by Matt Wallace
The tip of the blade is aimed directly at James’s heart.
It’s less than half a foot away from piercing his chest when the entire world goes off its axis, the floor beneath their feet tilting more than seventy degrees. It throws the trajectory of Darren’s strike off just enough that the blade of the spear skewers James’s shoulder. He cries out and turns away just before they’re both thrown from their feet.
Darren loses his grip on the spear, and trying to hold on only makes his fall wilder and even more off-kilter. His body flies several feet through the air before hitting the ground again and rolling from the top of the dais. He hits the onyx platform hard but manages to plant the soles of his feet and halt his inevitable slide.
The platform’s sudden descent ceases just as suddenly.
Whether it was the jarring effect of the drop, or whether the effects of the magical shockwave are wearing off naturally, bodies all around Darren begin to stir and moan and occasionally cry for vengeance. He begins to stand carefully, to lean enough of his weight against the incline of the platform to keep him stable.
It turns out to be wasted effort. Darren never sees the object that collides with the back of his skull, but the force opens his head, sprays the onyx with blood, and floods his skull with a darkness that sees him crumpling to the platform and rolling down the incline until he loses momentum and sprawls.
Allensworth looks down at the unconscious body, Darren’s blood still dripping from the churro crumb–filled mini-basket held in Allensworth’s hand.
“The assassin is down!” he proclaims triumphantly. “Protect and attend to our new president!”
SKINNY DIPPING
For the last five minutes, Nikki has been pretending the bungee cord is the sinewy stalk of some vegetable, like broccoli, that’s just been boiled too long. That’s helping her ignore the truth, which is she’s gnawing on old, dirty, greasy nylon. She doesn’t know how long it will take that Darren robot to make his move; she only hopes she’s moving fast enough. Spitting out the gag took a full minute all by itself.
But she’s made progress. The length of cord closest to one of the bungee hooks is chewed almost to its center. Nikki imagines herself as a rat enthusiastically eating a corncob, nibbling fiercely at the dent she’s made there. She applies the same laser focus that overtakes her in her pastry kitchen, meticulously crafting as close to perfection as humanly possible. It’s still another five minutes before she feels the final tiny strands of cord against her tongue.
Nikki grips them with her jaw and yanks viciously, growling around them in determination and sheer will. The cord breaks and she immediately feels the tension around her wrists ease as one of the hooks loses its tether. She wriggles free of the bonds, spitting and trying not to retch or vomit all over the trailer floor.
Nikki unhooks her ankles and kicks free of the final bungee cords. Standing, she looks around frantically for a weapon, then realizes how absurd that is. She’s not trying to physically overcome Darren; she just needs to tell someone.
She bolts for the door, pushing it up with both arms and leaping down from the back of the truck. She lands so hard, she rolls across the grass and has to recover her bearings before she can get back to her feet. The platform seems a million miles away, even if in reality it’s only a short sprint from the tree line. Nikki makes a run for it.
She can sense something is already wrong even before she realizes it’s far too deserted, too quiet. The party noises up there have all but ceased. She catches only a few scattered, unintelligible shouts. She can’t see up onto the platform itself. Nikki stops running. She realizes she may be too late, or at the very least she will be too late to stop whatever’s happening.
She moves her gaze around the shore, frantic, thoughts racing to come up with something, anything useful.
The only people still in sight are the robed mages surrounding the lake, using their silent, conjoined powers to keep the onyx platform hovering above the water.
“Oh, shit,” Nikki says as she realizes what she’s about to do.
She breaks into a run again, charging at the shore. Several yards from the first floating onyx step leading up to the platform, Nikki cuts a sudden left.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry!” she repeats over and over again, stopping only when she finally tackles the nearest robed mage.
Nikki feels a shock like a dog with an electric collar who wanders too far from their home yard. Then she feels the freezing water engulf her and the surprisingly frail figure to which she’s clinging. They’re separated almost immediately after they’re both submerged. Nikki, in her heavy smock, begins sinking like a stone.
For several moments, she just stays there in the near-pitch darkness and total silence. Eventually, it occurs to her that she should swim back up to the surface. As Nikki prepares to kick her feet and spread her arms, the silence and the darkness are both obliterated by the entire front edge of the onyx platform crashing down through the water.
A flood of moonlight blinds her and a force unlike anything she’s ever felt rushes beneath her and lifts her up through the water. She feels cool air at first grasping her skin then rushing around her. Weightlessness gives way to the harshness of gravity and she’s pulled back down to Earth. Nikki collides with solid ground, and all the oxygen seems to leave her body at once.
When she can breathe (read: “cough up water”) and see again, Nikki realizes she’s somehow been knocked all the way back onto shore. She’s also surrounded by inauguration party guests, some sprawled out on the grass around her, and others crawling back up from the water.
She looks up. The onyx platform is tilted on its axis, several yards of it submerged in the water in front of her. Tents have collapsed. Tables and chairs are overturned. There isn’t a person or creature left standing.
All she can do is say again, helplessly, “Sorry.”
STAND AND DELIVER
Lena is dreaming of the shade tree she occupied for much of her and Darren’s high school career. It sprouted from a small patch of grass lined with concrete curb facing the teacher’s parking lot at the northernmost tip of the school. It was a virtual student no-man’s-land, and that’s why she and Darren liked it. Lena would spend every lunch and free period there, reading Octavia Butler and Magda Szabó (one of her personal heroes) and Ursula Le Guin.
She wakes up to the heavy lines of Bronko’s face, all of them contorted in concern. He’s leaning over her, one hand gently cupping her right shoulder. There’s pain in her head, pain in her jaw, and a constant throbbing of blood in her right cheek. She can feel the bandage there seeping wetly, the alien sensation of the stitches woven in and out of her flesh underneath it.
She realizes she’s lying on Bronko’s couch, back in his office at Sin du Jour. She barely remembers the trip back or the medical treatment after she regained consciousness. They must have given her some heavy drugs at the scene.
“Darren?” she asks immediately, groggily. “James?”
“James took a very large blade clean through one shoulder. It’ll heal; he’ll just have that arm slung up for a goodly while. Vargas is alive. He’s being kept sedated and under guard by the Sceadu. It’s clear he was possessed by somethin’, is possessed by somethin’, some kind of evil that’s taken root right in his soul. I called White Horse, interrupted his teaching sabbatical, told him what went down. He agrees. He’s on his way back. Now, I have no doubt he’ll be able to cleanse Vargas of whatever’s taken hold. He’ll be okay, Tarr.”
“‘Okay’ is a relative concept when it comes to people.”
Bronko nods. “It surely is. Fortunately, Vargas has people like you and James close to him. And he’s got me and the line and the staff. There’ll be fallout, external and internal. But we’ll fix it. Okay?”
“Yes, Chef. What about the others?”
“Jett made it back. Dorsky, Pacific, and Mo are still unaccounted for. Sure enough the Secret Service has them.”
Lena sits up
in alarm. “You seem awful damn calm about it, Chef.”
“Yeah, well, we got one thing going in our favor.”
“What could that possibly be?”
“You know how you saw America’s new president blown to synthetic chunks and a live gremlin explode from his chest?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, no one else does. No one else saw it.”
“What?”
“Just like I said. They tape-delayed the broadcast, sent out some kind of glamour. As for the folks who were there live, well, there are ways to erase that memory. And if they miss a few hundred, even a few thousand, who’s going to pay any mind to a story like that?”
Lena is stunned. “So, nothing happened?”
“Close enough. And if it didn’t, then there’s no reason to hold our people.”
“Yeah, unless they shoot them and bury them for the convenience of it.”
Bronko is resolute. “We’ll get them back.”
Lena is going to argue, but then another thought, one that rides a high and bloody wave of rage, crashes over her brain.
Lena stands, carefully, readjusting to having her feet under her again.
“Where’s Ritter?” she asks him once she has her bearings.
“He’s here. I called everybody in to catch ’em up on the events of the evening.”
Lena nods, turning and walking toward the office door.
“Hey there!” he calls after her. “You okay, Tarr?”
“Relatively,” she says without stopping or looking back.
The halls outside Bronko’s office look foreign and strange to her. Lena isn’t sure if it’s the meds they gave her for her face, or being knocked unconscious, or if the past twelve hours crossed some kind of invisible line in her psyche from which there’s no return.
She finds Ritter in the main kitchen, by himself, eating leftover sushi Tenryu made for the staff’s last family meal. When he sees her enter the kitchen, he chews and swallows his last piece of makizushi quickly, setting the plastic container aside.
“How deep is that?” he asks, waving four fingertips over the patch of his cheek where, on Lena’s face, the seeping bandage is taped.
“One more scar,” she says without emotion, navigating the grid of stainless steel islands to meet him.
Ritter stands a little straighter, ready to embrace her, ready to give her whatever she needs.
Lena closes the remaining gap between them in three quick strides and then punches Ritter in the face.
It doesn’t rock him, but it does sting all the way to the tips of his ears and bloody his nose. Lena puts more power behind the second punch, this one landing against his jaw and actually wobbling him a little.
Ritter stares down at her in abject surprise, but he makes no move to fight back or even defend himself.
The third time Lena rears back to strike him, she turns deeper into it than she yet has, and when the blow comes around, it runs straight through his chin with adrenaline-fueled force. Ritter loses a split second of time and drops to his right knee, drunkenly leaning to one side until his shoulder pressing against a refrigerator stops him.
He shakes his head viciously in his attempt to vent the fog between his ears. The blood from his nose has run over his lips and is dripping from his chin onto his plain black T-shirt.
Lena stands over him with her fists clenched tightly at her side, the knuckles of her right hand split, his blood mingling with hers in those small wounds. There’s unfiltered rage filling her eyes to their barest corners, and she’s breathing through a layer of tearful snot and spittle.
“You tell me the truth now!” she demands, a powerful fury in her voice even if it is shaken with sorrow. “I don’t want any of your brooding alpha-male bullshit, d’you hear me? You tell me what happened with Darren and you and Allensworth and you tell me all of it! I want to know what you fucking did to Darren and why!”
“It wasn’t me who did that to him,” Ritter whispers, haunted, unable to look up at her.
Lena kicks him sharply in the knee that isn’t pasted to the kitchen floor.
Ritter grimaces, clasping his hands over the offended kneecap. “Goddammit, Lena!”
“The truth, I said!”
Ritter sighs, letting his head fall back none too gently against the stainless steel door of the fridge. “It wasn’t me who did that to him, but I sent him there. I sent him to whoever or whatever did it.”
Lena shakes her head, more tears filling her eyes. “Why . . . Why would you do that? Why would you ever do that? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“I didn’t know what he was walking into,” Ritter insists. “Allensworth gave me an address. That’s all.”
“So, you’re that wannabe underworld dictator’s boy now, is that it?”
Ritter doesn’t answer at first. He slumps down onto his ass, back pressed into the refrigerator.
“I used to, uh . . . I used to hunt witches for a living,” he begins, and he laughs suddenly, absurdly, laughter that mutates in the barest sliver of a second into tears.
He quickly swallows those back as well.
“I didn’t ask for your fucking backstory, Ritter.”
“You want to know why. This is why. I joined WET. ‘Witchcraft Enforcement Team,’” he enunciates slowly and with bitter irony. “It was Allensworth’s brainchild. It was supposed to be elite shit, hunting rogue magic-users. Dangerous people using out-of-control powers to do very bad shit. The worst of the worst. They had to be not just tracked down and stopped but destroyed. That was the mandate.”
He falls quiet again.
“And?” Lena presses, though it’s less impatient than before. Her stomach is starting to twist.
“It was all bullshit,” Ritter admits, genuine pain registering in every contour of his face. “It was just Allensworth’s never-ending control trip. He wanted every human magic-user in the fucking world to answer to him solely. He created a coven-only structure to make sure. Anyone who didn’t join . . . they ran or they disappeared. The women we hunted down . . . they were just scared. Jesus, if they even were women. A lot of them were just girls, barely old enough to . . .”
“What did you do?” Lena asks, though the answer is obvious, inescapable.
His voice becomes very far away. “We burned them. All of them. High-tech thermite. Next-generation shit. Quick and horrible. We burned them all alive.”
Lena can’t decide whether she wants to hit him again or throw up all over him.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” he continues, near tears himself again. “I wanted out. Allensworth let me go, but only because he needed someone doing this job. That was our deal. My brother, Marcus, stayed behind. He finally cracked. He’s more . . . impulsive than me. He just ran. Allensworth found him. He was going to take Marcus out. Allensworth offered me a deal. He wanted Darren. He didn’t say why or for what. He just told me to send him to that brownstone and stay out of it.”
“And what did you think would happen?” Lena asks, even more disgusted.
“I thought Allensworth would give the kid a choice. Because that’s what he does. He never . . . forces you to do anything. You know? At least, he didn’t before this. He offers you a simple choice, and he weights the one he wants you to make so heavy, you can’t go any other way. I hoped Darren would be smarter than me. Stronger than me.”
“Right. Because you turned him into a tough guy.”
Ritter finally looks up at her. There’s more emotion in his face than Lena has ever seen displayed there.
“Because he was brave enough to ask me for help,” he says. “I’ve never been that strong.”
“You piece of shit,” Lena hisses at him.
There’s a magnetic strip bolted above the station behind her. The blades of a dozen kitchen knives are held, suspended, to it. Lena reaches for the largest butcher’s knife, snatching it down and holding its tip inches from Ritter’s face, menacingly.
“If you ever come near me, Darren,
or anyone on my line again, I will fucking kill you.”
Ritter doesn’t even see the blade. He stares straight past it at her face.
There isn’t any doubting her sincerity in that moment.
“I know you’re a badass kung fu half-wizard mercenary or whatever the fuck, but I will find a way. I will wait until you’re sleeping and I will slit your goddamn throat. Do you understand me?”
Ritter nods.
Lena drops the knife. It clatters on the kitchen floor between them, ringing out sharply.
She turns and strides away. Ten feet from the kitchen entrance, Lena breaks into a run, knowing if she doesn’t, the tears will seize her before she can make it out.
Ritter’s left sitting there alone, staring at the knife on the floor. All the light in the kitchen seems to be held there in the flat of the blade. It shines like edged enlightenment, bright enough to make him close his eyes when he stares at its center too intently.
Ritter finds, in that moment, he prefers the darkness.
It’s much, much easier.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first pitched my overly ambitious seven-novella concept for Sin du Jour, I quite honestly never expected to see book three released, let alone make it to book number five. It’s a helluva thing, and I still firmly believe it wouldn’t have happened without Tor.com Publishing creating such a unique home for projects like these. I owe the team behind Tor.com Publishing all my gratitude, chief among them my editor and eternal champion (damn right in the Michael Moorcock sense), Lee Harris, and associate publisher, Irene Gallo. I also want to thank Mordicai Knode and Katharine Duckett, who’ve strived tirelessly to get the word out about the series, and Carl Engle-Laird, who always provides unending support in whatever form it’s needed. Peter Lutjen, whose cover design just gets more epic with each book, and Greedy Pig’s copyeditor, Richard Shealy. I feel genuinely privileged to have a group of professionals with their combined talents elevating my work. I always owe gratitude to the folks in my own life who prop up me and my writing as needed. My agent and the best-dressed man in publishing, DongWon Song, who is the literary representation equivalent of a Hattori Hanzō sword. My fiancée, Nikki, my toughest critic and fiercest supporter. My mother, Barbara, the single most tireless champion of my books. Finally, my thanks to you, the constant reader of Sin du Jour. You’re the most important person in my little made-up universe, because you keep the lights on. Thank you.
