Midnight Dawn

by Jocelyn Adams

  “Be careful what you ask for, asshole.” Some internal nudging had the lid shifting on my box only enough to light up the patterns under my skin. What had Kyle said before he shut off the security system? Izan couldn’t speak to him, so he must have had the knowledge in his noodle somewhere. Hopefully I had it stored up there somewhere, too.

  Baku clapped his hands. “Oh, so pretty. Show me, then. Show us your power. If you can.”

  If he wanted me to put on a show-and-tell, I probably shouldn’t. Do or don’t, we were screwed either way. “I’m not much of an entertainer, sorry,” I said.

  Baku raised his gun and fired at the young man in the corner who’d fallen to his knees and had begun to pray. He screamed, clutching at his stomach, which gushed blood around his fingers as he fell with a confused look on his face.

  “No! Why did you do that?” I moved toward him, but Baku’s dragon form stretched out and took Asher by the throat before I caught any movement. Choked sounds came out of my sensei, but with only the wraith king’s energy strangling him, he scratched at his own throat trying to pry off the metaphysical noose. How could Baku even do that?

  “Stop it!” I screamed. “Nobody needs to die. I can still get that guy some help. I don’t know what you want.”

  “I want you to become what Izan always promised you would become,” Baku said, the teenage face staring at me while the dragon mantis still manhandled Asher, whose lips were turning blue. “He is content to let you muddle your way into being, but I know you better, so this is me motivating you.”

  Oh God, what do I do? “Please, let him down, and I’ll do whatever you want. You don’t know me. Just tell me what to do.”

  “Oh, my dear, but I know you far better than even Izan. Better than you know yourself. Now, show me your power before lover boy asphyxiates. I give him seconds. The other man is beyond saving, I’m afraid, as we’re not nearly done here.”

  I roared wordlessly at him, my anger and panic ripping away my control. My storm didn’t just rise out of its inner prison, it exploded out around me as if I stood in the eye of a hurricane. I stopped resisting the pull of that power and my need for Asher, set my mind free, and invited his storm to me. When it didn’t come, I crashed into him hard, cracking the walls he used to keep the world out.

  Words in the Machine’s ancient language spilled from my lips. I didn’t care how the knowledge had gotten there as long as it worked, and in a hurry. The king’s cheers echoed through the awesome rush of power in my ears.

  Asher cried out as his energy crashed to the surface. It beckoned to me, tickling along my senses, begging to be with me as I drew hard on him. Unrelenting, I smashed at his crumbling barrier, breaking his storm free.

  Baku dropped him like a hot stone, his dragon head open wide in a silent scream while his flesh suit laughed.

  The swaying woman raised her gun to me while staring at Baku. “What does the Sun do, my lord? I feel her heat.”

  He shot her in the head before she could get an itchy trigger finger. I screamed as she fell back and crashed against a glass display, but I didn’t stop. Now that it had begun, the joining of our storms, I couldn’t stop it. Not that I wanted to. Oh my God. The world turned golden and bright with the kinds of colors I’d never seen before, like Northern Lights refracted through some insanely faceted diamond. Sensations on the far side of pleasure, hot and erotic, burst into Technicolor life within my every cell. Forgetting the horror around me, I felt like I could pick up the planet and spin it on its axis. Or rip Asher’s clothes off and have my way with him right there on the museum floor.

  Feet scrambled against the floor as my eyes fell shut. Asher must have stopped fighting, because one inhalation had me bathed in all that was him, as if his soul had slipped his skin and joined me in mine. God, it was so good. Together we spoke a single word in the old language. Contain.

  A collective wail rang out as we exploded our merged forces into the room. Tendrils of glowing blue energy crawled along the floor, up the walls, and met in the center of the ceiling above us, weaving together like a net. It would become a prison that would keep them from fleeing their hosts and rushing off to find new ones, as well as a shield to hide us from those on the other side who were constantly searching for me. That was the part of the ritual we’d been missing. Where was Baku? The cold knot in my stomach had faded, so he wasn’t inside the grid.

  The calm inside me seemed surreal, and I’d never felt Asher so utterly at peace other than whenever he fondled the item in his pocket. My body didn’t react like it would with my conduit, no energy-merge fireworks, and my tattoos still glowed with only my own power, but it still felt incredible. Without fear, without doubt, I commanded our power to seek out every marble of cold in the bodies around us. Like the pages, the wraiths reached out to greet me as if they’d been waiting an eternity for me to call them, welcoming the final rest only I could grant them.

  Lightning streaked out of me, hitting them all in the forehead as we made the connection. Asher and I spoke another word: banish.

  I flooded the bodies, pushed the wraiths out, exposed them in their true forms, and gave them the first peace they’d probably ever known in their afterlives as their energy broke free and dissipated to wherever it went, out to the stars, into the Earth maybe. Their fear, joy, and relief bloomed inside me as snow covered my outside.

  Totally spent, I couldn’t hold Asher when his presence withdrew from me and retreated behind his control, which came up like the Great Wall of China again. Drowning in sadness at the loss of him, I took a minute to limp back into my own head. He still knelt where he’d been, coated in snow. Breathing hard, he stared forward, confusion scrunching his brow.

  When the rest of the euphoria of having him with me faded, I had a look around for Baku, but it was only Asher, me, and a bunch of wraithless bodies, none of which wore hip-hop shorts.

  I guessed that meant I’d done what the king wanted me to, and that pissed me off. Until I noticed the blood creeping through the snow and remembered the boy Baku had shot, and then sadness crashed over me. I rushed over to the still form and cleaned the snow off him, coughing away a cry when I couldn’t find a pulse.

  I pounded the floor. “I’m so sorry.”

  “The woman’s dead, too,” Asher said. “This isn’t your fault.”

  I scrubbed my hands on the snow, desperate to wipe off the boy’s blood that smeared my palms and fingertips. When all I did was spread it around worse, I came to my feet and jabbed a finger toward Asher. “It is my fault, because this whole thing is on me. I’m the Architect, remember? Even you’re counting on me for more than just intergalactic peace. If I’d done what Baku wanted in the first place, that young guy might have gone back to the hospital and gotten the help he needed.”

  A few deep ones calmed me. I wiped my wrist across my eyes. “What the hell was that back there, huh? You run off into a bunch of guns and leave me standing there? Did it not occur to you how that would affect me after what we went through with Marcus? He almost killed you, dammit, after I risked everything to save you. And don’t bother chewing me out for disobeying an order, because I don’t have to listen to you. Nobody is getting left behind on my watch no matter the cost, so if you don’t like it, you can stick it up your ass.”

  He stared at me, not with the daggers, but with wonder. “I wasn’t planning on becoming a martyr today. I was only going to cause a diversion until you were clear, find out what he wanted you to do, and then I would have found a way out.” Tilting his head in curious slant, he said, “You called my power from across the room without touch and filled my head with words I didn’t even know. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Plaid?”

  “Full of… Why does it always surprise you when I do something right, huh?” I frowned. “Why aren’t you freaked out that a dragon mantis almost choked you out, and why aren’t you telling me off for coming after you or cracking your storm open like a can of sardines? You should be going all whispers-in-the-da
rk threats and crocodile teeth, and you still have that ridiculous look on your face. What would have happened if Baku had ripped your head off, huh?” My heart would shatter, that’s what.

  He glanced around at the now-wraithless bodies and brushed the snow off of his shirt. “I expected you to run or hide, but you didn’t. You’re starting to think and act like a sentinel, an Architect, functioning on pure instinct and nerve. And, anyway, my life doesn’t matter, only yours.”

  My mouth dropped open before I snapped it shut. “You matter to me! Um…I mean, it matters to me.” Gah! I swallowed the acid from my throat as I considered what our future held. It wasn’t really the time, but I couldn’t help it. “I’m guessing your girlfriend is a regular mortal, which means she can’t be your conduit, so who will you match up with?” I knew instinctively it had to be someone he was attracted to on a romantic level. It would no doubt be weird with anyone but her.

  Despite feeling like a dirtbag, I had a violent urge to break someone’s skull—namely any woman who would get close to him.

  He moved toward me, brushing snow off my shoulders while his gaze tracked the path of his fingers. I shivered, and it had nothing to do with the cold. Would it be wrong for me to throw my arms around him like I wanted to? To comfort both of us? Because I got the feeling he needed it as much as I did. Yeah, probably.

  “I’ll take whoever my power and heart choose, as will you,” he said finally.

  It already chose you, stupid, so what do I do now? I could call his storm, but he still couldn’t conduct mine like a true conduit should. I didn’t know how any of it worked, but he’d made it clear he didn’t want me that way, anyway. “I don’t know how to do that,” I said.

  When he frowned at me, I turned my back on him, listening to the deafening silence. “Wait, why is it so quiet?” I asked.

  Baku appeared in the corner of the room from the Shift, clapping. “Bravo, Adaline.” He twisted his head, and as if that movement had flipped a switch, a symphony of sirens from outside filled my ears. He’d done something to block the sound. Stupid jerk! Voices shouted from a few directions inside the building, muted as if they were coming from the floor below us.

  A quick test of the Shift didn’t get me anywhere, so Baku must have closed it up again after he appeared.

  “You might have paid attention to the time between the alarm going off and NYPD response times,” Baku said. “I have a few meat suits with machine guns holding the stairwells, but I think we’ll be leaving our hosts and going now. I cannot wait to see how you’ll get out of this one.” He smiled and offered a mocking bow. “And so it begins.”

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Locking my hand in his, Asher dragged me through the snow and out the door. “The Shift still isn’t answering,” he said. “We have to get back to the window. I’m not sure you left me enough juice to wipe that many officers, and I am not letting you go to prison tonight.”

  I ran beside him, breathless more from fear and the fact that he was touching me than exertion. “I thought Izan’s methods sucked, but I’d take him over Baku’s motivational techniques any damn day. And what about the people we left back there? They’re not going to have a clue what happened, are they? What if they get blamed for our damage? And two of them are dead.” At least the cops wouldn’t see the snow. It was like wraith ashes, I supposed, so it made sense that nobody but us guardians could see it.

  “We can’t help them. Now move!”

  I moved. Stumbled, bumped into him at least a dozen times, but I hauled butt and kept up with him. Go me.

  Once we reached the broken window, I hesitated, afraid he’d pull another hero dash, but he shoved me up onto the ledge and gave a don’t-even-start-with-me glare. By the time I stepped over the jagged sill, he’d climbed up after me. I let my pent-up breath go and shimmied onto the outer ledge. Kyle, Iris, and the artifacts were gone.

  I called out to the Shift again, but it was like nothing was out there but sky and stars.

  Dozens of cruiser beacons flashed over us in the muted light hazing the sky. New York’s finest scurried around the streets below like roaches. How had Baku blocked out the sound like that? And how had he strangled Asher with his energy? Could I do that with mine?

  “Dammit, Asher, this isn’t going to work,” I whisper-shouted. “Look at them all. There’s no way we’re making it all the way over to the scaffolding and down to the ground without being seen.”

  “We’ll make it; just go. And if you hadn’t done something so utterly stupid and come after me, you’d be back at the facility by now like you should be.”

  I tried and failed to burn his face off with my stare before shuffling along, stopping every time a light swept over me. “My ‘utterly stupid something’ worked, didn’t it? How many times have I saved your ass now? Three times? And how many times have you thanked me for it? Yeah, that would be zippo, pal.” I felt like a jerk for reminding him, but I didn’t apologize for it.

  As I made it to the scaffolding, the entire bank of fluorescent lights inside the museum turned on and eclipsed the emergency lighting, spilling two thousand watts out the window.

  Asher flattened himself against the stone on the far side of the last window separating him from me. It might as well have been another hundred miles, and a gauntlet of police with guns still stood between us and freedom. I lay against the scaffolding platform boards, trying to ignore the sick stabbing in my stomach that told me the king had beaten me after only two hours of our apparent race to be badasses.

  An elbow appeared through the broken window to Asher’s left. A radio crackled. Low voices, sharp and precise. Telling the cops below to look up, having spotted the broken pane, no doubt. Bad to worse.

  Lights flooded up from the street. “Do not move,” some guy shouted from the ground, and my imagination was sure I could hear guns clearing holsters. Many, many guns. Yep. Totally FUBAR.

  I lifted my head and found Asher staring at me. “What now?” I asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” he shot back. “You’re the one with all of the bright ideas.”

  “Oh, so now you’re finally getting mad. Be thankful you’re not pushing up daisies. Now shut up, so I can think.”

  A gun in a double-fisted grip slipped through the broken window to Asher’s left. “Come on back inside,” an officer with a gruff edge said with over-the-top lighthearted calm. “In or down, you’ll still find a heap of trouble.”

  Oh crap, oh hell, oh damn. The cop leaned out the window, pistol trained on Asher, raising an eyebrow when he spied me lying on the scaffolding. I swallowed a frantic giggle, so I wouldn’t blurt anything out and get us killed, and slowly raised my hands.

  A commotion followed by heated voices rose up inside. Asher and I stared at each other, and he shrugged.

  “I’ll take it from here, Officer…” A man with a British accent said from inside the window.

  “McConkey,” the one holding the gun said. “And just who the hell are you?” There was a pause, and then he said, “Christ. What do the feds care about a pair of local psychos?”

  “They’re wanted in connection with a rash of crimes across the country, including kidnapping and murder. In fact, I’m sure the officers you sent to search the museum will soon be back with news of the remaining Manhattan Psychiatric Center patients you’re missing, some of whom have probably not survived their ordeal. Now, if you’ll step aside, my partner Agent McIvers and I will take it from here.”

  What? Asher had murdered wraith-infected people to expel their wraiths, before I came along, but those deeds had been covered up, so how did the Feds even know about that? So now we weren’t just headed up the river to the cop shop but to the freakin’ FBI headquarters. Had I broken a mirror or something?

  Officer McConkey dropped the f-bomb, sighed, and disappeared from the window. A second later, another guy wearing what appeared to be a blue Walmart suit covered by a beige trench coat took his place. The
man smiled, and holy crap, he looked just like the guy who played Thor, Chris something-or-other, but without the beard. He had medium-length brown-sugar hair, only his eyes weren’t straight mortal blue but sporting a jade star over a circle of ice.

  A thrill of hope took a dash through me. He was a sentinel, one I’d never seen before. Asher stared first at the Thor lookalike, then at me. His raised brow suggested he didn’t know the guy either. What the hell was going on?

  Thor winked at me. “My name is Agent Phillips. Come along quietly now, and nobody else has to get hurt, yeah?”

  Thank bloody hell. I didn’t care where he’d come from. If he was part of the Mortal Machine, I had to believe Izan had sent him. When I climbed to my feet, Asher said, “What are you doing?”

  “Getting out of here,” I whispered. “What do you think?”

  “We can’t trust him. I don’t know him.”

  “You know what he is, and we’re not exactly swimming in choices at the moment. We’re being thrown a bone here, so unless you have a better idea, we go with the cute Fed.”

  He frowned harder, and I wished I hadn’t said that last part. “You’re mine to protect,” he growled. “Why can’t you let me just once?” That same ferocity from our first encounter with Baku spilled out of him. Afraid someone would cap me before I could reunite him with her, no doubt. He seemed to realize how much pain he’d revealed to me again, shaking his head while his expression faded to blank. “Forget it.”

  I didn’t mean to keep stealing his manly thunder, but now wasn’t the time for that conversation. “We’ll talk about this later. For now, I’m making this call, and we’re going.”

  “Jesus. This is such a bad idea,” he said as I shuffled back along the ledge to him.