Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  “Jesus!” Nax said from somewhere off Leif’s shoulder. He scooped up Jeff’s rifle and pulled Leif behind the truck’s open driver-side door.

  Janus watched. He swung his rifle around as if he knew full well where they hid but he didn’t shoot.

  Nax aimed through the gap between the door and the truck’s frame. “You should have let me kill him.”

  He wanted permission to kill him now. “You and I both know that if he thought you could hurt him, he wouldn’t be standing there watching us.” Unlike Leif’s suit, Janus’s must have fully powered up.

  Nax pulled the gun out. He shook as if releasing not only his muscles, but all the heat his body had generated while he had his fever.

  Leif reached into the truck. Jeff had been kind enough to leave the keys in the ignition.

  “Get in.” He pushed in the healer, who crawled through and into the back, then Nax, who crawled over the center console to the passenger seat.

  Leif followed and started the vehicle. Nax looked back between the seats.

  “This thing bulletproof?” he asked the healer.

  “Should be,” she said.

  Nax pointed. “Run him over,” he said.

  “I’m with the Emperor on this one,” the healer said.

  Leif unbuckled Stab’s scabbard. “Release magnet,” he said, and his suit let the sword slide down between his back and the seat. “Take it,” he said to Nax.

  Janus picked up one of the other rifles and flipped it over his back so it stuck to his magnets, then calmly walked out of view and behind the second truck.

  He was checking on the sliced-up Vivicus.

  Nax yanked Stab out from behind Leif’s back out and placed her on his lap. “What’s your name?” he asked the healer.

  “Sandra,” she said.

  “Hello, Sandra,” Nax responded. “Thank you for making sure my heart didn’t explode out there.” Then to Leif, “We need to kill him.”

  If he’d allowed Nax to take Janus’s head before the soldiers had come out, they would have arrived at what looked to them like a murder scene. The soldiers would have shot them both. Leif’s suit offered protection but couldn’t completely stop rapid fire at close range. They’d both be dead.

  “We don’t know what he’s set to trigger if we kill him.” Because the Fate Progenitor had something in place. He always did.

  “He killed Penny,” Nax said.

  Yes, he did. Three shots at close range while her suit was down. And now he was dragging Vivicus’s body toward the back of the truck.

  “He just murdered five National Guard soldiers,” Sandra said.

  He’d get away with it, too. He’d force them all to go to Tokyo and he’d get that targeting data. And three days from now, they’d all be on the Dragonslayer ready to mess up the dragons on their own turf.

  Because that’s what the Final Protocols were really about. The Sentinels and the Progenitors were just a lovely coat of Plan B frosting in case the actual mission messed up. The major time jump was a safety valve to make sure the option to try again stayed open.

  The real point of the Final Protocols was just the right amount of time travel with the correctly detonated weapons. That’s why Janus didn’t care who he took with him up to the Dragonslayer.

  And no one would ever know that the genocide had flipped the other way. No one but Janus, and he didn’t care. He didn’t care about the Progenitor-making Plan B, either. Not really. If he had, he would have put in the effort needed to find this timeline’s Sentinels. So all the talk about taking Leif, Vivicus, and Nax with him up to the Dragonslayer? Distraction. Slight of hand. Manipulation for some purpose only his Fate brain understood.

  Janus tossed Vivicus’s body into the back of the truck.

  “We gotta do this now,” Nax said.

  Leif could ram the other vehicle. He could run Janus down. He could chance Janus placing four or five shots so perfectly they shattered the truck’s bulletproof glass.

  Or he could deal with it himself.

  “Stay here,” Leif said, and opened the door.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Full armor,” Leif said to his suit. His retinal display popped up Full armor and a capacity bar. His suit diverted all its power and functionality to interlocking and overlapping its plates to provide extra protection over his head, torso, and the major blood vessels of his limbs. Full armor decreased the suit’s agility, but it also meant that a shot to a major organ wouldn’t get through, even with a high-powered rifle like the one Janus carried.

  The capacity bar sat at just under seventy percent.

  “Wow,” Sandra said from the back.

  “Leif…” Nax reached for his arm.

  “Don’t,” Leif said.

  Nax stopped his hand an inch from Leif’s elbow.

  “The suit will shock you.” Part of the protection against hand-to-hand was targeted shocks. Leif tapped at his keypad. “Now.”

  Nax’s cheeks worked as if he was confused, but he touched Leif’s suit anyway.

  Signature acquired, Leif’s retinal display said. “You’re safe now.”

  “Thank you.” Nax did not sound thankful. “Don’t go out there. He’ll kill you.”

  Leif shook his head and pointed at Stab. “Keep that away from him.”

  Nax nodded.

  “Full camouflage,” Leif said.

  He vanished.

  “Jesus!” Sandra breathed. “They said you all were like the dragons, but shit, man, that’s impressive.”

  It’d more impressive if his suit was operating at full capacity. He’d be visible if he moved quickly.

  “Stay here.” Leif jumped out the door. He dropped low to the ground and hopped away from the truck.

  Nax did not listen. He crawled back over to the driver’s side, and in one quick, smooth movement, stepped out of the vehicle and out from behind the door. “I’m going to fucking kill you, Janus!” he roared.

  A targeted, visible-to-Leif wave-tentacle burst from Janus directly toward Nax. It washed over him, then pulled back as if Janus controlled it like an appendage.

  He’d seen the three Fates of the Draki Prime do something similar many times, but nothing this… visceral. Or viscous.

  Or so utterly aimed.

  Leif darted at an angle away from the truck and toward the horse statue, hoping that this once Janus really wasn’t paying attention to anything other than the distraction offered.

  Nax gave Janus the finger, then dropped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.

  He gunned the engine.

  Janus stalked back and forth next to the second vehicle, rifle held up in the air, silent yet visibly agitated. He didn’t yell or call out. He waved the weapon at Nax, and at the cruel universe.

  His hood rose up and enclosed his head, and he shouted again. Leif held perfectly still about ten meters away, waiting.

  Janus turned his back.

  Leif bolted the distance between them and slammed into Janus. His suit delivered a shock and the Fate shouted, but Leif chopped his hand down onto Janus’s elbow hard enough to make him drop the rifle.

  Janus landed on his back in the gravel. They were on the ground now, Leif holding Janus down by gripping an arm and pressing his knee into the other man’s thigh so he couldn’t kick.

  Janus scraped his boots against the rocks and swung at Leif’s invisible head with his other hand. He didn’t engage his own camo, probably because it wouldn’t matter at this point. “I know you’ve taken command!” he yelled. “You think I didn’t see the obvious future?” He swung at Leif’s head again. “I know exactly where you are, Impossible Son.”

  Leif caught his other forearm. “Then you know you’re going to stand down.” All they had to do was wait for Antonius to show up. Or Praesagio’s security. Someone with a little bit of power in this timeline. Anyone who could rein in Janus.

  “Stand down.” Janus chuckled. “You mean take a breather? Perhaps drink a refreshing lemonade while
we wait for the other Legion boy to roll in? Your suit doesn’t have enough juice to keep shocking me, by the way.” He tried to head-butt Leif but missed. “You called in Daniel’s honey.”

  Janus grinned like the all-knowing bastard he was.

  “You murdered five soldiers, you pathetic piece of shit,” Leif said.

  “No one in this timeline matters!” Janus shouted. “Nothing matters!” He blinked rapidly, and his face cycled through every twitchy emotion a human could make. “Give me back my sword!”

  Thirty feet away, Nax gunned the engine.

  Janus stopped twitching. He stopped fighting and frothing at the mouth. He went from frantic and frenzied to ice-cold calm in the blink of an eye.

  Leif had watched the Judicial High Commander use the same technique on unsuspecting individuals several times. The change was meant to disorient. It made Leif want to punch his psycho face.

  But that, too, would get Janus what he wanted—leverage, both physical and theatrical. So Leif didn’t respond. No sigh. No expression. No language and no letting go of the Fate’s arms or legs.

  “How very Dracae of you,” Janus drawled. “Are you going to allow the Lesser Emperor to run me over?”

  Again, Leif didn’t respond.

  His capacity indicator jumped from seventy percent to thirty. Camouflage systems down it said.

  Janus grinned. “See? Running out of juice.”

  His suit displayed no indication that Janus had hooked into its systems. None. Leif pushed off Janus as far and as fast as his Dracae strength allowed.

  Janus sat up. He dusted snow and gravel off his thighs, but didn’t run, nor did he stand. “These suits are primitive.” He said it as if those four words explained what he’d managed to do.

  Leif’s hood opened. Diagnostics engaged popped up on his retinal display. “What did you do?”

  “The me that was me before I became me,” he dusted his shoulder, “that me was important to the programming of our versions of these suits, my dear boy.”

  He was not a boy. And the Progenitors didn’t remember the before time. None of them did. If Janus remembered, then…

  “I didn’t fully remember until Kai’s suit connected to one of my implant tattoos.” He pointed at his left shoulder. “They’d been there all this time, invisible under my Progenitor skin.” The same momentary confusion that had shown when the bubble formed blinked across his face, then vanished just as quickly as it had appeared. “We should put your father and aunt in these suits, huh? I wonder what would happen.”

  “Stay away from my family.” He should have kept his mouth shut. The threat was just as much bait as the ice-cold change moments ago.

  “They no longer matter,” Janus said.

  Yes, they did. So did Del. And Nax. And the healer, Sandra. So did the dead soldiers. So did Leif. There had to be some mattering here or the entropy of the universe would have already turned them into cold, solidified death.

  He had to believe that. He had to.

  Nax gunned the engine again.

  All Leif had to do was move out of the way. That’s all. Move enough and Nax would be the agent of change that forced Janus to realize that just because he believed nothing mattered didn’t mean it was true.

  A diagnostic scroll rolled by on Leif’s retinal display. The motherfucker had tampered with his suit’s self-repair programming.

  Leif rolled away. He rolled more out of an unconscious need to protect himself than from hate, or resignation, or malice. A part of him knew he needed to move, so he did.

  Would it be enough?

  Janus vanished just as Nax charged.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Del…

  The woman named Cordelia drove. Harold rode with Antonius the Angelic Otter Boy in the other SUV behind us. The other three vehicles peeled off and headed in a different direction after we left the crash site. Seemed the two War Babies were being transported with extra guards to a location where they would be “kept out of trouble.”

  Some dude who also wore a violet-colored jacket sat between Daniel and Marcus in the back of the SUV.

  The dude said things like “You need a CT scan to identify specifics in your shoulder,” and “I’m going to give you a generalized healing to offset the blood you’ve lost because of the cut to your hand.” He made Marcus sigh, too, when he placed his palm on his forehead. Then he wrapped his hand around Daniel’s cut and made it disappear.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask, either. I was done with this shit.

  “None of us is done with this, Philadelphia,” Cordelia said.

  “Stop reading my mind,” I snapped. “And you Mr. Healer back there can fuck right on off back to Shifterville or wherever you came from.”

  “No one is reading your mind, Del,” Daniel said.

  I turned around in my seat and poked a finger at his stolen face. “You used me as bait.”

  Marcus rolled his shoulders. “I cannot believe you put Antonius and Harold in the same SUV,” he said, as if me being chum in the water for Fate sharks was just how the world worked.

  “You two needed healings more than they did,” Cordelia said. “You should be thankful I had access to someone with enough tactical training for fieldwork.” She nodded to the healer. “Del, open the glove compartment, please,” she said to me.

  I gave her the finger as I turned back around and flopped into the seat. They didn’t care. I didn’t care. I wanted to go home.

  Cordelia reached across and popped open the glove compartment. “Give Daniel that case.”

  A small, gray, zippered portfolio sat in the middle of the normal insurance and manual clutter. “That looks like an insulin case,” I said. Some of the oldsters at Paradise Homes had them.

  “That won’t work,” Daniel said from the back. “Not with the suits.”

  Cordelia glanced at the rearview mirror. “You are sure of this?”

  “Do you want one of them to steal it and use it on Nax? Because it’d work on Nax,” Daniel said. “And you and I both know what Janus is capable of.”

  “If that’s some sort of Shifter killer, you better keep it away from Nax,” I said.

  Cordelia slammed the glove compartment door. “I thought you didn’t care anymore,” she said.

  “I don’t care about you,” I said.

  Marcus chuckled. “My professional recommendation is that you train this one, Cordelia.”

  “No!” I slapped the dash. Maybe before Mrs. K had died, I would have said yes to training. But not now. Now, they were just a bunch of manipulators and killers, and I wanted nothing to do with that.

  Cordelia gave me some side-eye. “You will use that ring on your thumb and the sword to release Maria Romanova from new-space. Then we will escort you to Cheyenne.” She looked at the rearview mirror again. “You’ll never see any of us ever again. Right, boys?”

  Daniel shook his head. He didn’t answer.

  I still needed to get away from them. Maybe Leif would help. He wanted to see his family as much as I wanted to see mine. “Antonius relinquished his Seraphim-ness and went back to his roots?” Because from what Leif said, they were Legion before they were Seraphim.

  Cordelia slowed the SUV slightly and took us onto the road leading to the airport. “Daniel?” she asked.

  “The suits make it hard to read the Seraphim,” Daniel said. “Plus add in proximity to the ring.”

  Cordelia tapped her ear. “Antonius says he’s lost contact with Leif’s suit,” she said. “And that the suit Janus stole is actively looking for other systems.”

  “Tell him to put up a firewall,” Daniel said.

  The last little strand of tolerance I had for everything—the Fates, the damned invading dragons, that motherfucker of a spaceship that I knew was out there but had not yet seen in real life, all the ghosts, all the tech, just snapped. It popped and I swear so did a blood vessel.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Let me out!” I hit the dash again.

  A
hand snaked between the seats and landed on the side of my neck. And…

  The panic vanished. It didn’t even leave a shadow, or a burned-in memory. My chest was tight one breath and loose the next. The extras that came with panic—the susceptibility to touch, to every single change in pitch, the brightening of colors, all those things that you don’t realize are affecting your perception until they subside—didn’t subside so much as were erased.

  It didn’t erase the rest of my emotions, though.

  “Hey!” I slapped the healer’s hand away. “Do you mind?”

  The healer rolled his hand around my slap and latched onto my face as if he was laying on some sort of mind-meld. “Calm,” he said.

  But he didn’t just say it. His voice modulated, and…

  “Clearheaded,” he said.

  What the hell was he doing to me?

  “Warrior.”

  The interior of the SUV brightened. The view of the road ahead sharpened. Dust and grit carried in through the heat vents stuck to the inside of my nostrils. The air dried my eyes. The seat wrinkled under my butt. And in the back, Daniel gasped.

  The sound bounced between the cold windows, through the dry, gritty, blowing air, and not only to my ears, but also the exposed skin of my cheeks and hands.

  I knew exactly where he was and how he’d positioned his body, even though I faced forward. I knew how Marcus shifted in his seat. And I knew from the healer’s subtle gasp that he had not expected “warrior” to trigger full warrior.

  He had no idea what Alt-me had downloaded into my head just before she tricked me into opening the gate for the Dragonslayer. No idea that I could, somehow, access her years and years of training.

  I slowly turned my head to stare at the men.

  The healer sat back. At least he watched me more like a doctor looking for side effects than a smug bastard who’d just messed with my mind.

  The muscles around Daniel’s eyes tightened behind his dark glasses as if he was looking at the inside of his dead corneas. “Cordelia…” He did not sound pleased.

  Let him not be pleased. I was a warrior goddess and I was going to kick some bad Fate ass.