by Jenn Stark
“Why are we—what’s happening?”
My brain didn’t seem to be making the right connections, and I couldn’t move my hands, I realized dimly. There was something important about that, but it could simply be that my arms were still swaddled under the blanket, weighted down with the thick cloth.
I shifted my arms, and they responded, but sluggishly. The movement made me woozy again.
“Easy does it,” Nikki said. “You toss your cookies when you lie down, and we toss them when we move too far away from you. So we’re all here together, keeping all our collective cookies safe, and you’re getting better. When you get better, we get better. It’s a fun new game we’ve learned.”
She said all this nonchalantly, but the content of her statement cut through my haze. I shook my head, straightening between them. “You’re kidding me.”
“See? More improvement still.” She looked over my head at Nigel. “Your turn.”
Nigel uttered a tight curse, but gamely pulled away and hauled himself to his feet. He swayed, staggered, but got all the way to the gurney before he half collapsed against it, his hands gripping the sides as his shoulders heaved.
“Keep it together, golden boy,” Nikki encouraged him, her arm still tight around me. “Take one for the team.”
Golden boy usually was an apt description of Nigel Friedman. He wasn’t tall, but his blond, blue-eyed, British good looks and ex-special forces body made him a force to be reckoned with. Now, however, the prospect of him moving away sent a bolt of fear through me. My eyes widened in something approaching horror as Nigel managed another step. I wasn’t afraid for Nigel either. I was afraid of him leaving me to fight alone.
To fight…?
A wave of sickness roiled through me. “Release,” I whispered.
Nikki clenched her arms around me, hissing with what I assumed was pain. But I shook off her hold.
“Release,” I said loudly, almost urgently now. “Release. Unbind. Snap out of it, whatever. Both of you, I release you—go!”
As if I’d shoved him from behind, Nigel sprawled forward to the floor, and the pressure of Nikki’s arms around me fell completely away. With a squawk, she tipped sideways, half sliding, half scrambling across the floor until she reached the opposite wall. Nigel was already at the door, his hand on it, but he whipped his gaze back to me, anxiety suffusing his face.
“Go,” I croaked again, my own panic ripping through me. I appreciated the Norse and their commitment to their leaders and all, but whatever they’d inscribed on those nails, it wasn’t just a warning. There was powerful binding magic here between master and minion that went beyond pure weaponry. “Go!”
They went.
The moment the medical facility door crashed shut behind them, a shudder ripped through me—then it was over. Lightness, well-being, even satisfaction flowed through me like oil tipped from a cup, and I lurched to my feet as well. I’d done it, I knew. I’d released them completely.
Best of all, I’d done it myself. Armaeus was no longer in my mind.
Slowly, carefully, I unwound the blankets swaddling me, surveying my arms. My hands were wrapped in what looked like ten layers of gauze that stretched from my wrist to the knuckles of my fingers. To my immense relief, however, there was no blood seeping through. I flexed my hands and staggered a bit, but the pain was manageable after the first flash.
“You good in there, dollface?” Nikki’s voice didn’t come from the door but over the PA system, as if she was watching me now on closed-circuit TV. What the hell had I done that had spooked them both so much? That was only one of my questions, and not the most pressing.
“The artifacts?” I asked.
“Under lock and key. And a few chains to boot.” Nikki’s voice was wry. “What do you remember?”
“She should rest.” Nigel’s voice sounded tired, even through the speakers.
“She’s rested plenty. She’s currently coherent, however, and I’d like to keep her that way. How long until the next call?”
Call? I wondered as Nigel gave a tense sigh.
“Ten minutes,” he said.
“Good enough.” Nikki’s voice shifted, and I could picture her turning her attention back to her screens.
“What do you remember?” she asked again.
I shrugged the blanket back over my shoulders, unreasonably cold. “You pulled out the nails, threw them. I…must have passed out.”
“Close enough.” I could tell from her manner that I was missing something crucial. “How are you feeling?”
“Sick,” I muttered. The boat gave a slight roll, and my stomach dipped along with it.
“How sick?”
I considered that. I’d felt worse, usually after tequila, but this had a similar sense to it, all headache and nausea and wobbly limbs. I stared at the floor, then lifted my head a little, managing one step forward, then another. I made it to the gurney without falling down, and braced myself against it. “Two-day bender,” I finally decided.
“Oh good. Three and we’d need you to sleep it off, but two…”
Something in Nikki’s voice made me frown. I looked up at the speaker. “What happened?”
“We’re sending someone down to you, ship’s doctor. She checked you out when we dressed your hands, before you—well. I don’t think Nigel and I should get too close till you’re fully recovered. But we need you up and at ’em as soon as you can manage it, dollface.”
I scowled as she signed off, torn between being irritated at her ambiguity and suddenly not wanting to know how I’d behaved under the influence of the artifacts. The doctor arrived and spent another ten minutes examining my eyes, my ears, my heart rate—and lastly, my hands. She hesitated so long about touching them that I squinted at her.
“I didn’t…hurt anyone, did I?”
She blinked up at me, but her assessing gaze was level. “Hurt? No. Other than Dawes and Friedman, anyway. They couldn’t leave your side once you reached the boat, without severe reactions. For the rest of the crew, it was more a pull on them, a desire to protect and defend.” She smiled gently. “Arguably, that feeling was already present, but your condition drove it to manic levels, from what I observed. It diminished again once your wounds stopped bleeding, which I had nothing to do with, of course. You handled that on your own.”
She paused. Clearly, someone had clued in the doc on my superglue healing ability, and she did an admirable job not asking me the million and one questions I could see burning in her eyes. “The gunshot wounds you sustained in the firefight are fully sealed, and a quick scan of your internals indicated no trace of bullets remaining in your system. If any were lodged inside you, they’ve been…eradicated.” Her careful phrasing belied her obvious interest, but I couldn’t offer her much in the way of insight. I had no idea how the self-healing worked either.
“And now?”
“I’d recommend that you ingest as much fluids as you can comfortably manage to alleviate the nausea, stay away from the artifacts for the time being, and carry on,” she said. “They’ve put the artifacts into the hold, in a lead-lined box, and they seem to have gone dormant once more. We don’t know enough about them to know how long they’re going to stay that way.”
“Fair enough.” I stood, and she helped me to my feet, remaining at my side as I crossed to the door.
I tried to disengage her. “You don’t have to go with me—”
“I do, in fact,” she replied, her tone efficient and straightforward. “The protective effect isn’t as strong as the compulsion that Friedman and Dawes experienced, but an echo of their separation anxiety is suffusing me as well. I’d just as soon track that and test its limits, if you don’t mind.”
“Great.” I blew out a long breath, wondering idly if Armaeus was going to go all codependent on me too when I saw him next. The thought strangely cheered me, and I was still smiling when the good doctor finally reached a door deep in the ship, then stood away.
“You okay?” I asked a
s she gazed at me, a mixture of relief and satisfaction on her face.
“I am,” she said. Her face split into a smile. “I feel more than okay, actually. I feel completely fulfilled at having delivered you safely to your destination. Which is fascinating, I think you’ll agree. Am I dismissed?”
“Oh. Yes, you…um, you can go. You’re released or whatever. Go.”
“Excellent.” She nodded to me, a gesture that stopped just shy of being a bow. “Good day, Madam Wilde.” Then she turned smartly and moved away, not even a hitch in her step to indicate that leaving me was causing her pain. Progress.
I pushed through the door and into a hive of tightly controlled chaos.
The glowering face of Ma-Singh, the Mongolian warrior who served as head of security for the House of Swords, was on three different monitors, but his voice was only audible on one. Other monitors showed maps of what was apparently the city of Barcelona, or at least that was what was typed along its lower right edge, with bright red and yellow markers lighting up the metropolis’s southwest quadrant. Still other monitors showed news feeds of what looked like a partially destroyed nightclub.
When I entered, all activity stopped for a second, and Nikki and Nigel abruptly straightened—from good ol’ surprise, it seemed, not anything more insidious.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said.
“No, your timing is excellent,” Nigel spoke first. “We have reports of an explosion at a club in Barcelona that hit our radar two hours ago, and information is still coming in. Ma-Singh is en route there now from Beijing, but it will take him a while to reach the site.”
I peered at the screens, focusing on the one featuring an international news station, clearly covering the explosion. I scanned the subtitles rapidly. “Terrorist attack?”
“That’s what they think—or what they’re officially reporting,” Nigel shot me a glance. “We suspect something a little different. There are Connected casualties.”
I frowned. The war on magic had made everyone jumpy, but our enemies weren’t the only bad guys on the planet. With militant extremist cells cropping up throughout the Middle East and into Africa, there was plenty of evil to go around. “You sure that’s not a coincidence? It looks pretty straightforward on the news. And I think they’d mention it if anyone started glowing or conjuring demons or anything.”
“Your skepticism is justified, Madam Wilde.” Ma-Singh spoke from the screen, and I turned my attention to him. “But this nightclub is known to us in the House of Swords. It is very old, very well regarded. It attracts an eclectic clientele, it is true, but…” He shook his head. “We know this attack was not merely to create panic, or to make a statement for traditional news markets. It was a deliberate hit on a specific Connected community.”
“How’s that?” On the screens, I could see police and fire officials crawling all over the rubble, as well as hundreds of frightened onlookers who stood beyond a thick line of police tape, many of them crying.
Ma-Singh sighed deeply. “The twelve occupants who died in the nightclub tragedy this night…all of them are Revenants.”
Chapter Six
“Revenants.” I swiveled my gaze from Ma-Singh to Nigel. “That’s not seriously a thing, I thought. We’ve heard of them, but we’ve never seen…” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Or have you been holding out on me?”
Nigel shook his head. “I’ve never encountered one. I also was under the impression that they were merely a story told to frighten children.”
That made me feel better. From his perch on the screens, Ma-Singh continued.
“Revenants are Connecteds with appreciably longer life spans than most humans. They generally remain reclusive, forming few outside connections with their lesser-aged counterparts, and the legends that have sprung up around them, in fact their very name, is a result of both that reclusiveness and their youthful demeanor.”
“People seeing ghosts,” I murmured.
“Exactly.” Ma-Singh nodded. “The communities remain strongest in Eastern Europe but have spread over the years to Western Europe and a few enclaves in South America, North America, and, to a lesser extent, Asia. In all cases, they remain highly secretive, and to our knowledge have allowed no genetic testing of their kind to identify the source of their prolonged life. Our own physicians theorize that their cell structure is uniquely different, minimizing deterioration, allowing them to age much more slowly while retaining an ever-youthful appearance.”
A Revenant’s physiological variances were a lot like my own recent enhancements due to becoming immortal, I realized, without the whole Magician-intervention protocol that had caused my personal cellular upgrade. But if the Revenants’ genetic differences could be isolated…
I frowned at the screen. “I get abducting the Revenants, if someone out there is looking to replicate their genes to produce some kind of antiaging serum…that’d be worth millions. But killing them…” Another thought struck me. “Are any, um, unaccounted for? That we know of?”
“Preliminary indications are no. However, that risk remains high and has precipitated an unusual request for assistance.” A new note of awkwardness had entered Ma-Singh’s voice, and I refocused on him. “One which I took the liberty of answering, before I was aware of your current circumstances, Madam Wilde. Historically, when the Revenants have been in need they reach out to the House of Swords, and we have answered. It simply has not happened in a very long time.”
I lifted my brows. No wonder Nikki hadn’t wanted me to go nighty-night again. “Answered how?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. I glanced at my hands, wondering how long I’d be doing the whole mummy thing.
Nigel intervened. “We’ve changed course for Ireland, where we’ll take a private charter to reach Barcelona. The ship will continue to the US, as if you’re still aboard.”
I thought about the welcoming party in Reykjavik. “Is that even worth it?” I asked, irritated. “It seems like I’m the easiest woman in the world to track these days.”
“You have been, with your insistence on moving around without the benefit of a disguise or a security detail,” Nigel nodded, always one to take the opportunity to pile on. “But Madam Soo was the same way. It grew too difficult for her to disguise her appearance every time she went into public. So, she chose the other route.”
I sighed, knowing where this was headed. “Seventy-two layers of bodyguards.”
Across the room, Nikki snorted. “It’s for your own protection, dollface.”
“I suppose.” I said the words grudgingly, though I understood Nigel and Nikki’s point. I had been the primary target, back in Reykjavik. Nikki, with all her skills, could have slipped in and out of Agnar’s embrace, able to identify the location of the artifacts—if not precisely, then at least down to the house. A less famous hunter might have been able to find the Gods’ Nails using his or her own tricks. I was one of the best artifact hunters around, yes—but I wasn’t the only one. Nigel himself had found his share of treasure without my help, and there was easily another half-dozen other finders around the globe who would give us a run for our money.
How many of them had been gunning for me in Reykjavik?
That didn’t matter right now, of course. What mattered was—I was a target. If I wanted to move around the globe, I’d need to accept protection. The only trouble with that plan? Protection meant that someone else might be stopping a bullet meant for me. And I was the only one in this group who could handle that kind of wound well.
So…what, I should go out on my own? That would be stupid.
Right?
Nigel, apparently unaware I was solving the mysteries of the world, continued. “It’s settled, then. We’ll adopt the same level of security Madam Soo had in place to start, and adjust down if needed. Better to be too careful than not enough.”
I scowled. I didn’t like this at all. “How many people are we talking about?”
“It’s wiser you didn’t know,” Nigel said, and on the screen,
Ma-Singh nodded with satisfaction.
“Madam Soo did not know the details either,” the Mongolian said gruffly. “She knew she was protected, not by who or how. It allowed her to move more quickly when situations required it, rather than worry about a detail whose training ensures they are capable of defending both her and themselves. You will reach that point as well, and be a safer asset when you do.”
“Fine.” I spread my hands, extending my fingers wide within their bandages. “I trust you.”
The spasm of energy happened so quickly, I doubled over, jerking my hands into my gut, wincing with white-hot pain as I clenched my hands. Beneath us, deep in the hold, a high keening note burst up, searing my eardrums.
It was over as quickly as it began, and the fog behind my eyes cleared as chaos erupted around me. Guards scrambled to their feet again, Nigel barked commands, Nikki cursed a blue streak. On the screen, Ma-Singh now stood, alarm writ large across his face.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What just happened?”
“Nothing—nothing!” I shouted, flapping my hands. I jerked them back as quickly, bracing myself for another keening blast. “We’ve got artifacts aboard—sensitive artifacts. They seem to be triggered by any sort of call to arms.”
I looked around, peering into the faces of the guards. They were shining with purpose, excitement, and a slightly frenzied intensity. Nikki and Nigel met my gaze, but that same passion shone in their eyes as well. Everyone had gotten the memo to up their game, it seemed, but I wasn’t sure if they realized where that message had come from.
I decided it wouldn’t help anything for me to bring it to their attention. “We’re good now,” I assured Ma-Singh, who continued to eye the room with interest. He’d been a general in Soo’s army for a long time. He knew what he was seeing, even if he didn’t know how it’d come to pass. “We’ll, ah, see you in Spain.”
