Damnation Marked (36 page)

They flew low over Sparks and buzzed the edge of the ethereal ruins, using it as a windshield as they headed for the pass. The snow was becoming too thick to tell what the Union was doing downtown, but he made out a few things in the darkness.

His heart ached as he spotted the empty pits that used to be familiar landmarks, but were now destroyed—casinos, the new ballpark, and even Rancho San Rafael park, where the fields had caved in from Yatai’s merciless tunneling. They were scars on the face of the land, black areas of blight, as though she had dragged razors through the earth.

There was no sense to any of it. It was the embodiment of Yatai’s suicidal despair, and nothing more. She had left so little behind.

They passed on, flew higher, arced over the mountains. Aside from the empty freeways, there was no sign of destruction once they reached the thick trees and ski resorts. Empty and peaceful.

There was sunshine on the other side of the mountain. A thick yellow haze turned the sun red where it splashed on the asphalt, and it smelled of forest fire, but everything was otherwise normal—untouched by the evil across state lines.

They touched down in an industrial area north of Sacramento. Everyone, aside from James, wore Union black. The trucks were even UKA branded. He stepped onto the tarmac and gazed at the sun, trying to remember the last time he had seen it.

“James Faulkner?”

He turned. A young man with red hair waited behind him. “Yes?”

“I’m Remington Boyd. I’m under orders to hold you until I get further instruction.”

“Malcolm agreed to send me to the airport so I could get to Colorado,” James said. “The flight is already arranged.”

“This order comes from HQ. Your evacuation was conditional on Kavanagh going with you, and she’s still in Reno. Until she’s contained, I have to keep you here.” Remington shrugged. “It’s nothing personal.”

“I’m sure.”

James spent a few hours pacing in an empty room with a locked door, twisting the gold band on his finger, probing the magic, considering reaching out to a silent Elise. But what if he distracted her at a critical moment?

He sat down and occupied himself by copying spells on blank pages of his new Book of Shadows. He tried not to think about Elise. He tried not to think about frozen beaches, smooth lips, or sad smiles.

But he thought about nothing else, really.

When Remington returned, it was only to move him to a private room in the barracks for the night.

James thought he would never sleep, but he must have passed out at some point, because he was jolted awake by a knocking at the door. He was surprised to find that the time had somehow jumped from midnight to nine in the morning.

Time wasn’t the only thing that had changed as he slept. Remington entered, freshly shaven and smiling. “Morning! I’m here to take you to breakfast.”

“Has Elise been secured?”

“I don’t know. But we won last night—that demon is dead, the city’s safe, and you’re heading out this afternoon. Come on, aren’t you hungry? We’re having a party in the mess hall!”

James’s cautious optimism didn’t last long. “No. Thank you. I’ll wait here for now.”

Remington shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He turned to leave, but stopped before he could close the door and put two fingers to his earpiece. “Boyd here. Yeah… Understood. Yes, sir.” He refocused on James. “There’s a phone in the cabinet by your cot. The operator’s forwarding a call in here.”

“From whom?”

But the young kopis was already gone.

The bedside table chimed. James pulled open the drawer and found a plain black cell phone. Did everything the Union made have to be so damned black?

James answered it. “Yes?”

“Hey, this is Malcolm.” His tone was unusually muted. All the humor had gone out of his voice, and it immediately put James on high alert.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, even though he knew there was only one reason that Malcolm would call. James held the phone between his shoulder and ear as he twisted the golden band off his finger again.

The commander let out a sigh. “Listen, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but… How do I say it?”

James slipped the ring free, and felt… nothing.

A gnawing emptiness gaped in the back of his skull. It was like losing an entire hemisphere of his mind—or half of his heart.

“We recovered Elise’s body this morning. I knew you would want to hear immediately. I’m sorry, mate. If it makes you feel any better, it looks like she went out fighting. Can’t imagine she’d want to have it any other way.”

James tried to sit down and missed the chair. His back struck the wall. He slid to the floor.

The phone bounced and landed near his foot.

Malcolm’s voice, tinny and small, continued to speak.

“Hello? You still there?”

James turned the phone off and sat in silence.

DECEMBER 2009

A
fter too many
long days of panic and blood, the Union’s infirmary was finally getting quieter. Anthony awoke from his drugged haze with a nurse standing by his bed and Christmas lights wrapped around the foot of his bed.

“What date is it?” he asked when he could finally speak.

“December third,” said the nurse. “Don’t move.” She left him and didn’t return. A dour witch whose nametag read “Allyson” replaced her.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Allyson asked without preamble.

Anthony struggled to remember, but his recent memory was blank. “No.”

So Allyson told him. She told him everything. That he had been demon-possessed and killed people. That they had been keeping him under sedation until they could be sure he was safe. She also told him that Reno was destroyed and he wasn’t going to be able to return.

And then she left, too.

He was stunned. But that didn’t last very long. Bound to his bed by the wrists, Anthony had no way of entertaining or distracting himself. Once he confronted the horror of waking up a homeless murderer, it got kind of boring.

A day passed slowly, and then another. So he watched people move through the ward instead.

He caught a couple familiar faces, covered in soot with bruises and lesions, but they were just classmates or old customers. Nobody he cared to talk with. And none of them stopped to look at him. They probably didn’t recognize him with two weeks of beard growth and crazy hair—he didn’t recognize himself in the reflection in the steel table beside the bed.

Nobody but Anthony lasted long in the infirmary. One short check-up, and each patient moved on—either to a hospital, or to another Union facility, depending on the type and severity of the wound.

A lot of corpses passed him, too. Apparently, the morgue was just beyond his bed.

Anthony tried to catch glimpses of them, but most were covered in sheets or zipped into plastic bags. Sometimes he saw a bare shoulder, or a foot. He saw a couple of unfamiliar faces as doctors checked the identity and moved them along. If Anthony had killed any of them, the memories weren’t accessible to him.

So he wasn’t surprised—not really—when he saw Elise.

It happened late in the evening. A woman in Union gear stopped a few beds away with a gurney leaving the morgue. She spoke briefly to a doctor. She lifted the sheet to reveal the body.

Anthony saw red-brown curls. A bloodless face with freckles across the bridge of her nose. Full lips that he had kissed more than a few times. Skin blue with cold and eyebrows frosted with ice.

Elise seemed pretty peaceful, for a dead woman.

The exposure lasted only an instant. Then they put the sheet over her again.

“Do you have the autopsy results?” asked the doctor. The nurse gave him a clipboard, and he looked it over. “Hmm… this one’s getting a formal service. Guess she was a friend of the commander. Take her to be prepared.”

Elise was wheeled on.

He craned his neck around in his bed to watch the Union team member take her away, but there was nothing to see. Elise didn’t sit up, push the sheet away, and climb down. Given her stubbornness, he half-expected it…but only by half. He knew death when he saw it.

Anthony stared at the ceiling.

He tried to imagine her cremated, reduced to ashes, and spread over the lake, like Betty had been.

A new nurse approached Anthony’s bed. She wore the Union slacks and a scrub top patterned with white flowers. “How do you feel?” she asked, unlocking the handcuffs that bound him to the bed.

“My girlfriend is dead.” He couldn’t seem to make himself sound like he was grieving, but the nurse looked sympathetic anyway.

“Poor dear,” she murmured. “No more symptoms of possession? Any unusual time lapses? Strange voices or urges?” He shook his head at each question. “You seem to have recovered well. You can get up and use the bathroom if you like, but stay in the ward until we can have someone discharge you.” She checked his chart. “You haven’t had a meal yet. Hmm. I’ll find you something to eat.”

Anthony sat up, rubbing his wrists. His mouth tasted like ash. The idea of eating sounded ridiculous. “Yeah,” he said, “thanks.”

After she left, he hobbled to the bathroom, which was a curtained room with a few basins people had been using for toilets. The nurse was right about the weakness; he could barely support his weight long enough to piss standing up. His urine was orange and filled the curtained area with the sour tang of ammonia.

When he finished, he hung in the hallway to watch the quiet bustle. Nobody seemed to notice his absence from the ward.

But he went back to his bed anyway, and sat down to give his legs a break.

It wasn’t like he had anywhere to go. Anthony’s family was all in Vermont. There was nobody to talk to about what he had seen, or the things he had done. What little of it he remembered, anyway. Everything after taking the elevator into the Warrens with Elise was a blur.

And if Reno were wasted, he wouldn’t have a job anymore. As if he hadn’t screwed up his grades enough already, there definitely wouldn’t be a college to attend for the rest of the semester.

Without a job, family, or Elise—or hell, even James—Anthony had no idea what to do.

A man finally approached him. He had an eye patch, hair shorn so short that his scalp glistened underneath, and knuckles that looked like they had punched a thousand faces. His bent and scarred fingers held two small bags. “Anthony Morales,” said the man with a thick Irish accent. “You’re looking healthy.”

“Who are you?”

The man tucked the bags under his arm and held out one twisted hand. “Malcolm. Union commander. I’m in charge of all this.” He tipped his head toward the wall, which didn’t have anything of particular interest on it, so Anthony understood it to mean the base at large.

He gave the proffered hand a brief shake. “What did I do to rank a visit?”

“You mean, besides killing four of my best men?”

His stomach lurched. “You’re going to arrest me, aren’t you?”

Malcolm laughed. “Union regulations say that victims of demonic possession can’t be held accountable for what they do under the influence, so you’re good to go once the doctors give their permission. It’s your lucky day.”

He thought of Elise being wheeled past him on the gurney, and what Allyson had told him about Reno—buildings toppled and streets ripped from the earth.

“Sort of,” Anthony said.

The commander seemed to understand. His shoulders sagged. “Yeah. Sort of.” He coughed. “Here.” Malcolm gave him one of the bags. It was a plastic sack with the UKA logo on it. “You can have your belongings back. It’s just your clothes, but I’m sure it’ll feel nice to get back to normal, eh?” He hesitated, toying with the plastic edge of a second bag. “You were dating Elise, weren’t you?”

Malcolm spoke her name like he knew her, but his face gave nothing away.

“Yeah.”

“I left a message for James. Asked if he wanted to claim Elise’s belongings once we had them sorted. He never returned my call, so I thought you might want them. We’ll incinerate them if nobody makes a claim.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sure.”

Anthony took the second bag. He peeled open the tape and peered inside.

There wasn’t much. While the Union’s commander hung nearby, Anthony pulled out a glove—just one—and a cell phone. There was also Betty’s wedding photo.

And that was it. Anthony’s throat closed as he looked at Betty’s smile.

“Nothing else?” he rasped.

Malcolm lifted his shoulders. “Two swords. Can’t have those—sorry. Our witches are studying them. There was also an enchanted ring, but the forensics department kept it. They can’t figure out what the hell it’s for. Is it yours? I can try to put in a request to get it back.”

He pocketed the glove and Betty’s photo. “No. It wasn’t mine.” He swallowed, and Anthony closed the sack again. “Thanks.”

Malcolm set a hand on his shoulder for a moment.

Anthony watched his retreating back as he walked away. As soon as he was alone again, he turned the cell phone on. The battery still had half a charge.

He tapped the photo icon and started with the old pictures. Elise had been using the same phone for a couple of years, so the first few pages mostly showed Motion and Dance—photos of recitals, some pictures of James playing the piano, a nice shot of Elise in a dress she must have worn for a performance. She also had a few snapshots of fancy dinners that Anthony couldn’t imagine her having actually eaten.

She had taken pictures of wine glasses. Lots of wine glasses. Why? Because she liked the wine, or because she liked the glass, or because she liked the lighting? He had no guesses.

Betty started appearing a couple pages into the shots. He went through those slowly. Beach photos, lifting weights at the gym, dancing together at a bar, a shot where they were both making that stupid duckface outside of a club.

He had picked on Betty for making that face. A lot.

Around the spring, Elise seemed to have stopped taking so many pictures. The wine glasses disappeared. His abs clenched as he noticed the one picture she had taken on their camping trip together—and it was of a dead spider-demon.

The last photo was of some random rocks up at Lake Tahoe. Just a month old.