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

by Craig Schaefer

  Janine dropped the empty tube to the ground and lifted what she’d brought with her, hurling it to Marie. A gleaming arc of steel flew through the starry night sky. Marie held out her hand and caught it by the hilt.

  She’d bought the sword off the Home Shopping Network, one night after too much cheap wine and too many poor decisions. It had hung on her bedroom wall ever since. Now she clutched it in a two-handed grip and bent one aching knee, brandishing the blade like it was Excalibur.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” Rosales laughed and thumped the chest plate of her armor. “That thing isn’t even sharp. See this? Eighty. Million. Dollars.”

  “A knight fights,” Marie told her, trembling on the edge of exhaustion. “A knight doesn’t quit.”

  The suit’s afterburners fired a gout of blue flame as Rosales hurtled toward her, aiming to end her with a single rocket-fueled punch. Marie slid into the Conversation. Into herself. She remembered walking through the other Ezra’s labs, before his ill-advised betrayal and her own death. Studying the Valkyrie schematics and his early efforts at building a transdimensional drive into the suit.

  “Here,” he’d said, tapping a slide rule against the lower back of the armor. “The existing internals are already as compact as possible. We have to build out a little bit, a separate compartment for the drive, just below the jets.”

  “Is that safe?” Martika asked.

  He was kind enough to muffle his patronizing chuckle behind his hand. “None of this is safe, my lady. It’s a transdimensional drive bolted onto a suit of armor. Danger is assumed. Most of the compartment will be taken up with ceramic heat shielding, and that should protect against most hazards as well as your own propulsion system.”

  “Most?”

  “I would avoid direct impact,” he said. “And until we work out a better method of protecting the internals, definitely watch these seams.”

  As Rosales swept in for the kill, it was Marie who threw herself to one side, rolling on her shoulder, drawing on her last reserves of strength to jump back to her feet and charge. It was Martika who drew Marie’s arms back, took precision aim, and struck the final blow.

  A blunt sword could still serve as a spear. The tip drove through a hairline crack along the back of the armored suit, sliding home, and into the guts of the dimensional drive.

  Rosales whirled around, ripping the sword from Marie’s grip. “What was that? Seriously? Did you just try to stab me? Okay, playtime’s over. I’m getting—”

  She paused as an electric shimmer washed over the armor. It rippled along the coppery hull, sparking off the engraved runes.

  “Oh,” Rosales said. “Oh, this is bad.”

  The shimmer became a web of wild lightning, encasing her in a crackling cocoon of sapphire light. Marie threw a hand over her eyes and staggered back, pushed by a wave of heat as the crippled drive went out of control. The light flared, brighter than the moon—

  —and the world tore open, sucking Rosales and her armor through the crack before sealing itself up with a hiss of air that made Marie’s eardrums pop.

  Marie stood there, dazed, squinting against the smears of light on her retinas until they faded. Nessa pulled her close.

  “Are you okay?” Marie managed to ask, leaning against her. “Where’s Savannah?”

  “She made her choice,” Nessa said.

  She pointed to the end of the boulevard, the monkey house, the tiger pit where the ruins of the king’s ship teetered over a twenty-foot drop.

  “Way’s clear,” Nessa said. “Let’s finish this.”

  Forty-Nine

  Adam watched the humans press forward, rally, fighting back against everything he could throw at them. He held his microphone in a death grip, beads of sweat breaking out on his squat brow.

  “More portals! I want gateways to parallel fifty-two, gamma-epsilon-eight—”

  “Sir,” squawked the response, “we can’t. Our systems are blowing out right and left. They were prototypes as it was, and you’ve overloaded them past any hope of repair.”

  Adam took a deep breath. He studied the field. Weighed his own odds of survival if he let a king fall into human hands.

  “One more portal,” he said. “On my location. Give it everything you’ve got. Open a gateway to White Nine.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do it,” he growled. “If the King of Rust falls, I fall. Might as well take this entire insufferable planet with me. Open the gate.”

  Another gristle-flesh maw ripped open at his side. White mist boiled from within, spilling around his feet, a harbinger of the horrors about to arrive.

  “Mutual assured destruction,” Savannah said. “I approve.”

  He turned just as she hit him full-on, her oily form splashing across his chest and face, clinging to him like a second skin. She sprouted arms, tipped with jointed blades of hardened ink. Then the arms drove home and stabbed him in the back. He staggered, flailing as her blades pierced him again and again, turning his body into a slab of bloody ground beef.

  “The things I’ve done are beyond making amends for,” Savannah told him, “but that’s no excuse not to try.”

  He teetered dangerously close to the edge of the yawning portal, struggling to catch himself. The microphone toppled to the shingles at his feet as he clawed at Savannah’s body, his thick fingers passing harmlessly through her. It was like trying to fight an ocean.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing!” he shouted, flailing at her.

  “Quite to the contrary,” she said. “I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m choosing for myself.”

  A whip-thin line of ink wrapped around his ankle and gave it a bone-cracking twist. He lost his balance, tumbled, and they fell into the mouth of the gateway together. A blast of energy rippled from within, disrupting the conduit. The maw slammed shut.

  * * *

  The survivors converged on the wreckage. Nessa and Marie, Hedy and her coven—ragged, bleeding, but all of them still on their feet. Daniel and Caitlin ran up from one side of the path to join them. Harmony and Jessie were the last to arrive; they’d tasked the able-bodied operatives from their fire teams with shepherding the wounded to the medical staging ground a quarter mile up the road.

  Blue mist wreathed the twisted steel and shattered engines. The pools of spilled coolant smelled like ripe fruit mixed with chlorine. Nothing moved.

  Then a girder shifted. Metal groaned as it slid aside, a figure squirming from the wreck. The King of Rust rose, his wrists still trapped in the sapphire manacles, his silken robes in tatters and his flawless form flecked with cuts that oozed golden blood. He towered over them as he stood at the ruin’s summit, armored in disdain.

  “It’s over,” Marie said.

  “Nothing is over.” The king strode down the wreckage, the sapphire chain taut between his wrists. “You think this cheap trinket can contain me? You’re all going to die here. And look what your little rebellion cost you. The Demiurge is dead, exactly like my brothers and I wanted. You did our bidding, and now you are a species without a god. Alone, utterly alone.”

  “That makes two of us,” Nessa replied.

  “I am a god.”

  He flexed his arms, twisted, groaning as he pulled. And one by one, the links in the sapphire chain began to stretch. Then they snapped.

  The manacles died, falling open, clattering to the pavement at the king’s feet. He singled Nessa out and closed in on her, one clawed hand rearing back to strike her down.

  “Now prepare to face the consequences of your—”

  Nessa thrust the Cutting Knife forward with both hands, outward and upward, and speared him through the chest. The blade punched through his immortal skin, broke through unbreakable bone, and ruptured his angelic heart.

  He froze, trembling, as if his muscles had turned to stone. “How?” he croaked.

  Clytemnestra appeared as a flickering blue projection at Nessa’s side. “Speaking of consequences.”

  “I
t would take the Demiurge’s power to unmake a king,” Nessa told him. “And that’s what he gave us. He infused this knife with some of his blood. Just enough to get the job done.”

  “I’ve waited centuries for this moment,” Clytemnestra said. “Dreaming of it. Preparing for it. Do you know why I never changed my form back when I was freed from your power? Because I wanted you to see me like this. I wanted you to see what you did to me. So you’d remember. And I wanted you to know something else, too: you never broke me.”

  “Oh, but we’re not just going to kill you,” Nessa added. “You have something I need.”

  Clytemnestra’s image clasped hands with Nessa, their powers conjoined, their souls made one.

  “Indeed. Now let us feast.”

  Thick mists swirled around the women as they moved in on the King of Rust, embracing him like lovers. Then Nessa sawed his chest open. His golden blood spilled out and she bathed in it, washing herself in its corrupted light. It coated her arms like gloves of melted wax, matted her long black hair, droplets plastering her owlish glasses as it ran down her cheeks and into her upturned, open mouth. Clytemnestra dug her luminous fingers into the meat of his wound and ripped it wide as the king began to scream.

  The mist swirled faster, turning to smoke now, thick and radiant from within, like a lightning storm roiling behind shadowy clouds. It enveloped the three of them, blotting them from sight as a hot, violent pressure filled the air and shoved everyone back from the wreckage. The pressure built to a screaming, thundering crescendo.

  Then it stopped. The smoke cleared, blown free on a stray gust of night wind.

  The King of Rust was gone. Destroyed. Wiped from the face of existence.

  And so was Nessa.

  Marie stood there, motionless, staring at the spot where they’d been as if she could will them to come back. If she wanted it badly enough, prayed hard enough. Then she remembered. There was no god left to pray to.

  Harmony was the first to shake off the stunned silence that had fallen over the battleground. “C’mon. Can I get some help here? We have to find Carolyn.”

  The others moved, climbing up and combing the wreckage, pulling back debris and tossing the smaller bits aside. Marie didn’t. She couldn’t.

  It was supposed to be easy. Kill the king, take his power. Nessa had miscalculated. Maybe she’d been too greedy, taken too much, and the king’s destruction had taken her with it. Something had gone wrong. For the first time in a hundred lives, they’d had the chance to break the cycle, to escape, to be free and together at long last. Their happy-ever-after.

  Ruined.

  She stared, and fought back the sting of tears, and dug her short-chopped nails into her palms until they threatened to bleed.

  “Over here,” Daniel shouted. “She’s over here!”

  The sound jolted her into movement. She climbed up, numb, making her way through the debris as the others scrambled to help. They peeled back fallen girders, broken furniture, and found Carolyn beneath. A fat slab of steel pinned her from the waist down, one of her arms was bent the wrong way, and blood crusted her mouth like lipstick. Her eyes tried to focus on Marie.

  “Hey, kid,” she croaked. “Did we win?”

  Marie looked to Daniel, to the slab of steel. He gave her a tiny shake of his head.

  “We won,” Marie told her. She’d gotten better at lying. It felt like the right time for it. Carolyn closed her eyes.

  “Worth it, then. You take care of that girl of yours. Don’t let her conquer the world or anything crazy.”

  “I won’t,” Marie said, her voice breaking. “I’m…I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “Nah,” Carolyn breathed. “Don’t be. You were right. Nice to play the hero, just once. ’Sides, I’ll be back somewhere, sometime. Sooner or later, everything comes round again.”

  She let out one last, rattling breath and died.

  Tony put his good arm around Marie’s shoulder and eased her away from the wreck. No one said a word.

  The survivors of the Battle of Vandemere left in a long, ragged, and silent line. They walked in twos and threes, abandoning the wreckage and the bodies of the dead but carrying the memories with them, etched bone deep.

  They had won, sort of.

  Fifty

  Marie turned herself in.

  A night in hell didn’t change the hard facts of reality come morning, and she was still wanted for Richard Roth’s murder. Tony drove her to the station. Captain Traynor met them at the back door, cleared the hall, and kept a fatherly hand on her shoulder as he steered her into an interrogation room.

  Then she waited. No one came to question her. No one asked her anything at all. The clock turned, slow, leaden, and the hours dragged on. She didn’t really care what they did to her now.

  The door swung open. Harmony poked her head in and nodded back over her shoulder.

  “You’re a free woman. Hit the road.”

  Marie pushed her chair back. “How?”

  “Politics,” Harmony said. “The dirty, off-the-record kind. Long story short, Senator Roth exerted some pressure on a few city officials to get you indicted. We exerted a little pressure of our own. My partner is really good at pressure. Anyway, the charges are dropped. I can’t get you your badge back—I’m sorry, that’s outside my reach—but you’re not setting foot in a courtroom.”

  “Thanks. Thanks anyway.”

  She walked out of the interrogation room and turned toward the exit, numb on her feet.

  “Hey, Marie?”

  Marie turned.

  “I told your partner once,” Harmony said, “that sometimes in life, people make a wrong turn. They open a door that should stay closed, hear a secret that wasn’t meant for their ears. Then, before they know it, they find themselves in a world they weren’t prepared to face.”

  “The real world,” Marie said.

  “The real world.” Harmony nodded. “Dealing with that, that’s my job. Finding people before they can slide too deep, and pulling them out before they drown.”

  Harmony looked her up and down and let out the ghost of a sigh.

  “You and Vanessa…I wasn’t fast enough to save you. And I’m sorry for that.”

  * * *

  Marie walked through Midtown, listless, swallowed by the electric canyons of Times Square. The city moved around her. She was a face in the crowd, a walking shadow, seen and instantly forgotten by ten thousand eyes.

  It was a week after Vandemere. Janine had taken her back in. Her old bedroom was just the way she left it. Yesterday Janine had suggested maybe it was time Marie thought about looking for a job. Cosmic adventures or not, the rent was still due next Tuesday.

  Marie had walked with witches and angels, seen the golden city of heaven, and battled nightmares spawned from the pits of hell. And now it was over. It was all over, and she was back home again. Without Nessa. It almost felt like she’d been yanked back in time, back to the day before they first met, when the only inkling of magic she’d had was found in the pages of a yellowed paperback.

  Now she knew better. But she was back from the Land of Oz, without so much as a pair of ruby slippers to show she’d been there. And now she had to find a way to live in an ordinary world all over again.

  No wonder there were no stories about retired heroes. In the myths and legends, they came onto the stage, fought their titanic battles, and then faded into the mists. No one talked about the aftermath, and now she understood why. Once you’d tasted ambrosia, how could you go back to microwave dinners? Ex-heroes had to shave their legs and balance their checkbook just like everybody else, and the world didn’t care where they’d been or what they’d seen.

  She had promised to go to Nadia. She couldn’t keep her word. The beacon had burned out when they used it at Inwood Hill. She assumed that sooner or later, Tricia would come hunting for her. And she’d go with her. Or I could just die, Marie thought, and she didn’t really care which. Dying wouldn’t be so bad.

  S
he took the train back to Queens. She didn’t have anywhere to go, really. The sun was long gone and it was Janine’s game night, so she’d have the apartment to herself until well past midnight. She picked up a bottle of gin at the store on the corner. Drinking herself to sleep kept the dreams away.

  Her key jiggled in the lock. She let herself into the apartment and shut the door behind her.

  The lamp by the futon clicked on.

  Alton Roth sat on the futon, patiently waiting for her, with Nyx at his side. The demoness was curled like a cat, leather-clad legs nestled beneath her. She uncoiled them and raised her arms, indulging in a slow and languid stretch.

  “You didn’t think I was going to let you get away, did you?” he asked.

  Marie set her brown paper bag down on the kitchen counter. She didn’t try to run. She’d seen how fast Nyx could move.

  “What amazes me,” Marie said, “is that you still think you’re the good guy here.”

  “You murdered my boy.”

  She didn’t have the energy to try to talk him down. No, she did, but she wasn’t going to. She decided in that moment that if she was going to die tonight, she’d do it standing on her feet and telling the truth.

  “He had it coming,” Marie told him. “Richard was an abusive, manipulative, murderous piece of shit who carved up women for fun. He had it coming, and I’m glad I killed him. It was a public service. And you know what? I enjoyed it.”

  Alton’s eyes narrowed to slits. He flicked his gaze toward Nyx. “Do it. Kill her slow. I want to watch. Peel her fucking skin off one inch at a time.”

  Nyx rose from the futon, flashing a shark-toothed grin.

  Marie had thought about dying, but something stopped her. She didn’t want to die. Not really. That was the easy way out. And she didn’t take the easy way out.

  And she wasn’t going to die here. Not like this. Alton didn’t get to win. Not tonight, and not ever.