by S. M. Reine
4
The Union headquarters in Montana took three days to prepare for its newest prisoner. They kept James Faulkner sedated the entire time, and Zettel didn’t allow the medics to rouse the witch until he was already in a containment cell at HQ.
Zettel couldn’t help but feel disappointed at how uneventful the transfer had been. He had been hoping that Elise would try to save her aspis, so Zettel had prepared a room with very bright lights to receive her.
But Elise never showed.
“This is overkill,” Allyson said, pacing behind Zettel.
First she thought it was too easy. Now she thought he was making it too difficult.
They were observing the end of Faulkner’s transfer from the safety of an adjacent room on a gray-scale security monitor. Zettel touched the keyboard to switch the monitor to a rear view of the cell. The medic slid a needle into James’s arm.
“You know what he did in Hell?” Zettel asked. “He broke out of prison. He mutilated an honored apothecary. He broke into the House of Abraxas—the home of the judge himself! And then he escaped high trial.” Even saying it made chills roll down Zettel’s arms, but he didn’t dare show how much that unsettled him, even to his aspis. “Overkill? There is no overkill where James Faulkner is concerned.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Allyson said. “I already gave you my risk assessment for him. He’s a serious danger, but he’s only a man.”
“He’s ‘only a man’ that was indicted for violation of the Treaty of Dis.”
“That ruling was classified by HQ,” Allyson said.
He smiled grimly. “It’s not classified. There was no ruling. The entire Council died before they could come to an agreement.”
The door to the surveillance room opened, and Yasir stuck his head inside. He was a young commander, fresh out of the Marines, and still in officers’ training. He was a good guy. Very smart. And today, he looked like he was in a huge hurry.
“The meeting starts in fifteen minutes,” he said.
“I know.” Zettel put every ounce of “leave me alone” that he could muster into those two words. “I’ll be there. Thank you.”
Yasir slipped out again, closing the door behind him. Zettel returned his attention to the monitor.
The medic was gone. Now a kopis named Rooke was patting Faulkner down again. It was protocol to search prisoners when they were transferred to the holding cells at HQ, even if they had already been through multiple security measures at other bases.
Rooke pushed back Faulkner’s sleeves a few inches, revealing those strange brown tattoos on his arms.
“Did the researchers ever find an explanation for what those are?” Zettel asked.
Allyson opened the logs on her cell phone, reading aloud as she skimmed them. “Tattoos cover sixty percent of his body,” she said, pushing a lock of red hair behind her ear. “They cover his calves, thighs, hips, stomach, ribs, chest, and arms. Only his back, posterior, neck, and face are bare.”
“Those are observations, not explanations,” he said.
“But that’s all the information we have on them. We don’t know what they are.” Allyson passed her phone to him.
The images documented James Faulkner’s cavity search, and every inch of his naked body had been photographed in unflattering detail, from his hairy calves to his scarred abdomen. All covered in tattoos.
“His skin was unmarked five months ago,” Zettel said. They had encountered each other when the Union seized the Palace of Dis—shortly before Faulkner vanished without a trace. “What would motivate a man to tattoo his entire body within a matter of weeks?”
“I have a theory,” she said.
“Let me hear it.”
“I don’t think those are tattoos.” There was a sly smile on Allyson’s lips, the kind of expression she always got when she was on the verge of acquiring a new and dangerous weapon. She didn’t smile very often. It gave Zettel chills. “The marks look like henna.”
“So it’s temporary,” he said. “Dangerous?”
“Definitely.”
Rooke finished searching Faulkner and took a seat in the corner. It left the witch twitching his way toward consciousness on the cold floor of the cell.
“I think it’s an advancement,” she said, pointing to the symbols stitched into her armband. Since deconstructing written magic, she had spent every waking moment figuring out new spells. She carried them with her everywhere she went. “Let me talk to him. I can find out.”
“I don’t want you to fight with him.”
“I’m the only one who knows anything about written magic in the entire organization, Gary. Nobody else will have the right questions for him.”
Before Zettel could decide, the door opened again.
It was Yasir.
“Five minutes,” the young commander said. “They’re asking for you.”
“I’m coming,” Zettel said. This time, Yasir didn’t leave as quickly. He hung in the doorway with an expectant look. Zettel swore silently and faced Allyson again. “You want to deal with James Faulkner? Fine. Don’t kill him. I’ll be back in an hour—I have to meet with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”
She smiled again. “Yes, sir.”
James woke up in the Union cell feeling groggy, numb, and dried out.
His eyes opened on a blank concrete ceiling. A light was embedded in the center, protected by a wire cage. It gave off a soft, whining buzz.
He sat up and rubbed his sore legs. They were covered in white linen, with a white shirt to match—an obvious contrast to what Union soldiers wore. They had been kind enough to give him long sleeves, but not so kind as to put him in a cell that was much warmer than freezing.
James’s chest ached like he had taken a sledgehammer to the sternum, and he dimly recalled being shot. Despite all of his planning, he had expected himself to be too valuable for the Union to actually shoot him—a serious mistake that he wouldn’t make again. Yet there was no wound. The Union’s finest healers must have paid him a visit.
He also wasn’t alone. A man sat in the corner with a gun in his lap. His nametag said “Rooke.”
“Hello,” James said.
Rooke didn’t reply. His silence gave off a feeling of tension, strength—a kopis, then. No surprises there.
James pushed himself to his feet. Rooke aimed the gun at his chest.
He paced the cell and counted the strides it took to move between walls. Twelve feet by twelve feet. Generous in comparison to Hell’s idea of a prison. Every wall had a camera on it. He wouldn’t be able to write any lengthy spells in this cell without being watched.
Placing a hand against the wall, he sent a curl of magic through the cracks in the wall. Concrete. Only six inches thick, but there was steel inside. Quite secure, for most humans.
“Sit down,” Rooke said.
James sat down in the middle of the floor, where every camera would be able to track him.
Let them watch. Let them wonder.
His eyes fell closed, and he meditated.
He drifted among the beat of his heart and the magic that pulsed along with it. He avoided thoughts of what the Union would attempt to do if he remained in their custody. He didn’t think about what he would do in retaliation to that. He also didn’t think about the last several weeks, or what had become of Elise Kavanagh.
Those weren’t calm, meditative thoughts. They were black. Vengeful.
He sighed and tried to clear his mind again.
The drugs must not have completely left his system, because he felt himself begin to sink into sleep. A face rose to the surface of his mind—a freckled face with a crooked nose, broad lips, and angry eyes.
“How long?” Elise had asked him.
He should have told her the truth.
The sound of scraping against the outside of his cell door sent him crashing back to consciousness. He glimpsed a flash of red hair through the window. His heart jumped.
Unfortunately, it was a wit
ch he didn’t recognize that stepped through, not Elise. She was stocky, broad-shouldered, and flat-faced. She addressed the kopis guarding James. “How’s his behavior?”
“He hasn’t done anything.”
And that didn’t seem to bother Rooke. James had pulled out his showiest magic to get arrested by the Union, yet the guard didn’t bat an eye at his sudden compliance.
“Leave,” she told Rooke, and he did.
She took a device out of her pocket. It was some kind of black plastic remote with white marks chalked on the back. She hit a button. The camera behind him buzzed, then clicked, like it was turning off. James had a feeling that the cameras that had been watching wouldn’t be watching anymore.
They were alone. Really alone.
The witch crouched in front of James. “My name is Allyson Whatley. I’m the Union’s lead witch.”
He lifted an eyebrow as he sized her up anew. Lead witch? James wouldn’t have pegged her as anything much more powerful than the witches he had fostered in the Reno coven. When he opened himself to her energy for a second look, he still didn’t find anything that impressed him.
“Pleasure to meet you, Allyson,” he said. “I’m James Faulkner.”
“I know. Tell me about your tattoos.”
“They’re decorative. It’s an expression of my personal emotional turmoil through the beauty of body art. My life’s story in abstract.” James managed to keep a straight face while saying it.
“They’re magic.”
“Oh, are they?”
“Don’t play with me, Faulkner. I could be your friend if you let me. You want me to be your friend.”
James gave a thin smile. “Why would I want a friend that can’t do more powerful magic than what my grandmother used to cast over Thanksgiving dinner?” He expected the jab to hurt. This was a woman with a lot of pride—someone who thought herself to be important.
But she didn’t react to it. Not even a twitch. “You had a half-healed bullet wound covered in paste when we found you. Those spells tattooed on you are powerful. Why didn’t you heal yourself with one?”
“I don’t have any healing spells on my body,” James said.
“But you admit that they are spells.”
“No.”
“Okay,” Allyson said. “Tell me about the demon posing as Elise Kavanagh.”
James’s jaw tightened. He forced himself to stare at the wall over Allyson’s shoulder, trying not to show that she had struck a nerve.
She went on. “We caught it at your house in December. It went to Hell through a Union portal and never came back. Where is it?” At his ongoing silence, she flexed her hands into fists, as though contemplating punching him. “You didn’t come back through our portal, either. How?”
Elise and James hadn’t passed through a Union portal on their way out of Hell because she didn’t need a portal. Elise had become an extremely powerful demon. Dimension jumping was only the beginning of what she would be able to do, if given the chance.
But she hadn’t been given any chance at all.
“Tell me, Faulkner. Where is she?” Allyson asked.
James said nothing.
After a moment, she straightened. “We’re waiting for instructions on what to do with you. You’ll either be executed or studied. They’ll dissect you, skin you, and figure out why your blood sends up every red flag our computer system has.”
“I won’t be harmed. You all want what I have too much to hurt me.”
“What do you have?” she asked.
He tapped a knuckle against his temple with a small smile.
Maybe she would have argued with him more, but she got a distant look in her eyes and put a hand to the earpiece. Someone was talking to her.
“I’ll be back,” she told him.
“I can hardly wait.”
Allyson stepped out, closing the door behind her.
James stood immediately. It wouldn’t be long until Rooke returned to babysit him, and he had no time to waste.
He placed his hand on the wall. Pain flared in the center of his back, and magic followed, seeping out of his bones to ripple through the concrete. The steel bars melted away at his touch. The lights ensconced in steel flickered, buzzed, turned off.
A hallway appeared on the other side, and James continued to funnel power into the wall until the hole was big enough to step through.
As soon as he released the magic, the lights came back on.
He glanced back at the door. Still closed. James straightened his collar, ran a hand through his hair, and tugged his sleeves down to make sure that his wrists were covered again. Then he walked briskly down the hallway, straight-backed and sure.
James made it around the corner before the alarms started blaring.
5
Two floors down and three halls over. James counted the cells as he passed. J Block. K Block. L Block. And then down another floor.
The fluorescent lights turned off, replaced by red emergency lighting on the baseboards. It cast the halls in eerie darkness and made the signs hard to read. He kept walking.
Chatter would be exploding on the Union’s communication channels. Kopides would deploy to search for him in seconds. But it was all too slow. By the time they located James, he would already be on his way out of the compound.
He stopped in front of cell L13 and peered through the window, hands cupped on either side of his face. The alarms had automatically turned off all of the cells’ interior lights. He couldn’t make anything out.
James put a hand on the lever, preparing to magic the lock.
The door whined open at a touch.
Before the Union had “found” James in Fallon, he had stolen one of their cell phones. It had been loaded with text messages about relocating Malcolm Gallagher to Montana HQ, block number and all. He should have been here—cell L13.
But the holding cell was empty.
Whatever happened to Malcolm must have been recent. The cot was rumpled, and a half-eaten dinner hadn’t been cleaned off of the side table yet.
Recent or not, James was too late.
He heard voices at the end of the hall. Pushing the door closed, he jogged in the opposite direction, swearing under his breath. Couldn’t Malcolm make anything easy?
Two floors up, three halls over. The alarms were louder at the higher levels. The glow of a green light led him to an emergency exit at the top of the stairwell. It opened into a cool Montana morning.
A line of kopides jogged along the perimeter a few yards away. James slipped around back before they could spot him. For the first time, he was grateful for the flimsy linen slacks and shirt, a shade of white paler than the eggshell walls of the building. Industrial camouflage.
The loading bay staff must have emptied out when they heard the alarms. Now it was only being watched by one nervous-looking witch who was chewing on her fingernails. She didn’t notice James slipping past the truck parked in the bay.
He climbed onto the platform behind her and eased through the door.
James found himself in a ground-level hallway near the barracks. There were arrows painted on the wall. Left for units six through nine, right for units ten through thirteen. He hesitated at the juncture.
He still needed to locate Malcolm, which meant that he needed an unsecured terminal—and fast.
A voice called out from behind him. “Hey!”
James didn’t look back. He headed right.
A few yards down the hall, he approached a door with a reinforced window. There weren’t any computers inside, but what he found was almost better: a locker room, replete with a couple of open lockers, unattended equipment, and the kind of mess he would have expected to find in a dorm room.
“Stop right there!”
He glanced over his shoulder. A kopis jogged toward him, still at the other end of the hall.
James slipped through the locker room door, snagged a spare uniform, and slid into a shower stall. He stripped and quickly wiggled int
o the uniform.
The door opened and closed. Rubber-soled boots squelched on cement as the kopis drew nearer. James’s fingers flew over the uniform’s buttons.
The curtain whipped opened while he was still tucking this shirt into his slacks.
“What are you doing?” The kopis’s nametag said “Yasir ibn Omari.” He was young, handsome, scarred.
“Changing, sir,” James said.
Yasir’s suspicious expression didn’t change. Even though James was wearing a kopis’s uniform, he looked every year of his four decades—the graying hair and rugged features made sure of that. Very few kopides lived that long.
The young commander reached for his Bluetooth earpiece.
James’s hand brushed against one of the tattoos on his hip. He mouthed a word of power.
Yasir’s eyes went blank before he uttered a single word.
James caught him, lowering the young kopis to the floor. Then he stole the earpiece, his sidearm, and the key card clipped to his pocket. “Thanks,” James said, slipping the headset onto his ear. Union control’s chatter whispered through the earpiece.
He found a razor on the sink and pocketed it. Then he snagged a jacket hanging off an open locker door, threw it over his shoulders, and walked out. Less than ten minutes after he had entered the locker room, he was out again.
James flicked the edge of Yasir’s key card as he jogged upstairs to the commanders’ rooms. He passed a couple of men hustling in the opposite direction, and he gave each of them a small nod. Nobody stopped him.
There was no room number on the key card, but the doors were conveniently labeled with the inhabitants’ names, like in an office building. He circled the halls until he found the door labeled “ibn Omari” and slipped inside.
The commander’s room had the same miserable, Spartan furniture as every other Union room James had seen: a gun safe in one corner; a bookshelf with encyclopedias, manuals, and other required reading in the other corner; a hard, square sofa between them.
All that he cared about was the computer on the desk.
