Enchantress Under Fire, page 34
part #4 of Arcane Artisans Series
“We knew it was coming. Eventually the world is going to notice what we are. The chief of police wants assurances that we won’t start taking over the city by force.”
“Like Geralt did.”
“Like Bane Harrow did before him.”
Desmond grimaced. “That’s fair.”
“I’ve told them things are different now. We won’t be expecting any paranormals to get out of jail free. We won’t be ordering them to turn the other way when a crime with supernatural elements is committed. We’ll be true partners. Not overlords.”
Desmond smiled fondly. “You’re going to be good at this job.”
“I hope so. Somebody has to do it. The shifters, the elementals, the vampires, the Voids, and the enchanters have all agreed they’ll trust me. I guess since I’ve been hurt by all sides, they can all see me as an ally.”
Desmond planted a kiss on top of my head. “Regional Supervisor of Paranormal and Extranatural Elements on the West Coast. It really flows off the tongue.”
“I prefer to call myself the RSPEEWC.”
“I’ll print that on your business cards.”
“Please, I wouldn’t let you near a graphic design project. You’d get sawdust all over it.”
“Better than hot glue.” He laughed softly, kissed me again, then headed for the door. “Fair warning. Customers are clamoring for your art. Ever since the show at the Dayfall Gallery, you’re an up-and-coming hot thing. I’ve had half a dozen requests for custom pieces this morning alone. “
I smiled. “Tell them I’ll be out in just a few minutes.” He nodded and disappeared, leaving the door open.
I turned back to the email I was about to send to the leaders of the paranormal groups throughout San Francisco. I scanned several paragraphs of logistics and question answering, before coming to the last few lines.
No one is blameless in war. We all have legitimate grievances. We have prejudices from the past, not all of them undeserved. We have made choices we cannot completely justify. We all bear guilt. In fighting one another, we became the very things we set out to fight. Despite our powers, despite our sacrifices, we are all still just human.
We won’t always agree on how to step forward into the future. But one thing is clear: we must take those steps together. Enchanters, Voids, paranormals, and normals alike, this is our reality. This is our city.
Let’s make it a place of beauty.
I sat in silence, feeling the gentle tingle of magic on my skin. I sent the email.
Then I closed my laptop and headed into Haven to create some beauty of my own.
Author’s Note
Thank you for taking this journey with Adrienne and her friends. I sincerely hope you enjoyed the ride.
I would deeply appreciate it if you’d take a moment to review Enchantress Under Fire on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Reviews are an author’s lifeblood, and your brief comments make a huge impact. Also, if you didn’t have a chance yet to review book one, posting a few words about Enchantress Undercover on Amazon can help other readers discover this series.
So many people helped bring this series to life. First of all, many thanks to my writing partners, Intisar Khanani and Anela Deen, who gave tons of feedback to improve every book in the series, including this one.
Gracias to my sensitivity reader, Ximena Silva, and my Colombian culture consultant, Dámaris Martinez-Adkins, for giving life to Adrienne’s heritage.
Thanks to Tahlia and John Arthur for beta reading and to Marjorie for proofreading.
A zillion thanks to my patient and supportive husband, who kept me going through this journey.
Finally, thank you to my lord Jesus for the privilege of telling stories and creating worlds. I hope they make you smile.
About the Author
A. C. Spahn wanted to be an interstellar starship captain when she grew up. Since nobody was hiring, she became a writer instead. She loves practicing martial arts, organizing messy rooms, and debating sci-fi physics. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, son, and feline overlord.
She is the author of the Endurance series and the Arcane Artisans series, and shorter works published by Daily Science Fiction, Star*Line, Outposts of Beyond, and more.
To learn more and get in touch, please visit www.acspahn.com.
Other Books by A. C. Spahn
Science Fiction
Endurance: The Complete Series
Urban Fantasy
Arcane Artisans Series
Enchantress Undercover
Enchantress Under Pressure
Enchantress Underground
Enchantress Under Fire
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Preview of Endurance: The Complete Series
You were supposed to be excited when they promoted you to captain. It was supposed to be the best day of your life. You were supposed to celebrate with friends and consume an amount of alcohol that would get you kicked out of the service if Dispatch found out about it.
Thomas Withers did not have a party. No one came to see him off. Even his own former commanding officer barely wished him “good luck.” In fact, since he’d first found out about the promotion, he’d done his best to avoid everyone he knew.
His footsteps echoed around the empty space dock concourse. Despite the fact that nobody was around, he kept his head down and tried not to think about where he was headed. He’d dreamed about this day—the day he took command of his first spaceship—from childhood. Now that he was here, he wished he’d stayed in bed.
It all came back to that moment three days ago, when he received the ultimatum that landed him here and ruined the rest of his life.
* * *
“You screwed this up big time, Lieutenant!” Commissioner Wen’s expression, like her crisp blue-and-black uniform, looked stoic as she paced in front of him, but Thomas couldn’t miss the rage seething beneath her words. He stood stiffly at attention in her office at Dispatch headquarters, trying not to look as scared as he felt.
“Commissioner …” he started, but stopped when she held up a hand.
“Save it, Withers. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but you made a bad call.”
Thomas felt heat rise under his dark brown skin. “I saved that woman’s life!”
“You ruined a five-year-long investigation!”
“But if I hadn’t …”
“Spare me your damsel in distress story. I’ve heard it enough this week on the news.” Wen brushed aside a strand of black hair that had escaped her bun and glowered at him. “Unfortunately, because the media has gotten so excited about your supposedly heroic rescue, we can’t kick you out of the service without an onslaught of bad press. I came this close to doing it anyway, but we’ve decided on an alternative punishment.”
Thomas felt a weight lift from his shoulders. He wasn’t sure he could have lived with himself if he’d been fired, to say nothing of having to explain it to his family.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Wen said. “You’ve lost Dispatch’s trust, and that’s not something we recover easily.”
He nodded. “I know, Commissioner.”
She crossed to the other side of her enormous desk and planted both her palms on it. “We’re going to give you a choice. You can either stay at your current rank for the rest of your career and continue to serve as Captain Liu’s first officer, or …” She took a deep breath. “… we’ll promote you.”
Thomas’s heart leapt instinctively at the word “promote,” but his confusion stifled the reaction. “You don’t trust me, so you’re promoting me? I don’t understand.”
Wen’s face twitched with annoyance. “Captain Jonah Davis has passed away. Old age. The Endurance is currently without a commanding officer. If you accept the promotion, that will be your new post.”
Thomas’s stomach sank into the floor. No, he thought, not that ship.
This was literally the worst news he could have received—worse than being dismissed from the corps. His parents might have gotten over that eventually, especially with the media on his side, but this … there was no excuse for this.
The Endurance had a slew of nicknames among the United Earth Law Enforcement Corps: the “Misfit,” the “Dead End,” the “Quacker Barrel,” and the “No-I-Quit-Instead” among them. It was the dumping ground for officers who had no business staying in the service, but who, for one reason or another, Dispatch couldn’t actually kick out. To keep them out of the way, the Endurance spent all of its time patrolling the area of empty space around Neptune and running a handful of off-the-wall science experiments. It never did anything. It never saved anyone. It never stopped any crimes. The only time it had been in the news in the past decade was when one of its officers won the lottery and retired. Nobody, with the exception of Jonah Davis, ever wanted to command it.
That was the ship they were offering to him.
And he had to take it.
Ever since he was a boy, Thomas had dreamed of commanding his own ship—protecting civilians, fighting crime, and keeping space safe. He’d risen quickly through the ranks to lieutenant, and up until last week, he’d been the model officer.
Then that mess with the Uprising case went sideways, and his carefully constructed stack of cards came tumbling down.
This would be his only chance to make captain. If he refused it, his career would stall out. Of course, if he took it, his career was probably over anyway.
He swallowed and thought of the one thing that might possibly save his future. “If I accept the Endurance command, can I have a chance to prove myself?”
Wen watched him with a frown. “What do you have in mind?”
“I’ve heard the stories. I know the sort of nonsense that crew is known for. If I whip them into shape—if I prove that I can maintain Dispatch standards—will you let me transfer to a different ship?” Thomas held his breath.
The commissioner stared at him for a moment, then broke into a hearty laugh. “If you can … if you can fix up that ship … then by all means, Withers, you can transfer to any other ship in the fleet!”
Thomas wasn’t sure if that was a real agreement or just outright mockery, but he would take what he could get. “Then I accept the promotion, Commissioner.”
He hoped he hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of his life.
* * *
Thomas found his ship at the last airlock of the concourse. Though the outside was the same white metal as any other vessel, the rumors that circulated about the Endurance’s interior (not to mention its crew) were enough to make even the most stoic captain cringe. He steeled himself. Now or never, Thomas. Taking a deep breath, he entered his authorization code into the airlock activation panel.
It beeped twice, and its indicator light flashed red. Entry denied.
So it began.
“Come on,” Thomas muttered. He hadn’t expected the problems to start until he was actually on board. He tried his code again, taking care to push each button correctly.
Beep beep!
“This is a joke,” he decided. “This has to be a joke.” He looked around to see if anyone noticed his embarrassment, but the area was deserted. Even if he wanted to ask for help, he couldn’t.
He turned back to the panel and entered the code again, speaking over each number. “Work. You. Stupid. Piece. Of …”
Beep!
The light flashed green, and the airlock slid open. Thomas blinked at the panel, then took in his first impression of the UELE Endurance.
The entry corridor looked surprisingly normal. The white metal walls, the plain brown carpet, and the overhead light panels all seemed perfectly functional, and perfectly standard among the United Earth Law Enforcement fleet. The corridor ran in both directions from the airlock, and the directional signs on the walls were both polished and mounted correctly.
A whiff of the ship’s air flooded through Thomas’s sinuses. There was something musty in the odor, but it smelled breathable, at least. He could hear a vacuum cleaner running somewhere down the corridor, evidently in need of a new sound damper. That would be easy to fix.
His first officer, Lieutenant Viktor Ivanokoff, was supposed to meet him at the airlock, but he hadn’t yet arrived. Thomas took his first step onto the Endurance, keyed the airlock closed, and then stood in the middle of the hallway to wait.
And wait.
And wait.
The sound of the vacuum came closer, and Thomas concluded Ivanokoff had forgotten the time of the meeting. He wouldn’t tolerate that sort of unprofessionalism in the future, but he could afford to give the man a warning.
He headed down the corridor to the right. The sound of the vacuum grew louder, and the musty smell stronger, until he rounded a turn and came into sight of Archibald Cleaver, the 104-year-old civilian who served as the Endurance’s janitor. The man had volunteered to work for the UELE fleet way back when civilians were still allowed to do that, and a small line in his contract said that he couldn’t be laid off except for gross misconduct. Though he was well past retirement age, Cleaver was a very good janitor and simply refused to quit his job. So Dispatch had stuck him here, and over the years he’d become something of a running joke at headquarters.
Thomas passed him in the corridor and nodded to him. “Mr. Cleaver.” The old man turned his half-bald grey head, nodded back, and continued pushing his vacuum down the hall. The smell faded as he walked away, and Thomas concluded the vacuum’s filter needed to be replaced as well.
Right after he dealt with his wayward first officer.
He turned the last corner that would lead to the bridge and found the path blocked by the enormous form of a man, hands planted on his hips and a scowl on his pale face. The man’s arms bulged with muscle under his black uniform shirt, and his thumbs were tucked into his belt next to a pair of customized handguns.
Ivanokoff looked like he routinely bench-pressed elephants, and Thomas had to fight his instinct to take a step back. Though he was just shy of six feet tall himself, he still had to look up to make eye contact.
The first officer, for his part, apparently didn’t notice the overt hostility in his posture. “Captain Withers, I presume?” he intoned in a deep bass.
Habit took over while Thomas recovered his confidence. “At attention, Lieutenant!” he ordered. Ivanokoff’s frown deepened, but he shifted into the proper stance. Thomas crossed his arms. “And you’re correct—I’m Captain Thomas Withers. I had thought you would meet me at the airlock, but I assume something pressing came up?”
Ivanokoff shook his head. “I do not do airlocks.”
Having no idea what that meant, Thomas settled for saying, “You do now.” That’s right, Thomas. Show them who’s in charge. He nodded at the two pistols on the man’s belt. “Those are hardly standard attire, Lieutenant. We’re in green status, and at space dock. Why do you look like you’re preparing for war?”
Ivanokoff seemed to have anticipated the question. “These are Dickens and Dante, sir. They never leave my sides.”
Thomas blinked. “Dickens and Dante?”
“I like to read, sir.” Ivanokoff shrugged. “Captain Davis understood.”
“Well, I’m not Captain Davis,” Thomas said. “As long as I’m in command of this ship, you will observe the rules for carrying weapons and leave them in your berth unless they’re needed.”
Ivanokoff cocked an eyebrow. “How do you know when they will be needed until it is too late?”
Thomas didn’t have an answer for that. But he couldn’t back down on the first order he’d given. That would set a bad precedent. So instead he doubled his resolve. “You heard me,” he snapped. “I want those back where they belong as soon as I’ve inspected the bridge. Let’s go.” Thomas stepped past his first officer and continued down the hall. Ivanokoff hesitated for a moment, then followed. Point, Captain Withers, Thomas thought.
As they stepped through the hatch to the bridge, he felt a sense of relief. Though most of the stories about the Endurance were highly improbable (he hadn’t really believed that the captain’s chair was made of cardboard boxes and held together with packing tape), some of them had made him nervous.
Fortunately, the bridge looked adequately professional. In fact, the most unusual thing Thomas could see was his first officer standing next to him, fiddling with the handgrips of his guns. Even the other crew members seemed less odd than he’d been anticipating. The man at the defensives station was tapping his foot spasmodically, and the pale engineer standing over an open wall panel was sporting a unibrow, but they were all human, all standing appropriately at attention (more or less), and all seemed to have at least a general sense of what they were doing. This might not be so bad.
Then the engineer’s wall panel exploded.
Somewhere amidst the smoke, the coughing personnel, and the apparently-too-sensitive fire alarms, Thomas heard Ivanokoff paging main engineering. The huge man found him in the chaos. “There are no flames; it is just an overloaded circuit,” he informed him. “Chief Engineer Habassa will be here shortly to fix the problem and vent the smoke. In the meantime, I suggest we move everyone elsewhere.”
“Obviously,” Thomas tried to answer, but a lungful of smoke made the word come out in gasps.
They managed to get everyone out, though they almost missed the skinny man who had been at the helm. As they stood regaining their breaths in the corridor (though the old-vacuum smell lingered), a young woman with wavy black hair and deep copper skin came around the corner. She looked like a brand-new officer, and her black uniform shirt had only a single medical certification patch on its shoulder. Having only had time to familiarize himself with a few senior officers’ profiles, most of which included outdated photos anyway, Thomas didn’t recognize her.
“Well,” she said with a nod, “what seems to have happened here?”
