She faced north, where she knew the palace hovered on the mountainside. Were the regulators coming to save them? “Hail to the north, earth which strengthens us.”
Turning east, she held the wand over her mother’s head, envisioning the ocean that lay beyond the city, and the world that waited like a memory beyond the ocean. “Hail to the east, air which teaches us.”
She faced the empty wall of the closet, looking towards the south. The breach in the wall lay a block away. Dajia closed her eyes, trying to eject from her mind the vision of inky forest and even inkier ravagers invading Sector 14, invading their safety. “Hail to the south, fire which protects us.”
A loud thump from above gave her pause. She met her mother’s wide eyes, and her heart leaped to her throat. Ghost’s enigmatic face lifted to the ceiling, and then she turned her vivid green gaze on Dajia as if to say Continue.
Not for the first time, Dajia wondered if the cat knew more than she let on.
As Dajia faced the west, her wand hand shook. In the west, beyond the mountain range, lay nothing but wasteland and ravagers. So much more of it had belonged to Sector 14 before the Purge, before the population declined and everyone decided they were better off together. The wallkeepers moved the wall, closing in on the city. “Hail to the west, water which cleanses us.”
At the last word, her circle slid into place with little pageantry. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it in the displacement of air, the pressure in her ears. She crouched beside her mother and Ghost and waved her wand as her father had shown her so many years before. “Praesidio.”
This ward she could see. It snapped into place around them with an audible pop, a murky pink that shaded the basement closet in rose-tint.
For a moment, there was silence but for the harsh rasp of her mother’s breaths. Then the basement door opened with a metallic creak.
Dajia held her breath and reached blindly for her mother’s hand on Ghost’s warm fur.
They listened, barely breathing, as steps shuffled outside the closet door. Heavy crashes indicated the ravagers were searching the basement for them.
They smell us, Dajia thought, leaning heavily on her mother. They won’t stop until they find us.
She didn’t know how long she could hold the ward. Already, it drained her, making her sleepy. She recalled her father’s voice: Magick is like a muscle, Daija. In order to maintain the strength of that muscle, you must exercise it. Every day.
In a world where her magick could be a death sentence, she didn’t get enough exercise.
Mom wrapped an arm around her shoulder and tapped her chest. Take what you need, she mouthed.
Daija shook her head. If the ward fell, Mom needed her strength to run. Fight. Have a shot at survival.
The closet door rattled, and an angry roar filled the basement. The silence that followed deafened them. Then heavy fists began to pound on the door. Daija felt every crash in her core, breaking down her defenses, crumbling her circle.
She knew she couldn’t hold it.
4
Eli
Elliott Pierce, Heir Regent of Sector 14, awoke to the crash of fists against his bedroom door, and a panicked voice: “Sir! There’s been a breach!”
He lay in the dark for a moment that seemed longer than it was. The palace bustled with life outside his bedroom door, abnormal for the middle of the night. Eli closed his eyes. If he ignored it, it wasn’t happening.
The slim, soft figure beside him shifted, a rose-bud nipple pebbling in the cool room. She sat up, clutching the sheets to her bare breasts. “Shouldn’t you go?”
Fuck, he couldn’t even remember her name. She worked in the palace. In the kitchen, maybe? After the council meeting last night, he’d gotten drunk with a few of the men and ended up swiping her from a solitary hallway.
It wasn’t hard for the future regent to get a piece of ass.
“Shouldn’t you?” Eli snarled, throwing back the covers, irritated that a gods-damned maid was telling him how to do his job.
He swept around the room, tugging on underwear and socks. He found his regulator uniform hanging in the closet, freshly pressed and smelling of eucalyptus: Black, long-sleeved shirt, black wool pants, and flexible, indestructible ebony armor.
“What about the hood?” the woman chided as he headed for the door.
“I expect you gone when I return,” Eli said coldly before turning his back and leaving her speechless in his mussed bed.
If he’d thought the palace bustled with action before he left his room, he realized as he stepped into the melee it was worse than he’d imagined. Panic had turned the usually sedate north wing of the castle into a riot of screaming women and stern men snapping orders. It was madness; the kind that could kill someone. Eli skirted a group of society men speaking over one another in ever-increasing tones, and descended the stairs two at a time.
He strolled into the War Room to find his general addressing a group of commanding officers. All seven soldiers bore creased brows and stiff shoulders. An eighth entity in the form of anticipation hovered in the room.
“What’s happening?” Eli asked.
“A breach in Beat 3,” General Coyle responded, circling a section of map on the table in front of him. Coyle’s snow-white hair—usually coiffed and shiny with pomade—hung limp around his lined forehead. For the first time in Eli’s memory, the old man looked his sixty years, driven from bed by the first breach in sector history.
Some small part of Eli had hoped the panicked voice outside his bedroom door had been overreacting. He had to clear surprise from his throat to speak. “How?”
Coyle exchanged glances with his lieutenant commander, a battle-hardened woman with silver-threaded auburn hair and shrewd gray eyes, known by Ryan. She put a hand on Eli’s shoulder. “Your father had a stroke this evening.”
Eli stepped out of her grasp, his hip butting the table. He barely registered the pain. “Is he dead?” I’m not ready.
Coyle answered. “No. He’s stable. For now. But he’s incapacitated.”
“I’m in charge,” Eli said dully.
“Yes, sir.” The statement came from multiple voices. Multiple sets of eyes awaited his orders.
The world he knew caved in. Liquor from last night still clouded his mind, and his limbs felt heavy, as weak as his heart. All the training, all that he’d endured as Heir Regent had led him to this moment.
He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t right for this.
“Sir?” Coyle prompted.
“Are regulators on scene?” Eli asked, the question coming from outside himself, from somewhere where his father existed in his psyche like a bad dream.
“En route.”
“Then that’s where we need to be, too.”
The regent’s weapons cabinet leaned against the far wall. Eli opened the doors, desperately trying to hide the way his hands shook as he extracted his preferred katana. The sword’s familiarity against his palm helped steady him. Fighting, he could do. Fighting, he was good at. Excelled, even.
He clicked the holster into place over his lightweight armor and turned to face his general. “This is what we’ve trained for.”
“Yes, sir,” Commander Ryan spoke up, her craggy face schooled into smooth plaster.
General Coyle’s green eyes shone with approval.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. SECTOR 14 STOOD safe and secure for twenty-five years. Eli hadn’t known the world pre-Reckoning. All he’d ever known was the fortress of protection his father had built for them.
Father was already old during the Reckoning, Eli thought as he walked quickly beside his general through the cold, snowy night. One of the oldest of the Sixteen. He’d created Sector 14 and then immediately conceived Eli, knowing that eventually, he’d need someone to take over.
Except that someone wasn’t strong enough. Eli didn’t inherit his father’s great power, or his mother’s above-average skill with magick. There were regulators more powerful than he.
T
hat grated on him. Made him feel less of a witch; less of a man.
“Do any high-ranking officials live in Beat 3?” Eli asked the general.
Coyle shook his head. “No, sir. The Writers checked the records as soon as we received indication of the breach. It’s an entirely human neighborhood.”
“They’ll all be dead before we arrive,” Eli murmured.
“Then we contain the breach, seal it, and save everyone else,” Ryan spoke up, thumping her armor with a fist.
“But the loss of human life… with Father…” Eli shook his head, unable to complete the thought without panic rising. With his father sick, possibly even dying, the witches would need every human available to feed their magick and protect the Sector. Even a dozen lost would hurt them dearly.
“One crisis at a time,” General Coyle reminded him, gesturing at the road ahead.
The blue street sign stated Beat 3, M Street, with a cross street sign indicating 10th Street. All the years he’d grown up in Sector 14, he couldn’t recall a time he’d ever been this deep into the beats, scraping the end of the continent where the rest of the world began.
M Street dead-ended at the wall, a giant concrete and brick structure that the wallkeepers maintained daily. They were paid well to make sure the wall stayed clean and free of weather erosion, and to ensure any cracks in the mortar from the extreme temperatures of Sector 14 were patched immediately. The wallkeepers had a job nearly as important as the regent’s, in Eli’s opinion.
But because of his father’s decline, the magick of the dome had failed, and the ravagers had broken through the wall. Flames sputtered on the ground around the hole, and chunks of brick and mortar lay scattered down M Street as if blasted by force. Amidst the ruins, regulators fought against creatures Eli had only ever seen in photographs.
“How did they…” Coyle came to a halt, shaking his head. “They’re nothing but animals. It looks like they bombed the goddamned wall.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ryan stated, unsheathing her long sword. “They don’t have the mental capacity to create a bomb.”
“How else would you describe this?”
Eli whipped his katana from its sheath and pointed at the battle happening a block away. “Can we have this conversation later?”
He didn’t wait for a response. His boots pounded the pavement as he jumped into the fray.
In one smooth slice, he decapitated the first ravager he passed: a female, indicated by her pendulous bare breasts. Her snow-white skin stretched tight over skeletal bones, and a leather loincloth draped modestly around her waist. She had claws like knives and teeth like a shark’s. Her back-bent, wolf-like legs collapsed, and the dismembered pieces of her body fell to the snow. Her blood was human-red.
The exposure was going to be dangerous, Eli thought, leaping past the dead ravager to help another regulator fight off a large, muscular male. Ravager blood was poisonous to humans; even a drop of it on a human’s skin could turn them. Anybody who survived would have to be quarantined and disposed of before the illness set in.
Eli’s training took over, and his mind drifted to a safe place inside. He’d been taught since childhood that the ravagers were not human; they were monsters, plain and simple. Killing them felt no different than slaughtering an animal for food or skin. But seeing his comrades fall tore at him. He reached one officer too late; the ravager had torn into his throat, exposing raw meat and tendons, his blood bubbling as air escaped through the wound.
Eli dispatched the ravager, staring in horror at the regulator. The man touched his ruined neck, eyes on Eli’s katana.
Please, he mouthed.
Eli closed his eyes and swung, witch blood joining ravager blood on his blade.
Coyle’s hand on his shoulder shoved him forward, toward the breach and the men and women fighting the incoming tide of ravagers. “You have to seal the breach!”
“Me?” Eli stumbled to the opening, weak-kneed at the thought of fixing his father’s dome. He didn’t have that kind of power. But his father was damn good at pretending he did. Nobody was the wiser. His general expected nothing but greatness.
“Go through, men!” Coyle roared, motioning to the hole and the ravagers coming from the forest. “Let no more of the monsters pass our wall!”
Several regulators obeyed without question, vaulting over the crumbled bricks, swords flashing in dim moonlight.
“Now, Eli, do it now!” Coyle whipped around, his sword stopping a ravager before it could reach them. The old man moved with the swiftness born of a lifetime in battle.
Shit. Eli waved his wand, drawing forth the power of his father’s circle. The dome was an unseen ally on the outside of the wall, invisible until made so. The golden prism shimmered into view. The High Regent’s magick raced over the surface, sparking like active electrical wires. Directly in front of him, the dome had shattered, and broken-glass edges jutted from a gash in the protective field.
It’s not large, Eli thought, relieved. I can do this.
He closed his eyes and centered himself, trusting Coyle to keep him safe as he worked. His power rose within him, an ebb that spoke to the moon and ocean, filling his body until he felt it would burst through his skin. He raised his wand.
“Praesidio.”
Nothing happened.
Fuck me.
The magick was there, but it wasn’t strong enough. He watched a regulator fall beyond the wall, overtaken by three ravagers, claws and teeth ripping and tearing. The twang of arrows flew from the watchtowers above; the best archers in Sector 14 stood above, saving who they could.
If he couldn’t seal this breach, everyone would die.
Eli closed his eyes once again and tried to ignore the screams and the viscous slide of sword on skin. He brought his magick to the surface, preparing to give it all he had.
Something tickled the edge of his awareness. He cocked his head, eyes still shut, waiting for the prickle to happen again. There, somewhere outside of him but inside Beat 3, magick poured like a waterfall. Strong magick, the way his father’s felt twenty years ago, ten years ago, before he began to waste away.
Eli didn’t think twice. He didn’t know who the magick belonged to. A regulator, maybe, though magick had no effect on the ravagers. It could slow them down, but only decapitation could kill them. But it didn’t matter; none of that mattered. What mattered was Eli could grasp that source with all he had and siphon what he needed to make himself strong enough. He clutched the unfamiliar magick and ripped it from its owner.
The crystalline power washed over him, strengthening him. He raised his wand and screamed, “Praesidio!”
The spell burst from him with alien force. He flew backwards, skidding on his ass across icy concrete. He hit a mailbox post, stars bursting in his vision. He lay on his back, stunned, snow melting beneath his black hair.
When he finally found the strength to sit up, he saw the breach had sealed. Pale pink swirled among his father’s golden magick, the jagged edges smoothed by the new power.
Coyle stared at him from afar, sword tip resting on the cracked asphalt and blood running down his face from a scalp wound. Eli saw the question in the old man’s eyes: he knew Eli’s magick shone silver. Not pink.
A sharp, soul-wrenching cry jerked Eli from the old man’s gaze. Ryan, her armor covered in the blood of ravagers, raced to the breach and vaulted over the destroyed wall. She pounded against the still-visible dome of magick, sobbing.
Coyle offered Eli a hand. He hadn’t even seen the old man come near. “Her husband is on the other side,” he said stiffly.
Eli reeled. Coyle had sent men into the forest to keep more ravagers from coming through. When Eli had sealed the dome, he’d sealed their fates.
Eli fell to his knees, his wand clattering to the ground. His hands bore no ravager blood, not like Ryan’s did, but the blood of his own men streaked the crevices of his palms.
Coyle clasped his shoulder. “Sometimes, you must sacrifice some to sav
e all. That is the way of our world. That is how we survive, Eli.”
The dying screams of his lost men drifted on the frigid night air as snow began to fall.
5
Eli
Eli took the stairs leading to the palace door one painful step at a time. His sore body held the weight of his instructions to the regulators he’d left in Beat 3.
“Locate any survivors.”
Another step toward home, toward his ailing father.
“Humanely dispatch any who are infected.”
Every step of his life had led him to a place of power, where his decree decided who could live and who could die.
“Offer aid to those who need it. The regency will help rebuild the beat.”
A small mercy. One more stair and a gaping door that led to his bloody legacy.
“Burn the dead. Ravager and human. We must quell infection before it begins.”
Eli imagined a river of blood around his knees, making his steps sluggish. How many more would be lost before the day began? The sun would rise on Sector 14 and cast shadows on the dead.
He ascended the grand staircase, disgusted by the opulence of the ruby-encrusted handrail and the gold-leaf filigree lining the walls. He and his family and the elite of Sector 14 lived in this fortress on the side of the mountain, surrounded by luxury and safety. But down the steep incline, in the human neighborhoods, homes were destroyed. Lives lost.
What right did he have to this elevated status?
The door to his father’s quarters opened silently beneath his hand. Eli’s sword weighed heavy on his back as his mother lifted an emerald gaze from her cross-stitch.
“Elliott, sweetheart.” She rested the pattern in her lap and held out a hand. “Come. See your father.”
Eli undid the strap of his holster and set his katana on a table near the fireplace. He could count on two hands the times he’d set foot in this room—his father’s private apartment. The sheer curtains were drawn on the large, canopied bed, but for the panel closest to his mother.
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 42
