Dragonsword

by Chloe Garner

  “I’m tired,” Samantha announced. “I’m going up to bed.”

  “I’ll sit up for a while,” Jason said. “Keep watch.”

  Sam didn’t know what had happened while he was gone, yet, but Jason had silently promised to tell him at some point. He knew better than to dig, after how badly Samantha had reacted. It was bewildering, being on the other side of the wave of emotions that she sent at him, like it or not. He’d asked, without words, if he should be sorry, and she’d said no. She was better than she’d been before, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She hadn’t let him be affectionate, not coldly, but distant.

  “I guess I’ll get some sleep, too,” he said, standing. She showed him upstairs to a bedroom. The walls were lavender and the furniture was white.

  “Were you planning on having kids?” Sam asked. She shrugged.

  “We hadn’t ruled it out,” she said. “I didn’t realize, yet…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sleep well.”

  “You, too.”

  She left and he pulled his shirt off and got into the bed. It was the first time they hadn’t slept in the same room since he could remember. It was unsettling, and it took him a long time to get to sleep.

  Samantha didn’t sleep any better. Angry at no one in particular, she lay in bed for a long time, haunted by the shadows of what this place was supposed to be. She crossed to the Paradise plane for a few hours and returned warmer, happier, cleaner, but didn’t drift off for a while after that.

  She wasn’t actually sure she was asleep when she heard the scuffle downstairs. She was out of bed and out the door before she was awake.

  “Get out of my house,” a gruff voice said.

  “This isn’t your house, dude,” Jason answered. There was a growl and a stream of mixed Greek, Arabic, and Egyptian as Samantha accelerated down the stairs.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jason was saying to the aged man standing in the front entry.

  “Stop!” Samantha yelled as she reached the bottom of the stairs. The man turned and stared at her, his mouth falling open. His skin was without pigment and papery, his hair thin and feathery over his head. Sam slammed into the railing above, stretching to figure out what was happening.

  “Who are you?” Samantha asked, eyes picking out signals that worried her. His fingernails were bluish and streaked with gray, and his eyes were bloodshot with veins that were so dark they were nearly black. He turned and ran out the door. Jason drew Anadidd’na and Samantha drew Lahn and they gave chase. When they got outside, he was gone. Sam was in the living room with Wrath when they came back in.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Jason asked, sliding Anadidd’na back into her sheath over his shoulder.

  “You’d be surprised,” Samantha said.

  “Who was he?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know,” Samantha said.

  “You recognized him,” Sam said.

  “I recognized symptoms,” Samantha told him. Jason sat down on the couch and crossed his legs on the coffee table.

  “He’s why we’re here. What was he?”

  “He’s an immortal,” she said. “Carter locked this place up himself. For him to be able to get in, he’s powerful in dark magic. Humans don’t mess with us, so Carter was only targeting demons, but it’s still really hard to get in.”

  And then she was in motion.

  “If he’s been here routinely, we need to figure out why. Look for anything that’s been in regular use.”

  The stove had been cleaned regularly by the demon crew, but had smelled of disuse. The refrigerator had been empty. Samantha went through the pantry, the cabinets, the dishwasher, everything in the kitchen item by item. Jason turned on the television as Sam went upstairs. She had worked her way out into the garage when Sam tugged at her.

  “I think I found it,” he called downstairs when she got back inside. Jason turned off the TV and went upstairs with her.

  The guest bathroom was at the opposite end of the house from the master suite and the door had been closed when she had come up. She had opened it, looking to make sure there were clean towels, but she hadn’t gone in. Now, as Sam stood over the bathtub, she took a moment to look at the door.

  The seal was obvious. It was well-constructed and powerful, but targeted, like Carter’s locks, at demons. The door had corroded under it, leaving a dusty gray section of wood where the door met the frame, and a matching rot on the door frame.

  She went to look in the tub. They would have found it by evening when one of the twins had gone to shower. The rest of the house was well-kept. The tub had hundreds of crusty black rings up and down the sides, and below the rings, the porcelain was stained gray. Samantha wrinkled her nose.

  “Should have just shot him,” she said.

  “What is that?” Jason asked.

  “Thirsty man,” Sam said. Samantha looked at him, and he shrugged. “Don’t care what you call him, the Rangers have hunted them before. Probably the origin of the fountain of youth myth.”

  She was impressed.

  “You may not be wrong. I would call him a water sorcerer, and he’s going to go find a safe place to regenerate, somewhere else. When they’re energized, they’re impossible to kill.”

  “Nothing’s impossible to kill,” Jason said.

  “How do you kill thirsty men?” Samantha asked.

  “The Rangers say you’re supposed to slit their throat and bury them alive.”

  She shook her head and grinned.

  “That would do it.”

  “See,” Jason said.

  “You aren’t killing them. You slit their throats so they can’t talk - I assume you’re supposed to go through the windpipe - and they can’t immediately drink. They heal just fine without needing to drink, but it cuts them off from their power. And then you bury them deep enough and well enough to let them dry out. It’ll take them six months to die like that, but it will eventually work.”

  “What a terrible way to go.”

  “There are worse, but not a lot,” Samantha said, glancing at Jason. “But they set themselves up for it. If the only way to kill you is to bury you alive, eventually someone’s gonna do it.”

  “So let’s go find him and do it.”

  “Immortals are generally sadistic. Not all of them, but they get bored with everything else, and they get corrupted with the magic, and they start killing people. You find a string of murders or unexplained deaths here, we might be able to track him down.”

  “He said this was his house.”

  “He hasn’t lived here. He just uses the fact that it’s empty to regenerate.”

  “I’ll start going through the records that are available online,” Sam said, turning to go. Samantha gave him a guilty twinge and he turned back.

  “I hate to say it, but you should probably ask Kerk for help.”

  Both of them glared at her. She shrugged.

  “Look, we’ve got a lot going on. We’re supposed to be here, but I don’t want to waste time. Let Kerk know what we found, ask for help. Okay?”

  Sam muttered under his breath as he left.

  “How do you feel about being child advocates?” Jason asked.

  “Hmm?” Samantha asked.

  “Fountain of youth… He regenerates to a young man. If he’s going to hurt people, I’d put odds on it being kids.”

  “I’d go with that,” she said.

  “So, let’s go to the sheriff’s office and go through their records.”

  “As child advocates,” she said. He nodded.

  “You still have that black dress that gets you in anywhere?”

  “You insult me,” she told him.

  He grinned and stuck his head out the door.

  “We’re going to go hit up the police for information. Be back in a few hours,” he called.

  “Don’t get arrested,” Sam called back.

  Samantha changed into the black dress and they headed out. Jason didn’t u
nderstand how it worked. It was a simple black dress, knee length, well-fitted, but it somehow made Samantha invisible. She walked into the police station carrying a clipboard against her chest, said something quiet to the receptionist, and a young man in a uniform escorted them back to a files room and unlocked a cabinet.

  “Everything is online, but the paper copies are there,” he said. “She gave you the guest password?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Samantha said, smiling. Jason avoided eye contact. Samantha might be invisible, but he might have warrants in a few states he’d forgotten about. She sat down at the computer and checked a slip of paper.

  “This can’t be that easy,” he said. He and Sam had broken into a few of these places over the years, looking for archaic records that only existed on paper.

  “It’s a read-only password that she created just for the files I asked for,” Samantha said and shrugged. “Technology. You want to go start pulling files? This computer doesn’t have e-mail access. You’ll have to take copies for Sam with your phone.”

  He’d had a phone before. He remembered it. Remembered all the phones before that one that he’d broken. When he’d gotten out of the hellsgate, he’d remembered how to dress himself, how to drive a car, how to work a push-button phone, but the cellphone eluded him. He even remembered how to wield a sword, something he’d only been doing for a few months before Brandt had snatched him, and he and Sam had been using cellphones since they’d left his aunt’s house. And yet.

  He fumbled it as he tried to set up the camera and Samantha looked up.

  “Oh. Sorry. I remember the issues with technology. Do you want me to do it?”

  “Like hell,” he answered. She grinned and ducked behind the computer screen again. A few minutes later, she started reading off case numbers. He pulled them one at a time, taking pictures of the reports, page after page. After the third one, Samantha gave him the pad of paper off of her clipboard so he could write the name of the kid in the report on it and take a picture of that, to make it easier to find the beginning of each report.

  They spent most of the day, making copies of dozens of files.

  “How far back are you looking?” Jason asked, paging through one near the end.

  “As far back as they’ve computerized them,” she said. “I’d go through the raw paper copies if I thought it would help, but if we can’t find patterns from this much, they aren’t going to be there.”

  They weren’t all kids. There were attractive young women, college-aged men, in one case a woman out with her two nieces.

  “What are you searching on?” he’d asked, at that one.

  “Unresolved, involving children, no obvious suspects.”

  “This is a lot for one town.”

  “We’re talking about fifty years, here.”

  “You think he’s been here that long?”

  “Who knows?”

  “What about her?” he asked, holding up a picture of a blonde co-ed.

  “She was on her way home from babysitting.”

  “So you think he was stalking the kids and went after her instead?”

  “I’d rather have more data than I need, if I got to choose,” she said. “And this doesn’t cost me anything but watching you wrestle with that blessed phone. Will you please let me do a few of these?”

  He’d grunted and swung his elbows away from her. She’d laughed.

  “So where does the dress work?” he’d asked after a long period of silence.

  “Anyplace without active security. Metal detectors, that kind of thing. Anything that requires someone to look directly at everyone as part of their job.”

  “How is that not the receptionist’s job?”

  “She’s supposed to look at everyone and smile, but she’s busy. She doesn’t look directly at anyone who doesn’t demand it.”

  “And she won’t remember you? How does that work?”

  She’d twisted in her chair and looked at him.

  “Jason, if you’d left me behind in that little town in West Virginia when I insisted you take me with you, would you remember me, now?”

  He’d thought about it.

  “No.”

  “No. You wouldn’t. I don’t make an impression. Useful as it is, I still hate it.”

  “You made an impression on Kara, when she first met you.”

  She grinned, turning back to her work.

  “Kara’s kind of amazing like that.”

  After they packed everything back up and Samantha had logged off the computer, they glided back through the station and out the front door, and Jason unlocked Samantha’s door for her. He got in next to her and glanced over, wondering how to start. He figured tact wasn’t his strength, so he wouldn’t go with it.

  “About this morning,” he said. She glared daggers at him, but he kept going. “Sam’s right. You need to talk about it. And I’m here, if you want.”

  She closed her eyes and turned forward again, and as he started the car he thought she was just going to fume, but as he turned around to pull out of his parking space, she spoke.

  “The things I’ve seen. The things I’ve done. They make me who I am. Rationally, I know that. But I wish I could un-see them and undo them. I don’t like them about myself, and I don’t want you to know about them.”

  He waited, but there wasn’t anything else after that. He let it be, driving back to the pretty Connecticut house maintained by demons and sometimes inhabited by a thirsty man.

  <><><>

  “What’d you get?” Samantha asked, sitting down on the couch next to Sam.

  “Other than a fight?” he asked, turning the laptop so she could see it. She read back over the last half-dozen lines, her hand creeping up to her mouth as she read.

  “Seriously. If you want me to find him and beat him, I will. I would do that for you.”

  “I know. No, he’s a fine researcher, but he doesn’t like being told what to do.”

  “I could have told you that,” Jason called from the kitchen where he was pulling a beer out of the fridge. “You should bail on him and take a look at what we’ve got.”

  “Well, we didn’t get nothing,” Sam said.

  “All right,” Samantha said, picking up the notepad next to Sam’s feet on the coffee table. “Let’s see what you came up with.”

  Sam pulled a map up on the computer and pointed.

  “There’s a region around here where he says the statistical distribution of unsolved murders is higher than normal. He says they use metrics to figure out hunting regions for our kind of stuff, and there’s a good chance that something lives around here.”

  “That circle includes New York,” Samantha said flatly. He grinned.

  “They don’t know.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Besides,” Jason said from the table. “It’s not like the demons really raise the murder rate in New York all that much. Lotta people dying, anyway.”

  Samantha glanced at Sam.

  “He doesn’t know either,” Sam said.

  “Not his fault,” Samantha said, smirking. “So they think they can predict the ‘normal’ murder-slash-disappearance-slash-accident-slash-suicide rate well enough to tell when something abnormal is happening?”

  “He certainly does,” Sam said. “He’s pulling the murders, disappearances, and accidents that were most abnormal. We both forgot suicides. I’ll have him look at those.”

  Samantha rubbed her face.

  “And the fact that demons can glitch across the country?”

  “They haven’t taken that into account,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  “We didn’t believe it happened until you told us that that was what was going on,” Jason commented. Samantha rolled her head over the back of the couch.

  “Are you eating a sandwich?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “I want one.”

  “I left the mayo out,” he answered. Sam snorted.

  “Patterns,”
Samantha said. “Just start identifying anything that might turn into a pattern, and we’ll put everything in stacks. We’ll work through them after that.”

  Sam nodded.

  “I need a printer.”

  “Let me show you where it is.”

  <><><>

  The old man paid for the hotel room with a credit card, went upstairs, filled the bathtub, and lay down in it, leaving only his knees exposed. At first this had been hard, laying with his head underwater, breathing it in and out, but now it just required focus. It took power to convert the water, to use it to wash off the decay, but it no longer felt like drowning.

  He filled his lungs, then pushed the water out again, sending a stream of gray water down his chest. The decay started on the inside. He had nearly waited too long this time. He had been so exposed.

  He hadn’t expected her to be there. It made him angry. She wasn’t supposed to come back.

  He needed to think.

  It was his house. For centuries, he had nurtured a territorial instinct, and he clenched his hands against the desire to march back to that house and kill all three of them. He needed to make a plan. There were consequences to consider.

  <><><>

  Sam sat with his feet on the coffee table again, Jason in the recliner across the room.

  “Broken home,” Sam said. Samantha glanced at the name on the folder he was reading out of and added a name to the list.

  “Musical,” Jason said.

  “Taken at night.” Sam.

  “Religious.” Jason.

  “Blood.” Sam.

  “Blood.” Jason.

  Samantha added both names to the blood list and stretched her neck as they moved on to the next folders.

  “The number of suicides that bled out seems high to me,” she said. “I mean, women tend to kill themselves with poison, and they’ve only got one gun suicide in the last ten years. Six people slit their wrists.”

  She scanned down the suicide list.

  “Can I have those last two?”

  Sam handed her his; Jason tossed the other folder onto the table.

  “We’re not talking small amounts of blood, either,” she said. Sam sat forward, taking Jason’s folder.

  “No. They marked this an unexplained death rather than a missing person based on the amount of blood they found.”