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

by Craig Schaefer

  “Hedy,” Nessa said, “you’re with me.”

  Carolyn passed Hedy the first-aid kit from the restaurant, and she took it with a curt nod.

  Gazelle stepped up. “And me.”

  “No,” Hedy told her.

  “Mistress? You can use my help, and—”

  Hedy raised her open hand. Gazelle fell silent. The next words between them didn’t need to be spoken. They showed in the look on Hedy’s face. She had already lost one apprentice tonight.

  “I need you here,” Hedy said, “because I have work for you. You’ll be leading the coven until I return. Full authority. And if anything happens to me—”

  “I should be with you.”

  Hedy took a deep breath.

  “Your task, as of now, is gathering information about those who attacked us. Nyx, and the men with her. I want their true names, I want to know where they came from, and I want to know where they are now. And don’t stop there. I want the man who sold them the weapons they used. The innkeeper who gave them shelter while they planned their attack. Everyone who had a hand in Badger’s death, to the smallest degree.”

  “Everyone,” Gazelle echoed.

  “One of our own died tonight. Everyone pays,” Hedy said. “All of them.”

  Gazelle clicked her heels together. Hedy turned and gave Nessa a passing glance. Nessa caught the glimmer of uncertainty, like Hedy was a student giving a recital in front of her teacher. Nessa’s fingers curled on her shoulder and gave a reassuring squeeze.

  “Exactly what I would have commanded,” Nessa told her.

  While they were talking, Daniel had sprinted up the wet marble steps, carrying on a quick back-and-forth with a man standing inside the casino doors. He was short, with greasy side-slicked hair and a pencil-thin mustache. Daniel waved Nessa up, and Hedy followed on her heels.

  “This is Greenbriar. He’ll get you upstairs.”

  “We’re square after this, understand? Square.” Greenbriar turned his glare from Daniel to Nessa, looking her up and down. “Okay, first, maybe hide that knife before I walk you across my casino floor? Maybe? Swear to God, Faust, I don’t know where you find these people.”

  “They find me.”

  “Watch over my coven,” Hedy told him.

  Daniel backed down the steps, into the rain. “They’ll be fine. Trust me.”

  Greenbriar’s mustache twitched as he beckoned the women inside.

  “Now that,” he said, “is terrible advice.”

  Twenty-Three

  Greenbriar hustled Nessa and Hedy across the casino floor. News of the shootout down the block hadn’t spread to the Monaco’s halls yet, half of the ground floor concealed behind plywood and yellow construction tape. The casinos of the Strip were built as a string of hermetic chambers, no windows and no clocks, blocking out the worries of the outside world while the slot machines trilled their siren songs.

  He ushered them onto an elevator and stopped a pack of tourists from following them on with a flourish of his security ID badge. Then he leaned in, swiped the badge across a key reader, and tapped the button for the penthouse floor.

  “Don’t touch anything up there, don’t break anything, don’t make me regret this,” he said as the door slid shut between them.

  The elevator began its climb. A video screen set into the wall sprang to life, advertising the casino’s renovated theater space. Blue-painted men hammered on improvised drums and spat synchronized ping-pong balls at each other.

  Nessa watched the antics on the screen, trying to find something to say to her daughter. Some words that didn’t seem trite, pointless.

  “I want to ask if you’re all right,” she finally said, “even though I know you aren’t.”

  “I should be used to losing my students by now,” Hedy replied.

  “No. You shouldn’t. If you ever get used to that, if it ever stops hurting, something’s gone terribly wrong.” Nessa gave her a sidelong glance as the elevator crept upward. “A coven is a family. A bastion of support and shared strength, in this nightmare of a universe. Losing family is supposed to hurt.”

  Hedy stared at the video screen. Now it was advertising one of the casino’s restaurants, steaming pork dumplings falling onto a lacquered plate in slow motion.

  “How’s your cut?” she asked.

  Nessa gave her hip an experimental poke. Her lips went tight.

  “Stings. I’ll live.”

  Then she giggled. It burst out of her, unbidden. Hedy lifted her eyebrows.

  “Mother?”

  Maybe it was the aftermath of adrenaline—they’d been shot at and sliced at and drenched by a thunderstorm, and this was the first moment of peace they’d had since the night began—but Nessa’s next giggle broke into a helpless laugh. She leaned against the elevator wall, grinning, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “We should put some ointment and a new bandage on it. I mean, we don’t want to risk an infection.” She opened her eyes, damp, and smiled at Hedy. “See? It’s funny. It’s funny because I’m going to die.”

  Hedy pulled her into an embrace, clinging to her, her head buried against Nessa’s shoulder.

  “Not until we get Marie back,” she said.

  “No,” Nessa agreed. “Not until.”

  The elevator stopped. The door glided open, looking out onto a modern ruin. The penthouse floor was half-demolished, carpets torn up to expose bare stone, once-elegant walls riddled with sledgehammer holes and exposed wiring.

  You have to destroy before you can rebuild, Nessa thought. She stepped off the elevator. Her shoes crunched on loose rubble. The fixtures had all been stripped; the only light came from the glowing cage at their backs. The door silently shut, leaving them in darkness.

  They picked their way through the labyrinth of half-shattered walls and dangling plastic tarps, following the distant drumbeat of the rainstorm as it grew louder, echoing through the lonely corridors. They found an access stair, steel door groaning open under Nessa’s palm. One quick flight of steps, one more door—its stiff push bar fighting her as if it didn’t want to let them leave—and they emerged onto the long, flat rooftop of the Monaco.

  The storm and the dark embraced them. The water washed down in a monsoon rage, the wind sweeping it in sheets across the concrete, stealing their breath away. They could see the length of the Strip from up here, the hotel neon, the endless snaking sea of red lights on the boulevard.

  “Are you ready?” Hedy shouted, trying to be heard over the peal of thunder.

  Nessa held the Cutting Knife high, a lightning rod. She felt Clytemnestra’s thoughts, her feelings, her heartbeat synchronized with Nessa’s own.

  We are in accord, Clytemnestra told her, speaking into the depths of her mind.

  “We are in accord,” Nessa breathed. The rain tasted like electricity. Her skin tingled, her nerves burning.

  Think of your lover, Clytemnestra said. Think of your desire. Gather up your need and kindle it into a fire. And cut.

  Thunder boomed like a cannon as Nessa’s hand swept down. And in one swift motion, she sliced a gash in the skin of the universe.

  Reality frayed, then snapped. The world buckled and warped like a slashed canvas as the Cutting Knife tore a hole. Beyond it lay a void of perfect darkness and a sudden vacuum, pulling at Nessa, howling as it sucked in the air and the rain and the light to feed its infinite hunger.

  Nessa looked back, to Hedy, and held out her open hand.

  “Shall we?”

  Hedy took her hand. And together they jumped into the darkness.

  * * *

  In the void, there was a moment of silence.

  Perfect silence, perfect darkness. Serenity, and the scent of roses.

  Then Nessa felt herself flying, propelled as the world blazed back to life and the void cast her out. Her feet clattered onto a corroded steel grille, and sudden light drew blazing streaks across her vision. She was running, almost falling, pinwheeling one arm to catch herself. Hedy’s hand yanked her bac
k, both women leaning against each other and fighting for breath as the tear in the universe sewed itself up, whipping shut.

  Steadier now, Nessa took a slow look around. They stood in a corridor with angled walls and a flat ceiling lined with burned-out bulbs. Rusted metal and broken sheets of plastic surrounded them. On Nessa’s left, a computer screen set into the wall shed soft, trembling light as it spat an endless scrolling feed. Most of the script was alien, letters she’d never seen before, but a single line in mangled Hebrew caught her eye.

  “What does it say?” Hedy asked her.

  Nessa’s fingertip touched the screen, smudging away a line of filmy dust.

  “Error, fatal…” Nessa squinted. “Engines gone. Captain lost.”

  “We’re on a ship?”

  Hedy crouched down, close to the floor grille, and held out one open palm. She shook her head.

  “But no sway. No ocean.”

  “I’m not sure it’s that kind of ship,” Nessa said.

  She picked a random direction and led the way. Humidity clung to the stale air, thick with the smell of mildew and congealed oil. Nessa felt they were in the bowels of some old and great and dead machine, nothing left of its former majesty but frozen gears and rotten pipes. Not even rats prowled this steel tomb: anything they could have fed on had been devoured long ago.

  She heard something. A crackling, electric noise, like the humming of a generator about to burst, and the faint glassy tinkle of wind chimes. The sound gusted down the corridor, washing over them, then faded into the distance.

  “This way,” Nessa said. It was impossible to judge distance in this labyrinth, but her magic guided her as firmly as her ears. And Clytemnestra joined in, the knife tugging in Nessa’s grip. Nessa and Hedy jogged past a long bank of wall screens, half of them shattered and dead, the rest spewing the same endless distress call to an audience of ghosts.

  Then she rounded the corner and froze. The figure at the end of the hall might have been a ghost, too, silhouetted in the thin electronic light from a wall screen. But then she broke into a run, and so did Nessa, and they swept each other up and clung tight.

  “Don’t you ever leave me like that again,” Nessa said, her voice breaking as she fought a river of tears.

  Marie squeezed her, laughing, wiping a wet smear from her own cheek before lifting Nessa off her feet.

  “I’ll try,” Marie said. “God, I’ll try.”

  Neither one could let go. They held each other like they could stop time and stay that way forever, skin to skin, cheek to cheek, feeling each other’s warm breath, the steady and reassuring pulse of their beating hearts.

  “You’re soaked,” Marie murmured against Nessa’s neck.

  “We were just on a rooftop in Las Vegas in a thunderstorm. Long story. Where did you go?”

  “Longer story, but I met the mastermind behind this whole mess. The person who’s been pulling the strings since the day we met. Longer than that, really.”

  Nessa broke their embrace, pulling back just far enough to look into Marie’s eyes.

  “Do you remember,” Marie asked, “when you said you wanted to take over the world?”

  Nessa’s eyelashes fluttered behind her glasses.

  “In hindsight,” she said, “I should have seen this coming.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Think about it, Marie. Who else would be clever enough to trap me like this? I don’t suppose she told you why.”

  “She wants you to kill God for her,” Marie said.

  “Brilliant little monster. Not sure what I want to do more, kiss her or kill her.”

  Standing at her shoulder, glowering with her damp arms folded, Hedy said, “Why not both?”

  “It’s a long story,” Marie said. “I should start from the—”

  A thump, stout wood against corroded steel, turned their heads. A tall, thin figure stood draped in forest-green robes, face concealed behind a mask of intricate wicker. His hands were the color of the gnarled mahogany staff he clutched, with four fingers and jet-black nails.

  He thumped the staff against the floor again and pointed to them. The sound that emerged from under his mask was like a blast of electronic static pushed through a human throat: mechanical, rasping, squeezed out from a bellows of meat.

  “I’m…sorry,” Marie said. “I’m not really sure—”

  He thumped his staff twice more, letting out another rasping blurt.

  “I think we’re trespassing,” Nessa murmured. She slowly pulled away from Marie, turning to the creature, and held up an open palm. “It’s all right. We were just about to leave. We’re leaving. No problem here.”

  “We can’t leave yet,” Marie said.

  “I don’t think we’re exactly welcome here.”

  “The Marquis,” Marie said to the creature. “We’re looking for the Marquis. Can you take us to him?”

  He paused, leaning on the staff, then nodded. He waved the staff in a “come along” motion before turning his back, flowing robes trailing behind it on the corroded deck.

  Whatever the creature was, he seemed to know the trackless corridors like a native, leading them along twists and turns until they came to a break in the scenery: a broad metal staircase stretching upward. There was light up above, glowing white and azure blue, and the sound of music. Nessa recognized the muffled notes, the voice on the warbling record: it was an old Leonard Cohen tune.

  The creature stood to one side, content to stay down in the labyrinth. The tip of his gnarled staff pointed to the light. Nessa, Marie, and Hedy made their way up the stairs.

  Twenty-Four

  It was a tavern, of sorts.

  The stairway led up to a vast, circular room with bulbous walls and dangling globes of light the color of winter snow. Some effort had been made to fight the decay here, with the dark steel walls scrubbed and the floor grilles glistening wet from a recent hose-down. Round tables were flanked by steel chairs not built for the human form, dipping sharply before the backs angled in ways no spine could bend. A bar, sheathed in dented plates with rusted bolts, curved along a quarter of the room.

  Nessa felt like she was back in the storm, pulled in every direction at once. The bartender was a squat, thickset man, pouring a rainbow of drinks with a wooden arm. The ornate contraption was varnished, sleek, held together with pins at the joints, a woodworker’s masterpiece. It had been grafted to the stump of his elbow, skin inflamed and ragged around the edges, and moved like an arm made of flesh and bone. He was making small talk with a woman—deathly pale, no hair, no eyebrows—who wore a skin-tight Plasticine bodysuit that rippled like oil when she moved.

  At one corner table, a motley crew in armor made of rags and scavenged scrap metal hooted and drank, rolling dice. As they tumbled, the runes carved into the dice flashed bright violet. Not far away, two men in prim Victorian suits stared silently at one another, drinking from china teacups. Every inch of their skin, from their foreheads to their delicate fingertips, had been tattooed in precise lines of writing too small to read. An astronaut stood at the end of the bar, waiting for service in a full space suit, NASA mission patches on its bulky white sleeves. It turned its helmet, giving Nessa a look through the visor. Nothing was inside.

  Leonard Cohen sang out on an old Wurlitzer jukebox. Everybody Knows.

  Then there was the window. Nessa saw the long, tall rectangle of glass and felt herself drawn to it, hooked on a line that pulled her across the room. Hedy and Marie followed her, quietly awed by the sight.

  Nessa had suspected they were on a spaceship. Wrong kind of space. No stars shone in those inky, endless depths. Just the occasional flicker-flash of a massive sigil in the void lit with burning yellow flame, a storm born of pure and raw magic.

  The Shadow In-Between, she thought. She could feel it calling to her, singing to the power in her veins.

  Wreckage drifted in the void as far as she could see. Torn, broken metal, girders and dark debris, all tangled in a twisted knot
. And the ships. Ships like cathedrals, long and mighty and dead. Stained-glass windows hung ruptured and open to the void, bellies torn wide, hulls crushed like toys in a mad child’s hand.

  “It’s called the Deadknot,” Marie said, her voice soft with reverence.

  “What happened here?” Nessa said.

  Another flash in the deeps illuminated a distant sight. The outline of a body. Titanic, at least twenty stories high, floating motionless. The spear-tip nose of a ship had punched through its chest before breaking apart.

  “This is what happens,” Marie said, “when angels go to war.”

  Nessa turned away from the window, facing her. She cast a quick, furtive glance across the room. No one was paying any attention to them.

  “I need to know everything,” Nessa said.

  The song’s final note trailed off. The Wurlitzer swung a dusty arm to scoop up a fresh record, dropping it onto the spindle. A new tune warbled over the speaker, Sinatra now, hitting Nessa with a pang of homesickness as he sang his ode to New York City.

  Marie knew what she meant. She took Nessa’s hand. Hedy knew, too. She turned her back to keep an eye on the rest of the room, standing guard.

  Then, in their own little space by the window, Marie and Nessa danced. Slow, cheek to cheek, the world melting away as Nessa invoked the Knot of Venus. And just like it had once before, back in their hotel room in Ohio, her enchantment drew a wreath around them, gently shifting them into Marie’s memories.

  * * *

  Nessa circled her duplicate, standing in a frozen recreation of Nadia’s throne room.

  “Brilliant little monster,” she murmured. While time passed at a molasses crawl in the real world, she and Marie danced through the fast-forward flicker of her lover’s memories.

  “You sound like you admire her,” Marie said.

  Nessa looked at her from over Nadia’s motionless shoulder, surprised.

  “Of course I do. Even if her plan frayed at the edges a bit, it still leaves her holding a winning hand. One way or another, with minimal risk to herself, she gets everything she wants. What’s not to admire?”