The Last Sun

by K. D. Edwards

  “Darts?” I said. “Not bullets?” I thought about it, and drew together a few other puzzling details. “I think the grenade fragments were rigged to self-destruct. It was a nonlethal trap.”

  “Maybe,” Brand said. “And maybe they would have rigged an accident, once we were down. Something that explained our deaths. But now they messed up, and they messed up in front of witnesses.”

  I said, “They’ve compromised themselves. Which means they’re going to get a little more blunt in their attentions. They can’t risk letting us leave.”

  On cue, wind surged around us. It was so cold that at first I thought it was a blast of heat, burning my nostrils and lungs. Worse, it carried the taste of carrion and death magic.

  Brand said, “Everyone on your toes. Rune, spells ready.”

  We turned a corner and entered an untended section of the subbasement. Cobwebs, crusty with grime and desiccated insect corpses, broke against my outstretched sabre hilt. The tunnel opened up into a massive room with stone arcs and a vaulted ceiling. There were channels on the ground for floodwater. Old crates lay in splintered piles.

  We were halfway across the room when they attacked.

  Two men wide and six men deep. They had skin like spoiled milk, and their seeping, gangrenous flesh was stuffed into black turtlenecks and jeans. They wore holsters filled with knife blades. Some had guns. They made no noise, exchanged no words. Their feet whispered over the cement floor as they ran.

  Brand wiped his free hand over his chest harness. A blade slid into it, made of volcanic glass inlaid with strips of coral. A special blade for a special enemy: he’d already figured out what they were. I said, quickly, “Ashton, they’re recarnates; they can see in the dark. Don’t let the light go out.”

  “And stay out of our way,” Brand added.

  I punched the first recarnate, my shoulder shrugging up to cover my face. It ducked and stabbed at me. I blocked its forearm, jabbed, caught it on the chin. Brittle bone crunched.

  While it was off-balance, I nailed it with a spinning backfist. It staggered back, nearly falling. I kicked it into another recarnate, then shot a firebolt through its eye.

  Three recarnates swarmed past me. Brand engaged two; Ashton paired off with the third. The bulk of them were in front of me.

  I ran a thumb over Elena’s emerald ring.

  A Frost spell shivered loose. I sent a frigid gale howling toward the dead men, freezing the pus on their cheeks and hardening their joints. I spun, punched, kicked. Decayed tooth enamel spit from a broken jaw; a jagged arm bone sliced free from cadaverous flesh. I stopped one recarnate with a close-range firebolt strengthened by the last gasps of my Fire spell. The overpowered firebolt created an entry wound so large that my arm almost slipped through it.

  A lull—measured in heartbeats—gave me enough time to look for Brand and Ashton. Brand was surrounded by corpses, and his two knives dripped with black gelatinous blood. Ashton was attacking recarnates with showy, epic blows that completely left him open to ripostes.

  In front of me, two recarnates dropped to their knees. A third loomed over them. Some sort of scoped gun rested on its shoulder. I spun to the left as it fired, and the bullets made a pneumatic hissing sound. Darts.

  The three of them were lined up, so I pulled the remainder of the Frost magic into my hands and sent it outward in a cone. Dead skin whitened in hideous, flash-frozen patterns.

  I jumped them. Fingers snapped off on triggers; a jaw caved in; one of them lost a hand. I focused my willpower on my sabre hilt, and a blade began to boil outward. I lengthened it into a garnet katana and cut the rest of the recarnates to pieces.

  It was over in seconds. My last swipe divided a recarnate in half. Its skin, covered in tattoos from its human life, split like old parchment, revealing a mess of organs and black, oily blood.

  “Some of them are still moving,” Brand said in the silence that followed. There was a gash on his forehead, bleeding freely.

  “Put them in a pile,” I said.

  Brand and I kicked body parts toward the center of the room while Ashton stood around uselessly. The upper half of one of the recarnates stared at me with sentient eyes that burned with rage at its desecration.

  Someone had pulled their bodies from the ground and done this to them. Someone had raised them. It was a magic so unpalatable that I couldn’t name a single court that still engaged in it.

  I sent willpower into my thigh sigil. The magic slid out like the pin of a grenade. My Shatter spell turned the corpses into bits and vapor. Pieces caught fire, making a sound like fat popping on a hot skillet. I felt it when their souls feathered past me, returning to wherever they’d been torn from.

  “This is an abomination,” I said softly.

  “We’re not out of this yet,” Brand said. “Let’s find a door.”

  “I bet if we—” I started to say, and my stomach spasmed with nausea. I dropped to my knees as Brand’s outstretched hand slipped off my shoulder.

  Through a daze of illness, I saw a hooded man standing on the other side of the room.

  Brand started to speak. Ashton was saying something. Everything was dulled to distortion.

  Then a wave of power washed from the man, thick with death magic. The world came loose. Literally loose. A huge bite of reality tore free around the man—slats from the crates, chunks of the cement floor, the dust and dirt that our fight had churned up—and began to spin around him.

  He flung it at us.

  The nail of a board dug a wire-thin slash across my cheek. A chunk of stone scraped the skin off my knuckles. Another chunk smashed the bones in my left elbow. My arm dropped, useless, as Brand pulled me to the ground and covered me with his body. Through the V of Brand’s armpit, I saw Ashton dive behind a pillar.

  Debris pattered. A moment passed. My ears were ringing so bad that I couldn’t hear a thing. Brand was a dead weight on top of me. I felt warm liquid drip off his head and onto my eyebrow. He was alive, but unconscious, which didn’t make me any less terrified for him.

  I pulled Brand off and crawled between him and our attacker. My sense of peril was a small, living thing; it scraped and clawed up my throat.

  The man walked closer to me. I think I shouted. When he was near, I realized that he was dead. He was an it, a recarnate. A raised body. Which was not possible. A recarnate could not fling magic around like that.

  It wore a plain brown cowl, pulled deep over its head. It reeked of over-ripe citrus and unwashed flesh. Laid over that smell was the crisp and incongruent odor of new linen.

  It lifted a bone-white hand. A band of parasites crawled around one knuckle in a parody of a ring.

  The creature spoke in my head. It said, in fascination, What are you?

  Which was just too fucking funny. What was I? I tried to cough a reply, but it made no sense. Blood and spit speckled the backs of my hands. My smashed elbow hurt so much that I nearly passed out.

  The thing said, You smell like abasement. You smell delicious.

  It reached for my face.

  Suddenly, Brand grabbed my shoulders and threw me backward. He was covered in blood. My panic solidified into strategy. I showed him my fist, the one with a rarely, rarely used sigil. Brand went pale and dove to the ground behind me.

  I don’t know if the creature read my mind. Maybe it was only its instinct for self-preservation. But just before I was about to unleash Exodus, it stepped backward and held up its arms in a type of surrender.

  It said, I have missed so much, if things such as you walk this world.

  Rotting waves of power washed from it. What I’d thought was surrender became something else, as it pulled the roof down.

  There was a parking lot above our heads. An entire section of it— painted asphalt, cars, a cement bench—fell down into the basement.

  Dust mushroomed. The creature vanished behind the blockage.

  We got the hell out of there ourselves, before a car could drop on our heads.

  CUBIC
DREAMS

  I was sprawled across the floor of my third-floor sanctum, riding out the exhaustion from storing and casting not one, not two, but three healing spells. It had taken three healing spells to patch us up after our fight with the recarnates. Since Brand and I needed to be mobile in addition to able-bodied, I’d doctored each spell with the magical equivalent of caffeine, at the cost of occasional junkie twitches.

  Sleep would have to wait. Matters had moved beyond our caution. Ashton—who’d bailed on us as soon as he could back at the hospital— would talk, which meant our investigation had moved into the open. The plan now was to dress like slumming scions; trawl the clubbing district for the principality known as Ciaran; and see if Quinn’s hints could lead us to Addam Saint Nicholas.

  Ciaran wasn’t answering the phone number I had for him. According to sources, he had been holding court at a bar called Cubic Dreams in the wee hours of the morning. Brand had headed downstairs to gear up and prep Matthias. Against whatever meager shred of paternal sensibility I may have had, I was listening to Quinn and bringing Matthias along with us.

  “I talked with Amy Beige,” Brand said from the stairwell.

  Amy Beige was a contact who worked in city healthcare. “Quinn,” I said.

  “I apologized about the wyvern. So she told me he’s alive. That’s all I know. His Shield went down, but hospital security showed up.”

  Brand walked barefoot over to his corner of the sanctum and opened the trunk where he kept his special knives. I stared down at the white-gold sigil in my hand—newly minted with a Fire spell—and wondered why I was so grateful that a kid I’d just met was unharmed.

  “You kissed me on the eyebrow once. And you’ll hit the bully with a barstool after he calls me a freak.”

  “You okay?” Brand asked.

  “This case is getting weird.”

  “No shit,” Brand said. “Were you able to get Lord Tower on the phone?”

  I shook my head. “Went to voicemail.”

  I put the ring back on my finger and made a fist around it. “I can’t figure out what happened in that basement, Brand. A recarnate using spells? And leading other recarnates around?”

  “Have you figured out what kind of magic it was using?”

  “That’s just it. There is no figure out. It’s like asking where the fourth side of a triangle goes. New magical disciplines just don’t pop up. I get that the Dead Man was using a variation of death magic. I get that he had no sigils on him, or at least none that I felt. I get that he was using spells, actual spells. But I can’t see the line that connects those dots.”

  “People can cast spells without sigils.”

  “Sure, after they’ve spent their lives studying how to do it. Even then, they’d never get the range and strength that the Dead Man did. He should have burned out after that first telekinetic blast, forget what he did with the roof.”

  Brand said nothing while he lined up knives. He’d broken into his most expensive arsenal. All of them black volcanic glass, inlaid with coral and vulcanized coal. Obsidian, coral, and coal were three substances that had a very adverse effect on the defenses of magical creatures. It had to do with their elemental nature—coral formed in the ocean, obsidian in lava flows, and coal deep in the earth.

  Brand muttered, “. . . knew how to fight.”

  “Who? Ashton?”

  “Ashton’s a douche. Did you see all those fancy flourishes? He’s lucky he didn’t get gutted on the first counterattack. No, I meant the recarnates. The fucking zombies. They knew how to fight, and at least one of them knew how to use a firearm.” Guns were anathema in our culture. You didn’t bring bullets to a magic fight; it bruised our sense of spectacle. You needed a special dispensation to even own guns, like Brand had.

  Brand said, “So it begs the fucking question—whose bodies were they? There were twelve of them, including the guy you’ve so cleverly tagged the Dead Man. How can twelve fucking bodies go missing and get raised on an island? And recarnates don’t just appear, do they? They get summoned, right? Which leads us right back to the question—who really kidnapped Addam?”

  “I hate that we have to bring Matthias with us.”

  “Don’t tell him that. He’s going to ask you to slow dance.” When Brand saw the look on my face, he rolled his eyes. “What? You didn’t know he’s crushing?”

  “On me? Why me? Maybe he’s crushing on you,” I said, somewhat panicked.

  “I stuck his head in a toilet. You straddled his body and fought off a gargoyle.”

  “Godsdamnit,” I said.

  Brand’s humor faded. “Do you really think it’s a bad idea to bring him with us?”

  I shrugged. “I think . . . Quinn is the real thing. I really think he’s got the gift. And I don’t think he’s lying. If he says Matthias has a role to play, then Matthias has a role to play. I just don’t like it.”

  “I’m pretty damn sure that before this is over, we’ll have plenty of other things not to like. We haven’t even talked about Ciaran yet.”

  I couldn’t hide a flinch. Arcana were bad enough. Take away any sense of rules or purpose, and what you had left was something much like Ciaran.

  “Oh, and I pulled our clubbing clothes out of storage,” Brand added, and ducked his face before I could fire a look at him. Brand liked us to dress for our environment; but when it came to his capacity to show skin, he was far more Atlantean than I was.

  It was going to be a long night.

  The first thing I did after looking in the mirror was to grab an ankle-length duster and button it all the way up. The clubbing outfit consisted of a black, mesh shirt and sheer, translucent black slacks. Very translucent.

  Matthias came running out of the guest bathroom as soon as he heard my footsteps on the stairwell. He was wearing a short-sleeved bowling shirt with three buttons open, and his pale chest swirled with a fae sheen of dark greens, blues, and purples.

  He held up a tube of medicine. “It’s heat rub,” he said. “I found it in the cabinet. I was thinking that I could put it on your shoulder. You hurt it, right?”

  “Um,” I said. “Maybe later. We’re heading out. See you downstairs.”

  Brand was waiting by the car, dressed in a leather gladiator harness and tight, gray pants. The first thing he said was, “A coat? A fucking tweed coat?”

  “Have we met?” I asked.

  “Ladies and gentlemen: Rune, the other white meat.”

  I glared at him and took off the coat. I opened the door of our beat-up old Saturn and threw the coat in the back seat.

  Five minutes later, Half House was locked up, and we headed out. It was drizzling by then, and dagger-shaped clouds drifted past the face of the moon. The moisture stirred up the smell of salt from miles away. I turned out of our cul-de-sac and merged into city traffic.

  Matthias said, “Maybe I should borrow a gun?”

  “Maybe fucking not,” Brand said.

  “Just stay close to us,” I said to the rearview mirror. “And, hey, should we call you something other than Matthias?”

  “Like a code name?” Matthias asked.

  “No, Matthias. Not like a code name. I never asked you if you had a nickname.”

  “Oh,” he said. His mouth opened and closed, as if the invitation baffled him. “I suppose . . . I once had a friend. She called me Max. I liked that.”

  He said it like the idea of a friend was just as unusual as picking his own nickname. It made something inside me twinge—pity or conscience, I’m not sure which.

  “Max,” I said. “Max it is.”

  Cubic Dreams operated out of a five-story building called the Otis. Translocated from Washington State, it was once a skid-row hotel frequented by drug addicts and sex offenders. It must have been beautiful in its prime. It still had the bone structure of a great beauty, weighed down by decades of bad choices.

  The bar was on the top floor, and it vibrated with music and energy. If I hadn’t known in advance it was a human bar, I would
have spotted it the moment I walked through the door. The management catered to tourists with glaring displays of parlor tricks. The air was filled with will-o’-the-wisps and mist, and magicked bubbles that burst into showers of random debris. In the minute we lingered at the doorway, I suffered spatters of beach sand, snow, green glitter, and inchworms.

  The bartender gave us a glance as we approached, and he swiped his way toward us with a dirty rag. He was very handsome and not wearing a shirt. He said, “Hey, love. What’s your poison?”

  “Something with an antidote,” I joked, lamely, because he was handsome and not wearing a shirt. Brand rolled his eyes, so I cleared my throat and said, “A bottle of diet raspberry ginger ale for me. Spartacus will have bottled water. Matthias? Max?”

  “A beer?” Max suggested.

  “Nope.”

  He sighed. “A virgin daiquiri.”

  The bartender slapped our bottles on the counter. As he turned to make Max’s drink, Brand and I watched like hawks. It was never a smart idea to get anything without a seal in a New Atlantis bar.

  When I was convinced that he hadn’t doctored it, I let the bartender pass it toward Max. To Max’s delight, the bartender said, “On the house, cutie. Love the skin.”

  In due course, I installed Max and Brand at a corner table, then went off to find where Ciaran was holding court.

  A procession of rooms was packed with drunks and dancers. In one room, I passed a group of pale, young humans giggling in a corner and trying to speak Atlantean, which I’d heard was the new Klingon. In another room, a delirious woman had doused herself with the contents of a glow stick and was doing lopsided pirouettes. Radioactive-looking drops flew from her arms and speckled the crowd.

  By the time I had gotten to the last room, I still hadn’t spotted Ciaran. I took a stool at a heart-shaped bar and ordered another soda, to see if he’d come to me on his own.

  A middle-aged human ignored my scowl and sidled up. He didn’t peg me as an Atlantean—and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. In a distressingly short amount of time, I learned that he was on a business trip; that he ran the Atlantean fan club for the Hierophant; and that he liked wine coolers.