ONSET (Book 4): Stay of Execution Read online

  “There is apparently a Dresden Familias team in Sarnia, Canada,” she told him. “My impression is we’re talking VIV and bodyguards, not a combat team, but they got the call.”

  A Very Important Vampire was not what David wanted as backup, but…

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he said grimly, looking up at the still-lit sky. “I’m guessing arrival after nightfall?”

  “Bingo. Same timeline as the med team.” Leitz paused. “Boss, should you hold off until they get there?”

  “If we do that, anyone who’s left dies,” he reminded her. “Let’s go, Stone.”

  The smell hit him when they were still fifty feet from the building. Sulfur. Burnt pork. Blood. He knew those smells and he didn’t like them.

  They had him distracted for a critical moment, and he found himself unexpectedly surrounded by large black men in rough clothes, all of them holding guns pointed at him and Stone. He wasn’t entirely sure where they’d come from—and managing to sneak up on him was damned impressive.

  “I ain’t figuring you’re here to make friends,” one of them told him. “MIBs in the waste? Yeah, no. What’s your game, government man?”

  David turned to look at the speaker, knowing that the faceless black mask of his helmet could be disconcerting.

  “There’s trouble ahead,” he gestured to the clinic. “We’re here to find out what and fix it.”

  “Only fixing MIB likely to do here is burn us out,” one of the other gunmen snarled.

  “I don’t know who you are or why you’re here,” David told them calmly. “I do know something has gone very wrong at the clinic and we’re here to deal with it.”

  “You got half that right,” the first speaker replied. “Call me Saw. I run this bunch and this waste, you get me?”

  David had already marked him as “gang leader.”

  “Now, I won’t pretend I ain’t what I am,” Saw continued, “but a bunch of crazy-ass cracker girls want to set up and keep my customers alive a bit longer? That’s to my advantage, see?

  “So, my man Chase was watching the clinic. And my man Chase called for help—and then there was just screaming.” Saw paused. “Some of it was Chase. Chase was in Afghanistan and then spent ten years behind bars for murder two.

  “Not much scares Chase, but brother was screaming like a little girl when the phone cut out.

  “So, tell me, government man, whatcha gonna do?”

  The guns were still levelled on David and his people.

  “I’m going to go in there, rescue anyone who’s still alive, and kill whatever killed those who aren’t,” David said flatly. “If you want to help, you can make sure everybody clears out of here. There’s something unhealthy in the air.”

  This close, he could feel the waves of black energy rippling out from whatever was in the clinic. Anyone who didn’t have the defenses woven into the ONSET Agents’ body armor was going to be in serious trouble.

  Saw was silent, and then gestured to his men. Familiar gestures—the same US Special Forces sign language ONSET was trained in.

  The leader and the three men with the most modern-looking guns remained as the rest scattered.

  “My boys will clear the neighborhood,” Saw promised. “But we’re going in with you. Those folks are my customers, my brothers, my sisters.” He smirked. “And those cracker girls are owed something for the care they’ve taken of them, hear me?”

  “You have no idea what we’re getting into,” David told him.

  Saw shook his head, a darkness flashing over his eyes.

  “I was in Afghanistan with Chase,” he said flatly. “Watched a raghead cut a girl’s throat and summon a sand monster that ate six men before we killed him and it stopped. Gonna be something like that, ain’t it?”

  David grimaced.

  “Yeah, pretty much exactly like that,” he admitted.

  Saw racked the slide on the assault rifle he carried.

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  3

  Beggars can’t be choosers. With two men, no matter how individually powerful or well-equipped, David didn’t stand much of a chance at getting anyone still in the building out alive.

  “Fine,” he agreed. “But you focus on getting the people out. Whatever is in there is our problem, not yours. Clear?”

  “Five by five,” the gang leader replied brightly.

  With a sigh and a hand gesture, David set off for the clinic once again. He unslung his own assault rifle now, the modified M4 loaded with silver bullets.

  He swept the building ahead with the full extent of his senses, absorbing the waves of nausea that swept over him as he did so. This was new. It felt like demons, but…not.

  The front door was still open, a breeze flinging it back against the wall as David approached. The crash echoed through the silent neighborhood, the sound seeming to slow, like it was being carried through water.

  Something was not right.

  Stone led the way, his machine gun held almost lightly in his hands as he stepped up to the door and checked through it. The instant he moved toward the door, however, something in David’s mind screamed warning.

  “Stop!” he barked over the radio channel. “If you go through that door, you die.”

  His Agent stopped with admirable speed, pulling back.

  “What now?” he asked.

  David slowly stepped forward, running through possible futures. Hammering through the walls or windows would have the same effect. The entire building was wrapped in a tingling ward of life-sucking black energy.

  More than enough to drain the life of any mortal human or parahuman. David poked the future where he stepped through the door and winced.

  “Okay, this is going to suck,” he said aloud. “Cover me.”

  If they’d had a Mage, they could have disrupted or taken down the ward. Since they didn’t, less-elegant measures were required.

  He strapped the M4 to his back and drew his sword. Memoria was a leaf-bladed weapon, forged to the pattern of Bronze Age blades but made of souls more than of any metal. Seven brave soldiers had tried to kill a high-court demon, and instead the demon had enslaved their souls into the weapon.

  In turn, they’d betrayed the demon and helped David kill it. Now they were remembered, and he carried the blade against humanity’s enemies.

  Memoria was powerful but it couldn’t destroy the ward. He slashed through the wall of black energy anyway, scattering rivulets of it in every direction…and then stepped into it.

  The sword disrupted the attack that followed, weakening it. Any of the men with him would have died…but David White was a class one regenerator, with a far more powerful life force than any merely mortal parahuman.

  The ward drove him to his knees as he absorbed its power—and then three massively ugly toad demons charged at him as he wavered.

  Stone’s M60 had been enchanted and modified in a dozen different ways…but no one had ever managed to make it silent. The heavy weapon thundered behind him, echoing in the enclosed space as the gunner fired past his boss, long bursts of silver-tipped bullets that hammered into the nine-foot-tall monstrosities like the fist of God.

  Two went down, but the third made it past Stone’s hail of fire to reach David, fists the size of basketballs lashing toward his head to finish what the ward had started.

  David’s prescience let him reach about half a second into the future in a fight. It wasn’t much, but it was more than enough to let him evade even those inhumanly fast blows. The ward shattered, he rose to his feet with Memoria in his hand.

  The second time the demon charged him, both of its arms went flying with a single slash of the red-tinged blade. The limbs flashed to ichor in midair, splattering black demon-blood across the walls.

  Before the demon could adapt—regrowing its arms was almost certainly within its abilities—Stone adjusted his aim and hammered another ten silver bullets into it.

  The whole creature collapsed into ichor and David
stared at the three rapidly dissipating monstrosities in disgust.

  Toad demons weren’t high-court demons. They weren’t the heralds of the apocalypse that served the Masters Beyond, but…they were far stronger than could normally sneak through the Seal that kept magic and demonkind mostly out of the world.

  Saw stepped through the door behind them, his rifle sweeping the room in a practiced manner that implied the black man had been far more than the grunt he’d implied when he’d served. He eyed the puddles of goop.

  “I’d love to say I’d never seen that before,” he quipped. “But…sand monster.”

  “Demons,” David replied. “There’s more in the house.”

  He looked around. Once, the room had been a somewhat grand entrance foyer, the centerpiece of a solid middle-class home. More recently, it had been the reception area for a crude but clean charity clinic and safe injection site.

  It looked like half a dozen of the people in the room had been using it for the latter purpose when something in the needles had killed them. Quietly. Peacefully.

  The other eight people in the room had been ripped to shreds by the demons. Much less peacefully.

  “That woulda been Chase,” Saw pointed grimly. About the only thing distinguishing the gang member from the other occupants of the room was that he’d had a gun in his hand when he’d died. It was a crude thing, handmade in a machine shop to a design dropped into France in the Second World War, but it was still a gun.

  And it had clearly done Chase no good at all.

  “Unless your guns are loaded with silver, you’re not going to do much more than Chase did,” David warned Saw. He looked around the main floor, reaching into his Sight to try and assess what was going on.

  It wasn’t easy. The building was warped with energy in a way he’d never seen before. The source was…up. But there were demons on the main floor, too.

  “I ain’t leaving, MIB,” Saw told him. “So, what do we do?”

  The gang leader was completely unbothered by the slightly-glowing sword in David’s hand. He’d clearly passed his quota of caring about weird shit today.

  The ONSET officer glanced at Stone, then sighed and unslung his M4.

  “I’m assuming you trained on an M4 at some point?” he asked the man.

  “Qualified Expert,” Saw grunted, passing his older rifle over to one of his men. “I’m guessing silver rounds?”

  “Steel-jacket hollow-point, silver-cored,” David confirmed. “Muzzle velocity is higher, aim lower. Don’t miss. None of the big things are down here anymore, but the little ones will still kill you dead twice over before you know what hit you.

  “Find any civilians left, get them to safety.”

  “And what you doing, government man?” Saw asked, checking the safety and chamber on the rifle.

  “There’s some kind of dark energy source upstairs, probably a summoning portal,” David told him. “Stone and I are going to go make it go away.”

  Whatever was on the second floor of the house turned clinic was nasty. Every step David took up the central staircase felt like wading deeper and deeper into muck, his Sight screaming that he should turn back.

  Stone looked unaffected, which suggested that it was only through his Sight that David was being impacted. The big Agent was looking concernedly at his boss, though.

  “You okay, Commander?”

  “Yeah,” David replied, adjusting his grip on Memoria and focusing on the feel of the weapon through his gloves. “Something nasty is waiting for us, though. Just getting closer to it sucks.”

  The other man grinned and hefted his machine gun, checking the ammunition level in its drum magazine.

  “The advantage of being roughly as sensitive as a rock, I suppose,” he said. “You point, I’ll shoot.”

  David returned the smile and stepped off the staircase, using the sickening sense of unease to direct them both.

  “That way,” he concluded. “Odds are there isn’t much left of the innocents, but let’s watch our fire. Who knows what’s going on up here.”

  From the hand-lettered signage hanging at the top of the stairs, the source of the darkness was in a Dr. Sinclair’s office; what had once been the master bedroom. A pair of double doors was closed in front of the room, with an unfamiliar hulking form kneeling in front of them.

  “Greetings,” it rumbled, rising to its feet and letting jet-black bat-like wings flicker out to either side of it. Other than the wings, the creature could almost have passed for a large black man.

  Having met demons, however, David knew what to look for. The “black” of the creature’s skin was actually a dark crimson. Small protrusions of white bone, not quite large enough to be called horns, emerged from the demon’s skull above his ears, with larger protrusions forming a natural layer of armor across the creature’s shoulders above the wings.

  “My mistress is busy,” the demon said politely. “If you’ll come back later, I’m certain we can make time for you.”

  “Boss?” Stone asked carefully.

  “Shoot it,” David ordered.

  A shield of black flame flashed into existence around the demon’s left hand as Stone opened fire, flickering across the air with blinding speed to catch the bullets before they reached the creature. Silver and steel flashed to vapor, and the demon smiled.

  “Now, that is just rude,” it murmured.

  David was already charging as it spoke, however, Memoria’s red-tinged blade glittering in the hallway’s artificial light as he attacked. A blade of the same glittering black flame as its shield flickered into existence in the demon’s right hand.

  The ensuing parry didn’t go nearly as well as the creature had been hoping. It was fast—but David was faster. He was inside its guard even as the sword came into existence, Memoria stabbing forward like an extension of his arm.

  The demon’s eyes flared wide as the bloodsword hammered into its chest, both its shield and blade of fire vanishing in an instant.

  “That’s…not right,” the creature stammered out—and then collapsed into ichor as Memoria severed the connection between the conjured body and the demon, a Pure creature formed entirely of magic.

  “Seems perfect to me,” David quipped. “All right. Stone, cover me. I’ve got the door.”

  The room on the other side of the door had been set up as a simple but complete doctor’s office and examination room, with a cheap IKEA desk separated from the bed by a hanging curtain.

  The examination bed was occupied by a young black woman who was very clearly dead, her stomach torn open to allow something access to the baby she’d been carrying. A blonde white woman in dark blue scrubs, even younger than the pregnant victim, was crumpled against the bottom of the bed, her neck bent at a horribly impossible angle.

  A second nurse in scrubs, her throat torn open, had been tossed against the wall. David wasn’t sure at what point the nurses had realized something was going wrong, but they’d clearly tried to save the pregnant girl on the examination table.

  They’d failed.

  The room was covered in spatters of blood from the women, and the scent of fresh death filled the air. David wasn’t sure how the smell hadn’t permeated the house even more than it had!

  In the middle of the mess knelt a naked woman with long raven-black hair. Despite the blood everywhere, nothing marred her skin as she ignored the two men walking into the room, and something about her drew the eye.

  David felt as much as saw Stone freeze, the Agent’s every muscle locked down as his gaze fixated on the naked woman. He felt the urge himself, but his Sight allowed him to see the magic radiating from the creature in the room.

  It wore her flesh, but the thing sitting in the middle of the massacre was not Dr. Evelyn Sinclair.

  “Come in, come in,” she half-whispered. Stone walked past David, dropping his gun as he did so. Even David couldn’t stop himself from approaching her.

  She rose and turned to face them, and even the fresh blood dri
pping from her mouth failed to detract from the stunning attractiveness of her form.

  Her grossly pregnant form.

  “It is almost complete,” she murmured. “You destroyed my guardians, so you shall replace them until He comes.”

  “Who?” David forced out.

  “The Herald,” she told him, touching the naked skin of her belly. “Three months here, waiting for the right time of weakness and a mother at the right stage. Now the beginning.”

  She smiled.

  “Put the sword down, Commander White. Accept what has come, and know that surrender will buy you a place at the Herald’s right hand—and life when the Masters return!”

  Her pregnant belly warped grotesquely as she removed her hand, sliding it to cup her breast as she ran her other hand over her lips. “And there are other rewards, too,” she murmured, tilting her head at him.

  “Just…put the sword down.”

  “She’s so beautiful,” Stone murmured beside David. “We can’t…”

  “Your friend is right,” she told him. “Let me birth the Herald and serve Him, and I shall be yours, to obey your every whim.”

  David took another step toward her, unwilling, unintentionally, his grip on the sword in his hand weakening…and then the slipping blade sliced through the armor plating on his leg like it wasn’t even there, the tip gouging gently through his flesh like fire.

  Memoria impeded regeneration. Even he couldn’t heal from that injury instantly, and pain flashed through his body as blood welled up from his flesh…and the blade’s magic shattered her spell.

  He didn’t say anything. He just struck, the blade flashing across the intervening space toward the demon wearing Sinclair’s skin.

  Unlike the demon outside, she’d been expecting it—and was just as fast as he was. Fingernails grew into foot-long claws in a moment, parrying his strike as the succubus shifted into combat form.

  The shift was incomplete. Her skin turned to dark-red scaly armor, claws flashed out from her hands to strike at him, and natural horn defenses emerged across her chest to protect her heart—but her stomach and womb remained entirely human.