Sully was in her office at the IBI finishing her last tasks as Acting Deputy Director of the IBI. Safely tucked away in the deep leather chair, she signed off on her final reports and her letter of resignation. She folded the latter neatly, placed it into an envelope, and left it on top of the pile of closed files on the desk.
The case was closed. The Year of the Knife was over. Now she had to keep a promise to herself. Now she had to stop being what she had been all of these years and be someone else. Someone better.
On the plus side, her pension was going to be vastly improved, the acting director gig made sure of that. She had put everything into the reports. Everything that she had done, everything that she had allowed to happen, everything that she barely understood, and a full list of crimes carried out by people she was too conflicted to prosecute. Enough rope for the Governor and his lackeys to hang her with, if they were so inclined.
The island of Manhattan was safely nestled back in the Black Bay, its people and its demons were contained behind their own walls and barrier spells. It was practically a prison by itself, and Ogden and his people didn’t seem inclined to stage a breakout any time soon. Sully shrugged to herself. It wasn’t the job of the Director of the IBI to deal with something like this. The politicians would have to sort it out amongst themselves. She left it all on the desk for the next victim or volunteer. Then she took out a cigar and listened to the reports coming in.
There were protests going on all over the city and, while the redcoats were more than willing to attend every one, inciting riots by doing foolish things like opening fire on the crowd, the NAPD was begging the IBI for assistance in calming the crowds. Sully huffed out a cloud of smoke. Not her problem.
There were protesters outside the IBI building, too. Sully had coffee and tea sent out to them every few hours, and gradually, the story of what had really happened to the ship still bobbing upside down in the bay began to circulate among them. They drifted off to join other protests before long, and the stories kept on spreading. At least the newspapers were happy.
The telephone rang—the direct line from the governor’s compound—and she seriously contemplated not answering it. She guessed someone had finally told on her. She forced a smile into her voice and answered. “Good evening, Lord Price.”
There was a muffled sound on the far end of the line, possibly the phone changing hands, and then the dulcet tones of the governor’s voice trickled down the connection. “I believe that we may have gotten off on the wrong foot, Director Sullivan. I do not honestly think that butting heads with one another is useful or that it benefits the people in our care. Don’t you agree?”
He was showing more self-awareness than Sully could have expected. “Couldn’t agree more.”
He pressed on. “To that end, I wonder if I might borrow either yourself or some of your staff. Some of the citizens are becoming a little fractious on my lawn and, while it would be easier to bring in a show of force, I have heard that your department has been successfully diffusing these situations.”
Sully covered the receiver, sighed heavily, and uncovered it again. “Of course. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He was smirking, she could tell. “Thank you kindly, Director. I am sure that this is the beginning of a far more profitable relationship for both of us. I look forward to seeing you.”
Sully rang down for a car, skipping the pointless task of ringing around to see if there were any other agents still in the office. It was midnight and they would all be out celebrating the biggest case of the year being closed or, more likely, catching up on lost sleep. Sully had worked every one of them to their limits while she was Director. That was the problem with a coworker being promoted; they actually knew what you were capable of and expected nothing less. By morning, they would all be relieved that she was gone.
Her driver was an older agent, and they swapped some stories as they drove to the governor’s compound, which was outside the city in an area of minor mansions and gated communities. The castle down in Roanoke was too isolated to be useful in the running of the Empire’s interests, so it had been turned into a museum back in the seventies. The city’s lights faded away until they turned off onto the governor’s private road and had to stop.
The compound was set back from the road with a wall around it. The crowd of protesters that had gathered outside the wall was too thick for Sully’s driver to get through, so she got out of the car and sent him home. She started elbowing her way through the mass of people. The crowd was angry. Sully felt it—like a dry electric heat in the air—exactly as Ogden had described it from that long ago meeting in the counting house.
It was easy to find the front of the crowd despite the dim light and the press of bodies around her, because that was where the yelling and jeering was the loudest. Sully could make out the words to bits and pieces of dozens of slogans she’d heard through the years. The crowd was chanting, “Set Manhattan free! Don’t tread on me! Set Nova Europa free! Don’t tread on me!”
There were redcoats lining the compound’s walls. The governor must have recalled every one of them from their posts in the city and beyond. They had rifles and spells trained on the crowd.
Sully stepped up to the gates and tried to get somebody to look at her credentials. One of the redcoats—Sully recognized her as the gray-haired woman from Winchester Village—saw Sully and pointed her out to another redcoat with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. There was a terse nod exchanged, and then Sully saw the woman adjusting her aim. The rifle was pointed right at Sully now. Words were being exchanged between redcoats along the line, too quiet for Sully to hear over the chanting, but she saw their shoulders tensing. She realized what was happening and threw up the biggest barrier that she could, but not before a volley of bullets tore through the crowd.
Only a few of the protesters had been killed but there were plenty of injuries and screaming; some people were scattering into the forest on either side of the road.
It was only when she felt something wet running down her shirt that Sully looked away from the barrier to herself. The bullet had gone through her chest, high up, beside the shoulder. She wasn’t drowning in blood or dead so it must have missed everything vital, but she could still feel the black buzzing on the edges of her vision. She stumbled back a step and the barrier flickered.
Strong arms seized her shoulders from behind, and glancing up over her shoulder, Sully saw Ogden. Looking around, she saw others spread out through the crowd—men and women dressed in ruined clothes from another time, scarred and cold-eyed. They held up her barrier and cast other shields of their own to protect the protesters from the Gatling gun fire when it started. Ogden was saying something, but all Sully could hear was a high-pitched whine. Holding a hand over her wound, he looked at her with a question in his eyes and magic cracking between his fingers—that strange cool light she now associated with necromancy. Sully nodded for him to proceed and leaned into his chest as the pain came in waves.
It was easier than her first healing. Briefer and more skillful. Less like someone digging out a bullet with a rusty spoon and more like a surgeon making a delicate incision. It still hurt, but this time it felt like there was a reason for the pain. When she opened her eyes, she was surprised to find that it was still night-time and that she was still in the magus’s arms.
He was holding her uncomfortably close and, judging by his ragged breathing and whatever was poking her in the kidney, he was enjoying it. Sully tugged his hands off and stumbled to her feet. The hole in her chest was gone, there wasn’t even a scar. Sully scowled at that. “I didn’t even have a bullet wound yet. You ruined my collection.”
Ogden stared at her like she was a lunatic until she flashed him a smile, and he burst into laughter. The crowd was still milling around under the Manhattan magi’s protection and now there was real fury in their cries. This wasn’t an abstract event any more. Now the British had opened fire on a peacefully protesting crowd of their own citizens.
With her feet under her, Sully now found herself being patted on the back and pushed forward by every person she met. She almost missed having Ogden at her back for stability. Eventually she was facing the barrier. Behind her, the crowd was screaming. On the other side of the barriers the redcoats were lined up, ready to fire again the moment there was an opening. Above her, the crows were circling.
Sully squared her shoulders, cast her own defenses, and then let the barrier fall. It had been a long time since she’d fought with anyone on her side—she was used to taking care of everything herself. So, when the first flurry of spells came flying from the compound’s wall, she was already readying counters when they were snuffed out in a flurry of dull flashes. The magi of Manhattan were there, protecting the people the way she was meant to, the way the soldiers on the wall were meant to. They would protect her flanks and let her do what she did best.
Sully stretched out her arms and unleashed hell.
A torrent of flames swept along the battlements and for every redcoat who managed to raise a protective shield, there were a dozen who fell, flesh charred, not even a scream escaping as the air in their lungs burnt away.
Sully was laughing and she couldn’t stop until she cast a wild-eyed glance behind her and saw the fear on the protesters’ faces. It stopped her in her tracks. She put her business face back in place and let her moment of doubt turn back into anger. She blew the gates off of the governor’s mansion with a well-placed concussion spell and strode up the path without looking back. When the topiary started rustling to life, an entire menagerie of poplar tree animals reaching for her, she burnt them to their roots with a cascade of fire. From behind her, Sully heard the roar of spellfire and glanced back to see that the magi were making short work of the few redcoats at the gate who had survived Sully’s initial assault.
Sully strolled right inside the marble atrium of the governor’s lavish home. The two guards that had been held back in this position unleashed their evocations at such a pathetic rate that Sully didn’t even bother to counter them. Ropes of bright flame coiled out from her hands, snatched their paltry spells from the air, and whipped them back across the room to where the redcoats hid behind pillars.
Sully didn’t know exactly when she’d started thinking of them as the enemy. They were just people doing a job after all. It was probably when they shot her. She had always held a grudge about that sort of thing.
Sully could see a barrier hanging over a double doorway at the top of stairs. She couldn’t rip it apart from this side—that would defy the point of the spell—but Sully wasn’t just some Agent of the Crown, or a college-taught magician; she wasn’t even just her mother’s little witch. She was a soldier and she knew war like an old friend. In war, you learned to get around entrenched defenses or you learned how to breathe through a hole in your chest.
Sully took the stairs two at a time but at the top, she took a second to prepare before she blasted a hole through the wall beside the door, shredding the minor defensive enchantments that had been stitched into the stone and worn down with the passing of the years. The governor was behind his desk with his hands clapped over his ears. His haughtiness had fled, along with the contents of his bowels by the smell of the room.
To one side of him was a magus—one Sully had never seen before. He was an Indian boy who couldn’t have been long out of his teens. He had gold jewelry through his nose, his eyebrow and his ears, and his head was shaved bald.
In the corner of the room, beside a hastily drawn circle, was a greasy looking man who would have fit in on any Red Hook street corner. He had long hair, wore an orange leather jacket, and was trying to summon a demon as quickly as he possibly could. The magus caught her before she moved another step—a construct creature, whipped together out of a grandfather clock and a pair of tall brass candlesticks, wrapped its makeshift arms around her before she could cast a thing. Every time she squirmed the flames of its candles flared up and burnt her.
The governor took his hands away from his ears and laughed when he saw her caught. The burns were worthwhile just to see his gloating face crumble a moment later when the construct fell apart into its component pieces. Ogden peered through the hole in the wall. He glanced from the destruction to Sully. “Your work?”
She shrugged. “Who else?”
The magus launched another attack: lightning in the shape of kingfishers swept out from behind him in a starburst. If Ogden had not hastily jerked bricks from the shattered wall to intercept the kingfishers, they would have dived straight into Sully’s chest. She held up her empty hands to the magus. “We aren’t your enemy. We aren’t the ones keeping you in chains.”
A flicker of doubt passed over the boy’s face and that momentary pause was all that Ogden needed to launch a whirlwind of needles into his throat. The needles splintered into the Indian’s fingers when he grabbed at them in surprise, and when he spoke, the tiny needles started to vibrate, flicking out more tiny shards that trailed sparks between them. Fury set in his features; he tried to cast and the needles responded violently, his throat exploded in a gory mess and Sully got the unparalleled treat of watching his vocal chords twitching around in the gap before he collapsed.
The greasy man had spent far too much time watching the action when he should have been paying attention to what he was doing. He had poured too much of his power into the circle, he emptied himself out completely and dropped cold and twitching to the floor as the dimensional rift tore open. The demon that emerged looked like a giant crow gone horribly wrong: black and oily with a jagged beak and six huge eyes shimmering with green light like a cat’s at night.
Sully readied herself to drain the power from the circle but Ogden interrupted her. “No need. It is with us.” He stepped forward and bowed to the demon. “Mol Kalath, blood of my blood. Your brood-mate holds our home in safety. Go south to the island of Manhattan, and you shall find it there.”
The demon brushed over the hastily drawn circle smearing the chalk with its trailing wings. Then it returned the bow, in as much as a seven–foot-tall bird can bow. Its eyes flared when they passed over Sully and it said, “I HAVE LONGED TO MEET YOU IONA. SISTER FROM ANOTHER WORLD. SHADOW TWIN.”
Sully backed away from it, shuddering, and held up her hands. “No thank you. Not today. I’ve got enough to deal with.”
The demon clattered its beak open and shut as it laughed. “SOON, THEN. WHEN YOU ARE FINISHED AND THERE IS THE TIME. LET ME TEACH YOU WHAT WE ARE. WHAT YOU ARE. WHEN THE TIME COMES. I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOU.”
Mol Kalath shuffled over to the bay windows behind the governor’s desk and spread its wings. Lunging forward it burst through the glass windows, shattering them in its wake, and soared off into the night.
The governor was curled up on his knees, cowering behind his desk, when Sully turned back to him. His hands were clasped and he was shaking. “Please. I was just following orders. You have to understand. You served your country. You know that we must all follow orders.”
Sully picked him up by the throat so that their eyes were level. “Your job was to take care of people. You failed. Now it’s somebody else’s turn.”
She dropped him back into the puddle of his own filth on the thick plush rug and turned to Ogden. “Do you want to run a new country?”
He looked horrified. “I have had more responsibility in my lifetime than I could shoulder comfortably. I do not want to carry a whole nation’s happiness on my back.”
Sully shrugged. “We can hold elections once the fighting is done.”
Ogden glanced at her with faint amusement. “Ah yes, so I would only have to command a divided nation, one that may not even carry out its threats of insurrection, through a war with the greatest of the imperial powers. Why would I turn down such an opportunity?”
The doors to the governor’s office burst open, hitting the crawling governor in the face as he tried to escape. In strode Leonard Pratt, acting like he’d never abandoned Sully for even a moment. He glanced down at the sprawled governor and chuckled softly. “Sic semper tyrannis,”
He treated Sully and Ogden to a smile, as if he hadn’t noticed that the room was covered in blood and half the walls were missing. “I hear that congratulations are in order, Miss Sullivan. You have solved your case and caught your killer. And this must be the gentleman himself.” He turned to Ogden. “Congratulations to you too, Mr. Ogden, I understand that you have finally returned from your exile and are eager to resume your insurrection against the British. I am here to represent some interested parties who wish to expedite that process as much as possible and help the people of Nova Europa establish their sovereignty.”
Sully groaned. “Of course you are.”
Ogden glanced at Sully. “Who is this man?”
Sully fumbled for an introduction. “Sorry, this is Leonard Pratt. He runs with a lot of academics and political types that want us to be independent. And I’ve got a hunch it was his activities down in Louisiana years ago that accidentally punched a hole through to the far realm and showed you the way home.”
The men looked at each other with intrigued expressions, and Sully snorted. Leonard took it in good humor and strolled around to sit behind the desk, ignoring the unpleasant smell. He took a sheath of papers out of his briefcase and organized them on the table into three piles.
He gestured to the tallest pile first. “This is a declaration of independence, a bill of rights, and the outline for a simple democratic process.” He turned to the next pile. “These are offers of alliance to the free nation of Nova Europa from Ophir, Nippon, The United Nations of America and the Republic of South America. I expect more will follow once we have publicly declared.”
He tapped the last pile. “These are pardons for all of your crimes against Nova European citizens and your written statement that you agree to my assuming the temporary role of Interim Prime Minister of Nova Europa until such time as it can secure independence. We will announce the first one publicly and hold the other until later, so that they appear a little bit less self-serving. And I’d like the two of you to immediately assume roles within my cabinet.”
Ogden seemed to be weighing this all up before he nodded. “I would be glad to lend our strength to your cause, Mr. Pratt.”
Sully said, “No. Nope. No way. I’m no politician.”
Leonard held up his hands. “Of course, my dear. Your position would be General of the Nova European armed forces. The British will inevitably turn their violent attentions upon us in the near future, and it is my understanding that you would prefer to shield our citizens from the worst excesses of war.”
Sully set her jaw and growled, “No thank you, Mr. Prime Minister.”
He leaned forward on the table and sighed. “Minister Ogden, could you give us a moment.”
Ogden smiled and dipped out of the room to talk to the gathering magi in the hall. Leonard tapped on the middle pile of papers again. “Miss Sullivan, there are certain political realities that you need to be aware of before making your decision.”
Sully scowled. “I’m not going to be an officer, Leonard. I’m not going to send people off to die in your war.”
He cocked his head. “The vampires will be leaving, Miss Sullivan. It is a contingency of our alliances with the United Nations and Ophir that all vampires are expelled from our borders. I have been granted a limited number of immunities to hand out among those undead who are too vital to the running of the country to be exiled.”
Sully slammed her hands on the desk. “Don’t threaten me you little cock-weasel. The first of your little toadies to show up at my door would go home as dust.”
He raised an eyebrow. “So you would just murder innocent policemen? Over and over? I doubt it, Miss Sullivan. I doubt that the gentlemen from Manhattan would allow it either. Hard to believe that there are as many magi in the whole world as there are compressed into so small an acreage.”
Sully leaned in close and hissed. “I hate you.”
He laid a hand on his chest as though he were shocked. She grabbed him by the lapel and growled, “This isn’t a joke. This isn’t a game we’re playing. From this day forward all of your bullshit about friendship is over. I hate you.”
She snapped her forehead forward into his face and let go of his jacket. He rocked backward with the impact, flipping his chair over and landing on the rubble, piss and broken glass of his new office floor. By the time he was back on his feet with blood streaming out of his nose, Sully was scribbling her signature on the papers.
Ogden drifted back into the room and pretended not to see the state of the Prime Minister. He bent to work beside Sully, signing in his own elaborate handwriting as she finished. Sully recognized with a shudder it was the same script that was branded on poor Bertie Collinwood’s dead hide. She glared again at Leonard and then dropped the pen on his desk with a clatter. “Congratulations, Leonard. You’re the boss now. Don’t screw it up.”
She turned to Ogden. “Hey, are all demons on your side or just the relatives of your pet ones?”
Ogden raised an eyebrow. “I believe that our non-aggression pact extends to all members of their race.”
Sully held up a hand to make him pause. “What I’m asking is, if we let a bunch of demons loose, will they attack who we want them to attack?”
Ogden tilted his head from side to side in consideration. “They are extremely trustworthy and we already have contacts with them across the planes. We could certainly talk to them about it. We share a common enemy, if nothing else.”
Sully glanced at him. “Why do demons hate the British?”
Ogden almost smiled. “It is not the British but the allies they’ve called upon that troubles the demons. Our world is their life boat, their escape route from being so close to the creatures of the far realm. They do not want to see holes poked in that life boat. They do not want deals being made between the powers of our world and the far realm—”
Leonard interrupted. “Regardless of these wild accusations, you cannot mean to summon more demons into the world. Think of what happened to old Europe in the Great War. The land has been lost to all of humankind.”
Sully turned back to Leonard with thinly concealed contempt. “We don’t need to summon a thing. You actually just gave us the best answer to the problem. You’re the best spell-breaker in the world, and we have a hundred magi sitting on their hands just waiting for the British to come. If it is going to be a war, let’s take the first swing. Let’s bring down the Veil of Tears.”