Chapter Forty-Four
An ancient fire engine screamed through the breech, almost completely covered with graffiti that I couldn’t see in detail because of the cage of welded-on armor it wore, made of rusted rebar and wire mesh, but that seemed to feature a lot of fangs.
A machine gun nest made out of the cab of a bulldozer was perched on the back of the strange contraption, already strafing the crowd.
And the truck’s foam cannon was blasting a column of something off the side that was corrosive enough to send Weres screaming and mages shielding.
Hard on its heels was an old school bus with similar graffiti, which I could now see looked like wolves ringed in flames with exaggerated fang-filled mouths.
Hinged grates, like the kind found on storm sewers, covered the windows, and manhole covers protected the wheels, turning the vehicle into a mobile armored pillbox.
One bristling with rifle barrels sticking out of the grates and already picking off combatants.
And muscling in behind them was an old diesel garbage truck.
I couldn’t tell if its body had graffiti, too, because every square inch was covered in smashed salvage—rusted hoods, dented trunk lids, and different colored panels from a few dozen vehicles that had been hammered into place like a second skin.
It also had a mass of air horns mounted on top, all of which were sounding at once, or so I guessed from other people’s reactions.
I couldn’t hear a damned thing, the reverberation of that massive blast rendering me all but deaf, but at least half of the crowd could.
Weres have super-sensitive hearing in their Changed form, and the blasts of sound must have been disorienting, as plenty were bending over and clutching their heads.
Of course, that might also have been an attempt to avoid the spray from the mounted light machine guns that had just popped out of either side of a makeshift turret.
Yeah, that was probably it.
And then I saw—
“What the hell?” The mage yelled so loudly that I almost heard him. But I didn’t answer. My eyes were glued to the sight of Fireborn—all of it.
Because hard on the heels of the big vehicles were hundreds of people on motorbikes, in dune buggies, and on the backs of pickup trucks, and I recognized many of them.
It looked like everyone we’d rescued from Tartarus, including the toothless elders, who had shown up sans fangs but with M4s. And they’d brought friends.
Specifically, they’d brought a good portion of the clans from Wolf’s Head, and they hadn’t come to play. But neither had the mages, and this was their turf. And while I didn’t know what was coming, I knew something was.
And then all the hair on my body started reaching for the sky, right before I figured out what the overhead ward did.
Deadly purple lightning started flashing down everywhere, causing mages to shield and Weres to duck and cover as best they could while the blasts sent sand and debris flying.
It suddenly looked like a hurricane in here, and I scrambled for the edge of the platform, about to Change and jump down to shield some nearby clan members, when the lights went out.
It would have surprised me more except for that, I thought, feeling arms grab me from behind and then start dragging me back, while my nose picked up absolutely nothing. Just a void where a person’s scent should have been. And yeah, it may as well have been a certain asshole’s calling card.
The next second, the mage was on the floor, and while I couldn’t see the bastard, I didn’t need sight to kill him, not with his shield enveloping us, to cut us off from the battle and any chance of rescue.
But that plan had a minor flaw, didn’t it?
I thought, and then he was shrieking, no doubt feeling the change in the body bearing down on him, which would have squashed him flat if not for the fact that I was bracing over top of him.
Which, I guessed, he realized, because he started talking, and thanks to my transformation, I could actually hear him. And to my surprise, the fucker was finally saying something interesting. Not that my counterpart cared.
Wait, I told her. Give me a minute.
Hurry, was the only response. She wanted to join the battle, but this one was the leader, so she needed to kill him first. Sounded like a plan.
“—potion!” the mage was screaming. “The wards will slaughter your people, but I can stop them! I can release Cyrus! I can give you everything you want without a fight—”
“But I like to fight,” my voice informed him, and I wasn’t sure which of us had said it.
“You won’t like fighting that thing!” he said wildly. And suddenly the darkness broke, enough that I could see him lying on the platform with an absolutely terrified face, but again, it wasn’t because of me.
A massive prehistoric horror was crouched over him, claws out and fangs dripping onto his face, but what did he do? Grabbed my arms and shook me as hard as his limited human strength could manage, which wasn’t very. But still.
Had the man gone mad?
“It wasn’t my fault!” he shrieked. “Wasn’t my monster! I didn’t call it—he did! Fucking Brandon—”
Kill him and be done, my counterpart growled, but I shushed her.
“Who is Brandon?” I asked.
“—and whoever heard of a mage named Brandon—”
I shook him, and not gently.
“He’s my competition on the Council!” he spat. “Or he was. A trumped-up nobody—a norm before we fed him Punch and brought out his necromancy. And he was strong, I’ll give him that, but not stronger than me, and it irked him. It irked him, the freaking ignorant fuck!
“I had been binding chindis for various purposes, as your Circle doesn’t use them and can’t detect them.
It’s how I landed on the council in the first place, and he knew it.
He decided to raise an even better spirit, something stronger, something special.
We were trying to influence Bleddyn to revolt, but the miserable sot was more interested in drinking himself to death than in helping us, and it wasn’t working! So Brandon decided to show me up—”
He had never let go of me, and now his fingers sank into my arms in a way that would have been painful for a human, and the shaking recommenced.
“He didn’t understand! You don’t raise the spirits who want to come back!
Especially the strong ones! They don’t make good servants—they will fight you, hurt you, possess you—”
“But he did anyway?” I guessed.
“He raised a beast, something so powerful that it killed him immediately, using his life force to tear its way back into this world. And then it went looking for information—someone it could talk to, work through. It came looking for me.”
“And you didn’t send it back?”
“I tried, but it was too strong! It invaded my body, made me do things—like that scene at the grocery. That wasn’t my idea; I’m not a damned Reaper! But it wanted the potion—”
“Wanted it why?” I demanded.
“To make more Relics. That was really why we raided Tartarus—it forced me into that, said it needed troops worthy of the name, and that some of them down there must have the old strain in their blood—”
“Make Relics to do what?”
“I don’t know! Do you tell a slave your reasons?
I tried to tell my Circle that Brandon had raised something wrong, something weird, and that it was out of control, but they wouldn’t listen.
Thought I’d been taking too much borrowed magic lately, to help with the strain of all the extra work. Thought it was affecting me—”
Considering that he looked completely insane right now, that seemed about right.
“—and said that the spirit was doing what they wanted anyway, turning the Weres on each other. But they didn’t understand—it wasn’t doing it for them. It has some kind of plan—”
“What plan?”
“I don’t know! It hasn’t been with me much since it discovered Bleddyn.
It seemed to find him more to its liking—thankfully!
It was his idea to kidnap Sebastian and try to get you to betray your Circle.
We’d never dared anything like that for fear that it would cause the Weres to go from passively supporting your Circle to fighting alongside them, but neither of them cared—”
“Why not just sic the creature on HQ to begin with?” I demanded. “If it’s that powerful—”
“Because I didn’t tell them you had the potion there! I said there was no way to know where it was, but that you could find out. And Bleddyn, the idiot, doesn’t know anything about the Corps, so he couldn’t refute that!
“I didn’t want them to get it, since I don’t know what they’ll do with it, and I have to live in this world, too! But I had to tell them something. They said that either I get them an army or they would drink me down like the rest—”
“Drink?”
“They eat souls!” I would have thought I misunderstood him, except for the expression on his face.
Instead of a big, bad dark mage, he suddenly looked like a little kid afraid of the monster under the bed.
Worse—he knew the monster was real. “They take the heart and somehow access the soul through it. I mutilated the Reaper to cover that one up, so when the body was found, it wouldn’t be just the heart missing, but I couldn’t find them all—”
“God.”
“God has nothing to do with this! And the bastards who did have been getting sloppy! They went on a tear through every potion seller they could find, causing the very people who might have a vial or two of Jenkins’ stuff in their inventory to pack up and leave, while expecting me to cover up the evidence—”
“Like the guy in Tartarus a few days ago,” I said. “You sent people to scour his shop and remove the body.”
“Which one?” It was savage. “That thing has killed—and eaten—dozens so far, and I couldn’t get to them all—”
“And you did nothing to stop it?”
“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do? But I need the potion! That’s why I redirected them away from HQ, to try to get it for myself. With it, I can increase my power and—”