by Myke Cole
Pretty. Schweitzer could feel Ninip’s excitement, the presence reaching out to their hands, tensing the trigger finger.
Ninip’s tendrils dug deeper in his memories, matching the image of the weapons before them to Schweitzer’s knowledge of guns, from shooting skeet with his father as a little boy, all the way to his first qualification with the M16 in boot camp, to the slow building of his deadly skill in the CQB shoothouse. The presence shuddered in excitement. Schweitzer observed Ninip, soaking up every detail, reaching out to touch the jinn even as it touched him.
Schweitzer thought of the bloodlust sensation the jinn had sent coursing through him, choreographed to scenes from his past. Whatever this demon wanted, he wanted the opposite. All good ops started with intel. Knowing your enemy was the first step.
New to you, eh? Schweitzer asked. Who the hell are you, anyway?
Who I am is as useless as who you are, Ninip answered. There is we, and that is all that matters.
He felt Ninip pressing to stretch his filter across their joint senses again, shadows gathering in the corners of the room. Schweitzer fought back against it, boosting his own energy into their shared body, struggling to keep his view of the world.
I’m thinking things would go a lot easier if we made an effort to get along.
Schweitzer could feel Ninip’s anger and frustration. It was not used to being defied. Let’s try this again, Schweitzer said. Who are you?
I am a god, Ninip answered. Schweitzer’s vision went white, then to static again, as it had when Jawid had shown him his story.
It resolved into an image of a muscular man, back to him, standing atop a stone pyramid. His dark skin was festooned with jewels, dangling from his crown, from the collar that stretched to the tips of his shoulders, from the trimming of his leather boots and broad belt. Tight black ringlets of hair hung to his waist, shining with oil.
Guards stood to either side of him, nude except for bronze helmets and hide shields. Their bronze-tipped spears pumped into the air, matching the rhythm of the throng of people at the pyramid’s base. The crowd was sallow-skinned, with hooked noses, black hair and eyes, matching the guards’ and the jeweled man standing before them, arms outstretched, soaking up their adulation.
I ruled them. The greatest warrior of my age. And now I am joined with the greatest warrior of yours. And we will rule again.
Schweitzer’s vision returned, crystallizing into Eldredge, arms folded across his chest, regarding him frankly. “Jim? Are you with me?”
The speaking was coming more easily now, but it was still difficult to consciously do what had always been unconscious. “Talk . . . jinn.”
Eldredge’s eyebrows drew together. “Ninip? What does he say?”
“Eh . . . gypt . . . Sumer? Old.”
Eldredge shook his head. “You are the first Operator we’ve had who could communicate with us. I’d love to get some interview time. Do you think . . . Ninip would be willing to talk to us?”
Old fool. We will drink his blood, Ninip said. You bray like a donkey with this animal. Take the weapons! Let us go!
Schweitzer felt their shared hands twitch toward the war gear, threw his will against Ninip’s, struggling to pull their limbs back into place. Calm the fuck down! We can’t just shoot our way out of here. Everyone has guns like these.
We are greater than the best of them, Ninip said. The bloodlust surged again. Schweitzer felt a phantom pulse, as if his dead heart raced with excitement. It was heady, addictive. He pushed against it.
There are hundreds of them, and they’re the good guys. Calm down and let’s get our bearings first.
Schweitzer felt Ninip pause, relax the fight for their shared hands and arms. We shall see what the cattle offer.
“No talk,” Schweitzer managed.
Eldredge shook his head. “See what inroads you can make. This is the first . . . communications we’ve ever had with a jinn since the program began. I’d love to see what we can do with that. The jinn do not speak with Jawid willingly.”
“Other . . . Op . . . rators?”
“Were not strong enough to grapple with . . . with what Jawid calls jinn. They became . . . uncommunicative.”
Schweitzer didn’t like the sound of that.
“The world is changing, Jim. It has been for some time. Jawid isn’t the only person with his . . . abilities. What Jawid does . . . this summoning, is particularly rare, nearly singular. But there are most certainly others. Those who can call fire. Those who can fly. Those who can heal flesh or tear it. The Gemini Cell is looking into what these phenomena are. Sometimes, they manifest in decent people, folks who are cooperative, who want to work with us. Sometimes, these powers manifest in . . . bad people, criminals, terrorists. When that happens, we need to take action. Fight magic with magic, if that makes sense.”
“Me,” Schweitzer said.
“Yes.” Eldredge nodded. “The souls of the dead linger about the body for a time. Paired with a jinn, they remain. The union creates a magical being powerful enough to go toe to toe with the magical beings that threaten us. You are the heart of a new and growing Supernatural Operations Corps.”
Idiot prattling, Ninip said.
Shut the fuck up and listen. Even now, dead and reanimated, sharing his own corpse with a malevolent spirit, he could barely believe Eldredge’s words.
“Maj . . . ick,” Schweitzer managed.
Eldredge nodded. “We call it the ‘Great Reawakening.’ We don’t know what it is yet, but we know this: Magic is coming back into the world.”
“Back?” Schweitzer asked.
“Yes,” Eldredge answered. “We now believe that there was a time like this before, roughly a millennium ago. We’re not sure why or how, but it raises the troubling possibility that this . . . thing . . . is orbital, or ebbing and flowing like a tide. And that means things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.”
Schweitzer felt the force of the statement swamp him. His training answered. Failure to accept reality ran ops off the rails, got good men killed. The untrained, the average, froze when disaster unfolded around them; SEALs responded to events, not their perception of them. Life wasn’t fair. Sometimes it didn’t make sense. You didn’t worry about that. You determined where the fire was coming from, and you got off the X.
He could feel Ninip’s appreciation. It weighed his thoughts, replaying them, considering them. Your way of war is . . . different. We have much to learn from one another.
It flashed him an image of a man, naked save for a bronze helmet, shield, and spear. He strode out from his place in the front line of an army, beating his chest and shouting at the enemy, brandishing his spear. He shouldered the weapon, grabbed his testicles and penis, thrusting his pelvis forward, shaking his manhood at the enemy.
Schweitzer imagined the response such antics would get in his day. He pictured an infantryman sighting down on the posturing warrior from behind a rock, taking his time to line up his sights, easing back the trigger.
And as he thought it, the image materialized, blotting out his vision and Ninip’s at once. The American soldier braced his shoulder as his rifle bucked, the posturing warrior’s bronze helmet flying, a tiny red hole appearing in his forehead, the back of his head exploding, spraying his comrades with fragments of his skull.
He felt Ninip’s amazement. That kind of shit doesn’t fly nowadays.
The jinn didn’t answer, only replayed the image again and again. Schweitzer clawed through it, struggling to reengage with Eldredge.
“There’ll be some training,” the old man was saying, regarding him from beneath frosted caterpillar eyebrows. “It never takes long. The soul remembers most of what it knew in life. We want to get you in the field as quickly as possible.”
“No,” Schweitzer said.
Eldredge looked up at that. “No?”
&nb
sp; He could feel Ninip’s surprise. You said we would hear his offer.
Shut up. I’ve got this.
“Why?” In life, he’d fought for his country, for the mass of citizens he would never meet and see. But while that moved him, they were always an undercurrent, a theme that never truly touched his heart. There was pay, there was advancement. There was the house he wanted to buy, the records he wanted to break. There was the immense pride in knowing he did things no one else could do. There was his mother, alone on the West Coast.
But most of all there was his family. A son he wanted to make proud. A woman for whom he still felt the little-boy impulse to impress and protect.
And now they were gone.
“Why?” Schweitzer repeated.
“For your country,” Eldredge said. “To do good.”
Schweitzer felt Ninip’s contempt. The jinn understood the words, but not the concepts behind them. He dug in Schweitzer’s memories, replaying old civics classes, the pledge of allegiance, the Constitution, the abstract notion of pledging one’s allegiance to an idea instead of a leader.
Madness, the jinn said.
Schweitzer felt only nostalgia and sadness. “I . . . dead.”
“You’re still an American,” Eldredge said. “You pledged yourself to the navy. That oath still holds.”
Today, Master Chief Green had said, you erase your old life. You put away everything you knew or sought. From this day forward, you belong to your country. You belong to one another.
Chang, Biggs, Ahmad, Perreto, even Martin. What would they see if they saw him now? How would they react to his ash-colored skin, the pools of shimmering silver where his eyes had once been?
“No.”
Eldredge scratched his head. “Jim, I don’t think you fully appreciate your position. We’d prefer your cooperation, but if you force our hand, we can simply have Jawid compel you.”
That goatherd cannot compel us to do anything, Ninip said.
No, he can’t, Schweitzer agreed. If he could, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He wouldn’t be trying to motivate me. Us. Whatever.
Schweitzer shrugged their dead shoulders.
“The Gemini Cell does deadly work, Jim. Our Operators tread paths that even the teams you used to run with shy away from. You know better than anyone that these paths must be gone down, Jim. If you won’t walk them, then we’ll have to send others. Living men. Men with families, wives, and sons. Men like who you once were.”
The words sent a spasm of grief through him, but Schweitzer was careful to bite down on it, send it funneling inward to boil beneath the jinn’s contempt.
Eldredge was right. He was dead. His family was gone. Nothing in the world would change that. The most he could hope to do was what he had always done. He remembered the motto of the Air Force pararescuemen who had medevac’d Chang off the deck of the freighter: So others might live.
Schweitzer had taken a similar oath when he’d pinned on his trident. It was who he was in life. It was who he was in death as well.
He said nothing, but he knew that Eldredge had already won.
Eldredge mistook his silence for defiance and smiled, folding his arms across his chest. “All right. What do you want?”
“Sarah. Patrick . . .”
“They’re gone, Jim. Jawid’s abilities don’t allow him to . . .”
Schweitzer was already shaking their shared head. “Who kill?”
Eldredge froze. “We don’t know. We’re still trying to find out. I can promise you that when we . . .”
“I find,” Schweitzer said, batting aside Ninip’s scorn. “Me.”
“Jim, you’re an Operator, not an analyst. You don’t know how to find them.”
“You find. Send me.”
Eldredge nodded thoughtfully, stroking his moustache. “I’ll take it up with the director.”
He lies, Ninip said.
I know, but it’s a start.
Schweitzer made them nod, allowed Ninip’s eagerness to move their shared body forward to the workbench. The armorer stepped back, stopping only when Eldredge put a hand on his shoulder. “Show our newest Operator what we have for him.”
The armorer forced himself to take a step forward. Schweitzer could feel the fear in him, taste it in his breath, smell it emanating from his pores. He felt himself instinctively leaning toward it, muscles responding to the scent, coiling to spring.
The armorer was a big man, wearing the navy uniform that Schweitzer had known and loved all his career. But Ninip’s senses addled his own, and he saw only a weaker being, ripe for the kill. Ninip exulted, taking control of their shared limbs, balling the hands into fists, raising them.
Eldredge’s own fear began to mist the air, his eyes widening. Schweitzer followed his gaze to their hands.
Their gray fingers had lengthened, the bone sliding out, piercing the fingertip, tapering into four-inch claws, the ends jagged and yellow, sharp enough to pierce flesh, tear it.
Ninip threw his presence forward, pulsing the image of the claws rising, falling, rising again, trailing gore. Before Schweitzer could stop it, the jinn had taken control of their arm, raising it over the armorer’s head. The man leapt backward, Eldredge with him, shouting.
Schweitzer struggled to pull the arm down. Stop! What the hell are you doing?
But he already knew. The predator joy was coursing through him, shouting in his dead nerves, trilling in bones. It felt right. It felt . . . alive. All he had to do was close his eyes and let it take control.
The arm froze, trembled. He battered himself against Ninip, felt the jinn fighting to strike the men.
Idiot! Coward! Let me . . .
His vision went white again, overlayed with images of throats laid open, hearts plucked still beating from human breasts. Schweitzer pulled with all he had. Their body shook with the effort. He was barely conscious of a low groaning escaping their shared mouth, could just make out Eldredge’s widening eyes, his fear stink abating.
Slowly, the arm began to lower.
Ninip raged. No words now, just an incoherent animal scream.
Schweitzer’s vision cleared. He saw guards flooding the room, spreading out along the walls, sighting their weapons at him. Flamethrowers, large-bore shotguns. Two carried axes.
Eldredge jerked his chin at the guards. “We can’t kill you, Jim, but we can render your body . . . inoperable. The dead don’t die, but they also don’t heal.”
Ninip’s madness sobered somewhat at the words. His fight for control over their body eased.
“Okay,” Schweitzer said, pinning his arms to his side. “I okay.”
He met Eldredge’s eyes. Whatever he was now, he wasn’t an animal. He wasn’t a murderer. “I okay,” he repeated.
Eldredge waved the guards back, awe etched on his face. “I believe you, Jim.”
Eldredge put his hand on the armorer’s back, tried to move him forward again. The man wouldn’t budge. Eldredge finally gave up and stepped up to the workbench himself, extending a hand. “I believe you.”
Ninip flashed an image of Eldredge’s wrist, grasped, pulling the old man over the workbench, the claws coming down into the back of his neck. It thrilled him, made him shiver with anticipation, but Schweitzer fought it down. He reached out, took Eldredge’s hand. He clasped it quickly, released it, not trusting his ability to hold Ninip at bay.
And in a tiny square not covered by armament, caught his reflection in the stainless-steel surface of the workbench.
The claws were retracting, as were horns and spines, protrusions of yellowed bone sprouted across his body. Their jaw had lengthened, the dead tongue lolling from it, the muzzle of a corpse wolf bent on the hunt. Their teeth were daggers, razor stalactites overhanging their shrinking jaw.
Within moments, he was himself again, as much as a dead man could
be. But in that moment, there had been nothing about him remotely human.
He pulled back the shared hand, staring.
“That is the jinn,” Eldredge said. “It is a form . . . useful in the field, in tactical contingencies. At other times, we find it counterproductive. I have never seen an Operator rein it in before. Once loosed . . .”
Once loosed, we rule, Ninip said, as we were meant to.
Schweitzer continued to stare at his hand, the slit tips of his fingers where the claws had been. “Why?”
“We don’t know,” Eldredge said. “All jinn were once human, that much Jawid is sure of. But the time they spend in the beyond changes them.”
Humanity is weak, Ninip said. Tearable meat and breakable bone. What we are after is greater, purer. And the longer we tarry in the void, the stronger we become. It purges us, distills us. Our form becomes perfect. Better suited for the fight, the hunt. Stop thinking of yourself as a man. Start thinking of yourself as half of a god of war.
The jinn surged, and Schweitzer felt as if he were being pushed from his own skin. He gritted his spiritual teeth, struggling anew to keep the demon in check.
Eldredge frowned, reached into his pocket, and lifted out a small length of chain, raised it in front of Schweitzer’s face.
Sarah and Patrick smiled at him, the beginnings of brown rust forming in the depths of the etched lines that made up their faces.
“I was told you carried this with you everywhere you went. I see no reason that should change.”
Ninip raged anew, shrieking. Baubles from a life beyond us. It will hurt us. It will make us weak!
The jinn still fought for control of their body, but now it struggled to pull away, to move as far from the etched talisman of Schweitzer’s past life as it possibly could.
He was not letting the demon take him now. It would not rob him of this.
He shouted silently, pushing back with all he had, shooting the arm forward to snatch the dog tag from Eldredge’s hand, lift it over their head, settle it around their neck.
As soon as the metal touched skin, the demon quieted, the voice receding to a low muttering.