Blood Drawn: A novel of The Demon Accords

by John Conroe

  “Please. Ash says he’s turned out better than she or her sister ever thought possible.”

  I glanced at the Elders. They are hard to read, as old vampires generally lose bits and pieces of their humanity. But I’ve been around Senka a fair bit and learned some of her body language. Her head was tilted a tiny bit, maybe a degree or two off center, almost undetectable. Almost. She was listening to Levi and Darci. Her head shifted minutely, turning just a millimeter toward me. She moved, suddenly by my side, the air breezing over me at her passage through space.

  “To think we had to find out about this from the machine,” she said.

  “In our defense, we were kinda busy working out how to get out of extinction-level events and all that,” I said. “And we’re just getting started.”

  “Oh yes, we have an entire war to look forward to,” she said, clasping her hands together like a kid at Christmas. The mannerisms were an act, but her fascination wasn’t. “I have lived a long time, Chris, seen all manner of monsters, heard all kinds of stories of gods and goddesses. But to witness this, to be here for these events, well, like the man said, it is not quite real.”

  “I’ve been sorta neck deep in it, so I haven’t looked at it that way till now but yeah, crazy stuff.”

  “From their conversation, this Levi had much to do with how young Declan has turned out. Just over the course of ten or twelve years. How?”

  I understood what she was asking. At over thirteen centuries, Senka had long forgotten how important childhood was. The first twenty years of her life now represented less than two percent of her existence.

  “We don’t arrive in this life with a manual, but we do have teachers. Good ones and bad ones. Boys in particular need guidance and role models. It is fantastically lucky that Declan got one in Levi.”

  “Or you got one in Alex?” she asked.

  “I was born to Gramps’ family, but Levi just blindly chose to live in Castlebury and somehow meet Ashling. Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

  “Ah, Einstein,” she said.

  “By all accounts a pretty sharp man,” I said.

  “Yes, he was very gifted. He had a kind of insight into, well, everything,” she said.

  “You met him?” I asked, not really surprised.

  “He made such a splash that I had to find out what all the fuss was about. An interesting man.”

  “Fascinating, even?” I asked.

  “Not at this level,” she said.

  Elders Tzao and Mausya turned to us, expressions blank yet somehow conveying minor annoyance.

  “What do you think?” Declan asked his aunt. Seeing him defer to anyone on anything magic-related was kind of amazing.

  “In the upper right quadrant, did ye mean to funnel that much power?” Ashling asked.

  He studied the spell array, his face thoughtful. “I wrote it that way the last time. You think it’s overkill?”

  His aunt laughed a little. “A rich man forgets the value of small coin.”

  His head jerked around to look at her, his expression unsettled. “I’ve gotten sloppy because I’m used to too much power?”

  “Perspective, lad. Between Fairie and yer uncanny connections here on Earth, ye walk through more power than any witch has ever seen.”

  “So if I throttle it down a bit…” he wondered.

  “Ye can spend the savings on more of the same, ye can,” she said with a nod.

  He moved quickly around the big circle, which I guessed was all of twenty feet in diameter. As he bent down, he pulled a small brass brush from his bag and then eradicated a set of symbols. The ones he replaced them with seemed almost the same. Almost.

  “Tis better. Leaves plenty to get the job done, it does,” Ashling said with a nod.

  “Anything else?”

  “Not a thing. Most tidy it is,” she said with her eyes on the spell. Declan’s eyes were on her and I saw him stand slightly straighter at her words.

  “Is it ready?” Levi asked out loud, broaching the question on all our lips.

  “That it is,” Ashling said, looking around at all of us. “Ye might all want to turn yer backs on this one though. Like looking at the sun, it’ll be.”

  “Dah,” Arkady said, jumping lightly across ten feet and landing by a massive duffel bag he had carried. Opening it, he began to pull out welders’ masks.

  “Oh, good call, Arkady,” Holly said. “I only stopped seeing spots an hour ago.”

  When all the participants had masks, even the three Elders, Declan looked them all over. “’Sos?” he asked. The giant bear was sitting on his rump, looking at them all masked like workers in a steel foundry. Declan stepped over to Arkady’s bag and pulled out two extra masks. Then he did something with his hands. Something I couldn’t see, at least through my own mask. Whatever it was made his aunt take a sharp breath. Then he stepped over to the gargantuan bear and waved the barrel head down to his own height. ’Sos complied and the witch boy put a pair of goggles over my bear’s eyes. Goggles that hadn’t existed a moment ago.

  “Okay. We all good?”

  “What about you, dear boy?” Senka questioned.

  In a silent answer, the nano armor around his head flowed over his eyes, forming clear lenses.

  “I’m good. Here we go,” he said, returning to the edge of the circle and folding his legs under himself. He sat for a few moments, eyes shut behind his nano goggles, the gray skin-like armor making him into a true Gray Man. Then, almost a minute later, he opened his eyes and they glowed such a bright blue that the spell array was briefly illuminated. I say briefly because suddenly the whole giant circle of chalk-drawn symbols and runes lit up like a massive rooftop red neon sign. A second later, the top layer of rock vaporized from the power rising from below, the symbols now etched in red-hot magma. The light increased beyond even the Fuji spell, red light flashing up into the heavens, sheets of almost solid magenta so bright, I had to close my welding-mask-protected eyes. The ground under us shook and a crackling sound filled my ears.

  The light burned through my lids, through the self-darkening lenses of the high-end mask, and it went on and on, the sound of vaporizing rock getting louder and louder, turning from a crackle to a hiss. And then, twenty-three seconds after it started, it simply died. The ground stopped moving and the night went dead silent.

  I opened my eyes and saw Declan’s mask melt away from his face. Around me, the others were taking their borrowed welding gear off and I did the same. Lydia pulled ’Sos’s goggles off his eyes when he tried to paw them off.

  “That was bigger than last time,” Nika said, looking at Declan.

  He held up both hands, palms out. “Yes, but still in a category three. Plus Aunt Ash’s tweak made it way more efficient.”

  I wasn’t fully buying what he was selling.

  “Father is correct, although barely. It was a little shy of being equivalent to a four. I am gathering intelligence now as to the effectiveness of this projection.”

  “So, eruptive power approaching a four VEI, channeled through a spell array that uses the actual DNA code of its target?” Senka asked, directing the question at Ashling.

  “That’s about it,” the witch said with a nod. She smelled wary, but not afraid.

  “Just your run-of-the-mill crafting, then?” the oldest vampire asked.

  “You know it isn’t.”

  “Could you do this?” Senka pressed.

  “No one can do this, jest him. Myself with me sister, our mother, and our entire village couldn’t do this,” Ashling said, frowning at the vampire.

  “What of his cousin, that young Einin?”

  “She’s not even a sneeze in his handkerchief,” Ashling said, frowning.

  “It’s as if he was here for just this sort of thing?” Senka wondered with a pleased smile.

  Before Ashling could ask the question brewing in her eyes, Omega spoke up.

  “Initial reports indicate no living kraykenast.”

  �
�Over what distance?” Tanya asked.

  “All distances. None reported living from any source I can connect with. My own drone coverage is finding similar results.”

  “You killed them all in one shot?” Lydia asked Declan.

  He shrugged. “I tried to kill as many as I could.”

  “There was no try, just doing,” Lydia said with a nod and a smile.

  “Damn, a Star Wars reference,” Levi said, turning to Darci.

  “Along with one witch to bind them all,” Ashling added with a smirk. “I hear pretty well, you know.”

  Chapter 48

  We buried Len in a little cemetery not too awful far from the Canadian border at the top of New York State. His marker was next to my father’s. On the left side of the burial plot was my grandmother, then my mother, my brother, and my father. Len was to Dad’s right. Gramps had intended for the spot next to grandma to be for himself, but that was unlikely to happen soon, at least from natural causes, as his first Change into a werewolf had gone well. Stacia had guided him through it, surrounded by her little pack, watched over by her powerhouse boyfriend. After, they had run in the forests around Gramp’s farm and were joined by the pack that lived next door.

  Tanya, Declan, and I had sat in the backyard I had grown up in, listening to the wolves as they ran with joyous abandon, their song reaching up to thank the moon for yet another brother.

  “It’s odd, but I find that sound comforting,” Declan said.

  “The sound of superwolves hunting? Soothing?” my Tanya asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Right? But I’ve gotten used to it and now I just think of friends when I hear it,” he said.

  “You’re a weird-ass kid,” I said to him with a grin.

  “No shit, but hey, Kettle, how you doing?” he shot back.

  “True,” I agreed.

  “What’s next for Alex Gordon?”

  “He’s moving to the city. The pack up here has been helping with the farm for a while now. I think he’ll just sell it to them.”

  “I think he should join Stacia’s pack,” Declan said. “We could use a wolf with the knowledge and experience he has.”

  “We’ll see what he decides, but that’s entirely possible,” I said. “Any sign of surviving krays?” I asked.

  “We have witches all over the world doing sympathetic searches. Nothing so far,” he said.

  “What about you? How are you feeling?” Tanya asked.

  “I’m still a bit tired. And I don’t know if this will make sense, but my crafting ability feels—sore.”

  “Like overused muscles?” she asked. I doubt she’d ever felt an overused muscle in her life. “Not true,” she said to me. Damned Chosen bond.

  “Yes, like that,” he agreed, ignoring her comment to me.

  “Muscles heal,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s getting better, which is good because I don’t know what comes next,” he said. “Do you think Barbiel will take you remote viewing again?” he asked with more than a bit of hesitancy.

  “He’s refused,” I said. “He was at Len’s funeral. He saluted him. It wasn’t a joke.”

  “Good. He could have been buried in Arlington, right?” Declan asked.

  I nodded.

  “Well, being among family is probably better,” he said after a moment. “Especially if an angel gives you a sendoff.”

  “True. But anyway, he said no,” I replied.

  Declan took a breath. “I think I can do it,” he said.

  “Do what?” Tanya asked.

  “Replicate the remote viewing thing.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “The minion parts in the vault under the Tower are still tethered to the Vorsook. I think we can follow it.”

  “But that base was blown up?” Tanya asked, glancing my way. She knew he knew that but was testing him.

  “And you all saw recovery efforts. If the entangled particles survived, it is likely they were recovered by our next contender. I want to get a look at it.”

  “What if they didn’t survive?” Tanya asked.

  “Then we likely go nowhere,” he said.

  “You really think you can do it?” I asked.

  “Me? Fifty-fifty, but with Aunt Ash’s help, yeah.”

  “What’s your play?” Tanya asked.

  “The two of you, me, Aunt Ash, and Omega,” he said. “Maybe Nika listening in.”

  “How exactly does Omega hitch a ride?” I asked.

  He held up one wrist, showing me the gray bracelet. “I connect with him on a nano level before we do the whole mind-out-of-body thing.”

  “Will that work?” Tanya asked.

  “It very well might,” he said. “I’ve done some interesting magic connections with him, which is one of my innate skills, if you recall: connecting with computers.”

  “What are the risks?” Tanya asked.

  “That they have some way of detecting us,” he said. “Whoever picked up the pieces will want to take steps to insure we don’t bomb them too.”

  “What’s to stop them from doing the same to us?” she asked.

  “I took a lot of care setting up the vault before putting that shit in there,” he said. “The tech is sitting inside a heavily warded circle that itself is sitting on top of a portal. If any level of power fluctuation occurs, the circle is set to absorb it while the portal is activated, dumping the minion parts out into space.”

  “How much power can the circle absorb before it fails?” I asked.

  “It’s a version of the circle I use with the volcanoes,” he said.

  “When?” Tanya asked.

  “When this is settled and we go back to the city,” he said.

  “And your aunt is on board?”

  “Not yet, not fully,” he said. “I asked her a bunch of questions about it after the Taupo spell. She’s not going to be real surprised.”

  “I think you need to get her approval before we agree,” Tanya said. “But I think it’s a really good idea.”

  Just then, the wolves came streaming back into the fields from the thick cedar grove at the far end. The cows were in the barn for the night, but other than a couple of plaintive moos, they failed to react to the presence of apex predators just yards away. Something about the fact that many of those wolves were now their caretakers.

  The dark brown wolf that was my grandfather was fourth behind Stacia’s white wolf. Holly and Kristin were just before him, Devaney’s almost black wolf following second to last. ’Sos, in wolf form, was the true tail-end Charlie. The wolves from next door had split off and run to their own property, leaving Stacia’s group to change back in relative privacy. Stacia was first, Holly not far behind her, then Devaney, and finally Kristin. Gramps just lay down and watched, ears flicking forward as he took it all in. Dressed in the sweats that Declan had ready, Stacia moved over to my grandfather and took his large wolf head in both hands.

  “Change,” she demanded.

  He whined, looking nervous, but he couldn’t disobey her order and his body started to transform on its own. It took a full ten minutes, and he was clearly in some pain, but at the end he was fully human again. Exhausted, but human.

  “Congratulations, Alex,” Stacia said. “You have made the Change both ways. How do you feel?”

  “Starving,” he said with a bright smile.

  Tanya chose that moment to bring out a platter of sandwiches and bottles of chocolate milk. Declan and I wisely held back as the pack fell upon the food, waiting our turns.

  Chapter 49

  We sat inside a circle, on the floor, cross-legged and holding hands. Our circle was around a very small circle that held the gleaming chrome skull and spine from the Vorsook’s Earthside agent. Small enough that we could hold hands around it. Tanya sat across from me with Nika kneeling behind her, Declan to her right, his aunt to her left. I tried to ignore the sight of the gray nano bracelet puncturing Declan’s wrist. When we’d sat down, he’d claimed it was better for connecting
to Omega.

  “We need to look at the metal of that thing and think upon it,” Ashling said. “Just think about what it is, what it represents, where it might have come from.”

  That thing was floating in the air above and between us, about two feet off the ground.

  “Notice how it writhes and twists like sum kind o’ metal snake, the jaws clacking and clicking. See the red eyes, illuminated by its own internal power, glaring at us.”

  I was expecting more spell-type stuff, but this didn’t seem like that. Her lilting brogue was oddly relaxing, even if the object of her words was a horrifying approximation of human life.

  “Now close yer eyes and picture it floating there. See it. Feel the cold of that alien metal, cold like the very space it came from. Can you see it? A twisting and turning its way through space, past our outer planets, past Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and even tiny, frozen Pluto. Heading out across our galaxy, past the other stars, past nebulae, and even across the empty space between galaxies.”

  The odd thing was that I could see it, clacking its jaw like a Halloween prop, turning and spinning the metal vertebrae like the segments of a centipede’s body. I could see it travel backward past the planets she’d named, picking up speed as it moved out of our solar system. The other stars became streaks of light, lines of white and yellow, and we seemed to be inside a tunnel of streaming starlight. Images of Star Wars popped unbidden into my mind, our travel now faster than light, like hyperspace with the Millennium Falcon.

  “It slows as it approaches its home galaxy, the star system where it was created, as it were, dropping back into normal space, circling past planets large and gaseous, approaching a world something like our own.”

  I could see it all, a solar system somehow like ours but also not. The home planet for our jaw-snapping horror show was brown and green with bits of blue.

  “It seems more land than water, but is it?” I asked.

  “Half and half,” Declan said, and I agreed, seeing more bits of blue but nothing like Earth.

  “This is different from our first trip,” Tanya said.

  “Could it be the same system, but closer to the sun the way Mars, Earth, and Venus are?” Declan asked.