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

by Craig Schaefer

  Three suits of black armor rose up and hovered before her, riding on plumes of flame. The Valkyries came in for a landing. The one in the middle, standing before Marie, reached up and tapped a fingertip against the base of her helmet.

  The helmet opened with a tide of machine-gun clicks, segmented black metal folding in on itself in strips as it peeled away, exposing the face of the woman beneath. Marie recognized her—her bright eyes, her cinnamon hair worn in an undercut that was long and wavy on top but buzzed to the scalp on the sides. They’d met at the Bast Club in Chicago. She’d introduced herself as Tricia and claimed she and Marie had gone to college together.

  As one, the other two armored figures dropped to one knee, their heads bowed. Tricia curled her gauntleted hand into a fist and struck her shoulder in a salute. The echoing clang of steel on steel rippled across the open floor.

  “Lady Martika,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Thirteen

  Alton Roth was back in DC. Back in his element. He usually felt right at home in the marble halls, the grinding gears of government, the sloppy and rough machine that could transform lip-service notions of public service into raw profit. He had polls to tell him his principles, a stream of lobbyists at his office door bearing position papers and discreet checks, and a guardian angel just down the hall.

  His angel had been quiet. Alton hadn’t understood half of the overheard discussion between Calypso and the redheaded stranger on his private jet, but he got the gist of it. Calypso had crossed a dangerous line, protecting Alton’s interests, and the woman was calling him to account for it.

  We’ve got a contract, he told himself for the hundredth time, pacing the goldenrod carpet of his office. He busts the deal, he loses everything. No. Doesn’t matter what kind of pressure they put on him, Calypso’s my guy. All the way to the White House.

  Some men turned to diamonds under pressure. Some cracked like coal. Alton needed more than a demon’s word of honor. If his time in the Washington trenches had taught him anything, it was that sometimes a man needed to get his own hands dirty. Elbows-deep in the dirt, if he had to.

  “Do me a favor,” he told his assistant on the intercom. “Pull Mr. Scratch’s call logs for the last week. Inbound and outbound. Be discreet. He doesn’t need to know about it.”

  He knew Calypso had been heading things up with his lead hunter, that woman, Nyx. She looked like somebody who could get things done. And in a few minutes, Alton would have the number he was using to reach her.

  “Right away, Mr. Roth. Also, you have a visitor. She’s not on your appointment sheet; do you want me to pencil her in?”

  “Constituent or lobbyist?”

  “Angelica Rosales, says she’s the director of corporate security for Talon Worldwide.”

  He knew the name. Not hers, but Talon was a big player in DC—and a big spender. Curious. He wasn’t on any committees that dealt with arms appropriations, wasn’t sure what he could do for her, but this smelled like an opportunity.

  “I’ve got a little time. Send her on back.”

  Rosales let herself in and shut the door behind her. She prowled his office, taking in the nautical knick-knacks on the credenza, the framed portrait of the president alongside Alton’s two diplomas, barely glancing at the man behind the desk. Her fingertip trailed along the buttery wood of a bookshelf.

  “Nice digs,” she said. “You didn’t skimp on the decor. Look, I’m going to cut straight to the chase and save us both a lot of time. If you could cooperate by not playing stupid, I’d really appreciate that.”

  Alton stared, momentarily speechless. She took off her copper-tinted glasses, her turquoise eyes flashing, and gave him a smile.

  “You’re trying to kill Vanessa Roth and Marie Reinhart. Hey, fine, your business, I truly don’t care.”

  “I don’t—I don’t know what you’re suggesting—” Alton started to stammer. Rosales held up a finger and wagged it at him.

  “Uh-uh. Please. You’re doing that thing I asked you not to do. I’m going to keep talking as if you didn’t. Now, me, I’m supposed to retrieve a special object in Marie’s possession. And I know where she is. Well, sort of roughly where she is. My problem is that I’ve got two bosses, and one of them—Ezra Talon—wants Vanessa and Marie taken alive. He also wants that special object I mentioned, but my other boss wants it more. And I’m doing a playing-both-sides thing, so I’ve got to at least make an effort at looking loyal, or I’ll only be getting one paycheck instead of two from now on. And that would suck for me, because I like getting paid a lot of money for minimal effort. Are you with me so far?”

  Alton sank back in his chair, feeling more of his world fraying apart at the seams. First a demon had walked right onto his jet and confronted him and Calypso about their hunt. Now an executive from one of America’s biggest arms dealers was standing in his office, doing the same thing. He was naked, his secrets on full display, all semblance of control slipping out from under his fingertips.

  He needed to get it back. More than anything, he needed to feel like he was in control again.

  “I’m listening,” he told her.

  “I’m proposing a little tag-team action. My intel and field support, your shooters. Your people do the dirty, take ’em out, and I get to pick Marie’s pockets before you dump her in a shallow grave. You get what you want, I get what I want, nobody knows I was ever involved, and we pretend none of this ever happened. Sound good?”

  Alton steepled his fingers. His gaze fixed on hers, steady, as he weighed his options.

  “What kind of support?” he asked.

  * * *

  She gave him the address of a private airstrip, a stone’s throw from the Potomac. The setting sun painted the sky in pastel pink and drew long shadows across the runway. She was waiting in hangar four.

  Alton came alone. He had concocted a story for Calypso, a private dinner with a generous donor, but he hadn’t even asked. The senator took his guardian’s silence as proof that he was doing the right thing, making his own moves. He and Rosales waited for their third guest.

  Nyx didn’t come alone. She brought a posse with her, eight men in urban camo who spread out like a firing line at her back as she strode through the open hangar door. She kept her Wayfarers on, turning her shrouded gaze from Alton to Rosales to an empty patch of floor.

  “Someone is missing,” she said.

  “Calypso doesn’t need to be involved,” Alton told her. “You’re dealing directly with me now. There’s been a failure of management from the start of this operation, and I’m here to fix it.”

  Nyx moved close, black leather glistening as her hips swayed. She had two inches of height over Alton and pointedly looked down at him while her lips curled, amused. She raised a hand and flapped her thumb against her fingers as she spoke.

  “Yap, yap, yap. That is what this one hears when humans talk. They rarely have anything interesting to say.”

  Alton cast a glance at the men backing her up. They stood like soldiers at loose attention, but they weren’t cut to any official grooming standards. Beards, long hair, neck tattoos. They were either bargain-basement thugs or real operators, and he couldn’t tell which.

  “I’m surprised,” he said. “Thought you lost all your men in Carson City, when Vanessa chewed them up like reheated leftovers.”

  Nyx’s smile vanished.

  “This one still has resources she can call upon.”

  “Not like mine,” Alton replied.

  He gestured to Rosales. Her fingers trailed across the face of a drab olive crate, rough plastic with a heavy-duty lock and a fingerprint sensor. One of a half dozen boxes just like it, laid out along tables that lined the hangar wall. Nyx didn’t care about the crates. She zeroed in on Rosales’s eyes.

  “Wolf blood.”

  “Blame my father,” Rosales said.

  Nyx looked to Alton. “You know what she is?”

  “An enterprising self-starter,” he said. “My
kind of woman.”

  “You fraternize with a servant of the kings.”

  “I’m a servant of myself,” Rosales said. “I know the courts of hell and the Network have their little back-alley feud going on, but honestly? I don’t care and I don’t want to care. It’s real simple: we work together, we get this done, we all walk away happy.”

  Nyx folded her arms, glowering. “This one needs no help from a human, or a wolf.”

  “You sure about that?” Rosales replied.

  She pressed her thumb to the sensor. The lock snapped open with a high-pitched beep. She lifted the lid, inviting Nyx to take a look inside.

  Sleek rifles, fully automatic and built for a battlefield that didn’t exist yet, nestled in beds of black felt. They had company. Matte-black handguns and cylinder-shaped grenades filled out the crate.

  “Are these…?” Nyx trailed off.

  “The latest from Talon Worldwide’s brand-new summertime catalog,” Rosales said. “These crates just mysteriously fell off the back of a truck this morning. No idea how that happened. And of course, once our deal is done, you get to keep the toys. Call it a parting gift.”

  Nyx almost reached into the crate. She paused, looking at Alton with fresh suspicion.

  “This one has seen your contract. Going behind Calypso’s back? Making deals with an agent of the Network? This puts you in violation. He could call the contract forfeit.” Faint waves of heat shimmered off her alabaster skin as she leaned close to him. “You do understand what that means, yes? This one could claim your soul, here and now. Drag you straight to hell.”

  Alton pushed his shoulders back and tried to keep any hint of fear from his face. Clean and cool, he told himself. You’re in control.

  “He could, but he won’t. I assume demons understand the concept of sunken costs? Calypso has invested way too much time and effort into bringing me this far, just to punch my ticket over a little legalese. He wants me in the White House just as badly as I want to get there. Hell, he wants it more than I do. He’ll fall in line.”

  Nyx’s nose wrinkled. She turned back to Rosales.

  “Did you bring more than weapons?”

  “Intel,” Rosales said. “No more reports of a woman flying on a broomstick since Carson City, so Vanessa left the scene using ground transportation. Good bet she’s trying to reconnect with her weird-ass coven buddies. Plus she’s got a little help from the mob.”

  “Faust.” The name was acid on Nyx’s tongue.

  “Which means Vegas—”

  “Too obvious,” Nyx said, cutting her off. “Faust would expect this one to search there first. He would never hide her in his own city.”

  “And given enough time to shuffle her elsewhere, you might be right. But when he took off from Iowa, Faust stole a school bus. My people have been combing through police dispatches all over Nevada. Want to guess where the bus just turned up, a couple of hours ago?” Rosales pressed her thumb against a second case. The lid swung up, offering another bounty of weapons. “They’re in Las Vegas. And if he’s reluctant to stash Vanessa and her crew in any of his hangouts, knowing you’re going to come looking eventually…”

  “They’re hiding in a hotel,” Nyx said. One hand curled into an eager fist.

  “Your men, my weapons and tactical oversight. Oh, and my corporate plane, which is fueled up and ready to go in the next hangar.” Rosales gestured with her thumb. “Wheels up in ten minutes. We can be there in four hours, before he has a chance to relocate the targets, and we get this done tonight. What do you say?”

  Nyx turned to her men. She pointed a black fingernail at the plastic crates.

  “Load the weapons onto the plane,” she told them. “This one gets first pick.”

  Fourteen

  A storm was coming to Las Vegas. Nessa watched it from her hotel room, a razor line of roiling darkness creeping just ahead of the sunset.

  The plan had been set, the orders dispatched. Nothing to do now but wait. She wasn’t good at waiting. So she paced, and watched the clouds crawling toward the city, and listened to Hedy and Clytemnestra debate. They were on the far side of the suite, past a king-size bed with a mountain of fluffy pillows and a stretch of hot pink carpet. Daniel had scrounged up a tablet with Internet access. It sat on the kitchenette counter beside Clytemnestra’s blade; the ancient witch had emerged from hibernation again, her human form projected in a shimmering blue outline.

  “The problem is, my herbcraft is admittedly prodigious, but just like you I didn’t learn it on this world. Different herbs, here. Different names for things.” Her luminous finger tapped at the screen and passed through it, blasting the pixels with a wash of static. Hedy pulled the tablet a little closer to her side of the counter and advanced the page herself.

  “Let me, you’re going to break it.” Hedy paused. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just…stop being a knife? You can change your form anytime you want.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “Suit yourself. And same problem here. I know exactly how Nessa’s serum is mixed, how to concoct it, the precise herbs—I just can’t get them on this world. We’re down to three flasks—”

  “Two.” Nessa held up a pair of fingers. They both looked her way. “I pushed myself too hard in Carson City. Had to drink one just to stave off the infection and keep it from killing me.”

  “Two,” Hedy echoed. She looked to Clytemnestra, eyes wide as inspiration grabbed hold of her. “So let’s go back. You can open a doorway, right? We’ll hop over to my workshop, grab what we need, and we’ll be back before sunset.”

  “I can open a doorway, but not easily.” Her projection raised an open hand, as if weighing the cool air in her palm. “There’s a reason I asked for an ideal ritual site. Have you felt this place? This world is…”

  “Muffled,” Hedy said. “I know, it’s amazing the natives even discovered magic exists. Their greatest sorcerers do card tricks.”

  “It’s a sound strategy, though. Nothing says we can’t make more than one jump. We’ll leave tonight, pass from here to your home world, secure the herbs for another batch of elixir—”

  “You’re forgetting what’s waiting on the other side of that door,” Nessa said. “The Sisters of the Noose will be on us like sharks on a blood trail.”

  “We don’t know that,” Hedy said.

  “The odds are your entire covenstead’s been burned to the ground by now. That or they’ve made it their new lair, infesting the place, just waiting for us to come back so they can finish what they started.”

  “Mother,” Hedy said, “you don’t know that.”

  “I know how many of your followers died in Mirenze when the Sisters attacked. I’m not asking you to put yourselves in that kind of danger again. I won’t allow it.”

  Hedy fell silent for a moment. Then she folded her arms and fixed Nessa with a cool and steady gaze.

  “As I recall,” she said, “you made a pointed statement, no less than twice, that you have no intention of usurping my position as the leader of the Pallid Masque. Therefore, you are not in a position to dictate what dangers my students and I choose to subject ourselves to. According to your very own words, the decision is mine to make.”

  Nessa stared back at her.

  “You really are my daughter, aren’t you?”

  Hedy nodded. “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’m very proud. Annoyed, but proud.” She pointed to the window, to the distant red rocks and the darkening sky. “Marie is out there. Right now, as we speak, she’s out there, alone—”

  “If my workshop isn’t compromised, it’ll take me less than ten minutes to grab what I need.”

  “If. And if it is, it’s a death trap.” Nessa took a deep breath, steadying herself, grasping for calm. “All right. Let’s compromise.”

  “I didn’t think you knew that word,” Hedy said.

  “Don’t push your luck. Look, I have two days’ worth of elixir, so I’m not in any imminent danger. We hunt for Marie first.
If we can find her right away, all is well. If not, we keep searching. When I run out, then—and only then—we risk a return to Mirenze.”

  A crisp knock sounded at the door. Hedy let Gazelle in, then waited while she leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. Her tanned skin glistened with a sheen of sweat.

  “Sorry,” Gazelle panted, “just ran up twelve flights of stairs.”

  “I showed you how to use the elevator,” Nessa said.

  “Lock myself in a cage? A cage that moves without magic? Oh, no. Not for me. Stairs are fine.” She gulped down air. “Daniel went to pick out a ritual site, buy a new deck of cards, and talk to his contact in the courts of hell. Butterfly and Mantis have acclimated the best out of any of us, so they’re doing some local scouting, trying to source precious metals for the trip. Roach and Vole are still having trouble passing for natives, so I have them in their room, watching the talking box.”

  Nessa shot a glance at the television. “That may or may not be a good idea.”

  “And Badger?” Hedy asked.

  “Down in the hotel bar, keeping an eye on Carolyn, who is drunk. Also!” Gazelle sprinted over to the long credenza across from the bed, crouched down, and pulled open the minibar. “Have you seen this? It’s a tiny tavern. In your room. Carolyn says that if you drink all the little bottles, the staff just comes back and replaces them all the very next day. And these things in the shiny bag are called ‘barbecued potato chips’ and I love them. I think we should make our new covenstead here.”

  “We’ll see,” Hedy told her. “We have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of problems to solve in the very near future. It’ll keep until…after.”

  After. The word hung in the air like a bad smell. They couldn’t see it, but they could feel it, driving out the oxygen, suffocating everyone in the room. Gazelle deflated. She shut the minibar door, flicking a glance at Nessa.

  Even a fresh batch of elixir would only delay the inevitable. Nessa was dying.

  “Can we have the room, please?” Nessa asked.