“I see.” I mulled on that for a minute or so, and reached up to absently stroke Angkor’s hair. It was a strange feeling made stranger by the way he stretched and shuddered in response. “You know… I’ve never done this.”
“This?”
“Touched someone without…” I trailed off, not able to find a word that didn’t make me sound like an ogre. “Gently. I don’t think I’ve ever touched another human being gently before.”
“Why?”
“It hurt. Any time someone had touched me, growing up, it was painful.” I stared up at the cracked ceiling above.
“Well… you knew a lot of Morphorde-infected people. Morphorde are anti-touch,” Angkor said. “They hate touch and they hate sex, except when sex is used as a tool of war.”
“My father was definitely Morphorde. But I thought everything Edenic was anti-sex, too. I had to be a virgin to safely handle Zarya.”
“Edenic flora and fauna don’t have a relationship with virgins because they haven’t had sex. It’s not really about physical sex at all, actually.” Angkor replied. “It’s more about… energetic self-containment. One of the best Hounds in GOD is seriously a superhuman-level slut. I’m not even joking. He’s like the Alpha and Omega Slut.”
I snorted. “Good band name.”
Angkor made a low sound of amusement. “But despite that, the Hound I’m thinking of… Edenic things flourish around him. Eden loves sex. Non-penetrative. They’re not big on penetration, but everything there feeds on pleasure. Basically all Edenic creatures are erotivores.”
“Pleasure?” I pulled him against my side. The uncomfortable sweat on our skin would make it feel unpleasant, eventually... but not yet. “Zarya eats pleasure?”
“Why do you think she’s sleeping with me?”
I blinked. “Well... I assumed it was because you love her.”
He laughed drowsily. “It’s because I’m an all-you-can-eat buffet and she was badly underfed. I love her as much as I do any Horse, but I’m a mercenary, like I said.”
“Meaning… what?”
Angkor stretched languidly, nuzzling my skin with his mouth. “Most Hounds just serve one Gift Horse. I used to, but then I joined the Corps. My work takes me to places my first Horse can’t go. He’s kind of… childlike, and physically fragile. He spends a lot of time being babysat at ANSWER headquarters while I jaunt around the Theosphere. So I hunt when and who I can.”
“So you don’t love her?”
“Of course I do. But there’s lots of different kinds of love, and as long as everyone’s in agreement, they’re all good.” Angkor stroked the side of my neck and pushed himself up to an elbows. “We probably should go back. Zarya will be wrapping up. Norgay told me we’re crashing the Vigiles’ party as soon as we’ve put together the raid plan.”
Part of me wanted to call him back down, to lie here and linger for a bit, but I was already feeling a different kind of urgency: the need to act, to set plans in motion. People needed rescuing and Norgay had a job for me to do, and Angkor and I would do this again together again… someday.
“Norgay said I needed my memory modified, to erase the true location of Eden.” I sat up, watching Angkor’s lighter flare. “We need to do that.”
“He told me.” Angkor drew and exhaled with a soft sigh of pleasure, and the smell of cigarette smoke briefly overwhelmed everything else, bright green in the orange-lit gloom. “I’ll do it before we go back into camp.”
“Good. I just hope we’re in time to help the Tigers.” I watched him stand, lingering over the curve of his back, the way the light slid over his skin. I didn’t know what love felt like, but whatever I felt now was blue and bittersweet, a brief and brilliant pleasure. I had no idea when I’d see him like this again. “Assuming that Keen’s plan to catch them was even successful. Jenner was going to put landmines in the ground.”
“You can count on it, but the Vigiles Magicarum is also a bureaucracy, and a ritualistic one at that. We’ll make it.” Angkor turned to look back at me with his bodysuit hanging from his hand like a second skin. He was proud, fierce, beautiful enough to make me wish we had more time. “And if we don’t, we’ll kill every last one of the bastards.”
For what felt like the first time in a very long time, I smiled. “Amen to that.”
Chapter 43
We ended up having our war meeting around a fire, like a band of Mongolian raiders. The analogy cut even closer to the bone than that; the ANSWER personnel—they were not ‘soldiers’, I was told, but ‘fighters’—were a motley of well-equipped troops, male and female, wearing idiosyncratic gear that, while functional, looked scratched and dinged up enough that it had to have been recycled. We were going up against the Vigiles with everything from spears to assault rifles and magical talismans. This alone eroded my lingering doubts about ANSWER being what it claimed it was: an interdimensional movement against the Morphorde. Some twenty fighters surrounded Doug’s workstation, where we pored over maps in an effort to nail down where the Vigiles’ holding center was. With my description of the ship’s graveyard and the escape route I’d taken off Staten Island, we triangulated its location, and formed a plan.
My final misgivings were obliterated when our transport arrived and I finally saw the Tulaq. We went to the shore of the island to receive them. While we waited, I learned from Zarya that the process of jumping to a body of water and pushing through it into GOD’s Phitonic bloodstream was called ‘Riverjumping’, and that corrun, Tulaq, and specially-bred horses of the Akhal Teke breed were some of the few creatures capable of it. She’d just finished telling me this when five beings the size of gliders burst out of the river, wings beating. They had far-reaching forelimbs; narrow, tense wings; and high withers that gave them a skulking, hyena-like gait as they clambered to shore. Water streamed from every contour. They almost looked like they were coated in plastic. Their feathers, which were shiny with wax, were gray-blue on their dorsal parts, darkening to a clay red on their flanks.
I was dumbstruck. Doug had warned me that they were intelligent, sentient beings, and that the feathers of a Tulaq’s crest, wings, and tail were edged with razor-sharp carbon filaments that could slice HuMan flesh to ribbons. I stepped back when one of them passed quite close to me, pausing long enough for me to catch my own reflection in one of its huge eyes, and I smelled its weird, citrusy breath as it rolled its lips back from rows of pointed crystalline teeth. I jumped, startled, when it flared a portion of the dorsal crests that ran from either side of its skull and down the length of its spine, and as it tossed its head and skulked off toward the camp. I had the distinct feeling that it was laughing at me.
By the time we were ready, the storm had turned into a hurricane. The young trees outside the sanitarium were blowing almost flat to the ground. The rain was horizontal, the sky howling and red. The power was out, and New York was lit only by hundreds of thousands of car lights, sirens, helicopters, and backup generators. The site of the Ruined Tree was obvious from the air. The station Glory had taken me to was in the Lower West Side. There the military had congregated around a howling black nexus, a collapsed city block at the eye of the storm that grew bigger and more voracious with every bullet they fired at it. A bunker was forming around the edges of the void… a concrete dome held together with crackling energy visible from the sky. The arterials were packed with cars full of panicking refugees: inert, glowing lines of scarlet light that snaked toward the city limits in every direction. New York was hemorrhaging out from the tumor swelling at its core. Even from here, it seemed hopeless, the fear meshing with my directive from Norgay and a tumult of confused feelings for Angkor and Zarya. They were riding on the two other Tulaq in our formation, each of us flying in tandem with the beast’s bonded rider.
The plan was simple enough. The Tulaq would drop me on the roof, where I had twenty minutes to infiltrate the building using the route I’d taken to escape it. Whatever resources the Vigiles might have mustered in twelve hours to plug the e
levator shaft weren’t going to hold up to a forced entry by an experienced burglar with proper tools. The goal was to cause havoc: bust switches, short-out electrical devices and generators, free prisoners, draw attention, and cause a ruckus—at which point, Angkor, Zarya, the Tulaq, and a ground force with trucks and RPGs would assault the compound from the road and air. They were coming from two directions: the corrun cavalry from the swamp, and the trucks from the road. We had contingencies in place, but the quietest option was the first we’d try. The stealthier we were, the more likely the Weeders were to survive.
We flew hard, cloaked in devices that reflected light from the Tulaq’s bodies and turned them into living stealth bombers. Their wings cut the rain and wind like scimitar blades. From the air, the recycling center was easy to spot: it was the only place in Fresh Kills that still had electricity. The lights blared out into the night sky. I tuned my binoculars as we swooped into view, searching for helicopters. There were none: they were grounded by the storm. The Tulaq—bullish and inelegant on the ground—could fly in the kind of wind and rain that would knock a helicopter out of the air. She and her rider soared easily around the spotlights and angled for the roof of the factory. Satisfied, I checked over my gear, trusting in the harness as we surged into a crosswind.
“Brace for impact.” I thought back to Zarya.
“Understood. We’re right behind you.”
My stomach swooped as the Tulaq tucked her wings and dived. I braced my rifle and held on with my legs, trying to focus my aim over the head rush. She was so fast that the guards stationed on the roof didn’t know what had hit them until we were quite literally on top of them. The squad of ten dropped to five as the Tulaq crushed one in her jaws, landed on another, slashed two with her foreclaws, and used her wing to slice one of the Men in Black in half. The rider and I opened fire to either side as soon as we touched ground, hosing down the remaining soldiers in a sweeping circle of armor-piercing ammo. Chalky white blood spewed across the concrete. Enhanced reflexes or not, there was nowhere for them to hide.
“My girl here wants to know what the hell these things are,” the rider said. He had a thick accent, vaguely Middle-Eastern. “She says they taste awful.”
“Dead macerated Weeder souls.” I unbuckled my harness and dropped to the roof, then unzipped the front of my baggy riding suit and shed it like a snakeskin. It was made of special leather that the Tulaq’s feathers couldn’t cut. I wore ordinary, faded fatigues underneath, along with a tool belt and a shoulder holster. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Fuckin’ Morphorde.” The rider hawked in his throat with disgust, and took the leather suit from me. He threw it over his mount’s neck. The Tulaq spun and bounded away from me, launching herself back up into the sky with powerful beats of her wings and vanishing into the rain. I was alone.
“Touchdown.” I ran to the nearest twitching corpse and raided it for a keycard, gas mask, and ammunition.
“Alright. COMMs copied in. Good luck, bat’ko.”
I ran another quick check over my weapons and tools, then took a moment to reach back in for Kutkha, and out for Binah. My heart sunk when I sensed her. She was alive in the building somewhere below, her anxiety thrumming through the energetic tether that bound us. After a couple more seconds, I could feel her pacing, hear her restless meowing, and, more distantly, the sounds of human distress that were agitating her. When I snapped back to my own body, it was like falling from a great height back into my skin.
The keycard got me into the elevator engine room. I kicked the door in, spraying the far wall with a suppressing burst that scattered paint chips and shards of brick across the floor. When the dust had settled and no one returned fire, I stepped in, closed the door behind me, and looked around.
The big motor and cables were motionless and cold. The electronic console showed that the elevator was on the second floor, the top of the building, and the ventilation grate that I’d busted during the escape had been replaced with a brand new one. That new grate was warded—with blood. I crouched beside it, frowning, and held out a hand. The magic hummed like a live-wire, energy that made the veins in my fingers and forearm buzz. It was a trap of some kind, a quick and dirty seal based on Paracelsus’ Seal of Scorpio.
This felt personal. Scorpio was ruled by the nocturnal aspect of Mars. Intoxicating and dangerous, I’d been working with that particular kind of energy since birth. Scorpionic and Martial aspects were a powerful influence on my astrological birth chart, and the Vigiles had to know that. A Scorpionic ward pitted like against like. The design was simple, even classic, but the way it made the hair on my arm stand on end gave no reason to doubt its power.
There was a very good chance this ward was generally made to protect against forced entry, and specifically, entry by me. What it did was hard to say. It could secretly whisper to its caster, or explode in my face, poison me, or infect me with catastrophic sepsis. Given that it was drawn in blood, blood poisoning wasn’t out of the question, either.
“Solidly made, but...” I sighed and shook my head, and immersed into the design. Carefully.
Every physical ward had at least one flaw: the alpha-omega point where the enchanter first touched the surface the ward was scribed on. There were several different methods to find this point. The easiest and most direct was a massive sacrifice directed into the matrix of the ward, which was akin to hitting a car battery with a lightning bolt. The energy swelled the ward, and if it didn’t have a channel to shunt that energy away, it would burst from the pressure at the weakest spot. Most wards were made to conserve and gather magical energy to sustain their power, and if a mage was putting up a set-it-and-forget-it ward, a power sink was almost never factored into the design.
By itself, the Wardbreaker did something like a sacrifice. Using my blood and the kinetic energy it discharged when firing, it could surge a sigil, destroying it, or at least expose the alpha-omega point. Slowly, I drew the pistol from its holster, reading the sigil thoughtfully as I cocked the hammer back. There was no Phitonic sink to prevent surging, but there was a variable of some kind in place. Its purpose was inscrutable, but my guess was that it had multiple simultaneous reactions to being triggered. It seemed a little egotistical to assume that there was anything specifically related to me.
I used chalk and a soft nugget of copper—the pure metal—to circle the ward and buffer any explosive or venomous actions, then focused on the Wardbreaker. With a push of intention, the magic in my weapon kindled to life. Phi swept over it and up my arm like a hot wind. The energy tugged at my skin, pulling blood painlessly through the pores. It flowed between the checkered grooves of the pistol grip and snaked up and along the sigils engraved into the barrel. Zarya’s flesh had charged my body with Phi, so much of it that I had to rein back how much charge the gun accepted. When it began to pulse in time with my heartbeat, I leveled the Wardbreaker at the grate, and barked the command word as I pulled the trigger. “IAL!”
The round left the barrel with a puff of sound, blowing into the steel grate with disproportionate force. The flow of phi in the design snapped like lightning, sparking and discharging down into the elevator shaft below. The ward consumed the steel as it warped, briefly sucking the all light of the room into it as it buckled and imploded.
“Come on. You can do better than that.” I muttered as I kicked in the crumpled metal. It bounced off the walls of the ventilation shaft, clattering down on top of the elevator car. It was a little over six feet below. I navigated down the shaft with my flashlight, and dropped down feet first. I landed on top of the car. It jostled, bouncing a little under my weight, but held firm underneath me.
The trapdoor on the top of the car was padlocked closed, so I cut the bolt, then checked my watch. Fifteen minutes until the assault teams arrived. Resolute, I pulled the door open and slid in, the keycard already in my teeth, ready to go. My feet hadn’t even completely touched the ground when the trapdoor slammed shut over my head, and the ward I hadn’t s
een or felt activated around me: walls, floor, and ceiling.
That was when I remembered that Scorpio, more than anything, ruled secrets and surprises.
“Oh shit,” was all I got out before the elevator buckled in, metal groaning under the wave of powerful magic that swept in from all sides, and fell.
Chapter 44
The cables whipped loose somewhere over my head. There were no rails to slow the descent. The power cut as I slammed back up against the ceiling, the hollow steel cage plummeting in freefall. I had three seconds, maybe four before it slammed into the ground. The elevator bounced—I didn’t. Gravity reversed direction and slapped me down before I’d even finished shouting ‘CHET!’ with all the force I could muster. The barrier I conjured was all that saved my life, forming an air bag between me and the floor as it crumpled and buckled up into the cabin. Instead of being crushed by inertia, the magical shield threw me into one of the walls, upside down. I slid before I tumbled head-first to the ground with a mouth full of panic: ears banging, heart hammering, light flashing behind my eyes. I wasn’t even on my feet when the doors rammed open and a grenade rolled in, spewing gas into the small room.
Even wearing the mask I’d looted from the Vigiles soldier, enough tear gas got in around the displaced seal that my eyes stung. I struggled to my feet, reached for a weapon, and found myself facing a circle of rifles and piercingly bright, scope-mounted flashlights.
“Drop it!”
“Down! On the ground!”
“Down!”
“Get down! Get down!”
Security poured in. Something yanked the Wardbreaker out of my hand, and I started swinging. I cracked one across the visor with the ‘Tzain’ spell, shattering it and knocking him against a wall, kneed another between the legs with enough force that not even his cup could save him, and nearly brought a third down while I shouted telepathically to Zarya.
Zero Sum: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 3) Page 41
