Lonesome Paladin

by S. M. Reine

  He’d been away from Suzy too long, clearly. She was more than Cèsar’s girlfriend and sexual outlet. She was also his sanity. She’d have smacked him where it hurt if she saw him ogling Agent Rodes.

  Cèsar lingered by the table where they offered water bottles, grabbing one for himself while keeping a casual eye on Lincoln.

  The former deputy had found a mat in the middle of the room. He was stuck between a group of young teenagers—kids, really, who didn’t have parents as far as Cèsar could tell. They’d been detained at Wooster for a week.

  Cèsar especially didn’t like the idea of Lincoln around kids.

  There was a universe of possibilities surrounding Lincoln’s origins. He’d survived Northgate, after all. And werewolves weren’t the only thing that came out of Northgate.

  For generations before Genesis, Northgate had been home to a cult that quietly worshipped demons via human sacrifice. Grove County had never been populous, but it had always been sick—up until the werewolf Alpha claimed it as her home.

  Lincoln fit into that somewhere, and Cèsar didn’t know where.

  Now he was fitting in here.

  Agent Rodes approached Lincoln with a welcome basket, which was a not-terribly-humorous name for a water bottle, blanket, and bag of chips. The detainee took them with a small smile, which must have hurt his torn lip. He exchanged words with Agent Rodes. She pointed at the bathrooms, then left.

  Lincoln spoke quietly to the teenagers, who ringed around him with threatening posture. Those kids were punks. They liked to bother the new detainees.

  They didn’t know that Lincoln was different.

  Whatever passed between them didn’t appear to be hostile. After a minute, Lincoln handed his water bottle to one of the girls. He gave his blanket to one of the boys. Then he kicked back, using his arms as a pillow, and stared at the ceiling.

  The kids were warmer, and Lincoln was quiet.

  “Nice guy,” remarked Agent Idañez, who was guarding the opposite door. “Where’d you find that one?”

  “Apparently he got his teeth kicked out in an alley,” Cèsar said, hooking his hands in his pockets. “After curfew.”

  Idañez gave a low whistle. “And now he gets to spend the night here, poor guy. Tell me Edie put his teeth back in.”

  “Yeah, he got lucky.”

  “Aren’t you here kind of late?” Idañez asked. “Even for you, I mean.”

  Cèsar had been pulling sixteen-hour days while getting OPA facilities prepared for the official launch. He’d have gone longer if Fritz had permitted it, but the secretary had capped the weekly hours any employee could clock for their own safety.

  Fritz had made it clear that the rules didn’t exclude Cèsar. He’d worked eighteen hours that day, and he was going to have to fudge his time sheet to get out of a lecture from his old friend and partner.

  “I’ve just gotta finish up the night’s paperwork before I get out of here,” Cèsar said. “See you tomorrow.”

  The paperwork waiting in his broom closet office didn’t take long. He added a few items to a to-do list that he wouldn’t be in town to complete. Tomorrow Cèsar would join Fritz in Sacramento, and it’d be up to agents like Idañez and pretty little Rodes to see that everything got executed to plan.

  Once he was done with the to-do list, he only needed to sign off on orders for the current detainees. They had a few older, obviously ill people who didn’t belong in “jail”; he ordered their release into the custody of Social Services’s new preternatural unit. A pair of men who only spoke Spanish needed to be put in touch with pro bono lawyers who were bilingual.

  And then there were those teenagers. They wouldn’t get lawyers or a release. They needed to be transferred to a hospital, and then probably a state-run school, so they would stop breaking into convenience stores to steal the basics.

  Plus Lincoln Marshall.

  Edie had left a note. “Instructions for LM?” Her handwriting was no-nonsense, so clean it could have been produced by a computer.

  “Shit,” Cèsar muttered, rubbing a hand over his upper lip.

  Lincoln needed to be watched. Cèsar trusted his gut on this.

  But there wasn’t any evidence to support punishing the former deputy. Lincoln had given his blanket away immediately, draping it over the shoulders of a scrawny Mexican kid who’d smiled for the first time in days. He hadn’t fought with OPA staff once. Didn’t even mouth off.

  All evidence showed he was harmless. Just a curfew breaker.

  “You better not make me regret this, deputy,” Cèsar said.

  He added “release Lincoln Marshall at sunrise” to his list, filed it away, and headed to the motel to sleep.

  CHAPTER 3

  Cèsar slept in a motel. He dreamed of the Genesis Void closing in on him, as he always did. As everyone did now.

  He woke up on a mattress that smelled like mildew, brushed his teeth without toothpaste, and shook out his suit before putting it back on.

  An escort was waiting for him in the morning. The austere black-clad agents wore sunglasses against the blazing-yellow shards of Nevada sunrise. They greeted him with humorless nods, loaded Cèsar in the car, and took him back to work.

  “How’d things go last night?” Cèsar asked Agent Rodes when he arrived. She was just ending her shift, and her top button was undone so her collar framed the hollow of her throat. It was the first hint of informality he’d ever seen from her.

  “The night was uneventful, sir,” Agent Rodes said. “Nonetheless, I’ve left a full report on your desk. Can I do anything else before you leave?”

  Cèsar glanced down at her cleavage. He looked back at her face as quickly, but he could tell by her humorless eyes that she’d seen him. “No. Thanks. Have a good day.”

  “The days are never good,” she said crisply, and without saying “sir.”

  Man, Cèsar missed Suzy.

  He watched Agent Rodes’s ass as she walked off. Her ass wasn’t as good as Suzy’s. Unfortunately, his girlfriend was as independent as she was sarcastic, so they’d been apart all month. As far as Cèsar knew, she was raising hell in Dilmun, the ethereal city. It could only keep her entertained for so long. He’d hear from her soon. But not soon enough to resist looking at Agent Rodes’s ass.

  The first thing Cèsar did when he got to his desk was check one of Rodes’s other assets: the nightly report she’d left behind.

  The event log was mostly empty, as promised. They’d received only four new detainees overnight. Either it had been a peaceful night in Reno or the carnage had been bad enough to leave no survivors.

  Several people had been due for release at sunrise, and they were listed at the bottom. Lincoln Marshall’s name was among them.

  He was gone.

  Cèsar Hawke suspected he’d never see Lincoln Marshall again. That it’d be one of those lingering mysteries in life he thought about every few years without ever meeting a conclusion.

  It did not take very long for Cèsar to realize he was wrong.

  Cèsar’s car to Sacramento arrived at eleven forty-five in the morning. He’d already grabbed his carry-on and was giving Edie Ashe a couple last instructions, both of them halfway out the door.

  The attack struck at eleven forty-seven.

  Alarms rippled through the security wards, and then through Cèsar. The alarms devoured his nerves with flame. Seconds extended into hours as his vision fogged crimson and black stars budded at their hearts. The pain was in his gut, in his skull, in his deepest core.

  For a moment he thought he was going to die again.

  He shouldn’t have been able to feel this. Cèsar hadn’t been able to cast magic since Genesis, after all.

  He must have been dying.

  Then it passed, and Cèsar came to his senses gripping the wall, barely holding himself upright.

  A look of concern crossed Agent Idañez’s features. He was near the end of his sixteen-hour shift and looked exhausted yet alert. “Sir?”

 
; Cèsar opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. It felt like a fist on his throat.

  Instead, he pointed to the walls, the doors, and drew his gun. Cèsar carried a Desert Eagle with .50 Action Express bullets, but he always clung to the sincerest hope he’d never have to use it. So of course he used it all the damn time. It fit into his hands like he’d been born with it.

  Agent Idañez drew his sidearm too. “Where?”

  Cèsar pointed again, directing Idañez toward the courtyard.

  Other agents were waiting there. Idañez shouted orders to them, and they leaped to lock down the cafeteria with more wards. Each one flared in Cèsar’s senses with a nauseating lurch. Like a fingernail wiggling into a fresh razor gash.

  He staggered into the school’s entryway, where the wards screamed loudest.

  A man stood in the doorway.

  At least, the intruder kind of looked like a man. He had shoulders. He had arms. He had legs and a torso and peach-colored flesh on the backs of his hands. He also wore a long jacket with the hood pulled so far over his face that Cèsar couldn’t make out any features. There was something not quite right with that hood. Like it should have been a little taller to fit a man’s skull underneath, or like its depths were too dark for such a bright morning.

  There was a duffel over the intruder’s shoulder. The sodden bag hung heavy at his hip, drizzling something that was not quite crimson onto the ground beside his feet.

  “Inanna,” he said. The voice didn’t come from the hood. It was muffled and deep.

  Cèsar managed to speak. “Drop the duffel.”

  The hood tilted, as if someone inside had cocked his head inquisitively. The fist tightened on the strap of the duffel. “Are you Inanna?”

  “I’m Agent Cèsar Hawke, Undersecretary of the Office of Preternatural Affairs, and I told you to drop the duffel.” He leveled the Desert Eagle. “You’ve got five seconds to comply.” It wasn’t in Cèsar’s nature to threaten to shoot before he knew a guy, but this power—this power—was as overwhelming as Cèsar’s fear.

  The creature lifted his hand. The wards thrummed again, and the walls of Wooster shivered. The glass covering the announcements board cracked. Drywall dust drifted to the linoleum.

  “I felt Inanna,” said the creature. “She’s walking this Earth again, as am I.”

  Agents filed into the room behind Cèsar, fanning behind him. “Sir?” asked Agent Idañez.

  Cèsar couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. An ocean of acid climbed from his shoes to his knees and his groin. He was going to be sick if he opened his mouth.

  “What does Inanna do?” asked the creature quietly. “Does Inanna surrender to Dullahan’s justice? Does Inanna try to kill Dullahan again?” It patted its chest with an eerily waxen hand. “What will Inanna do this time?”

  Dullahan. This thing was called Dullahan, and it was fluctuating. Rippling. One shoulder lifted and the other dropped. Knees flexed. Elbows twitched. Unnatural minute movements like kelp jerked by waves.

  “This is your last warning,” Cèsar said, barely moving his lips. Each syllable was punctuated by the plucking of a cello string, a magical note that slammed into his bones. “Put down the duffel.”

  “I feel Inanna here. She’s here now or was recently. And she still owes Dullahan.”

  “What are you?” Cèsar whispered.

  Now Dullahan was shifting toward Cèsar, his knees bowing forward and back. His feet sprawled over the linoleum. He wore white sneakers below the long black jacket, and they were clean but for a single droplet of blood on his left toe.

  Cèsar didn’t want that left toe anywhere near him.

  The OPA didn’t have many procedures these days, but Secretary Friederling had made one thing clear: all preternaturals they encountered were likely to be American citizens, so they needed to contain rather than kill threats.

  Dullahan was huge. He was infinite.

  Forget containment.

  “Take him down,” Cèsar said through his teeth.

  In the corner of his vision, he watched agents lifting their guns, moving slowly compared to Dullahan. They took years to squeeze the triggers and fill the room with the crash of a thousand cymbals.

  The bullets did not seem to make contact with Dullahan, ricochet off the furniture, or embed into the walls. They vanished.

  “This is Dullahan Daith,” said the intruder in that muffled voice, “and you are Undersecretary Cèsar Hawke. Dullahan wants Inanna. Not Cèsar Hawke.”

  “Stop right now. Or else we’ll...” Do what? Shoot again, to no avail? Try to handcuff a creature as insubstantial as shadow? Throw a stapler at him?

  “You have the look of Inanna about you,” Dullahan said. “She has touched you. If you bear Inanna, you’ll leave with Dullahan.” He pulled his fist out of a deep pocket in his jacket, and it was clutching one end of a jointed rope that uncoiled with jerky twitches. Its links were white and glistening. They were held together with elastic yellow strands. Barbed wire studded its girth.

  No. That wasn’t a rope.

  Dullahan was holding a fucking human spine. He lifted it toward Cèsar like it was a present.

  Cèsar said, “Fuck that.”

  He reached into the wards of the building—wards that Cèsar had not been able to reach into for weeks, because he hadn’t been casting magic for weeks—and yanked hard, trying to snap them closed on Dullahan.

  Instead, something broke.

  Power receded and returned in a crashing tenfold storm. Starlight shredded Cèsar’s skin. His skull swelled with the cacophony of a thousand violins played at once—a long, slow caress of bows over catgut that could have been weeping or screaming or the mezzo ululations of a prima donna.

  It was too much.

  Cèsar exploded.

  The agents flew away from him. Literally, they flew. Their feet lifted from the linoleum and their bodies dented drywall and Cèsar couldn’t see where they landed among the rubble.

  His flaring power lit Dullahan like blasting a spotlight. The shadows fled from Dullahan’s hood. Underneath, there was only the stump of a neck, a ragged rear crescent of bone stapled into place.

  No face, no ears, no fucking skull.

  Cèsar knew what was dripping in the duffel bag.

  Dullahan lashed the spine through the air, tearing into the magic. “Inanna!” he roared.

  “Get away from me!” Cèsar roared back.

  And he pushed all that power at Dullahan.

  He blinked.

  The room went lightless and silent. Cèsar hit the ground face-first, blinded in the sudden dark. A full minute passed before he could make out the shapes of his dazed agents along the wall. And he could see that neither Dullahan Daith nor his trail of blood were in the room any longer.

  Fritz Friederling didn’t look like much on video chat, but then, their network connection had the bandwidth of an ambitious potato. The secretary’s face used all of six pixels. Damned be the world if Cèsar wasn’t happy to see those six pixels, though.

  “The wards went haywire, you say?” Fritz asked. The bland disbelief in his tone didn’t need bandwidth to come across clearly.

  Cèsar swallowed hard. His throat was all slimy, like he’d snorted a jellyfish and its tentacles were dripping into his stomach. “Yeah, the wards went funny and I had a reaction. You know I’ve always been allergic to magic.”

  “You used to have a reaction to human magic, yes. You used to sneeze. We never knew if it was an allergy.”

  “It was,” Cèsar said. Abuelita had said it was an allergy. The woman had been older than dirt when he was born, and only became older and smarter in the twenty years they’d shared together. If she’d said it was an allergy, he believed her. “The point is that the wards repelled Dullahan Daith. We’ve got no reason to think he survived, although we’ve also got no proof that he died.”

  Dullahan hadn’t come back yet, so Cèsar hoped he was dead. He’d crossed paths with some weird shit before, but nothing h
ad embedded fear into him as quickly as the headless guy with a spine-whip. It was too surreal. If not for the security footage, Cèsar wouldn’t have believed it had happened himself.

  Fritz’s six-pixel expression was unreadable. “I want you to submit to Edie Ashe for another screening.”

  Another screening would take hours. If he needed to do the full panel, he’d be stuck in Reno for days. “I’m supposed to be in a car to Sacramento right now. You need my help in California.”

  “It can wait.” The feed sharpened briefly, allowing him to see that Fritz had his hands steepled in front of his face. “I’ve got to visit Berkeley tomorrow, but I’ll drive to Reno after that if I can.”

  If I can. Three menacing words.

  Fritz had also told Cèsar that they would audit new OPA facilities together “if they could manage it,” and then promptly sent Cèsar to Reno alone.

  It felt an awful lot like Fritz was trying to get rid of Cèsar.

  “I don’t need a full panel,” Cèsar said. “I’ve been screened before. I came back clear.”

  Fritz tried to respond and started coughing. He muffled it somehow—probably with a monogramed handkerchief, though it was impossible to tell on the feed.

  The coughing fit continued too long, and Cèsar’s anxiety turned to five-alarm worry.

  “People are still getting Rebirthed with deadly results,” Fritz said once he recovered. His voice was hoarse. “Some have killed their families because of new powers manifesting. There was an incident in Bangor where someone Rebirthed as a mara, and there were no survivors.”

  “In his family?”

  “In Bangor.” Fritz sat back in his chair, tucking a white pixel into the black pixel of his breast pocket. Definitely a handkerchief. “Dullahan Daith wanted Inanna. That name brings back distant memories of theology tutoring. Something about Sumerians?” Cèsar could imagine Fritz’s thoughtful look as the secretary tried to recall an education that had surely cost six figures.

  “One of the agents in Sacramento might have a book about Inanna,” Cèsar said. “I could check in with Janet, maybe. And then the Berkeley witches can test me.”