by Reine, SM
A gargoyle slammed into the other side of the door again.
Deirdre took a step toward him, holding the gun straight at his head. “The sword. Where?”
Marshall walked forward until the gun butted up against his head.
“You won’t shoot me, Deirdre Tombs,” he said.
The sound of her name coming from his lips made her skin erupt in chills. She took a quick step back. Deirdre looked Brother Marshall over again, staring hard at his unfamiliar features. “I’m sorry, do we know each other?”
“I watched you kill that doctor on the news. You hated him. You kill because you feel like you have to. Not because you’re evil. You’re not going to shoot me tonight.”
Crazy and delusional.
But damn if he wasn’t right. Deirdre wasn’t going to shoot some harmless nutball.
“Screw it,” she said, dropping the gun. “You’re either brainless or have balls of steel. I’ll just have to find your stupid sword on my own.”
“You’ll have to search quickly,” Brother Marshall said. “The Office of Preternatural Affairs is already on its way.”
A chill washed over Deirdre. “What?”
“The gargoyles are usually enough of a security system, but just in case they’re not, the OPA is automatically notified to come clean things up.” He flicked the robe of his sleeve back, baring one wrist. He was wearing a watch. It looked so weird along with the robes. “I’d give them five minutes.”
No wonder he wasn’t worried.
Deirdre had to get out of there, and fast.
She only made it two steps past Brother Marshall when his other hand emerged from his robes.
He had a gun.
Deirdre didn’t move fast enough. He shot, and an instant later, pain smashed through her shoulder. Her whole arm erupted with fire.
She threw herself behind the other statue for cover. Bullets pinged into the legs of the statue, mere centimeters from her head.
Brother Marshall was a good shot.
The doors exploded open an instant later.
One of the gargoyles loped into the hallway, pounding along on its knuckles like a giant stone gorilla. Brother Marshall shouted at it. “She’s behind the statue! Get her!”
Deirdre threw herself across the hall. The gargoyle swung its fists into the statue, and stone exploded behind her.
She bolted down the hallway, rushing past Brother Marshall at full speed. He tracked her with practiced ease, swiveling to train his gun a few inches ahead of her.
Another gunshot. It hit her in the thigh.
With a cry, Deirdre fell. She bowed her head and let the pain rock through her for a moment—only a moment.
Brother Marshall was reloading.
The healing fever swept through her, immediate and strong. He must have been using standard bullets. It didn’t hurt anywhere near badly enough to be silver. But who knew what kind of bullets he’d have in the next magazine?
She got back to her feet and limped toward the door at the end of the hall.
Deirdre threw herself down the stairs to the basement.
She didn’t take the time to close the door behind her. It probably wouldn’t have slowed down the gargoyle anyway. She could hear it thudding on the floor above her, rushing to catch up. It sounded like being chased by a herd of buffalo. Giant, angry buffalo with razor-tipped wings.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness under the cathedral. She seemed to be in some kind of catacombs. Candles smoldered in recessions on the walls, allowing her to make out the dusty tunnels, the cobwebs dangling from the ceiling, the dirty floor. And coffins lined the walls. Actual coffins, most likely filled with actual dead bodies.
Deirdre would be grossed out later.
She leaped around a corner, pressing her back to the wall beside a coffin. Deirdre held her breath and listened. There was scuffling, crashing, shouting.
The gargoyle didn’t follow her downstairs.
A familiar roar shook the catacombs.
Stark had followed her inside the cathedral, and he was obviously in his shapeshifted form.
Damn it, but Deirdre was actually excited to hear him.
If anything could take down one of those gargoyles, it would be Stark’s monstrous beast.
His presence also meant that her time to find the Infernal Blade first was running out.
She shoved her shirt aside to inspect the bullet wound in her shoulder. She had already healed most of the damage there. Her thigh was rapidly knitting together, too. When she rested her weight on the foot, it didn’t throb too much.
“If I were a legendary cursed blade, where would I be hiding?” Deirdre breathed, stepping back out into the broader tunnel of the catacombs.
She eyed the coffins, stomach churning.
If the sword was hidden within one of those, it was going to have to stay hidden.
Deirdre jogged down the central aisle of the catacombs, swatting aside cobwebs. The catacombs felt much longer than the cathedral upstairs, as though that hallway extended into infinity. The sound of her footsteps fell flat against the stone walls without echoing.
Within a few hundred feet, the floor changed from dirt to a mosaic. As soon as the tunnel widened into a larger chamber, Deirdre stopped.
The room she had discovered couldn’t have been under the cathedral—it must have been deeper within the canyon. A long, thin window let in the moonlight from the surface, dappled by the grass and bushes above.
A moonbeam spilled directly onto another altar.
The stone pedestal was large and elevated above the rest of the room. It looked like just the kind of place to hide a cursed sword.
Deirdre’s gaze skimmed the floor. The tiled mosaic was elaborate enough that it could have masked magical runes and she never would be able to tell. Without any visual sign of spellwork, she didn’t have any way to detect traps.
There might have been no magical traps at all. Why craft extra spells to protect the cathedral’s bounty when they had animated statues ready to smash intruders into bloody smears?
Just in case…
She set her Walkie Talkie on the floor and kicked it gently, sending it skittering across the mosaic.
For an instant, nothing happened.
She blinked. “Okay then,” Deirdre said, lifting a foot to step forward.
Then the Walkie Talkie exploded in blue flame.
She shouted and leaped back against the wall, clutching a sconce for balance. The battery in the Walkie Talkie popped, jetting acid across the tile. Plastic warped and bubbled. Wires turned white with heat.
Some trap.
Yeah, I’m not walking out there.
The catacombs shook again, showering dirt from the roof. Deirdre’s eyes flicked to the top of the tunnel, half-expecting to see Stark throwing one of the statues through a wall.
They were so far away that she could barely hear the fight now. It was impossible to tell who was winning.
Stark might be only seconds behind her.
If Deirdre wanted to get the sword, she needed to do it now.
She studied the room with new eyes, searching for a way to reach the central altar without touching the floor.
Deirdre could jump pretty good distances without a head start—as she’d proven to herself in New York while escaping the killer—but she’d had more space on the rooftops. Here, she would only be able to jump ten feet at most.
The entire room was a large dome, with inlets in the walls that curved toward the apex. If she could get atop one of the tall statues set back among the pillars, those would give her some altitude. She might be able to jump from there onto the altar.
Deirdre rolled out her shoulder, flicking Brother Marshall’s flattened bullet to the floor. It had been pushed out when she healed. Now she was aching, but limber.
She reached around the corner to grab the wall, pulling herself up using one of the decorative inlets. It was edged with old stone that crumbled under her fingers. It didn’t want to
hold her weight.
Deirdre dug her fingers into the cracks anyway, swinging a leg around to step onto the base of the statue.
Her foot slipped. It dangled an inch from the floor before she jerked it back up.
The Walkie Talkie was still smoldering with blue fire.
She swallowed hard and climbed up the statue, getting her feet onto its shoulders, bracing her arms on the top of the inlet. She climbed higher and higher, using the cracked stone as footholds. It got her a good ten feet off the floor. Twelve feet.
The walls trembled against her hands. The fight between Stark and the gargoyles sounded like it was bringing the whole cathedral down.
Or maybe the OPA had arrived.
Deirdre pushed those distractions out of her mind, checking over her shoulder to gauge the distance to the altar.
She could do it. She needed to do it.
Bending her knees, Deirdre took a deep breath…and then pushed off.
She flipped over backwards, gracefully tumbling through the air.
Deirdre landed on the edge of the altar.
She froze, knees still bent, toes dangling over the edge of the raised dais, arms uplifted for balance.
Did I do it?
She looked down, looked behind her, looked around for blue flame.
Nothing.
Deirdre was safe.
“Ha!” she laughed, swiping the back of her hand over her forehead. “Easy.” She rubbed her palms dry on her shirt—terror had a way of making her very sweaty—and then pulled the lid off of the pedestal.
There was no sword inside the box. Instead, it cradled a long golden chain covered in charms: crosses and pentacles and ankhs and things Deirdre didn’t even recognize.
Magic erupted.
Blue flame formed a wall around the entire dais, roaring with power. The immense heat bore down on her, scorching her eyebrows, making her arm hair curl. The lid of the stone box was instantly about a million degrees, so hot that it turned white. Deirdre dropped it with a shout.
“Tombs!”
She whirled to see Stark on the other side of the flames, standing in the hallway to the catacombs. They were separated by magical fire. He couldn’t reach her.
“What do I do?” she shouted back.
The chamber shuddered. The window level with the surface shattered, showering glass across the floor in sparkling shards.
Bodies clad in black leaped through the hole.
Agents from the Office of Preternatural Affairs.
They landed on the mosaic without catching fire. The witches glimmered with golden wards, probably meant to dispel the enchantments that had melted Deirdre’s Walkie Talkie.
Voices barked orders. Gunfire rang out.
Deirdre flung herself flat to the dais.
Stark. Where’s Stark?
She couldn’t see him anymore, and she didn’t know if it was because he’d abandoned her or because the fire blocked her view.
OPA agents stepped through the wall of flames surrounding the dais, aiming their guns at Deirdre. She had her Ruger out, but there were so many more of them than there were of her. She could only shoot one at a time.
Deirdre was surrounded. They shouted at her all at once in an overwhelming cacophony of voices.
“Drop your weapons!”
“Hands on your head!”
Deirdre hesitated to put the Ruger down. “Stark?” she yelled. “Stark!”
But he didn’t respond. He wasn’t there.
A booted foot sank into her midsection, forcing the breath from her lungs. Another foot pinned her to the dais.
“Stark!” Deirdre wheezed.
The agents restrained her. Cloth was shoved into her open mouth, muffling her cries. They plastered tape across her mouth.
“You’re under arrest,” someone said.
And Stark didn’t save her.
All she could do was watch as they brought a black sack toward her, its open end aimed toward her face. She thrashed and kicked.
The hood dropped over her head, cinched around her neck, and everything was darkness.
—XIV—
Hours passed.
The hood whipped away from Deirdre’s head and she winced into the sudden light that blazed directly into her watering eyes. It was too bright for her to see anything.
A hand appeared. It seized the tape by the corner of her mouth and yanked. Pain flared along her cheeks where the tape had been removed. She spit the cloth out of her mouth, working her tongue around. The roof of her mouth was so dry. Deirdre coughed.
“What’s going on?” The light felt like it was punching straight through her eyes. Her whole head throbbed. “Where am I?”
A cool male voice spoke. “You’re in the custody of the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”
Deirdre tried to stand up and couldn’t. Her arms were bound behind her back, tethered to the chair she sat in.
Her wrists sizzled faintly. The handcuffs were made of silver, and the contact stung the way that frozen toes stung when stepping into a hot shower.
“You’re under arrest for aiding the terrorist known as Everton Stark,” her captor continued. “You will be transferred to a detention center shortly.”
Cold panic swept over her. “What about a trial?”
“You don’t get a trial.” The man finally stepped in front of the light, casting shadow over Deirdre. He was a portly man wearing a well-fitted black suit and sunglasses. His skin was a few shades darker than hers, bushy eyebrows hanging low over his eyes.
“A phone call,” Deirdre said. “One phone call.”
“Tell me where Everton Stark is.”
“What? You think I should give you information just to make a damn phone call? Give me a phone!”
“If you ever want to see the light of day again, you’re going to be cooperative. Where is Everton Stark?”
Deirdre’s mouth opened and then closed again.
It wasn’t that she wanted to protect Stark. He had abandoned Deirdre when surely he could have prevented the OPA from arresting her. But she didn’t know this agent or his allegiance. She wasn’t going to talk to anyone she didn’t know for a fact to be an ally.
But if she didn’t talk, then they were going to put her in a detention center just like the one that Vidya had been kept in.
Vidya had been in that closet for so long that she couldn’t walk. Deirdre could already envision the weakness in her legs, the constant fatigue, the hunger and thirst.
She could be left like that for months. Years.
The rest of her life.
“Get me a damn phone,” Deirdre said.
The OPA agent backhanded her.
Her head snapped to the left. The taste of blood filled her mouth. Her aching skull throbbed harder.
Stark hit much harder than this guy.
Deirdre’s tongue darted out to lick salty blood off of her lower lip. “This is bullshit. You know this is the reason there are rebellions against the government in the first place?”
He slapped her again. It was no harder than the first time. Not enough to knock her silly, and not even enough to damage anything. He obviously wasn’t a shapeshifter.
The insult of it was far worse than the pain.
“God bless America,” she muttered.
He lifted his hand.
And then he stopped.
The agent put two fingers to his ear, eyes unfocusing as he listened to a distant voice. He said, “Yes, sir.” And then again, “Yes, sir.”
He turned off the light. No longer a silhouette, Deirdre could see that he’d split the skin of his knuckle while striking her. He plucked a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed the blood off as he walked across the cell.
Weak little human.
Deirdre was in an empty concrete box. Its only fixtures were the chair she sat in and the spotlight that had been shining directly in her eyes.
Plain as the cell was, she was certain the walls would be reinforced with silver. The
re were probably curses embedded into the floor, too. Even if she got out of the chair, she wouldn’t be able to break out of the room.
The agent opened the door and stepped outside.
Deirdre was alone.
She twisted her wrists behind the chair, testing the strength of the handcuffs. Silver burned her flesh.
Deirdre gritted her teeth and yanked her arms in opposite directions. She let emotions fuel her—righteous anger at what a government agent had done to her, the fact that Stark had abandoned her, the weeks of constant fear and pain.
A roar ripped out of her chest as she pulled.
And the chain snapped.
Deirdre stood quickly, patting herself down. She wore a tank top and her underwear. Everything else had been stripped away—including her weapons.
Damn.
She checked the door and was unsurprised to find it locked. The handle stung her palm, too. It was silver.
Deirdre couldn’t break out that way.
She’d have to wait for someone to come back in.
“I’ll borrow this, thanks,” she muttered, breaking the screw that held the spotlight on top of its stand. She tossed the light aside. Glass shattered on the concrete. She didn’t want that—she just wanted the pole.
She got into the corner behind the door, clutching the stand in both hands.
It wasn’t much of a weapon, but she felt a lot more confident with its weight in her hands. The only problem was that the agent would have a gun when he came back. That was a far more effective weapon than a flimsy steel pole.
Deirdre would have to attack before she could get shot. She would have to be swift and brutal and make sure he couldn’t get up again.
She swallowed hard.
I need to be like Stark.
Shutting her eyes, she recalled the way that he had attacked the OPA agents outside of St. Griffith’s. He hadn’t given them an opportunity to fight back. He’d popped off a few fatal shots with a sniper rifle and hadn’t worried about who they were, how many people might be waiting for them at home, whether or not it was fair for them to die.
If she wanted to survive, she’d have to be more like that.
She heard motion in the hallway outside. It had only been a few minutes since the agent left.
