“Get a chair; break a window,” I told Matthias. “Hurry!”
Plaster claws in the hallway had me whipping around. I concentrated and sent my willpower—my magical essence—into my sabre. Molten metal boiled upward from the hilt, cooling into a glowing, garnet sword. I stopped the blade just short of bastard length, which made it manageable with one hand while keeping my other free for spellwork.
I’d already transferred Fire into the sabre; now I stretched the spell up the length of the blade. The sword burst into flame and cast rust-colored shadows on the polished wooden floor.
The gargoyle lurched into the doorway. It still retained a semblance of its mural image: a generic demon drawn to tempt generic saints. It assessed the room with careful, reptilian interest, and crept at me.
I eased my posture; relaxed my knees; and leveled my breathing. I drew a map of the room in my head so I wouldn’t trip into my opponent’s arms. There would be enough room for a good first swipe, and the first swipe is everything. A skilled strategist can see the end of a fight in that first swing.
When the gargoyle was in range, I sprang, lashing out with a horizontal cut that bit into its shoulder. It flinched and roared as fresh paint spilled down its chest. I followed that with more slashing cuts, putting as much strength behind them as I could without sacrificing my guard or overextending my arms.
The gargoyle’s claws swiped for the inside of my thigh. I blocked it with a downward parry. The gargoyle tried it again, liking that move, which would either tear into a major vein or rip my balance out from under me. The urge to jump back was strong—but leaps only looked good in movies. You can’t change direction midair.
Then I screwed up. I went for a center thrust that opened a tear in the gargoyle’s chest but left me vulnerable for a gutting. I barely managed to bash away its arms as claws raked my abdomen, taking a handful of fabric and flesh.
I backed off to rebalance. My belly was hot and wet, blood ribboning across my ribs. It wasn’t hurting yet, but blood loss would cost me quickly.
The gargoyle’s wounds had already dried and become part of its painted surface. Worse, the spots where I’d torn or chipped it had become another danger, with edges as sharp as broken glass.
It came at me again. I ducked a chest-high swipe, spun around it, kicked it in the back of its knees. It stumbled. I slammed the flat of my blade across the back of its head. It went down on all fours.
Across the room, Matthias was surrounded by pieces of cracked chairs. The windows weren’t broken. I could almost feel the magic that sealed us in—a strong, strong spell. I had to assume all exits were blocked. We needed to find a more defensible spot. If I couldn’t go out the first-floor doors, maybe I could get to the roof?
“The main hall. Back to the main hall!”
Matthias ran along the left of the struggling gargoyle. I moved a step behind him, stopping at the doorway. I brushed a thumb over Elena’s emerald ring. Its stored spell released. Magic branched across my vision like frost on a windowpane, giving everything a momentary bluish tinge.
The gargoyle regained its footing. I held out my arm, and a globe of sluggish ice thrashed and formed in my palm. Before the gargoyle could leap at me, I pitched it.
The Frost shattered against the gargoyle’s painted surface. The gargoyle didn’t stop moving, but its joints began making snapping, splintering noises.
I raced to the lobby. Matthias was futilely banging on the sealed front doors.
“Where do we go?” he asked in a panic. “It’s still lock—” He caught sight of my stomach. It must have been more of a mess than I thought. He raised alarmed eyes to meet mine—and then, with even more surprise, lost balance, tripped into a pillar, and cracked his head against it. I reached down, fisted his shirtfront, and yanked him back to his feet.
“Your eyes,” he gasped.
My Atlantean Aspect was rising, a sign of my strength among other scions. I could feel the heat from it on my face.
The gargoyle roared into the lobby. Abandoning its graceful economy of motion, it now stormed past the marble pillars, arms wide, claws extended. Gouged chips of marble flew in its wake.
I didn’t have time to touch the sigil on my ankle, so I concentrated on the feel of the loose gold links. A Wind spell sprang loose. The initial rush of magic left my skin feeling tight and inflated.
I raised an arm and pulled the lobby’s air currents toward me. With a skill that came from years of limited sigils and cornered desperation, I infused the Wind with Frost’s frigid temperatures. I redirected the gale toward the gargoyle.
It staggered and slowed, but kept on coming.
I threw everything I had into the spell, reducing the gargoyle to all fours. But between my sabre use and the spells and blood loss, the edges of my vision were going dark.
I said, “Run for the stairs!” I grabbed Matthias’s arm and my right leg collapsed under me. A lot of blood loss, then.
Matthias divided a petrified stare between me and the gargoyle. I didn’t understand why he wasn’t running, until I saw that his fingernails had grown two inches, the tips drawn into points.
He jumped between me and the monster.
I got my second wind. I stumbled up, grabbed the collar of his shirt, and hurled him in the direction of the stairs. In the process I missed the worst of a claw swipe I hadn’t seen coming. The cheap magical wards in my jacket saved me from a gash, but the pressure of the blow still knocked me off my feet. I let my sabre blade crumble into glowing sparks until just the hilt remained. I thought I could force more firebolts, buy Matthias a few more moments.
A car drove through the front of the building. The heavy front doors flew into the marble lobby with a bang. The moment the driver’s side door was clear, it opened, and Brand dove out. “Distract it!” he shouted.
I didn’t think I could come up with a distraction better than a bloody car, but I put everything I had into my sabre. With the aim of the desperate, I shot a lava-bright firebolt into one of the gargoyle’s eyes.
It shrieked and reared. Brand ran up behind it. He had something that looked suspiciously like a strip of duct tape in his hands. He slapped it against the gargoyle. A grenade pin dangled from his thumb.
“Down!” I shouted at Matthias, and either fell or slid behind a pillar just as the teen landed next to me.
The concussive blast sent a crack through the marble. Pebble-sized bits of wall mural bounced off my upraised arms. The violence of the action settled into an immediate silence, punctured only by the rain of plaster.
“Holy shit,” I whispered. I brushed blue paint chips out of my hair and crawled out from behind the pillar.
Brand was inching his head from behind another pillar. I said, “The car?”
“Stole it from the gas station.” Brand squinted at the bent, smoking hood. “I hope the Tower has us on a fucking expense account.”
The guarda arrived. I was hastily bandaged by emergency technicians. The lobby was now a busy crime scene.
“My lord, just to be clear,” one of the uniformed men said, “the gargoyle entered the premises from over here.”
I said, “Entered the premises? It pulled itself off the wall. Right there. In the spot with the monster shaped cut-out.”
“My lord, I—”
I walked away from him.
They’d take the easy way out, and chalk it up to wild magic. New Atlantis—not to mention the Westlands—was lousy with unstable energy. I didn’t have the luxury in believing that, though. The gargoyle had shown too much sentience. Plus, the doors and windows had been warded shut to prevent our escape. That showed skill. It showed purpose.
Brand was waiting on the other side of the room with Matthias. Some people got the shakes after an adrenaline surge. Brand got pissed.
He leaned into me and said, “If those bastards upstairs—”
“Not them. Or maybe? I don’t know. It takes time to do a summoning like this. Or a hell of a lot of power. I don’t know if
they could do this, or even had time to do this.”
I looked toward the stairwell, which was now unsealed. None of the scions had come downstairs. The guarda had sequestered them in their offices while they sought witnesses.
“Could whatever was upstairs—whatever you felt in Addam’s office—have been a gargoyle?” Brand asked.
I shook my head no. The gargoyle wasn’t even a little like the nastiness I’d sensed in Addam’s suite.
My own adrenaline ebb was weakening me. My bad shoulder ached. The bandages on my stomach had already soaked through. I’d refused a trip to the hospital, wanting to spare the bill and heal myself.
“You saved me,” Matthias said to me from behind Brand. I couldn’t quite identify the expression that lit up his face, but it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as plain gratitude. “You saved my life.”
“If we get you killed your first week, people will make fun of us,” I said.
Brand said, “Rune, if we find out the Tower knew Addam was into some shit he didn’t tell us about, I’m heading to the Pac Bell with a whole fucking roll of duct tape.”
I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a private number. Vivaldi began playing in the background while the call connected. The Tower answered by saying, “How’s your stomach? Shall I send my healer?”
I didn’t waste time being surprised he knew what had happened. “Did you tell anyone you hired me to find Addam Saint Nicholas? Or that you were going to hire me?”
“I may have mentioned it in certain circles,” he said.
“I see. Just out of curiosity, did you introduce me by name, or just call me Bait?”
I could almost hear his smile. “For what it’s worth, only anyone involved in Addam’s disappearance would have understood the significance of your association. Based on that, and given the people I spoke with, I now suggest you focus on his siblings and business associates.”
“Excellent information, Lord Tower. I would never have suspected them.”
He said, “I have every confidence in you.”
The call disconnected.
THE ENCLAVE
I woke to another hot morning. Moaning my complaints, I got up, turned on my old, rattling air-conditioner, then lazed on my bed for nine more snooze alarms.
Before I could hit the tenth, Brand poked his head over the edge of the spiral stairway. “Will you get the fuck up already?”
“I’m reviewing the case in my head. I’m strategizing.”
“Strategy doesn’t give you fucking pillow creases,” he said. With a snort, he stomped the rest of the way into my bedroom and went over to the window. His baggy white bathing suit turned translucent against the roaring sunlight.
“Can you get me some vitamin water from Queenie?” he asked.
“Why can’t you?”
“She’s mad at me. I think she hid them.”
I opened my mouth to ask the obvious, but he waved me off. “I may have used the dishwasher without asking her.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “You put your socks and underwear in it again, didn’t you?”
“The washing machine is broken,” he said defensively.
“Oh, wonderful.” I threw a forearm over my eyes. We’d have to take turns schlepping to a laundromat until I could call a repairman. Between that and property taxes, the Tower’s two checks would all but evaporate.
“Stop that,” Brand said. “You’re going to give yourself frown lines.”
“And that bothers you because . . . ?”
“Because you’ll get old faster than me, which means you’ll get rejuvenation treatments before I need them, and through the wonder of the Companion bond, I’ll fucking end up looking twelve.”
“Did you come up here for a reason?”
“The water. And to tell you I pulled the research on the idiot scions.”
I’d asked Brand to look into their school records. Most scions were educated at the Mangus Academy; and Brand and I had a backdoor into their servers. I’d hoped it would give us an idea which of them might have the ability to summon a gargoyle—let alone to summon whatever had taken Addam from his office.
“I got their grades and course loads,” Brand said. “You already knew about Geoffrey. Top of his class, lots of academia and theoretical magic—as opposed to those practical courses that support the idea of theoretical survival.”
“Geoffrey has what it takes to work a summoning,” I said. “What about his brother?”
“While it’s possible Michael’s spent his life masterminding the image that he’s dumb as tar, I’m betting that’s just an insult to tar. He’s got some training in aggressive magic—enough to fucking cheat at rugby—but the chance he’d be able to pull off a big ritual? No.”
“What about Ashton?” I said.
“Ashton did post-grad work in Poland.”
Well, that snagged my attention, as Brand knew it would.
Two of the biggest human casualties of the Atlantean World War were magically radioactive zones in Poland and America’s Pacific Northwest, both sites of battlegrounds. Very little lived in the fading blast radii, which made it perfect for spell training. The camps had very good PR staff. I knew this because the human world never asked what they were training for.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Ashton’s father is old guard. He’d expect his kids to do tours of duty.”
“So maybe he’s not the useless fucking dandy he wants us to believe.”
I thought about Ashton’s parting words and said, “Maybe he’s not.”
The Surfside Beach Enclave sat at the western end of Nazaca Road, the priciest real estate on the island. The Enclave was originally part of a ruined resort built in the 1920s for pampered French colonials looking to escape the crushing poverty of Cambodia’s Phnom Penh. Thousands of Cambodians lost their lives building Bokor Hill Station, not to mention those that died during the resort’s final abandonment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The building was baked in their misery.
The jungle’s rust-red moss still clung to some of the stonework, giving it a decrepit allure. Brand, Matthias, and I entered through one of the side doors and worked our way through carefully extravagant security points. My footsteps got heavier the higher I climbed, until finally we stopped before the doors of my father’s suites.
I raised my hand toward a stylized sunburst emblem. Sealed wards within the doors recognized my presence and opened on oiled hinges.
The Sun Throne’s rooms were decorated in wicker and driftwood, with powder-blue walls and lots of windows. The living area led to an outdoor terra-cotta balcony. Off the balcony, a narrow stairway merged with other narrow stairways, down to a private, heavily guarded beach.
It’d been years since I’d been back. I’m not sure what I’d expected. There were no cobwebs. No haze of dust. No sheets sagging off furniture like folds of dead skin. The rooms were so close to memory that my father may have just stepped outside to have a drink, or to watch me hunt for sand dollars in the tidal pools.
In some ways, it was easier to look at the ruins of Sun Estate than it was this deceptively whole memory.
I closed my mind against the images.
“We could spar,” Brand said.
I frowned at him.
“It’ll make you feel better. We could go outside and spar, if you want.”
“Sparring means something different for me than it does you,” I said. “Sparring is getting hit in the face a lot.” But I smiled and started unpacking my beach bag with a little less morbidity.
We had a couple hours to kill before I was due in Lady Justice’s suite, so Matthias and I changed into two bathing suits from a supply kept in the suite. I didn’t like the speculative looks Matthias was giving me, though. Especially when I took off my pants.
Matthias squinted at me and said, “Is that a—?”
“No.”
“But it looks like a—”
“It isn’t,” I said.
Brand started to open his mouth, so
I pointed at him.
Not all sigils were lucky enough to be shaped as jewelry or weapons. Sigils are tools for the manifestation of our magics, and our magics are driven by human appetites—aggression, sex, defense, shelter, and so on. Considering that, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some sigils would be shaped as marital aides, like the one threaded through a leather strap and tied around my thigh.
“It’s a cock ring,” Brand told Matthias.
“Godsdamnit,” I said. “It’s a sigil. I have a Shatter spell in it. Do you know how few scions can pull off Shatter?”
“His magic cock ring,” Brand said.
Almost none of my sigils had been given to me. Most were scavenged from the haunted ruins of Sun Estate. I tried, on a daily basis, to forget I’d pulled this one from my old seneschal’s nightstand.
“Lord Tower makes his Companion work in a basement office all day,” I told Brand. “I take you to the beach.”
“Mayan’s basement office is an armored vault with a hundred security personnel,” Brand told me. “You probably won’t be able to tip the towel boy.”
I lifted my long-suffering gaze to the ceiling and said, “Let’s go swimming.”
I got some sun. Brand threw wooden practice knives at seashell targets. Matthias spent most of the time standing and staring into the ocean, moving his eyes from one point of the horizon and back. After a while, he came over to us and said, “Are there really krakens out there?”
“Young ones,” I said. “The adults hang out near the whirlpools off Smith’s Point in the Westlands. The babies are dangerous as hell, though. Don’t go swimming past the wards.”
Brand said, “Every year there’s at least one stupid American college that tries to make New Atlantis a spring break destination. The newspapers have a field day when they get eaten.”
Max spent the next fifteen minutes splashing in the shallows—the only part of the cove protected against predators. When a wave knocked the back of his knees, he fell on his ass, swallowed ocean water, and burst into laughter.
“So how is it,” Brand asked, “that the grandson of an Arcana is acting like it’s his first day at the beach? What the hell is his story?”
The Last Sun Page 7