The Wounded Ones

by G. D. Penman

  There was a rumbling from within the demon beneath her, a regular, crackling sound that it took Sully a long moment to realize was laughter. Mol Kalath was not at the head of the pack, but it was charging on with the same blind abandon as all of the rest of them. A few spells were flung up from the walls of London but even the few that hit a demon just made the creature swell up larger and more powerful than before. The demon swarm dove for the redcoats manning the walls and—only an inch away from their targets—smashed against an invisible barrier.

  Mol Kalath was one of the lucky ones; it had enough time to turn aside instead of plowing straight into the unseen, impassable wall. The demons’ roars of triumph had turned into bitter shrieks. Sully had to scream to be heard over their wailing. “What is it, what happened?”

  “A WISH. IT IS THE ONLY THING THAT COULD TURN US AWAY. THEY HAVE WISHED THAT DEMONS CANNOT ENTER.”

  “How could they make a wish when all of the demons are on our side?!”

  Before Sully could get her answer, the British opened fire. Mortars had been emplaced all along the wall, and the exploding shells easily penetrated the swirling mass of demons. Creatures that had survived millennia died in an instant.

  Sully was screaming at the demons to retreat. Slick ichor showered down on her amidst the sparks and buzzing metal. The explosions were so loud and so close that she couldn’t even hear herself. Instinct had her throwing up shields but there was no end to the burning chaos. Mol Kalath was trilling at her in a language she didn’t understand. A demon’s head tumbled past her, looking halfway between an elephant and a man.

  One lucky shard of superheated metal made it through, searing a line across her back and ruining her jacket. The next piece of shrapnel bit deep into her thigh and she burned her fingers digging it out. Her eyes watered from the smoke and her hands were sticky with her own blood. When she drew a breath to cast, her spell turned to a wheezing cough.

  She fell. It could have been one second into the bombardment or an hour, she didn’t know. All she remembered when she hit the water was that one moment the demon was beneath her and in the next all she held was a handful of bloody feathers.

  The freezing sea washed away her confusion and she launched herself back into the air with Ogden’s clumsy flying spell. Sucking in oxygen, she slipped past the firestorm, skirting close to the lapping waves, then rushed up the cliff face with spellfire boiling up out of her hands faster than she could shape it. She rose like a comet. For one awful moment the redcoats on the wall looked up at her and saw her fury before she rained death down on them.

  Her concussion spells ruined the mortars’ aim. Darts of white flame pulsed from her fingertips, shredding hastily erected defenses as they were cast. She landed on the wall without any interference from the barrier that had repelled the demons. Then the real work began.

  All British eyes were still on the sky. Down on the ground, Sully danced through the assembled soldiers with a stolen saber in one hand and a whip of flames in the other. Her heart thundered in her chest and with every breath she cast another curse. It had been a long time since she had gone to war, but she had not forgotten the screams, the blood, the horror in her guts when she recognized that appetizing smell as roasted human flesh.

  Arterial spray got caught in her defensive spells, swirling around her as she killed and ran and killed again without pause. There had been a hundred men stationed on the walls when she began at one end of the line of redcoats, soldiers, and artillery equipment techs. Now there were less than twenty still standing. Sully could not remember a single one of their faces. They had been only a blur of targets, only objects in motion. Not people. Not really. She couldn’t stop to think that they were people or she wouldn’t be able to throw the next spell that boiled away a young man’s guts in a flash of putrid yellow smoke.

  The deafening rhythm of the mortars had fallen to a stutter. When she had a moment to look up, the demons were fleeing to France. Her hands were shaking. Adrenaline or exhaustion or both. Blood thumped steadily from the wound in her leg. Marie was going to be furious—these trousers had been a gift and besides, that was her dinner going to waste.

  Reinforcements were already boiling up the stairs onto the walls to take a last few pot-shots at the demonic stragglers. Sully staggered through the corpses to the edge of the wall, killing an officer in a pressed uniform with a sloppy backhand stroke before the snapped saber tumbled from her numb fingers. She caught a stray bullet from the far end of the wall in a hazy shield and let it drop to the ground with a little splash.

  More and more soldiers rushed onto the wall, readying their Gatling rifles and bellowing out orders at her, as if she would ever have listened even when she was on their side. The dull ache in her chest told her that she did not have enough power to cast her flying spell again. In her frenzy, she had depleted not only her own resources, but had drained the oversaturation of magic from the air around her, too. All the excess power that the dissolution of the Veil of Tears had released had passed through Sully and come out as death.

  There was no way in hell that she was letting the British take her alive. She turned to face them as they emerged from the stairwells and charged toward her. She raised her middle fingers to the whole country and jumped backward off the wall.

  Mol Kalath caught her before she had fallen ten feet.

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE LOOKED DOWN.”

  “And lose my nerve?”

  The wheezing crackle started up in the demon’s chest once again and this time Sully was laughing along with it. Mol Kalath spun in the air, dodging shells and bullets with a familiar grace. But now that the British gunners weren’t spoiled for a choice of targets, every mortar on the wall was tracking their position.

  “YOU MUST TAKE US AWAY FROM HERE. I CANNOT FLY AND CAST AT THE SAME TIME.”

  A bullet clipped off the top of Mol Kalath’s beak, as if to prove the point. Sully buried her face in its feathers and groaned. “I’ve got nothing left. I’m empty.”

  “SHARE MY STRENGTH, IONA. TAP INTO THE WELL OF MY POWER.”

  A mortar shell shrieked by them and Sully had to cling tightly to avoid another bath.

  She shouted, “Great plan. Except I have no idea how to do that.”

  “YOU HAVE DONE IT BEFORE. YOU HAVE DRAINED DEMONS DRY.”

  “That was… I don’t want to hurt you. What the hell? I really don’t.”

  “YOU WILL NOT HURT ME. BUT THE BRITISH WILL. CAST YOUR SPELL, IONA.”

  The barrier between Sully and the power that she needed was only as thick as her skin. The moment that she tried to draw magic from the beast beneath her it began flooding through like from a hole in a dam. In an instant her strength was restored, and an instant later spellfire started leaking from her fingers and her eyes. It was too much, too fast, and in the back of her mind she saw glimpses from the cases of magical overload that she had witnessed, bone fragments and puddles that were left behind. The power started to burn.

  She cast her traveling spell without a full set of calculations, mostly from memory, while they dodged explosions and Gatling gun fire. With a thunderclap as the air rushed in behind them, Sully and her demon vanished.

  November 5, 2015

  Mol Kalath hit the barrier across the Black Bay like a fly hitting a windshield. It spun as it fell toward the battering waves below, shielding its precious cargo from the sight of the British Dreadnought along the coast. In the water Mol Kalath gathered power and reset its broken bones, then it launched itself back into the air, flying hard for land and passing through the spells blocking travel without even pausing to unravel and reset them. With one last effort it heaved itself and Sully onto a street by the bay-side. The demon collapsed in a sodden heap with one black wing stretched out over her and then it let exhaustion drag it down into sleep.

  When it awoke, Mol Kalath was dry but alone. Their return had sounded no alarms and th
e docks had already been evacuated when the British bombardment began so there had been nobody to discover them sleeping through the early hours of the day. The demon did not see New Amsterdam as Sully did. Whatever romance she attached to the plumes of fog drifting between the blocky buildings, it did not ascribe to. To creatures of chaos, a city built on grids was a maze; it wasn’t surprising that so many of them had chosen to grow wings rather than trying to navigate it from down here. With senses so arcane that humanity had no name for them, Mol Kalath started to hunt for Sully’s trail.

  There was a strange sense of familiarity as Mol Kalath passed through the streets by the Black Bay, not just from the oddments of architecture that reminded it of Manhattan, but a more profound sense of déjà vu, as if it had walked these streets in another life. It followed that déjà vu back to its source, an unremarkable apartment building that had its façade hidden behind a web of scaffolding. Mol Kalath shed as much of its size as it could and pressed through the front door into a hallway. There were traces of Sully everywhere; fragments of her spells, long since spent and discarded, littered the hall. One of the apartment doors had been kicked in—with Sully’s temper in mind, Mol Kalath peered through the gap. The apartment had been stripped of all decoration and furniture, but even empty it looked hardly large enough for a person to live in. Still, to Mol Kalath’s eyes, Sully’s presence was ingrained in every surface. She herself was standing in the center of the room, staring into a corner, where once there had been a bed.

  “IONA.”

  Sully spun to one knee, launching a barrage of spells at Mol Kalath before either of them realized what was happening. The magic hammered into the demon, making it swell larger and crackle with contained power. “IONA, STOP.”

  She didn’t stop. When her first barrage failed to scratch the creature, she cast something on herself and charged with a guttural roar.

  “IONA. IT IS ME.”

  Her fist caught Mol Kalath at the side of its beak and with her enhanced strength it was enough to snap the demon’s head into the doorframe and shower them both with plaster dust. “IONA. I AM A FRIEND.”

  She cursed and hammered her forehead into the central cluster of Mol Kalath’s eyes. The demon quailed and tried to pull its face back out of the room but Sully was as relentless as she was vicious. She hammered at Mol Kalath with both fists, slammed the door into its neck and roared defiance in the demon’s face when it still would not fall. “SULLY.”

  She stopped dead. Ichor trickled from her knuckles to join the puddles on the floor. “I AM MOL KALATH. I AM YOUR FRIEND.”

  She spat. “I think I would remember making friends with a giant talking bird.”

  “THINK BACK. WHAT IS THE LAST THING THAT YOU REMEMBER?”

  Sully’s eyebrows drew down. With a whisper, she let her enhancement spells slip away. “I . . . I don’t know what you have done to me, but . . .”

  “SULLY. CONCENTRATE.”

  She stumbled back a step, then sat down heavily on the bare floorboards. “I asked Marie to marry me. She said that she would. She had a friend, who was a party planner. We were going to meet him after work.”

  The searing pain in Sully’s brain started to ease and memories started to come back in a trickle. First a day at a time, then weeks and months. She turned pale. “Jesus. I burned out? I never burn out. What the hell did I cast?”

  “A TRAVELING SPELL. YOU PULLED US BOTH FROM THE FIRE. YOU CARRIED US OVER THREE THOUSAND MILES.”

  Sully snorted. “Nobody can travel that far; you’d need a portal and Magi . . .”

  “YOU CAN. YOU DID. REMEMBER.”

  She scrambled to her feet and darted into the only separate room in the apartment. Mol Kalath did not understand human digestion, but it did know that the process was meant to travel in only one direction and that the sounds coming from the bathroom were probably a sign of distress.

  When Sully came back, wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she was shaking. She pointed at the demon and looked absolutely furious that her finger was waving around. “Stay away from me.”

  “IONA. YOU MUST TRY TO REMEMBER—”

  “I remember everything. That’s why I’m telling you to stay away. If you come near me again, I will end you. If you try to touch me again, you are getting an express ticket right back to the hells. Do you understand me?”

  Mol Kalath backed out into the hallway, wincing as its feathers ruffled over the corner of the doorframe and tugged on its wounds. “YOU ARE INJURED. I CANNOT LEAVE YOU WHEN—”

  “Get out of here. I’ve had much worse and I’ve dealt with it myself. Go find our army. I need some time to think.”

  Mol Kalath was not happy but it backed its way out of the building and took off in a shower of wilted feathers. Sully took one last look around the hollow shell of her old apartment and then limped inland to catch a taxi.

  Breaking in to the IBI used to be a lot easier. Most of that was the confidence that had come with knowing she could wave a badge and make all the guns point somewhere else, but the current block on traveling spells was definitely a complicating factor. She probably still had friends in the Bureau, but she didn’t want to put anyone at odds with Ceejay. Despite their disagreement earlier, Sully couldn’t shake the idea that he was on her side and that she had to be screwing up a lot to make him this angry. The motor pool entrance gate had always been sticky coming back down, so she only had to wait half an hour behind a dumpster before she got her chance to duck in. The blind spots in the security down in the lower levels of the building were so gaping that she only had to use one spell to get through, a tiny concussion spell that was just enough to spin a camera to point the other way and yet it left her skull humming. She was going to have to be careful with magic for a day or two. She had no desire to feel ever again the void where a lifetime of memories was meant to be. Once she was in the guts of the building, she didn’t have to think any more; she had trodden these halls so many times that her feet carried her to Raavi’s lab without her input.

  He had turned the place into a modern art exhibit while Sully was away. Huge hunks of white wood, crackling with magic and in varying stages of being carved into human likenesses, littered every flat surface. Raavi himself was shirtless in the midst of a heap of sawdust with flecks of it stuck in his oiled back hair, hacking away at another carving with a scalpel in each of his four hands and a manic glint in his eye. In other words, he looked more or less the same as usual. Sully made sure to slam the door as she came in so he didn’t panic and drop the scalpels while she was in the danger zone. “Sully, my dear, what a delightful surprise! To what do I owe the pleasure of this—Oh. You’re bleeding everywhere.”

  The pain had been manageable, but only until he pointed out her injury. Now she hobbled her way to one of the tables and hauled herself up with a grunt. “What do you say to a little surgery between friends? For old times’ sake?”

  “You know what. I’m not even going to complain. I am bored out of my mind. Get your trousers off and lets me get all this muck cleaned off me.”

  Sully flopped back onto the metal with a clatter and laughed. “No wonder you’re single, with that bedside manner.”

  “I will have you know that I have been on two dates this week,” he shouted over his shoulder from the sink at the far end of the room. Sully grinned as she fumbled with her belt.

  “With the same person?”

  “You do remember you’re here for a favor, right? I am about to be sewing you up. Wouldn’t want to stitch your elbow to your arse by accident.”

  She got the blood-soaked trousers as far down as her knees and gave up. “Come on, you miss the abuse when I’m not around.”

  His grinning face suddenly loomed into view above her. “I do actually. Most of the folks upstairs have no sense of humor whatsoever.”

  She hissed when he prodded at her leg and made a sound somewhere between a gasp
and a yelp when he tugged on the edges of the wound to peer inside. “Half of this is cauterized. What on earth have you been up to?”

  “Waging wars. Riding demons. You know, the usual.”

  The syringe was jammed into her leg before she had the chance to make her usual objections and in less than a minute, the cold metal beneath her started to feel much more comfortable. The pain was still there, but there was a handy layer of mental fluff between her and experiencing it. “So am I to assume from all of the bullet wounds that the war isn’t going according to plan?”

  “None of them ever do,” she yawned, “I wouldn’t worry about it though. Plenty more plans.”

  He was frowning when she caught a glimpse of his face. “Do plans B through Z also involve you getting pieces of yourself blasted off?”

  “Wouldn’t be a proper war if I didn’t have some scars to show for it.”

  He tutted and set to work suturing her leg. For a few moments there was a companionable silence as he concentrated on the fine manual work, but that gave Sully long enough to pick out the soft voice on the radio. “What the hell are you listening to?”

  “Oh, you haven’t heard this? I half thought it was one of your ideas.”

  “Some girl reciting numbers?”

  “Isn’t it marvelous. Nobody has a clue what it is! There are theories though, so many theories. I personally subscribe to the idea that the British are using some pattern in the numbers to share intelligence with their spies across the Americas. Although if that was it, why wouldn’t we be jamming the signal? Of course, it may be that we are the ones broadcasting it to communicate with our spies. So that would explain that. Whatever the code is, it must be terribly clever because nobody has been able to work out the pattern yet. They broadcast on the hour, every hour. It must be a recording, right?”