by S. M. Reine
Hannah glanced at the wall calendar. Below the picture of an ocean sunrise, Nathaniel had been crossing off days. One week would be the end of the month.
Swallowing down the last vestiges of her shriveled pride, Hannah asked, “Could you meet us here instead?”
“I won’t be available for another week.”
“Why?”
“Because,” James said, “I’m about to be arrested by the Union.”
The phone slipped an inch before Hannah realized that her fingers had gone slack. She caught it, put it back up to her ear, and leaned around the doorway. Nathaniel was still transfixed. She whispered anyway. “Arrested? For what?”
“That’s not important. They won’t keep me for long. My parents have agreed to hide you, and they won’t tell Landon you’ve returned. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worried about it for me. I’m worrying for Nathaniel.”
He sighed. “Yes. I am, too.”
The silence between them carried a lifetime of secrets. Hannah had a thousand questions, but nothing to say—not over the phone. She didn’t even know where to begin. Thoughts of archangels, conspiracies, and deicide vanished as quickly as they occurred to her. She shut her eyes. Pressed her forehead against the wall.
“Here’s the thing, James: I don’t have any money left. I can’t afford to go to Colorado.” It was physically painful to confess that aloud. “And don’t tell me to ask the coven here for help.”
“I wasn’t planning on it. It’s not necessary anyway—I’ve added you to my bank account. You’ll be able to withdraw whatever you need from the local branch. But move quickly; my transactions are likely to be monitored, and they’ll be looking for you.”
“Who?” she asked.
James gave a low, mirthless chuckle. “Everyone.”
“This week is going to be bad. Isn’t it?”
“Very bad. But after that, you’ll be safe. You and Nathaniel. You’ll never have to worry again—not about money, your safety, or any covens. I promise you that.”
“You’ve made promises before,” Hannah said. The laughter from the living room abruptly stopped as Nathaniel turned off the TV. She was out of time for questions. “I’ll see you in Colorado.”
She hung up the phone.
2
Fallon, NV
It was doomed to be a routine patrol from the start. After a few shootouts with stubborn old people, the last of the stragglers had finally allowed themselves to be ousted from Fallon’s ruins weeks earlier. There weren’t any demons left, either. The Union only sent patrols through town for appearances—just a friendly reminder that they were still in control of the region.
Boring as it was, Zane St. Vil found ways to enjoy the posting. He had fun walking between the empty buildings on the main road through Fallon, which was hardly big enough to be called a street, much less a main street. The evacuation had left behind a ghost town. The silence was kind of creepy. But it meant that nobody would know when Zane shot out a window or three.
He popped off a few rounds at the Long John Silver’s on the corner and was rewarded with the sound of shattering glass. “Blam , motherfucker,” he said. His boots ground against broken asphalt as he marched closer.
The neon sign over the door was still working—this was one of the few buildings that seemed to have power these days.
Zane took aim at the sign. Another bang , and half of the lights went dark.
He was already mentally drafting the explanation he would give for his emptied magazine back at the base. I saw a shadow move. I was trying to flush out nightmares . Didn’t matter how legit the excuse was. Nobody cared as long as it filled the forms on the paperwork.
“Suck it,” he said, finishing off the last of the fluorescents.
An SUV stopped at the corner. “What are you doing?” asked Spencer, hanging his head out the driver’s side door. He was way too fat to walk on his patrol. Lazy bastard.
“Shadows,” Zane said, not that he owed Spencer any explanations.
“Where’s your vehicle?”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That way. Ajax and I split up so I could check downtown while he did the farms. You know how bad they were at the Lattin place.”
Spencer still looked suspicious, but what was the fat fuck going to do to him? Run him down? Zane would have paid more than the cost of a blowie on Fourth Street to watch Spencer try to kick that blubber into high gear.
“We’re moving to check the next sector in twenty,” Spencer finally said. “Don’t take long.”
“Right. I’m just going to look at the bar a block over.” Zane was pretty sure he hadn’t done any target shooting at that one yet, and he still had some testosterone to kill before going back to the boring hellhole that was the Union base.
“Don’t forget to turn your earpiece on.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Zane followed one of the roads past the fast food joint until Spencer was out of sight. The bar was a big brick building on the corner. He had noticed the week before that it still had most of its windows intact—for now.
The moon was as bright as a spotlight that night, and it turned all of the buildings on the street into looming silhouettes. Zane hadn’t been lying about how dark the shadows were. The only reason that the darkness wasn’t infested with nightmares was that they knew to stay out of the Union’s way.
Another SUV rolled down the street. Zane waited for it to pass before facing the bar’s windows.
Zane tried to envision demons standing on the other side of the dark windows. He recalled the satisfaction of mowing down the demons in downtown Reno over Christmas. That mess with the mother of all demons—and the violence it had justified—had definitely been the highlight of his short career with the Union.
“Die, you ugly taint-lickers,” he said, finger tensing to fire.
A light turned on in one of the hotel rooms over the bar.
He jerked the barrel of the gun up at the last moment. Only a stroke of instinct kept him from shooting.
The light flickered like an oil lamp. It was a contained flame, not an electrical fire.
Someone was in the hotel.
Zane slapped a hand to his earpiece. He had turned it off so that he wouldn’t have to hear Spencer’s inane back-and-forth with the guys at the base, and now it beeped as it searched for the channel.
It couldn’t seem to connect, which meant that he was alone for the moment. Nobody to watch over his shoulder, nobody to ask why he was discharging his firearm so much.
Excitement thrilled through his gut.
Spencer kicked in the front door. The bar was empty inside. Fallon had only been evacuated for a few weeks, but it didn’t take long for the desert to start reclaiming a town; a good windstorm had blown through the week before, and there was a layer of dirt over the mirror. The tables were covered in a thick layer of dust, insulating the sound of his movements so that the creaks and scrapes fell flat on the air.
He touched the flashlight mounted at his shoulder, and brilliant blue light washed over the tables. As he moved through the room, deep shadows mirrored him, taking lefts as he took rights. His lamp looked like a shining star in the smudged mirror.
Zane stopped by the bar. There were handprints on it, like someone had braced themselves to jump over the back.
Fresh handprints.
He restarted his earpiece, but he still only got the beep, indicating that it couldn’t find a channel. Not that he needed a fatty like Spencer backing him up. The guy would be a liability anyway. But having support from the base on hand—that was sounding better and better.
Keeping an eye out for more signs of life, he moved deeper into the bar. Banks of electronic slot machines stood in rows two deep near the back wall. The blank screens looked like vacant eye sockets.
Only a glint of light on metal made Spencer realize that there were stairs hidden behind the slots.
The steps creaked as he mounted them. The yellow, p
eeling wallpaper on the second floor looked like it hadn’t been updated since about 1976, and was almost the same shade as the recycled casino carpet.
Zane stepped onto the second floor. His earpiece stopped beeping.
He plucked it out of his ear and pummeled the power button a few times. The light wasn’t even coming on now. Dead battery?
The flashlight mounted on his chest failed only seconds later. The shadows of the hallway consumed him.
When the mother of all demons had been attacking Reno, that kind of darkness had meant that someone was about to die an ugly death. That bitch was dead—but maybe some of her followers weren’t. And HQ had made it clear that demons were fair game.
“Gonna be some good shooting tonight,” Zane whispered, dropping the earpiece into his pocket.
He stepped down the hall, rolling along the carpet heel-to-toe so that his feet didn’t make a sound.
Which hotel room had the light been coming from? It had been one of the rooms facing the street, but he hadn’t thought to count windows to help him locate it once inside. The hotel room doors were cracked open. No sign of the flickering firelight remained.
Zane nudged open one door at a time. All of the tobacco-stained rooms were identical: double beds with hard mattresses, ancient televisions, dusty curtains.
Then he entered the room five doors down from the stairs, and his mouth dropped open.
The mattress had been propped against the window, but it had slipped a few inches, which was why Zane had glimpsed the light. All of the other furniture was piled in one corner to bare the floor. A brown, crusty fluid had been smeared on the walls, too. Zane couldn’t tell if it was blood or shit.
A circle had been burned into the carpet, and dozens of melted tapers were welded to the floor with cooling wax. Some of them still trailed wisps of smoke.
He kneeled next to the circle. A spiral notebook had been left next to one of the candles, and Zane nudged it open with a knuckle. Each page was covered by runes drawn in ballpoint pen. A single brown thumbprint had soaked through the last few pages.
A photo was tucked inside the back cover, which showed a smiling couple at a vineyard, glasses of wine in hand. The man had black hair, blue eyes, a strong jaw, glasses. The woman was a redhead with a great rack.
So which of them had left behind such a mess?
Zane slipped the photo into his back pocket as he continued flipping through the notebook. Many of the symbols that were painted on the wall were also drawn on the pages. He’d take it back to base—might be interesting to the witches there.
The door behind him creaked. Zane spun, raising the gun, and found a man standing in the doorway.
The witch had found him.
His finger twitched. A gunshot ripped through the air, and gray light flared.
Zane hit the floor, unconscious.
James Faulkner had been shot. He twisted his arm around to inspect the damage and found a stripe of brilliant red on his deltoid, where he had been grazed. The matching impact site left an inch-wide hole on the door behind him. The hotel room had taken the brunt of the damage, but damn did that wound sting.
When James had decided to lure a Union recruit to his room in Fallon, he hadn’t planned to end up on the wrong side of a gun. But he seemed to have accidentally picked a guy with a quick trigger finger and nerves of pudding. James was probably lucky that he had only been hit once before knocking him out.
Leaving the unconscious body on his floor, James stepped into the bathroom. It was the only part of the hotel room where he could have lights without risking discovery, so it had become his makeshift study. The bathtub had been converted into a cauldron; spells he had already performed waited for the right moon phase on the countertop.
Two of the other bullets that the kopis had fired were embedded in the plaster behind the showerhead. A third had shattered an empty glass on the counter.
He sat on the edge of the tub and fished a corked phial out of the water. It was filled with a gelatinous silver paste, which he smeared over the flesh wound on his arm. The paste worked quickly. By the time he had finished covering the wound, the redness was already fading.
James returned to the man unconscious on his floor. The healing wound barely ached as he pushed the kopis over to take the photo out of his back pocket.
He smoothed the picture over his knee. Cramming it into a pocket had bent the corner, leaving a line down Elise’s forehead that split her face in half. James crumpled the other side in his fist—the side that he was on.
The kopis stirred. James tucked the picture into his notebook again and drew a knife.
According to the badge on his chest, James’s new friend was named Zane St. Vil. There was a camera mounted on his shoulder rig. James cut it off and set it on top of the mattress. He checked the angle to make sure that it would take in the entire circle of power, then began arranging the items for his final ritual.
Five months of isolation. Five months of working on new magic that exploited gaps left behind by the failure of the Treaty of Dis.
He was ready.
St. Vil’s eyelids fluttered open. “Where…?”
“Quiet,” James said. “This won’t take long.”
“I’ll kill you,” St. Vil croaked.
James shoved his magic into the quartz crystal at the center of the circle, allowing electricity to return to the hotel room.
The battery-powered lantern on the dresser fizzed to life. Yellow light washed over the circle. And a tiny red LED illuminated on the side of the Union-issue camera.
He waited until the light began blinking. Then he cut St. Vil’s face. The blade was sharp; all it took was a flick of his wrist to make dark red blood well to the surface. St. Vil twisted away, but not before James had collected several drops in a shallow bowl.
James fixed his gaze on the Union camera, imagining the audience that would be watching: the commander that had taken over the Fallon base, some witches, security personnel. And, hopefully, Union HQ in Montana.
“Come and get me,” he said.
He removed his magic from the crystal, and the electricity died once more.
James mixed a phial of potion with St. Vil’s blood. It formed a brown, sludgy ink that hummed with power—and it was like the bullet he needed to fill the last chamber of a gun.
While St. Vil continued to groan on the floor, James inked a symbol on a bare patch of skin near his ankle. It wouldn’t be long before the Union arrived to arrest him—about five minutes, if his estimates were correct—but he didn’t dare rush the mark. Every millimeter of every line needed to be drawn precisely. There was no room for mistakes.
St. Vil finally managed to stagger to his feet. The spell should have knocked the man unconscious for sixteen hours or so; the fact that he was attempting to stand at all was incredible.
But he failed in his attempt nonetheless.
James stepped forward in time to catch the kopis before he hit the ground. “Relax,” James said as St. Vil struggled weakly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You cut me!” he said, swinging his fists. It was a clumsy attempt at an attack, but the blow to James’s shoulder still hurt—he had hit the healing bullet wound.
James grunted and forced the man to the floor. “I’m conserving my energy,” he said, leaning his forearm into St. Vil’s throat. “That means I won’t knock you out with magic again, but if you keep trying to attack me, I will stab you. Do you understand?”
There was no understanding in St. Vil’s animal eyes. Only anger. But he nodded.
Slowly, James eased up, then stepped back to the ink made of St. Vil’s blood. He picked up the bowl.
Weight crashed into James’s back, shoving him against the mattress.
St. Vil had gotten up. Damn kopides and their fast healing.
He drove an elbow into St. Vil’s gut. The man had abs of iron; it was about as effective as elbowing a particularly stubborn rhino.
An arm snaked around hi
s neck, forcing his chin back. St. Vil twisted James’s wrist behind his back.
“You’re making a mistake,” James said, trying to remain as calm as he possibly could while in a headlock. St. Vil only laughed. It was a low, desperate sound. “You have three seconds to release me. This is your last warning.”
St. Vil dragged him away from the wall, scooping his gun off the floor and jamming it into the small of James’s back.
“You fucking cut me,” St. Vil breathed into his ear. “Maybe I should just shoot you now.”
James touched his own wrist. He couldn’t remember which symbol he had drawn there, but he could only hope that it was powerful. And if it just so happened to be deadly…well, he had tried to warn St. Vil.
He spoke a word of power. Magic flamed at his wrist.
The entire wall of the hotel vanished.
Spencer Wallace’s earpiece beeped. It had lost signal.
He stopped the SUV to inspect his earpiece. No matter how many channels he switched, he couldn’t reach the base again.
“Strange,” he muttered, keeping one eye on the street as he toggled the power another seven or eight times. Nothing happened, so he tossed the earpiece onto the dashboard. “Hey, Dante, are you getting anything on the main channels?”
“I dunno,” said the witch in the back, who was playing with his cell phone. Personal electronics weren’t allowed on patrol—or anywhere on a Union base, for that matter—but contraband had a way of sneaking in anyway.
“Turn on your earpiece. See if you can find a signal.”
“You’re not the boss of me, bro,” Dante said.
Ah, the witticisms. The Union had only recruited the best when they picked up Dante Reyes, that was for certain.
“Dude, look at this.” Dante turned the phone around, flashing a photo of a girl squeezing her breasts together at Spencer. “Girlfriend just sent this to me from Tijuana. Look at those tan lines, am I right? Don’t you just want to stick your tongue between those titties?”
Spencer swatted Dante’s hands away. “Check your goddamn earpiece.”
