My blood spattered the dirty floor. Something in the distance screamed. I felt the focus of the estate’s diseased life pressing in on me.
I grabbed my sabre with both hands for a powerful downward thrust. It sliced along the side of the wight’s head, shearing off an ear, cutting through brittle skull. The wight went batshit. Pain drove it to abandon all caution, and it came at me with claws extended. I let my sabre blade crumble into a stiletto for close combat and stabbed its neck, then its collarbone on the back draw. Its claws dug flesh out of my own neck, but snagged in the collar of my jacket.
I finished it with a quick thrust through its withered heart. It fell to the ground. Its hands, covered in my blood, clung to the hem of my jeans. As I watched, the skin brightened until they were smooth and lovely, like a concert pianist.
There was a creaking sound. The wights outside the room were digging around my Shield, crumbling the old wood of the lintel.
I reached inside me and brought out the Flight spell. I let the buoyancy surround me. My clothes fluttered, as if caught in a strong wind.
I moved to the hole in the wall, stepped onto the sharp, broken rim, and shot into the air like a superhero.
“Fuck,” Brand said when I landed in the visitor’s lot. He was standing next to my car, putting a cat-sized drone into the duffle bag.
“I’ve had worse,” I said, gingerly touching the gashes on my neck. I transmuted the sabre into wristguard form to free my other hand.
“You’ve got a Healing spell?” he said.
“I do,” I said, and ran a thumb across a platinum disc slotted to my leather belt. I touched the wounds on my neck and hands, wincing as the flesh reddened and sunburned, and itched shut.
Brand studied me quietly.
“I’ve had worse,” I said again. “It’s okay.”
“We can’t do that again,” he said. “Not without backup.”
“I got out. It’s fine.”
Brand climbed on top of the hood of my car, ignoring my sounds of protest. He clambered to the roof, and shaded his eyes with his fingers to stare at the mansion. I didn’t have to ask what he was looking at. He’d have seen the wall explode from here.
“Aren’t we planning on living there again?”
“The windows were already broken,” I protested.
“That’s your room now.”
“It’s the conservatory. The windows were already broken. It . . .” I sighed. “You’re right. It’s all going to hell in there, Brand. The mansion is breaking down. I’m not sure it’ll stand much longer.”
“So we reclaim it.”
“How? You just said yourself I can’t go too deep into it without backup. One big fight, and it all falls down.”
Brand looked down at me, eyes still shaded. He gave me a rare, small smile. “You’ll find a way. You’re a stubborn little shit when you want to be. Come on, let’s go home. I bet Queenie baked cookies.”
HALF HOUSE
Companions, an ancient institution, have lost favor in the modern world. As with most things—human and Atlantean—instant gratification is a cult following, and Companions are a decades-long investment.
It worked like this:
You find a good human candidate. An infant. You gamble on this infant by learning as much as you can about its genetic lineage. You gamble that it’ll be a perfect match for your own infant. You gamble that it’ll be the perfect friend; the perfect advisor; the perfect killer. Then you stick this candidate—this baby—into your own child’s crib, speak a few powerful verses of magic, and metaphysically duct-tape them together for the rest of their natural lives.
You don’t see many Companions today, except in older Atlanteans from the greater houses. Addam’s brother had a Companion. Lord Tower— my benefactor—had a Companion. I had Brand. But even in these cases, the utilization was so different. Lord Tower’s Mayan was the head of Lord Tower’s security division. Christian’s Eve was his formal consort. Brand was my partner. But one thing that tied all Companions together was that they were, without compromise, deadly. From childhood, they trained as lethal bodyguards.
Whatever my father had meant Brand to be, Brand had become more. He was more than just a Companion. He told me otherwise—he insisted that being a Companion was his purpose. If that’s true, then so was the reverse: he was my purpose too. My first idea of the world was a soft mattress and wooden bars—and Brand, there, right next to me, the biggest thing in all of Existence.
He’d saved my life, over and over. He’d saved me from things worse than death. He’d saved me from myself.
I always knew he’d come from somewhere. That was the nature of Companions. He came from a human family. But the details of his lineage, outside anonymous medical records, had always been beyond my reach.
Now I had a file that told me everything about his past.
There were medical histories in the records, stretching back three generations. Pictures of male relatives from both his maternal and paternal line. Dozens and dozens of pictures, from various points in their lives.
It made me sick. It literally made me ill. The files treated him like a thoroughbred. The details—the comparisons they made against his living relatives, to hedge the gamble on how he’d mature—were filled with violations. The quality of his relatives’ teeth. How they aged. Hereditary diseases. The size of their dicks.
The file indicated where he was born. An address where his parents lived. It was over thirty-five years old, but it’d still provide a starting point, if we wanted to look deeper.
I wasn’t sure I could do that. Because I was a selfish, selfish man.
I put my finger on two of the pictures and stared at them, feeling a hard, frightened lump forming in my chest.
Brand’s older brothers looked like him.
I woke the next morning when something heavy landed on me. I blinked myself into a bleary awareness as Brand kicked off his running shoes and buried his head in my comforter.
“There’s light coming through the window,” I said, clearing my throat. “That means the sun is still on the wrong side of the sky. Why are you waking me up while the sun is on the wrong side of the sky?”
“I thought you were up already,” he said.
He most likely had a five-mile run under his belt; had made breakfast; and probably been through one or two training sessions. But, on the plus side, he always got sleepy again late in the morning right about the time I was banging on my snooze alarm, so it offered me the illusion that we shared a wake-up time together.
“I think you should go to your own bed,” I decided. “This never ends well for me. You sleep for ten minutes and then start talking about painting the living room.”
He pressed into the cool corner of my pillow and shoved me toward the edge of the mattress, just like he’d done when we were kids.
I stared down at him, thinking about the file I’d hidden in my bureau.
Why did his parents give him up? Did they do it willingly? Did my father buy him? What would I find in the records, when I had the balls to read further?
“The fuck is going on with you,” he muttered into my comforter.
“Nothing.”
“Rune.”
“Just a dream.”
“At this hour, it’s called a daydream, you lazy ass. I thought you were already up and bitching about coffee? I want you to go through your sword stations today. I can’t believe you let a wight lay hands on you. A wight.They’re like the cannon fodder of the undead world.”
“It was an old wight. An ancient wight.”
“How is that better? Something that gets discounts at fucking matinees, and goes to early bird specials?” He pulled the pillow out from under me and threw it clear across the room—which, granted, was only nine feet away. We lived in a sliver of a brownstone on a twelve-foot-wide property. “Wake up!”
“I am. You’ve got me thinking about coffee,” I said.
“He’s going to start demanding an allowance if
you use him as slave labor,” Brand warned me.
“The barista?”
“Max.”
“What does Max have to do with the barista?”
“Who’s talking about a barista?” he said, shifting so he could scowl at me.
It suddenly felt like we were having two different conversations. Only, Brand wasn’t looking puzzled. Brand had gone very, very still.
“Rune, did you text Max and ask him to get you a coffee?”
“Max said I sent him a text asking me to get him a coffee?”
“I saw it,” he said. “He ran down to the corner.”
“But—”
Brand launched off the bed. His bare feet were already slapping down the metal rungs before my heart even had a chance to start beating hard.
I jumped up and swiped my thigh circlet off the bureau, along with a leather bracelet fitted to hold a sigil shaped as a platinum disc. They were the only sigils I didn’t sleep with; they snagged on the sheets. Wearing only boxers, I ran down the stairs after Brand.
I didn’t stop for boots. Or my pants. I flew out the front door, passing by our housekeeper Queenie, who stood in the kitchen archway with kitchen gloves, a dripping sponge, and an astonished look.
Brand was already halfway up the cul-de-sac. I panted a cantrip, and a burst of adrenaline tightened my calves. By the time we hit the main street, we were abreast each other.
“Stop,” I said. “Brand, stop!”
He gave me a wild look, but stopped, scanning either end of the busy avenue. We were a dozen blocks away from the skyscrapers of downtown, but it was still pure city congestion, and there were multiple coffee shops in either direction. Max liked the one with fat yellow sofas in the lobby, though.
Before Brand could take off again, I whispered another two cantrips, hardening the skin on our soles. Cantrips were barely parlor tricks; but they’d keep our feet from getting sliced open too badly.
“We need to think this through,” I said. “If someone is trying to snatch him, he may not even be in the coffee shop.”
“How many spells do you have on you?” he asked.
“I didn’t refill all of them yet. Just Shield and Heal. And I’ve got Exodus.”
“Fuck. We want to find Max, not turn him into a crater.”
We began jogging toward the nearest coffee shop, which gave me enough time to complain. “We live in a nine-foot-wide house. Why would you think I’d text Max?”
“Because I’ve fucking met you,” Brand said. Frustration tightened the fine wrinkles around his eyes. “Is it the Hanged Man? Do you think it’s the Hanged Man?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve heard nothing from his court. This wouldn’t be his first move on Max.”
“Who else would take him? Lure him outside?”
“Anyone who’s met us?” I said. “Maybe it’s not about him at all. Maybe someone is getting back at us.”
Brand’s pocket began to sing Green Day’s “Basket Case.” His eyes widened and he pulled it out, sliding a thumb across the screen and putting it on speaker.
Quinn didn’t even wait for a greeting.
“Find him,” the teenager said. “Hurry. You don’t have much time.” Quinn was a prophet who usually spoke in riddles with messed-up verb tenses. It never boded well when he made clear-cut sense.
“Who has him?” I said. I took advantage of our pause to tie the leather strap of my thigh sigil around my leg. “Where is he, Quinn? We need information.”
“The scarred man’s people. He’s being taken to a black car.” Quinn paused, then added, in his much more normal voice, “Sometimes the black car is a helicopter, but the scarred man usually doesn’t want to spend the money on that, because he thinks you’re really stupid.”
“He’ll find out how stupid we are,” Brand promised. “Who—”
“Oh! Park! Trees! There are trees in a park, and Max, and the crowbar. The crowbar’s there!”
There was a public park behind Half House, in the other direction. Brand and I turned and ran like hell. On all sides of me, I noticed that people were stopping and pulling out their phones. I was going to go viral, in my boxer shorts, which was perfect, because there wasn’t nearly enough gossip about me.
We ran off the street, down an alley that led to one of the park’s side gates. Summer had cooled into autumn, and the concrete was littered with the first bright leaves of fall. People were milling around for an early lunch, blocking our path. We dodged around those we could, and sent others flying.
“If they’re moving to cars, they’ll be there or there,” Brand said, finally sounding a little winded himself. He pointed to the access roads that crisscrossed the walking paths. “Quinn? Are you still there?”
“I need to hang up,” Quinn said. He sounded like he was running too.
“Help us first!” Brand said. “Where is he?”
“Um . . . Go toward the road where the oil is shaped like a garden rake.”
“We are going to have such a talk!” Brand said. “Try harder!”
At that point, I tried to run around a pebbled asphalt golem, and tripped over someone’s duffle bag. I stumbled and hit a cashew vendor with the edge of my shoulder. The entire cart groaned and overturned, sending boiling peanut oil across the pavement. The spill made splatter patterns, one of which looked like a godsdamn garden rake. It pointed to the access road on our left.
Brand grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. We ran in that direction.
“There!” Brand said.
A football field’s length away, two SUVs were parked along the side of the access road, near a huge fountain pool that had yellow warning tape around it. A group of men in tactical black was herding someone to the cars. Max’s white-blond hair glowed like a bull’s-eye in their center.
“Too far,” I said.
They outnumbered and outgeared us, but the cars were the real threat. We needed to stop them from getting in those cars.
Or, at least, we needed to stop the cars from leaving the park.
I turned in a quick circle. People. Vendors. Children. Lots of children, milling around with parents and school groups. And running through them, toward the cashew cart mess, a guarda patrol officer in his green and amber uniform.
Before Brand could yell at me to move quicker, I nodded at the approaching guarda officer.
“What the fuck will the guarda be able to do that we can’t?” Brand said.
“You’ll see.” I ran up to the official. Before the young man could ask what the disturbance was about, I said, “An underage scion is being kidnapped. Initiate the child abduction protocols.”
“E-Excuse me?” the guarda official said, caught between affront and surprise. “Who the bloody hell are—”
“I am Lord Sun, heir to the Sun Throne, and you will initiate the protocols NOW!”
New Atlantis was not a democracy. It was a hill. There were people on top of the hill. There were people afraid at the boulders that could be rolled down the hill. The guarda official didn’t waste time with guesswork; he recognized my standing, stared off into the near distance, and acted.
Whatever signal he sent to the protective wards happened almost immediately. Magic erupted around us, a sourceless, electrical feeling that came from every direction at once. The wards, hidden beneath the soil lining the park’s perimeter, exploded into barriers of pale lavender energy. It was as good as a cage door swinging shut. No one would be allowed to pass through until a full guarda patrol was onsite.
I shook my wrist, transmuting my sabre into hilt form. With a flicker of willpower, a smoking garnet blade extended from the hilt. The guarda official blinked at it with an expression not unlike relief, because no average scion would have a weapon like that, which meant he was right to trust me.
“Stay with us,” I told him.
“Can—my lord—I should radio it in.”
“Radio it in, then. Send help to my side. Then follow.” The man fumbled for the wireless rad
io in his belt, and trailed us as we began to run to the SUVs.
By the time we were abreast of the cordoned-off fountain, we could see the kidnapper’s frustrated expressions as they stared at the barriers. Their confusion didn’t last long, though. One raised a shout and pointed toward me. Five of them pulled bladed weapons and stood their ground, while two others grabbed Max by the arms and hustled him down a walking path away from the cars.
“You’re faster,” I said to Brand. “Go after Max. I’ll handle the others.”
“There’s five of them,” Brand said calmly. His face had gone blank, and he had a switchblade in hand. I don’t even know where he’d hidden it in his running shorts.
“So? You need me to take your guys, too?” I asked.
He gave me a cool look, but peeled off and ran to flank the men who had Max. He could hold his own against two men, especially if Max was able to grief the person restraining him. I’d have to trust in that—I needed to focus on my own fight.
None of the men coming toward me had guns—just knife blades and a single sword. The one with the sword ran in the lead. I held up my garnet sabre blade and met his swing. My blade sheared off the last foot of his blade, leaving him with a small, broken edge. The man swore and backpedaled. I didn’t follow. I let the moment settle, to see what they’d do next. I also ran a finger across my thigh sigil, releasing Shield. Faceted light spread—and sunk—into my skin.
“You will yield,” I told them. “It’s as simple as that. The boy is mine. He is under my protection. Do you know who I am, and what I could do to you?”
The man with the sword—average face, brown hair, brown eyes— gave me a surprisingly heavy look. “Yes, sir, I surely do. We don’t have a choice in this, though.”
He held up his hand and twisted his fingers in quick gestures. Two of the men veered off to my left; two went right; and he stayed in front.
Two came at me first, one from each side. I jumped at the one on my left. He dodged my sword and swiped at my wrist tendons. My Shield deflected it with a sizzle. I blocked his next thrust with a Shielded forearm, spun back, and parried the second kidnapper’s stab. They disengaged immediately while a third kidnapper danced in with a slice, withdrawing before I could counter. My Shield sparked and saved me, filling the air with a smoky leak of energy.
The Hanged Man Page 3
