by SM Reine
“Does it matter if I am? She’s dead.”
“Listen here, Special Agent Dickhead.” So much for being “cutie.” “You stay the fuck away from Elise. Malcolm too, while you’re at it. Nothing that happened here was their fault. You want to go blaming dead bitches? Blame the necromancer who woke up the last Night Hag and made shit rain all over my home.”
Prickles exploded down the back of my neck. “Necromancer?”
“I ain’t talking to you,” Neuma said. “Not gonna say one fucking thing.”
She folded her arms across her boobs, sat back, and glared out the viewport.
I caught Krista’s gaze in the mirror. She was watching me instead of the road, but even distracted, she drove straighter than Malcolm.
She was looking for my reaction.
There was no keeping the shock off my face. There was only one necromancer I’d known in the area, and that was Ann.
You know, the necromancer that I had put in Reno myself.
CHAPTER NINE
WE GOT NEUMA HOME to her cozy little pit and picked Malcolm up without running into any brutes. I was mostly relieved. A little disappointed about not getting to use the machine gun, but hey, I wasn’t going to complain about evading mortal peril.
Things had gone so smoothly running Malcolm’s errand that I wasn’t surprised when we got a mayday on the way back.
The Union’s always got one comm line or another open, allowing every unit’s chatter to flow through the black headsets they wear. Anyone paying close attention could know what every team was up to at any given moment. Fritz had given me a headset, but I’d turned the volume low enough that it wouldn’t bother me.
The mayday came out on a different line—the kind that got red lights flashing on BearCat’s dashboard.
Krista pushed a button. The line opened.
“We could use support,” a woman said.
I recognized that voice. It was Suzy, who shouldn’t have been conscious, much less out of the med bay yet.
“We’re penned in the northwest part of town and need someone to clear a path,” she went on. “Up by Moraine, off North Virginia. We’re secure at the moment but we’re not going anywhere in these conditions.” I checked a nearby street sign. We were on North Virginia.
“That’s my partner.” I turned the dashboard’s GPS unit toward me. There were red marks where we’d noted obstructions that were difficult to pass. Moraine was on the other side of a big one.
“She’s in a bad part of town,” Malcolm said from the back seat. He had unzipped his body armor so that it hung halfway off, and he covered both eyes with one arm. “She’s fucked.”
I tapped at the GPS, seeking an alternate route northwest. “Head back, I bet we can get around UNR.”
“I need to get the commander back to base. Someone else will provide support to your partner.” Krista pressed the button on her Bluetooth headset to report just that.
But what if Suzy was in trouble? She’d just gotten out of the med bay for Christ’s sake. And the base was miles out of town—they’d never get there in time.
Which was the line of thinking that led me to saying something really stupid.
“Let me out here.”
“Are you stupid?” Krista asked.
“Do what the guy says,” Malcolm said.
She craned around in her chair. “Sir?”
“C’mon, Krista. Stop the car. Let the lad out. He wants to save his partner, so let him save his partner. That’s an order.” Malcolm said the last part with no real conviction, but as I’d said, Krista was loyal.
She stopped the BearCat.
Before I knew it, I was standing on the broken pavement, watching the Union kopides trundle away into the half-light of late afternoon.
I’d been abandoned in downtown Reno, just three feet away from the point that asphalt turned to ichor. And all I had was a pocket of minor spells and a Beretta.
It should have been a lot, but it wasn’t.
“Fuck,” I told the retreating rear of the BearCat.
I turned to look around, try to get my bearings. The GPS had placed me near a parking garage—that was to the left. Former auto shop to the right. A tourist wedding chapel a block up.
Moraine was up the hill. Way up the hill, past UNR. And light was fading fast.
Good thing I was in great shape. I’d managed to down a couple fitness-augmenting poultices before leaving home, too.
I started running.
The red spots on the GPS hadn’t been kidding about all the rough patches I had to navigate on my way up to Moraine. Fritz’s words haunted me, about how the Mother of All Demons had eaten Reno. I could see her toothmarks everywhere: in the collapsed buildings, the smears of clean sidewalk in the middle of the ash, the splatters of blood that had dried to a brown crust, and the piles of rubble twice as tall as I was.
Moraine was on a hill north of UNR. I hadn’t connected the dots when I’d heard the name, but once I saw it in reality, I knew exactly where Suzy had gone.
That hill was overlooking a cemetery named Our Mother of Sorrows. It had a lot of apartments, student housing, older homes. I’d been there before because it was the perfect place for a college student whose hobbies included raising the dead.
Moraine was right by Ann’s apartment.
“Fuck,” I said again, with even more gusto.
The wind shrieked in agreement, whipping my coat in front of me. I turned to squint into the sudden gust.
And I saw…nothing.
I was standing alongside a community baseball field across from the cemetery. A four-lane road, McCarran, separated hill from university—which I could no longer see.
There was nothing on the other side of McCarran. Just fog. Black fog, which hadn’t been there when I’d climbed up this way.
I couldn’t even see the ethereal city at that point.
Chatter erupted over my Bluetooth headset. I hadn’t realized it was quiet until it suddenly wasn’t anymore.
“Incoming,” someone said.
“Infected demons. Northwest toward northeast. Sector nineteen.”
“Sightings verified.”
“Contact.”
Infected demons dragged their hulking bodies out of the black fog.
Fuckers had sneaked up on me.
The invisibility charm I’d gotten from storage almost slipped right out of my sweaty palms. I gripped it tight, dived into the sagebrush on the shoulder of the road.
“Come on, come on,” I muttered, trying to summon the concentration to activate the charm. It might not be enough to keep the demons from seeing me if they were on the hunt—but it would be more effective than the Beretta, especially since I still couldn’t figure out where the eyes were on a brute.
After the first two demons emerged from the fog, a couple more appeared. And another.
Five of them.
All were bigger than me. All were distinctly…drippy.
They weren’t even the demons that Suzy had phoned home about.
The charm slipped between my fingers and hit the dirt. “Fuck!” I flattened myself to the ground.
Magic pulsed around me.
I almost thought I’d activated something by accident, but the strength behind that magic spiked quickly, too high and too fast.
There was another witch casting nearby.
The surge was so big I sneezed. That sound felt louder than a gunshot.
All five of the brutes I started dragging their carcasses toward my sagebrush.
Forget the invisibility spell.
I bolted up the hill toward Moraine.
It was a steep hill, and the dirt was loose. I slipped to my knees. Dropped another spell from my pocket. I let it roll down to the road.
Have to get to Suzy.
Magic spiked again. I sneezed and slid six inches down the hill.
I’d felt that magic when I’d first approached the Union warehouse. It was what had set me off at the perimeter.
&nb
sp; Then I saw why.
Allyson Whatley rounded the corner by Our Mother of Sorrows Cemetery, accompanied by a half-dozen armed men in Union black. She had something wrapped around her fists. At that distance, they looked like bandages, but strips of embroidery made them look too fancy. They weren’t bandages. They were some kind of ribbon.
She thrust a hand toward the brutes.
A concussive blast rippled through the earth like an atomic shockwave.
It tossed the brutes into the air. They went high, higher than the tops of the trees.
They came down hard enough to crater.
Allyson whirled to push her fist toward another brute rushing her from an angle. Heat rippled from her knuckles and splashed acid magic on the brutes.
I’d never seen magic cast like that before, though. It wasn’t humanly possible. Witches needed time to prepare magic, ritual space, a sacrifice of some kind. We couldn’t do action-movie stuff.
But Allyson was.
The guys hanging around her didn’t even look impressed. Her magic was new to me, but not to them.
The shock was enough to delay my body’s allergic reaction to her magic, but there was no fighting the itch for long. I wrapped my arms around my face and sneezed into my sleeves, rapid-fire, eyes streaming.
It only took a few moments for Allyson to disable brutes that had required cannon fire to take down earlier. She didn’t fire a single shot. She just used those ribbons and gestures.
Allyson’s magic wasn’t just powerful. It was sloppy. The colors of magic splattered all over the road, the cemetery, the baseball field. To my witch senses, it looked like the Union had been playing paintball with neon.
When Allyson spoke into her Bluetooth headset, her voice came through over mine as well. “We’ve cleared the infected demons, Agent Takeuchi. You’re good.”
“Thanks,” Suzy replied.
Allyson gestured to the men backing her up. They lashed the brutes together with cables and started dragging them down the hill.
I glanced up at Moraine, where Suzy was waiting.
She was fine. She’d always been fine.
I followed Allyson’s team at a distance.
Don’t ask me why I didn’t walk up to them and ask how they’d done that magic. We were on the same team. Wore the same jersey, slept in the same places, got our paychecks cut by the same people.
But I hung back, and I kept at least a block or two between us the whole time they were dragging those brutes.
I didn’t have to follow them far. They hit the UNR campus and veered east, going toward the planetarium.
I hid behind a tree to watch.
Allyson stopped beside a squat white building I didn’t recognize. She gestured to the men again. They hauled the brutes to the gate then took them downstairs—under the building—through an external stairway.
She glanced around once, hand on her earpiece, as though looking to see if anyone was watching.
Then she followed the brutes down.
CHAPTER TEN
ISOBEL HAD DONE THE walk-through on the townhouse we’d rented for Ann, so I hadn’t seen it before. She’d told me all about it, though. It had a big attic, perfect for spell casting. Something like two bedrooms. A small living room joined with the kitchen. One-point-five bathrooms. Clean, small, within walking distance of the university.
If the whole attic had been blown off, Isobel would have mentioned that to me.
That was what I found at Ann’s address. An apartment ripped apart.
The damage had happened long before the apocalypse, though. There was a yellow tractor waiting nearby to tear it down. Tape was plastered over the doors, wood over the windows, tarp stretched between exposed studs.
“Suze?” I called. The tape on the front door had been torn down, so someone had to be in there.
When nobody replied, I stepped inside.
There were still signs of Ann Friedman, the girl who had lived there for such a brief time. She’d been a gawky teenager with a bad slouch and tangled hair, and her living space was exactly what I’d have expected from such a person. Broken, sagging couches. Stained carpet. Ten-dollar Wal-Mart appliances on the counter, the kind of stuff that wouldn’t last a semester. The house must have been busted open for months, but nobody had bothered stealing her stuff.
A quick search of the first floor didn’t yield clues to where she might have gone.
The basement was a lot grimmer.
Mostly because of all the blood.
Ann had painted the walls in it. There were ropes too. Not real ropes, but black silk bondage ropes secured to the wall studs with steel hooks. The kind of ropes a dumb teenager might buy because she didn’t know how else to hold someone captive.
I didn’t have to guess why she would have been holding someone captive, either. The magical residue was strong enough that my throat closed up even without active magic being cast.
She had been keeping sacrifices in her basement.
“Shit, Ann,” I muttered.
I had to return to the first floor to breathe. With the walls blown out, the wind had blown out a lot of the old magic.
Floorboards creaked overhead.
“Suzy?” I called, resting a hand on my gun.
She came down the crumbling stairs. She looked fine. Suzy wore a black tactical vest with “UKA” on the chest in bold white letters, black cargo pants, black boots. Looked like anyone who worked for the Union.
I’d have smiled to see her if Aniruddha hadn’t been two stairs behind.
“The fuck are you doing here, Hawke?” Suzy asked.
“Responding to your call for help. You’re welcome.”
Aniruddha gave her a pointed look. “Your call for help.”
“Shut up,” she said.
I wanted to ask, Trouble in paradise? But I was a little better than that. I had restraint. Sometimes.
Anyway, snapping at each other was how Suzy handled all her relationships, so it wasn’t proof of anything except Suzy feeling normal.
“Any reason you’re investigating Fritz’s missing people here?” I asked.
Suzy clenched her jaw, her tiny fists. “Great question. Want to answer that, Agent Banerji?”
“We’re getting all the information we need, but it’s classified,” he said, like it was a rehearsed response, something that he’d been preparing to tell me or anyone else who asked.
“I’ve got high security clearance these days,” I said.
His eyes were all tight at the corners. “Not high enough.”
Whatever. “How’s the second story?” I asked, heading up the stairs. They creaked under my weight.
“There’s nothing to see,” Suzy said. “I think there was a ritual space in the attic, but someone scrubbed it.”
I stopped halfway up. I’d spotted graffiti on the eggshell-white wall by the bathroom door, but it wasn’t random tagging.
“Is that the seal of St. Benedict?” I asked.
Aniruddha frowned at it from the bottom of the stairs. “I don’t know. Why?”
Because I’d seen that symbol recently, and not on anything to do with Ann. It had been in the files for the territory’s kopis.
“Do we know anything about the person who lived here?” I asked.
“Just that she’s missing,” Suzy said. “If we knew more, we wouldn’t have come here to investigate. Right, numb nuts?” I wasn’t sure if I was the numb nuts in this scenario or if she was talking to Aniruddha.
Aniruddha didn’t seem to know, either. He spoke to me. “Do you know anything about her?”
“Nope,” I said a second too slowly.
“Then how’d you know to come looking for us here? We didn’t provide a specific location in the mayday.”
Because instinct had told me that their proximity to Ann’s house was too convenient. “I can always find Suzy. Her body odor’s that bad.”
“Fuck you, Hawke,” she said.
“Why are you here? Is this resident one
of the people who has gone missing in the time surrounding the apocalypse?”
“She’s gone missing,” Aniruddha said reluctantly. “I don’t know if it’s related to the other disappearances yet. Come on, you know something about this house’s resident. Tell me what you’re thinking. We’ll get more done if we work together.”
There wasn’t a chance in Hell. “Night’s coming. Let’s get moving.”
I only got three steps to the door before Aniruddha said, “Wait.”
And Suzy said, “Don’t you dare.”
That was directed toward Aniruddha. I was sure this time.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Agent Hawke,” Aniruddha said. “Suzy and I aren’t investigating the disappearances together. We’re doing an internal investigation of the OPA—much like you.”
“Good for you,” I said. “Who’s got you chasing cheese in the maze? Lucrezia de Angelis?”
“It’s an independent thing,” he said.
“Don’t,” Suzy said again, and if she’d talked to me in that tone of voice, I would have done whatever she wanted.
Seemed like my half-wit was still twice what Aniruddha had. “We think that the Union has a direct hand in these disappearances,” Aniruddha said. “We’re trying to find out what’s happening, and we’re planning to…” He turned thoughtful eyes to the roof, as though searching for words. “Rectify it.”
“Independently? That sounds suspiciously like mutiny.” I said that in a joking kind of way, because the whole idea of mutinying against the OPA was about as horrifying as the idea of demon apocalypse.
“Here’s the thing,” Aniruddha said. “The Union is evil. The OPA is closely associated with the Union, so mostly evil as well. We’re going to dismantle both of them from the inside.” There it was, said out loud so calmly, like he wasn’t sharing ideas that would get us hexed into infinity.
“Aniruddha!” Suzy’s fists slammed into his arm. It was nice seeing someone else deal with that for once. “I told you, we’re not telling Cèsar one goddamn thing!”
I lifted my hands. Not because I wanted her to stop beating Aniruddha, which I enjoyed, but because I needed her attention for a minute. “You’re keeping secrets from me?”
