Broken Quill [2] (11 page)

Great, add freakin’ Void travel to
his list of skills. Son of a bitch had an impressive
résumé
.

I cradled my branded arm against my
chest for a long moment, staring at nothing as blood dripped down my face. I found
my feet and wandered over to Annie—hoping for the best but fearing the worst.

She lay curled on her side, arms
wrapped under her breasts. I felt for a pulse against her soft, olive-skinned
neck.

With a start her eyes flew open, and
she sat up, grasping at my shoulders. “What...?” It took her a moment, but she
remembered.

I stood and stepped back, giving her
a view of the fallen officers and Grey. Annie made an awful sound, somewhere
between defeat and despair.

“He’ll pay for this,” I said because
I didn’t know what else to say and the silence was terrible. I’d stood here
before, in the aftermath, and was just no good at it. “They don’t get to do
this. Not here. This world is off limits.”

Dazed and confused, Annie reached
for her trusty phone and called for help. I stood silent as she relayed what
had happened, on the verge of tears. The lights overhead cast wicked shadows
across the boardwalk. Annie stared not at me but at my shoes, at what was
missing under those lights.

My shadow.

She snapped her phone closed and
found her feet—and her gun. This time there was no mistaking the look on her
face. It was one of righteous fury. The look of the wronged and the vengeful.

Annie reached under her leather
jacket and produced a pair of steel handcuffs. “Give me your hands,” she said.
“Declan Hale, I’m placing you under arrest.”

Cut off from all my terrible power,
I had no choice but to agree.

And that’s how I found myself
chained to a desk in Joondalup Police Station. My head wound throbbed, and
blood dribbled along the curve of my nose and down into the corner of my mouth.
All things being even, I’d gotten lucky tonight—damned lucky. Whatever Emissary
was, he’d had me dead to rights and decided to play a little longer.

...keep you here for the finale.

Well, keeping me alive was his
second mistake. The first, daring to attract my ire at all.

A young nurse dabbed at my head
wound with gauze and some alcohol-based disinfectant while Annie sat opposite
me, tapping away on her computer and trying very hard not to cry. I rubbed some
burn cream into the Infernal rune marking my forearm. That, more than anything,
was perhaps the worst thing to have happened to me tonight. Emissary had left
me defenseless, open to attack from anyone who wanted to take a swing. And that
list could be damn-near infinite.

The atmosphere in the station, just
as the clock ticked over midnight, was one of denial—the first stage of grief.
They had lost seven of their own in a devastating attack. Plain-clothed and uniformed
officers moved past each other as ghosts—some angry poltergeists, slamming
drawers and whispering furiously into phones. Slim televisions attached to the
walls played footage of the Hillarys boardwalk falling into the sea. The body
count was unknown—some dozens, including Officer Murie and his men.

“How’s your head?” Brie asked, her
eyes on the computer screen. A small frown creased her brow.

“Tickles. I’ve had worse.”

She briefly met my eyes. “Yes, I
believe you have.”

Her fingers returned to the keyboard,
and her tone became brisk and businesslike. “This is your arrest report, Mr.
Hale. I’m about to ask you for a statement concerning the events that occurred
at Hillarys Boat Harbor tonight. You understand your rights, but I’m going to
ask you again, would you like legal assistance?”

“I’m very sorry for your loss,
Annie. I know Detective Grey was important to you.”

“Would you like a lawyer, Mr. Hale?”

“Declan, please.” I thanked the nurse
as she finished bandaging up my head. She left the young detective and I alone,
dancing around the truth and sipping at terrible lukewarm coffee that could
have done with a splash of scotch. “And no, no I would not.”

We moved through the formalities,
and I gave my recollection of events as truthfully as I could. When I got to
Emissary throwing cars and breathing pink flame, Annie sighed and lifted her
fingers from the keyboard. “You’re making it sound as if he were actually doing
those things,” she said.

“You saw what I saw, Detective.”

“I saw...” Annie shook her head. “I
don’t know what I saw! But it was some sort of trick. Has to be.” The last she
said to herself, and it almost sounded convincing. “We need to find this man
before he hurts anyone else, so please, Mr. Hale, take this a touch more
serious—”

“Oh, but I am. Now you need to take
what I’m saying seriously. Like it or not,” I said, “Perth is my home for the
foreseeable future. I need to be here, for reasons that will take too long to
explain.”
Even if you would believe those absurd reasons.
“But, you see,
this is a good thing. The city is under my protection, and right now, I am
uniquely capable of dealing with this type of threat.”
With or without this
damn rune, you coal-eyed bastard.
“Annie, do you believe me?”

Her chin trembled. “I… Christ, I
do.”

“Splendid. No place left to hide
now. Time for the truth.” But how best to explain it? “Annie—”

“Detective Brie.” She sighed and
relented. “I suppose Annie’s fine now. You’re not a killer.”

My indomitable charm could wear the
best of them down. “Yes. I am. And I’m afraid everything I’m going to say from
here on out will probably seem, if not outright fantasy, then a cruel and
terrible joke, given the severity of what happened tonight. Please understand—and
this is important—that I truly know how the loss you have suffered feels. Seven
men and women are dead, six of them your comrades-in-arms, and one of them more
than that, a friend.”

Annie opened her mouth to speak. I
raised a hand to stop her.

“I say this because I would not have
you think me cruel or terrible or perhaps insane. You’ve suffered a loss that
cuts so deep and hurts so much that the pain is numb—a train bound for nowhere,
do you ken?” I shook my head, catching my words. I’d slipped into Forgetful
speech there—at once both archaic and modern. “Does that make sense?”

A single tear cut a lonely track
down Annie’s face—that awful way single tears do. She let it fall unchecked.
“Yes, yes it does.”

“You’re tired, you’re scared, you’re
angry, and you want it all to stop. You want it to have never happened. For the
darkness not to have crushed out the light like a spent cigarette.” I’d had
five and a half long years in exile to think all these thoughts for myself. How
to deal with loss, with death, with bitter resentment and consuming regret.
With the guilt of being powerless or, worse, powerful. “You need to dismiss
these thoughts. You need to embrace the truth—and the anger. The anger is good,
useful.”

“And leads to the dark side... What
is your truth, Declan?” she asked, using my first name for the first time. I
liked the way it sounded, rolling off her tongue.

“The thing that killed Detective
Grey and the others, that tried to kill you tonight, and gave me this knock on
the head.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Annie, I’m sorry, but it’s
not human. It’s not even from this world.”

Her face crumpled, as I’d known it
would. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl, and she immediately
put up a wall between herself and my cruel truth. “You think I’m an idiot?”

“Far from it.”

“Officer Owens!” she called across
the bullpen. “Please find a nice cell for Mr. Hale. He’ll be spending the
night.”

A large cop shuffled across the floor
and hauled me up by the arm. I went quietly, Annie following in my wake, and
did not protest the concrete box—stinking of chemical cleaners trying hard to
mask urine—they shoved me in. I’d seen enough in that last glance on Annie’s
face to know that, despite it all, she believed me wholly.

And it terrified her.

Her logical mind just needed to
catch up with her soulful heart and absorb all she had seen tonight.

I sat down on the thin mattress in
the cell, alone in the dull fluorescent light, and rested my aching head. It
had been a long day—as long as any I could remember, even during the dark days
of the Tome Wars. My heart was telling me it was only the first of such long
days to come… War, or something like it, marred the horizon.

A few hours later, as I lay dozing
on the edge of sleep, Annie returned and let me out. She held my worn, old
waistcoat over her forearm. In one hand, she carried a bottle of water and in
the other a packet of ibuprofen. I swallowed three of the pills, shrugged into
my coat, and followed my new friend out into the early morning light just
before dawn.

We said nothing as I climbed into
the passenger seat of her car, and she took off in the general direction of
Riverwood Plaza and my bookshop.

We didn’t speak until I’d let us
both into my shop, reset the wards, and led Annie through the maze of
bookshelves, around towering pillars of creative endeavor, to the counter near
my writing alcove.

“If this thing...” she began, then
faltered.

“Emissary,” I offered.

“If Emissary wanted you so badly,
then why’s it killing all these other people?”

A good question. One that needed
proper answers. What had Emissary said?
Spill enough blood, and the walls of
reality begin to crack. What, perchance, may slip through then?
“We need to
go see my brother, Annie. I may be the last sheriff round these parts,
according to Emily, but there’s an army of men and women like me who need to
know what’s happening here.”

“Your brother? Grey told me you
didn’t have any family.”

“Ah, no. What I told Grey was that I
was alone on this big, blue marble. Which is technically true. I’ve no family
that I know of here on Earth. My brother lives on another world, in Ascension
City. He’s the king of an order of men and women who can use Will—the magic, as
you understand it—called the Knights Infernal. An ancient order responsible for
maintaining the Story Thread and charged with protecting all worlds, but
this
world in particular, from nightmares such as Emissary.”

Annie took as much of that as she
could in her stride. “Your brother’s a king?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound too happy about
it.”

I snorted. “We’re not exactly close.
In fact, we’re not close at all.”

“You had a falling out?”

“We’re still falling. He stole the
Dragon Throne and had me exiled to True Earth, here, under pain of death. It’s
likely he’ll want to kill me if I return, but perhaps not given recent events.”
I rubbed at the tender rune seared into my arm. “Regardless, Emissary has
forced my hand. I have to go back.”

“How so?”

“What happened last night, and the
two murders taunting me yesterday, are bad. Real bad.” I shook my head.
“Monumentally bad. The thing is, the Knights are usually on top of these things
well before local law enforcement, or even the media, know what’s happened. Our
world, our power, is best kept secret, and even during the Tome Wars the
Knights and the Renegades held to that secret here on True Earth. When
something broke through, like a Voidling, it was handled swiftly and surely.
The fact that you’re involved at all, Annie, is an appalling lapse. The Knights
are in trouble.”

She considered and then nodded.
“What kind of trouble, do you think?”

“The Everlasting…” I fumbled again
at how much she needed to know. “Uh, that is, some powerful beings that seem to
wish us harm must be encroaching on King Faraday’s territory. Despite what
Emily said, I can’t imagine he’s abandoned Earth willingly… It’s the real
world, after all. The Story Thread was first spun here, cast out into the Void
like a beacon against the night. To give that up is like, well, like poisoning
the well. The bad apple that spoils the rest. Somewhat of a degradation. Heh.”

“I’m following about one word in
three here, Declan.” Annie wrapped her arms about herself and shrugged. “I
guess there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to come with me,
normally. Forget is no place for those without Will, save for a few bastions
against the chaos—like Ascension City—but Perth is just as dangerous, if not
more so, with Emissary on the loose. And he took a shine to you last night, I’m
afraid.”
Why you, though? Aeons become seconds...

Annie paled. “I feel sick. I should
phone Brian and let him know.”

“Brian?”

Annie waved her ring finger at me
and pulled out her phone. “My fiancé.”

“Be brief. Tell him nothing about
Forget, or Emissary, or any of this absurd nonsense. There are creatures…
Voidlings again, made of abstract concepts or worse, that can sometimes
sense
that kind of dangerous knowledge.”