“It continues on this way for five Circles, Initiate and Master,” she continued. “You can intentionally seek out a trial, but often life will bring you one.”
“Like it’s fated?” David asked.
“No…” Kate trailed off. “More like something recognizes what you’ve done and makes you stronger. Some…awareness at the core of the magic. We call it the Deep Magic.”
“And this vampire Mage was one of your trials?” David asked, putting together the pieces.
“I accepted a while back that I was a Third Circle Initiate,” Kate told him. “I’d tried to induce a trial with the College, which usually works if you’re meant to be more powerful. It failed, which meant that an Initiate of Third was all I’d ever be.
“Then came Montreal, and the vampire, and suddenly I was a Third Circle Master—moving from mid-Class 3 supernatural on ONSET’s classifications to borderline between Class 3 and Class 2.”
“I…see,” David said softly. And he did. That sort of change could easily be as shocking in its own way as, say, suddenly finding out you’re a supernatural after thirteen years of adult life.
“When I reported to the College, they suggested I try to induce a trial again,” she continued. “Sometimes, a spontaneously induced trial opens up new abilities.”
Kate met David’s gaze, and to his Sight, her eyes now glowed with azure flame.
“It worked, David,” she told him. “Now I have to learn to master the magic of a Fourth Circle Initiate, and it scares me. And while I’m doing that, ONSET has decided I’m a Class 2 supernatural.”
“Which means?”
“Which means I’m now a candidate to command an ONSET team,” Kate told him. “Hence being left in command while Michael is gone. They’re testing to see if I can cut it.”
“Being in command overnight isn’t a big deal,” David reminded her. “You’d have to find some new and amazing way to screw up to create a problem overnight.”
She laughed and gave him the same small smile he remembered.
“It’s odd for you to be counseling me,” she told him. “I forget that you’re more experienced at the whole cop-and-leader shtick than most of us. I’ve been used to helping you adjust to our job.”
“That’s probably a good sign, you know,” David said. “If you can convince me to accept being an ONSET agent, then I’m pretty sure you can convince ONSET agents to walk into hell. We’re pretty easy to convince to do that,” he added dryly.
#
They were all woken in the morning to the loud chatter of rotors as ten Chinook heavy helicopters descended into the formerly calm alpine meadow. David and the rest of ONSET Nine fell out into the field, dressed in full combat gear by the time the last rotor whirr faded away.
Captain Narita joined them as Michael swung out of one of the helicopters, accompanied by a man who looked in his mid-twenties with bleached-white hair.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” Michael greeted them. “This is Captain Anderson, CO of OSPI’s Special Supernatural Tactics Technology and Reconnaissance platoon.”
“You know,” Narita observed, eyeing the white-haired Captain, “some of us drove up here.”
“Well now,” Anderson drawled, “that’s why we brought the choppers—so you don’t have to drive to the target.”
“Noisy, aren’t they?” Akono murmured, the elf’s dreamy tones managing their usual effect of being heard regardless of volume.
“I’m splitting my Mages up,” Anderson replied in a slow, irritatingly calm accented drawl. “One per chopper should do it.”
David wondered, as he eyed the apparently Texan SSTTR Captain, if the man’s accent was real or put on—and if the man had any idea how annoying it was.
“Does that mean we’re going in?” Narita asked—the scarred Asian pointedly asking Michael and not Anderson.
“We do indeed have a go,” Michael confirmed. “Saddle your people up, Narita. You leave as soon as the Chinooks have refueled.”
Chapter 31
Magically silenced from the outside or not, a Pendragon’s rotors still echoed through the helicopter gunship’s passenger compartment. David and the other members of ONSET Nine sat in silence, only the short, sharp breathing of men and women about to go into combat cutting through the echo of rotors in the chopper’s belly.
“T-minus three minutes,” Akono said quietly over the team’s radio. “Ape Six Actual has confirmed his people are on the ground. Entrances are covered and entry charges are placed.”
No one said anything in response. No one needed to. Outside the window, mountains whipped past them. Inside, David checked the magazines on both his M4-Omicron and his Omicron Silver. Both were seated and full. Holstering the caseless pistol, he checked that the thong on his mageblade was on but loose enough to be quickly released.
“T-minus two minutes,” Akono reported into the silence. “Slowing us down and beginning final approach. If you’ve any prayers left to say, now is the time.”
David glanced around at his teammates. Blank faceplates looked back at him, and he knew that was all they could see of him. While he understood the necessary anonymity of ONSET combat gear, at a moment like this, he wished he could see his companion’s faces—he could see their auras, but that wasn’t the same.
“T-minus one minute,” the pilot said quietly.
“Unstrap and hold on,” Michael ordered, unbuckling himself and rising to his feet as he spoke.
David felt the tension in the small helicopter around him, the scent and Sight of nervous anticipation. They knew what was coming, and they were ready.
“Bringing us in now,” Akono snapped. “One roof entrance—it’s chained and padlocked, Commander!”
“This is a damned gunship!” the werewolf barked. “Blow it open. All units,” he continued, presumably switching to a channel reaching everyone on the operation, “Go.”
The sound of the Pendragon’s automatic cannon opening fire was the opening note in the crescendo of explosions that followed.
#
David hit the roof running, following Michael forward toward the shattered and smoldering hole that had been a locked and chained door a moment before. The heat from the fires still flickering around the staircase they bolted down was palpable even through his insulated suit.
Gunfire echoed up the spiral staircase and David reached the bottom to find the shattered body of a man, still holding the Uzi that had been his death sentence.
Michael was waiting just outside the door in a hallway that stretched away in both directions. Plush brown carpeting crushed beneath the ONSET team’s feet, and expensive-looking textured beige wallpaper smoked around the bullet holes behind the werewolf.
“Split up,” the Commander ordered. “Maintain radio contact, watch your tactical nets. Move!”
David went left with Ix at his side. As they moved, he kicked down the flimsy wooden doors on the left, and the red-skinned demon kicked down the ones on the right.
The rooms were empty. The hallway was filled with well-appointed bedrooms, but the only sign of life they’d seen was the one gunman at the stairwell down from the roof.
As if to put the lie to David’s thought, the sound of gunfire began to echo up from the ground floor. The heavy bark of M4s conflicted with the sharper noise of Uzi submachine guns.
“This is Bravo-Three Actual,” a breathless voice reported over the radio, identifying itself as the leader of AP Six’s Bravo Platoon’s Third Squad. “We have engaged armed opposition—SMGs and automatic rifles. We have them pinned down, but it’s a mutual affair. Estimate fifteen to twenty hostiles.”
David and Ix hit a staircase as gunfire continued to echo through the building. The two exchanged a look, and David gestured for Ix to continue along the corridor they were in. With a nod, the demon moved away, and David took the stairs down another floor.
Even the gunfire didn’t conceal the sound of running footsteps to his enhanced senses, and he broke through the dark wood door
at the bottom of this flight of staircases to face a trio of men charging forward, Uzis in hand.
As guns swung toward him with lethal intent, a moment of shock shook him. For a second, a spasm of fear at being in deadly danger held him, but then his training took over. His Sight warned him to step sideways as the three men fired, the Uzis firing uselessly down the corridor, and then told him where his own bullets were going.
Six shots later, he was stepping over the twitching bodies of the dying men. Part of him screamed in horror, but he ground the screams down as he headed down the hallway in the direction the armed men had come from.
Ten meters behind, a barely closed door was marked with the familiar black iron sun. Grinding his teeth against its wrongness, David shoved the door open and inhaled sharply. While the rest of the lodge had been well appointed, this was something more. The brown plush carpet gave way to a pure mahogany hardwood floor, and David was sure he could see a fur rug just down the corridor. Mahogany hardwood paneling rose halfway up the corridor walls, and the upper half was a continuous woodland mural.
As he moved along this new hallway, careful to be as quiet as possible on the hardwood floor, David realized that there was something plainly wrong about the mural on the wall. The angles and scales of the animals and trees were all subtly wrong. And the sun…every ten feet was another sun, and they were all black.
More running footsteps sounded, and David sank to one side of the hallway, trying to hide behind a solid mahogany table holding a black iron sculpture of what appeared to be an unnaturally skinny man with a sun for a head.
Two more men, these in body armor and carrying ugly-looking bullpup weapons with drum magazines, were hustling along the corridor. To David’s Sight, both had auras slightly tinged with red, marking them as Empowered.
One of them spotted David behind his flimsy cover and fired the weapon as David dove out of the way. A three-round burst of heavy shot obliterated the statue and its stand as David mentally classified the ugly weapons as assault shotgun—highly dangerous.
He returned fire before the second gunman could shoot, his three-round burst shattering the man’s skull. Nerves pulsed in death, and a dying finger twitched around the trigger of his weapon. The first man was blown across the hall into the wall as the heavy shotgun emptied a single shell into his upper torso.
Again, David ground down the sick feeling of having killed and his nausea at the remains scattered across the hall as he charged deeper into this more luxuriously appointed area of the lodge. He used his combat information suite to ping the location to his teammates. There was something here.
Then his hearing, stretched to its inhuman limits to hear anything under the continuing gunfire from the lower floors as more Ape squads clashed with defenders, heard something different.
First, it was only chanting, but as he headed toward the sound, he began to hear the crackling noise of several fires burning. Finally, he reached a large set of double doors that his Empowered senses told him was the source of the chanting.
Slowly, ever so slowly, David checked that he was still getting a feed from the camera on his M4 and slowly poked the barrel and its camera mount around the corner of the door, peering into the room.
It was apparently the inner sanctum of the Black Sun’s temple. The room was set up like a chapel, with six split rows of chairs leading up to a raised stage. Stairs led up either side of the stage, flanking two massive braziers whose flames sparked up to the roof, resplendent in unnatural colors David could See were fueled by magic.
If there’d been anyone in the audience seats, they’d left to help defend the ritual. Five men, all dressed in blood-red robes out of a cheap fantasy horror, stood in a rough circle around a roughly hewn stone. The rest of the room was shrouded in deep red hangings and shining mahogany, and the stone stood out.
It, like the angles in the murals outside the room, was vaguely wrong, and David knew even without his Sight that the rock was the key to the ritual they were performing. The braziers, the unnatural flames, the stone altar and the robed Mages all fit together.
Here was the sanctum where the Black Sun would bring their demon into the world.
#
With a deep breath, David focused, trying to See as much as he could through the mundane filter of the gun-mounted camera. The ritual continued as he slowly picked out the lines of power connecting the robed men to the stone and each other, and the one robed man that was the focal point.
He gently, ever so gently, settled the crosshairs of his M4 on the man’s head as he continued to chant. One shot, and it would all be over. Even if they could retrieve the ritual without its leader, it would cost the Mages enough time for the rest of ONSET Nine to get here.
David hesitated. His disgust at the deaths he’d caused getting here surged up in rebellion. He was a police officer, not a killer. Shooting without warning, gunning down an unarmed man without mercy; these were his enemy’s tools. Taking the shot would take him one step closer to becoming like Carderone—absolutely certain of his right to carry out evil acts.
His finger rested on the trigger of his rifle, and he knew every moment risked both discovery and the completion of the ritual. Slowly, David lowered the rifle a few degrees. He stared through the scope for an eternal moment, and then fired.
The single bullet flashed across the room and smashed into the ritual leader’s knee. The silver round blasted out the front of his kneecap in a spray of blood that splashed over the stone altar as the Mage crumpled forward.
David focused through his rifle, hearing the sounds of confusion and anger in the room. Mages scattered away, raising shields of magic and throwing bolts of fire at nonexistent targets. Now he fired again, and again, more to suppress than to actually do any harm. He had to slow this ritual.
Only his prescience warned him of the man behind him—he never heard the footsteps over the commotion in the sanctum. His Sight warned him of pain, and he spun in place, yanking the assault rifle from the gap in the door he’d been aiming through.
A shaved bald man in a brown robe had stepped out of a hidden door along the corridor David had passed through. The black T-shape of an Uzi machine pistol was extended in his hands, pointing at David as the man pulled the trigger. This time, there was no way David could dodge.
David felt the bullets before they even hit him, ripping through his flesh in both the present and the future, but he held his focus long enough to drop the M4’s video crosshair on the bald man’s head and fire three rounds.
The Uzi’s hammer clicked onto empty just as David’s burst ripped the man’s head apart. David stood frozen, knowing he’d been shot, knowing he was dying.
He fell. The bullets from the Uzi, he saw, had thrown the door behind him wide open, and he watched in horror as the crippled body of the man he’d shot first erupted into flame. The flame shot up from the altar, incinerating the Mage’s flesh, and formed into the shape of a man.
David saw the demon they’d come to stop take form before his very eyes, and knew he didn’t have the time left to warn his comrades.
And then shock took him into darkness.
.
Chapter 32
Michael cursed to himself as the vital signs for David White on his helmet display flatlined. The werewolf had been watching the junior agent’s progress since he’d pinged an unusual find, but he’d also been trying to break Bravo Three clear of their deadlock with the cultist defenders.
“White is down,” Ix said over the radio in clipped tones. “I’m moving to investigate and provide medical.”
Medical assistance was likely to be unnecessary, Michael reflected grimly. According to his suit, he wasn’t getting a transmission from David’s health monitors. The younger man was almost certainly dead.
The momentary distraction almost proved fatal, as Michael took one step farther than he planned—past the end of the wall. He found himself staring at the backs of over a dozen brown-robed men and women with automatic w
eapons, several of them turning to him.
The werewolf jerked his assault rifle up and opened fire, emptying a thirty-round magazine of silver bullets across the hallway before diving across the hallway to take cover on the other side.
Gunfire echoed after him, followed by screams, and then silence. In the moment of calm, Michael realized he’d been shot. At least three bullets had gone through him, and two more were still inside him.
With a grunt, the werewolf focused and slowly forced the two remaining bullets out, thanking whatever deity happened to be listening that these idiots weren’t using silver. Regeneration complete, he poked his reloaded assault rifle around the corner.
The brown-robed men and women were down. Most, by their scent and lack of motion, were dead. Bravo Three had followed up his surprise rear attack with an assault of their own, and their medic was giving rough and ready first aid to the handful of cultist survivors.
The squad leader, an older man whose features were entirely obscured by the large and ugly black glasses of his combat gear, crossed to Michael.
“Most of the resistance seems to be dying down,” he reported. “We got the ping from your man. Do you need support at the target?”
“My man is down,” Michael responded sharply, his HUD still showing the blinking icon of David’s location. “I’ll take whatever support I can get.”
“Understood,” the sergeant confirmed. “Kabongo, Culligan, stay with these idiots. Star, you’re with us. We’ve got a super in need of first aid.”
The medic left the hastily patched-up survivors to the pair of soldiers detailed to watch them and joined up with the rest of the squad as they formed up around Michael.
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 26
