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

by Craig Schaefer

  Gazelle murmured something about checking on the others and made her way out the door. Clytemnestra simply nodded, grave, and her projection shattered into motes of sapphire light. Her knife-body sat silent upon the counter. Nessa turned to the window.

  “We spoke, Clytemnestra and I,” she said. “We have a plan. A theory, more than a plan, really. It’s a long shot.”

  Hedy took an eager step toward her. “Then let me help! Whatever you’re going to do—”

  “It is a cosmic long shot, Hedy. A gamble of astronomical proportions. I’ll bring you in when the time is right, but for now, I want you focused on the task at hand. Even in a best-case scenario, I don’t have much longer to live.”

  “We don’t have to talk about that.”

  “Yes, we do, because I need to make sure you understand me.” Nessa turned to face her, putting her back to the gathering storm. “Everything we’ve learned about the first story, and Carolyn’s backed it all up, tells us that the Witch and her Knight die together. Either we die together, or I die and Marie follows me soon after. Usually by her own hand.”

  “Suicide,” Hedy breathed.

  “Not this time. Marie lives, do you understand me? No matter what happens to me, Marie lives. You make damn sure of it.”

  “I’ll protect her like she’s one of my own,” Hedy said. “And we’re not giving up. I’ll continue my experiments. I’ll find your next incarnation, we’ll try again—”

  “Task at hand, Hedy. All well and good, but right now, only Marie matters.” Nessa glanced down at her phone, distracted by an incoming text. “Janine and Tony just boarded their flight at O’Hare. They have Marie’s book and they’ll be here in…just under four hours. Daniel should have the ritual site secure by then. As soon as they land, we get to work.”

  “Have you decided who you want on the rescue team?”

  “As few people as possible. I’d say that Clytemnestra and I would go alone, and her only because she has to open the way for me, but—”

  “But you know there’s no chance I’m letting you go without me,” Hedy said.

  “As I was about to say, yes.”

  “Gazelle wants to come. I think it would be wise. She adores Marie and she’ll fight harder than anybody to protect her. I mean, anybody but us. Good to have in case…you know. Something goes wrong.”

  Nessa nodded. She turned back to the window.

  “Fair. I’d say bring everyone, if I wasn’t half-certain we’re walking into a trap.”

  Her eyes captured the clouds and reflected them back out into the desert. Growing dark, as cold and ominous as her frown.

  “I have an enemy, Hedy.” She pointed, her fingertip tracing the sky. “Somewhere. Out there among the stars and the deeps. They gave me that tainted book of spells. Made damn sure I’d poison myself. But I’m already doomed to die, and doomed to come back again, so why go to all that trouble? It’s a murder with no purpose.”

  “They also left you that card to open the way to my world, and made sure you’d find it,” Hedy pointed out. “You didn’t know what Shadow infection was until we were reunited. You would have died without ever realizing why you were sick.”

  “So was it a simple twist of the knife? A little bit of extra cruelty, making sure I could see my death coming but do nothing about it?”

  Nessa fell silent. She studied the clouds.

  “No,” she decided. “And that’s what worries me about tonight. Not one thing, not one element since Marie and I first crossed paths, has been random. My enemy has a design. Intricate, elaborate. Terrible. And I fear that somehow, when we open that door tonight and set off across the wheel of worlds, we’ll be doing exactly what they want us to do.”

  “What’s the alternative?” Hedy asked.

  “There is no alternative. We know it, and they know it too. All we can do is expect the worst and be ready for anything.”

  Hedy crossed the pink carpet and stood at Nessa’s side.

  “I’ll be with you. Every step of the way.”

  Nessa squeezed her hand tight, then let it go.

  “I know,” she said. “I really am proud of you. You know that, right?”

  Hedy quirked a tiny smile. “Careful with the compliments. Don’t let anyone hear you say that, or they might think the Owl is going soft.”

  “I should spread some pain and suffering, just to make certain they don’t misunderstand me.”

  “I know a good place to start,” Hedy replied. “Because somebody, and I don’t care what kind of master manipulator they think they are, deliberately made you their enemy. They chose this fight. Talk about asking for pain and suffering…”

  “And I will deliver.” Nessa took a deep breath. “But first things first. Marie is out there. Damn the costs and damn the consequences. I’m bringing her home tonight.”

  Fifteen

  Marie had expected handcuffs, shackles, maybe a summary bullet to the head. Instead, the men on her heels stood down with a wave of Tricia’s hand. Her jet-black armor hissed softly as she gestured to the stairs and her two companions, both down on one knee, rose back to their full height. Their helmets peeled open, metal folding in on itself. Both of them were women, one with rich brown skin and deep eyes, the other with signs of a faded sunburn on her freckled cheeks. Marie didn’t recognize either of them.

  Tricia, though, she couldn’t forget. She remembered how the woman had approached her at the Bast Club, feeding her a story about how they’d gone to college together—and how for just a moment, before she regained her composure, she looked crushed that Marie didn’t remember her. Tricia watched her with that same tremulous expression now, half wonderment and half fear.

  “I’m not who you think I am,” Marie told her.

  “It’s really her, though,” said the freckled woman. She looked to Tricia. “It really is.”

  “It really is,” Tricia echoed.

  “There’s been a mistake,” Marie said. “Look, Ezra Talon can clear all of this up, if you’d just let me talk to him alone for five minutes.”

  The women shared sidelong glances and a soft chuckle, sharing an inside joke. Tricia took a step closer to Marie and held up her gauntlets.

  “Relax. No one is going to hurt you here. You’re among friends now. Old and dear friends, I promise. I know you don’t remember, but it’s okay. We’re going to fix you. We’re going to make you all better.”

  “Ma’am?” The man with the crimson metal badge, standing at Marie’s back, spoke up. “Will you need support on your way to the extraction point?”

  Engines roared and the brown sky lit up with pinpoints of fire. Two more Valkyries blazed in on their shoulder jets, afterburners hissing as they landed like birds of prey on the lip of the building.

  “Does it look like I need support?” Tricia sniffed at him. “Take your men and disperse. We’ve got it from here.”

  They walked Marie across the street, back into the TAG building, onto an elevator. Not to visit Talon’s office, though: their final destination was the top floor, where a bulbous and black turboprop jet was waiting. Marie ended up squeezed between a pair of the women, with Tricia and her two companions in the seats facing her. The door rattled shut, sealing them in. The concealing enchantment Nessa had laid upon the mirrored shoulder bag still held strong; even pressed right up against Marie’s side, the woman on her left didn’t seem to notice it was there. Not that anything inside the bag could help her now.

  Tricia tried introducing the others, but her words washed over Marie like the thrum of the rotors as the plane lifted off, lurching straight up from the pad and into the turbulent smog.

  They were all smiling, looking at her with expressions ranging from genuine friendliness to open awe. Tricia kept leaning forward while she talked, touching Marie’s knee for punctuation. It didn’t stop her heart from pounding, didn’t stop her from having to take deep breaths to keep the panic at bay.

  Tricia had called her Lady Martika. The name from the armor dis
play in the TAG office lobby. The woman who spoke with Marie’s voice as she called for death to the degenerates, the radicals, the foreigners. Marie had tugged down her surgical mask so she could breathe a little easier, but she wanted to cover her face. Or wear a different one.

  She wasn’t that woman. This was a mistake.

  “I didn’t entirely lie,” Tricia was telling her. “We did go to college together. Just, you know, on this world. Speaking to you at the club was a protocol breach. I wasn’t supposed to make contact at all, just observe and report, but when I saw you there…I couldn’t help it. I hope you’re not mad.”

  “I’m telling you, you’re confusing me with someone else.”

  Marie didn’t even believe the words. She wasn’t a good enough liar to fool herself. All the same, she had to say them. As long as she kept protesting, this wasn’t real.

  “Oh, no. No mistake.” Tricia beamed at her. “Do you have any idea how long it took us to set this all up? And that was before half the plan went sideways on us. I spent months shuttling back and forth between parallel Earths just to keep tabs on all the pieces in play.”

  “Missed the entire new season of Golden Voice,” said the dark-complexioned woman at her side. Tricia had introduced her as Kiyana. “Don’t worry, I recorded it for you. And adjusted your news feed so you won’t see any spoilers until you’re caught up.”

  “Best lieutenant ever,” Tricia said.

  On Marie’s left, the one Tricia introduced as Ines—with ice-white hair and features sharp enough to cut glass—wrinkled her nose.

  “Golden Voice is bourgeois trash. It should be banned from the airwaves for the public good.”

  The woman on Marie’s right snorted into her hand. “‘Trash,’ says the one member of the squad who never misses an episode of Sexy Nurses in Danger…”

  The cabin erupted as they all began shouting at each other, more or less good-naturedly, until Tricia flapped her gauntleted hands and waved them back down into silence.

  “The point is, my lady,” Tricia said, “we’re all honored to have you back.”

  “My name is Marie Reinhart, okay? I’m from a place called New York City—”

  Tricia arched an eyebrow at her. “C’mon, Martie. Really? I already told you I’ve been following you for months. You know perfectly well who and what you really are. Obviously you died and reincarnated on that other Earth. I mean, come on, duh? But you’re still our Lady Martika. And though you don’t remember—which I’ll be honest, hurts a little, but I know it’s not your fault—the real you is still in there, deep down inside. We just have to bring her back out again.”

  The others were smiling, staring, with the kind of laser-intense certainty only found among the zealous and the mad. Marie squirmed in her seat. She was hemmed in, and the view outside the window offered nothing but a wasteland of roiling smog. She had nowhere to run.

  Then she had a thought. A suspicion, deep in her gut.

  “You said…keeping tabs on all the pieces in play.”

  Tricia nodded. “That’s right. I can’t complain too much. I enjoyed your world for what it was. But there’s no place like home.”

  “What do you know about Nessa’s book of spells?”

  “I know that it took forever to get her to notice it. I must have followed her to half a dozen used bookstores, rushing ahead to prop it on a shelf at every single one of them, just waiting for her to finally buy the darn thing—”

  Marie lunged for Tricia’s eyes. She threw herself across the aisle, screaming, kicking as the women at her sides grabbed hold of her arms and pressed her back against her seat. Kiyana gently slid in and laid one onyx boot across her thrashing legs. The powered armor effortlessly pinned Marie in place while Tricia tried to talk her down.

  “No, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay—”

  “You killed her,” Marie shouted. “She’s infected with Shadow. You fucking killed her—”

  “No, I wouldn’t, I swear,” Tricia said. “Listen to me. Mart—I mean, Marie, listen to me, okay? I would never ever hurt her. Never in a million years. You just haven’t seen the big picture yet. But you will. Just wait until we land and it’ll all make sense, I promise.”

  Marie fell silent. She bristled, locking eyes with Tricia, but she stopped fighting. Her seatmates still clung to her, their steel-gloved hands gentle but firm.

  “I don’t like the way you’re looking at me right now,” Tricia said.

  Marie’s voice dropped to a graveyard whisper.

  “You had better,” Marie said, “have a way to cure Nessa. Or her blood is going to be on your hands. And yours is going to be on mine. That’s a promise.”

  Tricia broke into an eager smile.

  “There’s our Lady Martika,” she said, her voice soothing like she was trying to calm a frightened animal. “You feel it, don’t you? You feel it already. That’s your nature, rising to the surface. The real you.”

  “Our Lady Fear,” Ines murmured.

  “You said she even became a lawbringer on that backwater planet?” Kiyana asked.

  Tricia nodded. “They call them ‘police,’ but yes. You should have seen her. No Valkyrie armor, nothing but a semiautomatic pistol with primitive ammunition, and she still led the way into battle. It’s in her blood. And now she returns, to lead us once again.”

  The jet banked hard, veering left, and the smog broke. At first Marie thought they were circling over another skyscraper, but she hadn’t felt any descent, only a swift and steady rise since the moment they took off. She stared at vast sheets of dull gunmetal, the thunder of engines that blazed like Vulcan’s forge.

  It’s a ship, she thought.

  “Odin Platform One,” Tricia said, answering her unspoken question. “Or as we like to call it, the Triumph.”

  * * *

  They led her across a flight deck and through an open bulkhead, down sheet-metal halls that thrummed with the vibration of the engines. Marie ended up alone in a small, spartan room with padlocked cabinets and a doctor’s exam bench, a fresh strip of antiseptic paper laid out over the cold vinyl. A new arrival wore spotless white scrubs and peered at her through cherry-tinted glasses only slightly bigger than her beady eyes.

  “I’ll need you to undress, please.”

  “Excuse me?” Marie said.

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Right, the amnesia, they told me about this.”

  She brandished a slim black wallet, like Marie’s old detective shield, and flipped it open. The woman’s badge was a symbol of a pole, striped in red and white, set onto a field of shining gold.

  “I’m a barber, by official appointment. Your barber, to be specific. Well, your entire squad’s.” She let out a nervous, distracted giggle. “I swear, m’lady, if you could remember how many times I’ve patched you up. You had six bullets in you after the Battle of Philadelphia. So if we could just get this examination underway—”

  “I’m fine,” Marie said. “I don’t need any help.”

  The lies were rolling off her tongue today, but they weren’t getting any more believable. Her body was a wreck, punishing her with jolts of pain every time she took a breath or turned her hips. All the same, she could live with it. She was already vulnerable here, already powerless.

  The doctor shot a glance over her shoulder, to the closed door. She fumbled with her glasses.

  “Please,” she said, barely a whisper. “Don’t do this to me.”

  Marie shook her head. “To you?”

  “I’ve been instructed to give you a medical review. If you refuse, your…comrades are going to come in here. They’re going to make you undress, and they’re going to hold you down until I finish the procedure. But I’m the one they’re going to be angry at, and I’m the one who’s going to get punished for it.”

  While she talked, she folded her glasses and set them on the counter. Her hands were shaking.

  “Okay,” Marie said. She unbuttoned her blouse. “Okay.”

  After that she was gently poked
and prodded, wore a blood-pressure cuff, breathed deep while the doctor jotted down notes on a clipboard. Her body was a quilt of bruises, some fresh and some old, black and blue and yellow all blurring together like oil paint.

  “Definitely fractured here and here,” the doctor murmured. “Raise your arms for me?”

  Marie winced as she held her arms up. A plastic corset filled with blue gel snaked around her ribs. It felt like it had just come from the freezer, and the cold sent a shiver up her spine. The corset hissed and contracted. Not painfully tight but snug, like it had been tailored for her body, and it flexed along with her breath.

  Not painful at all, she realized, as the ache in her ribs faded to a distant and almost ticklish tingle.

  “Adaptive plastic,” the doctor explained. “It uses intelligent compression to speed up healing, along with a time-release anesthetic to keep you comfortable in the meantime. Keep it on, and we’ll change it in four days.”

  “Tell me something,” Marie said.

  “Hmm?”

  “What was she like? Lady Martika.”

  The doctor studied her for a moment, holding her thoughts in. Then she spoke.

  “At first I thought this might be some kind of a trick. Or a loyalty test. They’re big on loyalty tests around here. You really came back to life somehow. And you really don’t remember anything, do you?”

  “I’m not her,” Marie said.

  “I almost believe you.”

  “I’m not her.”

  The doctor turned to her clipboard. Marie realized that she hadn’t actually made direct eye contact with her, not once, always glancing down or turning away when they spoke.

  “Early on,” she said, “there was a hotbed of rebellion down in Austin. Some people in district eighty-four were caught harboring protesters and stockpiling munitions to fight back against the New American Militia.”

  “What happened?” Marie asked.

  “The Valkyries came. And at Lady Martika’s command, the culling began. They killed them. Slaughtered their way from one side of the district to the other. She wanted to make an example. Show the rest of the city the price of rebellion. Not everyone. A few, those of us with valuable skills, were taken for punishment and reeducation.”