Beta

by Reine, SM

  She was surprised when Vidya showed up at the last moment, arriving with a backpack slung over her shoulder. She wore black leather similar to Deirdre’s. In fact, completely identical to Deirdre’s—it looked like Vidya may have taken the clothing from her dresser while she was in the infirmary with the healer.

  Deirdre didn’t mind. She would have given them to Vidya if she’d asked. But it was discomfiting to see a woman who had been nearly catatonic gearing up to join them on another mission.

  “Why did you invite her?” Deirdre whispered when she climbed into the front seat with Stark. He had assigned her the first shift driving.

  Stark acted like she hadn’t even spoken to him. He handed his tablet to Bowen in the back of the van as Deirdre pulled out onto the road. “There are the plans. Everything you need to know. Study it.”

  Bowen tapped on the tablet’s screen. “Hey, I grew up in this area. This says we’re going somewhere called…’Holy Nights Cathedral’? There aren’t any cathedrals out that way.”

  “The satellite photos disagree with you,” Niamh said, snagging the device out of his hands.

  “Holy Nights Cathedral,” Deirdre echoed. “What kind of name is that?”

  Niamh scanned through the information.

  “It’s for a small sect of some obscure religion called triadism. They’re run by this guy named Brother Marshall.” Niamh lifted the tablet to show a picture to everyone in the van. Brother Marshall was an attractive man on the cusp of his forties, with blond hair and heavy lines on his face. He looked more like a football player gone to seed than a monk. “I bet they’re worshipping this Infernal Blade. Dummies.”

  Colette nudged Niamh with an elbow. “Don’t lie. You know you’re excited to be going after the sword.”

  “It’s the Infernal Blade!” Niamh stopped trying to hide her delight. She was practically squirming with glee. “It would be like—I don’t know, if we found the One Ring or something. Nerdtopia!”

  Deirdre almost laughed by force of habit, but then she remembered their earlier fight, and the smile slipped right off her lips again.

  “Where’s the Infernal Blade supposed to be from, anyway?” Bowen asked. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Oh, this is a good story. You’ll love it. There used to be this demon named Lilith, right? She was a demon who created every living creature on the planet by sculpting them out of clay,” Niamh said.

  “A demon made everyone in the world?” Colette asked, skeptical.

  “I know, right? No big shock here, but Lilith was also a force of destruction. She had this poison touch that could turn anyone back into clay. One of her daughters, Yatai, got hold of that poison power, and she attacked a city with it.”

  “And then Atlantis sank to the bottom of the ocean,” Bowen intoned.

  Through the rearview mirror, Deirdre watched as Niamh slapped his arm. “Atlantis is fake, stupid.”

  “Your story is fake too,” he said.

  “If it is, then we’re wasting a lot of gas on this drive, aren’t we? This isn’t ancient mythology we’re talking about. It’s recent history. Ask anyone who works for the Office of Preternatural Affairs and they’ll verify it. Yatai attacked Las Vegas like five years before Genesis and turned half of it to stone.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just ring up all my besties with the OPA,” Bowen said. “Oh wait, I forgot, we’re rebelling against those people.”

  Niamh ignored him. “Anyway, when Yatai attacked the city, this badass bitch named the Godslayer killed her with a sword. A falchion. That falchion got infected with Lilith’s poison, and now that sword turns everything it touches to stone. Hence the Infernal Blade.”

  “Isn’t that a comic book?” Bowen asked.

  The swanmay grinned. “Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Christopher Nolan. But it’s true. It’s all true.”

  “If there really was a woman named Godslayer, then I bet the nurses laughed putting that on a birth certificate,” Colette said.

  Bowen barked a laugh and low-fived Colette.

  “You people mock me now,” Niamh said with a melodramatic sigh, “but do you know what I’ll do once I have the Infernal Blade?”

  Stark shot a look at her over his shoulder.

  The meaning of his expression was clear: Nobody would have the Infernal Blade but Stark.

  Niamh deflated. “I will do nothing,” she muttered. “I definitely won’t do the best cosplay ever.”

  The reminder of Stark’s presence was a killjoy. His one glance was enough to entirely dampen the mood in the van, choking all conversation.

  The drive south was excruciatingly boring after that—made only worse by the fact that Stark wouldn’t talk to Deirdre.

  She never would have expected his disregard to be so galling. Ignoring her meant that he wasn’t directly inflicting pain. She should have been grateful. But the road noises made it hard to keep up a conversation with the people in the back, the radio in the van was broken, and she had no choice but to drive for hours in silence.

  Stark worked on his tablet for the drive, typing rapidly on the screen. It was tilted away from her so that she couldn’t see what he was doing.

  All she could do was cast sideways glances at him, discreetly studying the crags of his face while he was distracted.

  She tried to imagine him as a younger man, without the faint scars, without the beard, without the constant cloak of hatred that hung over him. A man who had fallen in love with a woman named Rhiannon. A man who cared about another human being so much that he would go to war over her loss.

  Deirdre couldn’t imagine him like that.

  But maybe he hadn’t been all that different from her, once upon a time. She had suffered losses, too. She had lost her father, her home, and a hundred friends over the years. She had lost Gage.

  Now she was shooting people like Dr. Landsmore and barely batting an eye when Stark murdered OPA agents in front of her.

  He wasn’t the only one getting harder with time.

  Stark took the wheel in the middle of the night, allowing Deirdre to climb in back. By that point, almost everyone else had fallen asleep. Niamh had her head pillowed on Colette’s stomach. Bowen had passed out upright with his head against the door.

  It must have been nice to slip into sleep without fearing someone would stab them while they were unconscious.

  Vidya wasn’t sleeping. She sat opposite the others on the wheel well, staring fixedly out the rear window of the van. She didn’t react when Deirdre moved beside her.

  Deirdre noticed the corner of a comic book poking out of Niamh’s backpack. She glanced at Vidya—who was still ignoring her—and extracted the comic carefully.

  It was an issue of Godslayer. Not one of the ones drawn by Niamh’s boyfriend, but an issue prior to his run. It had been read so many times that the paper was soft and falling away from the staples.

  The illustrated woman on the cover was holding two swords: one made of infernal obsidian, and one made of ethereal bone.

  Deirdre flipped through the pages of the comic book. There was a full-page splash dedicated to the carnage inflicted by the cursed sword. The artist had painstakingly drawn the contorted positions and silent screams of victims who had been turned to glossy black stone.

  Their deaths would have been painful. Deirdre could imagine their last breaths all too vividly, struggling to scream as their lungs turned to stone.

  It would have been even more painful than being swallowed by the Genesis void.

  Luckily, it was all fiction. Las Vegas hadn’t been wiped out by a demon apocalypse. The Infernal Blade didn’t exist. Nobody had died by having their bodies reverted to demon-clay. And Deirdre was chasing a rumor spread by the unseelie sidhe.

  Right?

  “You can sleep,” Vidya said softly.

  Deirdre almost dropped the comic book. “Huh? What did you say?”

  “If you want to sleep, I’ll keep watch.” She jerked her chin toward Stark.


  Returning the Godslayer comic to Niamh’s backpack, Deirdre gave Vidya a small smile. “Are you sure? I can keep watch.” There was no point pretending that they didn’t need to stay awake. Vidya understood the danger they all lived with.

  “I won’t be able to sleep,” Vidya said.

  Deirdre stretched out beside her, pulling the hood of her jacket over her head. “Thank you.”

  Vidya nodded.

  The instant Deirdre closed her eyes, she was asleep.

  For the first time in weeks, she didn’t dream of Gage’s burning fur or his pulverized fang.

  She dreamed of screaming faces turned to stone and a sword blacker than night.

  They reached their destination mid-afternoon the next day. Deirdre drove the van as far into the forest as she could, wheels jittering over the uneven terrain and branches scraping the roof. Then they unloaded and hiked the rest of the way to the coordinates.

  Holy Nights Cathedral was at the bottom of a canyon and surrounded by trees so dense that it really felt like it was an eternal night. It was a bigger building than Deirdre had imagined—easily as large as any of the cathedrals in New York, which weren’t intended to be clandestine.

  And the building wasn’t merely big. It was truly an intimidating work of architecture.

  Its roof was marked with jagged spikes at intervals, and gargoyles guarded each of the corners. The stained-glass windows along the sides must have been at least three times as tall as Deirdre.

  Weirdly, the stained glass didn’t show saints or other Biblical scenes. They depicted leafy trees, flowers, apples, and other ordinary garden things.

  Deirdre lowered her binoculars, frowning. She hadn’t really expected there to be a cathedral in that hidden corner of the mountains. But there it was, massive and looming, like a sacred fortress that had grown from the ground the same way as the trees.

  If the cathedral was real, did that mean the Infernal Blade existed, too?

  Stark took the binoculars from her, surveying the cathedral. The canyon was so deep that being at its top put them above the roof of the building. It was hard to see much of Holy Nights Cathedral from that perspective. “Bowen, head to the other side of the canyon. I want more angles on this.”

  “Roger that, boss,” Bowen said. “What should I do when I get there?”

  “Wait for orders,” Stark said.

  Bowen vanished into the trees, hauling a sniper rifle and backpack along with him.

  Deirdre squinted up at the sun. There were probably only a couple hours until dark, though it already felt like evening under the veil of the trees. “I’m going to scout out the cathedral,” she said. “Look for ways to get in.”

  Stark ignored her, which Deirdre took as assent.

  Deirdre approached the edge of the canyon, looking down at the rock face. It wasn’t a vertical drop, but it was pretty close; if she slipped, she would have a long way to fall.

  Still, it was no more difficult to climb than anything else she’d scaled before. The cliff by the sanctuary waterfall was steeper and slipperier, with few good handholds. At least this canyon was properly craggy.

  She sat on the edge of the cliff and flipped onto her belly to lower herself down.

  When she turned around, Deirdre was surprised to see Stark’s feet at eye level.

  “Let me know if you find anything,” he said, bending down to shove a Walkie Talkie into her pocket.

  “Wow, I’m not invisible,” Deirdre said. “You can see me. It’s a miracle.”

  “Don’t push it, Tombs.”

  Stark walked away. She scowled at his retreating legs.

  What had happened to “I can’t stay angry at you”?

  And what had happened to Deirdre not caring if Stark hated her anyway?

  That was an unsettling line of thought that she wasn’t willing to follow to any conclusion. Luckily, she was dangling over a precipice of several hundred feet. Actual physical peril was a welcome distraction.

  She made sure that the Walkie Talkie was settled firmly in her pocket and began sliding down, primarily using upper body strength to control her descent.

  The funny thing about cliffs was that they looked tall from the top, but not nearly as tall as they did once Deirdre was stuck to the side of it, dangling over the long drop down the rocks. She focused on climbing slowly, lowering herself inch by inch, sticking close to the shady side of the rock so that she’d be less likely to be spotted by anyone in the cathedral.

  Not that there seemed to be many people to spot her. The canyon was dead silent.

  Deirdre paused halfway down the cliff face, fingers jammed into a long crack, and listened.

  The silence didn’t only extend to human noises. She could hear the wind through the trees, but no birds, no rustling, no sign that there was anything alive in the canyon.

  There were always animals.

  As a rule, mundane animals didn’t like shapeshifters. A forest heavily populated by werewolves might not have much by way of birdsong or bunnies. It was possible—not likely, but possible—that Stark’s mere presence had scared off the local fauna.

  But the quietude was eerier than that. It didn’t feel like the animals had gone into hiding.

  It felt like everything surrounding Holy Nights Cathedral was dead.

  Deirdre dropped the rest of the way down and landed on grass, absorbing the impact with her knees. She slipped through the bushes to a hiding spot behind a tree and leaned around it to look at Holy Nights Cathedral.

  She wasn’t a witch, so she couldn’t see magic, but she could identify the hallmarks of spellcasting. Runes were a surefire giveaway of warding spells defending a building. From a few feet away, Deirdre could see thousands of such runes carved into the foundations.

  Holy Nights Cathedral was completely coated in spells.

  Deirdre’s eyes skimmed over the roof of the cathedral. There was only one window on the bell tower that looked like it wasn’t surrounded by runes, facing away from Stark’s chosen encampment.

  She pressed the button on the side of the Walkie Talkie. “I think I see how I can get in. I’ll hit up the roof, same way we did the benefits office. One of the windows isn’t warded.”

  Bowen’s voice crackled over the speaker, small and tinny. “Why would they have the rest of the cathedral covered in magic but leave a huge gap like that?” He’d seen the same thing she had from his vantage point.

  “Because they’re out in the middle of nowhere and they’re not worried about people climbing through their bell tower?” Deirdre suggested.

  “Or they’ll shoot you dead the instant you step through,” Bowen said.

  “We’ll shoot faster,” Stark said, joining the conversation. “Good eye, Beta.”

  Deirdre tried not to feel pleasure at the brief praise. “I’m going to keep looking around.”

  She stuffed the Walkie Talkie into her back pocket again and slipped around the cathedral.

  Her feet crunched on gravel. Deirdre lifted her feet to look at the ground underneath her. They’d spread small rocks throughout the grass, covering the soil in gritty substrate.

  She picked up a piece of the gravel.

  Tiny runes were stamped into the rock, just like the ones on the cathedral’s foundations.

  Deirdre was walking on a carpet of enchantments.

  She muttered a curse and jogged back to the trees just as the front doors of the cathedral opened and a man stepped out.

  Brother Marshall was more handsome in reality than he’d been in his picture. Weirdly, he was wearing black robes, like the kind that a wizard from a fantasy novel might wear—but he’d topped those robes with a cowboy hat. It shouldn’t have matched, but he was working it.

  He held a staff in one hand. At that distance, she couldn’t tell if it was just for keeping him steady while hiking, or if it was some kind of witch’s implement.

  Black robes, wizard staff, cathedral hidden in the middle of nowhere.

  If anyone had the Infernal B
lade, it would be a weirdo like Brother Marshall.

  He left the front doors of the cathedral open behind him as he stood on the stairs, so Deirdre got a pretty good glance inside.

  There were rows of pews leading to a pulpit, just like in a Catholic church, but the mural was unfamiliar. It featured two figures—a man and a woman—both of whom were white-skinned and black-haired. They glared sternly at the church as though the painting knew that it was on the wall and hated every second of it. They looked that annoyed.

  Brother Marshall’s eyes skimmed the canyon, fist wrapped tightly around the staff, as though prepared to swing.

  Could he see her?

  Deirdre slipped back an inch, cloaking herself in the darkness of the bushes. She tensed, hand on her gun, ready to draw.

  But Brother Marshall looked right past her without pausing.

  There was a slight bulge under the arms of his robes. Deirdre thought he was wearing an underarm holster like hers. Some monk.

  His gaze lifted to the roof of the cathedral. He was looking at the gargoyles mounted on the tiles. The gray stone monsters were frozen with their claws uplifted, teeth bared, and fury etched into their ugly faces. Deirdre imagined they must have represented demons from his religion’s mythos. They probably did a good job as scarecrows. They were uglier than sin.

  People walked past the doorway behind Brother Marshall—other monks in robes. Deirdre counted them.

  Four.

  If those were mundane humans, then Deirdre would have a laughably easy fight against the monks of Holy Nights Cathedral. If they were witches… Well, Deirdre and Stark would have an interesting night.

  After a long moment, Brother Marshall went back inside. The doors swung shut behind him.

  Each of the doors had half of a massive, elaborate pentagram etched into it. With the doors closed, the pentagram was complete. It shimmered in the gloom of the canyon.

  More magic.

  “Five people,” Deirdre whispered into the Walkie Talkie. “There are five monks in the cathedral. That Brother Marshall guy and four others wearing the robes. I don’t think there’s any more than that. There aren’t any cars. No easy way to get in and get out of the canyon. I’m going to say five.”