The Spellslinger

  A Fistful of Daggers

  S M Reine

  Copyright © 2019 by S M Reine

  LM4-v1.0

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Next

  About the Author

  I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.

  ​— ​Psalm 34:4-5

  Never bet your money on another man’s game.

  ​— ​Laura Ingalls Wilder

  1

  L incoln Marshall spent a whole night bleeding on the floor of a Union jail cell before he started worrying.

  Not about the wound opened on his arm like a bloody mouth. At least, not only about the wound. It was deep. He suspected he’d see bone if he poked around in it, so he didn’t do that. He wrapped a strip of shirt around it to slow the bleeding. When it bled more, he cannibalized his undershirt, and the blood soaked through that too.

  The cell was empty of alternatives. No bed, no linens. He was in a windowless room the size of a closet with a heavy door, no handle on his side. He was lucky that he hadn’t gotten to eat or drink the past day because he didn’t have anywhere to relieve himself. He got harsh light from an exposed bulb on the ceiling. Otherwise, his only furnishing was a tap low to the floor which barely drip-drip-dripped when he twisted the knob all the way open.

  He didn’t sleep. He couldn’t have.

  Not when he was still trying to figure out how the hell everything had gone so wrong.

  Lincoln’s mind ached with the weight of a timeline gone askew. He replayed it over and over again: finding his dead father hanging from the rafters, Sophie going missing, finding her with the Traveler, hurtling into the past without taking the time to think of what that really meant .

  Lincoln Marshall was still in the year 2006, nine years earlier than he should have been. And he’d fucked up everything. Every last thing.

  Elise Kavanagh was living her worst nightmare.

  Reno was devastated.

  The Traveler was dead.

  And he couldn’t even get back to Sophie.

  He wanted to blame his dad, the Traveler, the gods that warred through his body. But alone in that room, he could only think of one person who deserved the blame, and that guy was bleeding through four layers of cotton and denim.

  “Is someone gonna come talk to me?” he yelled at the walls. By law, a government agency could hold him for seventy-two hours without charges. Even a secret government agency like the Office of Preternatural Affairs couldn’t be above the law. But he also didn’t want to wait seventy-two hours.

  He hadn’t seen Sophie since both of them had been black-bagged and carried out of Yatam’s safe house in downtown Reno. Or anyone else, for that matter.

  Seventy-two hours without food or water or medical care sounded impossible. Ridiculous.

  “I still need to talk to someone,” he called into the hallway. The slit in the ironclad door was an inch tall, so he pressed himself to it to make his voice project.

  There was no response.

  “I could use a bucket to piss in!” he shouted.

  And still, there was nothing.

  He cradled his throbbing arm against his chest and wondered if he ached because of his wounds or from fever. Better that he hurt because he’d nearly been torn apart by his brother, a gargoyle possessed by the will of a God gone mad. If it was fever, then he’d caught an infection from Elise’s sword, which was a grim thought without medical care.

  She hadn’t meant to cut him open. He’d gotten in the way at the wrong moment. But that didn’t mean her accident couldn’t kill him.

  He hadn’t meant to kill her either, but he couldn’t be sure his actions hadn’t led to her death in the garden. Elise had made it clear that she would rather be dead than surrender to God. Maybe she was swinging from a tree branch at that moment.

  No. She’s fine.

  Elise was the last person on the planet who needed his worry, and Lincoln couldn’t obsess about those thoughts without losing his mind. Yet he also didn’t have anything else to obsess about. In the silence, he was alone with himself, with his fears, with his thoughts. The memory of John Marshall hanging dead in the hospice wore a thousand faces in that quiet.

  After a few hours, he tried pounding on the door. There were sounds outside. People moving in the halls. Someone must have heard him.

  He wasn’t the only one starting to make noise. It sounded like the OPA had arrested a lot of souls while sweeping Reno, and Lincoln couldn’t blame them. Ethereal invasion of the city had screwed everything up. The OPA had to clear things out, keep people safe. Eventually the crying of others in detention would subside as the detainees were addressed.

  They would come talk to him once it was his turn.

  Right?

  His stomach became a gnawing hole under his chest. He kept hydrated by lying under the tap and drinking water one drip at a time. Given the apocalypse he’d left behind in the outside world, he probably should have been grateful for that much. He reckoned he should have been grateful for the roof over his head, the quiet in those walls, the living heart that pumped blood through his veins.

  Lincoln didn’t feel grateful.

  The longer he went without seeing hair or hide of Sophie, he felt a lot less grateful.

  He passed seventy-two hours—as near as he could tell by the light creeping through a crack to the dusty outside world—and didn’t care by the time it happened. Elise had been in the garden for three days. She was as good as gone.

  On the fourth day, Lincoln lost his shit.

  He threw himself at the walls. He punched and kicked. He screamed until he thought he’d spew his lungs onto the floor. He demanded a lawyer and got no response. He took the last dump he might ever have, right there in the room, because nobody was coming to see him. It hurt to have a bowel movement. It felt more like acid than a solid stool. His body rebelled against it and his mouth tasted like poison.

  He woke up on the fifth day with a definite fever and crawled through moment by agonizing moment, which is also how the sixth day unfolded.

  On the seventh day, Lincoln Marshall rested. His fever broke, and he was exhausted. He had no choice but to sleep.

  That was when his cell door finally opened.

  The woman who entered was stocky, round-faced, and brassy-haired. She looked like she could have spent all morning throwing bales of hay and still made it to Wednesday night Bible study. She wore black with black, belted at the waist, her gig line straight and sidearm holstered.

  “Lincoln Marshall.” Her voice probably wasn’t that deep normally, but lady law enforcement often affected masculine tones. Made them sound authoritative. “Honors student at the University of Tennessee on a football scholarship. Quarterback. Dual major in criminal justice and theology. Family coven around Grove County. No known associates in the state of Nevada and no business being found with the Mother and Father of All Demons crystallized as your new favorite mantelpiece tchotchke.”

  If she was trying to show off by knowing his identity, then she should have found him days earlier. Lincoln didn’t have enough sweat in his body to work up a fuss.

  He pushed himself upright, grimacing at the ache. There was only so much he could do to keep limber in a six-foot-by-six-foot box where he shat and slept. “Good evening, ma’am. Seems like you’ve got me at a loss. You know me, but I don’t know you.”

  The courtesy didn’t bring a hint of sympathy to her dead eyes. “Allyson Whatley.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, you’re with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”

  “Union Unit B13.”

  Lincoln didn’t know much about the OPA or the Union, and he preferred it that way. What he did know was that they were joint organizations and the man who would be secretary in a decade owed Lincoln a favor. He couldn’t cash it in for a decade. The world might not exist in a decade.

  Allyson’s nose wrinkled. “You smell like shit. Get up. I’m not putting up with this while I question you.”

  There were men waiting outside the door, so whatever brief thoughts Lincoln had about running were quickly abandoned. He was too injured and starved to make it far anyway. He barely made it down the hallway on his own two feet. When he stumbled, the guards took his arms and dragged.

  Lincoln got angrier when he saw the showers. It was a room without privacy and four shower heads. Black-clad Union agents were waiting to strip him down. He yanked his arm away from them to keep the makeshift bandages.

  “Not until I see a doctor,” he said.

  “You could have anything in there,” said an agent, a man, who postured the way that men liked to do. The big shoulders, the challenging look in his eye. Fight me. Just try to fight me.

  Lincoln
postured too, but it didn’t make him feel strong. It made him feel ashamed. He could stand tall and meet this guy’s eyes. He could talk in a deeper voice. Assert his power. But what power was he asserting? They all had guns and Lincoln was naked, without so much as his falhófnir dagger to defend himself.

  They yanked his wrappings off. It wasn’t a pretty sight, underneath. The wound had scabbed but removing the cloth tore it open, making fresh blood sprinkle on his feet. It was still more healed than he expected. The skin was red, but not swollen. He was going to have a deep scar.

  The blast of water was cold. The soap was grainy, and he had to rub his skin with his fingernails to get everything off—as much as he could with three minutes of being hosed down.

  His clothes still smelled bad, but someone had stuck them under water too. He had to fight to get back into his sodden jeans.

  He was shivering when they took him to a room they used as clinic. It was filled with chairs and gym mats, which were occupied by people who looked even worse than Lincoln. They weren’t the worst he’d ever seen. He’d seen sicker among the slaves in the City of Dis, worked and underfed until their organs failed, when they became meat.

  He was sitting in a plastic chair for an hour before Allyson Whatley came back. She brought someone wearing scrubs.

  “A healer?” Lincoln asked.

  Allyson snorted. “Hold your arm out.”

  He quickly realized this was no witch. The lady in scrubs might not have even had medical training. She didn’t put on gloves before touching his arm, and she pulled something out of her kit that looked like superglue. Whatever resources the Union had, they weren’t going to waste them on Lincoln.

  “You’re welcome,” Allyson said tauntingly.

  “Am I supposed to be grateful for getting treated like a cow scraped on razor wire?” Lincoln hissed when the nurse or whatever squeezed his wound closed. Elise’s sword had cut deep but clean. The sides met neatly. Maybe he wouldn’t scar after all.

  “We don’t usually treat kopides at all,” Allyson said. “If you can’t get your body together to heal itself, you’re not worth the attention.”

  “I’m not a kopis.” Lincoln hadn’t been changed in Genesis like most folks, and he sure hadn’t been a kopis in the year 2006.

  “Then you don’t know yet. All right. Breaking news. You’re a kopis. There’s a whole spiel we’ve got for newly recruited kopides, but it sounds like you already know what they are.”

  Lincoln knew too well. He’d seen their beginning through the eyes of Anat, a Remnant of Inanna who preceded him. The making of kopides had been the unmaking of Anat. It was shameful how thick his throat felt when he said, “How the fuck can you know that?”

  “Kopides feel kopides. Witches too. We train our agents to search for it, but if you grow up around your kind, someone will tell you sooner or later. Somehow you’ve gotten yourself neck-deep in this bullshit without the heads up.” Allyson tapped the back of her skull. “We always know. I feel you.”

  It’s not possible .

  Then again, Lincoln was in the year 2006, Elise was trapped by God, and his gargoyle brother had absconded with the dead deity that tagged along with Lincoln’s soul.

  “Where’s Sophie?” Lincoln asked.

  “Who’s Sophie? The kid you were brought in with?” Allyson cocked a brow at him. “Did you knock her up?”

  His stomach lurched at the idea of it. Sophie deserved better than that. Better than what she’d already gotten. “Fuck no. But she’s my—she’s my sister.”

  “She’s black,” Allyson said.

  “So what?” The answer had infuriated him when Elise used it, but now it felt satisfying to hurl it at Allyson. Maybe Sophie was his sister by marriage. Or adoption. Or they had really different dads.

  “She’s the witch who locked up the Mother and Father of All Demons,” Allyson said. “Don’t deny it. I’m a witch. I can see who casts the big magic when it happens. Considering I found a kopis and a witch in the Hot Zone, I’m thinking it’s all your fault. I want to know what you did and then I want you to fix it.”

  Lincoln couldn’t deny it even to save his skin. He just dropped his gaze to his arm getting glued shut by bloody, inexpert fingers. “I’m not talking until I see her.”

  “All right. Sign the contract.” Allyson put it in front of Lincoln.

  He didn’t have to read much to see that it was an employment contract. It was demanding his entire life for the Union. “Ma’am, with all due respect, there’s no way in hell I’m signing that,” Lincoln said.

  “Then there’s no way in hell you’re seeing your girlfriend.”

  He gripped the pen hard enough to bend the plastic. “Shit, you’re an angry dyke. You’d be prettier smiling. Maybe a good dicking would cheer you up.”

  She took the baton off her belt. She whipped it across his face.

  Lincoln’s head snapped back, and the flare of pain on his cheekbone wasn’t nearly so sharp to suggest a break. He snarled and tried to push out of the chair. She just hit him again, tossing him back. Allyson wasn’t out to ruin his face. She just wanted him to know she could beat him and there was nothing to do about it.

  What power did he have, without Sophie?

  What could he do, when these people controlled his body as thoroughly as the nightmare that once possessed him?

  Lincoln signed.

  Given how badly Lincoln had been doing, he’d expected to find Sophie even worse. And she didn’t look great, to be fair. She was a tiny teenager with a big belly and ashy skin. Whatever she did to make her hair coil had come undone, leaving an unruly pouf of curls that were matted in dirt. Those Union bastards hadn’t given her a bed either.

  But she was seated in the center of the floor, legs folded, hands curved under baby belly. She was upright. She was conscious. She even brightened at the sight of Lincoln.

  “You’re alive!”

  “The Union better be grateful you’re alive or else I’da killed them all.” Lincoln stepped inside so that the agents could slam the door behind them. “This place is insane.”

  “Insane is not an insult, but a derogatory description of mental illness. You do no favors to the insane by pretending they would concoct such punishments. This place is cruel.”

  “You’re being a pedant. You must be feeling good.” Lincoln kneeled down to embrace her like he had the last time he found her. He hadn’t been asking but she didn’t seem to mind. He only felt the tremors deep within her body once she rested against him. “Jesus, Sophie. Are you cold?”

  Her lips were colorless. “I’ve been having contractions.” In 2006, at fourteen-years-old, Sophie Keyes was around six months pregnant, carrying the child of one of the men meant to protect her. She couldn’t have contractions. She couldn’t have a baby for months yet.

  “What?” Lincoln was on his feet in an instant, slamming his fist on the door. “Hey! We need medical care here!”

  “Don’t waste your energy. They won’t respond. Regardless, I’m experiencing contractions because of dehydration. They only bring me two small glasses with my two meals each day.”

  “You’re getting glasses? They’re feeding you?” He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or jealous or still furious beyond all reckoning. The injustice was unfathomable. That a girl—a pregnant girl—could be locked up on American soil, ignored, without medical care, with barely enough water...

  Yeah, he was furious.

  “A true patriot would bring a pregnant lady water!” he yelled through the slit.

  “I’ve attempted that.” Sophie took a deep breath and let it out slowly, eyes closed. She looked like she was meditating. “Now I’m conserving my energy. I only move enough to prevent atrophy, blood clots, or sores, and perform mild calisthenics for mood. We’ll need our strength to fix the universe.”

  Lincoln let his fists drop. “You’ve got a plan. Of course you’ve got a plan.”

  “I have focus, not a plan. This is above me. We need to seek help—James, Elise, Betty...”

  His stomach flipped. “James is some kind of dead. Maybe Lazarused, but maybe not. Depends on how trustworthy you think God is.”

  Sophie’s eyes popped open. “God?”

  Lincoln gave her the short version of the story—everything she had missed in the minutes leading to His arrival, including James’s possession and Elise’s sacrifice. “He took her, Sophie.” Lincoln balled his hand into a fist again, tighter than ever, and resisted the urge to pound the door again. He’d bust the glue on his arm. “He took her to the garden. She’s not ready.”