by G. D. Penman
They met someone who had tried to fight back a couple of streets over. He or she had been plastered across a car, the pavement and the side of a building, spread over them all, paper thin. They hadn’t recognized what the strange overlay was until one of them had stepped on a nipple. When Sully finally spotted a contorted face in the expanse of skin, up by a window, it blinked at her and she had to resist every urge to burn the whole thing away. They couldn’t afford to announce their position. Not yet.
Every squad had the same mission, to press into the heart of enemy territory and close the portal in the Archive. Rifts between dimensions were notoriously unstable, you only had to look at the chaotic mess in Kolikata to know that. All it would take was a solid enough hit with a spell, any spell, and the whole thing would probably unravel. Every squad had at least one Magus who was likely to be able to do that, and one demon that would try to eat as much of the magic flung at their squad as it could. Sully had been genuinely surprised how many of the demons had stayed after Mol Kalath’s outburst back at camp, but she suspected that like most humans, demons would be brave if they were given the choice.
Frenchie’s little map showed them well into the red zone before they caught sight of their first Faerie. It was over so quickly that half of the squad missed it by blinking. A pale head popped up from behind an overturned car. Huge almond-shaped eyes stared back at them. Then it vanished in a flash of light. The Baker hauled a wall up around them from the wire-riddled earth beneath the street and they hunkered down in it like a foxhole, bracing for an attack that didn’t come. Long moments ticked by with half-formed spells hanging ready and guns cocked, then Mol Kalath rumbled, “IT HAS GONE.”
Sully didn’t move. “You sure of that?”
“I CANNOT SENSE ITS PRESENCE AND TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE.”
Frenchie snorted. “Why is it that demons always talk in rhyme?”
“WE DO NOT DO SO, ALL OF THE TIME.”
One of the squaddies started sniggering at that and the crushing tension that had held them all pinned in place broke. Rolling her eyes, the Baker pushed their little bunker back down into the ground and they set off again.
Sully strode ahead of the group. “We’ve got to assume that they know we are coming now. Stealth probably isn’t viable, so let’s pick up the pace.”
Mol Kalath had to hop along with a flutter of its wings to keep up with Sully. “IF WE ARE TRULY ABANDONING STEALTH, THEN WHY DO WE NOT TAKE FLIGHT?”
Sully counted off the reasons on her fingers. “Only four of us can fly. The soldiers are probably going to have better odds against the Fae than us so we need to stay together. There is no cover in the sky. They might know we are here but they don’t have our exact position. Any more questions?”
“NO, GENERAL SULLIVAN.”
Sully whacked the demon with the back of her hand and smiled. “No back talk either.”
That was when the Fae attacked.
Sully didn’t even recognize that a spell had been cast until time ground to a halt around them. She turned to throw up a shield, but it was like she was moving through molasses. Mol Kalath was their savior. It flung its wings out wide, a meager shield against the beam of coruscating golden light that rushed out from a side street to envelop them. Those standing in the demon’s shadow were saved. The Baker. Sully. Four of the gunners. The rest didn’t have a chance. For a moment they stood there like statues, then they began to unravel, layer after layer of their bodies coiling off like when Gormlaith used to peel off apple skins in one tapering piece.
The demon let out a screech of agony, toppling forward. Mol Kalath was growing fast, but it seemed that there were limits to how much magic even a demon could swallow down before the spell asserted itself anyway. Feathers drifted away from it, swirling up into the sky one by one. Droplets of ichor began to spot the cobbled street beneath them and Sully’s protections finally cast, snapping her out of the timeslip. She stayed low beneath the demon and listened carefully for any sound beyond the hysterical panting of the Baker and the soft hiss as their team blew away. A footstep. Almost too soft to hear, despite the echoes of the empty streets. Then another. Coming closer with a gait too ungainly to be human. Sully cast as close to silently as she could, layering on defenses and finally infusing herself with flight, almost as an afterthought.
She shot straight up into the air. The Fair One stood only a few feet away, hunched over, low and reptilian, to prod at what Sully would guess had been Frenchie. She didn’t have time to be afraid now. A dart of pure white fire leapt straight down, aimed right between the huge black eyes that stared up at her. For a moment it looked like it was going to strike true, but the Fae flickered out of the spell’s path and it bounced harmlessly off of the ground.
Sully launched into a barrage, letting her flying spell cut out so that she tumbled down toward the monster alongside the lightning, fire, and razor-edged nothingness that she was flinging wildly down. Not only at the Fae but at the whole street around it. She shattered the very earth it had walked. She left it with nowhere to blink away to.
“Clever girl.” She didn’t have to turn to realize it was hanging in the air behind her. On instinct she hammered an elbow back and was gratified when the creature folded around the blow. The soldiers opened fire. There were only four Gatling rifles left, with the rest rendered down to metal shavings on the ground but if Sully thought that her spells had left nowhere to run, they were nothing compared to the sheets of bullets that now filled the air. Her old contingency spell fired off, turning the storm of bullets away from her. In the moment she was protected she hit the ground and flung herself prone.
The chattering of the guns echoed off down the streets around them when the shooting stopped. Sully lifted her head up reluctantly. The Fae didn’t bleed, so there was no satisfaction to be found in a gory mess, but its rubbery body lay perfectly still on the street, riddled with so many holes that Sully could see right through it. “Somebody put a cold iron bullet in it. Finish it off.”
One of the soldiers had made the mistake of looking down at his companions and was now vomiting noisily. Another had fallen to his knees and the closest squaddie was trying to haul him back up. The last was frantically trying to reload her rifle with a new drum so that she could go back to firing until there was nothing left of the thing on the cobbles. Sully gave that one a smack around the head that stopped the reloading process, then held out her hand. “Pistol.”
One of their few precious cold iron bullets spent, right between its eyes. It was only after Sully had handed the pistol back that the perfect circles all over the Fair One’s rubbery surface stopped creeping shut. Sully spat on it. “Let’s not get caught out again. Shall we?”
She wound her way through the remains of her soldiers until she reached Mol Kalath and the Baker. “What’s the prognosis, doc?”
The Baker looked up from the demon’s back with a blank look on her face. Enough trauma gave you that dead mask to wear. Sully was pretty sure her own face was an almost perfect replica of that absence of expression right now. “I have seen demons heal from worse. It just needs to shed some mass. It can take them a few hours, but they will recover from nearly anything.”
Sully nodded and tried very hard not to look at the oozing mess of Mol Kalath’s back. She ducked under its wing and whispered. “Can you heal this?”
“I NEED TIME. SHELTER. COVER. IN CASE . . . MORE OF THEM.”
Sully cast a quick glance around then grabbed onto Mol Kalath’s wing. With a nod, the Baker took the other one. Both women infused themselves with strength.
Sully snapped out orders as she started to drag the demon along. “One volunteer to take point. One to harvest ammo from our dead friends. Two volunteers to help lift my friend here. Fuck, you’re heavy for a bird.”
“NOT A BIRD,” it mumbled.
“I’m not touching a demon.”
Sully stopped to lo
ok—it was the one who had thrown up, of course it was. “That demon just stopped you from turning into sausage meat, so you can either help us carry it or you can scout ahead to make sure we don’t come under fire. You’ve got about a half second to decide before I kick your ass so hard that I’ve got to open your mouth to polish my boot.”
Pukey looked from Sully to the glare of the other soldiers, then ducked under Mol Kalath to lift its back legs off the ground.
They made it to a shop and when the door proved to be both locked and too small, Sully set off a concussion and took out the window. They were in a high-end boutique, which meant that there was plenty of fabric to heap up into a makeshift nest for the demon. Mol Kalath slumped down onto the heap gratefully, then its eyes closed. Sully slapped a barrier up over the front of the shop, then dug out a kettle from the tiny breakroom in the back. Sully had never considered herself British, but they had a tradition for hard times that seemed to have been adopted across the colonies. She made everyone a cup of tea while they waited for their demon to pull itself back together. The Baker stayed at the front of the store, layering on more protections. Pukey and the girl who’d tried to keep on shooting huddled around their mugs as though the tea was the last beacon of hope in a wicked world. The other two were making themselves useful dividing up gear and the remaining cold iron rounds evenly among the squad.
Sully could feel every passing second like a pendulum slicing more and more of their chances away. The longer that they took to close the portal, the more of the Fae would have taken up residence. She started to pace. Pukey’s eyes following her back and forth. Eventually, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut any longer. “How come you’re friends with demons? You ain’t from Manhattan.”
Sully could have snapped at him or yelled about insubordination or picked any of a million other ways to avoid the topic, but with Mol Kalath lying so close, bleeding for them, it seemed cruel to pretend she didn’t care, so she shrugged. “They’re people, same as us. They just come from somewhere different.”
“They’re demons, not your funny Oriental neighbor. I mean, look at it. They’re monsters.”
Sully pushed her first, poisonous words back down and kept her cool. “There’s no shortage of monsters out there if you want to go looking. I’ve run into a few of them myself over the years. But big bird over there has pulled my ass out of the fire more times than I can count. Because it was the right thing to do. Because of honor, or friendship, or one of those other words that we think mean human. Demons are good people. They’ve just been fighting those things out there for so long that they got desperate.”
The Baker nodded. “We lived with them for centuries and they never did us any harm. Even when they could have.”
There was a rumble from the middle of the shop and Mol Kalath lifted its head. Feathers had regrown, and ichor had halted. “I AM NOT A BIRD.”
Dawn had broken while they took shelter inside. They left the shop through the back and Sully let her barrier stand as a misdirection until they were almost a mile away. This close to the portal there was no shortage of magic drifting all around them to restore her reserves, so it hardly felt wasteful. According to the little map that the Baker had conjured up, they were only about ten minutes away from the epicenter of the chaos. The buildings here were older, less sleek and more conservative. Patches of marble glinted here and there, but so did stranger things that the Fae had left behind. A fountain of blood had grown up out of a dead body on the ground, a contorted skeleton twisted into a spire and basin that a beating heart kept refilling as it drained. Some of the glass in the nearby windows had turned into liquid, held in place only by a surface tension that the slightest breeze might disrupt. Every time one sloshed down into the street, guns were trained on the empty window. Bubbles of molten glass drifted around in the sky above them, dispersing rainbows through their prismatic curves. It would have been almost whimsical if the hollowed-out city wasn’t so terrifying.
The fact that they had made it so far without facing a coordinated defense made Sully deeply nervous. Either the Fae were so confident in their abilities that they didn’t feel that formal defenses of the incursion point were necessary—which seemed in character with what Sully had seen of them and probably accurate given that one of the bastards had taken almost her whole squad with a single attack—or Sully and her squad had been lucky up until now. The second option frightened Sully much more. Luck was the kind of lover who would lay you to bed with kisses at night and wake you up for a breakfast of your own liver in the morning. She caught herself walking closer to Mol Kalath than was necessary. When she realized that the rest of the squad were doing the same, she very deliberately strode a few paces ahead. Cowardice could get them killed just as surely as brashness.
She grumbled, “Spread out, will you? I don’t want to lose you all in one shot.”
They seemed reluctant to leave the sanctuary of the demon, but they followed orders. At the end of the row of houses, they paused to consult the map. There were only two streets left before they hit the Archive and there was a patch of greenery between them. A public garden wouldn’t offer much cover, but a straight run through it would get them right to the doorstep of the nondescript building without any more delays. Under Sully’s watchful eye and with some trepidation, the Baker cast a scrying spell. Sully stared into the shimmering orb of liquid metal and counted. “Nine of them between here and there. Mostly clustered at the entrance.”
Pukey looked green again. The Baker was shaking her head sadly. Mol Kalath’s feathers were slicked down and the other three looked ready to run the moment somebody raised their voice. The girl mumbled. “We can’t . . . You can’t think we’re going to . . .”
Sully cut her off. “What do we know about the enemy?”
The squad glanced at Sully nervously before their eyes snapped away again, scanning for any hint of danger. The Baker scowled. “They are so powerful that just one of them can wipe all of us out without trying?”
Sully nodded. “You’re right. They don’t seem to be working together at all. Every one I’ve met is overconfident in its abilities.”
The Baker looked more furious with each passing moment. “Overconfident? That thing melted half of our squad before . . .”
Sully snapped. “Before we killed it. Remember that part. We killed it. We won.”
“AT WHAT COST?” Mol Kalath nudged against her.
“The price that you’ve got to pay to win wars.” Sully flexed her fingers. “Now what else do we know?”
After a moment of silence, Pukey and the girl both spoke at once.
“They move fast.”
“They port around.”
Sully treated them to a smile. “So focusing our fire isn’t the best plan. Scattershot.”
They fell silent again, so Sully pressed on. “You know what I’ve noticed? They can’t take a punch. I hit that thing once and it folded up. They’re too reliant on their magic. If you can lay hands on them . . .”
The quiet one who had harvested the bullets from his dead friends finally spoke up. “What? You want us to charge in and bayonet them?”
“No, but if you can hit them, you should. Just don’t let them lay hands on you.” Sully checked that her saber was loose in its scabbard. With only the one hand she wouldn’t be able to cast if she drew it, but it was nice to know it was there.
“Why not?” The girl whispered.
“They can stitch you together or melt you apart if they touch you, and I wouldn’t bet they’ll be doing a lot of healing today.” Pukey took a couple of steps away and retched against the side of the building. Sully pretended that it wasn’t happening. “Listen, once we are inside the building, they lose their mobility. Your guns will cut them down. We just need to clear a path and get inside.”
The girl was speaking so quietly that they all had to lean in to hear her. “Can’t we wait? Hit them with the
other teams when they arrive?”
“The more time they have, the worse our odds get. They’re bottlenecked coming through the Archive, but every minute gives them more reinforcements and increases the chances we’re spotted. We need to go now.” She looked around at their terrified faces. Even Mol Kalath wouldn’t meet her gaze. “You’ve all got friends and family somewhere out there in the world? They haven’t got guns or training or spells. If the Fae get to them, they aren’t just going to die, they’re going to get tortured for years until they can’t remember a time when there was anything but pain. We’re the only thing between the monsters and the people. It’s scary as hell. It hurts. You lose bits of yourself. But you still stand up and put yourself between people and harm because nobody else is going to.”
There was a soft clap from the back of the group that ended abruptly when guns were trained on Ogden and he put his hands up. His team was missing its demon and its other Magus, but most of the soldiers seemed to be intact. Ogden slowly lowered his arms. “What an inspiring speech, Sullivan. Do you have a plan to go along with it?”
Sully grinned. “I just might.”
No plan survived contact with the enemy. As the Baker opened the portal that was going to get the troops across the intervening territory, a spindly arm reached out of it and killed her. It was barely the lightest brush of the Fae’s fingers, but the woman fell apart like she had been unzipped down a seam. Bones, blood and organs tumbled out in a wet rush. Only the collapsing of the portal stopped the creature coming through. In that moment others would have hesitated, but this wasn’t Sully’s first time going to war. She bellowed, “Stay under the screens but don’t stop running until you’re inside. On three, we move.”