by S T Branton
“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” he snarled at me, all composure gone from his face. “Like I did the blonde bitch.”
As he spoke my world rocked. Jules was dead after all. The rage inside me overflowed and I spat out my next words.
“Don’t worry, I’ll learn from your mistakes.”
He lunged at me, but I was ready for that. The sword sliced through flesh like it was nothing, and Dorias’s body dropped to the floor. Inglewood’s form shifted away, only to be replaced with another, and another, and another. I stood over the dying shapeshifter in silent, repulsed awe as he cycled through all his many forms. Faster and faster, the identities switched from one to another. Some had fangs, or scales, or nasty, blue-grey skin.
When the changeling roulette stopped at last, Dorias was revealed to be an old man with flowing salt and pepper hair, clad in a long tunic that reminded me of Marcus’s. I looked down at the wizened face for an instant, its expression frozen in slack-jawed surprise. Then I turned my back and sought out the actual mayor and his aide, both of whom were tentatively emerging from the alcove.
“It’s over?” Inglewood asked anxiously.
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ve saved you.”
“No.” The voice was not Inglewood’s—it belonged to the yuppie aide. “You’ve just killed the mayor of New York City.” Theo brandished a knife identical to the one Dorias had used and plunged it into Inglewood’s chest.
“No!” I shouted, but it was too late. The mayor’s body shuddered once before it dropped like a stone. Theo turned to me, grinning fiendishly. His skin was rapidly losing its youthful color, bleeding into a sickly grey. His eyes had misted over and his hairline receded.
The son of a bitch was a fucking vamp.
“Damn it to hell!” I raised my sword, but he just smiled.
“Looks like the cavalry’s here. Just in time.”
Before I could blink, the glass on the office door shattered, the sturdy oak panel splintering inward. A whole contingent of officers burst into the room, with a familiar face taking point. And the first thing Deacon saw on that scene was me with a sword in my hand, standing over the dead body of Kenneth Inglewood.
His face was frozen, a strange mix of anger and disappointment and fear.
“Deacon,” I said. My voice snapped him out of his stupor and he raised his gun.
“Get on the ground!” he screamed at me. “Hands over your head. Now!”
“Deacon, wait.” I lowered the sword. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
But whatever goodwill I had earned evaporated in that moment. “You heard me. Get on the ground, hands in the air! I’m not gonna ask you again.”
“Deacon—”
“Don’t make me shoot you, Vic!” He hesitated. “Please don’t make me shoot you.”
Vic, you cannot let them take you. You’re too important.
He was right. I fought down my anger, the pain of losing Jules, and the shame I felt under Deacon’s stare. I couldn’t get arrested. There was something I had to do first.
“Fine.” I swept the sword up again, flashing the blade’s brilliance directly into the officer’s faces as I backed toward the window. Only three stories up, I figured with the nectar of Carcerum, it wouldn’t kill me—most likely.
I spun the Gladius Solis, striking the pane with its golden blade. Glass rained around us, and the agents shielded their eyes. All of them except Deacon St. Clare.
Deacon shouted, “Are you insane?”
I didn’t answer. At this point, he was free to think what he wanted. I’d have time to process it later. All that mattered right now was that I got myself the hell out of there.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Some say clichés be damned. I say bring ‘em on.
Cliché came in the form of a thick tarpaulin awning below the window, which protected me from the brunt of the impact.
I grunted, rolled off my landing pad and dropped onto the concrete below.
“Hell, yeah!”
As brilliant as my escape felt, I was lucky the mayor’s office was in the back of the building. Even still, the squeal of tires coming around the back caught my attention, and I charged at an oncoming cop car, sword in hand. The vehicle slammed on the brakes. I vaulted up over the windshield, hopping off the trunk.
“Stop! Freeze! Police!” The shouts surrounded me, but I shrugged them off. The fugitive life didn’t bother me, not anymore. Plus, I was way more comfortable hauling ass down alleys than sitting in a posh leather chair in an office.
Would have been better without heels, though.
The noise of the cops followed me as I ran through the backstreets, winding toward an older district of town. Someone shouted at me from an apartment window. “Hey, where’s the fire?”
I dashed through trash-clogged gutters, underneath jerry-rigged air conditioning units, past countless unidentifiable graffiti tags. A stray cat leapt out of my path just in time to avoid getting crushed under my shoes. It hissed.
“Sorry!” I called.
The sirens continued to dog me for minutes, but they couldn’t follow me where I went, and so I listened to them start to peter off as they spread out. The architecture began to age around me. I didn’t stop until I saw a building with the old-fashioned kind of fire-escape, the system with the ladders. Taking a flying leap, I pulled one down and started to climb. On the landing, I turned a corner and kept climbing. My peripheral vision told me there weren’t any cop cars in my direct vicinity—not yet, at least.
Working my way across the face of the structure, I reached the escape on the outer edge and jumped across to the one protruding from the neighboring apartments, like some kind of urban lemur. The metal grates and ladders were loud as hell, but most tenants in these run-down places weren’t exactly the snitching type. Noise on the fire escapes was just par for the course if you already had a warrant out for your arrest.
It felt a tad exploitative, but I was in dire straits. And I didn’t think the cops would be too keen to look at the sides of old-ass buildings. So I kept shimmying my way along, eyes and ears open. A few pigeons tried to step to me for infringing on their turf, but some well-placed kicks ended that particular war.
Using my fire-escape route, I doubled back as far as I could toward downtown. It was obvious who was behind the whole mess, the master manipulator who was wise to Dorias’s schemes in the end. Lorcan. The bastard had set the whole thing up. I didn’t know why, but I knew he was to blame. For everything—even Jules’s death.
I wasn’t sure if killing him would make me feel better, but it was certainly worth a try. But to do that I needed to be at the top of the One World Trade—that was where the thread ended.
But so did my sneaky climbing route, and I was forced to return to regular old pavement pounding not too far from the Center.
Vic, Marcus’s voice rang in my ears. I am sorry for your friend. But going against Lorcan now—it is suicide. You cannot play his game.
“I’m not playing his game,” I said. “I’m fucking flipping the table over.”
Whether or not I had convinced him, of if he knew that it was better not to debate with me now, Marcus fell silent.
I continued my path, creeping along like a thief toward the tower’s distinctive proud spindle. Occasionally, the whine of a siren drifted back to my ears, but they appeared to have fanned out sufficiently enough that I wasn’t in immediate danger of capture, as long as I was careful.
This luck held out until I reached One World Trade Center itself. On my way toward the doors, a cop car screamed up to the curb, burning rubber as it stopped. Six more cars showed in quick succession, and I soon found myself confronted by a dozen of New York’s finest, each with a gun pointed on me.
“Freeze!” someone bellowed.
I froze. But I didn’t raise my hands. “This is going to sound trite as all hell,” I said, “but you don’t understand what’s going on here. I know how it looks. I know it’s
bad. Okay? I know. But I didn’t kill him.”
They stared at me in stony silence down the barrels of their guns.
“I don’t care,” said the cop in the lead. Every gun cocked. Then every gun fired.
Time slowed down in the moments that followed. The Gladius Solis burned brightly out of the gate, arcing around in front of me. It was like when the satyr shot at me in that ally—my instincts and the sword took on a life of their own.
I spun, dropped to one knee, and shoved the blade into the ground, clear through the concrete.
“Kronin, protect me!”
By all processes of rational thought, I should have died there in the street in front of One World Trade Center. They should have found me riddled with bullets, a murder suspect on the run.
It was a damn good thing I no longer lived in a rational world. This was a world where I could survive just by trusting my sword and trusting my mission. Trusting myself to be able to get shit done.
As I plunged the sword into the ground, power surged out of it. The sword exploded with light, washing out everything around me. I ducked my head but felt nothing other than a weird, warm glow. A golden shield had erected itself around me, planted in place by the axis of the sword.
The bullets pinged harmlessly off it.
The cops stopped firing, staring in awe at the golden dome of light that covered me. I wasted no time.
Pulling the sword from the ground, I hauled ass toward the building. The shield disappeared the moment the sword was free, and the sounds of shouting and a few more gunshots followed after me.
Nothing hit, and I made it through the doors unscathed.
I slammed my hand into the elevator call button, barreled into the first car that opened, and punched the button for the top floor. My heart pounded painfully in my chest, and I bent at the waist, hands on my knees, to catch my breath. Everything on my body shook like crazy. I kind of wanted to puke. Still, I was alive, and I had just done something brand new and radical.
“What the shit was that?” I wheezed to Marcus. “You saw it, right?”
Yes. You appeared to summon a shield from the sword. Remarkable. I have never seen anything like it.
“We’ll talk about it later.” I panted, wiping my hand across my brow. “No time now. Have to get ready to deal with Lorcan.”
As it turned out, there was no need to worry. I was straightened up by the time the doors opened, halfway back to the world of the living, but the expansive office space on the other side of the doors was abandoned. None of the desks remained at all—just a high-ceilinged, open space that was completely empty.
Almost.
One huge TV stood in the center of the floor, its cords winding to a cable outlet on the wall. It was showing, in a looping cycle, breaking news alerts from every conceivable news channel. The clear centerpiece of each broadcast was grainy security footage taken from somewhere inside the mayor’s office, on which I was clearly visible stabbing Mayor Inglewood up against the wall.
I knew it wasn’t really Inglewood. But no one else did.
“We’d like to advise that our broadcast will contain sensitive, graphic material tonight,” the anchors kept saying. “It has been censored, but the images are still disturbing. New York City’s entire police force is out searching for the perpetrator of this heinous crime, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If you have any information regarding either the crime or a possible suspect identification, please call the tip lines at—”
“Fuck!” I shouted, unable to contain myself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I threw the sword at the screen and it exploded in a storm of sparks and glass. However south things had gone in the past, it was never as far south as this. I was in Antarctica, standing on the Pole, surrounded by penguins. Jules was dead. Deacon was apparently telling his men to shoot first and ask questions later. And now my revenge had vanished. Faith and logic both told me there had to be a way out—after all, I’d also just survived a hail of bullets without a scratch. But immediate prospects were looking incredibly dismal.
The sound of my phone buzzing interrupted my thoughts. I grabbed for it, thinking maybe it was Deacon wanting to hash things out. It wasn’t, but the number I saw still helped.
“Maya?”
“What the hell is happening? I just saw you on TV. They’re saying you killed the mayor.”
“Yeah, I know.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I didn’t. It’s a long story. The shapeshifter’s dead.”
“Oh. That’s not that long a story, but I’ll let you tell me later. I found Jules.”
My heard jumped in my chest. Suddenly a flicker of hope appeared in the darkness.
“You did? Dorias, he told me she was dead.”
There was silence for a second and then Maya’s voice. “That bastard was a liar. Your girl is alive.”
“Where is she? I need to see her.”
“I don’t think I should tell you over the phone, especially not while you’re being hunted like this. Where are you? Can you meet me somewhere?” She paused. “Somewhere stupid, preferably. Where they won’t think to look for you.”
My first instinct was to make a joke about the fire escapes, but then I realized she wouldn’t get it. “I know a place,” I said.
I gave her the location, then slipped my phone into my pocket and turned automatically back toward the elevator. “No, wait. That’s idiotic. They probably came in after me. They’ll be waiting.”
True. You will have to find some way around them.
I glanced toward the window. A repeat of my stunt in City Hall was out of the question. A hundred floors would kill me, nectar or no nectar. I sighed. “Guess we’re taking the stairs.”
Good. I don’t think you have gotten enough exercise today.
“Smartass,” I said, running for the stairwell. “Congratulations on your first contraction, by the way. How’s it feel to speak modern English?” Our lighthearted banter belied the gravity of the situation just enough to make me feel like the weight of the world on my shoulders was a little less.
Jules was alive. I could handle anything now.
Not as good as watching you try to talk your way into City Hall.
“Yeah, remind me to thank Namiko for that.” I stepped onto the first landing and looked over the side of the stairwell, into the dizzying drop. “Okay, here we go. Next stop: Jules.”
Thus motivated, I turned and started the decent toward ground level.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The last time I was in FAO Schwarz, I was a kid, barely in middle school, and I thought it was the most magical place on Earth. This time, the distinctive red awning produced a wide range of mixed emotions, mostly nostalgia and sadness. If I had even half suspected that in eighteen years I’d be racing against the clock to try and save the universe from gods hellbent on destruction, it would’ve blown my little mind.
It probably would have blown my mind at any age, to be honest.
The toy store was decked out early for the holidays in cheerful red and green colors, lights strung up over the towering displays. Just like I remembered, the place was jam-packed with kids who had no volume control and parents who regretted walking in. The noise level inside was almost inhuman, despite the cheery, welcoming atmosphere and sheer volume of the place. I could barely hear myself think as I wormed my way through the crowd.
Perfect.
As I walked, I kept my head down, just in case someone trying to push past me might have seen my face on one of those ten thousand news programs actively encouraging people to find me. Even with the baseball cap I grabbed and my aviators, I imagined I was still recognizable.
It wasn’t easy to orient myself inside the giant store, but the second I pinpointed the location of its superhero hub, I moved in that direction with great purpose and hoped I would be able to find Maya. People streamed by in both directions, chatting, laughing, blissfully unaware that I walked among them.
The beginning of the section I wanted was denote
d via a huge cutout of a certain god of thunder, under whose massive cardboard bicep I decided to shelter while I waited to pick Maya out of the crowd. Looking wistfully up into his chiseled face, I wondered why he couldn’t have been real instead of stupid Lorcan. How infinitely more pleasant my life would be.
There is no shortage of handsome gods, Marcus said. It simply happens that those with which you have dealt up to now leave much to be desired.
“You’re telling me,” I muttered. “Except the harpy, but I don’t know if she counts. She’s not exactly my type.”
The gods are no one’s type except their own.
“Hey.” I turned around a little too fast to see Maya standing at the back of my shoulder. She laid her hand on my arm. “You’re a little jumpy. Not that I can blame you.” She led me around the back side of the cutout. “Here, let’s stand behind him. His washboard abs can shelter us from prying eyes.”
I snorted. Her gift of levity was much appreciated. “I was just complaining to Marcus about how, out of all the possible gods in the universe, we didn’t get ones who look like him. Wouldn’t that be, like, a thousand times better.”
“Depends.” Maya gave me a look. “Is he still trying to kill us in this alternate timeline?”
I frowned. “No, but I see your point.” Then I leaned closer so she could talk more or less directly into my ear. “What do you know about Jules?”
“Well… I found where they’re keeping her,” Maya said. “She’s in this creepy old abandoned storefront where the windows and stuff are all boarded up. There was only a side window still open, so I couldn’t catch much, but her scent was all over the place.”
“Then how do you know she’s alive?”
“Because of the way her captors were talking,” she said. “Vampires, all of them. I’d stake my medical license on it. And while my ears aren’t as good as the nose, I heard enough. They’re hungry—and pissed about the fact that they have to babysit her without taking a bite. Big man’s orders.”
