Baptisms of Fire and Ice

by Nadia Sheridan

  Enzo was covered in smeared soot and sweating up a storm. His glasses sat crooked on his nose and bobbed up and down in time with his uneven steps, threatening to fall off. His splinted wrist was pressed to his chest, no doubt aching from the rough motions Enzo had been putting it through since Adara had first crashed the clunker into the hydrant.

  But even though he was clearly bushed and barely staying upright, Enzo didn’t show any signs of slowing. He was running on pure adrenaline, and he was in for a bad crash.

  The blond man wasn’t much better off. He’d held that time bubble for so long, he must’ve run his god shard ragged. His gray-blue eyes were barely open, and his sclera were seriously bloodshot. He was twice as dirty as Enzo, and his skin was covered in so much ash it would take him hours to scrub himself clean. A thick layer of half-dried blood clung to the side of his face, where a piece of sharp debris had skimmed his temple.

  But despite his injuries and obvious fatigue, he too kept on going.

  They reached the truck just ahead of the imps and threw themselves across the back seat. Unprompted, Solomon yanked the door shut just as Adara slammed her foot on the accelerator.

  The truck lurched forward with a grumble, tires skidding on the asphalt. Then the wheels caught traction, and the vehicle flew off down the street. Everybody was flung back into their seats, but Adara maintained her control of the vehicle and swerved around all the larger pieces of debris in the road.

  Cutting through the corner of Solomon’s now dissipating rainstorm, she took a hard right onto a side street that led away from Tarly Square. This put the truck on the opposite side of the enormous smoke cloud from the news chopper that was still buzzing through the air.

  Without the eyes in the sky following their truck on live TV, Adara believed they’d have a few minutes to make a clean getaway from the cops and whoever else might be heading for the neighborhood well armed and trigger happy.

  Adara planned to follow the side street to where it joined with the highway that ran alongside Halloway Park. It was the largest and most popular park in the city, known for its pristine manmade lake and its numerous walking paths, most of which were hidden beneath a heavy evergreen canopy.

  She would pull the truck into the park’s visitor lot and have everyone cross the park on foot. They could circle around to the opposite side of Tarly Square and sneak back into Solomon’s apartment.

  It was a fairly decent plan, considering Adara had come up with it in roughly twelve seconds, and it might’ve gone off without a hitch…if the National Guard hadn’t formed a blockade that cut off her escape route.

  Radio Roadstead

  “So, I’m sorry to interrupt my coverage of the horrific events unfolding in the city of Edgerton. But social media sites have been hit with a deluge of reports about disturbing and extraordinary events that all started happening shortly after the office building of Edgerton accounting firm Barnaby and Pruitt began glowing like some kind of otherworldly beacon.

  “In the interest of keeping all you listeners informed about global happenings, I’m going to quickly review what I’ve learned so far. Then I’ll jump back to my minute-by-minute reporting of the ongoing incidents in Edgerton.

  “In Tokyo, half an hour ago, a high-rise office complex inexplicably transformed into sand and collapsed, killing an untold number of people who were in the building and crushing countless passersby. In London, almost an hour ago, a massive whirlpool mysteriously formed in the Thames River, right underneath the London Bridge, and swallowed roughly a dozen occupied boats.

  “In Moscow, ninety minutes ago, enormous stalagmites made of quartz crystal began bursting forth from the ground near Red Square, impeding traffic and causing several fatal accidents. And in our very own Washington, DC, the National Mall has been roped off and the Capitol Building evacuated after what appears to be lava sprang from the earth and set fire to the grass and trees.

  “According to eagled-eyed social media posters, all these strange events have been occurring smack-dab in the middle of impact zones from yesterday’s unexpected hail of meteorites. As for why and how these things are happening, no one is yet sure, not even the so-called ‘experts.’ But the nightmare currently unfolding in the city of Edgerton may give us some clues.

  “With that, let’s return to the news coming out of Edgerton. Just a few minutes ago, I told you folks about the devastating explosion and ensuing fire at the North Locum Apartment Complex on the edge of the city’s trendy Tarly Square neighborhood. Now, the city’s local TV news station is live at the scene, and the footage rolling in is quite frankly insane.

  “This is Jolly Jace Jones at Radio Roadstead, WPZK, reporting on day one after the Global Impact Event. And good god, what a day it has been.”

  Chapter Thirty

  They got arrested.

  Or, more accurately, they were detained for ten minutes by twenty-seven armed soldiers until the cops showed up. At which point they were all placed in handcuffs and shoved none too gently into the backs of two different police cars. They were then driven to the nearest police station, which was too close to Tarly Square for Adara’s comfort, as Astaroth was likely still in the neighborhood.

  The greater demon appeared to have abandoned the body Adara trashed with her ice maneuver, but Adara didn’t think she was vain enough to spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the “perfect” host. She would take what she could get, and then she’d be back on the prowl. Hunting shard holders. Hunting the people who’d embarrassed her. And if those people were in jail, they’d be sitting ducks.

  Damn, Adara thought as she was manhandled out of the police car by two male cops twice her size. I wish I’d been able up to come up with a plan that gave us more wiggle room to attempt the banishment. All three of us used up so much power on the rescue that we didn’t have enough juice left over to even attempt the spell. We need better strategies in the future. I need better strategies.

  That assumed, of course, that they had a future, and that Adara’s decision to come to the aid of the man who could stop time didn’t result in all four of them being carted off to some top-secret government lab. Which was a distinct possibility, she understood, as she was marched through the police station by two cops and four soldiers. All of whom looked ready to shoot her at a moment’s notice.

  The overbearing group of guards didn’t take her to a cell. Instead, they shoved her into a hard metal chair in an interview room and told her to sit tight and not cause any trouble. Two of the soldiers took up positions in the back corners of the room, while the other two remained in the hall and stood on either side of the door. Not only would Adara not be able to leave without their permission, but no one would be able to enter without that permission either.

  Who determined whether or not they gave permission? Now that was an interesting question.

  Which of the squabbling branches of federal law enforcement would be put in charge of developments like angels and demons and people with godlike powers? All the fiction she’d ever seen or read told her the FBI would come knocking sometime soon. But given the huge threat to national security that the greater demons represented, Adara wondered if Homeland Security would win the political tug of war.

  Before the cops scuttled out of the room, one of them was “nice” enough to remove the handcuffs from Adara’s chafing wrists. Either he didn’t think she could escape from the interview room with multiple guns pointed in her direction, or he didn’t want to risk losing his cuffs if and when Adara once again turned into a sentient water funnel.

  After the cops left, one of the two soldiers in the hall pushed the door shut. As it was swinging around, Adara spotted Solomon—who was white as a sheet except for the greenish tint around his mouth—being escorted into another interview room opposite hers.

  She didn’t see Enzo or the blond man, but they’d been brought to the station in the other car, so they might have been a minute or two behind.

  Adara prayed that Enzo was okay. H
e’d already been bruised and broken from his encounter with the men at Hudson’s, and then she’d gone and dragged him into this.

  Guilt welled up in her chest. He’d been wary about intervening to save the blond man, but she’d pushed him to do it anyway.

  Now, he might be in real trouble, all because she’d been too pigheaded to reconsider her gut reaction and he was too loyal not to follow her wherever she went.

  If and when we get out of this mess, she thought, I need to apologize to him. Him and Solomon.

  The minutes ticked by slowly, the effect amplified by the lack of a clock in the interview room. Adara assumed this was intentional and not an oversight. The cops wanted to throw potential suspects off their game, so they wouldn’t be composed enough to weave a long-winded lie without making critical mistakes.

  But if that was how they intended to shake Adara, then the joke was on them. She’d spent weeks in the middle of the wilderness with nothing but the sky to tell the time by, and after completing multiple treks through long, dim cave systems, she wasn’t remotely claustrophobic.

  Also, with her armed guards standing in the corners, the stuffy room failed to produce the illusion that she’d been left to rot.

  So she didn’t pass the long wait sweating and swearing. Rather, she just annoyed her guards by rapping her knuckles against the metal table at which she was seated in discordant rhythms that loosely correlated to the tunes of popular songs. When her knuckles began to ache, she switched to humming while bobbing her head side to side in a way that made her rickety chair squeak like a dying mouse.

  After what she estimated was about forty-five minutes, one of the soldiers finally sighed in annoyance. Adara openly grinned at her small victory, though neither of them saw it since she had her back to them.

  Just when she was about to redouble her efforts in order to get them to yell at her, the door swung open.

  A tall black man with close-shaven hair and a short white woman with a pale-blond bob stood in the hall. Everything about them screamed FBI. The crisp black suits. The guns strapped to their hips. The ramrod-straight postures that spoke of authority. The subtle frowns that demanded respect and obedience without question.

  They couldn’t have come off more like textbook feds if they’d tried.

  The woman slipped into the room first, pulled out a chair opposite Adara’s, and sat down with an air of finesse that made Adara think she’d been some kind of dancer in a previous life.

  The man loitered at the threshold to speak to the two guards stationed in the hall. He muttered something too low for Adara to parse, but whatever it was surprised the guards.

  They considered his words for a moment, then shrugged at each other and peeled away from the door. Satisfied, the man proceeded into the room.

  Before he sat down though, he gestured to the guards at the back and said, “We can handle it from here. You two can leave as well.”

  The guards exchanged bewildered glances, and one of them asked, “Are you sure, sir?”

  “Quite sure, thank you.” He gave them a dismissive wave, and it was like he’d told the guards the building was on fire.

  They hopped to attention and jogged out of the room, wearing complacent expressions that seemed at odds with the scowls of suspicion Adara had consistently seen each time she’d peeked at them over her shoulder.

  The man shut the door behind them, dropped into the other vacant chair, and grumbled, “I swear to god, we’ve been tripping over those grunts every five seconds since we arrived in the city. Whose idea was it to deploy the National Guard again?”

  “The governor’s,” said the woman in a voice as soft as the man’s was hard. “And we can’t override him, or it’ll look suspicious. So you’ll have to deal with the irritation.”

  “Oh, I’ll deal with it, all right.”

  “Without stepping on anyone,” she clarified. “Or punching them.”

  The man snorted. “Ah, you’re always such a spoilsport.”

  “That’s why Perez paired me up with you.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Not a joke.”

  Much to Adara’s confusion, the pair continued to banter for the next thirty seconds while the woman slipped her phone from a clip on her belt, opened a voice recording app, and set the phone in the middle of the table. When she touched the big red button and the counter started ticking off seconds, the two agents finally sobered up and turned their attention to the young woman across the table.

  They silently observed Adara at first, taking in her damp clothes and hair, the smears of soot from the ash fall at the apartment complex fire, and her mildly combative pose.

  At last, the woman spoke. “Let’s do away with the farce of a routine interview and cut to the chase, shall we? I’ve got four questions for you. One, what manner of supernatural creature are you and your friends? Two, what precisely are those creatures you’ve been fighting in the streets? Three, what’s happening to all the areas that were hit by the so-called meteorites from the ‘Global Impact Event’? And four, what the hell made you think it was a good idea to break the Secrecy Statute?”

  Perplexed, Adara said haltingly, “I…don’t understand. You make it sound like you aren’t at all surprised I have magic powers.”

  The man blinked, and when his eyelids rose, his irises were no longer brown but bright red. “We aren’t.”

  Adara jumped. “You aren’t human?”

  “No,” said the woman, and with a snap of her fingers, her magical mask dissolved in a flash of light. Revealing features that were slightly too sharp and ears that were slightly too pointed and eyes that were slightly too blue to qualify as human. “He’s a vampire, I’m a faerie, and you’re in big trouble. So you better start answering our questions.”

  “Hold up. Vampires and faeries are real?” Adara said. Though even as she voiced the question, she felt foolish.

  If angels were real, and demons were real, and God had been real until They shattered into thousands of tiny pieces imbued with a wide variety of astonishing superhuman abilities, then it made perfect sense that other supernatural beings might also be real. Adara simply hadn’t had enough downtime since acquiring her god shard and learning of its nature to have a good, hard think about the wider implications of everything that was happening.

  Adara smacked her cheeks. “Oh, of course there are others.”

  The vampire and the faerie both raised their eyebrows, and the man said, more to his partner than to Adara, “I’m starting to feel like we’re on very different pages here. Think we might have to reconcile that in order for this interview to become productive.”

  “I agree.” The faerie woman hummed in displeasure. “So, Ms. Water Nymph, or whatever you are, am I to assume from your surprise regarding our existence that you are also unaware of the Secrecy Statute?”

  “Yeah,” Adara said, “I literally have no clue what that is.”

  “Then I suppose we’ll start from the very beginning.” She placed her palms flat against the table and leaned toward Adara in a way that wouldn’t have been menacing had she still been wearing her mask. The razor-like sharpness of her true faerie features gave off the impression that she would cut you in half if you made her the slightest bit angry. “But this will not be a free lesson. This will be tit for tat. We’ll tell you some things that you ought to know, and you’ll tell us some things that we want to know. Deal?”

  “I mean, do I have a choice in the matter?” Adara asked.

  “Not really,” the man said. “I can compel you to answer our questions, just like I compelled those soldiers to get the heck out of our way.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Adara muttered. “Thought they were acting kind of weird.”

  The man smiled. Sharp fangs peeked out from behind his lips.

  Swallowing, Adara said, “I guess it’s a deal.”

  “Good.” The woman slapped her palm against the tabletop, producing a loud clang. “Now listen closely. Because I don�
��t like to repeat myself. And even if I had the patience for shitty students who don’t pay attention, I don’t have the time to hold your hand and pat your head like you’re some waddling toddler who can’t process anything more complicated than two plus two. Got it?”

  Adara let out a nervous laugh. “Uh, sure. I totally understand.”

  “Then let’s get started.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The gist of it was that supernatural beings had always coexisted with humanity. But after countless centuries of hostility from humans, the various creatures had collectively gone underground and allowed themselves to fall into the realm of myth and legend.

  That did not, however, stop them from involving themselves in human society in a secret capacity. As human civilization had grown larger and more bureaucratic since the industrial revolution, so had supernatural involvement in various world governments.

  After World War Two—during which there were several major incidents of supernatural exposure that took great effort to cover up—the supernaturals came up with yet another idea: the Supernatural Secrecy Statute.

  A global agreement signed by representatives from dozens of countries, the statute dictated that if any individual knowingly and intentionally exposed the existence of supernaturals to the general public, they would be prosecuted for treason under their respective country’s laws.

  The statute was globally enforced by various secret government agencies, or branches of larger agencies. In the US, it was enforced by a special branch of the FBI, codenamed “Overlock,” made up of supernaturals and informed humans. Whenever somebody committed an act that threatened supernatural exposure, this branch of the FBI would step in and mop up the mess before the public took too much notice.