Shade Chaser (City of Crows 2)

by Clara Coulson

  Is it me, Coop? Did you force yourself to come here because you’re worried about me? After the kidnapping. After the second assault by Donahue. Is he so scared I’m going to die here, on this snow-filled street between two rows of pretty townhouses, that he overrode his own fear so he could go to war?

  If I was a better “hero,” would he have gone home, safe and sound, where he belongs?

  I bite my tongue and try to muster a reassuring smile. If I can get him to think—

  The living room window of the Primrose house shatters outward, and a spell ripples through the air, blasting into the flaming compact car on the opposite side of the street. The driver’s side of the vehicle crumples with a screech, and the metal peels back until it exposes the fuel tank hiding underneath. The tank ruptures, spraying gasoline onto the snow, up toward the curling flames already consuming the car. The fire tastes the fuel—and screams.

  In the blink of an eye, the blaze expands into a roaring inferno. Flames lash out into the night. The car disintegrates, a dozen explosions slinging shrapnel through the air and throwing people off their feet.

  Amy, closest to the car, is slung backward into a nearby wooden fence. Her already injured arm snaps in half on impact, and blood stains her cast dark red in the firelight. She cries out and slumps onto the snow-covered sidewalk, patches of exposed skin burnt red.

  Desmond, who was carrying an injured plainclothes agent, is no luckier. He shields his charge with his own body, pieces of half-melted metal bouncing off his back. His protective coat holds at the onslaught—until a sharp piece of aluminum finds an opening created by the gusting winds. It impales him through the back, in his lower right abdomen, narrowly missing his spine. His agonized groan is swallowed by the screaming fire, but no one can miss the sight of the large man collapsing onto his side, hands pressed against his wound to stop the spurting blood.

  The injured plainclothes woman, sporting burns and deep lacerations and even broken bones, scrambles up to help the man who was helping her only seconds before.

  Riker and Ella barely escape without serious injury. They dive behind a snowdrift with their own plainclothes casualties in the nick of time. As soon as the shrapnel clears, they’re up again to survey the damage.

  Ella passes the man she was helping to Riker and rushes back toward the car, Amy and Desmond’s names rolling off her panicked tongue. But Riker, with his injured leg, finds himself stuck in place. A plainclothes woman is leaning on him for support, her leg busted, while the man Ella was aiding is on the verge of passing out, face covered in blood from a brutal head injury. Riker can’t carry them both back to the SUV.

  He needs help.

  I’m out of the SUV and moving toward my captain before my brain even catches up to the action. A car door pops open behind me, and I peek over my shoulder to see Cooper Lee fumbling his way out of Erica’s car to support me.

  The words No! Stay there! form in my mouth, but they gum up the back of my throat and won’t pass my lips. Because Cooper has the right idea—with this many injured, we need all the free hands to haul the casualties off the battlefield. Including the little archivist who’s never been in combat in his life.

  God, if he gets hurt…

  I shake off the fear and hurry over to my boss. Riker spots me coming, swallows his criticism of me leaving the SUV, and nods at the man with the head injury. I sling the guy’s arm over my shoulder, ignoring the ache in my ribs and legs and every other body part, and guide the poor guy toward the SUV. His feet drag through the snow—he’s off balance, his concussion worsening by the second—but Cooper comes to the rescue and supports the man’s right side. We exchange a glance, a promise to talk later, but don’t speak, and together, we carry the man to the backside of the SUV.

  I heave open the double doors, revealing the empty back area of the vehicle. It’s big enough to convey four, maybe five people off the battlefield. Cooper climbs into the SUV, taking the injured man’s arms while I grab his legs, and we carefully lift the guy up and situate him on the carpeted floor.

  As Cooper is maneuvering around the man to jump out of the vehicle, Riker hobbles around the doors with the other plainclothes agent. She’s breathing heavily, face contorted in pain. And as Cooper and I take her from my captain, I realize why: a compound fracture. Her femur sticks out of a ragged tear in her jeans.

  Cooper whispers, “God,” at the sight of the bloody bone and squeezes his eyes shut as he’s setting the woman down next to the man with the concussion.

  I hate to ask him this, since he’s clearly squeamish, but…

  “Cooper, you still good to go with that field medic training?”

  His pale face snaps up. “Huh?”

  “Can you stay in the back with these guys?” I point to the medical kit attached to the wall. “Do whatever you can for their injuries until we get them to the office?”

  Cooper glances from the badly broken leg to the gory concussion, and what little color was left in his cheeks drains to pure white. “I…well, I…” He presses his hands over his eyes and sucks in a shaky breath. “Y-Yes. Of course, Cal.” Then his hands slowly rise to the medical kit, and he unhooks the clasps, lips trembling, jaw set, like he’s trying his best not to break down in tears in the middle of this nightmare.

  And shit, I don’t blame him. If I wasn’t so pissed off at Marcus right now, I’d be crying too.

  Amy. Desmond. These poor fucking plainclothes agents.

  I step away from the SUV, into the frigid night, snowflakes sticking to my clothes, skin, hair—but I don’t even feel the ice. My eyes drift to Riker, who’s breathing hard, his new cane clenched in his right hand. His face is bright red, a pained red, and he’s favoring one side. He must have strained his injured leg again while carrying the woman. Too much weight for a knee held together by titanium screws.

  “Captain, you should take the wheel and drive back to the office. I’ll go help Ella get Amy, Desmond, and the remaining agent. And you can…”

  Riker holds up an index finger and stares at me with repressed fury. “You’re in worse shape than I am, Cal. You should not be on this battlefield. You are on medical leave.”

  “You can barely walk, sir.”

  “And you can barely run!”

  “Sir—”

  “Calvin Kinsey, I am your captain and you will listen to me when I say—”

  Cooper lets out a strangled gasp. “Erica!”

  I wheel around the side of the SUV, Riker a step behind me, and look to the Primrose house. A pulse of power radiates across the neighborhood, and my magic sensing mode switches on at the perfect moment. My vision is filled with a hundred colorful flashes as the intricate webbing of wards threaded into the exterior of the house unravel one after the other. The entire magic defense system collapses like a line of dominoes, leaving the once impenetrable house vulnerable to even the pettiest thief.

  Erica backs away from the front door, examining her handiwork to ensure there aren’t any remaining magic traps. But as her gaze travels up and up the redbrick façade of the house, her attention is pulled too far away from the ground.

  From the shadowy corner of the porch where a werewolf is prowling toward her.

  Donahue.

  “Erica!” Riker bellows out the instant before the Wolf lunges.

  The witch reels around to face the threat, but the Wolf is too close, too fast, and too large to stop in so little time. She only manages to pull up a small green force field in front of her chest before the Wolf barrels into her. Wolf and witch fly backward, straight through the weak wooden porch railing, and vanish behind a hedge of prickly green bushes.

  I act on pure instinct. Adrenaline pumping through beleaguered muscles, I reach into my coat, yank out my .22, and tear through the snow toward the row of bushes. Riker calls out for me to stop, but no way in hell am I letting one of McKinney’s lackeys take another victim.

  When I’m five feet from the hedge, Donahue reels up above the bushes, blood on his maw
. I don’t know if it’s his or Erica’s, but it enrages me all the same.

  I aim at his feral face, defined by red-stained teeth, wild dark eyes, a growl roiling in his throat.

  I shoot. Again and again. Empty half the clip.

  One bullet nails him in the left eye, another in the neck, and a third in the jaw. He lurches sideways with a pitiful shriek, blood running down his face, broken teeth crumbling out of his mouth. But, not a second later, he staggers up again, turns to look at me, recognition flaring, anger building.

  But before the Wolf has the chance to pounce at me, a mighty green flash erupts beneath him. He takes off like a rocket, like the car Erica kicked a few minutes earlier. His fearful howl is muffled by the vicious blizzard winds as he flails through the air. Higher and higher. Fifty feet. A hundred. He vanishes into the murk. And then his large Wolf form tumbles down, down, down, and there’s nothing Donahue can do to stop himself from landing on a sharp-tipped iron fence three blocks away.

  There’s a wail of pain. Then nothing.

  Donahue’s Wolf body melts away, revealing the pitiful man underneath. Impaled by a spike on the fence, through his chest and out his back—through his heart—he slowly slides down the metal pole, until he comes to rest on the snow. His body jerks several times, trying to heal, I guess, but you can’t heal an injury when the weapon is still inside you. Finally, with a violent shudder that must be the rattle of death, Donahue’s body goes still. For good.

  Stunned, I peek over the hedge. Erica is half-buried in the snow, but her little green shield held up. She digs herself out of the bank, coughing from the impact with the porch railing, which must have battered a couple ribs. But other than that, a forming bruise on her cheek, and three fingers wrenched out of their sockets when she pummeled Donahue with that powerful spell, she appears unharmed. No blood. No bites. The witch prevails.

  I lean over the bushes and offer her a hand. “You need any help?”

  “Nah.” She waves me off and sits up. “Thanks for the assist though. Bastard kept going for my neck.” Checking her dislocated fingers, she cringes, then locks her jaw and whispers what must be a spell. Her fingers magically snap back into place by themselves. A hiss of pain passes her lips, but she shrugs it off much faster than I would have. As she rolls over onto her knees, she asks, “Are your people okay?”

  I peer over my shoulder. Riker is about ten feet away—he must’ve been following me—shocked gaze locked on the dead Wolf down the street. Meanwhile, Ella has somehow managed to drag the much larger Desmond to the SUV, in addition to carrying the last remaining plainclothes agent on her back. (Damn. Now that’s strength.)

  Amy, too, has made her own way over to the vehicle, her broken arm cradled to her chest, the compound fracture weeping blood onto the snow. Everyone is accounted for, except the plainclothes man who died earlier.

  “Alive,” I reply to Erica. “But we’re in bad shape. Auxiliaries might be here soon, but…” I nod at the broken living room window. “Did you see who threw that spell? The one that blew up the car?”

  Erica shakes the snow off her coat. “Didn’t see him. But I heard him cursing through the wall.”

  “Marcus?”

  She scowls. “Who else?”

  “You think he’s still in there?”

  “Absolutely.” She waves her hand, and the bushes in front of her part, letting her through. “And if I was him, I’d be heading down to my secret basement lab right about now to perform the summoning spell I’ve spent the last several weeks planning.”

  “You think he has everything he needs?” I drop my gun to my side. “The sticky note message suggested he wasn’t ready. Can he still do the summoning without all the necessary elements in place?”

  “It’s not a matter of doing, Cal,” she answers, surveying the front of the house. “It’s a matter of doing safely. You can cut corners on any complex spell, including a summoning. But you do so at your own risk. If you deviate from a spell’s prep instructions, you’re bypassing safeguards that were put into place for particular reasons by the practitioners who came before you.”

  “So he can summon Ammit now, but it might backfire on him?”

  “Exactly.”

  The snow crunches behind me. Riker, who’s been listening in on the conversation. “You think he’s desperate enough to attempt the summoning in an unsafe manner?”

  Erica bites her lip, contemplating. “My gut feeling is yes. This whole summoning conspiracy clearly goes pretty deep into the Aurora magic community—which pisses me off to no end—and it’s possible it goes beyond the city too. All the way up to the High Court?” She wrings her hands. “No clue. I would hazard a guess that somebody in the upper echelons of the ICM knows about this, High Court practitioner or not. Maybe this was sanctioned by somebody fearing a major attack on the Council, somebody with more knowledge than we have, and Marcus ended up being the scapegoat in case something went wrong. In which case…”

  She sighs. “My point is, I think if this summoning scheme wasn’t vital to some big name’s plan, Marcus would have abandoned it already. Trashed all the evidence. Covered up all the clues. Marcus is an asshole, but he’s not stupid. He knowingly gave himself away when he sent his goons after the plainclothes agents. Even if I wasn’t trading info with you all, you’d have figured him out eventually. There’s no way he could have hidden his involvement in a straight-up practitioner assault on DSI.”

  “So you think he’s in that house right now,” I say, “about to perform the summoning without its safeguards in place. Because summoning Ammit is more important than his own well-being, than his life?”

  Erica huffs out a steamy breath. “That’s my hunch.”

  “Who the hell is this enemy?” Riker barks. “How powerful must they be to make a self-centered ass like Marcus risk his own life?”

  “About that…” Erica shifts uncomfortably.

  “What?” I cut in. “Do you know who—?”

  A flicker of energy in the corner of my eye cuts me off. My magic sense is picking up a faint, intermittent glow resonating up from underneath the porch. Underground. Where the basement would be. “Um, guys, hate to say this, but I think we’re running out of time. I’m picking up magic fluctuations in what is probably the secret basement lab.”

  Erica follows my line of sight. “Good catch, Cal.” She sounds more surprised at my magic sensing skills than I’d like. “He’s probably going through summoning setup procedures. You have to seal all summoning circles with a standard set of safety wards before you attempt anything—unless you want to commit suicide. We have a few minutes, ten, twelve, but not much longer.” She addresses Riker. “I can beat Marcus in a one-on-one fight. But it’s possible there are still other conspirators on the premises. I might need some backup.”

  Riker digs his heels into the snow and throws a despondent glance at the SUV, where most of my team is down for the count. He looks from me, to Erica, to Ella, who’s helping Cooper staunch the bleeding from Amy’s compound fracture. “Damn it,” he mutters. “Where are all those auxiliaries I asked for? We need more manpower.”

  I stick out my hand and watch the falling snow caress my glove. “Waylaid. It’s the storm. It’s snowing way harder than it was when we left the diner. The plows go by on thirty-minute rotations. We’re between sweeps. The auxiliaries are probably on their way, but the drifts are too high to drive through quickly. We may be on our own with this, if ten minutes is all we have left.”

  Riker curses. Then he rubs his face, straightens his back, and calls out to the SUV, “Ella! We need you.”

  Ella’s head pokes out of the SUV, which she just climbed into. “Coming!” She bends down to speak to Cooper, who’s still outside the vehicle and is now wrapping Amy’s broken arm in gauze. He hesitates at her words, then nods. Ella responds by tugging something from her belt—one of her guns—and handing it to Cooper. The archivist stares at it like it’s a ticking time bomb, but after everything he’s seen so far tonig
ht, he can’t refuse protection. Double-checking the safety, he sticks the gun in his coat pocket and returns to finishing Amy’s patch job.

  Ella hops out of the vehicle and trudges through the snow until she’s close enough to hear us without shouting. Riker fills her in on the situation in twenty-two seconds, talking so fast that I miss most of the words. But Ella, who must have heard Riker speak this way in a hundred other combat scenarios, absorbs every piece of relevant information. When Riker is finished, Ella says, “In that case, I’ll lead the raid to the basement, Nick. You go help Cooper Lee with the injured.”

  Riker looks taken aback. “Ella, you have no reinforcements—”

  Ella holds up her hand. “I have the witch. And Cal.”

  The captain blanches. “Cal is on medical leave.”

  “And you should be too with your leg like that,” she responds. “I saw you stumble, Nick. I’m not an idiot. If we need to make a fast getaway, Cal can push himself, even if he rips a stitch or snaps a rib. He’s young. He’ll heal. But if your knee blows out, and no one’s close enough to help you, you may very well die. Medical leave or not, Cal is in a better position than you.”

  Riker opens his mouth to protest, but Ella gives him a pleading look, and he deflates. Something silent and profound passes between them—an understanding of one another that only blooms after so many years of working together—and without further argument, Riker hobbles off to the SUV. As he’s leaving, he partially turns his head and says, “If you need me, Ella, I will come. Don’t expect me to sit by and do nothing while the specter of death hangs over one of my subordinates. I won’t do that again. Not even if you beg me to.”

  Ella wipes a spot of blood off her cheek with her thumb. “I would never ask you to do that, Nick.” A thin smile crosses her lips. “In fact, if I end up a damsel in distress, you better damn well come save me, oh mighty Captain.”

  The ghost of Riker’s laugh fades into the wind. “Good luck, Ella. You too, Cal. And Erica. Go kick that bastard’s ass for me, will you?”