Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  My left shoulder takes the brunt of the impact, tearing free from its socket. My already damaged ribs shatter, shooting fragments of bone across my chest cavity, shearing flesh and tearing organs. My head also smacks the wall, not quite cracking my skull but jarring my brain hard enough to short out my vision and hearing.

  I rebound off the wall deaf and blind, my good arm and two legs flailing in search of the ground. They don’t find it in time to break my fall, and I land face first on the large-grade gravel, causing my teeth to cut a deep groove across the inside of my cheek.

  For a while, I’m in so much pain, I can’t do anything but lie there and drool blood. Then my brain remembers I’m being attacked, and a fresh dose of adrenaline drives me to rise to my knees. My vision is still doubled, my hearing distorted by tinnitus, but I discern the cloaked woman casually walking my way.

  The wind catches her cloak and pushes it aside, revealing a regular winter outfit, a sweater and jeans, beefed up with a few obvious magic elements, like a belt holding various vials, a curved dagger, and a few charmed pieces of jewelry. Though her body is exposed, her face remains hidden, the shadow spell around her head blocking out all the light. Even the snowflakes that drift beneath her hood fall into darkness.

  The woman comes to a stop five feet away from me, both her hands glowing a pastel blue as she holds magic energy in reserve, just in case I try something. Like the cloaked man, her aura is lined with that odd rusty color.

  As I hawk up a glob of bloody saliva onto the pristine white snow, I idly wonder if that secondary color is some sort of manifestation of the “blood restraints” that all the Children apparently possess.

  The woman speaks with that distorted voice, rougher than her steps across the gravel. “You have one chance to answer me before I get irate with you, so think wisely before you reply.” She crouches in front of me, arms perched on her knees. “Where is the sword?”

  I’m still so disoriented from my impromptu introduction to the wall that I almost blurt out the truth: “I don’t know.” But I manage to hold my tongue, and good thing too. Not only is “I don’t know” the cliché refrain of almost every petty criminal on the planet, but in this case, the fact that the woman suspects I do know the whereabouts of Dawn Slayer is the only thing keeping me alive.

  If she comes to believe I know nothing of value, she’ll snuff me out with the same level of indignation her partner demonstrated when he killed that Knight at the satire theater. These people are not the sort who let their competitors survive the competition. They’ll kill me, Lucian, Foley, the other Tepes agents, every DSI agent they encounter, and anyone else who happens to step into their path, intentionally or not.

  Swallowing the blood-tinged bile in my throat, I say, “My partner has it.”

  The woman tugs her hood farther down as a gust of wind blows past. “Ah, I see. You played a reverse psychology trick. Met up with your partner in the theater lobby, switched clothes, and gave him the bag, so it seemed like you were making him a decoy for us to chase while you got away with the sword hidden under your coat, or perhaps a veil. But in reality, you made yourself the decoy and actually gave your partner the sword. So while my colleague was busy chasing you, your partner got away with the sword.”

  “Yes,” I say evenly, “that is exactly what happened.”

  “You used my colleague’s assumption that you were trying to fool him in order to successfully fool him.” She snorts. “Marginally clever, but pointless in the long run. I will wring your partner’s whereabouts out of you, one way or another. Would you prefer I start with the easy approach or skip straight to the difficult one?”

  “Um, easy?”

  “Good choice,” she says. “So tell me, where is your partner now?”

  “Our buyer’s agent and I were about to find out, when we were interrupted.” I throw a bit of anger into my voice to make it seem like I’m legitimately irritated at the interference to my nonexistent grand heist plan. “First by those foolish DSI agents, and then by you.”

  “You don’t know where your partner is?” she asks, skeptical.

  “No. We didn’t want to risk both being captured, so we picked two different safe houses. I don’t know the location of his, and he doesn’t know the location of mine.”

  She interlaces her fingers and taps her thumbs together. “So that dingy flophouse where you engaged the DSI agents…that was, what, a place to exchange information?”

  “Right.” I run my tongue along my teeth, wiping off the blood. “We rented a room there. My partner left a message for me, hidden under the mattress. I was supposed to retrieve the message and decode it to find out what location he’d secured for the hand-off of the sword. Then I was supposed to drive our buyer’s agent to that location.”

  “What’s the location?”

  I stare up into the darkness hiding her face. “I don’t know. I didn’t have time to decode the message, thanks to DSI.”

  “Well, decode it now,” the woman snaps.

  “I don’t have it.” I make to shrug, but my dislocated shoulder chooses this moment to snap itself back into its socket, so instead of giving the woman a recalcitrant gesture, I end up hissing in pain. “My buyer’s agent,” I add through gritted teeth, “put the message in his pocket before we fled the flophouse.”

  The woman’s shoulders tighten, a clear sign of growing frustration. “I assume this ‘agent’ you keep referring to is the vampire who was driving the heavily warded car?”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy.” I lift my hands in surrender, pretending I’m trying to placate her. “If you can get that message back from him, I can decode it in a few minutes. I swear.”

  She raises one hand to her face, rubbing her chin in contemplation, though I can’t actually see her chin due to the shadow spell. “You’re being awfully forthcoming. Perhaps a little too forthcoming?”

  My pulse quickens, but I don’t let the fear show. “Look, lady, I’m a thief for hire. Nothing more. I just want money. I definitely do not want trouble with some supernatural big shots. Nobody told me this dinky old sword was going to be such a huge deal. If they had, me and my pal would’ve turned down the big payday for a safer bet. All right?”

  “It’s funny you call us ‘supernatural big shots,’ when you’re clearly no weakling yourself.”

  I bark out a laugh. “Come on. Do I really seem like some master practitioner to you?”

  “Hm.” She pauses. “I suppose you have a point. You have a considerable amount of magic energy, but what I’ve seen of your spellwork screams amateur.” Her attention drifts down to my chest as something—a rib, I think—audibly pops as it reassembles. “You heal too fast to be human, and you have magic but no formal practitioner training. What are you? Some kind of fae?”

  I shrug, successfully this time. “You got me.”

  “Just what we need,” she grumbles, “faeries dipping their fingers into our business.”

  The woman stands up and makes a circular motion with her fingers, blue sparks of magic arcing off her joints. A magical vise that reminds me all too much of Targus constricts around my chest, pins my arms to my side, renders me immobile. And with a flick of the woman’s wrist, the spell lifts me off my feet.

  The extra pressure exerted on my injured chest sends electric jolts of pain zipping up my spine. I bite my tongue so hard to stop myself from crying out that I end up with yet another mouthful of blood that dribbles out from the corners of my lips.

  The woman, taking no heed of my discomfort, starts walking. My floating body bobs along behind her, as if leashed.

  The woman drags me along until we reach the western edge of the factory. As we come around the side of the building, I spy what must be her ride: an unmarked white van that would tickle a serial killer’s fancy. Or in this case, a supernatural killer’s.

  Even from thirty feet away, I can sense the hum of a multitude of wards embedded in the space behind the cabin of the van. Unlike Lucian’s BMW, these wards are no
t meant to keep things out. They’re meant to keep things in. Like captives you’d prefer to keep alive until you wring all the useful information out of them.

  If the woman puts me in the back of that van, I wholeheartedly believe I’ll never get out of it. At least not with a pulse.

  Think fast, Kinsey. Think fast and think hard.

  This is the same sort of conundrum that Targus presented back in Aurora. If the cloaked man’s demonstration at the theater is a typical example of his group’s capabilities, then the Children of Enoch are high-level practitioners, with quick reflexes and precise casting skills. Even if they don’t all have an ample amount of power, the odds of me being able to overwhelm this woman and escape with my head on my shoulders just by exuding a strong burst of energy is infinitesimally small.

  The instant I manage to override her vise spell, she’ll sling another spell to disable me. If I can’t block that spell, I’ll end up incapacitated again. Since my history with casting shields can best be described as pathetic, the odds are low that I can avoid taking significant damage and being recaptured in seconds.

  So what the hell can I do? How do I overcome an impossible—?

  The white van explodes.

  One second, there’s a perfectly fine vehicle fifteen feet ahead of us. The next, there’s a bright ball of blinding white light that balloons outward and then collapses into a wave of heat and force. The shockwave swats us like we’re a couple of bugs.

  As the woman is ripped from her feet and thrown all the way across the parking lot, she loses her grasp on the vise spell. Ironically, the vise spell holds me in place for a fraction of a second until it collapses, and I end up riding the tail end of the shockwave only half the distance the woman does. So while she hits the exterior wall of the factory, goes straight through it like it’s made of cardboard, and slams into some piece of metallic equipment inside the building, I instead bounce and skid across the worn asphalt.

  When my body finally runs out of momentum, I flop bonelessly onto my back. Stars in my eyes. Ears ringing on high. The pain from my breaks and burns so intense my brain can’t sort through the thousand different signals and just screams, “Oh god, the humanity!”

  But since I don’t know whether the Children of Enoch have a healing factor—and since the police and emergency responders in Moscow are already on the lookout for mysterious explosions—I can’t lie here for the next hour while my body heals. So despite the whine of agony that gets dragged out of my lungs as I roll over, I force myself to stand up, dizziness and nausea be damned.

  Walking is a bit more complicated than standing, but I put one foot in front of the other, again and again. A few inches at first. And then six. And then twelve. Until my legs are carrying me across the parking lot, away from both the factory and the smoldering crater where the van used to be, toward what I think is that highway whose traffic I heard earlier.

  A dark figure swoops down from the sky and lands on the pavement in front of me. I reflexively backpedal, trip over my own feet, and fall flat on my ass. Only to realize that the creature in front of me is not the cloaked man or that weird fleshy monster that wrecked the BMW. It’s Lucian Ardelean. Who’s somehow covered in more blood than me, and whose trademark hat no longer sits on his head.

  Lucian’s amber gaze, more predatory than normal, snaps up and scrutinizes me from head to toe. “You all right, kid?”

  “I’ve been better,” I cough out, my lungs choked by the fumes from the nearby fire.

  “Same.” He stands up, and as he does so, reveals his coat and shirt are in tatters. Beneath the torn fabric are five deep lacerations weeping blood, the longest of which stretches from his left shoulder to his right hip. It looks like something with enormous claws raked its hand across his torso.

  I have a feeling I’m already acquainted with the creature that dealt the blow. While I was taking my unplanned aerial tour of Moscow, Lucian must’ve been stuck fighting the monster that landed on the car.

  “Did you, uh, beat that monster?” I ask.

  Lucian growls. “I stalled it, and its master, but my trick won’t hold out forever. So we need to get going. Can you walk?”

  “Slowly.”

  “Not good enough.” Despite the multitude of injuries I spy as he crosses the distance between us, Lucian picks me up like I’m a sack of potatoes and slings me over his shoulder.

  “Brace yourself,” he says, and before I can ask why, he breaks into a hard sprint.

  The last time a vampire carried me somewhere at his top speed, he had to petrify my body with magic so the whiplash caused by his rapid changes of direction wouldn’t snap my neck. Lucian doesn’t move quite as fast as Foley moved back then, but the speed he maintains, even around the tightest curves, isn’t too far from that. So by the time the factory is a speck in the distance, I feel like I’ve been tossed around in an industrial dryer for an hour and a half.

  My torment ends when Lucian maneuvers us into a park with just the right amount of foliage to hide us from prying eyes. He gradually slows down until it seems like he was taking a leisurely stroll through the snow-dusted park all along. When he finally halts near the edge of a small pond, he tugs me off his shoulder and plops me down onto an icy bench. At which point I promptly keel over and expel all my stomach contents onto his boots.

  “Those cost three hundred dollars,” he says.

  “They were already covered in blood,” I reply between dry heaves, “so you can fuck right off.”

  Chapter Nine

  Lucian and I spend the next fifteen minutes sitting in silence on the bench while our bodies bend and snap themselves back into the proper arrangements. Once we’re sufficiently healed, we exchange stories, explaining to each other what happened after we got separated thanks to the monster that decided to throw me halfway across the city. Lucian’s story turns out to be just as harrowing as my own.

  The monster tried to smash him to death with its meaty hands while he was trapped inside the wrecked BMW. After he managed to extricate himself from the vehicle, he was immediately set upon by the cloaked man. Since Lucian didn’t think he could take on both the man and the monster, he deployed a powerful earth manipulation spell that created a huge sinkhole and collapsed the street. The churning mass of asphalt and dirt swallowed up both his opponents.

  “But they’re still kicking,” he points out. “I sensed the cloaked asshole pulling up a shield on his way down, and that creature has skin as tough as nails. All they had to do was dig themselves out of the rubble, which isn’t hard to achieve with magic assistance.” He pats his pockets until he finds his phone, whose screen is cracked and smeared with blood. Checking the time, he adds, “They’re probably out and about already.”

  I absently rub the back of my head. “You think they’ll be able to track me down again?”

  “Honestly, I have no clue.” He opens his message app, taps on Foley’s name, and starts typing a status update. “But if they try, at least two of the anti-tracking spells we dumped on you should throw up a psychic alert. So you’ll know immediately.”

  I lean back against the cold bars of the bench and sigh. “Great. So if they manage to get a lock on me again, I’ll have enough time to prepare a totally inadequate defense.”

  Lucian flicks the side of my head. “Cut it out with the glass-half-empty crap. We don’t even know if they’ll recycle the same tracking tactics, especially after I attempted to back trace their Eververse buddy, thus proving we’d figured out their tracking methodology. If it was me, I’d go for a whole new approach for the next round, just to make sure my enemies couldn’t possibly sense me coming. Thing is, formulating a new approach your enemy isn’t prepared for takes time, which incidentally gives your enemy more time to come up with countermeasures for whatever you might try next.”

  “So basically”—I wince as a dislocated finger pops back into place—“you’re saying we should use this respite to try and get ahead of people whose skills and abilities we know practic
ally nothing about.”

  “You’re in a bad mood, huh?”

  I lift my arms, showcasing my ruined clothing, complete with huge tears, singed edges, and bloodstains that no amount of bleach can erase. “Yes, asshole. I’m in a bad mood. In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve been brutally beaten by an ICM assassin wizard, kicked out of my hometown, drawn into the crazy pursuit of a magic sword, attacked twice by my own freaking people, and then attacked again by these cursed practitioners and their pet monster. Are you telling me you wouldn’t be in a bad mood if you were in my place?”

  He brushes the accumulated snow off his shoulders as he considers the question. “A couple years ago, yeah, that unfortunate series of events would’ve pissed me off big time. But after trudging through all the piles of shit that the Knights and Methuselah have dumped in my way over the past few months? Guess my threshold for fury has ticked up a few notches on the mood meter.”

  He prods at the healing lacerations on his chest. “So if I was you, Kinsey, I would be rightfully annoyed at my current situation, but I wouldn’t let that irritation distract me from thinking rationally.”

  I bend over, elbows propped on my knees, and ignore the puddle of vomit on the ground in front of me, now half covered by snow. “You make it sound like you believe I’m capable of thinking rationally.”

  “I do.” He leans forward to match my pose. “You might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I have known you to make smart moves on occasion. Now would be the perfect time to pull out that good sense you’ve got stored in that acerbic brain of yours and use it to the fullest extent.”

  “Are you ever going to give me a straightforward compliment?”