Chapter Fifteen #2
The city’s law enforcement had fought and killed, trying to protect the hundreds packed inside its walls.
In the area before the church, shattered notes clamored.
The sprites had gotten smarter, because now most were in the bodies of teenaged girls, their hands to their sides, silent, probably too old to be trapped by shackles and null bands around their heads unless they were already unconscious.
They were led by a man. He was dressed in priest’s robes, and by the blood in his beard and down his robes, he appeared to have been snacking on the living and the dead around him.
In each hand, he held a child by the arm. Unpossessed children, dressed for school. The priest stood in front of the church doors, facing them as if in challenge. He rocked back his head and screamed in defiance. Donati shot him. Neck shot. Not clean.
The priest dropped. The child to his left leaped to her feet and raced away, to the other side of the pile of cars. Donati finished the priest and shoved the other child away, shouting, “Run!”
There was a whoosh of blistering heat. Flames licked high. Spread through a dozen liquid fuel trails to the church. Up its walls. Inside the windows. Down and up the street.
Screams from everywhere.
The teenaged girls turned on EJ and Donati, firing weapons that they had hidden in the folds of their school dresses. Guns. Not blades. A trap. Donati went down. Half his head missing.
EJ took a round to the upper thigh. Another to the chest, hammering into his vest. His breath knocked out.
He ducked behind a burning car. Shot the girl closest. Then another.
One after the other. Until the sound of shattered music was gone, and all that was left were the screams of the dying, the stench of charring flesh in the street, and cries from the church as the trapped burst free and raced from the flames.
He slumped to the ground. He’d lost a lot of blood.
As his eyes closed, he heard a voice calling to him through his ear-patch comms. Farther away, the thump of a helicopter, bringing in a cleanup team, now that the threat of possession was neutralized.
Hot tears had trickled down his face. He had folded Delta, then Theta, and put the modes away as darkness fell on him.
EJ woke, drenched in sweat, his muscles cramping with fight-or-flight instincts.
He was at the kitchen table, facedown in sweat and tears.
A dog tongue was lapping at his face. He remembered to inhale and blew out a breath that ached.
Gently, he lifted George and placed the heavy dog on the floor.
“I don’t know how you got up on the table, Georgie Porgie,” he whispered, “but thank you. I’m okay. I’m okay, boy.”
He stood and stretched against the cramping muscles.
He remembered the smells. The sounds. The sight of young girls as he shot them and contained their demons.
He stripped out of the sweat-chilled clothes, pulled on something warm and dry, and took George downstairs and outside to the patch of grass, now beneath a foot of snow.
He kicked a spot clean. George was not a fan of snow, but he did his business and headed inside, leading the way.
Back upstairs, EJ ate a serving of yogurt and downed a cup of espresso.
Decided that wasn’t enough and finished off two more cups. It still wasn’t enough.
There was nothing to be done for memories. They simply had to be endured. Except…He trotted upstairs hoping for a fight. One of the guards had to be looking for a little fun.
Angie
A cat nose shoved into my open mouth, waking me.
Another cat yowled in irritation. I coughed up cat hair, raked it off my tongue, and pushed Borealis away.
Rolling out of bed, I stumbled to the kitchen, where I fed them.
“That’s all,” I warned, my voice grinding from sleep and what felt like a cat hair stuck partway down.
“You’re lazy, annoying, and demanding. And really fluffy. ” I coughed again.
Warming a cup of cold tea, I noted that I’d slept six hours, vamp lifestyle. My sleep cycle would be screwed. It was after two p.m. and snow still fell in a heavy curtain, blanketing my yoga porch. There would be no travel or working away from the house today.
I brushed my teeth, ate a small bowl of yogurt mixed with thawed blueberries, and curled on the couch with an afghan. I needed to organize this case. Too much had happened and I needed to start at the beginning.
On my tablet, I swiped the name of every person Ivyanna Holmes had spoken to at the queen’s party onto the wall screen.
I added the moving scan of the numbered guests, and put names, faces, magical talents, and political histories up with the vamp-socio-political dance playing out on the screen.
On a blank screen I began to draw lines from names and faces where connections existed between the queen, the emperor, Asshat, EJ, and me.
Konstantin and Ravensport weren’t on the list, of course, but I wanted to see where ties pointed to them.
After an hour of watching, I knew there was something here, something my brain recognized as a pattern, something my precog knew, but I couldn’t consciously recognize or classify.
Frustrated, I backed up the scan and watched the first hour again, this time at twice the speed.
Then at three times the speed. Then at four times.
I followed the next hour at the faster speed, and the third hour.
I watched Ivyanna glide through the crowd.
I watched her neatly (accidently?) avoid EJ and me, while managing to speak with Edmund and the Consort multiple times, her lustrous multi-red hair like a beacon.
I should have seen her, noted her, even from a distance. Instead I’d been too focused on my ex.
Then I watched the vid that was simply the energy patterns as everyone moved from place to place. Witches identified as one color. Vamps, humans, Onorios, each with their own colors. All at the faster speed, searching for…whatever felt so important.
Prismed light glinted, flashed. If I had blinked, I would have missed it.
A faint hint of light in one corner that never moved.
On the other scans, no one appeared to be standing or sitting there.
I hadn’t noticed the pale signature that night.
Maybe a glitch in the system? Maybe the signature was created by one camera reflecting from the other magical energies?
Tech and magic were still not meshed, despite wartime R&D.
I backed up the video, tiny hops of movement.
At normal speeds, it wasn’t there. I played it forward again at four times normal and saw it.
Right there. A hint of red, an emerald sparkle, like a fractured rainbow in a niche, tucked in a small corner.
Around it was a trace of something brownish, narrow and lined.
Something other than a glitch in energy recording.
Something made of matter, cloaked in energies, far more sophisticated than an obfuscation working.
Had there been an unannounced visitor, a spy, at the queen’s reception?
I remembered the colors of the energies cloaking Nyoka and the working that had blasted through my own blood gauntlet hedge of thorns working. Nyoka was a powerful witch. She might even be an XX-gened witch, like me, but with centuries of experience creating workings. Was this Nyoka?
If not Nyoka, could the glint of energies on the magic-scanning video mean an arcenciel had been hiding there?
Arcenciels—the rainbow dragons of lore—had disappeared from Earth around the Change, the dragons created of pure energy not interested in a planet where dangerous humans ruled.
With no notice, they had abandoned the humans and witches, as if there had never been an alliance, taking their magic and their power with them through a rift in space-time.
The location of the rift now led only to an underground river flowing through limestone caverns.
Yet, the sparkle of power at the queen’s party reminded me of the gemlike energy of the light dragons I had seen as a child.
The glint of energies could also be an artifact, a red herring. A waste of time. That was more likely than any other possibility.
The queen’s gala had been under such heavy security that it might as well have been a UN meeting. Only someone with extra heavy shielding could have gotten in and hidden. Like an arcenciel.
Or a different kind of magic user.
I marked the spot and sent a message to the team upstairs. If Grizz is up, I would like to see her in my rooms for an opinion on a video. I added the last part so the woman would know she didn’t need to dress out or gear up.
On the way, Grizz messaged back.
Seconds later the guard was at my door, and I tapped an icon on my wristband to let her in. “Grizz,” I said. “You don’t look like you got frostbite up on the roof.”
Grizz glanced at my own frostbite but didn’t comment.
“I love playing in the snow and working with you people. You got the best toys. That drone your brother built stayed aloft fifteen minutes in the heavy snow. As good as the queen’s flying arsenal and better than the military’s when I was active, which, admittedly, was decades ago. What’s up?”
“Take a look at this.” I patted the couch, pointed to the wall screen, and the paused vid. “See the place circled in red?”