“49ers. Opening fire.” And they heard the rattle of Drone Two’s guns from below. Tenants awoke in neighboring buildings. JT heard their cries of panic through electronic ears.
“Austin, cover the fire escape window. Buzz, I need emergency responder codes for BATN. Are you linked up?”
“On it,” Buzz said, and though he looked pale and shaken as any sane person would, he sat cross-legged on the floor and then slumped, looking for all the world like he’d fainted.
And seeing Buzz go into a hacker’s trance the way Roan used to do, JT almost changed his mind. Buzz was a forger—he didn’t belong in a gunfight. On the job that had gone bad, Roan had been sitting right next to JT in the van, not a meter away, looking just like Buzz did now, like any hacker did when they went deep in. And five minutes later, when all hell broke loose, blue fire had shot out the top of her head and she was dead. JT almost said, Stop, Buzz. Never mind. We’ll find some other way.
JT didn’t say it. Worse, he froze completely.
Things happened around him that didn’t register the way they should. There was Austin at the window with his bow and a handful of arrows, firing out into the alleyway—at what, JT didn’t know—broadheads sparking through the air as he whispered old elvish magic over them. There was Victor over a lava lamp working some kind of spell, his eyes glowing argent, and an immense, endless crash as the fire escape fell away from the building.
“Still coming!” Austin yelled.
But what just had happened JT couldn’t form, all of it dreamlike and slow, none of it sensical except . . . Buzz was sitting there the way Roan used to do, the way she’d done just before she died.
Data flooded through JT’s head, visions of things he shouldn’t have been able to see: four different views of a bi-rotor helicopter, air filled with tracers and SFPD fliers ascending (real ones this time). He saw a street littered with wounded. Someone with a scarred riot shield threw a grenade toward him (toward Drone Two).
He saw the suppressor of a QCW-10 sneak around a fire-escape window. Austin didn’t see it.
The grenade popped. Whiteout, then blackout, and Drone Two was lost.
An encrypted code appeared in JT’s head. Buzz opened his eyes and smiled. “Done!”
A black-gloved finger pressed the trigger of a QCW-10.
“Down!” Austin shouted and dove. Victor tried his snowball thing again, but his concentration broke and he had to dive too. And there was Buzz just sitting there. Buzz. The one thing that made sense to JT: Buzz.
The gun sprayed bullets wide and blind, and JT threw himself through all of it toward Buzz. Thup-thup-thup, shots quieter than the impacts, and bullet-shattered shelving, plaster, and cushion stuffing erupted everywhere. JT hit Buzz hard (“What the fuck, JT!”) and both of them sprawled behind a divan. The bullets kept on, and JT held him still while Buzz panicked and tried to get away. Lava lamps burst, water and glass. The lamps’ captured air spirits broke free and zipped around, smashing everything the bullets hadn’t before returning to some other world.
The bullets stopped, clip emptied. Three 49ers slipped in through the window, submachine guns and swords up, but Austin was up too, long knives out, and the first 49er didn’t even touch the floor before Austin had cut her throat. The second wheeled on Austin. Austin parried his with his knife and flame spat as the two blades slid along each other. Fire drizzled over the floor. The third raised her gun, but at a word from Victor, it became a viper and bit her three times. She fell screaming and thrashing, and the viper clattered to the floor, a gun again.
JT transmitted the code Buzz had stolen and freed his truck from lockdown. He pulled drones Three through Six away from the Nightshrike and police fliers. Let them battle it out—he needed his drones here.
Austin against the last 49er: parry, parry-riposte, feint with his left, and through the 49er’s heart with his right. The 49er slid to the floor. Austin flourished his killing blade and blood spattered the eyes of soldier number four, already through the window. The foot soldier fired blind and hit nothing that hadn’t already been ruined, then Austin killed him too. The window became a wall.
“Why didn’t you do that before?” Austin said to Victor.
Victor the Wizard shrugged. “Didn’t think of it.”
Victor’s eyes were tarnished dull and nowhere as bright as they’d been before. JT guessed they worked like Austin’s rocks and their wizard was almost tapped out of mojo.
“Are you going to tackle me every time someone shoots at me?” Buzz squirmed to get out from underneath him. JT liked the feeling of Buzz squirming under him.
“Until you learn to duck, yes.” JT stung all over, from bullet wounds or debris, he didn’t know. But Buzz was safe, Buzz was safe. He gave Buzz his hand and helped him up.
Austin laid a hand on JT’s shoulder. “Hey, you okay?” From the quiet with which he said it, the deep concern of his face, the weight of his hand, and the warmth of his glamour closing around JT like a childhood blanket, JT knew Austin didn’t mean diving through a hail of bullets. Even in the middle of his own fight, Austin had noticed JT had lost it. And for a moment JT was trapped in Austin’s soft, golden-flurried eyes. Almost, JT’s heart felt ready to burst. He let go of Buzz’s hand because just then Buzz couldn’t ever be enough. For one heartbeat, JT stood confused, rawly in love, the two years apart from Austin a bad dream.
JT shook himself from his confusion and gently shrugged Austin’s hand from him, now not the time, and said, all business, “Drone Two’s down, and they’ve probably taken the stairwell. The Nightshrike’s pulled back. It was a distraction to get me to send the drones off so a ground attack would work, and it did. I’ve called them back. Police fliers are tied up with the Nightshrike, but they’ll be coming soon enough. Truck is on its way. We need a way down to the street.”
“Okay then,” Austin said as if that was an answer to his question. “Vic?”
“Vic-tor. Victor the Wizard. Victor the Transmuter.”
From the stairwell, gunshots punched holes through the door.
Victor the Wizard waved at the floor. It disappeared, and they all fell down.
JT and Buzz half fell, half clambered down the hole Victor had made. Victor descended floating, and Austin jumped like the three-meter drop was nothing but a step. On the way, they glimpsed someone else’s living room, hands over faces stifling their terror in the corner. Then Victor did it again, then again, and they ended up in a car-less garage, street level. They scattered away from the holes above them.
Above, someone shouted, “Tóuxiáng! Tóuxiáng!” Surrender. Like it wasn’t a few minutes too late for that. Then the triad soldiers found the hole in the floor and one of them shot a burst down it into the garage floor. Everyone flinched and covered their heads.
“Out the door, right, down the hill. Austin, cover,” JT said, and they all nodded. JT had a view from Drone One clacking its way up the hill: there were a half-dozen 49ers outside. They had QCW-10s like the ones before, suppressors on, all aimed at the front door of the apartment building. And it sounded like the 49ers upstairs were coming back down.
Time to go. JT popped the lid on Drone One, prioritized targets, checked his truck (ETA thirty seconds), checked his airborne drones (ETA twenty), and opened fire on the soldiers outside. A few flailed and hit the ground, dead or wounded; the rest scattered, took cover, and returned fire.
JT hauled the garage door open and everyone ran out onto the street and to the right just like he’d told them to.
Behind them, four men from the apartment stairwell charged out the front door. JT heard the hiss of Austin’s magic arrows. He glanced back to watch (because it was impossible not to). Austin was running backward. He vaulted from a fire hydrant like it was a spring, hit the wall of a building, ran a few steps along it, then back-flipped to the ground. The 49er’s bullets tracked him all the way, striking a moment behind him, exploding wood, concrete, and asphalt. He returned fire: five arrows as he leapt and tumbled. Each
arrow streamed fire behind it and dropped a 49er. One arrow dropped two. The fires stayed where they were, twisting and snapping like pennons in a gale, and made a loose net the 49ers couldn’t cross.
Sweet fucking goddess, where had Austin learned that? JT stumbled and bowled into Buzz and Victor both—they’d stopped running—and they all nearly went down in a heap. JT started to cuss them, then saw why they’d stopped.
In front of them stood a man in Ming dynasty gold, red, and black robes, embroidered at the hems with white chrysanthemums. He wore a jade mask, jade rings on all his fingers, and a necklace of tiny jade skulls. In his hand he held a staff made from the bones of a human arm. The hand at the end twitched and curled like a wizard casting spells. It was pointed at Buzz.
“What’s that?” Austin said, skidding to a stop behind them.
“Owen Ren Leng, Necromancer,” the Chinese wizard said. “Bearer of the Withered Arm of the Seventh King of Hell.” And he touched the pointing finger of the staff to the street.
“Of course you are,” Austin said, and Austin and JT both shot him. JT drew the pistol he’d forgotten about and, two-handed, emptied the clip into the necromancer. Austin fired his last two arrows. Bullets and arrows all punched right through him, holes in the front, holes in the back, but all he bled was tiny bits of shredded paper, and that didn’t seem to bother him one bit. As they fired away, green mist boiled up from the ground where the Withered Arm touched, and slithered toward them.
The tendrils slid past them, beneath the net of flame Austin had created, to the bodies that littered the street. They slid into noses, mouths, ears, and any other hole they found. Dead eyes filled with green light, and the corpses rose, jerky like marionettes with an unskilled puppeteer. The zombies shambled toward them. They passed through the net of fire, shredding it into a shower of sparks. Some of the zombies burst into flame, but they kept walking, human torches lighting the street orange and filling it with the smell of burnt pork. Dead mouths opened. Teeth erupted into fangs. Hands rose and nails sharpened to claws.
“What the fuck did you steal?” JT shouted at Buzz. “Everyone off the street!” and he bullrushed them all to the side of the road. Drones Three through Six came blazing through, one after the other, strobing the street with gunfire. The bullets chewed up pavement and blew bodies to smithereens, but the zombies didn’t care, and there were so many of them, so many more than there should have been.
And Austin was in the middle of it all. Knives out, he rushed the necromancer. The necromancer whirled into the air and came down behind Austin, his bone staff sweeping. Austin leapt the staff, made his own impossible midair spin, knives all a blur, and ribbons of embroidered cloth fluttered away. But even with the necromancer occupied, the zombies kept coming.
Buzz tried to bolt, but JT held him back. “Just a few seconds,” he said.
The necromancer shrieked and swirled through the air around Austin, parrying Austin’s strikes. Then the staff’s skeletal hand simply grabbed one of Austin’s blades. It went white with frost, and Austin dropped it, cursing and shaking his hand like he’d been burnt.
And from down the hill: headlights high above ground, coming in fast. Austin leapt. JT’s truck slammed into the hovering necromancer with a sickening whump. Broken jade scattered over the street like shrapnel. A cloud of hell money burst from the robes as if that was all the necromancer had been. Empty, the robes swept beneath the truck. Stamped paper joss swirled angrily in the back draft. The truck kept right on going, smashing zombies beneath wheels the size of elephants. It screeched to a stop, backed up and did it again.
“Stop messing around, JT!” Austin yelled from the truck bed where he’d landed. “Let’s go!”
“That’s your truck?” Buzz said awestruck as they all ran, dodging broken-up zombies. Even ruined and smashed, they hissed and clawed and dragged themselves across the pavement toward them.
“I made it from scratch.”
“Gods help us all,” Victor said.
They climbed the ladders into the cab. Austin stayed in the back. JT threw the truck into gear, and they barreled down the street. And the last thing JT saw of Telegraph Hill were three SFPD fliers up in the air bathing the carnage behind them in stark white spotlights, while the silhouettes of a score of broken zombies reached up to them, hungry. JT shook his head in sad disbelief.
What had Buzz and Austin stolen that had been worth so much?
Five years ago, someone had broken up with JT. Today, JT couldn’t even remember the guy’s name. Paul? Doug? One of the four-letter names. But, back then, it had felt like the world had fallen apart—again—the way it always did when men decided he wasn’t the one.
So a moody JT had jumped the curb and parked his truck on the edge of the headlands overlooking Black Sands Beach, and he and Austin had sat on the back gate and watched the city lights to the south go hazy and the Pacific waters darken. They drank beer out of plastic. JT sat hunch-shouldered, and Austin leaned against him, his shoulder warm. They’d been sitting for fifteen minutes when JT had looked at Austin and said, “Consolation sex?”
Austin tapped his bottle against JT’s and gave him a sad, sympathetic smile. “Whatever you need. But you gotta do what I say.”
JT shrugged, sure. Just then, probably he’d have done anything Austin had asked if only to feel loved.
Austin told him to strip and lie down on his stomach on the blanket they’d laid out in the bed of the truck. It hadn’t been very comfortable—the blanket was warm, but it wasn’t enough padding to keep the corrugated plastic of the truck bed from pressing into him. He pushed his cock and balls down so they weren’t smashed underneath him.
Austin had good strong hands. JT had always thought so. They were all tendon and veins and white scar tissue. He laid them on JT’s shoulders and didn’t move. He left them there so long, JT started to ask him what he was doing, and Austin said, “Shush. Do what I say, right?”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I said shush.”
So JT had turned his face down into the blanket and gave a good long sigh and waited for whatever Austin was going to do. He’d expected a fucking like Austin usually gave him: bent over the truck walls, or hanging upside-down off the gate, or against the half-rotting and rickety stairs that led down to the private little cove they knew of, stairs that only got replaced when someone broke them and nearly died from the fall. That was the kind of fucking JT and Austin did. That wasn’t what Austin was doing to him now.
Austin kneaded his fingers into JT’s shoulders and neck, working him slowly, like he was a stubborn kind of clay. Austin’s thumbs traced the seams between muscles. His fingers found cramped knots and kneaded them flat. They slid up his neck to his temples. They traced down his sides. They lifted his feet and pressed deep into his arches. It hurt like Austin was breaking them. It brought tears to his eyes.
“Where did you learn—”
“I said shush.” And Austin kept on.
Somewhere in all that, Austin stripped. JT didn’t know when. But he felt Austin’s skin against his own, hard and hot as fresh-poured steel. And when Austin moved onto some other part of JT (Austin’s cock dragging lightly behind), JT’s skin cooled in the evening air. He shivered and his skin pimpled in gooseflesh everywhere.
Austin trickled beer over JT. It ran cold down the cleft of JT’s spine between fans of muscle and pooled in the small of his back above the crack of his ass. Austin lapped the pool dry and poured more. It tickled, and Austin’s tongue was so soothing all over him that he didn’t know whether he still wanted to fuck or would rather have slept the deepest sleep he’d ever had. He lost track of time. Maybe he had fallen asleep. So exactly when Austin’s fingers finally found JT’s ass, he couldn’t say. But they were there now, and JT thought Austin was going to push a finger or thumb inside him, but he didn’t. He teased and massaged and pulled at his hole until JT was good and ready, and then Austin pushed his way in, all the way in, and the warmth of A
ustin’s body settled on him.
The night had been cold and the breeze off the ocean wet and smelling of salt, but JT had felt warm and spread out, taken apart and ready to be re-assembled into a man. And so Austin had done. He fucked JT slower and longer than JT had ever been fucked in his life (or ever fucked since).
Austin’s glamour threaded through him: lust and violence. JT felt it build, felt his blood respond to Austin the way it always did: the rising need to fight, to add pain to the mix, the almost irresistible urge to throw Austin off him, to hold the elf down and show him how fucking was really done. He fought it the way he always did (and always he lost the fight). His hands twitched, and he balled them into fists and his knuckles went white.
Austin did what he’d never done before. He took JT’s balled-up fists and he pried them open and pressed his thumbs into JT’s palms, and pulled on his fingers, and kissed them until the need to hit something subsided. And all the while Austin never stopped fucking, never stopped impaling JT slowly, never stopped sliding his cock at that perfect angle to rub JT’s insides. Every time the need returned, Austin’s hands and lips were there to defuse it. Each time. Every time. Austin kept him balanced on the edge of need forever. It felt like madness breaking through. The world went hazy and timeless. Austin’s hands and lips were everywhere, brushing him quiet.
“Is that magic?” JT said, nearly in tears, not knowing how much longer he could endure this.
Austin kept fucking, slow as planets moving, slow as lava spilling. “Yep,” he whispered. “I have a magic dick, didn’t you know?”
“I need one of those.”
“They only made the one.”
He felt Austin come. Slow as Austin was moving, he felt Austin’s cock throb and the warmth fill his ass. Austin’s come was always hot. JT could always feel it. Austin’s breath shivered, and his fingers tightened a bit on JT’s arms. And that was all the sign of Austin’s coming there was. Austin didn’t stop.
The Glamour Thieves Page 6
