Authors: Saje Williams
Chapter Two
Val didn’t know who they were, or what they were doing there, but she was willing to bet they weren’t authorized agency personnel. She didn’t recognize them, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Over the past few years, the population of Starhaven had grown exponentially, and only the shopkeepers and agency heads had any idea how many people there were under contract between all of the agencies.
She knew they weren’t TAU and seriously doubted they were Sash.
They didn’t have the style. One thing you could say about Sash agents—
they could accessorize a black and crimson tiger-striped sash with nearly any outfit…even though most of them settled on basic black.
She’d tucked her own agency symbol, the ankh, into her bodice, and thanked the fates she’d done so. Whoever they were, she was willing to bet the symbol wouldn’t carry much weight with them. In fact, if they were who and what she actually suspected they were, the damned thing could well have gotten her killed.
She’d be best off leaving them to think she was a local who’d wandered in here by accident. They looked arrogant enough to swallow it.
That’s me, kiddies. Just a local bimbo looking for a place for an
assignation with an illicit lover.
She backed away, showing fear that was not entirely feigned.
“My apologies, milord, milady.” she said, hoping that her translator implant had supplied the correct accent. “I dinna expect to find anyone here.”
“And what are you doing here?” the man asked gruffly, even as his female partner laid what Val took as a restraining hand on his shoulder.
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“My beau was supposed to meet me,” Val said. “We thought it would be a good place to have a tumble.”
He gave her an odd, lopsided grin. “Well, we’ll have to ask him when he arrives—as long as you two don’t mind an audience.”
The man and woman exchanged message-laden glances. Val decided instantly that whatever had passed between the two in this moment of silent communication was something she really didn’t want to know.
“He’s not supposed to be here for a while,” she told them. “I was just in having a look around beforehand.”
The woman smiled sweetly and took a long, gliding step closer. “How unfortunate,” she murmured. “We make a much better audience than we do participants. But…” She paused, dragging a heavy gaze up Val’s body as if she could see straight through her clothing.
Val blinked as her stomach squirmed. She felt like she was suddenly swimming through a pool filled with pig manure. She hadn’t opened her telepathic faculties to these two yet, and was quite glad she hadn’t.
Whatever their game, she could be reasonably certain she wanted no part of it.
The woman, surprisingly enough, was the aggressor. She flowed toward Val, chattering about nothing in particular as she sliced half the distance between them. Cursing the dress the idiot had made her wear, Val darted past her for the door on the opposite side of the room.
Laughing, the woman lunged out and caught her by the sleeve. “Oh, it’s far too late for you to run, my—“
She staggered back, blood rushing from a split lip as Val withdrew her fist and smiled sweetly. “If you’re going to touch me again,
bitch
, you’d better have your thug sitting on me at the time.”
The woman whirled back at her, lifting her own right hand, not into a fist, but as if she snatched something out of the air. As a burst of adrenaline rushed through her, Val swept forward and smashed the heel of her hand into the woman’s nose, twisting her wrist and dragging her fingers across her eyes even as she stepped back and fired a low kick to the back of her knee.
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The woman toppled and, even as the male lurched forward, Val snatched the rapier from the woman’s belt and spun on him. “One more step and you’re eating steel.”
“Who are you?” he growled, watching in perfect stillness as she laid the edge of the blade against the woman’s neck.
“I think you’ve got this backwards,” Val said with wry amusement.
“I’ve got your companion under the sword―
I
get to ask the questions now.” She spun the rapier, nicking the woman’s neck. “And if you even
look
as though you’re going to cast a spell, witch, I’ll cut your throat and let you bleed to death in front of me. Keep your hands on the floor.”
Question is,
she thought with a dry internal laugh,
how long can this
stand-off hold?
Raven’s eyes snapped open and it took him a moment to orient himself. It always did. He stirred slightly, then willed himself to rise. His feet were silent against the stone floor as he tread to the communications center. A quick check revealed that his message had been received, and a confirmation sent. A TAU agent was on the way.
Wonderful.
He looked at the time and frowned, then switched over to the active monitoring system he had set up for the rest of the house. He assumed that the agent had been given directions, so by all rights he expected to find a stranger waiting in the living area or the kitchen.
The house was empty and, for all he could tell, had been so since he’d gone to bed at dawn. That struck a sour note and he walked to the door with a frown. He keyed it open and stepped into the hallway beyond, senses tuned for any sign of trespass.
He’d have smelled if anyone had entered; the only human scent he picked up was that of the maid, who came by once a week, and even those traces were faint. He did expect the agent to be human, though it was at least vaguely possible they’d send an elf with predominately human features. He considered it unlikely, but, in an infinite universe, even the most unlikely event was entirely possible.
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Something indefinable told him that he should be concerned.
Groaning in irritation, he fired up his contraband water heater and took a quick shower in the small stall secreted in his hidden room. Being in a technologically disadvantaged world didn’t mean he had to live like a savage, regardless how TAU might perceive it. He’d paid good money to have the water heater brought here and anyone who might suggest he get rid of it would have a serious fight on their hands.
He quickly dressed, threw on his hat and jacket, and strolled out into the night after securing his safe room from accidental discovery. The chances of that were slim indeed, but he made it a habit regardless. He’d decided long ago that it was better to do certain things without fail than take the chance of forgetting the one time when it would make all the difference.
He smiled at the memory this thought conjured—a recollection of his mother explaining why she used her turn signals even in a grocery store parking lot.
The body remembers even if the mind does not,
she’d told him.
He hadn’t thought about his mother in years and felt vaguely guilty at the realization. He didn’t even know if she was still alive.
Some
wonderful son I am,
he thought. It wasn’t a good sign, really. The one thing his kind could not afford to lose was any connection to their former humanity. The fact that he’d not thought of her for so long didn’t bode well in the long run, though he could attribute at least some of that to the fact that this job could be so damned demanding.
But, in all fairness, he hadn’t been there for but a fraction of the time that had passed since he’d last spoken with his mother.
Pushing the guilt aside for the time being, he glanced around, assured himself that no one was watching, then vaulted to a nearby rooftop. He scanned the darkened streets from three stories up, then turned and made his way toward the clock tower where they’d originally located the worldgate. If the agent had arrived as expected, that would be the first place to check.
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Val was ready to drop. She ached from head to toe. Her arm had begun to shake nearly two hours ago, leaving tiny cuts on the woman’s neck. The man had obviously grown tired of standing, and had lowered himself to the floor. He’d stretched out, staring at the ceiling and pretended she didn’t even exist.
Weird bastard.
By the fates, she was exhausted.
She’d asked these two who they were a number of times, only to get icy glares from the woman and snorts of derision from the man.
Note to
self—we need handcuffs, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. This is freakin’
ridiculous. We need
some
sort of restraining device.
She glanced at the tiny, opaque window in the far corner of the tower, noting that it had finally gotten dark.
This has to be one of those times it’s
just easier to be a killer,
she thought grimly.
She let out an involuntary gasp as the shadows in the corner coalesced into a human figure in a dark coat and what looked to be a cowboy hat of all things. Inexplicably, his boots made no sound as he approached.
The hat tilted back and she found herself staring into the queer emerald eyes of a man who looked not much older than the middle teens, youthful features revealing the potential for stunning looks caught half-formed and frozen there.
He took in the scene with an amused expression and shook his head.
“That can’t be comfortable,” he said, nodding toward her. “You can take the weapon away from her neck now. She’s not going anywhere.”
“I don’t know who the hell you are,” she snapped back. “For all I know you’re
with
them.”
“Hardly,” he sighed. “I’ve never seen them before, but I’d hazard a guess they’re not from around here. Neither are you, judging by the way you know one end of that rapier from the other. There are very few women in these parts with any weapon skill at all.”
The dark haired woman shifted her gaze, her lethal glare bouncing off the hard shell of his disinterest.
“Put it away,” he told her. “I don’t give a rat’s ass if you hate me.”
Val snorted. “And you would be…?”
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Saje Williams
“Raven,” he answered. “You TAU?”
She nodded. “You’re Sash?”
He returned her nod. “Don’t let my lack of that damn swatch of fabric fool you.” He rolled his eyes. “I have no need for the thing, and it would just draw unwanted attention.” He turned his radiant gaze on her two captives. “So what’s with these guys?”
“They came through the gate behind me. I don’t know who they are, but
what
they are is a couple of pretty twisted characters.”
“Huh. Well, if they came through the gate, I assume they fall under our jurisdiction. Do you want to run the interrogation, or should I?”
He smiled, revealing long, gleaming canines. She stifled a gasp and her eyes grew wide.
She’d never met a vampire in person, though she’d always been curious about them. She sent a tendril of mind creeping outward, only to have it rebuffed violently before it ever reached him. He had the strongest shields of anyone she’d ever encountered.
That fact in itself she found terribly intriguing.
A strange cracking sound came from the vicinity of the floor and she glanced down at the supine man to see him writhing there, his face oddly distended and shifting around like something else was trying to break free of his flesh.
Raven let out a particularly vitriolic curse as his hands dove inside his trench coat, emerging an eye-blink later with two chrome-plated
contraband
weapons. The one in his left hand spat fire at the figure writhing on the floor while the other simultaneously shifted to cover the woman. The roar of the pistol filled the tiny room like a bolt from heaven and Val backed away, wincing.
She felt outrage welling up and did her best to stop it from spewing forth but wasn’t entirely successful despite her resolve to keep her mouth shut. “What in the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” she spat out at him.
Raven turned a cold gaze on her as he leveled both pistols at the captive woman.
“Dealing with a lycanthrope the best way you can,” he replied in a chilly tone. “You have a problem with that?”
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“Actually, I do!” she snarled at him. “Those are banned weapons!”
This provoked a bored look as he slid one of the pistols home under his jacket. “Uh-huh. They’re also the most efficient way to dispatch a lycanthrope. What did you want me to do, wrestle him into submission?”
Val blinked at him in something akin to shock. Then she began to put the pieces together in her head. When he’d identified himself as
‘Raven,’ she’d felt a glimmer of recognition, but the fact that he was a vampire, added together with the twin pistols he’d used with such ruthless effectiveness, told her exactly who he most likely was. That they hadn’t bothered to warn her who and what she’d be dealing with went a long way toward alleviating the awe she might have otherwise felt. She was too pissed to give a damn whether or not this renegade Sash agent happened to be the legendary Raven from Earth Prime. “Actually,” she said, flashing him a too-sweet smile, “I would assume that you’d have no problems doing precisely that, considering who you are.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “And who do you think I am?”
“Name’s Raven, you’re a vampire, and you’re carrying twin automatic pistols. A dead giveaway, when you get down to it.”
“No pun intended.”
“Hah-hah. Funny man.”
“As amusing as this is,” the woman cut in, “I’d like to—“
“Shut up!” they snapped in unison.
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Saje Williams
Chapter Three
Raven rolled his shoulders and let out a heavy sigh. “As with most legends,” he said. “My prowess is somewhat exaggerated.”
“Yeah. So you say,” Val said. “You’re the Raven who headed Earth’s Paranormal Action Response Division, who commanded troops against the Cen during the Siege of Earth, who reportedly single-handedly took out a whole crèche world to bring the war to a grinding halt. Am I wrong?”
He shrugged, quite aware that the dark-haired woman was staring at him with an odd expression on her face. “No, you’re right…as far as it goes. I’m also the man who lost his commanding officer and one of his best friends to an act of unnecessary sacrifice, who watched as thousands of his own troops threw themselves against the bitter blades of the enemy and fall, and who sacrificed untold innocents by ‘taking out’
that crèche world to bring the war to a halt.”
“Let me tell you, legendary status is overrated. And if that hand comes any farther off the ground,” he warned the captive woman in a mild tone, “I’m going to give you a lethal dose of lead poisoning.” She sneered at him in response, but put weight back on the hand.
Sometimes
having a reputation as a killer is a good thing,
he mused.
She was beautiful, he decided, but the lines of avarice and cruelty marring her otherwise perfect features told a deeper tale than her obvious beauty could have told. Though already annoying him, he found the TAU agent’s prettiness far more enticing than their black-haired captive’s. The blonde reminded him somehow of a cheerleader or a debutante, but he knew enough about TAU to know that her appearance 18
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could be nothing but deceiving. Beneath that fresh exterior lay a foundation as hard as a granite slab.
Too bad she was being so damned irritating, standing there with her hands on her hips, giving him the evil eye. Figuratively speaking, of course. Even
he
was not immune to a real evil eye, though his status as one of the undead gave him some level of protection. It was a fey ability, and usually only showed up in those elves with particularly strong bloodlines, but he’d met a few vampires who could knock someone for a loop with nothing more than a gaze.
He, unfortunately, was not one of them. He had to do this the old-fashioned way. By scaring the crap out of their captive.
A good sniff told him that his initial fear that she, too, was a ’thrope had turned out to be false. She was a human mage, which was bad enough, but at least she wasn’t going to go fuzzy and try to chew their faces off. He slid the second pistol home and turned back to the blonde.
“It’s not as though anyone else is going to get their hands on my weapons,” he told her. “And I know that’s the primary reason you folks don’t like advanced weapons on these primitive worlds.”
“The other being that we don’t like how easily they could be abused,”
she shot back with a telling glance toward the body currently leaking blood and less savory liquids through the hole in the base of its skull.
“Are you suggesting I shouldn’t have shot him—that it was somehow an abuse of the weapon to kill him like that?” It sounded ludicrous to him, but it was hard to say exactly what someone like her would find reasonable.
“Now you’re just being obtuse. It’s a moot point anyway, if you get right down to it. You’re already so much more powerful than the average native that the firearms don’t throw the balance off much. It’s still in violation of the contract between your agency and mine, but I’m willing to overlook it in this particular case.”
“That’s convenient,” he muttered. Especially since he didn’t have any intention of giving up his pistols no matter what she had to say about it.
Her agency’s reason for existing didn’t have a damn thing to do with him, as far as he was concerned, and he liked it that way. Contract or no www.samhainpublishing.com 19
Saje Williams
contract. No one asked
him
if he was willing to set aside his pistols while in the field.
Not that he would. They were just too damned useful, particularly if he ended up facing a lycanthrope or another vampire. He had other ways to kill them, but none as simple as a bullet to the brain. Magic tended to be unreliable with regards to both paranormal types, and it wasn’t something he wanted to overuse here anyway. The last thing he needed was to attract the Church’s interest. A running battle with a bunch of mage-priests wouldn’t do anyone any good, and would screw up his mission faster than anything else.
Even than the unwelcome intrusion of a pesky—albeit lovely—TAU
operative.
Definitely fits the definition of an ‘attractive nuisance,’
he thought with an inward chuckle.
He turned his attention to the captive brunette, who, despite the straits in which she found herself, hadn’t set aside her arrogant demeanor. By looking at her, one might think their positions were reversed—that
she
were the one holding
them
captive.
Which suggested to Raven that she might simply be insane.
Val took a deep breath. She wasn’t sure what to think at this point.
She couldn’t believe Raven. Legend or not, the man was just rude. Her agency’s whole mission was to prevent technological contamination and he had the unmitigated gall to draw a pistol and fire it
right in front of
her.
She was furious.
And, as she said, there wasn’t really anything she could do about it other than include it in her end-of-mission report once all this was over.
What really got under her skin, even more than his apparent disregard for her position and whole reason for being here, was that she had to fight to keep her eyes off of him. She’d already jerked her gaze away more than once, and her deepest fear at this point was that he’d been able to read her mind or emotions and sense how absolutely fascinating she found him.
His apparent youth—and, yes, he did look remarkably young—was offset by the absolute faith he seemed to have in himself and his 20
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decisions. Even if those decisions were totally screwed up from her point of view.
“So,” said their prisoner, with annoying aplomb. “Are you going to do something with me, or am I going to have to stand here all night watching you two undress one another with your eyes?”
The look Raven gave her could have stilled magma. “Watch your mouth.”
“What are we doing with her?” Val asked him, with a pointed glance at the dark-haired woman.
“You have a gate module on you? I left mine at home.”
“That’s smart.”
“I don’t carry the damn thing every where I go,” he said. “We’ll dial up Starhaven, send a quick burst through telling them what’s going on, and toss her through after it.”
She nodded and threw the rapier in a corner, turning her attention to the silver bracelet dangling from her wrist. “You going to haul her up the ladder?”
He shook his head. “Not necessary.” He did something with his hand, grabbed the woman with one hand and Val with the other. An instant later, they were standing next to where the gate had opened. Val suppressed a shiver even as she reoriented herself. Magic always made her a little queasy—probably because she had no mage talent at all and it all seemed so damned mysterious to her.
“Do it,” he told her.
A flick of her finger activated the worldgate, which unfolded in a great burst, materializing into a door-shaped cascade of silver light like a radiant waterfall. She lifted the bracelet to her mouth and murmured a quick message, then tapped the tiny protrusion that sent the message home in an encrypted capsule. “It’s ready. Send her through.”
As Raven went to grab the woman, she ducked away, faster than he would’ve expected. Even as he moved to intercept, he dialed up his magesight, cursing silently as he saw a glowing sigil expanding from one of the rings on her right hand.
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He snatched a generic counter-spell from the spell web orbiting his body and hurled it into the midst of her expanding spell, the spells meeting and exploding into a mass of wrestling silver strands as he lunged to stop her from activating her next little surprise.
Again, she was a little quicker than he was; a single strand of force shot out from her fingertips, stabbing straight through the center of his chest and hurling him with immense force into the bells lining the center of the tower. A great ringing peal ripped through the city as Raven fell to his knees, gasping from the pain.
A second spear of power lanced from her fingers and caught the TAU
agent unawares, effortlessly swatting her to the floor. The woman gave Raven a mocking salute and threw up another mana strand, this one expanding into a transit tube like the one he’d used to transport them from the floor below. “It’s been fun,” she said, yelling over the clang of the pitching bells. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
She stepped through and vanished.
“Son of a bitch!” Raven struggled to his feet, wincing. He glanced down at his chest and saw the wound from her blow knitting itself together, but his shirt had been darkened by a copious amount of blood, probably ruining the black silk garment entirely.
Figures.
He walked over to where the blonde agent lay and knelt down beside her. He could hear her pulse, and sense her breathing, so he knew she was in no immediate danger. He gently lifted her, glanced at the gate, and shrugged. It would collapse on its own within five minutes, long before any local authorities could arrive, but it still bothered him to leave the area with a worldgate in active mode. No telling what could find its way here even in that short span of time.
He didn’t know how to work her gate module. He’d never even seen anything that sophisticated. Technology had jumped ahead again even in the ten years he’d been here.
His own was nowhere near as subtle in appearance, which was why he didn’t tend to carry it with him. If it should fall out of his pockets, it would really raise questions among the natives, the sort he didn’t even want to consider the possibility of them asking.
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His initial response would have been to create a transit tube of his own and get them the hell out of there, but there was still the issue of the active worldgate he wasn’t willing to abandon.
How do I get into these
messes?
And, of course, his rebellious brain supplied him with the obvious answer.
By underestimating the resourcefulness of a mere mortal,
it told him.
Oh, shut up.
He waited, listening to the sounds from the streets below, until the gate finally collapsed. Breathing a sigh of relief, he ‘tubed them out to his secret chamber.
The church mages would have fits when they saw how much unlicensed magic had been thrown around the place. They’d tear the city apart trying to find out who was responsible. He had no intention of being in their line of sight anytime soon. And, with any luck, he’d be able to keep them off his trail in perpetuity.
He was, after all, a much more experienced mage than any of them.
If
I can’t dodge their dumb asses, it’s time for me to hang up my hat and
retire.
Assuming his boss would let him. And that was quite an assumption in itself. And the question remained, what the hell would he do if he retired anyway? It wasn’t as though he wouldn’t be around forever unless some unforeseen calamity happened to claim him. All he’d really have to look forward to would be an eternity of boredom.
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