by Nazri Noor
The far walls of the room, which was about the size of a tennis court, were shrouded in darkness. Perfect for a getaway, I thought, should the need arise, but considering the vast, aching emptiness of the house, it seemed unlikely. The walls were absolutely covered in trees and greenery, which thinned out as they approached the middle of the room, the centerpiece of which was a trellised gazebo.
Vines snaked in and out of the gazebo’s bare wood latticework, giving it the appearance of a large canopy overgrown with leaves and flowers. Also grapes. Lots and lots of grapes, enough that I could imagine the party overflowing with tittering serving girls. A whole squad of them, gliding around in flimsy togas and hand-feeding grapes to guests, like a good old Roman orgy. A bacchanalia.
And who was to say that we could discount that, exactly? Especially since the interior of the gazebo was so well shrouded. Great swathes of light, flowing silk draped over every entrance to the tent, affording some privacy. They moved gently, drifting as languidly as the rush of the water fixtures that had been installed to resemble the flow of a small stream.
These people were crazy. They’d paid for this ballroom to be stripped out and terraformed into a veritable Garden of Eden. There was soil here and everything, the tiny stream running around the gazebo driven by motorized pumps hidden among the bushes. I had to admit, there was something relaxing about the sound of the artificial brook babbling its way around the room.
“Whoa,” I said, or thought, rather, transmitting to Vanitas. “Are you seeing this?”
“Yes.” I had no way of explaining how that worked, either, but maybe it was part of how the sword could sense his surroundings through his host human. Hah, did I say host? Slip of the tongue. Vanitas wasn’t a parasite. I meant to say I was his wielder. “And I don’t like it one bit,” he said.
“What do you mean? I kind of like it. Sure, it’s totally insane, but someone clearly spent a ton of money to do this place up. Seemed like a fun party, and – ”
“Dust. Shut up. You don’t smell that?”
I wrinkled my nose. Now that we were closer I could pick up hints of all that wine Vanitas was talking about. “You mean the twenty-thirteen Napa you were bragging about?”
“Not that. The blood.”
What? I stooped closer to the ground, eyeing the shadows closest to me, just in case I needed to make an exit. That’s my talent, the reason I tend to specialize in infiltration and artifact retrieval. To the casual observer, shadowstepping looks unglamorous. All that happens is that I disappear into the darkness, then reappear somewhere else. I can assure you, however, that the in-between that involves moving through the Dark Room is anything but pleasant.
Beats me how I can do that stuff, but it all started when someone stabbed me through the heart, something which forced the latent magic in my bones to bloom. Now I can enter a dimension full of shadows, and as I recently found out, bring that same dimension into our reality, with extremely bloody results. Though that second part hurts like a motherfucker, which is why I try not to do it too much.
I discovered that my own murderer was the woman who used to be my old boss, and the man I thought was the bad guy was now my new boss. It’s less complex and way more interesting than it sounds because I ended the whole ordeal alive, in possession of a badass flying sword, and handsomer than ever. Did I mention that the sword could fly? Because in addition to talking, it could fight on its own and cut things up into tiny, bloody little pieces. Insane story, I tell you, someone should have written a book about it.
Still, a jaunt through the Dark Room beats getting stabbed in the back. Or the chest. Again.
“Watch my back,” I said. “Keep an eye out.”
“Very funny, asshole.”
But this wasn’t funny to me, not at all. It was too similar to that one night some months ago, when I had discovered a wealthy couple – the Pruitts – murdered in their own home. That, and a dead god, but that’s a whole ’nother mess. Point was that I’d had prior experience with finding corpses when all I was out doing was trying to steal an enchanted artifact or two. How dare these people have the nerve to bleed to death in my general vicinity when all I wanted was to relieve them of their priceless bewitched belongings?
Sorry, terrible joke. I have to be honest though, Vanitas’s little warning was gnawing at me. That was how I found the Pruitts after all, by smelling, almost tasting their blood on the air. I trusted Vanitas enough to be able to detect that sort of thing. Hell, it would have been stupid not to. His hilt kept pressing into my back as he guided me like a dowsing rod. Just past that curtain, he seemed to say, pointing me towards the gazebo and its billowing drapes.
My foot sank into the earth, and my heart thumped. It was wet here, but not because of the artificial stream. I bent closer, daring to sniff at the soil. Wine, and the dirt was getting looser and muddier, meaning that the source of the liquid – the Chalice, no doubt – was somewhere inside the tent.
I shook the mud off my foot, cursing to myself. Sure, I could buy nicer things now, but my sneakers weren’t a dime a dozen. Though I couldn’t help thinking that there were more pressing matters. The smell of blood, for example. By rights I should have been anxious, on the verge of panic, really, but I knew that some part of me was still in denial. I’d seen enough death in recent times, and I couldn’t be so close to more of it. Could I? Not in a place like this, so tranquil, a garden of delights with its stream of cool water, and a second stream of wine.
Then a man burst through the curtains, screaming, blood on his face, his hair bedraggled, crazed eyes bulging. He was naked, his torso smeared in red. It wasn’t body paint, that much was clear. He clutched and pulled at his hair as he shrieked, his voice going louder and hoarser as he found me, as our eyes made contact. The man exposed his teeth – white, but streaked with gore – and charged straight at me, his fingers gnarled into a claw that stretched for my throat.
I panicked. No time to shadowstep, so I did the next best thing. Twisting out of the man’s trajectory, I let him come to me across the wine-slicked mud at the base of the gazebo. His screams didn’t let up as he slipped in the soft earth, but I aimed a kick at his shins for good measure. He went down heavily, collapsing face first, but the fall barely impacted his momentum. The man scrabbled at the earth, pushed himself to his feet, and with renewed, insane fervor, ran screaming for my throat once more.
Drugs. Had to be. Guy couldn’t be drunk. I didn’t care how much wine went down this psycho’s throat, even if he chugged it straight from the Chalice. No one gets that violent just because of alcohol, and he would have stayed down after that first trip. I watched him cautiously as he ran, my eyes flitting for the right shadow to enter –
When the leather straps securing the sword to my back snapped apart. I froze as the blur of verdigris and bronze sailed past me, the red garnets embedded in its hilt flashing as it rocketed through the gloom.
“No,” I shouted. But Vanitas kept flying straight at the man’s throat.
The last time this happened, Vanitas bulldozed dozens of shrikes, these horrible, multidimensional creatures made out of masses of tentacles and way too many teeth. Before that, just minutes after I met him, he cut a man’s hand off at the wrist. This wasn’t going to end well. I ran after Vanitas, wondering what I could possibly do to stop him, when I noticed at the last moment that he hadn’t unsheathed himself.
The wind sang as Vanitas swung from a fixed point in the air, cleaving a gold and green arc. Sending a crack through the room, the blunt edge of the sword’s scabbard collided with the crazed man’s face. The loud crunch and the spurt of blood from his mouth told me he was losing at least a couple of teeth in the bargain. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head as he fell backwards into the muddied earth.
“I thought you were going to kill him.”
Vanitas, still in his scabbard, scraped himself gingerly against a clump of grass, smearing away the man’s blood. “He clearly was not in his right mind. Besides, it’
s not like I’m trying to get you in trouble on purpose.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“And we might have a chance of questioning him when he wakes up.”
“Unless you knocked his brain out along with his teeth. Does he even have his tongue still?”
“Hush,” Vanitas said. He hovered closer, floating at my waist level, blade upturned. “The cup. Where is it?”
That’s right. I parted the curtain at the same side of the gazebo where the drugged-up dude had emerged. Vanitas stayed close, which filled me with some small comfort. Who knew if there was another one of these lunatics hanging out in there?
Turns out there wasn’t. They were all dead.
“This is bad,” Vanitas said.
Bad was an understatement. The inside of the gazebo was decorated with the same mix of plants and silks as the outside, all formed around a small, shallow pool that had been built in the center. The Chalice of Plenty lay on its side, half-submerged, half-floating in the slow but steady tide of deep red wine that poured from its lip. The wine spilled over the edges of the pool, rendering the soil around it soft and muddy.
In the mud, and partly in the pool, lay all the corpses. A dozen from what I counted, naked men and women, their bodies marked with hideous red gashes. The tips of their fingers and their nails were a macabre crimson, as if they had clawed each other – or themselves – to death. Worse still was how some of the corpses had ecstatic smiles frozen on their faces, mouths in grins, their dead eyes glassy.
At least the ones that still had eyes, that is. Some of the grislier corpses had ripped their own eyes out. I held a hand up to my nostrils. Rot was far from setting in, but the sheer number of open wounds and the volume of gore made the gazebo stink of copper. Blood mingled with the wine spilling out of the Chalice, seeping into the mud. This wasn’t an orgy. This was a massacre.
Vanitas spoke again. “We should go. Now.”
“But what about the dead? What about the unconscious guy outside? We need answers.”
“We came for the Chalice, and we’re leaving with it. That’s what Carver wanted. Besides – we’ve got company.”
Weird noises emanated from far outside the gazebo, close enough that I knew they were coming from inside the house. I froze in place. Cops? Interlopers? No. Worse. I recognized those sounds, those characteristic hums and pops and squelches of human bodies materializing out of thin air. Teleporters.
The Lorica.
“You’re right,” I hissed. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”
I ran for the pool and grimaced as I waded in, the grotesque cocktail of gore and grapes filling my shoes. They were permanently ruined, but I didn’t want to know how much more screwed I would be if those people outside discovered me in there. I swiped the Chalice, the vines twined around its stem gone red from blood and wine.
Behind me the curtains rustled. I didn’t turn to look, and whoever it was didn’t have a chance of catching me, anyway. Too slow, bro. I ran into the darkness under a palm tree. Clutching Vanitas close to my chest, I leapt into the shadows, and into the Dark Room I stepped.
Chapter 2
“And that’s when the Wings showed up. A whole bunch of them, from the Lorica.”
All eyes were on me as I spoke. This was serious business, everyone knew, and Vanitas and I were lucky to have gotten out when we did. The hideout was as quiet as a tomb, but what else was new? Carver liked to keep things silent and still, and as boarders, Sterling, Gil, and I could only play along. I mean, I didn’t hate it. I kind of like when it’s quiet.
I’d once been tricked into believing they belonged to a death cult known as the Black Hand. I’d learned two things since then. One, that the Black Hand didn’t actually exist, and was just something made up to manipulate me. Black Hand? More like red herring, am I right? And two, these guys were actually mostly okay. Mostly.
“They knew that quickly?” Gil rubbed his chin. Swarthy, muscular, Gilberto Ramirez was the resident werewolf. Nice guy, actually, stolid, levelheaded, and neat, except, obviously, when there was a full moon out. “Why were they after the Chalice?”
“They knew as much as we did.” Carver drummed his fingers against the sparse wooden table in what passed for our combination break room and mess hall, his myriad rings gleaming. Carver was our boss, landlord, and mentor all in one, and we each of us had reasons for being indebted to him. “The Chalice poses a danger to those around it. Say what you will about the Lorica, but it serves its purpose.”
The Lorica were my former employers. As the premier organization of mages in North America, they took it upon themselves to regulate the use and exchange of magic and magical items, ensuring that it stayed out of the wrong hands. An artifact that drove those around it to murder certainly qualified as something that needed regulating.
Sterling – the vampire, you might remember – leaned over the table, an unlit cigarette dangling loosely from his lips. His leather jacket was so snug that it squeaked as he moved, wrapped tightly over his frame. Slender as he seems, though, Sterling is packed with supernatural strength, just one of the reasons Carver liked to keep him around. “How many Wings?”
“Hard to tell,” I said. The Wings were the Lorica’s teleporters, mages who specialized in transporting themselves and others across vast distances. I was a Hound when I worked for the Lorica, which meant that I was tasked with infiltration and intelligence. I couldn’t take people with me when I shadowstepped, which meant I never qualified as a Wing. “Does that matter now, anyway? I’m sure they brought Hands with them, which is much worse.”
Hands were probably the most dangerous of all the members of the Lorica, mages with talents specifically geared towards combat and destruction. They hurled fireballs, created electrical storms, shot razor-sharp shards of ice out of their hands – crazy lethal stuff.
Technically the Scions – the Lorica’s elders – would be the deadliest, but they’re so rarely seen on the battlefield, except for that one time they were forced to fight when my former boss Thea ripped open a portal to another dimension. Long story. Like I said, someone should have written a book about it.
“So let me get this straight,” Sterling said. “The Lorica knew all along about this mug thing.”
“Chalice.”
“Sure. Chalice. And now we have it here.” Sterling gestured at the cup, looking all innocuous on the wooden table, and not at all like the epicenter of murder and debauchery it had been just hours ago. “Which means the Lorica’s liable to kick our door down any minute to take it from us.”
Gil folded his arms and grunted. “I’d like to see them try.”
“Gil’s right,” Carver said, taking the goblet by its base, rotating it a few degrees, tilting it to study its sculpted rim. “Our home is warded. Their Eyes can’t see us here.”
Eyes, of course, were mages who used scrying to track down anything or anyone the Lorica deemed useful. Seriously, the Lorica had an answer for everything, and just as well, since it was structured like a corporation, or somewhat more disturbingly, like a government agency. But I believed Carver. The man – if he was a man – was likely the most powerful sorcerer I’d ever met. All I knew was that he had somehow lived for centuries, and that he was responsible for creating the hideout we lived in, possibly quite literally carving it out of empty space. I’d wondered, briefly, if that was why he called himself Carver. It was an obvious alias, after all.
But about the hideout. The only way to access it was through a portal installed in the brick wall set by a service refrigerator in the kitchen of a Filipino restaurant somewhere in the Meathook, a shitty and hilariously unsafe district of Valero, California. Yes, that’s extremely specific, and just as well. The hideout wasn’t located in regular reality, as it were, but a kind of pocket dimension that Carver had assembled himself, like real estate that he had created out of thin air.
It was mostly dim, lit by enchanted flames hidden away in alcoves or hovering above torch brackets. Everythi
ng was hewn out of smooth stone, from the floor to the pillars to the massive skeletal statues that adorned the dimension’s every corner. It had the look and feel of a mausoleum, as well as the deafening silence of one. Fortunately, though, through whatever kind of sorcery, Carver maintained a comfortably toasty temperature throughout the entire structure. It was pretty considerate to the dimension’s human occupants – me, basically, and Gil when the moon wasn’t full. Our rooms even had windows that let in sunlight, somehow mystically piped in from its source. Sterling’s room, for obvious reasons, had no such windows.
Carver, whatever he was, never seemed to need to eat or drink, or even sleep, for that matter, but he was kind enough to provide facilities for those of us who needed to. Our break room-cum-mess hall served as a dining area and kitchenette. It was weird to look at, just an oven, a sink, a dishwasher, and a few fundamentals like a microwave and a coffee machine set on top of a bunch of counters, all of it suspended on a stone platform that was surrounded on all sides by total darkness. Most of the public area of the hideout had no walls, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner had to be enjoyed in what essentially looked like the cold vacuum of space. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a bowl of sugary morning cereal while staring off into a pitiless void.
Sterling was typically left to his own devices. We never asked what it was – or who it was – that enabled him to feed, only knowing that he slunk off every night to look for nourishment. To my dismay, it looked like he had discovered some new source tonight. He had set his cigarette aside and was fiddling with the Chalice, turning it this way and that, then finally discovering how to get it to work, tipping it on its end. With preternatural speed Sterling brought the rim of the cup to his mouth as a rich, viscous red fluid began its slow drip.
“Oh, gross,” I said.
Gil tutted. “So inappropriate.”
