Warp Wraith, page 41
Footsteps clanked on the ramp at his back and he turned to the shadow sweeping down it. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Of course,” Malik answered. “Didn’t want you to miss all this.”
Callisto smiled and surveyed the lamp-strands and fires and figures dancing by their illumination, in the streets, on rooftops. Smells of feasts, spiced in the Circe way with herbs he didn’t quite recognize, carried to his flaring nostrils. A growl issued from his stomach and he realized he was intensely hungry.
“They’re partying like we’ve already won.”
“What I’ve learned of Cireans, both before...” Malik shifted with some internal discomfort “...and after, is that they take their wins where they get them. Life is short and hard, here, and they live it while they can.”
Callisto sighed, fighting back the wave of melancholy he’d been resisting all day. “Seems like a sound strategy.”
“Indeed.” Malik cleared his throat. “How many Slayers did we leave on Farbanks?”
Callisto stiffened at the switch in topics. “Two squadrons, operational,” he replied thoughtfully. “A third squadron is the trainees.” He frowned at the Wraith. “Not sure how I’d feel about putting them into a fight.”
“Not going to have a choice.”
With a deep breath to quell a flutter from his gut, Callisto turned fully to Malik. “So, we’re here for the long haul?”
“I think you knew that already, Dee.”
Callisto smiled back at the masked man and shrugged, turned to look out at Malvik again. “Not a bad bunch, I guess. There’d be worse places to make a stand.”
“Speaking of stands...” Malik stepped closer to him. “I understand you were the deciding vote in the decision to disobey my directive.”
Callisto’s smile remained in place, but he wouldn’t look at the Wraith. “I’m not apologizing for it.”
“I’m not asking you to.” Malik’s hand came to rest upon his shoulder. “In fact, I’m thanking you.”
With the hand warming upon him, Callisto looked once more at Malik. He noted the damage to his mask on the right side, the wounds still-healing on the flesh of his face—albeit, rather faster than a human—and the older wounds on his pale scalp. He looked tired. He looked old. And the realization of that sent a current of unease trickling through him.
“You know I think it’s creepy when you get like this.”
Malik chortled. “It’s an awkward fit, no doubt.” He patted his shoulder one last time and released him. “But you’re becoming a hell of a leader, Dashawn.” His dark brown eyes narrowed, crinkling at the corners to indicate a grin under the mask. “I’m glad I fished you out of that wreck on Vorral.”
He started down the ramp.
“Why did you?” Callisto called after him. He waited as the Wraith paused and turned back to him, brows crinkling in confusion. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, lately,” Callisto added. “I sure as hell didn’t deserve it.”
Lydiria and that horrible night burned in his mind, once again.
Malik nodded once, seemed to understand. “Because no one fished me out of the wreck that was my life,” he answered and took a step back up the ramp to Callisto’s side. “Because I’m still fishing my way out.” He touched his arm and his eyes flared with that unnerving Flux-light for a second. “But I’m starting to have help with that.”
Callisto watched the cloaked silhouette turn and sweep away at a stride for the town. He watched him go, for a moment held back by the weird sense that he didn’t deserve this, didn’t deserve to join the celebration, to even be alive. The faces of Kreeve, of Brula, of so many others paraded through his mind. Malik had thanked him for staying.
But none of them would.
The fresh clack of footsteps from behind him broke the dark reverie. A glance over his shoulder showed him Skraar coming down the ramp.
“Not joining the party, Commander?” the Fury pilot asked him. “If so, plenty of work to be done on this junk heap.”
It was clear from the lycanthrope’s tone he was not actually interested in that. Callisto grinned. “I was just leaving.”
“Figured.”
Malik had already disappeared into the town as Callisto started after him. That was fine. He’d followed the Wraith enough, these last couple years. Time to let his own will carry him. He knew where he was going anyway; the open mall surrounding the government dome.
Following the racket of the parties, it was clear the heart of the festival clustered around that towering structure. Wading through crowds, Callisto’s olive drab Revenant uniform earned him pats on the back and cheers—and, in one case, a very messy kiss from a very drunk matron. Grinning as he sidled his way clear from the latter, he kept going, marveling at the Circeans’ wild abandon, their full-fledged embrace of life after so much death and fear.
He followed what appeared to be one of the main streets, dodging dervishes of dancing. The Circeans wore garish, wild colors, featuring bandannas and scarves and ribbons. Even hard-faced veterans in the battered fatigues of the Freedom Brigades festooned themselves in splashes of red or blue or purple. And more than one Revenant Callisto encountered, swaying to drink and song with the grateful locals, had done the same.
Nearing the heart of town, with the skies darkening above, the strings of lamps suspended above and zig-zagging from rooftop to rooftop gave the avenue an uneasy, flame-like flutter. Blazes lit in braziers at street corners, or atop roofs, added to the almost infernal hue. And Callisto felt his blood cooling despite the surrounding merriment.
Lydiria...
He wobbled suddenly, heart hammering out chill pulses. Flesh went clammy as he paused just shy of the main party, put a hand up to a pocked stucco wall to support himself. He sucked in several breaths, but none helped. His vision throbbed with images that were not those around him.
He saw fire in the streets. He saw death from the skies. He saw Lydiria and what a younger him had done to it.
Now could this place expect anything better than the same?
Someone shouted something. He flinched and came back to the present. But the call hadn’t been for him, he saw, as he watched a compact little man in Freedom Brigade fatigues stride by to throw his arms around someone coming down the street at Callisto’s back. He turned to watch the greeting.
And froze.
And warmed all over again.
The little man stood, arms linked to a woman and shaking her as he spoke excitedly. He was obviously drunk and she could obviously tell, grinning tolerantly as he rambled and flecks of spittle flew. She gave him a smack on the shoulder and shoved him on his way, back into the current of celebration. The smile still in place, she paused, clearly sensing Callisto’s eyes upon her.
She wore the garb of the Freedom Brigades, though threadbare and badly-faded. But she’d donned a long scarf around her throat that spilled down her chest in a current of red, speckled with diamond patterns of sky blue. And she wore dirty-blonde hair down in braids, interwoven with little flowers of creamy white. Hard-jawed features hardened further into a challenging smile, and brown eyes shimmered.
Damn.
Callisto smiled back stupidly and had to look away.
The Circean moved on.
He waited what he judged was long enough before turning to watch her go. Long-legged strides had already carried her well into the open mall and the writhing crowds there. But his eye still found her.
Lydiria faded from his skull. Life coursed back into his soul.
He followed it.
EDIE FELT THE MAN SHADOWING her. But senses that would normally sharpen and muscles that would typically tense only tingled and warmed. She’d felt a jolt, seeing those green eyes alight upon her from that dark face. And nothing about it had been unpleasant.
She snorted to herself and quickened her pace.
The mall was a mess, but she had a guide through it in the form of the crude stage erected before the entrance to the dome. She found the darkness of Malik quickly, striding up onto the platform. Esli Vier was greeting him, clasping hands, red-faced with drink already and his uniform disheveled from dancing. A slender man in the suit and officious air of a politician joined them—studiously sober and cautious as he, too, took a turn shaking the Wraith’s gloved hand. Iurie Cretu, Edie knew, leader of one of Circe’s largest factions.
She sighed, her previously-buoyant mood weighted down by the reality that still lingered at the corners of all this merriment. Politics. War. Factions swirling all about. Did it ever end?
Craving something other than the despair that always seemed to dog her, Edie let herself pause shy of the stage and turn back to survey the mall. She knew she’d find him again.
She did.
The Revenant officer—pilot, by the winged pin on his uniform—had taken up a spot at the back of the open space, leaned against a storefront wall. His eyes were off her for a moment as, smiling tolerantly, he waved off a young girl’s offer to dance. But with that accomplished, they rose to lock with Edie’s across the joyous bedlam again.
Eyes green like the lower slopes of the Magvars in summer. Smile rakish—arrogant, even—as it crinkled a handsome, angular jaw of slightly-whiskered mahogany. Tall in a way the grinding lives and slightly-higher-than-standard gravity of Circe rarely allowed its men to get. Broad-shouldered, broad-muscled.
Alive.
“You will only find misery there, young one,” a voice rasped from her side.
A tingling current of fright passed through Edie’s blood as she turned to the speaker. The figure standing behind her should have evoked no such response; a frail-seeming, cloaked crone leaning on a polished staff. But Edie felt the power of the old woman’s presence, the years of her experience, the depths of her malice.
“Excuse me?”
The crone drew her cowl back from her face with one hand to fully reveal finely-winkled skin over a pointed chin and equally-pointed nose. The wrinkles bunched into crevasses around cold, cold eyes that Edie could feel seeing through her bones.
“Do you not know me, child?”
Edie resisted the urge to simply walk away. “You’re one of the Sisters.”
“Some would say I am the Sister.” The crone fingered her staff and grinned, revealing surprisingly good teeth. “Perhaps even the Mother.”
“How nice for you.”
“More than that,” the woman went on, “I was the one who sent Greta to Reyes.” The smile faltered for a moment, but returned with a zealous glint to the eyes. “I was the one who foresaw what she’d find there.”
Edie swallowed once, remembering the girl’s last moments. “You saw that she’d die and sent her, anyway?”
“I understand that you command partisans,” the old woman replied. “You’ve never sent them into a fight, knowing many will perish?”
Edie rolled her eyes and finally heeded the instincts that had flared since the moment the crone had spoken. “I’ve got things to do, Lady.” She turned to go.
“I knew your mother.”
The words snared Edie’s muscles like hooks and she could go no further. She knew it was as much some trick of the Flux as anything else, dragging her back around to face the old woman. But she could not resist, regardless.
“What?”
The crone’s smile shined with triumph as she stepped close. “And I know that your name is Edie, but not Sundown.”
Edie scowled. “It is now.”
“Call yourself whatever you like, child,” the old woman replied. “But it does not change what you are. You are a creature, like us. You are a Sister of Circe, and you have been away from us too long.”
The pull of the woman’s presence, her endlessly dark eyes, drew Edie closer. Dark as night, she lost herself in what suddenly became memory, became the night everything changed. But the vision had altered; rather than stumbling through smoke into the path of the Wraith, she came face-to-face with this woman. She found herself physically fighting it, stiffening, then pulling back.
“It’s going to be a hell of a lot longer,” she snarled and turned to go again.
The crone’s hand was on her arm restraining her with strength that shocked her—and chilled her as the fingernails seemed to lance ice through her sleeve, into the flesh. “You’re not even a little curious?” the woman asked. “You have no interest in discovering your power?” She turned Edie to face her. “You’ve been around the Wraith. You have seen what he can do with the Flux.”
“I’ve seen that it’s brought him nothing but pain.”
“You are drawn to him, as many are.”
Edie yanked her arm free. “He is Circe’s best chance at lasting freedom.”
The crone’s smile twisted into something sickening. “You know I mean something else, besides that.”
Rubbing her arm where those frigid fingers had bitten in, Edie hissed back, “What I know is that I’m done with the Sisterhood.”
“But the Sisterhood is not done with you,” the woman replied icily. She drew herself up to her full height; still diminutive before Edie, but momentarily seeming to tower. “Know this, child. I am Magda Bauer—”
Edie flinched, knowing that name very well, even if she’d never encountered the woman.
“—and I have foreseen many things about you.”
Anger spiked up from Edie’s guts, cutting through the pall of dread settled between the two of them. She was Captain Edie Sundown, Fifth Irregulars—the Hardcases—of the Freedom Brigades; not some sniveling, scared girl, fleeing through the snow. And this Witch and her ilk could offer her nothing she hadn’t already earned herself.
“Did you foresee this?”
She whirled away and strode through the crowd.
A whine pierced the din of the celebration; feedback from a PA. The high pitch of it shocked away much of the cacophony, but mutters persisted as folk turned in the direction of the disturbance. Up on the stage in front of the council dome, Esli Vier was tapping a microphone while others—Malik among them—gathered to his side. Music was still blaring from the near-distance. Shouts quieted it. The crowd shifted and stilled.
Edie found herself halted, as well, pressed in from all sides. She glanced once over her shoulder, seeking Magda. But the crone had vanished in the throng.
Vier patted the microphone again, triggering another squall of feedback that sent hisses through the onlookers. Grinning in embarrassment, he held the mic up to his face.
“Excuse me, everyone,” he called out. “Excuse me! I won’t take up too much of your time.” He gave a theatrical paused. “But on behalf of the Brigades and the Circean Freedom Council, we wanted to take a few moments for acknowledgements. It’s a great moment for our world. It’s a great moment for liberty!” He thrust a clenched fist skyward and was met with a roar from the crowd.
Edie was jostled from every side. Again, she glanced about for a sign of Magda Bauer, but found nothing. She did catch sight of Hutch leaning drunkenly into Vasilache on the far side of the space, both looking ready to leave for more nocturnal activities. It drew a snort. She’d always thought Vas kind of a vile sort—but everyone had their preferences. She could see other Hardcases showing theirs as they mixed in the crowd; Moff draping his arm over the shoulders of a girl who looked like she was trying to squirm away without him toppling over her.
“The victory we have been building to for so long has begun,” Vier was continuing. He half-turned and gestured towards Malik, lingering near the back of stage. “And I’d like to extend my thanks, not just to all of you, but to new friends and allies.”
The Wraith exchanged a wry glance with Ingrid, who took her eyes off the crowd—though not her hand from the blaster at her hip—long enough to smirk at him. Nodding resignedly, he joined Vier at the front. When the General held out the microphone to him, he waved it off and instead touched the underside of his mask.
“The General is correct when he says victory has begun,” boomed from the mask’s speakers. “But it is not finished. There’s a long fight ahead.” He looked around at the crowd, which had quieted and stilled to an almost unnatural degree. “You all know this. And I can’t foresee how long a fight it will be, only that we will win it!”
That triggered another wave of cheers. Malik let it carry on for a few seconds, panning his eyes across the mall. They came to settle upon Edie and she felt the touch of his mind. She resisted quieting her thoughts—seeking the Silence he spoke of so often—glowering back at him with crooked smile that said, I know what you’re doing.
The wrinkling at the corners of his eyes coincided with the retreat of his mental brush on her aura. She could almost hear his chuckle. There might have been satisfaction there, too; in a short time, he’d taught her how to resist, how to obscure her own aura against another’s. And he’d promised her it wouldn’t be the last lesson on the teachings of the Flux—if she so desired. He hadn’t pressed. But he’d warned her others would.
Edie scanned again for Magda Bauer, found her at last, stepping up onto the stage at its rear. Vier and Cretu glanced at her, the former frowning thoughtfully, the latter not bothering to conceal his dislike. She smiled wickedly at both. Then she found Edie’s gaze across the crowd.
“Circe,” Malik declared, “and the entire galaxy, has been held hostage for a generation by creatures existing in violation of the very natural order of the universe. Our fight is one to restore, not just freedom, but that order.” He nodded grimly. “Indeed, it is a fight to restore the balance between life and death.”
Looking at the Wraith, knowing what hid behind his mask—what kind of thing he was—Edie wondered if he was speaking of himself. Dhampir. Half-living, half-undead. Trapped forever between worlds, just as the galaxy is.
