Irregulars, page 36
He jerked free of Lord Jaguar’s grasp.
“You will not take him.” Deven took a shaky breath. “And you will not return to Aztaw. Things have changed there. They no longer need you.”
Lord Jaguar stared, stunned. “You order me?” His mouth contorted in rage. “Shut your mouth and bow down!”
Years of training made it hard to disobey Lord Jaguar’s commands. Instead he reached into the shredded remains of his overalls and clutched Fight Arm’s distraction-enchanted beads.
Deven kicked Lord Jaguar’s knee. The thin skin broke as the glowing bone underneath bent awkwardly. Deven dashed out of the way and threw the beads over his neck.
Lord Jaguar spun, searching for him. Deven’s heart raced in terror. He felt too tired to fight, but he reminded himself that Lord Jaguar was Aztaw, and therefore slow. He waited until Lord Jaguar turned completely in a circle, trying to locate Deven in the obscurity spell.
Once Lord Jaguar’s back was to him, Deven rushed forward and snatched the pen back. He darted to the edge of the pool and Lord Jaguar splashed through the water after him.
Something heavy clunked against Deven’s thigh and he remembered his own shard pistol. He unlocked the safety and fired. The powerful recoil slammed him backward as it sprayed metal into his lord. Lord Jaguar howled in agony and ducked under the water.
Deven had only seconds. He started to write, his left hand scratching the glyphs imperfectly, drawing figures in the water. The water turned to steam in the shapes of the symbols. Seven, gold, fox, clove…He scrambled to surround Lord Jaguar.
Lord Jaguar resurfaced, his bones shimmering with fragments of silver. Deven knew he wasn’t invisible, just unnoticeable, so he kept moving. But Lord Jaguar could see the glyphs steaming and knew what Deven was doing.
He growled a curse and shoved his hand over the surface of the water, dispelling one of the glyphs and breaking the pattern. Deven kept writing.
“Faithless human!” Lord Jaguar roared.
Deven shot him in the mouth with the pistol. Lord Jaguar fell back, moaning and clasping his jaw with his hand.
The pen was a feeble thing in Deven’s hand, drained from writing the time trap. Guilt and regret flooded him, even as he kept writing. Such a beautiful thing, really. The last of the house powers. The last of the age of magic in Aztaw and he was killing it.
It needs killing, Deven told himself.
“Deven...” cried Lord Jaguar. His hand clutched his ripped jaw. “You swore an oath to protect me. An oath!”
Exhaustion brought tears to Deven’s eyes as he drew. Every symbol took more from his body, made it harder to keep his eyes open. Deven tried to write faster, but he physically couldn’t. As it was, he crawled, half in water, half out, body shaking with the effort. The pen was so thin and brittle part of its tip crumbled and broke in his hands. He kept writing.
The pen splintered further. He drew with the pieces, scorching glyphs into the water, making substance of liquid and shooting light through the deep, chilly darkness.
With the last fragment of his pen, he finished the circle and rolled out of the way as the wall of light encased Lord Jaguar and dropped him out of time forever. The light flare receded; only a crumbled fragment of the pen remained, cold and lifeless in his palm.
But the darkness didn’t continue.
Sudden sparks burst from above. A flare burned brightly as the ward sealing them beneath the world was dismantled. The Irregulars were breaking through. They were going to be rescued after all.
“Thank you,” Deven muttered, realizing how grateful he was to see light shining down, piercing the darkness.
Chapter Eighteen
Deven wasn’t the first to be discharged from the NIAD ward of the Sanitorio Espanol hospital. The younger, healthier sacrifices who had been administered the cyanide antidote on time and had their connections surgically removed had left before him.
The rest of the sacrifices were discharged later, after being fully cleared of any lingering effects of the poisoning. They lost one person in the exercise, an older woman who had suffered cardiac arrest when Night Axe had died.
Deven saw them leave the hospital. But he still waited, because the last one to leave was the person he wanted to see most of all.
As it was, he almost missed Agent August completely.
Deven had been sitting outside the doors of Sanitorio Espanol hospital for hours, scanning the crowd of admissions and discharges for sight of the agent. But when August finally emerged, Deven barely recognized him.
He looked like a new man.
His dark, thick hair was cut short, probably to lessen the appearance of the shaved patch and stitches behind his left ear. His hair was less curly when short, more tamed, lending him a rakish, movie-star appearance.
But more noticeable was the rosy pink hue to his cheeks and the sparkle in his blue eyes. He looked rested and healthy, healthier than he had before becoming Night Axe’s sacrifice. He moved with energized urgency, as if late for something. He walked right past Deven, who’d been sitting on the pavement near the door.
“Agent August!” Deven cried, standing up quickly.
August turned in surprise. For a second Deven worried he’d made a mistake in hanging around for August to finally be well enough to leave.
But August’s mouth curled up into an inviting smile and his eyebrows lifted.
“Deven.”
“After they released me, I wasn’t allowed back in your ward since I’m not a relative or an agent,” Deven explained, rushing his words in his nervousness. He felt his cheeks flush. “So I thought I’d just wait and—”
August gripped Deven by the shoulder, pulled him close, and kissed him. Deven opened his mouth and August’s tongue surged inside, filling him. Warm heat pooled in Deven’s groin and spread through his body. He pressed himself against August’s lean body, feeling a matching hardness that promised more than mere words ever could.
But Deven sensed the gaping children and disapproving glares of several older ladies in the waiting room, and he pulled back.
“I’m very happy to see you,” August said at last, grinning. His lips were red and swollen from the kiss, almost obscene, and the look of them drove a surge of need through Deven’s belly, recalling the sight of August’s beautiful lips wrapped tightly around him.
“Are you feeling all right?” Deven asked belatedly.
“Like a million bucks.” August reached for Deven’s right hand and examined the brace on his wrist and bandaged fingers. “You?”
Deven shrugged. “I’ll live.”
“And aren’t you glad about that?”
“Yes, I am.” Deven grinned. “As much as it pains me to say it, you were right, Agent August.”
August took his hand and said, “Call me Silas.”
Things Unseen and Deadly
Ginn Hale
The dead are selfish:
They make us cry, and they don’t care,
They stay quiet in the most inconvenient places,
They refuse to walk, and we have to carry them
On our backs to the tomb…
Diatribe Against the Dead
— Angel Gonzalez
In the predawn gloom the phalanx of armed NIAD agents threw dull reflections across the wet sheen of the narrow streets. A fine rain diffused the glow of the streetlights, making their black-clad figures look like shadows cut loose from the creatures that cast them. They moved swiftly, silently toward the innocuous stone front of a three-story antiques shop.
From the hidden recesses of the shade lands, Henry watched the young agents fan out behind him, filling the narrow San Francisco street. His old trench coat and patched pants hung from his long frame, utterly at odds with the sleek garb of the homogeneously clean agents behind him.
They carried mage pistols loaded with laser-etched incantation ammo. Henry wore masking tape and ink-stained rubber bands around his nine fingers and was currently loaded with whiskey and a sweet, nameless poison. His straw-yellow hair smelled like roadside brambles and the dark soil where he’d spent so many nights.
For all that, Henry easily strode through the shade lands while at his heels younger, far more keen agents crouched and scampered across the earthly ground, no more able to enter his world than could the rain or wind.
Three hours earlier their operation commander—a slim, athletic woman with cropped black hair who answered to the name Carerra—had informed Henry that her San Francisco agents ranked among the top three internationally for execution of Irregular assault operations. They’d all been on raids before; they’d busted illegal goblin markets and shut down soul trafficking rings. They were toned, trained, and supremely experienced at keeping magic artifacts from coming to light while simultaneously ensuring the general public remained in the dark about their very existence.
Between the spritz of holy water in Henry’s direction and her cool tone, Commander Carerra had made it clear that her state-of-the-art strike force did not need the assistance of some shabby relic from an age when Irregulars’ operations had been run on half-assed witchcraft, peyote spit, and blood sacrifices.
Henry had slumped in the commander’s straight-backed chair and assured her that he’d have been happy to leave her and her enthusiastic crew to their modern devices, but he’d been dug out from the field and sent back to San Francisco by Director Hehshai herself. Neither he nor Carerra would defy the director. And they both knew Hehshai wouldn’t have dirtied her claws exhuming Half-Dead Henry if his presence wasn’t in some way necessary. Though in exactly what way Hehshai hadn’t said. Oracles never did.
Still, Henry didn’t doubt that he could make some kind of difference, because really even the smallest thing, an icy step or a missed letter, could save or end a human life. Henry knew too well that it took only one mistake to strip all the swagger and confidence from even the best agent and reduce him or her to a cold lump of meat. And somewhere deep in him he still cared about human lives, even those of these strange, modern agents who seemed so much more like machines than women and men.
But they were human enough, certainly, to err.
Most of the young agents hadn’t noted the thin filaments shimmering through the soft rain all around them. The two who had simply brushed them aside like cobwebs. The threads were hardly visible and appeared to break at the touch of a hand, but that fragility was itself a weapon, producing countless poison needles.
Henry held up a callused hand and Commander Carerra, watching him through spell projector glasses, signaled her agents to a stop. Henry glanced back at them only briefly. Two swayed, glassy eyed, their skin tarnishing blue black as mage poison infiltrated their organs through thousands of needles.
They were already dead. They hadn’t hit the ground yet, but that would be only a matter of seconds. Henry couldn’t save them. The best he could hope for was to keep the rest alive.
He turned back toward the antiques shop.
Millions of the gold threads cocooned the quaint facade of the gentrified Victorian storefront and cascaded down over the door like a tangled glass tapestry.
He focused on the delicate filaments in front of him. This old spell was probably the reason Director Hehshai had tossed his ass on a Falcon 7X jet in the dead of night and shipped him back to San Francisco. He might look like a battered hobo and smell like a cold night in a fresh grave, but old magic saturated his blood. Ancient incantations ringed the chambers of his scarred heart and etched the shrapnel of the other men’s bones that he carried beneath his skin.
Carefully, he reached out and stroked one gleaming thread with the rubber band ring wound round his thumb. The filament sparked and Henry felt a chill shudder through his guts. But he was gentle and slow, never allowing the thread to break, even as he drew it back and caught another around the band of heavily defaced masking tape on his forefinger. Steadily, he chose and captured other strands, until all nine of his fingers were ringed with luminous gold threads. His breath felt cold as nitrogen on his tongue.
Slowly, turning first one strand aside then another, he twisted and unbound the tangled tapestry, playing a game of cat’s cradle, reweaving the web.
At last, just in front of the shop door, he found the knot at the heart of the immense tangle. A ruby nearly the size of his fist but cut into the form of a spider: the guardian of this gate set here to keep other magicians from entering its master’s domain. It glinted and flashed as it caught hints of the power within Henry.
And as Henry drew closer, the scarlet limbs twitched. The gleaming threads that encased Henry’s fingers pulled taut—almost brittle.
If he’d been as sober and focused as the clean agents waiting behind him, he would have tensed in an instant and the guardian at the web’s center would have known him to be something powerful, something dangerous. Instead, Henry went slack as any hapless drunk, staggering unaware into a doorway. Around him the countless strands trembled but didn’t break. Not yet.
Henry averted his gaze from the twitching ruby legs and fat orb belly. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander where it would as he unconsciously searched for the words that the jeweled guardian needed hear before it could return to its deep sleep.
What absence kept it from rest? Random words floated through Henry’s mind, as did half-forgotten promises, old regrets and pleasures. He blew out a soft breath across the ruby spider and faint words echoed back to him. He blew out a second breath and listened more intently.
Henry tilted his head, hearing something fragile and faint. Perhaps an old nursery rhyme, but not one of his recollecting. And then the words came to him.
“This cuckoo’s a fine bird; he sings as he flies. He brings only good news and tells only lies,” Henry whispered to the spider. Deep within its body something seemed to shudder. A tremor passed through the threads binding Henry’s fingers. It felt almost like laughter.
Yes, this was the way to reach her.
“My spider’s a sweet girl,” Henry crooned to the guardian. “She rocks and she spins. She waits on the doorstep to catch her dear friends.”
Henry felt another laugh escape the guardian. Gleaming threads all around Henry sputtered out like spent candle flames.
“Cuckoo comes calling, a lullaby he sings. And spider she’s sleeping all curled in her strings.”
Henry fell silent, feeling only the tingle of tiny flames on the back of his tongue. Then slowly the ruby spider curled her legs closed and dropped into Henry’s extended hand. He held the jewel for a moment, marveling at the craft of its design, feeling the slightest pulse pass through it, as if it harbored real life. And he knew that once it had.
Then he turned back to Commander Carerra and stepped out of the shade lands into the crisp air of the world of the living.
Several agents jumped back at his sudden appearance.
In his right hand he held the gray cinder that had once been some unlucky child’s heart and, in another world, still longed to be sung a lullaby and laid to rest.
“Door’s open,” Henry informed Carerra.
She pushed her spell projector sunglasses up from her eyes and scowled at him. “You’re certain? We’ve got two down already.”
“I never said you wouldn’t lose agents, just that I’d get the door open for you. It’s open. You may lose more once you step inside.” Henry gently slipped the hard little cinder into one of his deep pockets. “You want me to go ahead and clear the way?” Henry asked.
“We can handle it from here,” Carerra responded. She clearly didn’t want him taking credit for the capture of the site. That glory belonged to the San Francisco branch. That was fine with Henry; he’d found glory an overrated commodity. Didn’t keep a body whole or even make for good company through the lonely evenings that followed its capture.
Commander Carerra signaled the first six of her agents ahead through the door. They marched in like windup toy soldiers.
“I could follow them through the shade lands—”
“You let me worry about my agents, all right, Falk?”
Carerra gave him a hard glare and didn’t wait for his response. “HQ informed us that you could create some kind of dimensional split. Make this whole place disappear to the common populace. Is that the case?”
“I can call the Lost Mist and lay wanderers’ wards to keep anything from getting out of that building.” Henry shrugged. “It won’t help your people inside there, though.”
“You just concern yourself with keeping civilians from getting past our police lines,” Carerra told him. “The last thing we need are more pictures of bat boys popping up on the Internet.”
Henry heard something squeal and hiss from beyond the open door. He smelled the tang of human blood rushing up to the open air. They were already dying in there.
But these men’s deaths weren’t his business; if they were lucky, they never would be.
Henry gave Carerra a sloppy salute. Then he stepped back into the shade lands, where Carerra and her agents looked like shivering little shadows at the door of an immense, coiling darkness. He called up a white, rolling mist and it covered them all like a shroud.
***
The wheels of Jason’s battered green bike hissed against the wet pavement. He veered past braking cars and banked a sharp right turn despite the blazing red light. He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to, not at this speed. Iron balconies and painted Victorian houses blurred as he plunged down into the sea of fog that lay across the streets below. Dull shadows and the haze of red brake lights were his only warnings of imminent collision. Jason swerved, darted, and narrowly missed a speeding police car.
His heart pounded and sweat drenched his chest, but he didn’t slow. Instead he threw himself into the momentum of the steep San Francisco hill, racing into the cold fog. The whole city narrowed to the white mist, the slick black road ahead of him, and the knowledge that he was late and not getting any earlier.
