by Reine, SM
Despair swept over him. He kicked the mailbox on the corner. It didn’t do anything—not to the hot metal, and not to his mood.
It was cooler inside the convenience store by about two degrees. He was glad to see the shop was empty, aside from a clerk reading a book by the cash register. No way could an empty convenience store trigger a vision.
Benjamin walked through the aisles of candy and junk food trying to scratch an itch under his collar, and failing. It was too tight to get his fingers around it.
He loaded up with candy and dumped it on the counter. The cashier glanced at him. “That’s going to be about fifty bucks. You know that, right?”
“Charge it to the Union.”
The cashier paled. “Just take it.”
Benjamin snagged a bag from the corner of the counter and filled it. He was grabbing another handful of candy bars when something inside of him shifted—like his brain had just prepared to jump off a cliff.
He grew alert, scanning the shop around him. It was still empty. There was a sign by the bathroom that said it was for use by paying customers only. The TV in the corner was turned off—none of that stuff worked around angels, except the Union’s equipment, which was thoroughly buffered with warding magic.
But there was that shift. A premonition was coming.
Leaving the rest of the candy on the counter, Benjamin hurried for the exit. The bell over the door jingled. He bumped into someone walking in.
His mind couldn’t process the visual information. There wasn’t enough time.
His eyes rested on her, and then he was gone.
Benjamin woke up on the floor without his sunglasses some minutes later.
A woman was bending over him. Her auburn hair was a veil of curls hanging at the side of her face. “You okay?” she asked, and Benjamin saw the scar on her eyebrow, the nick on her chin, and the smattering of freckles across her cheekbones.
He already knew Elise Kavanagh’s face better than his own. He had seen it in thousands of visions, for years and years, and almost believed she wasn’t real—until that moment. He had to stare.
She was so… alive.
He realized she was waiting for a response.
“I’m fine,” Benjamin stuttered.
His head throbbed with a pain unlike any other he had experienced. It was like his skull was packed with shattered glass from the motel mirror, and each shard was new information—things he knew, and wished he didn’t. He rolled over and cradled his head.
Elise sat back on her heels. “Here,” she said, offering a hand to Benjamin. He stared at it.
Where was her aspis? She shouldn’t have been alone.
A pair of legs moved behind her, and he felt an instant of relief before realizing it wasn’t James Faulkner at her back. It was some guy with brown hair, a tribal tattoo on his shoulder, and a sullen expression. Benjamin didn’t recognize him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Benjamin asked Elise.
“I’m giving you a hand,” she said. “Sorry for knocking you over. Come on, get up.”
He let her pull him to his feet. She was strong, solid, and very real. He hung onto her for longer than necessary. “You’re so young,” he blurted out, unable to resist.
“I’m a little older than you are.” Elise gave him a thin smile that was more unpracticed than unfriendly. She handed the sunglasses to him. One of the lenses had popped out. “Are you here with somebody? Can I make a phone call for you?”
He shook his head silently. He knew he was still staring at her, but he couldn’t stop. Her hair was red—red! And she was so tan. “I must have hit my head,” he said faintly.
Her lips pursed. “What are you, epileptic?”
“I don’t need a doctor. I’m okay.”
“All right.” She glanced over his shoulder at the coffee machine. Elise loved her coffee so much. “Try to take it easy, kid.”
Benjamin went outside, but he didn’t leave. He watched Elise through the window. She grabbed a cup of joe while the other guy—who was he?—went to the counter to ask for directions to the motel. Benjamin stared at their backs. He suddenly wasn’t craving candy anymore.
It wasn’t every day that Benjamin Flynn met the person who would destroy the world.
V
The motel in Silver Wells looked like a horror movie waiting to happen: decrepit, wind-battered, and on a lonely edge of town. The welcome sign depicted a cartoon coyote with a broken tooth. Scaling the stairs to the second floor was harrowing—some steps wobbled upon having weight placed upon them, and one near the top was missing entirely. There were no rails on either side.
It was easy to tell which rooms were already occupied by kopides. The motel staff had left the curtains open in the empty rooms, and as soon as someone checked in, the new occupant closed them. If there was one constant between all kopides, it was paranoia.
The curtains for room twenty-nine were parted. Anthony opened the door with their key.
There was no television. The linens on the bed had to be at least thirty years old, and the air smelled like dust. He stepped in to search for the light switch, but Elise reached out to him.
Something was wrong. Her instincts screamed out for him to stop.
“Wait,” she said.
Footsteps pounded up the stairways on both sides. Before Elise could turn, hands shoved her into the room and slammed her body into Anthony’s.
“On the ground! Now!”
The door banged shut behind them as lights blazed to life. Hands grabbed Elise’s arms, forced them behind her back, and shoved her to the floor.
Her cheek was mashed into the carpet. Shiny black shoes passed through her vision.
“I’m Gary Zettel, commander of Union Unit B13. You’re under arrest.” He turned to address the person holding Anthony. “Take them to the trailers, then separate, strip, and search. Remember protocol. We’ll need to defend our actions in court.” Zettel immediately left, as though too busy to be concerned about whether or not his orders were followed.
Elise met Anthony’s panicked gaze. Then a black hood jerked over his head and cinched at the neck.
Cloth touched her hair, and she threw herself away from her captor with a hard twist of her body. She had an instant to analyze the situation—Gary Zettel, one woman, and three men, all armed—and then she snapped both of her feet into the air. Her heels cracked into the face of the man bent over her. He shouted and fell.
The butt of a rifle smacked into her solar plexus before she could get up. The air rushed out of her lungs.
A blond man’s hands clamped on her upper arms and pressed them against her side. Anthony began shouting: “Let me go! I have rights!”
Elise ripped free of the man’s grasp and launched herself at the door. She drew her knife with a flash of metal, throwing all her weight into a blow across the face of the man holding her boyfriend.
The instant of freedom was fleeting.
Something struck the back of Elise’s knees. She collapsed as they dragged Anthony out of sight.
The hood flipped over Elise’s head. The cord tightened around her neck.
Darkness.
Metal bit into her wrists and ankles. She thrashed, but three sets of hands seized her, and she was carried from the room. Unlike Anthony, they didn’t even let her feet contact the earth.
The blackness within the hood was absolute. The only way she could tell she had left the room was by the sudden heat of sunlight.
Elise was shoved inside something shaded, and what sounded like the door on a van shut. The vehicle growled to life and began to move. She opened her mouth to call for Anthony, but stopped an instant before giving herself away. “Lucas,” she said instead, “are you there?”
No response.
In a void of visual stimulus, James’s presence filled her mind. He was walking hand-in-hand with Stephanie along a garden lush with flowers. Elise could smell pollen, hear the buzzing of bees, and feel his girlfriend’s long, man
icured nails digging into the back of his hand. Stephanie smiled for him, and the red-blond hairs that had escaped her bun drifted around her face in the breeze.
James thought about how beautiful she looked—and then realized he wasn’t alone. His attention drew inward.
Elise?
She didn’t want him to know what was happening. She shut him out with the practiced efficiency of having to block him several times a day, every day, for weeks.
The garden was gone. She was back in the darkness, and someone whispered beside her.
“Think we’ll get to execute them?” It was a man’s voice. He had a New England accent, and Elise memorized the sound of it. When she got a chance to fight back, he was going to be the first to go.
“You heard Gary. They’re going to court. Eyes forward.”
Nobody else spoke as they drove on. Elise wasn’t sure how long they traveled. She could hear the mechanisms of guns being moved—removing clips and checking them, sliding them back into the gun, cleaning parts. Nobody else talked.
Time passed.
The van stopped. The door slid open.
Elise was lifted again. Her captors were not gentle. They hauled her by the cuffs at her wrists and ankles and flung her unceremoniously to the ground.
The hood came off, and Elise found herself inside a tent. The floor of the tent was dirt, and blissfully cool in comparison to the heat blowing in from underneath the tarp.
The broad-shouldered woman from the hotel room loomed over her. Elise saw a spark of silver around her fingers that meant she was a witch, and a fairly powerful one. “I’m going to strip-search you. This will go a lot faster if you don’t struggle.”
Elise responded by slipping her other knife out of her wrist sheath behind her back.
The woman began unbuttoning Elise’s shirt. A couple of buttons popped off. The witch reached around to undo the handcuffs and remove the shirt, which freed Elise’s left hand.
She swung the knife.
Her arms had numbed from being forced behind her back, and she was fractionally slower than normal. A fraction, nothing more, but it was enough.
The witch dodged the blow and ripped the knife from Elise’s hand, taking the glove with her.
“Nice tattoo.”
“Do you recognize it? Do you know what it means?” Elise spat.
“No.”
“It means you shouldn’t fuck with me.”
The other woman snorted. She stripped off the wrist sheath, then went for the second glove, but Elise clenched her hand into a fist and put it behind her back.
“Open your other hand. You heard me—open your hand!” the witch ordered. Elise threw her body forward, cracking the top of her head into her captor’s face. She reeled as blood splattered on her shirt. “I need support!”
A man rushed through the tent flap, took an instant to size up the situation, and swung his rifle.
The room exploded around Elise. She hit the ground a moment later, and the woman pounced on her. She was strong for a human. Her hands patted along Elise’s body brusquely, stripped off the other sheaths, and then started to pry her fingers open again.
She couldn’t open her hand. She couldn’t have both palms bared.
There were far, far worse things than her attackers.
The man slammed his knee down on Elise’s arm. “I think she’s holding something!”
A badge clipped to the witch’s belt momentarily dangled in front of Elise’s face, and she had an instant to read it: Allyson Whatley, Union of Kopides and Aspides.
Elise wasn’t given the time to wonder why the Union had attacked them. Allyson Whatley’s hand squeezed around Elise’s just above the knuckles.
For an instant, her hand was hot with the strain of it, and then her bones croaked and groaned and snapped.
She screamed a wordless scream.
VI
Gary Zettel watched on a security monitor as Boyd dropped the McIntyres into the interview room, which was a trailer at the center of the Union camp. It was a sparse box with a single overhead light. The windows had been covered with trash bags and duct tape.
The woman on the left was rigid. She wore a plain gray sports bra and matching underwear, which revealed well-cut abs and arms. Her thighs were thick with muscle. The man at her side wore red plaid boxers, and was likewise well-defined, although he didn’t look nearly as fit in comparison to his supposed aspis.
The voices that came through the tinny speakers were whispers. Gary turned the volume all the way up.
“Are you okay? What’s going on?” A masculine voice. The man turned his head in the bag, obviously trying to move toward the woman.
“Don’t move,” she said, and it was quiet enough that he could barely make it out. “Don’t speak.”
Zettel was still studying them with a hand on his chin when Allyson returned. “What weapons did you find on them?” he asked.
His aspis dropped the captives’ belongings on the table. There were wrist sheaths, two knives, and no guns in sight. “All on the woman,” Allyson said. “The woman got violent when we removed her gloves to inspect them. It took both Boyd and I to restrain her. We were forced to break one of her hands.”
“What was she hiding?”
“Nothing.” Allyson seemed insulted by the nerve of it. “She put her hands back into fists after we broke her fingers—she wouldn’t even let the medic treat her. She’s an animal.”
He grunted. “If that’s the aspis, how did the kopis react?”
“He allowed us to search him, and we found no weapons on his person. He insisted on his innocence at least six or seven times.” She showed Zettel her phone. “I took pictures of them.”
He took the device. The picture of the woman’s face showed obvious anger, frenzied hair, red cheeks. The man had a square jaw and strong shoulders, but a young face. Not exactly the kind of thousand-yard stare Zettel had come to expect from a kopis.
Motion on the camera distracted him. The woman had shifted from her knees to her lay on her side, and she squirmed to maneuver her still-clenched fists under her legs. She didn’t show any signs of being in pain. She was absolutely silent.
“This isn’t right,” Zettel muttered. “There’s no way she’s an aspis. What’s our intel say?”
Allyson swiped through a couple pages on her mobile device. “We don’t have any. All we know is what Michele put in her travel request, and that’s the name: Lucas McIntyre. There’s no identification on these people besides their badges for the summit. I couldn’t even find social security numbers for the McIntyres.”
“How would Michele have known who they were and how to find them if they’re ghosts?” Zettel mused aloud. “Too bad she’s not here to ask.”
“She’s the problem.” Allyson jabbed at the woman on the monitor with a finger. “She’s not an aspis, and she makes him look like a goddamn fairy.”
He glanced down at the photos Allyson had taken. There were pictures of the undersides of their forearms, and the woman had a silvery, near-invisible scar tracing from wrist to the inside of her elbow. The man didn’t. It was a telltale sign of having performed a binding ritual, and it almost certainly meant they were not bound—not to each other.
“If they’re both kopides, where are the witches?”
Allyson looked a little too eager to find the answer to that. “I don’t know. Let me interview them.”
“We’ll go in together.”
Zettel opened the door for Allyson, and she went outside. Surveillance was set up in a trailer beside the interview room, and Boyd leaned against the exterior wall in the shade. A wad of bloody tissues was pressed to his face.
“Bitch broke my nose,” he grumbled.
Allyson laughed.
They left Boyd to himself and entered the other trailer. The woman already had her hood off and was crouched beside the man. It looked like they had interrupted her in the middle of trying to free the man.
She froze. Her hazel eyes flas
hed.
Zettel stalked around the edge of the room, glancing over to make sure Allyson had the door secured, and stood over the woman. “Identify yourself.”
“Could I have my hood removed?” the man asked, voice muffled.
“You can, if your partner will behave herself.”
She glanced at the hooded man, and Zettel could see the calculations running through her mind. After a moment, she sat back and rested her hands on her knees. Her left hand was bruised, purpling and swelling, and still she had it in a fist.
Allyson jerked the hood off the man’s head. He winced and blinked at the bright light.
“Identify yourselves,” Zettel repeated.
The man cleared his throat. “I’m Lucas McIntyre. Could I have a drink of water, please?”
“You’re Lucas McIntyre? And what is your partner?”
“Leticia McIntyre. My wife.”
“I said, what is your wife?”
Lucas glanced at Leticia. “She’s my aspis. Please—I’m really thirsty.”
Zettel nodded, and Allyson left to find a bottle of water. “You swear that you are a kopis and she is your aspis?” When Lucas nodded, he said, “And you swear that you are Lucas McIntyre?”
“What’s going on? We haven’t done anything.”
“You’re the last person to see Michele Newcomb alive,” Zettel said, “and that makes you a person of great interest to the Union. I’m going to ask you to move away from your aspis, Mr. McIntyre. Get over there. On the wall.”
He didn’t hesitate to obey. Very nervous, like Allyson said. “Who is Michele Newcomb?” asked Lucas.
“She was our recruiter and a witch,” Zettel said as Allyson reentered the room with a bottle of water. She gave it to Lucas, who slurped half of it down with a sigh. “She put in a travel request to a private home at an unspecified Clark County address—your address. Michele Newcomb was found dead a few miles away. You’re the last person she saw.”
