“Godspeed, my friends,” Cordelia said. May you close the hole in reality raining six-taloned death onto our world, she thought.
She had her part to play. The missing shard, like all the pieces of the broken original midnight blade, carried secrets that might—just might—save them all.
She tossed a large block of rubble toward a smoldering pile, and peered into the dark space underneath.
Nothing. She stood again and slapped her gloves together as she surveyed the ruins. Her seer told her very little beyond that she needed to be vigilant. The Incursion was interfering with everyone’s seers, not just hers, but she did pick up one clear reading—the danger of Paradise Homes had not completely passed.
Something here still pulsed with the same irrational reality as the menace in the sky.
The hiss from her earbud spiked. Cordelia yelped and pulled it out of her ear. “Damn it!” she said.
A wave of energy hit her full on. Her vision wavered, and the pulse rocked her inner ears—exactly the way the first wave had, the one that had hit seconds before The Incursion opened.
All her onboard systems shut down. Her indigo jacket’s arm display vanished, and its embedded heater turned off. The earbud stopped hissing. The phone in her pocket was also likely dead.
Cordelia staggered against the wave, but kept her footing, and unclipped her service weapon.
Her seer screamed what her eyes were telling her anyway—thirty feet away, a distortion bubble hovered over the charred grass off the circular driveway in front of what used to be Paradise Homes.
The cause had to be the missing shard. And she’d walked right by it when she’d parked near the road. Her seer had slipped right over it.
Primary colors moved across its surface more like electrical static than rainbows. A whiff of ozone hit her nose. The air crackled. And the bubble expanded into a mini, doorway-sized Incursion.
She pressed her earbud back into her ear. “This is agent zero-zero-six! We have a surface Incursion! I repeat! One is opening right now at my location!” Would her radio pick up her voice? Her systems hadn’t yet rebooted.
The mini-Incursion’s colors flipped over to orange, green, and purple, and it stopped expanding at about an eight-foot diameter.
Cordelia aimed her weapon. She might have a regular semi-automatic, but it was Praesagio-built, and fired fast and true. They’d have to come through one at time. This close, a bullet between the eyes of an invader or a hellhound would likely take the creature down.
She held her aim. She’d get as many as she could before her bullets ran out.
A human ran through the distortion. Not an invader. Not a hellhound. A heavily armed human in full-body, face-and-head covering, active-camouflage, world-mimicking armor.
He jogged ten feet into the circle, massive rifle up and ready, and stopped. The suit fluctuated, its onboard systems reading and mimicking the environment, but it wasn’t hellhound skin. She could pick out his movements against the background.
The armor was clearly some type of articulated exoskeleton, and did not inhibit the soldier’s movements.
Her seer buzzed. Shifter, she thought. She aimed again. “Who are you?” she yelled.
Her comm rebooted and a new hiss filled her ear. She winced, but didn’t take her gaze off the soldier in the super-suit.
Fast Japanese cut through the hiss. Hers was rusty, but she managed to pick out Tokyo and the Japanese word for dragon. In the circle, the soldier lowered his weapon as if accentuating the words flowing into her ear.
She also lowered her weapon. Japan had been hit the hardest. They’d had no time to evacuate, or to prepare. Yet a Japanese-speaking super-soldier had just come through a mini-Incursion into Colorado.
Three more soldiers ran out of the mini-Incursion in quick succession, with the third carrying a large payload.
The second and third stepped away from the distortion as a fourth came through.
“Do you speak English?” she yelled.
The first soldier raised his hand and pointed at Cordelia. He slapped the side of his helmet, then raised his weapon again. “Identify yourself!” he yelled.
“Cordelia Palatini-Sut,” she said. “I work for Praesagio Industries.”
Two more people exited the breach.
“Sir,” one of them said over the comm. “Global Positioning data says we are in Colorado. Aurora, sir. The Incursion is east of us.”
Solider number three, the one with the case, pointed at the sky.
The first soldier turned around. “What?” he said. He, too, looked up.
He turned back to Cordelia. “Where are they? Are they at the base?” he asked.
Her seer told her exactly who he meant when he said they. “They’re on their way to Nebraska,” she answered. Humanity’s last hope was about to sacrifice themselves to close The Incursion.
Seven armored soldiers had come through. Most carried cases. Half carried staff- or spear-like poles. All seven looked up the sky as they exited.
“I’ll be damned,” number one said. “They’re going to do it this time.” He slapped the side of his helmet again and turned toward the mini-Incursion. If he communicated with someone on the other side, she didn’t hear it.
And a full state away, the handful of people capable of saving Earth set off a bomb. A column of power rose from a Nebraska field. A column that pierced the eye of The Incursion in very much the way a blade would pierce her own eye.
Behind the seven, the mini-Incursion burst. The distortion field vanished. The colors disappeared. All that remained were seven people who shouldn’t be here.
The seven stared at the sky. They did not move, nor did they celebrate in any way.
Her seer buzzed: The people in front of her were human, but they were not of her Earth.
One by one, helmets flipped up and over heads, and retracted into suits. Faces appeared. Some she recognized.
Some who, here, were long dead.
Soldier one walked toward Cordelia. He stopped at the edge of the rubble. “Line up,” he said into the comm.
His helmet flipped up over his face, and retracted into the neck of his suit.
She knew this man. She’d suffered at his hands. His deeds were as horrid as they were infamous.
A man she had helped to kill stood before her in a super-suit that should not exist.
He’d reverted to his true face, a musculature he hadn’t worn for centuries, and watched her now from dark eyes under hair that had been shaved over his ear.
All of the soldiers had shaved hair over their ears. Most looked as if they wore some type of cranial implants.
The dead man extended his hand. “Cordelia of the Palatini, Imperial Praetorian Legate and Daughter of the Assassin.” He pulled it back, bowed, and offered it again. “It is good to see you again.” He pointed over his shoulder. “You… well, you didn’t survive this,” he waved at the sky, “where we come from.”
She aimed her gun at his head. “And here, you died a final death.”
Here, this man was not good. Not good at all.
He frowned, then bowed once more. “I sincerely apologize for the faults of my other self. I am not him.”
Could this version be good? No, she thought, and held her weapon aimed at the spot between his eyes. Not him. Never him.
He raised his hand. Behind him, the two members of his group carrying staffs stepped to the side and transferred the weapons to their outside hands.
“We are Imperial Special Operations, ma’am,” he said, “assigned by the Emperor himself to the Dragonslayer. We are the bane of all things six-taloned.”
Behind him, his people whooped.
He slapped his closed fist against his breastplate. “Earth is human!” he shouted.
“Earth is human!” his team echoed. The two on the outside raised their staffs at an angle that framed the group.
He thumped again. “Earth is ours!”
And again, his people echoed and held high their weapons.
>
He raised his fist over his head, completing the classic Roman military salute. “Earth is Empire!”
“Earth is Empire!” they all shouted.
Empire? Oh, no, she thought. This man plus “empire” might just be worse than the invaders.
“Allow me to introduce myself.”
But she knew. Her memories knew. She understood precisely who this man was and the planetary-level destruction he was capable of causing.
He extended his hand one final time. “I am Vivicus, the First Morpher, son of my Progenitor and Second of the Legio Dracones,” he said. “My Seraphim and I are here to stop a great horror before it befalls this Earth.”
His team stomped their collective feet and raised their fists once again.
The man who called himself Vivicus clasped his hands behind his back. “We are here to stop the Witch of the Midnight Blade.”
PART TWO
Chapter One
I can’t shake the feeling I’ve done the apocalypse before. The smoke, the fires, the screams? They were familiar. The car crashes, the crazy guys with guns? I’d seen that, too. The lost little girl holding the remains of a stuffed lion while she cried at the side of the road? We drove on by.
It wasn’t the lingering touch of Alternate-me, the crazy, terrible version of Del Parrish who for some stupid, cowardly reason decided that befriending a flesh-eating Burner was the way to survive the fall of civilization.
Because that happened, out there, somewhere in the curlicues of time and space. A version of me became the bestie of a demon named Ismene, and together we terrorized humans and hellhounds alike.
My sword told me. I listened, because everyone needs to listen to their own cautionary tales, but the blade’s whispers were memory-stories. The feelings I couldn’t shake? They were something different.
My college-dropout brain understood that Alt-me was on a curlicue of the great fractal of time and space, and that I’m on another, adjacent, almost-identical twisty bit of space-time. They’re the same, the curlicues, because that’s how fractals work. But they’re also different. Alt-me came from a future produced by a different version of right now. A version that, from what I could pick up from the Midnight Blade, suffered an end of the world much worse than it believed would happen here.
My sword was more hopeful than me.
And I knew this. I, the woman who worked as an aide at a retirement warehouse for oldsters called Paradise Homes, understood what the blisters called Incursions really were. I understood that out there, in my right-now with its abandoned children and ruined cities, were people whose entire reason for living was to stop these cycles.
People, and dragons.
Men, women, and monsters who wanted to get us off these crazy curlicues. Men, women, and monsters who, when left to their own devices, might just be as bad for humanity as the end of the world.
Sometimes we don’t get the heroes we need. Sometimes we get the heroes we deserve.
My sword thought that this time, I was a hero.
I knew this, too. God, somehow I knew. And all I wanted to do was cry.
Chapter Two
Mrs. Karanova sat in the mini-bus’s front seat, where I could keep an eye on her as I drove. She settled her hands on her hand-crocheted lap throw after smoothing her old-lady bun, and looked out at the burning world around us. Nax had stashed her wheelchair between two back seats, so neither of us would need to carry her once we reached my parents’ home, but I did dread getting her off the bus without Nax’s linebacker arms to help.
He rolled around on the bus’s back bench and moaned a lot. Burns do that to a person, no matter how powerful a Shifter the person might be. And it seemed Nax was what people who understand the complexities of super-beings called “powerful.”
Mrs. K sat quietly and listened to the ghost of Maria Romanova. Every so often she’d speak up and relay information from the Russian Grand Duchess, who I was pretty sure wasn’t really a ghost.
Maria Romanova must have gotten sucked into an Incursion blister just like the one we’d closed at Paradise Homes. Sucked in, abandoned, and now cursed to live inside the membrane between curlicues.
I hadn’t said anything yet to Mrs. K about my theory. I needed to concentrate on making our way through the pitch-black streets of Aurora.
The radio said Tokyo and Osaka had been attacked first, then Seoul. Reports also said more than fifty major cities across China, Southeast Asia, and into India had already been bombed from space. Cairo had been turned into a crater about half an hour ago.
The invaders were moving west across Asia and into Europe, dropping targeted, ballistic rods or spears or mega-bullets onto every major human habitation they could see from up there, inside their candy-colored magic bubble of death.
I drove. Mrs. K chatted with Maria, Nax groaned on the back bench seat, and I did my best to navigate us through the pile-ups and the shrill screams of desperation.
The highways were jammed. Everyone was trying to get out of the Denver orbit before the invaders reappeared over North America. The authorities said to shelter in place. They’d turned off all the power to make us less visible from space, but people fled anyway.
Right now every major road in the United States was probably lit up with headlights, like the national connective tissue it was.
I’d tried calling my mom. I’d tried both of my little brothers, and my stepdad. No one answered. Was it because service was down? Had something happened to my family? I had no idea.
So I took the wounded Emperor of Glamours and the Russian Ghost Whisperer into Aurora, with the hopes that even though my Midnight Blade wanted me to “run from the angels,” I’d at least be able to run knowing that my family was safe.
“The blade is called Stab, darling,” Mrs. K said.
I maneuvered us around a burning eighteen-wheeler on the dark side road I’d taken to get into my parents’ neighborhood.
“What?” I asked. Mrs. K liked to speak up when I most needed to pay attention to my driving.
“Your sword,” she said. “Maria says this one is likely Stab. She says the other Maria told her that Poke had other duties.”
I wasn’t surprised that its buddy had “other duties.” My sword wasn’t so much an object as it was an… antenna? Maybe it was a magical internet connection that was beaming Worldwide Wibbly-wobbly Timey-wimey Web into my brain.
Whatever the blade was, it could cut through anything, which was why it stayed in the mechanical fingers of its scabbard housing. The whole apparatus was currently tucked safely between the seat and the side of the bus.
“The sword’s name is Stab?” I asked.
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. K said.
She’d said something back at Paradise Homes about there being more than one Midnight Blade. “There’s another one named Poke?” Poke and Stab, huh? How ridiculous. Next she was going to tell me that there were other blades named George and Ringo. At least they’d be knightly.
Mrs. K muttered something in Russian.
“What?” I asked again.
“Not every blade needs to be called Killer of Enemies or Slicer of Evil.”
I shook my head. At least “Stab” was succinct and literally to the point. “So there’s more? Does Maria know where they are?”
Mrs. K frowned. “She says to get her ring first.”
Ah, yes, the Tsar’s ring. Mrs. K hadn’t given me any real info about how to find this ring beyond “the Fates have it,” which, honestly, could mean anything. What Fates? Where were they? Would they give up the ring or would we be in the middle of another hellish battle like the one with Ismene the Burner Demon? We’d barely survived.
In the back, Nax once again groaned.
Mrs. K looked over her shoulder. “The dear Emperor is in bad shape,” she said.
Nax, a big bruiser of a guy who had been hiding out in Paradise Homes pretending to be a little old man, had gotten himself burned pretty badly by Ismene.
At least none of
us had been bitten by a hellhound. Who knew if they were venomous too? They certainly flashed and shimmered like something that would be venomous in a giant, weird-ass, glowing-naked-bear or wolf or bear-wolf kind of way.
I took us over a bump, and in the back Nax jostled a little. Another loud moan followed.
“Nax?” I called. He’d been responsive when we left Paradise Homes.
Mrs. K looked over her shoulder again. “Emperor!” she yelled in her surprisingly loud old-lady voice.
She’d taken to calling him “Emperor” now that we’d left Paradise Homes. Not once since he flopped onto the back bench had she called him Nax.
I was beginning to think that the whole Emperor thing was as literal and to-the-point as my blade named Stab. I had no idea what kind of emperor he used to be. He wouldn’t say. And my limited grasp of history wasn’t connecting “Nax” with the name of any famous leader.
Which was probably for the best. The last thing I needed was a world-history-sized ego in the back of my bus.
“Leave me be,” he groaned.
So he wasn’t unconscious. “We’re almost to my parents’ house,” I said.
He didn’t respond.
“I could take you into Emergency.”
“No. I will heal. Leave the doctors to deal with the less fortunate.” He waved his hand as if dismissing serfs.
Mrs. K scoffed.
How imperial of him to dismiss his pain for the benefit of his subjects. “You’re burned,” I said.
The curve of the overhead mirror did nothing to hide the pain on his face.
Nax sat up. He inhaled deeply, though it looked as if it took considerable effort, and slowly walked toward the front of the bus.
I slowed the bus and turned into my parents’ neighborhood. Like everywhere else on Earth, the power had been cut, and only the moon lit the yards and driveways. The streets were empty, but a candle blazed behind a window here, and another there.
Maybe half the households had actually sheltered in place. Were they safer than those out on the interstates? Maybe. Maybe not.
A lot of hellhounds had come through with Ismene. If Maria’s estimates were correct, at least a thousand monstrous beasts now ran the dark places between trees and homes in Aurora, Colorado.
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