The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 19
“Thank you, Lucas,” George said with a smile. “But I’ve been working with these people for twenty years; I’ll be fine. So will Dale; they won’t find him, and we’ll make sure that your apartment, and his, are cleaned. I know a few revenants who specialize in removals.”
I did not want to know.
“In the meantime, my husband wishes to gift you something very important to him,” George continued. “He won’t tell you it’s important to him, because he doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but it is.”
“George,” Bill said in a tone that suggested his husband could shut up anytime he wanted to.
“What’s going on?” I asked as George placed an affectionate hand on his husband’s shoulder.
Bill opened the garage door, revealing a dark green Audi R8.
“Wow,” I said as Bill tossed me a set of keys, which I thankfully caught. Judging from the expression on Bill’s face, I was pretty sure that catching them was some kind of test.
“My Audi R8 V10 Spyder Performance Carbon Black,” Bill said. “To give it the full name.”
“I assume you shorten it,” I said.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” George said with an almost audible roll of his eyes.
“I did not expect that,” I told him.
“He also has an old Shelby GT Mustang in the other one,” George said. “I don’t remember the year.”
“Yes, you do,” Bill said.
“Yes, I do,” George replied with a large smile. “But I do so love to hear about it when I pretend I don’t.”
“Thank you both for this,” I said. “I don’t know how I can repay you.”
“Do not break my car,” Bill said. “That’s a good repayment.”
“I promise I’ll have it all washed and waxed before returning it,” I told him.
George offered me another handshake, which I accepted. “Godspeed, Lucas,” he said, serious for the first time since we’d left the bar.
Bill walked over and hugged me, patting me on the shoulder. “Come back in one piece,” he said. “I got to know the human Lucas pretty well, and I think I’d like to get to know the real you, too.”
“I’ll be back for a drink,” I promised. “And to return your car.”
“More the car,” George called out, and was playfully struck on the arm by his husband.
I unlocked the car and got inside, positioning the seats and windows before I drove out into the alley wondering if, despite all of the horrors that I’d seen, and despite me needing to find my friends, it was okay that I was going to enjoy the drive. Take the little bits of happiness where you can get them.
I spotted Bill watching me all the way down the alley, presumably regretting ever passing his Audi to another soul. I drove out of view, and it took me a while to get through New York, which was, as always, busy no matter the weather. But once outside of the city, heading north, I opened the Audi up and smiled. I would take the happiness now, thanks.
Dawn had just lit up the sky in a sea of brilliant reds and oranges as I reached Hamble. I didn’t go in for superstitions much, but “red sky in the morning, shepherds warning” was one that always stuck with me.
I stopped the car in a car park close to the church and walked the rest of the way, the rain making me glad that along with the duffle bag—which I’d left in the car—I’d brought a thick raincoat.
The church was a shell. The roof was gone, the glass destroyed. Scorch marks adorned every inch of the exterior walls, and the small garden in front of it was ash.
“Goddamn it,” I said, remembering that Gabriel didn’t much care about blasphemy.
I walked to the front doors, which were now charred and partially collapsed. Snow had collected just inside the main steps, and I paused to take a breath, preparing myself for whatever I was about to find inside.
“It wasn’t me,” a voice said from behind.
I turned to find Nadia stood at the bottom of the steps, about ten feet away. Rage filled me.
“It wasn’t me,” she said, louder as I leapt down the steps and started to walk toward her, smoke billowing all around me.
“Explain,” I said through gritted teeth.
“I didn’t do this,” Nadia said quickly. “The day I saw you and Emily in Mason’s office, I left the organisation. It was time to go.”
The smoke vanished. “Why?”
“Two reasons,” Nadia said. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt under her thick black jacket, which wasn’t zipped up. She had no shoes on her feet. I wondered if there was any point to the jacket.
“I don’t feel the cold,” she said. “The jacket is for appearances.”
“You knew what I was thinking?” I asked her.
“I knew what you would ask,” she said. “I will explain all, I swear.”
“Now,” I told her. “The two reasons, you’ll tell me now.”
“They asked me to kill Gabriel,” she said. “I don’t kill priests of any religion.”
“And two?”
“I met you,” she said softly.
“Angry smoke,” I said.
Nadia nodded. “My life is intertwined with yours.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I told her.
“That is true,” Nadia said. “I can only see one possible thread of where my life goes, but that thread has smoke swirling around it. I have seen that smoke since the day I woke up a revenant. Sixty-three years I have been searching for the smoke, moving myself to what feels right until it comes into my life. That smoke is you. Or at the very least, it’s what you represent.”
“And what is that?”
“Vengeance,” Nadia said. “That’s what you want.”
“I want to know where my friends are,” I said.
“But you still want vengeance, yes?”
I stared at Nadia, her cloudy eyes almost mimicking my smoke. There were no emotions in them, but no lies either. Chained revenants didn’t like to lie, it caused them pain, it altered paths of their thread in ways they couldn’t foresee. “Yes,” I said softly.
“I shall help you,” Nadia said. “I need to be where I need to be.”
I stared at her for a moment. She was deadly, probably an assassin, and almost certainly capable of killing me should she be given the chance. There was always a possibility that her thread would reveal that she needed to kill me, and if that was the case, she’d inform me before it happened. Chained revenants had a sense of honour about such things. Some people would find it weird, but it was who they were.
“I need to go inside the church,” I told her. “I need to find my friends.”
“Mason sent a death squad after me,” Nadia said cheerfully as she ran past me up the stairs.
“I assume that ended badly for them,” I said, following her.
“I tore one of their heads off and beat another man in the face with it,” Nadia said before smiling. “It was eventful.”
I shook my head and followed after her, ducking under beams and stepping over rubble until we were in the seating area of the church. I looked up at the lack of roof, which had crushed all of the wooden pews around me. The sky was clear, and it looked almost peaceful.
Nadia sat on the dais at the far end of the room and watched me. “Did your friend die here?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Hey, Gabriel, you watching me right now?”
The dais began to move. It was slow at first, and Nadia practically leapt off as it sped up, as though it were being unscrewed from beneath. I stepped off the dais and watched it continue to move up, revealing a set of stairs beneath.
“Your friends are down there?” Nadia asked.
I nodded. “I hope so.”
“Let’s go, then,” she said and practically jumped into the stairwell, vanishing from view into the darkness before the lights adorning the walls of the circular staircase ignited themselves, revealing the stairwell to be dozens of feet deep at least.
I followed Nadia down under the church, wondering how there didn’t appear to be any damage to the walls of the stairwell. I reached the bottom, where Nadia waited for me, and pulled a lever on the wall that opened a nearby door at the same time as repositioning the dais above.
Nadia darted back behind me, raising her hands. “It wasn’t me,” she shouted as Gabriel appeared in the doorway, a shotgun in his hands. He took one look at me and lowered the weapon, practically enveloping me in the hug a second later.
“We thought you would be gone for weeks or months,” Gabriel said.
“Your church appears to have fallen down a bit,” I said.
Gabriel smiled. “It’s been a long few weeks, my friend; I honestly hadn’t noticed.”
I returned his smile. “She’s with me,” I said, pointing to Nadia. “She’s . . . I’ll explain in a minute.”
“I know Isaac,” Nadia blurted out.
I turned to look at Nadia. “You didn’t mention that.”
“Sorry,” Nadia said. “I was feeding information about Mason to Isaac. He was concerned about some horror stories that he’d heard about him. I’ve known Isaac for twenty years, and he contacted me a year ago, asked me how happy I was working for Mason. I wasn’t. I saw my chains continued with Isaacs’s involvement somehow, so I fed what I could. Had to keep up the appearance of loyalty to Mason, but when Lucas arrived, I knew where my future lay. I knew I had to leave. Ask Isaac; he’ll tell you.”
“We need to talk to Isaac,” I said.
“Come see the others,” Gabriel said sadly. “I think there’s a lot you need to find out about.”
“Hannah, Meredith, Isaac?” I asked. “What happened?”
Gabriel looked sad. “Hannah is okay, mostly. They went for her at home with her husband. Hannah fought them off, but Jonas got hurt. Not badly, but Hannah sent him to his folks’ home in Toronto. Meredith is unhurt; she was already back in New York City when all of this went down. She’s flown back home to be with family; it’s safer that way. Obviously, everyone is going through some stuff. I’ve called in some favours to get the families of everyone involved watched.”
“And Isaac?” I asked.
“He was in the hospital about two minutes after Annie was murdered,” Gabriel said. “He got jumped by Dan, hurt badly. Managed to radio Hannah, but by the time we got there, he was in a bad way. After what happened with Hannah’s family, we got Isaac’s out of harm’s way. Kids sent away, but his wife, Ruby, is here. It’s really bad, Lucas. We can’t get him to a hospital because we don’t know who we can and can’t trust. Everyone here is someone we know for sure isn’t working with Mason. They’ve taken some RCU agents. We don’t know where they are.”
There was a pit of fear that practically filled my entire body in an instant. “Is Isaac . . .” I couldn’t finish that sentence.
“He’s in a coma,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
No one said anything for the five-minute walk through the tunnels under the church. I wasn’t sure which direction we were going but was pretty sure we were going deeper underground.
Eventually, we came to a large metal door that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a submarine, complete with large locking wheel. Gabriel knocked rhythmically on the metal, creating an echo around us as the large wheel slowly turned.
The door opened and a tired-looking Hannah stood in the doorway. She hugged Gabriel, saw me and smiled, and looked over at Nadia. An expression of hatred swept over her face and she dove at the chained revenant, who didn’t move an inch as I intercepted Hannah’s path.
“Get out of the fucking way,” Hannah snapped at me, trying to shove me aside.
I stood my ground. “She’s on our side.”
“She’s working for them,” Hannah almost snarled.
“I work for no one,” Nadia said calmly.
“She left the day I went back to the embers,” I said. “She had nothing to do with whatever happened after that.”
“I did not know that they were going to burn down the church or go after your families,” Nadia said. “I was working with Isaac. If I’d known what was about to happen, I’d have told him.”
“They went after Hannah’s family,” I said, “after Gabriel’s church, and I assume they would have gone after Isaac’s family if you hadn’t gotten them out. This was personal. There’s nothing to gain by it other than causing pain.”
“Mason didn’t do it,” Nadia said. “Not to say he wouldn’t, but he would only do it if there was a long-term benefit to him personally. Burning down a church is effort and time better spent doing something else.”
“Dan did this,” I said. “I don’t know why, but I’d bet money he was the one who decided to go after the church and families.”
“What makes him hate his own team like that?” Gabriel asked.
No one had a good answer for it.
“I’m sorry about your husband,” Nadia said to Hannah.
“Fuck you,” Hannah snapped, pointing at Nadia.
“Hannah, we need help,” I said keeping my voice level. “Chained don’t lie; chained don’t care about the machinations of people like Mason. They arrive where they’re needed to get them where they need to go. We’re going to find Mason, Dan, and anyone else helping them, and we’re going to kill them all. But right now, Nadia wants to help.”
“I need to help,” Nadia said, walking past Hannah and me, through the open door.
“She puts one toe out of line,” Hannah said watching Nadia leave. “One goddamned toe.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’m sorry about Jonas. Is he okay?”
Hannah nodded once and walked back through the hatch.
I followed a moment later, hoping that Hannah wasn’t going to do anything to Nadia. While Nadia had been working for the enemy, even though she’d also been working with Isaac, it’s hard to keep a grudge against chained revenants. Some people have theorized that they create a bubble of influence around them that lets them join those whose lives they need to be a part of. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t about to throw away help.
I stepped through the hatch, Gabriel closing it and locking it shut behind me. “Welcome to the hideout,” Gabriel said as I looked around the spacious room.
“We have this room,” Gabriel said, gesturing around him to the sizeable table and chairs, but other than that, and despite the size, it was empty. “Each of those seven covers leads to a chamber. This whole place is like a large wheel. Down each chamber is a similar-sized room to this one. Each room is connected to the one either side of it.”
“What are in the rooms?” I asked. The ceiling was a mural of Inaxia, done in vibrant colours, making it look like something out of a fairy-tale.
“One is a medical bay, kitchen, bathroom, three bedrooms, and the last is where we store, keep, et cetera anything we might need. It’s basically an armoury but without large amounts of armour.”
I dropped the duffle bag. “Lots of cash, a few other bits,” I said.
“I’ll take it to the armoury,” Gabriel said, unzipping it and removing a medallion. He looked up at me. “Lucas.”
I fished my medallion out from beneath my T-shirt. “I’m back in every way that counts,” I said.
Gabriel got to his feet and hugged me. He’d always been a hugger.
He went back to the bag and found the Talon mask. He looked up at me and I expected him to ask questions, but he just put the mask back and zipped the bag up.
“That’s why you took it so personally,” he said. “Your failure to protect the Guild, I mean.”
“It was quite literally my job,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You should have told me.”
“No one is meant to know who the Talons are,” I said. “That’s sort of the point.”
“You have no Guild left to be a Talon of,” Gabriel said. “Whatever secrets you were duty-bound to keep shouldn’t be kept at the expense of your own mental health.”
Gabriel had a good point. “Well, I’m back now, so hopefully I’ll make a better go of it this time.”
“I know that must have been a difficult decision,” Gabriel said. “To put the medallion back on after all this time.”
“People are trying to kill me and my friends,” I said. “Same people betrayed us. Same people killed my Guild. It might have been the easiest decision I ever made. How many people are down here?”
Gabriel re-zipped the bag before answering. “Hannah, me, Isaac, and his wife, Ruby. I’ll take you to see him if you like.”
“Please,” I said. A lot of churches belonging to the Tempered Souls had excellent medical facilities on site to deal with those who were newly rift-fused or otherwise required care not provided by human-run hospitals. Apparently, that meant they were able to administer to coma patients as well, although I doubted that was something they dealt with all that often.
“Let’s go deposit this,” Gabriel said, lifting the bag and walking through the first chamber on the right, next to the door.
I followed Gabriel down the lamp-lit corridor. “When was this constructed?” I asked.
“Early 1900s,” Gabriel said. “I had it renovated about five years ago. That’s why there’s electricity, internet, fresh water, et cetera. It cost a small fortune, but I figured it might come in handy. We were lucky about the firebombing. No one was here when it happened; we were trying to make sure Isaac’s family was safe. Booker and Zita were instrumental in helping. We owe them our lives.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About the church.”
“Places can be rebuilt,” Gabriel said, pushing open a metal door. “People can’t.”
The armoury had two more doors inside and looked pretty much identical in size to the main room. There were over a dozen tables, each one covered in weapons, ammo, various pieces of armour, and, on one table, several large briefcases.
“You’re doing okay, then,” I said.
“Money and weapons aren’t an issue,” Gabriel said. “People are.”
“What about the rest of the RCU? You mentioned that some of them were taken.”
“The rest of the New York branch were attacked the same night as you were hurt,” Gabriel said. “Two dead, ten missing. The LA team was also attacked by, apparently, fiends. Several dead or missing there, too. We suspect they were taken hostage as some sort of insurance, but no one can confirm that. We don’t know where any of them are.”
