by Gwynn White
“It’s ok,” Harker said. “He’s gone. In fact, he was never here. It was all in your mind.”
“The Demon of Technology and Dark Lord of the Witches didn’t speak to me?”
“He did. When you touched the necklace, it somehow allowed him to tunnel into your mind. When I realized what was going on, I tethered you to me so he couldn’t transport your body away, at least not if you didn’t want to go. You fought him.” Harker smiled at me.
“How?”
“I drank your blood.” He held up my wrist, which was sporting two puncture marks. “I only took a few drops. It was enough to link us.”
“You saw everything?”
“Yes.”
I swallowed hard. That meant he knew what I was, the daughter of a dark angel, the granddaughter of a demon. My hands grasped across the floor behind me, looking for something—anything—I could use to defend myself. I found only a few loose sheets of paper. Somehow, I doubted an angel’s fatal weakness was a paper cut.
“You don’t need to be afraid of me,” Harker told me, lifting his hands in the air so I could see them.
“That’s what the demon said too,” I retorted. “You’re an angel, a soldier in the Legion.”
“Bella—”
“What are you going to do with me?”
“First, I’m going to heal you. If you let me.”
“The gods have decreed that dark magic is evil.”
“They’ve decreed a lot of things.”
His reply was unexpected. Harker lived to serve the gods.
“Not all of the gods are so absolute,” he told me.
And people said I saw the world through rose-colored glasses.
“So you’re going to tell them,” I said.
“No.”
I froze. I must have heard him wrong.
“I have demon blood in me. Dark magic,” I said. “Forbidden magic.”
“Your magic doesn’t determine what kind of person you are,” he said. “Only you can choose that. And Leda says you’re the best person she knows.”
“Leda is my sister.” Well, not by blood, but everywhere it counted. “She is rather biased.”
“But she’s not wrong. Valerian is a powerful demon, and you resisted him.” Harker extended his hand to me. “I won’t tell anyone.”
I took his hand. “Not even the First Angel?” I asked as he helped me to my feet.
His eyes twinkled. “It will be our little secret.” He flipped my hand over, tracing his finger across my palm. “Now, how about I heal this?” His hand hovered over the twin puncture marks in my wrist.
“Ok,” I said. If anyone saw that mark on me, I wouldn’t hear the end of it. Did I mention that witches were big gossips?
Harker’s fingertip tapped one of the puncture marks. As the skin knitted together, a feeling of complete and utter happiness swept over me. He tapped the second mark, and that feeling intensified. Whoa. No wonder people were smitten with angels. It wasn’t just because of their killer good looks.
“Thanks.” I hastily drew my hand away, before I lost all sense. “You know what? I think Leda is right about you too. You are a good person.”
He shot me a smirk. “I’m not a person, Bellatrix. I’m an angel.”
I laughed. I just couldn’t help it.
“You don’t hate me anymore, do you?” he asked.
“Not entirely.”
“So, would you like to go out with me?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
A devious look gleamed in his eyes. “Oh, I will, Bella. You can be sure about that.”
THE END
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About the Author
Ella Summers has been writing stories for as long as she could read; she's been coming up with tall tales even longer than that. One of her early year masterpieces was a story about a pigtailed princess and her dragon sidekick. Nowadays, she still writes fantasy. She likes books with lots of action, adventure, and romance. When she is not busy writing or spending time with her two young children, she makes the world safe by fighting robots. Ella is the international bestselling author of the paranormal and fantasy series Legion of Angels, Dragon Born, and Sorcery & Science.
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www.ellasummers.com
The Disenthroned (Sneak Peek)
Sneak Peek at Volume II of The Chronicles of the Worldcracker
Felix R. Savage
1
Anton
May 11th, 1989. The German Empire, Eastern Administrative Zone, Bangladesh
They were approaching Chowmuhani. Quickstone highrises grew like black thistles out of the horizon. Slums sprouted from the desert along the Great Eastern Road. Anton Orlov’s thumb flicked mechanically over the safety of his Z4. Tailguard duty this morning, eating the dust of sixty tankers. The up-armored 4X4’s wipers smeared grit around the windshield.
“Looks nice and quiet today,” said Peters, who was driving.
Anton stared at him. “I can’t believe you just said the Q-word.”
An almighty boom rolled out. The dust made it difficult to see what had happened, but Anton didn’t have to. Some goddamn cultist had fired an RPG at them. A pillar of red fire and black smoke rose from the convoy, a middle finger raised to the morning.
Peters yanked the wheel over. The 4x4 leapt across the desert between two slum settlements, taking to the air on the bumps.
The drivers behind the toasted tanker slammed on their brakes, careening across the road. Anton heard the crashes of a couple of collisions, hopefully minor. As for the drivers ahead of the explosion, they were roaring away as fast as they could go, and who could blame them? They were driving forty-thousand-gallon bombs.
Bullets rampaged around the 4x4. Flaming blobs of oil hit the windshield, burning away the dust.
“’Bout a dozen of them.” The laconic voice of Nick Reyes, their boss, crackled over the radio. “Couple of belt-fed weapons, a bunch more small arms, and at least one RPG.”
One of the Wehrmacht jeeps that had been deployed in the middle of the convoy had come off the road near the explosion. The grunts were out, running around the desert, spraying fire at hapless slum-dwellers fetching water. Peters braked fifty yards behind the jeep. Anton hauled the belt-fed Z7 out of the back seat. As usual, the Wehrmacht packet had radios on their own secure frequencies and no spare handsets, so the Tactical Outcomes men couldn’t communicate with them except by shouting. Anton didn’t bother.
Taking cover behind the engine block of the 4x4, he pointed the Z7 at the gutted-looking third storey of the nearest highrise, where he’d spotted muzzle flashes. Casings showered into the dust. He was so sick of this shit.
Just a few seconds into the contact, the exchange of fire became one-sided. The Sahari cultists knew a thing or two about survival. Damage done, they melted away. One German private lay dead on the desert sand, one jeep was totaled by a lucky RPG round, and fully half the tankers in the convoy were missing.
“Catch the rest of the drivers, get them back on the road,” Reyes ordered, his dark eyes furious in the sooty strip of face above his shamash.
Anton took three of the Tactical Outcomes 4x4s and sped ahead. They found the front half of the convoy churning along in a mountain-sized dust cloud a few miles beyond Chowmuhani. They wove through the tankers and forced their helter-skelter pace down so the rest of the convoy could catch up.
“Only two more years of this,” Peters said optimistically.
After half a century, Germany was preparing to end its occupation of the former Russian empire. All over the Eastern Administrative Zone, military and administrative assets were being packed up and trucked west. This convoy was a part of that
massive operation. Tactical Outcomes was escorting the fuel tankers in the other direction, towards the eastern end of the Zone. Lot of money to be made at the end of an era. If you survived.
“What’ll you spend it on?” Peters asked Anton.
“I’m thinking of buying a castle,” Anton said.
“Very funny. We’re not making that much.”
“Castles come cheap in Russia.” Anton shrugged.
“I’m going to marry my girl,” Peters said dreamily.
“Which one?”
“Fuck off.”
“I’ll send it home to my family,” Anton admitted. “Like I always do.”
The shadows shrank like water droplets on a hot gun barrel. The convoy fled across the desert like a line of ants fleeing the stomping foot of the sun.
Five Hours Later
When the mountains materialized on the horizon, they stopped for lunch. No need to pull off the road, since there was nothing else on it except the occasional Bangladeshi warlord’s packet of jeeps flying pennants as long as kite tails, which could damn well go around.
Anton chewed his way through some of the sausages he’d bought two days ago at the Supermarket At the End of the World, otherwise known as the Wehrmacht PX in Dhaka. He checked the armor of the team’s 4x4s. The top plates of the trucks that had been in the contact had started to degrade. Have to try and replace those in Chittagong.
Reyes, walking up and down the convoy, discovered that fifteen tankers were missing.
“Fifteen?” Anton said. He squinted up the line. The drivers were eating, smoking, and listening to cassettes in the shade of their tankers. Bangladeshis, Punjabis, Uzbekis, Khazakhs, a few Africans risking their lives for more money than they’d see in ten years back home.
“Fifteen,” Reyes confirmed. “I was wondering why they only hit the one tanker, when the guy with the RPG could have taken out half the convoy if he wanted. It was just a diversion. While we were busy, the other drivers must’ve vanished into the city.”
“I didn’t think of that.” That was why Reyes was the boss and Anton wasn’t. “Vakhrushev’s going to be pissed.”
Vakhruschev was the owner of the haulage company.
“Not our problem,” Reyes said. “Anyway, nothing we can do about it now. Have to just try and not mislay any more of them. I’m going to go cheer the Wehrmacht captain up; he’s in a bit of a swoon.”
Reyes’s granite face was about as likely to cheer the Wehrmacht captain up as a mountain falling on him, Anton thought. Good. Nick Reyes was mid-thirties, maybe mid-forties, half-Spanish and half-British, nobly born, or born of ex-slave stock? Didn’t matter. What mattered was that Nick Reyes was a true knight, and unlike Anton, he advertised it with a hairknot, dust-ratted forelocks blowing loose today. He’d built Tactical Outcomes up from nothing into a boutique security agency with marble-floored offices in Tashkent. Escort, advisory, close protection, extraction, and personnel training services offered at reasonable rates. Don’t call us mercs.
They pushed on through the afternoon and reached Chittagong, their scheduled layover, with ten minutes of daylight to spare. Chittagong was known as a stomping ground of the Sahari cult, the sharpest, most poisonous thorn in the side of the German occupation … soon to be handed off to the new Tsar, God help him.
The Wehrmacht platoon beetled off to safe beds within the walls of Chittagong, leaving the Tactical Outcomes team to escort the convoy to their billets at the freshwater depot near the port.
The water depot was fortified with quickstone hedges. Quickstone was impermeable to anything short of a ballistic missile, once you knitted the individual rattoons into a solid wall. But these rattoons had been planted too far apart, and probably had not seen the attention of a ‘stone mason since they were planted. There were gaps between the greasy black trunks wide enough for a man on horseback, all the way around. The inner perimeter was just a concrete wall. In one corner of the parking lot it had fallen down. Nor was there any razor wire netting over the courtyard to defend against attacks by hostiles on dragonback.
Anton fingered the bullet scars in the wall of the pumping station.
“Don’t worry,” Deuce said. “The Sahari need water just as much as everyone else does. That’s why we’re safe here.”
Deuce, a Belgian, was the team’s ‘consultant,’ a.k.a. magician. Anton looked at him narrowly. “What are these Sahari really out for, Deuce?”
“Independence.” Deuce shrugged. “Sovereignty. Same thing they’re all after.” His eyes said: You’re Russian. You should know.
Anton smelt smoke, and glanced towards the shed where the drivers had billeted themselves. Light glimmered in the windows. The drivers were lighting cookfires on the floor.
“The Sahari are a cult of magic-worshippers,” Anton said.
“So they say.” Deuce scratched his scalp. His brown dye job was growing out, revealing flaming red roots.
“Can you handle them? That’s what I’m asking.”
“I dunno. No one knows much about them. Look, before the Russian Empire gobbled them up, all the little countries out here were ruled by magicians. We purged Europe of magicians after the Second World War. But out here, the purges were … spotty. So they might have some tricks that we don’t know anymore. You hear stories.” Deuce’s eyes were pits in his thin, pale face. “They believe the end of the world is coming, and only a few special souls will survive. Meaning them, of course.”
“Go get something to eat,” Anton said.
The attack started around two in the morning. Rockets screamed over the perimeter, bounced off the roofs and water tanks, and occasionally exploded. The drivers fled to the front gate of the depot, as far away as possible from the parking lot where the tankers were lined up. Reyes yelled for Anton and two more guys. Leaving the other half of the team to guard the front gate, they ran between the tankers towards the gap in the perimeter wall.
A rocket crashed two yards behind Anton, harmlessly. The things weren’t exploding. They’d be vintage. Much of the ordnance available to the cultists was Russian stuff. At the end of the Second World War, eighty percent of the population of the Russian Empire, including the biggest army ever fielded in the history of mankind, had been wiped off the face of the earth. That left a lot of munitions lying around.
The four men spread out on either side of the breach in the wall. Anton fumbled for the pocket scope hanging around his neck, a set of NVGs like a miniature pair of binoculars. He raised them to his left eye, not wanting to lose the night vision in his master eye. Nothing moved in the rubble at the foot of the wall. The quickstone hedge was a fluorescent green colonnade.
Reyes slid out through the breach.
Anton followed. Peters and Moritz came behind him.
A stiff breeze scuffed up spirals of sand, black in the moonlight. Just a fingernail’s breadth of moon up there, but when the clouds parted, the shadows vanished, removing one potential advantage for the attackers. They’re on the other side of the depot anyway, Anton thought. The noise of the incoming rockets—now intermittent—and the team’s return fire was concentrated around the front gate. This is pointless. The desert spread like a phosphorescent ocean, complete with gentle swells, for miles to the actual ocean. Anton let the butt of his Z4 slip out of the hollow of his shoulder, like slipping out of a woman without release.
Reyes had his sword out.
A sand devil danced out of the nearest trough. In the last instant before the moon vanished, Anton saw the sandstorm swallow Reyes. It had a shape: a crudely defined head, arms that encircled him before hugging him. It also had fiery blue eyes. A djinn!
Fucking Deuce. Not a fucking clue.
Anton slung his Z7 and drew his own sword. Cold steel was the best way to handle the fey. But he did not swing. He might hit Reyes. Couldn’t see a yard in front of his face.
The storm shrieked like a tea kettle. Sand scoured his face. He pulled his shamash higher, squinted his eyes nearly shut.
A weight plummetted onto his back. Claws hooked into the back of his neck. He dropped and rolled, crushing the thing between his back and the ground. Felt movement to his right, struck out with his sword. Connected with something that cracked like glass, shattering. The thing on his shoulders was digging into the flesh of his neck. He brought his sword around in an awkward two-handed grip, pried at the thing with the point. The claws loosened.
The storm lit up. Moritz’s face shone orange in the light of an emergency flare spitting and hopping on the ground. The thing that had fallen off Anton’s neck was a beetle the size of a cat, oozing silver fluid from its cracked carapace. Reyes fought more of them nearby, beetle-bodies piled around him. Lunge and stab, then sidestep and catch the next one on the forte, like a machine on an assembly line. Reyes was the best swordsman Anton had ever met.
Beyond Reyes, Peters was fighting hand to hand with a man in Sahari robes.
Anton ran towards them.
The Sahari saw him coming, got distracted, and let Peters’s sword inside his guard. Peters then lost a precious instant whipping his blade free of the Sahari’s robe. The Sahari’s blade found his throat.
Anton fired his Z7. So did Moritz.
The flare guttered out, leaving them in darkness again.
Reyes came running, unstrapping the feretory pouch he always carried on his belt. He dragged out the plastinated heart of the Holy Nobody and clapped it to Peters’s throat.
Anton slapped in a fresh magazine and scanned a full circle. No hostiles, just the piled bodies of the beetle fey. The sky was as clear as if the sandstorm had never been.
Moritz knelt, finishing the Sahari off.
“Don’t kill him,” Reyes said. “Got a few questions to ask him.”
“Too late,” Moritz said. He enjoyed killing, a defect in a security advisor.
