Doom Sayer

by Clara Coulson

  Instead, I’ll be heading to Delos’ personal prison.

  I curse myself a thousand times for entering the construction site. I should’ve taken my chances with the streets. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid! Now I’m going to end up interrogated by the king of mind breakers himself, the guy who can wipe out a person’s personality in seconds, leave them as blank as a clean slate and as malleable as clay. If I’m lucky, I’ll end up his slave. If not, I’ll be his sacrifice, a pawn used and thrown away at the earliest convenience.

  Bitterness burns my heart. Commissioner Bollinger knew damn well he was making a deal with the devil when he agreed to turn me over to Iron Delos. But he did it anyway, because Delos’ cooperation benefits DSI as a whole. It wasn’t a personal decision on his part—it was pragmatic—but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel personal to me.

  The witch hops down from the first floor and lands in the dirt a few feet away from me, and panic races through every fiber of my being. I consider making one more break for it, but my last vestiges of hope are shredded when the hellhounds, already healed from my attacks, lumber down into the basement behind the witch and take up positions on either side of me.

  “Yikes,” says the witch, drawing closer. “That is not the way I wanted this to end.” She leans over me, examining the state of my body. “Bounty on you is alive only. Jeez, I almost screwed my wallet, didn’t I?”

  Confused, I hack out, “Bounty?”

  The witch straightens up and nods, then pulls her smartphone from the pocket of her cowboy coat. When she turns the screen toward me, I spy a picture of myself. Underneath that picture is a proclamation that my capture and subsequent delivery to Delos is worth a million dollars.

  That fucker put a price on my head.

  The witch barks out a laugh, and I realize I accidentally said that thought out loud. “Well, I don’t know Delos personally, kiddo, but I understand the sentiment. Hard to like a guy who puts a seven-figure reward on your arrest.”

  “Who…” I pause to wet my dry throat. “Who the hell are you?”

  She quirks a dark eyebrow and plucks a wallet from her other coat pocket, flipping it open to reveal a fancy, diamond-shaped badge I’ve never seen before. “Delilah Barnett,” she says proudly, “ICM bounty hunter. And you, Cal Kinsey, are my bounty of the month. Wanted for colluding with forces conspiring to destabilize and bring harm to the ICM. In particular, wanted for your role in the creation and deployment of this curse that’s got people cowering like mice in a corner.”

  Barnett snorts, chin tipped up haughtily, looking down her nose at me. “You know, half a dozen other bounty hunters dropped out of the rat race to Aurora when they heard about the curse. Hah! Like I’m giving up a million dollars because a few weaklings can’t hold out against a cute little curse. No, I’m getting my payday, yes sirree.”

  Crap. For a second there, I thought maybe I could persuade her to let me go, explain I’ve been framed and had no involvement with the curse at all. But that expression on her face, triumphant and giddy at the thought of a million-dollar paycheck, tells me that Delilah Barnett is the sort of person who is totally undeterred by any moral qualms she comes across in her dodgy profession. Even if I tell her Delos is going to wreck my mind, she won’t care. Not really. Not enough. She’ll look the other way, take her money, and skip town.

  I decide to try a different tactic. “I’ll pay you more if you let me go.”

  “Huh?” Her head tilts downward, and a sly smile crosses her face. “You expect me to believe you can rustle up that kind of cash on short notice? I mean, sure, DSI pays all right, and maybe you inherited a little something-something from your parents, and maybe you own a nice condo in the city, but I’m looking for liquid assets, Kinsey, not weeks of dough sitting in escrow. Unless you’ve got a duffle bag full of Benjamins sitting in that crummy motel room of yours, no deal. Plus, I have a professional reputation to uphold.” She clicks her tongue reprovingly. “I release you on a whim, there goes my cred as a reliable bounty hunter.”

  I spit in her direction, disgusted, but it falls short, an impotent glob of saliva absorbed by the dirt. “You say you don’t know Delos, but you must know his reputation. You know exactly what he’ll do to me once he’s got me alone.”

  She purses her lips. “None of my business what happens after the handoff.” She wags the phone back and forth. “And if you didn’t want Delos on your ass, you should’ve thought better of getting mixed up in this Methuselah madness.”

  “I didn’t get mixed up in anything! You all—”

  Barnett snaps her gloved fingers, leather striking leather, and her red-orange aura—the same aura that surrounds the hellhounds—flares up, a bolt of magic jumping from her hand toward my face. There’s nothing I can do to avoid it. It hits me in the center of the forehead. My vision is extinguished, light to black in a microsecond. All the sensation drains from my limbs, and I’m paralyzed. My mind starts to sink into a void much deeper and darker than a basement, and though I reach as far as I can for the surface of my consciousness, trying to stay afloat, I slip away.

  The last thing I register is Barnett muttering, “Sorry, kiddo, but nobody defies Iron Delos. Not even me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  For the second time in my life, I wake up in an asshole’s torture room tied to a freaking chair. I come to with a crick in my neck, my head hanging down, chin on my chest, left there to strain my muscles for who knows how long. A few blinks. A few squints. A few long, silent seconds eying the cracked concrete cube that surrounds me, the flimsy metal fold-out chair my arms have been zip-tied to, and the cold metal table in front of me, and the memories of my encounter with Barnett the bounty hunter, the cowboy witch, come rushing back. My head throbs at the thought of her, along with eighteen other places on my body. That fall at the construction site beat me like a sledgehammer, and the knockout spell didn’t help.

  I curse myself for falling, for letting her get the better of me. I was so caught up in trying to deal with the hellhounds that I didn’t notice her sneaking up behind me. She was probably wearing a veil, but I can see through veils. (At least, I saw through a veil once before. A success that earned me another beating at the hands of another practitioner.) If I hadn’t let myself descend into panic, if I’d kept my cool, kept my head on straight, I would’ve remembered to look for the witch. But once again, I flubbed a pursuit. Only this time I was the one being pursued.

  And the fact I failed means that was probably the last criminal pursuit I’ll ever be a part of, depending on how Iron Delos decides to twist my mind.

  Swallowing thickly, I test my bonds, but I don’t even have to activate my magic sense to know they’re charmed. I can’t break them with my pathetic human strength. With a sigh, I go limp in the chair, head tipped up at the bare gray ceiling, eyes following a thin crack toward a corner that suggests the foundation of the building has shifted since its construction. Gradually, I drag my gaze toward the thick metal door directly across from me. No window. No slot for a food tray. Hell, there’s not even a toilet in here.

  If this is where Delos is keeping his MG prisoners, then he’s engaging in a dozen human rights violations. At minimum. The fact he’s able to act with that kind of impunity doesn’t sit well in my gut. Where’s the accountability? The checks and balances? Christ, we’ve given the supernatural too long a leash, haven’t we? I think. We haven’t been watching the communities as closely as we should, thinking them tenuous allies, and now innocent people are going to die because of it. The issues run so much deeper than just Methuselah.

  Or rather, the Methuselah Group is a manifestation of the fact we’ve let so much get swept under the rug.

  We have to do better than this. Somehow. We owe it to the billions of completely helpless humans who have no idea their lives hang in the balance of the whims of supernatural powers. Humans who are currently being picked off, seemingly at random, by the MG’s devastating curse.

  I tug at my bonds, frustrated, an
d attempt to ignore the growing terror in my stomach working its way up to deep-rooted nausea.

  Nausea that jumps all the way to my throat, bile gushing up, when I hear loud footsteps echoing down the hall outside my cell.

  They stop at my door.

  A wave of magic envelops the room for a moment, a flash of reddish purple as the wards deactivate—familiarity niggles at my brain—and then a set of keys jangle as the manual lock is released. The door swings open with a rusty screech, revealing a man who appears to be in his fifties, a dash of gray at his temples, deep wrinkles around his eyes, deeper dimples pitching down his lips. But as he steps through the door, Robert Iron Delos, unimposing in height and build, an everyman that any passerby would immediately label the corporate office type, the naked light bulb hanging over the table dispels the illusion of his middle age.

  The fluorescents glint off Delos’ dark eyes and reveal the compounded knowledge, wisdom, and coldness of well over a century. He’s probably bordering on two hundred, if not more, given his previous status as the High Court’s fixer. That inner circle consists entirely of the oldest human practitioners on Earth. The youngest people who work in the High Court offices are probably eighty-year-old secretaries.

  Delos tugs the door closed behind him, with his mind, not his hand. It clangs shut, the impact reverberating through the cell, rumbling through my haggard muscles. The wizard eyes me the way you’d stare at a condom stuck in a gutter, with an air of disgust and a dash of amusement, like I’m a bug he’s about to crush. To him, I’m by far the least threatening person in this building. I’m a weak little Crow, his sneer says clearly, and he’s the god of this domain.

  He pulls out the chair on the opposite side of the table and sits smoothly, then drops his interlaced hands on the metal tabletop. For a moment, he observes me, working out my expression—which I imagine is a cross between sheer terror and petty defiance—and then he smiles, not unlike a person who’s had too much plastic surgery.

  “You’re a hard man to find, Kinsey,” he says, his moderate base bouncing off the walls. “I had to part with quite a large sum to have you brought in.”

  I wait a beat. “You could’ve just brainwashed Barnett into thinking she caught me for funsies.” My voice is raspy, but the acidic tone is perfectly audible.

  “I don’t like to burn those kinds of bridges. They have a tendency to fall on you.” Delos snorts. “Although that particular bridge is already smoking. Barnett was quite angry that I misrepresented your abilities. She thought you’d be an easier catch. You dealt a great deal of damage to her hounds.”

  “Thought you weren’t supposed to summon creatures like that. ICM rules.”

  Delos makes a dismissive gesture. “I gave her some extra leeway. Considering the situation in the city right now, I thought it was appropriate to loosen the reins.”

  “And yet, despite the situation, here you are, interrogating someone who had nothing to do with the curse attack.” I bite my tongue, waiting for him to counter my statement of innocence with a long list of unsubstantiated rumors. Instead, Delos’ eyebrows rise in amusement, and his fake smile slips sideways into a smirk.

  My nausea peaks.

  Something is off.

  “You know,” Delos says, leaning back in his chair, nonchalant, like the lives hanging in the balance outside this building are absolutely meaningless in this moment, “I did warn Barnett about your magic sensing skills—that’s how she got the drop on you, using the hounds as a distraction to approach in your blind spot—but when she asked me how I knew how acute they were, I had to gloss over the answer. She’s got a mouth, that one, and a fine brain to work it. I know she saw through my hand-wave to some degree. But that’s the thing about bounty hunters. They know how to shut up, take their payday, and look the other way.”

  My thoughts grind to a halt. “What…What are you talking about?”

  He suddenly smacks the table with his palms and leans forward, causing me to jerk back and painfully press my cracked ribs against the unyielding chair. “Tell me, Kinsey,” he says, “why do you think you’re here? Why do you think I spent a million dollars to drag you down to my cells? Because of some random gossips tossing rumors? Because I’m a gullible fool easily swayed by unsupported stories? Me? The High Court’s go-to man for all matters of the mind? Really?”

  My heart rate picks up, pounding in my chest. I thought it was weird that the much-touted Iron Delos would be taken in by fiction instead of fact, when he could simply tease the truth out of anybody spreading rumors. But at the time, in the closet down the hall from the cafeteria, I was so panicked at the thought of being accused, captured, and taken away that I didn’t question the situation as thoroughly as I should have. “I don’t understand,” I say slowly. “If you don’t buy those rumors, why arrest me?”

  Delos just smiles, an infuriating smile, lording a vital piece of information over me, dangling it like bait. “I already told you part of the answer, Kinsey. Be a detective and figure out the rest.”

  “What kind of game are you playing here?” I snap.

  “The long and fruitful kind,” he replies.

  Muscles tense against the zip-ties cutting into my skin, I backtrack through the conversation, reviewing his words. The only thing that sticks out to me is that he warned Barnett about my magic sensing ability, but Delos has never seen me use it. We’ve never been personally acquainted. In the past, when my team confronted him, tried to convince him to work with us, we simply approached him on the street. There were no fights, no struggles. I had no reason to activate my magic sense. And yet, he acts like he’s seen it in action.

  “Have you been watching me?” I ask.

  “Yes.” Delos crosses his arms, an air of impatience creeping across his expression. “But only since I arrived in Aurora. Before then, I had someone else watching you, someone who failed to report exactly how dangerous you are.”

  Ice spreads through my extremities and creeps toward my chest. “You were watching events unfold in Aurora before you were ever appointed as the chapter leader.”

  “I’ve been monitoring Aurora for years.”

  Silence drops like a lead weight, and I stare at Delos, uncomprehending. All my thoughts have come unspooled, tangled into an incoherent mess. I choke out senseless sounds as I desperately try to unravel them, and with each uttered whine, Delos’ grin grows ever wider, ever deeper, as if his greatest pleasure in life is to rip the carpet out from underneath someone and send them tumbling down a flight of stairs, shattering at once everything they thought they knew and leaving them broken on the landing.

  “It was you,” I breathe out, as if a whisper will bring the ceiling down on top of me. “It was you in the woods that day. You’re the one who killed Feldman. You’re the one who tried to kill me. You…” My voice cracks. “You’re a member of the Methuselah Group.”

  “A member?” Delos scoffs. “I’m the leader of the American branch, you pitiful Crow. I’m the one who built the Methuselah faction in this country. I’m the one who planned the theft of Vanth’s key, the destruction of the Wellington Center, and the current curse crisis plaguing this stupid little city caught in the crossfire of a struggle that most of its inhabitants can’t even comprehend.”

  Reeling, I choke out, “Why? The Black Knights—”

  He holds up his hand to silence me. “Yes, I know what Ardelean told you, that Methuselah thinks the Knights are a false flag. But that’s only half true. The false flag spiel is a recruiting tactic we use to tip ambivalent practitioners over the edge and fuel the most paranoid of them. Some of our pawns sweat that line from their pores, that the vampires as a whole are setting the stage for a genocide of human practitioners, making a power grab for world domination, yada yada. Others, the less easily convinced, buy the line because we push it on them, again and again, until it wears down their defenses and they’re just scared enough to acquiesce.”

  Delos strokes his neat gray beard, thoughtful. “Of course, many
practitioners don’t buy the line, think that there’s no way the vampires would risk the status quo—and they’re right. But we need to convince them otherwise, convince them to join our cause, or at least the cause we’re parading, the cause on our banners: saving the world from the evil vampires. We need them because this is a numbers game. Vampires are stronger than humans, much stronger, so we need more bodies to make up for the power differential.”

  “So let me get this straight.” I tug at my bonds again, the skin tearing under the strain, blood seeping out. “You don’t actually believe the vampires are trying to destroy the ICM and trap all human practitioners underfoot?”

  “No.”

  “Then why does the MG exist in the first place?”

  “Because we want to do what you just said to the vampires.”

  A heavy cloak of confusion settles on my shoulders, wraps around my head until I feel like I might suffocate. “But why? What’s the point? You hate vampires?”

  “Me personally?” Delos frowns, a look sharp enough to slice skin wide open. “Yes, I do hate vampires. They murdered half my family during World War II, during the last great skirmish between vampires and human practitioners of the twentieth century, shortly before Berlin fell. Not an event you’ll find in history books, of course. We played a bit of a shadow war with the vampires, hiding under the thin veil of the European theater, due to some…ideological differences.”

  Electricity jolts up my spine, rattling my every nerve. I lick my chapped lips and mutter, “Most supernatural beings fought with the Allies during World War II. Vampires included. They influenced the resistance movements, helped carry out assassinations, worked with governments to funnel intel to Allied troops. The only group with a faction that joined the Axis Powers…were the human practitioners.”

  Delos stares at me blankly.

  Apparently I’m not being direct enough, so I try again. “Are you a fucking Nazi?”