Oblivion Heart (Darkling Mage Book 4)

by Nazri Noor

  “We haven’t met,” he growled.

  “I, um, hello,” I said. Something about the man unsettled me, and it wasn’t just the way his eyes were boring into me with the intensity of someone who seemed morbidly interested in studying my insides. “Dustin Graves. My name.” I held out my hand.

  “I know who you are.” He didn’t take my hand. “Name’s Royce.”

  “Royce?”

  “Just Royce.”

  I didn’t push any further. The guy looked about ready to rip my head off. He was kind of shabby, smothered in exhaustion, his flannel shirt buttoned in the wrong holes, his coat pulled on hastily, his laces half-tied. He had the look of a Wing who had been on one too many night shifts, or, alternately, had just rolled out of bed. It was easy to tell from his disheveled hair, and his eye bags, which were big enough to carry cigarettes in. Which he smelled of, honestly. Also whiskey.

  “Listen, Royce. I know this looks bad, but I swear I had nothing to – ”

  “I know you had nothing to do with this,” he snapped. “Don’t patronize me. I don’t see any holes in their bodies. You might not have evolved to the fullest of your abilities, but this isn’t something you can do with your shadow blades.”

  “Oh.” He knew about the blades I could summon from the Dark Room. “So you’ve, um, heard about me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. We keep records on everyone at the Lorica. You know that. You used to work there. Remember?”

  I raised my hands. “So I’m off the hook, right?”

  Royce walked very, very close to me, so close I could smell his breath. It was laced with the minty-freshness of someone who had leapt out of bed, thrown on yesterday’s clothes, and hurriedly brushed his teeth, all in the rush to cover up the scene of a magical massacre. I tried not to gulp.

  “Look around you,” he growled, deep and low. “This place is a blood bath. I have questions, and until you provide answers, you aren’t going anywhere.”

  I did look around, as he told me to, and I couldn’t ignore how the Lorica was already hard at work eradicating all of the blood. A cleanup crew used focused spells of disintegration to scrub away all traces of organic matter, to make the warehouse look exactly as it did before Mona’s song caused everyone to leak their brains out of their skulls.

  But I noticed that they hadn’t done anything about the corpses just yet. It was awe-inspiring, and in that moment, I realized, terrifying to watch how efficient and how brutally skillful the Lorica was at preserving the Veil, at throwing a sheet over the realities of the arcane underground.

  “Wherever you are, carnage follows. Do you know how much time my people are going to spend making this look like an accident? God, we’re probably going to have to set this entire place on fire. No way we can explain over a hundred disappearances in one night.” He raked through his hair, his eyelids squeezing hard together, the very picture of a migraine medication commercial. “If you know anything – anything at all about this incident – now’s the time to talk.”

  “I swear I don’t know anything. I was just here to watch the concert. There was a light show. The stage looked all silver, and then she did her last song, and everyone just started bleeding from all of their face-holes.”

  “And your companions? The vampire, and the necromancer. I know you didn’t come alone.”

  Damn it. The Lorica’s Eyes were always watching. “We came together, but when the bleeding started it all became a blur. I tried to get on-stage to do something, get Mona to stop. I don’t know. I was too late. By the time I checked, my friends were gone.”

  Royce raised an eyebrow. “Fantastic. That tells us nothing.” He rubbed the center of his forehead. “God, this is a public relations disaster. I don’t need this right now.”

  Wait, so he wasn’t a Wing after all? When the Lorica talked about public relations, that typically meant wiping people’s minds, or rearranging their memories, to rub out all traces of exposure to magic and keep the Veil intact. I couldn’t help myself.

  “So, you’re like a Mouth?” I scratched the back of my head. “I honestly had you pegged for a Wing.”

  Royce’s eyes narrowed, and he stepped impossibly closer. Somehow I hadn’t noticed how he was nearly a full head taller than me, but the size difference was really bearing on me now.

  “They told me that you were a mouthy one. Sure. I’ll tell you. I used to be a Mouth. And a Wing.” The faintest beginnings of a smile crept into the corner of his lips, then faded. “But now I’m a Scion.”

  I prayed that there was no actual way he could tell that a shiver had just run down my spine. You know when you ask to speak to the manager, and it turns out they are the manager? Well.

  Scions were the most highly ranked of the Lorica’s members. These were powerful mages, those who displayed both expertise in their specialties and an ability to diversify by learning further magic. I’d only ever met one Scion, Odessa, an ageless woman in the body of a teenage girl who could erect massive force fields with little effort. I forced my eyes to stare Royce right in his smug face, hoping he couldn’t read my thoughts, which lingered on whether other Scions made a habit of going around looking all unkempt.

  “I had no idea, um, Mr. Royce. Sir.” I don’t know what it was about Scions, but they just made me jittery. Maybe it was knowing that they had enough mystical power to wipe me off the face of the planet without blinking.

  Royce frowned, his eyes appearing to focus on something in the distance. “Shush. Shut up for a minute.”

  He raised two fingers to his temple, just above his right ear, like he was activating an invisible headset, or a bluetooth device that wasn’t really there. He was tapping into a telepathic connection. I’d seen it happen before, and, well, at some point in my distant past, I’d also used it to communicate with the same woman who had shoved a knife in my heart. Long story.

  “Okay,” Royce said, to someone who wasn’t there. “Right. Understood.” He clapped his hands, the sound magically magnified as it thundered throughout the warehouse. “All right. Evacuate. HQ ordered an incineration protocol. Everybody out, and send me a signal when you’re clear.”

  A flash of light burst on the stage, then again. It was a Wing, who had moved so fast that I barely caught them transporting Mona’s sleeping body out of the warehouse.

  I blinked. “An incineration protocol? I thought you were joking. You’re not seriously going to – ”

  “Just shut up,” he mumbled. Royce slung an arm over my shoulder, somehow making even the friendliest gesture seem so menacing. I caught a whiff of cigarettes, and aftershave. Then he snapped his fingers, and I smelled the wet night air, and somehow we weren’t in the warehouse anymore. He’d teleported us out onto the street, and I hadn’t even felt it.

  I shrugged from under his grasp, but he pulled me in even harder. I had the weirdest feeling I was going to end the night wearing cement shoes at the bottom of a lake.

  “Listen,” he said, speaking into my ear. “I’m keeping tabs on you and your motley little crew of friends. If I hear one thing – and I mean one tiny thing about you misbehaving, I’ll pounce on your ass so fast it’ll make your head explode.”

  “Spin,” I said. “The expression is ‘make your head spin.’”

  He scowled. “I know what I said. Did I stutter?”

  I mean I got the gist. He was going to fuck me up. But playing dumb worked well enough for me in the past, so I just said nothing.

  “You heard me, sweet cheeks.” He reached into his jacket, pulling out a single white card and slipping it into my shirt pocket. Then he patted my chest. “You give me a call if you get any leads on this case, which I’m sure you will. Don’t be greedy. Learn to share. We’re all in this together. Right?”

  “We are?”

  Royce gave me a mocking smile. He finally let me go, and the rush of night air running cold over my shoulder told me that he’d squeezed me tight enough to cut off at least a little bit of my circulation. The guy looked shabb
y, and mostly lean, but I had the sneaking suspicion that he could bear hug the life out of me if he wanted to. Just what I needed: a Scion on my ass, and one who wasn’t afraid to get physical, too.

  I grimaced at him and rubbed my arm. He ignored me, holding two fingers up to his temple again.

  “All clear? We sure? Right. Proceeding.” He turned to me again. “Remember, Graves. You hear anything, you get in touch.”

  I nodded, biting back the stupid retort just itching to catapult its way out of my mouth. Or what? I thought.

  Or this, his eyes seemed to say. Royce snapped his fingers, the last time I saw him do so that evening. I thought nothing had happened at first, but that was because the flames started from inside the warehouse. It only took a couple of minutes before it had turned into a blazing inferno.

  I watched, my mouth half-open, as the fires swept the warehouse clean, imagining the way they ate at the corpses littering what used to be a concert. I watched as the Lorica, in its own ruthless way, upheld the law of the Veil.

  Chapter 3

  “They burned the warehouse down,” I said.

  “Holy crap, man,” Asher said. “What the hell.”

  I pointed at him. “Yeah, hell. That’s exactly what it looked like. Glad you guys got out of there when you did, or the Lorica would’ve wanted to question you, too.”

  Asher shrugged. “We had to get out. Sterling was getting all weird.”

  Sterling shook his head. “It wasn’t the hunger, either. It was fucked up, seeing everyone bleed like that. None of it was appetizing. Made me sick. And the light was hurting me. Did any of you feel that? I just couldn’t stay. Something was seriously wrong.”

  That was the last thing I’d expected Sterling to say. I guess that even apex predators had their limits.

  “I didn’t feel anything,” I said. Asher shook his head, too.

  “The question is,” asked our other apex predator, “how the hell did you guys survive?” Gil Ramirez scratched at his beard, looking at the three of us with one thick, cocked eyebrow. Our werewolf was surprisingly mild-mannered, and was pretty sharp and inquisitive – at least, when he wasn’t going full dog.

  We were in our hideout, an otherworldly space accessible only through a brick wall in the kitchen of a Filipino restaurant. By stepping through a portal, in the blink of an eye, you go from grubby linoleum and peeling paint to a dark, expansive stone temple that’s about as quiet and cheery as a tomb. That, among other reasons, was why Asher had decided to christen our home the Boneyard. It felt correct, and to be honest, a little cool.

  Carver, our employer, mentor, landlord – the guy was a lot of things – stroked his own perfectly manicured beard, his brow furrowed. As a lich, an undying sorcerer, Carver had spent countless decades, maybe centuries honing both his magical talents and his enormous intellect.

  But it looked as if this dilemma had stumped him, too. I didn’t like knowing that the man who’d taken me in, who had taught me how to control the wildness of the Dark Room’s shadows and the ferocity that lay dormant in my own heart, didn’t have the answers.

  “Dustin,” he said, and we fell silent, all heads turning to look in his direction. “Are you certain that the four of you, the singer included, were the only survivors?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said. “I mean there’s a chance I might have missed a couple of people. I was kind of focused on Mona. Somehow I thought I could do something to stop her, but I was too late.”

  I tried not to look so disappointed at that. If there was one thing I’d learned about dealing with magic, it’s that you can’t always save everyone. The world of the arcane is chaotic, sprawling, and often immensely dangerous. But over a hundred dead? Holy shit.

  The leather sofa squeaked as Asher scrambled to sit up. “Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure we saw a couple of other people run out of the warehouse when Sterling and I did.” He scratched his chin, like he was trying to imitate Gil and Carver, except that he had no beard to stroke. “Come to think of it, one of them just vanished into thin air.”

  “Could be the perpetrator,” Gil said grimly.

  “Or,” Carver said, “the spell the songstress unleashed might have been designed specifically to target the normals. It seems to me that all the supernaturals present at the performance were spared.”

  Now that definitely got us all quiet. We glanced nervously at each other, and the anxiety began to bubble up so harshly in my throat that I took a noisy, horrible slurp of my coffee, just to break the silence.

  “Then that’s way, way worse than what we expected,” Gil muttered. “Why not just nuke Valero while they’re at it? There’s a reason they’re leaving magical people alive.”

  I took another sip, grimaced, then asked. “Has Prudence said anything?” Prudence was one of the Lorica’s most powerful Hands, and someone I considered a friend. She was also, incidentally, dating Gil, which made him the right person to ask.

  Gil shook his head. “I mean, obviously I’ll tell you guys if I hear anything from her, but you know how she is. Professional to a fault, and sure, we’re informal allies in a sense, but the Lorica likes to keep it in the family.”

  Sterling grunted. “We’ll hear one way or another. Both of you guys are dating people in the Lorica, anyhow.”

  I chuckled and raised an eyebrow. “What? Are you talking about me? Who am I dating?”

  Sterling waved his hand, rotating it at the wrist as he checked his mental ledgers for the right person. “What’s his name. Japanese guy. Herald, was it?”

  Herald Igarashi was another staffer from the Lorica, probably one of my closest friends in Valero. I blinked, then sputtered, confused. I sipped my coffee again, hoping the oversized mug would hide some of the blushing.

  “Can we just get back to business?” I cleared my throat, my ears still burning. “Seriously.”

  “There isn’t much business to get back to,” Carver said. “Without further information, there’s no telling what truly happened tonight. The best we can go on is that Sterling’s songstress unknowingly recited a spell, delivering it in the form of a song.” He cupped his chin again, raising an eyebrow. “You did say she seemed surprised by the song’s effect, did you not?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “She was crying. It was almost like she’d broken out of a trance, like she didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “Mind control,” Asher suggested.

  It was entirely possible, but I didn’t want to think of what else it suggested.

  “Thea,” Asher added.

  That was the exact thing I was avoiding. When I first joined the Lorica and discovered the world of the arcane, it was through forced circumstance. I’d been murdered, a victim of ritual sacrifice. Long story short, Thea, my former mentor and first friend in the arcane underground, was behind my death. Her actions triggered my latent magical abilities. More importantly, she’d been known to use various forms of mind control in the past.

  “No,” I muttered. “No way. She’s dead. We all saw that happen, remember? She can’t be back. It’s impossible.”

  “It isn’t a pleasant eventuality.” Carver raised a hand. “But let’s not jump to conclusions. We’ll reconvene tomorrow and examine this from a fresh angle. I’m sure you’ll all want to be rested.” He nodded at me. “Especially you, Graves, and especially after your harrowing encounter with another Scion. You must tell me more about this man soon.”

  I patted at my chest, feeling for Royce’s business card. “Oh, I’ll tell you all right. Guy’s a piece of work.”

  Carver nodded again. “Tomorrow then.” Everyone, with the exception of Sterling, rose from their respective perches in our makeshift living room.

  “Think I’ll stay here,” he mumbled, twisting into the piece of furniture that had been informally designated Sterling’s Sofa, the blood-red one that he stretched out on and claimed the very day it appeared in the Boneyard.

  Asher chuckled, then sauntered off to his room. Gil, who’d assem
bled most of the modular Swedish furniture Carver had ordered singlehandedly – and loved it – shrugged and walked off. I poked around in the break room fridge for a beer, snapped the top off, then headed for my own bedroom, taking sips as I made my way to the corridor where our quarters were located.

  We’d each been assigned a room, each of them roughly equivalent in size and amenities. The Boneyard had some interesting properties, among them its ability to provide exactly what its occupants needed in terms of space. When I first entered the hideout, the corridor only held Sterling and Gil’s rooms. A third one appeared when I joined, then a fourth, when Asher did. I took my beer into bedroom number three and shut the door behind me.

  Setting the bottle on the nightstand, I kicked off my shoes and stripped off my shirt. Then I plopped down onto my bed, throwing myself fully into a pillow. A rare opportunity to relax, I thought, at least before we went out to find a fix for the warehouse problem.

  But that would still be better than dealing with the Eldest. Things were strangely quiet on the cosmic horror front. Not that it meant we could relax any. Quite different from the entities of earth, the spirits, demons, and mythological creatures that populate the various ethereal layers of our reality, the Eldest were primal, ancient forces that represented the most destructive aspects of the universe.

  They were older than the human race, older than the gods themselves, and though they’d been asleep for so very long, recent events had awakened them, drawing their attention back to humanity. We’d had multiple encounters with the agents of the Eldest in the past, and the worst was knowing that we hadn’t seen the last of them. When it comes to mad elder gods from beyond the stars, no news is bad news. It felt like an invisible bubble could burst at any moment.

  Still, maybe the world wasn’t totally screwed just yet, and I was just overthinking things. I sighed, angling my head over at the shelves that held my meager possessions. Some books, a laptop, a few gaming consoles, and there, on the top shelf, was my sword, Vanitas, the very paragon of how you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.