by Karen Chance
He hadn’t come back, either.
As a result, this time it was a full squad, with a half demon along for the ride because they still didn’t know what they were dealing with. And things that eat humans for breakfast were usually classified as demonic. Or so Jonas had told him over tea, without so much as batting an eyelash.
John really, really wished he’d been able to take offense at the casual comment.
But the plain fact was that Jonas was probably right. And his men were probably going to get eaten, possibly alive, if they went in there with only human magic and human hubris. John had therefore reluctantly allowed himself to be talked into going along.
After all, who better to fight a monster than another monster?
The only problem was that this monster might recognize him, or at least, what he was. And while that could result in an attack, it could result in the opposite, as well. If the murderous beast slithered away somewhere, who knew where it might turn up next, and how many horrors it might commit along the way.
No, this ends here, John thought, concentrating. And slowly, slowly, slowly, he began to get a picture. Of something powerful . . . yet not; of something old . . . yet not; of something familiar yet alien, but not in the way he’d expected. But almost as if . . .
The boy broke his concentration by suddenly grabbing him, which was bad. And by throwing a curse through a gap he’d made in the improvised gag, which was worse. But it was still manageable, because John was, of course, shielded.
Unfortunately, the cliff face wasn’t.
A chunk of it shattered, sending cracks up the already jagged rock, and a large piece above their heads started sloughing off. The falling slab only missed the two idiots who’d been clinging to its surface because they weren’t anymore. John had thrown them backwards at the last second, sliding into the cave mouth on a moving stream of chalk and rock that felt almost as liquid under his feet as the ocean outside—and as slippery.
He also somehow kept hold of the boy, raising a shield around them both and expanding it outward to the size and shape of a large bubble. One tough enough to cushion the mass of blows they took as they bounced and slammed and rolled and jarred, all the way to the bottom of a steep ramp inside the cave. And hit a wall at the far end where the shield burst apart, dumping them onto a floor that was wet and salt encrusted and rough as a cobb.
The amount of bruising he’d taken might have occupied John’s mind more, but at the same instant, a wild, blood-soaked figure lunged at them out of the darkness, arms raised and teeth bared, an unearthly howl emanating from between its lips.
“John!”
“Fuck!” John yelled and jerked around, one hand outstretched in a defensive posture that caused his shields to snap into place. The other was laced with a barely contained fireball that he couldn’t see well enough to throw, because of the migraine blurring his vision.
It felt like someone was striking his head with a mallet.
A very determined someone.
With a damned big mallet.
After a moment, he managed to focus enough to notice his surroundings, which were neither a salt encrusted cave nor a burning hotel room. What slowly came into focus instead was a cavernous space with a general air of dilapidation. There was flaking paint on some exposed piping beside him, industrial tile under his feet, and the whole thing smelled of body odor, magic and . . . mouse droppings?
“John!”
His head snapped up when the voice came again, and agony lanced through his skull. He went down to one knee at the violent, almost shocking pain. Over the sound of his fireball spell sizzling out against the cold tile, he heard the thud of running boots.
“Get back!” someone barked, as several nearby figures converged on his location. He couldn’t see them—the pain was blinding—but he heard them pause whist the runner did not. And the next second, strong hands were gripping his arms.
Or trying to. The hands actually gripped his shield instead, which permitted them through the surface, like plunging into a cold pool. Only to solidify immediately after, trapping them under a watery scrim. And allowing John to spin and slam the offending body against the floor.
It wasn’t easy, even with all the adrenaline pumping through his system, the body being huge and heavy with muscle.
And not fighting back, John realized, after a moment.
“Right on the sciatica,” someone sighed.
For an instant, John saw again the boy he’d dragged over a cliff: a narrow, coffee-colored face, suspicious brown eyes, and a thatch of wild curls. Only to have the face change and age as his eyes managed to focus: the neck broadening into maturity, the hair disappearing, the eyes—the most recognizable feature—acquiring a few obvious crow’s feet. It was still Caleb, but this man was teetering on the cusp of middle age, if a well-preserved and handsome version of it.
John wondered why he’d been dreaming about his old friend, and such a weird dream, too. Jonas had come after him, that much was true, to shake him out of his downward spiral after the death of his wife. But that strange foray into Cornwall wasn’t what had followed.
Was it?
“You gonna kiss me or let me up?” Caleb asked dourly.
John let him up.
And then sat back down abruptly, as the room spun around him.
“You hurt?” Caleb asked, as more people started gathering around. And then dispersed just as quickly, when the cranky war mage commander sent them off with a few well-chosen words.
A bunch of smart “sir, yes, sirs!” echoed through what John was finally recognizing as the Corps’ temporary Vegas HQ. After the previous one was destroyed in the current war, the Corps had taken over an old warehouse complex on the outskirts of the city that had looked like it was about to fall down. And still did, since they’d been more concerned with functionality than appearance. None of which explained—
“What the hell are you doing here?” Caleb demanded, as John pulled himself back to his feet.
Exactly, John thought, memories swirling around him like a hurricane, or like those damned washcloths Jonas had set on him, all those years ago. But he couldn’t grasp them. They slipped through his mental fingers and danced away, and when he pursued them, they turned into demon sprites who laughed and laughed, taunting him from just out of reach—
“John!”
“I’m fine,” he said hoarsely, answering his friend’s previous question, and promptly staggered into a wall.
“Of course, you are.” The tone was unamused.
John stared around blearily. “Did I set anything else on fire?”
“Were you trying to?” Caleb asked, and grabbed him.
That led to John looking down, and blinking in confusion.
“The hell am I wearing?”
“That was my next question,” Caleb said, pulling him off the wall and over behind some sandbags. They were shoulder high, delineating an exercise area that was currently empty. Another set behind them created a pathway which led to a bank of lockers along another wall.
John located and then fumbled with the dented metal cabinet assigned to him, finally managing to get it open and to pull out the only clothes it contained: a set of ancient gray sweats that he kept around for workouts. They were worn and threadbare, but clean. And better than the t-shirt, boxer briefs and pale gray bathrobe he’d been wearing for some reason.
Probably because I’m supposed to be in bed, he remembered.
“Damn it, John! You’re supposed to be in bed!” Caleb echoed his thoughts in what he fondly believed to be a whisper.
“I’m aware of that—”
A meaty hand grabbed his shoulder. “Then what the devil are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
All this repetition was starting to get on John’s nerves, which weren’t in great shape to begin with. Much like the rest of him. The small, square mirror on the inside of his locker showed him back a thin, pale
face that he barely recognized, one with dark circles under bloodshot green eyes, a three or maybe four-day growth of beard, and a shock of blond hair sticking out haphazardly, as if trying to form a halo around his pounding head.
He grimaced at the irony and pulled on the sweats. That worked out all right, but his hands shook slightly. And, of course, Caleb noticed. His bull-in-a-china-shop routine masked a more than competent investigator, and a damned fine mage.
One who was going to drag him off to the medics if he didn’t start making some sense.
“I swear to God,” Caleb snapped. “If you don’t start making sense—”
“Cut it out!” John said, and then paused, wondering. He looked at Caleb, his eyes narrowing, which caused the other man to make an abortive movement toward his side holster. One he stopped halfway, although he didn’t lower his hand, as John slowly and deliberately reached out—
And poked him in the chest.
“Something wrong?” Caleb asked dryly.
John grabbed his friend’s shoulder and squeezed. He felt real. Solid. Not like another damned dream. The repetition was probably down to the fact that there were only so many things someone would say when a friend showed up at work looking dazed and disheveled, in his underwear, and proceeded to slowly poke you.
John ran a hand over his eyes. “I’m . . . not feeling well.”
“I gathered that.”
John sat on one of the benches in front of the lockers in order to put on his trainers. Caleb settled beside him. For a moment, nobody spoke.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Caleb finally asked.
John assumed he meant in the real world, although for a second it was hard to tell the difference. He pinched the bridge of his nose. Concentrate, damn it!
“Dante’s,” John said hoarsely. “I’d just woken from a dream and thrown a fireball spell. There was a woman there . . . she caught it—”
“Tami. A null witch.”
John nodded.
“She’s been helping me babysit,” Caleb informed him. “Cause sometimes you throw weird fey spells I don’t know how to counter. But her abilities absorb them just the same.”
“Fey spells?” John looked up at his friend. “Then I’ve . . . done this before?”
“’This’ meaning walk across town in your bare feet while apparently zonked out of your mind? Or ‘this’ as in try to burn down the hotel? Which this are we focusing on here?”
John contemplated that for a moment. At least it explained why his feet were cut and bruised and filthy. He tried cleaning them off with his socks but it didn’t help much, just smeared the dirt around. He finally put the shoes on anyway and leaned his head back against his locker.
“I guess you’ve had an interesting day, haven’t you?” he asked Caleb.
“Not really.” Caleb said, eyeing him darkly. “The fireball incident was a week ago.”
Chapter Three
C offee?”
John rounded on Caleb as soon as they hit the man’s dingy office, because discussing his current state out in the open wasn’t a great idea. But instead of answers, he had a coffeepot thrust in his face.
He pushed it aside with a curse.
“Well, I’m having some,” Caleb said, unperturbed, and plugged the frayed, fabric wrapped cord into the wall. Or, more accurately, into an adapter, because the pot looked like it had been bought in Britain circa World War II.
“A week?” John demanded, his hands on the desk. One of which Caleb calmly moved aside so that he could put down a disposable placemat.
The thick white paper was printed with decorative beads and swags of lace and looked like something a small, grandmotherly figure should be fussing about with, instead of a huge war mage, but Caleb didn’t care about such things. He was well known for unashamedly drinking the girliest cocktails imaginable, the multicolored kind with three parasols, and for stubbornly believing that he could sing karaoke. To say that he was secure in his manhood was an understatement.
“Girl’s drinks taste better, and I’m amazing at karaoke,” Caleb said, when John made a comment.
“You are not amazing.”
A flash of brilliant white teeth lit the dark face. “Women think I’m amazing.”
“I was talking about your singing.”
Caleb laughed. John didn’t. He just watched his friend commandeer an old leather desk chair that he refused to get rid of, despite the fact that it squeaked terribly and had stuffing falling out of the cushion, and put his feet up.
The coffeepot gulped and gurgled. The chair squeaked and squawked. The two men glared at each other.
Or, rather, John glared; Caleb gave back his patented Zen face, the one he used with perps he’d decided to simply wait out.
“My go to is “Power of Love”,” he finally said. “Luther always pulls.”
“Caleb!”
“Stop hitting my desk.” Caleb adjusted his little doily. Because God forbid that the scratched and stained wood get another ding in it. “And relax. I got you in here before you tore a hole in the roof or fried any recruits. I’m duty officer tonight, so nobody’s coming by to ask questions. And the coffee is almost done. Sit back and I’ll bring you up to speed.”
He did. A few minutes later, John was on his second mug of coffee-flavored water, trying vainly to get some caffeine into his system, and Caleb was finishing up a short, but alarming recitation.
“You mean to say that I’ve been wondering about, setting things on fire, for a week?” John demanded.
“Not on fire.” Caleb thought about it. “Mostly. But I think you were dreaming, and you talk in your sleep.”
“I damned well don’t!”
“Okay, you spell cast in your sleep. Some weird shit, too. That portal—”
“Portal? What portal?”
“—you conjured up may have permanently scarred some of the boys—”
“Boys?” John said sharply, despite feeling like a magpie.
“I had to bring some of the guys in, and don’t give me that,” Caleb shot him a look. “The vamps that work at that hotel were helping to relieve me, so I could get some sleep, but then you do stuff like open portals full of hell beasts—”
“What . . . kind of beasts?” John asked weakly.
The big shoulders went up and down. “Damned if I know. One of the guys called them fire sprites, ‘though if that’s the technical term I couldn’t tell you. Small, red, evil eyed little bastards who scorch everything they touch—”
John winced.
“—and you know how much vamps love open flames—”
“So you brought in members of the Corps?”
Caleb sent him another look. “Good guys. I trust them.”
But can I? John thought. And hoped he hadn’t been up to anything too illegal. “Was that all?”
“Oh, hell no.”
John sighed.
“I was there three nights ago when you started muttering. Next thing I know, the damned shower curtain walked out of the bathroom all on its own."
“What the—”
Caleb nodded. “That’s what I said. Turns out, you’d conjured up some sort of fey construct, human shaped but formed out of water. I asked Adam about it—you know the one, part brownie?”
John nodded. The diminutive war mage was barely four feet tall, having taken after his paternal grandmother, but spells don’t care about a man’s height. And Adam could more than hold his own in battle.
“Well, he called it a man . . . a manli . . . a man-something. Said the fey use them like squires in battle, the way we do golems.”
“They do not use them in battle—usually,” John corrected himself. “And they’re called—”
He was running, and running fast. He tore through the thick underbrush, getting whacked in the face by tree limbs, some of which sent sprays of burning sap across his skin. Faerie, he thought grimly, as he jumped a gorge, almost missed, scrambled up the other side, and then paused for a second
at the sudden appearance of an arrow, white fletched and rune carved, vibrating out of the dirt in front of his feet.
Alorestri, the more clinical part of his brain noted. Wave Dancer clan. They liked to rub red ochre into the carvings, to make them stand out—
Shut up! He told himself, while standing on tiptoe to avoid the arrow.
The fey didn’t miss, so they were playing with him, trying to herd him where they wanted him to go. As if he was an animal, the way they thought of all humans. But he wasn’t an animal.
And he had fey blood, too.
He proved it a second later when he sent the arrow flying back at them without the need for a bow. The sudden windstorm he conjured up was strong enough to also blow three sentries out of the trees and send them tumbling to the forest floor. They jumped up and tried to scale the bank behind him, preparing to run across the river like it was solid land, for water was their element. But earth wasn’t, as demonstrated when a sudden landslide sent them sliding all the way back down.
John laughed, feeling amused and relieved—for a moment. Until the river at the bottom of the gorge began to ripple and bulge in a very unnatural way. And three new figures emerged from the depths, looking almost transparent against the rushing stream, including one with a surprised looking fish swimming round and round inside its watery head.
John stared at it in consternation.
Well, shit.
It stared back, or rather, the fish did. The creature itself didn’t have eyes, just vague indentations in what John assumed was a ward, serving as a magical “skin.” The trio didn’t exactly look human, although their shapes were mostly right, but they didn’t look like anything else, either. Until the vague bulges on the face of the fish creature slowly transformed into the approximation of a saucy grin, a horrible, too wide expression that no human could duplicate, because no human could open up half his skull.
Or shoot up out of the river like a geyser and latch onto the bank, pulling itself towards John like something out of a horror movie—and pulling fast.
