Dragonsword

by Chloe Garner

  “I’m going to take it away from them.”

  “Let them die,” Jason said. She nodded, waiting for the magic to click into place. It would. She had faith.

  Only one word occurred to her.

  O’na Anu’dd appeared, scanning the room. He nodded at her, and she crouched over the floor, not willing to set her knee down in the drying blood, and spread her hands out. She focused, driving power into the word.

  “Pall,” she said. It wasn’t her favorite word. It lacked the grace of much of the rest of angeltongue, but here, it was a simple blessing. Death. There was no audible change, but when Samantha lifted her head, O’na Anu’dd, Saddo’dd Pall, was gone. She looked around the room to find corpses. The flickers of light were gone. Jason helped her up, a simple salute more than recognition of need, and they left. They broke down the rest of the doors downstairs, finding more playrooms, but no more people. In the last room, there was a large table with a black-stone surface. Ash dusted the surface, and there were a few piles of it around the room.

  “They’re negotiating,” Samantha said, feeling like she had swallowed a stone. “It’s close.”

  “How can you tell they’re close?” Jason asked as she pulled vials out of her backpack and took samples from the piles of ash.

  “I need to know who she’s negotiating with,” Samantha said. “I need to break it up…”

  She drifted off, looking at the ash.

  “I need to figure out who these were. This is a mistake. I have a link that goes directly to her.”

  Jason nodded.

  “Is there anything else we can do?”

  She thought of the room across the basement and angry flames lit up her creativity. She nodded.

  “Yeah. We can lay flypaper.”

  “What does that mean?” Jason asked.

  “Call Bane,” she said. She looked around the basement as he dialed, searching for the geographic features that would give her the most help.

  “Word will get out that I’ve been here, but it won’t be instant. I can lay a trap so that any of the lower demons who come back won’t be able to get out.”

  She put her backpack on the steps and dug through it, finding various things that clicked together and started to form the right shapes. She would have loved to capture Cassie herself, if she had the nerve to come back, but that wasn’t possible. Not with the massive psychic trap she had laid for Sam. The demon was too powerful. But the higher up the food chain she could get, the more information she’d end up with.

  Bane picked up.

  “What do you want?” he asked, sounding tired.

  “We’re at a house in Knoxville,” Samantha said. “Huge demon pit.” She turned her head to throw her voice toward the phone as she kept working in her bag. “They cleared out when we got here, but I’m going to set flypaper. I need you to check up on it.”

  “You’re really doing this?” Bane asked. She stood.

  “Doing what?”

  “Taking his job? I thought better of you.”

  She was torn. If she admitted that it was just to get Carter back, she’d never have the authority to organize all of them. As much as she liked Bane, compared to the rest of them, he would use it against her if he thought she wasn’t doing the right thing. Old Samantha would have tried consensus-building and bridge-building, but she didn’t have time, and failing wasn’t a learning experience; it was the end of her chance to save Carter.

  “If you’re surprised, you’ve misjudged me,” she said. There was a soft noise on the other side of the phone.

  “What do you want me to do if I catch someone?”

  “If you’re up for it, I need to know who they are and who they’re working for. If you aren’t, call me and we’ll come do it.”

  “You still toting around that pair of children?”

  “Down to one,” she said.

  “Oh, and the angel,” Jason said.

  “Upstairs,” she answered. “You should probably check in every couple of days if you can. Things are getting tight.”

  “You’re making me come to New York,” he reminded her.

  “Obviously you have to do that, too,” she said. “Make it work.”

  She jerked her head at Jason, and he hung up. She spent an hour setting up the trap while Jason watched, then they left. Outside, the yard was empty save for a few drifting piles of ash, leaving them nothing but a long walk back down the driveway and a longer drive back to New York.

  <><><>

  Carter sat in the dark.

  His imagination was running away with him. When he closed his eyes, he thought he heard dripping, or screaming. He would open them, and while nothing changed, he would feel the dry on his skin, the faint cool of the metal by his shoulder, and he would know he was alone.

  He was lonely.

  He thought he’d forgotten how to be lonely.

  He didn’t need anyone. He was Carter.

  And yet, he missed voices, and the minds behind them.

  Nuri was going to have to kill him. He wouldn’t let her take him. Her or anyone else. And despite the fact that he faced death every day, this time it scared him.

  It stared him in the face through the unmetered hours of his days. The inevitability of his death, and the reality of what that meant. He kept trying to flee from it, to put it away and not think about it, but his mind was merciless.

  He was going to force Nuri to kill him, and no one was going to let him slip through the cracks a second time. He wouldn’t be Carter, the most powerful man who ever lived. He would be a nameless, chained soul who didn’t remember his own identity.

  Even if he did somehow get out of this one, did live…

  He was going to kill Nuri.

  But the end was still the same.

  He sat in the dark with his head in his hands and cried.

  <><><>

  Samantha trudged up the stairs.

  Her body was beat from fights and worry and lack of sleep, and while she could see the next step, her hope was abandoning her. Her joints were stiff and she kept rubbing her neck, with no improvement. She was going to have to turn it all off, before it was over. She needed sleep, but there was too much left to do and not enough time to do it. She had accepted on the drive home that she was going to be awake for the rest of the time it took to get Carter back, assuming she even managed it. She was doing semi-permanent damage to her body and her mind, she knew, pushing it this hard. There would be surgeries and interventions and probably another hypnosis - she shuddered - to try to get all of the pieces back to where they could heal. She would make Jason sleep, but she wouldn’t sleep, herself. She had to identify the ash and use it to track Cassie inside the city, and prepare for the arrival of the rest to help her hunting. She needed another set of hands. She had a demon and an angel doing her bidding, and she still needed more. She needed an army.

  Her backpack felt heavy.

  She’d carried it for so many years, and it was never heavy, because she carried it every day. For two years, she’d carried it and a duffel bag with all of her clothes and things that she kept in the Cruiser now, and it had been fine. She worried that when she finally caught up with Cassie, there wouldn’t be enough of her left.

  She leaned heavy on the railing as she went up the stairs, watching the backs of Jason’s feet, the black rubber soles of his boots as he went ahead of her.

  Trudged.

  She loved Jason. It was possible that she fought and worked better with him than Sam. They shared a ruthlessness of purpose that pushed Jason harder than it did Sam. For all that, though, she was lonely. Her mind was empty of the calming, playful, curious influence she’d grown used to. Stern when she pushed herself too hard, encouraging when she stretched for the next goal.

  She missed Sam like she would have missed her dreams. The world was flat and uninteresting without him.

  They were silent up to the fifth floor. Kelly had been here since they’d left Tennessee; she would need to move Abby again
. She was too predictable, she knew, coming here. If they knew her well, they could lay an ambush here and catch her coming or going. She came straight here.

  Home.

  Sad that the dark, bedraggled apartment in the rat-infested building was home, but it was. It was hers.

  She would need to move Abby again. Then get to work on identifying the demon ash while Kelly and Jason moved her. How long would it take to figure it out? There was no telling. Minutes, hours, days. The sign that would tip her off could show up in the first test or the thousandth. It would show up, though.

  Oh, yes.

  Jason put his hand to the door and opened it and Samantha sighed through it, planning the order of the tests she would run in order of probability of positive conclusion, prioritizing first the tests that divided the demon population in half, and then the ones that identified individual demons who were most likely to be involved.

  Something about the room felt wrong. Like it was too still. Like everyone was holding their breaths.

  She blinked, pulling her mind back into her own setting, and her eyes snapped to the tall figure standing in the middle of the room. She dropped her backpack and ran at him in the same motion, hitting him midair. He didn’t stagger back. He had expected it.

  Sam wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight as she burrowed her face into his shoulders, too exhausted to cry. Her whole body shook.

  “Sam,” she whispered.

  “Hey, babe,” he answered.

  She wanted to cry. Everything needed it, the catharsis of recognizing that she was tired and in pain and overwhelmed, but she was past the point of being able to. She just held on tight, breathing through his shirt, eyes squeezed shut. Behind her, she heard a beer bottle hiss open and a cap clatter onto a counter.

  “She needs sleep,” Jason said.

  “Is she still doing that?” Sam asked, his voice rumbling through his chest as his chin came to rest on top of her head. “How long has it been?”

  “She’s slept twenty-odd hours since we left California,” Jason said. “And all of that the day we got back here.”

  “Sam,” Sam muttered. “Why?”

  “There’s too much,” she answered.

  “Can you make her sleep?” Jason asked.

  The pressure of his chin increased and he rolled his head to the side, resting his face against her ear.

  “Sam,” he said. It plucked her attention, something she couldn’t ignore. “Sleep.”

  She started to explain why she couldn’t, all the things she had to do, but she was already gone.

  <><><>

  Sam sat at the table with Jason over a pair of beers. Sam had stayed with Samantha while Jason and Kelly took Abby to Carter’s apartment, and Kelly had grudgingly agreed to stay there until Samantha woke.

  “So where’s Carson?” Jason asked.

  “I dropped him off in Kansas City on my way here,” Sam said. “He said he wasn’t carrying his own water, and he’d catch up with us when we weren’t trying to save the world.”

  There was a moment as Jason swirled the beer in his bottle.

  “I miss Arthur,” he said. Sam nodded. It was a strange turn of phrase the man had always used, and it had pricked him, too, when Carson had said it. Jason tipped his bottle back, then motioned to Sam’s. “You want another?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “I’m good.” He paused. “Doris seems like she’s enjoying having someone around all the time.”

  “Who?” Jason asked.

  “Maryann,” Sam said.

  “Oh. I keep forgetting about her.”

  “I think that’s what she’s good at,” Sam said. “Doris has got her all dressed up, though, and they just sit on the porch and talk. Maryann is helping Doris take care of the house. If she didn’t keep glitching around, you’d forget she’s a demon.”

  “Can you imagine what Arthur would say if he knew that Doris was playing surrogate mom to a demon?” Jason asked. Sam shook his head.

  “I wish he’d gotten to see all of this.”

  Jason nodded, folding his fingers over his drink. They sat silently for a minute.

  “So you have fun, fighting all the old fights?”

  “Kind of refreshing,” Sam said.

  “You and Kerk best friends now?”

  Jason tossed another bottle cap into the trash and came to sit back down as Sam got out his phone.

  “Not really, if the…” he paused, checking the number, “thirty-seven unreturned texts are any evidence.”

  Jason snorted.

  “You lose the thirsty man?”

  “We found some documentation in Seattle on him. Couple of names. One on a water bill, another on an old letter. Kerk is running them down. We’ll find him.”

  Jason nudged the phone with his beer.

  “How do you know that’s not what that’s about?”

  “I know,” Sam said, grimacing. “He thinks I should be in Omaha looking for a wandering visitor.”

  “Sounds like more fun than this,” Jason said.

  “She needs me,” Sam said.

  “You do what you needed to do?” Jason asked. Sam nodded.

  “Yeah. I’m not leaving again.”

  Jason tipped his bottle toward Sam.

  “Good to have you back. Last few weeks have been hell without you.”

  “You guys look like you’re doing okay,” Sam said.

  “We’re doing our jobs,” Jason said. “Damn, though, man. I didn’t realize how much I was going to miss you.” He snorted. “If she hadn’t been here to make a scene, I might have. And her…” He took a drink and shook his head. “Dude, she’s a machine, but she doesn’t know what to do with herself without you. And with you dodging her on the phone like you did…”

  “You know why I did it,” Sam said.

  “I know, I know,” Jason said, shaking his head again. “You just didn’t have to live with it, is all I’m saying.”

  Sam smiled, flattered at the fact that they’d missed him. He’d wondered if they would. Well, not Samantha, certainly, but Jason, he hadn’t been sure.

  “I’m back now,” he said. “What should we be doing? Did you find Cassie?”

  “She was there,” Jason said. “In the house.”

  “Did you fight?”

  “No. O’na Anu’dd showed up and she split. There was more really messed up stuff there.” Jason paused, and Sam could feel there was more coming. He waited. “She’s going to kill her.”

  “Which one?” Sam asked. Jason looked down at his beer morosely.

  “Yes.”

  “So we need to find her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Sam’s got some ash in her bag she was going to use. Hell if I know how.”

  “Where?” Sam asked, standing. “Maybe I can get a lead off of them going backwards.”

  Jason nodded, hooking his arm over the back of his chair as Sam went through Samantha’s backpack. Sam found the rack of vials and pulled them up one at a time, finding three with ash in them.

  “Those are them,” Jason said. Sam sat back down, feeling the glass in his hands. Demons. He looked over at Samantha.

  “If I give you a list and some money, can you go shopping for me?” he asked.

  “Seriously?” Jason asked.

  “Seriously,” Sam answered. “I’m going to see what I can do with these, and then there are some things I’m going to need when she wakes up. We need to have everything ready for her so she doesn’t lose any more time than she has to, sleeping.”

  “You drove here straight from Kansas City?” Jason asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He looked at Jason, daring him to challenge him, and Jason shook his head.

  “Damn. Give me the list.”

  <><><>

  Her dreams when Carter made her sleep were dark, nightmarish, and out of control. She didn’t have the ability to wake up, and it was as if all of her bad dreams lay in wait
for the moment that she couldn’t escape them to manifest. The sleep that Sam put her into was lighter and heavier. She was carefree, taken care of, protected, and watched over. It slipped past with normal, quest-oriented dreams, but they were less pressing than normal. She would get there. She knew it from the beginning, and it spared her the adrenalin-filled frantic moments of indecision and unknowing.

  And then she was sitting on a park bench.

  And the swirling, chaotic, irrational nature of dreams evaporated, and she was there, her whole mind, awake and yet asleep. Sam sat next to her. She realized that she had felt him in her dreams, there at the end, the facts and plot slipping away like with normal waking. He had been there, and it had made her feel safe.

  “You took my pin,” she said.

  “I did,” he answered. “Abby can’t see you here, so I figured it would be safe. We needed to talk, and you need sleep.”

  And then she was angry.

  “You made me sleep,” she said. “Everything is going to fly to pieces, and you made me sleep.”

  “You needed it,” he said. “And I found out who your demons were.”

  “You…” she started to continue the attack, then paused. “You what?”

  He laughed.

  “I found them,” he said. “I don’t know who they are, but I hung out at Toby’s club for a few weeks’ time, watching for them, and one of them turned up. I followed him back and found another one, and… Anyway, I know where they spent most of their time. All three of them.”

  It was like a pressing stone rolled off her chest, and she could breathe. She felt the echo of relief from him. She approved, and she wasn’t angry anymore. It was what he had wanted. She leaned her head against his shoulder, and he put an arm around her. For a few minutes, as children screamed and laughed on the playground down the path from them and women chatted unintelligibly as they walked past, they just sat, having the silent conversation they’d both missed. He was excited to be back, he’d missed her - really missed her - and he scolded her for being relieved, then she dug out his own satisfaction at how much she had missed him and turned the scolding back on him with good humor.

  She shivered with a sense of inevitability. He had decided it was time to go.

  “You need to wake up now,” he said. “We still have work to do.”