Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (36 page)

“I don’t know how he managed to escape the realm of light, but he’s here.” Deven shook his head. “It shouldn’t be possible. There are no natural calendar alignments between the realm of light and anywhere else. It was the perfect prison.”

August arched an eyebrow. “The Irregulars have a report on the realm of light. From the way it was described it isn’t a prison, rather a place full of peaceful, bodiless beings.”

“No body means no blood. That’s hell for an Aztaw lord.” Deven shook his head.

“What were those veins floating all around him?” August asked.

“I don’t know, but it must have something to do with how engorged he was on human blood,” Deven said, frowning. “None of this makes sense.”

“Night Axe needs sacrifices to fuel his magic, yes?”

“Of course.”

“If he’s trying to keep a low profile here, it would draw attention to him if he murdered dozens of people to extract their blood,” August said.

“You think he’s developed another way of collecting sacrifices?”

August shrugged. “Hell if I know. Can you use your mirror to look into the future and see?”

“I can try, although I doubt it will help.” Deven pulled his obsidian mirror fragment from his pocket. He unwrapped its cloth and dipped a corner of the mirror into the puddled remains of their mixed blood.

Deven spat on the mirror. He didn’t expect to see much. Premonitions were murky at best and subject to change. He’d rarely found anything worth learning when peering into the cloudy uncertainty of the future.

The opaque surface of the mirror shimmered and cleared. He looked at the image. From a pool of darkness glowed the bones of a horde of Aztaw soldiers, running full speed, weapons raised as they charged.

Deven pulled out his knife and shouted to August, “Run!”

Chapter Seven

The air snapped like exploding light bulbs. The corner of the warehouse ripped open to reveal a jagged pool of darkness. At least a dozen Aztaw soldiers poured from the breach between realms, raising dart blowers, swords, and batons spiked with obsidian blades.

Deven caught August’s sleeve and pulled him to the front door. Adrenaline tensed the muscles of his body into flight mode.

August stared at the coal black crack in the air, then seemed to finally comprehend the danger. He pulled his new shard pistol from a holster hidden under his jacket.

“Too many! Run!” Deven urged.

“There are civilians out there!” August cried. He grabbed another object from his pocket, a powdery white ball that resembled something for a bath. He hurled it at the soldiers. It hit the Aztaw in front and a fine white powder burst out explosively, shooting upwards to coat all of them in glittering fragments of light.

“What the hell is that?” Deven cried. He yanked open the door.

“Glamour bomb!” August shouted. Half a dozen poison darts flew past their heads, embedding in the door. “We can’t have them seen here.”

“Go, go!” Deven pushed August out into the street. He broke into a run.

The hot midday sun blinded Deven. He followed August down a narrow side street. Something knocked over behind him and he heard angry yelling in Spanish.

Deven glanced over his shoulder to see what looked like a mob of angry Mexican men charging him.

The masking spell was good—from afar, they appeared rough, unapproachable, but undeniably human. But the masking spell hadn’t applied evenly and at certain angles Deven saw their Aztaw bodies poking through the deception.

In their natural form, the soldiers were slightly larger than humans, with pale skin like rice paper stretched over their glowing bones. Skirts of cotton and feathers covered their waists and armor of finely braided, enchanted husks protected their bony chests like bulletproof vests. The fierce black and yellow markings of the Lord of Hurricane’s house darkened what could be seen of their skulls underneath the human camouflage. One of them had obviously protected his face from the glamour bomb and his lidless eyeballs rolled in his skull sockets.

They moved as if drugged, slower than August and Deven, but their determination to follow didn’t waver.

“We’ve got to get away from all these goddamn people!” August gasped, sprinting from a busy intersection and down another side road.

The Aztaws continued doggedly in pursuit. Glimpses of raised spears and batons shimmered into sight and disappeared as the masking spell failed under the heavy sunlight. The range was too far for Deven’s knives but maybe not too far for his new freeze balls.

But as he pulled one from his pocket, August barked, “No! Too many civilians.” He stopped for a moment, concentrating, as if discerning their location. He pointed to the left. “This way. Hurry!”

Deven did as he was told, racing to keep up. Up ahead a temporary fence cordoned off a vacant construction area. Vaguely he remembered it was a Sunday.

But there was a guard for the site, who yelled and rose as if to physically restrain them from entering the property.

“
Corre
!” August shouted at the man. The guard picked up his phone. Then his mouth went slack as he saw the dozen angry men chasing Deven and August. The guard dropped the phone and ran toward a trailer on the periphery of the site.

“Where are we?” Deven panted.

“New subway tunnel drilling site. Come on!”

“Good thing I took up running!” Deven shouted to August. To his surprise, August barked a short laugh.

At the poorly barricaded tunnel entrance August paused to pull out his utility knife and quickly selected a tool that came off the knife. He cradled the small metal sliver in his hand.

The masking spell was wearing off the soldiers. They looked more like a furious attacking Aztaw army. But it wasn’t as if Deven didn’t have practice running for his life from Aztaw soldiers. He knew what to expect. Aztaw soldiers were fierce but unimaginative; they hunted in formation and never strayed. Normally, Deven would do anything but flee in a straight path from Aztaws. But he was stuck following August into the tunnel.

They entered the smooth, cylindrical shaft, lined with concrete walls. The ground was roughly hewn rock and soil. Dim emergency lighting lined the ceiling, but as they plunged deeper, shadows overpowered the light. The tunnel entrance gaped like a minstrel’s mouth, a circle of light in swallowing darkness.

Once the soldiers entered the tunnel, August tossed the sliver he held in his hands and it spun like a propeller. August shoved Deven hard against the concrete wall and covered Deven’s body with his own.

An explosion rocked the tunnel. A blast of hot air knocked both of them over. August held him tightly underneath him as another wave of heat threatened to blow them into the darkness. Deven’s nostrils burned with the stench of scorched ozone.

After a moment, August pulled himself off Deven and stood. Deven blinked, feeling stunned. “What was that!”

“Mage grenade.” August stared intently at the tunnel entrance.

Deven stood to watch as well, bracing his hands on his knees, catching his breath.

August leaned against the tunnel wall, breathing hard. “Goddamn Aztaws are
scary.
”

Deven nodded, remembering the first time he’d met one, age ten; he’d thought his father had dragged him down to the hell his grandmother had always been going on about.

A shuffling sound directed Deven’s attention to the tunnel entrance. Most of the Aztaw soldiers remained motionless on the ground, but several slowly rose to their feet. August looked shocked. “Shit!”

“Can I use these freeze balls now?” Deven asked.

“Yes, yes!”

Deven pulled one of the balls from his pocket. It fit nicely in his palm and was soft and slightly warm.

The soldiers moved toward them, cursing in Aztawi. One’s glowing tibia protruded through his skin. Another had lost the bottom half of his jawbone. Still they charged. Deven threw the ball. As it spun in the air it hissed and popped like fire on dry wood. It launched itself at the nearest soldier and slammed into his body. The Aztaw gasped, freezing solid, falling backward from the force of the impact.

The soldier beside him tossed his spear and barely missed Deven’s neck. He and August ran deeper into the tunnel. He threw the other two freeze balls in his pocket. Each hit their mark, but the three remaining soldiers were close. Deven tossed one of his knives, but it hit the soldier on his armored chest, causing no damage.

August fired his shard pistol. Thin, needle-like slivers of metal sprayed from the smoking barrel. Several of the thin slivers sliced through the soldier’s rib cage and stuck in his bones, but others shot through him and out the other side. The wounds were severe but not debilitating. The soldier’s knife was nearly long enough to be a sword and he raised it to cut August down.

Deven didn’t know if August had experience with hand-to-hand combat. He wasn’t about to find out the hard way. He threw himself between the soldier and August, blocking the blow clumsily with a knife. The blades clashed and his knife clattered to the ground. The soldier swung again. Deven ducked low and threw himself forward into the soldier, knocking him off balance.

He spun and pushed August out of the way as the other soldier swung his baton. The blow landed hard on Deven’s arm, sprawling him onto the tunnel floor. Pain radiated up his side. As the soldier raised his baton again, Deven pulled the last knife from his back pocket and hurled it at the soldier. The blade sank deep into the soldier’s eye and he screeched, dropping the baton as his hands fumbled blindly at his face.

Two remaining soldiers were nearly upon them, and Deven was out of weapons. Without another choice, he yanked the pen from his hair and frantically started scribing glyphs on the ground. Each symbol brightened, then dulled into deep black, sinking to the underworld. He wrote around himself in a circle, the pen growing colder in his hands. It was a dark, purplish red when full of his energy, but almost immediately the color began to drain from it as he wrote the spell, and Deven felt himself weaken as his energy drained out to fuel it. He could almost smell the stench of corn on Lord Jaguar’s breath as he held the weapon between his fingers.

He drew the symbol of a dog eating itself, the pyramid, the black reed. He drew crossbones and a quail feather. He drew the images of the lords who created the house power.

August stood in front of Deven, shard pistol aimed at the soldiers. “What are you doing!” he cried.

Deven finished the last glyph and jumped to his feet, grabbing August and yanking him into the circle as a wall of sparks shot from each glowing glyph and linked to form a fiery curtain around them. The sound of howling wind filled the circle, deafening in volume.

“Is it a shield?” August shouted, covering his ears.

“No! I took us out of time!”

“What?”

The soldiers charged through them into the black emptiness of the unfinished subway tunnel. August spun to watch, gun aimed.

“Don’t shoot!” Deven cried above the wind. “We’re in a time lock. It won’t do anything.”

“They passed right through us!” August shouted.

Deven felt sick with exhaustion. The benefit of being able to fuel his own magic without sacrifices was lessened by the fact that it sapped most of his strength. The sucking wind grew louder. They didn’t have much longer. “We have to get out.”

“They may double back when they reach the end of the tunnel.” August watched for them anxiously.

Stepping out of time was a tricky prospect and Deven watched the edges of the time lock sizzle, blacken, and fly away like charred embers. He gripped his pen and drew a symbol in the air, conjuring the image of the grinding wheels of calendars. They had mere seconds before the calendars moved again.

“We’ve got to go, now!” The roar was deafening. Deven’s pen was nearly white, its inky power drained from it. He shoved it back behind his ear and grasped August’s arm. He stuck out his foot and smudged one of the symbols.

The floor beneath them split and cracked away in a perfect circle.

“Jump!” Deven shoved August toward the natural world.

August landed on the tunnel floor and spun. He looked back and went sheet white. Deven glanced down and saw the movement of thousands of glowing bones, felt the furnace of heat of the Aztaw world—his world—rumbling below.

Dangling from earth, Aztaw looked like hell incarnate. The smell of burning maize overpowered Deven.

August gripped Deven’s arm and jerked him up. The circle of earth beneath Deven’s feet crumbled and collapsed into the dark underworld. Everything Deven knew and had cared about was down there in that heat.

No, no, I want down
, Deven thought, but August’s hand was warm in his and held him tight. As the tunnel floor plummeted into darkness August hauled Deven back into the human world.

Chapter Eight

When they emerged from the construction tunnel, filthy and exhausted, Deven saw city lights twinkling in the darkness. The smell of sewage and lime permeated Deven’s senses, reminding him he was in Mexico once more. A sick, nervous grief tore at his throat and left him ragged. If he’d only dropped...