Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Read online

  That, only two people in the bar could see.

  The air was aswirl with spirits, and Vickie had her hands full fending them off Djinni and Bulwark. Bulwark’s bubble did nothing to keep them out. Djab, they had to be—she could see that when they did manage to get through, and raked their long talons over one or the other of the men, a spark of life-force drained away at the touch. Or rather, drained from Djinni—they tried the same trick with Bulwark, but he was protected in some additional way. They screamed in silent protest, but mostly they couldn’t get through to drain him.

  You are lawful prey. Was that it? Had the Red Djinni’s past finally come back around on him? On rare occasion, houngan did call djab, when the target was a murderer, rapist, or some other violent criminal…lawful prey. Maybe Bulwark was “innocent” enough to gain some protection from that alone.

  But Djinni clearly was more than they had reckoned with. He hardly seemed to notice the drain. He fought like a berserker, going down under a pile of assailants, then throwing them off and going after them in turn. But the spirits riding them were as fast and as cunning as he was; they might not be able to do much damage to him, but he was having a hard time laying so much as a claw on them.

  With a kind of muffled wail, the last of the construct vanished into the mud. Vickie drove the water out of the mud pit, trapping the thing. That was when Jacob Stone, face twisted with fury, finally found his rival mage and locked eyes with her, and she felt the fear rise up in her and choke off her breath. No, not just fear, it was her fears personified, made real and solid, a clutching hand at her throat.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Her protections on Bulwark and Djinni failed. Djinni went down under an avalanche of bodies, physical and ghostly. One spirit inside the bubble managed to get enough power to manifest physically for a moment, and used that moment to bring two translucent hands down on Bulwark’s head, knocking him out cold. The bubble failed as he crumpled, and the men who had been struggling to get in through the back now came pouring inside.

  Her lungs were burning. She struggled against the fear, the thing that was cutting off her air, and her vision started to fail. Jacob Stone stared triumphantly into her eyes and grinned.

  And a spirit materialized out of the back bar and engulfed him. He screamed, the cry of a man who sees his own death coming and is helpless to stop it. The choking hand of fear let Vickie go.

  Experience and intuition directed her. Not one, but two…bocor and houngan, and we’re being used…

  Operating on instinct alone, she gulped in air, stumbled across the bar and slashed her atheme across the back of the thing that was killing Jacob Stone. She did it in no particular pattern, but the thing howled, and pulled away, leaving Stone half conscious, but still alive.

  That was when the Djinni erupted from beneath his pile of assailants with what looked like a two-by-four in his hands. He spun in a furious circle, and a moment later, stood panting, bleeding from dozens of stabs and slashes, his signature shoulder wrappings torn half off, exposing an ugly, strangely wrinkled-and-scarred mass of tissue at his neck. He was battered, but alive, eyes furious.

  Staring at the thing that had attacked Jacob Stone.

  He could see it!

  It must have drained enough life-force from Stone to be able to manifest in the real world. It stared back at him for a moment, then shimmered as all the other spirits in the bar became very, very still. The humans still being ridden dropped to the ground as their riders let go of their “mounts” to lend what must have been their leader additional strength. Whoever this djab answered to, it was not Jacob Stone.

  It shimmered again, became amorphous…and then…where the spirit had been, was a woman.

  A meta, that much was obvious from the costume. And stunning, absolutely stunning. She had a face that could have graced a magazine cover, and the body of a goddess. Even among metas, who so often seemed to have a heightened physical presence, she was beautiful. The fury drained from Djinni’s eyes in an instant, and he began to tremble, visibly. The lovely woman held out her hands to him, her expression half promise, half pleading. He took a single, stumbling step towards her.

  Epiphany whacked Vickie in the face. That’s her. That’s the other Vic. And this woman had to be dead, or the djab could not have assumed her form. There were rules to these things…

  Djinni took another step towards the vision, eyes glazing over. Vickie watched as life-force began flowing from him to her. The creature smiled. Will. He has one of the strongest wills I’ve ever seen. Will is magic. As long as he fights her, the djab can’t drain him. But if he gives it to her—

  And a red rage took hold of Vickie.

  “Get off him, you bitch!” She wanted to scream it, but all she could do was choke it out. She called up every last vestige of magical energy inside her, everything she could gather from the Earth Her Mother, and threw it, not at the creature, but at Red Djinni. “Djinni, you asshat, wake up! Vic is dead and that is not her!” She put all the force of will and power she could into her words, rendering them into an impromptu spell, and punctuated her shriek with a beer bottle that hit him in the shoulder. Then, as the Djinni started back for a moment, some of the dazed look leaving his eyes, she remembered something else.

  Salt. Blessed salt. The one universal component for dispersing ghosts. And djab were nothing more than very, very powerful spirits of the dead. She spotted her kit on the floor within reach, mud-spattered but intact. Closer still were the remains of the bar, and despite the mud spatters everywhere, the bowls of bar peanuts and pretzels were within even easier reach. Bar snacks were always heavily salted, to encourage more drinking. She grabbed every bowl she could reach, and chucked them at the powerful djab, which roared a bone-chilling howl. The disruption of its manifestation was palpable, and Vickie used that moment to retrieve her bag. She broke its zipper in a frenzy, and pulled out the stapled paper bag of blessed salt. Tearing that open, she hurled it in an arc, and sprayed the creature with the contents.

  It screamed, as did every other spirit in the bar. The form of the lovely metahuman woman melted away and reshaped itself into that of the hideous djab, and it flung itself on Vickie, still very, very much in the physical plane. Once again, she found herself fighting for her life, as the creature slashed at her mail with claws as long and wicked as the Djinni’s. They caught and penetrated the mail, and the links joining the plates gave. The djab ripped a gash in it, slashing the shirt underneath, exposing the mass of hideous burn scars that laced her from neck to toes. She managed to kick it off with a surge of power; it lunged for her again as she looked up at it, rage gone, so terrified she had been reduced to nothing but incoherent whimpers.

  Which was when Jacob Stone, with a roar, stood up and called upon the god Ogun to “ride” him. And Vickie blacked out.

  * * *

  She came to lying on a bed. Not hers, not her hotel room; this room had the preternaturally neat look of one inhabited by—

  “—a classic case of leaping before we looked,” said Bulwark in the other room.

  “Ah, you are awake.” Jacob Stone had a Jamaican accent, not a New Orleans one. “I told them to leave us alone in here, that you would be fine.”

  “Fine is relative,” she croaked. Then she remembered, and her hands clutched frantically at the blankets. “Did anyone see?” she choked out, panic rising to engulf her. “Did anyone—”

  “Only me, I think. I served as your nurse.” He patted her hand reassuringly. “I have in my time seen much worse, but my loas told me that you do not wish any eyes to fall on you. So I covered you, I carried you myself, I put you here with my own hands. And here—” he gestured at the hotel bathrobe lying at the foot of the bed. “You can put that on, if you are ready to go to your room. I could not enter it, nor could Bulwark, nor the staff.” He chuckled. “They are most vexed. That is clever work.”

  She was going hot and cold with shame. “There was a bocor—”

  “Who used us
against each other, yes,” said the elder Stone. “Adolphe Le Fevre.” Stone’s long face looked sour. “He has been a thorn in my side since the invasion. He is under the impression that I want what he wants.”

  In the other room, Djinni was laughing, as was a stranger. “Tomb, I thought we taught you better. And you believed those jackasses? Why would I telegraph my moves that way?”

  “If you had simply waited until you knew we were in the city and put a tail on us, you would have seen we were coming from here,” Bulwark said mildly. “We weren’t trying to hide our movements.”

  “Ah well, my brother would say, ‘The guilty man flees where none pursueth.’ ” There was a sigh. “Here I was, tryin’ to stay straight, an’ you show up, Red. An’ people are tellin’ me you’re startin’ up a new gang—”

  “Control of this parish?” Vickie hazarded. Stone nodded. “As my brother said, just now. He cannot imagine that I only wish to be left in peace to heal and help those who come to me.” He shook his head. “This is not my city, and I am not needed in Kingston. I can go anywhere. I told my brother as much, so we will both join your Echo. There is a greater enemy to be countered than Le Fevre.” He got up from the chair beside the bed. “There is your kit, there is your computer, and there is what is left of the metal shirt. I think it can be repaired.”

  “It can—” She was, once again, too exhausted for a panic attack. All she wanted now was to get herself and her stuff back to her room, cocoon herself in clothing again, and go home.

  “Then I will join the others. I think you should too, once you are composed.” He gave her a measured look. “I think it would be courtesy, at least.” He left, closing the door behind him. She pulled her aching body out of the bed, muffled herself in the bathrobe, and grabbed her gear. All four of the men in the other room looked up as she opened the bedroom door.

  “When you’re cleaned up, come back here, Op Nagy,” Bulwark said, formal, but friendly. “I’ve got a food delivery coming.”

  “Yeah, Tomb told us not to order from the kitchen; it stinks,” the Djinni said.

  The other Stone, whom she had barely gotten a glimpse of until now, spread his hands wide. “What can I say? They brought their own cook. To New Orleans? A crime.”

  She ducked her head and scuttled off to her room. Once inside, she put down her things and sat on the bed with her face in her hands. Her throat ached, and in fact, she hurt all over, more than the usual ongoing pain; there were taped-up tears through the scars from the djab’s talon slashes, and probably huge bruises under the scars, and the scars hurt and hurt…It was the touch of magic, she realized. She’d been warned about that. She went to the bathroom and slathered on her lotion, defiantly. To hell with them. She hurt, and they could just get over their fricking reflexive reactions to her perfume.

  And then, she realized, she was officially off-duty now. It was over. With a feeling of release, she grabbed her meds and swallowed down a pain pill and an antianxiety pill, dry. By the time she was dressed and, she supposed, looking fit to be in company, they had started to work. She rejoined the others. The food had arrived, and for the first time since this had started, she felt like eating.

  They had saved a chair for her, placed a little apart from the rest, placed a little in shadow. Whose work had that been? Jacob Stone’s probably. She took the plate he passed over to her, already laden with red beans and rice, crawfish pie, and jambalya, and met his eyes. They were kind eyes. She managed to smile.

  “Good job, team,” Bulwark said, raising a glass of beer. “Tom, Jacob, I’m glad we sorted things out. Nagy, I’m going to recommend upgrading you to OpTwo. Good work.”

  “OpTwo?” Djinni objected. “Bull, she might not be as useless as I thought, but c’mon…”

  Vic, who felt the angry flush in her cheeks once more, thought of any number of retorts but paused instead. The Djinni’s tone, while still snarky and caustic, had softened somewhat. Moreover, something had softened between them, though Vickie couldn’t figure why he would have let up any on her. But as for her…that glimpse of his neck, and of his naked soul when he thought he was looking at a lost love…she couldn’t be angry with him right now. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was because she was too tired, but probably not. If she was hurting, and walking wounded, well, so was he.

  “Useful enough to save your sorry ass, Red,” Bulwark observed, and before Djinni could react to that, continued, “If it hadn’t been for that tracing she did, you’d still be hunting.”

  Red considered that. “Point.” He turned and gave her the briefest of nods, perhaps the closest thing to an apology he could manage. “Guess you psions have your uses.”

  “Magic,” Bulwark corrected. “And she did a good job in the bar too, even if we are going to have to pay for her wrecking it.”

  He said nothing about the illusion of the other Vic. So he didn’t know…and if Djinni remembered, he wasn’t saying. Better if he didn’t remember.

  “That didn’t go as badly as it could have,” the Djinni muttered. “You might even say we won.”

  * * *

  “Well, that did not go as well as it could have,” Le Fevre mused aloud. His chief djab was not happy, but it could not deny that it had not done what it had been tasked to do. He had placated it with permitting it to feed on some of those others who had failed him. It would take some time before it undertook any great tasks for him again, but he could make do with lesser spirits.

  Meanwhile, the Stones, elder and younger, were leaving. The Echo mage, the only other possible person who could oppose his rise to power here, was leaving. That left the field open to him. Unlike some others of his kind, Le Fevre was not interested in pursuing personal vendettas. There was only so much magic to be used, and why would anyone of sense use it to get revenge instead of power?

  So…

  “In fact,” he observed to the empty room, “I would say I won.”

  Chapter Fourteen:

  A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall

  Cody Martin and Mercedes Lackey

  Most of the time, Atlanta was so humid it felt like you could almost cut the air. Today there was no “almost” about it. The air was supersaturated, and the black clouds slowly rolling towards the city promised that it wouldn’t be long before the place was under what some of the locals were calling a “toad-strangler.”

  Those clouds weren’t quiet either; there was enough lightning and thunder off on the horizon that John Murdock was fighting to sleep through the midmorning, if not the afternoon. “Working” all night, in addition with the handyman stuff he did during the day, took its toll. Nightmares didn’t help much, either. Metas usually needed less sleep than normals, but John actually dreaded the few hours of sleep he got.

  When he finally did manage to rouse himself from bed, it wasn’t even dark yet, aside from the clouds blocking out the sun. His squat was muggier than usual, leaving John’s clothes soaked with sweat. It’d be worse once he got outside, of course; he could only hope that the storms would have a nice accompanying breeze to keep him cool while he did his errands and made his rounds in the ’hood, and maybe the rain would provide a free full body shower. Absolutely nobody’s hygiene in his neighborhood was great since he’d arrived, but then again, whose ever was after a disaster? It didn’t matter who you were, smelling April fresh wasn’t a huge priority when your main priorities were, oh, food, shelter, and a lack of bullet wounds.

  It hardly seemed fair. The weather reporter on the tube was getting positively frantic with his flash flood warnings, and John had to wonder how all the folks in their tents and temporary shelters were going to weather this one.

  Well, at least his people would be all right.

  His people. Damndest thing, but that was the most honest way to describe the situation. He was responsible for them, now. This wasn’t to say that the ’hood was helpless; everyone had banded together a lot since the attacks, and had become fairly self-reliant. But John was still a big part of their protection and a
id, and they used him like the resource he had become.

  Jonas seemed to think that he should just settle down into the position of local sheriff and get over it. He just couldn’t do it. He’d never been a fan of the police, and was even less of one now. And yet, he couldn’t not do it either, at least in deed if not in badge.

  John privately dreaded the day when things got back to “normal,” and someone official decided to poke around. Or worse, to offer him a job. But hell, that was gonna be a long time coming; things just weren’t stable enough yet for these folks to take care of themselves.

  He steadfastly refused to listen to the little voice in his head that asked “And what if they never are?”

  Shaking his head to clear out that troublesome line of thinking, John got himself cleaned up to walk of his territory. The little voice in his head gave a last sardonic snicker and receded into the dark depths of his brain. Rain or shine, someone had to check on things. Bad guys didn’t stop for flash flood warnings.

  But the moment he left his door, his clothing was plastered flat to his body by the pounding rain in seconds. If there had been wind, he would have suspected a hurricane, the rain was coming down that hard. “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Pulling the collar of his jacket up higher, he trudged off through the flooded streets. The worst part about hard rains like this one was that all the trash and filth came up with the deluge, clogging everything. Garbage floated up from the storm sewers, got spread out from trash piles, and got washed down off roofs. Add to that, the dust and powdered brick and wreckage…Yep, the garbage was hitting the streets. Usually in more ways than one.

  Tonight was no different. John was only a few minutes into his walk when he saw quite the scene unfolding. Underneath one of the few working streetlights in this part of town, two people were fighting. Scratch that; one person was beating the ever-living crap out of another. The storefront that they were brawling near had been smashed in; bits of glass glittered in the lamplight and a few boxes were scattered into the street.