The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 26
“We’ll find them both,” I told him. “First, we do the job we’re here for.”
“Be safe, my friend,” he said.
“You too,” I told him.
Gabriel ran off after everyone else, and I walked back toward the truck as a black Ferrari pulled up and Booker and Zita got out, and I waved them over toward the rest of the team.
I pulled on my Talon mask, climbed into the cab, and switched on the truck’s engine, taking it away from the building down the block, until I was far enough away that I could build up speed. There were sirens in the distance, and while I didn’t want to know what Booker and Zita had done to get the cops’ attention, I also hoped that attention was going to stay elsewhere. I didn’t want HPD, crooked or not, turning up to cause complications.
I gunned the huge engine inside the truck, and the rear wheels spun as it gained traction. I wasn’t sure how fast trucks usually went, but even at only forty miles per hour, I was pretty sure I was going to cause significant damage to whatever it hit.
I planted my foot on the gas, and the truck continued to gain speed, practically launching up the curb onto the slope, storming toward Mason’s Tower. I kept my foot planted as we hit the front entrance, and the world became one of overwhelming noise.
I’d turned to smoke a second before the truck had hit, but the momentary lack of the gas pedal being pushed had done little to stop the momentum of several tons of truck smashing into steel shutters. The shutters tore like paper, and the truck barrelled into the pristine foyer, destroying everything in its path as I drifted away from the chaos and re-formed behind a pillar at the far end of the large foyer.
The truck hit the reception area, destroying the granite, but the truck flipped onto its side, taking out the wall behind the reception in a cacophony of steel, stone, and wood all coming together. Shrapnel pinged around the foyer, destroying even more of the area. I moved around to the side of the foyer, the smell of burning rubber and oil combining with the dust to make a noxious atmosphere.
The lifts still worked, and they were far enough away from the ruination I’d caused for me to not worry about them breaking and leaving me stranded in the middle of a lift shaft.
I removed my daggers and pressed the button for Mason’s office, the lift starting its upward climb. The doors opened just after the lift stopped, and I darted out, becoming smoke, but quickly realised there was no one there and re-formed myself. I looked around the empty reception area, half-expecting a dozen armed guards to drop out of the ceiling or something, but it was pretty clear nothing was going to happen, so I opened the door to Mason’s office.
“I thought you’d have more guards,” I said, removing my hooded mask and placing it on a nearby desk.
“You took your bloody time,” Dan shouted from the far end of the office. He was sat in Mason’s chair, his boots up on his desk. “You’re a Talon? You kept that secret.”
I nodded. “Was,” I said. “Haven’t been one in a long time, though. Not since my Guild were murdered in an ambush.”
“Looks like we both kept big secrets,” Dan said, but there was an edge of concern in his voice. “You know it never needed to be this way.”
“You helped murder my friends,” I said. “It was always going to end up being this way. How long have you been working against us?”
“About twenty years now,” he said. “You want to know why?”
“Not really,” I told him.
“Tough,” he snapped. “When I heard that the Ravens were going to die, I asked them to spare you. Believe it or not, I did actually consider you a friend. They did as I asked, and then you vanished from sight to go hide somewhere, and I hoped you’d stay away. Give the people I work with time to do what they need to do. And the second it starts, you pop back up to get involved.”
“They gave you the RCU,” I said. “Was that your price?”
“Part of it, yes,” Dan said. “New York was always going to have to be removed; the LA branch was just a happy coincidence. Callie needed more bodies, and seeing how I disliked many of the people working there, it was a good day to be me.”
“You going to tell me who you’re actually working for?” I asked.
“No,” Dan said with a chuckle. “I’m definitely not doing that.”
“So, all of this, all of this misery you’ve caused, was so you got a little bit more power?” I asked. “More wealth, more . . .” I waved my arms around the office.
“You’ve been a mercenary,” he continued before I could say anything. “You’ve taken coin over people. You’ve taken coin over principles. At least I took the goddamn coin and have the principles to back it up.”
“What? The principle to be an asshole?” I asked.
“The Ravens had to be killed,” Dan said. “They had to be. Someone in your precious Guild discovered something they shouldn’t have, and so there was a scorched-earth policy. I don’t even know what that information was. I just get told to arrange the deaths of people, and I do my job.”
“Like a good little assassin,” I said. “You helped murder my friends. That’s the crux of why I’m going to kill you.”
“Do you ever hear yourself?” Dan asked, a chuckle in his voice. “You sound like you’re the arbiter of life and death. The one person who gets to decide if I live or die. Fuck you. You don’t get to decide shit.”
“Dan, you don’t really know much about me,” I said. “You didn’t know that I was a Talon for the Ravens, you didn’t know that I’ve killed people bigger and better than you, you didn’t know my history. We were friends, Dan, but it wasn’t like we were besties talking about our hopes and dreams. When I walk away from your corpse—and I will be the one walking away—I’ll feel disappointment more than anything else. You traded morals and ethics for cash and hurting people to get more cash. How many people here were innocent?”
“No one is innocent,” Dan snapped.
“Oh, grow up,” I said. “How many, Dan? How many people did nothing to deserve whatever monstrous shit you did to them?”
“We got them from prisons,” Dan said. “Mason had a deal with a few. We get prisoners; they get paid. The prisoners were all long-term criminals, violent thugs who didn’t deserve to be allowed to breathe. Who should have been put down when they were arrested!”
“So, you tortured them to death?” I asked. “You had Dr Mitchell experiment on them for profit. Not sure that’s any better than being a violent thug.”
“Yet you’re going to kill me, so who has the moral high ground here?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “The moral high ground doesn’t interest me, Dan. Don’t you get it? You’re going to die because you betrayed me, my friends, and hurt people I cared about. I’m not interested in a philosophical debate about morals; I care about putting your head through that wall.”
“You want to fight me?” Dan shouted, rage on his face, spittle flying out of his mouth. “I’m an arcane revenant. You can’t do a goddamned thing to me.”
“I think you’ll find I can,” I told him.
“Your Guild thought the same thing,” Dan said, shrugging off his jacket and making a big deal of removing his cufflinks and rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Guess how well that worked for them.”
I took a step toward Dan as I thought back to that horrific day, of waking up at the bottom of a hill, of having to scale it with one badly damaged hand, drenched in blood. I thought back to seeing the bodies. I couldn’t be sure it was everyone; I was sucked back into the embers before I could check, my body giving out on me.
“You know, I stuck the knife in Isaac myself,” Dan said. “I figured it wouldn’t be the same coming from someone who didn’t know him. It was so easy, too. Like slicing through butter.”
I sheathed my daggers and ran toward Dan, tendrils of smoke billowing out before me, wrapping around him. He smiled and grabbed one, and an electrical surge flooded back into me, throwing me back, my smoke vanishing.
“Arcane revenant,” Dan said smugly, as if I might have forgotten somehow. “We’re each unique, a bit like riftborn themselves. You ever met an arcane that can use a riftborn’s power against them before?”
I blinked, pushed the pain aside, and got back to my feet, rolling my shoulders, which ached. “Lucky you,” I said. “You’re unique.”
“I always wanted to know if I was better than you,” Dan said. “You got to be a Guild member and I never did, people liked you, people looked up to you. I looked up to you. But I always wondered who was better. I guess we’re going to find out.”
I drew my H&K and shot him in the chest. I kept firing as I walked toward him, until the gun was empty, and I replaced it in my holster. The bullets weren’t rift-tempered, and neither was the gun, so it wouldn’t kill him, but I was pretty sure it hurt like hell.
Purple rift-power flooded over Dan’s body as it sought to heal itself as quickly as possible. I drew a dagger as Dan rolled to the side and tried to get back to his feet.
“This isn’t fair,” he shouted at me, spitting up blood as he fell to the ground.
I shrugged, and stabbed him in the back, pulling him upright and stabbing him twice more. The rift-tempered blade hissed as it left wounds that would almost certainly be fatal should Dan be left alone. I dragged a badly bleeding Dan to the door that led to Mason’s museum of stuff that didn’t belong to him. I opened the door, pulling Dan inside, and closed it behind me.
I left Dan on the ground and walked over to where the Raven medallion sat, inside its glass case, amongst a hundred other artefacts that Mason probably had no business owning. I smashed the glass with the butt of my dagger and removed the medallion. I didn’t know who it once belonged to; I just knew it wasn’t Mason’s.
“Do you know who you killed for this?” I asked Dan, who spat blood onto the floor.
“You didn’t fight fair,” he said, indigently. “I knew you were a killer, but you always fought fairly.”
“Fight fair?” I asked. “We’re not children. You ambushed and murdered my friends; it’s not my fault you were so blinded by your need to be better to get one over on me that you ignored the fact that I just wanted to kill you. There’s no such thing as fair when it comes to battle. There’s winning or being dead, and you never were much of a winner.”
Dan placed a bloody hand on a table and hauled himself to his feet, making unpleasant noises as he did. I watched with a sort of detached interest. There was no way he was going to survive the night, and I wasn’t into torturing people, but I had to admit a level of being impressed that he hadn’t simply curled into a ball and died.
“I will die on my feet,” Dan said, his tone now hard and determined.
I looked down at the bloody dagger in my hand, and then over at Dan again, before pocketing the medallion. “Sure,” I said, happy to oblige.
“Send me to the rift,” Dan said.
I showed him the blue-tinted blade. “Nope,” I said, and darted forward, plunging the blade into his chest.
Dan screamed in pain and I twisted the blade until he began to whimper. Only then did I drive my second blade up into his throat, puncturing his brain. I twisted the dagger, took a step to the side, and pulled it free, avoiding the gushing blood and falling body of Dan.
“That was for Isaac,” I told him. “You deserved a lot worse.” I stepped over the body and out of Mason’s museum to find Ji-hyun sat on Mason’s desk.
“He dead?” she asked calmly as she cleaned a bloody knife.
I nodded. “How about downstairs?”
“A few dozen guards, nothing major,” she said. “We grabbed the surviving prisoners.”
“Surviving?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer but knowing I had to find out.
“Some,” she said. “Found four of the RCU agents and a few human survivors. Ten in all. Dr Mitchell had over two dozen people down there; most of her experiments were done on people who were originally human, trying to change them.”
“Damn it,” I said.
“Hannah downloaded a lot of intel from the servers,” Ji-hyun told me. “Hopefully, we’ll get answers to pinpoint Dr Mitchell’s exact location.”
Ji-hyun passed me my Talon mask.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Well, I think they’ll know we’re coming,” Ji-hyun said. “We made quite the statement here. But I’m thinking that we need to make sure.” Blue fire ignited over Ji-hyun’s hands. She walked past me into the museum, and I heard the crackling of flames as she ignited everything she could. She left the room, flames flickering out of the doorway behind her, trailing in her wake as she walked through Mason’s office toward me as I stood next to the office door.
The flames incinerated Mason’s desk, and by the time Ji-hyun reached me, the office was on its way to becoming an inferno.
The fire alarms went off, and sprinklers started to try and put out the fire, but it would be a losing battle. I’d seen Ji-hyun’s fire burn through metal. I left with her, taking the stairs down, as the lifts had shut down the second the fire alarms went off.
We reached the outside just as the glass on Mason’s office was burned through and flames began to lick the outside walls of the building. It wouldn’t move to other floors; it would stay exactly where Ji-hyun wanted it to stay, behaving like normal fire but not being normal fire. Ji-hyun clicked her fingers and the fire extinguished immediately.
“Now, that’s a statement,” Ji-hyun said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ji-hyun and I ran a few blocks away from Mason’s tower before being picked up by Booker and Zita, who were driving around in a large Mercedes SUV.
“Thanks for the lift,” I said, climbing into the back of the vehicle, with Ji-hyun beside me.
“We’ve had a long night,” Booker said from the front passenger seat. “I now owe a lot of powerful people some favours.”
“Whatever you need, Booker,” I said, “I’ll be there to help.”
“I will take you up on that one day,” Booker said. “Just don’t get killed before we get to that point.”
Zita drove us to their underground casino building and parked around the rear, where the rest of the group were already waiting. “Figured the church might not be safe,” Gabriel said as I got out.
“You okay?” I asked him.
Gabriel nodded.
“Anyone hurt in the attack?” I asked. “On our side.”
“Bill got a nasty cut to his temple,” Gabriel said. “Dale took a round to the chest, but he was wearing a vest, so he’s mostly bruised. A few of the others have scrapes and bruises, but it looks like most of Mason’s staff were absent.”
“We closed the casino floor for the night,” Booker said. “We’ve put Isaac in our office.”
“What about those who we got out of Mitchell’s lab?” I asked.
“Bill and Gordon sent everyone to the same hotel you were staying in,” Booker said.
“They’re safe; Isaac might not have mentioned,” Gabriel said, “but we used the hotel as a sort of halfway point for the newly returned.”
“Sounds like we owe you a lot, then,” I said.
“The amount climbs ever higher,” Booker said with a smile.
We all entered the building and found space on the casino floor to sit down and relax for a few moments. I sat next to Dale and Emily, both of whom looked exhausted.
“Glad you made it back okay,” Dale said.
Ji-hyun went to grab food.
“Dan?” Emily asked.
“He won’t be bothering anyone again,” I said.
“Your friend is quite the fighter,” she said to me.
“Ji-hyun was a Talon too,” I said. “She walked away from the life about a century ago.”
“She’s as old as you?” Emily asked.
I shook my head and took a seat next to Gabriel. “Not even close.”
“Still don’t know who’s working with Mason and co, though,” Emily said.
“A problem for tomorrow,” I said.
“They think I’ve absconded,” Emily said. “My boss phoned. He was told I’d lost the tail that had been put on me; his response was to ask why there was one on me. No one had a good answer for that. He told me to help you however I can but that there’d be no backup. Can’t risk it.”
“So, everything you just did was all by the book?” I asked her.
“Retroactively,” she said. “I think officially we were never there and it never happened. That seems like the safest way forward.”
I nodded. “My lips are sealed,” I told her. “I’m going to see Isaac.”
“You sure you’re up to it?” Gabriel asked. “Hannah is combing the information we took from Dr Mitchell, trying to figure out where she’s gone. We can leave at a moment’s notice.”
“I promised,” I said by way of explanation.
“And if it goes wrong, you’re out of commission for a day, maybe longer,” Gabriel said. “Isaac will understand. I’m pretty sure that Mason is going to want vengeance for the fact that we just killed his remaining staff, stole his research, burned down his office, and . . .”
I removed the medallion from my pocket. “Took back what wasn’t his.”
“Got the bastards,” Hannah exclaimed. “Mason and Dr Mitchell went to Baffin Island.”
“That’s a big place,” I said.
“There’s a research station in the northeast,” Hannah told me. “Well, it’s more of a research village. It’s big enough for a few hundred people. I’m working on getting a satellite image of the place, but it’s going to take me a while. The old codes we used as RCU aren’t something I want to use again unless I need to.”
“Isaac’s awake,” someone shouted.
“Wait, what?” I asked, suddenly awake and looking around as Ruby ran into the room, tears in her eyes.
“He wants to talk to you,” Ruby said to me. “He says it’s urgent.”
I practically sprinted through the casino, taking the stairs two at a time, and bursting through the office door to find Isaac lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to things monitoring his vitals.
