What Man Defies

by Clara Coulson

  After ensuring everyone was packed inside the circle’s bounds and that none of the markings had been smudged, Brigid took a position on the outer edge of the circle. She clapped her hands together, an orange glow emanating from her palms as she summoned her magic. As she parted her lips to speak the invocation, she made eye contact with me. Her gaze held a promise that we would see each other again. And despite her gruff demeanor, I found myself looking forward to that day. We were in oddly similar positions in this grand mystery that was Abarta’s revolt.

  I gave her a nod of farewell.

  Brigid fluidly spoke the invocation, and the circle flared bright orange. A cylinder not unlike the one I’d used to trap the ghosts formed around the group of survivors, a vehicle to ferry us home. It began to sink into the earth as the veil parted beneath us, and we dropped into that vast and perilous void once more. Some of the survivors whimpered as the darkness swallowed us. Others prayed. But a few understood, in their hearts, in their souls, that the realm where they belonged lay at the end of this jaunt through the void. I felt their sense of sweet relief sweep through the cylinder as a rise of soft sighs. I let my own sigh join in, and closed my eyes, enjoyed the sensation of floating through infinite space.

  It was a nice break. While it lasted.

  We hit the rippling edge of our realm, the portal spell flipped us around, and suddenly, we were standing at the northern edge of the park that housed Kinsale’s central market, roughly two blocks from the best hospital in town. But instead of immediately turning around and herding the survivors toward that hospital, as I’d planned, I was left staring straight ahead in shock, mouth unhinged.

  Because about forty feet in front of us, the market had devolved into utter chaos.

  The Sluagh were attacking in force.

  And they were really, really angry.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The ghosts of the people who’d been killed in the vault wrecked everything in sight. They plucked tent poles out of the ground, collapsing the white tents on top of market patrons and sellers. They picked up tables and hurled them at the stampeding crowds trying to escape the maze of stalls. One ghost had a virtual arsenal made up of silverware floating around and glinting in the overcast light of early morning. Whenever someone moved in her visual field, she slung a bunch of forks and knives at them. Another ghost was near the ground, moving in and out of tents and destroying everything he could get his ghostly hands on.

  People were hurt. A lot of people. More were getting hurt by the second.

  And there was nothing I could do about it. I still had magic energy buried somewhere inside me, but my body was so drained and damaged, I wouldn’t be able to cast properly. Rebuilding my glamour over the course of the trip back to the cavern entrance had almost knocked me on my ass. There was no way I could banish almost two dozen angry ghosts. I’d pass out before I made it through the first five.

  “Vince, what do we do?” Saoirse asked. Her arm slung over my shoulder was the only thing keeping her upright. “We have to stop them before someone gets killed.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” I scanned the carnage. Inventory damaged beyond repair. People screaming in pain and terror. “I can’t handle that many right now. I just can’t.”

  “You may not have to,” said one of the survivors.

  I turned my head to see it was Rebecca Shriver. She wasn’t gawking at the market like everyone else, but rather at the wide street that branched off to the east. I followed her line of sight and found what was more interesting than a group of angry ghosts wreaking havoc: an approaching squad of dullahan on horseback, weapons drawn. Two of them were the boundary guards I usually ran into when I returned from scavenging trips. The other four I didn’t recognize, largely because their heads weren’t visible. When headless horsemen engaged in combat, they stowed their detached heads in their saddlebags. So the only way to identify them visually was to recognize their builds.

  The dullahan blew through the intersection and bounded into the market. They split up into three groups and branched off in different directions, each focusing on areas where the Sluagh had congregated. The ghosts, latching on to more worthy adversaries than cowering market patrons or business owners trying to protect their stock, flew toward the approaching dullahan with all the projectiles they could telekinetically heft and started slinging. Unfortunately for the ghosts, dullahan were among the only faeries you could unironically call “no nonsense.”

  With no fanfare whatsoever, the dullahan expertly directed their horses through the fields of flying objects, and when they got reasonably close to the ghosts, they cast their banishment spells. The ghosts dropped like flies.

  The horsemen’s spells weren’t much more elegant than the ones I’d used on Amy Newsome and Orson Barnum. They trapped the ghosts in cramped cubes of energy and then dragged them through the veil, depositing them in the void and leaving them to drift until they finally found the way to their appropriate afterlives.

  In less than five minutes, it was over. Dullahan were cold and efficient like that.

  Quiet consumed the market in the aftermath. The horsemen picked through the wreckage, searching for anyone who was seriously wounded. They found one person who’d had his table overturned on top of him, but the guy only had a broken arm. It appeared the market-goers had largely gotten off lucky. Cuts and bruises. Cracked bones. Lost dignity. And some cash down the drain. As far as an attack by a large group of Sluagh went, this was far from the worst outcome.

  I stood at the edge of the park for a little while longer, just to ensure no one needed any help I could provide. When nobody popped up on my radar, I turned to the group of survivors and said, “Everyone head for St. Andrew’s Hospital, up on Ninth.” I pointed in the right direction, in case anyone was new to town or unfamiliar with this neighborhood. “If you’re strong enough to carry someone, please hang back and help us move the unconscious. We need to get them to the ER in a timely manner.”

  More people than we needed volunteered to help. That was a heartening thing to witness after everything they’d been through.

  Somehow, we managed to make it to St. Andrew’s without attracting too much attention. The dullahan were preoccupied with searching the market, and most of the bystanders were too focused on ogling the widespread damage, including a smoking fire in one of the tents, to hassle us. We did catch a few curious stares, however, as we passed the cluster of restaurants near the intersection with Piedmont Road. People plastered their faces to the windows and pointed and whispered as the survivors of the cavern of death, and their battered “saviors,” stumbled their way to the ER entrance and practically collapsed inside the doorway.

  The next few hours passed in a haze. The doctors and nurses jumped into action, running all of us through triage. Those with the worst injuries were given higher priority and shuttled off to the available operating rooms. When one of the doctors got a look at the gaping hole in my hand and my sloppily stitched abdominal wound, she tried to have me spirited off for an operation too, but I dismissed her concerns and pointedly told her I would heal on my own. She opened her mouth to try and contradict me, but then she caught my drift. The words not human hung between us, unspoken.

  Placated, the doctor handed me off to a couple nurses instead and went to work on the next person in line. The nurses, one of whom was a cheery young man and the other a stern-faced older woman who looked like she would stab you in the ass with a large-gauge needle the second you turned your head, forced me into a wheelchair and moved me out of the ER.

  We ended up in a bathroom, to my surprise. Though it shouldn’t have been, because I smelled and looked like I’d crawled out of a dumpster. Stern nurse ordered me to get naked and clean myself up. Cheery nurse helped me strip off my nasty clothes. I then took a shower in a big stall with one of those stools they had for people who couldn’t stand, which I used because my legs had had enough of my shit today. After I was all nice and clean, they gave me fresh bandages,
a lot of bandages, along with some cheap scrubs to wear, and wheeled me into a large room with six beds, two of which were already occupied. Saoirse and Christie greeted me tiredly.

  As cheery nurse helped me into the bed next to Saoirse’s, stern nurse said, “I don’t know what you and your friends were up to before you got here, but while you’re in my hospital, no funny business. Stay in bed and rest. We’ll serve you lunch in an hour.”

  She turned to leave, but I asked, “Can you tell us the status of our friends Granger and Mallory?”

  Stern nurse huffed. “The other two detectives? They’re in a different room, along with some others from your group. The whole lot of them are gossiping like hens and making a ruckus.”

  “What about Odette?” I pressed. “The one who lost her arm?”

  “Fresh out of surgery. Should be in recovery now. We’ll move her in here when she’s ready.”

  With that, stern nurse left the room, cheery nurse on her tail.

  “They got you all squeaky clean too, huh, Vince?” Christie was covered in bandages, but most of them were for cuts she’d sustained when she was thrown into the wall of thorns. Unlike earlier, she wasn’t clutching her side anymore. In fact, she was moving in an almost casual manner. I wondered if they’d given her a hearty dose of painkillers to drown out a fracture or extensive bruising. “Man, we must’ve left a mess in the ER. They probably had to call in an army of janitors.”

  “I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be clean,” Saoirse said. Her broken leg was wrapped in a splint and elevated with pillows, cast pending. A rib wrap peeked out through the overly large arm holes in her patient gown. She was breathing shallowly, and after that brutal gut punch from Bismarck, I figured she’d be doing that for a while. She probably had muscle damage in addition to the cracked ribs. “That ashy dirt from the Divide got literally everywhere, and I’m pretty sure my clothes are ruined.”

  “Well,” I said, settling into the mattress, “I’m sure the captain won’t mind if you show up to work in a sexy cocktail dress.”

  Saoirse shot me a look and grabbed the pillow under her head. “Do you want me to smother you?”

  “Hey, you wore one for an ‘undercover operation,’ remember?” I raised my hands in surrender. “But really, you set yourself up for that.”

  She rolled her eyes. “The next time I wear a dress like that, it’d better be when you take me to dinner. Because you still haven’t made good on that promise.”

  Christie giggled. “He owes you a date?” She wagged her finger at me. “Bad, Vince. Bad.”

  “This doesn’t involve you.” I turned to Saoirse. “Look, I’m working on it, okay? We can’t go to Raphael’s because Bismarck’s people whittled down the diner list to mob associates only after their boss dropped off the map. So I have to come up with an alternative that still counts as ‘fancy.’ I’ve got an idea, but I’m still ironing out the wrinkles in the logistics. Just give me a little more time, okay? I promise I’ll make it work. It’s just a matter of strong-arming the right people about the right things.”

  “Speaking of arms,” a drunken voice called from the doorway, “I’m missing one.”

  A team of nurses wheeled Odette into the room and set her up in the bed across from me. She was groggy from the anesthesia, but otherwise, she looked much better than before. The empty socket where her arm used to be had been properly tended and bandaged, her deep cuts stitched, and two of the fingers on her remaining hand splinted. Presumably, she’d broken the fingers while punching the crap out of the svartálfar. Unlike her missing arm, those fingers would heal, but Odette was going to have a bad time of eating, dressing, and doing practically everything else that required fingers until they did.

  Once the nurses finished setting up all of Odette’s monitoring equipment, they left the room. Stern nurse, who was among the team, gave us all another perfunctory warning to keep it down and not cause trouble. She also switched off some of the lights in the room as she exited, citing electricity rationing. The hospitals and clinics in Kinsale had guaranteed electricity around the clock, but it didn’t come in abundance. They had to trim out excess usage wherever they could. The dimness didn’t bother me though. It had been far dimmer in the cavern of nightmares.

  After the door clicked shut behind the last nurse, I said to Odette, “Feeling better?”

  “Oh, yeah. They got me on the good stuff.” Her lips drooped into a frown. “But they said I better not get used to it. They don’t exactly have a surplus of morphine.”

  “They don’t have a surplus of anything,” Saoirse said. “Kinsale’s production capability is still lacking in critical areas. We can only produce about a fourth of the medical supplies we need. Rest of it has to be shipped in, and a lot of the convoys get delayed by werewolf attacks, even though they’ve got dullahan escorts. Stretches are a damn mess, as I’m sure Vince can attest to.”

  I nodded solemnly.

  “Well, now I feel bad for taking up valuable resources.” Christie wrung the fabric of her faded hospital gown. “Vince, you said you were going to nab us a healer or two, right? Can you call them in now? If they can heal most of us enough to get discharged, we can free up supplies for other people. I’d hate to take medicine someone needs for a serious illness, or a chronic problem.”

  “Christie, you just went through hell,” I replied. “I don’t think sitting tight in a hospital bed for a couple days is going to put you on the wrong side of the morality coin.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I can call all the healers I know,” Odette slurred out. “There’s, like, five of them or something. And I beat up two of them once.” She raised her only hand and pointed it at the space between Saoirse and me. I thought she meant to point at me. “Give me a phone. And I’ll call. And if they say no, I’ll threaten to bash their faces in.”

  “Boy, I bet you inspire a lot of goodwill in people.” I shook my head. “How about I call them instead, and offer them payment in exchange for professional services?”

  “Didn’t I tell you they cost a lot?” She scrunched her nose, like she couldn’t quite remember our conversation as we were leaving the cavern. Anesthesia was fun like that.

  “I told you the cost was no object. I can pay. It’s fine.” I located my bag of dirty clothing, which cheery nurse had helpfully left in the top drawer of my nightstand. I dug around inside it and produced my cell phone, which had somehow survived the trip to the cavern in one piece. It was badly scuffed, slightly dented, and streaked with dirt and blood, but when I hit the power button, it still turned on. “Can you remember the number for the best healer you know?”

  Odette gave be a bleary-eyed scowl. “What’s it matter? Good or shitty, they can’t conjure me up a new arm. Might as well hire one on the cheap and save your chits.”

  Jeez. She got even more belligerent when she was high.

  “You’re not the only one who needs healing, remember?” I pointed at Saoirse’s leg. “I don’t think the other injured people would appreciate a shitty healer.”

  Odette blinked heavily. “Oh. Right. Sorry. Yeah.” She closed her eyes and hummed a long note while she tried to dig an entire phone number from the slush in her brain. Eventually, she came up with one that had the right area code, so I plugged the number in and gave it a shot.

  To my surprise, it was correct. I had a short conversation with an older witch who quoted me a painfully high price for healing all the injured survivors, plus us “rescuers,” but I took her up on the offer anyway. Thanks to Tom Tildrum’s bloated payment for the harp case, I had enough in my savings to cover the witch’s healing fee plus all the medical care we’d received from the hospital. When all was said and done, I’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel, but it wasn’t like I had anything better to spend it on. Couldn’t take a nice tropical island vacation when the world was shrouded in Mab’s wintery blanket. Might as well use it to do some good.

  Admittedly, it was also kind of a penance t
hing. I felt bad that so many of the victims had died in the vault. I didn’t want the few survivors to languish from the injuries they’d sustained.

  When I hung up, I told my three companions, “She’ll be here within the hour, along with her two apprentices. If everything goes as planned, we should all be able to leave the hospital this evening.”

  “Does the hospital tolerate healers swooping in to save the day?” Christie asked.

  Saoirse bobbed her head. “They kind of ignore it. If someone wants to go with magic medicine instead of the traditional kind, the staff won’t interfere. They’ll just boot you out after you’re healed to open up more space for those who can’t afford fancy healing spells. Public magic use is legal under the fae regime, as long as you don’t use it for criminal ends, and no one has set up any regulations for magic medical care versus mundane. So the hospitals and clinics shrug it off. They’ll probably be annoyed at the interruption to their usual procedures, but given the size of our group, I can’t imagine they’ll be angry when we free up all the beds and save them a bunch of supplies.”

  “What about a prosthetic? Who do I see for that? The doctors here? A specialist somewhere else?” Odette waved her hand through the missing space where her other arm should’ve been. “There better be a good prosthetic maker in Kinsale somewhere, or I’m going to send your ass”—she jabbed her splinted fingers toward my face—“out into the stretches to hunt one down.”

  I came up blank with answers to her questions. I knew nothing about prosthetics. Glancing to Saoirse for help, I found her wearing an expression that mimicked my feelings. She didn’t know how to help Odette find resources to replace her arm either, which left us in a bind. I supposed I could ask a doctor here for advice, but I had a sinking feeling prosthetics fell into one of those “critical areas” Saoirse had mentioned. Kinsale hadn’t exactly been the manufacturing capital of the East Coast before the war, and while there were more factories popping up all the time to rectify the city’s shortages, the budding economy could only work so fast given the resource constraints.