The Wounded Ones

by G. D. Penman

  The impact knocked the air out of her again. There was no pain. Or at least, there wasn’t any more pain than there had been before. Sully forced her eyes open and her vision was filled with feathers. “I CANNOT LET YOU OUT OF MY SIGHT FOR A MOMENT.”

  Sully was laughing despite herself. “Didn’t I tell you to piss off back to Europe?”

  “I DID. THEN I RETURNED.”

  Whatever membranous barrier there had been between Sully and Mol Kalath’s raw power in the past had been stripped away when they last connected. Her reserves refilled in a heady rush. “It is after me. We need to lead it away from people.”

  “WE NEED TO FIGHT.”

  Sully climbed Mol Kalath, scrambling and yanking at feathers as she tried to get up onto its back. The Hydra loomed into sight the moment she passed the demon’s wings, so big that looking up at it triggered her vertigo. She shook her head. “How do you fight something like that?”

  “THE SAME WAY THAT WE FIGHT EVERYTHING ELSE.”

  Spellfire was coiling out from Sully’s fists, her shadow-twin’s power flowing through her as easily as she would draw a breath. Fear and confusion were forgotten as the raw power coursed through her. The demon flew in an ever-widening spiral around the Hydra. The mass of heads tracked their movement as they ascended, coiling and weaving around one another. “It’s just a big turtle, right? So, let’s flip it.”

  Laughter rumbled beneath her and they dove for the Hydra’s flippers.

  Sully cast as they fell, the complex formulae for increasing the power of her concussion spell unneeded as she poured more and more raw power into the working. She had been using the spell for decades. Tinkering with it for even longer. This latest change wasn’t even difficult—it was what the spell had been fighting to be all along.

  She tumbled from Mol Kalath’s back when they hit the sand bar, but she rolled to her feet without missing a single syllable of the spell. The spellforms that she had traced in the air rained down all around her, and with only a moment of hesitation Mol Kalath was a reassuring weight braced against her back. The instant that the Hydra had seen them land it had lunged for her once more, but it was too late. Sully raised a hand and snapped her fingers.

  The impact of the concussion tore her from her feet despite Mol Kalath’s support. The demon, too, was flipped end over end. Both of them went skipping over the tops of the waves until they hit the beach. The shockwave rolled over them, deafening and huge. The windows of the warehouses along the waterfront imploded. The lampposts rocked back and forth like ears of corn in a windy field. Sully scrambled over the downed demon to see what her spell had wrought, just in time to catch the wave that it had thrown up directly to the face. She spat out the mouthful of saltwater and scrubbed at her stinging eyes. The Hydra was nowhere to be seen. She cackled, then kicked Mol Kalath playfully. “Did you see that?!”

  “THE HYDRA HAS BEEN LAUNCHED FAR FROM THE LAND. WE HAVE TIME TO PREPARE OUR DEFENSES.”

  “At this point, I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  Ogden dropped from the sky to land between Sully and the demon, looking even more windswept than usual. The experience of being hit by the shockwave had done nothing to temper his good manners. “What the hell did you do?” he bellowed.

  November 7, 2015 AM

  A little after three in the morning, Sully’s head lolled over to bash against the train window and she snapped back to attention. A cigar had turned to ash where it was dangling from her lips and it had sprinkled into the little plastic cup of gin that the bar had let her take back to her compartment. She stared down into the swirl of gray and after a moment of deliberation, grudgingly decided it was undrinkable. Arrayed around her on the table of the cabin were a scrying mirror, two cellphones, and a pad of paper where she was working through the calculations and formulae of all her usual spells, to see just how easy it would be to amp them up with a little demonic backing. One of the phones was buzzing incessantly because Sully couldn’t work out how to turn it off; it was the one that Pratt had the number for. The other one had been given to her to call friends and family. She had reluctantly called Marie’s parents and left the number of the new phone on their answering machine, but there had been no reply yet.

  The surface of the scrying mirror rippled and Mol Kalath’s croaking whispers came through unbidden. “IT LURKED DEEP WITHIN THE CASPIAN SEA. THE ANIMALS AND HUMANS TRAPPED WITHIN THE BARRIERS AROUND EUROPE WERE HUNTED TO EXTINCTION BY MY KIN IN THEIR FURY. THIS CREATURE STILL PERSISTED. IT WOULD NOT DIE NO MATTER HOW THE DEMONS WAGED WAR UPON IT. THERE WERE OTHER CREATURES, LESS FEARSOME BUT EQUALLY ETERNAL. FOUR OF THEM IN ALL.”

  Sully dropped the butt of her cigar into the plastic cup. “In the classical myths there were gods and monsters that couldn’t die. Immortals. We assumed that they were just stories. If they were real, then why weren’t they still running around?”

  “ON THE RARE OCCASIONS DURING ITS HUNTING SEASON WHEN THE HYDRA WAS INJURED BADLY ENOUGH BY OUR ALLIES IT RETREATED INTO HIBERNATION. PERHAPS THE REST WERE SLEEPING WHEN YOUR KIND RULED EUROPE.”

  She drummed her fingers on the table beside the mirror, watching the surface ripple with the vibrations. “I don’t buy it. Everything can be killed.”

  “MY KIND DO NOT DIE NATURALLY. AND THE MAGI OF MANHATTAN HAVE CEASED TO AGE.”

  “But if I cut you, you bleed. If I blast Ogden with a fireball—like I frequently want to—he isn’t going to get over it and come back after me once he has had a nap. Everything dies. That’s a pretty firm rule.”

  “IF THEY CAN BE KILLED, OUR ALLIES DID NOT HAVE THE WHEREWITHAL TO DO IT.”

  Sully plucked a fresh cigar from the dented silver case that she had rescued from yet another destroyed jacket. “Do the demons have any idea why this thing is after me?”

  “ALAS, NO.”

  She lit the cigar and rolled her eyes. “Well, thanks anyway. Keep in touch.”

  “BE SAFE, SHADOW-TWIN.”

  The mirror’s surface flattened out once more and Sully let out a huff. She kept catching herself being polite to the demon, and she wasn’t sure why she was so annoyed about it.

  Everyone knew that Europe had gone to hell during the Great War. The Romans didn’t give a damn what they were calling up by the end of it and the Entente hadn’t been much better. When the decision had been made to open the barriers, there had been a lot of trepidation about what they were going to be unleashing on the world. With the promises from Manhattan that the demons could be controlled, it hadn’t crossed Sully’s mind that there might be anything else lurking in the ruins of the continent. Of course, the fact that there was some unusual fauna in Europe didn’t explain why a giant primordial turtle had swum around the world to murder her specifically. The phone finally stopped buzzing, so Sully picked it up to listen to the voicemails. The first eight were secretaries asking her to return various politician’s calls. The next three were Pratt’s secretary, sounding increasingly nervous about the fact that Sully wasn’t answering his calls either.

  The last one was actually helpful, a report from one of her subordinates about the Hydra’s movements. It had made landfall again in Carolina Province, ignoring the local population entirely as it worked its way inland, pausing only briefly when it “came into contact” with a herd of cows that promptly became fast food. The plan to keep Sully moving inland, away from population centers, was working, but the hope that the Hydra was going to slow down once it was away from its natural aquatic environment had been in vain, and they still had no idea how it was tracking her position.

  Sully picked up the personal phone and called Ceejay. She wasn’t sure why, but it was probably the same impulse that made her pick at wounds that weren’t healing fast enough for her liking. Despite the late hour and the way that they had last parted, he answered on the third ring, and she could hear the smirk in his voice. “What do you want, despicable traitor?”

&nb
sp; Sully was smiling back before she meant to, startled by the reflection of her own teeth in the black glass of the window beside her. “Burning the midnight oil again, Ceejay? Working on your big case? Anything you want to share with the government’s evil spies?”

  He tried to muffle his belly laugh, but he had never been very good at keeping them in check. “I wish that my life was that simple. Instead I am sitting in an office that is bigger than my apartment in the middle of the night trying to find the appropriate forms to file when some idiot brings a big pissed-off turtle into the middle of my city and lets it flop around.”

  “To be fair, I also kicked it out of your city.”

  “And I thank you for that. But now I need to find the appropriate forms to send to every constabulary across the whole colony telling them not to go and shoot the giant turtle rolling through their back gardens because it will just eat them.” He rustled something beside the phone for emphasis.

  “Come on, you remember our arrangement. I kill the monsters, you do the paperwork.”

  He grumbled. “That wasn’t an arrangement. You just wouldn’t sit on your ass at a desk long enough to do anything constructive.”

  Sully cackled. “You can’t prove that.”

  “I have got literally eighteen memos on file about your inability to sit on your ass. I only wrote ten of them myself. It is well documented.”

  “I never knew the Empire took such a keen interest in my backside.”

  He muttered a spell down the line and the connection crackled with static. When he spoke again there was an echoing metallic quality to his usually buttery voice. Anyone scrying on them would have one hell of a migraine if they went on listening. “You would be surprised just how thorough the Empire’s records on you really are. The IBI has had you under surveillance for a very long time, since your navy days. I know much more about your personal life than I want to. Some of those women were very ugly, Sully.”

  Sully scowled. “I’m Irish. The IBI probably thought I was one bad day away from sedition.”

  Another laugh, bizarre through the distortion of the spell. “Who knew that eventually they would be right?”

  With a fizzle as he lost concentration on his masking spell, his voice returned to normal. “So you want to hear more about my big case, do you? Well you can tell your masters that I was right. It was just spies abandoning their positions.”

  Sully snorted. “You got anything to back that up?”

  “If it was anything else, then why would it have stopped?”

  “It stopped?”

  “No new missing people. None. Not in the last two days. Not since you came poking around in my basement with your four-armed freak friend. And don’t you think that I don’t know what is going on under my own roof ever again, thank you very much.”

  Sully’s scowl had started to ease, but now it was back. “Why would it just stop?”

  “Why would it just start? Mark my words, it was spies. British spies.”

  “All right. I will tell His Majesty it was just spies. You know your job.”

  Ceejay let out a whoop of triumph. “You are actually admitting that I was right for once? I take it all back, Sully. The bloodsucker you are shacked up with is doing wonders for your temperament. She must be sucking out all of the bile instead of the blood. I like this new, amicable version of you far better than the old crabby one.”

  Sully lit a cigar off the stub of the last one and stared out at the fields flowing by, bleached to stark whiteness by the moonlight. It jogged her memory. “Yeah, I’m a delight now.” She waited for his laughter to die down before asking, “Could you check up on something for me? It isn’t about work. Just curiosity.”

  “Whatever you need, amicable Irish princess.”

  She sniggered. “Could you look up any reports of crop circles for me? I was at a farm down in Georgia and they have some. Apparently, they’ve had a few around about there.”

  She could hear that damn smirk again. “Consider the reports collated, stapled and emailed to you.”

  She took another pull on the cigar. “Right. Thanks.”

  “I had better return to this quagmire of bureaucracy that you have left for me. Try to get some sleep, yes?”

  “I will put it on my to-do list.”

  He was still laughing when he hung up.

  Sully realized that she needed a drink, a meal, and a solid twelve hours of sleep to recharge her reserves. She would settle for the drink. She didn’t know if the bar would still be open at whatever hellish time of night this was, but she forced herself out of the compartment and into the corridor. Gin would help her sleep—it was medicinal—and every bar sold those little packs of nuts. They were practically a balanced meal by Sully’s reckoning, containing all three of the important food groups; crunchy, salty and greasy. She doubted that twelve hours of peace were on the horizon, but even a couple of hours would be better than nothing. She bumped into the door at the end of the car and stared at it blankly for a moment before reaching for the handle. Apparently, she really needed that sleep.

  The next car wasn’t the bar. Neither was the next. She had a vague memory of the train being relatively short when she was being hustled onto it amidst a barrage of questions from all quarters, so the treacherous thought that it might not even have a bar was starting to prey on her. The next car rocked from side as she stepped in and she had to grab onto one of the empty seatbacks to stay upright. The lights flickered out. Sully didn’t panic—it wasn’t in her nature—but she took a moment to reassure herself that the Hydra was still halfway across the country and that she was in no danger.

  Something skittered over the metalwork above her head and she quickly reassessed her assumptions. She was also starting to revise her opinion of trains. Being trapped in a metal tube, hurtling across the landscape with everything completely out of your control, was seeming less and less like a good idea with every consecutive journey.

  The scrabbling sound stopped almost as soon as it started, but Sully was certain that something was on the roof of the car. She let a tiny trickle of spellfire slip out and pool in her hand, illuminating the cabin. Her full strength wasn’t close to returning yet, but it wouldn’t take much to catch a would-be assassin unaware. She stayed perfectly still, straining to hear where the roof-rider was. The train turned a bend and just at the edge of the roof Sully heard a tiny squeak of pressure being applied to the metal. A lance of raw conjured force leapt from her hand and tore through the pale faux leather that upholstered the cabin roof.

  Blood dropped into the train in a congealed dollop before splattering across the seats. A gargling avian cry made Sully clap her hands over her ears. Even as she recovered from that it was replaced with the deafening screech of tortured metal as the thing above peeled back the roof like a sardine tin. Sully hated being the fish in any analogy. She wasn’t idle as the looming shadow tore its way into the train. Her first lance was followed by a blast of fire and a non-lethal ray of moonlight meant to freeze everything it touched. Each slowed the progress of her attacker, but none of them stopped it. The whole situation was starting to feel a little bit too familiar, like a recurring nightmare.

  In the gap in the roof, illuminated by the distant stars and the barrage of her spells, an image of the creature started to take shape. Here was a patch of white feathers, singed by her fireball. There was a golden flank, encrusted with fast growing scabs where another of the spells had left its mark. There were claws of too many different types digging through the metalwork, bird and cat in quick succession. The creature decided that the hole was big enough and started forcing its way in. The hole was not big enough. It tore itself on the ragged metal and blood ran down the walls all around Sully.

  Sully stopped her steady assault and backed toward the door, casting quick protections over herself and infusing her eyes with the dull red glow that let her see in the dark. T
he mangled thing passed the point of no return and dropped into the train. It had the face of an eagle, but its neck was snapped and the once-noble head hung limp and useless. Atrophy and rot had set in. The eyes were dry and shriveled amidst now filthy feathers. Its wings could barely fit into the cabin, and they spasmodically twitched and twisted, battering off the walls and cracking the windows with each flex. Behind the flurry of falling feathers Sully could make out the rear half of the beast, a lion’s body grown to twice the size of the shoddy specimens she had seen in the Ophiran touring zoo.

  “A gryphon. Holy shit. They are definitely extinct.”

  It tried to cock its head, which flopped over and hit the chairs on the other side of the aisle. Sully stared at it. “You can hear me, can’t you? Do you understand me?” The head flopped back, bones grinding and popping noisily within the gryphon’s neck. “I don’t want to fight you. I don’t know what you and your Hydra friend want from me, but—”

  The gryphon charged.

  Concussion spells knocked it back before it could build momentum and Sully retreated into the previous car, tossing up barriers as she went. Spells would normally bounce off a conjured barrier, a demon, and anyone else who could use magic. The gryphon brute-forced its way through them as though they were cobwebs. Sully made a tactical retreat as fast as her legs could carry her.

  She made it to the back of the train in under a minute, with the sounds of the gryphon’s progress through the furnishings and walls behind her serving as constant motivation in her efforts. Looking behind her down the corridor, she had enough space to breathe now. Enough space to come up with some big ingenious solution to her problem. With a tiny pilot light of spellfire on her fingertip, she started scribbling calculations on the wallpaper. The situation was different, but she had a spell that might work. It was just a shame that old notebook from the IBI was currently moldering somewhere in the ocean. She had just seared a circle to work in on the floor when the gryphon arrived. Frantically she dumped power into the magic circle, weaving it into spellforms after the fact and hoping like hell that she wasn’t about to accidentally blow off her own elbows. It was hard to close her eyes when the gryphon was bearing down the corridor toward her, but she managed to blink for long enough to extend her awareness out of her body, to feel the forces being exerted just beyond the protection of the walls around her and to capture all of that raw kinetic power.