November 2, 2015

Rewriting the Inferno must have worked eventually, because about an hour before dawn Sully woke up with her face stuck to her notes and an ache in her back screaming to remind her that she was heading toward fifty years old, even if magic was preserving her looks. Marie’s fingers were in her hair, brushing out the tangles of yesterday. She leaned in close and whispered, “You really can’t take care of yourself, darlin’.”

Sully mumbled, “Good thing I’ve got you to take care of me then.”

Marie’s fingers tightened in her hair and Sully let out a grunt. “Darlin’, do you have any idea why my daddy was acting so strange last night after he came back up to the main house?”

Sully yawned and peeled the paper off her face. “Probably because I asked him for permission to marry you.”

Marie bit her lip as Sully tried to stretch the kink out of her back until finally she couldn’t wait any more and she blurted out, “D’you think you could have asked me first?”

“You can’t ask permission for something you’ve already done. Just forgiveness.” Sully staggered to her feet and carefully placed a kiss on Marie’s cheek. “I wanted to do things right this time around. Since it’s going to be forever. I had to ask your dad first.”

Marie was glowering at her. “Are you going to ask me now?”

“He hasn’t given me permission yet,” Sully smirked. Marie put a hand to her mouth to cover her involuntarily lengthening fangs. Sully’s smirks held promises. There was a knock on the guest house door before either of them could go any further. Marie whispered, “They were still asleep when I snuck out.”

An angry Jeremiah on her doorstep would have been a relief compared to what Sully found. When she opened the door, Magus Ogden was waiting for her, sweeping off his hat and bowing. Sully scowled at him, hard, but her scowls never seemed to penetrate his aura of perfect confidence. “Good morning, Miss Sullivan.”

“I know you’ve been away for a while, but morning traditionally starts when the sun is up there.” Sully pointed at the purple darkness above them.

“Then I suppose that I have been traveling through the night to come and see you.”

In his tricorn hat and overcoat, Ogden looked perfectly at home in the little courtyard. Places like this probably hadn’t changed since he was around the first time, before his little trip to the far planes. Sully sighed, “Come in then. Before you scare the farmers.”

“Why, thank you.”

Sully fussed with the kettle while Marie stood in the doorway behind Ogden and scowled at the back of his head. Even Sully couldn’t burn water, so eventually two cups of instant coffee found their way onto the breakfast bar. If Ogden could taste how bad it was, he was too polite to mention it. “You know that you caused quite a stir the other night, flouncing out of that diplomatic function. The ambassador was quite offended. The Prime Minister considered it to be pretty rude.”

Sully growled, “I figured that melting that condescending prick’s face off would probably have been a bigger diplomatic incident.”

“What on earth did Ambassador Red Bear say to provoke such ire?” Ogden was grinning.

Sully bit back her first response and then took a long calming sip of the scalding, godawful coffee. “He was rude about my girlfriend.”

Ogden threw back his head and laughed. “In all the time that I have been back I don’t think that I have met this girl who is always getting you into trouble. I am starting to suspect that she is just an excuse for you to avoid late night meetings and yell at politicians. I am not sure that she even exists.”

Sully put the cup down carefully, her scowl twisting into confusion. “Marie is standing right behind you.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course she is.”

“No. She really is.”

Marie stepped forward. “What in the nine hells?”

Ogden was smiling at Sully indulgently. “I am sorry, Miss Sullivan, but we are the only people in the building.”

Sully leaned back on her stool. The cogs of her mind whirred into action despite the ungodly earliness of the hour. “Marie, could you poke Magus Ogden in the back of the head?”

Ogden started to frown. “Miss Sullivan—”

He leapt out of his seat with a yelp when Marie prodded him, spinning around on the spot and knocking his coffee all over the floor. “What was that?”

“That was Marie.” Sully snorted.

“Sullivan, I do not know what tricks you are playing, or how, but I am warning you—”

“Oh, shut up for a minute. This is fascinating.”

Marie looked giddy. “He really can’t see me? This is so weird!”

Sully was tapping her fingers on the counter, rattling out the rhythm of her thoughts. “This has to be a vampire thing. Demons can’t sense vampires, can’t really see them unless they are right on top of them. This must be the same. The Magi of Manhattan were exposed to much higher levels of ambient magic in the Far Realms than anyone here experiences and they adapted to the saturation. That is why they can store so much more of it, why it comes to them so much more naturally.”

Marie was dancing in a circle waving her hands in front of Ogden’s face and giggling. Ogden looked anything but amused, and for the very first time Sully caught a glimpse of fear on his features. “Are you trying to tell me that there is a vampire in this room?”

Sully stopped smiling. “Her name is Marie.”

“I don’t care if she is Her Majesty, Victoria, the Queen of England. You are telling me that vampires could be all around me at any moment and I wouldn’t even realize until they were touching me? Not only me, but also all my brothers and sisters in Manhattan? Wasn’t it you who told me that the British deploy vampire soldiers against demons? What is to stop them from—”

He took a deep breath and calmed himself. “There are very few vampires left in the Americas. Nobody needs to know about this. I can rely on your . . . on Marie’s discretion?”

Marie nodded solemnly, and Sully did her best not to laugh at the expression on her face. “She won’t say a word to anybody.”

Ogden brushed himself for imaginary lint and then settled back into his seat. “All is well then.” He frowned. “How often has she been there when I was talking to you?”

“We just assumed that you were rude.”

He turned slowly to look around the room, glancing at Sully for confirmation as he went. When she nodded, he said, a little too loudly, “I apologize for any offense that I gave, Miss Marie. I was not made aware of your presence.”

Marie had drifted right around Ogden to come stand beside Sully behind his back. She let out a delighted giggle. “Oh, he’s a charmer. You never told me he was a charmer.”

Sully pursed her lips and Marie took it as an invitation. What should have been a chaste peck grew deeper as Marie leaned in against Sully’s shoulder. Ogden coughed loudly and Marie pulled away giggling. “I just made you make fish-lips at your army-wizard work buddy.”

Ogden was staring, a little perplexed, at Sully, but she discounted him for a moment. “What was that all about?” she asked Marie.

“Just saying goodbye properly, darlin’. He’s here to drag you off to work again. I figured I would just stay here with my folks and try to smooth out some of the strangeness you made by tossing a dowry at Daddy.”

Sully spluttered. “I was just being polite. You told me they were old fashioned. And besides, I’m not going anywhere.”

Ogden coughed again, more forcefully, “Actually the Prime Minister sent me here to collect you—and I quote, ‘by any means necessary’—for the strategy meeting this afternoon.”

Marie quirked an eyebrow at her and Sully grumbled. “Fine.”

After a hasty change into a new Hawaiian shirt and the battered leather jacket that Sully had won off of a were-snake in Laos, they went out into the courtyard and prepared their spells. With the lock on portals and teleportation that the Magi had leveled on the American continent to keep the British out, there were limited options for travel beyond the slow, mundane ones. Ogden had been using a flying spell for centuries, but despite the relative ease with which Sully had learned it, she still wasn’t entirely comfortable flitting around the sky. It felt simultaneously alien and all too familiar. She conjured a parasol for Marie to see her safely back to the house now that the sun was rising and kissed her goodbye. Marie murmured into her mouth as she pulled away, “Don’t be gone too long, darlin’, I’ll miss you.”

Sully gave her a wink, then launched herself up into the red dawn sky.

It wasn’t easy to talk with the wind whipping past his face, but Ogden still tried. Incessantly. “Did you really think that the Prime Minister would let you vanish in the middle of planning the first offensive action of the war?”

“I was due a holiday. I’ve been in every planning meeting for months. All that is left is for your people to finish the damn spell. Until that is done, I am as useful as a decorative fern.”

“And what if I told you that the spell was complete?”

“Then I’d call you a liar.”

Ogden laughed loudly into the bandana he had wrapped around his face. Sully wished she had borrowed a scarf from Clementine. She was genuinely concerned that she was going to swallow a fly while going fifty miles an hour.

He spun in to fly closer to her, lying on his back in the air. “You are correct in your assumption. The Magi still work diligently on your spell. Even so, you must have known that you would not be allowed—”

“Allowed what? A whole five minutes to myself without some tool in a suit talking to me like I’m there to make his coffee?” Sully poured a little extra power into the spell and shot off ahead of Ogden. The rush of frigid wind biting into her cheeks was less painful than listening to him prattling on. He caught up to her within a few minutes and she could tell at a glance that he was smirking under the salt-crusted cloth on his face. She pointedly ignored him and tried to keep herself pointed due north.

They had almost made it to the border of New England Province when the hair on the back of Sully’s neck started to stand up and her arcane senses started to scream at her. She spun herself to glower at Ogden. “I suppose I’m meant to think this is just a coincidence?”

She could feel the wind of powerful wings beating against her skin. She could taste the blood of the battlefield. Ogden didn’t even look ashamed. “I see no reason to hide my movements from one of my oldest friends and closest allies, Sullivan. I do not know why you are so afraid—”

She cut him off. “I’m not scared of shit. But you know I don’t want to hang around with—”

Mol Kalath dropped out of the cloud bank above them, moisture turning to steam as it rolled off the oily black feathers of its wings. From a distance it could have been mistaken for a crow, albeit a crow of impossible proportions, but as it swung in close Sully could see the six burning green eyes arrayed around its head, and the way that its torso tapered so that it had a silhouette almost like a feather-coated snake’s. The smell of brimstone still clung to Mol Kalath despite the time it had spent away from the hells and the stench rolled over Sully, even here in the open air. The demon closed the distance between them, only seeming to remember at the last moment that it was not swooping down to grab her. Its beak creaked open. “GREETINGS TO YOU, IONA SULLIVAN. GREETINGS TO YOU, MAGUS OGDEN.”

Demons had no inside voices.

“Greetings to you, Mol Kalath, it is a beautiful day for a flight,” Ogden bellowed back. Maybe neither of them had inside voices. Sully had certainly never heard Ogden whisper.

“YOUR SKIES ARE STRANGE. TOO SMOOTH AND TOO STILL. AT HOME THERE IS FLUX AND TURBULENCE. STORMS THAT LAST GENERATIONS. WINDS THAT WOULD STRIP YOUR MORTAL FLESH FROM YOUR BONES.”

Sully shuddered, mentally blaming it on the cold rather than revulsion. It seemed to catch the demon’s attention. “I HAVE COME TO SEEK AUDIENCE WITH YOU, IONA SULLIVAN. THERE ARE THINGS THAT YOU MUST KNOW. THINGS THAT ONLY I CAN TEACH YOU.”

Mol Kalath had been pursuing her politely but relentlessly since Manhattan had returned from the far plane. The only benefit to the ridiculous work schedule that the new Prime Minister had been inflicting on her was that it gave her an excuse to avoid the demon. Right now, there was nothing but dead air between her, it, and New Amsterdam. She calculated the distance in her head.

“If I’ve survived this long without knowing, I’ll manage a bit longer.”

Sully put on another burst of acceleration, leaving the two gigantic pains in her ass spinning in her wake. For one glorious moment both Ogden and the demon shrank away to nothing but dark spots on the horizon, then they gave chase.

At first Sully tried to lose them by flitting through cloud banks, but both her pursuers were far more accustomed to flight than she and they closed on her easily. She couldn’t beat them on skill and she couldn’t beat the power of either a demon or a magus. She grinned, then she plummeted from the sky as though someone had cut her strings. She dropped a few layers of shielding ahead of her as she fell, and they wrapped around her like a cocoon, taking the friction from the air and dissipating it around her into a pleasant warmth. By the time she was about to hit the covered bridge beneath her, she was almost comfortable. She changed direction so hard that her neck snapped back and for one agonizing second she thought that she had done herself permanent harm, before the jarring pain started to fade. With the added momentum of the fall and another push of power, she opened up the gap between herself and the demon. She couldn’t keep up this pace forever but she didn’t need to, she just had to reach New Amsterdam before the demon could make itself heard.

New England Province was a darker shade of green than the farmlands that had made up most of their flight. The color felt rich to Sully as she rushed back to the only place that had ever felt like home. Forests that would have been stripped clear for farmland in other provinces were allowed to flourish here. The British might have mutilated their share of this continent for centuries, but they still liked to have somewhere nice to walk their dogs on the weekend. Sully swung low enough that the beating of her invisible wings ruffled the leaves on the treetops as she sped along. Mol Kalath was still trailing along up in the clouds. If it had been brave enough to come down and risk bumping its pinfeathers, Sully would have had to fly underneath the canopy, and would likely have crashed into a tree trunk for her troubles. She suspected that the demon knew that and was hanging back as a courtesy, which only irritated her more. She knew that her behavior was irrational and that demons were the allies of America—in the abstract she could accept that—but face to face with that creature she still felt the bone-deep terror that the nuns back in Catholic school had spent so long trying to instill in her. She hated feeling that fear, and she hated the big bird for making her feel that way, even if it didn’t mean to. Especially if it didn’t mean to.

Before too long, houses began to appear beneath her, the frayed fringes of suburbia stretching out into the beauty of the wilds. She slowed just a little, easing the drain on her reserves in case of a crisis. The city was as big, beautiful and lethal as it had ever been, climbing up over the horizon like a rampaging titan, surrounded by its own personal aura of smog and human suffering. Sully grinned as home came into sight. She didn’t get to look in on the monster from the outside very often; usually she was in the belly of the beast. Even after all this time she still got choked up just looking at it. The strange spires of Manhattan had been an unwelcome addition to the skyline, but she had gotten used to them eventually. What she couldn’t stand was the milky white expanse beyond the city where the barrier spells were layered against the British bombardment. You couldn’t even hear the explosions. The Magi of Manhattan had done amazing work. She swept by the sentry stations posted around the city proper and felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention as she was inspected by the multitudes of spells designed to spot intruders. She could have done without that, too.

The Brooklyn Municipal Building wasn’t the tallest in the city, but the brassy quality of its fixtures made it stand out despite its lowly stature, that and the cloud of complex magical protections that had been layered over it. Sully drifted down to land on a balcony, staring down the barrels of a half-dozen rifles as usual.

“Gentlemen, if you don’t point those somewhere else, I’m going to shove them up your asses.”

She could hear one of the soldiers snigger but they still waited until their sergeant gave them the signal to lower their guns. Sully gave him a nod as she strode past, but it wasn’t out of respect. Most of the soldiers that the part of America that used to be Nova Europa could field had been on the British payroll until this little coup got up and running. She trusted them as far as she could throw them. Which from this balcony was actually pretty far, so that was a bad metaphor.

She breezed past the swarming civil servants who were waving papers at her to sign and made meaningful eye contact with the one who had been offered up like a sacrificial lamb as her personal secretary this week. “I have a meeting with the Prime Minister in three minutes. I know that. Anything else I need to know?” The poor woman shook her head jerkily. The tangled bun of gray hair pinned to the back of her head started to unravel. She wasn’t going to last long. None of them ever did.

In the cabinet room there were already various ministers and lords surrounded by their own buzzing hive of bureaucrats. Most of Sully’s retinue had dropped off at the door, but her secretary still hovered behind her like a mosquito suffering from stage fright.

Some of the men in this room probably believed in a new American Empire—in equality and fraternity and whatever other nonsense Pratt had had students spray-painting on college walls all those years—but Sully was willing to bet that the majority were opportunists who couldn’t grab onto enough power back in Britain and were here now in America to take a little gamble. They might not have been the majority to start with, but that was the trouble with opportunists and career politicians, they were very good at gaining power and hanging onto it while lesser men got distracted by things like morality and fell to the wayside.

Sully hated everyone in the room on principle, but the burning loathing that bubbled up in her throat was reserved for Prime Minister Pratt. A man who treated every favor he did as a debt owed and who had blackmailed Sully into her current position with the threat of deporting Marie along with every other vampire on the continent. She tossed herself into a seat by his right hand and smiled at him beatifically when he glanced up from the mounds of paper in front of him. He smiled right back. They sat and smiled at one another while Sully fantasized about hacking him open from navel to neck. The last few stragglers made their way into the room and the meeting started right on schedule.

About five minutes later Sully started to tune it all out. Her opinion was not welcome on most of the subjects that they were discussing, as Pratt had politely explained after the third time Sully threatened to punch someone in the throat during a taxation debate. She was here to contribute on military and magical matters and to shut up the rest of the time. The conversation swung in her direction before long, as it tended to when the British were bombarding the city. Some lord, an overstuffed suit with a waxed mustache, was reporting on their allies’ preparations. “The United Nations and the Republic of America have worked in conjunction on military matters in the past, so their lines of communication seem to be wide open. Our other allies, who do not share a border or look to benefit from our continued independence, seem a little more reluctant to commit troops. There is much to be said for—”

Sully spoke over him, “We don’t need every ally to send us an army. The British Land forces are tiny. Their garrisons on mainland Britain are miniscule. They’re spread too thin across their holdings. They have always relied on their navy and their Magi to maintain control. If you’ve got the Natives and the Republicans, we are good to go on an invasion.”

Lord Wax-Stache blustered for a moment, then admitted. “Well, that is rather the problem. Neither group will commit. They have mustered their forces, but they won’t bring them over until our rather wild promises regarding demonic allies from Europe have been confirmed with some evidence.”

“So they aren’t going to help until we prove we don’t need any help. Great. Great allies. Just what we needed.”

Ogden cleared his throat from where he was standing by the door. The demon Mol Kalath hadn’t made it in past the magical protections laid against its kind, but the Magus was still nominally human enough to attend meetings. “Using the information that was provided to us, we have been making great strides toward bringing down the Veil of Tears and unleashing all the trapped demons of Europe onto the British Isles. We have only a few fine details still to iron out in the spell, then—”

Sully snapped. “So it still isn’t ready and we can’t do a damned thing until you, your Magi and your pet demons are done fiddling with it. This is the same story that we have been hearing for weeks.”

A muscle in Ogden’s jaw twitched, Sully could see it from across the room. “We are very close now. I would say less than a day of theoretical work remains before we can start the casting.”

Sully slumped back into the soft leather of the seat with a grunt. After a long moment of silence while the politicians waited to see if she was going to launch into another tirade, they moved on to new business.

The meeting dragged on for so long that the sun actually set on them, but Sully didn’t give one of the bastards the satisfaction of seeing her bored. She plastered on an attentive face and nodded along with whatever Pratt said like she was his little lapdog. The fact that his lapdog was silently plotting to tear out its owner’s throat wasn’t information that she needed to broadcast to the world. Pratt knew that he was going to get what was coming to him and Ogden probably had an inkling that there was some tension there, but the rest of them would just try to use the information as leverage.

Sully wasn’t sure exactly when the meeting ground to a halt, but it must have been about dinner time, judging by the grumbling of the stomachs all around her. When the room came back into focus Ogden had vanished, probably not into thin air, and the rest of the scum were starting to drift away, with only a few still lingering to whisper into Pratt’s ear. Sully started to slink out of her seat, only for Pratt to tut at her and shake his head. She sank back down and tried not to grind her teeth. Sully’s secretary sensibly took that as a sign to make a break for it with her clipboard full of notes, although if the woman had any real sense she would quit before Sully’s temper got the better of her.

One by one the parasites of the upper echelons of American government trickled out the door until finally only Sully and Pratt remained. He gave her an indulgent smile after he had finished signing papers. “Shall we order in some dinner? I hear that an absolutely marvelous little boutique Nipponese restaurant has just opened up in your old neighborhood. Raw fish served on little blocks of sticky rice. I could send a runner down and have us both satiated within half an hour.”

“I’ve swallowed enough raw crap for one day, thanks.”

“Perhaps some more traditional fare, then? I believe that there is a—”

Sully snarled. “I don’t want to eat with you, Pratt. We aren’t friends. I work for you. Can we just get to the point?”

“Ah, as tactful as ever. I am going to be relying on some of that famous tact of yours in the near future, as a matter of fact. You see, I find myself in need of someone who is accustomed to the vagaries of the Imperial Bureau of Investigation. Someone who might be able to inveigle themselves into an active investigation and report any relevant findings back to me in a discreet manner. Someone who is respected within the IBI, but not beholden to its power structures or its chain of reporting.”

Sully slumped down in her chair groaning. Pratt could turn a yes or no question into a twenty-minute soliloquy on the difficulty of making decisions. “What’s the case and what do you think they aren’t telling you?”

Pratt smiled again. “There have been a string of disappearances. No clear connections among the people who are vanishing. No signs of foul play. Just a steady stream of citizens of our new republic who are no longer there when someone comes to check upon them. The local constabularies have had no luck whatsoever in identifying the cause, or any methodology involved. There seem to be easily detectable traces of magic at every location. Indeed, there is an overabundance that renders the Schrödinger’s magical detection devices altogether useless, but otherwise no clues are presenting themselves.”

Sully leaned forward to rest her elbows on the table. She was interested, despite herself. You could take the girl out of the Bureau, but you couldn’t take the Bureau out of the girl. “Yep. That all sounds like a case for the IBI. So why do you want me involved?”

Pratt glanced nervously at the door. “Beyond my obvious faith in your oft demonstrated investigative abilities, the high levels of magical contamination seem to indicate that it is possible our demonic allies may have been involved in these abductions.”

Sully whistled. “Wow. I can see why you would want to keep that one under your hat.”

“Yes, you can understand why this is something of a political hot potato at the moment. Without the demons we lose Manhattan, and without Manhattan we lose the war. On the other hand, we can’t have them roaming around unchecked, feasting on our citizens as they please. This needs to be resolved discreetly, and I believe this may be better achieved through diplomatic channels rather than through the thorough and dogged police work of the IBI.”

Sully nodded. “All right. What’ll you give me for it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I told you before. We’re not friends. You’re a politician, asking someone else with power and influence to do you a favor. I might not like what you do, but I can grasp it, and if I need to use it, I will.”

Pratt chuckled and settled back into his seat. “My dear Miss Sullivan, I have no idea what you could possibly want. You know that I cannot offer your dear Marie or her kind any further concessions without alienating some extremely important allies.”

“I know all that. We’ve been over all that. I want justice. I want Ogden on trial the day that this war is over, and I want him to hang.”

Pratt blinked. “My understanding was that the two of you had a rather convivial working relationship. Has he done something in particular to offend you?”

Sully drew in a deep breath and launched into the speech she had been practicing in her head for months. “He is a mass murderer. The stunt that pulled Manhattan back from the Far Realms killed about three hundred people, give or take? I’m not . . . I’m not jumping down your throat for welcoming Manhattan back with open arms. I understand that we need all the firepower we can get. This is wartime, and decisions need to be made based on necessity, but when the war is over, I want him tried. I’m not asking you to round up everyone who followed him blindly. They were desperate people stranded a long way from home, but he was their leader. He led them down that path and a price needs to be paid for it. Ogden should be the one to pay it.”

Pratt stared at her, his eyes unreadable. “You know, I believe that may have been the most you have said to me since I made you a general.”

“Have we got a deal, Pratt?”

He held out hand and they shook on it. “We have a deal, Sullivan. Make this problem go away and I will misplace Mr. Ogden’s pardon.”

She forced a smile onto her face and resisted the urge to wipe her hand on her trouser leg. “I will get back to you on the IBI investigation as soon as I have something useful.”

“Thank you, Miss Sullivan. I look forward to hearing your insights.”

Sully walked out of the building like she was on a tightrope, keeping any hint of emotion from reaching her face. Pratt hadn’t argued about “political realities” or tried to make her feel like a petty idiot for asking for Ogden’s head. He hadn’t tried to explain that he was going to end up with an island full of enraged Magi that he had no real way of controlling without their anointed leader. Even if he had intended to give her what she wanted, he would have let her know how much it was costing him, so he could use it as leverage later. He was going to screw her over.