Eventually, the lawyers were talked out. The journalists rushed off to make their deadlines. Everyone left except Mason. He was free to go, but of course, he couldn’t.
Only Dutch remained, quiet and unruffled as ever. He waited for the sun to go down so he could take his captain home. One guard stood by the closed door to the judges’ chambers. He nodded when I asked to stay with Mason.
I sat in the defense counsel’s chair, listening to my sword wail and gripping my hands tightly in my lap.
We waited.
An hour later, Dutch said, “I’ll bring the car around.”
I glanced at the window. It was near dark. My nerves were shot from the constant whine of my sword.
I poked Jacoby, who had been dozing on the chair beside me and held out my finger.
“Bite me.”
He squinted one eye and shook his head.
“Please. I don’t have a knife. Just bite hard enough to draw blood, then take it to my sword. Go now, while Dutch is leaving and wait for me in his car. I’ll be out soon.”
His sharp teeth flashed for an instant and blood welled on my fingertip. The pain followed, but I ignored that, and smeared the blood across Jacoby’s hand, then gave him my widget to show the sword’s receipt.
“Go now!”
He scampered away.
A few moments later, the sword’s wailing dimmed to a whine as my blood comforted it.
I watched the window darken until Mason’s magic rang frantically, then settled into his usual deep bell-tolling energy. He opened and closed his fists, then tilted his head from side to side. His neck cracked and he sighed.
His hair was messed as if he’d run a hand through it just before turning to stone. It fell over his forehead in thick black curls that begged to be touched.
“You look different,” he said and smiled. His silver-gray eyes flashed at me, taking in my court dress and my hair hanging loose past my shoulders.
“Different? You mean I’m not covered in dirt and blood for once.”
“Yes, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you dressed up. And are those heels?” He pointed at my shoes, and I was glad they were close-toed, so he couldn’t see my ragged, unpainted toenails.
“I do remember how to be a girl, once in a while.”
He leaned in. “You do it well. Always.”
I let the moment linger. Then I was either going to kiss him or get back to business. I chickened out and went for business.
“Did you hear everything?” I asked.
“Yes. Bloody fools. They can’t keep the bloodstone safe. No one can.” Not even me, was the unspoken end to that sentence.
“Have you been able to prove that Golovin was working with Alvar?”
Mason shook his head. “But he knows I’ve been sniffing around.”
“Which explains why the alchemist judge threw you over.”
With only the tenuous link between Gerard Golovin and the transport company used to haul Ollie and the other abused dragons, we had no proof that Gerard was in on the attempt to breach Montreal’s ward last month.
No proof, but plenty of suspicions.
“There’s something else.” Mason spoke quietly so the guard couldn’t hear. “Something I never told you about the bloodstone.”
The history of the bloodstone was personal. Mason’s wife had tried to murder their daughter in some dark rite. Unable to kill her, Mason had trapped Polina’s essence within the bloodstone for all eternity. But it seemed at least three factions—Golovin, the opji and Prince Alvar—had their reasons to release the mad witch. The last attempt had almost brought down the ward.
I couldn’t wait to hear what other goodies Mason had in store for me.
“I lost it once, during the war.” He turned his head and grinned. “That would be World War Two, not the Flood Wars.”
Sometimes I could forget that Mason was over three-hundred years old.
“It was a desperate time in Europe and the stone ended up in the hands of a German army doctor. It took me three decades to track it down again. I have no idea what the Nazis used it for, but when I recovered it, the stone was…heavier. Not in weight, but in magic. Do you know what I mean?”
I did. I’d held the bloodstone, a marble-sized black rock with a shot of red chalcedony streaked through it. Something that small shouldn’t feel as if it carried the weight of the world, but its magic was dense. And angry. I hadn’t wanted to touch it for any longer than necessary.
“I suspect the stone gathered more souls.” Mason rubbed a hand through his hair. “It has a sentience of its own now. Or maybe that’s Polina. She was always strong-willed. I don’t know. But it wants to be found. They can lock it away in a vault, but someone will break it free.”
“We have to find a way to destroy it.”
Mason shook his head. “Not we. Me. I have to destroy it. You have to go home and hope that Hub doesn’t come after you for that ridiculous confession you made in court today. What in the hells possessed you to tell them you brought not only the stone within the ward, but a dragon too?”
“I was trying to help.”
“Well, you’re done helping. I don’t want you involved in this mess anymore. Go home, Kyra.”
I met his glare with one of my own.
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I can, and I—” Shouting from outside the courtroom cut him off. I looked at the guard, who shrugged. Then came the sound of running footsteps and more shouts.
The courtroom doors opened and Dutch poked his head through.
“There’s been a cave-in at the new railroad excavation site. Several workers are dead or trapped. The whole place is on fire and…” He glanced at me. “Some kind of beast manifested in the flames. They think a ley-line was breached.”
Mason’s gaze hardened as he turned to me. “You’re going down there, aren’t you?”
“You going to try and stop me?”
“Would it work if I did?”
“Nope.”
“Then I’m coming too.”
Chapter
2
Thankfully, I had a change of clothes in my truck. My job was messy, and extra pants, shirts and shoes were often a necessity. I dressed quickly, hoping the gloom in the courthouse parking lot would cover me, and then braided my hair. No matter how pretty Mason thought it was—and I still felt a little glow from his words—it was never a good idea to go into a fight with hair flying around. At best, it could blind me. At worst, it was an easy handhold for an enemy. Jacoby politely waited outside the truck. My sword lay on the seat beside me, blissfully quiet.
“You can come in now,” I called out as I slipped on my work boots. Jacoby hopped into the passenger seat without opening the door. Dervishes can teleport short distances, so I didn’t bother trying to keep him away.
“If you’re going to come, you follow my rules, okay?”
He stared at me with wide eyes as I started the truck and navigated out of the lot.
“You stay close and at the first sign of danger, you teleport away. Understood?” I glared down at his earnest face and he nodded.
We parked near the water between the excavation site of the new railroad and a cluster of abandoned warehouses. The parking lot was a mess of emergency vehicles and Hub officer transports. The evacuation zone was a good hike from where I parked. I grabbed my emergency pack and headed toward the fires I could see burning in the distance.
GenPort, the conglomerate spearheading the new rail system had bought all this land. The warehouses were slated to be torn down and replaced with a snazzy new train station where GenPort could charge enormous fees to passengers looking for a quick and safe way through the Inbetween to Manhattan. A similar station was being built in Manhattan Ward by a company called Mansys. The two crews would meet in the middle, sharing the
expenses and profits of the new railroad.
Digging through the Inbetween was expensive in both labor and magic. Terra had reclaimed the land, the water and the air. She left humans a few small spaces to live, and if we wanted to thrive, we had to learn to do so within those limitations.
So trying to create an empire by connecting two wards…well, that was just an exercise in hubris. For the past months, as GenPort broke ground and started digging under the river and into the Inbetween, we all waited for the hammer to fall. Surely Terra would manifest her displeasure and stop this encroachment? And now it seemed she had.
Somewhere in the excavations, the digging crew had breached a ley-line. The resulting explosion of magic had collapsed the tunnel, killing or trapping a dozen workers. And something had come out of the breach. All this I learned from frantic reports on the news as I drove to the site. When I got there, the reality was much worse.
Ahead of us, smoke filled the night sky and people screamed. Something roared.
“What in the hells is that?” Mason yelled over the noise as he ran to join me.
“I don’t know. Ogre, maybe? Where’s Dutch?”
“Gone to get the other Guardians.” Not all the gargoyles could fly. I just hoped they got here in time.
We reached the construction site as a giant creature picked up a bulldozer and chucked it into the parking lot, flattening two cars. It turned its attention to a crane and shook it like a toy. A massive metal hook hung at the end of the crane’s arm, and it smashed into the side of a nearby warehouse. Debris exploded like shrapnel.
The creature—whatever it was—stood before the construction site’s main office, or what was left of it. The temporary building had been crushed like a tin can. Beside it, the entrance to the tunnel that would become the new railroad was now just a pile of rubble.
All construction was stopped. The site was in shambles. Fires burned in three places. The raging beast flung bricks, shards of wood and equipment while workers in hard hats dodged these missiles and tried to pull their wounded coworkers out of the way. A group of Hub officers in tactical gear mustered next to the abandoned warehouses, but they had yet to act.
I got a good look at the creature. It was easily twenty feet tall—taller than any giant or ogre I’d ever encountered. Grayish hide and wiry black hair covered thick slabs of muscle across its shoulders. Red eyes were almost lost under its overhanging brow. Blood stained the puckered skin around its lipless mouth, which was too round and had too many teeth.
While I watched, it seized one of the scurrying construction workers in a massive fist, bit off his head and swallowed it whole, hard hat and all.
Then it grew about a foot, its shoulders bulging even bigger.
Oh no.
I ran for the group of Hub officers.
“Who’s in charge?” I demanded.
“Detective Lowe.” Someone pointed to a swarthy woman with dark hair cut short in a military style who was giving out rapid-fire orders. They were going to shoot the beast with a synchronized burst of multiple blasters.
“Stop!” I yelled. “You’ll make it worse! That’s a snooker!”
Snookers fed off magic of any kind—life magic, blaster magic, they didn’t care.
“Who are you?” Lowe frowned at me.
“Kyra Greene.” I flashed my Hub credentials. “I work in pest control.”
Lowe folded her arms. “And what exactly is a snooker?”
“It’s something that manifested from the ley-line breach. If it gets any bigger, it will replicate and we’ll have the beginnings of a snooker infestation.”
“Mason, do you know this woman?” Lowe’s tone was clipped. I wasn’t surprised that she knew Mason. As captain of the Guardians, Mason had deeper connections to Hub than I did.
“Yeah, Glenda. She’s legit. I would listen to her if I were you.”
Captain Lowe squinted at me. “What do you mean by replicate?”
I took a deep breath and explained.
In the early days after the Flood Wars ended, pools of magic filled the space we now call the Inbetween. These were lakes of pure magic, from ruptured ley-lines or the residue from bombs dropped during the wars. A lot of really nasty things came out of those pools. Things like the snookers that rampaged the countryside, killing to feed and sometimes just for fun.
“Snookers are born of magic and they feed on magic. When it gets big enough, this sire will split into dupes.”
Lowe scowled and I rushed on. “Dupes are duplicates of itself. They’ll be smaller and easier to kill, but fast and sneaky. And—”
The snooker picked up a truck and bashed it against another truck.
“Just tell me how to kill it,” Lowe growled. A few other Hub officers had gathered to listen.
“Blades, not guns. In this form it will only eat the blast magic and get stronger. Cut off enough parts and it will go down.”
“And if it splits into these dupes?”
“Same,” I said, “but you need to kill the sire, the master copy, so to speak. Then the others will die.”
“You heard her!” Lowe barked. “Blades only!”
The officers dispersed. Mason pulled me aside, and we watched the snooker grab another construction worker as he ran by in a panic. It raked the man from head to foot with dagger-like claws and let the blood spray over its face, howling in pleasure. Then it tossed the body aside. The man lay in a crumpled heap against the broken office building. I turned away from this gruesome sight.
“Are you sure about this?” Mason asked.
“As sure as I can be.” My blade was already singing as I swung it slowly to loosen my shoulder.
Behind us, Hub officers were re-arming with swords, maces and spears. This wasn’t their first rodeo.
Then, before everyone was in formation, a thin man with crazy hair burst out of the broken office building, screaming and pointing a blast rifle at the snooker.
“You killed him! You killed him!” The man was hysterical. Tears, dirt and blood streaked his pale face. The beast turned at the noise and the man shot it. The blaster flared and hit the snooker in the chest. It would have been a killing shot to any other being, but the snooker only grunted and got bigger.
The man shot him again.
“Someone make him stop!” Captain Lowe yelled. Four officers rushed the shooter, but it was too late. The snooker was now taller than the office building and wider across than a bus. It roared, spraying blood and spittle, and stomped a foot. The ground shook under the impact.
Then it burst, like a seedpod exploding.
Where there was one snooker, now lay dozens of smaller versions of itself, no bigger than large dogs. They scattered like the wind, some disappearing into the ruins of the construction site, others into the vast warren of abandoned warehouses that stretched along the shoreline.
“Go after them!” Lowe snapped. “Buddy formation. No one goes alone!” The officers moved out.
“We’ll take a section of the warehouses,” Mason said, and Lowe nodded. But before we walked away, she stopped us.
“Give me the worst-case scenario,” she said.
“If we don’t find the host dupe and kill it, the others will grow and eventually be able to thrive on their own. When they grow big enough, they will replicate too. We’ll be facing an infestation in a few months, tops. That’s how Chicago ended after the war.”
Lowe looked grim. “Find it.”
*
The warehouse park was bigger than a village. When the waters receded after the wars, most of the buildings were still standing. They’d been looted for anything usable to the budding new ward, then left to ruin. In the fifty years since, they’d been bought and sold, used, burned, rebuilt and left abandoned. Now they were a cluster of dirty, half-rotten structures with a million places for a dupe to hide. Captain Lowe had e
fficiently sectioned off the buildings, assigning each to a pair of officers and the farthest one to us.
We skirted around the last warehouse on the east side, looking for an entrance. No matter how much I pleaded, Jacoby wouldn’t wait outside. He had decided he was my protector and nothing would dissuade him.
Mason thought it was amusing. “You should get him one of your Valkyrie Pest Control shirts and make him your apprentice.”
“Very funny.” But really, that wasn’t a bad idea. If the little dervish was going to keep putting himself in danger on my account, I should give him some training.
“Remember, stay close to me,” I said to Jacoby. “But port away at the first sign of danger. Don’t wait for me.”
He nodded, his eyes even bigger in the gloom. We found a door that was chained shut but broken near the bottom. I melted the lock with a bit of magic pushed through my sword and we went in.
The construction site was well lit, and some of that light filtered through the bank of high windows even though they were filmed with dirt. Rows of crates lined the walls, leaving narrow aisles to walk through, except at the center of the large space, which held three antique carousels. The horses and mythical beasts on the old rides were reared up, hooves poised to run, and eyes mischievous in the shadows. We snuck past them, listening for any sound that could mean a dupe was inside with us. The wind banged a loose shingle on the roof and we all stopped. Jacoby slipped his tiny hand in mine. I squeezed his fingers once, but didn’t let on that I knew he was scared. Or that I was too.
Mason motioned for me to go clockwise around the last carousel while he went the other way. I stopped halfway to peer underneath but could make out nothing in the darkness. The skin on the back of my neck tingled, as I imagined the dupe jumping out at us. He would be smaller than the sire, but he could still do a lot of damage with those claws. I reached with my keening, and felt only the tiny magics of crawling things as I moved on to join Mason at the far end of the warehouse.
We stood staring into lines of piled up crates holding abandoned goods. The warehouse was big enough that we couldn’t see the far end. Many of the crates were rotted and their contents spilled out. Navigating around all this junk in the dark would be dangerous.
Dervishes Don't Dance: A Paranormal Suspense Novel with a Touch of Romance (Valkyrie Bestiary Book 2) Page 2
