The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 30
It didn’t take long for the soldier to figure out what I was doing, and he exploded from the shadow directly in front of me, grabbing the rifle and head-butting me. I saw stars for a moment, which was all he needed to pull the rifle away and smash the butt of it into my face.
“I will be rewarded when I bring Dr Mitchell your head,” he snapped as he drove his knee into my stomach. “Nothing to say?”
“Made you look,” I said with a wink.
He turned around as Ji-hyun grabbed him around the jaw and ignited her flame.
If the soldier had been able to use his mouth, I was pretty sure the screams would have been deafening.
Ji-hyun kicked him in the chest, sending the soldier to the ground. He tried to cover himself in shadows again, but Nadia fell from the ceiling, her now blue-and-purple glowing chains wrapping around him like snakes, constricting him, pinning his arms to his sides.
Ji-hyun walked past me toward the soldier, the smell of smoke filling my nostrils. Blood was on her jaw, which I was pretty sure wasn’t hers.
“He can’t use his power while the chains are here,” Nadia said, almost whispering it into the soldier’s ear. “Good to see you again, man whose name I never bothered to remember.”
“Traitorous bitch,” the soldier snapped.
One of Nadia’s chains coiled around the soldier’s throat and instantly tightened as the soldier fought to breathe. “Be nice,” she whispered, and the coil lessened the pressure but didn’t move it from his neck.
“Where’s Mason and his staff?” I asked.
“Where’s Dr Mitchell?” Nadia whispered.
“And why blow this place up?” Ji-hyun asked.
Nadia’s chains snaked around the soldier, who fought to breathe.
“Mason isn’t here,” he said.
“Wait, what?” I asked. “Where is Mason?”
The soldier laughed. “New York, I imagine. Mason was no longer useful, so Dr Mitchell made a call to give his location to the authorities. About an hour ago.”
“He’s been arrested?” I asked.
“By now, I imagine, yes,” the soldier said. “Poor little rich boy never figured out that he was never the one in charge. His money paid our wages, paid for the research done here, but we believe in Dr Mitchell. She’s going to change everything.”
“Where is Dr Mitchell?” Ji-hyun asked.
“We were to destroy it all,” he snapped. “We were here to remove the lab people, blow the whole place. Kill anything that remained. Dr Mitchell knew you’d come sooner or later. They wanted you to get here, to find this place, so we could kill you all at once.”
“That did not work out how you’d planned,” I pointed out.
“Where is she?” Ji-hyun’s tone left no room to suggest she was anything other than getting seriously angry.
“Gone,” the soldier said. “Don’t know where; she didn’t tell us.”
I tried to get reception on my phone, but there was nothing.
“It’s a few hours back to anywhere with a reception,” the soldier said smugly. “You’re stuck here.”
“I’ll go back to New York,” I said. “If Mason has been arrested, he might be more willing to tell us where Callie has gone to.”
The soldier laughed again. “He’s not going to do a damn thing if he has any sense.”
“We’ll see,” I said, turning to Nadia and Ji-hyun. “Get back when you can.”
“And this soldier?” Nadia asked.
“Where’s the intel you got from the viewing point up there?” I asked. “That’s what you came in here for, isn’t it? Make sure there’s nothing left? I assume some of the things got loose and you all had to fight your way in.”
“The intel is gone,” the soldier said.
“Kill him,” I said. “He’s useless now.”
Nadia punched a hole through his head with one of her chains, killing the soldier.
“Keep safe,” I said to Ji-hyun and Nadia, opened the embers, and stepped through.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
You’re back already?” Maria the hawk asked as I left the longhouse in my embers.
“Yes,” I said, walking past them. Despite the fact that it was dark in Canada and would be in New York too, it was light outside in my embers. “In a hurry, though. I left my Talon mask in New York, need to get back there.”
Maria took off and landed on my shoulder. “You can’t heal here.”
“I’m not here to heal,” I said, stopping and turning my head to find my face less than an inch away from the beak of an animal designed to rend flesh from bone. It was a little disconcerting.
“So, you’re here to just run though, is that it?” Maria asked.
I wanted to nod, but it would have involved head-butting Maria, so I just smiled instead. “Need to get from northern Canada to New York, fast.”
“You’re going to feel it when you leave,” Maria said. “That’s a big trip.”
“I know,” I said. “But it still needs to be done. If I have to crash for an hour after, so be it. I can’t wait a day to get back there.”
“What the bloody hell are you doing back here?” Casimir the wolf asked as they trotted into view.
“He needs a long journey done in a short time,” Maria said.
“You’re not hurt,” the wolf said, sniffing me.
“No, I’m not hurt,” I said, feeling slight frustration. “Seriously, I just need to get back to New York.”
“It’s a bit of a walk to the exit,” Maria said. “Let’s go.”
I set off at a jog, and Casimir ran beside me. I knew Casimir wasn’t really a wolf, but it was still pretty cool to have one running beside me. And having once had to run from a real wolf—long story—having one not trying to bite you is a much more pleasant experience.
We ran for five minutes with Maria flying above, until they landed on a hut that was some distance outside of the main village. I didn’t remember ever having seen this hut before. The embers changed as they needed to, and despite having been back hundreds of times, it was something I’d never quite gotten used to. We were close to a set of foreboding woods that I most certainly had been in before and never wished to again. These particular woods in my embers signified the furthest reaches of them. Stepping inside was bad. Really bad. I’d done it once and vowed never again.
I opened the door to the hut as dusk began to settle in the skies above. The embers weren’t keen on me returning so often. Sometimes nightfall takes hours, but sometimes, if you keep making trips to the embers, it hurries it along. A warning to not overuse it, maybe. Who knows? Either way, it was my cue to leave.
“This is going to be the longest jump you’ve taken in a long time,” Maria said. “You will not feel good.”
“No, I don’t suppose I will,” I said.
“Take care,” Casimir said. “Try not to vomit.”
I stepped into the hut. “Thanks,” I said as the door closed, and my embers kicked me back out to the real world.
I vomited. It was neither heroic nor pleasant, and I was glad to find a metal bin in the middle of the room I found myself in. I was also glad I hadn’t eaten for a while.
I stood up and realised I was in the medical bay of the church shelter, just as Gabriel rushed into the room, weapons ready for fighting.
“Hey,” I said. “This sucks ass.”
At that point I fell over. You can’t damage your pride and dignity if you’re not conscious to remember it.
I woke up in bed, with Gabriel on one side and Hannah stood at the foot of the bed.
“This was not how I assumed today was going to go,” I said eventually, after remembering that I shouldn’t just lie still and stare. “How long was I out?”
“Two hours,” Gabriel said.
I swung my legs out of the bed. “Had to come back from Canada pretty sharpish, no phone reception in the middle of nowhere. Mason has been double-crossed.”
“He was arrested about an hour ago,” Gabriel said. “Emily told us. He tried to run, ended up being detained in the Grand after he got spotted and led the police on a bit of a chase. He had put on a disguise and tried to pass himself off as one of the victims of Callie’s experiments.”
“There was a high-speed chase?” I asked.
“A slow, plodding chase,” Gabriel told me. “It was on foot. Mason tried to take some hostages. It didn’t work out so well; last I heard, he was being detained in the Grand waiting for his lawyer, or someone to take him to lockup. Turns out money still buys you some privilege, even after getting caught red-handed.”
“So, I didn’t even need to rush back and tell you,” I said with a sigh. “Everyone okay here?”
“All good here,” Gabriel said. “Or it was until a vomiting man passed out in our medical bay.”
“I thought you’d be staying at the casino,” I said.
“We are,” Gabriel said. “After you left, Scarlet was finding it a little bit too overwhelming being around everyone, so Hannah and I took her here to collect some of her things. Then you burst in. Good timing, by the way.”
“Sorry about that,” I said, getting up.
“We needed to see you,” Hannah said. “We found something. Something really bad.”
“Any chance I can get something to eat and drink while I get the bad news?” I asked.
We went by way of the kitchen and a grabbed half a dozen apples and an entire pack of sliced chicken to eat while Hannah and Gabriel went through what they’d found. Scarlet walked into the room after Gabriel called her over.
“Dr Mitchell was working on a serum that let people turn into monsters,” Hannah said.
“I know,” I said. “I remember that bit.”
“Well, we learned a lot more about the serum that Callie was working on in secret,” Hannah said. “Scarlet told us about the hybrids that Mason got; she didn’t know about the ones done in secret.”
“The hybrids that Mason got were part greater fiend, part human,” Scarlet told me. “They also have animal DNA in them, and honestly the whole thing is a giant dice roll as to what attributes you get with every vial. Also, the effect fades quicker, but the more doses you take in a short space of time, the more likely you are to suffer . . . problems.”
“Problems like peeling apart?” I asked.
Scarlet nodded.
“Okay, so, what about the secret serum?” I asked.
“I didn’t know about it,” Scarlet said. “But reading through Dr Mitchell’s notes, these hybrids are part elder fiend.”
That got my attention.
“Seriously?” I asked. “How is that possible?”
“Dr Mitchell got it to work,” Scarlet said. “I’m not a genetics expert to the level of Dr Mitchell, but the notes say it worked well. They kept the intelligence of the human part, but the level of power is off the charts. Dr Mitchell notes that she had to make tests away from the confines of the Sky-High facility because they were in danger of being discovered by Mason. She took them to a facility in Canada, left Mason behind.”
“Yeah, she discarded him,” I said. “Also, they just blew up their facility.”
“Well, she did a lot of work there. In secret.”
“You ever go?” I asked Scarlet.
Scarlet shook her head. “I didn’t even leave the lab; I wasn’t allowed to see the progress on stuff like this. None of us knew this was a thing.”
“So, we officially have two types of serum, neither good, but one much worse,” I said, summarising. “Brilliant. And Callie just sold some of that serum to a buyer we don’t have the identity of.”
“We know that she was handing over the good stuff,” Hannah said. “There’s a lot of emails from her to someone I can’t identify about it. None of her notes say what their name was, though, or even how she knew them.”
“More information she probably kept on her,” Scarlet said. “She used a journal. A physical one. She was always asking about security for personal stuff.”
“One thing at a time,” I said. “Did Mason find out about the two serums?”
“No idea,” Hannah said. “He’s at the Grand; ask Emily to ask him.”
“Excellent suggestion,” I said, getting out my phone and calling Emily. The phone went to voicemail.
“That’s not great,” Gabriel said. “Maybe he’s being questioned and she can’t get to her phone.”
“I’ll head over there,” I said. “I’ll ask Emily myself. Besides, I have a bad feeling about him.”
“He’s not a warrior,” Hannah said. “What’s he going to do, set lawyers on us?”
“Fear my litigation,” Gabriel said.
“So, what happens to you?” I asked Scarlet. “When this is done, I mean.”
“I’ve spoken to Emily and agreed to testify against Mason in exchange for reduced sentencing,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was getting into, and by the time I did, it was too late, but I still worked there. There needs to be recompense for that.”
I walked into the armoury and picked up a rift-tempered H&K P30L and enough ammo to hopefully give something a bad day. After the last few days, it was better to be prepared for any eventuality. If Mason’s people had no qualms about killing FBI agents before, there was always a possibility they’d try to break him out.
My daggers were still in their sheaths, along with the throwing knives. At some point between arriving in New York and waking up, my jacket had been removed, so I grabbed a thigh-length leather jacket to keep me warm and also hide the weapons I was carrying. It looked a little Matrix, but what was good enough for Keanu is good enough for me.
“That necessary?” Gabriel asked as he walked with me up the tunnel to the bunker exit. He tossed me a set of keys to a Chevy truck that was parked nearby.
“Probably not,” I said.
“You want us to come with you?” he asked me.
“No, get to Booker, notify him,” I said. “If something is going on, he’ll need help.”
“What about you?” Gabriel asked.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “If trouble is there, and that’s a big if, I’ll contact you; you can all rush over. If it’s a setup, I don’t want any of you near it.”
“The injured RCU were going to be housed in an event room at the rear of the first floor,” Gabriel said. “That was the initial drop-off point so they could be kept safe by the guards in the hotel while Emily interviewed them. Emily’s people should still be there, will be able to tell you what’s happening.”
I practically jumped into the truck, started the ignition, and set away into the night at high speed.
The hotel came into view. It was nearly the witching hour and I didn’t expect anyone to be out and about in the winter night, but the complete lack of anyone at all set my nerves on end.
I got out of the truck, checked I was ready for whatever was going to happen next, and walked casually across the road to the outside of the hotel. I stayed a little down from the main entrance and drew my gun as I moved up toward it.
There were no lights in the reception area inside the hotel. No movement of any kind, although the darkness, combined with the mirror sheen of the glass, made it difficult to determine exactly what was going on inside.
I remained low and moved up to the revolving door, pushing it slightly, but it didn’t budge, so I pushed open the door beside it and stepped into a horror show. The entire front desk was caked in blood. It was dripping in a slow, methodical way over the edge of the desk into an ever-growing pool.
There were five bodies that I could see, although none of them were whole. Most were missing heads and limbs, and all five wore the uniform of the hotel.
I checked my phone, hoping for a signal, but got nothing. I replaced it, reached out, and touched the rift. Vapor-like trails of almost transparent purple and blue filled the entire room, moving through the hotel. Whatever was there was big. Really big. And incredibly powerful.
I stepped around the bisected body of a young man in a hotel uniform. The contents of a leather briefcase were thrown about the place—paper and pens stuck to the blood-slick floor. I moved toward the lifts, where there was another body. This one had a gun in his hand, which was several feet from where the rest of his body lay.
The blue and purple trails mixed together, twisting into one another as they went through a slightly ajar door opposite the lifts. The pale wood had bloodstained handprints over it, several of them smeared together as if people had sprinted through the door one after the other in quick succession.
I pushed the door open with the butt of my gun, but beyond was a calmness that didn’t exist in the foyer. The hallway was thirty feet long, with two doors inside. One opposite the entrance and one that, as I opened it, revealed a small office. It was empty except for the radio jammer that had been placed on the desk.
After switching the jammer off, I phoned Gabriel.
“Lots of dead; send everyone with everything you have,” I told him.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.
“No promises,” I told him, and ended the call.
I left the office, letting the door close behind me, and moved toward the door at the far end of the hallway. There were smears of blood along the hallway itself, as if people had stumbled while running, but whoever had made it into the hallway had made it through the opposite door in one piece.
They hadn’t made it very far beyond that.
There were several dead just after the door, which led into what I assumed would at some point have been a gleaming white kitchen. It now looked like someone had produced a horror film there.
The dead I saw first were all in pieces, each one discarded around the room. The entire kitchen had been torn apart. Someone huge had killed the people inside, but it hadn’t done any damage to the walls in the hallway. It had changed its size.
Considering the exit at the far end of the kitchen was now just a giant hole, it looked like whatever had killed the people had remained that size when it left.
I moved through the kitchen, fully aware of just how much noise I was making with every step. As I reached the far end, there were two men wearing Mason’s security uniforms. Apparently, some of Mason’s people had tried to get to him after all. Both had died from gunshot wounds to the head and chest. One of them had been partially crushed by something.
