by Tiger Gray
The Order had held onto Benaroya Hall by their teeth. The days when it had been a place you could go to see a fancy symphony were long gone. The Order volunteers had cleaned up most of the junk, the bodies, the water and ichor that coated damn near everything these days, but even they couldn't make it welcoming again. The big windows out front only held because of magic, and she worried about how they were burning out all their mages with spells like that, not to mention keeping the lights on; mages were the only ones whose magic mimicked electricity good enough.
Normally Jericho would have found the empty office she'd taken over as her own comforting, since it was shielded enough that she couldn't hear the constant howling and screaming from the city outside. Now it just felt oppressive, the silence creeping like clammy fingers down the hunched column of her spine. She was so tense these days she had a hard time straightening out.
The fight with the Cult wasn't going good and as soon as they'd taken Harbor Island, she knew it would be the Storm that would have to try and drive them back out again. Bad news. The Order was losing ground, and fast.
If we hadn't been so damn raggedy... she thought, remembering Ashrinn and Daniel's broken bodies wrapped up and stuck in hospital beds. It was like some shit from Alien, with all the tubes and pouches of liquid and stuff. She tried not to gag. She'd seen some real shit out on the streets but nothing beat full body burns and having all your bones broken. And they were her friends. More than friends. Work with someone long enough, and it was like being married.
Jericho shook her head, trying to clear it, and went over her gear one more time. She didn't want to do this without the commander, she realized. She wasn't sure she was up to it, especially with two team members out of commission. Even taking apart and reassembling her guns couldn't calm her down.
You'd better be up to it, Kassie. No other choice.
If it hadn't been for her heightened senses whoever was heading towards her would have taken her by surprise. She cursed at herself inwardly, long habit keeping her from voicing it aloud even if there weren't any enemies around to hear it.
Damn, but they smell familiar.
A knock on the door. She turned and yanked it open, .44 up but not aimed.
Kandy.
Jericho's youngest sister stood there frozen mid knock, eyes glued to the gun. Jericho guessed she wasn't prepared for being around a werewolf, either. Even in her human form she sometimes made sensitive people uncomfortable.
Her thoughts were really calm, too calm, protecting her from the urge to shout in Kandy's face. She lowered the weapon, wondering if this was some weirdo mind stuff again, Brenna trying to mess with her, maybe, or some stupid shadowmancer practicing nearby and making everyone see shit.
Kandy took advantage of her surprise, getting it together fast enough that she darted past, into the office. Jericho snarled and shut the door too hard. She turned and looked Kandy over, assessing her sister the way she'd do a stranger. She'd been an operator long enough that it was second nature to treat everyone like a potential threat.
Dark black like she was full Ethiopian, but with their momma's Korean eyes, Kandy stuck out. Her flat-ironed hair was razor-cut into a dyke spike and didn't do anything to make her look older; if Jericho knew her she'd been hoping to look tougher than she was. She wore a green t-shirt with a series of different sided dice across her chest. The slogan at the bottom said "Choose Your Weapon." A gray cloth jacket, kind of like a military coat, hung on her slender shoulders. The sleeves were too long, coming over her knuckles. Her pants were a little too big, too, held up by a belt with a Batman buckle, one leg strapped tightly to her with a cinched band of cloth. She had a messenger bag strapped to her back and Jericho wondered if the girl had biked here, through all that death and chaos.
"I know what you're going to say," Kandy started. Hearing that untied Jericho's tongue.
"Like hell you do. What the fuck are you doing here? You stupid? How did you even find me?"
Kandy lifted her hands, like she was trying to deflect the questions. "Come on, Sis. I thought you might come here because of Daddy's tribe. You know?" Their father was half Duwamish.
Jericho sighed noisily between gritted teeth. She bet the laptop in that bag of Kandy's had more to do with it than the tribal connection. The Order had to scramble to get their online security up to snuff, and she bet Kandy had found every hole. "What do you want? You shouldn't be here. I'm gonna kill whatever dumb motherfucker let you in here. You think I came here to play native?"
"They told us someone must have stolen your body. But I knew that wasn't possible."
"Why not? Sick shit happens all the time."
Kandy gave her an exasperated look, the kind of contempt only a teenager could manage. "How many people are really capable of breaking into the medical examiner's office, finding their way to the morgue, and carrying a dead body out without being stopped? It wasn't like someone came in and shot up the place, either. Even if some of the cops in our hood are corrupt, they couldn't completely cover up something that weird."
Okay, so maybe she hadn't been thinking about staging the scene when she'd busted out of that freezer.
"And even if that was what happened," Kandy continued, "like, if someone had a grudge against you or something, your body never turned up. If you'd pissed someone off that bad you'd think we'd find your corpse under a No Dumping sign or something a couple of weeks later. But we didn't. Nothing. And then all this magic stuff happened and I started to wonder if that last case you were working on had something to do with it."
She wanted to ask about Williams, but she was too afraid to know. Maybe he'd gotten bit too. She didn't want to think about him being one of the unlucky ones, crazy as a shit house rat, pissing himself in an alley somewhere and tearing up anyone who came close.
"Great, you're real fucking smart. Is that what you want me to tell you?" Jericho said. She felt bad tearing into her baby sister like that, but she was afraid for the girl. Kandy had always been the sensitive one, playing Dungeons and Dragons when other kids her age were trying to act hard. Kandy couldn't stand up to Seattle, the heart of the Cult's poison, and Jericho didn't have the time to protect her. If she could just make Kandy go away...
"I want to be like you."
That stopped her cold.
"You take that back."
"I heard you're a werewolf now! You can do so much with that. I heard you're teaching your friends how to fight and stuff." That was her day job, teaching the new recruits police tactics. She hadn't really thought Kandy could puzzle out her real role, but she still felt relief at knowing her covert identity had stayed that way. "Being a werewolf has to be a huge advantage for the Order."
Jericho thought it was weird that Kandy didn't seem like she was having any trouble buying that werewolves existed. With how much she loved super heroes and video games, maybe it was just a dream come true for her. Kandy obviously knew about magic --- that had pretty much come out across the country --- but she would have expected her baby sister to be rattled by it.
"You don't want to be a werewolf and no, I won't turn you so don't even ask. Go back to school."
"School? You should know better than me that school doesn't even exist anymore. You guys might have held on to stuff like that here because you were ready for all that hell outside, but we weren't. We didn't have any group of crusaders ready to fight for us and take care of the humans."
"Mamma...? The girls?" Jericho felt a flash of cold fear. She'd tried to put her family out of her mind --- being a werewolf meant she was as good as dead to them, because she couldn't exactly tell them what had happened --- but Kandy being here kind of kicked that right in the head.
"They're okay."
No thanks to you hung in the air, the unspoken end to the sentence.
Jericho felt a stab of anger. Wasn't like Kandy had woken up in the fucking morgue freezer, with no damn idea of what had happened or why she felt so sick.
"Then go ho
me to them."
"You won't do it?" Kandy's jaw tightened into a stubborn line.
"No. You don't even know what it's like. You just think you get to turn into a big friendly doggie whenever you want. It's not like that. It's... it's like... like you have a fucking disease, one that makes you all twisted and sick and disgusting, and you can infect other people whether they want it or not, with one slip of your claw, whether you meant it or not. Not to mention you've got other people in your head, and believe you me, them bitches be trippin'. If you let your emotions slip, for even a second, you can turn into a rabid killing machine and you'll tear your best friend's throat out as quick as you would your worst enemy. That sound like a fair deal to you? Huh?"
Kandy's eyes had gone wide with shock, but then she balled her hands into frustrated fists and did her best to stand her ground. "Right now, I'm just a human. I've got nothing. And you've mastered it. You can handle it. Why can't I?"
Oh, there it was. Kandy had always idolized her. Kandy thought of her as the big tough cop, the one shining light in a sea of corruption and violence, keeping the family safe. She remembered when they'd been well off, when Daddy had still had his accounting job, but Kandy had never known anything but their falling-apart house and Mamma at the strip club and gunfights outside their front door. Jericho knew how bad Kandy needed to feel safe, but this was not the way to do it.
"I said no. Get out. I have a job to do. Go home."
"You want me to go home? How the hell do you propose I do that?"
Jericho paused. Kandy had her there. Getting here was one thing. Getting back out? She ground her teeth. "Go on down the hall and find the guard there. Ask him to show you where Roger Brewer is at. He's a skinny black kid with a big white boo named Bonnie. She's got all this frizzy hair and they're always together. You can't miss her. They run the children's crèche. Lots of kids without parents now. You can help them. But you listen to me. If you don't keep your head down and stay out of trouble, I will whoop your ass. You heard?"
"Yeah." Kandy said, with some of her old timidity. "Yeah. I hear you."
Jericho stared at her until she got the point and took off down the hall. She swore at the empty air as she jammed her communicator in her ear. Great timing. Just great.
* * *
Jericho would have enjoyed the warm summer night if she hadn't had to spend it on a mission. She felt all alone out in the middle of Harbor Island even though she knew a good number of folks were waiting on her word. A detachment of the men from Ft. Lewis, under Malkai and Randolph, and Serwin's healers, who would find and hopefully save any civilian who had been unlucky enough to get taken and infected by Cultists.
She crouched down in the evening shadows, partially shifted so she could catch every little scent in the air. Considering a good amount of the space was taken up with steel mills and that Elliot Bay was good and sludgy, the heightened senses had some serious downsides, too.
"Tor, Hollywood," Jericho subvocalized over her communicator, calling for Sonth and Gerolt's attention, "any word on the mage?"
She had her teammates, too, though she wished for the thousandth time that they had their own mage; Daniel still wasn't up to this kind of mission. They couldn't even get a mage on loaner, even if she'd thought that was a good idea. They were all too busy powering the Order's operations, sometimes until they got so sick they had to stop. The bounty on them had gotten so high the Order was too afraid to let most of them outside, anyway. They were worth too much to the enemy.
"He's heavily shielded," Sonth said, while Jericho tried to shift on her knees and relieve some of the tension of hiding behind this shipping container, "but his mind is chaos. They must be running out of shadowmancers. If they had a good number, they'd have done something for this man."
Not out of the good of their hearts, Jericho knew, but because they had to keep what few mages they had running as smoothly as possible. She thanked Jesus that most mages hadn't thrown in with the Cult. The downside was that meant the Cult got the crazy ones.
She huddled against the shipping container as a patrol passed by, Cultists in their white and green and gold. It made them great targets, but they didn't seem to care. That was both to their advantage and tended to kick their asses; faith like that made them stupid sometimes, but it also meant they were willing to do shit the Order usually wasn't.
Must be nice. Wish I could do anything damn I wanted and never question whether it was a good idea.
She wanted to raise Lizbet on the communicator but knew the dryad couldn't answer her. Liz had to be in place in the astral for the ritual intended to cleanse the Bay while Jericho and the team, with the backing of Randolph's paladins and Serwin's healers, took the Island itself.
Jericho could feel the wards and spells around them that made the astral into as much of a twisted, blackened maze as the Island was. Harbor Island had been noisy as fuck and lit up like a Christmas tree back when things were normal, but now the cranes arching over the water were dark and motionless. A lot of the shipping containers had been knocked over and gutted, their contents long gone to feed the Cult.
The West Seattle Bridge arching through the middle of the Island was like a graveyard, overturned and crushed cars littering the concrete, the bodies of humans and constructs both wafting rot into the air. Jericho scrunched up her muzzle in disgust and crept forward, taking shelter behind the next pile of debris, a pile of metal scraps this time.
She could feel the corruption here, the slime that not only polluted the water but the spirit world, too. The twisted wolf-thing that lived inside her snarled and whined, but she ignored it and shut Brenna out as hard. She didn't need that simple bitch's help.
"I can see him," Gerolt said.
Jericho could just barely make out her teammate if she tried, a dim outline that had made his way up to the edge of light in the middle of the Island, one of the only places where there was any evidence of life. She prayed their target would be there, a Revelator by the name of Nikolai James. Killing him wouldn't get the Island back under their control, but they wouldn't be able to hide the dryad's ritual for long and without a leader, maybe the other Cultists wouldn't have their shit together enough to stop it.
She never saw Sonth and wouldn't unless Sonth wanted her to, though she knew her teammate's general position. She felt a little stab of pride, thinking about how sneaky her friend was, and how good Sonth was with that sniper rifle. Hopefully that held true tonight.
"Serwin? Lord del Sar?" Jericho asked, wanting every reassurance that things were a go.
"Just give the word and Bob's your uncle, mate," Serwin's clipped accent came through with diamond clarity. "Cultists are so blinkered about their precious demon they aren't even bothering to look for us."
"Don't be too sure," Jericho growled. Despite how difficult her job was she didn't envy Randolph and Serwin, having to take and hold the ships. If there were any civilians here, they'd probably be locked in the belly of those vessels, to say nothing of supplies and weapons.
"Location," she demanded, turning her attention back to Gerolt and filtering out other channels. No sense confusing everyone with cross-comm chatter.
"Machine Works building." Gerolt said. "He's due to move home bases in the next twenty minutes, based on past observations."
That fit with the intel they'd got so far. There were some offices and facilities on this section of Harbor Island, some in use by the Cult. But there were some places where they'd gone in, had their mage turn the lights on, and left again, hoping to throw them off with dummy buildings. She could see the Works from her current hiding place. The protections and wards she suspected were all over the place wouldn't drop unless the mage maintaining them died. Not even then, maybe, but she hoped otherwise.
"Tor, can you get a shot? You think the bullets Gearhead gave you are good enough to pierce shields?"
"If Gearhead made them, they can do anything," Sonth said, stubborn. Her teammates being out of commission had hit her hard, Je
richo knew.
"There's at least one patrol between me and the building," Jericho said.
"There's lots of magical protections," Gerolt confirmed, and Jericho was at least happy they had his magical Sight to rely on, "but they look like they're tied to the wizard. Kill him, and we'll be aces. Or we will be if we can get past whatever the Revelators have done other than that."
"In my sights," Sonth said, and Jericho could easily picture her stretched out on her belly somewhere behind them, making herself comfortable on top of a shipping container and bracing her rifle. Sonth could stay like that for hours, maybe even days.
"Give me as long as you can," Jericho told her. She surged into her true middle form. It might be that the original wolf the Wolfen had been based on didn't have much influence over what they'd become anymore, but her senses still changed in a way she imagined was modeled on a natural wolf. She could see all colors still, but what colors she paid attention to changed. Blues and violets stood out in more shades than a human had ever seen, and the yellow crates stacked here and there throbbed in her vision. The only green she cared about, though, was the green corruption sliming everything. In a way she was thankful for it, since it hid her nicely.
It felt good to shift the way she always imagined cocaine felt good, even though the change made her dizzy as her brain and eyes restructured themselves. She thought she glimpsed the wizard, a big blond guy that reminded her too much of Daniel. She could smell him perfectly, however, and that killed the illusion. Daniel always smelled like rain and metal, and clean sweat sometimes when they'd been working hard. This guy stank of starvation and insanity. He'd been burning himself out for his God, she guessed, letting his magic eat his body up.
She put the thought out of her mind as best she could, focusing on the footsteps of the patrol, now extra loud in her ears as if there was a stereo speaker right next to her. She had an advantage, being able to shift, but she knew that a Cult patrol could still be dangerous because of their unpredictable powers. They all smelled off the way Cultists tended to, a little bit like a water logged corpse.
