Marcus rushes into the park, his own form lighting up with a soft turquoise aura, and joins the battle to take down Charun. The death demon, now on his feet, seems to realize he’s outmatched, up against so many strong practitioners. And as another one of Erica’s manhole covers collides with his already abused head, he lets out a mighty roar, then turns and retreats into the woods on the left side of the brick path.
Retreats. The Etruscan death demon. Gives up and runs away.
The witches and wizards, still moving inhumanly fast with the help of some charm or spell, pursue Charun into the shadowy woods. Erica drops her last manhole cover onto the soggy earth next to the sidewalk, throws an amused glance over her shoulder, at me, and then activates her own super-speed magic, charging forward to catch up to her companions. She vanishes into the trees, and after a few more seconds of thumping steps and fading battle cries, the park goes quiet, the fight too far away to hear. In fact, everything goes quiet except my heart thudding in my chest.
Dazed and pained, I go lax against the park wall, a faint, exasperated laugh fluttering in my chest. I track my gaze across the neighborhood apartments in search of curious, prying eyes, but I only see one elderly man, who scans the street, stops on the crushed BMW, makes a confused grimace, and then drops his curtain. He doesn’t even notice my black-clad body, curled up against the wall. Or if he does, he writes me off as a random homeless guy and ignores me. Which works fine for me, because I don’t want anybody to see me in this state. Hunched over and beaten to a pulp.
Not that I ever get what I want.
Half a minute later, as sirens begin to wail in the distance, a black van speeds around the corner, onto Compton Street, and screeches to a halt in front of me. The back doors burst open, revealing Ella and Delarosa, who hop out and rush toward me. Ella sinks to her knees in front of me, and her gentle, gloved hand cups my face. “Cal, can you get up? Can you walk? We’ve been recalled to base, and we need to be way out of sight before the cops show up. Because as far as they will ever know, we were not here. At all. Catch my drift?”
I blink at her worried face, bleary, and nod. The Aurora PD isn’t supposed to know that DSI engages in fights like this. Our public function is assisting “strange” investigations. Whenever we have an explosive showdown, we have to skedaddle before the blue and red lights arrive on scene. Either that, or our PD liaison has to cook up an excuse for our presence, which he or she must have done for the garden fight yesterday.
But we didn’t leave much behind at the garden, other than Alicia Wilkins’ body, which could have been chalked up to a violent yet “normal” killer. Here, in the park, the carnage is exponentially greater. Dead kids. A blown-up boathouse. Toppled trees. A wrecked car. There’s no explanation for this other than the supernatural. That or a terrorist attack, which the PD may very well claim it was. As long as there’s no trace of DSI left at the scene.
Like me.
Delarosa and Ella help me up, and with the two of them supporting me, I manage to hobble to the van. Inside, I find Harmony already strapped in, her rifle tucked between her knees. She gives me a smile that looks more like a wince as Delarosa is boosting me into the van, and once Ella straps me securely into another seat, my short-lived battle partner fake coughs and says, “When you didn’t catch up to me, I thought you were dead.”
“Harmony…” I wheeze out.
She shakes her head. “You’re an idiot for ordering me away like that. And I’m an idiot for listening.” She eyes my left arm, hanging limp at my side. “Elite or not, you have no business trying to win a fight with an Eververse monster on your own.”
I run my good hand through my dirty hair and reply, “Wasn’t trying to win. I was trying to run. And I would have succeeded, too, if it wasn’t for that fucking fire spirit.” A harsh sigh breaks through my teeth. “I don’t apologize for giving the retreat order. A thousand rifle shots wouldn’t have downed Charun, and you would have died if you’d faced him head on. But I do apologize for worrying you. I’ll buy you a drink to make up for it.”
Harmony pouts for a moment, then lets a restrained grin show through. “Didn’t I reject your advances twice during our academy days? What, do you need a third shot to the ass to grasp the concept of no, or are you just so ineffably dense that you become deaf whenever a woman dares to defy your ‘charm’?”
“Ouch, girl. Do you have to rub salt in the wound?”
She rolls her eyes and snorts. “There’s not enough salt in the world for you, Kinsey.”
“All right, boys and girls,” Ella says as she clambers into the passenger seat, “strap yourselves in and hold on. We have a speed-limit-defying drive ahead of us.”
I tighten the strap on my seatbelt and throw a friendly nod at Delarosa, who takes the seat next to Harmony. “Is everyone else out of the field already?” I ask him.
He grunts out an affirmative, then mutters, “Yep. Only one unaccounted for was you, Kinsey. Your earpiece shorted out at some point during your tussle with our hammer-wielding buddy. Had Riker convinced you’d lost your head this time.”
“Oh, hell.” I pluck my earpiece out—I never noticed it took damage. I was too caught up in the fight. “He’s going to ream my ass for taking a second round with Charun.”
Delarosa considers this, gripping a bar above his head to steady himself as the van pulls away from the sidewalk and takes off down the street. “Probably. But you’re not unconscious this time. That’s a plus.”
“Why? So I can get through the ass beating faster?”
Delarosa shrugs. “That, if nothing else. Though really, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Riker’s going to have his hands full for the next few hours. He was already on the phone with Commissioner Bollinger before the operations van even rolled out. The whole office is in hot water for that boathouse explosion. Bollinger’s going to have to explain it to the mayor. After Riker explains it to him.”
Harmony grimaces, and I feel my own face mimic her expression. There are going to be some not-so-fun conversations happening tonight and tomorrow morning. It’s times like this I’m glad that I’m a no-name peon at the bottom rung of the authority ladder, else I’d be in Riker’s shoes, in sight of the wrath of DSI’s take-no-shit commissioner. The one time I was in Bollinger’s office, he gave me the impression he’d tear my face off and make me eat it if I dared to defy his order (the order to join Riker’s team and be fucking happy about it, or else).
The van zips around a corner, pulling sixty in a thirty-five, and the oncoming police sirens begin to fade away. I almost feel sorry for the cops. The first responders have no idea what cooling bloodbath they’re about to walk into. And if Erica and friends are still battling Charun in the park, then the boys and girls in blue might end up in the line of fire. Or, well, in the line of the hammer. But hopefully Marcus’ crew is skilled enough to maneuver the death demon away from any potential defenseless victims. Enough cops—like Mac—have been killed by supernatural creatures in recent years. We don’t need to add more to the tally.
Harmony clears her throat. “Hey, Cal. What’s that in your hand?”
I blink my thoughts away and glance at my empty right hand, then look up at Harmony and raise an eyebrow. “Um, air?”
“She meant the other hand, dumbass.” Delarosa scoffs. “The injured one.”
“Oh.” I take a closer look at my left hand, hanging at an awkward angle due to my dislocated shoulder (which still hurts like a bitch, by the way). My stiff fingers are clenching a small object attached to a black chain. I try to open my hand to see what it is, but my fingers refuse to obey. I have to reach across with my right hand and pry the object out of my frozen grip. Holding it up to the dim light in the van’s ceiling, I realize it’s Brendon’s key. I must have ripped it off his neck when I was thrown by the force of the hammer blow.
“Ah, this,” I say. “Looks like our way into a crumbling Victorian mansion. Anybody up for a haunted house?”
Chapter Twenty-One
If an outsider was to take a gander at the twenty-four agents in the task room, the first thing out of his mouth would be, Man, that must have been some bar fight. Most of my fellow agents are scraped and bruised, minor injuries, but some are swathed in crisp, white bandages taped to mottled skin. A few sport splints—one has a cast—and three, I count, wear slings, securing injured arms to chests for safekeeping. Liam Calvary, the guy who took the board to the face, has a huge wad of bandages taped over his nose, and his cheeks have swollen up, the color of a grapefruit. He lounges in his chair, eyes staring at a random ceiling tile, rendered lethargic by strong pain medication.
Next to him, there are three empty chairs. None of ours died at the raid—somehow—but those three are down for the night, if not longer.
I examine the room from beyond the doorway, analyze each worn, pensive face and the tone of each voice to determine who’s in what kind of mood and whether or not I might be better off sneaking out of the office before anyone sees me up and about. My left arm was reluctantly relocated during another trip to Navarro’s infirmary and now rests in its own sling yet again to allow my shoulder to heal. My ankle, thankfully, wasn’t sprained, but the muscles are sore where I twisted it hard after my lightning attack on Charun. I’ll be limping for a couple of days. The rest of my body bears an assortment of bruises and crusting scrapes that make me look like I stood in front of a baseball-pitching machine. Naked.
Yet, for some reason, despite feeling bone tired, aching head to toe, my brain won’t let me shut down for the night. After Navarro discharged me, I headed up here to the task room, for the post-fuckup meeting, instead of going home to chip a few hours off my growing sleep deficit. Tonight’s harrowing experiences are swirling around in my mind, pressure building, building, building, and I can’t make the images stop rolling across my sight like a screwy PowerPoint. So, once I see that none of the meeting attendants have hot steam spewing from their ears, I announce my presence with a quiet knock and enter.
Everyone glances up, movements slow and stiff, and half the people in the room are taken aback upon realizing who dared to walk through the door. I shamble over to an empty seat next to Ella Dean, who cocks an eyebrow at my ensemble—a contrast between dirt-streaked clothing and pristine medical apparatuses—but doesn’t say anything. I sink onto the chair, suppressing a whine of pain. My entire body feels like someone hit me with a man-sized flyswatter. Repeatedly. And really, that’s not far off from what happened.
Once my bruised ass is seated, I clear my throat and say, “Well, don’t stop the conversation on my account.”
Ramirez, who’s sitting where Riker should be—rumor has it the elite captain is still on the phone with Bollinger, three hours later—scratches his head and replies, “Should you be here, Kinsey? Navarro told me you took a beating.”
I almost shrug, but then I remember somebody drove my shoulder back into its socket a couple hours ago, so I settle for a headshake. “I’ve been discharged. Good to go. For a meeting anyway. Unless you think this meeting is going to turn violent, in which case I’m leaving. Because I’m done with having the tar beaten out of my delicate skin. For now.”
Ramirez rubs his temples. “Depends on how much longer Riker has to listen to the commissioner scream at him. He might charge in here, cane swinging, when it’s all said and done.”
“Last time I walked by his office, I heard Bollinger on speaker phone, ranting about how we cost the city an estimated $427,000 in damage.” Ella runs a hand through her short hair, frowning. “Which is one of the highest monetary tolls we’ve ever ripped out of the taxpayers’ wallets. Parks and Recreation is going to have to rebuild the boathouse from scratch. After the cops finish fishing college student bodies out of the lake.”
“$427,000?” I grunt. “Is that counting the BMW?”
Ella snorts, more exasperated than amused. “Yeah, that was a sight to behold. Hope the owner was wealthy and not somebody who spent their life savings on a dream car.”
Delarosa, seated next to the dazed Liam Calvary, raises his hands in a What can you do? gesture. “Maybe insurance will cover it. If not, lesson learned: don’t buy a nice car in a city full of vehicle-crushing supernatural monsters.”
Ramirez shoots Delarosa an irritated look. The two captains have similar tenures and were once lower-ranking agents on the same team, under a now retired elite captain. According to the water cooler gossip, they have a bit of a rivalry going on that may or may not involve an intermittent prank war. If we all get out of this Etruscan nightmare alive, I might actually get to see some fun stuff happen in this dreary, fluorescent hell somebody dubbed a workplace.
For now, though, Ramirez is all business. “Riker told me to start the recap myself if he wasn’t back by 3:00 AM.” He glances at the clock bolted high on the wall behind him. “Six minutes past, so it’s time to discuss what we did wrong.”
Liam snaps out of his pain haze for three seconds to say, in a nasally voice, “What didn’t we do wrong?”
Ramirez sighs. “Point.”
“I have a suggestion.” Ella raises her hand like we’re in an elementary school class. “Why don’t we start with the valuable information we obtained during the raid and leave the not-so-impressive material for the end of the meeting, where we can rush through it with a few, brief minutes left on the clock?”
Delarosa smacks the table. “Works for me.”
A murmur of agreement passes over the room, from twenty-four fatigued agents barely sitting upright in their chairs. Ramirez surveys the room and seems to pick up on the fact that he’s one of the least tired—as a consequence of sitting safely in the back of an operations van for the duration of the raid. He chews his bottom lip for a moment, then rolls his shoulders. “Fine. We’ll discuss intelligence gained first, but somebody make sure they keep detailed notes. I don’t want Riker to miss out on important details.”
Ella removes a pen and a small notepad from the pockets of her jacket, which hangs from the back of her chair. “All set, temp boss.”
Ramirez shoots her the same look he gave Delarosa a minute ago. “All right, folks. What did we learn?”
The room quiets for a minute, as everybody churns through their memories of the raid gone wrong to pick out the key details. But I’ve been doing exactly that for the past few hours, lying in an infirmary bed, staring at the off-white ceiling tiles. So I follow Ella’s example and raise my good hand, giving Ramirez my best attempt at spirit fingers. “I volunteer, sir, to tell my tale of woe.”
Ramirez swears under his breath at me, and his own fingers twitch like he wants to throw something heavy at my face. I’m pretty sure the only reason he refrains is because I already look like somebody beat me to death with a metal bat. With a huff, he says, “Well, I suppose you’re one of the better people to start with, Kinsey, considering you had the most contact with our new friend Charun. So, what’d you learn during your second ass whooping?”
Half the agents in the room chuckle at my apparent ineptitude, and the ones who don’t pointedly direct their eyes at random inanimate objects instead of me. Warmth rushes up my neck, into my cheeks, and I hope to God my multi-layered bruises hide the spreading pink. “Quite a bit, sir. But I was going to rewind to a few minutes before that lovely whooping, when the kids were talking in the boathouse. I think I’ve put the narrative together, as much as I can without interrogating the kids. But I don’t guess that’ll be an option anytime soon, eh?”
Delarosa leans back in his chair and gives me a solemn nod. “Most of the kids died in the initial blast. Of those who survived the explosion, two died from the resulting trauma on the way to the hospital, and the rest are still in surgery or unconscious in the ICU. By the time any of them are available to speak with, Charun will have had the opportunity to hammer down a third of Aurora.”
“More like a third of the trees in Michigan.” Ramirez fiddles with the wireless mouse on the table in front of him. “Wizard Marcus called twenty minutes ag
o. He and his team are still on Charun’s tail, way out in the woods, miles from Holden Park, trading spells powerful enough to kill a dozen DSI agents at once. That damn demon doesn’t tire.” He pauses, thoughtful. “So go ahead and tell us your grand unified theory, Kinsey. We have nothing better to do than sit through story time since we can’t send agents into a magic battle of that caliber. Unless we want to order a few new coffins.”
“Right.” I adjust my sore butt in the chair and take a breath to ensure all my thoughts are in order. “Okay, first thing’s first: My theories from our previous task meeting were a little off base. There was no sorcerer egging the kids on to practice black magic—at least not directly—but a buyer interested in a powerful item from the Eververse. This third party buyer, whoever he was, enticed the kids into going on a little Eververse excursion to steal said item, from the Etruscan Underworld, of all places.”
Harmony, a few seats down from me, hums a low note. “You think those kids managed to break into the Etruscan Underworld, without any training?”
Ella counters with, “You don’t need much training to open an inter-dimensional tear between Earth and the Eververse. The power requirements are quite small. The average minor practitioner has more than enough juice to open a portal for an Earth-born being to travel between the two realms. The tricky part is getting the portal to open in the right place.
“Some areas of the Eververse are warded against intrusion, like the Fae Kingdoms, so a portal will ‘bounce’ to a random location instead of your destination. And other areas are elusive, almost like they move over time, and opening a stable portal is a crapshoot.” She spins her pen around in her fingers. “However, if the mystery buyer gave Brendon and friends some intel on how to open a good portal to the Etruscan Underworld…”
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