“Maybe she’s a dragon.”
“A dragon, huh?” Detective Scott got serious for a moment, then jabbed the gun at me. “You’re fuckin’ with me Aeon. I can see it.”
“I’m taking what’s mine,” I said, reaching back into the drawer. Luckily it was empty, save the USB drive and a little piece of paper. Kitsune’s tracker code, presumably. Maybe I would hand that over to her, if I was feeling magnanimous. “And then I’ll be on my way.”
“I have a better idea,” Scott said, his voice loud. “The girl cuffs you, and then I take you both in.”
Without lowering the gun, he removed the handcuffs from his belt and tossed them to Nadia.
She didn’t move.
“Don’t listen to him,” I said.
“I’m at the end of my rope,” Scott said, and he looked the part enough to believe the words. “Don’t think I won’t hang you with what I got left.”
“Poetic.”
“You’re a cancer, and sometimes that requires surgery.”
“And you’re just the surgeon for the job.” I smiled grimly at Nadia. “It’s okay. Come over.”
Hesitantly, Nadia made her way across the small apartment, cuffs clinking as she walked.
“Now do it,” Scott said.
“I wouldn’t,” I said, looking at him. “You can still walk away.”
“I can’t, Aeon. Not after the shit you’ve pulled in this town. You think I don’t know you have something to do with this little avalanche outside? You’re done, Aeon. Done.”
“Remember what happened last time,” I said. “For your health, it’d be best if you just let this one go.”
A little light bulb dawned on him. “You know what, you’re right.”
“Glad we could agree—”
“I’ll shoot the girl if you don’t leave willingly,” Scott said, turning the pistol on Nadia. “You got some sort of code, right? That’s what the rumors say.”
Nadia’s green eyes were wide with fear. I heard the cuffs rattle in her hands. I squelched the urge to turn him into dust. I’d get the spell off, but the bullet would come quicker. That was a net loss, any way you tried to slice it.
“This is between you and me, Scott,” I said. “You’re a Detective. Protect and serve, right?”
“Sometimes the greater good requires sacrifice, Aeon.”
“I can’t let you do that,” I said, taking a step forward. Detective Scott wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer. But despair had pushed him up to this edge. It was time to see how far he was willing to go. “And I’m not leaving.”
“Then you leave me no choice.”
His trigger finger began to move.
And I jumped.
25
The bullet ripped through my shoulder as I flew through the air. All things considered, it was less painful than Isabella’s heart palpitations. But it still stung like a bitch.
Before I hit the floor, I dusted off an old spell from the archives, blocking out the pain. “Shadowus expandus.” The dim lights flickered, and ethereal smoke flooded from the floorboards. Detective Scott hacked and cursed.
I yanked at Nadia’s pants. She hit the floor as another shot fired.
“Stay close,” I rasped. We tore ass along the ground, through the swirling smoke.
“I’m gonna find you, Aeon.” Detective Scott slammed another clip into his service weapon to drive the threat home.
Not likely, if I didn’t give away my position with a snappy one-liner. I waved at the haze, parting the way for a brief second. There were Scott’s department store suit pants, billowing out around the ankles. I planted one knee against the ground and rose up, driving my shoulder into his breastbone.
Pain shot through the bullet wound, but I kept pushing forward. Scott was a stout, short bastard with a low center of gravity. But the pure shock of my attack caught him off guard and sent him on his ass into the hall.
I felt Nadia’s fingertips briefly slip away during the melee. But then she found me again, and we were running down the stairs. Shots glanced off the stairwell. How close, I’ll never know. We made it outside without further injury, plunging into the rolling blizzard.
Droplets stained the quarter-foot-deep powder red.
“You can’t keep running,” Nadia said, pulling against me to slow our pace. “You’ve been through too much.”
Knuckles white from gripping the drive and tracker password, I had no intention of slowing down. I heard the front door to the apartment slam shut, determined footsteps tramping through the snow.
“I’m gonna find you, Aeon. You son of a bitch.”
Maybe it had been a mistake snatching a little piece of his soul two months back. He’d always been a nasty piece of work with a minor Napoleon complex, but that might have been what put him right over the edge into psycho territory.
Nadia and I hauled ass through the winter landscape, the frozen wind searing my lungs. The shoulder wound was a through-and-through, and hadn’t hit any arteries. Checking my phone, I found a pharmacy nearby. The streets were abandoned. Apparently everyone was confused by the August blizzard and was huddled indoors trying to figure out if it was global warming or something even more concerning. I didn’t blame them.
We reached the pharmacy, but it was closed.
“What’s one more B & E?” I put my foot through the display window. An alarm sounded, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t planning on staying, and police response time would be eons in these conditions. Inonda wasn’t equipped to deal with a winter blizzard, let alone a summer one. Letting go of Nadia’s hand, I said, “Go find the bandages. And rubbing alcohol.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Keep watch.”
She tossed her black hair over her shoulder, not asking questions. The leather jacket, at least a couple sizes too big, was wrapped like a cocoon around her slender arms. I waited in the window behind a display for cola, just outside the whip of the cold.
I counted to six, focusing away from the pain.
Just breathe, Kal.
Trying to figure out the endgame. I noticed my phone had an unread text message from my inquiry about the Talon of Frost earlier. Argos had come through.
In all caps: YESS NEW ICE AGG
“Ice Age.” I recalled Sam Reynolds flippant words: the Talon of Frost was lost in the Ice Age. It had seemed like a throwaway piece of trivia at the time. But maybe it had disappeared during the Ice Age because the damn thing had been responsible for freezing the world.
Inonda was seeing the beginning of a new permafrost. Great.
I peered at the screen. The dog needed some work texting. Beneath about half a dozen accidental line breaks, he had written, TROPHY FROM PROTO-WENDIGO. BCK IN TOWN
Another forty spaces, and then the word INGI.
“So that’s your name, you ugly bastard.” Not that it meant anything. To me, it was still the same asshole who had nearly eaten Nadia and I for lunch at the precinct. But for some reason, it made me feel a little better, like the knowledge would somehow help me kill it.
Even though the truth was far from that.
I was shot in the shoulder.
The town was in deep freeze.
My ex-girlfriend was liable to kill me at any moment.
And a raving, psychotic wendigo—the progenitor of its entire species—was roaming Inonda, controlled by some unknown force.
I noticed that the text message had a final line. I scrolled down.
BLOOD FROST A VIOLENT NEW ICE AGG MEANS CHAOS
I rubbed my forehead, sliding the last puzzle piece into place. In addition to most of the world being frozen, the survivors would be at one another’s throats. Mortal and supernatural alike, fighting for scraps.
That would surely reveal our presence to humanity. And, with it, the fifth and unknown artifact
from the Journal of Annihilation would be exposed.
It seemed Marrack the Demon King had decided to take up his old warden’s mantle. If I hadn’t melted Athena the Goddess Killer into essence slag, she’d surely be beaming somewhere in the lower Circles of Hell.
“I hate politics,” I said, as Nadia returned, bearing a ton of bandages and first-aid supplies. We slipped back into the howling cold, jogging to keep warm.
“What’d you say?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s patch me up.”
“And then what?”
“I’m gonna bring summer back.”
26
It was five in the afternoon by the time we got back to Charon’s loft. Inonda might be a small town, but it sprawls in a way not conducive to foot travel. With all the snow piling up, walking was gonna be the only way people would be getting around for the near future.
I winced as Nadia put the needle through the jagged flesh on my shoulder. Javier Santos’ snores punctuated the otherwise morbid silence. A timer buzzed, indicating that another needle had finished boiling. One apparently hadn’t been enough to finish the job.
Nadia rose, sneakers squeaking across the echo-y loft.
The scheme was obvious, now that I had all the information. Clever, sure.
The Crimson Conclave, during their standard surveillance of the Four Points of the Southwest District and its surrounding areas, had stumbled upon the Demon Jägers. Inept, sure, but a bunch of rich people with a mission and ample funds were a good front to hide behind.
Marrack, after assuming control in the power void that followed Athena’s untimely demise, had probably sent a lackey to sweet-talk Tina Chen with a tasty plan. The Crimson Conclave would steer them toward a wendigo, and the Demon Jägers would use their funding to bring the beast back from extinction. And then they’d have their very own demon-slicing machine under their control.
They’d be real demon hunters.
How the organization had procured this proto-wendigo Ingi remained a mystery. Once Ingi had come alive, however, control of the cannibalistic beast had been quickly wrested away from them. If Marrack had slipped Ingi some Haelstrom, the beast would be his faithful instrument until the end of time.
Seriously, that shit was scary. I felt my arm tremble, quaking with untapped energy.
After that, Marrack had commanded Ingi to kill Diana the Fae. No big loss in my book, but it definitely wasn’t great for already tense supernatural relations. Probably as a warning shot to the Sol Council: new sheriff in town. Don’t fuck with us.
The receptionist had been collateral damage at the precinct, while the beast clamored around for my case evidence. A little dumb, sending the wendigo for a retrieval mission. They were more of a smash-and-smash-more type of creature than heist material.
That did leave one question: where was the Talon of Frost? From Argos’ explanation, Ingi’s presence hadn’t caused the sudden climate shift. The creature was powerful, but more wrecking ball than harbinger of the Ice Age. Did Marrack have the Talon of Frost in his control as well?
Someone was causing the frost half of the Blood Frost. I’d thought it was a coordinated effort, but if Tina Chen was trying to track down the Talon of Frost to fix her mistake, then maybe, just maybe, Marrack didn’t have it yet.
Then who?
“Come on,” I said as Nadia returned, brandishing the needle like a small dagger.
“Don’t be such a pussy.”
A phone that wasn’t mine chimed. After tucking in the trail of the bandage, Nadia checked her messages.
“Turn on the TV, Kal,” she said.
“I really need to think about tonight.” Yes, on top of the strange weather, I still had the problem of Isabella’s Destruction of Former Lovers curse to deal with. The Haelstrom had helped me considerably in that regard, but I couldn’t become a junkie to stave off her attacks.
She needed to be put on notice.
“Some attorney is talking about wendigos on the news.”
Head swimming, I walked over to the wall-mounted television and pressed the power button. Tina Chen’s perfectly tanned face flickered across the flat screen in sterling high definition. Her meticulously crafted persona was made for TV.
Snowflakes fluttered in the background behind the podium. I recognized her mansion from its torched roof. Then I read the scroll at the bottom of the picture.
PROMINENT TEXAS LAWYER CLAIMS WENDIGO TERRORIZING SMALL TOWN WAS CLONED
“Oh shit.” I cranked up the volume in a mixture of fascination and horror.
“This is not global warming,” Tina said, her voice stoic. I had to wonder what this would do to her career. If she was even alive in the morning. Every supernatural creature—even if it wasn’t part of the Council or Conclave—was gonna freak out about this announcement. “An organization I created called the Demon Jägers located the creature frozen deep in the Antarctic ice. We were told of the wendigo’s existence by a group known as the Crimson Conclave, an organization of dark essence—magic, that is. After extraction, we worked tirelessly to replicate the dead creature. Finally, we succeeded in cloning it. We named our creation Ingi, and were hopeful that it could destroy the demons living in our midst.”
Well that explained how wendigos had made a sudden resurgence. I waited for her to mention me as one demon living above ground. But she didn’t. Instead, Tina brushed snow from her stylish black hair and took a deep breath.
“Unfortunately, control of the powerful beast was lost. As such, we are seeking the public’s help in locating the Talon of Frost. It is the only object capable of controlling Ingi and ending the Blood Frost before the world is plunged into a new Ice Age.”
The scroll changed.
ALL-STAR TEXAS LAWYER SAYS KILLER MAN-EATING BEAST UNSTOPPABLE
“Wouldn’t want the public to panic,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“The Talon of Frost was missing from the beast’s paw when we extracted the original wendigo from the ice.” Tina coughed slightly from the chilly wind. “As such, there is hope that it still survives in the world, with a hero ready to step forward. That is why I am risking my career and standing in the community by revealing this information. I am truly sorry for this and have—”
She broke down sobbing, unable to continue. I turned the television off. Revenge could ruin a person. Blind them, make them foolish. I understood that well.
Javier groaned on the couch and rolled over.
“I know exactly what you mean, buddy.”
After thousands of years in the darkness, the spotlight was finally shining on the supernatural.
And there was no telling what the fallout would be.
27
I sat cross-legged on the deliberately-aged hardwood floor. One good thing about having a research-hound as an actual, um, dog, was that any new piece of information set off a thousand connections. Shortly after Tina Chen’s public service announcement, Argos had texted me almost his entire archives on the original proto-wendigo—also named Ingi—and the first Blood Frost.
The Blood Frost had preceded the Ice Age. It had been a lawless time, when wendigos had roamed freely about the chilling continents. I shuddered at the thought. The blood part of the moniker was apt: they feasted on mortals and magical creatures alike. The population dwindled due to the twin threats presented by the cannibalistic beasts and freezing temperatures.
Eventually, a large force had managed to defeat the wendigos’ leader, the proto-wendigo Ingi, from whom all the smaller, only-slightly-less fearsome wendigos were born. In the fight, one of Ingi’s talons had been severed—a fourteen-inch claw of diamond sharpness. The claw was taken as a trophy, but whoever carried it back didn’t understand the terrible dark power contained within.
The result was the Ice Age, as the frozen landscape plunged into a sub-zero, brutal tundra. The Talon of Frost had
been lost ever since. Until now, apparently.
Because Ingi-redux hadn’t triggered the start of the Ice Age. Sure, he’d been munching arms off and generally been terrorizing the locals, but the massive blizzard? As I’d suspected, that was someone else—and it was scary to know that it wasn’t Marrack.
The enemy you don’t see can hurt you in ways that even the most powerful known antagonist can’t.
“Cloned wendigos.” Nadia sighed by the stainless steel fridge. “And I thought demons were insane.”
“Not just any wendigo,” I said. “A clone of the biggest, most assholiest wendigo of them all.”
My work was really cut out for me. The vein in my arm rippled. A side effect of the Demon’s Mercury component of the Haelstrom.
“And you said that demons are weak against them?”
“Without the Talon of Frost, I’m fucked.” A light pain gnawed at my chest. Under the influence of the Haelstrom, Isabella’s curse was like being scratched by a squirrel. Irritating, but hardly lethal.
The snow continued to come down unabated. “Argos doesn’t have any leads?”
“Unless ‘interesting historical anecdotes that may or may not be factual’ count as leads, then no, he has exactly jack and shit.” I dropped my head into my hands, running my fingers through my short black hair. I wondered how soon the Blood Frost would spread to other locales, beyond Inonda.
I shivered. What did you call a Blood Frost that packed the stormy intensity of an Ice Age? Goddamnit. I’d already spent too much time freezing my ass off in ancient times to ever do it again.
I was beginning to understand why I appreciated this dive-ass town.
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Who’s old enough to have the Talon of Frost?” I said to myself.
“I don’t know.”
“Ziva.” The name came to me like a lightning bolt.
“Who?”
“Where do you fit in to all this?”
“Are you talking to me?” Nadia called across the loft, clearly annoyed. “I’m not following.”
Blood Frost (The Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy Book 2) Page 13
