by S. M. Reine
“It’s a quarantined dimension,” James said slowly. “You wouldn’t be able to jump in there.”
Nathaniel frowned, considering. “Okay. What about a gate? There are hundreds of gateways on Earth that go to the other dimensions. There has to be one that goes to the garden. Right?”
“There are only two doors on Earth that go there. One of them was in Landon’s basement. It’s broken.”
“And the other?”
James shut his eyes, imagining the mirror city that floated over downtown Reno. It had nine gateways—nine doors that led into different ethereal planes, one of which happened to be the garden.
“It’s in Reno,” he said.
And with those three words, he knew where they had to go next.
14
Nathaniel said that he knew someone who could pick them up, and he made a phone call. “She’ll be here in eight hours,” he said when he hung up.
“Who?” James asked.
“Brianna,” Nathaniel said. “We can trust her.”
James wasn’t in any position to argue. He sank back into the driver’s seat to wait.
He had expected Nathaniel to fall asleep again immediately, but the same insomnia that had tortured James seemed to have struck his son, too. So they sat together, awake but silent, to watch the empty night.
James closed his eyes to mentally trace a route to the gates above downtown Reno. What would the city be like, so many months after the Union’s occupation? They would probably need to pass through Union checkpoints to get in. James’s glamor spell would protect him from prying eyes, and hopefully Nathaniel wouldn’t be recognizable.
His mind drifted through the imagined streets of Reno—not the ruins that it would be now, but a tired city hit hard by the economy, baked by the sun, and occupied by Elise Kavanagh.
“She’s here,” Nathaniel said.
James’s eyes opened instantly. “Elise?”
His son looked at him like he was crazy. “No. Brianna.”
Had it already been eight hours? He checked Nathaniel’s phone, which sat on the dashboard. Six hours had passed. James had fallen asleep after all.
He beat Nathaniel out of the van, prepared to confront the driver if she turned out to be unfriendly. A silver sedan sluiced into the mud and stopped a few feet away.
Nathaniel bumped James aside.
“Brianna!”
He rushed down the shoulder and flung himself into the arms of the young woman that emerged from the car. She squeezed him tightly. Even though she looked to be a teenager, she was easily shorter than Nathaniel—barely over five feet.
“Thank Hecate you’re okay,” she said, holding Nathaniel at arm’s length to look at him. “You are okay, right? We found Landon. The coven’s run for the hills.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
The girl named Brianna lifted her gaze to James, and he felt like a piece of meat being sized up at the market. Like she was trying to decide how valuable he could be. “Who’s this?”
“Oh,” Nathaniel said, jamming his hands into his pockets. “That’s James.”
“James…Faulkner ?” Brianna’s jaw dropped open. She grabbed his hand and shook it. “Oh my God, it’s such an honor. I’ve heard so much about what you’ve done for the coven, for the witching community, for—”
He jerked his hand out of her grasp and resisted the urge to rub his hand on his slacks. “You’ve clearly heard of me. Who are you?”
“Oh. I’m Brianna Dimaria. I’m the high priestess of the coven.”
High priestess? She couldn’t have been older than eighteen, maybe nineteen years old. It took years to reach the level of magical fluency required for priesthood, and as far as the White Ash Coven was concerned, it also took a certain amount of ruthlessness.
“So you’ve been initiated,” he said skeptically. “And you’ve drawn down the moon.”
“Not yet, but it’s on the to-do list,” Brianna said. He realized that she was wearing a dozen different crystals on a woven necklace and a yellow shirt with uneven stitching, like she had sewn it by hand. The lack of concern for her appearance made him mentally bump her age into her twenties.
James tried not to let his skepticism show. “And how much did Landon tell you about the coven, exactly?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “But he was supposed to brief me on it soon. I guess that won’t be happening now.”
“Which family are you from?”
“No relation to any of you,” Brianna said.
Nathaniel was already throwing his backpack into her trunk. He spoke up from the back of the car. “Landon brought her in from outside. He said it was time for fresh blood.”
What in the seven hells had Landon been getting at? Putting his house on sale, bringing in a new person to run the coven…
Brianna’s presence was a puzzle that James wasn’t prepared to solve. Not that day, probably not that month, and maybe not for the rest of the year. Getting past the Union to reach the darkest gate was much more pressing than the successor to a senile high priest.
And Brianna, whether James liked it or not, could be useful. While the Union was going to be on the lookout for him, it seemed unlikely that they would know anything about a girl who thought it was fine to wear open-toed sandals in rainy weather.
“We need someone to take us into Reno, Nevada. It’s a city occupied by the Union. It will be dangerous,” James said. There was no reason to beat around the subject.
Fortunately, Brianna didn’t look like she cared all that much. “I’m scrappier than I look.” She gave him a small smile. “And I know things. I’m useful.”
He highly doubted that.
“Fine,” James said.
Brianna held the passenger door open for him. “I just have to say, I am so honored to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
James grabbed the door. “Get in the damn car and drive.”
Another pair of headlights approached in the distance. It was too dark to make out the shape of the vehicle, but judging by the height of the headlights, it was probably an SUV.
It wouldn’t have seemed strange if there was more traffic on the road.
“Pull into the trees,” he said, slipping into the passenger’s seat and slamming the door.
“I don’t think my Honda can do that,” Brianna said. “I don’t exactly have an ATV.”
“Just kill the lights and get us off the road.”
She shrugged and did as he asked. The rocks made dangerous banging noises on the undercarriage of her Accord, and Brianna flinched at every one.
By the time the approaching headlights slowed, she had pulled them behind a row of trees.
Through the bushes, James watched as a black SUV pulled alongside the van and stopped. This vehicle had no cowcatcher or hood-mounted machine guns. But it had long antennas, like a news van, and a man wearing all black was sliding off of the front seat.
James recognized Yasir ibn Omari—the young commander whose uniform he had stolen back at HQ. Yasir paced around the abandoned van, opened the doors, and climbed inside.
“The blood,” Nathaniel whispered, as if they were at risk of being heard.
Another Union member stepped out of the van to join Yasir. She was dark-skinned, dark-haired, and not wearing a jacket, so James could see that she wore a shoulder rig with a handgun under each arm. She also held a large DSLR camera with the strap around her neck. She climbed into the back of the van with Yasir.
“Get us out of here,” James said. “Now.”
“But they’ll see us,” Brianna said.
“So drive quickly.”
She shrugged again. “Whatever you say, boss. Hang tight.”
Brianna floored it. James was thrown hard into the back of his seat as they bounced over the rough terrain and onto the shoulder. The tires squealed on pavement, seeking traction.
James craned around to watch the SUV as they peeled away. Yasir had jumped out of the van, and his mouth opened
in a shout that James couldn’t hear.
“Faster,” he said.
The groan of the Honda’s struggling engine muffled Brianna’s heavy breathing. She watched the Union members in the rearview mirror until they disappeared into the night. Her cheeks were pale, and James half-expected her to throw them out of the car right at that moment.
But once the Union was out of sight, she grinned.
“I’ve got snacks under the passenger’s seat if you guys are hungry,” she said, punching the power button for the CD player. “It’s a long drive to Reno. Help yourselves.”
Brianna was right. It was a long drive back to Reno, and James’s reluctance to engage her in conversation only made the drive take longer. He watched the side mirror for the first three hours, expecting to see a black SUV behind them, but it never showed up. That didn’t comfort him. It only made him worry more.
If the Union wasn’t chasing them, then what were they doing?
The drive wore on, long and quiet.
Nathaniel talked to Brianna sometimes. It was never anything remarkable. Observing a landmark, suggesting a different route, asking for a bathroom break. James tensed when Brianna asked after Hannah, but Nathaniel ignored the question. And he showed no sign of the grief he must have felt beyond sullen silence.
The fact that James and Nathaniel weren’t interested in speaking to Brianna didn’t seem to dissuade her from random bursts of friendly chatting. And she never tired. A combination of caffeine pills and bottled cappuccinos kept her driving through the day and another night.
“I’m not just a witch, you know,” Brianna said when they reached Elko, as if someone had asked her. “Did you know that there are metahumans, too?”
James stared at the reflection of his gray stubble in the mirror.
She went on.
“There’s some other kind of metahumans running around, like precognitives and pyrokinetics. Not a lot—I think maybe like a dozen of us worldwide. Two dozen, max, if you count people that nobody has ever met in remote Mongolia or something. I think my rarity is why Landon elected me as the next high priestess.”
He propped his head up on his hand. His skull felt too heavy.
“Unfortunately, my power’s not as interesting as setting things on fire. It’s kind of a stupid pet trick, actually,” Brianna said in a low voice, as though confiding a dark secret to him. “But I can look at anyone and know what they are. Most of the time, the answer is human. Nothing remarkable about the average person. But if there’s a hint of demon blood, I can tell, and I can usually tell what flavor of demon, too.”
That finally caught James’s attention. “You can identify species at a glance?”
She tapped her nose. “More like at a smell. I can sniff them out.”
“Interesting.”
Brianna’s laugh was pleasant enough. It was just as light and fairy-like as the rest of her, almost like the jingling of sleigh bells. “Not really. I mean, how many Gray do you run into on a normal day?”
“Too many,” James said. The desert kept rolling past them, a monotonous sheet of yellow. He thought that the horizon might have been burned into his corneas.
“I don’t. For me, it’s like…” She jabbed her finger at the windshield, as if pointing out people in an invisible crowd. “Human. Human. Witch. Human. Witch. Witch. And then fifty more humans. You know? I did discover that one of the old biddies in my knitting circle has succubus blood, though, which was pretty funny. It definitely explains how she ended up with forty-three grandchildren.”
James wanted to ask her what she felt from him, but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to know.
Brianna prattled on, speaking to neither James nor Nathaniel. He tuned in long enough to know that she was sharing her life story. Something about gifted schools, a love of yarn, and a house filled with books. The story was as tedious as the long drive.
They passed through the outer fringes of Dayton—a sea of desert interrupted only by twenty-year-old housing developments—and entered the Minden area. It was comparatively green in the way that embers were comparatively cooler than live flames; spring made the artificial sod as lush as it would ever be, considering that they were surrounded by yucca, sagebrush, and sand flats.
That far south, there was no sign of the destruction that had struck Reno. Carson City, just fifty miles south of Reno, was in worse condition than Dayton. The sky was a steely gray, permanently dimmed by the fires burning underneath Reno. A haze clung to the northern hills. And all of the grass was dead.
The freeway had been closed, so Brianna was forced to drive them through the center of town. Protesters still lined the streets near the Capitol Building. They had been camped out almost six months now to demand Reno’s liberation. They wanted their city and jobs back. They didn’t seem to realize that there was no city left to regain.
James and Elise had wandered through the Capitol gardens in autumn many years back; she had smiled as she shuffled through the piles of leaves, quietly delighting in the colors.
And then Brianna’s car passed the Nugget, where James and Elise had enjoyed a cheap, greasy breakfast after a performance at the Brewery Arts Center. Elise had gotten coffee and eggs. He had eaten her toast and hash browns. The food was offensively stale, slapped together with all the consideration that a minimum wage cook could muster, and they had both been too tired to hold a real conversation. But being with Elise, fresh off of a perfect performance, was far better than any gourmet experience.
That had been during their five-year retirement—the peaceful period with no demons, no angels, and no looming threat of death. James had thought that life would never be better than that.
He hated being right.
When the casino strobes passed, he could no longer tolerate looking out the window. He flipped down the sunshade to shield his face and closed his eyes.
But shutting out the world surrounding him didn’t shut out Elise. Nothing could drive her out of his mind, not when she had spent so many years burrowing deep into his psyche. Eyes open or closed, whether they were in the same room or different worlds, Elise was all that James thought about in his idle moments. Especially now.
His mind drifted to a hike they had taken through a canyon northwest of Carson City. It was an easy trail, wide and flat, but they had gone too early in the year. The trail became muddy in the higher elevations. A few hundred feet higher, it was covered with two feet of snow.
Elise had been wearing shorts, but she insisted on continuing through the snow anyway. She had been too fascinated by the animal prints to stop.
“That’s a herd of deer. A stag, two does, and a couple fawns,” she had told James, nodding at a path off the main trail. “And I think a bear crossed through earlier.”
All James saw were shallow indentations in the snow. He squinted into the trees, searching for hints of fur and legs. “How can you tell?”
“I can’t. I’m just messing with you.”
James laughed. She laughed. The sun caught on her curls, highlighting them a coppery shade of red that made her cheeks seem to glow.
But then Elise cut off abruptly. She was staring at something in the trees.
James turned. A stag watched from the ridge above them. The points of its wicked horns and what must have been extremely long legs were half-concealed by shrubbery.
Once he made out the shape of one deer, he could pick out the others, too, though they were somewhat better concealed in the trees.
One buck. Two does. And two fawns.
James and Elise were only separated from the herd by fifteen feet of craggy cliff. If the buck decided that they were a threat, they would hardly have time before it charged. Yet Elise only stared at the buck, and it stared back.
The wind through the trees sounded like the rush of tires on smooth freeway. The sun was warm, snow and all, and James thought that he had finally seen where Elise belonged: among the earth and the forest, a primal force of nature.
Jam
es’s eyes opened, and he realized that the sound of the wind had really been Brianna’s car.
They were approaching South Reno, but it wasn’t the South Reno that he remembered. All of the familiar landmarks he expected to see—the shopping mall, the sweeping parks, and the geothermal station—had been torn down. Guard stations and towering iron fences stood in their places.
Brianna slowed to a stop behind a short line of cars waiting to enter. The Union only allowed one vehicle through at a time, after what seemed to be a lengthy inspection of the entire car.
James twisted to look at his son in the back seat. Nathaniel was asleep again. His shirt was still covered in Hannah’s blood.
“Get off the freeway. We need to find a way around the guard station,” James said, grabbing a blanket to toss it over Nathaniel’s sleeping form.
“Nah, it’s fine,” Brianna said. “I’ve got this.”
“What are you talking about?”
She waved a hand. “I told you, it’s fine.”
A witch was walking up the line of cars to speak to each driver. James triggered the glamor spell. Prickles washed over his skin, as if his entire body had fallen asleep at once. In the side mirror, the reflection of his gray-stubbled jaw had turned clean-shaven. He looked young, brown-haired, and Mexican—identical to Anthony, whose appearance he had “borrowed” for the spell.
Brianna stared at him. “Holy crap, that’s…”
“Not right now,” he said in his own voice.
Activating his magic immediately killed all of the electricity in the checkpoint. The red signal dimmed, darkened. James watched the guards inside the booths take out their earpieces and look at them in confusion.
The guard rapped on their window with her gun. Brianna rolled it down. “Hi,” she said. “We’re on our way to UNR for the study.”
What study? James tried not to stare at Brianna.
The guard bent over to look in the car. “He’s not old enough,” she said, jerking her chin at Nathaniel.
Brianna put her hand on James’s knee. His skin crawled. “We couldn’t leave our little guy behind.”
James glanced back at Nathaniel. His glasses had fallen off. With the blanket to his chin and uneven bangs, he did look like a little boy—though probably not little enough for Brianna and Anthony to have produced him.
