A twin bed. A wardrobe that can’t fit more than three outfits. A ludicrously small table in the corner. And an equally tiny chair sitting next to it. That’s it.
Lucian enters the room ahead of me and flicks on the light, but the lone bulb on the ceiling barely illuminates the coffin more than the dim light creeping in through the grimy window. I shuffle into the cramped space and carefully set the door against the frame without fully closing it, so I won’t have to waste time lugging it open in the event we need to leave in a hurry.
When I turn back to face the rest of the room, Lucian has already opened the wardrobe and starting digging through a lone backpack that appears to contain a few changes of clothes and some toiletries. While he works through that, I hunt for places where the shapeshifter might’ve hidden something important.
As much as the dirty floor grosses me out, I sink to my hands and knees and peer under the bed. Nothing sticks out at first, but as I’m about to sit up, I notice something out of place: a piece of paper pinned between the box spring and the wall.
“Under the mattress,” I say to Lucian. “I think he’s hidden some papers there.”
Lucian tosses the backpack aside, joins me next to the bed, and hauls the mattress up. Sure enough, there’s a smattering of papers lying atop the box spring, near the wall. One of them must’ve been dislodged from the stack and slipped over the edge when Hays got up or sat down at some point.
I gather the papers, and Lucian sets the mattress down. We head to the streaky window to get a bit more light so we can get a good look at the handwritten messages. They’re transcribed in a symbol-based language that I can’t immediately identify.
Lucian, on the other hand, takes one look at the papers and inhales sharply. “This is the same cypher used in the messages we recovered from the Caprio estate.”
“The ones sent by the Children of Enoch to the Black Knights?” I draw my brows together. “How can that be? The shifter can’t be working for the Children. He stole the sword from them.”
“Several possibilities come to mind.” Lucian plucks one of the papers from my hand and turns it upside down, which I guess is the correct orientation of the message. “One, the Children of Enoch are a splinter faction from some larger group of beings, not all of whom agree with the Children’s cause, and this cypher was created by the larger group but commandeered by the Children for covert communication. Two, this cypher is an obscure Eververse language, and either it belongs to the Children themselves, who are of Eververse origin, or it’s the native language of whatever Eververse creature is helping them. Three—”
“I get it. We don’t have enough information to pin down the answer. Moving on.” I run my finger across a long row of symbols on the page in Lucian’s hand. “I don’t suppose you’ve cracked this code?”
“Even with the translations we obtained, our best code breakers are having a hard time matching up the symbols to the Italian equivalents in any logical fashion. I’m sure they’ll get there eventually, but if this actually is an Eververse language, then its syntax and morphology may just be extremely difficult to comprehend from an Earth-born perspective.”
“I’m guessing the Knights, and Hays, were given a cheat sheet.” I scratch an extremely itchy spot on the back of my head.
“Probably. But we didn’t find one during our raid on the Caprio estate. The Knights may have actually managed to destroy that, if nothing else.”
“And unlike the more careless Knights, professional hitman Hays probably burned all his translations as soon as he memorized them.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Bad luck.”
“Mhmm.”
“Well, this is better than nothing.”
I hand the rest of the papers over to Lucian, and he tucks them into a hidden pocket in his coat.
“Maybe we can compare some of these symbols to those from the decoded messages and approximate the meanings of a few words,” I add. “We won’t get the whole story that way, but it might give us a lead on the identity of Hays’ client, or if we’re really lucky, the location of where he plans to hand off the sword.”
“Worth a shot.” Lucian pats his coat pocket. “I’ll scan these when we get back to the Hyatt and email them over to my code breaker team.”
“Think there’s anything else here?”
Lucian does a slow three-sixty, scrutinizing every nook and cranny of the room. “Unless he stuffed something into that big-ass crack above the headboard, I’d say we’re finished here. I didn’t find anything in his backpack, and there was nothing taped under or behind the wardrobe.”
He gives the underside of the rickety chair next to the table a cursory sweep with his hand, and grimaces when his glove comes back smeared with dirt. “Nope. Shapeshifters travel light when they’re on a mission, and they never bring anything they actually own in their ‘regular’ lives. They always buy new clothes before they start, and trash them when they’re finished. Even that backpack in the wardrobe is brand new.”
“So Hays is a true professional, like Ken claimed.”
“Usually. That’s why I hired him to kill Halliburton, Martinez, and Slate.”
“I still haven’t forgiven you for that fiasco.”
“Have you forgiven me for anything?”
“Now that you mention it, no.”
“Then why should I care…?” His nose wrinkles. “Uh, Kinsey, do you have lice or something?”
“What?”
Lucian points to my left hand, which I realize is still scratching away at the back of my head. I force myself to stop scratching and bring my hand around to reveal several streaks of blood staining the fabric of my glove. I scratched my head so hard that I managed to break the skin even though my nails were covered by a thick layer of leather.
How the heck didn’t I notice that I tore my scalp wide open? And why on earth is my head still itching?
I strip off my soiled glove and touch the back of my head with my bare finger, feeling around the edges of a small patch of bloodied skin. The moment my fingers make contact with my scalp, I also feel something else.
Something besides my warm blood chilling in the cool air of the musty room. Something besides my scored flesh, made rough by my vigorous scratching. Something besides my damp hair, strands plastered together by the congealing blood. I feel something besides my physical body. I feel something beneath.
“Lucian,” I say slowly, “take a very hard look at my soul. Right now.”
Lucian doesn’t second-guess me, immediately moving closer, stripping his own glove off, and placing two of his fingers against my clavicle. He screws his eyes shut to focus, and a moment later, I feel a faint pulse of energy as Lucian pokes and prods places far deeper than my bones and muscles and organs, and far more crucial to my existence. Nearly thirty seconds pass, a tense silence gripping the filthy flophouse room—before Lucian recoils as if he’s been struck in the face.
His back slams into the wall, sending tremors through the floor, the ceiling, the furniture, unsettling everything in the room, but me most of all. Lucian grips his head with both hands and doubles over, breathing loud and fast through clenched teeth, a faint whine wriggling up his throat. When he finally manages to wrench his eyes open, it reveals his sclera are blood red, all the tiny vessels having burst as if placed under some great pressure.
I shake off my shock and grip Lucian’s arms. “Are you all right?”
It takes Lucian fifteen seconds to stutter out, “N-No.”
“What happened?”
“You’re being t-tracked,” he manages to say. “Which should b-be impossible. One of the c-car’s wards is designed to dampen m-magic signatures and blood signatures. The effect should l-last up to two d-days after exposure, even if you d-don’t get back into the vehicle again. So no one should b-be able to find you using the residual magic you l-left at the theater, or with any blood you spilled. But someone…someone is…and I…I did…”
I coax him to rel
ease his grip on his head before he pulls out all his hair. “What did you do, Lucian?”
“I t-tried to do a back trace on the tracking spell.”
I do a quick search through my limited magic vocabulary. “You tried to use the energy of the tracking spell to locate the spellcaster?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And did you find them?”
“I f-found something,” he says. “Not human. Not even c-close. Not of this world, or any world near it.”
My stomach clenches. “Are you telling me a powerful Eververse creature is pinpointing my location right now?”
Lucian wrenches one of his hands free from my grip and wipes away the thick sheen of cold sweat that has broken out across his face and neck. “Yes. W-We need to leave. Fast. Far. Keep ahead of whatever is c-coming. The Children or…that thing. And we c-can’t go back to the Hyatt until we cast a stronger anti-tracking spell on you. Because if we don’t, it’ll f-find you. It’ll find us. It’ll find everyone. And then we’ll all fucking die.”
Chapter Seven
Another dire warning of death and doom. Why can’t it ever be joy and peace?
Since Lucian seems like he’s recovering from what I’m pretty sure was a nasty psychic backlash, I release him, double-check that he’s steady on his feet, and move to the window to peek out of the limited number of clear spots in the glass. A visual sweep of the street uncovers nothing of note, and a second pass with my magic sense reveals even less.
The street in front of the flophouse is empty. No pedestrians scurry down the windswept sidewalks. No cars zip past to ferry their occupants home before the building snowstorm arrives. The backstreet behind the flophouse appears to be just as deserted, no shadows creeping along the cracked walls of the buildings or…Hold on.
A flash of movement catches my eye as I’m turning back to Lucian. I end up spinning in a full circle to plant my gaze on a rusty dumpster parked in the small back lot of a place that looks like it went out of business before the Soviet Union collapsed. Zeroing in on the dumpster, I scour every inch of its bulk. I spend extra time on the edges, which someone might look around, and the bottom, where a careless person’s shoe might poke out as they shift position.
I watch the dumpster for roughly thirty seconds. A moment before I give up and blame my paranoia for making me see movement where there was none…the toe of a black boot peeks out from behind the dumpster’s wheel.
Somebody is hiding on the far side of the dumpster, and I have a good idea of what group that person belongs to.
“Lucian?” I say.
He grunts in acknowledgement.
“Is DSI Moscow aware of Ken’s ‘business’?”
He tries to shake off his disorientation, one hand pressed against the moldy wall for support. “The l-latest intel from my Russian sources says DSI Moscow has become aware there’s a significant shapeshifter p-presence in the city, but I haven’t gleaned the extent of their knowledge.”
“I think it’s safe to guess they’ve mapped out most of Ken’s business structure. Because there’s currently a DSI team preparing to raid the flophouse from the east side. And since DSI Moscow lost at least one entire team at the theater, I’m guessing there’s another whole team, possibly two, that I can’t see from this window, approaching the building from different directions.”
He groans. “How do they even know they should be looking for a shapeshifter? Hays didn’t shift out of your f-form at the theater, did he?”
“Not that I saw. But judging by my encounters in the park and on Blagoveshchensky Lane, DSI had a heavy presence around the theater. It’s possible that Hays ran into another team on his way out of the area. If they injured him, he might’ve inadvertently revealed his nature. The glowing purple eyes are usually a solid indicator.”
“Do you think they’ve figured out there are two copies of you running around?”
“Possibly. And possibly not. It depends on if, when, and where Hays engaged the hypothetical team.”
“So, really, we d-don’t know our heads from our asses at this point.” Lucian drags his hand down his face. “Fantastic.”
“We can worry about who knows what later. How do you want to play this now?” I absently reach up to scratch my head, only to remember that the ever-worsening itch is a side effect of a spell. I shove my hands into my pockets. “DSI aren’t the bad guys here, so we can’t just mow the agents down like we would if we were fighting the Knights or the MG.”
Lucian fakes a cough. “Speak for yourself.”
I scowl. “We are not killing them. And if you try to, I’ll stop you, even if it results in us getting arrested.”
“Such a goody-two-shoes.” He groans. “F-Fine. They live. But if they bite me, I’m biting back.”
“Fair enough.”
“You know DSI raid tactics, don’t you?” He moves away from the wall and wipes his hand on his pants. “Can you get us past their formation without ‘inciting an altercation’?”
I mentally map out the neighborhood as I remember it and peg the exact routes that three teams of DSI agents might take to form a secure perimeter around the flophouse before assailing the building. Given the location of the BMW we need to recover before we skedaddle, the limited number of exits to the flophouse, the positions of the main street and backstreet relative to the room we’re standing in, and the height difference between this building and the one across the alley from the window, I believe our best bet for escaping without a fight is…
“If we take a running jump out this window,” I say, “and rebound off the opposing wall onto the roof of the flophouse, we can dash across the rooftop at faster-than-human speed, leap the gap between the flophouse and the convenience store, bypassing the DSI agents who are sure to be in the alley, and then make our way back to the car before the DSI agents can switch gears and catch up to us.”
Lucian’s eyebrows spring up. “And what should we do after we get back to the car?”
“Three options. We can drop the veil and instigate a car chase with a big head start, drive the car veiled and hope we don’t cause a major accident, or sit tight in the car under the veil and hope all the agents run past, oblivious to our presence.”
Lucian sniffs loudly. “I give that plan a four out of ten.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Kid, I barely remember my own name right now,” he says bluntly, “so we’re going to have to go with your crazy gymnastics routine and pray we don’t break our necks in the process.”
Another flutter of movement near the dumpster tells me the DSI teams are running through their final checks and preparing for operation start.
I back up until I’m situated beside Lucian. “I’ll blast the window out first, so we don’t cut the crap out of ourselves.”
“That I trust you can manage,” he replies, “but out of curiosity, can you actually run faster than top human speed?”
“I know the basic spell for it.” I call up a pinch of magic and gather it in my palm. “I admit I’m not great at it yet, but I’m sure I can keep it going long enough to get back to the car.”
His skepticism is apparent as he says, “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”
I hold back a retort, partially because we have no more time for banter, and partially because Lucian looks like death warmed over.
“Ready?” I say.
He nods.
I point my hand at the window. “Three. Two. One!”
A wave of force shoots out from my palm and slams into the windowpane. The glass shatters outward and rains down into the alley below. Before the last shards are out of sight, Lucian gets a running start and leaps through the empty window, hits the opposing wall of the other building feet first, and bounds off it at an upward angle. I soar through the window not a second later, replicating Lucian’s move by directing some energy to my feet and producing an extra dash of push as I jump for the roof.
As I’m coming up, Lucian is coming down. He performs a
catlike somersault across the tin roof and slides to a quiet stop. I attempt to replicate his landing but bungle the first step and wind up in an uncontrolled spin that ends with my ass smacking the roof. The tin rings out like a bell, alerting everyone in a fifty-foot radius of our location.
Lucian opens his mouth to poke fun at me, but he’s cut off when a hail of bullets break the air from below us. Swearing, Lucian grabs my arm, hauls me up, and practically throws me halfway across the roof.
As a flurry of DSI agents begin shouting to each other on the east side of the flophouse, Lucian blows past me at his full vampire speed and leaps across the gap between the flophouse and the convenience store. The gap is wide enough to be a difficult jump for me if I don’t pick up enough speed before I hit the edge of the roof. So I speak the words for the speed spell I’ve practiced only a handful of times.
The spell works. A little too well.
I end up going so fast that I reach the edge of the flophouse roof before I’m primed to jump. Consequently, I still don’t make it all the way across the gap between the buildings. I hit the edge of the convenience store roof chest first, my feet scrabbling for purchase against the smooth siding of the building. Lucian, who’s already halfway across the convenience store roof, looks over his shoulder at the sound of my impact, growls in irritation at my screw-up, and starts to slow down so he can double back and grab me.
Luckily, one of my feet finds a crack in the wall before he gets to me (and wrings my neck for making such a boneheaded mistake), and I’m able to boost my lower half onto the roof. Unluckily, the DSI agents positioned in the alley directly below me do not fail to notice my ass hanging in the air. They too pull out their guns and fire at will.
Scrambling forward, I reassert my mental grip on the speed spell and sprint across the convenience store roof at double my normal top speed, catching up to Lucian in a heartbeat. He pantomimes grabbing me by the neck and shaking me senseless, but I pretend not to notice.
Dawn Slayer Page 7
