NEW SAINTS

That evening, Brand and I left Matthias in Queenie’s care and headed to New Saints Hospital, where Christian Saint Nicholas had been admitted ten days prior.

Brand took us by motorcycle. Early-evening rush hour hadn’t thinned enough to make it a quick commute. I took the time to review what we’d learned about Addam Saint Nicholas’s disappearance—which was a much quicker task than reviewing everything we hadn’t learned.

Addam was removed from his workplace by, or at the command, of Person Unknown. Person Unknown took Addam without any visible signs of a struggle.

Lady Justice said she’d have known if any of her children were hurt or in peril. So either her spell was defunct, or Addam wasn’t hurt or in peril, or Person Unknown was powerful enough to override or mask Lady Justice’s spell. Person Unknown also, presumably, had the magical spit to summon a gargoyle, as well as break through the Enclave’s and the Tower’s defenses to wrest control of the water elemental.

The problem was that our list of suspects didn’t exactly ring with masterminds. Between Ashton, Geoffrey, Michael, and Ella, there were more than enough red flags to warrant a second look—but none of them had what it took to break through Lord Tower’s safeguards. They just didn’t.

So how does someone without the aptitude to best Lord Tower, best Lord Tower?

They contract with someone who is powerful enough.

I couldn’t shake the memory of what I’d sensed in Addam’s office. That tinfoil-aftertaste sense of corruption. A stench like that usually came from a What, not a Who. There are plenty of evil beings in New Atlantis ready to barter away their power in service of others. Our history is full of greedy Atlanteans whose eyes were bigger than their souls.

The bike slowed. Brand parked two city blocks away from New Saints. Since there was a coffee shop on the corner, I made no protest.

As Brand eyed the surroundings in a slow three-sixty, I pulled out my wallet. It was upside down and sent loose change clattering to the pavement. When I straightened from picking it up, I saw that Brand was staring at my ass. I decided to feel flattered.

He said, “I know you’ve been bitching about your weight gain, but, honestly, I wondered where it was all going. Now I see. That is one magnificent ass. But maybe you should start jogging with me.”

I stalked into the coffee shop. Brand caught the swinging door before it hit him in the face. He said, either oblivious to or disinterested in my pique, “I overheard someone the other day say that people didn’t need to do cardio because people three hundred years ago didn’t have treadmills and they got along just fine. Can you believe that shit? People three hundred years ago also didn’t have dishwashers, laundry machines, grocery stores, or running water. Their entire fucking day was a little more complicated than moving their fat fingers toward the remote control. We—”

“Stop talking,” I said.

He caught the look on my face. “I called it magnificent.”

I placed my order and elbowed toward the barista counter. “What I don’t understand is why one of Addam’s business partners would want to harm Addam,” I said. “Geoff was right. Even if Addam is arguing with them about their investments—even if they want to take bigger risks like Michael Saint Talbot does—Addam is still far more valuable to them alive.”

“If he dies, his shares revert to the surviving partners. That’s a lot of money.”

“Sure,” I said, “but the value of those shares isn’t even close to what Addam’s continued contacts and influence are worth. Addam is their link to the Crusader Throne. It doesn’t make sense that any of them would want to remove him.”

“Unless something’s going on we don’t know about. And maybe it’s not them. Maybe Addam’s sister is involved. She’s third in line for the throne, and now Addam is missing and Christian is in the hospital.”

“But how does she think she’d get away with it? Justice may not protect, but it reacts. With a mother like hers, how could Ella get away with killing both older brothers?”

“Because Ella’s confident that no one will be able to prove anything,” Brand guessed.

I thought about that.

If Person Unknown had a way to screw with Lady Justice’s spell or Lord Tower’s control, then it wasn’t a huge leap to say they could cover their tracks—at least enough for plausible deniability.

I said, “Here’s another thing. Say they’ve hired muscle. Say Ella, or whoever, has hired a practitioner very skilled at magic—or contracted with something skilled at magic. If this hired muscle has the power to break through Lord Tower’s controls, why the hell am I still alive?”

“Because they weren’t trying to kill you,” Brand said. “Think about it. Lord Tower didn’t even believe at first that someone seized control of the elemental. He thought it was an accident—that the elemental just went haywire. And the guarda blamed the LeperCon gargoyle on a fluke of wild magic. Maybe someone is just testing boundaries, or checking how well protected you are, or seeing how annoying you’re going to be.”

“Oh, I’m plenty annoying.”

“You are,” Brand said.

“Maybe this isn’t hopeless. We know more than I thought we did.”

“Rune, we just tried to eliminate seventy-five percent of the suspects, leaving behind an anorexic woman whose aunt has to cast a glamor to keep flies from settling on her. We know shit.”

I pulled the wrapper off a straw and said, “This is why most of our assignments don’t involve anything more complicated than you shooting something and me setting fires.”

The barista handed me my iced mocha with raised eyebrows. I took it, and we headed to the hospital.

New Saints had been translocated from North Brother Island, off the coast of New York.

Built in 1885, the former Riverside Hospital spent much of its existence as quarantine for the mentally ill and contagious. Riverside had been the home of Mary Mallon, an immigrant cook and asymptomatic carrier of the typhus virus. Riverside was also the site of the 1904 General Slocum disaster, in which a remarkably stupid sailor snuck a smoke in the ship’s linen closet, starting a fire. The burning steamer foundered on the shore of North Brother. Of the eleven hundred souls lost in the tragedy, many died in the hospital’s wards as doctors and nurses pulled burn victims from the wreckage.

Psychic residue is a potent, tangible source of power. And power isn’t good or bad, just like one body of water can’t be wetter than another. Healers are just as able to plug into the remains of tragedies as death ritualists are.

Atlanteans are, by large, a practical people.

Brand and I headed down a corridor whose diamond-shaped tiles were white and red. Around us, the hospital’s magical imprint flickered in and out of existence. Brand couldn’t see it, but I could. Translucent gray bars appeared on windows; ghostly cages sprang up around hospital beds; shoelaces vanished and reappeared on passing nurses’ shoes.

“Did the Tower say anything about Matthias?” Brand asked.

I blinked. “Do you want the Tower talking about him?”

“He told you he was going to look into Matthias’s family. I know Matthias wasn’t close with his parents, but he talked about that uncle. The uncle might want to know he’s okay.”

I thought about the look on Matthias’s face when I’d mentioned his uncle.

“What?” Brand asked, almost a growl.

“I’m not sure Matthias’s uncle was . . .”

“Was what?”

“A good part of his life.”

Brand stopped. I passed him. A ghostly mental patient in a straight-jacket flickered into existence between us.

“What does that mean?” Brand asked.

“Just that . . . I want to know more before we contact Matthias’s family. Okay?”

“Sure,” he said.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“Sure,” he repeated, but slower.

We stared around us, realizing that we weren’t quite sure where to go next. Brand said, “Wait here. I’ll get the room number.”

He strode away. Annoyance simmered through our Companion bond. He’d guessed that I’d guessed that Matthias was hiding something pretty damn bleak from us. And since there weren’t many taboo subjects between Brand and I, he’d soon realize I suspected that Matthias had been abused.

Someone pssssted me from a nearby hallway.

A young man curled his fingers around the corner and leaned into view. The teen had cowlicked blond hair and wore a music festival t-shirt that was two or three sizes too big for him.

“Can you come with me?” he asked.

I said, “Probably not. Do I know you?”

“Maybe? I can’t remember. I’m Quinn. I think people are going to die if you don’t come with me. It’s not far. I don’t know why we can’t talk here, but we can’t. The floor’s not right.”

He smiled at me as if what he said made perfect sense.

I said, “Quinn? Quinn Saint Nicholas? Are you Addam’s brother?”

“Come on!”

He took off at a trot, without even looking over his shoulder to make sure I followed. He hit a fork, frowned at his feet, and darted left.

Brand was still out of sight. He had his cell phone with him, though, and he’d know through the Companion bond that I wasn’t in trouble. “Shit,” I decided, and ran after Quinn.

I transmuted my sabre as I jogged. The metal wrist-guard stretched taffy thin and scraped over my knuckles, then hardened into hilt form as I flipped it over my palm. On top of that, my sigils were freshly loaded. If the boy was leading me into a trap, I’d roll into it like a tank.

The corridor opened into an acre of white marble ringed by Corinthian pillars. Overhead, a domed crystal roof was flushed with sun, producing an overall effect more like snow-blindness than illumination.

Quinn stood in the middle of the rotunda, looking around with a baffled expression.

“Why did we have to come here?” I asked. “Who is going to die?”

“We come here because this is the floor where we talk. Blood looks really-really red on it.”

“Did you just threaten me?” I asked softly.

His startled gaze snapped toward me. “Why would I do that? I’d never hurt you!”

“You’d . . . This is nuts. You are Addam’s brother, aren’t you?”

“I am. Haven’t we met yet? And I’m not sure what’s wrong. Or—well, I mean, many things are wrong. I just don’t know what’s going to go wrong now.” He gave me a helpless look.

Was he a half-wit? I hadn’t heard that Justice had a half-wit son, which was strange, because scion gossip was parasitic and pervasive and loved to find weakness in Arcana courts. I said, “Quinn, does your family know you’re here?”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“Loud and slow, like I don’t speak English. I don’t think they know I’m here. They don’t much care where I am, unless Addam makes them care. I thought I came to see Christian, but it wasn’t about Christian at all, it was about you. You’re why I’m here. Aren’t you?”

All of a sudden, I realized I’d heard Quinn’s voice before. “You called me yesterday. You asked me if it was time for us to meet. Then you told me the motor was running.”

“I did?” he asked me. His face split into a grin. “I did! I remember now. Did you find the duct tape? It was very clever of me, wasn’t it?”

Brand had found duct tape on the dashboard of the car he stole. The car that was outside the gas pump, across the street from where I was attacked. Had Brand told me the engine was running? The skin on the back of my neck began to itch.

“Did you know a gargoyle was going to attack us?” I asked. “Did you leave the car there?”

“Clever,” he stressed.

“Quinn, how did you know that?”

“Well, I didn’t know for sure, not always, just most of the time. You almost always need my help, so that Brand can find a way in and save you. It takes too long for you to do what you need to do, otherwise.”

I said, “You’re a fucking seer.”

I have always, always mistrusted seers. I have always had reason to.

It started when a female seer made a prophecy. She was friends with my father; there was a party with lots of alcohol; and over my crib she pronounced: “He will be the most beautiful man of his generation.”

Other people were in the room. Word got out. I’ve tripped over that godsdamn prophecy time after time after time. It made it so easy for people to mock me.

I had other reasons to dislike seers, too. They almost never saw the future clearly enough to do more than cause it. The ones with limited ability prostituted their talent or outright lied; and the ones with a true gift were smart enough to hide from you when you came looking for them.

It wasn’t obvious where Quinn Saint Nicholas fit in the spectrum, but I had a feeling the universe was going to make me find out.

My cell phone vibrated. Brand had texted, in all-caps, “THE FUCK.”

I held up a finger to Quinn while speed-dialing Brand, who answered by saying, “I’ll put a fucking bell around your neck. See if I don’t.”

I told him where Quinn and I were. He got quiet and professional, and snapped his phone shut without a response.

“That was Brand!” Quinn said excitedly. “I miss Brand. He’ll make me laugh. Why did you never try to kiss him a second time? Is it because he pushed you into the water?”

“Oh,” I said, more of an exhale than a word. I’d once gotten drunk and kissed Brand, the day after my thirteenth birthday. He’d kissed me back, shoved me into the swimming pool, and never spoke of it again.

“Are you mad? You look mad,” Quinn said, nervously.

“You really don’t want to read my thoughts, Quinn Saint Nicholas.”

His face fell. “Oh. I forgot. You don’t like seers.” Then he burst into another delighted smile. “But you like me anyway. You kissed me on the eyebrow once. And you’ll hit the bully with a barstool after he calls me a freak. Or at least you do most of the time. Sometimes Addam grabs the stool first. Once I was very brave and kicked him in the shin myself.”

He’s seeing probabilities, I told myself.

And because it was such an unlikely thing, I repeated, He is seeing probabilities.

A moment ago, I was wondering if Quinn was sane. Now I was thinking he wasn’t insane enough.

“Quinn,” I said. He’d known about the time I’d kissed Brand. He’d left the car outside the scene of the gargoyle attack. “If you’re a seer then . . . Do you know where Addam is? Do you know if he’s hurt?”

“No. I don’t. I can’t—” His eyes went glassy, and he rubbed his nose onto the shoulder of his t-shirt. “I can’t see him. But that’s what I think I’m supposed to tell you. That’s what I remember telling you. I remember that you’re standing right here, on this floor, and I tell you that you’re asking all the wrong questions. You’re too caught up on the What and Who. The reason my mother can’t find Addam is a Where.”

Where?

There were places on the island that interfered with everyday magic; places crazy with wild magic and null zones. The Westlands. The prisoner cells in the Convocation building. Anything to do with the Anchorite’s court. Now there was a mad fuck.

Quinn’s face twisted in concentration. “I can only see a little. I think there are . . . ghosts. And a dried river. And a desert. I definitely see a desert filled with sand and broken glass. Ciaran will tell you more. He’s waiting for you at the bar with the ice cubes. Make sure you bring Max.”

“Wait, what? Ciaran? I have to talk to Ciaran? Godsdamnit. And who’s Max?”

“But,” Quinn said, and looked upset. “I could have sworn you’d meet Max by now. It doesn’t make any sense otherwise.”

“Do you mean Matthias?”

“Oh. No. He’d rather be called Max. He’ll tell you.” Quinn smiled, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to clear up.

My head started to hurt. A bar with ice cubes? What kind of bar didn’t have ice cubes? And there were no deserts on the island. And Ciaran? I didn’t want to share a city block with the principality known as Ciaran, let alone a conversation.

I reached out and touched Quinn’s shoulder to make him focus. The collar of his t-shirt was frayed, and the tip of my finger brushed his bare skin.

A rush of power arose, so potent that it manifested as a spiraling breeze. I jerked away from Quinn, furious at myself, because nothing ever good came from touching a seer. Damn my eyes if I’d triggered a prophecy. I already had enough of those in my life.

A look of horror spread across Quinn’s face. While his hair blew into his eyes, he hid his mouth behind a hand and said, “Oh gods oh gods oh gods, what is it? It’s like a hole in reality. It will want to touch your face, because you are food to it, and then everything will start in the middle again, and oh oh oh oh there are storms, and they’re alive, and there are waves as big as buildings, and we’re all a school of fish trapped in a bottle, but none of this happens at once. And . . . and . . . and . . .”

He went still. A bright bead of red appeared under one of his nostrils. It grew like a soap bubble, then burst and ran down his lip. I said, a little dazed, “You have a nosebleed. Quinn. You need to—” I mimed tilting my head back.

There was a handkerchief poking out of his jeans pocket, scored with drops of dried blood. I tugged it out and waved it in front of his eyes. When he didn’t respond, I covered my fingers with my shirt sleeve, and stuffed the handkerchief in Quinn’s hands.

After a few seconds, Quinn started to blink and shake his head. He touched his bleeding nose with the tissue. He whispered, “I’ve made a mess again, haven’t I?”

“It’s okay.”

“Are you very mad at me?”

“Why would I be mad?” I asked.

“When I have nosebleeds, sometimes, it means I told people things they don’t always want to hear. If Addam were here, he’d take me to another room. He’d stay with me until I was okay. He gets upset when people are angry with me.”

“Addam sounds . . . like a good brother.”

Quinn’s eyes filled with tears. He balled up the handkerchief and cleaned the rest of his face with efficient, practiced swipes.

He said, in a harder voice, “Animals kill their runts. I saw it on a TV show about birds. The baby runt bird gets shoved out of the nest. The runt’s brothers and sisters won’t waste food on the runt, because most of the time a runt won’t survive. I’m a runt. I take food from my brothers. I make them weaker by being alive. But they’ve never blamed me. Never. Especially Addam. I’m so scared.” Quinn took a step toward me so that his face was close to mine. His breath smelled like grape chewing gum. “If Addam dies, I won’t make it.”

“It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine, Quinn.”

“You don’t understand. It’ll either be with rope, or in a bathtub. I don’t know why I don’t just steal Ella’s sleeping pills. I’m much less scared of swallowing pills than I am of cutting myself. But all those times that Addam dies and leaves me, all I see are ropes and bathtubs. But . . . of all the ways that Addam can be saved, it’s you on the path.”

He blinked. “Oh. Brand is coming now. We won’t be able to talk alone anymore. Don’t tell him I almost cried.”

I turned just in time to see Brand stalk into the rotunda. Ashton Saint Gabriel dogged his footsteps, and Brand didn’t look so happy about that.

“We’re okay?” Brand asked me.

“We’re fine,” I said. “Ashton Saint Gabriel. What a coincidence.”

The scion had on a tight, shimmery gray shirt that complimented his reflective corneas, and cologne that was presumably trendy given how awful it smelled.

He said, “It’s not a coincidence at all. Your visit was unsettling. I thought I’d talk with Addam’s brother Christian to see if he knew where Addam was.”

Quinn was frowning. When it came to real seers, even I had to admit that it paid to study their nonverbals. I said, “Why don’t we see what Addam’s brother Quinn has to say about it.”

“Of course,” Ashton said, and turned an uncomfortable look on the teenager. “Good day, Quinn. It’s a surprise to see you without an escort. Does your family know you’re alone?”

“Why don’t I know why you’re here?” Quinn asked bluntly.

Brand blinked and gave me a look. It made me blink, too, but for different reasons. “Quinn, what does that mean?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s hard to figure that part out right now. The attack is too loud. Oh. We’re about to be attacked. They have grenades.”

“He’s a seer!” I said, but Brand had already drawn a knife.

While Ashton stared at us dumbly, I ran a thumb across my white-gold ring. The Fire spell I’d stored flushed through me like a fever. I siphoned the magic into my sabre hilt to bolster the firebolts. “Are you armed?” I said. “Ashton! Are you armed?”

“But there’s no one there,” he said, gaping at the rotunda exits.

I touched my mother’s cameo. A Shield formed a crystalline light-construct over my free hand. I kept it there, rather than draw it across my body. You can’t stab grenades; we needed another strategy. “Quinn, are you armed?”

“I have a Shield spell, too,” he said. “And I can make a Door.”

“Open one,” I ordered, just as a grenade skittered into the rotunda.

It slid glassily along the marble floor. I sent my Shield outward, and slammed a small dome over the grenade. It jerked, and the dome lit up like a small white sun.

Two more grenades slid toward us. I threw a Shield over the first. Brand ran forward, grabbed the second, and fast-balled it back into the hallway. It vanished into an unnatural curtain of shadow that had billowed up to hide our attackers.

“We’re in a bloody hospital!” I shouted at him. “Bystanders!”

“Don’t even!” he snapped back, because he was my Companion, and he’d let the entire building fall around our ears as long as he could keep me safe.

A fourth grenade was lobbed. I shot it with a firebolt. It made a crackling sound and caved in on itself like melting plastic.

There was still no sign of our attackers behind the black mist. Ashton was standing there like a trauma victim. We were in a godsdamn hospital with patients in the crossfire.

And then bullets began firing from a second corridor. The first barrage clipped Ashton in the arm and coughed powdered marble at my feet.

“Quinn, the Door!” I shouted, using Fire to superheat the air in front of us. Molten sparks blossomed as the bullets incinerated.

Ashton had fallen when he’d been shot. He staggered to his feet, blood droplets splattering against the ground. They were obscenely red against the snowy white.

The bullets were quickly devouring my Fire’s duration. To buy time, I divided my Shield and sent it whistling across the rotunda in two separate directions. Semi-visible blockades rippled into life at the mouths of both corridors, pinged with pinpoint flares as they absorbed gunshots and grenades or whatever the hell else they were throwing at us. The shields would not hold long.

Quinn still hadn’t released his Door. I yelled, “Do it!”

“But I can’t go!” he cried. “I can’t! I’ll die! Every time, I die, because I’m not good enough to fight them, and they’re always there. And you can’t stay here, because if you do you may die, which means Addam dies, and I need you to save him. So take this! I give it freely. Your Will is now its Will.”

He’d pulled a small disc from a slot on his decorative belt and dropped it into my hands.

One of my Shields vanished with a static popping sound. A grenade came at us. I took it out with a firebolt, and then filmed the hallway opening with the last dregs of my Fire. The crackling edges of a flaming barrier blackened the white walls.

Looking down, I saw the disc was a sigil. Quinn had given me a sigil.

I thrust it back at him, but he danced sideways and said, “A lot of times, you give it back. Go! Hurry!”

“I can’t just leave you here!”

Brand wrapped his fingers in the collar of my shirt and said, “Activate it. You,” he said, glaring at Ashton. “Get your fucking act together!”

Ashton stared at his torn shirt and bleeding arm. Numbly, he raised a hand and touched his copper-colored necklace. As the barricade on the south wall unraveled for good. Ashton held up an arm and unleashed a roar of Wind. Bullets met the gale and ricocheted, scoring the wall.

I closed my fingers around Quinn’s sigil and released its stored spell.

The Door manifested as a black circle in mid-air, rimmed by a narrow band of yellowing light. A twisting funnel trailed behind the circle.

I’d need to give it a direction, and fast, or risk corrupting the spell— which was a good way to translocate your ass into the middle of a wall. “Quinn, there’s got to be a direction that’s safe. Think.”

Behind me I heard the wail of Ashton’s Wind. A stun grenade was deflected the way it came, filling the unnatural black veil with a flash of lightning so powerful that, for a moment, it revealed men in black clothing. The men went down like bowling pins.

Quinn said, “Outside? Through that wall?” He turned, and just as quickly shook his head no. “The roof? No, not the roof, most of the time it collapses on the babies. I can’t—it’s hard to—” Fresh blood began to trickle over the crusted streaks under his nose. He dropped his gaze. “Steam tunnels! They’ll come for you, even down there, but you can run. You need to find Ciaran and let the ghosts eat first and run toward the people on the corner and leave the bug alone. And tell Addam I love him!”

I didn’t catch him quick enough.

He dropped to the ground while projecting his Shield into a dark semi-sphere that covered him. Just like that, he was as good as lost to us.

“Finish it!” Brand demanded, pointing at the unanchored Door.

I gave the magic a direction. The funnel end whipped around and sliced into the ground. Brand kicked Ashton in the ass, shoving him through. Then he grabbed my arm and pulled me with him.

The light went crazy.

Gravity went insane.

A slope became a vertical fall.

I smashed into concrete. Dust swirled into my nostrils, heavy with mold and age. Brand was already on his feet. I had time to see that we were in a narrow brick corridor before the portal closed. It took the last shred of light with it, leaving us in unrelieved blackness.

Ashton, who’d landed under my legs, croaked a light cantrip. It manifested as a scotch-colored flame above our heads. Like Quinn had said, we were in steam tunnels, built to house the massive iron pipes that heated the hospital. The pipes had long since rusted with disuse.

“Who,” Ashton tried to ask, but his voice shook so bad that he couldn’t finish. He cleared his throat and said, louder, “This is outrageous. Who in their wretched mind would attack sons of the Arcanum? It’s an act of war.”

“Hey!” Brand said, poking Ashton’s chest. “Dial it the fuck down. We’re not safe yet.”

Ashton knocked Brand’s hand away. “Touch me again and I’ll have you whipped.”

My vision went red. I grabbed Ashton’s jaw before he could say anything else, and slammed him against the wall.

I said, “You’re a scion who took over a minute to release his spells in an ambush. He’s a Companion who grabbed a grenade with his bare hands and threw it at our enemies. Who do you think needs to be whipped? Shut up and follow orders. There will be plenty of time later to bleat about your hurt feelings. Brand?”

Brand had pulled a black skull cap from his back pocket and was tugging it over his bangs. “Let’s go that way. Ashton, keep the cantrip going. If we get in trouble, stay the fuck out of Rune’s line of fire.”

We headed in the direction Brand had chosen.

Ashton’s face kept working like he had something to say. Finally, in a grudging tone, he said, “Addam has really been kidnapped, hasn’t he? Someone tried to kill us because of it.”

“Not kill,” Brand said. “Not right away, at least. They were using stun grenades and darts.”

“Darts?” I said. “Not bullets?” I thought about it, and drew together a few other puzzling details. “I think the grenade fragments were rigged to self-destruct. It was a nonlethal trap.”

“Maybe,” Brand said. “And maybe they would have rigged an accident, once we were down. Something that explained our deaths. But now they messed up, and they messed up in front of witnesses.”

I said, “They’ve compromised themselves. Which means they’re going to get a little more blunt in their attentions. They can’t risk letting us leave.”

On cue, wind surged around us. It was so cold that at first I thought it was a blast of heat, burning my nostrils and lungs. Worse, it carried the taste of carrion and death magic.

Brand said, “Everyone on your toes. Rune, spells ready.”

We turned a corner and entered an untended section of the subbasement. Cobwebs, crusty with grime and desiccated insect corpses, broke against my outstretched sabre hilt. The tunnel opened up into a massive room with stone arcs and a vaulted ceiling. There were channels on the ground for floodwater. Old crates lay in splintered piles.

We were halfway across the room when they attacked.

Two men wide and six men deep. They had skin like spoiled milk, and their seeping, gangrenous flesh was stuffed into black turtlenecks and jeans. They wore holsters filled with knife blades. Some had guns. They made no noise, exchanged no words. Their feet whispered over the cement floor as they ran.

Brand wiped his free hand over his chest harness. A blade slid into it, made of volcanic glass inlaid with strips of coral. A special blade for a special enemy: he’d already figured out what they were. I said, quickly, “Ashton, they’re recarnates; they can see in the dark. Don’t let the light go out.”

“And stay out of our way,” Brand added.

I punched the first recarnate, my shoulder shrugging up to cover my face. It ducked and stabbed at me. I blocked its forearm, jabbed, caught it on the chin. Brittle bone crunched.

While it was off-balance, I nailed it with a spinning backfist. It staggered back, nearly falling. I kicked it into another recarnate, then shot a firebolt through its eye.

Three recarnates swarmed past me. Brand engaged two; Ashton paired off with the third. The bulk of them were in front of me.

I ran a thumb over Elena’s emerald ring.

A Frost spell shivered loose. I sent a frigid gale howling toward the dead men, freezing the pus on their cheeks and hardening their joints. I spun, punched, kicked. Decayed tooth enamel spit from a broken jaw; a jagged arm bone sliced free from cadaverous flesh. I stopped one recarnate with a close-range firebolt strengthened by the last gasps of my Fire spell. The overpowered firebolt created an entry wound so large that my arm almost slipped through it.

A lull—measured in heartbeats—gave me enough time to look for Brand and Ashton. Brand was surrounded by corpses, and his two knives dripped with black gelatinous blood. Ashton was attacking recarnates with showy, epic blows that completely left him open to ripostes.

In front of me, two recarnates dropped to their knees. A third loomed over them. Some sort of scoped gun rested on its shoulder. I spun to the left as it fired, and the bullets made a pneumatic hissing sound. Darts.

The three of them were lined up, so I pulled the remainder of the Frost magic into my hands and sent it outward in a cone. Dead skin whitened in hideous, flash-frozen patterns.

I jumped them. Fingers snapped off on triggers; a jaw caved in; one of them lost a hand. I focused my willpower on my sabre hilt, and a blade began to boil outward. I lengthened it into a garnet katana and cut the rest of the recarnates to pieces.

It was over in seconds. My last swipe divided a recarnate in half. Its skin, covered in tattoos from its human life, split like old parchment, revealing a mess of organs and black, oily blood.

“Some of them are still moving,” Brand said in the silence that followed. There was a gash on his forehead, bleeding freely.

“Put them in a pile,” I said.

Brand and I kicked body parts toward the center of the room while Ashton stood around uselessly. The upper half of one of the recarnates stared at me with sentient eyes that burned with rage at its desecration.

Someone had pulled their bodies from the ground and done this to them. Someone had raised them. It was a magic so unpalatable that I couldn’t name a single court that still engaged in it.

I sent willpower into my thigh sigil. The magic slid out like the pin of a grenade. My Shatter spell turned the corpses into bits and vapor. Pieces caught fire, making a sound like fat popping on a hot skillet. I felt it when their souls feathered past me, returning to wherever they’d been torn from.

“This is an abomination,” I said softly.

“We’re not out of this yet,” Brand said. “Let’s find a door.”

“I bet if we—” I started to say, and my stomach spasmed with nausea. I dropped to my knees as Brand’s outstretched hand slipped off my shoulder.

Through a daze of illness, I saw a hooded man standing on the other side of the room.

Brand started to speak. Ashton was saying something. Everything was dulled to distortion.

Then a wave of power washed from the man, thick with death magic. The world came loose. Literally loose. A huge bite of reality tore free around the man—slats from the crates, chunks of the cement floor, the dust and dirt that our fight had churned up—and began to spin around him.

He flung it at us.

The nail of a board dug a wire-thin slash across my cheek. A chunk of stone scraped the skin off my knuckles. Another chunk smashed the bones in my left elbow. My arm dropped, useless, as Brand pulled me to the ground and covered me with his body. Through the V of Brand’s armpit, I saw Ashton dive behind a pillar.

Debris pattered. A moment passed. My ears were ringing so bad that I couldn’t hear a thing. Brand was a dead weight on top of me. I felt warm liquid drip off his head and onto my eyebrow. He was alive, but unconscious, which didn’t make me any less terrified for him.

I pulled Brand off and crawled between him and our attacker. My sense of peril was a small, living thing; it scraped and clawed up my throat.

The man walked closer to me. I think I shouted. When he was near, I realized that he was dead. He was an it, a recarnate. A raised body. Which was not possible. A recarnate could not fling magic around like that.

It wore a plain brown cowl, pulled deep over its head. It reeked of over-ripe citrus and unwashed flesh. Laid over that smell was the crisp and incongruent odor of new linen.

It lifted a bone-white hand. A band of parasites crawled around one knuckle in a parody of a ring.

The creature spoke in my head. It said, in fascination, What are you?

Which was just too fucking funny. What was I? I tried to cough a reply, but it made no sense. Blood and spit speckled the backs of my hands. My smashed elbow hurt so much that I nearly passed out.

The thing said, You smell like abasement. You smell delicious.

It reached for my face.

Suddenly, Brand grabbed my shoulders and threw me backward. He was covered in blood. My panic solidified into strategy. I showed him my fist, the one with a rarely, rarely used sigil. Brand went pale and dove to the ground behind me.

I don’t know if the creature read my mind. Maybe it was only its instinct for self-preservation. But just before I was about to unleash Exodus, it stepped backward and held up its arms in a type of surrender.

It said, I have missed so much, if things such as you walk this world.

Rotting waves of power washed from it. What I’d thought was surrender became something else, as it pulled the roof down.

There was a parking lot above our heads. An entire section of it— painted asphalt, cars, a cement bench—fell down into the basement.

Dust mushroomed. The creature vanished behind the blockage.

We got the hell out of there ourselves, before a car could drop on our heads.