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Flour, sugar, salt—basics they’d have to flash in from New Hope until they found a better way. He was, he thought, essentially starting out like his mother and the New Hope Originals had.
At least he had their template to work from, and experienced troops.
The armory would serve for now, he calculated, but they’d want to add to that, too.
He sat in what was essentially a shack with his lists and maps. The most secure structure—which he’d added layers to—now served as a prison, not for slaves or tortured magickals but for captured enemy.
He needed them off his base as soon as possible, and wrote down suggestions for prison camps.
He glanced up when Mallick came in.
“I’m sending out hunting, scouting, and scavenging parties at first light. I figure the faeries we’ve got with us can get started on growing food, for us and for livestock, but maybe we need some sort of agrodome for fruit trees.”
“I’ll ask about that when I get to New Hope.” Mallick glanced over to where Duncan had stacked bottles of whiskey, gin, beer, wine.
“I figured it was safer in here with me. We’ll keep some. Soldiers need a little recreation, and some can be used medicinally. And we can barter with the rest.”
With a nod, Mallick selected a bottle of wine, opened it, sniffed. “Barely palatable. Still.” He found cups, lifted a brow at Duncan.
“Yeah, why not? I’m sending a list of need now with you, and a list of need eventually.”
“All right. You did well tonight.”
Duncan took the cup of wine, tapped it to Mallick’s with the clink of tin to tin. “You, too. Then again, it wasn’t much of a fight.”
“Because we’d prepared and planned and followed through on the plan.”
“And because the enemy was mostly drunk assholes.”
“Yes, but even drunk assholes can kill. We lost no one.” He sat with his wine. “South Carolina lost eight.” Looked into his cup before he drank. “Arlington lost sixty-three, with another ninety-eight wounded.”
Duncan set down the cup, rose to walk to the window. “Tonia said it was bad. She said Flynn lost Lupa. I know Lupa and Eddie’s Joe have lived longer than they would have because of magickal treatments and healing, but still . . . I can’t imagine New Hope without Flynn’s wolf.”
He turned back. “Do you have the names of the dead, the wounded?”
Mallick laid a paper on the table, so Duncan came back.
As he read, he picked up the cup, drained the wine.
“You’d know them,” Mallick began.
“I went to school with two of them. Len and I used to play basketball, pickup games. I dated Marly a couple of times. Ben Stikes used to play this thing—ukulele—on his front porch. Margie Frost taught me and Tonia chemistry in the academy. I knew them. I knew all of them.”
And he could see them, hear them. He knew their families, their friends. He remembered he’d dated Marly primarily because she’d caught him with her quick, infectious laugh.
“It grieves her.”
Duncan pressed his fingers to his eyes, dropped them. “It has to. It should never be easy.”
“Correct.”
“I don’t mean she deserves—”
“I know what you mean, boy. I trained her, I watched her become. And though I had devoted my life to just that, when the time came, I grieved for her, for the weight she’d carry.”
“You came to love her.”
“I did. An unexpected development.” Mallick drank again. “And tonight, though it’s another beginning and not the end, she showed what she is.”
“She invited an attack. Not here. We’re not worth it at this point.” Though he’d make damn certain they would be. “Probably not South Carolina. But Arlington.”
“She meant to. She’ll hold what she took.”
“I know it. I have issues with her apart from this, but I believe in her, absolutely.”
“I know that as well. You’re a credit to your blood, Duncan.”
“Wow.” Sincerely surprised, Duncan searched for words. “That calls for another drink.”
With a laugh, Mallick poured them both more wine.
“I’ll build this place into a stronghold, and from here, we’ll expand the West. Tell her . . . Shit, I don’t know what I want to tell her.”
“You will, when you see her again.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Right now, he thought, he had to focus everything on making that stronghold, feeding, clothing, drilling the troops who’d hold it.
“What I do know?” Duncan said with a shrug. “Unexpected development—I’m going to miss you.”
“And I, also unexpected, you.”
Mallick lifted his cup. “To the light, and to the unexpected.”
Duncan tapped his cup to Mallick’s again, and drank.
Fallon stayed in Arlington for two weeks, helping to organize and arrange housing, training, overseeing the transfer of prisoners, and working to relocate any former slaves and captured magickals who chose to leave.
As more opted to remain—to live, work, train there—she supervised the redistribution of supplies and furnishings within the base.
Volunteers cleared the houses in the outlying neighborhood of the remains of the dead, banished rats, cleaned, repaired.
She used Katie’s blueprint from New Hope for assigning jobs—skills, experience, or interest in gaining both—for creating volunteer sign-ups.
The attack came on the dawn of the third day after her broadcast. Prepared for it, forces who now called themselves Light for Life repelled the PWs in under an hour. It had been, in Fallon’s estimation, more an angry, arrogant barrage than a structured attack.
There would be others, but at the end of two weeks, she trusted Colin and his troops to defend the base and any who settled on its outskirts.
She stood with him by the white memorial stone she’d placed. She’d shaped it like a tower to symbolize a rising, and with her light, had carved the names of everyone who’d given their life to take this ground.
Below the names, she’d etched the fivefold symbol, and had added LIGHT FOR LIFE.
Already someone had planted flowers at its base, and they bloomed as white as the stone.
“Mallick will be on and off base for the next couple weeks. You know how to send for him or for me if you need to. And I need those weekly reports, detailed.”
“We’ve been over it, Fallon. Detailed weekly reports. Anything unusual or noteworthy that comes out of scouting missions, you hear asap.”
“They’ll attack again. The PWs, and very likely government or military out of D.C. Watch the skies, Colin.”
She let out a breath. She had to trust he was ready. She’d already sent Taibhse and Faol Ban back to New Hope. Now it was time for her to join them.
So she turned to him. “Listen to Mallick. Learn from him. You’re in command—but you’re not president.”
He grinned at her. “I like fighting better than politics.”
“Clearly, but don’t forget the politics. Train them hard, Colin.”
She looked around the base, at the soldiers and recruits on the training grounds, the volunteers working the gardens, tending the livestock. Laughter filtered out of the house they’d outfitted as a school, and the scent of fresh bread wafted out of another they’d designated as a base kitchen.
More than a base, already more, she thought. A community in the making.
“Train them hard,” she repeated. “Within the year, we take D.C.”
“We’ll be ready.”
She turned to him, hugged him hard. “Keep them safe,” she said, then swung onto Laoch. “You’re still at least a little bit of a jerk, but I love you anyway.”
“Same goes.”
Laoch spread his wings. She flew up over Arlington, circled once, then soared toward New Hope.
She wanted the flight rather than the flash, and used it to make maps in her head of the land below. Too many roa
ds not yet cleared or in impassable disrepair. What had been cities, what they’d called suburbs, developments of houses, centers for shopping remained largely deserted. The land itself had taken over in the two decades since the Doom so grasses grew thick and high, trees spread like weeds. Over them, through them, wildlife roamed in herds and packs, and she imagined the rivers and streams below busy with fish and waterfowl.
With their mad mission to eradicate magickals, to enslave, the Purity Warriors had done little to nothing to tend the land, to build. Raiders raided, and left destruction in their wake. What government there was seemed focused on rule, and the battles in the major cities, and still, she knew, on their work to contain and restrain those with powers they refused to understand.
