Dawn Slayer

by Clara Coulson

  One of the eight primary symbols in the configuration flares red-orange, and Barnett pulls the trigger. Annette dives out of the way to avoid the bullet glowing like a tracer round. The bullet cuts through the air beside her head and slams into the middle of a tree twenty feet behind her. The tree explodes, fragmenting into a million fiery pieces. Flaming shrapnel careens across the park, so high and so far that it may very well rain down onto the city streets.

  Esther begins firing a continuous stream of rifle rounds at Barnett, but the witch’s shield repels the bulk of them, and the few that penetrate ricochet too far to find a fleshy home. Barnett pinpoints the sniper nest in seconds and fires off another round at the tree where Esther is hiding. Esther flings herself out of the tree in time to avoid being set ablaze, but the bullet blows apart the top half of the tree, and a thick branch strikes Esther in the back and drives her into the ground.

  Esther doesn’t get up.

  She’ll live, but she’s out of this fight.

  Fury surges through my veins—these vampires might not be my friends, but they are my allies. I dash out of the woods and slide to a stop in front of my doppelganger’s corpse.

  Barnett fires three more rounds with her magic revolver, blowing craters into the earth and pelting the other oncoming vampires with a barrage of blazing debris. Spying me in the corner of her eye, she raises her second gun. Only to register my face just before she pulls the trigger.

  Her gaze darts from me to the dead man on the ground, and a brief flicker of confusion crosses her face before she figures out exactly what she’s seeing. That’s all it takes, that half-second of hesitation, for me to shoot a bolt of lightning at her chest.

  The crackling violet arc strikes the center of Barnett’s shield, overloading the charm bracelet she’s using to maintain it. The bracelet melts in a flash, and Barnett shrieks as the molten metal sears her skin. Then the shield shatters and the force of the spell’s collapse throws Barnett backward.

  Behind me, I hear Annette pick up the duffle bag. At the same time, the other vampires manage to clear the field of falling debris from Barnett’s bullet strikes, and four of them converge on her. Barnett, shaking off her second fall, notices she’s about to become vampire food, and slaps her hand against a rectangular charm clipped to her belt.

  A force wave shaped like a bubble ripples outward from her body, slams into all four of the vampires, and tosses them through the air. Two of them slam face first into trees and go down bleeding, while two others smash into each other in midair and land in a tangle of limbs inside one of the bullet craters.

  But now more vampires are approaching, and with me standing there guarding Annette, threatening to throw another lightning bolt her way, Barnett does some quick mental math and realizes she can’t win this fight. She spits out a string of swears, holsters one of her guns, and slaps another charm on her belt. The telltale blur of a speed spell encompasses her body. She’s going to make a break for it.

  I’m inclined to let her go, as much as I dislike her. At the end of the day, she’s just a hired hand. So, as she whips around to sprint away from the approaching vampires, I lower my tingling arm and think, Would you look at that? We won the battle, and nobody died.

  Naturally, that’s when the Children of Enoch arrive.

  A bellowing roar breaks through the trees on the far side of the park, followed by a series of ground-shaking footsteps. Three golems crash through the tree line. One of them kicks a tree from its path so hard that the trunk crumples like a piece of cardboard.

  The top half of that tree tumbles through the air toward Barnett. She backpedals, using her speed spell to run in reverse and skid to a stop on the snow beside me. The enormous hunk of tree slams into the ground right where Barnett was standing, and a dozen broken branches pierce the ice with such force that I refuse to imagine what they’d have done to a person’s body.

  Barnett does imagine it though, if her distressed whine is anything to go by. “Shit. How many of those things do they have?”

  “Oh, so you’ve already seen the golems?” I ask.

  She throws me a snide look. “I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours observing this ridiculous tug of war for that sword. From a safe distance. Because unlike you, I don’t throw caution to the wind and barge into the middle of battles whose players and objectives I don’t understand.”

  “And that strategy has served you so well this morning, hasn’t it?”

  Huffing, she reloads one of her revolvers using a speed loader she had clipped to her belt. “I admit there appear to be some details about this situation I failed to glean through a pair of binoculars.”

  “Like the fact that there were two of me, and one of them was a shapeshifter?”

  She eyes the nearby body of Hays, lying in a pool of blood and gore. His eyes have reverted to shapeshifter purple. “You know, that explains a lot. I thought he went down too easy to be you. You’re a stubborn little bitch.”

  “So you actually thought you were shooting me?”

  She shrugs. “Don’t act so surprised. My contract said I should recover the sword ‘using any force necessary.’”

  “And who wrote up that contract exactly?”

  “I’m sure you’ve already guessed the right answer.”

  I have an urge to take a swing at her, but I don’t have the time. The golems, having set their sights on the gathering of bedraggled vampires, one witch, and me, come loping around the edge of the pond at high speed. They hop the half-tree like it’s no obstacle at all and split up.

  One golem hurls itself at the vampires who were converging on Barnett, scattering them back into the woods. The other two golems charge Barnett and me, intent on reaching Annette, who’s standing a few feet behind us with the duffle bag tucked under her arm.

  I peer over my shoulder to tell Annette to take the sword and make a run for it, only to spot two more problems sneaking up behind us. The cloaked duo are flying through the trees past the opposite end of the pond, soundless in approach and menacing in appearance, nothing but gray phantoms flitting through the haze of snow. Annette follows my line of sight, wheels around to face the oncoming threats, and shouts to me, “Destroy the golems. I’ll hold these two off until you’re finished.”

  Barnett raises a perfectly manicured eyebrow. “How do you destroy these things?” she asks me.

  “If you hit them in the center of their chest with a strong burst of concentrated magic energy, you can destabilize the seal that keeps their ifrit batteries bottled up inside. Problem is, the ifrit is usually angry at being chained inside a golem, so it has this tendency to explode when set free.”

  “I’m sorry, did you say ‘ifrit’? Like the djinni?” She cocks her revolver. “Is that what obliterated the little park yesterday?”

  “Thought you were watching all that through your binoculars.”

  “Missed most of that part.” She lift her gun and points it at one of the charging golems. “Somebody raised an illusion barrier that conveniently obscured everything that happened in the park.”

  “Wasn’t me.” I lift my arm and point it at the other golem.

  “But you do have magic now.”

  “I sure do.”

  “You’re going to have to tell me that story sometime. When we’re not on opposing sides.”

  We fire our spells in tandem. Barnett’s bullet leaves her revolver’s glowing barrel a heartbeat before my lightning bolt leaps off my fingertips.

  The golem on the left, slightly ahead of its partner, takes the bullet to the sternum. The bullet’s spell discharges into its chest, and the golem is launched backward. It tumbles head over heels for nearly a hundred feet. As it comes down on a sharp ballistic trajectory, the integrity of its manufactured body begins to fail, and its fleshy skin devolves to clay. It crashes into the earth, spewing dirt and debris high into the air.

  The second golem tries to dodge my lightning but doesn’t fully succeed. Instead of dead center, the bolt strikes the
right side of its chest and tears it off its feet. It careens diagonally across the park, right into the middle of the ongoing skirmish between the vampires and the third golem. The vampires are fast enough to dodge its flailing bulk, but the other golem is not. The flying golem hits the standing one the way a wrecking ball hits a brick wall, and they both go down missing too many pieces to quickly get back on their feet.

  A shotgun goes off behind me.

  I wheel around to see the duffle bag sliding across the surface of the frozen pond. Annette is down on one knee, the side of her neck spitting blood. One of the cloaked man’s energy blades is embedded in the ground just behind her, its edge stained from a near decapitation.

  The cloaked man himself is lying in the snow, his shield pitted with a hundred holes from the close-range shotgun blast. A few of the pellets made it through and raked his arms and legs, but he’s got no critical injuries. As Annette swings the gun around to fire another load of buckshot, he spits out a single-word spell.

  The energy blade propels itself out of the snow, back toward Annette, like a boomerang. Annette senses it coming but moves a millisecond too late. The blade shears through her own shield like it’s not even there and severs her right arm at the bicep, causing her to lose her hold on the shotgun. The gun drops to the snow, her arm falls beside it, and blood gushes out of the stump. Annette bites back a scream and clutches at the wound.

  While all of that is happening, the cloaked woman, still aloft, swoops toward the pond to pick up the duffle bag. Barnett fires off three shots at her in rapid succession. The cloaked woman pulls out of her dive, but the second bullet clips her shield and detonates right next to her.

  The blast throws her away from the duffle bag. She hits the frozen pond surface face down, bounces twice, and slides to a stop on the snow-ridden ice. As the woman tries to shake off the impact and sit up, blood pours out from beneath her hood and saturates the snow, her nose badly broken.

  Barnett sprints off across the pond to recover the sword. At the same time, the cloaked man rises to his feet, his magic blade hovering in the air beside him, and takes aim at Annette.

  I can’t let the sword fall into Barnett’s hands, but I don’t want Annette to end up headless, so I compromise. I situate myself between these two impending losses and fire force blasts from each hand.

  The cloaked man predictably dodges the blast that heads his way by doing an impressive backflip. Only to land awkwardly on the leg that I nearly cost him yesterday with my bench trick. His leg buckles underneath him, revealing that the wound in his thigh isn’t fully healed. He loses his hold on his energy blade, and it bounds forward as if released from a slingshot, embedding itself in a nearby tree. The tree, like many unfortunate trees in this park today, explodes into a rain of fire.

  The second force blast catches Barnett in the ass. Though she uses her shield as a buffer to prevent injury, the wave of my energy drags her off her feet and sends her sailing right over the duffle bag. Her scrabbling hand misses the strap by an inch. She keeps on going for another ten feet before she cancels out my blast with a counter wave and comes down in a controlled slide on her hands and knees.

  Annette, now holding her severed arm to the stump so it can reattach, says, “Go get that damn bag, Kinsey!”

  “You could at least thank me,” I mutter under my breath as I take off toward the pond.

  Keeping my attention split between the cloaked woman, Barnett, and the bag, I glide across the ice, using a series of wind current spells to speed myself up while maintaining balance on the slick surface. When I close in on the sword, I lean to the right, reach out with my hand to grab the bag’s strap, and…a shadow falls over me.

  The golem I struck with the lightning bolt is literally flying toward me at the speed of a missile, having been thrown by the other golem it collided with a minute ago. Given my current angle and speed, there’s no way for me to dodge to left or right or up, so as the monster’s massive claws make a grab for me, I drop flat on my back and slide across the ice.

  One of the golem’s hands misses me entirely, but the other one gets lucky and snags the sleeve of my coat. With a sharp tug, the golem diverts my course away from the bag, and I slip right past it, just out of reach.

  The golem flies onward, its claw still hooked into my coat. Before it can drag me to my death, I slap my left hand against the offending sleeve and discharge a burst of fire, scorching the fabric.

  The golem’s claw shears through the weakened fabric and pops out of my sleeve, then grazes my cheek as the creature’s momentum takes it for a ride over my head and off in the cloaked woman’s direction. Freed from the golem’s pull, I skid to a stop against a snowbank at the edge of the pond.

  The cloaked woman jumps over the careening golem with ease and throws another spell. A telekinesis spell. It grabs the duffle bag and starts to reel it in. Only for the bag to get yanked out of the spell’s influence when Barnett shoots another round.

  This bullet doesn’t explode into a ball of fire but rather produces a vortex of air that attempts to sling the bag toward Barnett. However, the cloaked woman reacts reflexively and realigns the telekinesis spell, grabbing hold of the bag once more. The bag ends up in a literal tug of war, with each woman manipulating her spell to try and pull the bag in her direction.

  The bag tears in half.

  An object falls out of the ruined bag and skates off toward the middle of the pond. The seraph blade in all its glory, finally revealed to the world.

  It doesn’t look like anything special. A blade of moderate length with a burnished gold hilt, sheathed in a black leather scabbard with metal accents and some peeling gilt designs on either side. The kind of antique blade you’d expect to find in any museum that deals with ancient cultural artifacts. There’s nothing about the sword that screams power beyond imagination, nothing about it that seems dangerous, nothing about it that makes it seem like it’s worth all the trouble we’ve all gone through to obtain it.

  It seems like a perfectly average sword.

  Until one of the vampire men, having managed to slip past the golem thrashing around in the woods, uses the opening left by Barnett and the cloaked woman to race across the pond and make the lucky grab. He leans down, reaches out with his bare hand, and grabs the sword by the middle of its scabbard.

  Out of nowhere, there’s a blinding flash of golden light.

  When it fades, the vampire man is a literal pile of salt.

  For a moment, all the fighting stops. Everyone stares at the salt pile lying next to the sword, trying to process what just happened. As if in a trance, we all slowly turn our heads toward what remains of the duffle bag. Which, as far as any of us can tell, has no magic properties.

  We all work out the basic logic problem in our heads at roughly the same speed: The vampire man touched the sword with his bare hand and disintegrated into a salt pile, but the shapeshifter carried the sword around in a bag with no issues. Therefore, you must be able to touch the sword through fabric, but not with your skin.

  Solution? Only pick up the sword if you’re wearing gloves.

  Luckily for everyone here—except that one vampire, who apparently lost an article of clothing somewhere along the way—it’s winter in Russia, and we’re all wearing gloves. So we can all pick up the sword.

  With that assurance in mind, everyone turns back to face their nearest enemy and resumes fighting to the death.

  Chapter Seventeen

  By happenstance, I’m the person closest to the sword. So while Barnett is busy duking it out in a magic duel with the cloaked woman, and Annette, arm now reattached, is scooping up her shotgun to fire more buckshot into the hobbling cloaked man’s ass, I scrabble to my feet and make for the prize.

  I’m only a few steps into my mad dash, however, when I spy something out of the corner of my eye. The golem that Barnett shot in the chest. Waddling toward the pond with all the grace of a drunken elephant.

  I thought Barnett’s magic bullet did e
nough damage to break the seal. But though the golem’s chest is nothing but cracked pieces of clay, the underpinning of the spellwork fully exposed, there’s no sign that the ifrit inside is on the verge of escaping and blowing a crater into Izmailovsky Park.

  Instead, the golem is moving in a mechanical fashion, like someone is guiding it along on strings. Its usual malevolent expression has been replaced with a look of indifference, its black eyes blank, its misshapen mouth showing neither smile nor frown.

  The golem comes to a stop at the edge of the pond and scans the entire scene: Vampires in the woods dodging the poison cloud spat from the mouth of another golem. A witch firing a hail of explosive bullets at the cloaked woman, who dances around in midair like a bird of prey. A female vampire with a dangling arm firing a double-barreled shotgun one-handed. And the cloaked man using a shield shaped like a cone to disperse the spray of buckshot around his body.

  Finally, the golem’s gaze lands on me. For a moment, it merely watches me maneuver across the slick surface of the pond, closer and closer to the sword. Then it opens its mouth and speaks. “You’re quite a determined little nuisance, aren’t you, Calvin Kinsey?”

  Shock punches me in the gut, and my feet slip out from under me. I hit the ice hip first, pain resonating down my leg, and come to a stop an arm’s length from the sword. But I don’t make a grab for it. I don’t even try.

  Because I can’t bring myself to do anything but look.

  Look straight into the eyes of the marionette piloted by the man who killed my mother.

  The voice this golem just spoke with is identical to the one the other golem used that day, from the trills in its t’s and the rolls of its r’s all the way down to its mocking tone, dripping with unadulterated arrogance.

  All this time, I thought it was the golem taunting my mom, but it wasn’t, I realize with a growing sense of horror. None of the golems that I’ve encountered in Moscow have spoken—because they can’t. They’re not sentient. They’re magic robots made of clay programmed to perform specific tasks. But anytime, anywhere, the taskmaster can pick up the controller and start pushing any button he wants.