Part of the breastplate and the coppery armor along one sleeve had been removed for maintenance. Beneath, a coat of sigils and runes carved with laser precision shone with faint violet light. Spells of warding and binding, designed to carve a channel between worlds and keep the suit—and its wearer—intact in the process. The Golden Saint was the perfect fusion of occult art and modern technology, a tool for exploration like none other. And a weapon of wars to come.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Standing at Ezra’s side, Rosales shrugged.
“It’s all right,” she said. “You need me for anything? I should get back to my office, start running background on Vanessa’s ‘coven.’ I want to know who these people are, in case they decide to come gunning for you later.”
He barely answered, just gave her a nod and a wave of his hand. He was distracted. She liked him when he was distracted.
Rosales’s office was in the security wing up on the penthouse floor. She wasn’t there much. Being that high in the air made her restless, nervous, and she kept the floor-to-ceiling windows shrouded under venetian blinds. Her empty bookcases and the kidney bend of her glass-topped desk stayed cloaked in shadow. Her turquoise eyes could see in the dark just fine, and on the rare occasions she had to deal with visitors, she liked how uncomfortable the cold and desolate office made them. She’d had the obligatory chairs for guests removed as a not-so-subtle message: she wasn’t a fan of long meetings.
She slouched into the only chair left, hers, and booted up the desktop PC. Then she slotted a slim black USB stick and rattled off a quick chain of keystrokes. Programs embedded on the stick, custom-designed, wormed their way through Talon Worldwide’s security and carved open a channel to the outside world without leaving a trace.
A ball-shaped webcam, clipped to the top of her monitor, woke with a soft green glow. Her screen popped open a video-chat window. She’d made the call. Her secret patron answered.
The man on the screen had a squat bald head, cauliflower ears, a boxer’s nose, and cruel, wormy lips. He looked unfinished, like a crude bust formed from clay by an amateur sculptor. He didn’t say anything.
“Good news and bad news,” Rosales told him.
Adam, the master of the Network, held his silence. She hated this. And she knew that he knew she hated this. Asshole, she thought. He could probably read her thoughts, but she didn’t care.
“You were right,” she said. “One of those trinkets you’ve been looking for was hidden under Deep Six. The bell.”
“And yet it isn’t in my hands.”
“Hey, shit went sideways, and you can blame yourself for that.”
Adam arched one bushy eyebrow. “Oh?”
“I had the situation on lock, and then somebody crashed the party. Savannah Cross and some psycho covered in congealed black goo. Last I checked, Cross is on your payroll. For starters, she and her boy carved their way through Ezra’s topside security force. Not that I care, but dead bodies make my life complicated. I agreed to pull this double-agent routine in exchange for one simple request: that you not make my life complicated.”
Adam stared at her, nonplussed. “Tell me about the bell. Did Dr. Cross secure it?”
“Don’t you know?” Rosales tilted her head. The tip of her nose twitched. “She hasn’t reported in, has she? Your mad scientist is on the loose.”
“Tell me about the bell.”
“She didn’t get her hands on it. Shit went sideways, fast, and Cross literally vanished in the middle of a beatdown. Vanessa Roth grabbed the bell and passed it to her girlfriend. Problem is, Deep Six is nothing but a bad memory: the station collapsed, and Reinhart got washed out to sea along with Cross’s pet monster. Good news is I overheard a little something before I got Ezra out of there. The cop is alive. Not alive on this world, but alive. So the bell is still in play.”
“I’ll notify our agents. And Mr. Talon’s progress?”
“On the Golden Saint?” Rosales held out her palm and waggled it from side to side. “Seventy, seventy-five percent done, if I understand the eggheads in the lab.”
“Good. Continue to watch and report. We will step in when the project is complete and…take ownership.”
“Explain that,” Rosales said. “As far as I understand it, you Network guys—you’re like the interdimensional Mafia, right?”
Adam’s brow furrowed. “We are not petty criminals, Ms. Rosales. The Network is a holy order.”
“Oh, so…ink? The drug epidemic you unleashed from coast to coast? That wasn’t a criminal act?”
“We aren’t petty criminals.” He folded his fat, piston arms and shifted in his chair. “What of it?”
“Why do you need a suit of armor that can jump across worlds if you’re already operating on a dozen different planets?”
“We can communicate across parallel Earths, sending targeted transmissions,” he explained, “and move inanimate material. Anything more than that requires extraordinary sacrifice and resources. Or the aid of a Cutting Knife—and there are only nine of those in the entire universe. In any event, we can do it, but the cost rarely justifies the benefit. The ability to mass-produce a suit that allows simple, reliable, and streamlined travel would be invaluable to our cause. The savings in—”
He paused. His eyes darted right, studying something offscreen. One corner of his wormy lips twitched, unreadable.
“Excuse me. I believe we’ve just located the errant Dr. Cross. Stay on the line for a moment?”
“Whatever.” Rosales slouched back in her chair and kicked her heel against the floor, spinning in a lazy circle. “You’re paying me by the hour, and the meter is running.”
Seven
Ezra’s helicopter hadn’t been the only one sweeping the desert, casting a searchlight along the edges of Pyramid Lake. Another, branded with a fake network-news logo and a Denver registration, had been honing in on a tracking signal.
Every executive inside the Network was fitted with a spinal chip. Ostensibly to rescue them in the event of an abduction, but no one was fooled. And when Savannah Cross’s chip went offline shortly after it was implanted, Adam didn’t even bother talking to her about it. The woman was a scientific genius and a magical prodigy; whatever tricks he used to keep her under his thumb, she’d just find a loophole. He was forced to resort to his least favorite tactic. Trust.
So when the chip suddenly sprang back to life after a year of dormancy, giving off a strong and clear signal from a spot about a hundred yards northwest of the ruins of Talon Worldwide’s lakeside camp, there was no hesitation. Adam scrambled a rescue team, skilled shooters trained in everything from hostage recovery to close-quarters combat, and told them to be ready for anything.
With dawn still an hour away, a Maglite’s beam strobed across the sand. A cloud of steam danced across the shaft of hard white light, curling like cigarette smoke.
“Jesus,” the team lead breathed into his headset.
The chopper’s pilot, hanging back and prepping for launch, asked a question in his ear: “You find Dr. Cross?”
They’d found her tracking chip. And her spine.
And almost a skeleton’s worth of femurs, ribs, finger bones, scattered and jumbled in a bubbling pool of black tar. The rescue team slung their weapons and stared at the steaming puddle. It stank of sulfur, the rotten-egg stench slipping under the leader’s visor and turning his stomach.
“Orders, Captain?” one of his men asked.
“Get a body bag,” he said. “And a shovel.”
“Captain? You can’t be serious—”
“All of it. Scoop up all of it. The bones, the…whatever the hell that goo is. We can’t leave it for some hiker to stumble across. We’ll take it back to base. Adam will know what to do.”
Which was how the remnants of Dr. Cross came to be zipped in a body bag and laid out on a stainless-steel slab in her own laboratory, black Mylar gleaming under the nightingale-blue lights. The doctor’s work surrounded her, her f
ormulas still etched upon long whiteboards, tanks and tubes piping fresh batches of the drug she’d dubbed “ink” as white-coated technicians worked to refine her formula. Her legacy.
Mr. Smith had been the first Network official on the scene. The bland man, in his bland gray suit, wanted a firsthand look at the remains. The lawyer wasn’t qualified to render a medical opinion; he just wanted to make sure she was dead.
Adam’s face loomed from a video wall. “You seem pleased,” he said.
Mr. Smith primly adjusted his gray necktie. “I won’t lie. The woman was a thorn in my side from day one. Our side, sir. We’re better off without her.”
“That remains to be seen. Though I did warn her about taking the power of magic too lightly. I suspected her ambition, while admirable, would devour her in the end.”
One of the technicians slowly backpedaled, his eyes going wide. “Uh, Mr. Smith?”
The lawyer ignored him, focused on his opportunity to butter up the boss. “You are rarely wrong about these things, sir.”
“Mr. Smith?” The voice rose an octave, turning into a strangled squeak. “You need to see this!”
Smith turned on his heel, then froze.
The zipper on the body bag slithered down, one slow tug at a time, drawn by a tether of black slime. The glossy plastic folds parted, and the thing inside sat up. It was a thin armature of a human body drawn in jagged lines of ink, dripping, drooling like blood on razor wire. The technician staggered back—then hurled himself to the laboratory floor as a liquid whip lashed through the air, smashing a tank of freshly processed ink. Shards of glass tumbled to the floor, crashing onto the man’s huddled back, as the liquid drug latched onto the whip—and held there, suddenly turning gelatinous.
“That’s…not good,” Mr. Smith said. Adam watched safely from the screen at his back, silent and curious.
Another whip-tendril fractured a second tank. Gallons of ink pumped along the line, draining from the fractured glass like a milkshake being greedily sucked through a straw. The shape in the body bag took on figure and form as its mass grew, fed by the drugs.
One wet, shimmering foot touched down on the laboratory floor. Then another.
Savannah Cross’s skeleton floated inside a rough parody of her human form, a body made of pure ink. Her eyeless skull bounced and leered with a death’s-head grin from within the murky broth. Her blob arms lengthened, sprouting hands, then tendrils filled by her shattered finger bones. Wire-thin whips sprouted from her shoulders, hungrily lashing the air like a cat-of-nine-tails made from living oil.
She had no mouth, but her voice echoed through the laboratory, crisp and clear as a crystal bell.
“Mr. Smith. Adam. How lovely to see you again. Tell me, are you familiar with the story of Theseus’s Paradox?”
Adam held a pensive silence. Smith could only manage a slow shake of his head as she took a step toward him, leaving an ink-puddle footprint on the ivory tile.
“It’s been attributed to Plato,” she said. “I’ve always found it fascinating. It goes like this: the hero Theseus sailed his ship through many great and terrible battles. Its mast snapped in a storm, so he replaced it with a new one. Its bow was scorched black by enemy fire arrows, so he replaced that as well. Every splintered plank of the deck, every barnacle-ridden strip of wood beneath the waterline, was eventually torn away and rebuilt anew.”
“I don’t understand,” Mr. Smith managed to say. He edged backward, his shoulders bumping against the video wall as she advanced on him.
“If the entire ship, every last piece of it, is eventually replaced with new material, is it still the ship of Theseus? The same ship he went to war on, back when he started? If the replacement happens steadily, slowly, over time, the materials renewed but the nature of the thing unchanged, would you even know the difference?”
She curled her oil-sheen fingers, brushing the bones that floated, disconnected and bobbing, inside the slimy blob of her chest.
“Now take the figure before you. Dr. Cross was the victim of an ill-timed and rash dimensional transition. Her brain was utterly destroyed. Her heart, her lungs, her nervous system, all annihilated. But slowly, steadily over time, she had been replacing her organic body with infusions of ink and using its alchemical powers to keep her alive. That ink slowly took on her memories, her thought processes, patching her damaged neurons and picking up the slack as her gray matter rotted away. Which brings us to this moment. Everything that made the original person who she is, is now gone. And yet here I stand. Show off that fine legal mind of yours, Mr. Smith, and tell me: am I Savannah Cross? How could you ever know for certain?”
His fingers fumbled with his tie. Behind Savannah, the technicians were scrambling for the door in a dead panic. Smith took a breath.
“I would say,” he started, careful with his words, “that who a person is—emotionally, internally—doesn’t really matter. What defines a person is what they do. The actions they take, and how they impact the world around them. So in your case, we would have to go by existing knowledge and see if you behave the way the former Dr. Cross would if she were in your current…situation.”
“Diplomatically put,” Savannah replied.
She swung her shoulder toward him, bending boneless and liquid, and a whip of ink sliced through the air. It coiled around his throat with a whiplash snap—and then a hollow cracking sound as his head violently jerked to one side and his neck broke in three places.
The whip uncoiled, slithering back into Savannah’s body. Mr. Smith’s corpse collapsed to the laboratory floor. Her grinning skull bobbed as she turned her eyeless face toward the video wall.
“There was no doubt in my mind,” Adam told her. “For the record, that was unnecessary and excessive. But forgivable. Welcome back, Dr. Cross. Can I hope you’ll be returning to your duties?”
She left black puddles on the tile as she strode toward the screen.
“I’m afraid not. Our interests are no longer mutual. You want Roth and Reinhart for petty revenge, because they burned your interests and offended your so-called kings. I want the power they contain. They are connected to the fabric of reality itself, the engine of creation. And now, so am I. You know, you chided me for not respecting magic. And I hate to admit it, but you were right. There’s a universe of magic out there just waiting to be understood, to be tapped, to be mastered and devoured. And I want all of it.”
“Reconsider,” Adam warned her.
“Consider this my formal resignation,” Savannah replied. “I’m afraid I can’t give you two weeks’ notice—rude, I know, terribly sorry—but you can keep my old research. I’ve progressed to a bigger and more important project. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have science to do. Stay out of my way.”
* * *
Adam sat in darkness, arms resting on his wingback leather chair, gazing at a bank of a dozen glowing screens. He punched a key. The laboratory feed died. Then he hauled a gooseneck microphone, vintage chrome like a relic from a 1940s radio show, closer to his frowning lips.
“Security. Send a kill squad over to lab one. Dr. Cross has mutated and gone rogue. Please send expendable troops; their guns won’t hurt her, and she’s probably going to tear them to pieces.”
“Sir? Um…why are we sending them, then?”
“Because she’s smart. And if I don’t make a token effort to stop her from leaving, she’ll be watching even harder for the surveillance team I’m sending to follow her. I’m also going to need a dummy surveillance team to cover for the real one and draw her attention. Again, expendables. They won’t be coming back.”
He didn’t wait for the reply. A second keystroke opened a fresh feed. Rosales appeared on the screen, spinning in her office chair in slow circles with her head tilted back as she stared at the ceiling.
“In the midst of crisis,” Adam said, “opportunity. For you.”
She stopped spinning. “Didn’t go too well, huh?”
“Dr. Cross is pursuing her own agenda, and Mr
. Smith is dead.”
Rosales shrugged. “So defrost another one. Not like that freak hasn’t died on the job before.”
“No time. I need you in the field.”
“And I want to do this why, exactly?” She paused. “Before you threaten me with dire consequences, how about maybe don’t, and save us both some time.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“You already pay me.”
“Vandemere Zoo, in upstate New York,” Adam said.
That caught her interest. “What about it?”
“The Vandemere Lodge is dead—”
Rosales puffed air between her lips, blowing a half-hearted raspberry as she cut him off. “Poseurs. Not one of those guys actually had wolf blood. Bunch of wannabes offering lame-ass, no-risk sacrifices to the King of Wolves hoping he’d puff up their stock portfolios. It doesn’t work that way.”
“As they learned, to their great misfortune,” Adam replied. “But the fact remains, their old killing grounds now lie vacant. And in need of a new owner.”
“You’re offering me a zoo?”
“I’m offering you a hunting preserve of your very own. Spacious, secure, remote from civilization—oh, and needless to say, owned by a shell company and it’s yours completely tax-free. Do what you like with it. Turn it into a vacation spot. Open a petting zoo. Use it for a body dump. You’re a resourceful woman.”
Rosales drummed her fingers on her glass desktop.
“I might have a few days of vacation time coming,” she said. “All right. I’m in. What do you want done, exactly?”
“We were already pursuing Reinhart and Roth for destroying our New York operations. That they crossed paths with the relic is…an opportunity. Find them. The bell is your top priority. Take it and bring it to me. If you can capture the women alive, do so and I’ll throw in a sizable bonus. If that’s not practical, kill them both.”
“Oh, it’s plenty practical. I’ll start with Vanessa.”
Adam lifted his chin, studying her through the feed. “I thought you said Ms. Reinhart had the bell?”
Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3) Page 6
