Night and Chaos: An Ashwood Urban Fantasy Novel (Half-Lich Book 3)

by Lee Dignam

  “Well… it isn’t so much that I have an address, but more like I have specific visions surrounding where it could be.”

  Silver’s eyebrow went up. “So, you don’t really know?”

  Cora shook her head. “I’m not a bloodhound. I get visions of where these creatures could be. Like, I’m able to see through their eyes for a split second at a time. I can never do this with Nyx—she’s too strong—but the Children. Yeah, them I can find.”

  “Where is it?” Alice asked.

  “This would be much easier if we had access to the internet.”

  “Why? What do you need?”

  “A map of Ashwood would be good, and newspapers, too; anything recent regarding construction projects.”

  “Construction?” Silver asked.

  He walked over to Alice’s desk where he had spotted this morning’s paper, picked it up, and using the glow of his phone scanned the inside while Alice plucked a map of Ashwood down from a bulletin board she kept on her wall. Alice unfolded the map on her desk and shone a flashlight on it.

  “They’re at a construction site,” Alice said.

  Cora came up next to her. “That’s what I thought too,” she said.

  “Yeah, but there has to be dozens in Ashwood,” Silver said, “More than we can visit.”

  “No,” Cora said, “This one was… tall. When I looked around I could see the city beneath me, not level with me.”

  “So, something like a skyscraper?” Alice asked.

  “It could have been.”

  “This one?” Silver asked. He set the newspaper down on the table and pointed at an article regarding a near stalled construction project in the middle of the financial district.

  The headline read ‘Construction force cut in half as company shares plummet.’ The building in question, which was being built by a private firm, had been under construction for several months. It was a project designed with functionality as well as aesthetic appeal in mind, something to beautify the district even further and provide more office space to the area’s ever growing needs. But the CEO was found to have been taking a little off the top and was promptly put in jail. Shortly thereafter, the company took a nose dive.

  Alice had seen the building once or twice during her roams around the city but hadn’t truly noticed it—could barely picture it in her mind. It made sense that Nyx, or at least the surgeon, should be using it as a place to hide out in. The surgeon had previously taken residence in an abandoned and rarely frequented hospital, so why not a rarely frequented construction site?

  Cora found it on the map and pointed. “Here,” she said. “I can’t tell you for sure if this is the right one, but it’s as good a guess as I can give.”

  “You said yourself your guesses are better than most people’s facts, right?” Silver said.

  Cora nodded.

  Alice grabbed a red marker from the pen pot on her desk and circled the spot on the map where the construction site stood. She stared down at the page for a moment, trying to figure out where they could go to stake the place out for a while, but without the help of the internet to judge height and offer recent pictures of the area for reference, this was tricky.

  The office lit up in shades of bright violet—color so intense it made Alice jump and her skin crawl. At first Alice thought it was Void magic, and her hackles had risen. Two seconds later, rolling thunder exploded from high above, causing the windows to rattle lightly and the ground to shake. Only lightning, she thought, and she looked around at Cora and Silver. The brightness and the sound of the detonation had been enough to startle them and grab their attention, too. They waited until the rumbling was over before exhaling.

  “That was right on top of us,” Alice said.

  “The storm is getting stronger,” Cora said.

  “Cora is right,” Silver said, “I can feel it too. We don’t have much time.”

  “This wasn’t an accident,” Alice said. “First the storm gathers enough charge to interfere with our magic, then Nyx knocks out the power, killing all the phone lines and throwing the city into darkness and chaos. That’s exactly what Nyx wants; she wants to bring another creature from the Void into the world again—a big one.”

  “Chaos itself,” Silver added.

  “Something more powerful than herself?” Cora asked. “And we thought she was bad enough.”

  Silver nodded. “We need to decide whether we’re going to stay here and wait for the others to maybe show up, or if we’re gonna get to that building and hope that the surgeon is staying close to its mommy after the beating we gave it.”

  “Isaac knows we’re here,” Alice said, “He’ll come.”

  “Yeah, but what if it’s too late by then?” Silver asked. “I know I’m always looking for the quick and dirty solutions, but this time I mean it. What if he’s too late and we’ve been sitting here? You can’t put Pandora back in the box once she’s been let out.”

  Alice sat in her seat, placed her elbows on the desk, and let her head fall on her hands. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, “I really don’t know.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Paid in Blood

  Isaac and Jim drove along the dark streets of Ashwood accompanied by the clunky grumble of the engine, the weather, and the whine of the wipers. Neither had spoken since they left the apartment building Logan had been living in for the last couple of months. The focus was on getting to Alice’s office, regrouping, and dealing with this situation once and for all.

  It was the for all that was ringing out in his mind like the echo of a gong. For all meant for good, forever—finished. But would this truly ever be finished? If they vanquished Nyx and sent her back to the Void, what was to stop her, or any of her friends, from trying again one day? As far as he understood it, this had been the entire idea of the Void Weavers to begin with; they were the ones that stood between the Void and the world of men.

  For all, he was starting to think, would never come no matter what happened tonight; the best they could hope for was for now.

  “How’s the hand?” Jim asked.

  Isaac glanced at his cut palm. They had stopped earlier, in a quiet alley, and Isaac had summoned the crows by offering up some of his blood. Despite the powerful winds, they had come. Watching them fly to the blood on his palm, gliding beautifully, immune to the storm’s effects, had been an incredible sight, but nothing would ever be able to wash away the image of the crows’ beaks and talons covered in the shiny red gore of the human they had been feasting on.

  What little he knew about the crows was that they were sentient and intelligent when in a group. They could also be made to do someone’s bidding as long as they were paid… in blood. Had Nyx sent them to eat once she was done with Logan? Had they found him all on his own after the fact and made him a feast of opportunity? Had they been the ones to kill him after he was tied up?

  “Isaac?” Jim asked again.

  “Yes?” Isaac said, turning his head to look at Jim.

  “The hand?”

  “Oh… this?” Isaac closed his left palm tightly over the cut he had made. It was swollen and throbbing dully, but the bleeding had stopped. “Sorry. Yes, it’s fine.”

  Jim nodded. “Do you think they’ll find him and bring him to the office?”

  “I know they will. They always do.”

  “That’s good news then. With Cameron, that makes six of us against Nyx.”

  “I fear we’re still outmatched.”

  “Probably, but there’s no time to be bleak about it,” Jim said. “Maybe we die tonight, and if we die, then that’s it. But if we don’t die I’m going to find the biggest, fattest pancake that I can, I’m gonna ask the cook to make three more of them, then douse them in cream and chocolate, and I’m gonna eat the hell out of them. The old me would have wanted to get blind drunk in some dive bar and puke until my guts hurt, but this sounds like more fun.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a fruit salad.”

  “Suit yourself. I kno
w a good place. Great pancakes, great coffee, great waitress.”

  Isaac smiled. “Waitress, Jim?”

  It was difficult to tell whether Jim’s stubble-covered cheeks had gone red, but the silence suggested as much. “It’s nothing. She’s just nice, and she brings me warm, sweet food. What’s not to love about that?”

  “I didn’t object. Have you asked her out?”

  “Ask her out? No. Why spoil a good thing?”

  “Because she only brings you warm food if you pay her.”

  “We don’t all have British accents, though, do we? Some of us are a little rough around the edges, and it’s been a long time since I stepped up to the plate anyway. I wouldn’t even know how to hold the bat.”

  Isaac reached for Jim’s shoulder with his hand and gave him a squeeze. “Don’t sell yourself short, my friend. We are our own worst critics. Try, and let her be the judge.”

  Jim turned to look at Isaac, smiled, and nodded. “Yeah, maybe I will.”

  Isaac let go of Jim’s shoulder and returned the smile when something at the edge of his vision made a sudden move. His body tensed, his hackles rose, and he turned to face the road screaming for Jim to stop the car. Jim slammed his foot on the brake, the car skidded and the tires cried out as the car came to a slow stop in the middle of the road; a road which was empty save for parked cars lining the edge.

  “What the hell was that?” Jim asked.

  “I saw someone in the road,” Isaac said. “I don’t think we hit them, I didn’t hear or feel anything, but I know I saw something.”

  “Do you know what the hell it was?”

  Isaac shook his head. “It looked like a child had run onto the road.”

  “A child? In this weather?”

  “I said I didn’t know what it was,” Isaac said, frustration mounting in his voice.

  “Can you see them on that side?”

  Isaac checked the passenger side mirror and saw only the red glow of the brake lights reflecting off the many parked cars along the street. There was no one on the sidewalk, no one between the cars, and no one hiding in the alley directly across from him—no one that he could see, at any rate. His heartrate came down, but the blurred, split-second image of what he had seen darting into the road kept pushing its way to the front of his mind. His photographic memory tried to piece it together, but the image in his head was about as clear as a photo of Bigfoot, and there wasn’t a mental filter he could run it through to clear it up.

  “What’s that?” Jim asked.

  Isaac turned his attention to the driver’s side where, about two blocks ahead of them, the buildings were being hit by strobing blue and white lights. An occasional red light danced between the blue and the red. “Emergency services?” Isaac asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  Jim put the car back into gear and continued down the road. This particular scene involved an ambulance, two police cruisers, and two cars tangled around each other. There was glass everywhere, and the police officers were doing their best to create a rickety human shield around the paramedics, keeping the wind off them long enough to allow them to work. Jim stopped the car at the intersection and both men watched, independently debating whether or not they should offer their help, but Ashwood’s mundane problems weren’t theirs to fix.

  As Isaac watched, he saw the silhouette of something dark and shapeless hovering along the side of a nearby building, blinking in and out of existence with the strobing lights, but clearly visible to Isaac and Jim’s mage eyes. It was one of those Void creatures, and Isaac suspected it was both the thing responsible for this crash and the one responsible for Isaac and Jim’s near crash. He thought he had seen the impression of a child against the car’s headlights, but maybe that was just because it was what the creature had wanted him to see.

  Who wouldn’t violently brake or swerve out of the road if a child came rushing in front of them?

  Without saying a word, Jim pressed gently on the accelerator and the car continued to roll on down the street, picking up speed until they were at a comfortable cruise. Alice’s office wasn’t far from where they were, but along the way they came across two more incidents, though the other two didn’t involve cars. On one street, an electronics shop had been broken into, looted, and then set ablaze. On another, several firemen were trying to pull people out of elevators.

  On one hand, seeing other people was comforting, but seeing them like this—panicked and suffering—was not.

  Isaac didn’t know he had entered the Victoria district until he and Jim pulled up right next to Werner Investigations. Jim pulled into an open parking spot and stopped the car. Isaac immediately stepped out into the rain and wind and, with one hand over his eyes, searched for Alice’s Mustang, which he knew she had taken with her. It wasn’t there. His heart was starting to race, now, and a cold block of ice had settled into his stomach.

  Without waiting for Jim, he rushed across the front of the car, hit the sidewalk fast, and stepped right up to the door to Alice’s office. Expecting to find it locked, Isaac turned the knob and pressed hard against the door with his shoulder, and almost fell into the office as the door unexpectedly opened and gave way. The office was dark and empty, but it had also been unlocked. He checked the door for a key, but it wasn’t hanging in the knob. Instead, something had been tacked onto the door itself with a pin; a map with a red circle on it, a ripped up snippet of a newspaper article, and a single key on a hoop.

  Isaac took these items down from the door, scanned the map, and then the article. “They’re gone,” he said to himself. “But this is where they went.”

  For a moment he was filled with the warm, tingly feeling of pride—pride that Alice had had the sense to leave him a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. But the pride and warm feeling thawing out the block of ice in his stomach soon disappeared. If they weren’t in the office, it meant they had gone there—to that place. But if they left without waiting for Isaac and Jim, it meant that whatever they had discovered was urgent enough to warrant them leaving in a hurry.

  The ice block in his stomach resisted the thaw, and instead seemed to get colder. He became suddenly possessed with the idea that leaving without Isaac and Jim had been a bad idea—a terrible, awful idea. Now overcome with an almost crippling sense of urgency, Isaac stuffed the map and the article into his jacket pocket and left the office, locking it hastily with the key he had been left with.

  He hit the street quickly, dashed around the back of Jim’s car, and slipped inside, soaked through and breathing heavily.

  “Not there,” he said.

  “God dammit,” Jim said.

  Isaac produced the map and article from his jacket and handed them to Jim. “This is where they went. They left it for us.”

  “Then that’s where we have to go,” said a voice from the backseat.

  Isaac’s heart leapt into his throat. He turned, startled, and saw Cameron sitting there, also drenched from head to toe. “Cam,” Isaac said, “How the hell—”

  “You sent the crows,” he said, “Once they found me it was easy to find you.”

  “I’ve never been happier to see someone.”

  “I’m glad I’ve found you both, too. Jim filled me in. Looks like I’ve been out of the loop.”

  “You have, but that doesn’t matter. You’re here and I know where Alice is, but we need to get to her quickly. We’re running out of time to stop this.”

  Jim nodded, pulled the car out of the parking spot, and headed straight for the financial district.

  “So,” Cameron said, “How about you start from the top? Who’s Chaos and why do we hate him?”

  CHAPTER 25

  Alone

  The financial district had more in common with a graveyard than it did with the bustling heart of a metropolis. Many of the buildings here would be able to run on massive, diesel powered generators hidden underground for days, or even weeks, following a general power failure—even if doing so racked up bills in the tens of thous
ands in the process. But for some reason Alice couldn’t explain, none of these generators had kicked in.

  What had happened to the men and women who had been working when the power went out? Had they been told to go home and be with their families, or had they been asked to stay and wait a couple of minutes—which turned to hours—to see if the power came back? After all, money needed to be made, stocks bought and sold, and nothing as trivial as a storm or a power outage was going to stop the world’s wheels from turning.

  Those wheels never started again, so where were all the people?

  A fallen tree lay in the middle of the road, and Alice swung the Mustang around it. Up ahead, through an intersection only a block away, an ambulance went racing past with its lights flashing wildly in all directions, its siren singing high into the night. Alice’s path took her into the same intersection the ambulance had driven across, so she followed it and watched as the ambulance’s lights lit up the skeletal outlines of tall, inert cranes high above. The building with no walls loomed high to the left, its perimeter surrounded by a tall, sheet metal fence that rattled and swayed with the wind.

  Alice stopped the Mustang in the middle of the road and looked out of her window. The building had to be at least twenty stories tall and was covered in green mesh netting to prevent people from plummeting to their deaths, but the mesh had been ripped off in some places and was nonexistent toward the top. She spotted the chain-link gate up ahead and pulled the Mustang up alongside it.

  “This is it,” she said.

  Silver, who was looking up at the building from the backseat, said “Looks pretty quiet to me.”

  “That’s how they like it,” Alice said. “Does this look anything like the building you saw in your visions, Cora?”

  Cora pressed her lips into a thin line and stared up through the windshield. “If I got up there and had a look around, maybe. Looks like its tall enough, but I can’t feel anything.”

  “Then we’ll have to go in,” Alice said, and she put the Mustang in drive.