Witch of the Midnight Blade

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Del…

  Nax touched my arm. He put his finger to his lips and nodded to the rubble in front of us.

  I stepped to the side to hide in the shadow of the overturned skeleton of a bus. No engine remained. No seats, either, and no markings as to what kind of bus it had been when it transported humans. It was just a burned frame now.

  I hadn’t heard anything skitter. Nax, though, had better hearing, so every time he signaled for me to wait, I waited. The first time yielded a tiny, shrieking hell-squirrel that scampered away before Nax could stomp on it. The second time turned out to be wind moving through a tunnel made by fallen girders.

  The third, a medium-sized hellhound. It flashed an array of reds and oranges at us, then lowered its head and snarled. A few of the Denver hounds had been the same species. They looked more like wolves than any of the other hounds and were terrifyingly fast.

  Nax shot it in the head.

  That’s when I began to regret my choices.

  We were alone out here with only dust and the hell-rats. The haze draped over the ruins like dirty cotton and smothered everything that hadn’t already been ripped down to pebbles and death.

  We’d found seaweed tangled in twisted metal, and the bones of a few fish. The haze had taken on a salty, fetid ocean smell. The spike drilling into Tokyo must also have caused a tsunami, the remnants of which we were finding now. How far inland it had swept, I couldn’t possibly guess.

  Was the water now so turbid and polluted that going to the shore was the dumbest thing we could do? Daniel hadn’t discouraged us from leaving. But then again, why should I place any faith in what a Fate wanted? I was already enough of a fool.

  Yet here I was with a man who, if he used his Shifter ability, would likely burn up and die.

  But hey, I had Leif’s knife, so I was just fine, thank you very much.

  “We’re going to die out here, aren’t we?” I asked. We were in a valley between collapsed walls. On one side, a building so obliterated I had no sense as to what its purpose had been. On the other, a fifteen-foot perpendicular concrete slab that probably had once been the core of a grand entrance. We walked in the narrow space between them like two sulking mice.

  Nax shouldered his rifle. The grit and fumes of the haze had me wishing for goggles, but at least I could see. We could breathe through our t-shirts, even if not deeply.

  “I’ll get you home,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.” He pointed forward. “Shore should be that way.”

  I might be a mouse, but Nax had decided to be something with more teeth and claws.

  Like every coastal city on Earth, “the shore” meant docks, warehouses, wharfs, and lots and lots of concrete right up to the water. We wouldn’t find beach no matter where we came out, but maybe we’d find a waystation, like Leif said.

  I had hope, which was probably a bad idea, but it was still there, under all the other bullshit.

  And I really was beginning to regret my choices.

  “Hey.” Nax touched my elbow. “This is the path we are on, so we go forward, okay? It’s what you have to do.”

  I couldn’t really see his features under the edge of his t-shirt. Not the wiggles of his mouth, or the cinching of his cheeks. But I’d spent enough time with him to be able to read his eyes.

  He blinked the same way he blinked when he talked about his son. His eyebrows did the same subtle shifting they did whenever the name Daisy Pavlovich came up. Unlike me, Nax had experienced worse horrors in his life.

  No, not worse. He’d caused his own horrors. Mine were inflicted. But they all ultimately generated the same belly-deep need to hide and scurry and skitter.

  Shame. That’s what it was. Nax and I were both full of shame. His, for obvious reasons. Mine, because I let assholes use me for their own benefit. And here we were, at the end of the world, both drowning in our personal hells when we should suck it up and do our jobs. Other people needed help.

  And here Marcus kept saying “This time, we save everyone.” Everyone but the rescuers.

  “Did you see anything while we were in Maria’s prison?” Because I was pretty sure all the flipping—from Alt-me, to the Dragonslayer’s commander, to that kid—meant there were still parts of the universe interested in scooping us up.

  Which seemed dumb. My part of this was done. The universe should let me go home.

  Maybe Nax was still important, though.

  “It happened too fast.” He shook his head. “We were in Denver, I blinked, and hooves dropped off the blue horse.”

  So time had moved differently for him. “I had visitors.”

  He poked at a pile of torn tarps laying against a bent-over light pole. “Maria-like visitors?” he asked.

  He’d gotten to the point where he took all talk about ghosts at face value, something I was more thankful for than I realized. Part of me still thought that he’d go all Old Man Nax on me, arguing about his slippers or another resident’s oxygen tank.

  But he wasn’t Paradise Homes Nax any more than I was pre-Incursion Del.

  “Yes,” I said. “I saw Alt-me again. I think she got shot.”

  He groaned. “Damn, Del.”

  I shrugged.

  “That’s not going to happen here.”

  Maybe he was correct. Maybe not. I was more likely to get eaten by a dragon than I was to get murdered by a human, anyway.

  Nax did not seem surprised.

  My head still hurt from where Janus had hit me, but not as badly as I suspected it should have. That healer who’d enthralled me must have boosted my background healing, too. But the extra health boost wasn’t helping me parse all this. “An alternate version of the Dragonslayer talked to me.”

  Nax gestured for us to keep moving. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said.

  I rubbed at my nose through the fabric of my shirt. “Okay.” Whatever made him happy.

  “My ex is a Fate.” He rubbed at the fabric covering his nose. “Her triad isn’t powerful. The Shifters call Fates like that breeders, as if their only purpose is to make stronger babies.” He glanced around a chunk of concrete. “The powerful families will often arrange triads just for that purpose.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said.

  He motioned me forward again. “Thing is, I don’t think a lot of the breeder Fates are ‘less powerful,’ the way low class-two and class-three Shifters are. I think it’s more environmental with Fates. You can give a set of Fate kids with potential a quality talisman—like, say, the Imperial Eagle of the Roman Empire—and they’ll do all their seeing among the rich and powerful. You end up with powerful families.”

  Just like everyone else’s life.

  “Anyway, my ex’s talisman isn’t impressive. Basically, her triad is good enough to do some uncanny psychic stuff. It’s a living.”

  I nodded.

  “They’d catch stuff now and again. See futures where the police would make people disappear. See past murders when the person was already missing. Dangerous stuff.”

  That also sounded like life.

  “That’s why I took my boy, by the way. Ukraine isn’t always safe.”

  I wasn’t up on the details, but I knew that his taking of the boy had not been well-implemented.

  “One day, she told me something that I’d never realized, or thought about, no matter how many Fates I’ve known in my years. They’re all present-seers, no matter what their ability is. What they do isn’t really about seeing the past or the future. It’s about giving the what-was and the what-will-be structure in the present.”

  Usually I could tell where a story was going. I didn’t know enough about Fates to see his point.

  Nax nodded as if he expected me not to understand. “All this has made you a default Fate,” he said. “You were effectively activated. Stab is as much your talisman as it is Janus’s. But instead of seeing the what-was-is-will-be, you see the what-might-have-been and the what-won’t-happen. Stab shows you alternate structure.”

 
I hadn’t thought of it that way. “I don’t have what I need to be powerful,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You’re not trained. You don’t have the experience to know if seeing your Alt-self’s end was a portent for you, or if it was closure. Nor do you have the tools to know if seeing the Dragonslayer’s commanding officer was important to you. For all we know, seeing her, meeting her, might be you doing an inadvertent reading for Leif, or Janus, or the ship. Or even me. I was in Maria’s prison, too.”

  “Maybe,” I said. All this talk about inadvertent readings didn’t refute the real problem. I wasn’t powerful. I wasn’t a player. I was the ball.

  I should tell him about the kid, though. Because he deserved to know. “How old is your son?”

  “Almost fourteen,” he said.

  Just a little younger than Elijah. “Does he look like you?” Because that kid looked like Nax in the same way that Leif looked like the man in the dragon’s video—same shape to his head, same set to his shoulders, same cheeks and chin.

  “His mother used to think so.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Nax stopped walking again and looked directly at me. “What’s this about, Del?”

  “I think I saw him, too. He helped Maria out of the cage.” I inhaled. “I think he might be looking for us.”

  Nax breathed in hard enough to pucker the t-shirt fabric over his mouth. He squinted. But he stood still where we walked, in the shadows between broken buildings. We were deep in the valley now, in the darkness.

  “Orel,” he said. “That’s his name.” When he did move, it was to rub his face. “I think Leif knew him back in their timeline. He knew a version of my son.”

  I stepped closer as if Nax was my brother, or my uncle. As if he was someone whose comfort I cared about.

  Maybe I wasn’t as done as I thought.

  “He called him the Captain.” Nax’s chest bowed out as if he was about to gasp. “What if I messed him up here, Del? What if he can’t become whatever leader he was in Leif’s world?” He backed into the concrete behind us. “What if you saw the other captain because I messed up Orel’s life?”

  He’d said something about me not having the tools to understand what Stab showed me. I was too used more than too green, but I knew what I’d seen. “I think he was using his Fate ability to search for us—for you.”

  I didn’t know for sure if he was using his Fate ability. I didn’t know enough about Fates to know if I was correct. But that kid knew.

  Nax pushed off the concrete. “He’s not searching for me. If anything, they have him searching for the Fates.”

  They meant Praesagio.

  “Or Vivicus. Or you.” A fast, small grin twitched the corners of his mouth. “Not me.”

  “Nax…”

  “Listen to me,” Nax said. “I have walked through multiple ends of the world. Droughts. Volcanic winters. Famine and plague. Wars. I have stood in the center of the Coliseum surrounded by goats and their herders who had no clue that they were descended from the builders of civilization.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “It means I’ll likely be one of handful of humans who makes it through this.” He walked toward a small patch of light about twenty-five feet ahead. “He’s not looking for me.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the shore. “Vivicus is dangerous enough that Praesagio would use a kid to look for him.”

  Nax thought that someone, somewhere, somewhen, had their claws into his son. That his boy was being used as a search and rescue tool at best, or an apprehension tool at worst.

  It was all of us, wasn’t it? Every single person even remotely associated with the Midnight Blade was a mark. Every one of us either was a dangerous weapon or big, bright target. And now Nax’s boy was involved.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.

  “I’m going to get you to that waystation Leif talked about,” he said. “Then we get onto a Navy vessel. We tell them everything we know, and we do our best to take up the fight again, okay? And to keep our families out of it.”

  How was I supposed to do that? I didn’t have any fight left in me. I didn’t. I probably had a concussion. Maybe internal damage I didn’t know about. I was breathing death-air. And unlike everyone else in this mess, I was a normal person. “I can’t help anymore, Nax. You know—”

  He held up his hand to tell me to be quiet at the same time he swung up the rifle. I stepped behind him and peered at the huge pile of broken concrete and seaweed in front of us.

  A thick band of metal, one not all that different in color from the dark haze, poked out over the rubble.

  “That’s a helicopter blade,” I said.

  The pile of concrete and girders was a good twenty feet tall. Like all the rubble and broken glass along the valley, it cut off all visuals of what was behind it. We walked sheltered and protected, but it also meant we didn’t have a good understanding of the big picture.

  I didn’t want that understanding. I didn’t think Nax wanted it, either. But it also meant we could have walked right by a bit of machinery that likely had a radio.

  Nax tilted his head. “I don’t hear anything.”

  We climbed the rubble, careful of shifting slabs and stabbing rebar.

  The copter was military. The main body sat on its side and up against the base of the rubble. What was probably a missile launcher hung off the side with the landing skids. The tail and the back rotor had snapped off and were lying against what looked like an overpass support just visible through the haze.

  Scorch marks blackened the copter’s fuselage. The windshield was gone, which meant the entire inside had been open to the elements since it crashed.

  “It’s a Black Hawk.” Nax pointed at a round red circle on the side as he slid down to the fuselage. “Japanese Air Defense.” He gripped the edge of the copter’s metal frame and ducked in through where the windshield used to be. “By all the old gods,” echoed from inside. Rustling followed. Then he reappeared. “There’s remains in here,” he said. “Three soldiers. Looks like they took six hellhounds with them into the afterlife.” He glanced back.

  “Six? After they crashed?” I moved closer more out of a weird need to honor badassery than because I wanted to see dead people.

  He held up his hand. “They don’t look right.”

  He didn’t want me to look. He wanted me to save myself this little bit of trauma.

  Was I annoyed? Thankful? Both?

  The dead, like the living, were going to do what they were going to do no matter my wants and needs. So, like everything else, it didn’t matter if I spread out my arms and bellowed for more terrors to be heaped onto my shoulders. Or if I hid. Or if I just walked away.

  I nodded and sat on a chunk of concrete a good ten feet away so as to not be in the way. Nax nodded also, as if understanding that my decision not to poke at dead bodies wasn’t simply because I’d already had my fill of horror. He understood that it didn’t matter either way.

  He ducked into the copter again. Clinking and clanking followed, and he tossed a gnarled wad of wires out the window. “The radio’s gone,” he called. “All the communications equipment’s been pulled.” He poked his head out. “The bodies have been here a while and everything remotely useful has been stripped out.”

  “That’s good, right?” I said. Not good for us, but good for the survivors. “Maybe someone else got the radio to work?” Maybe that was why we hadn’t seen any people. Maybe the militaries of the world had done their jobs and evacuated everyone left.

  Which meant they were done. They’d finished their work.

  No one would come for us. No one human.

  Something moved in the haze near the tail section. “Nax!”

  He stuck out his head. I pointed. He aimed his rifle and the distortion vanished as if it realized we’d seen it.

  “A hellhound?” I asked. Did we have a hellhound trying to sneak up on us? Most of them didn’t bother to camo anymore. They trotte
d through the ruins like evil glowing cats.

  He squinted, then swung the rifle around again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Stay down.”

  We’d already talked about him using his abilities. It was the first thing we did when we left the Seraphim behind.

  The healer back in Denver had calmed down the venom in his blood but it was going to re-assert itself sooner or later. We were both hoping that if he didn’t use his abilities, it would be later.

  But he’d been clear. He’d hide us if he thought doing so would keep us alive.

  “Don’t glamour, Nax,” I said.

  Nax was effectively a normal person, like me. A normal with centuries’ worth of military and fight training, but still killable. I ducked behind the slab.

  Whatever was out in the haze moved. Nax motioned for me to push myself as much as possible against the rubble. “It’s low to the ground and localized into a small area.” He sniffed. “Might be humans with dragon tech.”

  It vanished at the same time a shadow moved over us. Not a strong one, or one that I would have noticed if I wasn’t already pondering the likelihood that we had human bait with dragon tech nearby. And I realized something that should have occurred to me the moment I couldn’t make out for sure what the blob was.

  We weren’t dealing with a human.

  The dragon manifested directly in front of us.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I somehow did not scream.

  Maybe I was too shocked. Maybe the dragon dropping its head and touching one of its weird, double-jointed fingers to its iguana-like lips as if to tell us to be quiet was enough. Because I froze.

  Nax, too. He stared, wide-eyed, at the dragon.

  Small leaf-like patterns moved along the dragon’s hide. They appeared along its cheeks as amorphous squiggles, and by the time they’d made their way down its neck, they’d turned into a sea of undulating blue-green that looked as much like scales as it did blue leaves on water.

  It was half again the size of the one who had found the bus, a good twenty feet from the tip of its snout to the end of its thick, strong tail. Like the other dragon, it wore a camo-based tool harness across its chest.