The Wounded Ones

by G. D. Penman

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Copyright

  The Wounded Ones

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Praise for the Witch of Empire Series

  “There’s a grungy punk-rock bite to it that tastes like subways and smoke and whiskey-filled nights.”

  —Cassandra Khaw, author of Hammers on Bone

  “An addictive blend of magic and murder noir.”

  —Gareth L. Powell, BSFA award-winning author of Ack-Ack Macaque

  “Penman writes with the wit and charm of a foul-mouthed Terry Pratchett. His Agent Sully is what Dirty Harry would be if he was a lesbian witch fighting demons alongside the cast of Yes, Minister. She can be my date to the Imperial Bureau of Investigation Ball anytime.”

  —Robyn Bennis, author of The Guns Above

  “Vampires and demons. Monsters and magic. Forbidden love, in a mind-blowing adventure. ‘Sully’ Sullivan returns in a blaze of fury and might as the plucky, magic-wielding heroine who takes crap from no one, even when the odds are stacked infinitely against her. Good luck trying to put this one down; it’ll leave your knuckles raw.”

  —Kyle Richardson, author of the Steambound Trilogy

  “Agent Sully is a kick ass heroine, a kind of adult Harry Potter meets Katniss Everdene and is the tour de force that drives this novel along . . . The writing is fast paced, imaginative with an underlying intelligence that gives credence to the infrastructure of the magical aspects of crime and policing.”

  —Gill Chedgey, NB Magazine (4 stars)

  “A very entertaining and atmospheric alternative history fantasy novel . . . I would highly recommend The Wounded Ones to fans of the first novel in the series, and I would certainly recommend the author as a superbly creative fantasy writer.”

  —Readers’ Favorites (5 stars)

  “Penman has a knack for speculative fiction, especially involving magic, necromancy and, oddly enough, colonialism.”

  —TRL Reviews (4 stars)

  Also by G.D. Penman

  Witch of Empire:

  The Year of the Knife

  The Last Days of Hong Kong

  Deepest Dungeon:

  Dungeons of Strata

  Masters of Strata

  Romance:

  Lovers and Liches

  Moonshine

  THE WOUNDED ONES. Copyright © 2020 by G.D. PENMAN

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at info@meerkatpress.com.

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-19-4 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-20-0 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938591

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Tricia Reeks

  Book design by Tricia Reeks

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in the United States of America by

  Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

  www.meerkatpress.com

  October 31, 2015

  Sully stubbed out her cigar like the ashtray was her mother’s face. The last coils of smoke twisted in the air to join the geometric patterns that drifted in a blue cloud around her. There were three assassins this time, and three weren’t nearly enough. Sully set her glass down on the bar and let the mouthful of gin clear her sinuses. After an hour of quietly sipping liquor in the stuffy walnut paneled comfort of the train’s bar, Sully’s patience had run thin. The young men in three-piece suits might have blended in perfectly back in jolly old England, but here in the Americas, their blandness made them stick out.

  Sully swiveled on her stool to take in the lay of the room. “Are we doing this or not? Because I’ve got a thirsty vampire waiting for me back in my cabin and that sounds like a lot more fun than this bullshit.”

  The men had been studiously avoiding eye contact with Sully and with each other for the whole trip, but now they all looked up, as if they needed to confirm that their cover was blown before acting. Amateurs. Sully set off the concussion spell that she had been tracing in gin on the bar-top for the last ten minutes, spellfire racing over the liquor. The whole carriage rocked on its rails, and bottles and glasses flew through the air, a maelstrom of chaos that Sully’s contingency shield turned into a whirling dervish of shattered glass around her. All three assassins were moving now, leaping up from their tables and casting their own spells, but they were two moves behind her.

  Her next spell seared the broken glass around her, sending molten droplets across the red carpet on their way to scorch half of one assassin’s face off. The other men switched to casting shields and that delay gave her enough time to cast a more complex incantation. The next lance looked like white fire, and while the blond killer managed to get a shield up, the white flames used that dense structured magic as fuel, expanding out to consume him, leaving nothing behind but a heap of ash.

  The last one got an attack off before Sully could give him her undivided attention. A ray of moonlight was launched from his fingertip, refracting through the spinning glass to pepper the whole room with patches of frost.

  Sully let out a bark of laughter. “You’re trying to take me alive? They really didn’t give you fair warning when you took this job.”

  A new spell exploded in a corona around him, a nova of silvery blades that shredded what was left of the upholstery as they flew at Sully. Apparently, this one wanted to live more than he wanted big cash prizes. Sully dove into a booth as the blades and glass collided in a deafening, stinging explosion all around her. He didn’t let up. A roiling wave of green fire swept through the cabin, stripping the walls to bare metal, annihilating the furnishings and reducing the cowering bartender to a stripped skeleton. Sully did her best to ignore the strange absence of heat as the fire rolled over her shields and concentrated on the task at hand.

  She rose to her feet on the bare metal of the hollowed-out cabin. The assassin wasn’t smiling despite his change in fortune. Maybe he was a professional after all. She launched another white lance at him and he didn’t bother with a shield. His duelist instincts took over and he cast a traveling spell to jerk him out of the missile’s path. It didn’t work. The white fire hit him square in the chest. He vanished in a flash of light as his own magic consumed him from the inside out.

  Sully staggered to her feet and let her protective spells drop. She took a deep breath of the fresh air that was pouring in through the new ventilation that her would-be killers had provided to the cabin. If portals and traveling spells hadn’t been blocked by the Magi of Manhattan, then why would she have been on a train to begin with? The British really needed to hire smarter help. The last few assassination attempts had been almost insultingly lackluster.

  She paused on her way back to the sleeper cars to look out of the window. The marshland flew by, barely visible in the starlight, and Sully caught a glimpse of her own reflection. Her pupils were blown large and she was bleeding from a dozen tiny scratches all over her face. It was the most alive she had looked in months. Since before Prime Minister Pratt had started forcing her to attend cabinet meetings. Sully quite liked taking the train. Flying probably would have been quicker, but every p
lane in the new American Empire had been grounded for the week after a half-dozen Thunderbird sightings. Besides, it gave her six uninterrupted hours with Marie, probably the longest time they had spent together since war on the British had been officially declared.

  Sully fully expected the beds to be folded down and Marie to be dozing by the time she got back to their compartment, but instead Marie was sitting with her legs tucked up underneath her on the seat, staring out the window and chewing absently on the tips of her hair. Sully had to wrestle the smile off her face before Marie turned around. She looked just like she had back when she was alive, waiting around for a call-back to some audition. With a glance, Marie took in the wild mess of Sully’s hair, the rips in her clothes and the spattering of blood, then sighed. “Ugh, again?”

  Sully shrugged and the tattered sleeve of her one nice shirt slithered to the floor.

  “It wasn’t bad. Just three of them. Kind of trashed the bar though.”

  Marie had already turned to stare back out at the night flying by, and Sully quickly kicked her bloodied sleeve under the seat. She slumped down beside Marie and leaned her head against her lover’s shoulder, carefully, as if Marie were a wild animal that was likely to startle. Marie tolerated the touch, so she leaned in more heavily. Without adrenaline to carry her through, Sully was starting to feel tired now. “What is going on with you? I haven’t seen you this twitchy since The Khan and I. Are you getting cold feet?”

  Sully felt the movement on the top of her head when Marie smiled. “I ain’t seen my parents since I left New Amsterdam all those years back. I’m worried about what they’re going to say. What they’re going to think. It’s been a long, long time.”

  Marie started to lap at the little cuts on Sully’s forehead absentmindedly. Her tongue was cool, soothing. Sully grumbled. “What is it about me that you think they are going to hate the most? Is it the fact I’m a woman? No chance of grandkids. Or is it because I’m a witch? That is a fair thing to worry about. Maybe it’s because I’m Irish. Nothing like some good old-fashioned racism. Or maybe is it just the whole traitor to the crown thing? Were they loyalists? Are they going to try to shoot me when I walk in the door?”

  Marie paused her licking to pluck a piece of glass from a gash on Sully’s cheek, drawing a little hiss of pain. “Not everything is about you, darlin’. You’re a big step up from some of the boys I dated when I lived with them. Hells, the last boy I brought home was a carny. You’re a general. You’re a catch as far as they’re concerned.”

  Sully twisted to meet Marie’s eyes. “Then what are you freaking out about?”

  “Last time they saw me, I was still breathin’.”

  That shut Sully up for a moment. Then, very cautiously, she pried. “They don’t like vampires?”

  “I ain’t got a clue. Far as I know, they’ve never even met a vampire before. Georgia Province ain’t like New Amsterdam. The most exotic people we got were the Dutch. Everybody is just . . . normal there.”

  Sully tried not to grit her teeth. “White. Straight. That kind of normal?”

  Marie shoved her off. “Don’t make this a politics thing. Please. What if they think I’m a monster?”

  Sully turned to face Marie, took a hold of her hands and whispered, “Then fuck them.”

  Marie blinked. “Fuck them?”

  Sully nodded sagely. “If they don’t want you center stage in their life then that is their mistake, not any fault of yours. If they’re too ignorant to realize that a person is more than just their pulse, then fuck them. You don’t need them. You’re already perfect.”

  Marie snorted. “Iona Sullivan, you certainly do have your moments.”

  “Does that mean you are going to stop worrying?”

  “Oh hells no. I’ll be worrying until we leave the plantation, then I’ll spend the next three months going over every moment we spent with them in my head. Picking at it.” She leaned in and planted a soft kiss on Sully’s lips. “But thank you anyway.”

  They settled back onto the seat together, staring out at the darkness. Marie’s fingers started smoothing down the tangle of red hair on top of Sully’s head, brushing over the shaved sides and back and drawing a shiver from her. One of the few benefits of leaving the IBI was that she could have whatever haircut she damn well pleased, so one of her first stops once she was given her commission as general was the barber down by the Black Bay. The one where all the young southern artists used to go before Red Hook caught a fireball in the British bombardment and dropped the pretentiousness of the whole city by about twenty percent. Shaved back and sides. A splash of oil—when she remembered—to keep the curls smoothed back from her face. Marie said that it made Sully look too butch, but she also thought sundresses were the height of fashion, so Sully didn’t worry about that too much. Besides, anything that distracted from the mess of freckles and scars that made up her face was a blessing in Sully’s opinion. She had just started to drift off when Marie asked, “Are you going to take me to meet your parents, darlin’?”

  “Nope.”

  “Because you’re ashamed of me?”

  Sully snuggled in closer. “Because I never met my dad and my mother is the most bitter and vicious creature on the planet earth. I wouldn’t inflict her on my worst enemy, let alone you.”

  It seemed enough to placate Marie, even if the details were sparse. They lay against each other in comfortable silence. Out of some unnecessary reflex, Marie still snored when she fell asleep, even though she didn’t breathe. Sully wasn’t the kind of person to use words like adorable, but the gentle snorts of the vampire were enough to curl her lips into a smile despite the way it tugged on her cuts. Somewhere between Virginia and Carolina, Sully slipped into a dreamless darkness of her own.

  November 1, 2015

  Sully hung around the train platform looking as awkward as she felt. Marie’s parents had come to meet them and there was a great deal of crying and exclamations of love going on that she wouldn’t have wanted any part of, even if she had been invited. Marie’s mother resembled her daughter, but her hair was darker and straighter. She was older too, of course—something Marie would never be. Her father had Marie’s blonde hair and curls. Marie had had his soft blue eyes when she was alive. The color had changed now to a red so deep it was almost brown.

  Sully lurked while the train pulled away with a shriek and she slipped unobtrusively into the backseat of the car when they headed out, casting quick and quiet charms to keep the worst of the sunlight on the other side of the windows where it wouldn’t do any harm. Marie’s father’s name was Jeremiah—Sully had managed to gather that much from the non-stop flurry of conversation. Her mother’s was a little more difficult, but from one of the few words that Jeremiah managed to get in edgewise, Sully suspected her name was Clementine. Marie had a lifetime of local gossip to catch up on, and her mother seemed just as desperate for any news from New Amsterdam. Looking out the window at the endless uniform fields, Sully could understand why. They had been driving for a half hour when there was a brief moment of silence and Sully realized that a question had been directed at her. “Sorry?”

  Marie giggled beside her. “Momma was asking about your job. They don’t know who you are. At all.”

  “Really?” Sully’s face split into a grin that she wiped away almost as quickly. She met Clementine’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. “I’m a soldier nowadays.”

  Jeremiah chuckled tactlessly. “Uh . . . well at least you’ll always have plenty of work.”

  Sully laughed despite herself, a harsh little bark that sounded more like her own mother than she would have liked. Clementine filled the expectant silence with another story about somebody that Sully had never heard of and she was happy to sink back into her seat. It was nice to be somewhere where nobody knew your name. Where you could speak, or not speak, freely.

  They arrived at the plantation an hour later. The
Culpeppers were one of the older families in the Province, so when the land was being parceled out they’d had first pick and had chosen relatively fertile soil close to town over more acreage farther afield. The buildings must have been riddled with spells to keep them so pristine and white in such a muddy place after a century or more. The main house, a guest house, and long, repurposed stables formed three sides of a square around a manicured garden with a fountain at its center. On the other side, beyond their private road, was an orchard and beyond its bowed and withered trees was the rest of the Culpepper land. Sully had caught a glimpse of it on the way in, wheat waving golden as far as the eye could see.

  It would have been nice to let Marie come home to this place the way that she remembered it, blazing in the sunshine, but it would have been a very brief homecoming. Sully got out of the car as it rolled to a stop, calling up as much of a raincloud as she could muster on the spur of the moment. It looked a little out of place hanging in the otherwise empty sky, but it did the job. Marie was hustled into the house without so much as a blush, her mother’s arms wrapped around her shoulders, rubbing at her bare arms as if she could be warmed up. Jeremiah held back to walk Sully in. He rolled his eyes at the Culpepper women and would probably have made some comment about women in general if Sully hadn’t been one. “Surprised that they let you away from your post. I heard that the Brits are bombarding the whole East Coast.”