Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) (42 page)

The tattooed monster with the close cropped mohawk was watching her. Sio got the impression that the fucker was more interested in studying her markings than he was in copping a feel, which was fortunate for them both, because he was feeling decidedly hostile.

"The Sidhe male will be required to come with us," Eamon said, diverting attention from the inked mountain taking up most of the entryway. The statement, however blasé it sounded, cut through the chaos and landed like a dart to the forehead. Sio found himself irrationally amenable to the suggestion, which gave him pause for thought in the breath of space between head-up-ass-confused and flat-out-pissed. The Gray Man made even Avery's amicable diplomatic tactics come off as brusque as a two hundred pound east German masseuse from B movie hell. He wanted to attribute the subtle persuasion to the guy's looks because despite the bizarre coloring, Eamon's features were balanced to the point of perfection. The persuasion was more than visual affect, though. The words seemed to glide off the other male's tongue, which was literally silver. They warped his brain, pushed him towards obedience. A slow trickle of ice worked its way down Sio's spine. In that fear was a spark of righteous fury that he didn't understand, but knew enough not to question.

"I'm not leaving her," he said through clenched teeth.

"It is not necessary that we have your consent," the delicate feathered woman answered, shooting a wide dark eyed stare over to Eamon. "Only your life."

She looked as if she was no longer sure of her own intentions. The name Niceven was screaming in her skull, along with a whirlwind of outdated expletives which did nothing to clarify the confusion. They were conflicted those two, and growing more so, systems swimming with the dawning fear of a deep seated betrayal that had something to do with him. Hell, he could relate to that. In the face of everything that had happened the feeling was almost laughable.

"If you're going to leave. Get out," Royal said. Neither the demon nor the angel looked up from where Zulpey's prone form began to smolder. The smoke and crackle wasn't about some fucked up spell either. Apparently, "as painlessly as possible" wasn't about to be very.

"We'll do what needs to be done," Tian said, thumbing the safety off her gun and using the muzzle to flip out the porch lights. She cracked the door and slid into the darkness, bathed in the shadows of the indistinguishable porch. All was quiet, black as pitch, so dark it had become unnaturally so, as if they'd slipped into a time where fire had yet to be invented and the endless night consumed the world. Sio swallowed, willing the bile back down in response to the stench of the burning female behind him. He sent a silent prayer to the lost goddess grafted into Tian's soul and was shocked to get a visceral response. It unfurled in his torso and he felt the answer sliding along the exterior of Tian's skin like armor.

"It hardly matters whether the wizards kill you or we do," the tattooed bastard said. He'd silently moved up to where Sio made to exit, blocking his path. "The end result is the same."

The guy was massive. He was just really goddamned big, and he could have been on any number of magazine covers even with the extensive ink. The Assassin hit Sio with a disturbingly mismatched stare that reflected the faint light on the ground where Zulpey's still whimpering form smoldered like embers. The entirety of the guy's right eye was obsidian dark and the rectangular tattoo underneath it writhed. It was a shocking juxtaposition to the hot hazel color of his left. "If you run we will abandon them to their fate and hunt you down, clear?"

It was the first time Sio had met anyone who not only equaled his physical stats, but may have exceeded them. The all-stars made him feel damn near normal. "We're clear," Sio said, meeting the other male's gaze. "Now get out of my way."

The other male hit him with a wolfish grin and moved only enough to follow Sio out at an interval that was too close for comfort. The pressure change across the threshold was equally uncomfortable. The air vibrated with an energy that rippled from an unknown source. All else was still. The street was silent. The ambient noise Sio had always taken for granted and filtered on principle was absent. On adrenaline-fueled instinct he threw a hard shoulder into the male behind him, picking them both up and driving them towards the deck as a wave of invisible force slammed into the security gate, warping the thing beyond recognition and ripping the door off its hinges. The mangled piece of metal was hurled across the entryway with enough force to lodge itself parallel to the floor in what was left of the doorframe over their heads.

"Not bad," the assassin said.

"Anytime you wanna help, Daediem," Tian answered, squinting into the darkness through the sights of her handgun. She was so shrouded in shadows where she was crouched it was impossible to see her clearly, though for a heartbeat it looked as if Daediem were going to try as he scanned the small space through his periphery.

The assassin stood, dusted himself off, gripped the huge hunk of metal in the door frame, and pried the thing out with one hand. He glanced toward the street and the tattoo under his eye began to glow the dull violet color of early morning. The pale light reflected off of the hard lines of his face before being drawn upward and consumed by the black void of his right eye.

"Get ready to move," Daediem said.

On the heels of that statement a terrified scream went up in the night, along with a chorus of sharp hisses. Six wizards shifted into focus on the asphalt, materializing out of thin air in response to whatever nightmare the male had flung outward. The most unfortunate was decapitated by the metal security gate before he could do anything other than piss himself. Fucking thing must have been going a hundred miles an hour because it hit the street at an angle and lodged there.

Sio didn't stop to ruminate. He shot forward off the porch, aiming for an open patch of road. He somehow ended up crouched in the distorted shadows of a trash heap half way down the block. He was caught off guard by the furious curse of the wide balding man who lunged at him, muscling considerable amounts of both age and bulk forward as if he were an enraged beast and this were the motherfucking Serengeti.

The guy was brandishing a tire iron covered end to end in glowing runes, and since getting the hell out of the way had vanished as an option before it had registered, Sio caught the blow with a half full plastic trash bin roughly the size and shape of his assailant. He plunged the dagger Tian had given him through the guy's skull behind the hinge of the jaw. The wizard's eyes went round and dull with shock. The half chewed cigar hanging from his lower lip bobbled angrily, dropping ash and cherry red embers onto Sio's forearm as well as the litter-strewn sidewalk at their feet. The last thoughts of the dying man whispered like an exhalation through Sio's psyche.

"They lied to you," Sio said to the corpse. "Everything in your life boiled down to covering someone else's ass."

He'd never killed anyone before. He dropped the body on the ground in front of the battered hood of a nearby parked car and backed away, numb to the screaming adrenaline vibrating under his skin. Sio turned and took off running full tilt towards what instinct told him was Tian's direction. He didn't have to go far. He barreled through a blockade of detour signs that didn't exist as the surreal battle in front of him blasted into sharp alignment. Jesus Christ, how the hell had things devolved so quickly?

Bodies littered the street along with a shocking amount of blood and several random appendages. He caught sight of Tian in the massacre, as if, declining to point north, his internal compass had been re-calibrated. She was covered in a dark sheen of gore and using what looked like an old school Louisville Slugger to hammer into the cracking pale blue translucent bubble surrounding a gaunt hipster. For his part, the wizard looked stricken enough to have realized he'd run out of ammo without a backup plan. The furious inner monologue in her skull blended with Sio's own, which was a surprising development that suited him just fine. Sio moved toward her and tried to ignore the suffocating iron efflux of death.

A searing bolt of torment shot across his left side, upending him, and pitching him ass over teakettle into the decorative fence of a nearby Victorian with a loud crack. He blinked, willing the nausea to subside and caught a glimpse of Eamon behind the prick who'd kicked his ass. The Gray Man stopped short of interrupting Glenda's Death-star bubble and tossed out a casual remark before he got blasted. He hit the ground in a dark spray of blood, but the damage was done, the wizard he'd spoken to turned stiffly and began lobbing fire balls and invisible waves of force at his own kind with an almost manic level of fury.

The loud crack of gun shots echoed off the rooftops and the muscles in Sio's chest tightened as he fought to get up. The sorry bastards remembered the last miserable shooting incident and before he could send some sort of soothing mojo their way, a large heavily inked hand clamped down on his bicep hauling him up right. Little bursts of panic ricocheted through Sio's nervous system on the heels of the contact.

"Make yourself useful, shadow walker, or get out of the line of fire," the assassin said.

"Shadow what?"

Daediem turned and blinked at Sio as if he'd been slapped in the face. "Focail leat, you really don't know?"

A sharp pain lanced through Sio's gut and he looked over to see Tian's broken body fly several feet though the air and skid to a stop on the pavement. Her hand spasmed once around the bat where she lay otherwise motionless. Her thoughts were a murky subterranean murmur as if they'd been strained through molasses. A foreign energy burnt like cold fire in Sio's chest at the sight.

"I really don't know." It wasn't hard to hate himself for the truth of it. "How do I do it again?" His voice sounded harsh, too fucking loud in his own ears.

Furious whispers in the back of his skull preceded a sinking sensation as a familiar pressure current rippled along his skin. Sio ducked, grabbing the front of Daediem's tack vest and dragging the behemoth along with him toward the sidewalk as the fence exploded behind them. He was so lit up with the glacier congealing in his chest he couldn't breathe.

"Pull your shit together," the assassin snapped. A sharp blast of adrenaline punctuated the statement. "Focus on a shadow and will yourself through it. For me everything else builds like an orgasm. Hold it back until it starts to hurt, then pick a target and push."

Sio struggled to focus, struggled to take in oxygen as he watched Tian's elegant form jerk and twitch where she fought to get up. He opened the flood gates, suddenly focused on the pooling shadows beneath her and getting there became all that mattered. The distance between thought and action was nonexistent and Sio found himself spilling out of the darkness around Tian's body as if it were a natural occurrence.

Fury and fear built a tangible knot of ice in his chest that kept expanding and he either couldn't or didn't want to expend any more energy trying to choke it down. He let it grow, angry for a myriad of reasons he couldn't put voice to and an even greater number of reasons he could. The winter consumed him. His arms burned pins and needles from his collar bones all the way down to the tips if his fingers and in the center of the pain he found an unexpected recess of quiet solace.

Tian's goddess-laced presence beat like a silent pulse in his throat and behind his eyes. Her touch held that familiar wave of ecstatic electricity and he hadn't realized that he'd reached down to stroke her face until that staggering connection shot fire through his permafrost veins.

"Leave now or die," Sio said, staring down the barely perceptible domes of energy that shielded the remaining wizards in his line of sight. The statement was more idea than vocalization, given the ice storm threatening to split his skin. It hadn't come out right, but every head shot toward him; the faces on most registering shock or mounting terror.

Those who knew enough not to risk themselves for a lie became suddenly absent. He felt more than saw one or two at the fringes slip away, but the majority, the believers, stayed and redoubled their efforts in attack. Tian had called them Guardian and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the last defense was made up of seasoned veterans. Chunks of asphalt, glass, and warped metal carcasses were thrown from every plausible angle.

The arctic pain was nearing unbearable when he heard a loud crack and realized Tian was back in commission. She'd intercepted a pressure field with the now smoking Louisville Slugger and sent it hurling straight back into the wizard who'd flung it. Sio let go of his death grip on the blizzard in his skin and the sky warped above them, dropping so low it kissed the ground before splitting open.

Clayton Street became a world of ice and lightening. The battle was spun up in a chaotic whirlwind of thick white flakes that obscured visibility. The storm collected airborne objects and fireballs, hurling them diagonally from the heavens at the wizards and bundling what was left back into the air for another dizzy go round. The various bits and two ton ends glittered like the fake plastic filling to a snow globe at the mercy of a vengeful five year old. A flock of crows shot past, seizing the momentary distraction and slipping through the wizards' defensive cluster, splitting it the down the center. Anyone brushed by wings dropped dead where they stood.

Gunshots echoed and the bullets burnt to nothing inches from the feathered mass of bodies like they had with the demon in Union Square. Sio looked around and found Royal standing at the foot of the stairs to Tian's mangled porch. The tall male was burning, literally on fire with an electric green flame so hot he was melting metal and mailboxes into puddles as he passed. Xavier was next to him, right side covered in blood from jawline to ankle. The sword in his hand glowed with pale purity shooting arcs of light up his arm and illuminating translucent wings in electric flashes.

Sio's line of sight was fouled by a fireball aimed straight at his head. The gaseous mass was met by another full body bat swing from Tian. The resulting connection scorched her hands down to the bone and pushed third degree burns all the way up to her elbows. She winced, but made no effort to let go or move from her defensive posture.