Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  “Nope,” he says. “So you might as well take what you can get and roll with it.”

  “You know I still hate you, right?”

  He smiles. “No, you don’t. If you did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  I open my mouth to counter that claim, but something makes me stop short, the first syllable of my unspoken words hanging heavy on my tongue. Lucian looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to spout more amusing banter. But then his own senses pick up the unidentifiable stimuli that my lesser senses somehow caught first, and his expression crumples into confusion.

  He glances left and right, up and down, hunting for the source of whatever it is that simply doesn’t feel right. I join him in the search, sharpening my magic sense to the breaking point. But the weird sensation isn’t magic in origin—there are no active auras or residuals in the park, for as far as I can sense—at least not any sort of magic I’ve encountered before.

  “Is it them?” I whisper under my breath.

  “I don’t know,” Lucian says. “I can’t figure out what I’m feeling.”

  “Me either. It’s like…like some aspect of reality has been swapped out for something foreign, and now my mind can’t recognize the world for what it is.”

  He frowns. “Apt description.”

  “Should we be preparing for a fight?”

  “Definitely.” He slides off the bench, muscles tense. “There’s trouble brewing. Big trouble.”

  I stagger to my feet and position myself with my back to Lucian, so each of us is scouring one half of the park for the origin of the disturbance. Neither of us visually or audibly discern anything out of the ordinary. And without knowing which direction the threat is coming from, we can do nothing but wait. Two men covered in blood and freshly fallen snow, standing in the middle of a small city park that may very well become a war zone in the next couple minutes.

  Our breaths come and go in short white puffs. Our leather gloves creak at the strain of clenched fists. Our magic sparks off our rigid joints, auras hanging low in the air. Our senses home in on the smallest of sounds, from the skittering of a woodland creature to the typical city…Wait a second.

  “Do you hear any sounds originating from outside the park?” I ask.

  After a lengthy pause, he says, “No, I don’t. No cars. No people.”

  “Shit.” I peer through the gaps in the trees, hunting for the slivers of the city beyond the park I know were visible when we first sat down. All I find are clusters of blurry rectangles, identifiable only as buildings because of common sense. It’s as if someone has placed a dome of frosted glass along the outer perimeter of the park. A dome I suspect is completely unnoticeable from the outside and noticeable from the inside solely because of its sensory distortion effects.

  It must be a high-level illusion spell. Like a veil but far more complex. Instead of just making the area within invisible, the dome is likely displaying a false projection of the park’s interior to those outside it. A projection that shows nothing out of the ordinary.

  Someone doesn’t want any civilians to witness what’s about to happen in this patch of snowy woodland.

  “Kinsey,” Lucian murmurs, his usual bravado absent. “Did you sense that spell coming up?”

  “No, I didn’t.” I swallow twice to wet my dry throat. “I sensed absolutely nothing.”

  Lucian swears in a litany of languages, then admits, “I didn’t either.”

  “It’s like the tracking spell. I didn’t notice anything awry except the itching until I specifically looked at my soul for something amiss. This Eververse being’s magic doesn’t produce a noticeable aura, or create any other kind of typical magic resonance.” I dig my boots into the snow until they find purchase on the rocky ground beneath. “Do you think they cast the illusion spell from a distance, or do you think…?”

  “The Eververse creature is here,” he says grimly. “I don’t know if they’re planning to get involved in the fight directly, but I’d stake my life on the assumption that they’re close enough to watch events unfold and intervene if the Children fail to subdue us yet again.”

  “A being of that caliber throwing around heavy-duty magic so openly in the mortal world, where other powers are liable to take notice,” I say, rolling the implication around on my tongue. “That seraph blade must be a staggeringly powerful weapon.”

  “If I had known there was an Eververse creature involved before this mission started…”

  “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you about my trip to the Eververse right after it happened.”

  His hand lands on my shoulder, reassuring. “I’m not slinging blame, kid, and you shouldn’t pile it on yourself. None of us had enough information on the Children of Enoch before today to truly gauge their threat level. Even if you’d told me about your jaunt to visit dear old dad on paradise island, I still wouldn’t have guessed an Eververse power would be playing such an overt role in the Children’s operations. We still would’ve ended up where we are now, trapped in a shitty park on a shitty day with our shitty executioners no doubt traipsing down the trail toward us, axes in hand.”

  “Now who’s the cynical one?”

  “Just being realistic,” he says in a sing-song voice.

  “Well, stop it,” I snap. “I’d like to at least entertain the idea we might survive this by the skin of our teeth.”

  “If we knew exactly what…” He pauses for a moment, then sniffs the air. “Do you smell that?”

  I inhale deeply through my nose—and bite my tongue to stop my gut from spewing bile out of my mouth. Because the formerly crisp air, as clean as you can get from this kind of metro area, has been invaded by the overwhelming scent of rotten eggs. “What the heck is that?” I choke out. “Sulfur?”

  “Sulfur,” Lucian repeats, drawing out the word as he scans the immediate area from left to right. His attention lingers on the pond a stone’s throw away from our position, and I follow his line of sight. Until my eyes also pin down the small hole in the icy surface, perfectly round, as if cut by a tool, that definitely wasn’t there last time I looked at the pond.

  Our mental alarms go off at the same time, and in tandem, Lucian and I whirl toward the pond. Each of us point one hand at the ice, our palms steaming with magic energy strong enough to blast a third of the park to kingdom come. But as fast as we move, the creature hiding beneath the ice moves faster.

  The surface of the pond erupts like a volcano. Ice goes flying. Water roils.

  A massive clawed hand with bulbous fingers and distended joints covered by red wrinkly skin emerges from the churning water. The claws anchor themselves six inches into the earth, and the creature attached to the hand heaves its head above the edge of the pond.

  One look at the creature’s deformed face is all it takes to send me spiraling into a memory.

  An asymmetrical facial structure, one side appearing paralyzed as if damaged by a stroke. Eyes as black as night with no defined pupils or sclera. Elongated yellow teeth that taper to knifelike points. A forked tongue that flicks out like a snake’s and dribbles muddy fluid. All those features add up to a visage I have seen before—when I was a young boy standing on a sidewalk as my mother fought a monster inside the burning remains of her business, her home.

  This is the creature that my mother died fighting.

  No, it’s not the exact same one. Its facial features are distorted in different ways. Its build is slightly smaller in both height and breadth. And its skin is a few shades paler, more of a mottled pink than a bloody red. But I know without a doubt, as I stand there petrified, watching this demonic creature clamber out of the pond, the ground quaking beneath my feet with each heavy step it takes, the very trees seeming to shrink away as this unnatural thing takes up space in a world where it doesn’t belong…I know that whoever’s controlling this monster is responsible for the death of my only parent.

  The Children of Enoch are to blame for my mother’s death.

  Them, or their Ev
erverse benefactor.

  I was involved in this, in all of this—the Children, the Knights, everything—from the very beginning. Just by virtue of being born. Just by virtue of being me.

  “Kinsey! Snap out of it,” Lucian yells in my ear.

  But I don’t respond. I can’t respond.

  My body floods with anxiety. My lungs seize. My heart beats wildly. My fingers tremble. My magic retreats into my soul, running scared from a thousand terrible ideas that are now tumbling through my mind.

  As I stand there frozen, the creature’s pitch-black eyes observe me, and only me, with something akin to interest. When it sniffs the air, two times, three times, four, I get the distinct impression that it’s smelling the blood on my clothes.

  This thing knows I’m not human, and it’s trying to figure out what it’s dealing with.

  Pain shoots up my arm. I wrench my gaze from the monster to find Lucian has a death grip on my bicep. Sometime during my freakout, he put up a wide, shimmering shield between us and the monster, but his attention isn’t on the creature anymore. Instead, he’s fixated on something that snuck up behind our bench while we were too preoccupied with the monster’s arrival to notice.

  The cloaked man. Whose lavender aura, tinged with rust, is rolling off his form in a dense fog.

  Clarity strikes me like a bolt of lightning, and all my DSI training kicks in between two deep breaths. I quickly analyze the situation and break it down into a group of issues ordered by priority. The most pressing issue is the lack of viable escape routes.

  Lucian and I are blocked off to the north and south by enemies we can plainly see. And if I was a betting man, I’d wager that the cloaked woman and a second creature are lying in wait to our east and west, ready to stall us, by whatever means necessary, if we attempt to flee the park.

  What’s the quickest way out of this park that isn’t blocked by an adversary?

  “Bet you thought that deluge of anti-tracking spells would throw us off, vampire,” says the cloaked man in his altered voice, as he leans forward and braces his hands against the back of the bench. “But you missed something rather obvious, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s that?” Lucian growls.

  The cloaked man gives the monster a quick nod, and the monster lifts one of its hands and twitches a single finger. Lucian abruptly gasps in pain and releases my arm so he can clutch his chest. Coughing up blood, he staggers sideways, toward the monster. In a panic, I reach out to yank him back before he moves within the monster’s reach.

  Just as my fingers make contact with Lucian’s wrist, a small bulge forms in the back of his coat, straining against the fabric. After a valiant struggle, the fabric splits, and a small object soars across the gap between Lucian and the monster and attaches itself to the end of the monster’s finger.

  It’s a piece of the monster’s claw.

  A fragment must’ve broken off inside Lucian’s chest when it slashed him earlier.

  “The thing about golem bodies is that they don’t heal through new cell generation,” says the cloaked man, “but repair themselves by reassembling any damaged parts, no matter how thoroughly those parts are broken. As a bonus of this unorthodox regeneration method, a golem can always track any of its detached body parts. So all it has to do to create a practical alternative to a tracking spell is leave a splinter in its prey.”

  Lucian spits out a glob of blood that splatters across the seat of the bench. “You’ve got a funny definition of ‘splinter,’ pal.”

  “If you were human, an actual splinter would’ve sufficed, but vampire bodies can push small foreign objects out of wounds. I wanted to make sure you couldn’t discard my makeshift beacon before I had a chance to track you down again. Chasing you all over the city in this shitty weather was starting to grate on my nerves.”

  “Well, you found us.” Lucian tugs on his tattered coat like he’s straightening out a suit jacket. “So now what?”

  The cloaked man raps his gloved fingers on the bars of the bench in a discordant rhythm and jerks his head toward me. I can feel his eyes, completely hidden by his shadow spell, scanning me from head to toe, committing my features to memory and judging my general threat level. “My partner told me that you recovered a message detailing the hand-off location for the sword. You will decode that message for me. Now.”

  “And then what? You’ll kill us quickly instead of torturing us to death?” Lucian says.

  “Something like that,” the man replies. And then he raises his hand.

  The monster rears back and spits. A huge cloud of brown saliva that smells like sulfur mixed with raw sewage engulfs Lucian. My right arm, still grasping his wrist, is coated with the slime. It clings like glue, refusing to budge even as I recoil and vigorously shake my hand.

  The sleeve of my coat and the leather of my glove begin to sizzle and steam. And wherever the saliva touches my skin, it leaves fire in its wake. I hiss at the pain, a sharp, rolling burn, like a thousand superheated needles pricking my hand at once.

  Lucian screams. The saliva grips him head to toe and burns everything it touches, eating his skin like a potent acid. His eyes bleed. His lips crack. The shells of his ears seem to melt away.

  Once the saliva penetrates the outer layers of his skin and reaches his blood vessels, every vein turns black and bursts, leaking viscous sludge. Lucian collapses, coughing up a mix of blood and that noxious fluid, choking and wheezing and desperate for air. And all I can do is stand there and wait for him to heal.

  Except he doesn’t heal. It’s like his vampire healing factor has been turned off. He just keeps on deteriorating, second after agonizing second. His screams fade to gurgling cries. His limbs slip into convulsions. His chest is wracked with tremors.

  After less than a minute, the outermost layers of his skin have practically dissolved, his eyes are nothing but black pools slowly draining out of their sockets, and he’s leaking blood and toxic sludge from every orifice.

  I check my own wrist, but besides a vibrant red rash and a few blisters, I seem okay.

  I whip around to face the cloaked man. “What the hell have you done?”

  The cloaked man casually rounds the bench and sits down where I was resting not five minutes before. “When you interact with vampires on a regular basis, you need to account for their healing factors as much as you account for their superhuman strength. Their rapid healing has felled many an otherwise powerful player in this game of supernatural politics over the centuries, and my colleagues and I would prefer not to be counted among that number.”

  He gestures to the foul monster now leering at the vampire on the ground. “That particular poison prevents the activation of any healing factor, human or nonhuman, by playing a clever trick on the nervous system. It scrambles the signals sent by the nerves in a way that prevents the brain from recognizing damage, and so the brain doesn’t signal the body to begin the healing process.”

  “Yet they still feel the pain from the injuries.”

  “Yes,” the man says, and I can sense a gleeful smile hidden beneath his hood. “That lovely feature makes the poison all the more effective. Because vampires will keep fighting even when they’re falling to pieces, unless you incapacitate them with a crippling blow…or crippling pain.” He glances at my partially dissolved coat sleeve and the inflamed skin underneath. “Looks like you took a glancing blow from the poison yourself. Lucky for you, exposure to air renders it inert quite fast. So as long as it doesn’t enter your bloodstream through an orifice or a wound, exposure to a small amount will not result in a slow and painful demise.”

  “How slow?” I ask, trying desperately to restrain my anger.

  When I was at the factory, I played the part of the hapless thief. If I break character by showing too much concern for the well-being of a man I’m not supposed to know outside a business arrangement, the cloaked man might get suspicious and tear apart my cover story.

  “Vampires are resilient even without their healing factors,”
he says thoughtfully. “Given this one’s build, he might last thirty more minutes, maybe forty.”

  Lucian already looks like he’s liquefying. I can’t imagine him surviving for another half hour.

  As much as I dislike that goddamn vampire, even he doesn’t deserve to suffer like that.

  “Is there an antidote?” I ask.

  “Of course.” The man tugs up the sleeve of his coat and taps his wrist. His pulse point. “Accidents happen. We kept that in mind when designing the poison. We made the cure our own blood, which gives us a quick and easy way to rectify any errors—or to end a punishment once we’ve gotten the message across to any associate who decides to step out of line.”

  “If I decode the message, will you give him the antidote?”

  “Whatever for? I was told this man was just your prospective buyer’s agent. Why do you care if he lives or dies?”

  He’s testing me, seeing if I can maintain my story under pressure.

  “If he dies, then the house he works for will put me on their shit list,” I spit. “I don’t want to be on the bad side of a noble vampire house. I’ll end up with my head on a pike.”

  The cloaked man nods. “You’re quite sensible for a thieving lowlife. Must have inherited some of that faerie cleverness.”

  Lucian lets out a faint, wet moan, and I barely refrain from flinching.

  “All right,” continues the man. “Let’s hash out a simple deal. You will decode the message and tell me where and when your partner is planning to hand off the sword. In exchange, I will give the vampire enough of my blood to negate the effects of the poison. You will then accompany me to the hand-off location and convince your partner to give the sword to me without resistance. And once I have the sword, everyone will walk away alive, or satisfied, or both. Fair enough?”

  I have to admit, that’s a generous fantasy. If I was actually some faerie thief with no real concept of what was going on behind the scenes of this Dawn Slayer mess, I might actually believe this man possessed a big enough sliver of decency to let people who aren’t threats to his objectives survive an untoward encounter with him. But my ability to see the glass half full suffocated years ago—right around the time Lucian dropped Mac’s mutilated corpse onto the trunk of our patrol car.