. The world felt…tight. Stretched thin.

  “The boundary is weak,” Walker said softly. “I don’t know why. It’s not a solstice or an alignment or any of the dates that we associate with magic and power. But the world is fragile tonight. And something is going to take advantage of it.”

  “The Herald is coming,” he agreed. “Is that why it’s weak?”

  “No,” the old Seer replied. “He is coming because it is weak. A moment of fragility, an hour of tension, and the Masters Beyond will strike. Are you ready for what’s coming, David White?”

  “I will protect people,” he told her. “Ready is irrelevant.”

  She laughed bitterly.

  “I wish that was the case. The Elfin have been ‘ready’ for the masquerade to fall for years, but we never imagined it falling like this. What will the world look like a year, David White? Five? A decade?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “My Sight doesn’t stretch that far.”

  “It will, in time,” she told him. “It’s the irony of our Gift that it grows more powerful as you age—but is always limited by your own lifespan. I See more clearly tonight than I ever have…but I can only See so far ahead now.”

  She sighed. “If only I could have Seen even a day ago what I see now.”

  “Ms. Walker?”

  Walker stared out over the water, looking east with a lost expression.

  “The clinic is in Portland, Maine,” she said quietly. “The child’s name was Michelle Ambrose. She was homeless, and a kind man offered her a meal and a place to stay. Instead, he raped her, body, mind and soul. All that Buckley left of her was a mindless husk to act as host for his Masters.”

  David hadn’t thought it was possible for him to be angrier at the man who’d once been his mentor. He’d been wrong.

  “Nine months of pregnancy in four,” Walker continued. “No one would willingly make that sacrifice, so they forced it upon someone they thought no one would miss.”

  The Seer was crying now, tears streaking down her face.

  “They were wrong. Ambrose’s parents have been looking for her. She’d been on the street for barely a week—without the enemy’s interference, they’d have found her and made amends.”

  The tension in the world ratcheted up a level.

  “Make no mistake, Michelle Ambrose has been dead for months,” Walker said harshly. “Her body has stumbled on, sustained more by the magic they forced upon her than by anything natural, but her mind and soul were destroyed. Sarah Ambrose’s little girl died under the knives and power of a man she thought would help her.”

  She stared blindly over the water.

  “Buckley is a broken man,” she noted. “Even I cannot See what twisted him inside, but he may be more evil than the Masters Beyond. They are what the Seal made them. He chose to become a monster, to pledge the blood and flesh of others to servitude.”

  “We can go,” David told her urgently. “We have helicopters, Charles—Portland isn’t that far from here!”

  The world pulsed. His vision went black and the wineglass fell from his hand to shatter on the concrete roof. Shaking himself, he stared at Walker, realizing that both she and the Mage Lyle had dropped their glasses as well.

  The youth was trembling, meeting his gaze.

  “I felt that…but what is it?”

  “Contractions,” Walker told them simply, before another pulse crashed through reality.

  David was driven from the chair to his knees, his entire body rebelling against the twist in the fabric of all that the world should be. Lyle was clearly hit but not as hard, wavering in his chair but still seated, as David’s vision returned.

  “It’s too late,” Walker told David. The strain in her voice was audible now and she was breathing heavily. Too heavily for someone of her age, almost unable to speak through the gasps.

  “I Saw.” Blind eyes somehow met and held his gaze, and she reached out to him with frail hands. “I Saw this coming. I didn’t expect it to hurt quite so—”

  Pulse.

  David dragged himself toward Walker. Regardless of his supposed immortality, he was younger and healthier than the ol
d woman. He could survive. There had to be some way he could help—

  Pulse.

  This time, it hammered him to the floor and Walker fell from her wheelchair, mewling incoherently as he tried to reach her.

  Pulse.

  They were growing more frequent now, the world itself protesting at the birth taking place.

  Pulse.

  He reached Walker, desperately pulling her into the recovery position to clear her airways as the old woman vomited up the liquor she’d been drinking. She could still breathe, she still had a—

  Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.

  Walker’s eyes snapped open as David regained his sight, bright lights splattering across his vision. She was blind, but her hands grabbed his in an iron grip and she stared deep into him.

  “It is done.”

  Then she slumped against him, her blindly staring eyes closing for the last time.

  David sent the kid for Riley as soon as he was able to stand. Carefully, he cleaned Walker up as best he could and covered her with the blanket from her wheelchair. There wasn’t much more he could do for the woman.

  He wished he’d had a chance to know her better. There was so much she could have taught him—he hadn’t known there were any other Seers alive, or he would have sought her out long before.

  When Riley arrived, it was with Young and Mason in tow. All three Mages had bloodshot eyes, looking like they’d just finished the mother of all benders.

  “Damn,” Riley said softly when he saw Walker. He crossed over to where David was kneeling next to her body and joined the younger man on the concrete, taking the old Seer’s cold hand in his as he blinked away tears.

  “She warned me. It still doesn’t make it easier.”

  “It’s never easier,” David whispered.

  “No,” Riley agreed. “What the hell happened?”

  “You felt the world shake,” David said. It wasn’t a question. The Elfin Lord’s bloodshot eyes were the answer. “Every bloody Mage on the planet just did. That was your Sight, Lord Riley…now imagine how it hit the goddamn Seers.”

  From the way Riley’s face tightened, he was doing just that.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Shaken. Battered. But I’ll live.” David shook his head. “Walker was too old. Too sensitive.”

  “What happened?” Riley repeated.

  “The Herald has come. The Seal was weak, and the true host is born.” The words weren’t entirely David’s; he wasn’t even sure where they came from. “He grows as we speak. The sun shall fall and rise only once before he comes to his full strength, and then he will open the passage.”

  Shaking himself, David rose, staring out over the ocean.

  “God, that’s weird,” he half-whispered. “Those…”

  “Weren’t your words. Well, they were,” Riley chuckled. “That’s your gift filtering through what your mind expects a prophecy to sound like.” He shook his head.

  “So, we’re fucked. A day? One fucking day? We don’t even know where he is!”

  “We do now,” David replied, rising. “Portland. Near my old hometown, of course. Buckley went back to familiar stomping grounds.

  “Walker saw more clearly at the end. She had the answers to anything that would happen before she died,” he noted bitterly. “It’s not that big a city, and there are only so many clinics they could have taken over like we Saw.”

  “We don’t have the resources to search even a small city,” Riley objected.

  “No,” David agreed, the irony bringing a sad smile. “But we know who does, don’t we?”

  29

  Major General Arthur Purcell studied the report on his screen for a long time, rubbing his temples against the incipient headache.

  Age had brought the headaches with it. His new job had multiplied them tenfold.

  The report on his screen was straightforward enough. Los Angeles police had tracked down a serial killer. They’d deployed a SWAT team…and the killer had massacred eight of the LAPD’s finest. It had flagged up on SOCOM’s radar, and a platoon of Special Forces with silver-loaded firearms had gone in to deal with the potential supernatural threat.

  The SF team had managed to hold long enough to extract half of their numbers and get enough information for Task Force White’s analysts—who were definitely not former employees of a secret organization with access to its information archives—to identify the creature in question.

  A “lesser troll” or “wendigo,” apparently. A sapiovore—it had to eat the flesh of thinking creatures. So long as it did, however, it was near-unkillable: super-fast and super-strong.

  Also, smart enough to relocate after the Special Forces team had gone in. Their silver bullets hadn’t killed it, but they’d hurt.

  But his Mages said they could track the beast…and now six Sigma Force Seraphim troopers and two Task Force White Mages were dead.

  So was the troll. The survivors of the strike team had burned the body to be sure.

  “Major Hanson seems to have said the right things to the media,” the other man in his office said quietly. “Transparency is not the habit of any of your people, but he told them enough of the truth to settle fears.”

  “I’m sure watching US Special Forces pull bodies of their own out of the wreckage of a suburban bungalow helped too,” Purcell said dryly. “Not to mention burning the damn troll.”

  He shook his head.

  “Ardent can have this damn job back,” he noted.

  “Ardent has disappeared,” the paunchy man sitting across from the General replied. Arthur Purcell did his best to keep in the shape expected of a man who’d started in the Army and spent most of his career in Delta Force.

  Senator Albert Day was actually a year or two younger than him, but his balding white hair and expanding middle were solid warning signs of what Arthur was avoiding.

  “Like most of ONSET’s leadership cadre, he has followed O’Brien into hiding,” Day growled. “We’re going to need to action that. What’s your progress on finding the werewolf?”

  Arthur studied the report on his screen for a long moment.

  “Zero,” he said flatly. “Task Force White and Task Force Orange”—Sigma Force’s other official name—“have been swamped dealing with shit like this.” He gestured at the report on the screen. “We’ve been responsible for supernatural affairs in the United States for two weeks. Two weeks, Senator.”

  He held up a hand before Day continued.

  “In that time, I have lost fifty-six Seraphim troopers, nine supernatural volunteers from Task Force White, and four hundred and eighteen regular Special Forces and Army troops,” he said flatly. “Thankfully, only about half of those casualties were fatal, but half of those that lived are permanently crippled. The rest will be weeks to months before returning to duty.

  “I do not have the resources to spare to continue hunting down men and women who have committed no crime except knowing things you want to keep quiet,” he told the Senator. “They have rights, Senator.”

  “We gave you an order, General,” Day reminded him dangerously. “O’Brien especially is actively responsible for this all becoming public. We need to bring him in at least.”

  Arthur chuckled at the incongruency of the fat little Senator threatening him and grabbed a tablet from his desk—the one that had belonged to Major Warner before she’d been unceremoniously cashiered along with the rest of her organization.

  He passed the device to Day, who looked at it in confusion.

  “Read that,” he told the other man.

  Day looked at the text on the screen then back up at Arthur.

  “I wrote this,” he pointed out. “It’s the official dissolution of the Special Committee and Supernatural Secret Authority Act.”

  “Yes, it is,” Arthur agreed. “And it was signed by the President yesterday. Which means, Senator Day, that you are no longer in my chain of command and no longer have any grounds to issue unconstitutional orders to me.”
r />   He smiled.

  “If you want O’Brien arrested, find yourself a judge willing to write a warrant,” he told Day. “I and my people are going to be spending our time trying to keep the citizens of the United States safe.”

  Day paused, swallowing whatever he’d been going to say as he looked over Arthur’s shoulder. The Major General’s smile sharpened as he realized what the Senator was studying.

  The other wall of the office held a large metal plate that had once been the exterior chassis of a Patriot air defense missile. Carved into it in surprisingly neat claw-writing were the words leave me ALONE.

  He’d had the chassis checked for radioactivity before he’d put it there, but it made an important point—and one that Arthur Purcell himself needed to remember.

  Not all of the supernaturals out there were evil—and his job was to protect the citizens of the United States.

  Regardless of their size, skin color, or supernatural powers.

  Finally getting Day out of his office, Arthur continued reviewing the less-critical reports. Many of them were almost as ugly in their own way, though thankfully with far fewer deaths. There were worrying undercurrents as well.

  Officially, Arthur didn’t know anything about the agreements with the Elfin and the Familias to allow their paramilitaries to reinforce ONSET. What he did know left him furious with his own superiors—they’d been so determined to keep Sigma Force as a counterweight to Omicron that they’d kept his people under wraps when they were needed.

  His Seraphim should have been in the field months before, backstopping ONSET and Omicron in the chaos after the Church of the Black Sun. He understood the logic that had held them back. He was a good soldier and he’d followed orders.

  But he didn’t agree with the logic, and he wished he’d had then all of the information he had now. He could at least have made the argument.

  But the decision probably wouldn’t have been changed, and Arthur Purcell was a good soldier. He’d taken a bit more pleasure than he should have in flinging Day’s new lack of authority into the Senator’s face, but he also had a job to do.