“What are you doing?” the old man roared. “Stop this foolishness!”
An angel with two broken stumps on its shoulders grappled with Hedy, throwing her against the bas-relief wall. She shoved her hands against its chest and tried to force it back. Marie ran in, her baton drawing wintery runes in the air as she brought it down against the back of the angel’s skull. A blast of concussive force slammed it to the ground and it rolled onto its back, dazed.
“Nessa,” Marie said, “its eyes!”
The black orbs fixed upon her. Then it spoke, from behind its mask, in a familiar voice.
“Just who I’ve been looking for,” Savannah said. “Surprised to see me? That’s ‘me’ in the plural now. You could say there’s plenty of me to go around.”
The ones who could fly were circling in the hall, while more clambered in through the broken windows. They tore their hands open on the sills and crawled across shattered glass, relentless. A flying angel broke from the pack and folded its wings back, diving toward Nessa hard and fast. She brandished her Cutting Knife in both hands, jumped aside at the last second, and drove the blade upward, slicing the possessed creature open from its chest to its sexless crotch. It landed, facedown and dead, in a pool of spreading ink. As Nessa watched, the puddle took on a life of its own, turning serpentine as it wriggled away from the corpse.
A new figure loomed at the far end of the great hall. Marie recognized the rough outlines of the armored woman: it was a Valkyrie suit, coppery-red instead of black, and its engines thrummed with eager anticipation. Rosales’s voice spoke over amplified speakers.
“Is that another throne tomb? Holy shit. I just came for the bell, but if you’ve got another Elysium key in there, you know what that means? I am going to get paid tonight.”
Nessa reached in, punching through brittle rib bones, and snatched up the slim black book.
“Get your own,” Nessa shouted back.
The suit’s thrusters ignited with a hiss of blue flame.
“Normally I’d say hand over the goods and nobody gets hurt,” Rosales told her, “but as you can see, I’ve got Dr. Cross with me and, well, I’m pretty sure you’re all going to get hurt real soon now.”
The old man’s staff drew another crescent of mist, driving off an ink-maddened angel. Its wings flapped, shedding dirty feathers, as its claws scrabbled at the magical shield. The man looked back over his shoulder, face strained and beading with sweat.
“Get out, now, while you still can!”
“What about you?” Marie said.
Rosales triggered her thrusters. The armored suit streaked toward them, one metal fist cocked back to deliver a killing blow. The old man raised his staff high in both hands and brought it slamming down. It hit the marble hard enough to draw a hairline crack down the heart of the gallery, and with it, a blast of sheer force that roiled through the air like an invisible tsunami. Angels and broken glass went flying, and Rosales flipped end over end, thrown off-balance and off course as her suit’s thrusters slammed her into the wall.
She picked herself up and brushed herself off. Around her, the possessed angels slowly did the same, shaking their dazed heads in unison.
“I can hold them off a little longer,” the old man said to Marie. “And if they get their hands on those keys…never mind. Just go already.”
“Clytemnestra,” Nessa said, “are you ready?”
Let us cut, the ancient witch said, speaking into Nessa’s mind. Where would you like to go?
“Where?” Nessa asked. She looked to Marie, and they locked eyes.
“There’s no place like home,” Marie told her.
“No place like home,” Nessa echoed. Then she stabbed the Cutting Knife into the open air, dragged it downward, and tore open a hole in the universe.
Thirty-Eight
The tear in reality spat Marie out. She lunged, stumbling, almost tripping over her own feet. Hedy and Nessa were right behind her. The tear whipped itself shut, frayed edges of the world sewing themselves up with the sound of crystal chimes.
A laugh track rippled over a laptop’s tinny speaker. Janine was sitting on the futon, legs curled, watching a sitcom with an open pint of Ben & Jerry’s on her lap. The spoon in her mouth slowly slid free, then clattered to the apartment floor.
“Holy cats,” she breathed.
Then she leaped off the futon, grabbed Marie, and pulled her into a ferocious hug.
“Don’t you ever scare me like that again—” She paused, pulled back, and stared down at the batons in Marie’s hands. They wavered, trailing mist and snowy runes. Her jaw dropped. “What are those? Are those magic? Can I hold one?”
Hedy was looking around the apartment, from the cramped living room to the kitchenette with a sink full of dirty, mismatched cups. “This is…charming,” she said.
“Marie’s old apartment,” Nessa told her.
“Is this Vegas still?”
“Queens,” Nessa said.
“Daniel put me and Tony on the first flight out of town,” Janine said. “First class. Ritzy. He figured a ton of cops were going to be poking around, asking questions, and it’d be better if we were elsewhere.”
“And my coven?” Hedy asked.
“Still there. Not at the hotel, obviously. He’s got his own nightclub, but construction isn’t finished yet so they’re all camping out there, sleeping bags and everything. Sort of like a really messed-up slumber party, and I don’t want to know what their version of spin the bottle looks like. Carolyn’s with them, too, since she can’t exactly go home until this all blows over. Ezra already had her kidnapped once.”
“I need a phone,” Hedy said. “And someone needs to remind me how to make phone calls.”
Janine helped her. On the other end of the line, Daniel barely got a word out before Gazelle yanked the phone from his hand. Her breath was a gust of relief.
“Mistress, you’re all right! Did you find Marie? Is the Owl safe?”
“We’re all here. And we need you. Can you gather up the coven and come to us? We’re in a place called Queens. I assume Daniel knows where that is.”
“Daniel,” Gazelle said, “you need to steal another bus and drive us to Queens.”
His voice was muffled, somewhere a few feet from the phone.
“Or I can rent a bus, like a normal person—oh, shit. Ask if they’re watching the news. If not, they need to be.”
Hedy passed it along, and Janine grabbed her laptop. She pulled up her favorite news site, and the lockdown at Talon Worldwide’s headquarters was the top story on the banner.
“Former chief of security Angelica Rosales,” Janine muttered, “with a hatchet? Ew. Okay, so half the building is evacuated, the place is locked down, and they assume she’s barricaded in there.”
“We just saw her five minutes ago,” Marie said, “so obviously not. Does it say anything about Ezra?”
Janine shook her head. “‘Conflicting eyewitness reports,’ it says. Not a lot of details.”
“He’s dead,” Nessa said. “Judging from that suit she was wearing, it looks like Ezra was trying to build his own version of the Valkyrie armor.”
Marie rubbed her chin. “Well, it works. So she teamed up with Savannah Cross, stole the suit, and came gunning for us. She must have had something to locate us with.”
“The kitchen, at the Flamenco.” Nessa grimaced, patting her bandaged hip. “They found some of the blood I lost. Damn it. If they tracked us all the way to heaven, they can track us back here, too. We have to move fast.”
“Wait.” Janine blinked at her. “Did you say ‘heaven’? You actually went to heaven.”
Hedy pressed the phone to her chest. “Daniel says he can drive everyone here in three days, maybe a little less.”
“Fly out,” Nessa said. “We’ll find a way to reimburse him for the tickets.”
She shook her head. “Says you need identification to get on a plane. That’s fine for him and Carolyn, but my people aren’t exactly law
ful residents of this planet.”
“Fine, fine, just tell them to leave now. We need all hands for this, and time is not on our side.”
“Can we circle back to the ‘heaven’ thing?” Janine asked.
“Make sure they bring the candle,” Nessa said. “They need to guard it with their lives. We’re playing for all the marbles now.”
* * *
A few blocks from the Vegas Strip, a nightclub stood frozen in mid-creation. A motionless earthmover stood beside a drywall shell, tarp over brand-new windows, a week or two away from the club’s first coat of paint and a month from the grand opening. The construction crew had been told to take a few days off. A sign out front read, The American, where Old Vegas meets New, coming this summer.
Inside, an explosion of activity was underway. Hedy’s witches were breaking camp, rolling up sleeping bags and boxing battery-powered lamps, as Gazelle supervised the evacuation. She passed along everything she’d been told; Daniel was tapping his phone as he strode for the door, hunting for the closest rental place.
“Everybody sit tight,” he called out, “and I’ll be back in half an hour with a bus—”
He pulled open the door. Harmony and Jessie were standing right outside.
“—ted,” he added.
“Relax,” Harmony told him. “We saw the footage from the casino. We know you tried to stop the fight before it started.”
“We’re looking for Nyx,” Jessie added. “Figure you are, too.”
“Not even a little bit. Look, I’m going to make a really long story short: the Kings of Man made three keys to open the way to the sealed pocket-dimension where God is hiding. Keys stolen. Keys lost. Keys found again. We have one, Vanessa and Marie have the other two, and we’ve got to drive to New York and get the band back together.”
“You’ll be handing that over,” Harmony told him.
“I don’t think you get the magnitude of this situation. This is the first time in history that all three keys have been present on the same world. This one. And the Network wants these things like a cop wants donuts. As soon as they find out, they’re going to send all the assets they have. All of them.”
“All the more reason my people should confiscate them,” Harmony said. “We have a secure artifact vault.”
“You have a vault. They have thieves, spies, and assassins from a dozen alien worlds, and zero restraint. Want to know who I’m not betting on in that fight?”
“You got a better idea?” Jessie asked.
“Damn right,” Daniel said. “We give Vanessa Roth what she wants. As far as I know, the portal is a one-time, one-way trip. No keys, no reason for the Network to tear this planet apart looking for ’em.”
“And you’re not worried about what Roth is going to do on the other side of that portal?”
“I believe in risk mitigation,” Daniel said. “Vanessa’s dying, but Marie’s with her. Wherever she was, I’m told they just pulled her out alive and intact, which greatly reduces the chances of Vanessa going nuclear again. Look, I don’t even know what she’s going to find over there, much less what she can do. But I do know what the Network is capable of, and if you think Nyx shooting up a casino is bad news, just wait. At least Nyx follows some kind of code. They don’t, and they’ve burned planets bigger than this one for fuel.”
Harmony and Jessie stepped back from the front stoop. They leaned close to each other, conversing in low voices. Then Harmony glanced toward him.
“We have a plane,” she said. “Get your people and let’s go.”
“Got room for one more on that flight?” he asked.
“Who did you have in mind?”
He hit the autodial and put the phone to his ear.
“Hey, hon, how’s work? Good, yeah, same here. Long day. Hey, so, looks like the apocalypse might be happening, so I’m teaming up with the good guys and some witches from a parallel Earth to try and make that not be a thing. Uh-huh? Yeah. Love you too.”
He hung up.
“Caitlin says she’ll meet us at the airport.”
* * *
Janine put on a pot of coffee. Hedy was perched on the futon next to Nessa; the two of them leafed through the slender book, seeking insight from the runes scribed along its brittle pages. Marie was touching things around the apartment, the old ritual Janine recognized. Every time the past swallowed her in a bad memory, making her live it all over again, she would touch things. Reminding herself of where she was.
“So, you going to keep that promise?” Janine asked.
She blinked at her, jarred from her thoughts. “Promise?”
“Back when you called me from the road, you said that when this was all over, you’d tell me the whole story. The real story.”
Marie cracked a faint smile. “It’s not over yet.”
“Have you got something better to do?”
“Guess not.” She came over, opened the kitchen cabinet, and stood on her tiptoes to pull down a mismatched pair of mugs. Janine poured the coffee while Marie hunted in the cluttered fridge for the creamer.
They clinked their mugs together.
“Cheers,” Janine said.
“Some of it I’m still trying to understand,” Marie said. “And some of it…some of the things we learned…you’re not going to like it.”
“I’m a big girl. I can take it.”
“I know,” Marie said.
While they talked, Nessa watched from the futon, silent. She put her hand on Hedy’s arm.
“I need a little air,” she said. “Be right back.”
The apartment window was cracked. Street air and street sounds blew in through the cheap, gauzy curtain. Nessa opened it up all the way and clambered out onto the fire escape.
* * *
“Penny for your thoughts.”
Nessa had been alone with those, all racing and tangled behind her eyes. She thought the city might ground her. It was afternoon in Queens, under a hazy, dusty sky, and she stared down at the cars and the pedestrians and the line of bars waiting to roll their shutters up. Real, concrete things. The world she used to take for granted.
Now there were two people on the fire escape. The Lady in Red lounged beside her, leaning with one elbow against the metal railing like a femme fatale in a speakeasy. Nessa answered by tugging up her blouse and peeling back the bandage over her cut.
Black veins spread from the wound in all directions, carving spidery lines across her torso.
“I don’t have much time left,” she said. “The last dose of elixir saved me when I went all-out on the Logos, but the infection is worse now, spreading faster and faster. Can’t taste anything.”
She cupped the air and waved at her nose.
“Can barely smell anything. The world is…muffled. What’s next? If I can’t hear and see, I can’t fight. And sooner or later, Hedy tells me, the mind goes too. She says that when a witch succumbs to Shadow infection on her world, they usually have to put them down for their own good. Too dangerous otherwise.”
“You’ve died before,” the Lady observed.
“I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of losing. I feel like I’m on a tightrope, and I can see triumph ahead, and under me is this vast chasm of failure. One single wrong move, and down I go.”
“Is that what’s troubling you?”
Nessa tilted her head. She stared out at the street.
“If I want to win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. I have to hurt someone.”
“You enjoy hurting people.”
Nessa gave her a sidelong glare. “Not the people I love. Do something for me?”
“Perhaps. Ask.”
“When I’m gone, watch over Marie.”
“When you’re gone,” the Lady replied, “you are going to be watching over Marie. That was part of Nadia’s plan from the beginning.”
“I don’t know if she knows what she’s in for.” Nessa forced a chuckle. She curled her hand into a fist and rapped it against the railing. “I ju
st want her to be happy. Damn it, I just want her to be happy.”
“Mother?” Hedy said.
Nessa turned around. She was alone on the fire escape. Hedy crouched at the window’s edge, poking her head out.
“Gazelle just called me back,” she said. “They found a plane. They’ll be here in a few hours, which means we can do the ritual tonight.”
“Can we do it?” Nessa asked.
Hedy held out her hand, and Nessa helped her climb through the open window.
“I think so. The glyphs, the ritual poses, they’re all pretty basic—”
Hedy froze. She stared up and into the distance.
“That’s Manhattan,” Nessa told her.
“It’s…tall. And large. I thought Vegas was large.”
“After this is over, have Marie take you to the top of the Empire State Building. I wish I had time to show you myself.”
Nessa stopped talking. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Mother?” Hedy put her hand on the small of Nessa’s back.
“I just—” Nessa took her glasses off, rubbed her eyes, and put them on again. “There are a lot of places I would have loved to show you.”
“We don’t know what’s going to happen. The Demiurge might be able to heal you. He might end the cycle.”
“Anything might happen, Hedy, but we have to prepare for the worst-case scenario. The odds are I won’t be coming back tonight. Or ever again. And I apologize, because you aren’t going to like it, but I have a task for you.”
“Name it. Anything.”
She told her. Hedy listened, her face growing grim, and nodded. She went back inside.
Nessa took a deep breath, a long last look at the city, and followed her.
Thirty-Nine
Nessa pulled Marie aside. She sat her down on the futon and nestled beside her. Hedy was puttering in the kitchen, while Janine sipped what was left of her coffee and contemplated the impossible.
“We have to talk about tonight,” Nessa said.
“I’m ready,” Marie told her. “Whatever’s waiting for us on the other side, whatever happens, I’m with you.”
Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3) Page 30