by Karen Chance
Shit, shit, SHIT—
“John!”
He jumped and looked up to see Caleb leaning across the desk, both hands on the doily, eyes narrowed on his face. Like maybe that wasn’t the first time he’d said something. John swallowed.
“What?” It came out a rough croak.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Caleb demanded.
Not unless I want to get locked up, John thought, staring mutely back at his friend.
He could feel it even now: the panicked sweat trickling down his back as he ran, soaking his shirt; the mad chase through the forest, with him dodging iron hard trunks and whipping limbs, which his watery pursuers just flowed around; the drenching the creatures had given him when he’d finally managed to explode the wards holding them together, causing the little fish to gasp its last on the loamy soil.
And the beating that had followed from the fey, when his brief fight with their creations allowed them to catch up.
It had been savage—they hadn’t liked the fact that he’d used their own magic against them—but that hadn’t mattered. No more than it did when they picked him up and threw him back through the gate he’d painstakingly unlocked. The portal had grabbed him, but John had laughed through a split lip nonetheless, tasting blood but also victory. Because he’d won. The fey hadn’t realized: he’d been on his way out anyway . . .
His way out from where? he wondered suddenly. When had all this happened? He remembered vividly every trip he’d taken into Faerie and that . . . hadn’t been one of them.
He felt disoriented, almost dizzy, the same way he had after the dream about the cave. He refrained from rubbing his backside, where the bruises he’d acquired when he tumbled out the other side of the portal throbbed once again, because Caleb was looking at him like he might be mad. It did not help John’s frame of mind that his friend could be right.
He cleared his throat. “Yes. The, er, the water creatures. They’re called manlikans.”
“Uh huh.” Caleb’s suspicious expression didn’t waver. John couldn’t really blame him. He glanced around, but the only reflective surface in sight, to show him how well he’d managed to compose his features, was the scratched and dented side of the coffeepot. And it just gave him back a nose caught in a furrow and elongated past Pinocchio’s.
But his real expression must have been more convincing, because after a minute, Caleb slowly nodded. “Yeah, that was it.”
He started digging around in a battered cabinet and came up with some shortbread. He took one of the small cookies and slid the rest of the pack over to John. Things were bad when Caleb shared his precious shortbread, so John took a piece.
“Anyway,” his friend continued, after a moment. “The manlikan had gotten all wrapped up in your shower curtain, I guess when it exited the tub. So, there I was, half dozing off, because I’d finished my book and the only crossword type games you had were those damned sudoku things—”
“Caleb—”
“—and bam! The door slammed opened and there it was, swathed in that awful black curtain with the embroidered bats on it. Seriously, who thinks that crap is chic?”
“A casino designed to look like hell?” John said, feeling queasy. He looked at the shortbread, but didn’t eat it. He didn’t want a damned cookie. He wanted to know what was wrong with him.
“More like the bargain bin at Party City, the week after Halloween,” Caleb said sourly. “But I still had nightmares for days.”
John frowned. “Because of the bats?”
“Because of the way the water pushed and bulged at the plastic. It . . . wobbled.” The word was accompanied by a small shudder.
“Caleb—”
The coffee pot went off again, and the giant war mage stood to silence it. “Then, when I finally got my shit together and cursed the thing into oblivion, do you know what happened?”
“It turned into steam,” John said, watching the same thing boil out of the pot, while another random memory tried to ensnare him.
He brutally thrust it away.
“Caleb—”
“It turned into steam!” Caleb agreed. “For a minute. ‘Til the damned thing re-condensed and came after me, and by then it was pissed.”
John gave up attempting to explain anything to Caleb, because it felt impossible. His friend was an excellent war mage, better than most people gave him credit for, since he wasn’t constantly trying to claw his way to the top. But he also wasn’t a shrink, someone John was starting to suspect he needed, and it wasn’t fair to saddle him with this.
John decided to finish his terrible coffee, reassure Caleb, and go find someone who could help him.
But not in the Corps.
War mages were essentially magical nukes, and there were stringent policies in place for any who started to “malfunction.” Mental illness of any kind, whether PTSD or more magically induced problems, did not result in therapy. Best case scenario, it resulted in a carefully supervised leave, where any unusual behavior was flagged and reported. Worse case, it resulted in being locked up, drugged, or put in what was essentially prison until the Corps decided what to do with you—assuming they ever did.
There were stories of men who had been in the stasis pods the Corps used for warehousing its problems for a century or more, until a cure was found. There were rumors of others who were still there, from even earlier times, slumbering through the years while any life they’d had passed them by. And they would continue to do so for who knew how much longer.
John felt a shudder go through him, harsh and bone deep. He knew what it was like to lose literally everything and come back to a world changed beyond recognition. He wouldn’t go through that again. He couldn’t. Even if they eventually saved him, it wouldn’t matter.
Everything he gave a damn about was here.
“John?”
He looked up to see Caleb leaning across the desk again, coffeepot in hand. His friend was watching him narrowly, but still didn’t demand the answers John knew he wanted. He was giving him time to volunteer the information, only what he had to say wasn’t anything Caleb wanted to hear.
“You want some more or what?” Caleb asked, after a moment.
John held out his mug. Caleb topped him off with what he’d promised would be stronger this time. He’d lied.
John took a sip and made a face. “Do you honestly call this coffee?”
“Do you honestly still have a stomach lining?”
John started to reply when Caleb held up a hand.
“Wait.” He pulled a jar and a spoon out of the battered metal cabinet. And proceeded to add a heaping mound of instant coffee on top of the sudsy water.
John just looked at him.
He added another spoonful.
John waited patiently.
Caleb sat the jar down on the desk and made a be-my-guest gesture. John obliged. And finally managed to come up with something that was still swill, but was at least swill with a punch.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that,” Caleb muttered, and gathered up his now sadly depleted stash.
John drank his newly fortified coffee and his friend went back to describing the battle with the manlikan. It sounded like a Keystone cops sketch, with the creature flinging the burning curtain at some of the casino’s vampire guards, who had arrived at exactly the wrong time and went up like Roman candles. And then something about a fire extinguisher exploding.
John was trying to pay attention—Caleb told a good story—but his problems kept intruding. And not just the current one. But everything that had happened in the past month, a dizzying array of insanity that had started with an ancient demon curse and ended—
Here. With John sitting in his friend’s office, wondering if the Corps’ version of the men in the white coats were on their way while Caleb kept him busy. And the fact that he would entertain that, would actually suspect that one of his oldest friends would be feeding him shortbread and regaling him with crazy stories so he woul
dn’t run away, so they’d know where to find him—
Said everything about what kind of shape he was in. And he wasn’t going to get any better sitting here. John ate the cookie, knocked back the swill, and started to sit the cup on the desk before noticing something . . . strange.
Very strange.
“Caleb?” he said cautiously. Caleb’s lively story had come to an end at some point, but lost in thought, John hadn’t noticed. The two men had never felt burdened with the need for conversation. They’d often spent hours in each other’s company, even on missions that didn’t require it, in comfortable silence.
This wasn’t comfortable.
And neither was the hot coffee now running off the desk like a smoking waterfall. John abruptly pulled back, and managed to avoid having it soak through his trainers. But the liquid stream continued to come nonetheless, cascading off the desk to stain the worn carpet squares on the office floor.
Yet Caleb just stood there, eyes fixed, the now empty pot in one hand, the coffee-covered desk under the other, unmoving.
The hell?
Chapter Four
C aleb?” John said again, unsure for a moment if he was seeing things. And frankly hoping so. “Caleb!”
No response.
The doily was ruined, John thought ridiculously, as he watched coffee being soaked up by the paper lace for a second. Before snapping out of it and surging to his feet, his senses expanding in all directions. But if there was a threat, he couldn’t detect it.
There was no magic swirling around. No blonde time traveler of his acquaintance popping in for a private word and pausing everything around her. No anything.
Just his friend, standing there blank faced and unmoving, like an imposing statue carved out of wood.
Like the men in the hall, John realized, catching a glimpse through the glass pane in the door. He stuck his head out to see Jackson, a hard-bitten trainer, petrified in the midst of giving some sandy haired recruit a blessing out. The old man still had his mouth open, wide enough for a single gold molar to catch the light. And to wink at John as if to say: “Isn’t this fun?”
No, John thought, his hand dropping automatically to the thigh holster he wasn’t wearing. He cursed, because he wasn’t wearing anything else, either, at least not of the weapon variety. Which was a problem considering the large knot of glassy-eyed war mages headed his way.
He jerked back inside, spun and reached for Caleb’s sidearm—
And missed, because his friend was no longer behind the desk. Like Jackson and his recruit, who had been swept up by the advancing throng, Caleb was suddenly on the move. Passing John, flinging open the door, and heading outside—
All with the same blank eyed stare that everyone else was wearing.
Everyone.
A steady stream of mages, trainees, and support staff—even one guy with a mop still in hand—flowed silently by the office and down the hall. After a moment, John went with them. Because either he really was mad or something was very, very wrong. And considering that the supernatural community was currently at war . . .
Well, he hoped that he was simply mad.
The crowd surged down the hall to a door near the far end, which gave out onto the main salle, where Caleb had found John half an hour before. He’d have had a hard time locating him now, because people were spilling in from all sides, hundreds of them. But the place wasn’t filling up.
Probably because of the huge, black portal on the far wall, thrumming with power, that was swallowing them like water down a drain.
John stared at it for a second. Darkness boiled at the center and flickers of green fire licked the sides, the latter a tell-tale sign of destabilization. Not the kind that preceded a collapse; it would be far worse in that case. But the kind that indicated that an enormous amount of energy was being channeled through that thing.
A long-distance portal, then, the rational part of his brain commented, while the emotional part was busy screaming. Because nobody was supposed to be able to open a portal in here. This was the Corps’ West Coast headquarters. They had bloody shields!
Only they didn’t. The usual tell-tale buzz against John’s skin was missing, which around here was more like a bunch of electric eels snapping at his arse, because the Corps’ wards had never played well with his magic. But, suddenly, there was nothing.
Of course, there wasn’t.
Anyone who could enthrall this many war mages could also order them to turn off the damned shields, couldn’t they?
And then John spied Caleb, calmly walking ahead, and started pushing and shoving toward him. He doubted he would reach his friend in time, but that wasn’t the only point. If a group with this kind of power wanted them dead, they could have simply ordered them to kill each other.
No, they wanted them somewhere else.
And John was deathly afraid that he knew where that was.
Ever since the war started, there had been attacks on the Silver Circle’s main base of operations in Stratford. As the parent organization of the War Mage Corps, it was an obvious target, but the age-old fortress wasn’t so easily assailed. First begun during a time of war, it had been designed specifically with attack in mind, which was why it wasn’t in a castle or even a modern skyscraper. Instead, it occupied a sprawling rabbit warren of tunnels under the English countryside, protected by acres of spells, some dating back to Tudor times. They had been laid and re-laid and fortified by centuries of the best magical talent the Circle could boast.
No one was getting in there.
Or so everyone had thought.
John had missed the recent assault due to being involved in his own bit of drama. But he’d heard stories, in those few periods of lucidity since his return. How the base had been attacked from multiple directions at once, how literally thousands of dark mages had crashed through the outer defenses, how the Corps had been battered by vicious black spells, some of which no one had ever seen before.
To the point that the best the knights had been able to do was to slow them down.
Until Jonas Marsden, aged though he was, with arthritic hands that only worked because of the spells he constantly kept applied to them, his eyesight shot, his hearing questionable, his back bent, nonetheless rallied the Corps and led a charge through the tunnels. To which he’d applied an almost forgotten spell to morph them into whatever shape would allow the knights to take the invaders from behind. And above. And below.
Suddenly, the dark mage army had found itself trapped in an ever-changing labyrinth of steadily narrowing corridors that closed in so much that they couldn’t even move. Or cut them off from their allies into small groups that were then dropped a story or two, into the midst of a circle of murderous faces. Or crushed them under ceilings that abruptly collapsed, sandwiching them between tons of rock and earth.
And all the while, the Corps was slowly, methodically, and with utter savagery, clearing their base of every last one.
Yet it had been a vicious fight all the same, from what John had heard, one that had required ripping experimental weapons from the labs to test them in actual combat. One that had forced young recruits, many with peach fuzz still on their cheeks, out of bed to protect key areas, because every fully trained mage was needed for the fight. One that had caused a group of civilian adjuncts—secretaries and janitors—to arm themselves, and to defend their areas with deadlier force than anyone had expected.
Yet many of them had died nonetheless.
John had heard that Jonas, his face thunderous but his voice silent, had picked his way through the dead in the Corps’ library after a battle there. He’d been bleeding from a head wound, but had ignored the nurses vainly attempting to bandage him up. Instead, he’d personally seen to it that every deceased staff member had been gently and carefully put on stretchers and evacuated.
Before immolating the dark mage bodies himself, including several which had still been alive.
Burning them to powder.
It ha
d been a chilling sign that the war had entered a new phase, and that the old rules no longer applied. So what do you do, John thought now, when your all-out assault just failed, and you realize that your best efforts may never take out your opponents? Why, you let them do it for you.
Although how the hell the other side had gained control of a whole army of war mages, he couldn’t imagine. Enthrallment spells only worked on the weak minded, which war mages damned well weren’t! And the knights had received training in how to detect and throw them off in any case. The only thing that attempting to enthrall a war mage should get you was a pissed off war mage.
Yet here was not one, but hundreds of examples to the contrary, many of whom John had known for years and could vouch for their competency. No one should have been able to enthrall these men! Not without a fight, and not without the bespelled mage lurching about, screaming a warning and giving everyone time to react.
Just like no one should have been able to enthrall him.
But someone had. Why else would he be here, with his feet cut from stumbling barefoot around Vegas like a drunken tourist? Why else would he have shown up in his underwear? And why else would he be plagued by strange memories, if not to distract him from the job and fog his mind, while someone else took control of his body?
John felt his lip curl and power flood his system. Someone was going to pay for this. Someone who had been in too much of a hurry to designate specific war mages for their army, and instead had sent out a general call to everyone assigned to this base—and had netted more than they bargained for.
A lot more, he thought, anger surging to the surface. He stopped fighting to get ahead and instead cut through the now shoulder to shoulder throng to the nearest line of sandbags, pulled himself up and ran along the top, bypassing the strangely silent crowd. Only to see the portal swallow Caleb, just ahead.
Goddamnit!
He reached the end of the bags and jumped to the ground, knocking people over, not one of whom reacted. Other than to right themselves and continue on their path, like the mindless automatons someone had turned them into. John pushed past them until he reached the far wall, where the mighty thrum, thrum, thrum of the portal was raising chills on his arms.
