She knew how impressive their network of prescients and psychic spies—Oracles and sweepers—was. She’d seen it up close during her stay in Santa Costa. But they didn’t seem to know about the dagger or the fact that she had it.
For now, she intended to keep it that way.
Chapter 5
More than two hours later a frustrated and angry Kira made her way home. The search for the Fallen and the seeker demon had proven futile. She hadn’t found a trace of Chaos magic anywhere other than the area surrounding the hotel, as if her quarry had somehow stepped back through the Veil. The amount of skill and power it took to conceal a seeker demon’s trail meant Kira would have to be extra careful.
She paused at the end of her street, testing the area with her extrasense. Quiet draped the community, except for the low hum of electricity. She caught a glimpse of a few of downtown Atlanta’s skyscrapers through batches of trees and rooftops. The East Atlanta neighborhood had begun a reclamation project several years ago, turning some of the larger condemned warehouses into condos and apartments. Her own place had been a car repair and parts warehouse and boasted two roll-up bay doors on the front and a small loading dock on the back—plenty of room to maneuver artifacts of various shapes and sizes in and out.
She hadn’t done much in the way of outward renovation to the concrete and safety glass structure in the two years since she’d paid a bargain price for the warehouse. Most of the modifications were invisible to the naked eye—unless she had an intruder. By the time they saw anything, it would be way too late.
For a moment she almost wished she hadn’t put such strong protections on the blade. If she hadn’t, the seeker demon would have been able to trace the dagger to her. It would have left Bernie alone because it would have known he wasn’t the last to handle the ancient weapon. She would have confronted the seeker demon and its Avatar master—and her mentor would still be alive.
Or the seeker would have come for her after it had finished Bernie.
She knew there was no point in conjuring up alternate scenarios that resulted in Bernie avoiding death. He was dead, and there was nothing she could do to bring him back.
The orangey glow of a security light illuminated the metal garage door set in the concrete wall of the two-story building. Slowing, Kira maneuvered the bike into a very specific spot in front of the door, then pushed up her visor so the biometric scanner over the doorway could identify her. She mentally added a coded stroke of power to the Normal science that was the warehouse’s first line of defense, an extra precaution against the possibility of someone trying to use her against her will to gain entry. It had taken her, Zoo, and Wynne a couple of months to calibrate the door so that it responded properly to her unique combination and moved up and down with exact timing. With so many magical artifacts in her possession and Shadow folks running around, she needed more than ADT guarding her home.
The wards around the warehouse flashed once as the rolling door deactivated, an all-clear signal. Throttling the bike forward, she entered the former repair bay just as the automatic door began its glide back down.
Kira killed the engine and pulled her helmet off with a sigh. She wanted a hot shower and four or five glasses of rum. Maybe that would be enough to numb the pain that still roiled through her. It sure as hell wasn’t something aspirin could take care of.
She couldn’t give in to the grief. Not yet. First she had to make sure her protections would hold. Despite her earlier reckless thought, she had no intention of revealing the dagger’s presence. She’d have to tighten the controls and defenses to make sure the dagger didn’t emit anything that would bring the seeker demon and its master to her door . . . or catch Gilead’s attention.
The mundane alarm had its own encrypted server; the only nonmagical communication it had was to Wynne and Zoo. Atop that, Zoo had placed several aversion and protection spells to deflect the casually curious and the majority of hybrids. Which left her own Light-reinforced wards to handle the heavy hitters.
Kira got off the bike, placed her helmet on the metal and sheetrock racking along the back wall that held assorted bike parts, and crossed to the control panel beside the large beige-painted metal door in the concrete block wall that divided garage space from living area. She splayed her hands on either side. Closing her eyes, she tried to push beyond, only to be stopped by a red-orange molten emotional bedrock of her own grief and anger.
She realized that just because she didn’t want to feel the emotions didn’t mean they weren’t still there, waiting to pounce at the wrong moment. Kira couldn’t afford to be crippled by emotion. There were more important things than her anger, than her grief. Like revenge.
The lavalike layer of rage and anguish pulsed. Kira pulled back, refusing to allow the inferno to erupt and consume her. This was much larger than revenge, she reminded herself. This was about justice.
“You don’t win today,” she whispered to her angry core. “I still control me.”
She worked with the molten mass like a glassblower shaping a vase, using its own nature to mold it as she wanted—into extra protections. The added security to her shields would put a nasty burn on anyone who tried to breach them now. Not that she cared. No one breaking in would be after her teapot collection.
Finally she finished, easing back through the layers of technology and magic and emotion until her normal senses emerged. She rolled her head on her shoulders with a sigh. Do the things that need doing, Kira. You can do the rest after you find this guy.
As she moved through the side door into her not-quite living room, the red indicator light on her VOIP phone on the mission-style end table in the sitting area caught her attention. Since she’d trashed her mobile, only two people could be calling: Wynne or Balm. Wynne wouldn’t appreciate a callback at close to four a.m. and Kira wasn’t ready to talk to Balm. Not now. Not when the emotion was still too raw.
Her relationship with the head of the Gilead Commission gave a whole new meaning to “complicated.” Balm had saved her when her burgeoning extrasense had forced her adoptive parents to abandon her and threatened to drive Kira insane. Kira hadn’t made it easy for Balm, but she’d been half-starved, half-mad, and half-broken by guilt and the burden of her strange powers. As with Normal adolescents, anger had become a defense and she’d channeled it into her training. Being able to go to any public place—a restaurant or theater, or even shop for food, clothing, necessities—without being bombarded with the thoughts and emotions of those who’d touched the things she wanted was all due to her training at Gilead.
The training allowed her as much of a life as she could have. Being “gifted” with the extrasense of psychometry gave her the ability to receive the thoughts, history, and emotions of others through touching them or their objects. The gift also cursed her: the smallest patch of exposed skin became a receptor and her psychometric power also siphoned off the life force of anyone she touched—no matter how slightly or accidentally. Unable to control her abilities, Kira could never have functioned in society at all without the instruction she’d received from Gilead.
That offset some of the other things Gilead had done—like making her into a Shadow killing machine, refusing to save Nico, hiding the truth about Comstock . . .
Kira ignored the blinking red message light and wound her way through stacks of books, equipment, and artifacts. Her steps faltered as she passed the worktable she and Comstock had leaned over so many hours before. His loss hit her again, sharply, the void of his absence filled with what-ifs as she continued through the room and past the freight elevator at the back to the stairs.
If she had known what he really was to her, if they’d just been honest with each other, she might have taken him down the spiral staircase to the lower level. She might have shown him some of the rarer objects she kept in her office or her most private space behind the replica mural from the Valley of the Queens that depicted Queen Nefertari playing senet. Her hand strayed to her pocket, the bloodstained fabric still tucked safely i
nside. She took small comfort in the knowledge that a part of Bernie was with her now and she could do something to ensure he found peace.
The mural slid to the left after she sent a pulse of power through it. More than a few people would consider her extra precautions nothing more than paranoia, but after an imp had slid through a fracture in the millennia-old pottery that held him and nearly destroyed her former office, she’d learned to be careful. Most of the time her protections were designed to keep things from getting in. They also served to keep things from getting out.
She moved steadily past her collection of weaponry—both ancient and advanced—past ritual gear too dangerous to remain in the mundane world, past her second, smaller office and its triple-guarded vault that currently housed the Egyptian dagger.
A lifesize reproduction of the Weighing of the Heart ceremony emblazoned the far wall with bright color. Ancient Egyptians believed the heart, not a soul, measured the deeds of a person’s life. After a harrowing journey through the underworld, the dead arrived in Osiris’s palace and were taken to the Hall of Judgment. The mural showed Osiris sitting on a throne as the ruler of the afterlife, with the forty-two gods arranged around him. They bore witness as the dead person confessed all the things he hadn’t done to show that he had been a good person in life and deserved to continue living after death. The jackal-headed god Anubis stood by the gilded standing scales of truth and justice, ready to weigh the deceased’s heart against the feather of Ma’at. The god Thoth stood nearby to record the result. In the shadows waited Ammit, the Devouress of the Dead. If the heart was heavier than Ma’at’s feather, Ammit—with the head of a crocodile, forequarters of a lion, and hindquarters of a hippopotamus—would devour the heart, ensuring that the dead would die a complete death.
Kira stopped before the mural. Ma’at, her patroness, perched atop the scales to ensure their balance. Ma’at, with the curved white ostrich feather adorning her headdress, holding the scepter of rule in one hand and the ankh, the symbol of eternal life, in the other, the goddess who personified that which is right: Order, Truth—the things Kira desired most in life.
Closing her eyes, Kira centered her being, clearing her mind, preparing herself to go before the goddess.
On a soundless rush of air, the heavy panel pushed outward, then slid to the right, revealing her most private room. She called her extrasense, concentrating until it gathered in her right hand. Stepping inside the climate-controled space, she touched her hand to a spirit lantern waiting on a simple wooden pedestal beside the entrance. The pale blue light reflected and magnified against the concave mirror, spreading throughout the small chamber and slowly revealing its contents.
A large black silk cushion lay in the center of the tiled floor. Before it stood an acacia table, not quite three feet high, ornately carved with hieroglyphs. Three objects sat atop it: a sistrum, a golden statuette of winged Ma’at, and a gilded mirror. Beyond the table were more objects precious to her, artifacts of ancient Egypt given to her as gifts, for safekeeping, for services rendered.
She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the peace of the chamber settle into her pores. Her nights chasing Shadows always ended here, giving her a chance to purge her mind and soul in order to find solace in sleep. Most times it even worked.
Keeping her mind carefully clear, Kira approached the table, bowed low, then sat cross-legged on the pillow. The mirror gleamed at her even in the pale light. The surface was as still and dark as a pit, though highly reflective. It was, for all intents and purposes, an ordinary mirror. Once her extrasense touched it, it became much more: an instrument that allowed her to communicate with her patroness and perform a modified version of the Weighing of the Heart.
For the ancient Egyptians, the heart was the source of intellect and the center of personality, moral awareness, emotions, and memory. It was the heart that revealed a person’s true character.
Every battle with Shadow, every brush with Chaos, left a minute trace, a shadow in Kira’s soul. It had been a gradual accumulation. She wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t been for a casual remark made by Bernie a handful of years ago—or perhaps, she now realized, not casual at all—about an unusual flash of yellow in the brown of her eyes. She’d known what it meant: she’d been tainted by Shadow. Never too much, never unchangeably. She always made her way back to the Light. Still, the changes were enough to make her worry, and she didn’t like to worry. Finding Balance helped.
Tonight wasn’t about weighing her soul. She already knew it was heavy.
Resting her fingertips on the mirror’s edge, she exhaled from deep in her belly. Her extrasense welled up, charging the mirror with a violet swirl of energy. The color faded but the energy remained; the Veil opened. She pulled the torn bloody fabric from her pocket and placed it on the silky black surface, fighting against falling through the Veil again. Successive touches usually didn’t have the same intensity, but a murder—particularly this type of murder—could linger.
Her fingers shook as she smoothed out the pale cloth with its rusty brown spots. She shouldn’t have left Bernie. She should have stayed beside him until the Gilead team arrived. She should have tried to read more from him. She should have done so many things.
“Ma’at, vessel of justice, please look favorably upon the soul of Bernard Comstock. Help him complete his journey and find his way to the Light.”
She raised her chin, her eyes on the dark ceiling. “Ma’at, guide me. Allow me to serve Your will, to bring justice to the one who needs it.”
Her eyes closed as she held her prayers in her heart, waiting. She never doubted her patron deity; enforcing order and justice were her life, and she lived the principles of Ma’at every day. Soon enough, she felt a brush of warmth, the answering touch of the goddess.
She opened her eyes in time to see the strip of cloth sinking into the slick surface of her mirror. A moment of grief and regret gripped her—she had to breathe it out slowly before it took root. It wouldn’t have done to keep the cloth as some morbid memento. Comstock wouldn’t have wanted her to remember him that way. Better to let the Universe take it.
The mirror’s surface rippled, then stilled to an inky smoothness. A touch of her fingertip, and etheric scales would rise from the surface of the mirror, ready to weigh her soul. Instead, she drew back her extrasense, returning the mirror to normal. The ritual would have to wait for another night.
Her entire body felt heavy as she resealed the chamber, then made her way to her bedroom on the uppermost level. Sleep, by the Light. A shower and sleep. She had to hope that sunrise would bring the leads she needed to bring justice to Bernie.
Chapter 6
The warrior pulled the Dodge Charger over to the curb a hundred yards down the street from Kira’s warehouse. The spires of downtown Atlanta rose up from the west, touched by the first fingers of dawn’s light. He stared at the concrete and metal edifice that housed his prize. It must have been an auto-repair or tire store in its former life, he guessed, noting the roll-up garage doors. He couldn’t tell if the second story was original or added on, but he could tell the bars covering the windows on the main door were sturdy, an effort to deter common thieves.
Good thing he was neither thief nor common.
“The dagger’s there, or at least it was,” he said to Nansee. The wraith was back to his usual guise of a white-haired elderly black man. “I can sense it, though barely. I suppose she’s protecting it somehow.”
“She’s proving to be a very capable Shadowchaser, better than many you’ve met. She can certainly hold her own in a fight.”
“The Commission interrupted her before things got interesting.”
He had to admit, if only to himself, that he’d enjoyed watching her take out the hybrids. She had a lot of power packed into that lithe frame of hers, power he wouldn’t mind facing. “Does that mean you’re afraid to take her on, old man?”
A grunt. “Fear and self-preservation are two different things.”
&nb
sp; “If anyone would know, you’d be the one. Can you get inside?”
The old man faded from view. The warrior tapped out an ancient rhythm on the steering wheel as he waited, restless. Patience was something he’d learned the hard way. It had taken years, decades even.
After a minute or two Nansee coalesced beside him. He shivered like a dog shaking water from its coat. “It’s well-protected. Multiple layers of encryption technology, metaphysical barriers, and good old-fashioned locks.”
“Since when has technology stopped you, Traveler of Webs?”
“Since it is augmented by Light shields, the Chaser’s own aura, and a couple of curses that could take out a demigod, I’ll consider myself stopped. I like the way I’ve arranged my parts.”
Damn. It wasn’t unexpected, but it still angered him. To be so close to the dagger yet unable to reclaim it was frustrating. His own fault for dying and losing it in the first place.
He had to get it back. It had been out of his possession, his control, for far too long. Now a ranking member of the Fallen had its sights set on the dagger. The only comfort he could take was that if Nansee couldn’t get in, neither could the Shadow Avatar.
“Fine. I’ll think up some way to approach her and get my blade back. Take some time to find out more about her and what she does when she’s not racing hybrids down public roads. I’ve waited this long. What’s one more day?”
Kira woke up to the sound of someone knocking on her door. She opened her eyes to late-morning sunlight. Damn it, I’ll be behind schedule the rest of the day.
“Wynne, that had better be you with a couple of large cups of coffee,” she muttered, throwing back the bedcovers and kicking to her feet. The Light help anyone else who dared beat on her door like that.
She palmed her Lightblade from habit before heading out of the room. She pounded down the stairs, vowing to thank her visitor before ripping them a new one. Throwing open the locks, she yanked open the door—
Shadow Blade Page 6
