“A couple of times, yeah,” I said. “You have, too. Nicholas has one in his head, and so does his girlfriend Hailey. They use the Dark Ones to augment their magic.” Nicholas could also use his Dark One to change shape, becoming something that looked like a panther crossed with a nightmare.
“The Dark Ones will only enter someone in exchange for a human sacrifice,” said Murdo.
“You mean Nicholas had to kill someone to get a Dark One inside his head?” I said.
“Yes,” said Murdo.
“God,” I said. I shook my head. “That’s just like him. All those fine speeches about liberating humanity, and then he’ll kill someone to put a demon into his head.”
“It is contemptible, isn’t it?” said Murdo.
I looked at him, and another suspicious idea occurred to me.
Was Rory Murdo an Inquisition agent?
It made sense. His skill at magic and fighting, his contempt for the Rebels for whom he worked, his loathing of the Dark Ones cultists…all of that would fit. Except it was too obvious. Way too obvious. If he was a deep cover agent, he sucked at it. Maybe he had murdered his superior officer in the Legion or something and had no choice but to take refuge with the Rebels.
Or maybe this was all an act calculated to win my trust.
“That sword of yours is pretty handy,” I said instead.
“The elemental blade spell?” said Murdo. “It has its uses.” He glanced at me. “Would you like to know the spell?”
“What?” I said.
Murdo hit the turn signal lever and took an off-ramp leading to a rest stop. The rest stop wasn’t anything fancy, just a cinder block building housing a pair of bathrooms. It was deserted, and I watched as Murdo pulled into a parking space and put the SUV into park.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Would you like to know the elemental blade spell?” said Murdo. “I think you would put it to good use. With all the fire, ice, and lightning you used during the fight, you would be able to use all three elements to fashion different blades. That would be useful in some dangerous situations.”
I stared at him. “Why are you teaching me a spell?”
“Because you saved my life, and I pay my debts,” said Murdo. He shrugged. “Is that good enough? Or maybe it’s because you hate that scoundrel Connor too. Or that we both hate the Rebels but have to work for them anyway.”
“Or maybe you’re trying to win my trust to screw me over later,” I said.
“Very possible.” Murdo considered that. “But if I do, you can always chop off my head with an elemental blade.”
I laughed, despite myself. “All right. Fine. Teach me the spell. But if you try to hurt me, I’m going to blow up this SUV with both of us inside it.”
“Fair enough.” Murdo took a deep breath, flexing his fingers, and then leaned close, resting the fingers of his right hand against my forehead. His fingers felt surprisingly hot. Or maybe it was because I was so damned cold all the time.
Then he cast a spell.
I felt a surge of power, like electricity crawling through my brain, as if every neuron in my skull had lit up at once.
Then there was a new spell inside my head.
Murdo pulled back, and I blinked several times, turning over the new spell in my head.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. That’s complicated. I think I’m going to give it a try.”
“Roll down the window first.” Murdo smiled. “It’s hard to get insurance when you’re a fugitive fighting to overthrow the government.”
“Right,” I said. I rolled down the window and lifted my right hand, gathered my will and magic, and cast the new spell.
A sword of elemental fire sprang into existence in my hand.
I turned the sword back and forth, concentrating. It was a powerful spell, and it took considerable concentration to maintain. Yet I was used to that kind of concentration, and I opened the SUV door and got out. I slashed the sword, and it cut a smoking gash in the asphalt at my feet.
That would be useful.
An echo of an old thrill went through me. Before the Eternity Crucible, before Arvalaeon, I had lusted for magical power. I had the thought that if I gained enough power, if I became strong enough, I could save Russell and no one could ever control me again.
The Eternity Crucible had blown that fantasy to pieces. I had power now, a lot of power, and I still couldn’t save Russell or be free of Morvilind and Nicholas. Granted, I had a lot more bargaining power now, but I still wasn’t free.
But a hint of the old excitement remained.
I dismissed the elemental sword and got back into the SUV.
“Okay,” I said, and almost against my will, I smiled. Not my usual mirthless grin when dealing with the Rebels, but an actual smile. “That’s a pretty nice trade for saving your life. Thanks, Murdo.”
He inclined his head. “You are welcome. I wish to ask a favor.”
I raised my eyebrows. “If it’s an inappropriate favor I’m going to cast the elemental sword spell and make a mess all over your upholstery.”
He blinked and then burst out laughing, and to my surprise, I laughed with him.
“No, no, nothing of the sort,” said Murdo. “Can you drive for a while? I need to sleep.”
I blinked, surprised. “You would trust me to drive? What if I decide to kill both of us by driving into an overpass support?”
Murdo shrugged. “If I fall asleep and drive into an overpass support, the effect will be the same.”
“Mmm. Good point. All right. Let’s trade seats.” I opened the door. “You’ll have to tell me where we’re going, though.”
“Just keep heading east on I-70 for now,” said Murdo. “Once you take the bypass around the ruins of St. Louis, switch to I-64 and then I-68.” I climbed into the driver’s seat and immediately pulled it forward. Murdo was a lot taller than I was. “We’re meeting Connor and his friends at an address in northern Washington DC, not all that far from the ruins of Baltimore.”
“Super,” I said. The High Queen had destroyed three major American cities during the Conquest – Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore. I didn’t really want to see the ruins of St. Louis and Baltimore. I had already seen way more of Chicago than I wanted.
Murdo reached into the glove compartment and handed me a road atlas. “The address is written on the inside of the front cover, but I should wake up long before that.”
“Right,” I said. I started to ask Murdo another question, but I saw that he had already fallen asleep.
I blinked in surprise. I guess he must have really been in the Wizard’s Legion. James Marney and Riordan had both been men-at-arms, and they had both told me that soldiers learned how to sleep anywhere when they were tired.
Murdo knew how dangerous I was. He had just seen me kill a whole bunch of anthrophages. Yet he had just handed me the steering wheel and fallen asleep.
Weird.
And as I looked at him, I realized that I had a new problem.
I kind of liked Murdo.
Not like that. I mean, Murdo hadn’t hit on me or anything, but if he had, I don’t think I would have minded. Not that romance was an option for me any longer. I was crazy, and I had a head full of nightmares, and I hadn’t even kissed anyone for a hundred and fifty-nine years. (Well, Nicholas had kissed me, but I had almost killed him for it, so that didn’t count.) I hadn’t known that when I had kissed Riordan goodbye that last time that it would be the final time I ever kissed him.
Or the last time I ever saw him, really.
A wave of black melancholy rolled through me, and I shoved it aside. Or tried to, anyway.
But romance wasn’t the point. I detested all the other Rebels I had met and worked with. I could respect some of them, yes – Enzo Morelli knew his business, Vass was a hell of a helicopter pilot, and I had to admit that Martin Corbisher was a logistical genius – but I hated all of them.
I had never met a Rebel I liked and respected before.
And when the day of our confrontation finally came, if Murdo got in my way or tried to stop me, I would have to kill him too.
Though after seeing him fight, I realized that might be harder than I thought.
With those cheery thoughts in my head for company, I drove across Kansas as Murdo slept.
Chapter 5: Road Trip
Once again, I drove across the United States, though this time I had Murdo for company.
I had driven across the United States a lot. Driving was the least regulated form of travel in the US. If you took a plane, train, or zeppelin, you had to present proper ID, and while I could forge an ID, that left a paper trail. If someone really wanted to find me, they could backcheck the records. For that matter, if there were any flags on those false identities in the Homeland Security databases, that would draw attention very quickly.
For cars, on the other hand, all you had to do was get in and drive. So long as you didn’t break the speed limit and do anything suspicious, the Homeland Security traffic patrollers left you alone. So I made sure to stay just under the speed limit.
Considering how explosively the trip had started, the drive across Kansas and Missouri was uneventful. There wasn’t much traffic, and I made good time while Murdo slept in the passenger seat. He must have driven all night to make it to the Rocky Mountain Mile in time for our meeting. Once I got to the ruins of St. Louis, I took the bypass around the wreckage of the ancient city to get to I-64.
As I did, I tried not to stare at the grim spectacle.
According to official history, the populations of Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore had rebelled against the High Queen a few years after the Conquest, and she had used her magic to destroy all three cities and put down the Rebels. Nicholas’s research had turned up a fuller version of the truth. The Rebels in all three cities had been an insurgency group assembled by a former Army general and Secretary of Defense named Jeremy Shane. Shane had been assassinated by rivals in his own organization before he could finish his plans, and his insurgency had launched their attack prematurely. The High Queen had been caught off-guard, but she recovered and used a magical weapon called the Reaping to destroy the rebelling cities.
But Shane had been working on something when he had been murdered, some project, some weapon against the High Queen.
It was called Operation Sky Hammer. I didn’t know what it was. My best guess was that it was a weapon left over from the pre-Conquest era. The historical propaganda videos from the Department of Education regularly explained that the pre-Conquest American government had kept all sorts of nasty secrets, like secret prisons where government scientists used biological and chemical weapons to conduct horrific experiments on prisoners, and storehouses holding weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying the world a thousand times over. The broadcasts regularly praised the High Queen for dismantling those projects and protecting mankind from its self-destructive tendencies, which left a sour taste in my mouth since I knew the High Queen had been willing to nuke Milwaukee to stop the Archons.
But now there was a bit of fear mixed with the sour taste.
The High Queen had dismantled all those weapons or claimed them for her own.
What if she had missed one?
And what if I was helping Nicholas to find the thing?
I tried not to dwell on that thought as I drove past the ruins of St. Louis. Unfortunately, keeping my eyes on the road meant that I had no choice but to keep my eyes on the ruined city. The Reaping had destroyed Chicago, and a myothar had taken residence in the city, killing any human who entered and raising them as its undead servants. I wasn’t sure what had happened in St. Louis, but a huge cloud of whirling black smoke rose from the ruins, miles high. Anyone who ventured into the city died an agonizing death as their lungs melted and their skin dissolved. I wondered if some nasty creature like the myothar lurked in the ruins.
I didn’t want to find out, so I kept driving.
Once night fell and we got across the Mississippi River and into Illinois, I pulled over at a rural gas station to fill up and trade places with Murdo.
“Do you want anything to eat?” said Murdo, stretching.
“No,” I said, watching the numbers tick by on the gas pump. “Too much junk food here.” I didn’t like junk food, that was true. The real reason was that too many kinds of junk food reminded me of the Eternity Crucible and would make me throw up.
“Agreed,” said Murdo. “Smoothie?”
I blinked. “They don’t smell smoothies at gas stations.”
“I brought my own stuff,” said Murdo. He walked to the back of the SUV, opened the door, and in the cargo area I saw a cooler, a bag of various cylinders of protein and vegetable power, and…
I blinked. “Is that a battery-powered blender?”
“Yes,” said Murdo. “I travel a lot, and it’s hard to eat healthy on the road. So, I come prepared.” He looked in the cooler and frowned. “I think we might need some milk, though. What kind of protein powder would you like? I’ve got vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, peanut butter…are you all right?”
I was staring at the blender.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just…I used to know someone who had a battery-powered smoothie blender like that. A real long time ago.”
Riordan’s portable smoothie blender had been nicer than Murdo’s, but then, Riordan had been loaded. He’d been a Shadow Hunter for decades, so there had been time to build up a fat nest egg. Not that he had been pretentious about it – he had been frugal in a way that only someone who had been broke for a long time could be. But Riordan hadn’t skimped when it had come to healthy food, which made sense. Both Shadow Hunters and the shadow agents of Elven nobles had to stay in good shape. I guess former Wizards of the Legion turned Rebels on the lam needed to stay in shape as well.
Huh. I hadn’t seen Riordan in nearly a hundred and sixty years, at least from my perspective, and I was still torn up about breaking up with him. I had just been so harsh about it. But it had been for his own good.
I just had to keep repeating that to myself.
“I’ll get some milk,” I said. “Peanut butter powder, please.”
“Not chocolate? I thought women loved chocolate.”
“Do you want to pay for the milk?”
Murdo laughed and reached for a packet of peanut butter flavored protein powder.
I went into the gas station, paid cash for the gas, a half-gallon of milk, and a 24-ounce mug of coffee without sugar or flavoring. When I returned, Murdo made the smoothies with practiced efficiency, and then I started the SUV and pulled it into a parking spot away from the gas pumps.
Then we sat and ate our smoothies and watched traffic rumble past on the freeway.
A weird little picnic, I suppose.
It was a strange feeling, but not a bad one. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done this. Not the smoothies, I mean. I ate smoothies all the time. But I couldn’t remember the last time I had sat down and had a pleasant meal with someone I didn’t hate, someone I kind of liked…
The weird thing was that I felt comfortable around Murdo. That didn’t make any sense. I ought to have been on my guard around him. Granted, we had fought alongside each other at the hotel, but I had fought alongside Nicholas against the myothar, and that hadn’t changed anything between us, especially since he had tried to get me killed like two minutes later.
I wondered if Murdo had drugged me, but that didn’t make any sense. Drugs weren’t magic. He could have knocked me out, but there weren’t any drugs that made you comfortable around someone. (Well, alcohol, but I wasn’t drunk or even buzzed.) Maybe he had used magic on me, but he couldn’t have
done that without my noticing it. If Kaethran Morvilind himself couldn’t enter my mind without my knowledge, then Rory Murdo sure as hell couldn’t.
So why did I like him?
“Have we met before?” I said at last.
I took another spoonful of smoothie as I waited for his answer. It was a really good smoothie. Murdo hadn’t skimped on the protein powder.
“I think I would remember if we had met before,” said Murdo at last.
“There’s a vague non-answer.”
Murdo shrugged. “How often do you meet women who can kill that many anthrophages? It would be very memorable.”
“True,” I conceded.
“Out of curiosity,” said Murdo, “are you actually an Elven noble in disguise?”
I blinked. “What?”
“I’ve never seen a human use magic like that,” said Murdo.
If he didn’t make sense to me, then I must have made even less sense to him. After all, I looked as I ought to be working at my first job while hoping to marry a man-at-arms at the end of his term of service. I didn’t look like someone capable of killing that many anthrophages.
“Nope,” I said. “Human, not Elven or orcish or dwarven or anything. Go on, cast the spell to sense the presence of magic.”
He frowned at me.
“Come on,” I said. “I double-dare you. Didn’t they teach you that at Legion wizard school?”
Murdo laughed. “Legion wizard school? It’s called the Royal War College.”
“I like my name better.”
Murdo shrugged and cast the spell to sense the presence of magical forces. He peered at me, shrugged, and went back to eating his smoothie.
“See?” I said. “No illusion or mind-controlling spells.”
“All right,” said Murdo. “That must be why Connor managed to get your Elven lord or lady…”
“Lady,” I said, sticking to my earlier lie.
“That must be why he wants your help,” said Murdo. “You can cast illusion spells. None of the Rebel wizards I’ve met so far know how to do that.”
Cloak Games: Hammer Break Page 7
