White Winter (The Black Year Series Book 2) (40 page)

“Sure. Anytime, even if you’re not winter wolves anymore,” Jonas said. “So how are you going to break the curse?”

“I’ll show you,” the Sorcerer said. “Hold this for a moment.” He handed Jonas his staff.

Jonas was surprised by how heavy it was. The wood was so dense, he felt it would crack stone and dent metal. It was almost bursting with anima.

The Sorcerer touched the staff with two fingers, and green magic flowed into him. He raised his palm, muttering, and a ball of flame appeared in front of it. He pushed gently. The molten orb floated out, hanging four feet in the air, until it was 30 feet away. Gamil-Sin clenched his fist and the orb exploded, exposing the paving beneath the snow. He raised both palms, humming a deep note that made the air tremble, and all the bodies around them lifted off the ground as if raised by strings, their arms and legs hanging limply. Golden lines of force whipped and twisted from Gamil-Sin’s hands. The Sorcerer barked a command in a language Jonas didn’t recognize, and the bodies exploded into clouds of blood and powdered bone.

“Whoa,” Jonas said, looking all around him.

Jonas?
Madoc said
.

Gamil-Sin’s chant raised in frequency, volume, and pitch. His left palm still raised, he pointed his right index at the cleared earth and drew in the air. The bone separated from the blood and reformed into an inlay that followed the Sorcerer’s finger on the ground, sketching out the pattern of a ward 20 feet across. Blood swirled around overhead in a ring. As Gamil-Sin uttered the last word of the chant, he turned his left hand palm down and the blood dropped, splashing the inlay and sealing the ward.

Jonas, I don’t think this is a good idea.

Jonas gaped. “That was crazy.”

The Sorcerer grinned, and it looked like genuine boyish amusement this time.
I have got to get him to teach me this stuff,
Jonas thought, even if the bit with the exploding bodies was a little gross.

The Sorcerer took the staff from Jonas’ hands and walked to the edge of the ward. He touched the tip of the staff to the bone, and anima flowed into the ward, lighting it with green fire. Gamil-Sin straightened. “This is a bit of a culmination for me, Jonas. Millennia of probing the oath for weaknesses, acting with what little free will I was allowed. Centuries to set up the spell. I was forced to work with people I despised - present company excepted - but it was all leading to this.”

Thin lines of anima shot out in every direction, just below the surface, activating other nodes and wards in the city, but also going farther, into the woods of Upstate New York, south toward Atlanta, even across the Atlantic, splitting and building as it ran into more carefully prepared sites. It was like the chained wards in the Order facility in Greenpoint, only on a scale Jonas couldn’t have imagined. His consciousness raced along it, expanding. He felt the web of magic spread until it held the whole world in a delicate net.

“How did you even do all this?” Jonas said.

“I designed vampires and werewolves for spells like this. It’s like building magical circuits,” he said, stepping into the circle. More anima was flowing into the ward as werewolves died all over the city. “Think of werewolves as capacitors, storing energy slowly and releasing it all at once. Vampires? You’re more like switches, directing it. It’s simply a question of creating wards to conduct all that power in the right pattern at the right time.”

The flow of anima slowed and reversed, dumping massive amounts of energy back into the ward Gamil-Sin was standing in, feeding into the staff.

“Of course, it’s not easy to gather that many werewolves together in one place, because of their imbecilic laws, so I had to make do with humans. Things really accelerated once I started working with Marcus and his witch.”

“You
what?
” Jonas said.

“I worked with who I had to, Jonas. The demon could see through the curse, and Linda was a fast learner. Not as good as you would have been, but she’s a hard worker.”

Jonas focused his senses on the line of anima heading west, and followed it into the mountains of Pennsylvania. “You’re responsible for Temperance.”

He shrugged. “And others; I had to jump-start the spell.”

“You killed thousands of people!”

“Yes!” the Sorcerer said. “That took me years to prepare, and you’ve killed almost as many in a day. Can you imagine what we could have done together?”

Jonas felt numb.

Jonas, snap out of it! You need to stop him!

The Sorcerer hefted the staff with both hands and grunted. “I’m destroying this miserable planet.” He chuckled. “If you’d taken me up on the cull when I first suggested it, this would have taken a great deal of finesse. Now? Not so much.”

He struck the ground with the tip of the staff. Green light flashed.

Boom.

The ground shuddered. Jonas’ jaw felt like it was unhinged and he blinked away stars.

Boom
.

This time, the ground actually rippled, and Jonas fell to his hands and knees. A second later, the glass of the surrounding skyscrapers shattered. The lines of anima writhed like they were alive and in pain.

Jonas shifted forward, grabbing the staff as it came down. He twisted it sideways and kicked at Gamil-Sin’s knee. The Sorcerer pulled the staff to his waist, throwing Jonas off balance, and head-butted him.

Jonas’ nose cracked and his eyes stung, but he held on.

“Why are you doing this? There had to be another way.” Jonas yanked the staff toward him; the Sorcerer pushed at the same time, then pulled back and kicked Jonas in the chest. They both fell backward. Jonas jumped to his feet. Gamil-Sin pointed the tip of the staff at him and said a word.

A golden shield sprung up around Jonas. The staff discharged a bolt of green light that detonated when it struck, sending Jonas flying out of the circle.

He landed in the snow.

“Of course there was another way, but the book was lost in the flood. I spent 4000 years waiting for the spell to unravel, but it’s as strong as ever! I’m not waiting any longer.” He raised the staff.

“Alam-Baal has it!”

Gamil-Sin hesitated. “Where did you hear that name?”

Jonas pushed himself up on his elbow. Pain lanced through his arm. “He’s alive! He’s the one who planted the secret to making a winter wolf in Phillip Macready’s mind.”

The Sorcerer roared. He screamed at the sky in a language long dead.

Madoc?

The sky darkened and the wind picked up.

Madoc, what do I do?”

Jonas pulled the phylactery out of his shirt. It was cracked. The specter was gone.

Gamil-Sin looked at him, panting. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll take him with me.”

Jonas burned blood. Time slowed. He tried to get up but something was broken, and all he felt was pain and bone grinding against bone. He thought furiously, grasping for anything he or Phillip had known that might help.

The Sorcerer raised the staff.

“Izzy!” Jonas yelled. “Izzy I need you!”

Izzy coalesced in front of him, floating a foot over the ground. “Jonas? What-” Her eyes glowed green. “Ooooh…” she said, in Lena’s voice.

She raised her hand and the staff froze an inch from the ground, golden coils pulling it back up. Gamil-Sin snarled. He formed an orb of fire and shot it at her; she batted it aside, and it detonated 100 yards away. She touched down and stepped across the circle.

The Sorcerer let go of the staff; it stayed fixed an inch above the ground. He drew anima directly from the ward and fired a beam of green energy straight at Lena. She disappeared and reappeared to the side. The beam thrummed like a jet engine, tearing through and collapsing several buildings behind Jonas as the Sorcerer swung it around. The lich stopped it with her outstretched hand.

Light and dark inverted, and Jonas felt like he was turning inside out. Lena’s skin and hair flaked away, disintegrating, and reformed at the same time. Darkness flared around her hand, and a crackling mass of negative energy worked its way back up the beam, vacillating inches from the Sorcerer’s hands. He yelled, pouring all he had into pushing it back. It exploded with a thunderclap.

Dark became light, the Sorcerer flew through the air like a ragdoll, landing somewhere in the lake, and warm wind gusted over Jonas as his vision faded.

“Oh!” Izzy said. “This is so much better than what I had before!”

Anima flowed back into the network, strengthening it, like canals of power that ran fast and deep. Jonas smiled. He could feel the world. The last thing Jonas felt was some great and terrible presence brush against the ward Izzy was playing in, pressing against it like a sea creature trapped beneath polar ice.

The sheet was too thick; it turned away.

EPILOGUE

Jonas looked up and saw Tikaani’s smiling face. The world thudded and swayed one step at a time. Buildings slid by overhead.

“That was a stupid idea, Issorartuyok.”

Jonas grinned. “I killed your boss.”

Tik snorted. “Not quite, but he doesn’t like you very much. That’s okay, though,” he said, giving him a wink. “I don’t like him much either.”

Jonas’ head flopped to the side. It was too much of a strain to keep it up.

Tik shifted his arms to support Jonas’ neck. “Rest, Issorartuyok. You’ll be home soon.”

♘

Senator Wright frowned at Jonas. “And at what point did you decide it was a good idea to kill over 40,000 American citizens?”

“Senator?” Alice said, her voice edgy. “I didn’t agree to let you see him so you could find a scapegoat for the Committee’s mistakes.”

Jonas blinked against the light. He was in the Agency med bay. “It was Edwards’ idea.”

“Excuse me?” Senator Wright said.

Jonas swallowed. His tongue felt thick and dry. “It was Lieutenant Colonel Edwards’ idea. He saved the country.
You
saved the country.”

Wright looked at Alice. “I’ll have to confirm this with the Lieutenant Colonel,” he said, but Jonas was pretty sure he had him.

“Of course, Senator,” Alice said. “Although my son is exhausted from his ordeal; who knows what he’ll remember when he writes his report?”

The senator smiled. “Speaking of memory, I must have forgotten to forward you our findings in the search for Mr. Black. Some of them are quite promising.”

Alice walked him out, giving Jonas a slight nod as she left.

I owe Edwards an apology,
Jonas thought.
Saw this coming. Saw it all coming.

He drifted. He was so tired.

♘

“Citing internal security concerns, the President confirmed that US forces are being called home from around the world,” the reporter said.

The camera cut to the White House press room. Senator Wright stood in the background, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of State. The President was at the podium.

“I’ve recalled the Fleet. Our troops are coming home. Our nation is strong, and our commitment to our partners and allies remains strong,” the President said. “But there is a time and season for everything, and in this season it’s time we looked to our own borders, until we’re ready to step onto the global stage once more.”

The reporter reappeared on the screen. “The statement was met with everything from celebration to shock by the international community, as the world struggles to answer the question, ‘What do we do about the monsters in our midst?’”

Jonas turned the TV off and looked at the med bay ceiling. Supernaturals were all over the news, as was the damage done to New York and the US economy. No one had a firm grasp on the death toll yet, but between the Peacekeeper program, humans dying in the storm or at the hands of rogues, and the cull, Chief Grady said it was probably close to 150,000.

Jonas’ face was out there, too; apparently someone had leaked a video of him taking Heather Leigh down. Flames like wings came out of his back as he dove toward her. They were calling him “The Demon of New York.”

A lot of scared people out there
, he thought.

♘

Jonas crutched down the hallway at 2 a.m. There were fewer people - the contingent from Chicago was headed home, the students hadn’t returned yet, and the human staff was still trickling in. But the Agency was starting to feel normal again.

Most of the vampires regarded him with the mixture of suspicion and awe he remembered from walking with his mother; the werewolves with deference and resentment.
Nothing I can do about that,
he thought.

He made it to the cafeteria.

“Let me get that for you, sir,” one of the operators said, opening the refrigerator door for him.

“Thanks,” he said. He balanced on his good leg and set his crutch down, grabbed three blood packs, and stuffed them into the messenger bag slung across his body. “Appreciate that.”

“No problem, sir.”

Jonas grabbed the crutch, putting his weight on it, and turned back toward the door. He saw some of the Macreadys sitting at a table together. Amelia and Kieran sat side by side. He wondered how that was going. Jim and Viviane shared a table as well, smiling, laughing, and touching hands. Jim waved. Jonas smiled.