Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  Turns out there’s a KFC not too far from here. Sweet. Nothing like fried chicken and potatoes to stifle grief and suffering.

  Outside, the cold is still biting, but it’s not as bad as it was earlier, so I tug my scarf up to my chin and head down Tverskaya Street. I locate the KFC without too much trouble and order a huge meal to satisfy my whining stomach. Tray in hand, I find myself a seat and chow down. In between bites of chicken and chunks of biscuit, I peruse the map on my phone, seeing what else is nearby that might hold my interest.

  I’m fairly close to a lot of Moscow’s major attractions, so I decide to do a short walking tour. Get a little exercise in and let the cold air “cleanse me of my troubles.”

  From the KFC, I set off toward Bol’shaya Sadovaya Street. Three times, I nearly get run over by crazy drivers. One who’s going too fast and skids across the ice. One who’s on his phone and doesn’t even see me crossing the street. And one who straight up tries to commit vehicular homicide because he’s apparently got places to be and I’m in his way. I spit my best Russian swears at the last guy…and use a bit of magic to poke a hole in his tire.

  Don’t judge me. I’m all out of sympathy for assholes.

  Eventually, I reach the first destination on my impromptu tour: the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. There are several large event signs strung up in front of the entrance, and I peer up at each one in turn to learn who’s playing at the concert hall in the near future. Upcoming performances, according to these announcements, include the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia and the Russian State Symphony Orchestra of Cinematography. Their performance themes sound interesting, especially the cinematography orchestra, which will be playing soundtracks from disaster and horror movies at their next show.

  Man, I wish I had the spare change to snag some tickets. Alas, I am not—

  A magic shockwave rams into me. I don’t even realize until I’m on the ground, ears ringing, ribs aching, eyes seeing double, that the magic was accompanied by a physical explosion. Dazed, I roll over onto my knees and check myself for serious injuries. All I find are a few cuts and forming bruises from where my back and head smacked the pavement.

  I tentatively peek out from under the overhang of the concert hall’s entryway to observe the now hazy street strewn with settling debris. The explosion originated from the building next door. The Moscow Academic Theater of Satire. Whose empty windows and doorframes are belching smoke that rolls over the field of broken glass glittering on the sidewalk.

  There are no obvious hostiles outside the theater, which means that someone inside the theater just launched a magic attack. Presumably at someone else inside the theater.

  As the other pedestrians on the street flee past me, most of them covered in soot and wailing in terror, I hunt for a viable entry point to the theater. There’s one entrance along the front wall spitting a fraction less smoke than the rest. I might be able to power through it if I hold my breath and shield my eyes. Might be able to reach the fight in progress and disrupt whoever’s slinging spells before another explosion rocks this busy area and inevitably kills an innocent bystander.

  But should I? Should I involve myself in a magic showdown whose purpose I don’t know?

  One voice in my head shouts, This isn’t your city. This isn’t your fight. Run, you idiot!

  Behind it, a softer voice murmurs, People are in danger, and you’re the hero, so save the day.

  Pragmatism has never been my strong suit, as anyone can attest. So naturally, I shake off the dizziness from my tumble, call up my own magic, and take off for the entrance to the theater.

  So much for a relaxing vacation.

  Chapter Two

  Smoke stings my eyes and chokes my throat, but I press through the thick wall of haze in the theater’s lobby. Putting one foot in front of the other. Using my magic sense to seek out the source of the explosion via the varying concentrations of residual energy. More than once, I bump into a wall or a column, and twice I nearly trip over something lying overturned on the floor. I don’t, however, come across any people, dead or alive, and no one hidden by the smoke calls out for help. So I assume the only people inside the building right now are the ones who caused the disturbance. The people inside the main auditorium.

  The smoke largely clears as I near the first doorway to the auditorium, and I pause at the threshold, crouch low to examine my potential enemies before I rush in, spells blazing. On the stage at the far end of the room, I count eight people, but only three of them are standing: a man and woman wearing gray cloaks, faces hidden, and one woman in a blue parka streaked with blood and soot.

  The rest of the people on stage, lying in an uneven arc, are all dressed in hauntingly familiar black coats. Three of them are obviously dead, their bodies burned beyond recognition. The other two are so badly injured they’ll likely soon follow their comrades to the afterlife. The explosion must’ve been set off right in their faces.

  The cloaked people stand close to one another, their hands raised as if ready to defend themselves against a second attack that has yet to come. Meanwhile, the woman in the parka staggers around in circles, moaning in pain as her bones snap and pop themselves back into place. When her rapid healing factor knocks out the worst of her injuries, she relaxes slightly and opens her eyes. Amber irises. A turned vampire.

  A vampire. Two mystery people. And a group of dead DSI agents? A chill runs down my spine. What the hell is going on here?

  The cloaked man suddenly turns on the vampire woman and says in an intentionally distorted voice, “Where is Dawn Slayer? Did you lose it?”

  The vampire woman looks out across the theater, at the still-burning seats and the wisps of charred debris floating through the air. She curses in what sounds like German and replies to the man in accented English, “It was snatched right out of my hand by that goddamn thief just before he set off the explosive charm.”

  The cloaked man growls so loud it echoes off the ceiling. “If you can’t even manage to keep a single object in your grasp, then what good are you?”

  The vampire backs away from the cloaked man. “I brought it all the way here from Egypt without getting caught. It’s not my fault your rendezvous point was compromised. I didn’t even know we were meeting here until two hours ago.”

  “You must’ve been followed,” the cloaked woman chimes in, her voice also warped, a sound like sandpaper on wood grating over every syllable. “Because we were most certainly not. We had our scouts erect a three-block perimeter early this morning to ensure we would not be interrupted by local interests. And we negated the signs of our presence with all manner of blocking spells before we set off for the theater. No one could have tailed us here. So you must be the party at fault.”

  “Hey now.” The vampire woman raises her hands in a placating manner. “Let’s not start making baseless accusations—”

  The man’s hand whips up so fast that the vampire doesn’t see the movement until it’s too late. A blade of lavender-colored energy, whose edges are strangely discolored by a brownish layer of what looks like rust, appears in the air before the man’s outstretched hand and shoots across the stage.

  The blade impales the vampire woman in the chest, throws her off the stage, and pins her to the wall. She thrashes, desperately trying to pull the energy blade from her body, but the skin of her hands melts on contact. And before she can tear herself free some other way, the man snaps his fingers. The vampire woman bursts into flames, her shriek of terror and pain cut short as the viciously hot fire burns her to ash in seconds. Her remains flutter to the floor and join the rest of the settled debris.

  Holy hell. That guy just killed a vampire like it was nothing. What on earth did I walk into?

  The cloaked man dismisses the remnants of the vampire with a disgusted grunt and turns to converse with his partner in tones too low for me to parse from my current spot. But I’m not inclined to try and sneak closer to these people. Because anyone powerful enough to take down a vampire
in such an effortless manner is bound to have enhanced senses that could pick me out of a dense fog, to say nothing of a thinning haze of smoke. I’m lucky I haven’t already been noticed.

  I need to back away from this situation before I get entangled in something I’m not prepared for. With DSI, the vampires, these mysterious cloaked people, and at least one other party—the so-called thief—involved, whatever is happening can’t be some random conflict between the various supernatural factions of Moscow. There’s a much bigger and more complicated picture behind the scene on that stage. And I’m not up for getting stuck in another tangled web of magic politics, especially in a place where I have no protection from any of the involved factions. I should’ve walked away as soon as I sensed the magic energy.

  This isn’t my city. I have no business interfering in its personal battles without invitation.

  I quietly creep away from the door. The moment I’m out of the cloaked pair’s field of vision, I hop to my feet and hurry back the way I came. The smoke has cleared enough now to reveal the outlines of all the lobby’s exit doors, so I pick the nearest one, set myself on a quick course toward it, and then work out what to say if a normal first responder, or god forbid, a DSI agent, confronts me on my way out.

  Clearly, I should pretend to be a random bystander who thought someone inside the theater might be injured and in need of help. If they ask—

  A dark figure darts out of the smoke to my right and rams into me face first. Our heads collide with an audible thwap, and we go down hard, landing in a pile of flailing limbs and shouts of pain and panic. As I try to disentangle myself from the other guy, he kicks me twice in the back and punches me in the jaw. I retaliate by ramming my knee into his gut. My blow sends the guy reeling backward, and he lands atop the duffle bag slung over his shoulder, the object inside clanging loudly as it smacks the floor.

  The guy is stunned for only a second. Then he whips his head up, the hood of his jacket sliding off, yanks a gun from his waistband, and points said gun at my face. He doesn’t shoot me though. Instead, he stares at me with a sense of intense confusion that slowly morphs into absolute disbelief.

  And it’s not hard to figure out why.

  The guy looks exactly like me.

  We stare into each other’s identical eyes as it dawns on us that something has just gone very, very wrong.

  “Oh shit,” the guy says in my voice. “You can’t be here. Not now.”

  “You…” I raise my hand and point at him in the same manner he’s pointing the gun at me. “You’re that shapeshifter. The one who saved me from Lizzie Banks.”

  The shapeshifter rears up, grabs the lapel of my coat, pulls me close, and says, “There’s a side exit that lets out into a park next to this building.” He gives me a simple set of directions to the exit. “Go out that door. Take a left. Cut through the park. Jump the fence. Come out on Blagoveshchensky Lane, and then run like hell whichever direction you please. But whatever you do, make sure you don’t get captured. By anyone. Unless you fancy dying today.”

  He pushes me in the direction of the side door. “Now go.”

  “Hold up. You don’t get to use my likeness to steal shit”—I gesture to the bag on his back, which I’m almost certain contains the object the vampire and the cloaked people were arguing about—“from some very dangerous people, and leave me high and dry, without so much as an explanation.”

  The shapeshifter rolls my eyes. “Do you want an explanation, or do you want to get out of here in one piece?” He swings the gun around toward a shadow shifting in the smoke, a person wearing a cloak. The cloaked people heard the scuffle between me and the shapeshifter and came running in hope of recovering their precious “Dawn Slayer.” Whatever the heck that is.

  The shapeshifter pushes me again, harder this time. “Run. Now. Fast. And don’t stop until you’re sure there’s no one on your tail.”

  He fires the gun, emptying the entire magazine in the direction of the cloaked figure. The person—the man—grunts as the bullets bounce off what must be a magic shield. But he doesn’t miss a step on his plodding march toward the two renditions of Calvin Kinsey.

  This is the guy who just killed a vampire in one move. I can’t stick around here. I have to go.

  I lean close to the shapeshifter. “When this is over, you and I are going to have a nice, long discussion about your criminal usage of my face.”

  I break out into a hard sprint, but glance over my shoulder before I turn a corner. Only to see that the shifter has already faded into the haze, disappearing as fast as he appeared. There’s nothing to suggest he was even there to begin with, except a gap in the wall of smoke slowly being filled by twirling gray wisps.

  Following the shapeshifter’s directions to the letter, I manage to reach the side door in under thirty seconds. I barrel through it without slowing. Because the hairs on my neck are standing straight up—someone is watching me.

  The faintest spark of magic caresses the back of my head, the precursor to a devastating attack. I spin on my toes, kicking the door shut behind me just before the cloaked man fires off another energy blade.

  The blade bores through the door like it’s made of paper, but the impact changes the blade’s trajectory. Its weird, rusty edge misses my face by inches as it soars past. It keeps going, rocket fast, until it hits a tree thirty feet away. The tree explodes into a rain of fiery debris.

  I take a couple measured steps to regain my balance, and make to set off to the left, as instructed by the shapeshifter. Only to realize I’m not alone out here. To my right is a barred metal fence that separates the park from the sidewalk running along Bol’shaya Sadovaya Street. And on that sidewalk stands an entire five-person team of DSI agents. Who, until a tree abruptly exploded in their immediate vicinity, were sneakily approaching the main entrance to the theater. All of them are now gawking at me.

  The captain of the team, an older woman with graying blond hair, is the first to snap out of the stupor. She points her gun at me and shouts in Russian, “You there! Halt.”

  That is exactly what I don’t do.

  I dart to the left and speed down the stone path that cuts through the heart of the park. The DSI captain orders her people to fire at will, and a hail of bullets whip past me. Some of them bite chunks out of the walkway. Some of them eat into tree trunks. Some of them kick up dirt. And one of them, a single lucky bullet, finds its target.

  The round punches the back of my right shoulder, shattering my shoulder blade and sending me sprawling. I hit the ground in a hard roll, white-hot pain searing across my neck and back. But I’m Cal Kinsey, the guy who nearly gets killed on every case, not some chump who’s never been shot before. So I push myself to my feet with one hand, hardly a breath between my fall and my rise, and regain all my lost speed in less than three seconds.

  Unfortunately, those three seconds are enough for the DSI agents to climb over the fence and pursue me into the park. Having emptied their guns, they bring out the beggar magic. One of them shoots a series of force blasts at me. Another looses a fireball the size of a horse. And the captain, standing in the middle of the approaching line of black-clothed warriors, charges up an electricity ring and directs it at my head.

  Oh man. And here I was hoping I wouldn’t have to wipe the floor with my own people.

  I jump, spin around in midair, and come down on the toes of my boots, sliding backward across the ice-covered stones of the pathway. My magic hops to attention as I command it to pool in my left hand. Acting on nothing but hopes and dreams, I fire off four consecutive force blasts of my own, each one far more powerful than the spells being slung at me.

  The first blast shears right through the opposing force waves and slams into the chest of the man who fired his force rings. The impact flings the man fifteen feet back into the fence. He hits the bars with a resounding clang and bounces off, landing in a pile of dirty snow.

  My second force blast meets the fireball. The ball erupts like a blossoming
flower, petals of flame unfurling in all directions. The force blast continues unimpeded, heading straight for the woman who launched the attack. Unlike the man, the woman is fast enough to dive out of the path of the blast, and she somersaults safely to a stop behind the cover of a tree.

  My third and fourth force blasts take aim at the remaining three people, two of whom scramble for cover, one of whom stands her ground. The captain, of course. Who doesn’t budge until the force blast is five feet from ramming into her like a speeding car.

  She vaults over it with the flair of an Olympic gymnast, lands with nary a wobble, and finishes the initiation of her electricity attack by calmly murmuring the Russian equivalent of “Shoot.”

  A bolt of lightning blasts out of the ring.

  My brain blanks, but some part of me reacts on pure instinct.

  My feet brace against the stone ground to get a solid foothold. My left arm flies up, wrenching the embedded bullet even deeper into my flesh. Two fingers pop out, reminiscent of the way I shot off the lightning bolt that took down Lizzie Banks. And something, not quite a string of words but a command nonetheless, buzzes across the back of my mind, an undercurrent within my consciousness.

  My magic flares violet from the tips of my lifted fingers, up my left arm, across my chest, and all the way down my right arm, anchoring into my fingernails.

  All of that happens in the fraction of a second it takes the lightning bolt to reach me.

  The bolt strikes the fingers of my left hand, and like a lightning rod leading electricity toward the ground, my magic guides the power of the bolt through the path it carved across my body. As it moves through me, burning like acid every inch of the way, my stance shifts so that my right hand is raised, two fingers pointed at the stretch of stone in front of the DSI captain.

  The captain’s face is still morphing from composed to surprised when her own lightning attack arcs off my fingertips, shoots across the space between us, and strikes the ground beneath her feet. The electricity radiates outward from the impact point, shocking her and everyone else on her team. The voltage isn’t high enough to kill them. Just enough to really, really hurt.