Thirty-three minutes. I didn’t know what kind of eyes the necromancer had on this place, but I also didn’t want to leave. Alice Conway, whoever she was, must’ve piqued the silver-haired creep’s interest somehow.
And I needed to know why.
No use putting a good day to waste twiddling my thumbs. As far as I knew, it could be my last one alive.
I took Roark’s belongings—phone, money, pistol, knife—and made my way up the creaky steps. Avoiding the slick, dark blood, I peered inside. A thin whining drifted through the ruined door frame.
Checking the shotgun to make sure it was loaded, I listened for a moment. No movement, as far as I could tell. I stepped inside, walking slowly through the derelict house. The vinyl flooring was peeling at the corners, the rest of it stained deep yellow. Neon graffiti that glowed in the dark greeted me as I swung toward the first bedroom.
A man sat panting in the middle of the floor, back hunched over. He snarled as I walked inside, the sound mostly human. His torso was peppered with wooden splinters. Diamond flakes ran along a deep gunshot graze.
The wound healed slowly due to the silver, but it shouldn’t have been enough to incapacitate him. I looked down, finding a bloody patch on his thigh.
Hell of a shot from Roark, not even being able to see the bastard.
“You work for the necromancer?” I asked, scanning the room for other enemies. It looked like a teenager’s bedroom—band posters, a thin computer monitor in the corner flashing with numbers and research. Dirty clothes on the floor.
“I’m not talkin’ to you, bitch.”
I racked the slide, the sound cutting through the lonely night. He shivered, spine tensing.
“Let’s try this again.”
“Man, he just gives us some coordinates and a little cash. Tells us to fuck shit up.” His head whipped up, too quick to be human. “And we’re happy to oblige.”
I pulled the trigger, blowing his head clean off. “I bet.”
Stepping over the mess to reach the other side of the room, I found a blood pool coming from beneath the lopsided bed. Dropping to one knee, I saw a ghostly set of vacant eyes peering back at me.
Roark’s phone chimed and I about shit my pants.
“Alice Conway. Nineteen years old. Half-vampire. Booked by Special Agent Colton Roark for hacking and unauthorized access of government files. Currently a confidential informant.”
“Not confidential enough,” I said, pulling the thin glass out to glance at the profile. Definitely the same girl, although she looked a lot better alive than dead. Wolves wouldn’t be mistaken for elegant killers.
“Access restricted. Unidentified user voiceprint detected.”
I pressed a thin button at the device’s edge, and the light flickered out. Should’ve kept my mouth shut. In any event, without knowing what trail to follow—or what Alice might have been researching about time loops—all of Roark’s files were completely useless.
I rose from the floor and headed to the computer and its glowing numbers. A hacking algorithm was paused, interrupted by the werewolves’ attack. The blood droplets dripping from the thin display told that part of the story.
Never one for programming, the syntax on screen made little sense. I looked for a mouse and keyboard, finding them both absent.
Cautious from my recent lockout, I tried to decipher the riddle for a few extra minutes. Didn’t matter. There was no risk—this didn’t tell me anything, so if the system booted me out, I wouldn’t lose a valuable lead.
I touched the screen, feeling it ripple with a tactile pleasantness. Instead of access being revoked, I scrolled through the rest of the file. Nothing popped out until the middle of the blur of code.
A familiar address, marked with a plain text note. Tempe Internment Camp.
It was followed by dozens of similar entries—hundreds—each IP address labeled with a different city. Seattle. Philadelphia. Kansas City. Boise. On and on it went, from major metropolitan zones to places I couldn’t place on the map if you had a gun to my head.
This program was built to pull data from the internment camps’ secured servers.
“What the hell are you up to, little girl?” I said to the screen, finding Stevens’s words stuck in my head. I shook off the icky feeling and continued scrolling. Near the end, the display flickered off.
Power quota exceeded. Please enter account number to proceed.
Guess the Fallout Zone was semi-government sanctioned. The locals in the skyscrapers couldn’t be thrilled about having essence-based creatures in their backyard. Something deeper was afoot.
I didn’t care, though. Political analysis wasn’t part of my job description. The deal was simple: find the necromancer, get a free pass out of jail. And the only way that ticket stayed punched was by punching his.
The truth was eloquent in its abstract simplicity.
Total pain in the ass in reality, given his power. I rubbed my wrist, feeling his eyes from afar. Was he watching? No way of telling.
I shoved the screen in frustration, and a sticky note fluttered off the desk to the ground. It seemed like an anachronism—I hadn’t seen a sheet of paper in the place—so I grabbed it.
Here was what Alice Conway had been working on for Roark.
“You work fast, kid,” I said. “Damn you’re good.”
My mask beeped, a red countdown timer indicating I had three minutes of filtration remaining.
That was fine.
Because this note could help crack open the whole thing.
14
The feral glow of hungry eyes lurked behind ragged bushes and broken windows, eager to descend upon the feast in the middle of the street. Presumably, my presence—rather, that of my rather large gun—kept the locals at bay.
Lucky me.
The car, unlike Roark’s phone, had no qualms about granting me access. Apparently the ignition key wasn’t locked to his biometric data. No thumbprint or anything else required.
I tore the mask off as the car started up. Its filtration systems were far better than the manual rebreather. I would’ve been concerned about my long-term health, but I only had the day. It was weird playing with house money when it came to your life, but there was also the nagging fear that the plug could get pulled any time.
I glanced at the sticky note, now clinging to the plastic beneath the busted navigational console.
“With a time loop, one can gather his power unseen,” I said, reading the hasty handwriting. “And then emerge too strong to be stopped.”
The necromancer was clearly setting up a series of dominos. But when the needle came back down on the turntable and the record started playing again, what would be the tune?
I knew a few things: in the necromancer’s perfect day, Roark likely died. He had some sort of unhealthy fascination with Roark, killing his brother and taunting him with the photograph. And the silver-haired creep had killed seven public officials already—reanimating them, if Governor Cowden wasn’t exaggerating to drive home a point.
But you didn’t need to make a time loop to commit murder. It went far bigger.
And what of Roark’s CI, Alice Conway? It seemed paranoid to be concerned about a nineteen-year-old half-vampire living in the Fallout Zone. Even one with talent. The necromancer had been tracking us, but the wolves had been waiting.
It dawned on me, then, that in my haste to clear my own name I’d actually been mistaken. We hadn’t led the wolves there today. The necromancer had built up a network of Roark’s contacts from the endless re-runs, all the choices Roark had made but didn’t remember.
And then the necromancer had paid wolves, tweakers, imps, trolls—whatever pieces of shit he could buy for a couple bucks—to cut off Roark’s lifelines, one by one. There were others like Alice, dying or already dead.
Roark was selling out his people wi
thout even knowing.
That would fly over about as well as the time loop if I saw Roark again tomorrow.
Which led me to another question.
What made Roark so fucking special? Worth watching?
And why’d the necromancer need to marshal his strength, hidden away in a time loop?
I didn’t know.
But I didn’t want to die, so I sure as hell needed to find out.
I shivered, knowing the real threat wasn’t death.
It was allowing the necromancer to endlessly run through the loop without me stopping him.
15
I tried getting in Roark’s phone again, but it was a total bust, hissing at me and threatening to erase all his data. If it was anything like the phones of old, it would be totally uncrackable, even by the best techs. Voiceprint or nothing, which meant I was screwed.
Out of fresh leads, I briefly considered packing it in. But eating a bullet was a bridge too far, even knowing I’d wake up on the other side. So I shelved that idea and just drove around the bombed out landscape, gathering my thoughts.
An idea crystallized as I passed a vampire having relations with a werewolf hooker right in the middle of a convenience store parking lot. There’s something to be said for shamelessness, but that journeyed well into the realm of giving no fucks at all.
Which about sealed it: I was getting the hell out of this section of town.
Colton Roark was the FBI’s “preeminent unidentified creatures expert” according to the annoying AI system that had seen fit to lock me out of his device. All those files were still on the data cube. But after seeing the login screen in the holding area, I knew that required Roark’s vocal authentication as well.
Which left me sitting on a useless goldmine.
A thought dawned on me. The car didn’t have the same security.
Maybe, if I took his car to the right place, I could find out who else he’d visited from the GPS.
And whether any of them could help me.
Mind made up, I gripped the wheel tightly as I rode up to the towering solid steel gate. This side seemed a lot less friendly than the other, if that was at all possible. The guard didn’t step out of his heavily armored concrete tower. Instructions barked at me through the car’s ruined console, static ruining everything.
I made a mental note not to destroy the dashboard next time. Hopefully telling Roark his own secrets would garner his trust quicker. The thought of jumping through hoops just to get back to square one made me slightly nauseous.
Without any way of communicating, I put my hands up in an I don’t know, buddy kind of way. The growling from the broken system stopped, and the guard finally came out. Unlike the men on the other side, he looked ready to defuse a bomb—or launch one.
A thick metal exoskeleton glinted in the headlights, his massive metal gloves carrying a gun that must’ve weighed more than me.
The ground shook as he walked closer.
I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to talk to this Terminator looking fellow, but the car didn’t give me much of an option, cheerily rolling down the window.
I held my breath, waiting for the radioactive fallout to get me. But they’d made sure to scrub things near the gate, which made the air only slightly acrid.
The helmeted head swung down, blackened visor obscuring his face. “What happened to your vehicle’s console?”
“Malfunction,” I said, staring him straight in the visor.
There was a tense silence. “Credentials.”
I wanted to scream FUCK—of course I couldn’t get through without Roark, that was goddamn obvious—but instead I said, “One minute,” and reached for the shotgun and shot him four times in the head. The first shot didn’t do much, but the second one made a tiny chip in the helmet. The third busted through and the fourth sent him to the ground.
He kind of staggered forward before collapsing in a tangle. The crumbling ground shook.
I rushed out of the car, glancing at the rows of security cameras. This police state, constant surveillance, login-with-your-DNA bullshit was really getting old.
I’d just have to open the damn gate myself. I ran toward the guard tower, relieved that he’d kept the door propped open with a small stool. The strains of what sounded like a radio filtered through the door as I squeezed through. Once inside, I saw that the sound was actually coming from a small screen hanging above a massive control rack. There were enough switches for a producing studio.
Gatekeeping must’ve been a complicated business.
I passed by some steep stairs, which wound up to a sniper’s nest, and stopped in front of the controls. Scanning the labels, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the small screen, a familiar voice coming through the tinny speakers.
I glanced up, taking in the fuzzy archival footage. The voice, unmistakably, belonged to the necromancer. But the silver haired, one-eyed son of a bitch was nowhere in the frame. Instead, a young man with close-cropped hair stood at a lectern, delivering a rousing speech.
“Our new essence-modulation implant will allow all creatures to coexist peacefully.”
He pointed out into the crowd. A low question came. “And what if humans don’t want peace?”
That high pitched laugh, oddly hopeful in the corporate context. “Well, they’re going to get it anyway.”
Raucous cheers, then a gunshot. The camera tilted, and the feed cut out into a buzz of static. After a moment, the news anchor came on the screen.
“Today marks the eighth anniversary of Solomon Marshall’s assassination, an event many believe was the tipping point in the breakdown of supernatural relations. Marshall was inspired to start his research into essence and its many effects due to his sister, Eden, who was born as a coyote shifter. Soon after his death, however, the promising young start-up, LC2—short for Living Creatures, Too—folded without the guidance of its maverick CEO. Eden, once a staple of magazine covers and other media, has not been seen in almost seven years. Solomon Marshall’s death remains unsolved, despite an ongoing investigation. For more, I have our Early Morning Power Panel, who will weigh in—”
I tuned the anchor’s voice out, mind going blank as I stared at the controls. Visionary CEO rises from the dead, finding a new career as a necromancer. And a serial killer. I’d seen strange things. Comes with the bounty hunting territory. But today, and these events, had even me stumped.
But was it much different than my own story? Print shop girl rises from the dead in the Weald of Centurions, destined to guard it forever with my Realmfarer brethren.
Escapes from the unescapable.
Takes up a new career as a bounty hunter.
Galleron’s voice whispered in my ears. You’re a hunter, Rebecca Callaway. A killer.
The necromancer would be pleased to learn just how much the two of us had in common. I just needed some way to find him.
I dug deep into my pockets, taking inventory. The list. Useless, for now. A handful of shells. If I got cornered, I could take a couple jackbooted bastards with me. And the Realmpiece.
Maybe this could tell me where to go.
When I pulled out the pewter compass, every strand of light in the air immediately darted around it. That was unusual, even though the energy within the piece was strong. I could feel Galleron—long dead as he was—through it, much of his powerful intuition fused into the metal.
I watched the dial spin from symbol to symbol. I couldn’t identify them all—they were ancient, many of their meanings lost. Pictographs could have meanings well beyond the image. Through experience, I’d determined a few. But it was often like decoding a message, only to uncover a quarter of the letters.
The needle slowed, settling on a crow-like bird before bouncing to an ancient carved bone. Then it locked to the northwest, indicating that the answer lay in that direction. Glancing up, I
saw that this was somewhere beyond the panel of controls. Not particularly helpful. At least the Realmpiece was being kind today with the first half. I’d ascertained a basic meaning for both of those symbols.
The bird was a trickster, a symbol of deception. Not all was as it seemed.
I’d first thought the bone carving was a harbinger of death, or symbolic of a looming battle. But eventually I’d figured out that it was actually a representation of ancient currency, bearing the same value as silver or gold in a past world.
When I held the Realmpiece closer to my nose and adjusted my gaze, I found that the needle locked on tightly to the small screen. Maybe it was being more helpful than I’d thought.
It was trying to tell me something simple.
Deception was afoot. Solomon Marshall’s unsolved murder was tied to something deeper.
And I would find out what if I followed the money.
As the pieces slid into place, I saw a familiar story staring back at me.
Man rises from the ashes, only to kill those who wronged him.
I just needed to find out the who in this equation. Who stood to gain from Marshall—and LC2’s—sudden demise.
And then I would understand what Solomon Marshall had planned as an anniversary celebration.
That would lead me to Marshall.
Mission clear, I focused on the panel of flashing switches, locating the two corresponding to the gate. Steel groaned outside, signaling that I could pass back into the skyscraper jungle.
A disconcerting thought settled in my chest as I stepped away from the controls.
Maybe Marshall wasn’t the bad guy.
Maybe I was for trying to stop him.
I exited the guard tower, thoughts swimming as I shook off the feeling. It took me a moment to realize the guard and his thick metal exoskeleton had vanished. I stared at the cracked asphalt, not putting two and two together until I heard his voice.
Lightning Blade (Ruby Callaway Book 1) Page 7