by G. D. Penman
Claws extended, the gryphon pounced, and Sully slapped it back with the full force of the speeding train. The train suddenly slowed, losing all of the momentum that Sully had borrowed from it. She was flung from her feet, tumbling along the corridor after the gryphon. She caught onto a cabin door. It stopped her, but it also jerked her shoulder clean out of its socket with a wet pop. She hit the carpet and tumbled to a halt, blessing her protection spells with one breath and cursing them with the next.
The pain didn’t come right away. In Sully’s considerable experience of bodily injuries, that was a bad sign. That meant she was either in shock or had done damage so permanent that her body was refusing to acknowledge it. She dragged herself up with her other arm, sitting, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Then she tried to get her dead arm to move. She had almost managed to clench a fist when pain finally joined the party and brought nausea along as its plus one.
With bile burning her throat and tears burning her eyes, Sully wrestled her way up the wall of the train until she was standing. The swaying could be blamed on the movement of the train—she was fine. The daggers of pain that were dancing all around her neck and back meant nothing. On her third attempt, Sully managed to take a deep breath. A compartment stood open and empty in front of her. She took a staggering step to one side, lining herself up carefully, then she charged forward. Her injured shoulder hit the doorframe. The ball relocated itself in the socket with another, quieter pop and Sully spun around to land in one of the bench seats. It would have looked like a pretty smooth and deliberate operation if she hadn’t immediately thrown up everywhere. She didn’t know how long she sat there trying to force the encroaching darkness from the edges of her vision, but the gargling screech of the gryphon drew her back out of her trance.
She trudged along the length of the train until she reached the bar, just behind the locomotive itself. She had nearly made it the first time, before she was so rudely interrupted in her hunt for a drink. The gryphon had completely trashed the place when it landed. Sully couldn’t see a single intact bottle anywhere but the mirror behind the bar had somehow survived. She looked at herself, bruises blossoming all over her face amidst the cuts and scars from her earlier fights. Despite the hiss of pain it dragged out of her, she grinned. “You should see the other guy.”
The gryphon had lost a wing somewhere in its journey along the length of the train. There were feathers scattered everywhere and Sully was so punch-drunk that she hadn’t noticed the feathered lump wedged in the door of a bathroom as she passed. The other wing looked like it had been snapped neatly in two. Each of the creature’s legs seemed to be broken, twisted at odd angles. The neck still hung limp, and now it was turned right around to look back at the open wound where the missing wing used to be. Ribs poked out through one side. Blood coated the floor in a thick, sticky slop. Still its great chest heaved up and down, even as more blood misted out of its mouth with each exhalation.
Sully kicked it, but there wasn’t much feeling behind the violence. The grunt that came out of it confirmed her suspicion that it was still conscious. The only sounds in the bar were the distant rattle of the train along the tracks, the wheezing of the beast, and the quiet creaking of its bones as they tried to bend back into shape. Even as she watched, the nub of bone jutting out from its back seemed to have gained more meat. It was healing. Just as the demons had warned her.
Sully squatted down beside the gryphon’s head. “I guess you can’t speak but you can listen. I don’t know why you are after me. I don’t know what you want. But I can tell you that what I did to you just now is only the beginning. If you come back, I will flay you down to your bones and I will smile as I do it. Do you understand me?”
With agony in every trembling movement, the gryphon lifted its head and swung it forward at her like a blunt instrument. There was little strength behind the blow, but there was enough weight to send Sully back across the sodden carpet. When her shoulder hit one of the surviving stools the whole world went dark for a moment. Sully snapped back to attention and scrambled to her feet just in time to see the gryphon’s front legs straighten out. That was faster than she had expected. She started shaping another spell, something huge and fiery to fulfill her gruesome threats, but she didn’t cast it. Not yet. This was probably the last gryphon in the world, and she wasn’t quite ready to wipe them out. Not when there was a chance it might listen to reason. “You can’t win this. Give it up.”
The gryphon didn’t lunge for her, it didn’t even move closer, it just reared up onto its hind legs and slammed its claws down through the flimsy sheet metal of the floor. Sully opened her mouth to cast but it was already too late. The gryphon’s claws hooked into the tracks and the wheels beneath them. It was dragged down into the ragged hole, wedged partially in and out of the train. Sully turned to run but there was no time. The irresistible force of the train in motion and the immovable object of the gryphon strained against each other for an instant, then the carriage jerked sideways. The train derailed. The deafening roar of the train’s brutalized engine, the shrieking metal as the solid structure twisted apart and the agonized cries of the gryphon all blended into a nightmare cacophony, and then blissful silence fell as Sully’s head cracked off the side of the train.
Sully could taste blood. All the pains of the last week reared up out of the comfortable oblivion that surrounded her, dragging her back to consciousness despite her best efforts to cling to the numb dark. She spat and one of her teeth pinged off a bit of hot metal near her face. Only one of her eyes would open when she finally gathered the courage to see how bad the damage was. The shoulder might have been dislocated again, or the pain might just have been the swelling from the first time around. There were pieces of the train everywhere, recognizable only from tiny details. A decal on a chunk of glass by her cheek. A flutter of cream colored leather, singed at the edges and draped over the twisted hulk of what might once have been a chair. Sully’s protective spells had done their job, but now she was hollowed out from the loss of the raw energy that it had cost to keep her alive. Assuming that she wasn’t actually in seven bloody pieces right now without realizing it.
Her left hand was still good, so she brought that up to probe at her face, ignoring the blood and the pain to confirm that underneath the mass of swelling her eye was still intact. That was lucky. She was pretty attached to depth perception. She took her time, hauling herself upright. The shoulder screamed at her, but it was part of a chorus of cries from all over her body now, and the arm was moving so she had avoided the worst of it. The wound in her leg had opened up again, but there was no terrifying flood of red, just a damp patch on her trousers. She didn’t love the pain, or that her face was more than a little mashed, but the fact that she was about to walk away from a train crash silenced any complaints that she might have thought of voicing. Waves of dizziness and nausea took their turns washing over her as she clambered to her feet, but she paid them no mind. The sun was hanging high in the sky and the woodlands around Sully seemed hostile, with no shadows stretching out to hide her. She had lost half a day. How close would the Hydra be now?
She staggered to the tracks. The locomotive was a smoldering wreck, lying on its side in a ditch belching black smoke. She held out no hope of pulling anything but the charred skeleton of the engineer from it. A few of the rearmost carriages had been flicked off into the trees almost whole but the ones around her were scrap. The plinking sounds of the cooling metal might have been almost musical, but Sully could smell something under the ozone reek of the overheated steel. Roasted meat.
It didn’t take long to find the gryphon. She followed outlying pieces as they inched their way across the gravel toward the central mass of it. The head and torso were mostly together, although a big chunk of the beak had snapped off. Fresh feathers were just starting to sprout along that side of its face, which probably meant that side of its face had only just grown back. Sully spat on it and wished that m
ost of the saliva wasn’t red. “You stupid bastard. I gave you an out. What the hell did you go and do that for?”
Sully had thought she was spent, but looking down at the mangled monster she found a deeper reservoir. Spellfire leapt unbidden to her hands and she started to trace out some of the most dangerous spells from her artillery days. The fury that usually nested in Sully’s gut like a coiled viper wanted control. On a normal day it would writhe and simmer and she would spit abuse at whoever was closest, but when the fighting started, she let it take over. There was no fight to win now—there was no chance that the gryphon was going to defend itself in its current condition. Sully knew that she was never going to get a better chance to finish it for good, but it was hard for her to kill in cold blood. She had been beaten, shot, and flung across the ocean. She had been hunted and haunted by creatures that weren’t meant to exist. She had faced down a monster so gargantuan that she couldn’t wrap her head around it. Sully had done enough running and now she was angry.
The first torrent of flames leapt from her hands, enveloping the gryphon and drawing a fresh round of shrieks from its broken body. The backwash made Sully flinch and she could smell the popcorn aroma of her own hair burning. A blast of flame, blue hot, was next, over so fast that Sully almost couldn’t remember casting it. That spell had cut through steel hulls to sink ships, but though the gryphon was red and raw, when the fires died down it was still moving. Still stitching itself back together. Old military spells weren’t going to be enough—she needed more heat. She needed more power.
Dante’s Inferno was simple enough in the beginning, similar to a thousand other spells to evoke fire, but while the others had limitations written into them to keep the caster from draining their reserves completely—and dying—the Inferno did not. Sully had been tinkering with it since college, an intellectual exercise that was the closest thing she had to a hobby, outside of drinking and womanizing. Now Sully began layering her own modified version of the spell together in stages, tracing each spellform with painstaking care. She had never actually cast it—not when the risks of failure were so steep—but in this moment she didn’t care about the risks. The burned hunk of meat on the tracks had been given a chance to back down and it had chosen death.
Reserves of power that had seen Sully through the worst battles of her life ran dry as she poured more and more spellfire into the Inferno and she had to strain to drag more magic into her body from the air, using the same channels that let her tear strength from Mol Kalath. It was like trying to draw breath through a wet cloth, but she eventually got enough to finish. The gryphon opened one baleful golden eye in the charred, sticky remains of its face, that one tiny part of it briefly rejuvenated by its destruction and rebirth. The final words were on Sully’s lips, begging to be spoken, when she heard the ringing.
Sully stood frozen in that moment, hearing the electronic chiming of the bell and seeing the mass of runes and sigils hanging in the air all around her, intercut with the connecting lines and sacred geometry of the universe that it would take the uninitiated a lifetime to decipher. She took a deep breath, wresting control back from her anger. She reached out for the spellfire and felt warmth returning to her exhausted body as she pulled it back inside.
It took only a few moments of digging through the coiled innards of her seat to find her personal phone beside the shattered remains of the official one. She flipped it open on the last ring. “Hello?”
“Darlin’? Are you all right?”
Tears pricked the corners of Sully’s eyes when she heard Marie’s voice, stinging like hell on one side. It had been a hectic few days; it wasn’t surprising that she was getting a bit emotional. She was probably still in shock.
“About the same as usual. How are you doing?”
Marie’s voice was so tight you could have strung a banjo with it. “I need you back here, darlin’. As quick as you can.”
“Are you safe?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, then Marie huffed, “I ain’t sure.”
“Find somewhere safe and hole up. I will be there in . . .”—she did some frantic calculations—“about four hours. Is there anyone local you can trust? Anyone that can help?”
“. . . I—I don’t know. Just hurry, darlin’.”
The line went dead.
With a jerk of her hand, Sully drew all the scraps of spellfire back inside her, then cast the flying spell without a second thought for the golden eye that was still following her every movement. She had more important things to worry about.
November 7, 2015 PM
Georgia looked completely unchanged from her last flight over it, although Sully could only see half of the view at any given moment thanks to the swelling of her black eye. The crop circles in the fields around the Culpepper plantation were easy to see from above, strangely intricate from this distance. Not just one circle but many, forming patterns that set Sully’s memory alight. She knew these patterns and the geometry they conveyed, but she did not have the time to think on how she knew. Not now when Marie was so close she could almost smell her.
Sully dropped into the courtyard and stumbled into the fountain as her leg gave out. Raavi was going to be pissed that she had torn out all his careful stitches. The farmhouse and the guest house looked as pristine as when she had left them. There was a gentle breeze carrying the last warmth of the day through the orchards. Whatever had scared the hell out of Marie was damned subtle. Sully scooped up a handful of water and scrubbed the worst of the blood from her face. In her distorted reflection, it looked like the swelling on the eye might have been going down, but it was hard to tell between the bruises and the rippling of the water. She had been prettier. If Marie hadn’t already been terrified, there wasn’t a chance that Sully would have let her see her in this state. She mumbled to herself, “Eyes forward.”
Sully crept around to the patio doors with a freezing spell readied. There was no telling what the situation was going to be inside the house. Marie’s family could be hostages. Sully couldn’t risk rushing in, spells blazing. There was a record playing in the kitchen, some old country tune about a truck with a busted spark-rune. Clementine was singing along softly as she coated chicken legs in flour, her voice cracking at the highs in the chorus. Marie was sitting at the table, staring at her mother with an intensity that she usually reserved for blood and musical theater. As Sully crept into view, Marie’s eyes flicked over and widened briefly, but she didn’t say anything, just returned her gaze to her mother. Sully let her magical senses roll out over the house. There was no sign of anyone else using magic, beyond the usual household enchantments. She slid the door open carefully and stepped inside. Clementine cast her a glance as she came in; maybe she was too polite to mention her bedraggled state. “Iona, welcome back, child. I wish Marie had told me you were heading this way, I would have got more chicken.”
Sully looked at Marie and got nothing. “That’s very kind, but I don’t think that I can stay for long anyway.” She sidled over to Marie and leaned down to place a kiss on her cheek, murmuring, “What the hell is going on?”
Marie popped up out her seat. “I’m just going to show Sully where the bathroom is, Momma.”
“All right, darlin’. Don’t be too long. Your father will be back soon, and those potatoes need peeling.”
Out in the hallway, panic flooded Marie’s face. “What the hell happened to you? You look like you were in a train crash.”
“Uh . . . my train crashed.”
“Jesus. Are you all right?”
Sully shrugged with the shoulder that wasn’t screaming at her. “I’ve had worse days.”
Marie stared at her for a long moment and there was a sadness in her eyes that Sully wasn’t used to. “You really have, haven’t you?”
The sympathy was getting too uncomfortable for Sully’s tastes. “Why am I here? What’s going on?”
Marie looked nervously toward the kitchen door. “That ain’t my Momma.”
Sully blinked. “What?”
“She sounds like my momma, she looks like her. She even has my daddy fooled. But that ain’t her.”
“Why do you think that isn’t her?”
“She don’t smell right, Sully. She’s wearing Momma’s honeysuckle perfume and she has all the right kitchen smells, but underneath it she don’t smell like blood.”
“Your mother usually smells like blood?” Sully was trying to keep her voice calm and neutral like she was still a detective.
“Y’all smell like blood, Sully. Everybody. You’re full of it.”
Sully wet her lips. “Have you tried questioning her? Asking her questions that only your mother would know the answer to?”
“I’ve just been playing along. I figured that if she realized I knew, then . . . I dunno. This ain’t my day job, Sully. This stuff freaks me out, you know that.”
Sully took her hand. “It’s going to be okay. I’m here now. We can work this out.”
Marie let out a shaky breath. “Okay.”
Sully had half turned to go back into the kitchen when Marie caught her by the chin and kissed her. It was soft and unexpected, and for a moment Sully froze. Marie kissed her way up Sully’s cheek and whispered, “This is gonna hurt a little.”