But Nathan, with all his obvious faults, was no coward, no quitter. He came on hard now, swinging with as much strength as he could, intent on overpowering and killing her quickly, and if he connected, he'd slice her in half. She darted to the left, landing on her bent leg and lunging with Diparresso's Shadow, a little-studied late-Renaissance off-line feint followed by a mid-level attack. He parried the main attack, but only after the tip of her blade cut into his shoulder. He danced back, pain on his face.
"I'll kill you, traitor." He was panting now, sweat streaming down his face.
"Not a traitor. You kicked me out, remember? And you're the one who betrayed the Seagraves, your own soldiers."
"Freaks. I owed them nothing."
He attacked hard again in a blatant attempt to beat down her blade, and it almost worked, but she scurried back out of range. But now she felt blood drip down her back. No pain yet, but he had cut her, that was clear. She moved sideways, keeping her sword point at his face.
"Why, Nathan? Why sabotage the Concord? Marshal worked so hard for it."
His face twisted into rage. "That traitor? He'll be dead before the end of the day. When we're done with you and your friends, the Shrikes will fly to a site outside Sanwa City, where Marshal is meeting a delegation near the new fuel storage site. They'll fire every rocket we have if that's what it takes. The coup will be a mercy. A fiery death will be more than that traitor deserves for selling us out to the Fey. Then the Tzitzime will teach me magic to win a new war with the Fey. I'll be a grandmaster mage, and those fairy monsters will die!" Spittle flew from his lips as he spoke, his racism ugly and raw.
"You're such a small man," she said softly, more to herself than to him. "Char saw it. Why didn't I?"
He screamed and came on once more, intent on hacking her down. She felt no fear, only a cold detachment, as if this were happening to someone else. She slipped to the side and dropped to a knee, thrusting upward at the same time his blade went past her. Her strike was true, as good a strike as the thousands and thousands of thrusts at Bob's heart.
Only this time there was no ceramic plate to stop her sword point. Nightfall slipped through Nathan's ribs and into his heart. His eyes widened in shock as he stumbled back, his katana falling from his fingers. His lips opened, but no sound came out.
Colonel Nathan Case, the leader of the Home Guard and the first and only man she had ever loved, fell back, dead before he hit the ground.
As the Seagraves prepared to launch themselves against Tec and Ephix, Astris staggered forward, one wing burned away, a raw red burn covering most of her naked torso. In her hand, she clutched the Anasazi dreamcatcher. Tec was no mage, but he knew she had to be using her magic, because the Seagraves stopped, fell forward, and began to cry out with animal roars of rage as their bodies shifted and changed, becoming human and healed once more.
And then he too changed.
Only Ephix remained in her beast form, her voice still that of the young woman. She slumped to her knees, panting heavily. "Well, Astris, this may be the only time I've ever been happy to see a half-naked nymph."
Chapter 37
Angie turned away from Nathan's corpse to see the woman known as Mother Smoke Heart dash through the smoke, heading for the runway. Angie froze, her heart hammering wildly in her chest. A part of her wanted to go after her, to stop her from escaping, but another part of her screamed in warning, promised she would die if she tried to stop her.
To her shame, Angie did nothing, and Mother Smoke Heart reached the Aztalan aircraft. The aircraft sped down the runway, rising into the air.
Angie looked away. The battle was over. The surviving soldiers had fled. The other Home Guard soldiers were still trapped inside the Bunker. They had done it. Now what?
Tec, Ephix, Astris, and the Seagraves were just ahead. All but Ephix were naked, and all were staring at one another in blatant distrust. Angie staggered over to join them, the back of her shirt soaked in blood. On the ground between them, a black stinking ooze fouled the dirt, the last trace of the demon.
When Erin saw her, she cried out her name and rushed to embrace her. This time Angie did feel the pain in her back, and she gasped. "Less hugging."
"They're friends," Erin said to her brothers.
They were all there, Angie saw: Rowan, Casey, and Jay—all but Lewis. Astris, she noted with concern, was badly burned and must be in terrible pain. While the Seagraves were unhurt, blood poured down Tec's badly savaged leg, but he had already recovered one of his water bottles and was pouring it over the wound, washing it completely away. Must be nice to be were-creatures, she mused, the back of her shirt sticking to her skin.
Rowan, a middle-aged man with a thick reddish-gray mustache, assessed the situation in a moment, glancing about the base and the still-burning fire. "We can't stay here."
"No, I wouldn't recommend it," Ephix stated. "Sadly, I cannot help you any further. I promised my sister I would not lead our people into war with your kind if there was any other way, and if I were to offer you sanctuary, there would be war."
"Nathan was acting on his own," Angie said. "He was going to kill Marshal and seize power."
Casey, the bearded hairy brute of a man, spat on the ground, his eyes flashing hard.
Rowan sighed, shaking his head. "None of that will matter right now. We're dead if we stay." He looked about. "We need to find four horses."
"Five," corrected Erin, clutching Angie's arm. "She's coming with us."
Rowan hesitated, his eyes drifting over Angie and then his sister. He nodded. "Five, then, but let's get moving."
"Where?" Jay asked. "We're screwed."
"Southeast," said Tec. "The Democratic Republica Mexicana del Norte. They'll give you sanctuary."
Rowan shook his head. "I don't know who you are, friend, but no way the Norties are gonna welcome us. Too much bad blood." He glanced at Angie. "And they hate her more than us."
Casey looked offended. "I wouldn't say that," he said in a hurt tone.
"Doesn't matter," Tec said. "I have clout with the Nortenos, their presidente, and especially the leader of the Brujas Fantasmas, Constance Morgan. You'll have your sanctuary, I promise you, and then we can work out if Marshal will let you back once everyone calms down."
"Ain't never coming back here," Casey said with surprising venom. The other Seagraves nodded in agreement.
"Trust him," Angie said, looking to Tec, although she doubted that they trusted her any more than him. "He's been reliable so far."
"It's true," Erin told her brothers. "He's already saved my life once."
"Okay, then," Rowan said, having made his mind up. "Let's round up some horses and get the hell out of Dodge."
"What's Dodge?" Erin asked.
"Hey, boss," Casey said, staring at the five Shrikes parked at the far end of the runway. "Tell me again why we need horses?"
The Shrike helicopter rose into the air, its prop blast sending the dirt flying away, almost obscuring the other aircraft. In the bush nearby, Ephix and Astris waved farewell and then disappeared into the trees, gone from sight in a moment. As they rose into the air, the fires Rowan had set within the other aircraft caught, and thick black smoke poured out of their open cargo doors, followed by tongues of orange flame.
The power dynamics in Sanwa City and the Commonwealth of Cascadia had just changed, Angie realized.
She hung onto a cargo strap near the open door, remembering the last time she had flown in one of these. Strangely, she wasn't worried, not even a bit. Erin was beside her, holding up the back of Angie's shirt and applying pressure to the shallow three-inch cut. Erin and her brothers wore combat pants, but Erin also wore a T-shirt—all taken from the dead. Jay had belted himself in behind the door gun, working the action of the multibarreled mini gun. Rowan and Casey were forward in the cockpit with Tec.
Was he telling the truth, Angie wondered? Would the Norties offer them sanctuary? Even her, the hated Angela de la Muerte?
"I knew you'd
come," Erin yelled over the turbines as Casey turned the helicopter southeast and sped across the landscape.
Behind them, the stealth aircraft burned, thick plumes of black smoke rising into the air. Just for fun, Jay opened fire with the mini gun, sending a burst of fire into one of the helicopters, spent casings glittering as they fell away.
She understood the logic of disabling anything that could come after them but knew Marshal would never forgive the loss of his prized aircraft.
It didn't matter. She had done what she had to do. Erin and her brothers were safe. Char had been avenged. And Smoke Heart and her Tzitzime cultists had been stopped. She wished she could have killed that damned woman, but she was alive. Erin was alive. They were all alive.
All but Char and Lewis.
It would have to be enough.
She reached into her pocket and withdrew the small plastic container of Cloridine PTSD pills. Despite the hardship in getting them and the price she had paid, the pills had never helped. You will have to make a choice, Char had told her with her dying words. Live with what you are or end yourself.
Angie didn't want to die; she knew that now. She had saved lives today. Did that balance the scales for those she had taken? Maybe. Maybe not. But if not, it was a start. She was a source mage, and she'd need to come to grips with that, to understand it.
She opened the pill container and emptied it out the open cargo door, watching the pills scatter as they fell.
The bright sunrise, the sky crimson and beautiful, was filled with promise. A new day.
"You okay?" Erin asked, the bandage in her hand pressed against the cut on Angie's back.
"Tired. I'm tired. For the first time in months, I feel like I could sleep for hours."
The End
The war continues in Shade King: Book 2 of the Awakened World Trilogy.
Book 2 Shade King
Chapter 1
13 August 2053, 07:30 a.m.
Eighteen years after the Awakening
Eighteen minutes after the raid on the Bunker
They'll kill me for this. Rayan Zar Davi's thoughts raced like a haboob, the ubiquitous sandstorms of her youth. The taste of defeat was like bile in her mouth. The indignation that one such as she—Mother Smoke Heart, the High Priestess of the Tzitzime—had been forced to flee for her life was almost as disturbing as what her masters would do to her for failing to bring back the wolf-bitch Erin Seagrave. They'll make an example of me. It's what I would do. "How do I save myself?" she whispered. "There must be a path."
The de Havilland Caribou cargo aircraft banked, altering course, the whine of its propeller engines changing in pitch. As the aircraft turned, the early-morning sun shot through one of the plane’s portholes, and she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare. The old plane shook and lurched in a sudden drop of altitude, sending her heartbeat pounding into her skull. She forced herself to breathe deeply and remain calm.
Rayan rose from her uncomfortable seat, little more than a nylon bench secured against the aircraft’s frame, and headed for the cockpit, intending to take out her frustrations on the aircrew. The aircraft lurched again, and she grasped at the bulkhead. Her fear of flying, always bad, had grown much worse in the eighteen years since the Awakening—A-Day—when all electronics had been rendered inoperable by the sudden backlash of magical energy released by the four cowardly creatures that styled themselves "Great Dragons." The dragons had broken the global Fey Sleep spell, reawakening humanity to the presence of magic and supernatural creatures hidden from them since the Spanish Inquisition. But by doing so, the dragons had also broken the world.
And exposed themselves to Rayan’s masters.
This aircraft, built in the late 1950s, had been long abandoned when it was pulled from the deserted residence of a private collector and refurbished by the new Aztalan Empire. At close to a hundred years of age, the rusted-out airframe was well past the point that it should still be in the air, and as if in agreement, the old propeller-driven engines screamed in protest. But as old as it was, it was also of incalculable value. Without the aircraft, the only way to circumnavigate the new balkanized North American nation-states of the Commonwealth of Cascadia and the Democratic Republica Mexicana del Norte would have been by sea, and that would have taken a week or more. Besides, the remaining ships weren't all that seaworthy either.
At least ships don’t fall out of the air, she mused ruefully. But they do sink.
There were no other passengers on the aircraft. She was the only survivor of the massacre at the Home Guard base. More than a dozen Children of the Tzitzime, including a handful of her precious blood mages, had been murdered by the damned Jaguar Knight and his new allies, the demon-spawn Ephix Lamia and that bitch of a mage Angela Ritter. They had even rescued Rayan's prisoners—the Seagraves, a family of werewolves—by using a talisman to force them into their werewolf forms. In a single terrifying moment, her prisoners had turned into unstoppable howling monsters hungry for blood, and had broken their chains. It had been a slaughter. Even the demon Gouger of Faces had been unable to stand against them and had been defeated and forced back to its own dimension. Worst of all, Rayan had lost possession of the one member of the Seagrave family who mattered: Erin Seagrave, the only female werewolf in North America, the female changeling of prophesy. Her blood was key to everything.
And now she was free, and all because of Rayan’s cursed foe, Teccizcoatl, the Jaguar Knight.
Life was so bitterly unfair.
She'd need a scapegoat, someone to blame for this loss, but who? She alone had survived; she alone would be held responsible. Rayan shuddered as she entered the cockpit. The early morning sky was bright blue and cloudless but did nothing to lighten her mood. The Blessed Twins' anger was legendary, their spitefulness without measure. If they ate her alive, it would be a kindness.
"How long?" she demanded, making the question sound like a challenge to the pilots' skill. Her nose wrinkled in distaste at the smell in the cockpit—sweat and fear wrapped in old-man stink. She grimaced, breathing through her mouth. Of course the pilots were old. Only old men knew how to pilot such an ancient plane. She didn’t dwell on the irony that she was much older than they were, despite her middle-aged appearance.
The head pilot, a man in his seventies with long scraggly gray hair and a wild bushy beard, kept his eyes forward as he answered, speaking in the most respectful of tones: "Mother, it will be another two and a half hours."
"So long?"
"We can only push the engines so hard, Mother."
The copilot, another graybeard but one with glasses so thick she was amazed he could see at all, stared at the controls, wisely keeping his mouth shut.
She sighed. If she forced them to push the aircraft beyond its limits, she'd only risk her own life. Besides, arriving earlier only hurried her own doom. "Let me know when we're an hour out," she ordered, turning away.
"Mother," said the flight engineer, a thin man with a face shiny from sweat. He was younger than the other two but not by much.
"What?"
"Before ... before you boarded, just before the ... the incident..."
The explosion at the Bunker and attack at the hangar. "What about it?" she snapped.
"One of your Children brought two duffel bags filled with what he said were valuables, plunder taken from the succubus's lair. The Child never came back, but the bags—"
Chararah Succubus's talismans and other potential items of value taken from her home in Fresno, Rayan remembered. She had only given the items a brief glance earlier, so occupied had she been with moving the Seagraves to the Aztalan Empire for the ceremony. Perhaps this isn't a complete failure. "Where are the bags?"
"Secured in the tail, Mother."
"Show me, fool!"
He practically flew past her, so eager was he to obey. She followed him to the rear of the aircraft, where two duffel bags sat secured to the fuselage within a cargo net. "Open them, and then leave."
"Yes,
Mother."
Alone with the bags, Rayan knelt and rummaged through them. Many of the objects resonated with magical energy, and some were clearly powerful talismans. Chararah Succubus had been not only a grandmaster mage but also a collector of magical artifacts. Most of the items Rayan did not know, but she could guess as to the purpose of some. Others, she would need to study first—if she lived to do so.
One talisman, though, she recognized in a flash of excitement. She lifted a brightly burnished bronze bracer studded with emeralds and other precious stones the size of her fingertip. Her breath caught in her throat as she held it up. The Bracer of Matriarch Hel-Ka? There had been rumors Chararah possessed it, but Rayan had never believed them to be true. Rayan grinned, holding the talisman against her chest like a babe. Why had the succubus never used it, the fool? Hadn’t she styled herself a lover of animals?
Could Rayan barter the bracer to save her life? Would the Blessed Twins accept it in place of Erin Seagrave? Probably not. Her failure to secure the wolf-bitch would be all they'd see, Rayan’s screaming soul their only recompence. What am I going to do?
Then she saw the battered journal lying among the other items. It had been the only book secured with the talismans, locked in a safe that Rayan had had to breach with magic. Even the succubus's grimoires had not been so safely secured. What could it hold?
A single silver bar locked the journal closed, but Rayan drew her hexed pulwar, the curved scimitar that had once belonged to her Pashtun warlord father, and slipped it beneath the bar, using the hexed blade’s leverage to snap it. She opened the book and saw in a moment the handwriting within was ancient High Kandori, the almost-forgotten language of the Fey lords. Fortunately, Rayan had mastered it decades earlier, long before the Awakening. She skimmed the entries, recognizing them as journal notes of Chararah Succubus. Her most precious secrets, Rayan realized in mounting excitement—and so many.
The Awakened World Boxed Set Page 28