Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3)

by Craig Schaefer

  Deshawn rubbed at his eyes with his other hand, frantic, until he could see again.

  His partner wasn’t moving at all now. And in his place, where the man had fallen, was a statue of green glass. He’d been immortalized in a moment of horror, scrambling back on his hands and feet, crystalline jaw gaping wide.

  Deshawn looked to his gun hand. His partner couldn’t scream. So he screamed for both of them.

  His gun was a frozen sculpture. So was his hand. And his skin burned like it was pressed to a hot griddle as Nessa’s spell wormed its way up his arm, twisting flesh to glass. He felt one hip turn white-hot, then his other leg, his belly, his skin erupting in spontaneous rashes that became frosted windows into his body. Spreading, consuming him from the outside in.

  He ran. Something inside of him turned to glass and then broke as he hit the top of the stairwell. It chimed like a crystal bell and set off a nova of agony deep in his guts. Nessa’s laughter followed him, soft at first, then erupting into a full-throated cackle of glee.

  Three

  Lenny and Zed had met in the service and bonded over their half-demon blood. Half was a stretch. Like most cambion, they inherited a few drops of the infernal red along with just enough power to make them a nightmare for anyone who crossed their paths. When they learned they had a knack for killing, and that they could make more in private practice than they ever could on Uncle Sam’s payroll, there was no turning back.

  They were part of the second wave. Twelve men on the second floor, spread out to cover every exit. Lenny and his partner stood post on the east side of the building, rifles trained on a lonely stairwell. They kept their lips tight and their ears open, listening for the sounds of gunfire from above.

  Instead, they heard a string of echoing hollow thumps and a high-pitched whistling sound, trilling again and again as it came closer.

  They shouldered their rifles a little tighter and put their fingers on the triggers.

  The thing that rounded the bend, stumbling down the stairs, was almost a man. Half of his body was a sculpture of sea-green glass, from his dangling and frozen jaw down to one motionless leg. The whistling was the sound of him trying to scream through a throat they could see through, air escaping a tiny hole in the heart of the glass as his trapped lungs struggled to draw breath under a cage of frozen ribs. One of his cheeks was a window into his mouth, wet tongue squirming against fractured crystal teeth. His good hand flailed at them, begging for help, as his fingertips shimmered like ocean waves.

  “Stay back!” Lenny shouted. “Whatever you’ve got, man, we don’t want it!”

  Deshawn’s frozen foot hit the bottom step and fractured. His eyes bulged, rolling back, as the nonstop whistling pierced their eardrums. He kept coming. Zed framed him in the iron sights of his weapon.

  “Stay! Back!” Zed barked.

  He took another step. Both muzzles erupted, spitting three-round bursts. Deshawn’s chest exploded into frosted green shards, blasting across the steps behind him and coating the floor in razor-edged glitter. What was left of him collapsed at their feet, a mass of bloody skin and broken glass.

  Zed covered his mouth with his arm and coughed into the crook of his elbow. He shook his head as the last gunshot echoed into silence.

  “The fuck,” he breathed. “Call for backup. Target’s on the move.”

  Lenny plucked a radio from his belt. He had it to his lips, about to make the call, when they felt the air shift. Pressure grew, their ears popping, and a sense of raw velocity made their balance go sideways. Like they were on a jet rising from the runway hard and fast, taking off for a one-way flight. The temperature rose ten degrees in the space of a breath, turning the office-building corridor into a sauna as their vision dimmed.

  “What the—do you feel that?” Lenny asked.

  Zed was the first to change. His right arm jerked. It felt like something hot and slimy worming its way around his bones. Then his skin split down the middle of his bicep, shredding his bird-and-ball tattoo and spitting blood across Lenny’s fatigues. The sudden rush of agony stole his breath as his tendons tore, muscles ripping loose and snapping like whips from the open wound, moving with minds of their own. A slippering length of scarlet meat lashed out, curling around the muzzle of his partner’s rifle and jerking it to the floor. Lenny pulled the trigger on instinct, another three-round burst chewing into the floor tiles and spewing jagged chunks of laminate across Deshawn’s corpse.

  Lenny looked down and watched his stomach swell. In the space of three heartbeats he’d gone from a tight, muscular abdomen to looking like he was nine months pregnant, his shirt tearing and buttons popping to expose the distended, veiny skin of his belly, flesh stretched so thin it looked like wax paper.

  He fell to his knees, howling, as his belly burst open. A ragged rope of intestine whipped around his throat like bloody rawhide and began to squeeze. His partner was down on the floor beside him, kicking and spasming with white froth running from his gaping mouth and something clawing its way out of his bulging throat, a creature born from chunks of broken bone and organ meat.

  The last thing he saw, before his air ran out and his vision faded into crimson and black smears, was the Owl as she glided down the staircase. Her feet hovering an inch above the glass-strewn steps, pale hands open at her sides, a figure of dark majesty.

  * * *

  Nessa’s traitorous spell book was gone, lost with her lover at the bottom of an alien ocean, but she didn’t need it anymore. Her creator had endowed her with an intuitive grasp of magic, its weaves and its ways, and all she’d learned—from the book, and then from her adopted daughter, a fierce witch in her own right—had empowered her grasp. Magic was a dance. A waltz at reality’s edge, one foot always on the brink of an abyss, flirting with the endless void. The Shadow In-Between could fuel a witch’s craft or damn her in a heartbeat.

  Nessa was already damned. And with raw Shadow corrupting her body, burning in her veins like a lit trail of gasoline, she had no need for wards and protective measures. Nothing could save her life now. And that meant there was no reason to hold back. Other witches flirted with the void; she embraced it, straddled it, and rode it hard and fast, turning the endless crashing tides of Shadow into fuel for the furnace of her rage.

  She floated through the carnage, turning an approving eye to the mutilated bodies at her feet. Not enough. She wanted more.

  Boots tromped in at the far end of the hall. Two more men in tactical gear, one already shouldering his rifle while the other barked into a walkie-talkie.

  “Eyes on target! She’s on the second floor, east end, all teams move to—”

  Nessa’s black fingernails gleamed as she flung out her hand and batted the air, like a cat swatting at a mouse. A heat-mirage shock wave rippled through the air, swept both men up, and slammed them against the wall, human toys in an invisible fist. Bones snapped, jutting through torn fatigues, and necks cracked against cratered drywall. One was dead before he hit the floor. The other crawled on his belly along the blood-streaked laminate, dragging himself on his good arm, like he still had some faint hope of survival.

  She extinguished it with a giddy laugh and a twist of her hand. His spine buckled backward until he was folded in half, his eyes staring up at the ceiling tiles, his mouth frozen in a soundless, eternal scream.

  Maybe soundless. She couldn’t hear, not with the roar of blood pounding in her ears like a waterfall as the unleashed Shadow boiled inside of her. She was fuzzy-headed, muscles spasming, crimson dots speckling her vision.

  Too much, she thought. It’s slipping out of control. Won’t be able to—

  More gunmen rounded the far bend. She stared down the muzzle of a shotgun, her magic fumbling loose in a shower of sparks from her fingertips. She threw herself left, through an open office doorway, as the weapon roared and buckshot peppered the air.

  Nessa landed hard on her hip. Her legs kicked in a sudden seizure as she gulped down air, struggling to get herself back under co
ntrol. She’d pushed too far, stolen too much of the stuff of Shadow, and now it was fighting to swallow her whole.

  She fumbled for one of the long, slender vials filled with Hedy’s elixir. She yanked the cork with her teeth, threw it back, and gulped it down, the spicy broth flecking her lips and dribbling down her chin. It smelled like apples and tasted like hot cigarette ash. As the alchemical serum did its work, fighting the fires raging inside her body with a wave of cool wind and ocean water, she heard voices arguing in the hall.

  “She’s cornered, no way out of there. Go in and finish her off.”

  “Hey, fuck that and fuck you too. You see that horror show by the stairs? I’m not ending up like those guys.”

  “Well, somebody’s gotta go in there.”

  “Uh-uh. Get on the radio, call up whoever brought the Molotovs. We’ll either flush her out or roast her alive. Either way’s smarter than charging in blind.”

  The spasms and tremors faded as Nessa pushed herself to her wobbly feet. She felt drained, empty and aching, like she’d just run a marathon, and the Shadow had faded with it. Still in her veins, black specks in her blood like termites slowly eating her from within, but the storm had passed.

  She eyed her stock. Two vials left. If she went all-out like that again—if she was even capable of it right now—she’d need to drink another to keep the Shadow from swallowing her whole. Every vial gone meant one less day to live. So she’d save them, guard them like her most precious treasures. One vial would keep the disease at bay tomorrow and give her time—if she was cunning, if she was quick—to track Alton down and corner him.

  She’d use the last one, if she needed it, to borrow the strength to kill anyone who still dared to stand with him. Then she’d invite the Shadow into her body one final time. What was it that Daniel Faust had told her, his theory about how they were living in the last days of a secret world? It’s only a matter of time before somebody does something stupid, he’d said, something that can’t be written off as special effects or a hoax or a mass delusion. Somebody’s going to conjure a demon on the Vegas strip, or fight a magical duel on Broadway in front of a few hundred witnesses and a live TV camera. At which point we’re all good and screwed.

  The right moment, the right place and time to unleash her full power, and this entire world would awaken to the reality of magic. They would know that witches walked among them. Some would learn the meaning of fear. Some would learn the meaning of hope. There are worse ways to commit suicide, Nessa reasoned. She leaned her palms against a desk, breathing deep as her heartbeat slowed from a gallop to a steady, confident stride. She would die, but her legacy would be a world forever transformed.

  She thought of her apprentice, her adopted daughter. A world that Hedy and her coven can rule, she thought. My parting gift.

  But none of her grand plans meant a thing if she didn’t survive the next ten minutes. The office was a dead end. One way out, back into the corridor and the shadow of a loaded shotgun. She checked the windows. Tempered glass, not built to open. Men were milling on the asphalt below, like ants with guns. Nyx still reclined like a queen in the back seat of an open minivan, eyes shrouded behind her Wayfarers as she tilted her chin up, waiting for her hunters to bring back a prize.

  Nessa curled her fingers, feeling a pulse of raw magic like static electricity, invisible pins dancing on her palm. She could manage a little spellcraft without going all-out again, if she used it wisely. That meant playing defense. As much as she wanted to turn this entire building into a chorus of dying screams, all that mattered right now was escaping in one piece and without squandering any more of her precious elixir.

  Out, then. Up and out, the same way she’d arrived.

  Nessa hurled herself through the open doorway, left hand raised in a claw as she spat dimly remembered words from the pages of her spell book. Phantoms erupted from her hooked fingers, the air bursting in a twisting cyclone of darkness. The hunters threw themselves to the floor as shadows of tortured men, flayed and shrieking, boiled over their heads. Illusions, harmless, but they didn’t know that—and as the images dissolved on the air, Nessa was already on the run, her buckled shoes pounding the steps as she raced back up to the third floor.

  She rounded the bend, emerged onto the landing—and leaped back as bullets chopped through the air, chewing into the wall and spitting shredded plaster and chips of beige paint. Four hunters were covering the hallway, two of them taking a knee, two standing tall at their backs, forming a firing squad.

  No escape. Nessa wheeled around, looking back the way she came, only to hear boots pounding as the men on the second floor closed in. The stairwell had just become a killing box, guns at both ends and no other way out. As soon as the hunters drew straws and decided who was going to make the first move, they’d flush her out and cut her down.

  Not dying here. That’s what she and Marie said to each other when times were tough. The words were a talisman, a magic spell that worked until the night it suddenly didn’t. Now they were all Nessa had left. She steeled herself for a fight and crouched low on the steps beneath the third-floor landing.

  “Not dying here,” she murmured through gritted teeth.

  At the far end of the hall, calling out from behind the hunters’ backs, a woman’s voice answered her.

  “Got that right.”

  The shooters turned, confused by the sound. A dark, limber woman strolled from an open office doorway, her dreadlocks brushing the shoulders of her worn olive utility jacket like swaying serpents. She cradled a jar of white soapstone in the crook of her arm. Nimble fingers gave the silver cap a twist.

  “Identify,” one of the shooters demanded. “I didn’t see you in the convoy. You one of Nyx’s people?”

  “I’m gonna paraphrase a line from the lady down the hall,” the new arrival said. “Y’all made a lot of stupid-ass choices that brought you to this moment in life. I’m the fallout.”

  She plucked off the silver cap. A cloud, roiling, black, buzzing, boiled from the soapstone cask and billowed down the corridor like a torrent of living smoke. Muzzles flashed in the sudden darkness, guns barking, stray shots plowing into the walls and blowing out a window. The gunmen were reduced to silhouettes, fumbling, flailing—then screaming.

  The cloud was made of insects. Gnats, no bigger than a speck of soot, washing over the shooters’ bodies by the thousands. The tens of thousands. Nessa stared, unable to look away, as one of the men flopped onto his back at the cloud’s edge. His head poked out of the churning swarm, baring a skull stripped of its scalp, white bone gleaming, and a single lidless eye. His mouth hung open on a broken jaw, and gnats swarmed over his tongue, devouring the stringy meat.

  In less than a minute, it was over. The living sandstorm gusted, whirling in the air like a fist of smoke, and swarmed back into the cask. The woman screwed the silver cap back on. She gave the soapstone cask an affectionate pat.

  She and Nessa stood twenty feet apart, the remnants of a massacre between them.

  “You going to stare all day, or do you want to get out of here? Name’s Dora, by the way.”

  “Nessa,” she replied, edging her way closer.

  “I know. You’ve got an appointment with my coven sister in Vegas. And seeing as her pet gangster failed spectacularly, delivering you safe and sound just became my job. C’mon, there’s a utility stairwell right around the corner.”

  Nessa followed her down the bare concrete steps, glancing back over her shoulder. “I appreciate the help, but you’re wasting your time—”

  At the bottom, Dora held up one sharp hand. She put her ear near a bland, windowless door. Her amber eyes seemed to glow from within, like candlelight behind stained-glass windows.

  “Shh. Wait. Listen.”

  Nessa fell silent. She heard the tromp of steel-toed boots, at least five men, running fast. They froze until the echoes crumbled to silence. Dora waited one more second, nodded to herself, and pulled open the door. They sprinted down an empty corri
dor lined with dark office doors and bulletin boards, took a left, then another, guided by Dora’s intuition.

  The next door opened onto hard sunlight and the arid heat of a desert morning. Nessa cupped a hand over her eyes, squinting, as they emerged into the fenced enclosure behind the building. Utility trucks gathered dust and baked in silence, scattered across the mostly empty lot. The hunters had left a sentry. His black Kevlar stretched over his potbelly and a rifle dangled on a strap over one shoulder, festooned with gadgets: a comically long banana-shaped magazine, two scopes stacked on top of one another, a pair of laser pointers, and gadgets she couldn’t begin to guess at.

  His sleepy eyes went wide and he fumbled with the rifle, struggling to bring it up as the cluster of gimmicks and toys caught on his overstuffed utility belt. Dora sighed as her free hand snaked into her jacket. She came out with a cheap little snub-nose .32 and shot him three times. Two copper-jacketed rounds plowed into his body armor, and the third smashed through his left cheekbone. He pitched to the asphalt on his ruined face and stayed there.

  Dora barely lost a step, hustling across the lot. “Twenty pounds of tacticool bullshit on his gun, not one hour of training. That’s a positive sign, you know. If they’re calling out the scrubs, either they’re running out of hired guns, or the really good hunters are starting to turn down your contract.”

  “Nyx is out front,” Nessa said. “You want to call her a scrub?”

  “To her face? Nah, some other time. I pick and choose my battles, which is a skill you might want to think about acquiring at some point. You’ve got work to do.”

  “I told you, you’re wasting your time. Whatever you and your friend want, I can’t help you. I don’t have time to help you.”

  Their destination was a battered VW bug, faded cherry, with a crumpled back bumper and a windshield wiper held together with a twist of silver duct tape. The doors squawked. Dora jumped in and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel until Nessa got in on the passenger side.