Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  They all drop like rocks.

  I slowly look from the line of fallen, twitching agents to my burned and blistering hands.

  “Holy shit,” I say, “that was awesome.”

  But I don’t have time to bask in my victory—because the side door I exited through a minute ago blasts out of the wall of the theater and sails across the park. It’s going so fast that it cleaves straight through a tree, keeps going for another ten feet, and finally buries itself halfway into the ground.

  Drifting smoke creeps out of the empty space where the door used to be. Within that haze stands a cloaked figure. Alarm surges through my veins, overriding the burning pain from my lightning redirect and the steady ache from my bullet wound.

  I make a sharp turn and book it toward the back end of the park. I reach the fence just as the cloaked man steps out of the doorway, moving at a casual pace despite his apparent intention to stop me from fleeing the scene of what he believes is my crime.

  Since I don’t want to end up like the vampire lady, I funnel energy into the soles of my boots and take a running leap at the fence. I sail over the pointy tips of the metal bars with all the grace of a seal flung out of the ocean by a killer whale. Come down too hard on my feet and roll my ankle. And propel myself into another sprint by shooting two small whirlwinds out of my palms.

  At breakneck speed, I pass between the two buildings abutting the park, come around the back end of what appears to be a hookah bar, and approach an intersection with what I’m elated to discover is Blagoveshchensky Lane. From this point, according to the shapeshifter, I can go whichever way I want.

  I pick left. If my rudimentary knowledge of the city’s layout is correct, this road will allow me to get back on Tverskaya Street. From there, I can hightail it to my hotel, gather my stuff, and get the hell out of Moscow before any of the parties involved in this “Dawn Slayer” business hunt me down.

  Lavender magic energy discharges behind me as I’m whipping around the corner onto Blagoveshchensky. I flinch, anticipating an attack. But the only thing that rocks my world is a slight tremor beneath my feet, and I realize the cloaked guy wasn’t aiming a spell at me.

  My heaving stomach twists into a knot at the possibility that the cloaked man just threw a death blow at all the DSI agents I incapacitated. I can’t stop a wave of guilt from choking my throat like rising bile.

  I haven’t been in Moscow for twenty-four hours, and my gross incompetence is already threatening people’s lives. Why, oh why, did I decide to step foot in that theater? Why, oh why, did I think I could interfere in a supernatural situation with no grasp of its context? Jesus, I’m a moron. A complete—

  The growl of a loud engine reverberates through the air, and I look up to see a DSI SUV gunning it down the road. When the driver spots me, covered in dirt and blood and obviously fleeing the scene of the theater bombing, he slams on the brakes and jerks the wheel, pulling the SUV onto the sidewalk and blocking my path.

  I skid to a stop and hunt for an escape route. If I backtrack, the cloaked guy might catch me, so I have to go either left or right. But there aren’t any adjoining streets I can use to escape, only buildings. The closest place is a bar called Duckstar’s, just ten feet ahead on my left. But the DSI agents are already pouring out of the SUV, and there’s a very good chance I won’t be able to beat them to the bar’s entrance.

  Think, Kinsey. Think. Use your brain. Use your magic. You’ve wriggled out of worse situations before, and you’ve got far more tricks up your sleeve than you did back then.

  I glance at the cloudy sky. If I vaulted over the park fence with minimal trouble, then surely I can vault over a short building. Right?

  Two of the DSI agents yell at me in Russian, instructing me to surrender, get on the ground, and put my hands behind my head. I ignore them and dredge up more magic energy.

  Eying the roof of the building directly across the street from me, I do some quick mental math and approximate how much force I’ll need to use to lift my body in a sharp arc and—

  A black BMW blows past me and collides with the DSI SUV. A complex ward embedded in the hood of the BMW activates, and the broadside of the armored SUV practically implodes. The SUV goes flying, tumbling end over end, until it lands with a deafening boom twenty feet farther down the street. Right on top of a compact car whose owner picked a very bad parking spot today.

  The DSI agents, stunned by the sight of their virtual tank being thrown like a ragdoll, are too slow to respond when another ward, this one etched into the driver’s side door of the BMW, flares to life. A wide wall of force blasts out of the door panel. It slams into all five agents and hurls them into the side of Duckstar’s Bar. One of them is unfortunate enough to hit a window, which shatters under his weight. The man sails off into the bar, crashes headfirst into a table, and rolls off onto the floor.

  None of the agents get back to their feet.

  The BMW, not even scuffed by the devastating crash, smoothly backs down the lane until the tinted driver’s side window is situated right next to me. With a faint buzz of the motor, the window rolls down, revealing a very familiar man with amber eyes, a crooked scowl, and a wide-brimmed hat.

  Lucian Ardelean leans out of the window and says, “Get in the car, dumbass.”

  Chapter Three

  Before I can formulate a response to Lucian’s unexpected appearance, the back door of the car swings open. A hand shoots out and grabs my wrist, tugging me onto the seat at an awkward angle. The person then reaches over my head and yanks the door shut again.

  Without waiting for instructions, Lucian slams his foot on the accelerator. Wheels skidding, the car takes off backward down the lane, zipping past the hookah bar and the little side street I used to make my escape from the park. No one is on the side street, but another wave of lavender energy bleeds through the air above the street as we pass by.

  As soon as the car reaches the next intersection, Lucian spins us around in a tight arc and hits the gas again. We fly off down the street. Lucian expertly dodges traffic, vehicles and pedestrians alike, as he weaves the car through a complex series of sharp turns on narrow backroads to shake off any tails we might’ve picked up. He checks the rearview mirror over a dozen times before he’s satisfied we’re not being followed. Only then does he swing us back around onto a highway, merging the BMW with the midday traffic heading east toward Red Square.

  Once we’ve completely blended in with the rest of the vehicles on the road, Lucian looks at me through the rearview mirror. “What the ever-loving fuck are you doing here?”

  The adrenaline that was pumping through my veins during the fight and flight is beginning to wear off. The pain of my injuries surges up to the forefront of my brain. My sprained ankle throbbing. My hands on fire. My shoulder radiating agony. I try to answer Lucian, but my tongue won’t form the words. All that comes out of my mouth is a long, deep groan.

  The person sitting next to me places their hands on my arms and gently pushes me into an upright position. The change of angle finally reveals to me who the person is, and I’m not surprised to find it’s Foley Banks.

  Foley’s trademark glasses are sticking out of the pocket of his coat, so he examines me closely with his crimson vampire eyes. “You’re bleeding pretty heavily from your right shoulder,” he says. “Were you shot?”

  I manage to nod, my head feeling three times heavier than normal. “The bullet’s still in there. I can’t heal until it’s removed.”

  Lucian opens his mouth to nag me again, but Foley cuts him off with a sharp look. Lucian shrugs and refocuses on the road ahead, deftly changing lanes and navigating through clumps of wildly swerving drivers struggling with the icy slush that has left the asphalt slick and dangerous.

  After tilting me forward and bracing me against the back of the driver’s seat, Foley reaches under the front passenger seat and tugs out a first-aid kit. He pops the lid and collects several items, including a pair of long metal tweezers, sharp scissors, and e
very packet of gauze in the container. Since I’ve lost most of the range of motion in my right arm, Foley is forced to cut my coat and shirt open to expose what I surmise from his grimace is a ragged bullet wound. He uses the gauze to mop up some of the blood and scrutinizes the injury, searching for the slug.

  “I can just see the end of it,” he says. “It’s in there pretty deep. This is going to hurt, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ve been through worse.” I press my forehead harder against the seat. “Just make it quick.”

  Foley smirks. “You’re in luck. As a vampire, speed is my specialty.”

  “Speed, yes,” I say. “But what about precision—?”

  Foley jams the tweezers into the bloody hole, pinches the warped bullet between the tongs, and rips it from my flesh with a loud squelch, all in one fluid motion. It takes my brain almost a full second to process what just happened, but once it does, a wave of intense pain crashes against my back. I bite my tongue to stifle a shriek and let out a faint whine instead.

  My healing factor jumps to attention once it notices the bullet is gone. As the damaged flesh knits itself back together, the agony begins to ebb. After the pain fades to the point where I can function, I carefully settle back against my seat.

  Foley, having stuffed all his bloodied equipment back into the first-aid kit, cleans his hands with a wet wipe as he waits for me to get my thoughts in order.

  Lucian is not quite as generous. “All right, kid. You’ve had your five-minute break. Now tell us what the hell you’re doing here.”

  Foley frowns at Lucian but backs him up this time. “We need to know, Cal. As far as I can remember, neither of us mentioned we were heading to Moscow during our meeting in the Bridge, so how did you end up getting involved in all this?”

  “All this?” I say between gulping breaths. “I’m guessing you’re referring to the ‘Dawn Slayer’ business?”

  Foley and Lucian exchange looks, and the latter says, “How’d you find out about that?”

  “I didn’t.” I go to rub my cheeks but discover my fingers are still blistered from my lightning bolt redirect. “I know nothing about it, except what it’s called. Because I overheard the cloaked people and their vampire delivery lady talking about it. Right before I ran into the shapeshifter wearing my face and carrying a bag that presumably contained the object known as ‘Dawn Slayer.’”

  “Hold up.” Lucian jerks the wheel to the right, and the BMW skirts past a car spun out in the right lane, its emergency lights flashing and the driver pacing in the ditch. “What shapeshifter? What are you talking about?”

  Foley runs a hand through his unruly hair. “Maybe you should start from the beginning, Cal. What happened after you went back to Aurora yesterday?”

  I laugh mirthlessly. “Before I tell you, I need to know: are either of you two liable to share with DSI anything I say to you?”

  Lucian snorts. “Are you kidding? We don’t willingly share intel with DSI.”

  “Good. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”

  “I don’t understand,” Foley says.

  “You will in a minute.” I launch into a retelling of my last day in Aurora. Starting with my gambit to save Sadie Wheeler from Targus by employing the help of the Wolves, and ultimately, the fae. And ending with my confrontation with Targus on that rooftop. As I rattle off the terms of the agreement struck between us, I roll up my sleeve to showcase the faded symbols of the binding oath permanently branded into the skin of my wrist. “And that is how I wound up exiled from my homeland.”

  Lucian curses in a variety of languages. “Are you a hundred percent sure that you did not inadvertently tip Targus off to the fact you know what he really is?”

  “If you mean did I let it slip that I know he’s a member of the…singing group that shall not be named, then no, I did not.” I probe at my injured shoulder with my good hand and find that the surface skin has mostly regenerated. The scapula is still in pieces though, and those pieces are shifting around beneath my muscles. I can feel them moving.

  Foley wrings his hands. “He still might’ve inferred you know about the ‘singing group,’ if you said something that suggested he gets assigned covert missions from the High Court on a regular basis.”

  “If he thought I knew about the singing group, I wouldn’t still be alive. He would’ve killed me no matter what it cost him, and he probably would’ve wiped out a huge chunk of DSI too, just to ensure that information hadn’t spread beyond me. He’s not the kind of man who takes chances. He’s brutally efficient and surgically precise in everything he does. And the only reason I’m still breathing is because I was an unexpected variable that got thrown into his otherwise perfect equation.”

  Foley nods gravely. “That sounds about right.”

  “Okay,” Lucian says, “so let’s say we believe you didn’t spill the beans about the ‘singing group.’ Targus still knows there’s a leak somewhere in the High Court, and you can bet he’s already told the Court about it. The psychic bastards that root out spies in the Court are not amateurs, and they will eventually find my mole. And from my mole, it’s only one step to your buddy Milburn. She’s in trouble, kid. Big trouble.”

  “I know.” I close my eyes. “I was actually planning to contact you when I got where I was going to ask if you could warn her.”

  Lucian tilts his head from side to side. “I can try to pass a message on to my guy through the usual communication channels. Don’t know if it’ll get there in time though. The High Court has high security, so our contact methods are unorthodox, and as a result, tediously slow.”

  “Just do what you can.” I grip my pants legs, hard enough that my blisters pop and weep. “Erica’s not stupid. She knew what she was risking when she passed you the intel about Targus’ assignment, knew it would almost certainly come back to bite her in the ass. It’s likely she’s already working on a plan to extricate herself from Iyanda’s office before they peg her as a leak. The only question is…”

  “Does she know how little time she has to make her escape?” Foley finishes. He rests his hand on top of mine, coaxing me to ease my grip. “We’ll do everything we can to help her, Cal. I promise.”

  “Thanks.” I manage a small smile.

  He returns the smile, but it only lasts a moment. “So, now we know why you left Aurora. But you still haven’t told us how you got embroiled in the Dawn Slayer deal.”

  “Right, that.” I peel one hand off my jeans and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Funny story. My flight to Omsk got redirected to Moscow this morning due to the ‘blizzard of the century,’ which wasn’t even in the forecast when my plane took off.”

  Lucian eyes me through the rearview mirror again. “You say that like you think someone altered the weather to send you here.”

  “Crazy idea, right? I thought I was just being paranoid too. Until I ran into the shapeshifter using my skin. Right after he set off a bomb in a theater in order to steal some kind of important object from a vampire and a couple of powerful cloaked practitioners.”

  I recount everything that happened from the moment I stepped off the plane at Sheremetyevo to the moment they picked me up on the street. “The conclusion of this story appears to be that everybody now thinks I stole this Dawn Slayer thing, and since the real me is actually here in Moscow, all the people who want the thing will proceed to hunt me down to try and get it back.”

  “Why would he use your shape during the heist?” Foley asks. “It doesn’t track that he would try to frame you if he didn’t know ahead of time that you would be in town. So why the ruse?”

  “Beats me. I literally have no clue what’s happening here.”

  Foley looks to Lucian, who taps the steering wheel in a quick rhythm as he ponders the unspoken question. After what seems like a great deal of mental gymnastics, Lucian says, “Tell him.”

  Foley takes a deep breath, working himself up for a long and complicated story, and begins, “You remember when I told you we suspected the B
lack Knights were working with or for an unknown group, a group that we believe prompted the Knights’ formation in the first place?”

  “Vaguely.” The word comes out raspy, my throat suddenly parched. I have a terrible feeling I know where this story is going. “You said you had no viable intel on the group.”

  “We didn’t,” he says. “Until last week. During our operation to retake House Caprio from the Knights, we managed to obtain a series of coded messages that the Knights running the house had been exchanging with their unknown benefactors since the coup last month. One of the Knights, a real genius, this guy, had decoded the messages and written down the contents in plain Italian. He tried to destroy his translations, and the original messages, by burning down his office as we were storming the house estate, but one of our agents snuffed out the fire in time. And snuffed out the Knight in the process.”

  “Did these messages reveal the identities of the mysterious benefactors?” I ask.

  “In a sense,” Foley says. “Much like Methuselah and the Knights, the benefactors have a name for themselves: the Children of Enoch. All the messages were signed with that name. There were no personal signatures or mentions of any specific person within the organization.”

  “The Children of Enoch.” I roll the words over my tongue. “That’s something, at least.”

  “It’s a whole lot more than something.”

  “Really?” I work the stiffness out of my healing shoulder. “Did the messages reveal the Knights’ future plans, or the Children’s operational structure, or some combination thereof?”

  “Yes, to the third option. It turns out that the Children of Enoch don’t help the Knights for free. They use the Knights to run their own covert operations without the risk of exposing themselves. In this particular series of messages, the Children and the Knights in control of House Caprio were working out an agreement for the Knights to recover an ancient artifact of great power that had recently been discovered during an archeological dig in Iran.”