Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Are you going to shoot me?”

  “Are you going to piss me off? I don’t know. Same answer to both questions, probably.”

  He hustled up a short hall off the lobby floor, fumbled with a lanyard, and half leaned against a secure door. He rubbed his plastic-sheathed key card against the lock like he was trying to start a fire with it, until the display finally clicked and flashed green.

  She shoved him through the doorway. The room beyond was a little bigger than a walk-in closet, and two men monitored the building’s cameras through a bank of grainy screens. One saw her, jumped up, and reached for the pistol on his hip. She shot him between the eyes. The other one froze.

  Rosales pushed the dead man onto the powder-blue carpet. Then she shoved Carl into his chair, lining the two survivors up side by side.

  “Oh hey, Rick. Didn’t think you’d be working today. Now, here’s what I need. First get on those screens and find my former employer.”

  Rick stared at the corpse at his feet.

  “You…you shot Joe.”

  “Yeah, well, he was kind of a douche. I’ve been wanting to shoot him for a while. Carl, tell Rick the consequences of pissing me off, please?”

  “She’s gonna kill us,” Carl said out one side of his mouth. “Please don’t.”

  “Now don’t freak,” Rosales said and set down the toolbox.

  She pulled back the lid. Savannah burst from the container, a wave of inky tar springing to her full height as she took on a watery human outline.

  Rosales cringed as both men let out shrill, full-throated screams.

  “I said do not freak. Jesus. Learn to follow instructions.”

  She leaned in and snatched Carl’s key card, snapping the strap of his lanyard with one sharp tug. She stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans. Then she grabbed the only other thing in the toolbox: a stainless-steel hatchet, fresh from the hardware store down the street.

  “That’s the Blob,” Carl sputtered, on the verge of tears as a damp stain spread across the seat of his pants. “You brought the Blob in here. We’re gonna get eaten by the Blob now.”

  “I have a name,” Savannah said. “I mean, rude.”

  Rosales snapped her fingers at the bank of monitors. “Ezra. Now. First one who finds the old man gets to live.”

  They raced each other, flicking through camera feeds, eyes fixed on the screens. Rick won. He almost sprang from his chair—then thought better of it and pointed to the upper-left screen. Ezra limped his way down a mahogany-paneled corridor, then turned into an open doorway.

  “There. He’s in his office on forty-three.”

  “Perfect. Seen Bran today?”

  “Should be in the labs on twenty-one,” Rick said. “So, you’re not going to kill me, right?”

  Rosales looked between Rick and Carl. She ran her fingertip across the hatchet’s blade, testing it.

  “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Remember last week when I forgot my lunch and I didn’t have a dollar for the vending machine and I was like, ‘I’m super-hungry, does anybody have a dollar?’ and you told me you didn’t have any cash on you, and then ten minutes later I saw that you in fact did have a dollar, which you used to buy yourself a Coke?”

  Rick’s head bobbed, just a little.

  The hatchet was a blur as it came down. A gout of blood arced across the security monitors and spattered Carl’s face.

  Rosales braced a knee against Rick’s chest and wrenched the hatchet out of his forehead. She ran her thumb across the dripping blade, testing the edge, and nodded her approval.

  “Nice.”

  Carl clung to the arms of his chair and let out a faint whimpering noise. She glanced his way. Then she poked the head of the hatchet against his uniform shirt, leaving a scarlet smear.

  “You bought me a burrito, Carl. I didn’t even ask you to. It was an act of genuine thoughtfulness, and that, my friend, makes you one model motherfuckin’ employee.”

  “T-thank…you?” he said.

  “Doc,” Rosales said, “go and cut the comm trunk. We don’t need anyone calling the cops and making this more complicated.”

  “That won’t stop them from using cell phones,” Savannah said.

  “Then we’ll just have to be fast. I’ll head upstairs, get what we need, and meet you in the subbasement. And my man Carl is going to sit right here and count to ten thousand. You cool with that, Carl?”

  Carl was cool with that. Savannah’s human form wavered and broke, splashing into a puddle of ink on the security-room floor. She flowed toward an air vent, climbing the wall, making a slurping sound as she slithered into the grate.

  Rosales rode the executive elevator. The hatchet dangled in her hand, slowly dripping onto the carpeted floor. She hummed along with the elevator music. The elevator stopped on the fifth floor and a woman she vaguely recognized got on, toting an armload of binders.

  She didn’t notice the hatchet until the doors slid shut. She clutched the binders to her chest.

  “Anna, right?” Rosales said. “From accounting?”

  Anna nodded, mute.

  “Cool.”

  The elevator slowly glided upward.

  “Whatcha got there?” Rosales asked. “Some accounting stuff?”

  Anna stared at the hatchet. “Payroll,” she said.

  “Cool.” Rosales looked up at the glowing numbers. “Very cool.”

  Rosales tapped her feet in time with the elevator music while Anna pressed herself into the back corner of the cage.

  “Man, this elevator is slow,” Rosales muttered.

  It ground to a halt on the forty-third floor and the door slid open. Rosales was humming a jaunty tune as she wandered up the hallway. Behind her, Anna lunged for the control panel and pounded the Door Close button until it shut.

  * * *

  Ezra Talon’s desk was a monument of dark-varnished oak, its U-shaped sweep taking up half of his office. He needed the space. Like most days he had two laptops open at once, an in-box choked with papers demanding his attention, and a technical blueprint spread across the grainy wood. He sat in a tall leather chair, his silver-tipped cane resting against the desk beside him, and clicked through his email with executive efficiency.

  A thumping sound echoed from the next room, like something slamming against the door. He glanced up.

  “Cora?” he called out.

  Another thump, and then silence.

  His door swung open. Rosales sauntered in, casually toting her hatchet. Now it was wet from the tip of the blade all the way down to the rubberized grip, leaving her hand gloved in rivulets of scarlet.

  “Bitch tried to pepper-spray me, do you believe that?” Rosales looked genuinely perplexed. “I was going to let her go, she was halfway out the door, then she went all kamikaze on me. What were you paying her? I mean, what’s an admin make, like fifteen, sixteen bucks an hour?”

  Ezra sank into his chair. One hand slowly reached for the telephone.

  “Rosales, wait. We can talk about this—”

  “What kind of a dumbass makes sixteen bucks an hour and decides to literally die to protect her boss? I didn’t even have to kill her, but after a move like that, I figured I was cleansing the gene pool.”

  “Rosales, please.”

  He had his hand on the receiver. She waggled her hatchet at him, spattering crimson drops across the blueprint.

  “That ain’t gonna work. Anyway, I had a long think on the way up here. Slow elevator. You ever think about destiny, Ezra? I mean, it’s gotta be weird for you, this whole ‘fated to die over and over again’ deal. But do you think about destiny in terms of the big picture, the grand scheme of…everything?”

  “What do you want?” he said. “Money? I can get you money, assets, a jet—”

  “See, I didn’t really get it until today, the whole ‘first story’ concept. Oh! Right, I should explain. This is a robbery. We’re stealing the Golden Saint.”

  “Okay,” Ezra said. “I can—I can help y
ou. That’s very, um, reasonable of you.”

  “You know what’s not reasonable, Ezra? You know what just blows my mind? Okay, so you know you’re the Salesman. You know that according to the first story, you’re condemned to be imprisoned for the rest of your life after you get your hands and your tongue chopped off. Inevitably, it’s going to happen. That’s the part I never got. Like, just don’t put yourself in a situation where it’s possible and you’ll be fine, right?”

  Ezra swallowed, hard.

  “But there I was,” Rosales told him, “standing in line at the True Value, buying this hatchet. I’m not a part of this story, but it was like some cosmic force was just steering me. And then I’m thinking on the elevator up, you’re the one who decided to keep the Saint behind a biometric lock keyed to your personal handprint. Why would you do that? Were there no red flags? Did you think, for one second—”

  “Rosales, you don’t have to do this!”

  She grabbed his arm and hauled him out of his chair, halfway across the desk.

  “I know I don’t,” she said, “and that’s the fucked-up part. I mean, I could just take you hostage, walk you to the basement, and make you open it.”

  The hatchet plunged down. It split through the folded cuff of his dress shirt, through flesh and bone, splintering the wood beneath his wrist. He howled as his blood pooled out across the desk. She grabbed his other arm as he thrashed, pinning it down and holding him in an iron grip.

  “But here I am,” she said, “cutting your hand off. Hands. See, all of a sudden I don’t remember if it was keyed to your right or your left, so I have to take both. I’ve seen you open that door a million times; there’s no reason I shouldn’t remember this.”

  The blade caught halfway into his wrist bones. She had to wrench it free and give it two more chops to finish the job. She tossed the hatchet aside, letting it fall to the powder-blue carpet. Then she forced Ezra’s jaw open, reached in, and took hold of his tongue.

  “What I’m saying is, this is not rational behavior, and intellectually I know that.” His frantic screams were muffled by her curled fist as she pulled, shoving her other hand against his chest for leverage. “And now I need to jump to another dimension, and while I have absolutely no reason to set Roth and Reinhart on fire when I find them, I have a really strong compulsion to do just that.”

  Ezra fell backward as his tongue ripped free. He hit his chair and pulled it down with him, crashing to the floor, choking up gouts of dark, syrupy blood. Rosales glanced at the ragged strip of meat in her hand and tossed it onto the desk.

  “I feel like such an asshole right now,” she muttered.

  She locked his office door on the way out. No reason, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

  * * *

  A police cordon surrounded the parking lot. They’d tossed a phone into the lobby, wanting to talk to the madwoman with the hatchet and hear her demands. Rosales didn’t even know they were there. She’d taken the elevator to twenty-one, rounded up Bran and a couple of his more competent minions, and ferried them straight down to the subbasement.

  She pressed one of Ezra’s severed hands to the biometric pad. It flashed red. She tried the other one and the pad let out a happy beep.

  “Left hand,” she told Savannah. “See, there’s no reason I wouldn’t have remembered that.”

  She didn’t worry about keeping Bran and his people in line. One look at the living blob of ink at Rosales’s side, and they’d been paralyzed into compliance.

  The vault door rumbled open, one slow inch at a time. Rosales tossed both of the severed hands over her shoulders.

  “You do understand,” Bran told her, “you’re mad as a box of frogs. The Saint isn’t finished. She’s halfway peeled.”

  Rosales gave the Irishman a sidelong glance. “You know who else could be halfway peeled, real soon now?”

  After that he didn’t say anything. The door shuddered to a stop. In the heart of the test chamber, surrounded by coiled hoses and mottled olive walkways, stood the Golden Saint. The insect-like armor, coppery metal spaced out between segmented black joints, had been opened for maintenance. Runes of binding and warding lined the inside of the breastplate, laser-etched with mathematical precision.

  Savannah splashed into a puddle, flowed across the room, and rose up again beside the crane arm that held the armor. She stretched out, bending like a spring made of black water as she studied it from all sides.

  “How much of this is based on my work?”

  “Forty percent,” Bran said.

  The impression of a head turned toward him.

  “Eighty percent,” he said.

  Rosales handed him a microscope slide, with a crust of dried blood fixed to its transparent face.

  “We’re tracking Vanessa Roth,” she said. “Can you key the gateway to this?”

  He twisted his wiry beard as he stared at the slide. “Maybe? Possibly? We know our tech can hone in on first-story blood, but ‘can’ ain’t nowhere near a mathematical certainty. This suit is an untested prototype based on somebody else’s prototype. You’re taking a hell of a risk.”

  Rosales approached the armor. “I’m wanted as an accessory to a mass murder. Also I’m not exactly in a position to ask for my old job back. What I’m saying is, I’m pretty much out of good options at the moment. Suit me up.”

  “Suit us up,” Savannah said.

  “I’m trying to figure out where you can ride,” Rosales told her.

  “Simplicity. My current form is not only highly compressible, it’s eminently malleable.”

  Savannah turned into a geyser of ink, splashing toward her and then washing over her body. As Rosales staggered back, surprised, the oily tar engulfed her. The ink went taut. It compressed around her, forming a thin layer from Rosales’s neck to her toes, a suit made of ink.

  “I’m a scientist and a fashion statement,” Savannah said.

  Rosales curled her now-glossy fingers, her hand and arm coated in a sheen of what looked like wet latex.

  “Okay, that’s weird as hell, but I can roll with it.” She looked to Bran. “You heard the lady. Suit us up.”

  Thirty-Five

  Nessa, Marie, and Hedy stepped through the golden rectangle of light.

  They emerged under an overcast sky, the noonday sun a faintly glowing orb behind the clouds. The cool air smelled like the aftermath of a springtime rain, and dirty puddles collected here and there on the scalloped pavement around them.

  “This can’t be right,” Nessa murmured.

  Heaven, if this was heaven, was an abandoned carnival.

  The portal had placed them at the tip of a midway, the concrete boulevard lined with shuttered games. A cotton-candy machine stood empty, near a hot-dog stand where cheap stuffed animals and pennants dangled from a length of cord. Up ahead, off to their left, a Ferris wheel stood dead and silent. The skeleton of a wooden roller coaster rotted away like the bones of some ancient and misshapen beast.

  They advanced up the midway. Marie’s gaze swung left and right as they walked, her batons trailing wisps of frost and magic as they swayed in her hands. She couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. The skin on the back of her neck prickled.

  Something rustled, behind a shuttered booth. They stopped walking.

  A shape peered around the corner of the painted wood. Its three-fingered hands, tipped with dirty claws, slowly curled around the booth’s edge like a child trying to hide. Then it poked its head into sight. It had stringy, greasy black hair and wore a theatrical mask over its face, the grimace of Tragedy.

  Comedy emerged from the opposite side of the midway. The second masked creature shambled into sight, back hunched and twisted, its neck craned at a spine-breaking angle.

  The figure in the Tragedy mask stepped all the way out of hiding. The wings of a dove, tattered, feather tips soiled and twisted, ruffled upon its back. Comedy only had a single wing, and a stump of old, broken bone that jutted from its left shoulder blade
.

  The three women stood together, back-to-back, forming a triangle. Marie brandished her batons.

  Four more of the winged creatures crept out of hiding. Their masks were baroque but ravaged by time, flecks of once-golden paint clinging to bare and half-rotted wood. They circled, slow, claws making curious snatching gestures as they kept their distance.

  Against Marie’s side, the mirror bag began to quake, squirming like something was alive inside. She blinked at it. “Uh, Nessa? My hands are full. Could you—”

  “Right.” Nessa reached into the bag. She came out with the sapphire manacles they’d taken from the cathedral beneath Deep Six.

  They suddenly bucked in her grip, chain twisting, manacles snapping like angry twin mouths. Comedy was the boldest, and the one-winged figure lunged at Nessa. She let go of the chain. It flung itself through the air between them and the manacles clamped down on Comedy’s wrists. The creature fell to the pavement, thrashing in a puddle of water and making low, keening noises behind its mask as it struggled against the chains.

  “That,” boomed a voice from the end of the midway, “is enough of that.”

  The figures threw up their hands, covering their masked eyes, and parted like waves. The new arrival was an elderly man, deep brown skin with a mole on one side of his thick nose. Long ashen hair spilled down the shoulders of his plain linen cassock, and he walked with a gnarled staff in his grip, using it for a cane. He crouched down at Comedy’s side, voice low now, soothing.

  “There, there. They didn’t mean it. They’re just stupid humans.”

  The man’s fingers brushed the manacles, and the sapphire coils snapped open, clattering to the pavement. He helped the ragged creature up and brushed him off.

  “Go along, then. You’re good boys. Go along, all of you.”

  The masked figures scattered in all directions, loping back into hiding without a word. The man frowned, picked up the manacles, and slipped them under his cassock. Then he turned away. He started to leave, paused, and looked back.

  “Heaven’s closed,” he said. “Go away.”

  His staff thumped the wet concrete as he walked. Nessa took a step forward and raised her voice.