EJ closed Villetti’s folders. There was too much in them to get through today.
He pulled up Rocas’s folder. The sergeant at Londyn’s house. That was the first time EJ had noticed Walter touching his brand. A distant thought pushed to the forefront of his mind.
Was Walter’s brand intended to keep him from falling in love?
The brand hadn’t bothered him for hundreds of years. Why itch now? Vampires only itched when they were healing from a wound, or Walter’s null reaction. Had Rocas set it off? Had the witch, Nyoka?
Fighting off sleep, EJ began to research the women.
Chapter Fifteen
EJ
The memory-dreams always began the same way. Falling through the air. Thin. Cold. Strapped into a chute harness, carrying weapons, both mundane and magical. If hisobfuscationcharms failed, they would be visible against the sky in the middle of the day, no room for error.
EJ and Corporal Donati had leaped from the plane in a LALO—a low-altitude, low-opening parachute insertion—EJ carrying only four magic flutes, a single set of battle castanets, one hundred demon rounds between them, and modified M4s that fired them. Donati carried a preserved arm bone said to belong to Saint Cyprian of Antioch, the patron saint of necromancers. Great lot of good all that would do him. So far as he knew, there was no cure for possession but death of the host and containment of the EEB. He and Donati were here to kill the possessed citizens.
Hell of an op.
They landed in trees to the west of a village in northern Italy, near the Parco Nazionale della Val Grande, an Italian national park at the base of the Alps. They hiked in just after noon in what should be the busiest part of the day. Most of the townappeared empty. Deserted. Cars parked or crashed. Windows of houses and storefronts bashed out. Two lorries on their sides, produce spilled everywhere. Dead bodies here and there. Silent. His dreaming mind remembered the silence most, broken only by the soft whisper of their military boots on the pavement and on the cobbled streets. The smell of demon smoke and delicious food mingled together.
It looked as if the townsfolk had defended themselves against the possessed, killing a few of their own citizens, before they realized that simply allowed an EEB free to take another. Body-hopping, the grunts called it.
To help him recognize EEB energies, EJ opened Theta Mode and dropped into the brain wave patterns that, in humans, meant sleep. Theta brain waves allowed him to use his magic in different ways. He’d been practicing, and so far Theta allowed him to do things with his gift and his mind—his conceptions, pattern recognition, problem-solving—that he hadn’t been able to before.
Dropping into Theta, that he had mastered. Delta Mode was less cooperative. In training, Delta allowed him to use his magic faster, more efficiently, but Delta was hard to maintain. It was like a complicated origami that wanted to stay folded and placid deep in his mind. He was getting there but he didn’t trust it.
They moved cautiously through the empty part of town, the stink of brimstone and burned bones now mixed with the reek of torn bodies, feces, and death. EEBs clanged in the distance. EJ moved at point, aseeingworking backing up his air magic. He followed the broken twisted melodies, out of key notes, unrhythmic tocks and taps, back to the sources.
Donati covered their six, firing only when necessary. By the time they reached the street where the bomb had been droppedand exploded, the corporal had dispatched four men and two women with demon-trapping rounds. All the humans had been possessed by sprites, all now dead, the mini-demons riding them, contained in the dead bodies by the rounds. For now.
Donati pulled the still-possessed bodies to the center of the road for later retrieval and transport to a demon-extraction building in Rome, one constructed just for that purpose.
The sound of clashing cymbals rang brokenly on the air. An old couple raced at them. EJ fired. Chest shots. The couple went down, their flesh crawling with trapped green sprite energies.
The clangor where the EEB bomb detonated, was in front of apasticceria, the air redolent of scorched coffee, sweets, dead bodies, and filth. The remains of the bomb indicated it had been made of clay, like a funerary urn, and it had been dropped from the air, likely by a drone, in front of the pastry shop full of early-morning patrons. With hisseeing/hearingworking, EJ identified the trails of dozens of sprites—the lesser demons that caused the possessed to kill everyone they came near with knives, blades, even garden implements. Not guns. Blades. There would be screams and blood for them to glory in.
He counted the dissonance of the trails from the bomb. “Twenty-five altogether,” he said, after sucking water from the sip-straw near his cheek.
He checked comms for intel. Four priests, a Baptist missionary, two retired nuns, and a hundred humans were hiding in the Oratorio di San Michele, a medieval church, waiting for help. They were holding off the possessed citizens with prayer and holy water; neither was effective against EEBs. The sprites were toying with them.
Help wasn’t coming in the form the citizens hoped—a battalion of soldiers and dozens of collection vessels. The military was out, following the skirmish outside Paris last week. Theallied military sent what they had. Lieutenant Trueblood and Corporal Donati. Their orders were to kill the possessed and place the bodies for transport.
A rustling sounded from an open doorway to a home. Weeping. Pain. Terror. The sound of a single ruined bell. A faint green trail showed where the sprite had entered the house from the coffee shop down the street.
EJ was trapped in the memory, in the dream, a reality that was now and forever part of his Theta dreamscape. Even though he knew it was a dream-memory, EJ’s breath tightened. He was lucid yet he’d never found a way to wake himself. He screamed,Nononono.
It didn’t stop. It never stopped. And he couldn’t wrench himself free.
In the dream-which-was-a-memory, EJ activated asilenceworking, signaled Donati to cover his six, and adjusted the modified M4 on its strap. Readied for firing. Silently, he moved through the house, clearing each room with a glance. Green sprites weren’t smart enough to hide. It would be right out in plain sight. “Living room. Clear,” he whispered. “Dining area. Clear.” The kitchen was visible through the opening of the dining room, at the back of the house, blood on the floor. On the walls.
Bent-kneed, he approached the kitchen. A man’s work-booted foot came in view Three small children curled under the table. A man’s body lay in a pool of blood, propped up before them, a shield. Still alive. But missing the fingers of his left hand, as if they had been removed, joint by joint. The hacked fingers were laid out like Vienna sausages in the blood.
He was pale, blood splattered. Exhausted. He turned pleading eyes to EJ. “She fights the thing inside her,” he said in broken English. “But it requires sacrifice.”
In the center of the room stood a woman, a bloodied cleaver in one hand, held over her head. Her eyes glowed the orange-green of sprite possession. The clang of twisted aluminum banging in the wind came off her. She was straining, all the cords in her arms and neck standing out. Her human self was fighting the possession, fighting what the demon wanted her to do. “Help,” she grunted. “Hurry.”
EJ realized that the man had offered himself to her, piece by piece, to protect the children. Waiting. Hoping that someone would come. Knowing that if he killed her himself, the demon would simply switch to him, and that he…he might do much worse than the strong-willed woman hacking him to bits.
