by S. M. Reine
“No, because you’re staying in Reno,” Fritz said. “Edie Ashe is the likeliest to be able to contain emergent powers, and the facility in Reno is, sadly, one of our safest.”
“But you’ll be here in a few days,” Cèsar said.
“As soon as I can,” Fritz said, too ambiguously. “Take advantage of this time to rest. I’ll need you ready to work for the launch, regardless of what powers you’re manifesting. Got it?”
He swallowed down his frustration. “Got it, Secretary Fuckface.”
Fritz’s laugh was dorky, kind of snorting. It made him cough again. “I’ll see you soon, Undersecretary Idiot.”
“Idiot? Come on, you can do better than that.”
But Fritz had already shut off the video feed.
For a moment, Cèsar stared at the blank screen.
The secretary of the OPA used to be a kopis—a legendary demon hunter imbued with super powers. Kopides had vanished in Genesis. Now Fritz was just a middle-aged man with a prosthetic leg. Touring one of the run-down hospitals had given him a nasty flu, and Cèsar had never seen Fritz so colorless and weak.
He was still coughing. He’d been coughing for two weeks, which was longer than all the collective illnesses Fritz had suffered before Genesis.
Cèsar logged out of the tablet he’d borrowed from Edie, shoving it into the drawer on her cart. He stood and stretched out his back.
When his back popped, he felt bright prickles down his skin, but he didn’t get all shining and weird again. Cèsar lifted his hands to look at them. The skin was the color of soil warmed by Los Angeles sunshine, as always, and his knuckles had gnarly calluses from years of training to fight against Fritz.
He felt fine after his fight with Dullahan. He didn’t need a full screening.
At least, not in Reno.
Cèsar stepped out to find his escort waiting. One of the original team had gotten hit hard by the magic blast, so he’d been replaced by a familiar face. “Instructions, sir?” asked Agent Idañez.
Idañez wasn’t pretty like Agent Rodes. He had a big flat nose, sunken eyes, and scars along his jaw. Nothing to look at. But Cèsar caught himself transfixed by Idañez, noticing for the first time the subtle warmth in the brown depths of his irises, and the glint like pyrite in the hair trimmed away from his ears. He had broad shoulders, big arms, a barrel chest.
Pleasing to look at, somehow. Pleasing enough that Cèsar felt a familiar clenching in his gut like when he’d been looking down Rodes’s shirt.
Was someone playing violin music somewhere?
Cèsar rubbed his eyes, trying to massage the crazies away. Idañez was a crusty old Chicano yanked out of retirement. This bizarre reaction was just one more side effect of the power surge. It would fade.
It made no sense to stay in Reno, away from Fritz.
“Instructions, sir?” Agent Idañez asked in the exact same voice, like he wasn’t certain Cèsar had heard him the first time.
“Start the car and make sure we’ve got enough fuel to get over Donner Pass,” Cèsar said. “The secretary wants me at his house as soon as possible.”
CHAPTER 4
It was a long drive to Sacramento from Reno, and it should not have been. The route was straightforward. Even beginning from the tangled wreckage of Reno, it took less than an hour to make it over Donner Pass. Most people still didn’t have working cars, so there was no traffic to slow Cèsar’s driver from eighty, ninety, a hundred miles per hour.
Each second felt like an hour. Each minute felt like a lifetime.
Cèsar was alone in the backseat of the armored BMW, which Fritz had insisted Cèsar use in his absence. An incredible waste of resources. Cèsar couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed by it. He couldn’t seem to think, or stop rubbing his hands over his arms, or think of anything except Dullahan Daith’s sodden duffel bag dripping onto Wooster’s floor.
His skin wasn’t glowing again, but Cèsar’s vision was indistinct, as if he were trying to stare at the sun. He was feverish. Nauseated.
Maybe he’d picked up Fritz’s flu and it was just kicking in. Or maybe Reno had made him sick.
It was probably Reno.
Cèsar leaned his cheek against the tinted window. Sunlight sliced through the towering pines as they raced around another turn. Deep-blue shadows painted the valley below in shadow. Day on one side, night on the other. The tires thumping over unmaintained roads were mallets on drums, forcing Cèsar’s heart to beat in time.
He was burning. He was cold. He was grateful as hell that he’d ordered his bodyguards to sit up front so they wouldn’t see him squirming like there were ants in his pants.
“I’m not manifesting new powers,” Cèsar said to the trees outside. Had they always been so tall? Had their pine needles always shimmered blue? Their peaks were arrows pointing into the infinite emptiness of space beyond.
Why was Cèsar still so itchy?
He peeled off his suit jacket, bundled it against the window. He tried to use it as a pillow. It wasn’t comfortable. He unbuckled and stretched out on the seat, closing his eyes. Every bump felt like being peppered by stones.
Trees thinned, the road expanded, eons passed. The freeway dipped into the Sacramento Valley and grew in complexity, tangled like Celtic knots, like writhing worms.
The driver didn’t take them into Sacramento proper. He headed out toward Antelope, where sprawling strip malls became ranches and farms.
Esther Winery was a gem they’d discovered while looking for a NorCal base of operations. It had a sprawling mansion, two guesthouses, and a barn where they’d aged the wine.
Plenty of room for Secretary Fritz Friederling to move in with his support staff.
Cèsar had spent barely more than a handful of hours at the winery since Day Zero, but he’d still been given exclusive use of a guesthouse. Fritz had insisted.
Today he was grateful because it meant a quiet bed was waiting for him. He could sleep for a couple hours. Gather his composure. By the time the secretary realized Cèsar had disobeyed orders, he’d be able to prove that he was fully capable of accompanying Fritz to Berkeley.
Cèsar emerged from the BMW a thousand years older than when he’d gotten into it, and his wobbling legs didn’t want to support his weight. It was like he’d sprinted from Reno to Sacramento.
The sun was warmer here, the air moister, the baked yellow grass thicker. Grape vines flourished around endless rows of scaffolding. Cèsar wasn’t a wine drinker—or a drinker at all—so he’d paid no attention to the vines on his short visits before. But now he stared at them the way he’d stared at Idañez. The grapes were emeralds tossed smooth in a tumbler, clustered among delicate brass leaves. Every time the wind blew, the grapes gave little bell chimes.
Cèsar rubbed his arms, rubbed his face, rubbed his scalp. There was no rubbing away the prickles. God, he ached.
“Are you okay?” asked Agent Idañez, emerging from the car. His wrists were sturdy, with brushes of coarse hair drawing angular patterns from his forearms to the backs of his hands to his knuckles. Idañez’s cufflinks were the same brassy color as the grapevines.
Was Cèsar okay?
“Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Idañez looked unconvinced. “Why don’t I see about getting your bodyguards set up in your guesthouse?”
“No.” It came out sharp. “I need to work on documentation and don’t want to be disturbed.” Cèsar’s eyes were fixed on Agent Idañez’s jawline, and the place where he’d missed shaving gray stubble.
Idañez looked surprised. He wasn’t used to facing such a blunt rejection from Cèsar, who was easily the friendlier of the two men who led the OPA. “Then I’ll get the car parked.”
“You do that.”
The path to Cèsar’s quarters wound past the vineyard, less than a quarter-mile away. His body ached and burned with the effort of walking. The bones of his face felt like they were trying to stretch out.
Distant voices suggested nearby agents.
He walked faster, ducked his head, didn’t look up.
Cèsar reached the guesthouse without meeting anyone. The living room was a small space with big windows. The only personal touch he’d had time to add was a photo of his girlfriend, Suzy, looking annoyed as she was embraced by Isobel Stonecrow. Isobel was Fritz’s wife—a necrocognitive who could speak to the dead. She wasn’t in town. Like Suzy, she was busy with a life of her own, providing her desperately needed services as a death witch to the world.
He took the photo off of the mantel, gripping it tight. “I could use both of you right now,” he told the picture. His thumb grazed their faces, and the frame was so much colder than their peachy-soft cheeks. “You’d keep me from going crazy.”
Isobel was, in many ways, Suzy’s temperamental opposite. She was sweet where Suzy was snarky. She had a dark edge—much like Fritz—but she strived for goodness and always found it.
Between the two of them, they’d have had Fritz and Cèsar healed in hours and Dullahan murdered in days.
“Who am I kidding?” Cèsar muttered, running the pad of his thumb over Suzy’s rolled eyes. “If I asked for help, you’d tell me to stop being a little bitch and handle my shit.”
Music rang distantly, as though an orchestra was beginning to play down by the grapevines. Cèsar’s fingers tightened on the frame as he looked over his shoulder at the outside world.
His vision was distorted inside the house, but outside was worse. Nature called to him. Strands of golden grass swayed under the blanket of an ocean. The wind blew in the exact same pitch as the aching loneliness in his heart.
Wait.
That wasn’t wind.
He took in a breath and held it, willing his heart to quietude so that he could focus.
Quiet, desperate noises reached Cèsar’s ears. Tiny murmurs. Smothered gasps.
There was somebody in the guesthouse.
Cèsar’s mind was flooded with the memory of Dullahan Daith, so vivid that for an instant he was back in the blood-smeared entryway of Wooster, watching Dullahan rippling through reality.
It couldn’t be Dullahan. Even freaky monsters couldn’t get over Donner Pass faster than a car going a hundred miles per hour. Yet magic surged inside of him again, and a responding shimmer rippled over Cèsar’s flesh.
He followed the sounds toward the kitchen. Cèsar pressed his back to the wall, drew his gun, nudged the door open an inch so that he could peer through.
The first thing he saw was a pair of bare knees. Slacks hung off of one ankle, caught on a low-heeled pump. Her feet bounced rhythmically at either side of a pair of hips wearing pinstriped trousers. A belt buckle jingled. Man and woman gasped, grunted, groaned. The man stood with the woman pressed against a countertop. He had a sweep of well-groomed blond hair and shoulders almost as narrow as his hips.
Fritz wasn’t expecting Cèsar, and he’d taken over the guesthouse for a tryst.
It made sense. Fritz approached ladies the way that Cèsar had approached pizza as a teenaged athlete; he couldn’t seem to go a few days without finding a woman to devour.
The woman who’d succumbed this time had real curves. Big hips and belly, soft arms, dimpled thighs. Judging by the black slacks, the professional shoes, and the briefcase on the floor, she was one of the OPA agents passing through the winery.
Cèsar would have ordinarily liked to interrupt them in some hilarious way. Hit Fritz in the back of the head with a whiffle bat. Start commentating on what they were doing in a sports-announcer voice. Flick the lights and make dance music noises to really set the mood. He’d done it before, once or twice. Fritz took himself too seriously. It was good for him.
Yet Cèsar didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound.
He remained on the other side of the door, his face striped with light from the kitchen. He was immobilized by the strange rhythm of body against body.
Fritz braced one hand on the counter next to them, the other tangled in the woman’s hair as he bit at her throat. He was not a witch, but there was still some energy rising from him that Cèsar had never noticed before.
There was a lot about Fritz that Cèsar had only noticed in passing before, actually.
Idañez was an ordinary guy, but there was nothing ordinary about Fritz, and even now that he was human, he assaulted Cèsar’s senses.
The flex of muscles in his back. The snowcaps on his knuckles from squeezing them so tightly. The exact baritone pitch of his self-satisfied grunting. The sweep of hair almost the exact same color as the grass outside.
His profile was angular, with a pointed nose and chin that Cèsar had always described as “basically like a weasel, dude.” Now he looked like a piece of fine fucking art, and why did Cèsar think such a strange string of words about Fritz?
What the hell am I doing?
Pulling pranks on his partner while he screwed someone was one thing.
Sitting around to watch was something else.
Cèsar wrenched away from the door as silently as possible. He retreated into the living room feeling like he’d done something wrong, or that Fritz had—even though Fritz and Isobel had long since come to an agreement that they were free to sleep with anyone they wanted.
The world had filled with strange colors and lights, and Cèsar felt like he was standing on the deck of a yacht tossed by a storm. His skin tingled with an icy froth.
He was glowing.
“Oh Jesus fucking Christ, not again,” Cèsar said. He slapped at himself but it didn’t do anything. Of course it didn’t do anything. It wasn’t like he needed to stop, drop, and roll the glow away.
He wasn’t Rebirthing. He couldn’t be.
But just in case, he needed to fucking run.
You know, to make sure he didn’t hear Fritz say “I told you so” right before Cèsar died from unintentional self-immolation.
He bolted for the door.
“Cèsar?”
The sound of his name coming from Fritz made him stop.
Cèsar.
They’d only spoken over low-quality network connections lately, and Cèsar had forgotten the timbre of Fritz’s voice, with his precise enunciation and just enough arrogance to make him sound like a rich bastard rather than a nerd.
Cèsar had no choice but to turn in response to Fritz’s call. His body wasn’t his anymore, from his stupid disco-ball skin to the impulses within his skull. His bones were crackling. His marrow was melting. He was liquid flowing downhill into the gravity well Fritz formed.
The secretary emerged from the kitchen rumpled, though his belt was already buckled at expert speed. The only sign he’d been up to anything was the line of lipstick on his chin and his half-open shirt.
Cèsar almost couldn’t handle how good Fritz looked. The secretary always had the lifted cheekbones and strong brow of a Roman emperor, but that was something Cèsar had thought about maybe twice over a decade.
Fritz still looked sick. He was pale faced, his eyes shadowed. He really wasn’t over the flu. Too weak to stand up to whatever Cèsar was becoming.
“Why the hell are you glowing, Hawke?” Fritz asked.
He took a step closer.
Cèsar backpedaled until he hit the door, and he hadn’t expected to hit it, so he jolted. Just about yanked the curtains off the window.
“Who’s there?” asked the woman in the kitchen, still trying to tuck her shirt into her unzipped pants. “Should I call—?”
“Don’t come this way.” Fritz had flung an arm out to bar her. “Out the back door. Run.” His voice was music. Worse than music, it was the artful dance of fingertips on string, elegant and moving.
Cèsar’s glow was brightening.
“I’m gonna blow, dude,” Cèsar said. “You should clear out too.”
Fritz didn’t move. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Isn’t that why you wanted me to stay in Reno?”
“I don’t want you to hurt the other agents, you idiot,” Fritz said.
But the glow was gett
ing brighter and brighter, and Fritz was bathed in crystalline twilight. His pulse bounced at his throat. Briefly, for an insane moment, Cèsar thought about running his lips over that pulse.
“No survivors in Bangor,” Cèsar growled through gritted teeth.
He elbowed the door hard enough that it shattered behind him. Shards of wood turned to silver blossoms, exploding into puffs midair before drifting to the ground. He stumbled outside, and soil frosted beneath Cèsar’s feet. His toes didn’t quite touch the earth.
Fritz tried to follow him.
Cèsar pointed at him, opened his mouth to say, “Stop.”
The sound that came from his lips wasn’t any human language he’d ever heard. It was a cry, a wail, a note belted by an operatic tenor. And it was entirely automatic.
Magic snapped.
Fritz’s leg buckled under him—the left leg, the artificial one he had lost in battle against a fallen angel. He hit the lawn with his skin the color of paper.
Cèsar stood over him, shaking. The secretary choked silently. His back arched until only his good heel and the top of his head touched the ground.
“Freeze! Don’t move!”
Dimly, distantly, Cèsar was aware that Fritz’s staff had surrounded them. A team of twelve lived at the winery; all twelve had taken position in a circle around Cèsar. They were bound together by runic magic looped around their left arms, handguns uplifted in their right hands.
They were building a circle to contain him. They thought he was dangerous. They thought he would hurt Fritz.
He’d never hurt Fritz. Would he?
No survivors in Bangor.
Cèsar felt himself growing stronger as Fritz grew paler. Color faded from Fritz. Not just from his flesh, but from eyes so wide that there was a rim of white all the way around his irises, and on the edges of his lips, and at the tips of his ears. His hair whitened at the roots. The dull white of a corpse.
Guns cocked.
“Don’t move, Undersecretary!”
Cèsar looked around at the people he’d been working alongside for weeks, some longer. A couple had come from the old Magical Violations Department in Los Angeles, though he suddenly couldn’t remember which of them, or what their names were, or even if he liked them.
