Stay of Execution

by Glynn Stewart

  “Dresden!” he snapped. “Clear a path. Mason, Tsimote, cover us!”

  The vampire didn’t even seem to cover the intervening distance. One moment, she was pitching fire at the troll over the head of the rocky army; the next, she was at his side, blades of flickering black fire flashing into existence around her fists.

  “I see he brought some igneous friends,” she said calmly. “Shall we, Commander?”

  “Let’s go.”

  The rock that had hit him was charging again, but Dresden intercepted it almost casually. Her left-hand blade slammed into the center of the animated boulder, and a flash of black fire blasted the creature to pieces. Behind the host of rocks, the troll screamed in rage again.

  David was already moving. The troll itself was fast—far faster than a twenty-five-foot-tall stone monster had any right to be—but its minions were closer to human speed. Still fast. Still strong.

  Still no match for an elder vampire or a warrior Seer.

  The rock-men swarmed him and Dresden, first in twos and threes…then in dozens. Memoria sent them crumpling to the ground like puppets with their strings cut, and Dresden’s flame-blades exploded them in bursts of shrapnel that knocked down two or three at a time.

  Tsimote ran out of ammunition before they ran out of enemies, the elementalist joining Mason in blasting apart the swarming boulders as David and Dresden pushed through the ever-growing ranks—the troll using its conjured minions to buy itself more time for its gory meal.

  This was not in the briefing he’d had on greater trolls. This was new, and dangerous, and terrifying…and being broadcast on live national television.

  Every step forward was over the wreckage of what had been decorative boulders, accents on water features, several statues…if it was stone and weighed more than about a hundred kilos, the troll threw it at the advancing ONSET teams.

  Finally, David and Dresden broke through, and the vampire turned to hold the swarm back.

  “Go!” she hissed.

  She probably shouldn’t have been giving him orders, but that was an argument for another time. David charged across the dozen or so feet between him and the troll, dodging a terrifyingly fast sweep of a massive arm and leaping to strike at the creature’s head.

  The fist that knocked him out of the air had to weigh at least half a ton. It smashed him to the ground like a wrecking ball, shattering half of the bones in his body. Pain and heat flashed through his body as his gifts tried to put him back together and the monster stepped toward him, clearly planning to finish the job by stepping on him.

  He rolled out of the way of the descending foot, leaping back to his feet as enough of his bones healed for him to stand. He’d left Memoria behind and the sword was now under the troll’s foot.

  The creature seemed quite aware of what it had managed, twisting its foot to grind the sword deeper into the dirt as it glared down at David. It shouted at him, words in that strangely delicate, terrifying language that no living human would understand.

  Another massive fist slammed into the ground next to him when he didn’t respond.

  “Bring it!” he bellowed, hoping to lure the beast off of his sword.

  Instead, he earned himself another set of juggernaut blows. He dodged one, and the second slammed into his upper torso, flinging him backward into the wreckage of a hot dog cart with a very final-sounding CRACK.

  For a terrifying moment, David knew he’d broken his neck and wasn’t certain he could heal that. Given that he’d regenerated from being burnt alive, it was an unfounded fear…but even paralysis had a way of cutting through logic.

  By the time heat flared through his neck and his head popped back into position, the troll held him in its hand, raising him towards a mouth full of jagged rocks that clearly functioned as massive, terrifyingly sharp, teeth.

  “Commander!” Dresden snapped. “Catch!”

  It was a pointless gesture. There was no need for the vampire Mage to throw her sword of fire to David—except the warning told him what she was doing.

  There was no way for him not to catch the flaming blade, because she hadn’t truly thrown it. A glittering pillar of black flame erupted from his hand as the troll opened wide to try and devour him.

  He grabbed a tooth with his left hand, letting the jagged stone cut into his skin as he unfolded into the troll’s mouth, all five foot four inches and two hundred pounds of his stockily built strength driving the flaming blade into the top of the creature’s jaw.

  Both Dresden and Mason were channeling their power into that blade now, and it ripped out the top of the troll’s head, glittering black-and-blue fire searing through the creature in a pillar of destructive power.

  Then the monster’s head exploded, flinging David back through the air with a half-screamed curse.

  Thankfully, the army of rock monsters the troll had summoned had collapsed when it had died, which meant David only suffered a few cracked ribs and a loss of breath from landing hard on the ground. The ribs healed with an uncomfortable pop, and he dragged himself back up to his feet and studied his people.

  The ground around them was covered in shattered pieces of rock, boulders and statues and concrete alike having been animated by the troll and put down by ONSET.

  “McCreery, get down here and pick us up,” he ordered as he kicked aside debris to retrieve Memoria. “Dupond, don’t risk trying to land in Central Park. Get back to the old HTR facility and land carefully.”

  “Wilco, Commander,” the Agent replied gratefully. “See you there.”

  One helicopter disappeared over the skyscrapers while the second swooped down to settle to the ground next to them.

  “Those news choppers are getting closer,” Mason observed.

  “Probably want interviews,” David said dryly. “I think it’s self-evident that we are not talking to the press.”

  McCreery flung open the side of the helicopter, waving for them to get in while her helmeted face turned toward the news helicopters.

  “We need to move,” she told them.

  “Agreed. Go!” David told her as he entered the aircraft, the last of the four Agents on the ground.

  His pilot shook her head at him but was already moving forward as he closed the helicopter up behind him.

  “On our way,” she replied, the helicopter jerking as it lifted away from the ground.

  David turned his attention to his coms.

  “O’Brien?” he asked quietly.

  “Still here,” his old boss replied. “Well done.”

  “There were still people alive in there,” David told him. “They need medical help ASAP.”

  “NYPD and local EMS are already on it,” O’Brien said. “Look out your window, White.”

  David obeyed, seeing the lights as ambulances now swarmed past the police barricades.

  “How bad is the news?” he asked.

  “Depends on your perspective,” O’Brien answered. “Not much question in people’s minds that you saved a lot of lives, but…lots of questions around very clear magical powers deployed by folks jumping out of black helicopters.

  “Couldn’t be more of a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream if we’d tried. It’s been picked up around the world. If there’s a human being who doesn’t know magic is real by morning, they’re living in a cave somewhere.”

  David winced.

  “We just killed the masquerade, is what you’re telling me,” he said levelly. “What…what happens from here?”

  “I don’t know,” O’Brien admitted. “What I do know? The President and the Committee wanted to send in conventional troops, starting with an air strike from the nearby Air National Guard bases. Your Pendragons had AG-laced munitions and barely even irritated the thing.

  “Proper air strikes would have killed every civilian still alive in the park and probably taken down some of the surrounding buildings and achieved nothing,” the older Commander replied. “It would have taken tanks to bring the troll down, David. And by the t
ime they got tanks through NYC to wage war in Central Park…”

  “A lot of people would have died,” David agreed.

  “Yeah.” O’Brien was silent. “We did what we had to do. You followed my orders, you understand?”

  “Not…entirely,” David admitted.

  “The President and Committee issued a direct order that all Omicron assets in New York State were to stand down and leave this to the Air Force and the Army,” the werewolf said flatly. “You didn’t defy a direct Presidential order, Commander White.

  “I did.”

  He coughed.

  “You’d better get back on the main com channel,” he noted. “We may have carried the day and saved a lot of lives, but unless I miss my guess, the order for my arrest is going to be going out pretty damn quickly now.”

  10

  “Sir, we’re being ordered to divert to a set of coordinates I’ve never seen before,” Akono reported. “They’re about a hundred miles north of Washington, but there’s no listed Omicron facility there.”

  A chill ran down Michael O’Brien’s spine as half a dozen rumors he’d heard over his decades of service came screaming up from the back of his mind. A facility buried in the rural backcountry of Maryland, not listed as an Omicron facility but operated by people who knew all of Omicron’s secrets.

  “Well, set your course,” he ordered. “It wouldn’t do for us to disobey more orders today, would it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Malcolm Akono was an elf, capable of conjuring illusions with weight and strength from something he called “the Dreaming.”

  Right now, he was controlling a duplicate of himself that sat down next to Michael as he changed the Pendragon’s course.

  “And what, exactly, is a hundred miles north of Washington?” Ix asked calmly, the demon exchanging a look with the elf.

  “Nothing I know with certainty,” Michael told them. “Just rumors, dating back to the seventies, around something called Project Seraphim—supposedly an attempt to artificially create soldiers who could go toe-to-toe with supernaturals.”

  He grinned broadly.

  “While I doubt they’ve come up with anything that can take me on one-on-one, I’m sure they’ve got enough of whatever they do have to take me down. They’re not going to rely on me to go quietly.”

  “And are you?” Akono asked. The duplicate was creepy. Even for Michael, who’d known the elf could do it, having two of Akono in his sight was weird and uncomfortable.

  “Oh, hell no,” Michael confirmed cheerfully. “I have no intention of being aboard once you reach that base, gentlemen.” He shrugged. “I apologize for the situation that leaves you in, but…”

  “We appear to be covered by your orders,” Ix pointed out. “Plus, well”—the demon smiled lazily—“I serve your ONSET because I choose to, not because you have any means of forcing me. They do not want to test their methods of coercion on me.”

  “Parachute is under your seat,” Akono reminded him. “You have a plan?”

  “Yeah,” Michael replied. “Always had an exit plan. Ever since I gave the reins over to Ardent.”

  “The Colonel would make an excellent demon,” Ix said. There was no judgment in his tone. That was perhaps damning enough.

  “He’d make a shitty demon,” the werewolf replied. “He makes a shitty human, but he’s good at his job.

  “But his job requires him to obey the Committee and the President, and that means he’s turning on me whether he likes it or not.”

  Michael rose, towering over both of his soon-to-be-ex-subordinates as he stripped off his ONSET body armor and its included computers, augmented reality gear, and GPS trackers. In a few moments, he was nearly naked, only the thick hair on his skin keeping him from shivering in the helicopter’s chilled air.

  “You’re gonna drop into the middle of nowhere in your skivvies?” Akono asked. The elf’s duplicate was happily eating the eye candy of Michael’s undressed form, the werewolf noted with a wry internal smile.

  “I didn’t pack a change of clothes,” Michael replied. “Or a gun that isn’t ONSET’s.”

  He shook his head.

  “Trust me. I have a plan.”

  Ix handed him a parachute and, to Michael’s surprise, a shoulder holster with a matte-black revolver the Commander had never seen before.

  “I, on the other hand, have never fully trusted any of you humans,” the demon said cheerfully. “Six shots, solid silver rounds. Don’t waste them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My debt to you has hardly begun to be repaid,” Ix told him. “Hide well. Fight hard.”

  “I hope not to have to fight at all,” Michael admitted.

  “Good luck with that,” Akono told him dryly. “Now get out of my damn helicopter, Commander.”

  Fifty miles north of the capital, it had probably taken Akono some effort to find a suitably deserted spot to drop his mostly undressed Commander. There was no one around, however, in the farmer’s field where Michael finally hit the ground.

  He quickly shed the parachute, considering his options as he looked around him. For the first time in decades, Michael O’Brien didn’t have a mission, didn’t have a command.

  It was a strange feeling. Stranger still was the certainty that his own government was going to be sending people after him. If he’d thought for a moment he was going to get a fair hearing, he’d turn himself in, but the moment he’d learned he was being sent to the Seraphim, he’d known that wasn’t happening.

  He had a safe house in Washington, a property owned through a nest of shell companies and run by a property management company with instructions to keep a particular apartment empty but maintained and furnished. It had been self-funding since, oh, nineteen-ninety or so, but he’d kept in touch and knew it was there.

  He just had to cross fifty miles of farmland and suburb to get there, without being intercepted, starting with his underwear and a revolver.

  Fortunately for his dignity, Michael didn’t need to try and cross those miles as a human. With a bit of focused concentration, he didn’t even have to turn into the massive wolf he normally took.

  Hiding the parachute in a pile of mulch on the edge of the field, Michael O’Brien knelt in the dirt and channeled energy.

  A few minutes later, a midsized golden retriever smiled doggishly and set out for Washington, DC.

  11

  Morning came with a changing world. David sat in the mess hall in the underground New York facility with Mason and their people, and watched the news explode.

  Stone was up and moving around now, the big Empowered looking more shattered than disappointed he’d missed the previous night’s activities. The rest of the teams were settled in as well, seven supernaturals watching what might as well have been the end of the world.

  “So far, no one has been willing to come forward with any kind of identification for the rock creatures that swarmed Central Park last night,” the CNN reporter told her audience breathlessly. “Equally, no one has taken responsibility for the black helicopters and combatants that came to the rescue of the March for Truth.

  “Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to find any evidence of special effects or trickery, leaving us at CNN with no choice but to admit that we have live recordings of what appears to be a supernatural battle in New York.

  “With independent verification from three media agencies and a dozen independent YouTubers and bloggers who were present or had drones in the area, we find ourselves in a strange new world this morning: one where we have solid evidence that magic and monsters exist.”

  The reporter ran out of breath and stopped for a moment, looking like she’d rushed through the report because she couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. On the screen behind her, David got to watch himself jump into the troll’s mouth with a flaming sword.

  He’d been there, and he was looking for the CGI artifacts.

  “An emergency meeting of Congress has been called this morning, with
both the Senate and the House demanding answers from the US government about how much they knew—and if the strange black-clad people who saved New York are officers of the United States or vigilantes of some kind.

  “Anticipating potential riots and panic, the Governor has called out the National Guard and the NYPD is patrolling the streets in strength. No such incidents have been reported yet.”

  David flipped the channel, bringing up BBC’s coverage. Instead of New York, the British news network was showing a heaving sea of humanity marching on the UK Parliament with crudely assembled banners.

  “Protests in the aftermath of the revelations of the New York Incident continue as the afternoon draws on here in London,” the reporter told them in clipped Received Pronunciation tones. “The British public is demanding to know how much Her Majesty’s Government knew prior to these revelations—and if Her Majesty’s Government was aware of the supernatural, just what were they doing with that knowledge?”

  “Turn it off,” Mason said. David obeyed.

  “You’ve all seen the news feeds online, too,” the blonde ONSET Commander told them all. “Across the world, people are waking knowing that the supernatural actually exists. That magic is real. That myths have truth to them.

  “And most damaging of all, that people like us exist,” Mason concluded grimly. “Most of the Western nations have some kind of supernatural branch and police force that they never admitted to. That’s all going to get dragged out into the open now, kicking and screaming.”

  “We’re going to be in the middle of it,” David reminded them. “The problem is that we’re also in the middle of the biggest spike in supernatural incidents we’ve ever seen, so guess what our part in all of this is?”

  “Keep doing the job?” Stone told them in his oddly pitched voice, his hand touching the scar at his throat.

  “Exactly. No matter what,” David said. “We swore an oath; we took a side. We knew everything was being kept secret for half a dozen reasons—now that secrecy is fragmenting, but we still have a job to do.