Irregulars: Stories by Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Ginn Hale and Astrid Amara (50 page)

But Deven sensed the gaping children and disapproving glares of several older ladies in the waiting room, and he pulled back.  

“I’m very happy to see you,” August said at last, grinning. His lips were red and swollen from the kiss, almost obscene, and the look of them drove a surge of need through Deven’s belly, recalling the sight of August’s beautiful lips wrapped tightly around him.

“Are you feeling all right?” Deven asked belatedly.

“Like a million bucks.” August reached for Deven’s right hand and examined the brace on his wrist and bandaged fingers. “You?”

Deven shrugged. “I’ll live.”

“And aren’t you glad about that?”

“Yes, I am.” Deven grinned. “As much as it pains me to say it, you were right, Agent August.”

August took his hand and said, “Call me Silas.”

Things Unseen and Deadly

Ginn Hale

The dead are selfish:

They make us cry, and they don’t care,

They stay quiet in the most inconvenient places,

They refuse to walk, and we have to carry them

On our backs to the tomb…

Diatribe Against the Dead

— Angel Gonzalez

In the predawn gloom the phalanx of armed NIAD agents threw dull reflections across the wet sheen of the narrow streets. A fine rain diffused the glow of the streetlights, making their black-clad figures look like shadows cut loose from the creatures that cast them. They moved swiftly, silently toward the innocuous stone front of a three-story antiques shop.

From the hidden recesses of the shade lands, Henry watched the young agents fan out behind him, filling the narrow San Francisco street. His old trench coat and patched pants hung from his long frame, utterly at odds with the sleek garb of the homogeneously clean agents behind him.

They carried mage pistols loaded with laser-etched incantation ammo. Henry wore masking tape and ink-stained rubber bands around his nine fingers and was currently loaded with whiskey and a sweet, nameless poison. His straw-yellow hair smelled like roadside brambles and the dark soil where he’d spent so many nights.

For all that, Henry easily strode through the shade lands while at his heels younger, far more keen agents crouched and scampered across the earthly ground, no more able to enter his world than could the rain or wind.

Three hours earlier their operation commander—a slim, athletic woman with cropped black hair who answered to the name Carerra—had informed Henry that her San Francisco agents ranked among the top three internationally for execution of Irregular assault operations. They’d all been on raids before; they’d busted illegal goblin markets and shut down soul trafficking rings. They were toned, trained, and supremely experienced at keeping magic artifacts from coming to light while simultaneously ensuring the general public remained in the dark about their very existence.

Between the spritz of holy water in Henry’s direction and her cool tone, Commander Carerra had made it clear that her state-of-the-art strike force did not need the assistance of some shabby relic from an age when Irregulars’ operations had been run on half-assed witchcraft, peyote spit, and blood sacrifices.

Henry had slumped in the commander’s straight-backed chair and assured her that he’d have been happy to leave her and her enthusiastic crew to their modern devices, but he’d been dug out from the field and sent back to San Francisco by Director Hehshai herself. Neither he nor Carerra would defy the director. And they both knew Hehshai wouldn’t have dirtied her claws exhuming Half-Dead Henry if his presence wasn’t in some way necessary. Though in exactly what way Hehshai hadn’t said. Oracles never did.

Still, Henry didn’t doubt that he could make some kind of difference, because really even the smallest thing, an icy step or a missed letter, could save or end a human life. Henry knew too well that it took only one mistake to strip all the swagger and confidence from even the best agent and reduce him or her to a cold lump of meat. And somewhere deep in him he still cared about human lives, even those of these strange, modern agents who seemed so much more like machines than women and men.

But they were human enough, certainly, to err.

Most of the young agents hadn’t noted the thin filaments shimmering through the soft rain all around them. The two who had simply brushed them aside like cobwebs. The threads were hardly visible and appeared to break at the touch of a hand, but that fragility was itself a weapon, producing countless poison needles.

Henry held up a callused hand and Commander Carerra, watching him through spell projector glasses, signaled her agents to a stop. Henry glanced back at them only briefly. Two swayed, glassy eyed, their skin tarnishing blue black as mage poison infiltrated their organs through thousands of needles.

They were already dead. They hadn’t hit the ground yet, but that would be only a matter of seconds. Henry couldn’t save them. The best he could hope for was to keep the rest alive.

He turned back toward the antiques shop.

Millions of the gold threads cocooned the quaint facade of the gentrified Victorian storefront and cascaded down over the door like a tangled glass tapestry.

He focused on the delicate filaments in front of him. This old spell was probably the reason Director Hehshai had tossed his ass on a Falcon 7X jet in the dead of night and shipped him back to San Francisco. He might look like a battered hobo and smell like a cold night in a fresh grave, but old magic saturated his blood. Ancient incantations ringed the chambers of his scarred heart and etched the shrapnel of the other men’s bones that he carried beneath his skin.

Carefully, he reached out and stroked one gleaming thread with the rubber band ring wound round his thumb. The filament sparked and Henry felt a chill shudder through his guts. But he was gentle and slow, never allowing the thread to break, even as he drew it back and caught another around the band of heavily defaced masking tape on his forefinger. Steadily, he chose and captured other strands, until all nine of his fingers were ringed with luminous gold threads. His breath felt cold as nitrogen on his tongue.

Slowly, turning first one strand aside then another, he twisted and unbound the tangled tapestry, playing a game of cat’s cradle, reweaving the web.

At last, just in front of the shop door, he found the knot at the heart of the immense tangle. A ruby nearly the size of his fist but cut into the form of a spider: the guardian of this gate set here to keep other magicians from entering its master’s domain. It glinted and flashed as it caught hints of the power within Henry.

And as Henry drew closer, the scarlet limbs twitched. The gleaming threads that encased Henry’s fingers pulled taut—almost brittle.

If he’d been as sober and focused as the clean agents waiting behind him, he would have tensed in an instant and the guardian at the web’s center would have known him to be something powerful, something dangerous. Instead, Henry went slack as any hapless drunk, staggering unaware into a doorway. Around him the countless strands trembled but didn’t break. Not yet.

Henry averted his gaze from the twitching ruby legs and fat orb belly. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander where it would as he unconsciously searched for the words that the jeweled guardian needed hear before it could return to its deep sleep.

What absence kept it from rest? Random words floated through Henry’s mind, as did half-forgotten promises, old regrets and pleasures. He blew out a soft breath across the ruby spider and faint words echoed back to him. He blew out a second breath and listened more intently.

Henry tilted his head, hearing something fragile and faint. Perhaps an old nursery rhyme, but not one of his recollecting. And then the words came to him.

“This cuckoo’s a fine bird; he sings as he flies. He brings only good news and tells only lies,” Henry whispered to the spider. Deep within its body something seemed to shudder. A tremor passed through the threads binding Henry’s fingers. It felt almost like laughter.

Yes, this was the way to reach her.

“My spider’s a sweet girl,” Henry crooned to the guardian. “She rocks and she spins. She waits on the doorstep to catch her dear friends.”

Henry felt another laugh escape the guardian. Gleaming threads all around Henry sputtered out like spent candle flames.

“Cuckoo comes calling, a lullaby he sings. And spider she’s sleeping all curled in her strings.”

Henry fell silent, feeling only the tingle of tiny flames on the back of his tongue. Then slowly the ruby spider curled her legs closed and dropped into Henry’s extended hand. He held the jewel for a moment, marveling at the craft of its design, feeling the slightest pulse pass through it, as if it harbored real life. And he knew that once it had.

Then he turned back to Commander Carerra and stepped out of the shade lands into the crisp air of the world of the living.

Several agents jumped back at his sudden appearance.

In his right hand he held the gray cinder that had once been some unlucky child’s heart and, in another world, still longed to be sung a lullaby and laid to rest.

“Door’s open,” Henry informed Carerra.

She pushed her spell projector sunglasses up from her eyes and scowled at him. “You’re certain? We’ve got two down already.”

“I never said you wouldn’t lose agents, just that I’d get the door open for you. It’s open. You may lose more once you step inside.” Henry gently slipped the hard little cinder into one of his deep pockets. “You want me to go ahead and clear the way?” Henry asked.

“We can handle it from here,” Carerra responded. She clearly didn’t want him taking credit for the capture of the site. That glory belonged to the San Francisco branch. That was fine with Henry; he’d found glory an overrated commodity. Didn’t keep a body whole or even make for good company through the lonely evenings that followed its capture.

Commander Carerra signaled the first six of her agents ahead through the door. They marched in like windup toy soldiers.

“I could follow them through the shade lands—”

“You let me worry about my agents, all right, Falk?”  

Carerra gave him a hard glare and didn’t wait for his response. “HQ informed us that you could create some kind of dimensional split. Make this whole place disappear to the common populace. Is that the case?”

“I can call the Lost Mist and lay wanderers’ wards to keep anything from getting out of that building.” Henry shrugged. “It won’t help your people inside there, though.”

“You just concern yourself with keeping civilians from getting past our police lines,” Carerra told him. “The last thing we need are more pictures of bat boys popping up on the Internet.”

Henry heard something squeal and hiss from beyond the open door. He smelled the tang of human blood rushing up to the open air. They were already dying in there.

But these men’s deaths weren’t his business; if they were lucky, they never would be.

Henry gave Carerra a sloppy salute. Then he stepped back into the shade lands, where Carerra and her agents looked like shivering little shadows at the door of an immense, coiling darkness. He called up a white, rolling mist and it covered them all like a shroud.

***

The wheels of Jason’s battered green bike hissed against the wet pavement. He veered past braking cars and banked a sharp right turn despite the blazing red light. He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to, not at this speed. Iron balconies and painted Victorian houses blurred as he plunged down into the sea of fog that lay across the streets below. Dull shadows and the haze of red brake lights were his only warnings of imminent collision. Jason swerved, darted, and narrowly missed a speeding police car.

 His heart pounded and sweat drenched his chest, but he didn’t slow. Instead he threw himself into the momentum of the steep San Francisco hill, racing into the cold fog. The whole city narrowed to the white mist, the slick black road ahead of him, and the knowledge that he was late and not getting any earlier.

He was only twenty-four, but he already knew that time forgave nothing. Not a single second could be begged back, not for pity, love, or money. Two minutes too late to save his father might as well have been two years.

He felt the immutable past as if it were growing behind him. He felt it like hot breath at the nape of his neck, drawing closer to him, hungry to overtake him. And he saw it too, wavering at the corner of his vision, those long white creatures with their grasping spidery limbs and gaping rows of bloody teeth.