Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

The bastard staggered and dropped to one knee. He’d managed to get hold of his sidearm and was trying to lift it, trying to line up a shot even as he clutched at his chest. “You bitch,” he shouted, then made one last attempt to raise the weapon and failed. It tumbled out of his hand, and he fell onto his back, his legs splayed awkwardly beneath him.

  Nissa went for the discarded pistol first and kicked it well out of his reach. Then she holstered her weapon and went to one knee at the man’s side to examine his wounds. They were mortal. Even without the benefit of medical training, she had seen enough to know that on a good day, he would have only minutes, likely less, to get to a hospital. Tonight, it was out of the question. He was going to die, and soon.

  “You shouldn’t have gone for your weapon,” she told the man as she applied pressure to the wounds, if only so she could get a few quick questions in before he was gone for good.

  “Fuck… you…” he rasped, blood already starting to pool from his mouth.

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Fuck… you…”

  “Tell me who you work for! You owe me that much.”

  “Don’t… owe… you… shit…”

  “Why did you do it? Why did you go for your gun?”

  “Wasn’t… going… back… to… prison…”

  “Damn it, who do you work for? Are they in the government?” She hadn’t wanted to believe that before, but after Kleck she no longer had a choice.

  His only response to that was to half-laugh, half-wheeze, something not unlike a gurgling, hitching death rattle. Then he opened his mouth as if to speak, a weak grin revealing his bloodied teeth. It was the look he gave her that was truly chilling, though, as if he meant to say she wouldn’t believe him even if he told her.

  He passed before he could say another word. Had he even intended to? She would never know.

  “Bastard,” Nissa cried when it was clear he was gone, and punched the man in his stupid dead face. “Bastard, bastard, bastard!” She stood and turned circles in place, looking for anything to direct her fury toward, but there was nothing.

  The echo of gunfire shook her from that furious daze, animating her to action. Nissa quickly gathered the discarded rifles and repacked them in the trunk. Next, she collected her former ally’s sidearm and reloaded it as well as her own weapon with stores from the same trunk. The man himself she left dead in the street, because to hell with him. Back in the vehicle, she found the keys still dangling from the ignition and fired up the engine.

  One thing she did know—she was going to find out who he’d been working for, even if she had to claw them out of the highest perches of power herself.

  In the meantime, though, her city needed her.

  Nissa threw the vehicle into drive and roared through the blockade, ready to assist her fellow officers wherever she found them in need of help.

  22

  Circling high above the city, the fleeks saw all. They were its watchers, unseen observers recording everything that occurred below. Many in the city regarded them as a nuisance; others reviled them as pests or worse—yet, still they were not to be deterred. They had come through the same portal as all the other invading species, after all, though hardly by choice. No, they had been pulled through by its tremendous power and damned to that Earthly existence along with all the others. The primary difference was that they had no agenda, had not raised arms or shown aggression against the wights en masse. And yet they were certainly capable of it, even if most of human society remained blissfully ignorant to the nature of their existence.

  Theirs was a unique sentience, one allowing the creatures to think, communicate, and act in concert. There was no dissension among their ranks, only a single-minded drive to protect and preserve the place that their species had no choice but to call home. At no other time had this drive manifested itself as anything but a desire to simply live and look upon this strange new world as they had their old; to watch and wait and wonder what their place in it would ultimately yield.

  And then came the attempted coup, and with it the greatest clarity possible. With a single shrill cry from their many beaks, the fleeks descended as one.

  23

  Jeanine could hardly believe the carnage unfolding around her. The battle was so frenzied, she could barely tell friend from foe. All she could see before her were bodies, a single moving mass of limbs locked in mortal combat. Dozens had already fallen on both sides, their life’s essence commingling underfoot. The air reeked of blood and death, the sounds of battle punctuated by the cries of the wounded and dying. Beholding the veritable storm of fists and feet and fangs as their owners pummeled, stomped, and feasted upon one another, Jeanine had the absurd thought that she was witnessing a crazed animal trying to eat itself alive. Then she realized that that was exactly what the city was doing, and the thought suddenly seemed much less absurd.

  “Look out,” someone shouted, somehow making themselves heard over the mad scrum around them. Jeanine spun toward the source of the words, swinging her pistol up to bear, but it was too late. Something hit her hard, driving her to the ground and all the breath from her lungs. She scrabbled beneath the weight on top of her, trying to free herself, but it held fast, refusing to budge. The thing hissed in her face and, against her better instincts she opened her eyes, seeing only the fangs of the succubus poised to tear her throat out. She was about to scream when the sound of an almighty crack surprised not just her but the succubus as well. The creature’s jaw went slack, her eyes crossing and going fixed as she tumbled off Jeanine. The next thing Jeanine knew, John Rohner was there to finish the job, pulping the thing’s head with the butt of his shotgun before turning to offer Jeanine a hand up. She took it, as grateful as she was horrified.

  “Gotta keep your head on a swivel, young lady. These bastards are crafty. They’ll come at you from all—”

  “Get down!” she called.

  Rohner didn’t hesitate, dropping into a crouch and ducking his head as Jeanine aimed over his shoulders. She pulled the trigger, staggering the vamp charging his blindside with a shot to the chest. Two more put it down permanently.

  “—Angles,” Rohner said, finishing his previous sentence as he stood and examined the body. He looked up, nodding approvingly. “Nice grouping. Looks like we’re even.”

  “Let’s just get through this. Then we’ll worry about balancing the scales.”

  Rohner laughed, the sound as foreign as could be, given the chaos playing out on the steps of City Hall. He looked as if he were about to respond, then his face went hard with rage and he tore off into the scrum, swinging his shotgun like a bat at a clot of Steelskins that had surrounded a group of his fellows.

  The scene was mesmerizing in a way, but Jeanine knew better than to let her guard down again. She was part of the battle, she reminded herself, not an observer; if she wanted to live, she needed to fight.

  And so she did. Everything she had ever lived and worked for in her short life had come to this. She refused to give it up, refused to surrender her dream or her city. Ann had seen something in her, and she intended to honor that, even if it meant paying the ultimate price on her very first day of wearing the uniform. An ill-fitting uniform two sizes too big, but still the same uniform each of her heroes had put on during their first days on the job.

  With Rohner’s example fresh in her mind, Jeanine threw herself into the fray. The fighting was fierce, but she proved every bit equal to it, surprising even herself when she gave as good as she got and then some. She screamed as she seized one of the Steelskin youths by the back of the head and smashed the side of its skull against the balustrades before it could sink its teeth into a fallen wight. Another shrieked as it tried to leap upon her from behind. She turned and blew the crown of its skull off with a single shot, then emptied the rest of her clip into the two behind it. Not ready to be deterred by a lack of bullets, she was about to take a page from Rohner’s playbook and start pistol-whipping the next vamp she saw when a strange and terrify
ing sound split the sky, drawing all surviving eyes skyward.

  The fleeks, she realized.

  The fleeks were coming.

  “Everybody down!” she cried, dropping into a crouch and throwing her hands over her head.

  The creatures rained down upon the battle like sky-borne missiles, their razor-sharp beaks agape and their talons deployed. Vectoring in, the strange and rarely seen birds set upon the vampires and their allies in droves. There were hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands, their trajectories as precise as they were punishing. They landed by the dozens upon the strig army, those powerful claws and beaks tearing at any exposed squares of skin they could find.

  The strigs screamed and flailed in kind, and yet one by one they succumbed, their bloodcurdling cries mixing with the sounds of the unassuming creatures’ savage feast.

  Of all the terrible things Jeanine had seen over the last twenty-four hours, this was by the far the most bizarre. She couldn’t make sense of what she was witnessing, had no frame of reference for it. The fleeks had never shown the slightest interest in flesh of any kind, and yet there they were, peeling it back from the insurgent strigs like strips of bacon. Some they stripped to the bone, devouring skin, tissue, muscle, even hair and clothing. Others, like the Steelskin youths, were protected by their armor, but only up to a certain point. Their eyes remained exposed, after all, as well as parts of their necks and faces. Jeanine watched one of the creatures land on the armored shoulder of a Steelskin, stab its beak into the youth’s bare neck, rip out the veins within, then fly off to repeat the process as a geyser of blood fountained from the wound.

  Were they allies of humanity? Jeanine wondered. Enemies of humanity’s enemies? Could they be punishing the vampires and gargoyles for their aggression, perhaps protecting themselves and even the city from the possibility of a coup? Or had they simply chosen this moment as a species to go collectively and temporarily insane?

  The city might never know. As quickly as they had appeared, the fleeks soared back into the sky. Only one remained following the mass exodus. It flew a low, lazy circle over Jeanine’s head before landing on the balustrade in front of her. At first the diaphanous creature seemed utterly disinterested in her, cleaning beneath its wing with its beak. This it did for several seconds before abruptly lifting its head and meeting her curious gaze with one of its own, its tiny little brain bobbing away behind its unnervingly aware eyes.

  Then it said simply, in a deeply sonorous, almost echoing voice, “Gratitude. For Cato.”

  Jeanine froze. The eyes; the voice; the words. How could it know? Was that even possible? Before she could summon the presence of mind to ask, the fleek nodded once, then took flight once again.

  “Well, that was pretty fucking insane,” Ann said, holstering her weapon as she strode over. “I don’t know what I expected to happen here today, but it sure as hell wasn’t that.”

  Finally able to command her limbs again, Jeanine spun on her heel and seized Ann by the shoulders. “Did you hear that?”

  Ann raised a brow. “Hear… what?”

  “One of the fleeks,” Jeanine said, speaking rapidly. “It landed right in front of me, right on that balustrade, and it said…”

  Suddenly, she realized how strange she must look. Eyes agape, throttling Ann’s shoulders and babbling about talking birds. The fleeks didn’t really talk, did they? No, of course not. Could she have imagined the whole thing?

  She shook the strange thoughts from her head and let go of Ann’s shoulders, offering a weary smile. “Sorry. Never mind. I think I need to sleep for a few days. My brain is fried.”

  Ann smiled sympathetically. “Hey, no harm, no foul. You kicked ass today, kiddo. You have no idea how proud I am of you right now. You’re going to make one hell of an officer.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Ann.”

  They embraced on the steps of City Hall. Looking out over Ann’s shoulder at the wreckage sprawled out around them, though, Jeanine knew she should feel some sense of relief, perhaps even optimism. The battle was finally over, after all. They had won… but at what cost to the city?

  * * *

  The catacombs were exactly as Cato had described them: cramped, fetid, and dark as pitch. Even with their torches lighting the way forward, the closeness of the rock-carved corridors forced them to move single-file. Hank’s shotgun prevented him from using his torch, so Cato took point with Wexell bringing up the rear. Motes of dust spun lazily in the beam of Cato’s torch as he swept it this way and that, looking for any evidence of Crius and the rest of the escaped Wargoyles. Instead, he revealed only bodies, all of them neatly warehoused between shelves chiseled out of the rock, their hands crossed atop their chests. All shapes and sizes were represented, and many of them had mummified after years, if not decades, of being interred in the musty catacombs. The rest were either in the initial stages of the process or were still too fresh.

  “Damn,” Hank said in a low whisper, marveling as he followed the path of Cato’s beam. “How many people come in here and don’t come out?”

  “Probably more than they’d like us to know about.” There were no names or inmate numbers identifying the corpses, nothing at all to indicate whom they had once belonged to, only what species. This was the closest Cato could come to imagining a perfect place to make a body disappear, especially one whose owner had perished under suspicious circumstances.

  “But why do they keep them for so long?” Wexell wondered.

  “Ever try to get rid of a body?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it ain’t easy. So, why bother or take the risk of getting caught when you can just shove ’em in a hole in the ground and move on with your life?”

  “Point taken.”

  A low arch presented itself ahead. Cato ducked his head as he stepped through, only to find several more passages on the other side. There were five in total. Cato and Wexell shined their torches down them all, confirming that each was as long and confined as the last.

  “Well, this is interesting,” Hank said.

  “It’s gotta be either the left or right, whichever one shares a wall with the sewer. Any ideas?”

  Hank shook his head. “None. My sense of direction is all screwed up down here.”

  “Damn it.”

  “We could try splitting up. You take one, Wexell and I take the other?”

  “We’re not splitting up,” Cato said. They were almost certainly going to be outnumbered when they caught up to Crius and the rest. The last thing they needed was to split up what little firepower they boasted between them. “We need to pick right the first time. At this rate, we’re not going to have time to double back, not if Crius is up to what I think he is.”

  “Okay, but how do we figure out—”

  “Shh!”

  Spinning toward the source of the sound, Cato found Wexell pressed flat against the stone wall. His entire front was flush with the surface, his hands raised on either side of his head and his ear turned against it. He seemed to be deep in concentration, though over what, Cato couldn’t gather. Before he could ask the young officer what he was doing, Wexell detached himself from the wall and performed the same maneuver against its neighbor.

  “It’s this one,” he said a moment later, a broad grin lighting up his fleshy face. “It’s cooler, and you can hear the water moving through the pipes on the other side. It’s faint, but it’s there if you listen.”

  After trading glances with his partner, Hank walked to the wall and assumed the position Wexell had. Several moments passed before he finally said, “Son of a bitch. He’s right, Cato. I can hear the water in the pipes.”

  “‘Atta boy, Wexell.” Cato thumped the officer on his meaty shoulder for emphasis. Then they set off down the path, as sure as they could be under the circumstances that it was the correct one.

  They moved much more briskly through the second corridor than the first, covering the same distance in roughly half the time. It was much like the first, though some of i
ts shelves remained unclaimed. There were a number of open spaces toward the back, and it was within one of the larger, gargoyle-sized shelves that they found the break in the wall that led into the sewers. Crius’ operatives had chiseled through from the other side, an exhaustive process that must have taken days, if not weeks. The stone was several feet thick and extremely dense. On a certain level, Cato couldn’t help being impressed with the amount of planning and effort that had gone into the operation. On another, wholly different level, he was enraged at the audacity of it. Who the hell did these assholes think they were, making him chase his own tail all damn day and night?

  “I’ll go through first,” he said to Hank and Wexell, then pulled the bulky breather off his face and left it there in the corridor. “Unfortunately, I don’t think these are going to fit, which is really going to suck, considering where we’re going.”

  As he shimmied through on his belly, it was all he could do not to cough or gag against the fine grit he kicked up along the way. Finally, he was through, breathing deeply to clear the grit from his airway. That proved to be a mistake in its own right, the air on that side of the wall being much more fragrant, and not in an especially appealing way.

  This time he did gag, forcing himself to breathe through his mouth as he said through the opening, “All right, come on through. And make sure you take a deep breath first.”

  Hank came through next. He gladly took Cato’s hand when it was offered, then stood and dusted himself off. “Why did you tell us to—” he started to say before the stench got the better of him. “Never mind.”

  Wexell had the same reaction, shaking his head at the offending odor. “Now that is truly foul.”

  “Believe it or not, you get used to it,” Cato said. “Now, let’s move. If I know Crius, he’s following this shaft straight to the courthouse. It’s only a few blocks away, so, come on.”

  They set off, jogging quickly but carefully over the slick stone walkway flanking the filthy, murky water. The shaft itself was wide and open, allowing them much more freedom of movement than the catacombs or even the prison hallways. It was only the ever-present danger of slipping and cracking one’s skull on the walkway that kept them from moving any faster.