The Tree

  The continuous lurch in his stomach worried him too much and so this time he was cautious. He brought his power up slowly. Feeling it in his legs first, his knees locked and allowed him to go no further, his hands snapped out to stop both Patrah and Hettie.

  “What is it?” Patrah asked

  “I don’t know yet.” He brought his power up to his neck and into his eyes. Slowly and gently he looked nowhere but at the ground. He ignored the information his powers shouted at him about when the foundation had been laid and the names of the men who had built it. Instead he looked only at the surface and saw it. A thin metal wire the same discolored gray as the concrete it lay upon it. He followed the wire with his sight off into the lawn and then into the house.

  “Trip wire of some kind.” He narrowed his eyes at the house and again, and had to push through a multitude of useless information that tried to reveal itself to him. He focused on what the wire would do. “An alarm. There’s one person inside.” The person’s outline became clear but his eyes glowed so brightly with a prism of light that any facial features were washed out.

  Tae came out of it and allowed the power to ebb from his body. He stepped over the wire and made sure Patrah and Hettie did the same. When they were at the front door he turned to them.

  “So, do we knock or just try to go on in?”

  “Knock, of course. You should always begin as you mean to continue and we don’t want him to think we’re here to trap him against his will or capture him,” Hettie answered as she lifted her hand and rapped on the door three times in quick succession.

  They waited outside for a long time, so long that Tae wondered if the man had left through some other way. Just as he was about to chance bringing his powers up again to check, the door swung open. The man on the other side was pale, with a waxy look to his skin. His hair was thin but long; a deep brown that curled across his shoulders. He leaned on a cane and stared at them with bulging eyes that lingered in the border between brown and yellow.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, are you Fallon?” Hettie asked, smiling in a way that relaxed Tae, and it wasn’t even aimed at him. The man instead seemed to tense up.

  “No one by that name has ever lived here.”

  He went to close the door on them.

  “But was that your name once, before you lived here?” Tae asked.

  The man froze and looked at him through narrowed eyes. He rustled through all of the small pockets on his vest before coming up with a dirty green-and-silver monocle. He looked them up and down and Tae felt the shiver of being seen. Truly seen.

  “You’re not Maasu at least. That’s good.” Still he looked them up and down for another moment before he opened the door wide and invited them in. He did not take them far, directing them to a living room directly off to the right from the front door. “Have a seat.”

  They all did and he took them each in in turn before turning to Hettie.

  “You’re the one in charge here. Let me know what you want with me. I know you can’t be here to capture me because my warning would have gone off. Yes, young man, even the one you thought you avoided.”

  Tae looked at the man in surprise.

  “I learned long ago not to rely on power or mechaniques only. While you stepped over the wire infused with a little power, you missed the mechanique sensors. They would have picked up Maasu from miles away. I was just making extra sure at the door. Oh, and the doorway itself? If you had bad intentions when you entered, it would have exiled the three of you to a small pocket dimension. You’d be frozen in time for about an hour and would emerge thinking no time had passed, but I would be long gone.”

  Tae looked at him wide-eyed, surprised that he had not picked up on any of this. But perhaps it had been dormant because none of it applied to him?

  “I’ve been running for a long time now, boy. I have a lot of tricks perfected and I’m always making new ones.”

  Tae nodded.

  “Now what can I help you folks with?” The man asked, sitting down as well.

  Hettie spoke up. “First, you can tell us what Maasu are.”

  “Maasu are . . . they are creatures of war. Monsters that are hard to kill because they are already dead; things stitched together to specification. They are not mindless so much as single minded. They are given a target or a mission and pursue it relentlessly.”

  “So are they those things made of blackness? Or the people that have been going crazy and attacking others?”

  “The Maasu are both. They are the instruments of war. Traditionally they are armored in blackness because they are used at night more often than not. Traditionally they are made of mechanique mixed with alchemy and power and pieces of living beings. When the Ruling Courts of Zebub got their hands on the plans again, they had the idea to do the reverse as well. A human on the outside but a monster on the inside. They are still creatures built for war.”

  “Why do the Ruling Courts want you back so badly? What have you seen?” Tae asked.

  The man stared at them for a moment before throwing his head back and laughing until he started coughing. Once he recovered, he explained. “I’m no see r, boy. I’m a Holder.”

  Tae gasped and the man chuckled.

  “Well, former Holder. My apprentice took over long ago.”

  “So you’re from Zebub?” Tae asked.

  “You bet your ass I am. Born and raised until I jumped portals a couple of decades ago. Wasn’t that hard. They had just started sending the Maasu back through and I just loaded myself in with the ones that looked human. Those were the only ones they were sending through at the time.”

  “Why?”

  The man sighed and closed his eyes again.

  “Because they think they can make a better stand against the darkness from your world than their own and they are not wrong.”

  “Why is our world better?” Tae asked.

  “It’s older. More stable. The roots of Corpiliu are rotten and they will fall all too easily.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Hettie asked

  The man sighed. “Because I worked with them. I was the one who rediscovered the blueprints for the Maasu, and the one who designed the reverse Maasu.”

  “Why?” Hettie asked, her tone sounding surprisingly neutral to Tae’s ears.

  “Because I knew the darkness was going to return. All of the mechaniques I built to calculate its return told me it would happen in my lifetime. I took the information to the Ruling Courts because I was a fool and they convinced me to look for weapons; anything we could use against the darkness. I helped them because I thought I was helping my people and then when I found out the truth I ran.” The man put his face in his hands.

  “Why didn’t you try to help anyone? Tell anyone?” Tae asked.

  The man was silent and Tae felt his face harden as he continued. “The darkness is coming; has already made inroads into this world. You can’t run anywhere else now, so what are you going to do? Sit in your little house until the darkness swallows you whole or wait for your former masters to come find you?”

  Tae saw both scenarios playing out in front of his eyes as he described them and he also felt how likely they were. The darkness was the more likely of the two.

  The man closed his eyes and rubbed at them through the lids. When he opened them he met all of their gazes one at a time. “What do you need?”

  “We would ask that you come with us. That you help us fight what you found and what you built,” Tae said.

  The man was silent for a long time but then he nodded and stood, leaning on his cane for balance. “Let’s go.”

  They walked from the house and Tae felt Hettie put her arm around his shoulder. “Told you we would need a seer to talk with him.”

  DAYIDA

  Dayida pressed the gas down as hard as she could and swung around the corner. Her power flared in her shoulders and she maneuvered the car fantastically. The other two in the car were quiet at least. One was an indep
endent from Oakland—Citrine, a lovely dark-skinned young woman who calmly sat with her hands in her lap and swayed with the movement of the car. In the back, a nervous Suit from the Agency sat. His pale fingers twisted in the “oh shit” bar, making them even paler. His name was Uwe and he looked ready to scream at any moment. The team had been working together for a couple nights so far.

  When Luka got something in her head, she did not play. They had talked and organized and negotiated long into that first night. When the next day had dawned, they were still in her office, but they had a plan to try and protect the area.

  One of the things they had to worry about was mass hysteria. The photos and videos had thankfully been few and far between and most were still being written off as hoaxes. They had managed to gather all the corpses of the dead black armored things and the Antes that had died so no one was selling any “alien” or “cryptid” autopsy videos yet, but it was only a matter of time. The black Maasu were hard to kill but not impossible. It was the human-looking monsters that worried her far more. There were more and more reports coming through of normal humans suddenly turning vicious and violent. Some of them just seemed to hulk the fuck out at whatever was in range but others had been slyer. One man in London had gotten way too close to planting a bomb close to Buckingham Palace.

  A Blooded in London had managed to stop that through blind luck, though it had cost her her life.

  They weren’t winning by any means. They lost more people than they saved. More people on their side were dying than those on the other side. They were fighting a war of attrition, but it wasn’t a massacre yet, and they were getting better. They were figuring it out. There were seven different cars patrolling San Francisco, each one with three Blooded. Others were taking care of Oakland and the Peninsula, all the way down to San Jose.

  They used a police scanner plus the Alarmers of the Organization to try and find the attacks as they started. This call had come in only moments ago across the police scanner. A woman and a monster in the park. Dayida yanked the wheel and cut across three lanes of traffic to skid her car onto the grass of the park.

  The woman was sprawled on the ground unconscious, her child crying, still protected in the circle of her body. Dayida sped up and then slammed on the brakes as she yanked the wheel to the right. The car slid perfectly between the mother and the monster. The driver’s side slammed into the creature’s side and in that moment Dayida shoved her palm against its hard shell through her open window and summoned the burning metal that was her birthright. The sword sprang into being. The point easily pierced its side, going deeper as it grew. She whipped the car the other way, letting the creature’s own momentum pull it off the sword and away from the car.

  She stopped it on a dime and turned to the others.

  “You.” She pointed at the Suit. “Get the baby. I’ll get the mother.” She looked at Citrine. “Keep that thing away from us until we can get her in the car and don’t get hurt.”

  Citrine smirked. “Done and done.”

  Dayida had found a purpose in these rescue attempts. Her power lent itself to leading people into battle. Though she was careful not to dive too deeply into her power. Her worries about her mother held her back at all times. Still she was growing used to using it in these runs, simply enjoying the rush of joy that came with helping others. She hurried over to the woman and found the Suit hovering over them both, hemming and hawing. He looked at the baby, then back at her, and then back at the baby.

  “Oh, are you fucking serious right now?” She asked.

  She reached down and snatched up the baby. “Grab her now, and you better not drop her.”

  He leaned down and picked the mother up in a fireman’s carry. He staggered but didn’t fall. Dayida cradled the still-crying child against her chest and ran back to the car. They settled the mother in the backseat. The Suit buckled her in and then settled back himself. Dayida unceremoniously plopped the now-sniffling infant into his startled arms.

  “Don’t drop the baby either,” she ordered.

  He nodded shakily and she closed his door and slid into the driver’s seat. Citrine was facing off against the beast, which kept reaching for her, but the power she generated around her was keeping it at bay and even hurting it.

  It’s like having a semi-sentient force field, that’s also a big cat who likes to claw people, Citrine had explained when they first met.

  Dayida had nodded as if she had understood. She definitely did now.

  The creature looked like a rat and a crab had mated and then their baby killed them and added pieces of their bodies to its own. It was batted back from Citrine, and Dayida saw four parallel lines appear, splitting its armor.

  “Get in the car!” Dayida yelled.

  “You’re the boss,” Citrine shouted and hopped into the passenger seat but not before taking one more chance to throw the creature into a convenient tree.

  Dayida slammed the car into reverse and sped back into the street. She narrowly missed being squished between two SUVs. They honked and the drivers leaned out of their windows to curse at her but she was already gone, waving out the window at them. They were doing better than most of the other teams and Dayida knew that was because of her driving skills. Her instincts, while meant for battle, were quite useful when it came to dealing with the roads of San Francisco.

  She also liked taking the hills at fifty miles per hour. The liftoff was pretty damn awesome and it made Uwe squeak. She didn’t do it now, in deference to the baby, but she was tempted. Speaking of the baby; she glanced at him in the backseat and saw Uwe’s green face as he did his best to hold the baby securely but not too tightly. He was mumbling under his breath, but his smile as he looked down at the baby was surprisingly sweet. Perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all.

  “Tell the others we’ve got two more,” Dayida said. They needed to drop off the rescues and then go out on patrol for another call in.

  Citrine reached for the old-school CB radio on the dashboard. They were the best that Dayida, Hettie, and Luka could do on such short notice, but they worked surprisingly well.

  “Cars for Caring, this is Car One. Reporting two more captured strays for the group home, where should we deliver? Over.”

  “Well done, Car One. Take them to the honorable place. Over.”

  Dayida nodded to show she heard and understood, and turned the car toward the Legion of Honor.

  HU

  Hu was tired of running. He’d been doing it for over two weeks now, moving around so no one could find him, relying on cash reserves he had hidden around San Francisco. He had been trying to think of a plan, something that would get him out of the mess he was in. He was in the jaws of a trap. He had not been high enough up in the conspiracy to know who they were actually working for. And didn’t that just piss him off. But he’d also been high enough up that no one on the other side was likely to believe him. He was now staying in places that he had always been too proud to even look at straight on. The SRO in the Mission was the closest to hell he ever wanted to go, but it was heaven, given the refuge it allowed him.

  That is until the door shook. Not a knock. Rather the door shook. Hu did not wait for another sign. He pushed open the window by his bed and slid out onto the fire escape with his small bag of belongings. He scurried down the fire escape and leapt down from the lowest landing, ignoring the locked ladder. Hu looked up to see two people looking out of the window. First, he had them pegged as Suits but then they stepped out onto the fire escape and they were not in the traditional suits. They watched as he jaywalked across the street with his head turned, staring at them the whole time.

  They both crouched and leapt from the balcony.

  Hu moved swiftly, pushing through the crowds on the sidewalk and eventually just moving into the street itself and running in that narrow gutter between sidewalk and lane.

  There was a crash behind him and he turned to see they had landed in the middle of the street. Broken asphalt rose up all around them.r />
  They ignored the chaos around them, the cars skidding past and stopping just short of hitting them. They were definitely not the Organization either. They were causing too much ruckus in public. He ran faster and then said fuck it. If they were willing to be this open, they wanted him bad. And it most likely was not to talk.

  Hu’s body bent as he called on his power. He stumbled but recovered his balance as he transitioned from two feet to four. He swept between pedestrians who screeched and jumped at the sudden cheetah in their midst. Hu glanced back and saw that his stalkers were somehow keeping pace with him. Hu reached an intersection and braced himself to make a break for it when he recognized one of the people in the stopped car to his right: Blooded Haru from the Organization. He looked back to the two things that looked human but were most assuredly not, and decided he would take his chance with those he could have an actual conversation with. Seeing someone in danger usually meant the person got a chance to explain things.

  Hu kept running as he returned to bipedal form, this time stumbling horribly and slamming into the side of the car with his whole body.

  The people inside startled and they all raised hands to ward him off before one of them, Blooded Haru, who had begun her training just as he ended his, recognized him.

  “It’s Maestro Hu,” she said, her voice hard to read.

  The other two in the car raised their eyebrows, which Hu did not think was a good sign.

  “Yes, it’s me! And I’m being followed by two things that look human but are definitely not.”

  They looked behind him and their faces got grim.

  “Get in the car,” the man in the passenger seat said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Now,” he said, and Hu hurried into the backseat next to a teenager. “I’m Longworth.”