Author Archives: Emrys

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I felt awkward standing around with the Guards. I imagined it was something like a veteran cop might feel at a Neighborhood Watch meeting. I really was that these people were only playing at being.

 

The ridiculous costumes were probably not helping things. David was wearing his wingsuit, and I had on the weird feathered thing that Gosnell had designed. The armor was almost as effective as my usual set for most purposes, at least. I’d tested it first thing, and while it wasn’t quite as good as my real suit, it was still decent.

 

Unsurprisingly, though, those were actually the least absurd of the set. Tawny was in a dull maroon bodysuit with a ballistic vest and a luchador-style mask that left only her eyes exposed, with a featherlike pattern in black. Elyssa was in a similar getup, but lighter, without the vest, and in colors of green and violet. Tony was wearing heavier armor and a police-style helmet in shades of orange—less mobility, but more protection.

 

Unsurprisingly, Derek’s armor was the best except for possibly mine and David’s. It looked something like mine, with overlapping layers of scales in the general shape of feathers. The feathers were made of steel, with here and there one of silver, and they had lines etched on them. Individually the patterns on each feather were fairly simple, but as the individual feathers slid over each other the lines formed elaborate, shifting geometric designs.

 

I could feel that the lines were more than just decoration. They were a physical representation of the magic he’d integrated into the metal, a sort of mnemonic guideline he’d used for the magic. It was a clever design, in a lot of ways; each feather was built with its own protections, which were designed to overlap and mesh with each other. The result was marginally weaker than the reinforcements I had on my set, but they were also a little broader, and a lot harder to get around with clever tactics.

 

All told, it felt more like I was at a costume party than getting ready to go out and search the streets for evildoers. The costuming had a certain style to it, I supposed, and in its own way it looked fairly intimidating. But it just felt like it was trying way, way too hard. I was used to people who could scare the piss out of someone with an expression of mild disapproval. By comparison, this kind of display seemed tawdry.

 

“All right,” David said. “Shrike, you’re with Crimson going southwest. Spark and Razor, southeast. I’ll take Chainmail and head north. You’ve all got radios; if you run into trouble, use them and we’ll get there as quickly as we can. Any questions?”

 

“Nope,” I said casually. Everyone else followed suit a moment later, and we started splitting up. David grabbed Derek and started walking north, and a moment later Tony and Elyssa walked off as well, leaving just me and Tawny.

 

“Guess it’s just you and me now, Shrike,” she said. “You nervous at all?”

 

I shrugged and started heading southwest, setting a slow enough pace that a human could keep up without too much trouble. “Not really,” I said. “You?”

 

“A bit,” she admitted. “We didn’t see anything last time out, so I’m still pretty nervous about what’ll happen the first time we have to actually interrupt something.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry to miss the last one.”

 

“You didn’t miss much,” she said, walking along beside me. “The boss kept us so far away from trouble we couldn’t have found it if we wanted to.”

 

I snorted. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. Hey, Crim, maybe you can answer a question for me. What the hell is up with the codename bullshit? It sounds ridiculous.”

 

“We have to use something,” she said reasonably. “I mean, I know Crimson isn’t great, but it beats nothing.”

 

“Why not just use real names?” I asked. “Jonathan is fine with me. Dressing up like a bird is bad enough, but image is important, whatever, I get it. Calling myself Shrike? That’s just bizarre. It makes me feel like I’m in a comic book or something.”

 

“I can’t afford to use my real name for this,” she said. “It’s tied to things that couldn’t handle it. Don’t you have a family?”

 

I shrugged. “Not one worth mentioning. No parents, no siblings, couldn’t care much less what happens to my aunt. I guess I’m married now, but anybody dumb enough to try and get at me through her deserves what happens to them.”

 

Tawny—Crimson—stopped dead and stared at me. “You’re married?”

 

“Yeah,” I said dryly. “I didn’t see it coming either, believe me. Anyway, no, I don’t have a family, as such.”

 

“Well, I do,” she said. “And I can’t afford for them to get mixed up in all this. They’re just people, you know? They aren’t like us, they aren’t transhuman.”

 

“Hold up,” I said. “Transhuman?”

 

“People like you and me,” she said. “Werewolves, or people with spooky powers. You know, human, plus a little bit extra.”

 

I grimaced. “That’s not what that word means. Not quite.”

 

“Yeah, well, it’s the word I’ve heard used to lump us all in together,” she said. “And my family, they aren’t. My mom, my brother, if something from our side of things goes after them, they don’t stand a chance. And I can’t let that happen.”

 

“You’re not concerned about your father?”

 

“He’s dead,” she said stiffly.

 

“Ah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

 

“No problem,” she said, although there was very obviously a problem. “It was a month or two ago. I’m starting to get over it, I guess.” Which she very obviously wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to call her on it. We all have our own ways of coping.

 

I wasn’t in the mood for an awkward silence, so I decided to keep digging on the off chance that it would get me out of the whole rather than make it deeper.

 

In a way, it was nice to be working with people who didn’t matter all that much. It meant that I didn’t need to be too paranoid about what I said. If I offended Tawny, it wasn’t the end of the world. The nature of her magic was a little unsettling, in terms of what fighting her would entail, but it wasn’t like I was talking to Loki, or even to Lucius. Worst case, I could always just walk away.

 

So rather than try to backpedal, or shut up and hope she forgot about this, I said, “My parents are dead. I don’t remember them.”

 

“How’d that happen?” she asked.

 

I shrugged. “My father was a stranger,” I said. “Never met him, don’t think he knew about me. By the time I even learned who he was he’d been dead for years. My mom killed herself a couple of months after I was born.”

 

“Bitch. You want to die, that’s on you, but to do that to a kid? Total bitch.”

 

My lips twitched. “You have no idea. Anyway, I guess I get what you’re saying. I’ve just been a part of all this for so long that it’s hard for me to remember that some people have a life outside of this.”

 

She looked at me oddly. I couldn’t read her expression behind the mask, but between the eyes and the posture, it was easy to see that she was looking at me oddly. “You don’t look that old,” she said.

 

I snorted. “You should have learned by now not to pay too much attention to that,” I said. “Looks don’t mean much here.”

 

“Yeah,” she said. “So how old are you?”

 

I smiled a little. “Old enough,” I said.

 

We kept walking for a little while in silence. There was no one else on the street, beyond the occasional passing car. It was almost midnight, and people were reluctant to be outside after dark anymore.

 

“Okay, I don’t get it,” she said after a minute or two. “What the hell is up with you? You’re working with us, but you really don’t seem much like the rest of us. Like, most of the time you do, but then you start talking about how you’ve been mixed up in transhuman things for ages.”

 

“Hm,” I said. “Have you ever seen the film The Dirty Dozen? It’s an old war movie about a bunch of convicts who were recruited by the military to go on a suicide mission back in World War II.”

 

“Yeah,” she said. “I had to watch it for a class, I think.”

 

“I’m kind of like that,” I said. “I’m something of a bad guy, and under normal circumstances the Guards would probably want nothing to do with me. But I’m also useful, so they gave me the option to work against even worse people on parole.”

 

“I thought it might be something like that,” she said. “When you say you were a bad guy, how bad are we talking?”

 

“Bad enough,” I said, chuckling a little. I didn’t point out that I hadn’t been speaking in the past tense. “I mean, I’m not a serial killer or anything. But…yeah. Bad enough.”

 

“I see,” she said. “So…Jonny Keyes is…?”

 

“Not the name I was born with,” I said. “Or anything much like it, really. I’m not supposed to tell you who I really am. They’re concerned about me corrupting the youth or some such nonsense, I think.”

 

“Wow,” she said. “So I get that you can’t talk about the details. But when you say bad, you mean really bad, don’t you?”

 

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “If the authorities find out who I am, they’d almost certainly give me a death sentence. If they could prove that you knew who I was, I’d lay decent odds on you spending the rest of your life in a cage for having not turned me in. It’s that kind of bad.”

 

“You know how I said I was a little scared of you a while ago?” she told me. “I think I should have been taking that feeling a hell of a lot more seriously. Is it too late for me to run?”

 

I snorted. “Oh, come off it,” I said. “You aren’t exactly a paragon of sweetness and light yourself, now, are you?”

 

She froze. “How do you know about that?” she said, sounding stricken.

 

I shrugged and kept walking. I’d noticed something a block or so west of us through a stray dog’s ears, and started angling in that direction. I was thinking we were probably going to get some action after all.

 

“I didn’t know,” I said, answering her question as she started walking again. “It was more of an educated guess. In my experience, this lifestyle doesn’t attract normal, well-adjusted people. You have to be at least a little bit fucked up to voluntarily get into this business, you know? For that matter, just about every transhuman I’ve ever talked to has some kind of trauma in their background. It’s the nature of the world we live in. I usually work under the assumption that everyone’s got skeletons in their closets, bad things that have happened to them, bad things they’ve done to others. Some of us just hide it a little better than others.”

 

“That seems like a pretty fucking dismal way to look at things,” Tawny said.

 

I shrugged. “I see it more as a reasonable extension of my experience. Are you going to argue with me? I mean, think about it. From the way you just reacted you’re not an exception, and whatever’s weighing you down, I’d lay good money that I’ve got something worse. I’ve talked to David, and I’m not going to spill his secrets, but I can definitely vouch for him as much of a mess as you and me.”

 

“And the others?” she said. “You think they fit into this theory?”

 

“Frankly? Yes, I do. I’m still collecting dossiers on them, but think about it. Spark has a temper, he doesn’t have the best control, and he doesn’t have the best self-control. I’d wager he’s burned someone in the past, probably badly. Razor’s a sociopath, plain and simple. She’s used her magic on herself to the point that it’s warped her mind. Someone like that, with the power to be basically invisible? Not a chance that she hasn’t used it for something ugly somewhere along the line. Honestly, the only person I’m not sure about is Chainmail, and that’s only because I haven’t spent as much time with him.”

 

“You make it really hard to like you, Shrike,” she said. “Good job remembering the names, though.”

 

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “And I didn’t make the world this way. I just live here. Besides, as I see it the important thing isn’t what you’ve done and what crimes you’re guilty of. It’s where you go from here. It’s trying to be something better tomorrow than you were today. As long as you remember that, as long as you keep trying, I don’t think you can really turn into a monster. You might lose track every now and then, you might slip up, but you’ll never be so bad you can’t get better.”

 

“For a bad guy, that’s actually a pretty optimistic philosophy,” Tawny said. “Thanks. I…I guess I needed to hear that.”

 

“No problem. Now, listen up. There’s a mugging going down about a fifty feet in front of us, in that alley.” I pointed. “I’m not expecting us to have any trouble taking care of things. It seems like it’s just a guy with a knife. You might want to be ready just in case, though. It’s possible he’s a transhuman.”

 

God, I hated using that word for this. The word, the whole implication, it scared me. Talking about mages and werewolves and vampires as being human plus some reminded me uncomfortably of the things Shadow said, about how mages deserved to have power over normal humans. And that was one hell of a slippery slope, paved with good intentions and everything.

 

But it was apparently the word to use, and even if I could change it, it wasn’t going to happen tonight. So for tonight, I could play along.

 

Tawny—no, I reminded myself, she was Crimson right now. Crimson’s eyes widened slightly before she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

 

“Stay behind me,” I said. “Follow my lead. And if things get too serious, be ready to summon…something. I don’t know, whatever you think’s best. It’s your magic; I can’t really tell you how to use it effectively.”

 

“Okay,” she said again, picking up her pace. She sounded almost excited now. There was still an edge of fear there, but it wasn’t overwhelming.

 

I sped up as well, staying ahead of her as we got closer to the alley. As expected, there were two people inside. She looked scared, and had one hand in her purse; she was wearing a moderately expensive dress and high heels, one of which was broken. On her way to or from a party, I was guessing.

 

He, on the other hand, had a black ski mask and a knife as his main fashion statements. The message painted by the scene was rather clear.

 

“Stop,” I said, walking into the alley. Crim stood near the entrance, one hand in her pocket.

 

The guy in the mask froze and then looked back at me. “Walk away,” he said. “This isn’t your problem.”

 

“See, it kind of is,” I said. “Now, I’m going to lay things out for you in simple terms. I’m not allowed to kill you right now. I’m supposed to be turning over a new leaf, and not killing people is a major part of that. My bosses were very clear on that.” I grinned behind the mask. “On the other hand, my bosses aren’t here right now, are they, Crimson?”

 

“Nope,” she said back. She was grinning as well, I could hear it in her voice. Getting into the game. I’d thought that she was the type who would.

 

“So I can make you disappear, and they’ll never have to know,” I continued. I pulled a knife out of its sheath and started toying with it. “What do you say, buddy? You wanna go? Or do you wanna walk away now, and we can all just pretend that this never happened?”

 

He glanced at the woman, then started walking away. He stepped around me, staying well out of reach.

 

I almost thought he looked familiar when he was walking. I couldn’t see his face—even his eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, which was pretty ridiculous at midnight—but something about his gait was familiar. I couldn’t place it, though, and it might have been my imagination. So I turned back to the victim as he got past me and started for the alley entrance, where Crim was standing and watching.

 

“Sorry for the trouble,” I said to the woman, waiting for the guy to get further away. I wasn’t going to let him go—our instructions had clearly stated that we were supposed to apprehend criminals—but I wanted to make sure he wasn’t in a position to take her hostage.

 

“Me too,” she said, smiling at me. It was an odd smile, self-satisfied and not nearly as frightened as it should have been.

 

Then she flicked her fingers, and a blast of fire and force hit me right in the face.

 

I was caught completely flat-footed, without a chance to doge or chill the air around myself to get ready. There were things I could do to mitigate the effects of fire, but I had to actually do them, and that meant I had to be at least a little bit prepared for the fire to happen.

 

This time, I wasn’t. I just ate the fire, and it sucked.

 

It didn’t kill me. It wasn’t hot enough or prolonged enough for that, particularly not when the armor was providing some insulation.

 

But I hit the ground, and I was dazed for a moment afterward. Burns hurt, and while numerous previous exposures had left me somewhat blasé about the pain, I couldn’t completely ignore it.

 

By the time I was starting to stand, she’d already kicked off the heels, and she was pulling her hand out of the purse. It had a heavy, ugly handgun in it, the sort of weapon you used when you wanted to put someone down and you didn’t particularly want them getting up again afterward.

 

I glanced over my shoulder, and saw that the “mugger” had his sunglasses and ski mask off as well. I probably still wouldn’t have recognized him, but I could smell his magic on the air and I saw the shadows beginning to twist into the shape of hounds by his sides.

 

Of course. I knew I recognized him from somewhere. I hadn’t keyed on the woman as much when they attacked my house, or I’d probably have recognized her as well. All we needed now was the guy in the suit to show up and complete the set.

 

“Die,” the woman said, more flames kindling around her hand as the first of the constructs lunged at me.

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I fill the order.

 

That’s all there is to say, really. It’s what I do. I fill the order

 

There’s all kinds of hunger pangs. People have needs. They have wants. Desires. Urges.

 

Where there’s a hunger, someone will find a way to sate it. It’s basic economics. Where there’s a demand, someone is going to come up with a supply. Economic pressures will outweigh moral ones, given time.

 

That’s where I come in. I am not, precisely, a supplier. Rather, I consider myself a facilitator. I’m the middleman, the one who can connect the demand to a supply it didn’t know existed. It’s a thankless job, and not one that makes many friends. That’s fine. Friends have never been my priority.

 

I don’t ask questions. It’s none of my business what people want with the things they ask for. Not my business, not my problem. I don’t consider myself responsible for what they do with them afterward. I don’t understand their needs, and frankly I don’t care.

 

People don’t care for me much, as a rule. They find aspects of my work distasteful. They try to impose their own limits on my business.

 

I’ve found, over the years, that everyone has limits. Even my customers have limits. The man who buys a death is disturbed that I sell a person’s darkest secrets; the blackmailer finds it disgusting that I would procure a corpse of very exacting specifications; the necrophiliac draws the line at actually making corpses, and as easy as that it comes full circle back to the assassin. Each of them has limits, and each is convinced that the other’s limits are just unnecessary restrictions imposed by society, while their own are valid moral boundaries.

 

So I say fuck them all, and fuck morality too. It’s not like I’ve ever had much in the way of morals anyway. That’s not what I was made for; my brain’s not wired that way.

 

What I’ve got instead is professional standards. I’ve got good business practices. And while those standards can be phrased in a lot of ways, in the end it all comes down to one thing.

 

I fill the order. I always fill the order.

---

 

The man contacted me for a shipment of house slaves. His request had looser parameters than such often did. He wanted them human, warm, reasonably healthy, within a certain loose age parameter. That was all. No mention of sex, aesthetic qualities, or race.

 

It made my job easier. Some people got bizarrely specific. It wasn’t my business why they wanted the qualities they did, but on some level I had to wonder. I understood that there could be a tendency to go overboard, once they were finally dealing with someone who could fit their precise specifications rather than taking what they could get, but still.

 

And granted, I could charge them more for it, but the excess work wasn’t worth it. On the whole, I was just as glad to see that my job was going to be easy this time. It shouldn’t be much work at all to arrange.

 

I picked up a phone and a bottle, and started dialing some people I knew.

---

 

Of course my business does harm. Of course it hurts people. I know that. I’m not a moron.

 

But the thing is that you have to think about how to apportion the blame. If you get stabbed, do you blame the knife, or the guy holding the knife?

 

My business is like that, really. It isn’t like I actually do anything to people. I am, for all practical intents and purposes, a knife. I don’t make the choice to hurt people. Other people make that choice. Left to my own devices, I know I’m not a great guy, but I’m not terrible. I mostly keep myself to myself and don’t fuck with anyone else. Except for when I do, of course, but that’s a business transaction as well. Everyone involved knows what to expect from the beginning. It’s tidier that way.

 

It’s only when someone else makes the choice that I do things that ruin people’s lives. And it isn’t like that’s the only kind of work I’ll do, or anything like that. End of the day, I’ll do what people want me to do. All the choices, the agency, it’s on them.

 

So no, I don’t feel guilty. I don’t regret what I do. Why the fuck should I? As far as I’m concerned the burden there is on the bastard that paid me. We all bear the burden of our own choices. I’ve got enough of my own to answer for that I don’t need to claim anyone else’s.

---

 

He met me in person for the pickup, which was actually the first time I’d seen this guy. He was reclusive, paranoid. Didn’t leave his house for the most part, from what I’d heard. I’d been working with him for a couple of months now, but it was all information dealing, and that didn’t require anything face-to-face. We’d set this one up by correspondence as well, but with this much in the way of a physical product he had to come out and pick it up himself.

 

I was grateful he hadn’t tried to work out some fucking shenanigans with shipment or something. I’d been working on this for way too long now. If this setup hadn’t worked, I might have lost it. What little it I had left anyway. It wasn’t much anymore.

 

I met him in Detroit, in the warehouse district. The flight sucked five kinds of ass, of course. I had the cash to spring for first-class, but it still didn’t have the room to be anything that wasn’t terrible, and the attendant cut me off after the second bottle.

 

I was already in a bad mood, and that sure as hell didn’t make it any better. I was really looking forward to getting this job over and done with. When I first agreed to this request, I thought it would be a nice break in routine, just enough of a challenge to pique my interest. If I’d known how much of an ordeal it would turn into, I’d have told the buyer to shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

 

I stopped and bought a fifth of vodka, drinking it on the way. Nobody gave me a second glance. People pretty much didn’t, when I didn’t want them to. It was an old trick, one of the oldest in the book, but it got the job done.

 

The warehouse was locked, which was a nice touch. Unnecessary, but I reminded myself to pay the local factor extra. Attention to detail was sadly rare anymore. Always had been, really, but there were more details to pay attention to than there used to be.

 

I looked at the people inside, and liked what I saw. They fit the request—aged nineteen to thirty, physically intact, no permanent diseases, no glaring mental deficiencies. I’d have known. They looked scared, nervous, unsure of themselves. Each was kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, heavy black tape across their mouths.

 

Each of them but one.

 

“All right,” I said, settling in to wait. “Not much longer.”

---

 

And of course sometimes I feel bad about the way things go. I can talk a good game about how I don’t have morals, but those pesky standards do get in the way sometimes. Everybody’s got limits. I’m not an exception to that. Normally I don’t take jobs that cross my hard limits, but sometimes things don’t go the way I planned. Sometimes I underestimate how far things are going to go.

 

When they do, I finish the job anyway. It’s what I do. I don’t have a lot of self-respect, don’t have a lot of reason for self-respect. But I’ve got that. If I commit to a job, I do it. Doesn’t matter whether I enjoy it or not. I keep my deals. When I say that I’ll do shit, shit gets done.

 

I feel guilty about some of the things I’ve done for the sake of keeping those deals. But not half as bad as I’d feel if I hadn’t kept them. You’ve got to hold on to something, after all. Come what may, you have to hold on to something.

---

 

The guy walked in about five minutes after I got there. I wasn’t a great believer in showing up early, didn’t care for it. But I’d come early this time.

 

“Good evening, Jacques,” he said. “I look forward to concluding our bargain.”

 

I snorted and took another drink of vodka. I was most of a gallon into it, much more than should have fit into the bottle I’d bought, and it was only halfway gone. That much remained to me. “You have no fucking idea,” I told him. He winced at my breath. People often did.

 

People closed the doors and locked them. They were my employees, not working for my local factor. You want good hired help, you take care of that shit yourself. Other people aren’t reliable.

 

In the crowd, the one person who this was all about stood up. She was the only one not bound and gagged, the whole reason we were here. The rest? Just camouflage. I didn’t want him to hit the door and realize that something was wrong. Actors weren’t cheap, but compared to the hassle of starting this job over again? They were a fucking steal.

 

She pulled a knife out of her pocket and started forward, clutching an iron amulet in her other hand. It was a cheapo defense, the kind of thing you used when you only needed magic not to touch you for a few seconds. I’d bought it from a dealer in Tibet and sold it to her at a markup, back in the initial planning stages for this job.

 

The guy turned towards me. “You sold me out,” he said, sounding more shocked than scared. “I thought you kept your deals.”

 

I punched him in the gut.

 

I don’t look like all that. I’m not all that, not compared to what I was back in the day. Back then, I’d have broken him in half if I hit him while I was that angry. Just one hit and snap, like a fucking twig. I was a beast back then.

 

What was left was enough to pick him up off the floor and throw him backwards. He hit the floor hard, retching and gasping for breath.

 

“Fuck you with your pants on,” I said, walking over to where he’d landed. “I always fill the order. In this case, that order was you. And with how you just insulted me, I’m inclined to hand you over to her on a silver fucking platter.” I grabbed him by the lapel and picked him up, holding him off the ground for a moment before slamming him face down on the floor.

 

“But why?” he asked, struggling to breathe.

 

“The hell should I care?” I asked, holding my hand out. One of my people slapped a fresh roll of tape in it, and I pulled the guy’s arms behind him and started taping.

 

“It has to do with my sister,” the buyer said, bouncing the knife in her hand. “Emily? You remember her? You remember what you did to her?”

 

“Well, there we go,” I said, finishing up and checking that the bonds were tight. They were, enough to cut off circulation, and probably start doing some nerve damage. I’d really cranked those suckers down. Not that it was likely to matter. The buyer didn’t give the impression of planning for him to be around long enough to really object.

 

Magic stirred, hot and heady, and the buyer was enveloped in vivid green flames. Not real fire, but a good enough imitation for government work.

 

The amulet did its work, and she didn’t burn. “You want me to gag him?” I asked, as elsewhere my people started letting the actors out and giving them their bonuses. I paid in advance, but a bonus was good business.

 

“No, we’re good,” the buyer said, getting an iron chain out of her pocket. That was another of the purchases I’d arranged for her, something like the amulet in reverse. It would take a hell of a lot better of a mage than this guy to get any magic through with that thing on him.

 

“All right,” I said, getting up and grabbing my bottle again. “You’ve got my last payment?”

 

“It’s in the mail,” the buyer said, approaching with her knife out and a wicked gleam in her eye. “Thanks. You did a good thing here.”

 

I shrugged. “Whatever,” I said, walking away.

---

 

I wasn’t in the mood to be bothered on the way back, and airport security sounded like a bother. So I flicked my fingers, and their minds were clouded, their senses fogged at the critical moment. I waltzed right past, finally tipped the last of the vodka down my throat, and tossed the bottle aside. It landed in the trash, for someone to explain later. If they even noticed.

 

Little magics, but fuck it. They were better than nothing. I could get by on what I had left. Obviously.

 

I was a little fish. I knew that. I’d always been a little fish. It was a lot easier to be a little fish when you had a big fish with you, though. Back then I’d always had the option of saying, “Yeah, you can eat me, but do you really want to fuck with him?” And the answer was always no, because nobody wanted to fuck with him. Who would? Even if you could win, my boss was going to be more trouble than he was worth. That was his whole thing.

 

It had taken a while to get used to it, when I lost that. A hundred years, maybe two. Maybe I’d get it back someday. It’d be nice. Until then, I had to get used to working with what I had.

 

Back in Milan, I walked through the streets to the store by my building. They gave me my usual order, a crate full of clinking bottles, and I carried them up to my room.

 

I’d chosen this place very carefully. Close enough to my old home that I could fit in, far enough that the enemies I’d made there wouldn’t find me. Of course, the distance had been larger back then, before the world got small. Most of those enemies were dead now, of course.

 

Beyond that, though, Milan was a good city for my kind of business. It wasn’t huge enough to attract the really big players, but it was close to big places. I wasn’t that far from Rome, or Paris. Back when I chose the place I’d been thinking of Florence and Venice as well, but those cities weren’t all they had been.

 

Anyway, Milan was a good city for me. I’d been here for a long time now. I’d changed neighborhoods and buildings, making sure my home was always the right sort of place, but I’d stuck with the same city. There was something to be said for staying consistent. It was good for business.

 

Back in my room, I closed all the curtains and sat on my couch. The usual depression, the feeling of pointlessness that followed a successful job, was setting in. Was this all I could do? Was this all I could achieve? All I aimed for?

 

Fuck. Probably.

 

I opened the bottle of Everclear first. It was the good stuff, 190-proof. It was the kind of shit you sold with a liability waiver on the receipt. You weren’t supposed to drink it straight. You weren’t really supposed to drink it at all, but especially not straight. Two sips of that shit could lay a guy out.

 

I poured half of it down my throat in one go, and barely felt a buzz at all. It didn’t have much of a kick to it, not from where I was coming from. None of the stuff I could get down here did. Once you’ve had the real shit, you can’t go back to thinking the imitation is good enough.

 

“Fuck you, Dionysus,” I said to no one as I prepared to drink myself into a stupor again, chasing something I couldn’t get back. “I fuck up one time, and you do this to me. I was great once. I was great. And now look at me.”

 

I thought I heard laughter. It probably wasn’t my imagination. My god was never known for being kind, or gentle, or good. I mean, hell. He made me.

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The stone was rough, affording plenty of handholds. It was easier than I’d been expecting to get up it. Despite the rather impressive height of the wall, we reached the top in just a couple of minutes.

 

We didn’t use any rope in case of a fall, of course. I could catch myself, and the notion of Aiko using a safety rope was enough to bring a smile to my lips.

 

Inside, the open space of the amphitheater was illuminated only by the moonlight. It was bright enough to see—for us, at least; a human might have had some issues—but the relative dimness softened the edges, lending a touch of mystique to cover the harsh realities of time’s passage. Standing there, looking down from high above the ground, I was forcefully struck by the sheer magnitude of the building. Never mind the games that had gone on here, the structure itself was incredible.

 

Even in ruins, the Colosseum seemed to tower above the rest of the world in some way. It was a constant reminder to the architects and engineers who raised their towers of steel and glass around it that it had stood long before they came to be and would stand long after they died.

 

What had it been like in its glory days, I wondered? Back when Rome really was the capital of the world, when a passing whim of the emperor could change the course of nations? What an awe-inspiring statement of power, to raise something like this just for entertainment. Just to show that you could.

 

No wonder people hadn’t wanted to attack this city. Even the faded echoes of that legacy were enough to give you pause.

 

And they were faded echoes, there was no arguing that. Much of the floor below was gone, exposing the tunnels underneath. Back in the day those had been the equivalent of backstage, a place meant for the workers rather than the public eye. The practical reality that sat behind the glamorous facade. Now it was torn open, exposed to the outside world. It was like looking at a corpse on the dissection table, skin peeled back to show things that were supposed to stay hidden.

 

The people we were here to meet were standing in a small group on the intact section of the floor. It wasn’t hard to pick them out in the otherwise empty space, but even if it had been thronging with crowds, I would have known who I was looking for. They had a gravity to them, a presence that drew the eye. It was reminiscent of Conn, or Scáthach, or even Loki when he got going.

 

Powerful people, and a definite sign that they weren’t anyone to cross lightly. Not that I hadn’t known that already, of course, but if I’d had any doubt this was a nice confirmation.

 

Even more than the Pack, though, vampires and their ilk were predators. More to the point, they were predators that were optimized for the hunting of humans. I wasn’t human—hell, at this point humans probably had more in common with chimps than with me, in some ways. But we had enough of a resemblance to humans to trigger those instincts, which made this a delicate situation for us. If we behaved like humans—like prey—there would be a large part of these people that didn’t care about the fact that we were here to make deals. It would just want to eat us.

 

Which is why were on top of the wall, instead of walking through the freaking door like normal people.

 

I gauged the distance between us and them, making sure that the initial plan would work, then offered Aiko my arm. She rested her fingertips on it, purely for style points, and we started walking.

 

I wasn’t David. I couldn’t actually fly, however much I might want to—because really, who wouldn’t?

 

But one of the tricks I had figured out was how to support my own weight with air and magic. It was difficult and exhausting, even with the focus I’d built exactly for that purpose, but I could walk on air for short periods when I really wanted to. It didn’t come up nearly as often as I’d expected it to, really, but when it was useful it was really useful. So I’d kept in practice, making sure that I could still do it when I needed to.

 

I’d created a similar focus for Aiko. It was more challenging for me to support her weight than my own, for several reasons. It was further away, for one thing, and distance was power when it came to magic. With a ruinous rate of exchange, too, to the point that working at a distance of even a couple feet could be noticeably more difficult. I wasn’t nearly as aware of her movement as my own, either. With my own body I knew exactly when and how I was walking, letting me adjust the magic to suit on an instinctive level. With Aiko, even though I knew the ways her body moved, even though we were in physical contact and I could feel that movement, there was the tiniest delay. It wasn’t much, but it added up.

 

And then there was the weight, plain and simple. Aiko was pretty short, and she was slender. But between her and the armor, it was over another hundred and fifty pounds that I had to lift. That wasn’t easy.

 

The bottom line was that I could do it, but only barely. It would be a steep descent, somewhere between going down stairs and a controlled fall, and even that was taxing. Under the circumstances, though, that was pretty much exactly what was called for. If we got it right, it should look intentional.

 

It was a little tight, but I’d gotten the angle right, and we ended up dropping onto the floor about fifteen feet away from them. I landed smoothly; Aiko stumbled the tiniest bit, not having as clear of an awareness of our positioning, but she was quick enough to make it look like she’d just deliberately taken a fancy step upon landing.

 

We took a few steps closer to the group, just enough to get within comfortable range for a conversation, and I said, “Hi.”

 

Now that we were closer and I didn’t have to concentrate on not falling to an embarrassing and splattery death, I could get a better look at who I was dealing with.

 

There were three of them, of whom I recognized one. He was a vampire, his dark coloration offset by a flaming pink suit. He called himself Lucius, and while I didn’t know much about him, what I did know was the sort of thing to inspire terror. He’d made references to being an emperor, and ruling an entire continent, the one time I’d seen him before. It sounded like grandiose nonsense, but from Katrin’s reaction I wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t been telling the literal truth.

 

Of the three, though, he was the one I feared least. I had some idea of what he was capable of, what I had to worry about. The other two were total unknowns. They were both female, or at least they looked female, but beyond that there wasn’t a lot in common between them. The one to the left had tan skin and dark hair, and she was painfully beautiful. She didn’t have the physical beauty of, say, Scáthach, and she didn’t have the intensely sexual manner of Selene. But there were elements of both there, along with a barely-veiled hunger that elevated it to a weapon.

 

The other one was more ethereal, almost ghostly. She was very pale, maybe even albino, and wearing a simple robe as white as her skin. Even her lips were pale, almost blue, leaving pure black hair and eyes the only color about her.

 

Lucius was the one to answer me. “Good evening,” he said, smiling. “The surroundings are rather more hospitable than the last time we spoke. Less impressive than when it was young, of course, but I think it’s aged quite well, on the whole.”

 

“Are you telling me that you were around when the Colosseum was new?” I asked.

 

“Would it be so unbelievable?” he asked.

 

“Not really, no,” I said. “I’ve talked to people that are older. It just puts it into perspective, I suppose.”

 

“Oh? How so?”

 

“From my perspective,” I said, “it’s hard to really conceptualize watching several thousand years pass. It’s hard to see it as anything but an abstract number.” I gestured at the ruins around us. “This gives it context. If I think about it as being long enough to watch this crumble, that gives me some grounding as far as what it actually means.”

 

He considered me for a moment. “That’s an interesting way to look at it,” he said. “And an insightful one. I’ll have to think about it more. In the meantime, however, I haven’t introduced my associates. How terribly rude of me. This is Lily,” he gestured at the tanned woman, “and Yumi.”

 

“Charmed,” I said. “You know why we’re here.”

 

“You want status,” he said. “Recognitions. Or perhaps insurance would be the better word for what you’re asking.”

 

“It’s got elements of all three,” I agreed. “It raises the question, though. Is this even something you’re equipped to offer?”

 

“I do think so,” he said. “I am the most influential of my kind in Africa by a rather wide margin. Between that and my connections to others of similar influence, I could easily sway my people to agree with me on such a relatively minor matter. Lily holds a similar role among the succubi, and Yumi has some sway among…other types.”

 

“It’s a yuki-onna,” Aiko said, watching the pale woman closely. She seemed…not afraid, precisely, but wary. Coming from her, that was practically as good as outright terror from most people.

 

“Someone knows her stories,” Yumi said. Her voice was flat and androgynous, not seeming particularly human.

 

Aiko snorted. “With my mother?” she said. “Please. I couldn’t have gotten away with not knowing. I’m surprised you’d be hanging around with these guys, though.”

 

“We all have mouths to feed,” the yuki-onna said.

 

“In any case,” Lucius interjected, smoothly taking control of the conversation again. “We’ve established that the bargain can be made. But I have to question whether what you’re asking for even makes sense. I confess I don’t see how you could keep our respective affiliates out of your territory when it has so many people within it, regardless of whether it’s officially allowed or not.”

 

“The point isn’t to keep them out,” I said. “It’s to establish that it is my territory. They can come, but I want it to be very clear that they’re there on my sufferance, and I expect them to obey certain rules.”

 

“Again, pointless,” he said. “There will always be rule breakers.”

 

“Ah,” I said, smiling. “But if there’s a rule that they’ve broken, they can be punished. Rules can be enforced. If there’s no such rule I can’t exactly say that they’ve done anything wrong, can I?”

 

“And you think that you can enforce these rules? Really?”

 

“I already have, haven’t I?”

 

He smiled, thin and sharp. “Ah, yes. Dear Katrin, struck down in her own home. She always was lacking something. A certain ruthlessness, perhaps.”

 

And that really said all I needed to know about Lucius. If he thought that Katrin wasn’t ruthless enough, if he was seriously going to criticize her for not being willing to go far enough in pursuit of her goals, that was a pretty damn meaningful statement. That was the equivalent of someone telling me that I was too trusting for my own good.

 

“So what rules would you impose upon us, then?” he continued. “Please, regale us with your legal brilliance.”

 

“First off, your people would have to contact me when they come into the city of Colorado Springs,” I said. “I’d give them a grace period, say three days, but after that if I find them in my city and they haven’t talked to me, I’ll assume they’re working against me and treat them appropriately.”

 

“That’s basic courtesy,” Lucius said. “Get to the meat.”

 

Aiko started to make a smart remark, but I nudged her in the ribs, hard enough that she’d feel it through the armor. I didn’t know what she was about to say, but considering who we were talking to, I was about ninety percent sure it would have been a bad idea. She turned it into a cough, and while I was confident she was glaring at me, she didn’t say anything.

 

“The primary issues have to do with degrees of activity within the city,” I said. “Nothing so overt that it attracts attention. I expect that living people won’t make a fuss, and dead people won’t be unusual enough that they draw notice. They don’t interfere with my employees or personal associates. If they have a problem with one of my people, they bring it to me. If there’s a major threat or problem within the city, they’re expected to help out or get out.”

 

“I’m surprised,” Lucius said. “Not going to try and ban us from hunting in your city?”

 

“He is a hunter himself,” Yumi said softly. “He knows the nature of the hunt. Enough, I think, to know better than to do as you suggest.”

 

“Pretty much,” I said. “It’s basic ecology, really. Where there’s a niche, something’s going to fill it, right? There are a lot of people in the city, and there are a lot of things that want to eat people. I don’t really think I can keep the one away from the other. But if I acknowledge that it’s going to happen, I can keep it under control and make sure that it stays within certain limits.”

 

“Interesting,” he said. “You know, Wolf, coming here I really wasn’t expecting to take this seriously. But what you’re outlining is actually fairly reasonable. I think we could make this happen.” He smiled thinly. “But why would we? So far I’m hearing a great deal of benefit to you, and nothing much for us.”

 

“What do you want?” I asked. “That’s a serious question, by the way, not me being snide. I don’t really know what you guys would want, so it’s hard for me to offer you much.”

 

“I will speak to my associates without personal reward,” Yumi said. “The jarl and I have certain things in common.”

 

“How charming,” Lily said sarcastically. “I’m afraid I’m going to require a little more in exchange for my assistance, though. You’ll owe me one.”

 

“Details,” I said instantly.

 

“You’ll owe me a favor, to be redeemed at a time of my choosing,” she said. “One service, which you can perform without extraordinary risk or expense.”

 

“Fair, but I want the option to veto your requests if I think that they’re excessive or they’d require me to do something I’m not willing to do.”

 

“And what’s to stop you from rejecting everything I ask, so that you never have to pay at all?” the succubus asked skeptically.

 

“That’s how you get a reputation for not keeping your deals,” I said. “And that isn’t a good kind of reputation to have.”

 

“And you expect me to rely on your desire for a good reputation to that extent?”

 

“Pretty much,” I said. “I’m guessing you’ll take that as collateral.”

 

“Good guess,” she said after a moment. “All right, then. That’s good enough for me.”

 

Which just left Lucius to convince. I turned to him, tense and a little worried. I was guessing that he was going to ask for something that I really didn’t want to offer, and I was fully prepared to agonize over whether this was worth the price.

 

What I got instead was a casual smile. “I want you two to come to a party I’m hosting,” he said. “Day after tomorrow, Alexandria, dusk.”

 

I hesitated. “Is this an effort to lure me into a trap or something?”

 

“No,” he said. “It’s a good-faith invitation. I’ll even offer you my personal guarantee of safety while you’re there. If anyone starts a fight with you, I’ll ensure that they regret it.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I’d like to have a personal conversation with the pair of you,” he said, shrugging. “And while I do appreciate these environs, this is neither the time nor the place for that conversation.”

 

I glanced at Aiko, who nodded slightly. “All right,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

 

He was smiling thinly as we shook hands. I was sure he could crush my fingers into jelly if he wanted to, but his grip was only moderately firm.

 

As we left, I tried not to think about how much easier of a time I’d had working with the monsters than with the Guards.

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The outfit was a hell of a lot more badass than I’d been expecting. The base was a dull crimson bodysuit, something that was meant to fit close to the skin, made of some slick, smooth fabric. Layered over that were layers of fabric and metal, cut in ways that suggested feathers without outright being feathers, in every shade of red. The gloves were made of the same material as the bodysuit, and tapered at the fingers, hinting at claws without actually being sharpened. The helmet was similarly suggestive, something about its shape reminding me of a bird. I couldn’t have said quite what it was; it wasn’t like it had a beak or anything. There was just something about it that said bird.

 

Wearing that, my identity would be at least as well concealed as with my usual helmet. Everything was covered but my mouth, and even that was masked by several strips of metal. The eyes were concealed behind yellow lenses.

 

“This is a bit more aggressive than I was expecting,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but I thought you guys were going for the ‘friendly’ look.”

 

“We’re marketing you as edgy,” Gosnell said. “Not that we have much choice as far as that goes. You’re not exactly kiddie-friendly. But we should be able to sell you to the teenage crowd, play up the rebel angle and give you an aesthetic as the outsider. We’ll want you to play to type, by the way. Argue with David in public, that kind of thing. We’re expecting you to push some limits regardless of what we tell you, so you shouldn’t have much of a problem with that.”

 

“This feels so weird,” I said. “The way you’re talking about setting up this persona. It’s bizarre.”

 

“It’s no different than what you’ve done in the past.”

 

“Well, yeah,” I said. “But that was working to my own ends. Now I’m supposed to be taking instruction from someone else. It’s a hell of a lot harder to match my image to someone else’s idea of what it should be.”

 

“Speaking of which,” Gosnell said, unsympathetically. “You’ve been having a hard time following instructions, apparently.”

 

“What?”

 

“I clearly told you not to win during your sparring sessions with the team,” he said. “From what I’ve heard, you haven’t done much else.”

 

“David wanted me to win,” I said.

 

Gosnell raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And he told you this, did he? Walked up and said, ‘You know what, Jonathan, I want you to ignore all the things Mr. Gosnell told you to do?'”

 

I gritted my teeth. “No, but I’m not an idiot. I know what’s going on.”

 

“You don’t know best,” he said. “That is what I am trying to communicate to you, Jonathan. You are not dealing with the world you’re accustomed to. You are not playing by the rules you know. The sooner you figure out that you need to change your ways of thinking, the better off we’ll all be.”

 

“Okay,” I said, in a tone of badly forced cheer. “Well, as much as I would love to stay and talk about what rules you think I’m supposed to be playing by, I really only stopped to pick up the model of this suit. I’ll drop it off with my guy and probably have a finished version in a couple of days. Right now, though, I’ve kind of got a meeting to be going to.”

 

“I don’t know of any meetings on your schedule,” he said.

 

“Yeah,” I drawled. “This meeting isn’t so much for me as it is for me. I’ve got a lot of things that aren’t on your schedule.”

 

“I see,” he said. “Well, in the future, you should at least notify us. Otherwise there will be issues with scheduling conflicts. Tonight, for example, you’re supposed to be starting your patrols.”

 

“I’ll see what I can do,” I told him. “No guarantees, though. I’ve got a lot of obligations, and I don’t always get a lot of notice when something’s coming up.”

 

“All right,” Gosnell said. “But you have to meet us halfway here, Jonathan. We really are trying to accommodate your needs, but if we’re going to make this work you’re going to have to make an effort as well. I hope you have a pleasant meeting.”

 

“I sincerely doubt it,” I said, folding the prototype up and stuffing it into my bag. “This meeting is sort of the opposite of pleasant. But thanks anyway.”

---

 

The stairs were closed down at the moment, due to the renovations. I didn’t know what they were doing, but it was supposed to take several days, during which we were stuck with the elevator.

 

I seriously considered jumping out the window, but in the end I decided I wasn’t quite that irresponsible. I was pretty sure we were still supposed to be keeping a low profile, and jumping out of the window on the third floor was kind of the opposite of that. Even if it would have been much quicker, and considerably less painful.

 

I regretted that decision when I got into the elevator and saw Tawny already there. She had her hair up in the violently red mohawk I’d seen her with the first time, and she was dressed to match, with a black tank top, black jeans with a few carefully placed rips, and heavy black combat boots.

 

“Hey, Jonny,” she said as I got in. “Where are you going?”

 

“Meeting some friends,” I said, which was technically true. I hadn’t said what we were doing afterwards. “What about you?”

 

“Just going out to look around a bit before we go patrolling tonight,” she said. “I haven’t been in town all that long, so I figured I’d probably better know my way around.”

 

I nodded. “Where were you before, if you don’t mind my asking?”

 

“No, that’s fine,” she said. “We lived in St. Louis up until about a month ago.”

 

“St. Louis,” I said, thinking. “They aren’t doing well right now, from what I’ve heard.”

 

She looked away. “No,” she said. “No, they aren’t doing well at all. That was part of my signing bonus. They relocated me and my family out here.”

 

“Ah,” I said. “Well, if you need a hand settling in, just ask. I’ve been around a while.”

 

“Are you from here, then?”

 

I shrugged. “I’ve been all over the place,” I said. “Oregon, Wyoming, North Dakota…I actually even lived in Europe for a while. But I’ve been here for a few years now.”

 

She looked at me oddly. “You don’t look that old.”

 

I smiled. “Appearances,” I said, “can be deceptive. What the hell is with this elevator, anyway? It’s ridiculously slow.”

 

“Stalled, actually,” she said brightly. “Apparently it stops for a minute or so between the second and first floor. Something about them doing work in the elevator shaft, and they have to clear things out before we can go through.”

 

I closed my eyes for a moment. “I should have taken the window,” I muttered.

 

She chuckled. “Yeah, maybe.” After a momentary pause, she said, “About that offer. Do you mind if I come with you? I feel like I should try and meet some people around here. I like you guys and all, but I want to have some kind of life outside of this stuff.”

 

I sighed. “I really can’t,” I said.

 

“I get it,” she said, nodding. “You don’t want me along while you meet with your friends. That’s fine.”

 

“It’s not that,” I protested. “It’s…well, that. But it’s not because I don’t like you. It’s more that these people aren’t so much friends as acquaintances, and not very nice ones. Trust me, you don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

 

“So why are you meeting with them?”

 

“Because sometimes we have to do things that we don’t want to do,” I said, sighing. “Look, I’ll show you around later. I know some people that I think you’d like. But for tonight, I really can’t.”

 

About that time, the elevator doors finally slid open with a soft ding. I stepped out and found Aiko waiting for me, already in her full regalia of armor and weaponry. She was leaning against the wall, and tapping her foot impatiently.

 

“Cupcake,” I said, eyeing her. “I thought I told you to wait for me outside.”

 

“What, and you thought I’d listen? What are you, new?”

 

“Is this on of your friends?” Tawny asked.

 

“Nah, Cupcake actually is a friend. Something tells me you two will get along pretty well. But for now, we’re running late, so I really need to get going.”

 

“That’s cool,” she said, looking from me to Aiko curiously. “I’m going to hold you to that promise, though, Jonny.” She tossed a mocking salute in my direction and sauntered out the door.

 

“Cupcake?” Aiko asked, watching her go.

 

“You stuck me with Shrike,” I said. “It seemed like the least I could do to pay you back.”

 

She snorted. “Let’s get going,” she said. “Oh, and here’s your stuff.” She picked a black duffel bag off the floor next to her and threw it at me. It clanked when I caught it.

 

Outside, we walked around the corner while Aiko looked for a good doorway to craft her portal in. Once she was satisfied, she started working while I pulled my armor and cloak out of the duffel bag and got dressed. I stuffed the outfit I’d picked up from Gosnell into the empty bag.

 

We left it there as we stepped into another world. One of my housecarls would be along to pick it up and deliver it to my supplier.

---

 

Rome was an interesting city. It had been around forever, pretty much, and every era to pass had left its mark on the city. Driving south from Milan, it felt like we were traveling through time as much as space. Most of the city was firmly in the modern era, but every now and then I glimpsed a building that looked like it had been standing since before the fall of the Roman Empire.

 

Rome was probably in the top ten cities in the world, as far as simply not being affected by the chaos. Not surprising, really. It had thousands of years of history behind it. In addition to giving the residents lots of time to build up defenses, it also gave the city a sort of presence, a sense of tradition. Even for the fae, Rome was an old city. Having been around so long gave it a sort of momentum, an expectation that it would continue to be around into the future. Nobody was going to lightly go against that weight of history, and if anyone tried it would probably go very, very poorly for them.

 

And that wasn’t even mentioning the church. The Catholic Church didn’t have the power it once had—it wasn’t the single most powerful organization in Europe, the way it was for a lot of the medieval and Renaissance period. But they still had quite a bit of clout. Probably more now than before, now that I thought about it. With how bad things were right now, I was guessing a lot of people would have turned to religion to try and make sense of a world that seemed to have gone mad.

 

For a moment, I wondered what would happen if we were to walk up to the Vatican and start doing obviously magical things. Would they take us more or less seriously there than elsewhere? Hell, maybe they’d try to exorcise us. There was something bizarrely amusing about the thought of a priest doing a full vade retro satana on Aiko.

 

It probably wouldn’t work, of course. They had armed guards there. They probably had some competent mages, too; magic and religion had always gone hand-in-hand, in one way or another. But it was an amusing mental image.

 

Not that it mattered, because we weren’t going to the Vatican right now. That was entirely the wrong sort of venue for a meeting like this.

 

No, we were going to the Colosseum. The history and the atmosphere there were much more to a vampire’s liking than one of the strongest religious centers in the world, I was guessing. I wasn’t entirely certain whether vampires were actually repelled by religious faith, but it seemed likely enough. I’d seen the effect it could have on demonic spirits, and my understanding was that vampires were similarly vulnerable to ideas which were inimical to their nature.

 

The Colosseum was closed, of course. It was almost midnight, and visiting hours had ended with dusk. There was basically a citywide curfew when the sun went down, the same as in most cities, and for good reason. Less affected by the chaos wasn’t the same thing as unaffected, after all, and scary things came out to play under cover of night. Things like vampires, and demons, and us.

 

Visiting hours had never been much of a deterrent to Aiko or me, though. She parked the rented car in the middle of the huge, empty lot, and we walked over to the ancient building. We probably could have gotten in through the public entrance—I’d never met the lock that could keep Aiko out indefinitely, and if all else failed I could just cut my way in—but that might have attracted the wrong kind of attention. And in any case, it wouldn’t have been nearly as dramatic as what we were intending.

 

We’d had a week get ready for this meeting. The entrance we had planned was appropriately grandiose.

 

We walked over to the exterior wall, still standing tall despite the almost two millennia weighing down on it, and started climbing.

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I had some warning, some reason to expect things to get ugly. Not a whole lot of warning, but it’s amazing how much difference even a couple of seconds can make when it comes to that sort of thing.

 

It was enough time for me to brace myself. It was enough time to be ready for something bad to happen, even if I didn’t have any real idea what it would be.

 

The explosion wasn’t that large, but that was the kind of phrase that had to be appreciated on a relative scale. It didn’t level the building. It didn’t instantly kill anything and everything inside. It only really took out one wall.

 

But even a small explosion was still a force to be reckoned with. It threw me to the ground, knocked the wind out of me, and generally took the fight right out of me.

 

I was dazed for a second before I started pushing myself to my feet. Next to me, Aiko was also struggling back to her feet, grabbing for a knife as she did.

 

It was hard to figure out what was going on. The air was filled with smoke and dust, and most of the lights were out. The ones that were still on were flickering, casting the room into a chaotic mess of light and shadow.

 

About half the people in the room had been knocked out of their seats. It was worst next to the wall that had been demolished, a short distance to my right. Very few of the people sitting there were still sitting there, and a couple of the ones that had been knocked down didn’t look like they’d be getting back up. It was hard to say whether that impression was accurate—this was a Pack meeting, after all. Werewolves had a well-earned reputation for being quite hard to put down for good, and they weren’t the toughest creatures in the Pack. Even the people that looked like they’d been shattered by the force of the blast might be running around good as new in half an hour.

 

Maybe ten seconds after the explosion, people started rushing in through the gap in the wall. They moved like they knew what they were doing in a fight, and they were well-equipped. Each of them had some sort of bulky goggles strapped to their heads, and they carried assault rifles.

 

When they walked into the room, they started shooting.

 

They weren’t just spraying the room, the way amateurs would have. This was skilled, disciplined shooting, laying down tight, focused fire. One of the bullets glanced off my armor, and I felt a spike of pain even though it hadn’t penetrated. Silver, and heavily charged with magic.

 

The moment that happened, two things passed through my mind. The first was that I was sitting in a room with a hell of a lot of backup, for once in my life. Without even factoring in the people whose nature I wasn’t clear on, there was enough firepower in this room to level a city.

 

The second was that with the poor visibility, they didn’t necessarily know where to direct that firepower.

 

When I looked at it like that, it was pretty easy what I should do. I reached out and called the wind.

 

I wasn’t David. I couldn’t whip up a gale that shredded people like razors, or crushed them with the sheer force of its passing. I wasn’t walking artillery.

 

But I had something of a knack with air magic, and I had my bracelet to use as a focus, making the process much quicker and more efficient. And I was willing to throw a lot of power into this. The wind I conjured up wasn’t really a weapon, but it cleared away most of the dust and smoke in a couple of seconds, making it much easier to see what the hell was going on.

 

There were fifteen or so of the people with guns. They were identically equipped, and they were moving as a unit. These people had worked together before, enough to work together well. Between that and the quality of their equipment, I was fairly confident these people were professionals.

 

A couple of seconds after I cleared the air, one of the shapeshifters gestured, and sent a wave of fire at the gunmen.

 

It washed over them without so much as singing their clothes, though the building around them was left smoldering in its wake.

 

“Your sorcery can’t touch us,” one of the gunmen said, with a surprising amount of swagger in his voice for someone who’d just come within inches of being set on fire. “We’re protected.”

 

The skinwalker stood. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was aware of that. I could barely see her out of the periphery of my vision, and it sure wasn’t like she was the only person moving. But there was something about her that drew the attention, for no discernible reason. Elsewhere I might not have tried to put a label on the feeling, but here I could just label it dominance. She wasn’t a werewolf, but many of the same concepts applied, and I had the distinct impression that she’d have been one hell of a dominant wolf.

 

“You’re warded,” she said, sounding totally casual and confident. From what I’d seen of skinwalkers, I didn’t think that confidence was unjustified. “But not well enough.”

 

She didn’t gesture or otherwise show any sign of effort. But the guy that had been bragging broke. I couldn’t explain it any better than that. It was hard to see from where I was standing, but I was pretty sure that every joint in his body bent backwards, all at once.

 

He crumpled to the ground, instantly. He didn’t scream. I got the impression that his body probably didn’t have the structural integrity to breathe anymore, which made it pretty hard to scream.

 

But he tried.

 

After that, the fight was short, ugly, and entirely one-sided. Most of the mages didn’t seem able to get through whatever wards the gunmen had. I didn’t even try. Most of the people that preferred to mix it up in hand-to-hand were still dazed, off-balance, and too far away to take full advantage of their physical superiority. The gunmen had practically the perfect position.

 

But they’d tried to attack Conn Ferguson with just a handful of guys with rifles.

 

They never had a chance. I wondered whether they knew it.

 

The terrifying thing about Conn, on the very rare occasion that he let his real face show through the harmless mask, was that he didn’t look half as terrifying as he ought to. He didn’t turn into the Incredible Hulk, didn’t transform into a monster. He still looked like a teenage kid, short and slender, closer in build to a mildly athletic geek than a bodybuilder.

 

Right up until you looked at his eyes. Conn’s eyes had always shown the truth behind the lie he told the world. His eyes looked old, and full of a bitter wisdom that no human had ever matched.

 

Now, I saw all of that, and also the violent wrath of the most dominant werewolf on the planet with someone trespassing on the territory he’d claimed.

 

I met his eyes for maybe all of a quarter of a second, then I looked straight at the ground, my head bowed. I damn near knelt, and if there hadn’t been a fight I probably would have. Conn typically didn’t care about open displays of submission; he was the boss, and he knew that with a certainty that made display unnecessary. But just now, I wanted to make it very clear that I was not his enemy.

 

He didn’t seem to be moving particularly quickly as he crossed the room. He wasn’t moving in a way that suggested he was running, his attitude wasn’t terribly rushed. But somehow he crossed the distance in less than a second.

 

They tried to shoot him, which almost made me laugh. I could have told them that was a waste of time. They couldn’t hit him on the best day they ever had, and even if they somehow pulled it off, it was just an assault rifle firing silver bullets. That was something you used on a werewolf, and this was the Khan.

 

He walked through them, and then he walked out the other side, not slowing down.

 

After he passed, they were dead. All of them. He hadn’t even grabbed a weapon. He didn’t need one. His bare hands were more than enough to get the job done. He shattered spines through their body armor, crushed skulls under their helmets, and he wasn’t even trying.

 

Conn continued out through the hole in the wall. A few people joined him—the French werewolf, the skinwalker, a couple of people I didn’t recognize. I didn’t bother following. Anything that crew couldn’t handle was so far out of my league I couldn’t even be a credible annoyance.

 

Aiko stared at the wreckage left behind for a couple of seconds. “Damn,” she said, putting the kind of weight on the word that was usually reserved for names of deities. “Überwerewolf has his angry hat on today.”

 

“That wasn’t angry,” I said. “Not really. You can tell by how the building’s still standing.”

 

She grinned. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew her well enough to see it in her posture. When Aiko really grinned, she did it with her full body. “You aren’t laughing,” she commented after a moment.

 

“I wasn’t joking,” I said. “Come on, we should check on the injured.”

---

 

There were only three dead, which was probably a minor miracle. One werewolf had taken a silver bullet in the eye in the first barrage of gunfire, and died instantly. Werewolves were tough creatures, but there were limits. A shapeshifter had been caught in the crossfire between two of the attackers, and took a couple dozen rounds in two seconds. Shapeshifters were tougher than humans, from what I’d seen, but again, there were limits.

 

The last corpse was the kitsune who had spoken up earlier. Aiko paused by that body, looking down at him.

 

“Did you know him?” I asked, more out of a vague feeling that I should say something than because the question made much sense.

 

“Nah,” she said. “Like, I knew who he was, but we never really talked. I just feel a little bad for threatening to tell people his son raped me when I was nineteen. Probably not a great experience to go out on.”

 

“Did he? Rape you, I mean.”

 

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “But he didn’t know that. It was a pretty believable story. That kid was the kind who’d have done it if he thought he could get away with it. Nobody cried when somebody stuck a needle in his ear.”

 

“I thought people were laughing when you reamed this guy out,” I said after a moment. “Nothing you’ve said so far sounds funny in the least.”

 

“I said other things too,” she said.

 

I considered her for a moment. “You know what?” I said at last. “I’m not even going to ask.”

 

She grinned. “Smart move.”

 

And then we moved on, leaving the dead kitsune on the ground behind us.

 

There were more injured than dead, and I spent a minute trying to figure out what I should do for first aid, or triage. Then I realized how silly that was. These people were shapechangers, of one stripe or another. That was the whole point. That was what the Pack was. That particular talent wasn’t universally tied to a superhuman capacity for healing—Aiko was a great example of that. But there was a lot of overlap, and it looked like all the injured here were in the category that didn’t spend a lot on medical bills. If they weren’t already dead, they’d probably be fine.

 

So we just sat and waited for the people who’d gone out hunting to get back. Snowflake came in and sprawled across my lap, more for comfort than anything else, I thought. She tended to get stressed when things happened while she wasn’t around. She thought things went poorly for me under those circumstances. Considering how often she’d been right, I didn’t have a lot of grounds to argue with her.

 

After a few minutes, Conn walked back in, followed by the other people who’d followed him. He’d managed to get the blood cleaned up—I wasn’t even going to ask how he’d managed that—and looked like his usual self once again.

 

“Seems like it was just this group,” he said, taking me and Aiko off to a quiet corner of the room. “We’ve tangled with these people. They’re paramilitary, a bunch of people from police and military backgrounds with a hate on for magic. As far as we can tell they’re mostly going after werewolves, probably because it’s a target they don’t instantly lose against.”

 

“How did I not know about this?” I asked.

 

He shrugged. “There’s a lot to know about right now,” he said. “And these guys are new. Small-scale, so far, and they weren’t on the scene before things changed. You’ve had a lot on your plate since then, from what I’ve heard.”

 

“We all have,” I said dryly.

 

He chuckled. “Yes, well, I can’t argue with that. In any case, these people aren’t that much of a threat. They’re small-scale, and I don’t really see them hanging around that long. Too much opposition, not enough numbers. They’ve been more of an annoyance than a problem so far.”

 

I frowned. “Do they usually have warded armor?” I’d managed to track the protections down to spells woven into the body armor. It was solid work, generic and mass produced, but solid.

 

“That’s new,” he said. He didn’t say that he’d have known if they were wearing it before. Some things were just a given.

 

I nodded. “I thought so. And how’d they even know where this meeting was being held? No, I think there’s something more to it than that. At a guess, some people I annoyed were using them to get at me.”

 

He narrowed his eyes slightly. “Something you need a hand with?”

 

I shuddered. “God, no. I’m already on thin ice politically, here. The last thing I need is to get in more trouble by bringing werewolves into mage business. No, the only thing you can help me with right now is making sure I don’t have to worry about the Pack too, I think.”

 

“That should be dealt with,” he said. “You’d mostly convinced people already, and then when we were attacked, you instantly started helping. That says a lot. I talked to some other people while we were out chasing accomplices, and I think you’re in the clear.”

 

I relaxed a little. “Good. Thanks. I’ve got enough people after me without adding you guys.”

 

“Yes,” he said. “You’re leaving, then?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I think we’ve both got enough things to keep us very busy right now.”

 

“Yes,” he said again. “Good luck, Winter.”

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The problem with leadership is that by the time you understand what the job entails, it’s too late to run for the hills.

 

Once upon a time, I’d dreamed of this. Holding this power. Being strong enough that no one could hurt me, that no one dared to try.

 

Such a tragic comedy, I reflected. There was so often trauma in our pasts. We were so badly flawed, broken before we were made.

 

I picked the robe up off the stand by the door. The white fabric was lighter than it looked. Woven through with magic until the heavy velvet weighed no more than a wisp of silk.

 

It felt much heavier than that, like donning a coat of gilded lead, dragging me down with a weight that was nothing physical.

 

They said that crowns weighed heavy on the heads that wore them. I’d never worn a crown, but if the feeling was anything like draping that robe around my shoulders, I could sympathize with the heads of state. It was like carrying the weight of the world on my back.

 

Outside, I stepped up to my podium. It was smooth, dark wood, lined with weapons on the back side. I had all the implements I needed to lay waste to a small nation, ready to hand. The robe I wore was better than armor. Lacking any of the above, I would still be a force to be reckoned with, an army unto myself. It had been ages since anyone really threatened me. Nothing less than a demigod could do much to me, and even from most of them I could at least hold out long enough to flee.

 

The only monsters that really frightened me were the ones inside my skull.

 

I was the first to step on stage. I was usually the first. That was my task. To look forward, to guide our course through all its twists and turns. Foresight was both my nature and my name, for all that I lacked it. The future was as cloudy to me as anyone else.

 

Not for the first time, I thought that my long-ago predecessor had done me no favors by lending me her title. She’d had the true power of prophecy, magic that could look down the winding roads that branched out into the future, the power to make time itself her pet. Of all the Prophets that had followed her, through all the centuries since, perhaps two or three had shared that gift.

 

They’d been quite mad, of course. Or perhaps they were saner than the rest of us, but either way, they only barely existed in the same world as human beings. One does not violate something as fundamental to the nature of the world as causality without certain consequences. Towards the end, they didn’t even share the most basic concepts with other people, even other mages.

 

The rest of us simply had to muddle our way through the murky waters.

 

Arbiter joined me on the stage, his robe of unrelieved black standing at the other end of the arc. He nodded politely to me as he stepped up to his own podium, with his own selection of weaponry. He and I had always had a solid understanding of one another. We were in similar lines of work, broadly speaking. We were the ones who held things together when they would otherwise fly to pieces.

 

One by one the rest of the Conclave joined us.

 

Maker, in his indigo, looked like he was taking things seriously for once. Proof, if proof were needed, that this was a very serious matter. He blazed with magic, caged power on a scale that dwarfed even the rest of us. For all his considerable skill, I knew it wasn’t his work I was sensing. He was carrying one of the first Maker’s weapons, one of those that we couldn’t use without breaking the world in ways we couldn’t necessarily fix. He nodded to me as well, his face eerily calm. He didn’t feel emotions, not the same way the rest of us did.

 

Keeper, dressed in warm honey-yellow, looked at Maker distastefully as she took her place. She had held that weapon in safekeeping for the entirety of her adult life. She knew better than any of us the destructive potential it held. Letting it out of her grasp must rankle. But she also knew why it had to be done, and her work had left her with a great understanding of necessity. This was not the only weapon that would be released from her keeping. Some of the most dangerous were being brought out of their cages and lockers even now.

 

Guide—the new Guide, not the old, and that I had to make that distinction still hurt on some level—looked overwhelmed, swamped in his green robe. This was his first crisis, and it wasn’t one that I’d have wished on anyone in that position. He was fundamentally a political animal, appointed because of who more than what he knew. He was utterly unprepared for this.

 

Guard carried himself more confidently, wearing an immaculate suit under the red robe. He met my eye and opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. He’d often spoken of this day in terms that were not entirely unfavorable, but now that it had actually come to pass, he had nothing to say. He’d never really wanted this, whatever he might sometimes have said. I knew that.

 

Watcher stood beside Arbiter, looking small and frail in her violet robes. It was a miracle that she’d lasted as long as she had. She’d made the most enemies of any Conclave member that I could remember. To have held firm for so long, blind and crippled and with remarkable enmity even within the ranks of her own organization, had required incredible force of will. She showed that will now, nothing on her face but quiet resolution, though what had happened must be breaking her heart even more deeply than my own.

 

Caller and Walker were the last to arrive, wearing orange and blue respectively. They looked concerned and serious, but they lacked the masked horror and despair the rest of us exhibited. They had less to lose than we did. The nature of their positions was such that they had little investment in this situation. Their work was centered in other worlds, only tangentially related to this one.

 

As they took their places at last, I turned my attention to the audience. There were thousands of them. I didn’t take the time to look past the surface. Time was a resource we did not have in abundance, and looking too deeply was painful when so many of them would die soon.

 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, hearing the whisper of translators in the crowd like rustling leaves. “We are at war.”

 

Once upon a time, they’d burned us at the stake. Torches and pitchforks, drowning and hanging, had all been quite popular.

 

That had been a long time ago. Now they had guns. They had bombers and lasers. When they burned us now, they did it with nuclear fire.

 

And we retaliated in kind. How could we do less? We were as human as they, in some ways. We lashed out at them, the same as they lashed out at us. Our weapons were older and stranger, more abstract, but no less destructive in their own way.

 

We tore the world apart between us, and when we were finally done there was nothing left but ruins.

---

 

I blinked and looked away from the mirror.

 

Reminding myself of the worst-case scenario served two purposes. First, it reminded me how much worse things could be. The world wasn’t broken. I wasn’t going out to announce World War III. Things were tense between us and the normal humans, but it hadn’t escalated nearly that far. This was just a routine meeting, adjusting the budget now that the gods had finally made their play.

 

Second, it reminded me of how much worse things could be. The scenario I had just played out in my head was an unlikely one, but not impossible. One false step and we could slip off the path into the quicksand. All it would take was one mistake at a critical moment.

 

I didn’t have sole responsibility for that. But I might as well. As Prophet, I was the only member of the Conclave with no clearly defined role or job. The others had their areas of concern, their areas of influence, but I wasn’t assigned anything in particular. My job was more to make sure that the rest stayed on the path. I was supposed to ensure that things didn’t deteriorate to the point I’d just envisioned. We didn’t have a ruler—there was no leader of the Conclave. But when we negotiated treaties, it was my signature on the dotted line.

 

When I’d dreamed of holding that kind of power, I hadn’t realized quite what it entailed. I hadn’t imagined the responsibility.

 

It never occurred to me, until it happened, what kind of burden it was to know that my choices could decide the fate of the entire world.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The warehouse was quiet, in a neighborhood that looked abandoned. Chicago had fared better than almost any major city in the madness, from what I’d heard, but it hadn’t been totally unfazed by things. Although I supposed it was also possible that this was just the product of standard urban decay, without any need for magic and monsters. The weeds growing through the sidewalks, the bricks in the buildings across the street beginning to crumble…there were numerous signs pointing to this area having been at best depressed since long before the world went to pieces.

 

No other cars around, Snowflake reported, moving back into sight after circling the building. And the windows are all blocked with blackout curtains.

 

Not necessarily suspicious, all things considered, I said back, walking up to the door. These people have some very good reasons to not want anyone to realize they’re here.

 

Think I’m still going to assume that they want to kill us all, she said.

 

I snorted. Well, duh. Let me know if anyone comes in after us?

 

Yep, she said, slinking off into an alley.

 

I smiled grimly and opened the door. Having Snowflake around wasn’t anything like perfect insurance, and there was still a very good chance that things would go horribly wrong. She knew that at least as well as I did. But making the attempt made both of us feel better, if nothing else.

 

Aiko rested her fingers on my arm as we walked in, more for style points than anything else. Given that we were both fully encased in armor, the image was probably more than slightly peculiar. Inside, the warehouse had been partitioned out into multiple rooms. The first room inside was a sort of foyer, a transitional space between the outside world and the building’s interior. The door was open and we strutted inside without hesitating. Hesitation could easily be seen as weakness, and given that we were quite literally walking into a meeting of monsters and predators, weakness could easily become death.

 

The next room was fairly large, and hollow. I wasn’t sure what purpose it had once served, but it had been gutted, left as nothing more than an open space defined by open floor and empty walls, concrete and brick without decoration of any kind.

 

I was a little surprised at how informal the setup was. There were a couple dozen small tables around the edges of the room, with one or two people sitting at each. The only one I recognized was Conn, sitting at a square table on the other side of the room. He was wearing a suit so black it made his hair look pale, and for once he seemed exactly like what he was. Just sitting there, not even looking in my direction, his sheer presence was so imposing that it was hard to keep from staring at the floor in reaction.

 

Other than that, there were a wide variety of things in that room. There were a couple of werewolves; I didn’t know them, but the day I couldn’t recognize a werewolf when I smelled one, they could put me to bed in a hole.

 

A couple were shapeshifters, mages who had a talent for magics of flesh and bone, artists that used their own bodies as the canvas; I could smell it on them. One looked and smelled like a kitsune. Another had a distinctly fae scent about it, and its face moved strangely, like a mask that wasn’t quite attached to the face underneath.

 

Most of the rest, though, I couldn’t have put a name to if my life depended upon it. I was guessing most of them could eat me, though. That seemed like a safe bet here.

 

I didn’t want to let them see me flinch, though. Confidence was nine-tenths of what was needed here. The Pack had always attracted mostly predators, and predators had some common traits. One of the big ones was that when they went hunting they wanted a meal, not a fight. If they got the idea that you were easy prey they’d be on you like white on rice. It was much, much safer to seem like an arrogant jackass than to give them any reason to think that you were weak.

 

So, while I was probably supposed to stand in the open space in the middle of the room, I walked straight to one of the tables on the periphery and sat down. There were plenty of empty ones; these people valued personal space, to the degree that they left four or five times as much room between themselves as they needed.

 

They couldn’t see my face—unless they could see through metal, I supposed, which a couple of them might actually be able to do. Either way, I was smiling behind the mask, a broad grin like I owned the place and I dared anyone to tell me otherwise.

 

“Hi,” I said, leaning back in my chair as Aiko lounged in the one next to me. “Anyone mind moving this along? I’ve got things to do.”

 

“As do we all,” a slender Central American man said.

 

“Agreed,” one of the werewolves said. Not Conn; this one was female, and sounded French, though her English was very, very good. “Moving along, then. You killed a member of this Pack.”

 

“With cause,” I replied. “Very good cause.”

 

“Be that as it may,” a shapeshifter said. He had a thicker accent than the werewolf, something Middle Eastern. “We survive because we are pack, and not each alone, yes? We must stand together. Now more than ever.”

 

“Well, then somebody should have told him that,” I said, exasperated. “The guy tried to kill me three or four times, at least. He called up an army of demons to lay waste to my territory. I’m telling you, polite conversation wasn’t going to get anywhere with him.”

 

“He has a point,” Conn said. “He’s got a right to defend his territory.”

 

“You’re biased, Conn,” the French werewolf said, not unkindly. “The boy’s practically your kid.” She paused, turning her attention back to me. “Normally, that would be a valid point,” she said. “But this situation is an unusual one. More than any other point in recorded history, we cannot afford any weakness now, and the man you killed was a powerful asset. You should have sought some means of peaceful resolution, rather than killing him.”

 

I gritted my teeth. “You’re not hearing me,” I said. “He was evil, and that is not a word that I use lightly. He was messed up on a level that puts me to shame, which is not something that I can say about many people. Peaceful negotiation was not going to get me anywhere with him. Nonlethal measures were not going to work with him. Literally any means I had to plausibly resolve the problem entailed permanently removing him.”

 

“I can vouch for that,” another woman said. She drawled the words, lingering over the vowels like she didn’t want to let them end. “He was not a man to be swayed once he had settled his mind. Having decided to set himself against our young friend, he would have broken any agreement to the contrary that he made.”

 

I opened my mouth to thank her for backing me up, then paused. As nice as it was, it was also a little…odd. I supposed it was technically possible that she had risen high enough in the world to be at this meeting while still being nice enough to help a total stranger out of the goodness of her heart. Possible. But not likely.

 

I only had to consider her for a moment to figure out what was going on. Her appearance was similar to the Middle Eastern guy, broadly speaking, with tanned skin and dark hair. But she had startlingly orange eyes, an intense orange color that looked more like a pigeon’s eyes than anything that belonged in a human face. And she was wearing a coat that looked like it had been made from a wolf’s pelt.

 

I’m not that fond of math, but I can add two and two and come up with the right number. I was pretty sure I knew exactly what the story was here, or at least close enough for my purposes.

 

There was no sense in taking a needless risk, though, so I focused on the magic in the room for a moment, trying to get a feel for hers. It was hard to get an accurate read on things with so many competing auras in the room, but I managed to taste the edges of her power, enough to get some idea of what it was. There were smells of death, blood and sweat, and a hint of something more chemical, formaldehyde and alcohol. The scent was awful, nauseating, and strangely fascinating.

 

Good enough. It wasn’t quite the same—a more clinical, removed sort of awful, preservation rather than decay—but it was close enough.

 

“And how would you know that?” I asked her. It had only taken a couple of seconds for me to sort things out. Long for a casual pause, but not ridiculously so.

 

The skinwalker smiled at me. Her teeth were very even and very, very white. “We knew each other as children,” she said. “A long, long time ago. We were friends once. We’d drifted apart since then, but I know what sort of a man he was.”

 

“I see,” I said. “I suppose I should apologize for killing your friend, then.”

 

I didn’t actually apologize, though. I regretted a lot of things, but chopping that bastard’s head off was one of the few things in my life that I had no regrets about at all. I couldn’t think of any apology I could give that wouldn’t require me to lie through my teeth, and lying here was a bad idea. Considering the people I was surrounded by, I was nearly guaranteed to be caught.

 

“Don’t worry about it,” the skinwalker said with a casual, charming smile. “You saved me the trouble of doing it myself.”

 

She was already pretty high on the creepy scale, just by dint of her nature. I’d seen enough out of the last skinwalker to have a healthy fear of the breed.

 

But that line bumped her a few notches along, both what she said and the delivery. Even Aiko stared at her for a couple of seconds, her posture suggesting that she wasn’t sure whether to be impressed or terrified, and was settling on half of each.

 

“Okay,” I said, once I was confident I could do so without embarrassing myself. “So, again in the interest of moving things along, does anyone have anything else to add to this? Because from where I’m standing, it seems like we’ve pretty much covered everything. I killed him, nobody’s arguing that. I also had cause, which again, nobody’s arguing that point. If your concern is that I’m a liability to the Pack as a whole, all I can really do is say that I’ve got no intention of killing anyone from the Pack. We won’t have any trouble unless you start it, and even then I won’t kill you unless I don’t have any other way of resolving things.”

 

“And we are to take your word for this?” someone asked. A werewolf, I thought, but not one that had spoken so far.

 

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’ve earned some credit, here. I’ve helped the Pack in the past. I’ve gone out on a limb for you, and I’ve never really asked anything in return.”

 

“That’s true,” Conn said. “He’s helped me take care of some problems before. And even know, he’s been helping the werewolves around his territory. Establishing political connections and alliances.”

 

“So he helps werewolves,” the kitsune said. “Why should the rest of us care?”

 

Before anyone could respond to that, Aiko rattled off something in Japanese. I had no idea what she was saying, but from the expressions on some of the faces I could see, it was worth hearing. Maybe I could get her to repeat it for me later.

 

He opened his mouth, but Aiko just kept going, talking right over him. She ranted at him in Japanese for a solid minute, while those who knew what she was saying got increasingly amusing looks on their faces.

 

When she finally fell silent, still glaring at him from behind the mask of her helmet, the silence was resounding. “Objection withdrawn,” the other kitsune said after a couple of seconds, his voice choked.

 

“Anyone else feeling a need to officially discipline the jarl?” Conn asked.

 

Winter? Snowflake said a moment later in the back of my mind. There’s something odd…oh shit!

 

And then the building blew up.

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Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

“That door doesn’t open from the outside!” I shouted at David, peeling off to the side. “Window!”

 

He instantly veered off to follow me, running impressively fast for a human. He practiced, regularly. The jötnar kept pace easily, of course, and the Guard mercenaries were pretty quick on their feet as well.

 

Just not quick enough. A burst of fire caught the hindmost of the mercenaries, wrapping him in the same dull scarlet flames the mage had been shrouded in until the wind blew them out. Except he didn’t have her control over the fire, and she wasn’t inclined to be merciful.

 

He died too fast for screaming, long before any of the rest of us could do a thing about it.

 

Well, that didn’t bode well. I could get through the window, sort of, but we still had the wards to contend with, and I hadn’t designed those with the intent of letting people through the windows easily. Not even me. I could break through them, but I couldn’t do it clean, and I couldn’t do it quick. I’d kind of been counting on that blast of wind buying me a window of opportunity to get inside the house, where we’d be in a much stronger position than we were now.

 

Except that I didn’t need that window, as it turned out. As we got close, I realized that the wards were gone. Not broken, not nonfunctional. Gone, like they’d never been there at all. And not just on the window, either. A quick sniff, even the most cursory of inspections, showed that there were no wards on the entire building.

 

Well, that wasn’t good. I mean, it meant that I could get inside more quickly, which might mean the difference between life and death right now. But it was very worrying in the long term.

 

And wasn’t that just my life in a nutshell? Bloody hell, this game was getting old.

 

But right now it was a good thing, sort of. It meant that Tyrfing chopped through the shutter over the window on the first try, rather than the third or fourth. I slashed at it again, planning to cut it out entirely, but I smelled more magic and there was screaming behind me and I could smell cooking meat and there was no more time to spend on this. So I bodily threw myself into the shutter, counting on physical strength and momentum to get me through.

 

Somehow, in the rush and the chaos, I’d forgotten that I didn’t have a shell of metal to protect me from the consequences of my own dumbassery right now.

 

It turns out that breaking down a heavy security shutter with your shoulder hurts. Rather a lot, in fact. I picked up some burns where I brushed against the silver inlay, and that hurt too.

 

Then I landed on the shattered glass of the window on the floor inside. That was worse. The clothing I was wearing was reinforced enough not to get cut, but it didn’t cover my hands, or my face. And even in the places that were covered, it still hurt landing on a bunch of small points. They might not break the skin, but that didn’t mean they were anything like comfortable.

 

I just lay on the floor for a few seconds, pondering what a foolish decision I’d just made. It was worth pondering. Although I supposed that I was still alive, just not very happy. Seen from that perspective, diving headfirst through a secured window onto broken glass actually might have been the best option.

 

And again, wasn’t that just typical?

 

After I indulged myself with a couple of seconds of self-pity, Aiko gave me a hand and I pulled myself to my feet. That drove a couple of the shards of glass further into my flesh, making me glad that I still didn’t have all that much feeling in my left hand. The pain that did get through was more than enough for my liking.

 

“That was a stupid thing to do,” she said, still holding my hand. I was leaving small, bloody marks on her armor. It didn’t stand out that much against the red and gold, but there’s no red quite like fresh blood.

 

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said. “Who’s the fourth guy? We only saw three out there.”

 

“He’s good with illusion,” she replied. “Making you see things that aren’t there, or not see things that are. Took us a bit to catch on to what he was doing.”

 

I tensed. “So he could have snuck in with us. He could be standing right next to us.”

 

“Maybe,” she drawled. “Or maybe he’s not actually as good as he thinks he is.” She reached out almost casually with her other hand, holding her tanto. I hadn’t quite noticed when she drew it.

 

I stood there looking silly for a couple seconds. Then a skinny man with features that made me think of a rodent faded into sight right behind me, with her knife in his abdomen.

 

“How?” he gasped, seeming more upset at having been caught than at having been stabbed. The pain hadn’t really set in yet.

 

“This is my game,” Aiko said, sounding almost insulted. “You didn’t seriously think you were going to beat me at it, did you?” She pulled her knife back out and then flicked it up and across his throat. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Which, from some perspective, I supposed he was.

 

“Jesus Christ,” David said, staring. “You just killed him.”

 

“He was in my house, concealed, after announcing his intent to kill me,” I said. “If the clans want to challenge my claim that this was legitimately in defense of my life and territory, they’re welcome to try.” I looked at the body, confirming that it actually was a body. I was pretty sure it was. It looked very, very dead, and if it was an illusion this guy was one of the best I’d ever seen. “Throw him out the window,” I said. “It might make them hesitate. And someone work on closing that window. You should at least be able to hold that shutter in place, or nail it to the wall or something.”

 

“Jesus,” David said, as my minions hurried to comply. “That’s cold.”

 

“Yeah, well, so am I,” I said, as Snowflake hurried up to me. I scratched her head, smearing blood on her ears. Her jaws were already wet with…not blood, but whatever those constructs had instead. “Working for the Guards, I’d have thought you’d be used to killing by now.”

 

“I’ve killed people,” he said. “But I’ve never taken it that casually. And I usually at least try to solve things without murder.”

 

“We haven’t all had that luxury,” I said. A pair of the canine constructs jumped in through the open window, but they were cut down in seconds, and Kjaran slammed the shutter back into the opening a moment later, holding it in place by main force. Fire magic hit it a few seconds later, but with at least four jötnar actively focused on keeping it cold, she’d have a hell of a time heating it past mildly uncomfortable.

 

“I’d like to think that you could at least make the attempt,” David said.

 

I met his eye. “You’ve read my dossier,” I said. “You have an idea of what I’ve done. The people I’ve brought down. Do you really think I could have managed those things if I hesitated to solve problems in the most efficient way available to me?”

 

He blinked first, and looked away. “Was that guy telling the truth about you killing his grandmother?”

 

“How the hell should I know who his grandmother is?” I asked.

 

“That’s not an answer.”

 

I sighed. “David, let’s get real. I’ve killed a lot of people, okay? A whole lot. Some of them were probably somebody’s grandmother. It isn’t like I ask them first.”

 

“You’re still not answering my question,” he commented. “That worries me. Those people seemed to have something very specific in mind.”

 

“I killed Guide,” I said after a few seconds.

 

He blinked. “Wait. You mean, like, Guide? The one on the Conclave?”

 

“That’s the one,” I said. “I’m surprised they didn’t tell you.”

 

“How?”

 

“I don’t really know,” I said, feeling very tired, and very hungry for something I couldn’t quite name. “This was back in Russia, towards the end. I…kind of called the Wild Hunt. I didn’t mean to, but it happened.”

 

“The Wild fucking Hunt?” he shouted. “How in hell did you call the Wild Hunt and not mean to?”

 

“It’s a long story,” I said defensively. “Loki kind of did it on my behalf. I don’t remember a lot of what happened after that, the things I did. It’s just a blur. We got the necromancer, but apparently somewhere along the way I also killed Guide.”

 

He just stared at me for about thirty seconds. Outside, the sounds of violence had stopped. Apparently, the mages were trying to figure out a new angle of attack.

 

“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” he said at last. “You know, they offered me double pay to come here. This was before you were joining up. That was just to work in the same city you live in. And I’m suddenly feeling like that isn’t remotely enough in the way of hazard pay.”

 

“I’m not that bad,” I protested.

 

He stood and stared at me.

 

“Okay, I might be kind of bad,” I admitted.

 

He continued to stare at me.

 

“All right, fine,” I said. “Double pay isn’t nearly enough for getting dragged into the mess that is my life. Happy now?”

 

Aiko laughed. So did Snowflake. And Selene. And most of my employees, actually.

 

David just looked back at the window. “They aren’t attacking,” he said. “They might be giving up.”

 

“Maybe for the moment,” I said. “What happened to the wards, anyway?”

 

“Don’t know,” Aiko said. “The guy in the suit walked up to the building with a bunch of the dogs to cover him. We took out the dogs from the window, but he touched the wall and the wards just unraveled like that.” She snapped her fingers. The gauntlets made it a somewhat difficult gesture to perform very well, even for her, but it got the point across.

 

“Wolf!” a voice shouted from outside, just barely loud enough to be heard through the shutters. It took me a second to recognize it as belonging to the guy in the suit. “We’re leaving now. You have the advantage here, and we all know it. But we’ll find you again, and we’ll kill you. You will face justice for what you’ve done. I promise you that.”

 

I snorted. There was an empty threat if I’d ever heard one. If justice existed at all, the world would look rather different than it did.

 

“Are they actually leaving?” I asked.

 

Kjaran pulled the shutter away from the wall, just a little, and Selene peeked outside. “Looks like it,” she said. “There’s the portal, and…yep, they’re gone. Took the dead one with them, too.”

 

“Good,” I said. “Start working on taking the house off lockdown. David, thanks for your help. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

 

“Bullshit,” he said, without any particular anger. “You’d have figured something out.”

 

“Yes, but I couldn’t have done it in this specific way without you, so that statement is still technically true. Anyway, your help is appreciated. Thanks.”

 

“You’re welcome,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow for training. Probably best I get going, though, now they’re gone.”

 

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We don’t want too much of an obvious connection between you and me. You want to wait for the door to be open?”

 

“The window’s fine with me,” he said. Kjaran pulled the shutter away as he got close, and he jumped out the window. Just as he hit the apex of his leap a roaring wind caught him under those wingsuit-style flaps of cloth, carrying him up and out of sight. I’d been right. He could literally fly.

 

I felt that spike of jealousy at the sight again, then turned to Selene. “I’m worried about how easily they took out the wards,” I said. “If he can do that, we’re going to have a hard time keeping this place secure. I’m thinking we need expert assistance with this one.”

 

“Meaning?”

 

“Meaning I want you to call Alexander,” I said.

---

 

It took more money to get Alexander to come out to the mansion than a lot of people made in a year. Even at that, I was guessing he only came because he liked me. Cash really didn’t mean a lot to someone like him.

 

When he did arrive, he and Legion spent around half an hour talking shop. I tried to participate in that conversation, thinking I could contribute something or at the very least learn something, but demon and wizard both brushed me off.

 

Not that I was missing a lot. They were talking about things a lot more abstract and theoretical than I was accustomed to working with. They lapsed into Greek and Latin sometimes, and even when they were speaking English I didn’t know a lot of the words they were using. The parts I did understand sounded like they were borrowing from a fairly impressive range of fields, everything from magical theory and philosophy all the way to computer science and information theory.

 

Finally, Alexander walked over to me. He was wearing a ratty old bathrobe, rather than the formal robes he wore in his role as the Maker of the Conclave, but there was still no missing the authority he carried. There was a sort of precise, calm confidence to his movements that spoke of power more clearly than any ostentation could. He held himself like a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, but who could carry that weight.

 

I wondered idly whether he’d hid himself better when I was his apprentice, or I just hadn’t known to look.

 

“Looks like your guy is a specialist with abstract energies,” he told me. “His magic works on energy before takes it a physical form.”

 

“So…what? He can pull wards apart before they do anything?”

 

“Among other things,” Alexander said. “Odds are good that he’ll be able to unravel anything you build. You probably won’t be able to touch him with magic, either. You aren’t good enough to get anything through the kind of defenses this style of magic can put up.” His voice betrayed nothing but a detached interest, as usual.

 

“But he can’t actually do anything physical,” I said.

 

He shrugged. “It isn’t in line with what he did here, anyway. I wouldn’t count on him having no skills in other fields at all. But that isn’t really what you have to worry about from someone who can work with energies on that level.”

 

“What is?” I asked.

 

“What he breaks, he can also build. You tell me what you have to worry about from someone with that degree of control over the basic building blocks of magic.”

 

I thought about it, then groaned. “He can make people stronger, can’t he,” I said. “Other mages, I mean.”

 

Alexander smiled thinly. “Yes. Not literally, he’s feeding them energy to use rather than actually changing their capabilities, but the end result is much the same. That’s a basic enough application of this sort of thing that I would be very surprised if he can’t do it.”

 

“How much stronger are we talking here?”

 

He shrugged. “It depends on many things. The exact nature of his approach to magic, how much he and his partner have practiced together, how neatly their respective powers fit together, efficiency of transfer…it isn’t something that I can quantify or predict. But if he’s any good at it at all, it’s a substantial difference.”

 

“Wonderful,” I said sourly. “Okay, priorities. Wards. Can you set them up in a way that he can’t just take them down?”

 

“I can tie them to a physical structure,” he said. “That will make it considerably more difficult for his approach to affect them, and if he does unravel them it will be much, much easier to put them back in place. But it will take time, it will take materials, and it will be expensive.”

 

“Talk to Tindr,” I said. “The money can be arranged. In the meantime, I have to go pull some glass out of my skin.”

 

He smiled. “Good luck with that.” Then he turned back to Legion, going back to the conversation they’d been carrying on earlier. I felt a little like a child being told to go and play while the adults talked about business.

 

Which I was fine with, honestly. Abstract theory and mathematical modeling had always been my least favorite parts of magic. If I could spend a fortune to get Maker to do that work for me, it was a fortune well spent.

---

 

Astonishingly, the next few days passed without much incident. I did the training with the Guards, and while the others were clearly not comfortable around me, we were learning to work as a unit. We were getting more efficient. That was all we could really expect, I was guessing.

 

I got jumped by constructs a handful of times, but I didn’t see the actual mages again. The constructs were no threat to me, of course. I broke them without even really paying attention to them. I knew I’d have to deal with their maker eventually, along with his associates—I didn’t for a moment believe that they’d given up. But for the moment, it wasn’t too much of a problem.

 

Alexander got to work on the wards, although other people were doing most of the work. He drew up the plans, and the housecarls did the grunt work of installing the physical structures that would act as the skeleton for the wards. He put in around an hour a day, which was still more expensive than the material cost—and that wasn’t cheap. But I could afford to throw a few million at this project. If it worked, it would be worth it and then some.

 

And then, finally, the day I was supposed to meet with the Pack rolled around. We took a portal to Chicago, then bought a car to drive to the suburb where the meeting was being held. I wasn’t doing public transportation. I hadn’t ever liked public transit at the best of times, and from what I’d heard, Chicago after dark was pretty far from the best of times.

 

Aiko drove about three times faster than was safe for anyone involved, and skidded to a stop out front of the warehouse. She grinned at me and shut off the stereo.

 

“You know,” I commented, “it isn’t that I have anything against songs about insane asylums being converted into brothels, exactly. But did they actually have a little girl doing the vocals for it? Because that would be fairly messed up.”

 

“Nah,” she said. “That was just the nightcore remix. So are we going in?”

 

“You’re sure you want to come?” I asked dubiously.

 

“Hey, I’m allowed,” she said. “Kitsune are technically allied with the Pack. And I have two tails now, so I’m not a total chump. They don’t want to let me in, they can suck both of them.”

 

“As much as that mental image is now dominating my thoughts,” I said, “that wasn’t actually what I meant. Do you want to come? Because odds are good this is going to be ridiculously boring and aggravating.”

 

“See, here’s the thing,” she said. “Mostly I only get to see your unique ability to turn any situation into a total clusterfuck while we’re actually fighting. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action in a diplomatic setting, and I’m not actually allowed into diplomatic settings all that often.”

 

“If you say so,” I said dubiously. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. Let’s do this, then.”

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Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The black SUV pulled up in front of the building almost exactly as we walked outside. I wanted to think that it was great timing, but considering it was Kjaran driving, it was more likely that he’d been waiting outside for several minutes and just timed the final approach to suit. For a guy who didn’t talk, he had a surprising appreciation of the dramatic.

 

Kjaran was driving, and Kyi was in the passenger seat. There were more of my minions in the second row of seats—Nottolfr for sure, along with Jack and a ghoul I didn’t recognize. That left David and I to take the very back row.

 

“You have a driver?” David asked, buckling himself in.

 

“Not specifically, no,” I said. “People swap out for the job. But Kjaran does it most often, because he’s the best at it.”

 

There was a thump and some muffled shouting from the cargo area behind us. I didn’t react.

 

David did. He pushed himself up in his seat and looked back there. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted a moment later, fumbling with the seat belt.

 

I glanced back. As expected, the three gunmen from earlier were back there, hogtied and gagged with heavy black duct tape. “How was I supposed to know they were in on the game?” I said irritably. “You should be glad I told my people to be fairly passive or they’d probably have been in an incinerator by now.”

 

One of the guys twitched at that, as best as he could. It wasn’t much. They’d been very effectively restrained.

 

“It was just a training exercise, for God’s sake,” David said. “There was no need to bring ‘your people’ in at all.”

 

“Well, then, maybe you shouldn’t have played it up like it was a real problem,” I told him. “You wanted me to take it seriously? Well, you got your wish.”

 

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You need to learn to trust us.”

 

I snorted. “Trust you? Maybe. The rest of them? Let’s get real. Have you seen those people? I wouldn’t trust them to prepare a sandwich without screwing things up. They’re still in the equivalent of boot camp. I don’t think it’s unfair of me to hesitate a little before trusting them to keep me alive.”

 

“And how are they going to learn if you don’t give them a chance?”

 

I shrugged. “I’m giving them a chance. I told my people to hang back and stay out of sight. They were there strictly as a safety net, and the newbies don’t ever have to know the net was there, any more than they have to know the whole thing was a drill. I’m trying here, David, but you’ve got to meet me halfway if this is going to work.”

 

He stared at me for a few seconds, then sighed. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said. “For now, you said you had a crisis?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Kyi? Details, please. Oh, and I guess we might as well take the tape off.”

 

“I’ve only heard this secondhand, since we’ve been here waiting,” she said. “But the report is that four mages showed up around fifteen minutes ago asking for you. Selene kept them outside and put them off for a while, but once they realized that you weren’t there, they got aggressive. No casualties as of three minutes ago, but there’s some structural damage and things are getting tense.”

 

“Why can’t they deal with it on their own?” I asked, trying to think about who was there. I couldn’t remember all of them, but from what I could remember, there was a reasonably substantial force at the mansion. Selene was there, obviously, since she’d been the one to contact me, and she had several housecarls with her, a few ghouls, at least a couple of low-power mages, and probably a couple of human mercenaries. The last I heard Aiko and Snowflake were planning to hang around there, too. Not an army, but it should have been enough to scare off four people.

 

“I don’t know,” Kyi said. “Selene wasn’t all that clear. Things were a little rushed on her end.”

 

I grunted. “Yeah,” I said. “Well, I guess we’ll see soon.”

---

 

It was easy to see what Selene had meant by “structural damage.” The jötnar and ghouls were about as good in the dark as I was, but some of the people working for me were human, and in any case I’d felt that it was better to not take any chances we didn’t have to. So there were floodlights tucked away unobtrusively on the mansion’s exterior in case of an attack in the night, and currently they were turned on, lighting up the snow like it was broad daylight.

 

Thus, it was easy to see that some of the trees around the building had been reduced to charred stumps. There were some burn marks on the walls of the mansion as well, although it didn’t seem like the fire had been able to find any real purchase there. No surprise; we’d prepared for fire pretty extensively.

 

A couple of the windows were shattered as well, which had apparently prompted the residents to close the shutters. Heavy sheets of steel worked with geometric patterns in silver, they were tougher than the walls around them.

 

The front door was broken as well, cracked in half and lying on the ground fifteen feet from the door. But again, that hadn’t gotten the attackers much of anywhere. The gap in the wall was blocked by the security door, a slab of steel a foot thick with a silver core. I didn’t think they were going to have much luck getting through that door. I’d based the design on the vault doors they used on werewolf safe rooms, and built up from there.

 

It was impressive that they’d even managed to get that far, though. The windows and doors were still behind the wards, and we’d beefed those wards up heavily since Loki’s little announcement.

 

The attackers were also pretty easy to see. Selene had reported four of them, but there were only three in sight when we pulled up outside the building, two men and a woman. One of the guys was surrounded by vaguely canine shapes woven out of darkness, little more than vague shapes and gleaming teeth. Constructs, I was guessing, but not the sort I was used to dealing with. These were more temporary, the pattern of their construction not tied together as tightly. They were meant to be used, not to be kept or sold.

 

The woman, on the other hand, was surrounded by a nimbus of flame. It was a dull crimson in color, clinging tightly to her skin and flickering across her fingers. I noticed that it wasn’t actually touching her clothing, which looked to be a loose silk shirt and pants. She had impressively fine control over the fire, then. Odds were good the flames around her were as much a demonstration of that as anything.

 

The other guy had no obvious demonstration of his magic. He looked like just a normal guy, a fairly short fellow wearing a cheap suit and glasses with plastic frames. He actually had a pocket protector. I hadn’t realized they even made those anymore.

 

Of the three, I was by far most concerned about the third. The first two, I had some idea what they could do, what I had to worry about from them. Fire was a bitch to defend against, but I had a decent idea of how to go about it. I’d had lots of practice at it. It was probably the most common talent out there, after all. Constructs were a bit trickier, since they were potentially a lot more versatile. I’d never actually fought someone who specialized in making them that I could remember, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the real thing. But the constructs I’d fought in the past had been pretty wimpy, and while I was guessing these things were going to be tougher, I didn’t really expect them to be a serious threat.

 

The other guy, though? I didn’t know what to expect from him. Not at all. He didn’t look like much, but neither did most of the really terrifying people I’d dealt with. There were exceptions, but generally speaking, the people who you really had to worry about didn’t look like anything much.

 

“This one’s your show,” David said, handing the binoculars back to me. “How do you want to handle it?”

 

I grimaced. “Do you recognize any of them?”

 

“The guy with the dogs, I think,” he said. “His name’s…Bob, Bill, something like that. I’ve seen him around a few times. Seemed all right, as far as I could tell. I don’t know the other two.”

 

“Damn. If you know him, that probably means they’re legitimate.” I frowned, staring up the hill at them. “I can’t kill them out of hand, not if they’re really with a clan,” I said. “Not without getting myself into even more trouble. And I can’t afford to leave them be. That’d be hell on my rep, plus they’d probably do some serious damage to the house. So I guess that leaves talking.”

 

I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard a disappointed sigh from one of the minions.

 

“You’re with me, please, David,” I continued. “Having you around will make look a lot better, and hopefully they’ll hesitate to just set you on fire. Kyi, Nóttolfr, I want you somewhere they won’t see you and you can do some damage if necessary. On my signal, go after whoever I target first. After that, use your own best judgment. The rest of you, with me, hang back ten feet. Same instructions, bring down my first target fast and then use your own judgment. Jack, you’re playing defense; keep them off us if you can. Everyone clear?”

 

David said, “Clear.” The others just nodded.

 

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

 

I felt almost naked as I started up the hill. I hadn’t thought to have Kyi bring my armor; I was so used to wearing the stuff that the notion of having someone else bring it for me was foreign.

 

Not that it would necessarily have done much good. My armor was good for a lot of things, but stopping heat transfer wasn’t really one of them, and in the past it had never really done me much good against fire. If those constructs were powerful enough to matter, and from the guy’s attitude I thought they were, odds were very good that they had a way to deal with it as well.

 

But still. It would have been nice to have it along. As a security blanket, if nothing else.

 

I didn’t have it, though, and there wasn’t much point in standing around wishing I did. So I tugged my shirt into place, made sure the knife on my belt was very obviously visible, and hiked up to where they were standing just outside my door.

 

“Hi,” I said, once I got close enough that they could see me. “Can I help you guys?”

 

Apparently I’d been quieter than I thought as I got close, because all three of them startled and turned in my direction. One of the constructs tensed as though it was about to charge me, but the guy standing with them put his hand on its back and it relaxed again.

 

“I don’t think so,” the man in the suit said. “Move along, please. This is none of your business.”

 

“See, it actually kind of is my business,” I said dryly. “On account of you’re standing outside my house.”

 

He turned his attention fully to me. “Are you Winter Wolf?” he asked.

 

“That’s me,” I said cheerfully. “And you are?”

 

“So you really weren’t here,” he said, ignoring my question completely. “It seems I owe your employee an apology. I had assumed she was lying in hopes that we would go away.”

 

“Nope, she was telling the truth.” I paused. “I mean, probably. I don’t know exactly what she told you, but I’m guessing she probably wasn’t lying. Anyway, I’m here now, so you can go ahead and leave.”

 

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “We’d like to have a chat with you about certain incidents.”

 

“More specifically, we’d like to pull out your guts and strangle you with them,” the guy with the dogs added helpfully.

 

“Ah,” I said. “Any chance I could talk you out of that?”

 

“I don’t think so,” he said, stroking the back of one of the constructs. It didn’t react. “I really, really don’t.”

 

The woman hadn’t said anything. But I noted that she was flexing her fingers rhythmically, and the flames around her were moving in time with that rhythm, flaring up and then dying back down to a slow, intermittent smolder.

 

“Hold up,” David said, stepping between us. “This man is doing good work. He’s making things better. Don’t you think you should at least hear him out?”

 

“You’re with the Guards, aren’t you?” the man in the suit asked him.

 

“Yeah.”

 

He nodded. “I thought so. I saw you back in Russia. You did a lot of good in the early stages of that mess.”

 

“Thanks,” David said cautiously. “I got taken out pretty early on. One of his creatures had a rifle, and I didn’t see it in time.”

 

“Happens to the best of us,” the man in the suit said sympathetically. “That’s a little disappointing, though. I thought you were a decent guy. I’m sorry to see you working with this man. Do you know what he did?”

 

“He hasn’t been convicted of anything that I know of,” David said. “And the only thing he’s even been accused of was killing someone who earned it ten times over.”

 

“He killed my grandmother,” the guy with the dogs snarled.

 

“And my mentors,” the one in the suit added. “Both of them, which is fairly impressive, when you think about it.”

 

I raised my hand. “Um,” I said. “Do you mean, like, a metaphorical grandmother?”

 

“No,” he said coldly. “My actual, literal grandmother.”

 

“Oh. Well, shit. Sorry?”

 

“Even if that is true,” David said, cutting off the inevitable and disastrous reply, “it’s beside the point. He hasn’t been convicted of anything, and he joined the Guards specifically to improve things. I think it’s the least you could do to let him have a fair trial.”

 

“We won’t get justice in a court,” the man in the suit said. “The system is corrupt, and he has too many friends in high places. The only way he’ll get what he deserves is if we do it ourselves.” He looked at David seriously. “Walk away, Guard. We don’t have anything against you.”

 

“And if I don’t?”

 

“Then you’ve obviously been deluded by a dangerous criminal. And I won’t be responsible for what happens to you as a result.”

 

David nodded slowly. “So you want me to stand by while you illegally lynch a man who hasn’t been found guilty of anything, and who I’ve accepted as a comrade in arms, with all that implies. And you’re threatening to kill me as well if I don’t allow you to do this.”

 

“Pretty much,” the man in the suit said. “You seem to have an admirable grasp of the situation.”

 

“Well, I think there’s only one way to respond to that,” he said. Then he threw his arms forward, accompanied with a sudden, massive surge of power.

 

I’d seen air magic in use before. I considered it one of my stronger suits. I could do some fun tricks with it, and occasionally it even came in handy. I wasn’t spectacularly good at it, but I was decent.

 

That being said, nothing I’d ever done had come anywhere close to this. The sudden tide of air was more like a hurricane than a heavy breeze. It physically knocked people over, sent them sprawling and rolling across the ground. One of the constructs was actually lifted off the ground and thrown through the air, where it hit a tree and shattered into drifting shadows before dissipating entirely.

 

David staggered to the side a little, the effort of moving so much air so quickly obviously exhausting even for him. Then he started running for the door, a little bit unsteady on his feet, with the rest of us close behind him.

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“Oh God,” Frankie said, staring out the window. “Ohgodohgodohgod, it’s getting closer. It’s coming this way.”

 

Mom grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back down. “Quiet,” she hissed. “It’ll hear you. We need to be quiet now, okay, Frankie? Can you do that?”

 

He sniffled and nodded, clutching at her. He was eleven, just at the stage where he was starting to pull away from her, but this had made him regress a few years to the point where he wanted nothing more than the comfort of his mother.

 

I didn’t blame him. I might have been right next to him, but I was too tangled up inside, fear and dread tying me in knots inside. And besides, they were counting on me. She hid it, but I knew the last few weeks had worn mom ragged. If I let myself go now, if I dropped the mask, I thought she might crack, and then where would we be?

 

Hiding won’t help, I thought, with a quiet, numb sort of despair. It knows where we are.

 

But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. There wasn’t anything we could do anyway. Couldn’t run, couldn’t hide. Fighting was a joke, and not even a funny one. At least if I didn’t tell them, they could spend a few minutes more thinking that we had a chance.

 

Besides, if I told them I’d have to tell them how I knew, and that would lead to all kinds of other things I hadn’t told them. That conversation would get ugly; you could see it a mile away. I’d rather not have that be the last thing I said to my mom.

 

We sat there in the shelter and waited for the world to end, and I tried not to cry, and I failed.

---

 

“They say things aren’t this bad everywhere,” Nicole said, rubbing her hands together to try and warm them.

 

“Yeah,” I said, glaring at the back of the next person in line. Not that he’d done anything wrong; he was just there. “I figure it’s like hurricanes. Some places get hit by a hurricane and they come together, you know? People help each other through it. And then you’ve got places where people turn on each other, and there’s all this rioting and looting.”

 

“And we’re one of the bad places,” she said. “One of the places people are breaking apart, instead of coming together.”

 

I glanced at her face, then glanced away. She’d taken the piercings out, leaving just holes behind in her nose, her eyebrows, her lip. It made her look tired, wrung out, and much older than seventeen.

 

“Yeah,” I said. Nothing else. We both knew the way things were. We’d been run out of our house by a gang of thugs, and her house had been burned to the ground.

 

I stamped my feet in place, feeling the snow crunch under my shoes. My feet were freezing. We’d been standing in the snow for almost an hour now, and I didn’t have good boots. I hadn’t had time to grab mine when we were running, and the only pair I’d been able to scrounge up since was worn out, and two sizes too big. I’d stuffed them with newspaper, trying to make them fit a little better and give them a bit more insulation, but they still let the cold right through, and rubbed my feet raw.

 

After another half an hour or so, we finally made it to the front of the line. The guy in the National Guard uniform handed us both a box with an apologetic sort of shrug. When my numb, freezing fingers fumbled and dropped mine, he helped me scoop the food and medical supplies back into the box and gave me a chemical hand warmer before I left. I almost broke down crying in the middle of the street right there, because it was the first time a stranger had done something nice for me in weeks.

 

Nicole and I trudged back to the shelter we were staying at. We didn’t talk. There was nothing to say.

---

 

We all heard the crash as the thing smashed a pair of cars together. It sounded almost exactly like a car crash, screaming metal and breaking glass. It was shockingly loud, though. The monster was only a block or two away now. It was getting closer fast.

 

Most of the people in the shelter jumped at the noise. A baby started to cry, and it took a few seconds for an adult to hush it. Frankie squeezed mom even tighter, burying his face in her shoulder. She seemed to be taking almost as much comfort in the contact as he was.

 

I just sat where I was. I didn’t react to the noise. In a way, I felt like I was past being surprised. The last three weeks, and especially the last five hours, had left me numb.

---

 

I didn’t know the guy’s name, but I’d seen him around the shelter a few times. He was a scary-looking kid, around my age but a hell of a lot older in the head. He looked like he’d been living on the street since long before the world went crazy. I’d noticed that even the people who worked at the shelter gave him a wide berth. They didn’t want to turn him away—they didn’t want to turn anyone away, not now when it might well be a death sentence—but they obviously weren’t happy having him there.

 

And now he’d cornered us with three of his buddies a few blocks from the shelter, and he had a knife, and nothing I’d ever done in my life had prepared me for this. Not even a little bit.

 

“P-please,” I said, stuttering a little. I wasn’t sure whether my teeth were chattering because of the cold or the fear. It hardly mattered. “Please, my brother, he’s sick and he hasn’t been eating enough.”

 

“Do I look like I care?” he asked with a casual, mocking grin. “Come on, hand it over.” He waved his switchblade in front of me. The blade caught the light, gleaming in an almost hypnotic way. Logically I knew that waving it around right like that was probably stupid, that it was just a scare tactic, but damn if it wasn’t working on me.

 

I wanted to do something, but what could I do? There were four of them, with knives, and I’d never been in a fight in my life. Not a real one. Nicole hadn’t either, I was pretty sure. She’d looked pretty intense with all the piercings and tattoos, but she was from an upper-middle-class family, the same as me. She wanted to look tough, but these guys were the real thing.

 

We couldn’t fight. There were no police to call, not really. The response time in this part of town was somewhere around fifteen minutes, even if I could get to a phone. There were people close enough to hear me if I screamed, but they weren’t looking. More than that, they were not looking in a way that made it clear that they didn’t want to see. They knew what was going on, but it was inconvenient to pay attention to it.

 

I almost thought about using my magic—Christ, even in my head that sounded ridiculous. A month ago I’d dismissed the things I felt as a trick of perception or a sign of pending insanity. I’d actually managed to do something with it once, back when I was a kid, but over the years I’d convinced myself that was just my imagination. Now, though, crazy things were so normal that I had to actually think about it. I’d played with it a couple times since then, just to see whether it was for real, and if it was just my imagination I was a few steps beyond pending insanity.

 

But that didn’t work, either. It was too slow, and if what I got was anything like what had shown up in the past, it wouldn’t do much good anyway. It might keep one of them busy for a while, but that still left three more than we could handle.

 

So as much as I hated to do it, I bit my lip and handed the box over to one of the thugs. The food and medicine Frankie needed, the blankets and the camp stove to keep us warm, I just gave them away. Nicole waited a few seconds longer, but eventually she gave her box of relief supplies up as well.

 

“That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” the ringleader said, smirking. He folded his knife closed again and slid it into his pocket.

 

I shook my head, looking at my feet, and started to walk away.

 

He put out his hand, blocking my path. I could probably have pushed past him, but I didn’t.

 

“You don’t get off that easy,” he said quietly.

---

 

The seconds ticked slowly past. I found myself thinking again that I could try to do something with magic, but it wasn’t a good idea. I knew that.

 

And besides, I couldn’t feel as much as usual. The doors weren’t there for me to open, not half as many things waiting to happen as usual. I wasn’t sure how much of it was because I was feeling so numb, so overstimulated that I was barely even conscious, and how much of it was because of what I wanted them to do.

 

Not even the monsters wanted to fuck with this. I couldn’t blame them, really. After seeing what this thing was capable of, I understood why they wouldn’t want to go near it.

 

In hindsight, it would probably have been a good idea to think about that sooner. In a way, I’d brought this on myself. I could almost convince myself that I deserved this for having been so thoughtless. I’d known that I was screwing around with things I didn’t understand, I’d had all the evidence I needed to know that it might go very badly for me, and I’d done it anyway. Was it a surprise that it had all gone to shit? Not so much.

 

And then I caught my breath as I realized there was something else I could do. It might not work—from what I knew, from the tiny little scraps I’d heard from someone who heard them from someone who had some idea what was going on, I didn’t think it was likely to do much at all. But it might work, which was more than I had otherwise.

 

And besides, it wasn’t like I could make things that much worse. I’d already screwed up about as badly as a person could.

 

I stood and started for the door.

 

Almost instantly, mom was standing next to me. “Tawny?” she said. “Honey, what are you doing?”

 

“I’m going outside.” I felt like I should be choked up, but I wasn’t. My voice sounded almost disinterested. Numb.

 

“But that…thing is out there,” she said.

 

“I know,” I said. “It’s after me, not you guys. It might not keep coming for you if it gets me.”

 

She didn’t ask how I knew. Anymore, things were so crazy that practically anything was believable. The other day some guy had walked into a bank throwing fireballs from his hands, and set a clerk on fire just by looking at him when he didn’t hand over the money fast enough. If I were to walk up to a guy on the street and he told me he was Jesus Christ, I’d think twice before telling him otherwise. It was that crazy.

 

So I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t ask questions, or try to argue. She just said, “I love you, Tawny.”

 

“I love you too,” I said. I didn’t sound loving. I sounded numb. I hugged her mechanically, and then walked outside.

---

 

On cue, one of the other thugs grabbed Nicole, on cue. She struggled a little, but he was a lot better at holding people than she was at getting out. Then one of the other thugs punched her in the solar plexus, and she stopped fighting, sagging in his grip. She coughed, but the fight had gone out of her, as quickly as that.

 

“All right,” the ringleader said. “Drag the bitch over there. She can pay us back for making us work for those boxes.” He started walking in their direction.

 

I tried to run, while they were distracted, but the last thug was standing right next to me, and he caught me before I could go anywhere. They’d set the boxes of supplies down at some point. They would get ruined, if they were left to sit in the snow for long, but they didn’t seem to care.

 

I knew what was going on. The way they were moving, the expressions on their faces, made it pretty obvious what they were planning. I knew I was sheltered, but I wasn’t a total idiot. They were going to rape Nicole, and then they were going to rape me, and if we were very lucky they would leave it at that rather than killing us.

 

I wasn’t feeling lucky.

 

I looked around frantically, hoping I could do something, anything, but nothing had changed. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. The people who’d been looking away were gone entirely now.

 

In an odd way, that was what got under my skin. I could deal with the monsters. Werewolves and vampires and people throwing fireballs from their hands? I could accept that. It was huge and terrifying and confusing, but I could accept it. When a werewolf ate the neighbor right in front of me, it was terrifying and it gave me nightmares, but I could accept it. Monsters doing monstrous things made sense, at least as much as anything made sense right now.

 

But these guys were just…people. They were just normal people, just human fucking beings like the rest of us, and they were doing this. The idea that people could do this was more than terrifying, it was disgusting. I hated that there were scum who’d just been waiting for the chance to do these things, and I hated that people just turned a blind eye to it rather than take a risk themselves, and I hated myself most of all. I hated that I’d tried to run, that if that thug hadn’t grabbed me I’d have abandoned Nicole to her fate and never looked back.

 

And in that moment all that hate, the resentment, the disgust, the terror, it all seemed to coil together in my chest, a big ball of the worst emotions imaginable filling me up until it was hard to breathe.

 

I saw—except it wasn’t seeing, not really—another door, bigger than any of the others. And the fear and the anger and the hate were so intense that I broke the rules I’d set for myself, when I’d said that I would be careful and cautious and not do anything stupid.

 

I’d reached out to that door, and I’d given it a push.

 

Something came through. There was a moment of total silence, as everyone present tried to process what had just happened.

 

Then the screaming started.

---

 

It was snowing again, small dry flakes falling from the cold, slate-grey sky overhead. The snow crunched dully under my feet. I was cold, but I wasn’t feeling it. It was that odd state you get sometimes when the cold’s set its teeth in you so deeply, and for so long, that it isn’t really a feeling anymore, it’s more of a state of being.

 

My tracks from earlier had been erased, wiped away by fresh snow and wind. No one was moving, and the street was essentially just a blank expanse of white. It felt oddly clean, like a new beginning, which was ironic considering that this was my ending.

 

The thing I’d called through that door was standing in the road, ambling towards me. It wasn’t moving quickly. It had taken hours for it to get from where it had shown up to the vicinity of the shelter. It was in no hurry, obviously.

 

It looked almost beautiful, in an odd way. It was seven feet tall, but probably didn’t way much more than I did. It had ashen grey skin and jet black horns like a goat’s, protruding from its forehead above its huge golden eyes.

 

“Hello there,” it said, loudly enough for me to hear it clearly despite being several hundred feet away. “Did you finally come out to play?”

 

I swallowed hard and walked forward. “I called you here,” I said.

 

It smiled, showing very human-looking teeth and shockingly red gums. “I know,” it said. “And you obviously forgot the first rule of summoning. Do not call up what you cannot put down, little girl.”

 

I thought about fighting it, but again, it was a ridiculous concept. I’d seen at least a little of what it could do, and I couldn’t even come close to it. I’d have had a better shot at fighting the thugs with knives. I could maybe have talked to it, but I didn’t think that was going to get me anywhere. I didn’t know what this thing was, but I knew what state of mind had let me find the door that it came through, and somehow I knew that it was connected. I’d been feeling angry and destructive. In that moment I’d wanted to destroy everything in that moment, myself included, and it was that wanting that had let me form a connection to this creature.

 

It wasn’t going to be swayed by talk. It wasn’t a reasonable creature. When I’d opened that door, I’d been about as far from reasonable as it was possible to get.

 

Instead of talking, I tried to reach for it with my power, with my magic.

 

I could feel it, but it was dim, cloudy. It was like there was a curtain between us, masking the light it cast.

 

It was getting closer, though, and I knew that I only had one chance at this. I tried to put myself back in the state of mind I’d been in when I first called it, but it wasn’t working. The connection was getting a little clearer, but it was too slow.

 

In the end, it was disgust at my own incompetence that pushed me over the edge into that violent, destructive mindset. The second I did, that door snapped back into focus. I reached out and pushed the creature, trying to shove it back through.

 

It fought back. I wasn’t sure how; I didn’t have the words to describe anything that I was feeling now. But I could feel it fighting.

 

It had stopped moving. The two of us stood in the street, staring each other down. I was shaking with fatigue, but I didn’t, couldn’t let myself fall. Somehow I knew that falling now was as good as losing, and losing was as good as dying.

 

Finally, it lost its traction on the world. It wanted to stay, but there was something that wanted to pull it back as much as I wanted to push it out, and in the end it couldn’t hold on against both of those forces. It faded out of existence, sliding sideways from the world.

 

As it vanished, I collapsed on my face in the snow, like the struggle against it was the only thing holding me up. I laid there for a minute or so, getting colder and wondering why I was supposed to care. I knew I should get up, but I was so tired, and it would be so easy to fall asleep here.

 

Then I heard slow, measured clapping. I pushed my head up, more to see who was clapping than anything, and saw someone offering me a hand. I took it, and he pulled me easily to my feet. It was a man in a neat black suit, with a copper pin on his lapel.

 

“Well done,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of potential, Miss Hutchinson. Creatures like that are a fair bit beyond what you can safely handle, still, but that you managed to contact it at all is a promising start. Not many people find something that powerful the first time they call something out of Limbo.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. My voice was shaking, both from chattering teeth and sheer fatigue. I couldn’t remember having ever felt so tired before.

 

He smiled. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you do. That’s why I’m here, in fact. I work for a group that would like to offer you a job.”

 

I considered him, and I wasn’t sure whether it was having immersed myself in that attitude so thoroughly or just the reaction to weeks of tension and fear, but I wasn’t fooled for a moment. “This is one of those ‘offer you can’t refuse’ sort of offers, isn’t it?”

 

“I’m not threatening you,” he said. “But I doubt you’ll find anyone else to teach you how to use your power, and with what you just did, I don’t think you’ll last long without some instruction. You’ll summon something that you really can’t put back down, or someone who isn’t as nice as I am will come to recruit you by force. A knack for pulling things across worlds is a rare thing. There are plenty of people who would be interested in using you, whether you like it or not. I’m probably the best offer you’re going to get.”

 

I sighed. “Fine,” I said, still feeling exhausted and numb. “Let me talk to my mom. But fine. I’ll do it.”

 

He smiled and handed me a business card. “Talk to your family, and then call that number,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure doing business, Miss Hutchinson.”

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