Alaskan Fury (22 page)

“I never moved your medicine,”
Zenaida said.  The blonde woman was smiling, but every inner alarm that Imelda
had was going off, loud enough that she was getting goosebumps.  Zenaida’s
voice held an undertone that set her instincts afire when the woman said, “A
technician told me you had him test a pendant for traces of djinni magic.  I
merely wanted to see this ghostly apparition for myself, as you have assured me
it did not exist.”

Zenaida is a magus,
her
mind babbled in rising terror,
…and something else.

“So you entered my room,” Imelda
snapped, keeping her unease hidden behind a smooth façade of indignance.  “
Broke
the
lock
.  Like a common burglar.”

Zenaida showed not a hint of
remorse, her voice silky-smooth when she said, “You lied to me.”

Masking her growing unease,
Imelda narrowed her eyes and stepped toward the blonde woman, until she was
looking down at her.  “While you may believe differently,” she said softly, “I
do not answer to you, Inquisidora.  If you have a
request
to be made of
me, you may make it through Jacquot.  If I hear of you rummaging through my
personal quarters again, I will
personally
put my gun to your head and
blow your filth-ridden brains across the compound.  If it were up to me, you
would join those beasts on the rack.”  She swiveled on heel, her heart
hammering in her chest.

As she was walking away, Zenaida casually
said, “I heard you lost an entire team to a
wolf
today, Imelda.  All
brutally murdered, their blood spread across an acre of land, the two feylords
in the helicopter released.  I wonder if the Holy Patron knows.”

Imelda hesitated, her back still
to Zenaida, then silently took the stairs out of the basement.

Jacquot was waiting for her at
the top.  “I’m sorry, ma mie,” he said, wincing.  “I saw her coming, but I
could not reasonably come down to warn you…”

“Tell Herr Drescher he’s going to
fly me to my Padre,” she said, stalking toward the helo pad.

Jacquot winced.  “Herr Drescher
and Giuseppe were…close…ma mie.  He is in mourning.”

The world in flames!
  “Then
you
will take me to my Padre,” Imelda said, without slowing, but
changing her goal to the garage.

Jacquot bowed.  “I’ll just go
change into something less blac—”

“Now,” Imelda snapped.  “If the police
want to stop us because you are dressed in black, just
shoot
them.  I am
running out of time.”

Jacquot hesitated, indecision on
his face, then nodded once.  “I will grab extra magazines, Inquisitrice.”  He
turned toward the armory.

“Just
go
to the
car
or I will
leave without you
.”  And she, being an Inquisidora, had never
taken the time to learn how to drive in this wretched country.  As such, used
to the well-kept roads of Spain, she had about as much chance of getting to her
destination alive as she did careening down an ice-laden hill and meeting her
end in a ball of fire.

Jacquot hesitated just long
enough to realize that she was serious, then bowed low and ran ahead of her to
the garage.  He had the SUV running and the garage door opened by the time she
slammed the door of the back seat shut behind her.  He skidded out of the
garage and up the winding drive, spraying frozen gravel into the alders as he
spun out onto the main road.

While normally Imelda would have
commented on his reckless driving, now she wished he could drive faster.  She
watched the scraggly Alaskan forest rush by her window and pulled her bottle of
migraine medicine from her pocket.  Shaking twice the usual dosage of little
white tablets into her palm, she popped them into her mouth and swallowed
without water. 

“Headaches, ma mie?” Jacquot
asked, looking at her worriedly through the rearview mirror.

Imelda—who didn’t speak of her
migraines to any of her team, yet somehow, either by snooping or by Zenaida’s
rumors, they had found out anyway—waved off his concern.  She watched the
scenery pass as Jacquot pulled over the overpass and onto the Glenn Highway,
headed south.  Zenaida’s possession of a talisman similar to that of the wolf
set her nerves afire, but it was the wereverine’s words that were most
bothering her. 

“Hell if I know,”
the
wereverine had growled.
  “Not a fucking wolf.  That’s for sure.  Couple
times I got a whiff…smells like a fucking angel.” 
She had thought he had
just been mocking her faith.
 
After all, perhaps someone had told him of
her encounter.  Perhaps he was capitalizing on her own bewilderment, and was
trying to jab a wedge of uncertainty into her confidence.

Yet, she had seen the fear in his
eyes.  He had wanted her to kill him.  Him and the phoenix both.  He had been
cooperating
,
at least until Zenaida showed herself.

Mutually exclusive.  An angel.

Something began to nag at the
back corners of her mind, and Zenaida’s heart began to pound with the thought. 
What if…angels…were actually a form of upper-tiered First Landers?  What if
their appearances, in the Bible, was spawned by something…older?

Hijo Sagrado
, she thought,
horror creeping into her very being.  Could the Church’s doctrines, at least in
part, be based off of
demons
?

Not possible,
she thought,
quickly erasing that thought from her mind.  It simply was not possible.  God
would not have allowed it.

Yet this wolf had to be
something
. 
Magi simply did not have the
power
to do what she was doing.  Not these
days.  The Order had won too many battles, removed too much of the corruption. 
The creatures…fed…off of each other.  Things like the phoenix made habitat for
other things, which in turn fed still
more
, just as an olive tree made
the basis of an ecosystem for grasses and birds and mice and snakes.  Even now,
they were unraveling what was left of that network of corruption, having gone
too long unchecked in the heart of Alaska.  With each demon that fell, their
habitat collapsed, and the magi had less power to use in their witcheries.

Yet they had just lost six of her
men, all of whom had been equipped with the best technologies and artifacts
available, and these monsters were walking the Void to escape them.

…when they weren’t leaving
blatant, brazenly fearless trails across the mountainside, daring her men to
follow.

It was something that the texts
told her should
not
be possible.  Not with the Realm as pure as it was
now.

So she had to assume she was
dealing with something more than a magus, and had to assume that Zenaida could
also be one of these creatures, masquerading in the Order as a magus to
do…what?  Drain blood and…do what with it?  What was Zenaida doing down there
in the basement, when no one else was looking?

Her tingles of dread were rapidly
progressing into outright horror, and by the time Jacquot got her to Padre
Vega’s mountainside home, she was all but blind from an intense migraine.  It
took her a moment after Jacquot stopped the car before she could find enough
physical control to open the passenger door and step into the snow outside.

The glare of fresh snow hurt like
a laser, and Imelda did her best to concentrate on the darkness of her clothes
as she crossed Padre Vega’s driveway and climbed his steps.  She knocked on his
door, twice, then ducked her head and closed her eyes, leaning against the side
of the cabin’s wall.

Padre Vega opened the door in a
bathrobe, with water-tussled hair and a book in one hand.  “Imelda!” he cried
in Spanish, giving her a happy grin and gesturing inside.  “You don’t have to
knock, child.  Come in!”

“Thank you, Father,” Imelda
whispered, stumbling into the house after him.  She knew that Padre Vega’s look
was changing to concern as he watched her pull off her boots and cross to her
favorite chair, but she could not find the will to hide it.

“The headaches are bad today,”
Padre Vega commented softly, coming to stand beside her and setting his book on
the coffee-table beside his chair.  Imelda read the title. 
The Life and
Words of Thomas Jefferson.

Imelda waved a hand, her head a
throbbing mass of pain.  Six men.  She’d lost six men to this
thing
and
she still didn’t even know what it was she was dealing with.

“I’ll start coffee,” Padre Vega
said, moving to the kitchen.  He was, she noticed gratefully, blessedly quiet. 
After having known her for almost thirty years, ever since he dragged her from
the slums of Barcelona as a toddler to raise her as a Sister, he had long since
learned how best to keep the pain within from growing too intense.  In fact,
her migraines always seemed to lessen around her Padre, though she knew the
cause was probably as simple as the fact that he kept the lighting low and did
not bang around pots in the kitchen, when her head hurt her.

Still, the pounding in her head
did
seem to be lessening.  She wondered if her medicine was finally kicking in. 
Rarely did the pills actually help, but by the grace of God, sometimes there
were exceptions.  Imelda closed her eyes and listened to Father Vega rustle around
in the kitchen getting coffee, then heard his slippers on the rug as he came to
sit beside her.

“This is not good for you,
Imelda,” her Padre said softly.  He leaned across the coffee table and put a
cool palm to her forehead.  “You are going to make yourself sick like this.”

Almost immediately, the coolness
of his palm soothed her migraine enough that she could open her eyes.  “I don’t
have a fever, Father,” she sighed, with a wan smile. 

Father Vega removed his hand with
a shake of his head.  “What happened this time?”

She laughed, but almost ended up
crying, so wretched did she feel.  “You mean aside from no sleep in over a
week, with those damn demons screaming in the basement?”  She grimaced, tears
threatening.  “This wolf that follows the djinni—it killed one of my teams. 
Slaughtered them to a man.  From the
ground
, Father.  How does a wolf
knock a helicopter from the air?!  We have shields up around it, made using the
blood of the very things we fight.”

Father Vega made an unhappy
face.  “It’s a sad thing, Imelda.”  Very cautiously, he began, “Have you
considered that…perhaps…this…wolf…is something more than she appears?”

Mutually exclusive.
  The
words came back to her from her time in the basement, speaking to the
wereverine.  “It can’t be anything other than a wolf,” she blurted.  “The Law
of the Realms states that no ranked demon from one realm may overtake the demon
of ano—”  She froze, her words dying in her throat.  “She doesn’t give off any
of the usual signs…” she whispered, “…because she was bitten by a wolf. 
Because she
isn’t
anything other than a wolf.  A demon can only be one
or the other.  Not both.  The Pact of the Realms.”

“That would be my guess,” her
Padre said.  “This higher-tier demon was bitten and, for some reason, the Third
Lander was allowed to take hold.  It wouldn’t happen often because the Third
Lander moon-cursed are so low-tier.  But if the circumstances are right…”

Imelda hadn’t considered that,
and once again found herself glad for her Padre’s greater experience.  After
over fifty years with the Order, there was very little that the man could not
help her puzzle through.  “What kind of circumstances, Father?” she asked.

Father Vega sighed and leaned
back in his chair, looking all of his seventy-eight years.  “The time I saw it,
it was an elemental in Scotland who had been bitten by a cat.  He lost all of
his water-based powers with the bite.  Couldn’t even return to the ocean to
avoid our team.” 

“What caused the possession to
take hold?” Imelda asked.  Usually, immortals of a higher tier could easily
withstand the magics of those in tiers beneath them.  Elementals, while low on
the First Lands scale, were still well above moon-cursed, and should have
simply been able to brush the possession aside.  After all, werewolves and the
like were the hoodlums of Third Lander society, and while bestial and brutal,
there were
much
bigger things that went ‘bump’ in the Third Lands’ eternal
night.  Like vampires, barghests, or jötunn.

“He’d run afoul of a sea serpent’s
spines,” Father Vega said.  “He’d taken a human form and was resting on the
beach, waiting for the numbness to work its way out of his system when the moon-cursed
found him.”

Considering, Imelda said, “So he
had been previously weakened.”

Her Padre nodded.  “If the victim
is lower tier, or maybe if the victim is already fighting the magic of something
else, or if the cursed soul managed to deliver an overly large dose of poison
into their systems…  Such are ways that it could happen.”

Imelda watched the coffee brew. 
“I don’t think it’s weaker than a moon-kissed.”  She could think of a couple
First-Lander demons who were weaker, but none of them were magi.  Natural magi,
as a rule, were almost always middle-to-top-tier.

Almost tentatively, her Padre
said, “If you want my opinion, I would say you’re probably dealing with one of
the top tier, possibly
the
top tier, of First Lander demons.  Tread
carefully, Sister.  If you don’t, a good many more of your friends will die.”

She gave him a tired look.  “Is
that your Sight speaking, or your heart, Father?”

He gave her a sad smile.  “That’s
history
, my dear.”

Imelda felt her face twist.  “If
it were me, I would stop pursuing them altogether.  They just have too much
maneuverability, and we don’t have any home or kin with which to pin them
down.  All we know is that they are headed north, but we don’t even know
why
they would be headed north.  The djinni
hate
the cold, according to the
texts.”