by SM Reine
“How long?” Elise had asked him.
He should have told her the truth.
The sound of scraping against the outside of his cell door sent him crashing back to consciousness. He glimpsed a flash of red hair through the window. His heart jumped.
Unfortunately, it was a witch he didn’t recognize that stepped through, not Elise. She was stocky, broad-shouldered, and flat-faced. She addressed the kopis guarding James. “How’s his behavior?”
“He hasn’t done anything.”
And that didn’t seem to bother Rooke. James had pulled out his showiest magic to get arrested by the Union, yet the guard didn’t bat an eye at his sudden compliance.
“Leave,” she told Rooke, and he did.
She took a device out of her pocket. It was some kind of black plastic remote with white marks chalked on the back. She hit a button. The camera behind him buzzed, then clicked, like it was turning off. James had a feeling that the cameras that had been watching wouldn’t be watching anymore.
They were alone. Really alone.
The witch crouched in front of James. “My name is Allyson Whatley. I’m the Union’s lead witch.”
He lifted an eyebrow as he sized her up anew. Lead witch? James wouldn’t have pegged her as anything much more powerful than the witches he had fostered in the Reno coven. When he opened himself to her energy for a second look, he still didn’t find anything that impressed him.
“Pleasure to meet you, Allyson,” he said. “I’m James Faulkner.”
“I know. Tell me about your tattoos.”
“They’re decorative. It’s an expression of my personal emotional turmoil through the beauty of body art. My life’s story in abstract.” James managed to keep a straight face while saying it.
“They’re magic.”
“Oh, are they?”
“Don’t play with me, Faulkner. I could be your friend if you let me. You want me to be your friend.”
James gave a thin smile. “Why would I want a friend that can’t do more powerful magic than what my grandmother used to cast over Thanksgiving dinner?” He expected the jab to hurt. This was a woman with a lot of pride—someone who thought herself to be important.
But she didn’t react to it. Not even a twitch. “You had a half-healed bullet wound covered in paste when we found you. Those spells tattooed on you are powerful. Why didn’t you heal yourself with one?”
“I don’t have any healing spells on my body,” James said.
“But you admit that they are spells.”
“No.”
“Okay,” Allyson said. “Tell me about the demon posing as Elise Kavanagh.”
James’s jaw tightened. He forced himself to stare at the wall over Allyson’s shoulder, trying not to show that she had struck a nerve.
She went on. “We caught it at your house in December. It went to Hell through a Union portal and never came back. Where is it?” At his ongoing silence, she flexed her hands into fists, as though contemplating punching him. “You didn’t come back through our portal, either. How?”
Elise and James hadn’t passed through a Union portal on their way out of Hell because she didn’t need a portal. Elise had become an extremely powerful demon. Dimension jumping was only the beginning of what she would be able to do, if given the chance.
But she hadn’t been given any chance at all.
“Tell me, Faulkner. Where is she?” Allyson asked.
James said nothing.
After a moment, she straightened. “We’re waiting for instructions on what to do with you. You’ll either be executed or studied. They’ll dissect you, skin you, and figure out why your blood sends up every red flag our computer system has.”
“I won’t be harmed. You all want what I have too much to hurt me.”
“What do you have?” she asked.
He tapped a knuckle against his temple with a small smile.
Maybe she would have argued with him more, but she got a distant look in her eyes and put a hand to the earpiece. Someone was talking to her.
“I’ll be back,” she told him.
“I can hardly wait.”
Allyson stepped out, closing the door behind her.
James stood immediately. It wouldn’t be long until Rooke returned to babysit him, and he had no time to waste.
He placed his hand on the wall. Pain flared in the center of his back, and magic followed, seeping out of his bones to ripple through the concrete. The steel bars melted away at his touch. The lights ensconced in steel flickered, buzzed, turned off.
A hallway appeared on the other side, and James continued to funnel power into the wall until the hole was big enough to step through.
As soon as he released the magic, the lights came back on.
He glanced back at the door. Still closed. James straightened his collar, ran a hand through his hair, and tugged his sleeves down to make sure that his wrists were covered again. Then he walked briskly down the hallway, straight-backed and sure.
James made it around the corner before the alarms started blaring.
V
Two floors down and three halls over. James counted the cells as he passed. J Block. K Block. L Block. And then down another floor.
The fluorescent lights turned off, replaced by red emergency lighting on the baseboards. It cast the halls in eerie darkness and made the signs hard to read. He kept walking.
Chatter would be exploding on the Union’s communication channels. Kopides would deploy to search for him in seconds. But it was all too slow. By the time they located James, he would already be on his way out of the compound.
He stopped in front of cell L13 and peered through the window, hands cupped on either side of his face. The alarms had automatically turned off all of the cells’ interior lights. He couldn’t make anything out.
James put a hand on the lever, preparing to magic the lock.
The door whined open at a touch.
Before the Union had “found” James in Fallon, he had stolen one of their cell phones. It had been loaded with text messages about relocating Malcolm Gallagher to Montana HQ, block number and all. He should have been here—cell L13.
But the holding cell was empty.
Whatever happened to Malcolm must have been recent. The cot was rumpled, and a half-eaten dinner hadn’t been cleaned off of the side table yet.
Recent or not, James was too late.
He heard voices at the end of the hall. Pushing the door closed, he jogged in the opposite direction, swearing under his breath. Couldn’t Malcolm make anything easy?
Two floors up, three halls over. The alarms were louder at the higher levels. The glow of a green light led him to an emergency exit at the top of the stairwell. It opened into a cool Montana morning.
A line of kopides jogged along the perimeter a few yards away. James slipped around back before they could spot him. For the first time, he was grateful for the flimsy linen slacks and shirt, a shade of white paler than the eggshell walls of the building. Industrial camouflage.
The loading bay staff must have emptied out when they heard the alarms. Now it was only being watched by one nervous-looking witch who was chewing on her fingernails. She didn’t notice James slipping past the truck parked in the bay.
He climbed onto the platform behind her and eased through the door.
James found himself in a ground-level hallway near the barracks. There were arrows painted on the wall. Left for units six through nine, right for units ten through thirteen. He hesitated at the juncture.
He still needed to locate Malcolm, which meant that he needed an unsecured terminal—and fast.
A voice called out from behind him. “Hey!”
James didn’t look back. He headed right.
A few yards down the hall, he approached a door with a reinforced window. There weren’t any computers inside, but what he found was almost better: a locker room, replete with a couple of open lockers, unattended equipment, and the kind of mess he would
have expected to find in a dorm room.
“Stop right there!”
He glanced over his shoulder. A kopis jogged toward him, still at the other end of the hall.
James slipped into the locker room door, snagged a spare uniform, and slid into a shower stall. He stripped and quickly wiggled into the uniform.
The door opened and closed. Rubber-soled boots squelched on cement as the kopis drew nearer. James’s fingers flew over the uniform’s buttons.
The curtain whipped opened while he was still tucking this shirt into his slacks.
“What are you doing?” The kopis’s nametag said “Yasir ibn Omari.” He was young, handsome, scarred.
“Changing, sir,” James said.
Yasir’s suspicious expression didn’t change. Even though James was wearing a kopis’s uniform, he looked every year of his four decades—the graying hair and rugged features made sure of that. Very few kopides lived that long.
The young commander reached for his Bluetooth earpiece.
James’s hand brushed against of the tattoos on his hip. He mouthed a word of power.
Yasir’s eyes went blank before he uttered a single word.
James caught him, lowering the young kopis to the floor. Then he stole the earpiece, his sidearm, and the key card clipped to his pocket. “Thanks,” James said, slipping the headset onto his ear. Union control’s chatter whispered through the earpiece.
He found a razor on the sink and pocketed it. Then he snagged a jacket hanging off an open locker door, threw it over his shoulders, and walked out. Less than ten minutes after he had entered the locker room, he was out again.
James flicked the edge of Yasir’s key card as he jogged upstairs to the commanders’ rooms. He passed a couple of men hustling in the opposite direction, and he gave each of them a small nod. Nobody stopped him.
There was no room number on the key card, but the doors were conveniently labeled with the inhabitants’ names, like in an office building. He circled the halls until he found the door labeled “ibn Omari” and slipped inside.
The commander’s room had the same miserable, Spartan furniture as every other Union room James had seen: a gun safe in one corner; a bookshelf with encyclopedias, manuals, and other required reading in the other corner; a hard, square sofa between them.
All that he cared about was the computer on the desk.
James sat down. Yasir ibn Omari had two pictures taped to his monitor: the first, a portrait of himself in Marine uniform, and the other of him seated with friends wearing Iranian army uniforms. The second photo gave off a strong sense of camaraderie, of a trusted team, men who would fight and die for one another.
He ripped the picture off so he wouldn’t have to look at it.
James searched through the database. This commander appeared to have limited security credentials; records pertinent to Malcolm’s arrest came up “locked.” He ran queries on other keywords, searching for anything that might tip him off to Malcolm’s location. Punching in the room number only yielded another locked record.
Yasir might not have had access to arrest records, but he did have access to the general Union news feed, which occupied the right sidebar. And an item on the feed caught James’s eye just when he was about to give up searching: “Former Commander Malcolm Gallagher Transferred to Italy Headquarters.”
He clicked through and skimmed the article. In two terse paragraphs, it explained that Malcolm had been tried for sedition and found guilty. Now he was being transferred to Italy to serve his sentence.
“Hell,” he muttered.
James couldn’t let the Union take Malcolm out of the country.
He was just logging off when a reminder flashed on the desktop. Yasir ibn Omari was meant to guard a hall in the southern building from sixteen hundred hours until midnight—a hallway labeled “the Vault.”
The chill of shock settled over him like the icy spray of a frozen waterfall.
James had listened in on Union men discussing the Vault while they patrolled in Fallon. He knew what it was, and what kind of treasures it held.
He typed a short query into the database, and her name came up. It wasn’t a locked record. There was no reason to protect the secrets of corpses.
But she was there. She was in deep freeze.
Which meant that her killer would be there, too.
A ruckus in the hallway snapped him out of his reverie. James noted the freezer number and pressed his back to the wall beside the door. He watched through a crack as a pair of women ran past. They were shouting about an unconscious man they had found in the locker room.
James slipped into the hall and headed downstairs. He glimpsed the young commander’s body sagging between the two women as they tried to carry him to the infirmary.
He turned in the opposite direction and walked calmly away.
Inside, his heart was pounding.
Once James knew what was waiting for him in the Vault, he felt drawn toward it by unseen hands. He drifted through the base, invisible in his uniform, oblivious to the chaos surrounding him.
Voices buzzed on Yasir ibn Omari’s earpiece. Control was panicking. All of the security cameras had gone dead—not just those in his cell, but those around the perimeter, too. They believed it to be his doing. Allyson Whatley’s name wasn’t mentioned even once.
He wondered how much they would panic if they knew that Allyson was the one messing with their security system.
The Vault was in the basement of the main building. The only way to access it was via an endless concrete tube, lit every few feet by bare light bulbs. It was a place of death, cold and hostile and empty.
With all of the manpower directed to the surface, there was nobody to stop him on the long walk.
But the endless hallway did eventually end.
James peered around the corner to see a Union kopis standing in front of a steel door. He was playing on his cell phone with the rifle slung over his shoulder—he’d be easy to drop. But James didn’t need to attack when he was dressed as a commander.
He strode around the corner, imagining himself with the air of intimidation that Elise carried like armor. “What are you doing?” James demanded.
Guilt struck the kopis’s features. He tried to hide the phone behind his back. “What? What are you talking about?” He chuckled nervously.
“Your shift is over. Report to Zettel.”
The laughter turned to a quick intake of breath. “But…”
“Now.”
The kopis rushed down the hall, leaving James alone with a very large steel door.
Pushing up his sleeve, James twisted his arm to look for a particular spell. There was a fireball waiting on the inside of his elbow, a great wind on his forearm, and instant death at his bicep. The unlocking charm was near his wrist.
James touched the spell. The ink burned like a brand pressed to his flesh.
The lock clicked.
He entered a cavern of stainless steel. Rows of refrigerators filled the room, labeled only by incident number—like a cold, gloomy library occupied by the dead. The Union had been busy lately; almost every slot was filled.
The ink had vanished from his wrist, leaving an angry red burn in its place. He hadn’t been able to figure out how to avoid those burns yet. He also hadn’t been able to figure out how to make the ink stay on his body so he could use the spells again. Hopefully, none of the refrigerators would be locked.
James pulled his sleeve over the burn and stepped through the aisles.
The air grew colder as he moved through the aisles deeper into the room. The only light came from the eerie glow of the status lights on each drawer, like fireflies that had died without putting their lights out.
When he reached the seventh row, he knew that he had found her. He could feel it.
James stood in front of a wall of drawers, trying to decide which one he wanted. Three of them were labeled with the same incident number, but their windows were iced over so that he couldn�
�t see inside.
He opened the first drawer. The light turned red, and a chill fog sighed out the sides of the door.
Pale feet emerged first, and then slender legs, narrow hips, and an impressively proportioned organ that made the body’s sex immediately obvious. James’s eyes widened a fraction despite himself.
Well, that must have been Yatam. His body had been severed into two parts at the waist, and the Union had piled his organs between the segments. It was a mess of freezer-burned meat caked with ichor.
He didn’t care about that body. He slid the drawer shut again.
Two to go.
He knew who was inside the second drawer the moment that he opened it. James recognized those feet. He had bandaged her blisters and massaged the muscles when she was sore. He continued to pull the door out, and he saw the familiar shape of her thighs, the bony spur of a hip.
Stop. Don’t look at her.
Yet he couldn’t resist the urge to continue extending the table.
Elise never looked at peace when she was sleeping, and she didn’t look peaceful now, either. Her head was slumped against her shoulder. Her face looked sunken; her skin was gray.
He didn’t pay attention to the mortal wounds marking her flesh. He only saw ice crusting her auburn curls, her frosted eyelashes, blue lips.
James sank to his knees beside her, folding his hands in front of his face.
One arm was placed next to her body, palm-up, glove off. There was no ethereal mark on her skin. She had taken that with her when she died. The other arm terminated at the elbow, and the bone jutted an inch beyond her ragged flesh.
His fingers trembled as he curled them around her remaining hand.
James remembered holding her hand as they ran together, fleeing enemies, pursuing others. He remembered her hand curled into a fist, striking at demons.
He remembered her hand snaking between their bodies, seeking out the warmth of bare flesh beneath his belt. The burn of her lips against his. The low groans she had made as she pulled him tight against her, so close that they might have been one entity.
But that was a different body. A different life.
