Cairn recalled the nightmare after she’d willingly dosed herself with Nocturne—confronting Phobetor, then sliding into the depths while crucified to that dead whale. She’d willingly stepped into the dream world hoping that the nightmare god’s subconscious would reveal an important clue to his sinister plans. At the time, she’d believed she had emerged from that dream empty-handed.
Cairn had been so fixated on the gruesome corpse of her mother that she hadn’t paid enough attention to her surroundings. She’d assumed the dark ashes floating around her had been cremated remains.
But Vulcan had been the one to realize the truth:
It had been tea cascading around her.
Until now, she’d assumed it was just a symbolic indication that Columbia and Phobetor’s attack would happen today, at the reenactment.
But what if the tea had been more than just a symbol?
What if it had been a weapon?
On the deck of the Eleanor, Ra had suddenly grown quite still. With the camera zoomed in on him, Cairn immediately recognized the absent gaze of someone in the clutches of Nocturne. The champagne flute slipped from his fingers as the drug leeched into his system. His features went slack and his glazed eyes stared unseeingly off over the water.
His wife, who had been holding a tea chest for a photo op, stepped up beside him after he dropped his glass. “Ra?” Madison touched his arm. “Ramsay, what’s wrong?”
But he didn’t seem to hear her. “We are the torch that will ignite this revolution,” he announced into the microphone, speaking to an invisible militia. “But first, we must rain fire down on the Redcoat scum.”
As rumbles of confusion passed through the crowd, Cairn fought her way over to an on-duty police officer. She seized him by the arm. “Officer,” she pleaded. “You have to get everyone away from the—”
But she never finished her sentence.
Because across the bay, Ra had climbed onto the gunwale of the boat. He spread his arms and dropped face-first into the water below.
The audience around Cairn laughed, assuming it was some kind of drunken stunt to entertain the crowd.
Beneath the surface of the water, Ra’s dark form ignited, basking the bay in an orange glow.
And when his flames came into contact with the incendiary powder Phobetor had swapped with the tea, it exploded.
A gale of hot air hit Cairn, even from a hundred feet away. Screams erupted as the explosion rocked the Seaport.
The blast ruptured the hull of the Eleanor and sent the reenactors standing closest to the bulwark flying back. With a groan, the ship began to list to the leeward side, ripping free of its moorings. As the schooner sank, some of the passengers jumped ship, while others scrambled to help those who’d been maimed or rendered unconscious by the detonation.
It took mere seconds for chaos to seize the hordes of spectators along the channel. A tsunami of terrified bystanders enveloped Cairn. Ahead of her, she watched as the stampede knocked a young man over the guardrails and into the water. Others were trampled in the process. A police whistle shrilled as first responders struggled to contain the panic and muscle through the current of civilians, toward the site of the blast.
Cairn felt briefly paralyzed, torn between running to the aid of those in need, or in the opposite direction toward the Coconut Grove.
In the end, she knew that she had to get to Delphine because if the vision Themis had shown her was true—
Then the worst of the Liberty Day attacks was yet to follow.
Cairn barreled through the onslaught of fleeing bystanders, fighting against the current and the snow-laden winds, until with a gasp of relief, she arrived at the front doors of the Coconut Grove building.
Unbeknownst to her, across the channel from the smoldering wreck of the Eleanor, a fiery hand shot out of the water.
The Tea Party, Part II
Inside the building’s lobby, Cairn quickly made an unsettling discovery: Someone had disabled the skyscraper elevators. Left with no alternative, she raced up the tower’s thirty stories of stairs.
Cairn hurdled up the final flights, hands gripping the railing to propel herself upward even as her heart pounded in her chest and her legs threatened to give out beneath her.
At last, she arrived at the top floor and burst through the rosewood doors into the Coconut Grove. At the far end of the club, past the palm trees and dinner tables, Delphine stood on the stage in front of the microphone, preparing to sing as the opening bars to a Christmas tune played.
Several camera operators and a sound crew had set up at various points around the club. A full audience watched, entranced—they must have confused the explosion outside for fireworks, if they’d heard it at all, because no one seemed interested in anything except for Delphine.
A man hissed at Cairn to sit down as she edged down one of the aisles, but she ignored him. Her initial thought was that maybe she’d overreacted—maybe Delphine wasn’t in danger at all. Maybe Ra’s explosion down at the water had been the only attack planned for today.
However, as she crept closer to the stage, she saw the very thing she’d feared: the vacant, dreamy film over Delphine’s eyes.
She was in Phobetor’s clutches now.
As Delphine began to sing, her voice took on a new edge—Cairn felt its powerful pull tugging at the seams of her own consciousness. She felt a fog settling in over her brain and momentarily forgot what it was she had come to the nightclub to do.
But it wasn’t Cairn that Delphine was singing to this time. Nor was she was singing to the other audience members, who were equally entranced, practically crawling over their tables to get closer to her soul-stirring melody.
“Full many a bird did wake and fly,” she sang, “Curoo, curoo, curoo …”
She had turned her back to the audience to face the impressive windows spanning the back of the stage. Fireworks had erupted over the harbor, as the blaze from the explosion ignited the fuses meant for the block party’s grand finale. A dizzying array of red, white, and blue crackled against the dusk sky, and the club patrons applauded wildly, assuming the display was part of Delphine’s show.
High above, a plane finalizing its descent into Boston’s Logan Airport started to bank in an unauthorized turn.
“To the manger bed with a wandering cry,” Delphine sang, “on Christmas day in the morning. Curoo, curoo, curoo …”
At the same time, a dark shape materialized between two palm trees on the opposite side of the club. The shapeless blot coalesced into a humanoid form—
Crimson armor.
Slender, gleaming sword.
A determined but victorious smile beneath a war helmet.
Columbia had arrived.
On the opposite bank of the Fort Point Channel, a flaming hand emerged from the water and grabbed the railing. Onlookers in a grassy park watched through a billow of steam as Ra climbed out of the waterway. A corona of fire coursed around his body, burning off the last vestiges of his suit. With each slow, deliberate step, he left a trail of footprints charred into the grass.
“I will liquefy your bones,” he bellowed.
As the civilians screamed and fled, a police cruiser jumped the curb, followed by another. Four officers quickly exited the vehicle and took defensive positions as they trained their guns on the burning senator.
One of them bravely approached him. “Senator Ra,” he said. “I’m going to need you to extinguish yourself and come with—”
With a sweep of his hand, Ra unleashed a burst of fire that ignited the officer’s uniform. He screamed and sprinted toward the waterway, diving in to extinguish himself.
The other three officers immediately opened fire—or tried to. As they pulled the triggers of their Glocks, nothing happened. One of the guns ruptured, the top of the chamber blowing off as it misfired, and its owner dropped it with a yell.
Unbeknownst to them, the metallurgy god Ogun had been sleepwalking through the crowd prior to the attack, stealthily melting th
e cartridges inside of their magazines as he passed each officer.
In just half an hour, he had neutralized the weapons of every police officer patrolling the Seaport.
“Naughty, naughty,” Ra said.
Then he hurled a fireball at the nearest cruiser.
Cairn spotted Columbia across the club, slowly stalking toward Delphine. So this had been her plan all along. Phobetor would manipulate Delphine into playing the role of terrorist, and Columbia would sweep in at the final moment to kill her—all before a live studio audience and a recording crew.
Columbia was closer to Delphine than Cairn was, so in that moment, Cairn did the only thing she could think of.
“Bomb!” she screamed, loud enough to be heard over Delphine’s singing. “There’s a bomb under the stage!”
The club erupted into a frenzy. Diners who had been lulled by the spell of Delphine’s voice snapped out of it and stampeded for the stairs.
Columbia, who had been standing in one of the aisles, was immediately swallowed by a tide of concertgoers plowing toward the emergency exit. She froze, watching the plan she’d been developing for months, dissolve in the blink of an eye. There would be no crowd to watch her defeat the siren, no cameramen to film her well-timed foil of what could have been the city’s most devastating attack in its four-hundred-year history. With a growl of frustration, she shoved her way through the river of concertgoers.
Cairn leaped from table to table to avoid the mass exodus. Outside, the commercial airliner was rapidly descending on the skyscraper, growing larger in the window.
At the same time, Columbia emerged from the last of the fleeing crowd and climbed onto the stage. She drew the sword from her scabbard. She spied a camera on a tripod, still recording. There was still time to salvage this, for the world to see her save Boston from the murderous Mami Wata.
Too distracted by the task at hand, Columbia was blindsided when Cairn slammed into her. The blow sent Columbia crashing back into the piano.
Cairn changed course, this time lunging for Delphine. She slipped the syringe into her girlfriend’s neck and expelled the contents.
With a loud gasp, Delphine abruptly stopped singing. Her eyes bulged and for a moment her lucid yet confused gaze landed on Cairn. Then her eyes rolled back into her head, and she collapsed, unconscious. Cairn caught her as she went down.
Through the window, she watched as the 737 started to pull up out of its downward course—with Delphine unconscious, the pilots emerged from her broken spell and attempted to reroute.
Horrified, Cairn realized that their trajectory wasn’t correcting fast enough. The skyscraper shook and the scream of the jet engines crescendoed.
Cairn shielded Delphine’s body with her own, closed her eyes, and fiercely whispered “I love you” into her ear. At least they would leave this world together.
Then a miracle: the plane corrected skyward just enough that it passed mere feet over the Coconut Grove. The dome shattered overhead under the assault from the jet engine’s high-velocity exhaust. Cairn clutched Delphine closer as the turbine winds rushed around them, whipping shards past like thrown knives and threatening to blow them out one of the holes in the floor-to-ceiling windows.
When the gales relented, Cairn finally opened her eyes and watched the 737 sail back up into the sky. Its turbines had torn the nightclub asunder, flattening palm trees and scattering tables and chairs as if they were dollhouse furniture.
Cairn shook Delphine, whose eyes were still closed. “Wake up,” she urged her. “Come on, baby, I need you to wake up.”
But Delphine remained unconscious, her breathing shallow. The exertion of using her powers after years of repressing them must have taken a lot out of her, and the trauma of the serum shutting them down again would have sapped the rest.
Across the stage, Columbia grabbed onto the piano to pull herself to her feet. Through the holes in her helmet, her furious eyes simmered like two burning coals. “You little bitch,” she snarled. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Cairn planted herself between Columbia and Delphine. “Prevented a fraud from murdering an innocent girl so she could live out her deranged fantasy of being a superhero?”
Columbia laughed hoarsely. “Just like your mother—Arctic brine flowing through your veins, yet only capable of seeing the tip of the iceberg.” Her voice was familiar, but Cairn couldn’t quite place it in her memory.
“All I see right now is the same sad little girl from that island, Aether,” Cairn replied. “Nineteen years and you’re still just running from your daddy issues.”
With a cry of rage, Columbia flung herself forward. Even without teleporting, she was lightning fast. She brought her saber up with two hands, poised to split Cairn nose to belly.
Cairn seized the padded piano stool and raised it over her head as the sword came down. The blade clanged against the stool’s metal legs, and the impact rattled Cairn to the core.
Columbia recovered quickly, maneuvering the saber around for a thrust. Cairn lowered the stool like a shield to intercept the blow. The tip of the saber punctured through the cushion, parting the leather casing and stuffing as if it were butter. The glinting point stopped mere inches from Cairn’s face.
With a savage twist, Cairn used the stool to wrench the blade out of Columbia’s fingers, then hurled it aside. Before she could celebrate, one of Columbia’s gauntlets cuffed her across the skull, stunning her. She felt herself being lifted off the ground, and then she was sailing through the air, off into one of the VIP booths.
The wooden table buckled as she landed on it. As she struggled to get up, Columbia advanced toward her. The woman had scooped up a broken wine glass, the sharp stem of it glinting between her fingers. She glanced back at Delphine, who still lay unmoving on the stage. “While you bleed out, you can watch me throw Sleeping Beauty out the window.” Columbia lunged for Cairn.
She only made it partway. As she aimed the glass stem for Cairn’s jugular, her eyes suddenly grew wide as they shifted focus from her prey to the shadows beside the booth. She didn’t have time to teleport away as the hulking, white-furred arm of a polar bear arced around and struck her full-tilt across the face. The jarring blow sent her reeling back, knocking her war helmet clean off. It spun across the floor like a top.
Nook stepped in front of Cairn, lodged somewhere between human and bear form, a feral hybrid of the two. “Stay away from my cub!” he roared.
A now helmet-less Columbia staggered to her feet. And when she swept aside the matted blonde hair to reveal her face, Cairn couldn’t contain her surprise.
Madison Ra, the senator’s wife, glowered back at them.
The Tea Party, Part III
Madison touched the single claw mark that had scored a red line along the porcelain skin of her jaw. She leveled her bloody finger at Nook. “That wasn’t very nice, hairball. Do you know how much foundation it’s going to take to cover this up?”
Cairn felt paralyzed. This was the child from Sable Noir, the author of her mother's doom? “Why?” she couldn’t help but ask. “I read the journals. My mother looked out for you on that island. And you killed her for what? Because you were bored with your charmed, socialite existence, and she was standing in the way of you satisfying your fucked-up hero complex?”
“I wouldn’t expect a mortal to understand, but you …” Madison turned to Nook, beseeching. “I know deep down you get it. You and I are relics of an ancient time, once revered, yet now forced to walk the earth as billions abandon religion for the only truths they know: money, alcohol, glowing screens. So we have to change with the times and find modern avenues for being worshiped. Celebrity. Power. And when those fools elect me to office, I could use a man of your talents at my side. Chief of security one day, secret service the next. How does that sound?”
“I’d rather chew off my other arm,” Nook replied.
Madison’s smile dripped with venom. “Lucky for you, I have allies that can arrange that.”
>
As Nook eased back into completely human form, his hand hovered over the holster at his hip. If he drew too quickly, he risked scaring Madison into teleporting away. She was a danger to them so long as she lived, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake he had on Brewster Island when he tried to take Phobetor alive.
Cairn picked up a steak knife from the nearest table and circled around until she had protectively placed herself over Delphine.
Madison’s eyes flicked between Nook and Cairn, calculating what it would take to kill them both and whether she could teleport faster than Nook could draw his weapon.
“The world is going to know what you’ve done,” Cairn promised. “Your legacy will be as the terrorist people talked about for a hot minute before they forgot all about you.”
Madison scooped her helmet off the ground, slowly so as not to draw fire from Nook. “Who do you think the world will believe? The girlfriend of a siren who tried to down a commercial airliner? A disgraced cop? Or the hero who stopped the crime he couldn’t?”
Deep down, Cairn knew that Madison’s words were true. If only they could provide some kind of proof ... Her eyes landed on the camera lying in the aisle. Its tripod had tipped over during the brush with the plane, but the recording light still glowed.
Madison seemed to read her mind. “Oh, did you think it was a coincidence those producers picked today to record? All that footage has been streaming directly to my private server. It was supposed to be a nice highlight reel of me slaying a dangerous siren, delivered in time for the nightly news. Now, with some creative editing, you’ll both look like you were trying to aid and abet our darling canary.”
Cairn had reached her limit. “Nook, shoot this downmarket Statue of Liberty.”
Outside, a second boom echoed from the streets below. Madison’s muscles relaxed and she exhaled a breath of resignation. “Duty calls.”
This Eternity of Masks and Shadows Page 24
