by SM Reine
James released her hand and straightened. Even dead, even frozen in perpetual anger, Elise was beautiful.
He pressed his lips against her forehead. Her skin still carried the faint musk of her sweat.
The thought of putting her back in was suffocating—he couldn’t close that door on her again. He stepped back, leaving the table extended.
Guilt remained lodged firmly in his throat as he turned to open the third and final drawer.
The woman inside looked very much like Yatam. Her sexual characteristics were just as pronounced as her brother’s. She had the kind of hips and breasts that would have been well suited to ancient fertility statues: a gently curved lower belly, huge breasts, a small waist.
Yatai also had an angel’s wing at her back, hanging lopsidedly from one shoulder. As he pulled the drawer out the rest of the way, it flopped off of the table, limp and lifeless. The feathers were tattered.
It wasn’t the only stolen appendage. One hand was a different color than the rest of her body. It had scarred knuckles, a bony wrist, and a black mark tattooed on the center of the palm. Elise had spent so long trying to hide those marks that it was strange to see one of them so casually exposed.
James took the razor out of his pocket, turning it over in his fingers as he contemplated that mark. The wicked edges glinted in the dim light of the Vault.
The anger he felt at seeing Yatai with Elise’s hand was as powerful as his guilt.
Yatai had killed Elise. That demon was the reason that James’s kopis no longer had red hair, peach skin, and freckles. Yatai had stolen her hand, bled the life from her body, and left her to rot.
James kneeled by the table. He lifted the human wrist and peeled back the fingers.
And then he began to cut.
VI
Zane St. Vil had been through worse weeks than this one, but not many.
He couldn’t keep up with the doctors when they rattled off a laundry list of his injuries: minor fractures, major fractures, lesions, concussion. None of those fancy words meant anything to him.
When he got back to base, they said that they were going to move him to HQ in Montana, where they had the best medical care. They also said he would get some kind of commendation for helping to arrest James Faulkner.
Whatever.
None of that bullshit changed the fact that Faulkner had fucked with him, and Zane wasn’t a guy that liked to be fucked with.
He thought a lot on the ride out to HQ. There wasn’t much else he could do while strapped to a backboard, of course, but all the thinking was a novel experience anyway. Mostly, Zane contemplated all the things he’d do to that bastard as soon as he got a chance.
Witchdoctors received him when the helicopter set down in Montana. Zane signed a flier, and they cast some kind of weird voodoo over him.
He slept a lot. He had nightmares—more than usual.
When he woke up again, the backboard and splints were gone, and he could stand up to take a piss. The witches said that blood in his urine was normal. He felt dizzy watching the red-tinged fluids swirl down the drain of the urinal.
By the time he got back to bed, there was a personalized letter from Gary Zettel thanking him for his service, folded nicely underneath a medal. A medal. Like a gold star for effort.
Zane tossed both of them in the trash.
There was only one prize he wanted in thanks for his “honorable service”: James Faulkner’s severed dick on a platter.
“Did they get him?” Zane asked Spencer, who had gotten a photocopy of the same letter that Zane did. Of course they had stuck him in a room with that fat bastard. The Union had a sick sense of humor.
“You mean the witch in Fallon?” Spencer asked. He was polishing his medal with the corner of a bed sheet.
“No, the fucking Easter Bunny.”
“I heard that he’s being detained here. The witch, Faulkner—no rabbits that I know about. If you ask me, I’d strongly suspect that they’ll try to recruit him. You saw what he does. We could use that.”
Zane was about as hot on the idea of recruiting Faulkner as he was on the idea of the “good job” medal. But Faulkner was on base. That made Zane’s job a lot easier.
He got out of bed, using his IV pole for support.
“What are you doing?” Spencer asked, glancing nervously around the room like he expected Zettel to appear and court-martial both of them on the spot.
“It’s rabbit season,” Zane said, staggering for the door.
That was when the alarms went off.
Every door in the hospital ward swung shut, and Zane was moving too slowly to get out in time. His fists battered uselessly against the door.
Spencer hauled his fat ass out of bed, too. “What’s going on?”
Zane’s mind whirled with possibilities. Only one of them seemed to be likely, and it didn’t involve any fluffy-tailed woodland creatures.
He watched out the window as units mobilized, pouring from the other buildings in the compound.
“We’ve gotta get out there,” Zane said, opening the cabinets in search of a uniform. He didn’t find anything but a blue bathrobe and slippers. The kind of flimsy crap that was meant to keep him warm in the bathroom, not outside on a wet spring day. Better than going outside with his ass hanging out, though.
“Think about it,” Spencer said. “You’re dragging an IV pole. What are you going to do, beat someone with it?”
Tempting thought. But he had a point.
So Zane waited, watching through the window and thinking murderous thoughts.
He managed to wait for a good half an hour.
Then he noticed one man walking separately from the others. He wasn’t in formation, and he also wasn’t rushing, even though he was dressed like a Union commander in a uniform that didn’t quite fit.
The last time Zane had seen that face, he had been trying to pump it full of bullets.
James Faulkner.
Zane ripped the IV needle out of his hand. Saline and blood spattered to the floor.
“They would want us to stay,” Spencer said.
“So stay,” Zane said.
He pushed the window open and climbed outside.
The hall outside the Vault was still empty when James left. He took the elevator to the surface and exited the facility through the front door. Nobody stopped him.
James had made plans to get arrested and rescue Malcolm, but it got somewhat hazy at this point. He had a glamor tattooed on one shoulder blade that would disguise him for an hour. If he could get on one of the SUVs heading out—or, better yet, one of the helicopters—he could overpower the driver and steal it. Then he could catch up with Malcolm before he got shipped to Italy.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but he didn’t have any other ideas.
James headed for the front gate, hands in his pockets, head down. He passed the R&D building, a garage, the medical ward.
There must have been a thousand cameras on the Union base, and if Allyson brought them back online, James was confident that someone would notice that the escaped prisoner was walking around in stolen clothing. But the cameras must have stayed offline, because nobody looked twice at him.
He slipped his hand into the neck of his shirt, searching for the glamor spell on his scapula.
The squelch of footsteps on damp grass behind him caught his attention. “It is you,” said a man. He was a young skinhead with bulging eyes. Zane St. Vil—the kopis that had shot James at the Fallon motel.
So much for the quiet escape.
He shoved St. Vil into the shadows behind the medical ward. “Be quiet!” James hissed.
St. Vil began to shout wordlessly, trying to attract attention. His eyes bulged dangerously from his skull.
James punched him across the face. St. Vil dropped. More importantly, he shut up.
But it was too late to avoid notice.
“You don’t disappoint, that’s for sure,” a woman said.
James turned. The space
behind the medical building was empty. It looked like some kind of training field, which had become a mud pit after the recent rain. The guards that were swarming the front gates were nowhere in sight.
Allyson Whatley watched from the shadows behind the ward. Her arms were folded, and a spark of smug pleasure lit her face.
James extended his hands to show that they were empty. “You disabled the cameras so I could escape, didn’t you?”
“I can’t admit to that,” Allyson said.
She drew a pistol with a magical rune stamped on the side. It buzzed with power.
“Shoot him,” St. Vil said from the ground.
“Shut up,” she said. She returned her attention to James. “Empty your pockets.”
He tossed Yasir’s badge to the ground, along with the bloodied razor. He didn’t need either of those anymore. But he left Elise’s plastic-wrapped skin in his pocket—Allyson would have to kill him to get that.
“The Union has two lists: first priority and second priority,” Allyson said. “The latter, we want to arrest, detain, interview. The former, we are authorized to execute at the first sign of trouble. You’re on the first priority list, Faulkner.”
With his hands still raised, James touched a finger to his neck. “Then shoot me,” he said, feeling for the mark that he had drawn at the base of his skull.
“Lower your hands,” she said. “Slowly.”
Damn. James obeyed.
“While you were distracted with St. Vil, I activated wards on this patch of lawn,” she went on. “We’re invisible to the naked eye, as well as every camera on base. Nobody will see what’s happening in here from the outside. Nobody will hear anything. We’re alone.”
Which meant that the Union couldn’t intervene in a fight between them.
Allyson was weaker than James, both physically and magically. If she didn’t want the Union to interrupt their fight, then her arrogance was even worse than he expected. Or she knew something he didn’t.
She holstered the gun. “As soon as you’re back in Union custody, you’ll be on the next flight to Italy.”
James stepped to the side. Allyson mirrored him, as though they walked along opposite edges of a disc. St. Vil was still on the ground between them.
“What do you want from me?” James asked.
“Information. What makes you special? Why are you stronger than everyone else?” Her cheeks flushed, eyes wide with hunger. “And how do I take it from you?”
“You can’t have what makes me strong.”
Allyson glowered. “Because you think I can’t figure it out?”
“Because you don’t have the blood,” he said.
She came to a dead stop. “The blood,” Allyson whispered. “The blood. Of course.” As if those two words had answered her every question. “Do you really think I can’t take that from you?”
“Yes,” he said.
James gathered his magic, tapped a spell on his shoulder, and shoved.
It should have dropped Allyson instantly. That amount of magic could have disabled an entire unit of kopides. But she clapped a hand over the black band on her arm, and his magic washed away, dissipating into nothingness.
That had been one of his most powerful spells. It hadn’t even fazed her.
“Well,” James said, feeling uncertain of his odds for the first time.
“My turn,” she said.
Allyson flung her hand out and spoke a word of power.
Her voice rolled like thunder. The earth vibrated beneath James’s feet and rain showered off the eaves of the building behind him.
Then it struck him.
He hadn’t been braced for an attack like that. He stumbled. His skull pressed in on itself, like tempered glass on the verge of fracturing, and his eardrums ached.
James lifted his mental shields quickly enough to keep from blacking out—but just barely. A line of hot blood trickled from his nose and dripped off of his upper lip.
When the pressure vanished, he was left gasping, muscles fluid.
Allyson had spoken a word of power. And she had written magic sewn into her armband.
How?
Not only had Allyson somehow obtained magic—powerful magic, which James shared with no one—she had managed to prevent it from combusting, so that it was reusable. A feat that he had yet to manage himself.
“Well,” James said again.
That was definitely a grin now. Allyson placed a finger on another symbol and pointed at him.
He didn’t wait to see what she unleashed. James touched a mark on his left collarbone, a place that he had drawn a spell of protection.
Allyson’s next hit smashed into his mind like waves beating a cliff in a storm. The pain on his collarbone increased as it burned through the magic within the ink, the skin underneath, the bone.
She lost power before he did. The pain vanished.
James jerked his sleeve to his elbow, touched another mark, and whipped his hand at her.
Heat blossomed from his palm and took form inches from the skin. All of the moisture vanished from the mud beneath his feet. The rain evaporated.
A brilliant fireball, white-blue with heat, blazed from his palm.
Allyson shrieked and fell, rolling her burning arm against the ground.
James’s aim was poor—he had only gotten her left shoulder. But the cloth had been consumed, and so was the skin underneath. It smelled like hamburgers on the Fourth of July.
In her desperation, Allyson cast another spell.
It wasn’t as strong as the first two—hard to concentrate while one’s arm was on fire. But the earth bulged beneath his feet, lifting him like an earthmover had scooped the ground out from under him.
He raised two feet, and dropped.
James’s foot slipped on the rocky debris. He landed on his ass.
St. Vil took the opportunity to pounce. The kopis was on top of him instantly, smashing his fists into him over and over. James shielded his face with his arms.
“Move!” Allyson roared, shoving St. Vil aside. She was smoking faintly. Her arm was limp at her side.
She didn’t give James time to stand.
Allyson slapped a hand to the armband. He spread his fingers across several marks on his bicep.
They cast at the same time.
Their power rocked together. Equal pressure, equal strength.
James shoved with his power, and Allyson shoved right back. He ignited mark after mark. Lightning flashed, energy pulsed, the ground shook. None of them landed. Allyson’s shields were too good.
The nearest segment of fence blew outward, sending metal and concrete showering into the forest. James expected to hear alarms, but none came.
As their magic fought, so did their bodies. James grappled with Allyson, trying to shove her to the ground. He was stronger, bigger, more athletic, yet she was far hungrier for his blood.
Her thumbnail pressed against his eyelid, trying to dig into the socket. He bit her wrist. Allyson jerked back.
She rolled him and ended up straddling his hips. She was even heavier than she looked.
Allyson drove her unburned elbow into his solar plexus. It knocked the breath out of him.
James gasped for oxygen, and Allyson stood, letting him curl onto his side as his diaphragm seized.
She delivered a swift kick to his groin.
Her aim was perfect. It felt like all of his intestines had turned inside out, sucking his testicles into his chest. Heat flushed over him. Nausea filled him from the ends of his hair to the tips of his toes.
James’s finger twitched on a spell written on his bicep. Somehow, he managed to speak.
The magic plunged into Allyson. He felt it connect with the beat of her heart, the flow of blood, the intake of oxygen. The power of the spell built, powered by the fire of her life force.
And then his spell quenched it.
Her eyes went blank. She collapsed.
All of the magic surrounding them was gone instantl
y, leaving nothing but an empty, steaming field and immense silence.
James gathered his strength to crawl to Allyson’s side. She was still breathing—barely. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly.
His earlier fireball had done more than just burn her arm; it had melted the skin on the left side of her neck all the way up to her cheek. She would have been in for a very long healing period if she had survived. But dead women didn’t need to heal. He could see the life vanishing from her.
He still needed answers.
“Where did you learn to write magic like that?” he asked, grabbing a fistful of her charred shirt. It crumbled in his hands. “Tell me!”
Allyson’s lips cracked when she tried to speak. Her voice croaked in her throat.
Her eyes rolled back in her head.
She was dead.
St. Vil sat among the rubble of the earth, staring at James like he was Satan himself. One of the spells must have injured him—blood streamed from his temple.
“You killed her,” St. Vil said.
James wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. It was a cold night, but he was soaked with sweat.
He pulled the disruptor from her pocket. It hadn’t been burned. Very lucky. James put it in one of the pockets of his Union slacks and stood with a grimace.
The hole in the fence spared him from the problem of getting outside the base, but it also meant he didn’t have transport. Getting away on foot would be difficult. Especially since Gary Zettel was probably realizing that he was missing an aspis right at that moment.
A helicopter circled overhead, its spotlight focused on the forest. Now that the explosions of magic had silenced, he could hear rotors, distant shouts, the quiet chatter in his stolen earpiece.
James stood over St. Vil, whose left knee had a strange twist to it. Broken, most likely. It didn’t support his weight when he tried to get up to attack.
“What do you do for the Union when you’re not shooting out windows in Fallon?” James asked. “Can you work all of the equipment in one of those SUVs?”
“You think I’m a moron? Of course I can! I’m a pilot. I can drive anything they’ve got.”
“Good,” James said, pulling St. Vil’s arm over his shoulder. “You’re coming with me.”
