Crimson Wind (20 page)

Max took a sharp breath through her nose, tipping her head. Alexander caught a whiff. Uncanny magic. He had expected no different. He felt his Shadowblade Prime rising, pushing away his exhaustion. The animal in him clawed with savage fury. Max glanced at him. Her Prime was riding high. Her entire body radiated strength and animal power.

“Welcome to the party, Slick. It’s about time you woke up.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to stop wasting time.” She looked back out at the hills. “All right. You’ve got us stopped. What the hell do you want?” she yelled.

For a moment, there was silence. Then came a woman’s voice, shrill and thin, like she was walking the knife edge of sanity. “Drop your weapons.”

“And if we don’t?”

A rifle report echoed across the water, and a bullet struck the tire above Max’s head. She glanced at the hole it tore in the rubber. “I guess they want us to know they mean business. How many do you think there are?”

“I can smell four.”

“That’s what I’ve got. They stink like fear and desperation. That’s never good. But no point hanging out here. They’ve got us for now. Let’s go find out why.”

She pulled her knives out and set them on top of the car—the passenger door that was now facing up to the sky. Alexander followed suit. She hefted the rowan spear and regretfully leaned it against the wheel.

“What about the witch chains?” he murmured.

“Leave them on. They aren’t exactly weapons. If they notice them, they can take them.”

He reached into his pocket for the amulet and turned it in his fingers. It was too valuable to let it be taken. But what to do with it? He could throw it into the lake, but then it would likely be lost forever. And what if they needed it to escape from these faceless enemies? Could he hide it on himself? Or use it now? But going invisible would allow only him to escape. Their captors had seen him and would torture Max to bring him out of hiding. It was what he would do. He could not stand by and watch that. It was not an option.

“Quick, give it to me.” She pulled her shoe halfway off and stuffed the amulet beneath her instep. “That’s going to be annoying,” she muttered, lacing back up. “That’s it,” she called. “Come and get us.”

“Where are your guns and flash bombs? Where are your grenades?” This time it was a man. His voice was hoarse and ragged.

“Sorry, man. If you’re shopping, we don’t have anything for sale. We stole the car a ways back,” Max said dismissively.

Silence.

After about half a minute, Max made an annoyed sound. “Look, if you want to talk, come on down. I’m done otherwise.”

“That’s awfully brave, considering we have you at gunpoint,” the female speaker said.

Max made no reply. Another shot rang out. This time, it went through the crumpled roof of the car.

“Do you think that’s what they were aiming for? If not, they can’t shoot for shit, and we can start running now.” She said it loudly enough for their enemies to hear.

“I think that whatever is wrong with the
anneau
is affecting their minds,” Alexander said more quietly. “Possibly their aim also,” he added, the corner of his mouth quirking.

She grinned at him, and then her head jerked up. “They’re coming.”

All four of them had been perched up on the hills, two on each ridge. They picked their way down, rifles trained on Max and Alexander the entire way. There were three men and one woman. She was clearly the leader, although she was no Prime. None of them was.

The three men came down first, making a ragged line as they descended. They were filthy, their clothes ripped and stained with blood. They wore bandoliers of flash bombs and grenades and were armed to the teeth with knives and handguns. They looked as if they hadn’t slept in days, and all of them were too thin.

The men closed around Max and Alexander in a loose triangle. Stupid. It set up a crossfire that could just as easily kill them as their captives. Two of them looked like startled rabbits. They were twins, with blue eyes and blond hair. The only thing differentiating them was their clothing and the buzzed hair on one of them.

The third man was undoubtedly the one who had shot at them. He swaggered, his lip curled in a sneer that was probably permanent. He carried a .30-30 covered with smears of blood and mud. His eyes were dark except for bands of white around the edges. Alexander growled low in his throat. The man’s Blade had him in thrall, and he was close to going feral. It happened occasionally, usually with young Blades. Their minds broke under the magic it took to make them. But this one was no young Blade. What had driven him to the edge?

The woman came down last, and the others deferred to her, easing aside to give her room. She carried her rifle over her forearm. Her eyes were sunken, and she was holding herself so tight her body seemed to hum. Her hair was cut raggedly above her ears, as if it had been done with a knife. She wore a leather vest and jeans. Both were filthy, and the jeans were riddled with burn holes. From her left hip to her ankle was a patch of crusty brown blood, long since dried.

“Are you Max and Alexander?” she demanded.

“How the hell do you know that?” Max said.

“You were foreseen.”

Alexander scowled. He was getting very tired of foretellings. It was a rare talent, and here in the space of a few days, he had run into three different witches with it.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Your new boss.”

“Funny, I thought we already served a witch,” Max said

“Then she should have kept you on a shorter leash. You’re mine now.” She motioned at her companions. “Bring them.”

She walked away up the road. Max and Alexander followed, the three men trailing them in a half-circle.

A dusty black pickup truck waited around the bend. The woman climbed into the driver’s seat, revving the engine.

“Up there,” the nontwin ordered, pointing to the truck bed.

Max and Alexander hopped up and sat down with their backs to the cab. The men climbed in behind, sitting on the fenders. The rifle muzzles never wavered.

“Who are you?” Max asked.

“Shuddup,” said the twin with all his hair.

“Really, Sneezy? That’s the best you’ve got?”

“Quiet, or I’ll close your lips for good,” said the sneering Blade. He said it in a quiet singsong.

Alexander stiffened, eyeing him warily. His Blade Prime slammed against the cage that kept him from running wild. Alexander could tell that the other man recognized his danger. Still, he did not flinch in the slightest.

“And you must be Grumpy,” Max said. “Where are the rest of the dwarves? And the Wicked Witch? She must be around somewhere.”

That got a reaction. Grumpy’s face went blank, and his finger jerked on the trigger. Alexander knocked Max to the side. The bullet shattered the rear window and drilled through the windshield, passing just over the driver’s shoulder. The woman slammed on the brakes, jumping out before the truck was completely stopped.

“What the fuck?” she yelled up at Grumpy. “You could’ve taken my fucking head off!”

“But I didn’t,” he said, levering the bolt on his rifle, aiming again at the prisoners.

“Are you going to kill them?”

“Maybe just one. We don’t need a spare,” he said.

“Don’t we? Since when? Judith said to bring them both, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

He sucked his teeth and spat on the bed of the truck but did not object further. She took that as agreement, returned to the wheel, and began driving again.

The truck pulled off on a dirt road after a couple of miles and turned up into the folds of the flattening mountains, going another five miles, until they came to a broad, flat hilltop.

The moment they drove onto it, Alexander felt waves of twisting, wrong magic. His stomach lurched as it had when he had put the amulet on and the sun had come up. He swallowed, forcing himself to keep his food down. Sweat sprang up all over him, and his skin went clammy. He looked at Max. Her face was taut and slightly gray. Her jaw was clenched and she, too, was sweating.

This was the living void. Somewhere close. No wonder Grumpy was near to going feral. Alexander could feel the chains slipping from his Prime. His hands knotted. He had to keep it together, or he was going to lose Max.

You will be Prime.

Not if he could damned well help it.

The truck rolled up onto a smooth drive made of a flat black rock mortared together and edged by two lines of bricks. It wound through what appeared to have once been a verdant park. The grass, trees, and bushes were now black as if they had been burned, but there was no ash. The water in the creek was stagnant brown, and the plants floating on its surface were corpse white. The air was thin and bitter, and it hurt his lungs to breathe it.

“What happened here?”

The nose of Grumpy’s gun twitched in Alexander’s direction, but otherwise, there was no answer.

They pulled up outside a sprawling mansion. Or at least that was what it had been once. Now it looked like an ancient ruined castle from the backwaters of Ireland or Scotland. The mortar was cracked and crumbling, and many of the walls were collapsed or leaned drunkenly. It looked like the place could fall in at any moment.

Their captors got them out, and the woman stopped to stare at the building. For a moment, her concrete look of desperate determination gave way to stricken horror. She bit her lips and strode stiffly away.

She led them around the side and through a courtyard garden. Like everywhere else, it was barren and broken. They came to a set of stairs leading downward beneath the mansion. At the bottom was an iron door. It swung open without a squeak. Beyond it was a narrow corridor that led into a broad room filled with couches, televisions, exercise equipment, and a wall of books and games. The ceiling sagged pregnantly.

They went in and the door shut with a clang. Alexander’s nostrils flared. He smelled Sunspears and witches and illness.

The Spears came through a door on the right. There were three of them, and they looked haggard. Black lines traced beneath their skin like fractures in old fine china. They had been dark-poisoned, no doubt in helping to set the trap for Alexander and Max.

The three carried handguns, and, like the four Blades, they bristled with weapons. The first was a slight man with copper hair and darting blue eyes. The second man had dark hair and a round face. The last was a tiny woman, only five feet tall. She had wheat-blond hair and a pink mouth. She looked like a doll. But there was no doubt she was more than capable of killing. The aura of danger surrounded her. She was not a Prime—none of them was—but she was as close as Niko, Tyler, and Thor. A few years and a few more spells, and she would come into it.

She flashed a look at the two prisoners and then at the brown-haired woman escorting them.

“Come on. No time to waste. Oak and Steel, come with us. The rest of you, take up watch.”

Oak and Steel turned out to be Grumpy and the twin with the longer hair. The blond woman led the way through the rec room to a smaller room. Whatever it had been once, it was a sickroom now. Smudge pots squatted in every corner and in a half-circle around the narrow bed in the corner. Pungent smoke rose from them—sage and a strange combination of butterscotch, licorice, and celery.

On the bed lay a still form—a witch. His breathing was quick and shallow and labored. Another witch leaned over the first, muttering and wiping his face with a damp towel. Alexander hoped she was not using water from anywhere near. He was fairly certain anything within a few hundred yards of the place at least was completely dead. Not just dead in the normal way that provided fertile ground for other things but sterilized with no hope for any future life. It was a blight, and he doubted that even the wild magic from Mount Shasta could find a foothold here. Whatever had created it was the living void.

“What happened?” Max asked the witch in a voice devoid of any emotion. “What do you want of us?” Her expression was cold. She’d withdrawn deeply into herself. She was ready to fight.

The witch looked up. She was skeletal, much the way Giselle had been after the battle to save Horngate. Her brown hair was lank and stringy, and her skin sagged from her body. Her fingernails were purple, as if they had been crushed with a hammer, and her eyes were blotched with broken blood vessels. She looked like she had been through a war. She barely glanced at Alexander and Max before turning back to her patient.

The short blond Blade stepped forward. “Judith, are these the ones your vision showed you?”

The witch looked up again. She stared first at Max and then at Alexander. “Yes,” she said in a papery voice before going back to her muttering chant.

“Good,” the Blade said, turning to examine Max and Alexander speculatively. She had not put down her gun. It was a .454 Casull, made to bring down elephants. “We have a job for you.”

“A job?” Max repeated. Her entire attention riveted on the blond Sunspear. It could not have been comfortable. “What makes you think we want to work for you?”

“Oh, I don’t think you want to. But you’re going to. Or you’ll die.”

Max shrugged. “I won’t die alone.”

“No, you won’t. He’ll die, too,” the blonde said, gesturing her gun at Alexander.

“And so will you. All of you,” Max crooned. She rolled up onto the balls of her feet, her knees flexing.

Alexander tensed, shifting so that he could go after Oak and Steel. Their rifles continued to be trained unwaveringly on their two captives, although once again, their crossfire could easily take out the blond Spear and the brunette Blade. Stupid. Who had trained them?

The blond Spear stared. Her jaw was clenched so hard it was shaking. “You’ll do what we tell you, or I’ll put a hole in your chest the size of a grapefruit. You won’t walk away.”

“Everybody’s gotta die sometime. Why not tonight?”

She was bluffing. She had to be. Max’s family was waiting, possibly dying or dead. She had no interest in dying today. But even knowing that, Alexander believed her.

The Spear’s face contorted. The nose of her gun wavered. Then she jerked it at Alexander, shoving it hard against his chest. “You’re very willing to stop breathing, but what about him? Are you going to watch me kill him?”