The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 25
“I’d already put myself in charge,” Ji-hyun said. “But it was nice of you to do it too.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Hannah, you’re with Ji-hyun, so long as she’s okay with that.”
“George, I want you and your people down here,” I said. “You’re our eyes and ears. We need to know what’s happening on police scanners and radios. If we need a quick extraction, we’re going to need to know where and when we can get out.”
“I’ll get them everything they need,” Hannah said.
“It’s been a long day,” I said. “It’s not going to get any better this evening. You all need to be prepared to fight, to kill if necessary. Dan and those working for him won’t hesitate. You can’t either. I’m not losing anyone else.”
I left everyone to get ready and walked back up to the shelter with Gabriel and Ji-hyun.
“I’m going to go make sure this place is secure,” Gabriel said. “Give you two time to catch up.”
“That’ll have to wait,” I said.
“Go talk to Ruby,” Ji-hyun said. “I wish I could help, but . . . you’re much older than me; I’ve never taken anyone into my embers before, and I don’t think it would go well to take someone hurt in the first time.”
“No,” I agreed. “It would be . . . very bad.” It would, most likely, kill Isaac instantly and kick Ji-hyun back to the rift for who knows how long.
“I need food,” Ji-hyun said. “I guess it’s too much to hope that you have kimchi here.”
“Sorry, I don’t think Gabriel got the fridge full of Korean food,” I said. “You’ll have to put in a request.”
“I’ll make sure I do,” she said.
I smiled. It was good to see her again; it had been too long. But, as I said, our catch-up would have to wait. There were things that needed to be resolved first.
I found Ruby sat by Isaac’s bed. She was reading to Isaac and looked up at me, placing the book on the table beside her.
“I know I told you I would take Isaac into my embers,” I said. “And I will. I promise. But I can’t tonight.”
Ruby didn’t look up at me, and just nodded.
“I got hurt,” I said. “Shot in the shoulder. I had to go to the embers to heal up. Healing Isaac will take time and energy, and we don’t have either right now. I know this is horrible, and I know that I told you I would do it, but I just have to delay it for a little while. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Ruby said, looking up at me. “Isaac would understand. I understand.”
As much as she said that she understood, Ruby’s words still stung. I felt like it would have been easier if she’d sworn at me, or yelled, something. The acceptance was like a shot to the gut.
“I wish this hadn’t happened,” I told her.
“Me too,” Ruby said. “I assume you’re all going to save the others. The ones who were taken when Isaac was hurt.”
I nodded. “That’s the plan, yes.”
“I don’t want other families to go through what we’re going through,” Ruby said, looking over at Isaac and smiling sadly. “You do whatever you need to do to get them back safe.”
“I will.”
“No, Lucas,” Ruby stared at me, steel in her eyes. “You do whatever it takes to get those people home. Isaac would tell you the same, wouldn’t he? Take the gloves off; get done what you need to get done.”
I thought about the Talon mask. I thought about how I had failed my Guild. I wouldn’t fail my friends again. “They won’t live through the night,” I told her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The teams were ready for their tasks within the hour.
Apart from Dale and Emily, Gabriel, and Nadia, Hannah also joined me on our trip to the warehouse in a black BMW SUV that I didn’t ask where it was from, and no one told me. Plausible deniability.
Emily and Dale were wearing something resembling their FBI tactical gear that Booker had also brought.
I looked down at the Talon mask in the pocket of the SUV’s door and retrieved it. Dan had been responsible for what had happened to my Guild, and I hadn’t been able to stop it. Tonight, Dan would meet a Talon’s justice. One way or another.
The weather had turned unpleasant on the drive over, heavy wind and freezing rain, cutting through the night. I lifted the hood of my waterproof coat up as I pulled the Talon mask down over my face, opened the door, and stepped into the night.
“We need eyes and ears in there,” I said, looking beyond the BMW to the warehouse and its sizeable fencing.
“I’ll go,” Nadia said. “Be back soon.”
She’d run off toward the warehouse before anyone could say anything, her movements becoming jerkier the closer she got and the more she accessed the rift. Nadia was soon up and over the fence and scrambling up the outer wall of the warehouse to the roof, where she vanished from view.
“Chained revenants,” Gabriel said by way of explanation.
“Are we meant to just wait?” Dale asked.
“I believe so,” I said.
I heard the dragging of chains along the ground and turned to see Nadia jerkily walking toward us.
“So, how bad is it?” Emily asked Nadia.
“Half a dozen hostages,” Nadia said. “Let me show you.”
Nadia’s chains snaked around my wrists before I could say anything, and after the immediate explosion of sounds, smells, and, most unpleasantly, tastes, of what Nadia had encountered, I saw the hostages and the guards. There were six hostages, just like Nadia said, and six guards. I didn’t recognize any of the hostages.
The hostages looked to be in relatively good shape, although one of them had a few facial bruises. They were sat together in the corner of the room, facing a window that had bars and was far too high for a human to safely use.
Nadia moved again, making her way through the warehouse, keeping high as she spied on the six guards. Three were on the warehouse floor, playing cards, while another stood at the bottom of the stairs; the final two were in the remains of the office room.
The images vanished, and I dropped to my knees as reality came back in a rush.
“You okay?” Emily asked me.
I nodded. “Little warning next time,” I said to Nadia.
“Apologies,” Nadia said. “I assumed expedience was the aim of the game here.”
I got to my feet, feeling a little lightheaded, and saw Gabriel’s concerned expression. “I’m fine,” I said. “I do not like having memories dumped on me like that. It hurts.”
“So, do we have a plan?” Nadia asked.
“I’m going up to the roof,” I said. “Those bars aren’t going to stop me. The biggest concern is that there could be guards we don’t know about in the rooms that Nadia couldn’t get to, and/or guards in the corridor.”
“We’re the distraction,” Gabriel said. He’d brought his old 1950s Colt Peacemakers, both engraved in nineteenth-century patterns. They’d have been beautiful ornaments or exhibits in a museum, but Gabriel kept them well maintained and was steadily loading them as he spoke.
“That doesn’t seem like a very cleric thing to own,” Nadia said, with a huge grin.
“I wasn’t always a cleric,” Gabriel said, placing both guns in holsters against his hips.
“Emily, Nadia, you go with Gabriel and Dale,” I said. “Hannah, we’re going to need the security feed in that place on a loop.”
“I’m on it,” she said, throwing her rucksack onto her shoulder.
Dale tapped something on his watch. “Countdown,” he said by way of explanation.
“Give me five minutes, then create hell,” I said.
“I think we can do that,” Gabriel said with a wink.
I ran off toward the warehouse, turning to smoke and walking through the chain-link fence.
There were no guards outside that I saw, which meant all of the trouble was contained within the warehouse itself. In many ways, that was the preferred scenario, as I didn’t want to have to start running around in the car park to find people.
Climbing up the side of the building was easy enough. Much like climbing the trees earlier, I used my smoke to gain traction against the concrete wall and sort of dragged myself up it. It would probably look really strange to anyone below, but I wasn’t doing it to look good.
I reached the roof and moved along it as quickly as possible, finding the edge from Nadia’s vision and looking over. Smoke trailed out of my hand, snaking down around the bars in the window. I gave it a small yank, solidifying the smoke, and stepped off the roof.
There’s always that moment of Holy shit, I stepped off a roof seventy feet in the air when I do anything like this.
I used my free hand to pour smoke out against the wall, making sure I didn’t slam into it. When I stopped swinging, I retracted the smoke around the metal bars back into my hand, pulling me up the wall until I had hold of the bars with one hand, and the smoke anchored around it with the other.
I looked into the dark room and tried to make out exactly where the RCU agents would be. “Anyone there?” I whispered.
There was movement below, and the face of a male RCU agent came into view, lit by the dim moonlight.
“Who are you?” he asked. “How did you get there? Why are you there? What’s going on?”
“Explanations later,” I said, turning to smoke and pouring through the window, re-forming myself on the floor in front of the huddled RCU agents. “Name is Lucas Rurik; I’m here to get you all out.”
“They made us wear these suits,” the RCU agent said, showing the second-skin suit under his dirty clothes.
“Yeah, I’m familiar with them,” I said.
“There’s a digital lock on the back,” a female agent told me.
“We’ll get them done,” I assured them. “Let me just go get rid of anyone who might be a nuisance. Be right back.”
I opened the hatch on the door that was used to pass food through and turned to smoke, drifting through into the dimly lit corridor beyond.
I sensed the guard in the gloom before he saw me. A lone sentry sat on a chair between the two rooms of hostages, his eyes closed, his rifle held in a lackadaisical manner by his hip. I wrapped the smoke around his neck, nose, and mouth, solidifying it, choking him before he even had time to react. Another strand of smoke cushioned the AR-15 rifle from hitting the floor as I walked by. Threat removed without noise.
After checking the rest of the floor and finding no additional threats, I fished the keys from the dead guard and unlocked the makeshift cell used to keep the RCU prisoner.
“Stay behind me,” I said. “You’re all human if you’re wearing those suits, and I’d rather not have Isaac kick my ass for not getting you all back home.”
“Yes, sir,” one of the RCU agents said.
I took the lead as gunfire broke out. I had just about reached the door when it was thrown open and a large bald man stepped through. He saw me, panicked, and went to raise his sidearm.
I moved quickly, stepping around him, grabbing his wrist, and bent his arm back up toward him. A small trail of smoke brushed over his trigger finger, forcing it down. The gun fired twice, removing a portion of the man’s head and depositing it all over the wall behind him. I took his gun and slid it back toward the others before moving out onto the metal staircase.
Gabriel was a spined revenant, capable of growing huge spines all over his body and using them for both defensive and offensive purposes. He was currently firing them at two of Mason’s people who had hunkered down behind some metal machinery, the spines tearing chunks out of it. They were safe for now, but it wouldn’t last.
Dale and Emily were at the ruined entrance to the warehouse, shooting at two more guards who were returning fire.
I spotted Nadia crawling across the beams overhead; she dropped onto a guard who was trying to flank Gabriel. The guards’ last moments on earth were filled with blood and screaming.
I vaulted over the metal stairs, turning to smoke. The smoke startled the two men as it moved past their legs, and I materialized again. I shot each guard in the head as they tried to turn toward me, and spotted that Gabriel had killed one of the two men he’d been engaged with, the second man screaming as his companion collapsed with a foot-long red spine where his eye had once been.
The distraction was enough, and Gabriel killed the other as Emily began to fire on two more guards who were now engaged with Dale.
It didn’t take long for everyone to be dealt with, and despite the fatigue and injuries to the hostages, no one else was seriously hurt.
“These two were cops,” Dale said. “Obviously corrupt.”
“Not anymore,” Nadia said, stepping over one of their bodies.
We found some digital cards and gave them to the RCU agents to get rid of those horrendous second-skin suits. We left the warehouse after Gabriel found several sets of car keys that had belonged to the dead guards. Emily joined Nadia, Dale, and Gabriel as we waited for the RCU agents.
Hannah left the warehouse. “All done,” she said. “It’s on a loop. It’s not a lot of footage, but it’ll do.”
“Thank you,” I told her.
“Now we get the others,” Hannah said.
“You all have a choice,” I told the RCU agents as they assembled before us. “Isaac is hurt. Badly. He won’t be taking part in this fight, so we’re going to have to do the fighting for him. If anyone here doesn’t think they can do this, tell me now. No one will think less of you. You’ve been prisoners; you’re beat up and exhausted.”
Everyone stood where they were.
“Take a car,” I told them. “We’re going to Sky-High’s main office. We’ve got more of these assholes to remove tonight.”
“Booker and Zita called,” Emily said, looking everyone over. “Apparently, their friends kept the HPD busy, but Mason’s tower shut down almost the moment the rest of the team went inside.”
“So, the whole second team is trapped?” Gabriel asked.
“I can’t get hold of anyone there,” Hannah said, trying her phone.
“They’ve trapped our people in Mason’s tower?” one of the RCU agents said. “What do we do?
“Well, by god, we go get them back,” Gabriel said, opening the car door.
“How?” Dale asked.
I looked around everyone. “We’re going to do something extraordinarily stupid.”
“Can I join in?” Nadia asked with a smile.
I thought for a second. “I’m going to need something to drive that’s really big.”
“Like a van?” Dale asked.
“No, more like that,” I said, and pointed to several eighteen-wheelers in the warehouse car park and dangled a set of keys between my fingers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I’d never driven an eighteen-wheeler before, and after the initial difficulty of moving a vehicle so extraordinarily massive, I did a pretty good job. Or, at least, I didn’t hit anything and managed to keep it from tipping over when going around corners.
Mason’s tower loomed above and I spotted the SUV Emily had been driving parked up in front of it. There was a gentle slope from the road to the front of the tower, where the shutters had been closed. I stopped the truck and climbed out of the cab before running over to the shutters and looking for a way inside. Smoke poured out of me, but it found no entry apart from tiny holes, and it would take me ages to pour through and reform myself on the other side. And that was time I would be unable to defend myself.
“There’s no one behind there,” Nadia said from beside me, making me jump.
“You sure?” I asked, wrapping my knuckles against the metal shutters.
Nadia nodded.
I looked back at Dale and the others as they joined us. “Any other way in?” I asked.
“There’s a loading bay at the back,” Dale said.
“I know the codes,” Nadia told everyone. “But they’re going to expect us.”
“What if they changed the codes?” Emily asked.
Hannah stepped forward, removing her jacket and tossing it into the open door of a nearby car. She changed before our eyes, moving from her usual self into her horned revenant form. She was nearly seven feet tall, with a two-foot-long midnight-blue horn jutting out of each temple. Her skin was dark grey around her torso, while the palms of her huge hands were aqua blue. Her black eyes were like those of a shark, and when she smiled, you got to see the triangular saw-like teeth. Horned revenants were made for smashing. And Hannah was exceptionally good at that.
“We found a way in, then,” I said, nodding to Hannah.
“Been wanting to smash something for a while,” Hannah said, her voice now deep.
“What happens after that?” Dale asked.
“We find out,” Nadia said, setting off in that direction without another word, Hannah quickly running after her to catch up.
Dale and Emily left with the two revenants, with Gabriel staying back. “You’re going to drive that truck through there, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “I figured you might like a distraction.”
“Yes,” Gabriel said. “And it’s monstrously stupid.”
“It is,” I said enthusiastically. “I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes.
“When you’re in the lab, you need to find Dr Mitchell’s work,” I said. “Hopefully, we can find out exactly what she was working on, but destroy her work. It can’t get out of here, no matter what it is.”
“We sure she’s not here?” Gabriel asked.
I nodded. “William couldn’t lie, although he could be misinformed without knowing it. But while that might be the case, I’d still bet Callie isn’t here and neither is Mason. I think one of them would have at least informed William that they’d be gone. Either way, Callie’s research and results are conducted without any regard to morals or ethics. They need to be stopped.”
“She needs to go before the Ancients,” Gabriel said. “If she’s been conducting experiments on humans to turn them into fiends, she will need to be judged accordingly. Not by humans. Mason too.”
