Pride and Poltergeists

by H. P. Mallory

  Not that it mattered now. Wherever the hole took them, Dulcie and Jax weren’t there anymore. They’d gone from some forest in the middle of nowhere to one of Bram’s numerous mansions and later to the overturned ANC in Brokenview, where a witch had recognized Dulcie and sent word to me.

  Oh, did I forget to mention? The Netherworld had control of, like, half our ANC bases, and I could only imagine that number rapidly growing.

  So, that’s about how my week was going. I walked around the hole for a little while longer, hoping that lightning would strike somebody and we’d suddenly know where Dulcie, Bram, Knight, and Jax were. I was trying desperately not to think of them as missing persons, but as time passed, that conclusion was getting harder and harder not to draw. It had been—what? Three days since Knight and Bram went looking for Dulcie? And they hadn’t radioed in. Nobody had, but that was mostly owing to the political upheaval currently going down in the recently usurped Netherworld. Caressa was probably even more stressed out than I was.

  I went back to my office—what was left of it, anyway. Three of the four walls remained, striped in beige where the wormhole had violently ripped my pictures and certificates away, even dragging the paint off with them. The carpet was soaked through with rain and mud and coffee. Everything smelled like gas and wet dirt.

  I ambled over to the Mr. Coffee plugged in to the only remaining outlet this side of the building. The machine gurgled and spat, then a thin, black line poured into a green mug with an angry face stamped into the side, proudly declaring its aversion to Mondays. There was creamer somewhere, but it was one o’clock in the freaking morning, which meant I didn’t possess the wherewithal to even try to find it. Instead, I downed the bitter, black liquid like bad medicine, screwing up my lips at the virulent taste. I was half-tempted to get some mandrake out of the confiscated potions vault—mandrake being a potent, highly addictive, Adderall-like substance mostly used by college students during desperate cram sessions and deadlines.

  But I knew I wouldn’t do that. As an officer of the law, I decided not to drink the evidence. So black coffee would have to do.

  Please let Dulcie be okay, I thought. Let them all be okay.

  Something fluffy brushed against my leg and I smiled, looking down. A half-grown golden retriever sat on the carpet, its tail wagging and tongue flopping: Dulcie’s dog, Blue. He was a gift from our old boss (who also happened to be on a long list of people Melchior O’Neil was blackmailing into working for him, but that’s another story). She’d brought him to work with her the day the wormhole sucked her and Jax into the ether.

  “Come here, boy,” I said, and Blue jumped onto my lap, whining and licking my face. His collar shone in the low light, iron meshed with Celtic braiding that winked when it caught the light around his throat. It was enchanted, every braid painstakingly imbued with physical and magical wards, replicating a bracelet I’d given Dulcie to protect herself when she was neck-deep in the potion game. Hades only knew if it worked, but at this point, I had to take any reassurance I could get.

  I wrapped my arms around Blue and gave him a good squeeze, burying my face in his soft fur. For ten seconds, the feeling like I was about to explode vanished. Maybe everything was going to be all right. Maybe they’d lost their phones or had no reception. Maybe Knight had finally found Dulcie and they were fucking each other into the next life. The idea made me feel a little better. If they had each other, that was a thousand times better, regardless of where they were.

  The phone rang, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Hello?” I muttered.

  “Samantha?” said the caller.

  I nearly spat out my coffee. “Caressa!” I leapt out of my office chair, hard enough to send it skidding back into the wall. Blue tumbled to the ground and looked up at me in confusion. “Have you heard from Knight?”

  There was a split second of silence and a soft clicking sound: Caressa clucking her tongue. I swear I could feel her grimacing through the phone. Caressa was one of Knight’s oldest friends—and an old flame, too, if the rumors held water—so a grimace and a clucking tongue probably meant she had about as much information for me as everyone else on my team. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

  “I’m guessing that’s a no,” I said, sitting back and forgetting my chair wasn’t there to catch me. I sat hard on the wet ground and didn’t bother getting up, letting the icy rainwater soak through my skirt and freeze my ass.

  Caressa sighed and I heard a thunk! It sounded like an elbow on a table, followed by a rattling, like pens in a cup. It might have also been bullets, but I was trying not to think about that. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  I sighed too, running my free hand through my hair. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “Anything on your end?”

  I couldn’t suppress a snort. “What do you think?”

  “They’re doing their best, Sam,” Caressa replied, almost sounding defensive.

  “I know,” I said, “but it’s been like this for days. I mean, who knows where they are by now?” With the Brokenview ANC portals at their beck and call, they could literally be anywhere on the planet. Hell, they might have even been in the Netherworld, as slim a chance as that might be. For Dulcie’s sake, I hoped she was here. Her magic wouldn’t work in the Netherworld. And on the other side, her wings manifested. Big, translucent fairy wings that she had no clue how to control. Knight assured me it was hilarious, but they were no advantage to her when she was trying to escape.

  “You still there?” Caressa asked.

  I snapped myself back to the present and coughed. “I’m here. Sorry.”

  “… and Dia hasn’t found anything?” she continued hesitantly.

  Dia Robinson was the head of the ANC in Moon, California. Most of the witches on staff were hers, but I hadn’t heard anything from her in days. “MADC said there was nothing to find.” Nothing but a giant hole in the ground. My throat tightened and I felt my eyes watering. “Nothing,” I said quietly.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Caressa said, her voice much softer now. “I promise.”

  I laughed bitterly and tried to smile, even though she couldn’t see. Blue came up and started gingerly licking my cheek, his big, black eyes awash with concern. I scratched his head and felt the hot tears flowing soundlessly down my face. Blue kissed them away.

  I took a deep breath and sighed. “I know,” I said, even though I didn’t. “Caressa, I’m not getting paid enough to worry this much.”

  Caressa laughed. “Me neither, sweetheart, believe me. Listen, I’ve got to call General Maxwell and see if we can’t get his garrison out of the mountains.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. General Maxwell was a dark elf, a Netherworldian Army man of significant repute. He was as bull-headed as they come, and absolutely convinced that Melchior was still alive. He feared Caressa was trying to lure him out of Fort Blaster in the mountains to kill him and all of his force. “Good luck with that.”

  “Thanks, I’m gonna need it. Listen, if you need anything—”

  There was a beep, and then silence. I looked at my phone and saw it was roaming; all the bars had vanished. “Caressa?” I said, but she was already gone.

  “Shit,” I grumbled, throwing the phone across the room. It hit the wall and the back broke open. Blue cocked his head and pounded his tail against the carpet, letting out a low whine. My stomach was tying itself in knots again, sheer panic rising from the pit of my stomach. That’s what you get, I thought, remembering the eight other cups of black coffee I’d drunk in the last forty-eight hours. Too much caffeine, if there were such a thing.

  Not when you’re at war, I thought. Which wasn’t entirely true, not anymore, but it sure felt like it. This war was colder, though, looming like mountains in the dark. The Netherworld was gathering under the Darkness, sure, and Dulcie was missing, that was a given, but it felt like I was overlooking something. If I’d been anybody else, I would have written the feeling off as nerves. But I’m a witch, and that means
my hunches are rarely unfounded.

  I ran my hands over my face and pushed myself roughly onto my feet. My desk was scattered with papers and reports, most of them utterly useless in our search. No one at any ANC from here to Dubai had heard a word about the Darkness, and no one could seem to locate any of the big names in the potion world. Larx Manthrey from Crossbones, Henrick Torgiono from Mayhem, to name a few of the older players, and Jax. Hades only knew where he was. Dead, if we were lucky, or dying, and hopefully, very slowly.

  “Why does everything have to be so damn complicated?” I muttered, sifting through the papers without reading them. I’d been through them already a thousand times, all the collective information we had about every bad guy in the business, and there was nothing there I could use. Of course, it was extremely likely that a hundred or more reports had been redacted or destroyed when the Brokenview ANC went down.

  The lamp by the wall flickered and went out. There was a sound like a trombone being thrown down a flight of stone stairs, then the lamp came back on again—the backup generators kicking in.

  I frowned and walked out to the hallway, peering left and right. Nigel, an air spirit, came floating down, transparent, ghostly, and ravenously handsome. I’d sent him to do recon on the power outage—mainly to find out where it began and where it ended, along with anything else he could tell me.

  Then I had a thought. Wormholes are typically generated by extremely powerful magical entities—extremely powerful, meaning: nothing short of a very angry demigod. They could, in theory, also be created by inducing extreme electrical surges in a place with highly magical concentrations in the air or water. Places like nymph lakes and ancient, giant fortresses in the mountains, where they first mined the magic ores used in mood rings. If that were the case, the resulting power surge would have been enormous and bright enough to see from space, causing a blackout the size of Texas. Maybe we could track them that way.

  “Miss Samantha?” Nigel’s mouth didn’t move, and he spoke in a stage whisper.

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Out of it. What’s up with the power?”

  “Citywide blackout,” he said.

  “Citywide?” That didn’t sound good. “What caused it?”

  The apparition shrugged. “They’re looking into it. Seems to be a total grid failure.”

  “Grid failure? What does that mean?”

  “Mass malfunction,” he breathed. “Enough lights go out, the whole system flips.”

  “Uh huh.” I nodded, biting my lip, and Nigel drifted away.

  I turned back to my office, kneading my temples with my knuckles. I had to sleep. The ground wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was flat and, thankfully, not on fire, so I lay down on my back and closed my eyes. Everything shut down immediately, my whole consciousness going luxuriously black.

  When I opened my eyes, the sky was still black, and all the stars were present and accounted for. I sat up and rubbed my head, groaning, feeling less like I’d slept and more like I’d just been roundhouse-kicked by a Titan.

  I looked at my watch; fifteen minutes had passed. Probably as much of a reprieve as I would get for a while, at least until the twenty gallons of coffee drained out of my system.

  “All right,” I said, craning my torso to the left to pop my shoulder. “Back to work, I guess.”

  I stood, brushing my fingers through my short, brown hair and trying to look at least a little bit awake. Everybody was tired, and ready to punt a small goblin through a wall, but I was in charge. If anybody needed to pretend they were unfazed, it was me. Even if I were falling apart.

  I stood up, cracked my neck, and popped my knuckles. Then I noticed Blue standing by the missing wall, his hair standing on end, growling into the dark.

  “Blue?” I said. He didn’t respond, standing stock-still, hackles raised, throat rumbling.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” I knelt beside him and tried to pet him, but the growling got louder. He crouched and bared his teeth at nothing.

  Three seconds later, I felt it too. A sharp energy wafted in the air, a smell like burning grass and a subsequent tingling that gave me goose bumps.

  I grabbed Blue and dove under the desk just as the explosion rocked the building.

  Yellow-black shadows were cast by the billowing fire, and I felt the walls and floor crumbling with the force of it. The sound was muted at first, then it shifted into a high ring, and I realized I’d whacked my head on the table when it first went off. I reached up to touch my throbbing skull, and my hand came away red with blood.

  “Shit,” I muttered, barely hearing myself. The hair on Blue’s neck was still standing on end, and he hadn’t stopped growling.

  For ten painful seconds, there was nothing to observe but silence and smoke. The smell was acrid, strong enough to burn the back of my throat. I heard sirens, the human fire department rushing to our aid, and I had the fleeting thought that we needed to call them off.

  Then I was dimly aware of a rush that sounded like water, then shouting and a sound like hail—bullets, I realized—followed by the crimson and gold flashes of defensive and offensive magic.

  I crawled out from under the table and tried to stand. The whole room turned upside-down, and a second later, I was face-down on the ground. I felt Blue nudging my shoulder with his nose, whining and growling, even barking now too, but I couldn’t see at what.

  Get up! I thought furiously, and I did, hauling my body onto my feet, bracing myself against the table and taking deep, slow breaths until the world re-stabilized. The walls were gone, all of them, reduced to piles of grey-white rubble. The sky was awash with all the wrong colors, green lightning and the blue tinge of a witch’s hellfire. White flashes like grenades, along with yellow bursts in the barrels of countless automatic weapons seemed to be everywhere. I could see the parking lot now, swarming with rescue personnel and witches, half running for their lives, half returning fire on a massive group of gun-wielding silhouettes that could only be here for one reason.

  The ringing stopped, and suddenly, that was all I could hear—the incessant chittering of machine guns firing four hundred rounds a minute, only marginally covered by a very loud scream.

  “Come on!” I shouted to Blue, drawing my pistol from my belt—an Op 7, the magical equivalent of a Glock, loaded with bullets spiked with highly toxic dragon’s blood. I pressed myself against the wall next to the Mr. Coffee, which now lay on its side on the carpet. My Monday-hating coffee cup was in pieces too, scattered at the base of the desk. The angry face stared up at me accusingly.

  I closed my eyes and tried to focus, if only to get my frazzled brain to locate the site of the explosion. Sniffing the air, I could identify the burning asphalt and melting rubber, as well as a stench, like wet feathers and water boiled dry.

  “Shit!” I ran—ran being a very loose term, since it was more of an urgent waddle—into the hall and toward the front of the building. I headed toward the lot and the cars and the wormhole as well as nearly half of my employees.

  The closer I got, the louder the screams were. And the sound was changing. It started as fear, but now it was more urgent, like a desperate battle cry, the shrieking of someone on their last magazine. Some part of me thought power outage, and I realized this should have been obvious. Of course the outage wasn’t a natural malfunction. But I didn’t have time for that now.

  Suddenly, Blue grabbed my skirt between his teeth and dragged me to one side, behind one of three walls left standing in the whole structure. A hot flash of fire and force drove me to my knees, kicking up a cloud of black dust.

  I got back to my feet, panting, looking over my shoulder at the black scorch mark on the ground where I’d been standing only seconds before. “Thanks, buddy.”

  Blue obviously didn’t reply, but kept looking behind me at the smoke cloud that was rising up like an angry wave. He started growling, taking very slow steps backwards, and I realized he saw someone or something inside it. A silhouette began to tak
e shape as I watched and stumbled across the ruined floor, coughing.

  I started to level my gun at the shadow. But a different kind of shadow coursed through me, a lead-heavy sense of fear and dread, and I pressed myself against the wall. Blue did the same, hunkering down at my heels. He sniffed the air and released a low whine. I looked down and saw his tail start wagging. He scratched at my foot, his mouth open, and tongue lolling out over his teeth.

  “What?” I whispered. “What is it?” Maybe the shadow belonged to Gelvie or one of the other witches; or maybe it was Elsie the secretary.

  Rocks and dust shifted around the corner, and the silhouette loomed into view. It was too short to be Gelvie and too thin to be Elsie. The shadow in the smoke was encased in fire from head-to-toe, wearing the flames like a mantle and its shadows like a crown. The face was obscured, but I saw a long, black dress and bare feet. Her skin was red with the heat of her own magic, and blood streamed down from a gash in her chest that she barely seemed to notice. She flicked her wrist, and a small, white ball of hellfire flung itself into the ground twenty yards away, exploding on impact. I closed my eyes at the pervasive light, violent and hot, bright as burning magnesium. When it faded, a plume of silvery smoke hung in the air, three stories tall, slowly settling over the ruins. There was a gaping, black hole at its base with a table on its edge, half of it completely vaporized.

  The shadow stepped forward, and then she had a face.

  I sucked in a breath. “Dulcie?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sam

  Dulcie stood in the ruins of the ANC, blood all over her face and hands, ash sticking to her sweaty skin. She was something out of a story, Hades’s mistress, pale as paper and dressed in the colors of death.