“We’ve got ’em,” crackled a gruff voice in Two’s earpiece.
He perked up, downing the rest of his watery caffa and chucking the cheap cup. “I might need a location with that spot of sunshine, Ordo…” What was it, again? Ordo Franklin? Ordo Fenner? Scud if he could remember the officer’s name.
“They’re holed up in the back docks, sir,” came Ordo Whatever’s reply. There was the muffled sound of movement in the background. “Sending nav now.”
Two straightened the fingers of his left hand, and his palmlight map sprang to life a second before the red blip appeared at the southeastern edge of Divinity, right alongside the Red River. “Got it. Perimeter?”
“Moving into position now, sir.”
A bitter smirk pulled across Two’s mouth at the tone of the Ordo’s voice. The one good part about working with legionnaires: they didn’t ask questions. This guy didn’t have a clue who the scud Two actually was, and it didn’t matter. Two’s people pulled the strings, the orders came down from above, and Ordo Whatever hopped to Two’s command like a happy hound, tail-a-thumping.
“Great work, Ordo,” he said, perhaps a tad mockingly. His amusement drained quickly enough. “Sit tight until I get there, huh? These two aren’t your everyday apostates.”
Two killed the connection and raised his palmlight to hail an autoskimmer. For a split second, he thought to relay the apostates’ location to Watchtower control, just in case the worst should happen, but then he remembered that the nav pin had been sent to his palmlight, which meant they already knew. Watchtower was—appropriately enough—always watching, after all.
Fifteen minutes later, Two was soaring over the lower industrial area, skirting past the head docks straight for the dilapidated mass of rotted wood and blighted permacrete that was the back docks. The place was like a rodent’s nest of walkways, winding their twisted paths between the hundreds of tiny scuddy huts where poorer-than-dirt fishermen and scavengers squatted between their measly attempts at producing something of value. It was exactly the kind of place Two hated—not because of the dirt and the squalor, but because there were just too damn many winding paths and hidey holes to complicate his life.
Then again, he decided as he climbed out of the autoskimmer to the waiting reception of three ragged homeless men, he didn’t love the dirt and the squalor all that much either. They watched with a kind of stern expectation, brows furrowed and hands outstretched, their fingertips blackened and reeking of fish and sweet tar.
Tarheads. Charming.
It was his fault he was here at all. There was no getting around that. He should’ve nabbed the apostates back in the slums, but one of them had spooked far too quickly. Which meant she—or maybe he, but his gut said she—was well-attuned. And when a demon actually knew enough to catch Two’s probing and slip capture once…
Maybe he should’ve called for backup.
But grop that. He didn’t need Three—or, Alpha be cursed, One—stepping in here and trying to control his every move. No. He was perfectly capable of handling a couple rogue demons on his own. And if not… well, maybe today would be the day.
With that cheery thought in mind, he stepped forward—only to have his three waiting tarheads shuffle in a little closer, walling him in, frowns darkening. Half-beggars. Half-robbers. Even more charming.
He half-thought about reaching for his power and scaring them properly, but he quelled the idea as soon as it surfaced. That was the road to losing control—to letting the demon take over for good. So instead, he calmly pulled his jacket open and showed them the sidearm holstered under his left arm. Frowns turned to dark scowls, and the tarheads scattered with a few choice curses.
Two opened his palmlight map and set off with his own internal curse, wishing he could dismiss the men as savages. It was easy enough, letting the blind hatred roll in. Justifying it was a bit harder. Condemning beggars and drug addicts for their flaws when he was the one carrying an honest-to-Alpha demon astride his blackened spirit?
“Shut up,” he muttered to no one in particular. He shook his head, trying to clear it. He was close. They might’ve even felt him already.
Time to let the demon out.
He was reaching for his palmlight to reestablish contact with his tail-thumping Ordo when the gruff voice crackled in his earpiece.
“Sir, we’re picking up movement. The apostates appear to be—scud!”
Before Two could ask what in demons’ depths was happening, the report of a gunshot split the fishy air. Even in the relative quiet of the pre-dawn hours, it was faint. A rifle, he thought, but maybe suppressed. A sniper? That probably wasn’t good.
“Ordo, I need you to—”
Another gunshot, followed by the Ordo’s barked orders—something about contain that specialist and I said cease fire.
Two barely registered the Ordo’s words. Adrenaline spiking through his veins, he took off at a sprint, mind racing, wobbly walkway creaking underfoot.
This was why he hated working with clueless squads.
He needed a team that understood what they were up against. But Seekers didn’t get teams. Didn’t get friends. And as he rounded a corner and caught sight of the cramped muddy yard outside the target fishing shanty, he decided he wouldn’t want these softsteel sippers as teammates anyway.
They were already moving in.
He registered that fact just in time to watch the legionnaire on point turn around and open fire on his own squad.
Two took off with a curse, vaulting one last rickety railing and crossing the path to the muddy lot at a run, unable to look away from the perverse spectacle. A pair of legionnaires fell to the friendly fire almost immediately. The rest reacted as trained soldiers should and disarmed their maddened teammate, pinning him and dragging him roughly down the steps to where he wouldn’t be obstructing the squad’s avenue of ingress. Over it all, Two was vaguely aware of Ordo Whatever’s steady stream of barked, curse-heavy commands, telling the squad to move in, telling others to properly restrain their apparently mad point man.
Except it wasn’t the legionnaire who’d pulled that trigger. Nor would he be the last. Two knew it, just as he knew he was the only one here who could do anything about it. So he braced himself, closing his eyes, pushing down the sick feeling in his gut.
And he let the demon out.
The world exploded out around him. Rotting wood and cold mud, damp air baking a degree more fishy in the first beams of the morning sun, the flicker of a dozen legionnaire minds scrambling for order—all of it cascading through his senses in the bare instant before he directed his focus toward the inexplicably trigger-happy point man. His brotos were slapping the restraints on him now. Two reached for the real problem.
He could feel it there, like a black serpent coiled around the man’s very spirit—the influence of a wild demon, freed of its chains by one of the pair inside who was either too desperate, too ignorant, or too stupid to understand what manner of evil they were playing with. And given the strength with which the demon resisted Two’s initial attempt to pry it from the point man, he was guessing desperation had something to do with it.
He wasn’t going to win the fight for the legionnaire’s mind. Not directly. He could feel that much. So, Two turned to attacking the demon at its source instead. He traced the long tail of that black serpent in his extended senses, up the steps and into the crumbling fishing shanty. The cramped space was dark inside. There was an aura there, a sinister cloud of wild rage and black hatred. Two pushed past it, fixing onto the source of the demon in his senses. A woman—he was sure of it now.
And she could feel him too.
Her demon crashed into his with the unerring speed of a striking viper. No warning. No mercy. Anger flared deep in Two’s chest—a primal rage that swelled just as surely as if she’d gone and sucker punched him right in the mouth. The bitch.
He flexed his defenses tighter, the world of his physical body and the muddy yard outside shrinking from mind as he sank deeper into the one that belonged to his demon. Sometimes, he almost felt for these tragic abominations. Today, he had a feeling, would not be one of those days—if for no other reason than that he didn’t have the capacity left to worry about anything other than surviving.
Her demon was strong. Stronger than he’d ever felt from a wild one. Maybe as strong as One’s. Definitely as strong as his own. It was nearly overwhelming at first, the panic at finding himself equally matched. The realization slipped its icy fingers through his mind—numbing his thoughts, tripping up his reactions. Her demon didn’t miss the opening.
The fighting was tight and violently rapid. Her demon darting circles around him, striking from seemingly all directions at once. Him twisting to keep pace, balance faltering another sliver with each attack.
Then the onslaught abruptly ended. Two had all of an instant to catch his figurative breath before realizing what that meant.
He leaned back into his physical body just in time to find Ordo Whatever leveling his sidearm right at Two’s face. The man most certainly didn’t have that thumping-tail look anymore. Or any look, for that matter. He was vacant. Possessed.
Two caught the ordo’s wrist and shoved the weapon aside just as the first shot roared, nearly deafening his left ear.
No time for tact. He grabbed the possessed ordo’s throat with his free hand and let his demon ride the contact in. It was forbidden. It was despicable. But in that moment, he didn’t know what the scud else to do. He threw his demon forward and pushed the ordo down into a deep sleep like flipping a switch. The ordo hit the mud with a wet, squishy thud. Two looked back to the shanty, where the legionnaires were already moving back in. Or had been. Half of them had stopped.
And they were pointing their rifles right at him.
For a second, Two couldn’t help but marvel at the power of a demon that could take the minds of half a dozen soldiers at once. Then it dawned on him that they might be acting of their own accord—that they were probably simply turning their weapons on the stranger who’d just dropped their ordo like a bag of softsteel.
Alpha be damned.
“Wait!” he cried. Or tried to, before her demon found him again.
He fell to his knees with the ferocity of the attack, clinging onto control by the barest edges of his fingertips. The worst of it, though, passed surprisingly quickly as something else vied for the apostate’s attention. The legionnaires, Two realized. One fireteam was moving toward him now, coming to apprehend him, by the looks of it. But the rest of the squad had finished ascending the rickety stairs and were stacking up on the shanty door above, preparing to breach.
Good. If he could just keep that Alpha-cursed apostate and her demon under control for another few moments…
He sank back into their stalled contest, taking advantage of her distraction to spring a far more concentrated attack. She gave ground. Too much ground. He could feel the tenuous hint of her breaking point—was mere moments from claiming her mind and bringing a halt to this madness.
Then something yanked him away from their battle—away from her dark shanty and back to his physical body, right into a quickly soaking front side and a face full of cold mud. The legionnaires, driving him to the ground. Working restraints onto his wrists. Telling him to take it easy, buddy, and don’t try anything funny.
Funny?
Two pulled his defenses tighter and tried to gather enough control to tell the four goat-groppers where they could shove their funny business. Before he could, though, the shanty door exploded outward with a splintering boom, taking two legionnaires down with it.
After that, things degraded quickly.
Soldiers barked orders at one another, regaining their wits and pressing forward only to be tripped up or smacked aside by some invisible hand. When the first legionnaire inexplicably went flying over the walkway railing and plummeted to the mud below, the fireteam of barking hounds sitting on Two’s back finally decided maybe he wasn’t the real threat here. They stormed off to help their allies, all but the one who kept his bulk pinned on Two via a knee to the shoulder blade, looking around like a frightened pup.
“Let me go, you idiot,” Two growled.
Curiously, the legionnaire’s decision only pended as long as it took the demon to telekinetically hurl another of his squad mates from the walkway above. Two pushed to his feet, his entire front sopping wet and heavy with mud. But that hardly mattered.
“That’s it,” he muttered. Then he threw his demon at hers like a feral hound to a bloody steak.
Alpha damn her blackened spirit, she somehow managed to catch his attack, even extended as she was. But she certainly gave ground. Enough that the telekinetic maelstrom above ceased completely—so abruptly that the legionnaires almost seemed too surprised to act.
“Shoot her!” he cried.
Three of the less doltish legionnaires sprang to action at his words, sweeping into the dark shanty, weapons at the ready. The apostate was positively wild now, her demon bucking against his like a force of nature. Two held on with grim determination, strengthened by the knowledge that it was already over at this point.
A rifle cracked twice above, and made it so.
One of the shots must’ve found her head, judging by how immediately she disappeared. One moment, a raging storm of bitter fury and demonic presence. The next, nothing but… screaming.
The kid.
Alpha’s blessed body, he’d forgotten about the kid—had been too wrapped in their mental wrestling match to remember there was a second apostate up there. In his defense, the kid’s demon had barely picked up when Two had sniffed them out earlier that night. The fact that the kid hadn’t helped his partner seemed to confirm that his demon was still too young to be a serious threat. Except now…
There were several crashes within the shanty. Shouted curses. Gunshots. Above it all, the screaming continued.
“Son of a bitch,” Two muttered, right before what few windows there were in the shanty exploded outward in a demonic gale of howling wind.
He took the stairs three at a time, ignoring the wide-eyed looks the legionnaires shot him, and the wind whipping at his mud-caked jacket. Inside, three legionnaires were down in addition to the apostate woman they’d killed, all four of them sprawled throughout the room in kind with the rest of the overturned furniture.
The kid had found one of the legionnaires’ sidearms. He thrust it at Two’s chest, his hands visibly shaking with fear or rage. Probably both, Two decided, as the storm began dying around them, strangled out by the spirit of cold murder hanging in the air. Two reached out and calmly ripped the gun away with telekinesis. The look on the kid’s face as the weapon left his hands was almost too much to bear—the wide-eyed, slack-jawed epiphany, two parts panic, one part hopeless, morbid fascination.
It was the look of someone truly realizing they were about to die, and now he’d seen it one too many times.
“Restrain him,” he said, bending to pick up the gun. He probably should’ve neutralized the kid’s demon before doing anything else, but he was pretty sure the thing had already lashed out with everything it had. He’d heard tell that it happened sometimes, these untrained outbursts, but they were categorically brief and usually out of the young apostate’s control.
For now, the kid was probably harmless.
In the splintered doorway behind, the legionnaires were hesitating. Two was about to snap at them when they found their wrinklies and swept in. After that, they had the kid restrained and on his knees in the blink of an eye. Two checked over the sidearm, making sure it was loaded, the safety disengaged.
Alpha, he was tired. Straight to the bones.
Probably, he should’ve just skipped the next part. But he couldn’t. For the will of Alpha, and for his own sanity, he had to check.
The kid’s mental defenses were like soggy bread next to those of his fallen partner—or master, rather, Two saw as he broke into the younger apostate’s mind and began rifling through his life’s memories. She’d found him on the streets a few seasons after he’d escaped the father whose need for the bottle had been increasingly rivaled by the man’s enthusiasm for offloading the pain to his son, physically and otherwise. She’d protected him. Taught him. Loved him.
Corrupted him.
It was unmistakable. But Two swept over the kid’s mind again, just to be sure, ignoring the legionnaires’ looks of growing discomfort with the odd silence. He didn’t blame the kid for having fallen prey to a demon while living through the kind of abuse he’d so clearly experienced. If the Sanctum had found him sooner, maybe… but they hadn’t. And there it was, nestled at the core of him like a dark ink stain on his very spirit, undeniable.
Too old to be trained as a Seeker. Too dangerous to be left alive.
“Why are you doing this?”
The kid’s voice was shaky with fear in Two’s mind. It almost made him flinch.
He didn’t answer. Just finished his inspection as best he could. He’d tried before to explain himself to his marks. But there was no use. It made no difference in the end.
“I’m going to kill you.” This time, the kid spoke out loud, his voice brimming with a heartbreaking attempt to pass off fear as anger. “I’m going to gropping kill you!”
This was going to be one of those days, it turned out. One of the days when Two would lie awake questioning himself and his place in ending these tragic abominations. But Enochia was counting on him, whether they knew it or not. His own brothers and sisters, too.
Alpha was counting on him.
So he stepped forward, raising the gun.
“Alpha grant you peace, fallen.”
He pulled the trigger before the legionnaires could finish asking what the scud he was doing. And like that, it was over.
Two tossed the gun and turned to leave, mindful of the incredulous stares piercing him from all sides. They thought he was a monster. And they weren’t wrong. But they didn’t know the whole story. Didn’t know that there’d been nothing else to be done for the kid. That he’d been corrupted by a demon, and that there wasn’t a single brig on Enochia that could’ve held him once he learned to control his curse.
But Two couldn’t exactly tell that to the two legionnaires who stepped in to bar his exit from the wrecked shanty. They glanced at each other, neither one sure what to say, only sure that they couldn’t simply let this monster walk away. The entitled bastards.
“Check your orders,” Two growled, wanting nothing more than to be out of this shanty, and alone. “You’ll find I’m to be excused for my actions here. That I was never here at all, in fact.”
Another uncertain glance between them, then a look back to one of their squad mates outside, who looked up from his palmlight and gave a hesitant nod.
“As much fun as this has been,” Two said, shouldering his way between the legionnaires, who stiffly shifted just enough to let him past, “I hope no one will take offense when I say I genuinely hope I never see you assholes again.”
There was a curse and a rustle of movement from behind. Two glanced back in time to see one of the doorway legionnaires catching his partner before he could throw himself at Two.
Two shot the snarling man a smirking salute and turned for the stairs.
Only once he was well out of their sight and alone in a dark alley did he allow his hand to drift to the thin black collar at his neck, as it always did after a kill. Only then did he remind himself that it wasn’t just for the good of Enochia and for the will of Alpha—that he’d also lose his own head if he refused.
But that didn’t really change the fact that he’d pulled the trigger again. That his hand hadn’t even shook this time.
So maybe Alpha willed it. So maybe it was all a little less black and white than those legionnaires would imagine when they talked about this over their ale tonight. But either way, it was getting hard to deny.
He was a natural born killer.
