by Gwynn White
Before he could say anything, Jeanine threw her arms around him. “I know you don’t approve, but I have to do this.”
“Believe it or not, I’ve been given to understand how important this is to you. I didn’t see it before, but I do now,” he said, pulling back and letting her go, literally and figuratively. “I’m proud of you. Stay safe out there, Officer Gatz.”
“And stay close to Chief Banner,” Hank said. “Watch her back. She may be tough as nails, but even nails bend when they’re struck the wrong way.”
The implication was clear. Ann might not know she needed a shadow, but in her current state, she did.
Jeanine pulled herself up—back straight, shoulders squared, eyes shimmering with pride—and nodded at both of them. “Will do, Spector Smiley. And thank you, Spector Cato.”
The moment seemed to freeze there, just so, all the things they might have wanted to say to each other hanging in the balance. Then Ann called for Jeanine to step on it, and off she went, not even sparing a look back. Ann made sure to catch Cato’s eye, though, to let him know she understood.
His niece was in good hands. Maybe even the best.
“Ready, partner?” Hank asked.
Cato lingered for a moment longer, the bigger stakes be damned. He wanted to remember that exchange exactly as it was, every last detail. Just in case.
“All right,” Cato said. “Let’s go see if we can’t help put a stop to that broadcast.”
Captain Kenneth Nguyen nodded to his demolitions man, Sergeant Kel Vance, as he and the rest of the team braced for the blast before incursion.
Three, two, one… Kel signaled with his fingers before triggering the blast.
Besides punching a man-size hole in the reinforced wall, the blast was enough to shake every man and woman on both sides of the makeshift entrance down to their boots. There was no time to waste, though, not with what little advantage of surprise they might have had already slipping away.
“Move!” Nguyen called over his shoulder, then ducked his head and filed through the hole. Kel followed close behind. Together, they checked left, then right, but found no resistance. They took their places along the interior wall and called for the next pair to come through.
A matching boom more felt than heard confirmed that a second team led by Captain Holcomb was performing the exact same maneuvers as they breached and secured their own sector on the other side of the prison.
Nguyen and his team were inside in under a minute. From there, they split into two discrete teams, the better to quickly reach the antennarae and shut down the broadcast by any means necessary. Holcomb’s team would do the same, giving them four sets of eyes, ears, and trigger fingers on the situation. The antennarae would be theirs within a matter of minutes, he reasoned. Hell, they might even wrap this thing up before it got too out of hand.
And wouldn’t that just piss those showboating spectors off?
The thought cheered Nguyen, even left him feeling a bit woozy. He forced himself to focus. Why was his mind wandering, especially toward something so petty and unimportant? He didn’t really begrudge the spectors their authority, though they did seem to carry themselves with a certain swagger. Like they were above it all.
Maybe he did begrudge that authority a little, after all.
No matter. Not for now, anyway. He pushed those muddy thoughts aside and trudged on, one foot in front of the other, as he’d always been trained to do.
One foot… in front… of the other…
They were passing a bank of cells when a flutter of movement, the barest shift in the walls, seemed to catch his eye. Was it just him? He felt… odd. Detached somehow. Almost… medicated.
He looked to his team and saw the same effects writ on their faces and burdening their movements. Something wasn’t right. Something…
Gas! he realized. The prison used a unique form of gas to quell riots, he recalled, one that worked far quicker on his kind than either gargoyles or vampires.
“They got into the armory,” he shouted, trying to warn his people. “They’re pumping gas!”
The words came out sounding thick and muddled.
“Get out!” he tried to cry, even as he sank to his knees, the first giggles clawing their way out of his throat. “Get out now!”
Too late. The heart of Crius’ revolution showed itself even as the humans turned back, the cells coming alive with movement, vampires unfurling from the ceilings, gargoyles shifting from the mottled, darkened corners with terrifying grace. The SWAT officers were still stumbling and giggling with laughter, their giddy terror ringing off the reinforced walls as one by one they were pulled into the cells. They laughed hysterically even as they were torn to pieces or drained of blood by the incensed natives of the prison.
Only Nguyen maintained any sense of self long enough to key his comm and shout, “Gas! They’re using gas,” before putting a bullet in his brain and sparing himself the hilarious torment of being dismembered.
With the site of the Gjunta’s seeding ceremony secured and the scattered, broken remains removed, Nissa Aziani suddenly found herself out of pocket, more or less sidelined through no fault of her own. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, of course. Events were moving quickly, and PWD had to react promptly to even hope to keep up with all that was demanded of them.
She had long since come to grips with the fact that she was one of many pieces in motion on a very large, very fluid board, even if she wasn’t actually in motion at the moment. She wasn’t completely in the dark, at least, despite her lack of action. She’d been keeping abreast of what was happening throughout the city since her last conversation with Chief Banner by monitoring the PWD frequencies and the increasingly frantic calls coming in following the bombing of Faust’s Bargain.
Through it all, she had noticed that none of her fellow detectives were asking what, to her, were the most important questions: Where had the phosphorous rounds and solar flares used to commit the worst of the attacks come from? Who had supplied them to the perpetrators? And, perhaps most concerning, were there more of the banned weapons still in circulation? She didn’t want to know how much more the city could take, but she definitely didn’t want to find out the hard way.
So, Nissa Aziani decided to do something about that. After carefully assessing her situation and the resources under her command, she reassigned her people to the task of sourcing the banned weapons. The first step was getting them on board. That proved remarkably easy, though given what they had witnessed together perhaps she should not have been surprised. No matter. The second step was for each of them to lean hard on their sources and snitches. Whatever they could shake loose, she told them, no matter how petty or seemingly trivial the information might seem. She wanted to hear it all, especially if it concerned anything deemed ‘too hot to handle’ by the rank and file scumbags. They always had their collective ear to the ground and could be a surprisingly reliable source of information when they were properly incentivized. Usually that meant letting some petty infraction slide here or there, but it was a small price to pay if she and her people could prevent another spectacular attack.
The third step was, without a doubt, the most interminable: the waiting. The kind of information she was after wasn’t the sort they could bandy about over the radio, and, besides, many of her peoples’ sources didn’t have radios of their own. The only way to get to them was to run them down in person, and so that was what they did, leaving in staggered groupings and running the first few blocks with their lights and sirens off so as not to draw unnecessary attention.
Nissa remained on site, maintaining the necessary fiction that it was an active crime scene. In reality, she did everything she could think of to pass the time until her people began to report in. She paced the now-clear floor; she immersed herself in a semi-meditative state; she ran through several forms of ishana, the spiritual and martial discipline taught to her by her mother and sisters.
Finally, she found her mind wandering to her new ac
quaintance. Ryen Cato. An interesting man, she had to admit; not nearly as brusque or callous as she might have guessed from Ann’s descriptions of him, though people rarely projected much of their true selves during a first impression. Not if they could help it, anyway. Still, there was no doubting his acumen or his connections. His advice regarding Gragos Cairn had been spot-on and utterly counterintuitive to her own thinking. She had been prepared to establish herself as the dominant presence on scene and have him removed, if necessary. That was the PWD way, right out of the handbook and years of training, but by engaging the kovar and his need to grieve, she—they—had averted a potentially even more complicated situation.
Beyond that, as Cato had said afterward, when the gargoyles were long gone and he himself was about to make himself scarce, “You just made a powerful ally. Kovar Cairn doesn’t forget that sort of thing.”
She wasn’t sure how she’d felt about that then—or even now, really, only that she supposed it was better than making a powerful enemy.
On balance, she was glad to have taken Cato’s advice. To have finally met him and formed her own impressions of him, indistinct and unsettled though they presently were.
Whatever time she had to shape those impressions came to a squealing end outside the club. She had every reason to suspect the source was one of her officers, but there was no point in taking chances.
Nissa slid her sidearm free as she peeked out the door. Peering out carefully, she spied Officer Kleck behind the wheel of his cruiser. Morgan Kleck was one of the younger officers assigned to her unit, bright and energetic, with an uncanny sense of intuition. He would go far, she knew, and she wasn’t at all surprised to find that he was the first to report back.
“That you, Detective?” he asked over the idling hum of his engine.
“Kleck.” Nissa holstered her weapon. She stepped forward, ducking beneath the PWD tape cordoning off the scene, to speak to him directly. “What have you got?”
“I’ve got a lead, that’s what! We gotta go now, though.”
Nissa considered retrieving her own cruiser and following, then decided against it. They would move more quickly through the checkpoints in one vehicle, especially with her credentials eliminating extraneous questions. “Very well,” she said, then stepped around the front of the cruiser and dropped into the passenger seat when Kleck opened the door. She’d barely closed it when he hit the gas. “Where are we going?”
“Red Lantern District,” he responded. “Got a guy down there who runs some of the lesser whore traffic for one of the players. Said he heard about something going off a few rows down the other night, where the warehouses start to crop up. Said people in the area got real spooked afterward. Whoever it is down that way, they don’t like visitors. No one wanted to report it.”
Nissa listened closely, considering the narrative and its second-degree source. “Interesting. Could be just the break we’re looking for.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Good initiative, Kleck.”
As she’d predicted, they moved quickly and without question through the checkpoints and barricades partitioning the city. Demonstrators of every species and political stripe had turned out in droves to protest the imposition of martial law, though so far PWD seemed to have matters in hand. They saw fewer and fewer checkpoints as they approached the Red Lantern District, which was no great surprise, since the entire space was more or less a decriminalized zone to begin with. So named for the distinctive glow of the lights marking its boundaries, the Red Lantern District was home to a whole host of vices, conventional and otherwise. The selection might not have been quite as variegated as that available in the bazaar at Faust’s Bargain, but the merchants operating in the Red Lantern District were far less likely to pull up stakes and disappear, making them at least somewhat more reputable and accountable to their customers, at least by comparison.
The blind eye turned by PWD also made the district something of a blind spot, Nissa thought as Kleck turned off the district’s main drag and toward a cluster of low, long warehouse buildings. That the weapons might have come through here at some point shouldn’t have surprised her, but one didn’t normally think of such lethal items when considering what was trafficked through the Red Lantern District. Assuming Kleck’s tip panned out, that would have to change going forward.
The moment of truth arrived as Kleck pulled to a stop outside of a nondescript warehouse bay. “This is the place,” he announced.
“All right. It looks like no one’s here. Let’s check it out.”
“Copy that.”
The warehouse door was broken but still standing on its hinges, the knob smashed and incapable of latching. Nissa nudged the door open and searched the wall inside for a light switch. She found it, flipped it upright. The lights flickered, taking a moment to steady. When at last they did, Nissa was certain they were in the right place. The walls of the bay were littered with pro-wight propaganda, including one that prominently featured the blazing sun that was the movement’s preferred symbol. There were also several bullet-riddled targets of the type used at shooting ranges on display, all in the silhouetted shape of vampires and gargoyles. (Some, unnervingly, were clearly meant to resemble children). Standing along one wall was a group of heavy-duty cages meant to house heavy duty weaponry and ordnance. The cages had been compromised, their doors buckled and the contents stripped. Even with the cages empty, Nissa had a feeling she knew what had once been kept inside them.
“This is definitely the place,” she said, stepping back outside the bay. “Well done, Kleck. Stay here and keep an eye out while I call this in.”
Nissa keyed her radio, about to speak, when the click of a pistol’s hammer being cocked froze the words in her throat.
After several hours of being sequestered in the bunker-like basement of his tower, Erastes Ensanguine was informed by his security detail that it was safe for him to emerge. The threat to Meridia—and, by default, to him—had been dispatched. The perpetrators were either dead or behind bars, their associates and abettors soon to be captured.
Erastes thanked his security detail and quickly ascended the tower, ready to return to the business of governing his little slice of the city. That, and his opera. He was already considering the next phase, his mind blissfully unencumbered by the weighty matters of before, when he was intercepted by Kaboc Melo.
“Highness, may I have a word?”
“Must you, Kaboc? I was told peace had returned to the city. Was I misinformed?”
“No, sire, of course not. The city is calm once again. However…”
Erastes sighed impatiently. “Out with it.”
“During the lockdown you imposed, there was an incursion.”
“An incursion.”
“Yes, sire. Best we can tell, a rogue element entered the Old Town district to retrieve human citizens. A team led by Alsace Alkuhn was sent to eradicate them, but reinforcements arrived and overpowered them.”
“Alsace Alkuhn? Of the Steelskin Slayers?”
“The very same, sire. I activated them as a precaution after the attacks on our people this morning.”
“Activated them? From what?”
“Why, their state of dormancy, sire. I knew that once again their services would prove useful, even vital, and so they were. Do you not approve?”
“Of course I do not approve! You were supposed to dismantle them, not render them dormant. No, this is not good. You must recall them at once.”
“They have already been recalled.”
“I see. And there have been no complaints? No visits from our friends with PWD?”
“None, sire. They were… discreet in the performance of their duties. Only Alsace and his group have failed to report in.”
“I see.”
“Is there anything else, sire?”
“No. No, I suppose not. I need time to think about how best to respond to this. We may not have heard from them yet, but PWD will be on us soon, one w
ay or the other.”
“A bridge to cross when we come to it, as the humans say.”
“Indeed, as you say.”
“Indeed. If it’s all right, then, I believe I shall retire for the evening. It’s been a very trying day, as you might expect.”
“On that much, at least, we can agree. We will have words tomorrow about this business with the Slayers, though. Understood?”
“Of course. Good night, sire.”
“And to you, Kaboc.”
Only when he was alone did Erastes allow himself to relax. Finally, he could be alone with his thoughts—his music—once more.
His time locked in the bunker had given Erastes time to think. What he had realized, then, was that he no longer desired to rule over his people as he once had. The burden of command was heavy, and he had carried it for many years. Perhaps, he had begun to consider, it might be time to abdicate in favor of someone with a more ambitious, acquisitive nature.
It was a sobering thought. Certainly, one worthy of consideration. But not tonight. Peace had returned, and with it time to think, to appraise the value of a thought from all angles.
And, should he decide that no one was quite ready to assume the mantle of command, no matter. He had a few good years left in him yet, and then he could finally debut his glorious composition.
Of course, he had to finish it first.
Erastes crossed the floor of his office, took the prized instrument in his hands and breathed a relieved sigh. He was halfway through rehearsing his favorite section when he reached a point of dramatic flourish, forcefully bringing together the opposing ends of the accordion between his palms. Even through its squealing response, Erastes felt something inside click and latch, and somehow knew that he had played his last note.
The hellfire that exploded from within the ancient instrument incinerated Erastes instantly, along with several meters of the lord commander’s tower in every direction.
