It’s ten to midnight.
Tradition dictates that its newly elected president receives the blessing of a representative of each founding race of the Sceadu (of course, that’s in the modern parlance; a thousand years ago, tradition would’ve dictated the newly anointed Bardic Ovate Archdruid participate in a ritual orgy with offerings from each race). On the dais in the center of the hovering onyx platform, those Sceadu race representatives take their place in the formal reception line.
Several dozen gnomes have linked up in their piecemeal disguises to form a single slight Japanese businessman to represent the elementals. An elegant, middle-aged woman draped in sheer silk has been dispatched by the witch covens. The Goblin King has sent one of the stars, the beefcake one, from one of those awful superhero franchises. A graying minotaur stands for the taurian races. Finally, Allensworth waits to give the blessing of humankind.
Conspicuous by their absence from the dais is any demon clan elder. There isn’t a single demon in attendance at the inauguration, in fact. Even the youngest and most Earthly integrated of the demon clans, the suit-clad Vig’nerash, have failed to attend. It’s a silent but strong form of protest over the election of what they perceive as a human to the highest office in the earthbound supernatural world.
“Ladies, gentlemen, extrahumans of all stripes,” Allensworth addresses the crowd. “We gather tonight to receive the next in a long line of venerable leaders of the oldest and most venerable organization on this mortal plane. They’ve been warriors, great thinkers, great magicians, and occasionally all three.”
Allensworth gives pause for the scattered laughter.
“Tonight, for the first time, the Sceadu receives a human at the head of its table. An extraordinary human, to be sure.”
If there was sarcasm in his voice, a machine programmed to recognize such tones wouldn’t mark it.
“Welcome with me now the new president of the Sceadu, Enzo Consoné!”
Allensworth begins the next round of applause, stepping back into the receiving line.
Enzo Consoné is resplendent in his finest black pinstriped Italian suit. A full-length alligator-skin coat dyed jet to match is draped over his broad shoulders.
Consoné’s hulking satyr bodyguard, Claudius, keeps close pace with his charge. He’s also decked out in fine Italian sartorial splendor, tailored to perfectly hide his goatlike hindquarters and hooves.
The duo ascends the dais to warm, jovial applause and cheers. Consoné acknowledges the reception and the assemblage gratefully, waving, making direct eye contract with as many attendees as possible.
He raises his hands to silence the approbation. “Thank you! Thank you, my friends!
“For time untold, the Sceadu has served to protect the peace and covenant of our respective societies. As the world has changed around us, we’ve preserved the secrets of that covenant and the existence of our brothers and sisters from those who would do them harm. Many of whom, I realize, look like me. But that’s the point. That’s why I sought the presidency of the Sceadu. It’s time for a new era of understanding, of integration, of cooperation. It’s time for the Sceadu . . . to emerge from the shadow.”
Those who’ve come to celebrate his inauguration thrill and practically combust at Enzo Consoné’s words, each sentence feeding their deepest desires. While some fear his ideas mean losing themselves to a human world, others choose to believe he’ll elevate them to a new status.
Everyone with hands to do so applauds, except Allensworth.
Amid the celebration, no one takes notice of the handsome, bearded young server kneeling with his tray of champagne flutes in front of the dais. If anyone does, they surely think he dropped something or must be tying his shoe.
“Hold the hell on, girl!” Bronko calls to Lena from the bottom of the floating onyx steps.
She’s already reached the platform by the time he’s taking the first one.
“Hurry up, Chef!” she calls back.
The entire crowd is mustered in front of her, between the dais and the steps. A quick scan reveals nothing to Lena but a single mass of flesh whose prominent feature is the back of heads. She looks above the guests to the dais itself, seeing Consoné moving gracefully and gratefully through the reception line.
She breathes a brief yet deep sigh of relief.
“There’s still time, Chef,” she says to Bronko as he finally joins her, huffing and puffing from the pace.
“Find Vargas” is all he says.
“Right. I’ve got the crowd. Check the tents and get the others.”
He nods, gripping her shoulders for a moment, then strides off toward the crimson tents lining the perimeter of the platform.
Lena weaves into the back of the crowd and begins forcing her way through it, checking faces as she goes. No one registers, and there’s not a single white Sin du Jour smock among them that she can spot. Lena keeps glancing back up at the dais, monitoring Consoné. Everything seems to progressing just as it should, and she begins to wonder if it’s only her perception tinting the reality of the situation.
Then she reaches the front of the crowd and sees a tray filled with champagne flutes sitting on the onyx floor.
“Dammit,” she hisses.
“Tarr!”
She turns to see Bronko approaching her with James in tow.
“Rest of the crew is accounted for except for Nikki and Vargas,” Bronko tells her.
“I have not seen Darren in hours and Nikki disappeared before she finished plating dessert,” James says.
“Nikki—” Lena begins, but before she can complete the thought, a deep, baritone scream pierces the air.
They all turn to have a severed pair of goat’s legs wearing strips of fine Italian wool hit them in their smocks, smearing and splashing all three with blood.
Claudius’ anguished face appears over the edge of the dais, blood dripping from his lips. He’s trying desperately to pull his prone body away from something.
That something is Darren, standing where Claudius was only a moment before, holding his fully extended spear.
“Darren!” Lena yells up at him.
He doesn’t appear to even register her voice. He moves so fast, his feet barely touch the top of the dais. A powerful slash of the spear shatters the Japanese businessman, sending the gnomes composing his form flying perilously in all directions. Darren spins, twirling the spear expertly, and another slash cuts the podium in half. The reception line disperses, its members backing away or outright fleeing the stage, leaving Consoné exposed and alone.
Lena looks to the sides of the dais and sees what has to be security—Allensworth’s men as well as more robed figures—rushing toward it. She’s torn between wanting to protect Darren and hoping madly they can save Consoné’s life.
Atop the dais, Darren also sees them approaching. He twirls the spear again, holding it high and vertically with the jeweled end pointed toward the ground. As the first of the security detail ascends the dais, Darren stabs the spear downward with a deep, guttural cry.
The multicolored jewel shatters on impact, but from its core a rippling three-foot shockwave is born that lashes out in all directions simultaneously.
“Look out!” Lena hears Bronko yell right before his large form is obscuring her vision of the dais.
In the next moment, she’s lying on the floor beside James. Bronko is sprawled motionless on top of them. She can barely breathe under his bulk, and all that solid mass feels as though it’s crushing her bones. Lena wriggles free from beneath him, suppressing the panic and fear as if she were once again riding shotgun in an Army caravan on an IED-rich Afghan road. She crawls up to her knees.
Even a quick glance around tells her everyone who was hit by that magical shockwave is down. A more detailed glance tells her that appears to be everyone but her. They’re all lying motionless. Lena, the panic bubbling up to a dangerous level, quickly leans down against Bronko’s broad chest and listens for his heartbeat.
It’s there. He’s breathing but temporarily (at least she hopes) paralyzed.
Lena hears a voice she doesn’t recognize proclaim, “The nexus contracts in the face of a new star rising!”
Darren.
She jumps to her feet and charges at the dais, leaping onto its edge as it were an obstacle back at boot. She grips the edge and hoists herself up onto its surface, staying low on one knee as she surveys the scene.
Darren is advancing on Consoné’s rag-doll form, bladed end of the spear he’s holding guiding the way.
“You were the one on the other side of the mirror,” he says to new Sceadu president in that voice Lena doesn’t know, despite their being best friends for over ten years. “It was always you.”
“Darren, stop!” she yells, springing to her feet and practically sliding across the dais to put herself between Consoné and that spear blade.
“Stop it, Darren!” she repeats, holding up her hands. “This isn’t you! Look at me, man! It’s Lena! I’m your best bro—”
Darren reverses his grip on the spear without a word and strikes Lena across the jaw with the blunted end. Shards of broken jewel still attached there slash open her cheek as the force of the blow knocks her off her feet. She hits the top of the dais hard, the impact finishing the job the spear end started and sending her careening into unconsciousness.
Darren never even seemed to look at her.
He upends the spear again, pointing the tip of the blade at Consoné.
“The nexus implodes upon itself as a false star,” he all but exults, raising his arms above his head and readying to strike down with the spear.
Surprisingly powerful arms seize him in a full nelson, restraining Darren’s arms above his head and preventing him from bringing them back down.
“Stop this, mon amour,” James pleads in Darren’s ear, holding him as tightly as he can. “You do not know what you do here!”
Darren twists his own body with a supernatural strength, and the force not only breaks the hold, it sends James flipping over onto his back. The top of the dais cracks his spine painfully. He begins to groan in pain, but the groan becomes a growl of determination and James forces himself to his feet.
Now it’s him standing between the tip of Darren’s spear and Consoné.
“Please put down the weapon, mon amour,” James pleads with him again.
The muscles around Darren’s right eye twitch, just a hair, and unlike when Lena spoke to him he actually seems to be focusing on James.
Darren swings the blunted end of the spear into James’s face, bloodying his nose and staggering him several feet across the dais. James regains his footing quickly, shaking off the pain and impact of the blow. His expression becomes harder, more resolved.
“The man I have been with would never strike me,” he says through the blood running over his lips. “You only show me this is not my Darren. I will not let whatever this is inside of you turn you into a killer, mon amour.”
Darren turns the blunted end of the spear on him once more and thrusts it into James’s face, snapping his head back and filling his mouth with blood.
But James refuses to go down.
Instead, he spits viscous red onto the dais and stares back at Darren with a fury none on the Sin du Jour line have ever seen the jovial young man display before.
“No!” he insists. “This will not be! Do you hear? Darren . . . listen to me, please . . . I did not come to America for money for my family. I did not even come here to cook. I left Senegal to be here what I could not be in my family’s home. And to find what I have never had in my life. I came here to find you. I love you. I beg you now . . . come back to me.”
As James speaks, Darren’s jaw is seized by the same tremors he experienced in the trailer with Nikki. These, however, are more powerful and seem to begin spreading throughout his face and skull to the rest of his body. He stands there, frozen in place, trembling from head to toe, his every muscle seeming to strain to burst through his skin.
James can see the silent, agonizing turmoil inside him and how it’s beginning to boil over.
“Please, mon amour,” he presses. “Come back to me now. It is not too late. Please.”
Tears begin streaming from the corners of Darren’s eyes, almost seeming to create steam as they hit his cheeks. Those eyes begin to clear, to soften, more closely resembling their original owner than they have in weeks.
The tip of the spear lowers, just an inch.
James’s eyes widen hopefully.
“Good, Darren. Yes. Please. Just let go now. . . .”
The spear lowers another several inches, and a sound like a muffled word throws spittle from Darren’s anguished mouth.
“What is it?” James askes. “Speak to me, mon amour. Tell me what has happened. . . .”
Darren tries to force more words out, but he can only sputter and retch. His hands quake spastically around the haft of the spear.
Steeling himself, James begins reaching out slowly to wrest it from him.
In the split second before his fingers touch Darren’s closed fist, Consoné convulses and moans at James’s heels.
The piece of Darren struggling to break through recedes like a child pulled under its bed by the monster there.
“Darren!” James yells, reaching for the spear, but it’s too late.
Darren raises the weapon above his head and strikes.
The tip of the blade is aimed directly at James’s heart.
It’s less than half a foot away from piercing his chest when the entire world goes off its axis, the floor beneath their feet tilting more than seventy degrees. It throws the trajectory of Darren’s strike off just enough that the blade of the spear skewers James’s shoulder. He cries out and turns away just before they’re both thrown from their feet.
Darren loses his grip on the spear, and trying to hold on only makes his fall wilder and even more off-kilter. His body flies several feet through the air before hitting the ground again and rolling from the top of the dais. He hits the onyx platform hard but manages to plant the soles of his feet and halt his inevitable slide.
The platform’s sudden descent ceases just as suddenly.
Whether it was the jarring effect of the drop, or whether the effects of the magical shockwave are wearing off naturally, bodies all around Darren begin to stir and moan and occasionally cry for vengeance. He begins to stand carefully, to lean enough of his weight against the incline of the platform to keep him stable.
It turns out to be wasted effort. Darren never sees the object that collides with the back of his skull, but the force opens his head, sprays the onyx with blood, and floods his skull with a darkness that sees him crumpling to the platform and rolling down the incline until he loses momentum and sprawls.
Allensworth looks down at the unconscious body, Darren’s blood still dripping from the churro crumb–filled mini-basket held in Allensworth’s hand.
“The assassin is down!” he proclaims triumphantly. “Protect and attend to our new president!”