The Last Sun

by K. D. Edwards

  “Scary shit, I trust you with. A Grim Omen? No. No,” I said, loudly, when he looked like he might raise one last objection. “You will not step through that door, because if you do, I might as well follow. You’re not saving me from anything by dying.”

  “I’m not saving you from anything period,” he said, upset. “You went after Lady Lovers without me. I left you alone right before the gargoyle attacked. I let Ciaran mind-fuck me. And now there’s Matthias. Max.”

  “What about Max?”

  Brand gave me a narrow look. “His uncle. Not a good guy?”

  Shit. “I didn’t want to say anything until I knew more.”

  “Yeah?”

  I felt the oncoming shout vibrate through our bond.

  “That is such bullshit,” he yelled. “You were just avoiding the topic. How am I supposed to protect you—or him—when you keep details like this from me? How do I win here, Rune?”

  “There’s been a lot going on,” I said, a little surprised, or maybe hurt. “There wasn’t any time to talk. I only figured this out today, at the beach.”

  “You should have made time. He got dosed, Rune. That’s the least fucking bit of nastiness that could have happened. If Max has a past, I need to know about it, or the next thing around the corner isn’t going to be mopheads and magic carpet rides. Get your head out of your ass.”

  “You said that last part out loud,” I told him in a rising voice. “Are you really mad at me?”

  He started to say that, yes, he was really mad at me. Then his mouth shut so hard his teeth clicked. He had one of his Zen moments, where all of the volatile emotion got swept into pale wrinkles around his eyes.

  “I’m upset,” he said. “And I’m taking it out on you. That’s pretty fucking crappy of me. I know . . . I know I can’t go with you. I know. But . . .” He wiped his hands over his face. “At least tell me you have a plan. At least tell me you’re taking some kind of backup.”

  “I have a couple thoughts.”

  “Then how ’bout we plan them tomorrow? You’re tired. And you’ve been using your sabre too much. Why don’t we just wait? Let’s get the Tower on the phone. Let’s get backup from him. Let’s wait until tomorrow evening. You don’t have to do this in the morning.”

  Dusk or dawn—those were my two options. They were very particular times of day, which would offer some extra, meager protection against the dangers of Farstryke. Problem was, I didn’t think Addam could wait until dusk.

  “You trust my instincts,” I began.

  “Rune . . .”

  “You trust them, right? My gut is saying we need to go after Addam now.”

  Brand walked over to the draped windows. He parted the cloth with the tip of a calloused finger and looked out. There was only streetlight on the other side; dawn was still a few hours off. I didn’t have much time to restock my sigils. I certainly didn’t have time to sleep, or storm over to the Tower’s penthouse and ask why he wasn’t answering his damn phone.

  When Brand turned back to face me, he looked resigned.

  I went over, reached up, put my palms on either side of his face. It wasn’t exactly a touch or a sign of affection—it was just shy a headlock.

  I said, “Promise, no matter what happens, that you won’t go in after me. You promise me.”

  Even in shadow, he had the bluest eyes in the world.

  Then he closed them against me and said, miserably, “I promise.”

  FARSTRYKE CASTLE

  Farstryke Castle was the court of the long-dead Arcana who’d served centuries ago as the archetype for Time. It had been called, they say, the Hourglass Throne, and had been disbanded for crimes against humanity.

  The castle had been one of the few Atlantean structures that could be translocated to Nantucket without legal concerns or court politics. The lands had been in a cultural trust, collectively owned.

  Turned out, though, the translocation of Atlantean property was a bad idea. No one knew why. Within weeks of its translocation, it was a train wreck of hauntings. Dark spirits swarmed it like insects drawn to a rotting leg wound. Even on my best day, infiltrating it would be a challenge.

  The best time for an extraction on haunted ground was dawn or twilight. Neither morning nor night, the minutes around sunset and sunrise had a way of unbalancing monsters both nocturnal and diurnal.

  It wasn’t a big advantage, but it was an advantage, and I’d take any I could get.

  Ciaran gave me a red-lipped smile as I climbed into his front seat.

  “I’m not sure what I love more,” he said. “That you called me for help, or that you asked that we carpool.”

  “You don’t need to love anything. You’re getting paid. Are we going to be professional about this?”

  “All friends,” he said cheerily. “Professional it is.”

  Brand didn’t even let us pull away from Half House’s curb before he established a phone line. I spent the ride listening as he plowed through last-second research on Farstryke and its neighborhood. He’d accessed traffic cams, tracked crime reports in a four-block radius, even studied Doppler and multiparameter radar reports to see if there was any localized weather freakiness.

  I woke up to Brand swearing loudly in my ear and accusing me of snoring. I said, “We’re about to go into a tunnel. Are you there? Brand?”

  “Fucking try me,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  I slid my finger off the end button. I didn’t need a Companion bond to feel his strum of tension.

  I said, “I’ll be okay. You know that, right?”

  “How do I know that? We should have called the Tower, not hired backup off the island of misfit fucking toys.”

  “I have very good hearing,” Ciaran said.

  I sighed. “We’re almost there, Brand. I’ve got to go, okay? Make sure Max eats all his vegetables. Talk to you soon.”

  I hung up, closed my eyes, and rested my forehead against the window. Its predawn chill revived me a little. When I opened my eyes, Ciaran was staring at me from across the seat.

  “Your Companion mothers you,” he said.

  “Keep teasing him,” I suggested. “You’ll find out just what a mother he is. Do we need to go over the plan again?”

  “You were quite thorough over the phone. Don’t worry, Sun. Easy-peasy. Quinn will have his brother back in no time.”

  The car decelerated. The left front tire bumped over a curb. I got out and saw that we were at the mouth of a narrow driveway lined with beech trees. It was the only part of the property not surrounded by a low, gray wall covered in shining, coral wards.

  A distant, crenellated roofline was outlined against a purpling sky. The tree-lined driveway cut through a ruined garden filled with terraced walkways. All of the garden’s greenery was gone, choked under the advance of gnarled, native shrubbery, and trees spotted in fungal matter. I moved forward until the toes of my shoes were flush with a lip of dead grass.

  I’d reluctantly traded in my boots for black leather sneakers that, while less substantial, had been imbued with wards very effective in graveyard-type settings. Any edge was welcome. I didn’t have much hope for a lengthy element of surprise. Once we knew for sure the surprise was lost, our best tactic would be to become loud and ungrateful houseguests.

  “Okay,” I said. “So you know the plan. When I release the spell, we move. We’ll have just under five minutes before the spell fails. When it does, I’d like to be off the lawn and in the building. If something comes at us, square up. If you hear me say ‘Dead Man,’ possibly accompanied by emphatic finger-pointing, it means that our plan is fucked. Scatter and start blowing stuff up. Be on the alert for when it rips up the floor and throws it at you.”

  I knelt down and touched the earth while releasing a sigil spell. For a second I couldn’t tell where my fingers ended and the rock began, and then the spell stabilized. That was my backup plan. Next, I slipped a thumb under the top of my sock. My fingertip slid across the gold ankle chain. Its spell sprang free, a
buoyant rush of energy.

  Getting into a place like Farstryke isn’t just about moving from point A to point B. You needed to think spatially. The garden grounds would attract earth and nature spirits that leaned toward the physical. At the turn of day, I’d hoped most of the garden ghouls would be bedding down, and most of the revenants and grave wisps would be barely stirring from their corrupted sleep. The best way to keep everything off our backs was to drop from their radar entirely.

  “Like this,” I told Ciaran.

  I took a step into the air, tugged the levitation spell underneath me, and climbed an invisible step. Just like that, I was floating.

  I shuffled to the left and right, showing off a healthy six inches between me and the sidewalk. I expanded the diameter of the spell until it included Ciaran. He mimicked my movements with the addition of a small pirouette, and hovered next to me. A Flight spell would have been faster, but Levitation was quickly stored and easy to spread among two people—and I’d had only a few hours to prepare.

  I floated over Farstryke’s soil.

  My presence registered—I’m sure of it. The lawn seemed to flex, and the topiary rattled leafless, spear-like branches. But nothing attacked. No gleaming eyes blinked awake in the bushes. No fingers shoved up through the dirt. We headed across the garden toward a ruined, domed aviary, which I’d picked as our entry point.

  At the bottom of the slope, we had to backtrack. A narrow moat there had thickened into compost and ooze. I didn’t trust my spell over it, so we maneuvered onto the bleached planks of a walking bridge. We were on the other side, with the aviary maybe fifty yards away, when our luck ditched us. Ciaran stepped in a null thread.

  Null threads are the tricky bastard children of null zones: tiny whiplashes of void-magic that doused spells like cold water. Ciaran hit it and dropped onto the lawn.

  There was no grace period. The haunted land began to shake and scratch beneath us.

  “Ahead!” I warned, jumping onto the ground myself.

  A ghoul had slinked from a briar thicket, curling its unnaturally lithe body around the bottom of a cracked birdbath. Its face, streaked with slick stripes of mud, resembled nothing so much as a beaten child. It gave us a chillingly sweet smile and ducked its chin against its shoulder in a parody of shyness. There were gray bits of gristle caught between its front teeth.

  “Hit it hard, move fast—there’ll be more!” I said, shaking my sabre loose. It scraped over my knuckles and hardened into hilt form. I cauterized the air between us with a firebolt. The ghoul shrieked and retreated.

  Four more ghouls appeared, sniffing the air with the faces of mutilated adolescents. Two had been submerged in the foul brook—one came out of the briars—and a fourth rose from an unseen hole in the ground. Fuck us if we were standing on a nest node, because ghouls bred like rabbits, and we would be swarmed in minutes.

  I curled a finger around my mother’s cameo. The stored Shield released. I touched my white-gold ring and released Fire.

  I was too tired to draw on my sabre for a salvo; so I instead extended the sabre hilt into a molten long sword, with a basket hilt that curled protectively over my knuckles. In my free hand, I drew on Fire, and wove a ball of crimson flame. I launched it at the two ghouls wading through the sludge. The surface of the moat caught fire—literally exploded into a sheet of tar-smoke flames. The ghouls wailed and swam away, their scabrous scalps trailing slipstreams of burning hair.

  Ciaran extended his arm toward the ghoul in the briar patch. Magic swarmed his hand, potent enough to make his fingernails shine with friction. The ghoul began to leak—or sweat, or maybe bleed—rivulets of thick, sap-like liquid. The liquid began to glow. It flared into flame. Not just a powerful attack, but a tactical one—because the brittle nettles around the ghoul popped and sparked and began burning as well. The ghoul abandoned its ruined cover and raced for the hole in the ground.

  I’d hoped for all of them to flee in the face of an actual threat this close to dawn, but the one that had crawled out of the hole stood its ground as its cousins slithered past it. It stared at us, arms akimbo, claws as sharp as casket splinters.

  Then it froze, turned tail, and dove out of sight.

  Instinct was already a syllable in my mouth. “Incoming!” I shouted.

  The Dead Man stepped from behind a seven-foot cairn.

  The full impact of the creature’s arrival shut down my senses like a lungful of crematorium smoke. It was close, too close, and I could smell that awful combination of clean linen and moldering flesh. Its hood was pushed farther back than I’d yet seen, and the points of its face—the tip of the nose and chin, the top curve of its forehead—were the color of bruised fruit.

  It held out its arms. I ran like hell. The world rumbled, and a great slab of reality severed loose with a thunderous crack. Tendrils of dead ivy, part of a hedge, and clipped bites of the cairn’s stacked boulders began spinning around the Dead Man in a sharp, frantic sphere.

  Since we’d made moving targets of ourselves, it had to pick—and Ciaran was closest. The Dead Man launched the debris at him. Ciaran took a hunk of stone in the head and lost his legs. He skidded face-first down a gravelly embankment, out of sight.

  I shot the Dead Man in the head with my sabre. Or I tried to—its head dodged the blast like a rearing snake.

  It held out an arm. Ragged strips of crabgrass withered beneath it, tiny organic deaths that released flickers of black lightning that were drawn into the Dead Man’s hands. I dove behind a hedge as the Dead Man flung the lightning at me. The hedge caught fire. A pall of smoke rose between us. I dodged to the edge of visibility.

  When I could see again, I focused on the stacked cairn, on the thin spaces between the stones. I super-heated the air with Fire in a ferocious second. The loose rocks exploded outward, making the Dead Man stagger.

  Then it spoke. “The levitation spell was a shrewd gambit.”

  I’d never heard of a recarnate speaking out loud. The words were rasping, slick on the Ss, a wet vibration made from air forced through putrefied lungs.

  The world flickered—a light switch turned off and on nearly too quick for the mind to follow. The Dead Man was now standing just in front of me. The lawn between where it had stood and us was brown and smoking.

  I poured power into my Shield. Magic slid over my skin in a burst of fractal light. I swung my sabre blade at the Dead Man.

  It raised its hand. Something whipped across me. I felt my Shield and garnet blade dissolve. A thin line of blisters rose along the back of the Dead Man’s mottled hand, splitting and coating its fingers with pus, as if it had grabbed a hold of barbed wire.

  The null thread. It had grabbed and moved a null thread over me. “Oh, screw this,” I whispered. I flung myself down the tiered slope.

  It was a practiced fall—head turned away to protect nose, shallow breathing, bent ankles and knees and hips. On level ground, I got up and ran. I didn’t know how far the Dead Man could tug a null thread—which was sort of like asking oneself something as wholly fucking implausible as how far Santa’s reindeer could fly before needing a nap. None of this should be happening. Only it had. Which meant I had to keep running, because I couldn’t afford to lose any more sigil spells to null magic.

  Cracked, leathery vines shot out of the ground and wrapped around my ankles. I cut them apart with a shot of sabre fire. A wall of thorny shrubs broke apart and unspooled toward me. I jumped over one thorny ribbon and fired at two more.

  On the slope, the Dead Man rotated after me like a skater on ice, lifting both its arms.

  The world began to shake. I had nowhere to duck. My Shield was gone; the Levitation was gone; my Fire was gone. I don’t know where I got the idea, but I suddenly stopped moving and called, “Must we be enemies as well?”

  It was an old, old greeting from the days of polite combat. It offered a chance of parlay between two puppet forces driven by the commands of corrupt generals.

  The Dead Man hesitated. The rumb
ling faded.

  “My name,” the Dead Man said, “is Rurik. And yes, I must suffer the fools who summoned me. If you try to pass, I will kill you.”

  Recarnates don’t use names. Which was just so many more napping reindeers. I asked, stalling for time, “Who summoned you?”

  Rurik didn’t answer.

  I said, “Who the hell is mad enough at Addam Saint Nicholas, not to mention strong or nuts enough, to summon someone like you?”

  “A summoning is a spell. A spell is words backed with willpower. Any willful, ignorant tongue may form the right words.” Rurik paused. “It does not mean they will hold me.”

  “Can you tell me this? Is Addam alive? Am I wasting my time here?”

  “If you try to pass, I will have to kill you. I do not—”

  “Want to hurt me, yes, that’s awesome. This might sound crazy, but I’m thinking we might actually have a common interest.”

  He laughed. Laughter from dead lungs was an awful sound. “I only said, sweet thing, that I do not want you dead.”

  He lifted an arm and brought his fingers into a fist. A steel vice crushed down on my throat. I collapsed to my knees and dug fingertips under my jawbone, but there was nothing to pry loose.

  “Stay with me,” Rurik said, walking towards me, pleasure drenching the sibilants. “Play with me. You are filled with games and nightmares.”

  I tried to marshal my scrambling willpower. I couldn’t touch my sigils; I didn’t have the concentration to access their remaining spells. My sabre began a transformation into a short dagger blade. Rurik clenched his fist again, and I convulsed. The sabre slipped through my fingers, and the blade crumbled out of existence in a flurry of fireflies. I let my muscles go slack so that I’d fall on top of the hilt. Rurik grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled me up to him.

  His cowl slipped back, and I got my first real look at his face.

  He was a recarnate, or at least he’d begun as one, but he’d somehow reversed the rot. The reconstruction was imprecise. One eyeball had grown too big and bulged out of its socket; one nostril ended in folds of loose skin; one ear dripped wax that had hardened against his neck like the side of a candle.