by SM Reine
Someone like Konig?
“Interesting,” Luke said.
“When I ran, Marion was holding down the werewolf assassin. He might have seen her attacker. He could have more information.” Nori took a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. “I drew the assassins in case you’d like to be able to find them.”
Luke smoothed the paper out on his thigh. Nori’s inherited ethereal talents clearly didn’t include drawing. But the assassins had a few distinguishing features, even in the horrible illustrations. For one, the werewolf had a twisted nose and unusually squinty eyes. The other assassin was clearly a megaira, a demon who fed off of mortal aggression.
How many werewolves would be working with something as rare as a megaira?
“Why didn’t you take this to Marion?” Luke asked, tucking the drawing into his jacket.
“I hadn’t seen her since running from Original Sin, and she’s not all there anymore. She looks different now.”
“Different how?”
“It’s her attitude. She’s more casual with Konig than she was before. Their relationship has always been tumultuous—they all but shake the castle down when they argue. When I saw them at the archery range today, it was the sweetest they’ve ever been with each other, at least where I can see. And I see a lot.”
Luke was feeling worse and worse about leaving Marion behind with Konig.
“I didn’t know what Marion would do with that information now. She’s clearly a few pages short of a novel,” Nori said. “But you—I’m sure you could make use of it.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re you,” she said. “Your power is incredible.”
“I’m not following,” Luke said.
She started to respond, but he lifted a hand to cut her off.
There was movement at the back door from the hospital.
Charity Ballard emerged with a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. It must have been the evidence that Luke had requested from Oliver Machado’s home. Luke hopped off of the pickup to meet her.
Then Oliver Machado himself emerged from behind Charity, and Luke froze.
“Shit,” he said, drawing his gun.
Ollie pushed Charity into a sedan. He glanced around furtively before getting in the driver’s seat, and then pulled away.
“Nori—get in the pickup,” Luke said. “Now.”
* * *
Oliver was in a low-slung sedan, the kind that might have had hydraulic suspension and disco lights on the inside, and Luke was in a lifted pickup. Chasing the nurse through the forest should have given Luke a major advantage. Luke kept waiting for Oliver to high center so he could come up on his ass and save Charity, but Oliver seemed to have preternatural driving skills in addition to sidhe magic.
Nori had gone colorless, gripping the dashboard with both hands. Tearing around the forest off-road tossed her around the cab. “Who are we chasing?”
“Oliver Machado,” Luke said. “Name ring a bell?” Nori shook her head mutely. It looked like she might get carsick. “I caught him using unseelie magic.”
“He’s not sidhe,” Nori said.
“No. Gaean.” Luke wrenched the wheel ninety degrees, launching them over a bump. They caught air. Slammed into the soil. “Does the court have affiliations with any covens on Earth?”
“I don’t know, I’ve only been embedded in the court to facilitate inter-faction communications, and—good gods can you please slow down?”
Not until he got Charity.
It was Luke’s fault that she was in that other car, getting tossed around like Nori was. Except that Oliver was a hell of a lot likelier to hurt his passenger, and he’d do it deliberately.
Brake lights flashed on the rear of the sedan. Luke slammed his foot on his brakes. The pickup bucked.
Bumpers kissed—just enough to shove Ollie’s car a couple inches.
They came to a stop in the deep forest on the edge of a grassy clearing. It was unremarkable. Worse than that, it was remote. Somewhere they wouldn’t have to deal with witnesses.
Oliver emerged with his arm hooked around Charity’s throat, dragging her kicking legs through the driver’s side door. The pickup’s headlights cast bright circles on them from the hips down.
Luke jumped out. He aimed his gun at Oliver, just over the edge of the headlights—right about where his heart would have been. “Let her go!”
Oliver pressed a gun to Charity’s temple. Poor Charity Ballard was shaking more than a Chihuahua abandoned in a hurricane. “Throw the duffel bag at him, Charity,” Oliver said. She tossed the bag to Luke’s feet. Strong arm, good aim. “Go ahead, doc. Look inside.”
Luke’s gun didn’t waver. “What do you think you’re doing, man? Why’d you bring us out here?”
“The circle,” Oliver said. “Look at the circle.” He jerked his head back, toward the other end of the clearing.
For the first time, Luke looked beyond the nurses.
Between sunset and the blanket of gray clouds, the clearing was dark enough that the grass was a murky gray blob beyond Oliver’s feet. Luke could only see within narrow half-circles of lights on either side of Ollie’s shadow.
There was a circle burned into the grass, sort of like a crop circle. Rain and time had faded it.
Luke still recognized a circle of power.
“This is where I found her—that angel kid,” Oliver said. “Do you recognize the marks?”
Luke didn’t. They weren’t like the runes he’d seen at Myrkheimr or in Ollie’s spell pages. “Get away from Charity right now. Slow movements. Don’t make me shoot.”
“Come on, doc,” Ollie said. “Don’t be like this. Just…do what you’ve gotta do. You know you have to.”
He legitimately had no idea what Ollie was talking about.
Maybe the nurse didn’t know who Luke was after all.
That was a problem. It meant that Luke couldn’t give the crazy bastard what he wanted, and Charity looked like she was about to faint from the nerves. If she dropped, Luke couldn’t trust that Ollie’s trigger finger wouldn’t twitch.
“I’m going to count to five,” Luke said. “One. Two—”
Ollie screamed. Blood sprayed.
The movements happened so fast that Luke thought, at first, that Ollie had shot Charity. But there was too much blood for that—fountains of dark arterial blood. The scent of it was overpowering, and it sprayed so wide that it splashed on his shoes.
Luke jerked back, eyes widening, nostrils flaring.
The blood wasn’t Charity’s.
Oliver collapsed, and Charity rode him down, fingers gripping his shirt and knees on either side of his hips. He fired his gun into the air. He didn’t hit her.
Only then did Luke realize that Charity was ripping his throat open.
He was numb, motionless, as she sank her teeth into the meat of his neck and snapped her head back, ripping the esophagus free. Another spray of blood. Another scream. This one gurgled in the shredded remnants of Ollie’s throat.
Charity didn’t seem to appreciate the sound. She smashed her hand into his face, collapsing his cheekbones. And then she smashed again, wrenched the bottom of his skull off. His shrieks grew louder.
She bit down on the meat of his tongue and scraped it out of his jaw with her teeth.
His eyes rolled under all the blood. His chest hitched.
Luke could only stare as she picked the shreds of tongue muscle free, swallowing them down with greedy slurps. He knew he should have been shooting at someone—something. But he was transfixed by the blood. The screaming.
Charity dug her fingernails into Oliver’s neck and with a single, swift motion, decapitated him. She lifted his severed skull above her head. A few vertebrae from his spine dangled, framed by strings of tendon. She dribbled the remaining blood into her mouth.
It dwindled to drops. She tossed his head aside.
Charity straightened from his body, licking her hands clean.
Luke wondered
if it was finally time to shoot her.
“Sorry,” Charity said. It seemed as if bathing in Oliver’s blood had relaxed her more than a chair massage, like the kind that local therapists occasionally donated to hospital employees. She swiped her wrist over her face, smeared the blood away from her eyes, and heaved a sigh. “I got tired of having the gun to my head.”
Luke stared, unable to speak.
Nori covered her mouth with both hands and screamed.
* * *
Charity Ballard’s second shocking maneuver of the night was to strip naked where she stood, right there in the middle of the clearing, about two feet away from the remains of Oliver Machado. She was muscular under her scrubs. Luke had never noticed that before. He’d always thought of her as mousy, hiding behind those big glasses and thick hair.
Turned out the mouse was actually a lion.
“Revenant.” She toweled the blood off of her bare body. “I’m a revenant.”
“That’s a kind of vampire, isn’t it?” Luke asked. Of all the gaean species, he had the least exposure to vampires and their various subspecies.
“Closely related, like a cousin.” She rubbed the towel under her breasts, jiggling them with the motion.
Luke politely didn’t look. “I can’t believe a revenant got through hospital background checks,” he said to the cloudy sky.
“I don’t drink blood. Self-control like a monk at a strip show.” Charity propped one leg up on the tailgate of Luke’s pickup and wiped blood off of her inner thigh. “And the OPA doesn’t know I exist, since I never registered for benefits, so…”
“There was nothing to show up on a background check.”
“I graduated from nursing school before Genesis. When I came back like this, I didn’t want to have to change careers, so I’ve just abstained. It sucks, but you do what you gotta do.” Everything about Charity was different now that she’d guzzled Oliver’s blood. Her voice was deeper and more silken, her skin glowing, her hair smoother. “You know what that’s like, the blood abstinence thing.”
Luke couldn’t help but glance at her. She hadn’t gotten the blood off of her thighs so much as smeared it around. “Excuse me?”
She tossed the wrecked towel into the back of his pickup. “I’ve seen how you stare when we’re doing transfusions, so I thought you were like me.” She lifted her hands defensively. “Not judging. I stare too.”
He gave a hollow laugh. “It’s not because I’m a vampire. I just don’t like blood.”
“It seems like you’re not alone.” She waved at Nori, who was curled into a shivering ball near the front of the pickup. “Sorry!”
Luke pulled a spare set of his clothes out of the pickup and handed them to Charity without looking. “I never should have called in that tip,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought I was protecting you.”
“What tip?” Luke asked, keeping his eyes fixed on the sky.
“About your patient,” Charity said. “Marion? I saw an ad in the white pages with her picture. People were looking for her, and I thought…” She trailed off. “Anyway, Ollie showed the ad to me. I didn’t think about it much. I just called.”
That explained how the assassins—and Konig—had known to look for Marion in Ransom Falls. It had been Oliver and Charity. At least Charity looked like she felt bad about it, and Oliver had already gotten what was coming to him.
“You can turn around. I’m done dressing. But I’ll need a shower to get this out.” Charity plucked at her sticky hair and giggled nervously. “I can’t believe I did that.”
“I can’t believe you did either.” It was hard to pretend to be upset over it, though. Luke only felt a strange hollowness—the sensation of the universe shifting again, though in a less pleasant way than when he touched Marion. “I didn’t get any answers before you killed him.”
Charity toed the duffel bag. “There are all the answers you requested, assuming that the Brianna who called me really is your friend.”
“She is.” He kneeled and unzipped the bag.
The nurse had scooped a lot from Ollie’s house before eating his tongue like a mussel. The bag was stuffed with his laptop, trinkets from an altar, and a bong, which she must have mistaken for an occult item. She’d even grabbed the burned remnants of the pages left from the teleportation.
And, of course, the spellbook.
Luke carefully extracted it. He was surprised to see that the cover was heavy wood bound in leather. The inside was more typical of post-Genesis witches: cheap paper with notes printed by an inkjet. The cover was a hand-me-down from some kind of multigenerational coven. The rest was hacked together from the darknet.
He cradled the heavy text in the crook of his arm as he wandered over to the circle of power. He sidestepped Oliver Machado’s remains. Not out of respect, but because he didn’t want to track blood around the clearing.
“You’re not scared of me,” Charity said from behind him.
He glanced back at her. “Huh?”
She pulled her hair back with a rubber band. Once the bloody strands were hidden, and with her body concealed by Luke’s baggy clothing, she looked like herself again. Just a nurse on her day off. “You just saw me slaughter a guy, but you’re not acting scared of me at all.”
“I always handle the preternaturals at the hospital.” Luke shrugged. “Werewolves could do to me what you did to him.”
Charity smiled shyly and jammed the thick-framed glasses onto her face. “Werewolves are a lot more common than revenants.”
“I’ve worked with you for years.”
“So did Ollie.”
“Are you trying to convince me to be afraid of you, Charity?”
Insecurity seeped into her eyes, edging out the calm confidence that had suffused her upon Ollie’s death. “I just don’t understand it.”
“Don’t bother trying.” Luke had almost married a werewolf who had murdered a half-dozen people while suffering from silver poisoning. A revenant was nothing after that.
Flipping through the pages of the spellbook, he searched for any hints that Oliver might have designed the circle of power in the clearing. Its markings were bizarre, so they must have been crafted by an insanely powerful witch. Someone with access to arcane magic, or someone who had invented them from scratch.
If Oliver had made the circle, then there might have been notes on the ritual that had taken away Marion’s memory, too.
A couple of photographs fell out of the middle pages. They were actual physical pictures, taken on film. It was common for witches to use physical media instead of digital. Mechanical means of taking pictures would often succeed when everything else failed because of magic.
The pictures were blurry, but Luke could make out the images. Two of them showed the circle of power from different angles, when it had been freshly burned into the grass.
The other photos were of Marion. “Jesus,” Luke muttered, lingering over the pictures.
Ollie had found her standing in the middle of the circle, head hanging, eyes shut. She looked like she’d been asleep standing up. He’d been able to take pictures from multiple angles without Marion moving an inch.
He ran his thumb along the edge of one of the pictures, studying Marion’s restful face. She didn’t look distressed in the wake of her memory wipe. Her cheeks were flushed with color, her hair bouncy as though it had been freshly curled.
The nurse had written notes on the backs of the photos—dates, times, the GPS coordinates.
And also a name.
Seth Wilder.
“Hey Nori,” Luke called. “Come over here.” The half-angel gave Charity a wide berth when she obeyed. He showed her the photos of the fresh circle. “Are these marks sidhe magic?”
Nori shook her head. “Those aren’t, but this is.” She pointed at the page of the book he was opened to. “Can I look?”
“Be my guest.” He stuck the pictures of Marion inside his jacket. They felt too intimate to share with anyone.
>
She flipped through the book. “Yes. All of this spellwork is sidhe in origin.”
“But not the circle,” Luke said.
She shook her head again and kept skimming the pages. “Now this one here… This is the work of the Autumn Court. It’s privileged information that they keep in the library.”
“You’ve been in the library?”
“I’m a servant as much as a delegate. Someone has to wipe the fingerprints off those stupid glass cases. Anyway, they don’t share that stuff with outsiders, so how did a gaean get it from the Autumn Court?”
“I’ve got guesses,” Luke said grimly. The kind of guesses that were going to send him back to the Middle Worlds to save Marion’s ass from a murderous boyfriend.
Charity hung back, as though hesitant to get too close to Nori. “What are we going to do? How can I help you?”
“You can help by getting out of Ransom Falls.” Luke scuffed the outer edge of the circle, ensuring it was broken. “Something’s happened here. I don’t know what. But it’s not safe—not for you or anyone else. Especially since you’ve got Ollie’s blood all over you, and your DNA is all over him.”
“I could take her to the Autumn Court,” Nori said in a tiny voice. “Not the castle, obviously, but the village is populous enough, and they get enough tourists… Nobody would notice her. She’d be safe.”
It was a generous offer. Even more generous since Charity’s murder had thrown Nori into shock and a good half-hour of sobbing. Luke hadn’t expected Nori to be useful for hours to come—maybe days—but she obviously had more in common with Marion than he’d expected.
“I don’t want to go to the Autumn Court,” Charity said. “My glamour wouldn’t work there.”
Nori looked startled. “You have a glamour?”
“Must be a good one,” Luke said.
Charity’s smile was tremulous. “I don’t think either of you have seen a revenant before.”
“Either way, both of you need to hide. Here.” Luke gave Charity keys to his pickup. “Drive as far as you can, figure out where you guys are going to hide on the road. I’ll get my truck from you later.”
“How will you get around?” Nori asked.
