by Mark Henwick
Back in the building, I paced through the main rooms again. Clouds of flies swirled up as I passed. It was worse, going back in.
And I found one I’d missed before. Unlike the others, the woman had realized what was happening. She’d tried to hide underneath a solid desk in a study. They’d found her, and shot her where she’d knelt, curled up in a ball.
I took pictures of every body with the cellphone. All of them were Romero Athanate or Romero kin. All killed with gunshots.
Some of them had been killed by being shot in the head as they lay wounded.
I went into a bathroom and closed the door.
The water was cold on my face, shockingly cold.
I stayed bent over the sink. I didn’t want to look in the mirror.
In Ops 4-10, I’d had to deal with death on every mission. Ours. Theirs. Some I remembered; I made myself remember them. The others had begun to blur into a mass. I stopped seeing them. When I left the army and set up as a PI, I’d decided to make a rule: no killing unless completely unavoidable. It had worked for a while. It had brought me back to a place where lives mattered.
Now I was feeling the blindness coming back. I’d killed Nagas on Coykuti Mountain and Warders in Albuquerque. I could argue I had no options, but I’d felt nothing. Today, I’d just walked through a building full of dead bodies and all I could feel was relief that Diana wasn’t one of them.
The rest hadn’t meant anything to me until I found the woman in the study.
Was this normal? What did normal mean for me?
I splashed more water on my face, and after that, I took towels and scented gels, creating a mask to breathe through. I opened every window and door as I went back out. As soon as we left, the vultures and smaller scavengers would come in.
I cleaned everywhere I’d touched.
Then I went out to where Tullah and Savannah waited with the truck.
“They’re all House Romero, and they’re dead,” I said to Savannah. “You don’t want to go inside, but I need to know some names, or if you recognize faces.”
I held up the cellphone. She didn’t want to look at it.
“It might help us figure out who did this and why. Think you can handle it?”
Her face was pale and her mouth pressed into a thin line. She nodded jerkily.
I gave her the cellphone and she started to go through the pictures.
“I’ve seen him before,” she said on the fifth picture. “I’m not sure of his name.”
Then she went on to a couple more. Tears sprang up in her eyes.
I looked at the picture. The woman who had died in the study.
“Sienna,” Savannah said, the tears sliding out the sides of her eyes. “Sienna kin-Romero. She was kind to me.”
Romero’s own kin.
She wiped her face angrily and went on. She didn’t know any of the dead in the other side rooms.
The main cluster of bodies was in the central living room, a huge, glass-fronted space that projected out onto a stone patio.
She knew more of them.
Lying beside Oscar Jaworski was Charles Romero himself, the leader of House Romero, former Panethus Athanate House of New Mexico.
Now, the leadership of House Romero had been eradicated. The last man standing was Amaral and he didn’t look to be keeping the name Romero.
When Savannah finished her task, she staggered away to lose her breakfast.
Tullah looked as pale as Savannah.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I fastened the towel mask over her nose to cut down the nauseating smell. “I need you to see something.”
“I know,” she said. “I can feel it, too.”
“Close your eyes. You don’t need to see the rest.”
She obeyed and I guided her back through the horrors of the massacre, into the main living room and then down a short side passage to another room.
Just outside the door to the room, a Romero Athanate lay face down. He had a 9mm Sig automatic, still neatly holstered on his waistband. He’d been shot twice in the back.
I maneuvered Tullah past the body and into the room.
It was the center of that feeling of wrongness I’d felt, even up on the top of the hill. A feeling like the Aztec temple in the barn out at Bow Creek ranch. An evil feeling.
The room itself was a large guest bedroom overlooking the patio. It had views down to the creek. There were closets and a bathroom on one side. There were no bodies here. A vase of sweet-scented jasmine and lilies stood on the side of a vanity table, fighting the smell from the rest of the house. There were chairs around a coffee table and unfinished soft drinks for a small group. The bed was made. The only other sign of occupancy was a small rolling suitcase beside the bed.
Standing in the room itself was like listening to nails dragging down a blackboard.
This was the one place in the house where a hint of different marques lingered.
Tullah stood inside and opened her eyes.
“There was a working in here. A binding.” She closed her eyes again. “Like the lock they put on me, but much more focused. It’s strange.”
“There were Warders here,” I said.
She shook her head. “This working was Adepts. Strong ones. Did you find any…”
“There aren’t any dead Adepts or Warders in the house.”
She walked to the window. It had been open when I first came to the room.
“Read the scene,” I said.
“The Warders came in here.” She indicated the window. “They were let in by the Adepts, who were inside, restraining someone with a working. Someone powerful.”
She walked back to the door.
“The Warders started killing here,” she pointed. “Silenced gun, maybe. The dead man was guarding the door. I can’t say whether he was keeping people in or out. Probably out. They weren’t really expecting anything—only one guard armed with a handgun.”
She’d done the job I’d brought her in for; to read the working in the room. But she wasn’t finished. Her face pale and determined, she walked back to the living room and looked at the group of bodies that included Jaworski and Romero.
There were six bodies.
“Each of them…” she stopped and turned away to look at a wall. After a couple of deep breaths, she managed to go on. “Each of them has multiple wounds.”
“And the shot pattern?” I pressed her.
“Minimum two to the body, one to the head.” Her eyes flicked at me over her towel mask. “Like you were taught in special forces.”
The Warders had been well trained, or they’d been accompanied by Nagas who didn’t have a marque and didn’t leave a smell I could detect in this slaughterhouse.
There was more, but she’d had enough; I let her escape.
After the Romero Athanate had been killed in the living room and side passages, there were no more armed people except the intruders. The rest of the building was a butchery. They’d used silencers and most of the dead had died without fighting. The direction of the bodies and shots all pointed to the threat coming from inside the building.
Tullah’s analysis had been right, as far as she went.
A small group of Adepts had been in the bedroom suite. House Romero had left them with a guard on the door. They’d let in someone through the window; there had been no struggle in the bedroom. The intruders had killed the guard, then they’d killed everyone in the living room and worked their way through the remainder of the buildings.
They were trained professionals. They worked efficiently, they used silenced guns and their shot grouping was excellent, even in the dark.
They included someone who knew the layout of the house. Someone who knew who was in the house. Someone who was trusted. Charles Romero had betrayed Skylur and Panethus, and he’d been betrayed in turn.
There was one other thing, and I went back to the bedroom to double-check.
Underneath everything else, it still held a scent of her marque.
T
he rolling suitcase: the last time I’d seen it, Diana had been pulling it behind her as she went to catch a plane at Denver airport.
Chapter 39
I joined Savannah and Tullah outside.
The smell in the courtyard was bad, but nothing compared to inside.
The trees that provided the shade were sycamore. They were mature trees that looked as if they’d been well tended.
I hadn’t liked Jaworski, but somehow I hoped the thought of him visiting the ranch and checking on his namesake trees would be the memory that I took away with me.
We walked away from the house and stood next to the truck.
“Diana was in that room with the Adepts,” I said to Tullah.
“She’s part of this?” Tullah frowned.
I shook my head, my mind working to put this all together. “Weaver got the Denver community to put a lock on your abilities. What does it do, exactly?”
“It prevents me from manipulating the energy, except for trivial amounts.”
“If you did the same thing to a Were, what would it do?”
“They wouldn’t be able to change.”
“And an Athanate?”
Tullah was still frowning. “Well, it would stop them from manifesting fangs, I guess. I don’t know for sure.”
“What about a much, much stronger lock? The sort of thing you sensed inside.”
“Everything would be blocked eventually. All telergic abilities, like eukori and compulsion. But at that level, you start turning off things that sustain the Athanate. You’d kill them.”
“Okay.” I chewed on that and an idea came to me. “What about your zombie working? That allows you to move someone. Would it allow you to reach in and turn some abilities back on?”
“That’s complex. Really, really complex.” She scrubbed at her face with her hands. “I’m not sure, Boss.” It took her a second or two, but she caught on quicker than I thought she would. She gasped. “You’re thinking that’s what they did to Diana?”
I nodded. Diana was a very old, very powerful Athanate, with abilities I probably couldn’t even dream of. The main sticking point as far as anyone capturing her—and keeping her—was how? This could be the answer.
The idea of adepts manipulating Diana like a doll gave me chills. If they could do that…
Tullah was still turning it over in her mind.
“We have to get somewhere where we can call Ma on a secure line,” she said.
“Okay.”
But her guesses were enough for me. I didn’t have a choice about my next step anymore: I had to speak to Naryn about what I’d found.
I turned back to the ranch. Was there anything more I could do here?
The Hidden Path, the historic guiding principles of all Athanate behavior, said that the results of Athanate battles should not be left for humans to find. But we couldn’t spare the time to bury bodies, and setting fire to the ranch would probably bring emergency services here faster than if we left it alone. Normally, Athanate Houses had a disposal crew who could be called out, but obviously, there was no way I was calling any Athanate in New Mexico and telling them where I was. Opening the windows and leaving vultures and insects should do a disguising job. That was the best I could do in the circumstances.
The police would still know there’d been a gunfight and a lot of people killed.
The point was troubling me: why had the scene been left the way it was?
“Amber!”
Claude’s voice drifted down the hillside.
He was running; running too fast. He slipped and tumbled down the steep slope from the water tower, sprang back up and kept going. He was waving back over the hill, where the road came in. Someone was coming.
Shit!
The shock cleared my mind, letting me see the dullness that had crept in. I’d been creeping around, worried about Diana, worried about my becoming Basilikos. All the time, the biggest, most obvious threat had been right in front of me. The one I’d thought of first and dismissed.
A freaking trap. Not a sniper on the tower; not an ambush in the orchard. Something to keep us here awhile. A house full of dead bodies. And a single way in and out.
I looked around.
The building was designed to be defended, but not by four people. Make that two people, really.
That was the second trap, to retreat into the ranch house.
Not going to happen.
I needed to take control right now.
“Get in the car,” I said.
Who was it coming down the road? Nagas? These Warders with special forces training? Whatever remained of House Romero that had gone over to Basilikos with Amaral?
Savannah tried to run towards Claude, who was doing great getting here on his own. Tullah bundled her into the car.
“Are we going to have to fight our way out?” Tullah called through the window.
That’s what my wolf wanted to do. I could feel her snarling in eagerness, but the abrupt clarity in my feel for our position helped restrain her.
I shook my head. “Hold the shotgun and have your pistol handy.”
Claude stumbled the last few steps and leaped aboard.
“Nice work,” I said to him and started the engine.
Two SUVs came around the hill.
One immediately stopped across the road where it was narrow, blocking it, and the other bore down on us.
“Shit!” Tullah swore. “We can’t get out.”
The wolf snarled again. Just watch me.
Had I said that out loud?
I fought her back down. I needed to focus.
“Buckle up tight, Tullah,” I said. “Van, you and Claude, down into the footwell. Stay there.”
“What…” Tullah began.
Too late.
The wolf wasn’t done. I felt her bleed into me. I was going to show them.
Eyes sharper. Teeth bared.
I dropped the clutch and we shot forward, spraying dirt from the drive.
The second SUV skidded to a stop and turned side on, eighty yards away, confident that was all they needed to do. That told me they weren’t Nagas.
Armed guys in tactical vests spilled out. One of them had a bullhorn. As if all he had to do to stop me was ask nicely. Idiot.
I fired the Mk23 one-handed through the open window, just to see what they would do. They ducked. Yup. Not Nagas.
I laughed and shoved the Mk23 back in the holster.
Forty yards and closing fast. Pedal down. Engine screaming. Tires roaring. Aimed right at the nearer SUV. Guys backpedaled away from it, falling over themselves to get clear.
I pounded on the steering wheel. Faster. Faster. “Yeah! Run, you chicken-shit bastards,” I screamed at them.
“Boss?” Tullah yelled. “Boss, what…”
“There’s a reason she’s called the Hill Bitch.” I spun the wheel and pointed her nose uphill.
As Claude had found on his way down, a lot of the hillside was slippery with loose dirt, but underneath was good, solid rock. The engine snarled as the tires bit in.
We rocketed up the first part to the orchard. It had been terraced, but there was a path that rose through it. Taking that put the orchard between us and the SUVs.
The Hill Bitch began to buck like a rodeo steer as I drove over the uneven surface, but she didn’t miss a beat.
At the top of the orchard, the path stopped and we hit a section where the underlying rock was laid bare.
“What’s happening below?” I shouted, over the roar of the engine.
“Some of them are firing,” Tullah said, her voice choppy from riding the bumps. “Not all. Looks like an argument. Neither SUV moving yet.”
“Don’t know whether to kill or capture,” I said. Amateurs. “Going to end up with neither.”
They would never hit us now.
The nose veered off to the left as the tires lost purchase on loose stones. The whole car swayed and tilted, the slope on my side looking like a sheer drop.
> There were screams from the back seat. Tullah gasped and grabbed the chicken handle.
I laughed again.
Fun!
The tires regained their grip and I pulled the nose back up.
A shot ricocheted off the side of the hood, leaving an ugly scar six inches long.
Seemed like the kill faction had won the argument.
Let them try.
We needed to be over that hill quickly.
I dropped a gear and let the engine race. Rows of creosote bushes went down under the nose. Tires roared and clouds of dirt billowed out around us.
Another shot hit us somewhere on the roof, punching through.
Savannah screamed.
I could feel the movement behind me.
“Keep your heads down!” I shouted.
Come on, come on, come on!
Yes!
One more burst of acceleration and the car heaved up. The ground in front of us disappeared completely. Almost vertical. Nothing but sky beyond the windshield.
Freaking A!
“Yeaaaah!” I punched the roof with a fist.
The Hill Bitch bounded over the lip of the hill and the nose came crashing down.
Nothing but hillside beyond the windshield now.
We slithered down towards the road, more than a hundred yards below us. The traction was even worse on this side. The backside fishtailed and the bushes thumped and screeched as we tore around them, through them, over them.
Tullah’s knuckles were white from her grip on the chicken handle, but she still had hold of the shotgun.
I whooped and hollered, wrestling the wheel.
“Erosion ditches!” Tullah yelled.
Rain had cut deep channels on either side of the road below us. Hit those and we’d be stuck.
The Romero SUVs would be back in a couple of minutes. We couldn’t afford even a small delay.
“Got it. Got it.”
The Hill Bitch slithered sideways, jinked, lurched. The tires bit and spun and bit again.
Then we were racing straight, on rocks, parallel to the road, ten yards above it.