The transformation only took seconds, and when it was over, five two-legged wraithwolves stood before the farmhouse.
“Oh, God,” said Leon. “Oh, God…”
“Bullets don’t work on us anymore, Colonel,” growled the thing that had been Hopkins.
“I’m going to rip you apart,” said Cecilia, her voice now a horrid gurgling rasp. “I’m going to rip out your entrails and…”
She fell silent, blinking her harsh yellow eyes, and flinched in surprise.
Nadia was laughing a hard, bitter laugh that had no trace of humor, that mirthless rictus on her face.
“You idiots,” she said. “You think that’s scary? You want to see fear? I’ll show it to you. I would kill you all, right here and now, but I think Colonel Quell wouldn’t like it. So as a favor to him, I’ll give you one chance to surrender. Do it right now, or I’ll kill you all.”
“Little girl,” sneered Cecilia. “Little skinny bitch. You won’t be so pretty when I rip your face off.”
“Fine,” said Nadia, and she stepped towards the horrors and gestured.
There was a flash of blue-white light, and suddenly lightning globes whirled and spun around her like small, angry planets orbiting a very pissed off sun. Owen could use the lightning globe spell himself, and he had seen Elven nobles cast it a few times.
But he had never seen anyone summon seven lightning globes at once.
Riordan stepped to Nadia’s side, holstered his pistol, and rolled his right wrist. Suddenly he held a sword that looked as if it had been made from solid shadows.
“Last chance,” said Nadia.
“Kill them,” said the thing that had been Hopkins.
The five wraithwolves loosed chilling, tearing howls, and leaped forward, the claws of their feet ripping at the grass. Nadia gestured, and the lightning globes ripped forward and broke apart, striking each of the wraithwolves simultaneously. Lightning slashed up and down their bodies, the stink of burning fur filling Owen’s nostrils.
Riordan moved in a dark blur, the black sword flickering in his hands, and suddenly Cecilia’s head rolled away, her body falling to the ground. Likely Riordan had targeted her first because she had threatened Nadia. The surviving five wraithwolves recovered, and Owen cast his own spell. A lightning sphere leaped from his hands and struck the nearest wraithwolf, and the creature staggered back, roaring in pain. Riordan took off his head with a swift strike of his shadow sword.
The other three creatures lunged towards Nadia, and she gestured again. A sphere of fire burst from her hand and landed in the middle of the charging wraithwolves. Owen first thought that she had missed, but her spell exploded like an incendiary grenade. The bloom of fire engulfed the wraithwolves, and their howl of pain filled Owen’s ears. One of the wraithwolves staggered out of the fire, and he cast the lightning sphere spell again. This time his strike hit the wraithwolf in the forehead and burned into its skull, and the creature went down.
The final two creatures emerged from the fading fireball only to meet Riordan. His dark sword flickered left and right. One of the wraithwolves fell, its head tumbling away in the opposite direction. Nadia shoved her right hand at the remaining creature, and there was a sharp crack of shattering bone as a burst of telekinetic force hit the wraithwolf in the chest. The creature flipped head over heels like a child’s toy and landed hard with more broken bones.
Owen lowered his hand, breathing hard, but all the wraithwolves were down.
Nadia and her husband had mowed through them in less than a minute.
The smell of urine came to Owen’s nostrils, and he glanced back and saw that Leon had wet himself, his body shaking with terror.
With a cold burst of clarity, Owen realized that he would have died here today. Suddenly he knew exactly why Tarlia had sent Nadia to work with him despite their diverging personalities and experiences. Owen would have tracked down Leon sooner or later, and when he did, the wraithwolves would have killed him. He had enough magic to maybe kill one or two of them, but the rest would have overwhelmed him and ripped him apart as Doyle and his family had been killed.
If Nadia and Riordan hadn’t been here, he would have died.
He looked at Nadia. She was staring at the fallen wraithwolves, lightning crackling around her fingers, her teeth bared in a snarl. There was not the slightest trace of sanity or mercy in her expression. Probably she was reliving some of the horrible memories he had seen through the mindtouch spell.
“Nadia,” said Riordan. “Are you okay?”
She blinked, looked at her husband, and something like lucidity came back into her eyes once more.
“Yeah,” said Nadia. “Yeah, I’m swell.” She scoffed. “Better than these idiots. I…”
There was a blur, and four of the wraithwolves blurred back into human form. Owen felt a misplaced burst of anger at the sight of four uniformed officers lying dead. One of the wraithwolves kept its form, and Owen saw that the creature was alive, though badly burned with broken bones jutting out of its legs.
“Sergeant Hopkins is still alive,” said Riordan. “If we don’t kill him, he’s going to regenerate from his wounds in a few minutes.”
“We should question him,” said Owen.
“Good idea, but in a minute,” said Nadia. “I want to have a look at the dead ones first. Hey! Puppy! Stay!”
She gestured again, and a spike of ice the size of Owen’s arm shot from her hand. It stabbed through Hopkins’ stomach and sank into the ground, and the wraithwolf let out a scream of pain.
With Hopkins pinned in place, Nadia turned and walked to the headless corpse of Cecilia Sullivan. Riordan followed her, putting himself between his wife and Hopkins as he kept an eye on the snarling, thrashing wraithwolf. Nadia knelt, grunted, and flipped Cecilia’s corpse onto its stomach. She yanked up the back of Cecilia’s uniform jacket and shirt, revealing an expanse of pale white skin.
And, at the base of her spine, a thin metal plate about the size of a mass market paperback book.
“I’ll be damned,” said Owen.
“Don’t touch it,” said Nadia. “Wish I hadn’t left my aetherometer in the car. But I’m close enough that the sensing spell will work.” She cast the spell to sense magic, holding her gloved palm an inch above the metal plate.
“What do you sense?” said Riordan, still watching Hopkins.
“Nothing good,” said Nadia. “There’s a summoning spell bound into this thing…that was the echo I picked up when we were in Doyle’s building, Owen. Warren must have one of these plates on his back, too.” Her brow furrowed. “I’m not sure…but I think this works by summoning a wraithwolf from the Shadowlands and binding it into the flesh of whoever bears the plate.”
“That would influence their thoughts?” said Owen.
Nadia snorted. “They’d go bugshit crazy, that’s what would happen.”
“Direct summoning into a human body is rare, but it has happened,” said Riordan. “It’s rare because it’s incredibly dangerous. The summoned creature would have massive influence over its host, and it might even take control. The host wouldn’t even know that it’s happening. That’s probably why Warren killed Doyle’s entire family. He likely only intended to kill Ronald Doyle, but with the wraithwolf influencing him, the bloodlust took him over.”
Owen looked over the bodies. This was a catastrophe. Four dead Homeland Security officers, with a fifth likely about to die, officers who had violated the law and summoned Shadowlands creatures, earning an automatic death sentence.
And if Leon was right, there were still forty-three more plates out there.
He glanced at the porch, but Leon stood rooted there, still shaking. Owen really hoped he didn’t have a heart attack.
“Okay,” said Owen. “We’ve got to decide what to do next. Normally, if officers were involved in something illegal, I would notify our internal affairs division and have them open an investigation…”
“But you don’t know how many officers have those
wraithwolf plates,” said Riordan.
Owen shook his head. “Warren was a superb officer. One of the best. If he was involved in this…”
“Wait a minute,” said Nadia. “I’ve got an idea.”
She patted Cecilia’s leg, reached into the dead woman’s pocket, and drew out a folding knife. Nadia opened the knife and worked the tip of the blade beneath the plate, blood welling around the tip. She pushed on the handle, and the bronze plate popped off Cecilia’s back, exposing a rectangle of bloody, bruised flesh.
“Gross,” said Nadia, ignoring the corpses around her. She flipped the plate onto its back, and on the side that had been touching Cecilia’s skin, Owen saw dozens of rows of tiny sharp pins. “It kind of looks like a computer processor. Like, you know how a computer processor has hundreds of pins on the underside, and they have to line up perfectly to fit into the motherboard socket?” Owen didn’t, but he assumed she knew what she was talking about, so he nodded. “I bet some of these pins reached her spine, like it was injecting the wraithwolf into her nervous system or something, and…shit. Shit, shit.”
“What?” said Owen.
Nadia pointed with the bloody knife. The pins covered the back of the plate in neat rows, save for a square area in the center. Engraved in the square was a symbol that looked like a double helix of DNA in a circle.
“The logo of Catalyst Corporation,” said Nadia, voice grim.
“You mentioned them before,” said Owen. “What are they?”
“Don’t know for sure,” said Nadia, glancing at Leon. She lowered her voice. “They were an international corporation about a hundred and fifty years ago, did medical research and biotechnology, that kind of stuff. I don’t know exactly what they did to piss her off, but the High Queen shut them down hard. Then a couple months ago someone dug up some of their technology in New York and used it to make trouble.”
“And the Singularity is a terrorist group using that technology?” said Owen.
“It’s starting to look that way,” said Nadia. “The troublemaker in New York got his toys from something he called the Singularity. Let’s see if Sergeant Hopkins knows.”
She rose to her feet and walked towards Hopkins, Riordan at her side. Owen followed them, and Nadia stopped a few paces away, well out of reach of the wraithwolf’s claws.
“Colonel,” rasped Hopkins. The voice was deep and inhuman, and still recognizable as Hopkins, but it was disturbing to hear the words come from the fanged maw of a wraithwolf. “Are you going to arrest me? No cell will hold me. And the wounds you have given me will heal, and I shall find you and feast upon you…”
“Not if we get that gizmo off your back,” said Nadia. Hopkins snarled in rage. “Riordan.”
Riordan nodded, and Nadia cast a spell. She flung a single lightning globe into Hopkins, and the wraithwolf bellowed in fury, claws raking at the ground. In one smooth motion, Riordan kicked Hopkins onto his back, reached down, and ripped the plate away in a burst of dark blood. Hopkins screamed, his voice becoming normal again, and a second later, he returned to human form.
A dying, mortally wounded human, his shredded uniform red with blood.
“Oh, God,” croaked Hopkins, and he flopped onto his back with a cry of pain. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts…”
“Yeah,” said Nadia with a total lack of sympathy. “It hurts when you get ripped up by a wraithwolf.”
“Give it,” moaned Hopkins, reaching for Riordan. He could barely lift his arms. “Give it…back to me, I need it…”
“Phil,” said Owen. “This is crazy. You have to know this is crazy. Turning people into wraithwolves? It’s going to end badly. What are you doing? You have to help me stop this.”
The dying man looked at Owen, and something like regret came into his face.
“I’m sorry about your family,” said Hopkins. “But Warren…Warren said that you’d be home, and…”
“My family?” said Owen, the cold feeling in his chest getting worse. “What about my family?”
But Philip Hopkins had stopped breathing, his unblinking eyes open to the sky.
***
Chapter 13: Necessary Casualties
For an awful, frozen moment, we didn’t say anything.
Then Owen cursed and yanked his cell phone from his belt.
“Calling your wife?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Owen. “She’s at home today. So are the kids. Day off from school, faculty meetings or something like that.”
I heard the shrill beep from his phone. The number he had called was out of service. Or someone had cut the phone wires to his house.
“Shit,” said Owen. “I’ll call some officers, have them put a protective detail around the house…no, goddamn it, I can’t. Those wraithwolves will go through any officers like paper.”
“They need magic to hurt the wraithwolves,” said Riordan. “You could try Duke Tamirlas’s office, warn him the Shadowlands creatures are loose in the city.”
“By the time they get there it will be too late,” said Owen. I saw the fear eating him. “If we drive, it’s at least forty-five minutes to get there.”
“I have an idea,” I said. “Do you have something connected to your house, like…um, a rock or a key or something?”
“Yeah,” said Owen. “My front door key. Why?”
I took a deep breath. “Because we can take a gamble. If I open a rift way to the Shadowlands, that key will link back to Earth. If a nearby location within the Shadowlands corresponds to your house, we can get there in a couple of minutes.”
It sounded good. But it was insanely dangerous. There was no telling what I would find on the other side of the rift way. Maybe nothing. Maybe a few wraithwolves. Maybe a thousand anthrophages, or a naelgoth, or something even worse. But if Warren had decided to kill Owen’s family, we needed every minute.
But Owen knew that already.
“If you’re willing to do it,” said Owen, pulling a key from his pocket and handing it to me.
I nodded, took the key, shut off my phone so it wouldn’t explode or catch fire when I entered the Shadowlands, and started gathering the power for the rift way spell.
“I’ll go through first,” said Riordan, his voice hard. He might not try to talk me out of this crazy plan, but if I tried to go through the rift way first, he would physically stop me.
“Fine,” I said as he turned off his phone.
“What…what should I do?” called Leon from the porch.
“Get your ass in the basement and stay there until I come for you,” said Owen. “Your life is still in danger. Don’t call anyone, and don’t call Homeland Security. If anyone figures out you’re still alive, they’re going to come for you.”
Pablo Leon whirled and fled into the house. With my full attention on the spell, I barely noticed.
I gestured, and a curtain of gray mist and light rose up from the ground. The mist flickered and became translucent, and through it, I saw something that looked like a rocky forest. Except the boulders were all obsidian, and the trees were black with blue-glowing leaves.
Damn it. I did not want to go back to the Shadowlands.
“It’s ready,” I said.
Riordan went through the rift way, and I followed, holding the gate open as I summoned more power for a spell.
A flicker of nauseating disorientation and I was in the Shadowlands, the dark place that connected all worlds. The Shadowlands could look like anything – a forest, a plain, a mountain, a ruined city, whatever – and this part looked like a weird forest. My boots scraped against the rocky ground, and the trees with their blue-glowing leaves spread overhead. The sky was an empty black vault, devoid of sun, moon, stars, and weather, but despite that, I had no trouble seeing.
I could see the four anthrophages just fine.
Anthrophages were some of the more common creatures of Earth’s umbra in the Shadowlands, a twisted reflection of humanity that preyed upon people. Much in the same way that some people preyed upon oth
er people, I suppose. The anthrophages were human-shaped, but gaunt with gray skin, venomous yellow eyes, and black craters for noses. Fangs filled their mouths, and claws jutted from their fingers and toes.
We had caught them off guard. Even as I looked, Riordan killed one, and the remaining three circled around him.
I cast a spell, drawing more power even as I held the rift way open. The Shadowlands are the source of magic – I think technically magical force is actually “aetheric radiation” that seeps into our world, or at least that’s what the Elves call it. That means magic is much stronger in the Shadowlands, and I could already draw in a lot of power for a human. I pulled in way more force than I intended, but I had a handy target close at hand, and I threw that power into a spell.
The fire sphere that I had intended to drill a neat hole through the nearest anthrophage’s skull instead turned its head, shoulders, arms, chest, and most of its stomach to smoking ashes, and also set the tree behind it on fire.
Oh, well.
The remaining two anthrophages gaped at the unexpected explosion, and Riordan killed them without any fuss.
Strange, metallic hunting cries echoed in the still air.
“Hurry,” said Riordan. His eyes had turned solid black as his Shadowmorph fed, and I felt an extremely ill-timed wave of physical desire for him, complete with a vivid mental image of him ripping off my clothes and throwing me to the ground beneath him. That was a function of his Shadowmorph, a way to draw life force to it, and I have to admit that in the proper time and place (alone in our bedroom with the door closed and the curtains drawn) that could be a lot of fun. Right now, it was just distracting. “I think these four were the outer scouts of a bigger hunting pack.”
“Crap,” I said, and I held up Quell’s door key and cast the seeking spell.
It was one of the spells Morvilind had taught me a long, long time ago. Locations in the Shadowlands corresponded to various locations on Earth, but they weren’t congruent. Like, I could enter the Shadowlands from Milwaukee, walk ten yards, open another rift way, and come back to Earth in Africa or Asia. Plus, the linkages constantly changed, so using the Shadowlands to travel to different locations on Earth was a bad idea.
Cloak of Wolves Page 20