by SM Reine
Keeping an eye out for more signs of life, he moved deeper into the bar. Banks of electronic slot machines stood in rows two deep near the back wall. The blank screens looked like vacant eye sockets.
Only a glint of light on metal made Spencer realize that there were stairs hidden behind the slots.
The steps creaked as he mounted them. The yellow, peeling wallpaper on the second floor looked like it hadn’t been updated since about 1976, and was almost the same shade as the recycled casino carpet.
Zane stepped onto the second floor. His earpiece stopped beeping.
He plucked it out of his ear and pummeled the power button a few times. The light wasn’t even coming on now. Dead battery?
The flashlight mounted on his chest failed only seconds later. The shadows of the hallway consumed him.
When the mother of all demons had been attacking Reno, that kind of darkness had meant that someone was about to die an ugly death. That bitch was dead—but maybe some of her followers weren’t. And HQ had made it clear that demons were fair game.
“Gonna be some good shooting tonight,” Zane whispered, dropping the earpiece into his pocket.
He stepped down the hall, rolling along the carpet heel-to-toe so that his feet didn’t make a sound.
Which hotel room had the light been coming from? It had been one of the rooms facing the street, but he hadn’t thought to count windows to help him locate it once inside. The hotel room doors were cracked open. No sign of the flickering firelight remained.
Zane nudged open one door at a time. All of the tobacco-stained rooms were identical: double beds with hard mattresses, ancient televisions, dusty curtains.
Then he entered the room five doors down from the stairs, and his mouth dropped open.
The mattress had been propped against the window, but it had slipped a few inches, which was why Zane had glimpsed the light. All of the other furniture was piled in one corner to bare the floor. A brown, crusty fluid had been smeared on the walls, too. Zane couldn’t tell if it was blood or shit.
A circle had been burned into the carpet, and dozens of melted tapers were welded to the floor with cooling wax. Some of them still trailed wisps of smoke.
He kneeled next to the circle. A spiral notebook had been left next to one of the candles, and Zane nudged it open with a knuckle. Each page was covered by runes drawn in ballpoint pen. A single brown thumbprint had soaked through the last few pages.
A photo was tucked inside the back cover, which showed a smiling couple at a vineyard, glasses of wine in hand. The man had black hair, blue eyes, a strong jaw, glasses. The woman was a redhead with a great rack.
So which of them had left behind such a mess?
Zane slipped the photo into his back pocket as he continued flipping through the notebook. Many of the symbols that were painted on the wall were also drawn on the pages. He’d take it back to base—might be interesting to the witches there.
The door behind him creaked. Zane spun, raising the gun, and found a man standing in the doorway.
The witch had found him.
His finger twitched. A gunshot ripped through the air, and gray light flared.
Zane hit the floor, unconscious.
James Faulkner had been shot. He twisted his arm around to inspect the damage and found a stripe of brilliant red on his deltoid, where he had been grazed. The matching impact site left an inch-wide hole on the door behind him. The hotel room had taken the brunt of the damage, but damn did that wound sting.
When James had decided to lure a Union recruit to his room in Fallon, he hadn’t planned to end up on the wrong side of a gun. But he seemed to have accidentally picked a guy with a quick trigger finger and nerves of pudding. James was probably lucky that he had only been hit once before knocking him out.
Leaving the unconscious body on his floor, James stepped into the bathroom. It was the only part of the hotel room where he could have lights without risking discovery, so it had become his makeshift study. The bathtub had been converted into a cauldron; spells he had already performed waited for the right moon phase on the countertop.
Two of the other bullets that the kopis had fired were embedded in the plaster behind the showerhead. A third had shattered an empty glass on the counter.
He sat on the edge of the tub and fished a corked phial out of the water. It was filled with a gelatinous silver paste, which he smeared over the flesh wound on his arm. The paste worked quickly. By the time he had finished covering the wound, the redness was already fading.
James returned to the man unconscious on his floor. The healing wound barely ached as he pushed the kopis over to take the photo out of his back pocket.
He smoothed the picture over his knee. Cramming it into a pocket had bent the corner, leaving a line down Elise’s forehead that split her face in half. James crumpled the other side in his fist—the side that he was on.
The kopis stirred. James tucked the picture into his notebook again and drew a knife.
According to the badge on his chest, James’s new friend was named Zane St. Vil. There was a camera mounted on his shoulder rig. James cut it off and set it on top of the mattress. He checked the angle to make sure that it would take in the entire circle of power, then began arranging the items for his final ritual.
Five months of isolation. Five months of working on new magic that exploited gaps left behind by the failure of the Treaty of Dis.
He was ready.
St. Vil’s eyelids fluttered open. “Where…?”
“Quiet,” James said. “This won’t take long.”
“I’ll kill you,” St. Vil croaked.
James shoved his magic into the quartz crystal at the center of the circle, allowing electricity to return to the hotel room.
The battery-powered lantern on the dresser fizzed to life. Yellow light washed over the circle. And a tiny red LED illuminated on the side of the Union-issue camera.
He waited until the light began blinking. Then he cut St. Vil’s face. The blade was sharp; all it took was a flick of his wrist to make dark red blood well to the surface. St. Vil twisted away, but not before James had collected several drops in a shallow bowl.
James fixed his gaze on the Union camera, imagining the audience that would be watching: the commander that had taken over the Fallon base, some witches, security personnel. And, hopefully, Union HQ in Montana.
“Come and get me,” he said.
He removed his magic from the crystal, and the electricity died once more.
James mixed a phial of potion with St. Vil’s blood. It formed a brown, sludgy ink that hummed with power—and it was like the bullet he needed to fill the last chamber of a gun.
While St. Vil continued to groan on the floor, James inked a symbol on a bare patch of skin near his ankle. It wouldn’t be long before the Union arrived to arrest him—about five minutes, if his estimates were correct—but he didn’t dare rush the mark. Every millimeter of every line needed to be drawn precisely. There was no room for mistakes.
St. Vil finally managed to stagger to his feet. The spell should have knocked the man unconscious for sixteen hours or so; the fact that he was attempting to stand at all was incredible.
But he failed in his attempt nonetheless.
James stepped forward in time to catch the kopis before he hit the ground. “Relax,” James said as St. Vil struggled weakly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You cut me!” he said, swinging his fists. It was a clumsy attempt at an attack, but the blow to James’s shoulder still hurt—he had hit the healing bullet wound.
James grunted and forced the man to the floor. “I’m conserving my energy,” he said, leaning his forearm into St. Vil’s throat. “That means I won’t knock you out with magic again, but if you keep trying to attack me, I will stab you. Do you understand?”
There was no understanding in St. Vil’s animal eyes. Only anger. But he nodded.
Slowly, James eased up, then stepped back to the ink made
of St. Vil’s blood. He picked up the bowl.
Weight crashed into James’s back, shoving him against the mattress.
St. Vil had gotten up. Damn kopides and their fast healing.
He drove an elbow into St. Vil’s gut. The man had abs of iron; it was about as effective as elbowing a particularly stubborn rhino.
An arm snaked around his neck, forcing his chin back. St. Vil twisted James’s wrist behind his back.
“You’re making a mistake,” James said, trying to remain as calm as he possibly could while in a headlock. St. Vil only laughed. It was a low, desperate sound. “You have three seconds to release me. This is your last warning.”
St. Vil dragged him away from the wall, scooping his gun off the floor and jamming it into the small of James’s back.
“You fucking cut me,” St. Vil breathed into his ear. “Maybe I should just shoot you now.”
James touched his own wrist. He couldn’t remember which symbol he had drawn there, but he could only hope that it was powerful. And if it just so happened to be deadly…well, he had tried to warn St. Vil.
He spoke a word of power. Magic flamed at his wrist.
The entire wall of the hotel vanished.
Spencer Wallace’s earpiece beeped. It had lost signal.
He stopped the SUV to inspect his earpiece. No matter how many channels he switched, he couldn’t reach the base again.
“Strange,” he muttered, keeping one eye on the street as he toggled the power another seven or eight times. Nothing happened, so he tossed the earpiece onto the dashboard. “Hey, Dante, are you getting anything on the main channels?”
“I dunno,” said the witch in the back, who was playing with his cell phone. Personal electronics weren’t allowed on patrol—or anywhere on a Union base, for that matter—but contraband had a way of sneaking in anyway.
“Turn on your earpiece. See if you can find a signal.”
“You’re not the boss of me, bro,” Dante said.
Ah, the witticisms. The Union had only recruited the best when they picked up Dante Reyes, that was for certain.
“Dude, look at this.” Dante turned the phone around, flashing a photo of a girl squeezing her breasts together at Spencer. “Girlfriend just sent this to me from Tijuana. Look at those tan lines, am I right? Don’t you just want to stick your tongue between those titties?”
Spencer swatted Dante’s hands away. “Check your goddamn earpiece.”
The witch made an obscene gesture at him, but flicked the button on his headset anyway. “I’ve just got the error noise. We must have lost a tower.”
They were almost done sweeping Fallon, but there was no way Spencer would finish the rounds without a direct line to control. Violating line 16c in the recruit’s guidebook was like begging for toilet-scrubbing duty. Besides, he was sick of Dante jacking off in the backseat.
“I’m heading back,” Spencer said.
Dante grunted with disinterest. “What about Zane? Shouldn’t we pick him up?”
“Maybe,” Spencer said, mentally calculating the distance to base. How long would it take for them to realize that they had lost contact?
They could pick Zane up, as long as they were quick about it.
He turned on the hood-mounted spotlights as he crept toward the bar. It was a warehouse-sized brick box at the next intersection, monolithic in the darkness of the night. His lights fell on the dusty windows.
The screen of the GPS navigator fuzzed, and the earpiece’s beeping cut off.
Frowning, Spencer rapped a knuckle on the screen. “Hey, Dante,” he began.
The wall of the bar exploded onto the street.
The blast rocked the SUV, making the suspension squeal. Half of a brick smashed into the windshield. Glass sagged toward Spencer’s face.
Another explosion. The south half of the building collapsed with a roar of shattering brick, and Spencer thought he heard gunfire. Dust billowed over the road.
Dante was out of the SUV in an instant, his girlfriend’s tits forgotten.
“Take cover!” he shouted, crouched behind the wheel his shotgun. His curls were white with brick dust. Spencer shielded his head with his arms as he jumped out of the driver’s seat.
Wooden beams groaned and snapped. The north corner of the bar collapsed with a street-shaking concussion.
Dante peered over the hood of the car. “Oh, shit,” he said, hugging the shotgun to his chest and launching around the bumper.
Shotgun blasts rocked the air. A man screamed, interrupting Spencer’s fumbling attempts to load the handgun he had grabbed from under the driver’s seat.
Was that Dante’s voice? Or was it Zane’s?
Spencer craned over the hood to see what was happening in the bar. The entire street-facing wall was missing, baring the guts of electrical wiring, wooden studs, and plumbing. A waterfall fountained from an exploded pipe on the third floor. The haze of dust made it impossible to make anything out below that.
“Dante?” Spencer called, knuckles white on the gun.
The screaming stopped.
A gust swept over the street, and Spencer coughed into his arm as the debris whipped past him. But before he could shelter in the SUV, the wind stopped, leaving silence in its wake.
He straightened to peer over the car.
Spencer was ready to face anything that might emerge from the wreckage of the bar. After that kind of mess, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the mother of all demons herself strutting onto the street.
But the man standing over Dante’s limp body wasn’t the mother of all demons, nor was he one of her offspring. He didn’t have the pale skin, dark eyes, and weird hair. But Spencer wasn’t so sure that meant he was human, either.
The man wore a pair of jeans with the fly unbuttoned so that they hung loose around his hips, and a shirt hanging open over his chest. Every inch of bare skin below the neck was covered in marks that looked like they might have been drawn by a graffiti artist.
Despite all of the shooting Spencer had heard, he didn’t look like he had a single injury on his body.
Spencer leveled the gun and braced his elbows on the hood. He licked his lips, trying to find moisture to make his tongue work. “You’re under arrest. This area’s been evacuated for weeks, and you’re trespassing.”
Judging by Dante’s limp body, trespassing was the least of this guy’s crimes, but better to start with the easy stuff.
“It will take a small army to remove me from this hotel,” the man said in a cultured voice, almost like a college professor.
“We can probably arrange that.”
“Good.”
Plaster sprinkled from the floor above. Both of them looked up at the same time.
Zane staggered out of a second floor bedroom. Blood coursed down his cheek. Even though he was barely standing, he managed to keep a solid grip on his gun. Zane immediately opened fire on the tattooed man.
Not a single bullet struck him.
Magic flared. The man pointed at Zane, who slipped and cartwheeled through the air.
Spencer didn’t get to see if he survived the landing.
The witch pointed at him, magic flared again, and Spencer blacked out.
III
It wasn’t a particular sound that woke up Gary Zettel, commander of the Union base in Fallon, but a sudden absence of noise.
The Union’s functions were a twenty-four by seven operation, so no matter when you were trying to sleep, someone was stomping around in combat boots. The backup generators were always running, too, so a constant hum shook the walls.
But all of that noise had stopped.
Zettel woke in darkness and took the gun from his bedside. It was already loaded with silver bullets, just in case.
Even with black-as-pitch hallways, it was less than two minutes from his bedroom door to the helicopter landing pad. “Sir,” said Devlin, the kopis on guard. He saluted as Zettel mounted the stairs.
“What’s killed the power?”
he asked. “Why aren’t the lights and generators working?”
“We’ve lost all of the utilities, sir.”
“We have batteries,” Zettel said, opening the helicopter door. He flipped a few switches on the console to see if the computers would come on. Nothing happened. “And the helicopter’s electronics don’t run on utility power. Mobilize all units.”
“Sir,” Devlin said with another salute.
He passed Allyson Whatley on the stairs as he headed down. She was already fully dressed and carrying two travel mugs, one of which she handed to Zettel. She must have been brewing tea before they lost power.
Allyson was the only person at the base that wasn’t living on one of the three round-the-clock schedules. Ever since she had become the lead witch for the Union’s operations in North America, she was on all three schedules, all the time. She didn’t even look rumpled.
“What could cause a total drain of power?” Zettel asked, sipping the tea.
“Angels,” Allyson said. She was the only one who dared not to call him “sir.” It had nothing to do with being Zettel’s aspis. Allyson didn’t say “sir” to anyone anymore.
“Is that the only option? Angels?”
“It could also be extremely powerful magic, the likes of which would require human sacrifice. But most likely angels.”
“It’s too early in the morning for angels,” Zettel said. “How long until we’re due to leave for HQ?”
Allyson checked her watch and rolled her eyes. Guess that wasn’t working, either. “Last time I checked, the ETA on the transport was twelve hours.”
Twelve hours. Whatever was screwing with the power couldn’t have waited until Zettel had already left? “Let’s pin this angel down, and make it fast. Ward the helicopter so we can get going.”
She pulled a spool of ribbon out of her jacket and climbed into the cockpit.
As soon as she began working, Devlin returned with another kopis on his heels. The newcomer was a huge guy, well over six feet tall, and built like a heavy lifter. “Ajax Wright, sir,” Devlin said. “He has information.”
