The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 21
“They were FBI informants,” I said.
“Ah, you do know,” Booker said, although I could tell he wished I hadn’t. “Turns out one of them had a girlfriend who also works for Sky-High, and she is not happy about her beau being turned into fiend chow.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Hostages are split in two groups,” Booker said. “Half in the warehouse, half in Sky-High. You go for one, the others get killed. Et cetera, et cetera.”
“Shit,” I snapped.
“We have a plan,” he told me. “We need to hit both places at the same time. We do one before the other, and a whole bunch of people gonna die.”
“That needs more information,” I said. “We have to do that right first time.”
“According to our source, the doctor wants a steady stream of rift-fused for her . . . needs,” Booker said, sounding angry for the first time. “They’re all alive, all safe. But that won’t last forever. She doesn’t want to waste them on just any old research; she has others for that. Sounds like Mason has convinced her to keep the humans safe for now, use them as leverage should they be needed. He was pretty angry that it all kicked off without his say-so.”
“What does your inside lady do?” I asked him.
“Lab technician,” Booker said. “Her hands aren’t clean, and when this is all over, she’s going to be having a long, hard conversation with the law, but she knows that. I think she was the one who pushed her boyfriend to go to the feds. She’s angry, Lucas, and angry people are oh so helpful.”
“Can we meet her?” I asked.
“Tomorrow morning,” Booker said. “Already spoke to Gabriel; he knows the details.”
“What do they want?” I asked. “Does the lab tech know?”
“She knows bits,” Booker said. “She managed to download a lot of intel from the company. She’s bringing it over tonight, but it sounds bad. Like if you read it, they’re gonna go kill you bad. Whatever is going on here got a whole bunch of federal and RCU agents killed, and they didn’t bat an eyelid for it.”
“I’m going to kill Dan,” I said.
“Good, he’s an asshole,” Booker said. “See you tomorrow. Ten a.m. Gabriel will get you there.”
I hung up the phone and stared at the warehouse for a moment.
“Booker got an informant,” Hannah said.
“Yes, he did,” I said. “If Mason hadn’t killed those two hikers, none of this would be happening now, and Booker’s informant would probably either have run already or would be dead by Mason’s hand.”
“You think it’s legit?” Hannah asked.
“If Booker does, then yes,” I said. “He’s too smart to be taken in by a fraud. I guess we find out tomorrow.” I told her the rest of the conversation before we got back into the car just in time to see William pull up at the main gate to the complex.
The clock said 10:13.
“It’s a fifteen-minute drive,” Hannah said with a snort. “He’s a love ’em and leave ’em type. No cuddle or anything.”
I watched William’s car roll across the car park and stop, while I quietened the urge to go over and kill him.
William ran up the exterior staircase and entered the office building, vanishing from view.
“They’re in there,” I said. “Or the access to them starts in there. No point going to that building to see them when they’re over the other side of the complex.”
“We can’t be certain,” Hannah said. “Not enough to get them in time.”
I nodded. “We will be.” I started the engine and pulled away, driving back to Gabriel’s church.
“Can I ask you something?” Hannah asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were a Talon?” There was genuine hurt in her voice.
“Us or you?” I asked.
“Me,” Hannah said. “Who knew?”
“Isaac and Ji-hyun,” I said. “That’s it.”
“We were close, Lucas,” Hannah said. “I thought we were, anyway. And then you left without a word; you just vanished. You didn’t tell us you’re a Talon, or that you’re human, or where you were going; you didn’t even leave a number.”
“Talons can’t tell people,” I said. “Not because we don’t want to, but because if someone ever knew that I was a Talon, it could cause harm to the Guild if I’m ever put in a situation where I have to choose between my Guild and my friends. People would use that information against me, against the Guild. It’s happened before, and it never ends well. Ji-hyun knew because I’ve trained with her for centuries, and Isaac because he was the only one to help me hold it together after the destruction of my Guild. The more people who knew about me, the more dangerous it was for me—and for them.”
Hannah nodded. “I don’t understand why Dan is doing this,” Hannah said as she leaned up against the car. “Why destroy your Guild? Why the RCU? We’ve worked with him for years. Been friends for even longer than that, and he tries to wipe us out.”
“Some people are really good at pretending to be something they’re not,” I said. “Sometimes, that something is a good person, a friend, an ally. Dan pretended to be all of those for a long time. I don’t know why, but we’ll find out.”
“Booker said he’s working for someone else,” Hannah said. “This is beginning to sound like there’s a bigger plan here. Not just Callie Mitchell wanting to create monsters for weapons.”
Hannah and I returned to the bunker beneath the church, where we found Nadia sitting on a small table just inside the entrance. Hannah took a deep breath and walked away without a word.
“Do you want me to talk to her?” Nadia asked.
“I think that might be a terrible idea,” I said.
Nadia nodded as she considered this. “Yes, I am not a good person to do this.”
“Have you ever been in love, Nadia?” I asked.
Nadia’s face crumpled and I regretted saying anything.
“Yes,” she said eventually. “Twice. Once before I was this, once after. Neither ended well.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
“I have done terrible things, Lucas,” she said softly. “I have travelled the chains as I tried to get to my future, to my destiny, and I have seen and done things that would have made the human me ashamed. The need to be in the right place is great, but this is the first time I feel like I’m in the right place with people who won’t use me for my power, who won’t ask me to do something I do not wish to do.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
“I know how my kind are seen,” she said. “We’re monsters, murderers, psychopaths. There are chained revenants who open themselves up to the rift too much and see all of the chains all at once. They try to figure out which chain is the right one by eliminating anyone on the other chains. It drives them mad. It makes them monsters. I am not a monster. I have done monstrous things, but I am not a monster. I will help you. I will . . . do the right thing.”
I believed her. “That’s all any of us can try to do, Nadia.”
Nadia climbed down from the table. “Not just because it’s the right thing,” she said, “but because I have seen the angry smoke. I fear it. I fear you.”
“You have nothing to fear from me.”
Nadia stared at me for a few seconds. “You told your friends that you were the Talon. They have accepted that, but I have been searching for that smoke for a long time. I have seen the aftermath of places you have been. I have seen your work.”
It was more than a little disconcerting to think that someone had been looking for me for a long time, going to places I’d been, seen the things I’d done.
“Not even Dan really knows what you’ve done,” Nadia said. “He thought you were just a Guild member, a rank-and-file. Powerful and dangerous but no more so than any other Guild member. But Talons are . . . not rank-and-file. Things are going to get bad, Lucas. Worse than they are now, and you know this.”
“Are you asking me if I’m willing to do what’s necessary to get people back?” I asked. “Because you have to know I am.”
“I do,” Nadia said. “You’ve been away from all this for some time. I needed to check. Needed to know that you’re ready.”
“You can’t tell the future, right?” I asked.
“No,” Nadia said. “Not the future. I can see multiple possible timelines and events that happen in them, but I can’t see individual people too well. I couldn’t tell you that Dan was going to attack, because I wasn’t part of it. I couldn’t tell you what Mason is doing right now, because there’s no timeline where I’m involved. I see what affects me, and I see smoke in my future. That’s you. I can see timelines where I am killed before I get here. By Alexis, by Dan, by nameless, faceless thugs. But when it comes to an overall picture, it’s not as simple as just seeing a person; it’s something about that person. It makes the whole thing infuriating.”
“It sounds . . . exhausting,” I said.
“It is,” Nadia told me. “I’m . . . grateful for you letting me help.”
Nadia walked off, leaving me alone in the room. Help. We were going to need help to pull this off. I walked back outside of the bunker and called Bill. He answered on the first ring.
“You need something?” he asked.
“We’ve got a problem,” I said. “How quickly can you guys get up here? Bring anyone who can help.”
“How much trouble are you about to cause?” Bill asked.
“As much as I can,” I told him.
“Give me a day,” Bill said. “You okay?”
“I will be,” I told him.
I sat there outside for a while, just taking some fresh air and feeling the cold.
I heard the footsteps approaching well before I saw who they belonged to.
“Special Agent Emily West,” I said.
“Just Emily will do,” she told me. “I think we’re beyond formalities now, don’t you? Gabriel told me about Isaac; I came to see him—I’m sorry. I know you and he have history.”
I gave her a grim smile. “I have a lot of history. I probably owe you some kind of explanation as to who I am.”
“I think,” Emily said as she leaned up against the dilapidated wall beside me, “that you’re right.”
“So, where do you want me to start?” I asked.
“At the beginning,” Emily said.
“I was born in 235 BC,” I began.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
So, the phrase ‘older than Christ’ is appropriate for you?” Emily asked with raised eyebrows.
I nodded. “Can we leave questions until the end?”
“You were born in the age of Ancients,” Emily said, waving me to continue.
“Yes, in England. In what is now known as York,” I said. “To a tribe called Brigantes, who controlled much of northern England. My name was Sagillius. No last name. My father was a fisherman and hunter, and my mother a warrior of some renown. She’d come over to Britain from the continent. I was maybe six or seven when we left our home and headed south, across what is now the English Channel to Europe, stopping at Carthage.”
Emily’s eyes widened at the name and I saw she wanted to ask me questions, but she remained quiet.
“I was brought up in the city of Saldae, a port to the west of Carthage itself. My father taught me to hunt, my mother to fight. My parents fought alongside Hannibal; my father was a scout and my mother a general. When Rome destroyed the city, they removed all mention of the warrior women who fought against them. Rome was afraid that women would get ahead of themselves and start thinking they should be the ones running things.” I sighed. “Anyway, I digress. My mother and father were highly regarded in Hannibal’s military, and so I was brought up to hunt and fight. My mother taught me how to kill fiends.”
“There were fiends then, too?” Emily asked. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Yes,” I told her. “Quite a few. It was said that they were a punishment from the gods, many of them were never written about for fear that it would somehow displease them or please them too much. The Ancient gods of the time were fickle. But some, the chimera, minotaur, et cetera, they were mentioned. I killed my first at fourteen. It was a snake creature. Very much a lesser fiend, and probably only a quarter of the size my memory makes it out to be. Anyway, I killed it, and it was a big deal.”
I didn’t want to spend all night talking about my childhood, so I skipped forward a few years.
“In 218 BC, I was seventeen, and I joined my parents to travel over the Alps with Hannibal to fight the Romans. We won. I killed . . . I don’t know, hundreds maybe. My father was a scout; my mother and her squad went with him, using guerrilla tactics that they’d picked up from the Gauls along the way. Lots more fights, lots more Romans dead. Lots of Carthaginians too.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, remembering the chaos, the noise, the blood. I had never seen anything like it before, and no amount of preparing had done it justice. Mostly people screamed, begged, pleaded to the gods, or shat themselves. There’s no honour in war, that’s for the people who stand at the back and get congratulated when their people died for their victory.
“Eventually, my band were sent to Cannae, and we won a big victory for Carthage. Sicily too. I was sent to Salapia, and we were betrayed by people who were meant to be loyal to us. I was killed in 209 BC at the blade of a priest who was meant to be my friend. He slit my throat, and spat on me as he watched me die.”
“I’m sorry,” Emily said.
“Don’t be; I’ll get to that,” I said. “Anyway, I found myself awake in the rift. I didn’t know where it was at first; I just knew it wasn’t Salapia. I spent over a century in the rift; every riftborn does. It’s to make sure that you don’t immediately go back all evil-Superman and start tearing people’s heads off to get revenge.”
“What is the rift like?” Emily asked.
“Weird,” I said. “Large parts of it are uninhabitable by anyone not a fiend, at least long-term. The Tempest in the north bleeds power all the time, so there are occasional fiends that come from the area surrounding it. And I don’t mean like lesser fiends; I mean things that make Godzilla look like a pet in terms of temperament. These things are mean, cruel, and enjoy inflicting pain. There’s a theory that the Tempest is made up of all the dead revenants and riftborn who were murdered with tempered weapons. I think it’s horseshit, but no one is stupid enough to go up there and research it. Unless you like the idea of being worn as a hat.”
“What did you do in the rift?” Emily asked, having seen an opening for another question.
“I learned how to fight,” I said. “Properly fight as a riftborn. I learned how to use my power, how the world works, how the rift works. That hundred years went by in a flash, and when I returned to Earth, I discovered that it was 51 BC. I’d so wanted vengeance on those who had betrayed me, but my parents, Carthage were gone. I discovered that we’d lost the second Punic War and were given a treaty that made the one at Versailles look like a reasonable endeavour. It all but crushed us, but that wasn’t enough for some in Rome, who went to Carthage and murdered everyone there just because they could.”
“Did you find out what happened to your parents?” Emily asked.
“My father was killed in battle against Rome,” I said. “My mother was hurt, and returned back to Carthage. She married a merchant and settled in Gaul. She never returned to Carthage after that. She never had more children. I don’t know much more than that. The man who’d betrayed me was torn apart by horses a short time after my death. I didn’t find this out until sometime after the fact; all I knew at the time was that everyone I loved was dead and the Romans had made sure that I had no home. I wanted them to hurt, so I joined the Gallic rebellion, which went about as well as expected, and then found myself in Rome. I figured hurting Rome from the inside was the next best option, and after Caesar’s death at the hands of his own allies, I felt like I’d achieved something.”
“You assassinated Caesar?” Emily asked.
I shook my head. “No, I just worked for some people who did. Put the right word in the right ear, and soon people were looking at Caesar like the tyrant he was.
“Anyway, after that, I moved around a lot, until I went back to the rift for the first time. As a riftborn, I have to return to the embers every month to keep the contact alive. If I don’t, it causes issues, as I discovered recently, but I return to the rift regularly, too. I spent a lot of time in the rift over the centuries, and I always pop out a few hundred years after I left to continue whatever it was I needed to do.
“After centuries of working here and there for various people, I joined the Guilds. The Raven Guild. I was trained by a woman called Neb for several centuries more. The Raven Guild were the best of the best, and I was expected to be even better than that.”
“Neb?” Emily asked.
“She’s several thousand years older than me and used to be a queen, or a warlord, or a king, or a god, depending on who you ask. She helped create the Guilds.”
“And she trained all of the Raven Guild?” Emily asked.
I shook my head. “No, just me and a few others.”
“So, you were a Raven for centuries?” Emily asked.
“About seven hundred years,” I said. “I did a lot of other stuff before that. I worked for Neb for a long time before I ever joined the Guild; I think that’s why she agreed to train me.”
“Why’d you change your name to Lucas Rurik?” Emily asked.
“I’ve been Lucas Rurik for a long time,” I said. “First it was just Sagillius, then Lucius, and after a while I changed it to Rurik, and then I added them together.”
“Why not keep Sagillius?” Emily asked. “Or amend it?”
“You can’t use your birth name when you return,” I said. “It’s just something you don’t do. We all pick a new name and go from there. I chose Lucius because Rome was everywhere like a bad rash.”
“You’re not a fan of ancient Rome?” Emily asked, eating another cookie.
“You ever seen Star Trek?” I asked her.
Emily gave me a look that suggested that was a stupid question. “Of course.”
