Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (40 page)

With the spell projector glasses on, Deven saw how the circular bruise was the location where the artery connected August’s body to Night Axe. The rhythmic pulse of August’s blood flowed through the semi-transparent surface of the blood vessel, but none leaked, and the flow seemed small enough not to kill August outright.

August grimaced.

“Like it or not, this does give us an advantage,” Klakow said. “Now that you are linked to him, we can find him.”

August didn’t respond. Deven carefully buttoned August’s shirt for him.

“We need to find out more about Night Axe’s arrival,” Deven told Klakow. “We must know how long he’s been here, how much time he’s had to develop his network of sacrifices.”

“Network of sacrifices?”

“Night Axe apparently has replaced killing human victims on sacrificial altars with bleeding them slowly, consuming their blood through a network of these.” Deven motioned to the throbbing artery, pumping August’s blood out the window and down the street beyond. “But this requires great effort—it must take half the power he harvests to fuel the spell alone. At some point he’d have to have first fueled his mutation with murder. If we can trace how long ago he came here, we can start to estimate how connected he is through the city and understand how hard it’ll be to kill him.”

Klakow scowled. “Deven, NIAD doesn’t condone the killing of individuals, even if they’re from fucked-up realms. We police movement and goods but we don’t execute—”

“Shut up, Klakow,” August said. “You can lecture Deven on the rules later.”

Klakow looked ready to argue, but then his expression softened and he knelt beside them, pocketing his phone. “They’re waiting for you at the clinic. I’ll take you there, then go back to the office and see what I can find out about Night Axe’s recent history.”

August nodded. When Deven handed him back his sunglasses, August gripped them tightly but didn’t put them back on.

Deven and Klakow both helped him stand, although after a few steps he shoved them both off and walked on his own. “I’m not a fucking invalid,” August complained.

Deven considered disagreeing but kept his mouth shut as they made their way to the elevators. August’s complexion was deathly white and the surges of blood that drained out of the artery were clearly taking their toll. Even though he walked on his own, August leaned against Deven for support and didn’t stray far once they reached the lobby.

A large tour group had arrived; the lobby overflowed with loud people wearing even louder clothes. Luggage spilled out to the elevator and created tripping hazards. The moving mass confused Deven and he had to take a deep breath and work to identify individual objects: a fake Grecian pillar, wrapped in plastic ivy; a chubby woman in a pink-striped skirt, watching over a pile of black suitcases; a small, black-and-white-dotted bird, hopping under one of the coffee tables.

Deven blinked. He removed the glasses and stared at the bird, who had attracted the attention of a group of women. They laughed and cooed at the little creature, snapping their fingers at him.

“Stay here. Don’t move,” Deven ordered. He held his hand against August’s chest and pointed at Klakow. He put his glasses back on and slunk to a large potted plant beside the open front of the hotel and hid behind it as he scanned the street.  

Over a dozen Montezuma quail, far from their countryside habitat and hopping down the urban core of the city, peered into buildings and chirped as they dodged footfalls and honking cars.

Deven hurried back. August must have known something was wrong by his expression, for his mouth curled into an angry sneer. “Now what?”

“Watchbirds.” Deven pointed to the quail inside the building, skittering between furniture.

“Are they Night Axe’s?” August asked.

“No. They must belong to whatever lord has them assigned to track Night Axe’s movements. If they’re here, that means Night Axe has soldiers in the vicinity.”

August rolled his eyes. “This is ridiculous.” He angrily yanked his phone from his pocket. “Klakow, pull the car around to the service entrance and meet us there.”

Klakow nodded and headed out to retrieve the car.

“Why send him alone?” Deven asked.

“I don’t want anyone following you. You’re the prize, remember? Don’t forget it.” He started texting furiously, maneuvering through the lobby toward the elevators without looking, as if he knew the place like the back of his hand. “Damn it! Now we’re hiding from wildlife.”

The staff in the back of the hotel gave them strange looks but didn’t stop them as they made a beeline for the service entrance and waited on the curb alongside several employees who appeared to be taking an extended cigarette break. Klakow brought his car around and Deven helped August climb inside, wincing as he shut the passenger door through the floating blood vessel.

As Klakow drove around the corner and past the front of the hotel, Deven noticed watchbirds were everywhere. But they weren’t the only thing that caught his eye. As they passed the hotel awning he thought he saw an Aztaw soldier, visible one moment, invisible the next. The soldier reappeared, but as they turned the corner, he disappeared again.

But then the car plunged into the heavy onslaught of downtown traffic, bright signs, and blinding sunlight, and Deven pushed his new sunglasses tight against his face and closed his eyes. The soldier at the hotel would have to wait.

Chapter Eleven

In the basement of the Sanatorio Espanol hospital, Dr. Ramos from the NIAD medical team admitted he lacked experience with invisible, floating, city-wide circulatory systems.

“I’m not severing the artery,” Dr. Ramos told August. “The likelihood of you bleeding to death is too great.”

“Why would I bleed to death in a hospital?” August complained. “You sever arteries all the time.” He looked healthier than he had that morning. After his examination they’d let him shower the blood from his hair and skin and given him fluids to rehydrate. His black eye and damp curls lent him a defeated appearance, but his expression was defiant as he glowered at the doctor.

Dr. Ramos scoffed. “We don’t go around chopping off aortas.”

“What about heart surgery?”

“I don’t do heart surgery,” Dr. Ramos insisted. “Besides, we don’t even know how this blood vessel is formed. It could connect to multiple systems. Unless absolutely necessary, I can’t in good conscience recommend amputating it until we understand it better.”

August’s mouth curled in an angry sneer. But the fight seemed to abandon him. He slumped against the exam table and limply took his projector back, along with pain tablets and anemia pills, without further argument.

The medical office was deep in the bowels of the hospital, sandwiched between the laundry room and several storage areas, so they had to navigate a labyrinth of squeaky-clean hallways to make their way back up to the hospital proper and outside.

The dry air and sunshine left Deven aching for the darkness of Aztaw, but it seemed to put August in a better mood.

“At least it’s a beautiful day,” he commented. He pulled on his glasses and frowned down at the blood vessel that floated through the air from his chest.

Deven still wore the sunglasses, finding them not only helpful in seeing Night Axe’s realm but also in coping with the agonizing brightness of the city.

They were in a much nicer neighborhood than Beatriz Rodriguez’s home, with a grass median separating lanes of traffic and well-tended, tree-shaded sidewalks lining the curb. The multi-storied houses had elegant, decorative wooden garage doors.

They both followed the line August’s artery formed as it floated down the center of the street and turned a corner up ahead.

“We could follow it, see where it leads,” Deven suggested.

August shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking. “We can’t confront him until we have a method of defeating him.” As they walked, August’s artery retreated into his body, shrinking as he closed the distance between him and his parasitic attachment, lengthening as he walked the other way. It floated through the heads of a cheerful-looking young couple they passed on the street, and for a moment it looked as though August would be sick.

He ripped his glasses off and shoved them in his pocket, wincing at the sunlight.

“Don’t you want to see?” Deven asked. He couldn’t imagine voluntarily giving up an advantage.

August grimaced. “You have them on. Give me a heads up if you see someone walking around with a shin bone for a foot.”

“But—”

“Deven, I can’t look at it right now.” August looked queasy. “
Feeling
it is bad enough.”

“You sure you want to walk?” Deven asked. He almost placed his hand on August’s back in support, but it seemed too intimate a gesture. He kept his hands rigidly at his sides.

August nodded. “The safe house is only a mile up the road and I’m sick of Klakow’s company.”

Once the director of the Mexico field office had discovered August had been injured the same way Carlos had, she’d ordered him to a division safe house for the duration of the investigation into Rodriguez’s murder.

“What makes this house so secure?” Deven asked.

“I haven’t stayed in Mexico’s, but the safe house in San Francisco has wards and masking locks, as well as top-of-the-line digital security systems. There’s one official entry and it’s guar-ded by trained personnel twenty-four hours a day.”

Deven slammed to a halt.

In front of him, August’s artery branched off in two distinct directions.

August tensed beside him. “What is it?”

“Put your glasses on,” Deven said.

August pulled them out of his pocket and put them on.

“Following this to Night Axe may not be as easy as we thought,” Deven said.

August clenched and unclenched his jaw but continued forward. A block later it happened again; another Y in the circulatory system led in opposing directions, but this time they saw where the blood vessel terminated.

It ended in the body of a middle-aged woman, who was tending a narrow strip of garden behind a black wrought-iron fence in front of a large, showy house. As she knelt on her lawn she wheezed and it was clear by her ashen complexion and the weak pulses of blood through the blood vessel that her health was frail. August looked at the woman with a stricken expression.

The woman eyed the two of them suspiciously. They started walking again.

“I have to help her,” August said quietly.

“We will. Killing Night Axe will free her.”

“You don’t know that. What if killing Night Axe kills all his sacrifices?” August clenched his jaw. “We have to find out how many there are. Are we talking six people? Six hundred? We need to monitor them when we confront Night Axe.” Suddenly August changed direction, following the thick branch of his artery east.

Deven hurried to follow. “What about checking in at the safe house?”

“That can wait. Come on!”

They spent the rest of the afternoon following trail after trail of blood vessels, connecting one sacrifice to the next. Sometimes it was difficult; the arteries traversed direct routes, which often led through structures. They had to circle buildings until they found the exit point and could continue their hunt. Other times they couldn’t tell one branch of the circulatory system from another. Sometimes it thickened, wide as a football and branching off half a dozen times; some were thin ribbons of rubbery cord, linked to sickly bodies. The vessels stretched for miles, claiming victims all over the massive city.

There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the sacrifices. They saw several young men; then they’d turn a corner to find an artery terminate in the soft side of an infant. Some victims were out of sight, as the vessel led into locked apartment complexes or behind closed office doors. But it was unavoidably apparent that Carlos and Beatriz had not been Night Axe’s first or last victims.

“Why do you think Night Axe had Carlos and Beatriz killed?” Deven asked. They’d stopped for lunch and to rest their legs, having walked all over the city. August had his glasses perched up on his head, held in place by his thick black hair.

August attacked his eggs ferociously. As he ate, the color of the blood in his artery seemed to enrich, as if Night Axe was sucking the nutrients straight from his body. Deven didn’t relay this to August.

“I think once Carlos realized they both shared the same strange mark, he decided to investigate,” August said. “Unlike the rest of these citizens, Carlos had the tools to research it, and Bea knew the vision serpent spell.”

“So Night Axe must have realized they were getting too close and sent his tzimimi after them.”

August nodded. Despite eating, he remained pale. Deven didn’t think it was a good idea for him to continue wandering the city on foot.

“You should return to the safe house and rest,” he told August. “As long as we give the local agents the jade disk they can use a projector to follow Night Axe’s circulatory network, yes?”

“But it isn’t their investigation. It’s mine.”

“And you look ready to fall over.” Deven feared he’d have to argue further, but to his relief August nodded, slumping against the back of his seat, his eyes heavy.