Feldman raises his left hand as Lucian falls, a vibrant red aura coalescing into a crackle of lightning around his fist. The fresh memory of the thunderous boom echoes through my brain, and I picture that violent attack striking Lucian head on and blasting him into so many pieces that even his vampire healing will be useless. And as Feldman’s fist swings down to unleash his ruthless assault, conflicted feelings flicker through me like a broken projector.
I want Lucian dead. I want him to die the way Mac died, torn apart and left to rot on the ground. But Lucian Ardelean is a vital player in the resistance against the wayward Methuselah Group, and Feldman, who I can’t defeat with my own laughably minimal power, is a much bigger threat to my city and the innocents who live and work in it.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of Cal Kinsey. That’s how being a hero works.
Feldman’s fist is a foot from Lucian’s bowed head when I lift the shotgun and fire. The large-gauge buckshot fans out across the field as it sings through the air. It pelts the wizard’s magic shield, not hard enough to break it, but enough to distract Feldman, causing him to falter the fraction of a second before he discharges his lightning spell into Lucian’s skull. And that’s all Lucian needs to recover from the shock of his knee injury and slide out of the path of the oncoming fist.
Feldman misses his mark by mere inches. Lucian takes advantage. The vampire flips his knife around, springs from the ground with his good leg, and drives the blade upward. When the tip of the knife collides with the magic shield, Lucian’s cobalt aura flares up around it, and the entire shield shatters like glass struck by a powerful hammer. The knife keeps on going, unhindered, until it plunges into the flesh of Feldman’s wrist. Lucian, with no hesitation, jerks the blade in a counterclockwise motion that breaks both the bones in Feldman’s arm simultaneously.
Either the pain or the surprise costs the wizard his control of the lightning spell. It backfires into his broken arm, burning the limb to a crisp, then discharges into the air with a resounding crack of thunder. Feldman recoils, stumbling backward, screaming incoherently as he stares in horror at the crumbling black stump that remains of his left hand. He trips over a stray piece of broken fencing and spirals off into a tree at the edge of the woods, his head whipping back against the trunk, reopening the same punishing wound Lucian dealt him earlier.
Feldman must’ve used a healing spell on himself after that seizure in the locker room, one that allowed him to recover enough from his concussion to keep fighting—but I can’t see that tactic working twice. His hand is too far gone for any low-level magic to fix, and he doesn’t have the time or the ingredients to conjure up a more complex spell on the battlefield. Lucian is already rounding on him, the injured vampire’s leg visibly healing through the large hole in his pants, even as the wizard’s fingers start falling off in blackened bits and pieces.
Feldman’s a damn good practitioner, but once you bypass his fancy spells, the truth becomes apparent: he’s only human. And he’s lost this fight.
Keeping the shotgun trained on Feldman, I pass through the open gate, cross the track, and dart across the field, coming up behind Lucian. The vampire peeks at me over his shoulder, notes the gun in my hand, and gives me a thumbs-up. “Not too shabby, kid,” he says. “Though I could have done without the buckshot in my back.” He points to a trio of tiny holes near his right shoulder blade. “But thanks for the save, nonetheless.”
I stop beside Lucian and aim the barrel of the shotgun center mass on Feldman. The wizard, panting heavily, looks from me to Lucian, rage burning so hot in his eyes I’m surprised the rain doesn’t sizzle when it hits his face. “Always knew,” he growls, “that the Crows would turn against their own kind when it really mattered. ‘Protect the civilians?’ As if.” He spits on the ground before my feet. “Easy to buy. Easy to sell. Loyalty’s worth less than a bargain bin at the local thrift store, isn’t that right? What’d they promise you, brat? Huh? A nice, cozy place in the hierarchy of the new world order? A few pretty girls to fuck? Or are you even easier than that?”
I glance at Lucian, who rolls his eyes, like he hears this sort of thing all the time. And if he’s been fighting the anti-vampire Methuselah Group for years…he probably has.
“Look, dude,” I reply, finger already on the trigger, because I don’t trust Feldman one bit, “I don’t know who’s feeding you the overzealous conspiracy rhetoric, but I’m here to arrest your ass because you orchestrated a large-scale attack on a public building that killed dozens of innocent people. I don’t care why you did it, for a secret war or whatever other nonsense you’re busking—I care that you did it. DSI’s job is to bring supernatural criminals to justice. And you’re a supernatural criminal, so guess what?”
My words bounce off Feldman like he’s still wearing that shield. “You can try to backpedal your way out of reality, but we see it as it is. DSI is the enemy, and always has been. And now that you’ve revealed your true colors, there will be a reckoning.” He points his ruined hand, now missing three fingers, at my face. “So help me gods, I’ll make sure it starts with you, disgusting vampire sympathizer that you are. If I can’t hang you myself, by a rope of my own creation, I’ll get—”
“Oh, shut up!” Lucian groans. He gives me an exasperated look. “You see what I have to deal with? These Methuselah nuts are out of their goddamn minds. I swear every last one of them’s been brainwashed.” He bends down, recovers his knife, which must’ve fallen out of Feldman’s charred wrist, and spins it around and around in his hand. “Maybe I can crack this guy though, given that he’s broken the mold enough to go off script and plot these personal attacks against your boss.”
I lift my finger from the trigger. “Wait. You are going to crack Feldman?”
“Yes?” Lucian’s eyebrow ticks up. “I’m taking him back to my hidey-hole for a chat over some tea, if you know what I mean.”
“Um, no. You are not doing that.” I frown. “I’m arresting him, under the authority of DSI, which has jurisdiction to arrest supernatural criminals in Aurora. He’ll be interrogated in one of our holding cells by one of our people until he gives up the names of his co-conspirators, and then he’ll be put on trial for the crimes he’s committed, in which he will be fairly prosecuted, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. And then he will be crammed into a nasty, tiny cell, where he will spend the rest of his miserable life rotting. That’s how this story ends.”
Lucian wipes the rain off his face, and as he does, it’s like he flays off his outer later of sarcasm with it. He stares me down with the last expression I want to see on a vampire’s face. A predatory expression. “Oh, kid,” he says, “I’m afraid we have a conflict. See, I’ve got orders from the higher-ups in Parliament, orders I intend to follow, orders that explicitly forbid me from allowing anyone to interfere in the questioning and punishment of members of the Methuselah Group I happen to capture alive.”
He menacingly shifts his weight toward me. “Now, don’t get the wrong idea. You and your DSI buddies have been moderately helpful, in lieu of the real help I was supposed to have before this jackass over here blew them up”—he juts his thumb at Feldman—“but at the end of the day, you’re just Crows. Powerless. Ineffective. Unimportant. This, all of this, is a political struggle of epic proportions, and it’s beyond you. That’s a cold, hard fact. Accept it and move on.”
His hand shoots out, grabs the shotgun, and wrenches it from my grasp before any of my reflexes can kick in. Then he throws it, about eighty yards across the field, where it lands on the wet grass and lies useless, too far away to recover. Lucian next eyes the machete tucked through my belt, but I put my hand over it protectively and step away from him before he can relieve me of that too.
The vampire sighs. “Look, kid. Again, this isn’t personal. It’s the way things are, nothing more, nothing less. And no amount of bitching is going to change that. I’m taking Feldman, and you can’t stop me. You want to try to chop-chop me with the machete, be m
y guest, but you’ll just end up with a sore ass after I kick you halfway across the field. And then you’ll have to explain to your friends how I humiliated you and walked away laughing.” He shrugs. “Your choice.”
Heat blossoms in my cheeks despite the cold rain. “Hey! You don’t get to decide—”
A sharp whistle cuts the air.
Lucian and I whip our heads toward Feldman at the perfect moment to watch fifty—fifty—black-cloaked forms flitter out from their hiding places in the shadows of the woods. Light glints off their scythes. Rain slides off their cloaks, as if water cannot touch them. A hundred glowing green eyes all lock onto Lucian and me. And at once, in the brief beat of silence between one breath and the next, between a wave of rain cascading against the treetops and the hush of empty air that precedes another onslaught—at once, the wraiths charge.
Feldman cackles and slips around the side of the tree, stumbling off into the thick brush of the woods. Before either of us can grab him, there are ten wraiths in our way and more and more and more descending toward us, poised to strike deadly blows.
“You know,” I say, as I draw my machete, “a shotgun would be really useful in this situation.”
“You know,” Lucian says, raising his knife, “you should really shut the fuck up.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The cavalry comes to my rescue wielding Thai swords and flamethrowers. The first weapon I expect. The second blows my mind.
Lucian tears into the wraiths without restraint. He rips off arms and legs and heads, throws limbless stumps of bodies at oncoming hostiles to distract them, drives his knife into half-rotten necks and severs spinal cords as if they’re made of fine, fragile cotton. Meanwhile, I dodge blow after blow from half a dozen scythes, ducking and tumbling and scampering away, by far the least graceful combatant on the field. After avoiding a blade by a fraction of an inch, I manage to use my momentum to swing the machete around in a powerful arc and behead a single wraith. But as soon as its head thumps against the wet ground, six more fill its place, and I’m on the defensive again, retreating farther across the expanse of grass.
With each pounding footstep, each clanging, parrying blow with the machete, each swift feint, what little remains of my stamina drains that much more. I’ve been in too many fights the past couple days, and I haven’t gotten nearly enough rest, and in ten minutes, or five, or less, my adrenaline gauge will hit zero, and I’ll fall flat on my ass in the middle of the field, unable to even lift a weapon. And then the wraiths will descend on me and hack me to bloody bits.
A scythe skims my ear, and I jerk to the left as the wraith tries to ram me from behind and knock me over. But the second I maneuver out of that wraith’s way, another one dives down from above, and I have to leap to safety. The second wraith’s blade pierces the ground where I was standing, a blow that would have skewered me and left me pinned in place for easy pickings.
There are too many. I can’t keep this up.
The two wraiths rejoin the pack in hot pursuit, and as they rush me, their smooth levitation even more unsettling in the rain, I see my life flash before my eyes—or what’s left of my life. Six blades impaling me. Six blades dismembering me. Six blades stabbing me until every drop of blood in my body sinks into the earth alongside the downpour from the dark gray sky.
I grip the machete tight in my hand, trying to ward off the awful images, but I can’t imagine a way to escape my terrible fate. Lucian is forty feet away from me, dealing with the majority of the wraiths on his own. They’re ganging up on him in numbers even a vampire can’t take easily, swooping down in rotating groups of fifteen, utilizing attack patterns that make them seem like frenzied hornets but are, with a keen eye, identifiable as coordinated strikes. I don’t know if the wraiths have some telepathic link or what, but as a unit, they’ve clearly learned from their previous fights over the past two days.
The six wraiths pursuing me speed up, spreading out as they close in, a U-shaped formation meant to surround me. I push myself harder, to run faster, but my lungs are struggling to keep up with the need for air, and my boots keep slipping in the rain-slicked grass, and there are so many cramps in my abdomen I’m surprised every muscle hasn’t torn in half. I’m exhausted and sore from head to toe, and I can’t squeeze any more strength out of my battered body.
But I have to try anyway.
Vampire blood or no vampire blood, if a wraith takes one good swing at my neck, I’m done.
The wraiths loom behind me, and the hair on my neck stands on end, sensing the oncoming doom. I adjust my grip on the machete and pull my handgun again, psyching myself up for a last stand, telling myself that as long as I don’t give up, as long as I don’t surrender while blubbering like a baby, as long as I don’t go quietly into the night, then all my efforts won’t be in vain, then all my trials won’t be for nothing, then all my—
—coworkers are racing toward me from around the side of the school.
I nearly stop running and get myself killed in the surprise of the moment. But after a minor stumble, I manage to keep my pace, staying four or five feet ahead of the bloodthirsty wraiths while I watch in burgeoning glee as my reinforcements arrive on scene.
Naomi Sing leads the charge, twin blades already drawn. She charges through the open gate, picking up speed as she cuts across the grass and curves around toward me. For a second, it seems like she’s running straight at me, but then she shifts to the right, and we blow past each other.
Behind me, the Master of Blades leaps into the air, avoids two oncoming scythes, and decapitates both her assailants in one swift move. She lands on the grass, sliding to a stop, and the two severed heads bounce by her and roll off across the field. The corresponding bodies drop to the ground, lifeless.
Two of the wraiths from the remaining four break off their pursuit and round back on Naomi, but two of them continue after me, even as nine more DSI agents fly through the gate and rush toward us. Problem is, the wraiths are close enough to me to catch up before the other agents do, and now Naomi is preoccupied. However, two against one is way better odds than six against one, and I still have a machete and a gun, so…
I wheel around, slip-sliding backward on my heels through the grass in a less-than-graceful manner. But I manage to stay upright, and because I’m still moving away from my enemies, they can’t reach me before I empty my clip into both their faces. Bullets eat their flesh, break their bones, crush their eyes to pulp, throwing off their aim so much that both their scythe swings miss me by more than a foot. And as soon as the blades whip past me, I bound for the wraith on the right.
The machete strike is too shallow to completely decapitate the monster, but the blade cleanly cuts through the wraith’s esophagus, trachea, and major arteries. Old blood spurts out of the gaping wound in its neck, and it jerks as if shocked, causing its nearly detached head to fall backward and hang over its own shoulders. The wraith loses its levitation and crashes into the ground, scythe flying off across the field. But to my horror, it keeps groping with its hands and kicking with its feet, even though its head is attached only by skin and a partially severed spinal cord.
The urge to wretch floods my gut, but I don’t have time. The second wraith is on me.
Its blade streaks toward my face, and I raise the machete to block the attack. But the impact is so jarring, I lose my grip, and the machete sails away. I fall to my knees as the wraith spins back into attack position and springs forward to deliver another powerful blow. A death blow.
My gun is empty. My machete is gone. I haven’t had beggar rings since this ordeal began. And my colleagues are twenty feet away, closing fast but not fast enough. I’m done. I’m screwed. I’m dead. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I blindly grope at my tool belt, searching for anything I can use to fight, but I—I find a hard plastic rectangle tucked in between two pouches.
It’s the Bic lighter.
Lassiter must’ve stuck it on my belt when I was helping him earlier.
&
nbsp; God, I really owe that guy, I think in sweet relief.
Then I leap at the wraith. It attempts to strike me down, but I duck under the blade and bounce up right in front of its face, between its outstretched arms, behind its still swinging weapon. As the scent of rotting flesh hits my nose, I rip the Bic lighter from my belt, shove it under the wraith’s chin to shield it from the rain, and flick it on. Those terrible green eyes widen in realization the instant the fire licks its flesh—but by then, it’s already too late.
I drop to a crouch and launch myself to the left, rolling away across the grass as the fire takes hold of the wraith. The monster tries to shake the flames off, tries to douse them in the heavy downpour, but it’s magic-altered body simply burns too hot and fast. It shrieks as the fire engulfs its form, wavers in the air for a moment, then collapses into a writhing heap, until it, like many of its brethren, burns to dust.
This time, the rain drives the dust into the ground; wherever it lands, the grass dies instantly.
Death, that’s what the dust is. Refined and concentrated death.
I sit there, soaked to the bone, weary all the way to my soul, and watch the grass grow brown. Breathing hard, shaking hard, thinking hard. Until the rest of my backup arrives. Naomi’s teammates race past me to provide their captain support—Naomi has one wraith left to behead—while the others huddle around me. I don’t pay them any mind at first, too many thoughts jumbled up in my brain for me to produce a coherent conversation. But then one of them sinks to his knee and rests a hand on my shoulder. I look up to find Captain Ramirez, watching me with a concerned expression.
“Kinsey, hey,” he says, “you hurt?” His fingers trace the various holes in my coat sleeve, and the blood trapped beneath that wasn’t washed away by the rain. But Lucian’s “gift” healed all my major injuries, so there aren’t any obvious wounds Ramirez can use to make a determination of my status. He’s confused by the conflicting details, I see, but I don’t feel like taking the time to explain. I can save that for the hours of debriefing I’ll be subjected to in the aftermath of this chaos.
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 81
