Dragonsword

by Chloe Garner

  “You’re welcome to,” Samantha said, “but I’ve got a law firm to visit tonight.”

  “Seriously?” Jason asked. “You can’t take one night off?”

  “The timer went off weeks ago,” Samantha said. They could finish the deal any day, and we’re done.”

  “You’re no fun,” Jason said.

  “Not lately,” Samantha answered.

  “It’s done, Mistress,” Maryann said, appearing at her elbow. “Should I return to Doris?”

  “I think I want you here for a while,” Samantha said. “I’ll need you to help keep track of what they’ve got going on, when they leave.”

  “Yes,” Maryann said, taking a spot behind her. Samantha looked over her shoulder at the girl.

  “What did you guys do with your hair?”

  “She said there was so much of it, we tried everything,” Maryann said. “Do you like it?”

  It was highlighted and cut to fall in waves down her back with shorter strands framing her face. She was wearing makeup, too.

  “You look very pretty,” Samantha said, not sure whether she wanted to encourage it or not. She’d never understood it, herself. Maryann smiled and looked away and Samantha privately rolled her eyes. Men she could deal with. She’d failed to think through tying herself to a woman.

  “Where did Sam go?” she asked.

  “To get food,” Jason said. “We figured the dogs slobbered all over everything in there. He’s going to meet us back at the apartment.”

  Food was one of the two, then. She nodded.

  “All right. Then that’s where we’ll start.”

  <><><>

  She carried water with her wherever she went, now, like she was running on it. She emptied a large section of her backpack and stuffed it with boxes of crackers and bags of candy, and ate whenever they had time.

  There was something the demons weren’t telling them.

  Something everyone knew, and no one was saying.

  Sam could tell, and he’d only been around them for months. He knew it was driving Samantha crazy, but they didn’t talk about it. They continued moving Abby from apartment to apartment - the woman seemed withdrawn, resigned, and Sam hoped she didn’t give up all hope and just kill herself to spare the waiting - and they kept showing up at clubs and bars. Twice, Samantha got tipped about a major conference and they showed up to disrupt them. Once, it was a merger between two major groups in the city, and Samantha let it happen, staying as witness to the event and to make sure they weren’t lying to her. The other time, the demons scattered when they got there, leaving just piles of ash for her to interview. Samantha took samples and Sam spent a day with them, trying to track them down, but they were getting more careful about covering their movements.

  He asked Samantha one evening why she kept wearing the pin, since the demons who were after the angeldust obviously knew it was gone.

  “It’s still good for Cassie to not know where we are and what we’re up to,” Samantha had said.

  “How did they know?” Sam asked. “How did they find the gate?”

  “I had planned on taking the pin out and showing her that it was done, after we got back,” Samantha said. “She saw me do that, and sent them to try to intercept us before we got the gate open.”

  “But you didn’t,” Sam said.

  “Nope. I gave her one of the biggest headaches of her life,” Samantha said with a grim smile. Sam shuddered at the memory. He was sympathetic to the woman. Samantha would never understand what it was like to have so much stuff directly tied into her head like that. No matter how much she did to help him and shelter him from the worst of it, he still had something in common with the psychic hunting them that Samantha couldn’t be a part of.

  He slept reasonably normal hours, five or six hours during the afternoons, maybe an hour or so when he got the opportunity. Samantha and Jason kept working. Samantha would mix preparations to replace the ones she used, run tests on demon ash, and stare endlessly at a map of the continent that she had pinned to the wall. She’d marked all of the demons they’d hunted across the country, every place one of the demons who had come through the hellsgate had been.

  Peter called in the mornings. Sam would identify the caller before Jason’s phone rang, and Jason would answer it, and then pass the phone to Samantha. Sam was impressed at how capable they were, out in the world on their own, without Samantha or Carter to push them around.

  “We may be all full up on personalities, but we’re good at what we do, Sam,” Samantha told him. Peter and Ian had psychics who, while they weren’t as versatile as Sam, could follow the leads the group turned up, and, once they split up, Samantha’s peers were brutally efficient at running things to ground. It didn’t take them days to go across the country, chasing a glitching demon; because someone else was within a few hours of wherever the demon ended up. After the second day, Peter’s psychic would call Sam to give him something to track from, and Sam started to help. Twice, he caught glimpses of Cassie as she moved from one protected space to another, but never with enough warning to get anyone there.

  Something was happening, and everyone in New York knew what it was. Everyone but them.

  And then everything went quiet.

  The clubs were quiet and empty. The bars were full of demons who kept to themselves, drinking and leaving. The markets all but shut down. Peter and the rest stopped hitting lead after lead as demons stopped glitching across the country. Sam woke up one evening, the third day into the silence, to find Samantha sitting on the ground in front of the map, arms wrapped around her knees. Jason was cleaning guns. Samantha had her hair pin on the ground next to her. He’d been able to feel her in his dreams, and it had given him unquiet dreams. He went to sit next to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For not being here.”

  He moved to put his arm around her, but she warned him not to. She was sorry she was distant; it didn’t mean she was ready to be close.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to live,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked.

  “You see it, don’t you? That it has to be her or me?”

  He looked up at the map.

  “I do.”

  He didn’t like it, but he saw it. He thought of the grinning demon in the elevator, the one who had talked about the bidding on his soul, for who would get it when he died.

  “Sam, what happens to us if you die?” he asked her.

  He put his hand over the pendant hanging around his neck. He hadn’t taken it off in a long, long time. It kept him safe from demons possessing him. She looked at him.

  “What did you say?”

  It had been bothering him for a while.

  “I can’t depend on you for everything. I don’t want us to be like that, and it won’t work in the end, will it?”

  She stared at him.

  “Jason, I need you to go pack the car.”

  “What goes?” Jason asked. Samantha’s eyes didn’t move.

  “Everything. Not that it will matter.”

  “Everything. Check.”

  There was a shuffle.

  “I guess I’ll go get it, first.”

  She nodded, and the door opened and closed.

  “I can’t protect you,” Samantha said. “Not like that.”

  “I know,” Sam answered. She stood, the simple action of straightening her legs, and then helped Sam up.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said yes.”

  “What?” he asked, hoping she didn’t mean what it sounded like.

  “Not yet,” she said, then kissed him. She hadn’t kissed him since he had left in California, and this wasn’t the one he had been hoping for. He put his arms around her to pull her against him, but she tugged away. He opened his eyes to find himself on the other side. He’d hardly even noticed the transition.

  “You need to talk to him first,” she said, pointing. “He
told me.”

  He looked up onto the hillside where the chubby old man was sunning himself and smiled.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  <><><>

  She sat on the rock under the oak tree for most of an hour, her feet dangling in the cold water. She’d spent a lot of time here, lately, taking the restfulness of the place into herself. It didn’t replace sleep, but it felt good anyway. Sam climbed up onto the rock next to her and put his feet down into the water.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Yeah?” she answered. He nodded, combing his hair back off his face with his fingers.

  “A lot of things I needed to hear.”

  He was far away for a moment, then he came back to her with a quick smile.

  “He told me rules you don’t know about,” he said.

  “He what?”

  Sam grinned and nodded.

  “And said you aren’t stalling about marrying me.”

  “Did you think I was?”

  “You haven’t said anything about it.”

  She’d been holding back, certainly, but it surprised her he thought she was stalling.

  “I said yes, didn’t I?”

  He laughed.

  “And then nothing else. I can’t read your mind any more. I can’t tell what’s going on in there.”

  She pulled the pin out of her hair - angel-made, it worked even here - and braced herself against the wave of happiness and worry and uncertainty that washed back and forth between them.

  “There’s just too much going on,” she said. “I can’t just take time off and be happy.”

  He met this with humor.

  “I know. I get it, I do. It’s just… I propose, and you say yes, and then… everything is the same as before.”

  She looked at the ring and then away.

  “I don’t really feel like anything changed.”

  “Really?”

  She felt the introspection as he considered.

  “I guess I don’t either. We’ve been coming this way for a long time.”

  “Yeah.”

  She was still holding back, hard, and she could feel how much he wanted to try to beat down the wall between what she had to do and what she wanted to do, but he restrained. She was grateful.

  “He wouldn’t tell me if you’re going to win,” Sam said. The undertone said: he won’t say if you’re going to live.

  “He isn’t a fortune teller,” Samantha said. “There’s only one future, but he’s the only one who can know what it is.”

  She thought of the celestial plane, where the entirety of human time existed. She was free to walk it, when she was dead, but only in the present moment. There were men and angels who were given liberty to see into the past, but no one could push it forward into the future save the wrinkly man on the hill. He was watching her, now, expression calm but serious. What was going to happen was going to happen. She’d never had the ability to change it, though her own decisions played a part in shaping it: the paradox of free will. He couldn’t close the loop and tell her the results of her own decisions. The hellplane had guesses, and altering it was physically painful to people like Sam who had access to those guesses. To feedback the present time with real truth from the future… The irony of a single truth meant that it wasn’t possible to know what would happen, because it never would happen. Angelic philosophers asked if that meant that it had no result, but Samantha thought that this was absurd.

  Sam was off in his own thoughts as hers wandered. He felt her return, and it jolted out of his line of thinking.

  “I can’t depend on you,” he said. “Not like I have been. It’s not your job.”

  She looked over at him, wanting to tell him that she didn’t mind, but appreciating the truth of what he said too much to spoil it.

  “You’re good then?” she asked. He nodded, then dropped his eyes, a slow smile easing into place as he listened to words she didn’t get to hear. The shaman in her burned at the idea of knowledge that wasn’t for her, but she appreciated that Sam got to have his own secrets. He nodded.

  “I’ve never been better.”

  “We need to go, then,” she said.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, standing.

  “I don’t know yet. It’s just time.”

  She stood, her bare feet gripping the slope of the rock, and looked around the place. It calmed her, as it always did. There were so many things she didn’t know. Here, they didn’t matter. The things that seemed so important on the other side of the barrier were just events playing out as they were going to, from here. Sam hugged her.

  “Thank you.”

  She couldn’t be affectionate. Not yet. She still had too much to lose and too much to think about, but the comfort his touch gave her wasn’t something she could hide. He held her and she pulled them both back across the barrier, back into the dark, wooden apartment, where there was packing to be done.

  <><><>

  Samantha slept in the back seat.

  Jason drove.

  He hadn’t slept in more than a week, and he was concerned that his reflexes were off, but they needed to be moving, and Sam couldn’t drive straight through. Samantha had wanted to stay up, but Sam had insisted she sleep.

  “I’ll wake you up when you need to be awake,” he’d said.

  “But I don’t want Cassie to know where we are,” Samantha said.

  “It will be fine. Sleep.”

  And with that she had been gone. Jason had no idea which systems she had on and which ones she had off, to manage to work like she had been. He was having a hard time keeping it together, and he knew she had a lot more going on. He had been little more than a grocery boy for the last week, as the hunt had ground to a halt. He kept Sam and Samantha in food and water, and they kept the hunt moving forward. Samantha said it was historical, a hunt of this scale. He was disappointed that his role in the whole thing was as mundane as it was.

  They were halfway through Pennsylvania when Sam jolted awake, fighting his seatbelt.

  “Whoa, buddy,” Jason said, trying to keep out of arm’s length and drive at the same time. Samantha slept on, unaware. Four solid seconds of thrashing later Sam went limp, and Jason started to pull the car over, hoping he could wake Samantha if he had to.

  “I’m fine,” Sam said, as Gwen’s tires went across the rumble strip. “Keep going.”

  “What the hell just happened?” Jason asked. Sam rubbed his forehead and sighed.

  “I know where we’re going.”

  Jason waited, squinting against headlights and glancing at Sam.

  “Well?”

  Sam shifted higher in his seat and leaned his head against the doorframe.

  “Kansas City.”

  <><><>

  Sam slept through the rest of Pennsylvania and all of Ohio. Jason stopped for breakfast in Indiana, and Sam woke up as Jason was getting out.

  “You want anything?”

  “Whatever you’re having,” Sam said. “I’m going to stay with her.”

  It felt like this had happened before. Jason tried to remember when, as he went into the fast food joint and put in an order. He paid cash - still strange to always have cash - and brought the food back out to the car.

  “We in a hurry?” he asked. Sam shook his head.

  “We’ll beat them there by a few hours, at least,” he said.

  “What did you see?”

  Sam rubbed his face, trying to wake up, then huddled around his cup of coffee as Jason started the engine back up.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not giving me a lot to go on here,” Jason said.

  “Didn’t get much,” Sam answered.

  Jason drove in silence for a minute, following the signs back to the interstate.

  “Sam, you’d tell me if you knew something bad was going to happen, wouldn’t you?”

  Sam sipped at his coffee, watching the road.

  “Yeah.”

  Jason waited.

  “An
d…?”

  “I don’t know that something bad is going to happen. I just wish I knew that it wasn’t going to.”

  Jason waited again, but Sam seemed content with the silence.

  “What’s going on, dude?”

  “It’s Cassie,” Sam said. “She told me where to come. She’s waiting for us, and Peter and the rest of them aren’t far behind. She thinks she can win.”

  “You think it’s a trap?” Jason asked. Sam stared at the road.

  “Does it matter?”

  Jason considered, then shrugged. It didn’t. They would go, either way.

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw inside her mind,” Sam said. “What she wants to do.” There was a long pause, but this time, Jason could tell Sam wasn’t done. “It didn’t make sense, because it was in so many pieces… and there was so much screaming.”

  “Sam’s going to kick her ass. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said, unconvinced.

  “So how is Kerk taking you being AWOL again?” Jason asked. Sam dug his phone out and looked at it.

  “A hundred eighty-three new texts,” he said. “I’m afraid to look at my laptop.”

  “We’re going to have to deal with him eventually,” Jason said.

  “Right now, I don’t care if he finds the thirsty man or not,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t change what we’re doing.”

  “How was it, asking Kjarr for permission to marry Sam?”

  “Have you met him yet?” Sam asked. Jason shook his head. In the club any number of times, now, but he’d never made it back to the inner sanctum. Sam shook his head.

  “Dude, the man is terrifying. Think what it would be like to ask Arthur to marry Krista, then make him a thousand years old, seven feet tall, and drinking blood for breakfast.”

  “He really drinks blood?”

  “Used to, I’m sure,” Sam said. “Don’t know if he does now, or not. But Nuri was worse. Kjarr, you can tell what he thinks. You know in the first instant if you’re dead or not, but Nuri… She doesn’t give anything away. I still don’t know if she’s going to let me marry Sam, and she said she would.”

  “Could she stop you? I mean, Sam said yes.”

  Sam’s mouth gaped for a second and he held out his hands.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what she could do. She’s…” He held his hands up higher. “She’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”