Demons of Divinity

by Luke R. Mitchell

  So instead I asked myself: what would Carlisle do? He’d left me in his place, right? So what would he do if it were him here?

  I was already turning for the lifts when Dillard rounded back on me.

  “You want to help, Raish? Get your ass back in line and—Hey!”

  I was almost as surprised as Dillard sounded to find myself dodging past his reach and darting for one of the open lifts. They had it under control down here. I believed that. But up there… Parker get away. I couldn’t let him.

  One legionnaire tried to stop me at the lift doors, but I twisted outside his grab with the help of a light telekinetic nudge. As an afterthought, I tugged off my cloaking pendant and tossed it at him when he turned to give chase. “Tell Dillard to keep that with him.”

  His moment of surprised indecision was all I needed to slip into the lift car and jab the door controls. The door started sliding shut, and I was about to let out a tense breath when something slammed into it, halting its progress.

  Johnny appeared a second later, prying his way into the lift car with red cheeks to match his hair. “What the scud are you thinking, Hal?”

  “What are you thinking?” I shot back, jamming the button for the tenth floor button as soon as he scooted through and hoping my rooftop getaway assumption wasn’t faulty.

  The lift’s rapid upward acceleration didn’t settle my churning stomach any more than did the open defiance twisting across Johnny’s face.

  “I’m thinking you’re not going alone, you crazy bastard.”

  “You’re also defying orders.”

  “What orders?” A very Johnny grin split his face. “Dillard told you to stop, not me. The way I see it, I’m pursuing a rogue civie.” The grin died. “And a dangerous softsteel sipping one at that.”

  He looked upward as if he could see through the steel, straight up to the fight we might be walking into, then he busied himself with reloading his rifle and sidearm. I followed his lead.

  “So,” he said, slamming a fresh feeder home, “did you have a plan, orrr…?”

  I paused mid-reload to look at him, and suddenly all I could see was Alton Parker standing over his broken body, sneering at me with those glowing red eyes. Just as Al’Kundesha had done when he’d murdered my parents. Just as Zar’Faenor had looked at me when he’d plunged his scaly fist through Carlisle’s intestines.

  Cold dread quenched hot, tingling nerves, filling me with an equally cold certainty. I slid a fresh slug feeder into my handgun.

  “Hal?”

  The lift began to slow.

  “Hal…”

  I’m pretty sure he saw what I was about to do, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t face Alton with Johnny at my side.

  “Stay safe, buddy,” I said. Then I darted out of the lift car and into the richly adorned executive floor.

  Johnny lunged for the door after me, but I caught him with telekinesis and pinned him to the back of the lift.

  He struggled as I reached in and pressed every button from the fifth floor down. “Dammit, man, don’t do this! Hal… Hal!”

  I let the lift doors close, listening to Johnny cursing my name until he disappeared from view. He was going to be furious with me. But at least he’d be alive. It was enough for now.

  I drew my mental defenses tighter, sweeping out with my senses.

  I didn’t have to look far. The presence of a raknoth mind was unmistakable, like a roaring bonfire in the dead of night. I withdrew, tightening my defenses further before he could try to get in my head. I’d forgotten just how damned powerful the raknoth felt in my senses—how powerful they were in mind and body. It was more than a little terrifying.

  But Alton Parker had to be stopped.

  For Enochia. For Elise.

  My fingers clenched, the crack of knuckles crisp in the eerie silence.

  For Carlisle. For my parents.

  Holding that thought firmly in mind, I started for the stairwell that would take me to the monster.

  7

  Payback

  Alton Parker watched me with the air of a bored wolf as I emerged onto the rooftop. He wasn’t surprised to see me. But why would he be? I wasn’t a raknoth, but my uncloaked telepathic presence would’ve been hard for him to miss approaching. And he’d clearly been waiting for me.

  “I was hoping you might join me,” he called. “I suppose it’s the least you could do after bringing your meddlesome humans to wreck my facility.”

  It chilled me, the way he kept addressing me as if I weren’t one of them. I thought about telling him to grop himself—that this facility was only the beginning and that I was going to dismantle his entire world piece by piece. Instead, I raised my gun and put three slugs in his chest.

  He didn’t even try to move. Just took the three rounds to the chest and staggered back a step. It was only then I noticed the legionnaire lying further back on the rooftop, neatly tied up beside a sleek black skimmer that must’ve been Alton’s. I didn’t have time to worry about it as Alton calmly straightened out his perforated jacket, patches of scaly green creeping out from under his collar and sleeves—the beginnings of the reactive shift into his true monstrous form.

  “Are you done?” he asked.

  “I’ll be done when I put one of these slugs through your eye and into that slimy brain-jacking blob you call a body.”

  He arched a suave dark eyebrow, crimson eyes pulsing brighter as if daring me to try. In truth, I had no idea if his eyes were any more vulnerable to small arms fire than the rest of his body, but in the considerable time I’d spent thinking about how to kill a raknoth, it always seemed the best place to start.

  I was thinking about giving it a try when Alton broke the silence.

  “I was sorry to see your late friend go, Haldin. He was… interesting.” He frowned. “Far more interesting than that lot downstairs.”

  It was all I needed. I took aim at the son of a bitch and kept pulling the trigger until the sidearm was empty. Alton kept his face covered throughout the assault, then threw his hands wide with an aggravated growl when I was empty, flexing freshly-sprouted claws, his eyes burning with crimson rage.

  I was already hurling my empty sidearm at his scaly green face and drawing my second dagger to charge.

  I expected him to lunge straight for me in kind. Instead, he plunged a hand into his pocket and yanked out a small cylindrical device. I faltered, uncertain. Then, with a clawed thumb, he flicked the cap aside to reveal a tiny red button. The kind that looked like it was meant for nothing good.

  A detonator.

  “Did you say goodbye to them, Haldin?”

  I squeezed Carlisle’s daggers, tensed to the exploding point. He was baiting me. He had to be. It’s what Alton Parker did.

  He cocked his reptilian head, like he could smell my uncertainty. “Did you not stop to wonder why I fled an engagement I easily could have won beside my children?”

  That was exactly what I’d wondered, and he knew it.

  “I was wondering if you’d come out of your shell long enough to catch my trickery here with those Viper Company fools.” He bared glistening fangs. “And now that you have though, well…” He waved a hand as if to convey the obvious. “This facility has expired its usefulness. Time to deconstruct and move on.”

  “Bullscud. You’d never…”

  He gave a humorless chuckle. “Do you know how obscenely easy it is to build places like this when we can bend their wills like copper wire? Defending a known location isn’t worth the effort.” He waved the detonator. “Which is why I had the lab rigged with explosives, for exactly this contingency. So nice of you to bring a full company for the occasion.”

  My mouth was too dry to swallow. “You’re lying.”

  Thirty-some legionnaires down there, fighting for their lives. Johnny headed there right this moment. All because of me. All about to die because of me. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t process the next steam of words I vaguely noticed growling out of Alton’s mouth.
/>   All I could see was the legionnaire tied up behind him, wild-eyed, kicking and screaming through his gag for his brothers and sisters below.

  I was springing forward before I knew it, throwing my mind out, latching onto the detonator to yank it free. I had to stop him. Couldn’t let them die. Not again. But Alton’s grip was raknoth strong, and he was ready for my trick.

  “Stop!” he snapped, holding the detonator firm.

  I threw a dagger, using telekinesis to propel it like a pulse gun, straight for one of his glowing eyes, at the same time reaching for the detonator button, desperate to lock it in place against his falling finger.

  Too late.

  I’m not sure how it happened. Maybe it was a flick of Alton’s focus. Maybe it was the back of my brain catching up on exactly where the gagged soldier’s wide eyes had been fixed.

  Time slowed.

  My senses brushed against the blinding-bright brick of chemical energy a few yards to my right, and I had just enough time to understand that Alton Parker had tricked me again. Just enough time to throw out a helpless hand in defense. Then his thumb hit the switch.

  It was like Alpha himself had reached down to smack me with a fiery hand.

  Flames everywhere, then I was rocketing through a wild blur of pain and motion, too fast to comprehend. I must’ve passed out momentarily, because next I knew, I wasn’t looking at the rooftop, but at Vantage’s high perimeter wall.

  Plummeting straight for it like a human rocket.

  Some blessed part of my mind managed to get a grip and pull up on my flight with telekinesis. Someone was screaming. Me, I realized. I cleared the top of the wall by bare inches, almost flying level, and my control slipped. The ground leapt up far too quickly. I channeled off one more hard pull of deadly velocity.

  Then I hit.

  I lost count of revolutions and bounces, skipping across grass and dirt like a pebble on water. There was no controlling it. When the world finally stopped spinning, a weak turn of my ringing head showed I lay a good thirty yards outside the perimeter wall I’d narrowly avoided becoming a permanent piece of.

  For a few seconds, I was too overloaded to register anything more than that and the fact that I was still alive. Then the pain washed in past the shock, flowing through my body like liquid to a mold. Everything hurt. Everything. And the high, flat tone ringing through my head made me wonder if maybe my brain hadn’t been liquefied on impact.

  Impact?

  Maybe it had, because I couldn’t quite seem to string together what the scud had just happened.

  Impact. Hot, flaming, hand-of-Alpha impact.

  A bomb.

  Alton Parker’s bomb. I’d been charging at him, and then…

  The detonator.

  I tried to sit up and groaned at the effort.

  “Johnny…” The word came out as a raw croak.

  Sweet Alpha, the entire team. Hound Company.

  Had they all gone up in flames with the press of that button?

  I rolled over and vomited into the scraggly yellow grass, the convulsions sending fresh waves of agony through my everything. My heart was hammering, each beat setting the right side of my head awash with fire. Burns? Wouldn’t exactly be a surprise.

  When I was sure I wouldn’t asphyxiate, I rolled back over—just in time to see Alton Parker’s sleek black skimmer sailing by overhead, bound in the rough direction of Divinity.

  The treacherous son of a bitch.

  I wasn’t sure how long I laid there staring numbly at the sky, the right side of my head steadily burning like it was still caught back in the blast. My body sneered at the thought of moving, whispering to me of the ground’s soft comfort and how the pain would only double—quadruple even—if I worked up the audacity to try to move again.

  But I needed to get up. Needed to see what had happened. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, or that I was ready to handle what I might find. But I needed to know.

  Had it happened again?

  Had I led them all straight to death at the hands of the raknoth?

  I closed my eyes, and Johnny’s face was waiting in the darkness, etched with the anger and the betrayal of that final moment before the mag lift door had snapped shut to send him back below. Back to where…

  “Alpha please, no,” I whispered.

  I couldn’t push the thought away. Couldn’t stop seeing that moment. Then something gave, and it was the entirety of Hound Company in my head, bravely fighting one moment only to die screaming, consumed by fire, the next.

  “No,” I groaned, jerkily shaking my head.

  I couldn’t believe it. It was too much.

  Alton Parker might have blown my ass halfway to Alpha’s waiting arms, but he was also a liar. Johnny and the others could still be all right. They had to be.

  I gritted my teeth and sat up through a fresh wave of pain.

  “No,” I repeated, my voice stronger this time.

  I got my legs under me, moving through the pain as best I could.

  They were going to be all right. Had to be.

  It nearly fell my first couple tries, but eventually I made it back to my feet. I appeared to be on the eastern side of the facility, so I turned left for the front gate and slowly, painstakingly, sidled forward.

  I’d made it about twenty feet when my palmlight buzzed. My left leg buckled at the surprise, and I went down to a knee. I was too occupied with my palmlight to care.

  Please. Please.

  Over my shaking fingers, the display lit with a new message. I read the name on the message three times, just to be sure.

  Johnathan Wingard.

  I puffed out a jubilant gust of air and gestured the message open.

 

  I looked around stupidly for a second. Just as my explosion-addled brain caught on, my earpiece crackled with Johnny’s voice.

  “Up here, steel sipper.”

  And there he was, a tiny figure peering down from the rooftop I’d been violently ejected from. Another legionnaire was beside him—maybe the one I hoped to Alpha Alton had left safely bound up there. My head spun a little as I processed just how damn far I’d flown.

  “Johnny…” My voice almost failed me. “Thank Alpha.” I pulled myself back to my feet. “The others—”

  “They’re fine,” Johnny said, sounding a lot less touched than I felt. “They did their jobs and watched each other’s backs.”

  I was opening my mouth to explain what I’d been afraid had happened to them when his words properly clicked in my mind.

  I paused. “Johnny, I—”

  “Are you badly hurt down there?”

  “I’ve been better. Feels like I’ve got some burns and all, bu—”

  “Are you able to make it to the main gate?”

  “Yeah, I think—”

  “Then have a nice walk, buddy.”

  I checked my palmlight to confirm what the click in my earpiece had already told me. He’d killed the line. And when I looked up, Johnny’s distant figure had disappeared from the rooftop edge.

  As quickly as my elation had come, it was gone. Had I messed up that badly? In all the years I’d known him, I could probably count on my fingers alone the number of times I’d seen Johnny properly pissed. He’d never just stormed off. Until now, at least.

  I stood there in the dying grass, head burning, shaking with the pain and the residual shock, staring numbly at the empty rooftop.

  At least Johnny was still alive. If he’d been up there with me when Parker had sprung his trap… There was no way I could’ve kept us both alive, was there? I’d barely managed for myself.

  But that wasn’t what he was upset about, was it? He was pissed I hadn’t trusted him to hold his own and watch my back up there. But what was I supposed to do, let him die so he could feel like a valued member of the team?

  I couldn’t say why, but in that moment, I missed Carlisle more than I had since I’d lost him. The grief crashed down on me with violent force
, a deep, longing ache in my chest that nearly drove me to my knees. The ache ascended to the back of my throat, bringing tears I didn’t bother fighting. I trudged on, letting them stream freely down my cheeks, until the first heaving sob took hold of my body and dropped me to my knees. I reveled in the pain each movement jolted through my body. Cried until my eyes ran dry and my sobs went hoarse.

  Then I blew out a long sigh and pulled myself to my feet. The burning on my head was getting worse. I probably needed to have it looked at—not to mention to find out what was happening inside. It was only then my mind caught up enough to remind me that Dillard was probably going to have my crispy skin on a platter for the way I’d run off.

  All in all, it had been a pretty scuddy day, I decided. But I began my slow, limping plod to the main gate, holding three positive thoughts firmly in mind.

  Johnny was alive.

  Hound Company hadn’t died horribly in an underground explosion.

  And when I found Alton Parker, raknoth hide be damned, I was going to beat him bloody.

  8

  Lost & Found

  By the time I reached the front gate of the Vantage compound, the burning on the side of my head had grown to severely aggravating. At least the reinforcements had begun arriving—four more Legion transports followed shortly by four bulky white skimmers bearing the open red hand insignia of the medica. They all landed in the perimeter yard near our transports and disembarked straight to work.

  A quiver of trepidation passed through my gut when I spotted Dillard emerging from the main building, but I started limping his way, sure it was better to face any repercussions head on. It wasn’t like he could discharge me for insubordination down there, seeing as I was already a civie, but I doubted he was going to be happy.

  He either ignored my approach or didn’t notice it, busy as he was speaking with the ordos of the new arrivals—Boar and Bear Company of the fifty-first legion, I gathered from their transports. Most of the fresh legionnaires began hustling into the facility, trailed closely by all the medics, who were heavily armed with first aid kits and compact stretchers.