The Tree

  “What do you mean?” Dayida replied.

  Patrah took a deep breath and relayed her own story while Hettie and Dayida listened silently. After she finished she watched Dayida and Hettie worriedly.

  “The woman who attacked you. Could she have been another Blooded?” Hettie asked.

  “She could have been, but I do not think so. The glimpses I got of her dreamself as we fought were like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Patrah explained. “Then of course there are the continued actions of my aspirant, who can do impossible things like they are nothing.”

  “This isn’t the first time that footage of a Blooded has been captured,” Dayida stated after a second of thinking.

  “Except that now we have all these other stories and videos cropping up. This is no longer about one photo or video, one eye witness report. This is about a critical mass of information being spread to the general populace so that even those who would usually scoff at the stories will have no choice but to take them seriously,” Hettie stated. “We are on the verge of exposure and there’s nothing we can really do but prepare for it.”

  Dayida nodded reluctantly. “You’re right. Things are changing and we need to be prepared, but we also have to focus on how to keep those with power safe. I think we have to work under the assumption that the Angelics do not want our help for a problem in their world. They want our world for their own.”

  Hettie nodded, as did Patrah after a moment.

  “We need to bring everyone in. I don’t just mean warn them, but protect them. When this gets out there and people believe? It isn’t going to be just Antes that are hunting us. Humans are going to start hunting us too. A panicked populace under attack by monsters suddenly learns that people with supernatural powers have lived among them the whole time?” Patrah finished and watched both nod in recognition.

  “We can’t pull everyone in. Who would be out there patrolling for the Antes and making sure they don’t get the drop on us?” Hettie asked.

  Patrah admitted it was a fair question, but they had to do something.

  “Then we bring in the non-combatants. The infirm. The young ones, and anyone with a power that leaves them vulnerable,” Patrah amended.

  “And where do we keep them all?” Dayida asked. “Gathering them together might only provide a larger target and we’ll end up having our most vulnerable members taken out at the same time. There are no safe places anymore.”

  There were almost two hundred Blooded in San Francisco, and that was just those who belonged to the Organization. It did not include the hundred that belonged to the Agency or the estimated hundred-to-two-hundred independents and their families scattered all over the San Francisco side of the bay. Oakland had an almost-equal number of Blooded but fewer people that claimed membership in either group.

  Patrah was wondering about the feasibility of contacting just a fraction of those people when her b’caster began to vibrate in her pocket. She pulled it out and let its protuberances slink along her skin. The image of Maestra Luka flared to life in front of her right eye.

  “Maestra Luka?”

  “Blooded Patrah. I would like you to set up a meeting for myself with Agent Dayida. For tonight, if possible.” Maestra Luka was posed in a chair, still, with a very serious expression.

  “Hold on Maestra.” Patrah put her hand over the receiver and turned to Dayida.

  “Maestra Luka requests a meeting.”

  Dayida’s eyebrows rose.

  “Tonight, if possible,” Patrah continued.

  Dayida nodded. “Tell her to come over in an hour.”

  Patrah relayed this through the b’caster and came back.

  “Ninety minutes OK?”

  Dayida nodded.

  After Patrah hung up, Dayida spoke. “I think we should table this until we hear what Luka wants. It will give us insight on what the Organization is doing, at least.”

  The others nodded.

  “If you’ll excuse me, then, I need to go work out some of this tension. I will be in gym if you need me,” Patrah said as she walked out.

  “I wasn’t aware that this building had a gym,” Patrah heard as the door closed behind her and she went to beat the hell out of a sandbag.

  MAESTRA LUKA

  Maestra Luka paced back in forth in her home. The Organization was in shambles. Many of their Maestres and Blooded had disappeared, including Hu. It wasn’t clear yet how many had dropped off the radar of their own volition and how many might have been taken. They were all arguing too much; their conference calls a chorus of raised voices trying to drown one another out. They could not agree on a plan of action and new factions were forming. She had fielded five calls from fellow Maestres subtly feeling out her position; three of those had ended with a concealed offer of support, should she choose to form her own block of power.

  Luka had never been overly concerned with power. Luka liked where she was. She did not want to take on more, but the more frustrated she became, the more she thought that if taking more power was what she had to do to bring these headless chickens to heel, then she would. She picked up her phone and dialed.

  After hanging up with Patrah, Luka called Maestra Hertin. She answered after only one ring.

  “Luka.”

  “I am moving forward. I am going to form an alliance with the San Francisco office of the Agency, currently under the regency of Dayida Jayl. We are headed for war and Primo Erik is one of our best hopes of coming out of it alive.”

  There was a stretch of silence and then a husky, musical laugh that Luka remembered from their time as Blooded together. A tangle of missions and bed sheets and Hertin’s throaty voice. They had both moved on. Hertin was married now and had children, but the memory hit Luka sharply, and she could not help the shivers that went down her spine.

  “Bold. I approve. I will support you.”

  “Good.” Luka cleared her throat to clear out the hoarse purr that had seeped in without her knowledge.

  Maestres Dahlia and Fortuni were harder sells, but both signed on in the end. Luka left her apartment and was about to get into her car when she felt it. The shift in light and shadows. She turned toward the disturbance.

  “Who’s there?” It was across the street, in the dark between two cars.

  There was no answer but she still could feel it watching her.

  “I’ll ask one last time. Who’s there?”

  There was no answer and she turned up the ambient light all around her, feeding it with the power in her body. Before she got a good look, something struck her shoulder and spun her around. Her whole side went numb.

  “I’ll tell you one thing. You are fucking with the wrong one tonight.” It came out slurred. She let off a bright blast of light from her left hand and heard the thing howl. It also gave her her first real look at what she was facing. An Ante of the Phian bloodline. Telepathic, which was not that great for her. They resembled hairless monkeys but with putrid yellow skin. It had no mouth to speak of, but extremely large eyes that took up over half its face. Its fingers were tipped in razor-sharp claws that it tapped on the cars on either side of it, leaving behind green smears. She had been struck by its poisoned claws. If she could keep it too distracted to use its powers of hypnotism, and keep out of its claws, she had a chance. Luka quickly sent a flare of light through her body, burning the poison from her system. She felt the paralysis drop away.

  She flashed an extremely bright flare of light at it, lighting up the night sky. Luka knew that neighbors must be seeing something but she had no choice right now. She reached for her b’caster but made the mistake of catching its gaze. A bolt of pain lanced through her body and the b’caster dropped to the pavement. The light dimmed and she fought to breathe as the feeling that every muscle in her body was cramping at the same time wracked her body.

  Fighting only made her body spasm worse, so Luka stopped resisting, and let the pain and cramping force her to the ground and into a ball. Not fighting back lessened the pain just enough tha
t she was able to think around it for a moment and call all of her power, but not to her body. Instead she channeled it through the body of the other being with her.

  Luka had never tried to do something like this before—funnel her power through another living being. There were some Blooded who used bonded beings as conduits for works of power that would normally kill them but that was more as a way to pull more power into yourself, and not to push it into someone else. Luka could think of nothing else to try, though. She did not think her flashes were going to do much damage, and she couldn’t concentrate hard enough to do anything more complex.

  Luka pulled all the power that she could through the Angelic and heard something pop, then a high wail of pain. Her own pain lessened. She concentrated harder, feeling the presence of the Angelic and latching on with her senses, pulling more of her power through it. It was an odd sensation. Luka believed that she pulled her power directly from her link with her dead ancestor. Putting something else in that link felt wrong. Unholy.

  At the same time, the power that filled her felt sharper than ever before. Filtered. She felt she could use it with more delicately than ever before.

  The popping sounds continued, and she finally had enough control over her body to flop over and look at her attacker. It was deflating on the ground like a sad balloon. The ground around it was covered in a mess of liquid as parts of its body exploded, burned, and liquefied.

  “This is my world you piece of shit. You don’t know who you are messing with.”

  Luka looked down at the burnt husk of the Angelic. This was why beings that usually did this were bonded. It allowed the other being to handle power not native to their body. She took some of the power that had filled her body and turned it back into the Angelic, who had died filtering it for her. Luka burned what little was left of it to ash.

  No evidence was left behind as she climbed into her car and headed for the financial district. She needed to speak with Dayida immediately.

  She arrived at the building and was immediately escorted to the odd elevators by the young man behind the desk. She had read descriptions of the liquid elevators but it was very different to actually experience it. She did not enjoy it. The boy led her out and gestured at a door.

  Luka knocked.

  “Enter.”

  Luka pushed open the door and took in the woman behind the chair. She had seen pictures of Dayida Jayl before but never met her in person. Something radiated from her that Luka felt from across the room. Something that made her want to stretch in it and luxuriate like a cat in patch of sunlight. She turned to the other woman and recognized her immediately. Hettie Jayl had left before Luka had come to the Bay Area, but the stories about her were still told.

  Luka inclined her head to both and sat in the empty chair. Luka saw no need to beat around the bush. “I want to offer you an alliance. The Organization has splintered, and if I am to bring any order to it, then I need clout. An alliance of mutual assistance between us would be exactly what I need. We can all see the writing on the wall. Angelics are coming, but so is the darkness. If any of us are to survive, we must work together.”

  Dayida nodded. “I can see the intelligence in what you say. What do you have to offer this alliance?”

  “Trained operatives with intimate knowledge of the bay. We here in the Bay Area will have to rely on ourselves. Those in other cities will be looking to their own defenses. That may actually work in our favor, or at least not be a liability. This will be a nationwide attack, but not coordinated; the Angelics won’t be able to work that way. Each city will be facing its own force.”

  Dayida nodded. “We’ve been talking about guarding the non-combatants but were trying to figure out a way to do with without making them bigger targets.”

  Luka hummed to herself and thought about it for a moment. “The Organization has several safe houses that might do, but I’m not sure I trust any of the things in our files to be secure anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Dayida asked.

  “For them to have taken so many of our own? I can’t imagine they didn’t have some inside information. And some of the Maestres that disappeared, like Hu? They don’t fit the pattern. With most there’s evidence of a struggle, but others? Like Hu? We think they left voluntarily. I’m not sure what they are planning but—”

  She stopped.

  “Go on,” Hettie encouraged.

  “Many were from our retraining department.”

  “Re-education,” Hettie spat. The contempt in the air was thick, but Luka refused to lower her gaze. The Organization had been using the tactic long before she had come into any position of real power.

  “The point is that many of them had access to very high-level records. There may be few secrets that the Organization has left,” Luka replied.

  They spent the rest of the night throwing ideas back and forth. Tomorrow Luka would gather more allies and use some of the money in the Organization’s coffers to purchase more safe houses only known to the three of them. Dayida would do the same with the Agency money. They would spread them out as much as possible and assign guards with weapons taken from both of their armories and pray for the best while preparing for the worst.

  RAZEL

  Razel made her way out of Hive Chayyliel to her room in the Hive of Sorrow & Riches. She could not stop thinking about her confrontation with the humans from the other world. She contemplated telling Riana everything but decided quickly against it.

  Razel petted the light bulb vine by the door until it woke up and began to glow with a soft pink light. She stripped herself naked and lay on the pallet of blankets she was using as a bed. She allowed her flesh hand to trail across her body, cataloging the scars on her skin. There under her right breast was the cut from a mechanique that Riana had thought would aid in helping those with a stooped back walk upright again. There was much demand for such a device from the miners in the north of the city. Of course, Razel had been the guinea pig. Most of her injuries were from being forced to test out her Holder’s crude creations. She had only escaped more serious injury by fixing many of them when Riana was not looking.

  Razel looked down at her arm, the one that she had crafted from her torque of office when she was halfway between thirteen and fourteen cycles. The arm she now had because Riana had been so sure that she was right. Razel had known the mechanique was not stable enough but she had been ignored and the result had been the toppling of metal, the pain as her arm was sheared, flesh, muscle, and bone cut through so easily. Riana had not let her change anything of the original design and had only seemed annoyed that Razel was right as she lay on the floor bleeding out.

  Riana had eventually staunched the blood and helped Razel to her room. She had offered to call Enheduanna and have the Holder come over and grow her a new arm. Razel refused. She knew as well as Riana did that trusting those vipers to any bodywork was just as good as handing yourself over as a zombie.

  Razel had crafted the hand in three days. She knew that Riana’s sympathy was non-existent for anyone but herself. She had only a few more before Riana would have summoned her back to her duty and not long after that Riana would start to view her as slow and damaged, even though Razel could never be anything of the kind. So she had crafted it quickly.

  Still, the arm was dexterous, and the look on Riana’s face whenever she caught sight of it; when the knowledge that it would take her far longer than three days to craft even a rough version of it flashed across her face? That envy was one of Razel’s petty forms of revenge.

  Why had she even thought of telling Riana of the human’s . . . of Erik’s offer? Razel closed her eyes and imagined the tall, gray walls of Hypatia, the stiff lines and the reams of paper and models inside. Hypatia was her home. It was where she felt safe. The idea of abandoning it for the rest of her life? It terrified her. Who would Razel be if not Holder-Apprentice of Hypatia?

  She was still wondering when she heard Riana arrive. Even had Razel been asleep, the bellow
ing of her name would have woken her. Razel rose from her pallet and pulled a robe over her body before she exited into the main room. Riana was pacing back and forth, her teeth worrying her bottom lip bloody. She opened her mouth to bellow again as she turned, and caught sight of Razel.

  “And where were you?” she asked.

  “Resting. Did you require me for anything?” Razel calmly responded.

  Riana did not respond at first and simply paced back and forth. Razel knew from experience not to disturb her when she was in this mood, lest she become the target of her Holder’s ire. Riana finally spoke. “They have failed.”

  “Why did you expect them to succeed when entire groups of Antes, all bending their power to the same cause, failed?” Razel asked.

  Riana turned to look at her with a raised eyebrow, but it was a valid question and Razel refused to take it back. She normally knew better than to question her Holder, but something inside of Razel, some remnant of the woman she had wanted to be, had begun to rear its head after the conversation with Erik. That was what they were offering. The chance to be who she wanted to be, even if she left everything she had ever known behind.

  “They were not meant to succeed.” Riana said.

  “What do you mean, Holder?” Razel asked, shock going through her system.

  “The darkness cannot be defeated. This world if doomed.” She said it calmly and clearly but Razel could not understand the words.

  “What do you mean?” Razel was taken aback. “Of course we can defeat it. Why else have we been creating all these Maasu, if not to fight when we are threatened?” One thing she had not told the humans was that it was Riana’s predecessor who had found the blueprints to create the Maasu war mechaniques again. She did not know if they would hold this association against her.

  “Do not be foolish!” Riana snapped. “We will all be leaving this world far behind and claiming another. That is what the Maasu are for.”

  “What world?” Razel asked, but she already knew.

  “Their city of San Francisco, of course. The resources of that world are deeper than our own. Once we arrive there we will be in a better position to fight the darkness, but first we must subdue the ‘dants that occupy that place.”