Lightning Blade (Ruby Callaway Book 1)

by D. N. Erikson

  “Get out.”

  “You’re carjacking me, huh?”

  “No, dumbass.” I nudged him with the shotgun. “I’m saving your life.”

  “That’s a new one.” Roark scratched his neat hair, bicep tensing. This was going to be a problem if he decided to fight back. Way stronger. Close quarters. That didn’t give me the advantage, unless I actually pulled the trigger. “I have a better idea.”

  He yanked the shotgun straight from my hands and gave me a stern look.

  It dawned on me, suddenly, that he’d been playing along the whole time.

  The fucking gun wasn’t loaded.

  Goddamnit. It was difficult to keep all this straight. The mind wasn’t meant to deal with a bunch of events that didn’t really happen, but fully felt like they did. Ever confuse dreams with reality?

  Imagine confusing reality with reality.

  Roark set the gun down on the floor and crossed his arms. The fabric of the short sleeved polo bunched up.

  “Didn’t you say, I die, you die?”

  Shit. There was that, too. I gave him a sullen look, more embarrassed at my stupidity than the awkward situation in the car.

  “It was a short notice plan,” I muttered. Not my best work. I could hear Pearl screaming in my head, what the fuck are you doing, you idiot? To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know. Getting killed will throw you off your game.

  Waking up afterward is even more disconcerting.

  “You know, you could just talk with me next time.” Roark stretched his legs out and raised his eyebrows.

  “Because that’s worked so well in the past.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.” His sad blue eyes honed in on me.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “How’d you know so much about Sam?”

  “You told me about your brother.”

  “What else did I tell you?” Surprisingly, the words didn’t sound sarcastic.

  “Oh, everything.” I nodded sagely. “You won’t shut up, once I get you talking.”

  Roark looked nonplussed and unconvinced. But he handed me the shotgun.

  “You gonna let me keep driving?”

  “Is it—”

  “It’s not bugged.”

  Roark’s attention remained on me. Without the car’s humming engine, sounds of life drifted through the windows. Laughter, tears, people fucking and arguing. Punches, meals. The whole spectrum of life, in one tiny corner of the universe.

  Roark finally blinked his sad blue eyes once and said, “Talk.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  And talk I did, covering everything I could. The necromancer’s time loop. Solomon Marshall’s assassination, eight years prior to this very day. His obsession with killing Roark. The subdermal chips, both binding and tracking us. Explained that, before, I could dig the chip out, but now it had some sort of safeguard. How strangely the scene had shifted upon mentioning Marshall in the Tempe Camp’s command center, with Stevens marching me off and driving knives and nails through me for the next twenty hours.

  How Marshall seemed intent on tracking down and killing all of Roark’s CIs and contacts. Alice’s hacking into the internment camps’ server rooms.

  Little things. His call sign—Lightning Blade. His position within the FBI, both official— Supernatural Capture & Containment Task Force—and unofficial— the bureau’s preeminent unidentified creatures expert.

  The Realmpiece, and how everything led back to money and greed, with LC2 at the center.

  And finally, Alice’s little note: about gathering power within a time loop, and then emerging unstoppable.

  It took him no longer than three seconds to say, “I’ve got it figured out.”

  “You do?” I asked watching him press the ignition button, the car roaring to life. “Where the hell are we going?”

  “Only place that makes sense,” Roark said. “The city.”

  “Why?”

  “MagiTekk.” The word bore a cryptic resonance.

  “You know someone at MagiTekk?”

  “You could say that,” he replied, his eyes far away.

  “It’s kind of a yes or no question.”

  “Yes, then.”

  “Who?”

  Roark grimaced, and the wisps circling his head darkened the color of the night. He exhaled heavily and looked at me.

  “My father.”

  26

  The cruiser pulled into a twenty-four hour lot. Roark hadn’t mentioned his father since, and I didn’t press the issue.

  Look at me. Tactful. Restrained.

  Just like old times.

  “We’re heading to MagiTekk?” I asked as we stepped out. The words came out with a little bloodthirstiness. Yeah, it made sense; if I’d known anything about the world, I’d have put it all together much earlier.

  Corporate conglomerate kills rival over a threat to market share. LC2’s stock craters without its visionary CEO, the place closes up shop, and MagiTekk waltzes into a monopoly.

  Ruthless and elegant in its simplicity.

  “Not yet.” Roark glanced at his wristwatch, plain stainless steel. I recognized it from the photograph. His brother wore an identical one. With his lack of neural link and manual watch, Roark must’ve appeared oddly old fashioned to the world.

  But he didn’t evoke the sense of someone lost amidst technology. Simply that he’d chosen the tools best suited to completing his task. Streamlined focus, without distractions.

  In a land smothered in flashing lights and ads, that was admirable.

  Even if his motivations fought in the area between darkness and light.

  I followed him to the trunk. We loaded up what we could take—shells, the leather jacket, an extra rifle for Roark—and then we headed into the impending dawn.

  “Got a couple things to take care of before we stick our noses in the hornets’ nest.”

  “Things such as?” I loaded a few shells into the gun and racked the slide.

  “We need to make this process more efficient,” Roark said. We were flanked by steel and glass monoliths hundreds of stories high. “How many times have I died?”

  “Twenty-four that I know of.”

  His eyes flickered. “You’d think I’d get better with practice.”

  “You can’t remember,” I said, almost apologetically.

  “I know.” Roark let out a resigned sigh. “Which is why I need you to make me.”

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “I meant sooner. As soon as we meet.”

  I waited, wondering what other dark secrets would pour out.

  But he said, “The dog is drunk and Mom doesn’t care.”

  I said, “What?”

  “It’s something me and Sam used to say to one another,” Roark said. “Kids, you know?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I came home from school one day and found the dog passed out in the corner of our apartment. She’d chewed inside a box of wine and drank a bunch of it. I thought she was dead, so I brought Mom in, and she just laughed and told me the dog was drunk. I ran into Sam’s room, crying, not understanding what that meant, and said, The dog is drunk and Mom doesn’t care.”

  “And?”

  “He thought it was hilarious.” Roark shrugged. “Became a sort of secret handshake, I guess.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “It’ll work.”

  “We’re bound together, and you still barely trust me.” The memory of him drawing down on me outside Alice Conway’s house was still fresh in my mind.

  No one said I let go of grudges easy.

  “It’ll work.” The surprising force in his voice told me to drop it. “You really ready to chase this as far as it goes?”

  The wisps coal
esced around his head, almost blending into the reflective windows.

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  He gave me a grim smile, like that was a better answer than yes. “First thing we need to do is disable this chip.” Roark grimaced, like the thought sickened him. “Because I don’t want that son of a bitch Marshall to see it when I put a bullet through his good eye.”

  I watched as the wisps winked out.

  Or maybe they just turned completely black, disappearing into the hazy night.

  27

  Finding someone capable of removing the tracking chip was a relatively simple matter—if you wanted to call in the Feds. But reopening the time loop and Solomon Marshall ball of wax with law enforcement seemed like a bad call after what had happened on the third floor of the command center.

  MagiTekk’s tentacles went deep. How deep would take a lot of leg work to discover.

  Until then, traditional channels couldn’t be trusted, which meant we’d have to consort with a criminal element. Also not a problem for an FBI agent with a slew of CI contacts, except for two small concerns.

  Marshall was systematically killing them all. So we needed someone who Roark hadn’t visited in a while. Obviously there was no way of telling who he’d gone to see during all the past loops. But he could play a game of probabilities: which contacts had collected mothballs due to unreliability or other complications.

  Roark dug into his pocket and pulled out the data cube. “We need some place to read this.”

  “Plenty of magical tables lurking around.”

  He smiled at my lack of worldly knowledge. “The tables have circuitry running through them. Dozens of silicon processing chips.”

  “So they’re expensive.”

  “They definitely ain’t free,” Roark said, looking around at the mud-slapped neighborhood. “Government tech.”

  “Thought we agreed—”

  “We’re not going to the FBI,” Roark said. “Certain people have them.”

  The implication being that they shouldn’t have had them.

  I glanced at the shimmering lights hovering over the skyscraper jungle, ads still trying to sell me coffee and beer even in the early morning. How dangerous was MagiTekk?

  The flickering holograms offered me no answers.

  Apparently the place Roark had in mind was within the riot zone. We approached a large yellow police barricade. My muscles tensed, fully expecting to be shoved face first to the ground and sent back to jail.

  Do not pass go, do not collect your cash, and so forth.

  But Roark flashed his credentials without a word and was waved through. I shuffled along behind without anyone batting an eye. The FBI held clout in this world, far more than it had ever before. Shades of J. Edgar Hoover power.

  I wondered if, maybe, they—like MagiTekk—were the type of dangerous adversary that only a time loop could defeat. Good and bad was usually just a matter of which side of the fence you happened to sit on.

  Trash can fires and broken glass littered the sidewalk and road, a hazy smog obscuring the ads above the street. Firefighters and police officers—peacekeepers, I guess they were called now—rushed around, talking to their hands and each other.

  This neural link business took a little getting used to.

  “Mild?” I said in a low voice as we passed by the burnt out remnants of a pastry shop. A squat, spidery robot clicked on thin legs through the rubble, breaking down large debris chunks with destabilization waves.

  “You should listen to the news,” Roark said with a grim smile.

  “What do they say?”

  “They don’t report it at all.” He cut down a corner, this block looking much like the last. “The safest place in the world.”

  “Magic?” I couldn’t sense the aura of a spell, but it was possible the first responders had set up some sort of dampening tech.

  “Or sympathizers,” Roark said.

  “Guess all those bombs didn’t work.”

  “They never do.” It was difficult to tell where Roark stood on the matter.

  The skyscrapers began declining in height as we walked, resembling their old world counterparts. By the time we got out of the center of the riot zone—which stretched for a good four blocks—the buildings were a miniscule twenty or thirty stories. To my eye, this looked modern.

  But after seeing the towering structures reaching sub-space, they must’ve been quaint to the rest of the populace.

  Their architecture was less uniform, too, their windows different heights and their entrances delineated by more than the glowing corporate logo plastered above the door frame. I began to notice cracks in the sidewalks, signs of rust and decay.

  “Midtown,” Roark said by way of explanation. “Another part of the old downtown that didn’t fall.” The landscape became more colorful and vibrant, even in the comparative absence of the neon holograms encouraging me to purchase new dresses and condos. There was subtlety, it seemed, in shades of gray, that I had never noticed walking through cities before.

  “I’m surprised they let it stand.”

  “That makes two of us,” Roark said, and I followed him into a bar with an honest-to-goodness wooden door at the base of a stumpy seven floor structure. The door creaked and groaned as we walked inside the dim interior.

  It smelled of hops and looked like it’d been well-drank-in, neither of which I had a problem with. Whatever suits existed on the other side of town, they must’ve been freaking out about all manners of problems with a place like this.

  Health codes, height codes, safety violations.

  Truth be told, it was nothing but a bar. But corporatism always had a way of making the old seem dangerous and unsafe. Like adding guardrails to everything would suddenly cure people of stupidity.

  I followed Roark to the long wooden counter, looking at the bottles of liquor lining the shelf.

  An old man tottered over, either drunk or limping. My money was on both. An unkempt mountain of snow white hair graced his ruddy forehead.

  With a great laugh, he said, “Ey, it’s Colton!”

  There was the minor clinking of glasses from the few other bar patrons remaining. It took me a moment to remember that the start of my day was the end of theirs, right around last call. An old clock in the corner announced the time as 3:47 AM.

  “Still breaking the law, I see, Kendrick.”

  “If a man can’t drink after midnight, he ain’t free.”

  “Words you live by.”

  “Since when did you care so much about rules, boy?” Kendrick grabbed a bottle off the shelf, hair flopping as he set it down. “Drink. It’ll do you good.”

  “I need something else.”

  “Free drinks isn’t enough, is it?” The old man’s eyes narrowed, swerving toward me. “Oh, she’s a pretty one, Colton. Didn’t think you had it in ya, did we fellas?”

  There was snickering from the other end of the bar.

  Roark’s jaw tightened slightly as he said, “Ruby, meet Kendrick.”

  “And here we thought you might be a queer,” Kendrick said. “Always showin’ up alone, never looking at the ladies.”

  “We’re not together.”

  “Then my bet’s still good,” Kendrick said. He brought one of the shots up to his lips. “Well, raise your glass, boy.”

  “I’m on the clock.” Roark pushed the glass away, his gaze focused intensely on the old man’s ruddy face. No time for fun with the necromancer still loose.

  “I’ll do it.” I stepped forward and picked up the whiskey shot. Without hesitation, I downed it, feeling the liquid burn down my throat.

  “She’s a winner, this one.” Kendrick slammed his glass against the wooden counter heartily. “If you ain’t queer, then you best be working on that.”

  Roark flushed slightly at the ears, suddenly
flustered by the good natured barbs. “She’s a co-worker.”

  “Ooh.” Kendrick gave me a fake salute. “Sorry miss. Wouldn’t want you to close me down for breakin’ the law.”

  He didn’t seem too worried that either of us were here to do that.

  “I came here to use your table.”

  “Pool’s in the back. A buck a rack.”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Roark said in a low voice. He reached into his boot and plucked out a hidden stash of bills I hadn’t seen before. Lots of them. “Ten minutes.”

  Kendrick eyed the money with suspicion. “This business have to do with that gray haired son of a bitch you been chasing?”

  “Yeah.”

  The old man pushed the money back. “Money’s no good here. You do what you got to for Sammy.”

  Kendrick nodded toward the kitchen. I followed Roark back through the empty, fluorescent space.

  “You told me I was the only one who knew.”

  “I guess even when I’m dying I can lie.”

  “That’s reassuring.” I watched Roark press his fingers on a yellowing tile next to the refrigerator. There was a slight click, and then the stainless steel appliance disappeared, revealing a small back room. “You know a lot about this place.”

  Answering the implicit question, Roark said, “Kendrick just likes busting my balls.”

  “I’m surprised you have friends.”

  “Wouldn’t call him that.”

  “What would you call him?”

  Roark didn’t answer as the elevator slid back into place. Lights sprung on around us, illuminating a comfortable interior with faded red cushions. The table sat in the center, lying dormant.

  “So who is Kendrick, anyway?” I asked, approaching the issue from a slightly different angle as Roark placed the data cube on the clear surface.

  “That’s a difficult question to answer.” Roark swiped his hand through the air, answered the voiceprint login instructions, and stood back as a flood of information spider-webbed through the room.

  Turns out he wasn’t only obsessed with me. In fact, he wasn’t obsessed with me at all. Roark was obsessed with his job, having no other hobbies but data collection and case work. Endless reams of files—photos, videos, reports, newspaper clippings—streamed through the ether as he deftly whipped through it all.