by G. D. Penman
She didn’t go rushing straight up to the stones. She followed the path around the row of apple trees that Mother called an orchard and tottered up the slick slope until she could see what was happening. A deep red glow poured out and there was something within it. Something huge and too terrible for Iona to put into words. A face like three baboons spliced together. Tails like barbed whips, smashing back and forth against the invisible barrier between the stones. “THE PACT IS SEALED, GORMLAITH O’SULLIVAN. ALL SHALL BE AS YOU WILL IT, AND WHEN THE TIME COMES . . .”
“I know the deal.”
The light snapped out, but the dark was more than just the absence of light. It was the absence of everything. Like there was a hole in the world, pressing against the circle. Mother turned to look out, staring down at her little moldy cottage in the middle of nowhere, then she sighed and let the darkness loose.
It rolled out from amidst the stones until everything ahead of Iona was black and the stars had blinked out. She ran from it. Ran straight out into the swamp screaming at the top of her lungs. The mud sucked at her legs and she fell on her face in the shallow water. She tried to breathe but her lungs filled with nothing but burning. The darkness swept over her where she lay in the water. It dragged at her. Pulled her down, deeper and deeper. Further and further from air and light and life until it was as if she had never been there at all.
November 2, 2015
Rewriting the Inferno must have worked eventually, because about an hour before dawn Sully woke up with her face stuck to her notes and an ache in her back screaming to remind her that she was heading toward fifty years old, even if magic was preserving her looks. Marie’s fingers were in her hair, brushing out the tangles of yesterday. She leaned in close and whispered, “You really can’t take care of yourself, darlin’.”
Sully mumbled, “Good thing I’ve got you to take care of me then.”
Marie’s fingers tightened in her hair and Sully let out a grunt. “Darlin’, do you have any idea why my daddy was acting so strange last night after he came back up to the main house?”
Sully yawned and peeled the paper off her face. “Probably because I asked him for permission to marry you.”
Marie bit her lip as Sully tried to stretch the kink out of her back until finally she couldn’t wait any more and she blurted out, “D’you think you could have asked me first?”
“You can’t ask permission for something you’ve already done. Just forgiveness.” Sully staggered to her feet and carefully placed a kiss on Marie’s cheek. “I wanted to do things right this time around. Since it’s going to be forever. I had to ask your dad first.”
Marie was glowering at her. “Are you going to ask me now?”
“He hasn’t given me permission yet,” Sully smirked. Marie put a hand to her mouth to cover her involuntarily lengthening fangs. Sully’s smirks held promises. There was a knock on the guest house door before either of them could go any further. Marie whispered, “They were still asleep when I snuck out.”
An angry Jeremiah on her doorstep would have been a relief compared to what Sully found. When she opened the door, Magus Ogden was waiting for her, sweeping off his hat and bowing. Sully scowled at him, hard, but her scowls never seemed to penetrate his aura of perfect confidence. “Good morning, Miss Sullivan.”
“I know you’ve been away for a while, but morning traditionally starts when the sun is up there.” Sully pointed at the purple darkness above them.
“Then I suppose that I have been traveling through the night to come and see you.”
In his tricorn hat and overcoat, Ogden looked perfectly at home in the little courtyard. Places like this probably hadn’t changed since he was around the first time, before his little trip to the far planes. Sully sighed, “Come in then. Before you scare the farmers.”
“Why, thank you.”
Sully fussed with the kettle while Marie stood in the doorway behind Ogden and scowled at the back of his head. Even Sully couldn’t burn water, so eventually two cups of instant coffee found their way onto the breakfast bar. If Ogden could taste how bad it was, he was too polite to mention it. “You know that you caused quite a stir the other night, flouncing out of that diplomatic function. The ambassador was quite offended. The Prime Minister considered it to be pretty rude.”
Sully growled, “I figured that melting that condescending prick’s face off would probably have been a bigger diplomatic incident.”
“What on earth did Ambassador Red Bear say to provoke such ire?” Ogden was grinning.
Sully bit back her first response and then took a long calming sip of the scalding, godawful coffee. “He was rude about my girlfriend.”
Ogden threw back his head and laughed. “In all the time that I have been back I don’t think that I have met this girl who is always getting you into trouble. I am starting to suspect that she is just an excuse for you to avoid late night meetings and yell at politicians. I am not sure that she even exists.”
Sully put the cup down carefully, her scowl twisting into confusion. “Marie is standing right behind you.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course she is.”
“No. She really is.”
Marie stepped forward. “What in the nine hells?”
Ogden was smiling at Sully indulgently. “I am sorry, Miss Sullivan, but we are the only people in the building.”
Sully leaned back on her stool. The cogs of her mind whirred into action despite the ungodly earliness of the hour. “Marie, could you poke Magus Ogden in the back of the head?”
Ogden started to frown. “Miss Sullivan—”
He leapt out of his seat with a yelp when Marie prodded him, spinning around on the spot and knocking his coffee all over the floor. “What was that?”
“That was Marie.” Sully snorted.
“Sullivan, I do not know what tricks you are playing, or how, but I am warning you—”
“Oh, shut up for a minute. This is fascinating.”
Marie looked giddy. “He really can’t see me? This is so weird!”
Sully was tapping her fingers on the counter, rattling out the rhythm of her thoughts. “This has to be a vampire thing. Demons can’t sense vampires, can’t really see them unless they are right on top of them. This must be the same. The Magi of Manhattan were exposed to much higher levels of ambient magic in the Far Realms than anyone here experiences and they adapted to the saturation. That is why they can store so much more of it, why it comes to them so much more naturally.”
Marie was dancing in a circle waving her hands in front of Ogden’s face and giggling. Ogden looked anything but amused, and for the very first time Sully caught a glimpse of fear on his features. “Are you trying to tell me that there is a vampire in this room?”
Sully stopped smiling. “Her name is Marie.”
“I don’t care if she is Her Majesty, Victoria, the Queen of England. You are telling me that vampires could be all around me at any moment and I wouldn’t even realize until they were touching me? Not only me, but also all my brothers and sisters in Manhattan? Wasn’t it you who told me that the British deploy vampire soldiers against demons? What is to stop them from—”
He took a deep breath and calmed himself. “There are very few vampires left in the Americas. Nobody needs to know about this. I can rely on your . . . on Marie’s discretion?”
Marie nodded solemnly, and Sully did her best not to laugh at the expression on her face. “She won’t say a word to anybody.”
Ogden brushed himself for imaginary lint and then settled back into his seat. “All is well then.” He frowned. “How often has she been there when I was talking to you?”
“We just assumed that you were rude.”
He turned slowly to look around the room, glancing at Sully for confirmation as he went. When she nodded, he said, a little too loudly, “I apologize for any offense t
hat I gave, Miss Marie. I was not made aware of your presence.”
Marie had drifted right around Ogden to come stand beside Sully behind his back. She let out a delighted giggle. “Oh, he’s a charmer. You never told me he was a charmer.”
Sully pursed her lips and Marie took it as an invitation. What should have been a chaste peck grew deeper as Marie leaned in against Sully’s shoulder. Ogden coughed loudly and Marie pulled away giggling. “I just made you make fish-lips at your army-wizard work buddy.”
Ogden was staring, a little perplexed, at Sully, but she discounted him for a moment. “What was that all about?” she asked Marie.
“Just saying goodbye properly, darlin’. He’s here to drag you off to work again. I figured I would just stay here with my folks and try to smooth out some of the strangeness you made by tossing a dowry at Daddy.”
Sully spluttered. “I was just being polite. You told me they were old fashioned. And besides, I’m not going anywhere.”
Ogden coughed again, more forcefully, “Actually the Prime Minister sent me here to collect you—and I quote, ‘by any means necessary’—for the strategy meeting this afternoon.”
Marie quirked an eyebrow at her and Sully grumbled. “Fine.”
After a hasty change into a new Hawaiian shirt and the battered leather jacket that Sully had won off of a were-snake in Laos, they went out into the courtyard and prepared their spells. With the lock on portals and teleportation that the Magi had leveled on the American continent to keep the British out, there were limited options for travel beyond the slow, mundane ones. Ogden had been using a flying spell for centuries, but despite the relative ease with which Sully had learned it, she still wasn’t entirely comfortable flitting around the sky. It felt simultaneously alien and all too familiar. She conjured a parasol for Marie to see her safely back to the house now that the sun was rising and kissed her goodbye. Marie murmured into her mouth as she pulled away, “Don’t be gone too long, darlin’, I’ll miss you.”
Sully gave her a wink, then launched herself up into the red dawn sky.
It wasn’t easy to talk with the wind whipping past his face, but Ogden still tried. Incessantly. “Did you really think that the Prime Minister would let you vanish in the middle of planning the first offensive action of the war?”
“I was due a holiday. I’ve been in every planning meeting for months. All that is left is for your people to finish the damn spell. Until that is done, I am as useful as a decorative fern.”
“And what if I told you that the spell was complete?”
“Then I’d call you a liar.”
Ogden laughed loudly into the bandana he had wrapped around his face. Sully wished she had borrowed a scarf from Clementine. She was genuinely concerned that she was going to swallow a fly while going fifty miles an hour.
He spun in to fly closer to her, lying on his back in the air. “You are correct in your assumption. The Magi still work diligently on your spell. Even so, you must have known that you would not be allowed—”
“Allowed what? A whole five minutes to myself without some tool in a suit talking to me like I’m there to make his coffee?” Sully poured a little extra power into the spell and shot off ahead of Ogden. The rush of frigid wind biting into her cheeks was less painful than listening to him prattling on. He caught up to her within a few minutes and she could tell at a glance that he was smirking under the salt-crusted cloth on his face. She pointedly ignored him and tried to keep herself pointed due north.
They had almost made it to the border of New England Province when the hair on the back of Sully’s neck started to stand up and her arcane senses started to scream at her. She spun herself to glower at Ogden. “I suppose I’m meant to think this is just a coincidence?”
She could feel the wind of powerful wings beating against her skin. She could taste the blood of the battlefield. Ogden didn’t even look ashamed. “I see no reason to hide my movements from one of my oldest friends and closest allies, Sullivan. I do not know why you are so afraid—”
She cut him off. “I’m not scared of shit. But you know I don’t want to hang around with—”
Mol Kalath dropped out of the cloud bank above them, moisture turning to steam as it rolled off the oily black feathers of its wings. From a distance it could have been mistaken for a crow, albeit a crow of impossible proportions, but as it swung in close Sully could see the six burning green eyes arrayed around its head, and the way that its torso tapered so that it had a silhouette almost like a feather-coated snake’s. The smell of brimstone still clung to Mol Kalath despite the time it had spent away from the hells and the stench rolled over Sully, even here in the open air. The demon closed the distance between them, only seeming to remember at the last moment that it was not swooping down to grab her. Its beak creaked open. “GREETINGS TO YOU, IONA SULLIVAN. GREETINGS TO YOU, MAGUS OGDEN.”
Demons had no inside voices.
“Greetings to you, Mol Kalath, it is a beautiful day for a flight,” Ogden bellowed back. Maybe neither of them had inside voices. Sully had certainly never heard Ogden whisper.
“YOUR SKIES ARE STRANGE. TOO SMOOTH AND TOO STILL. AT HOME THERE IS FLUX AND TURBULENCE. STORMS THAT LAST GENERATIONS. WINDS THAT WOULD STRIP YOUR MORTAL FLESH FROM YOUR BONES.”
Sully shuddered, mentally blaming it on the cold rather than revulsion. It seemed to catch the demon’s attention. “I HAVE COME TO SEEK AUDIENCE WITH YOU, IONA SULLIVAN. THERE ARE THINGS THAT YOU MUST KNOW. THINGS THAT ONLY I CAN TEACH YOU.”
Mol Kalath had been pursuing her politely but relentlessly since Manhattan had returned from the far plane. The only benefit to the ridiculous work schedule that the new Prime Minister had been inflicting on her was that it gave her an excuse to avoid the demon. Right now, there was nothing but dead air between her, it, and New Amsterdam. She calculated the distance in her head.
“If I’ve survived this long without knowing, I’ll manage a bit longer.”
Sully put on another burst of acceleration, leaving the two gigantic pains in her ass spinning in her wake. For one glorious moment both Ogden and the demon shrank away to nothing but dark spots on the horizon, then they gave chase.
At first Sully tried to lose them by flitting through cloud banks, but both her pursuers were far more accustomed to flight than she and they closed on her easily. She couldn’t beat them on skill and she couldn’t beat the power of either a demon or a magus. She grinned, then she plummeted from the sky as though someone had cut her strings. She dropped a few layers of shielding ahead of her as she fell, and they wrapped around her like a cocoon, taking the friction from the air and dissipating it around her into a pleasant warmth. By the time she was about to hit the covered bridge beneath her, she was almost comfortable. She changed direction so hard that her neck snapped back and for one agonizing second she thought that she had done herself permanent harm, before the jarring pain started to fade. With the added momentum of the fall and another push of power, she opened up the gap between herself and the demon. She couldn’t keep up this pace forever but she didn’t need to, she just had to reach New Amsterdam before the demon could make itself heard.
New England Province was a darker shade of green than the farmlands that had made up most of their flight. The color felt rich to Sully as she rushed back to the only place that had ever felt like home. Forests that would have been stripped clear for farmland in other provinces were allowed to flourish here. The British might have mutilated their share of this continent for centuries, but they still liked to have somewhere nice to walk their dogs on the weekend. Sully swung low enough that the beating of her invisible wings ruffled the leaves on the treetops as she sped along. Mol Kalath was still trailing along up in the clouds. If it had been brave enough to come down and risk bumping its pinfeathers, Sully would have had to fly underneath the canopy, and would likely have crashed into a tree trunk for her troubles. She suspected th
at the demon knew that and was hanging back as a courtesy, which only irritated her more. She knew that her behavior was irrational and that demons were the allies of America—in the abstract she could accept that—but face to face with that creature she still felt the bone-deep terror that the nuns back in Catholic school had spent so long trying to instill in her. She hated feeling that fear, and she hated the big bird for making her feel that way, even if it didn’t mean to. Especially if it didn’t mean to.
Before too long, houses began to appear beneath her, the frayed fringes of suburbia stretching out into the beauty of the wilds. She slowed just a little, easing the drain on her reserves in case of a crisis. The city was as big, beautiful and lethal as it had ever been, climbing up over the horizon like a rampaging titan, surrounded by its own personal aura of smog and human suffering. Sully grinned as home came into sight. She didn’t get to look in on the monster from the outside very often; usually she was in the belly of the beast. Even after all this time she still got choked up just looking at it. The strange spires of Manhattan had been an unwelcome addition to the skyline, but she had gotten used to them eventually. What she couldn’t stand was the milky white expanse beyond the city where the barrier spells were layered against the British bombardment. You couldn’t even hear the explosions. The Magi of Manhattan had done amazing work. She swept by the sentry stations posted around the city proper and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention as she was inspected by the multitudes of spells designed to spot intruders. She could have done without that, too.
The Brooklyn Municipal Building wasn’t the tallest in the city, but the brassy quality of its fixtures made it stand out despite its lowly stature, that and the cloud of complex magical protections that had been layered over it. Sully drifted down to land on a balcony, staring down the barrels of a half-dozen rifles as usual.