Tempest Reborn (20 page)

‘Fuck,’ was my only response, but my grief ran a lot deeper than that. Losing Blondie had felt – still felt – like a knife in my heart. But she’d been killed by her greatest foe. I would never be okay with her death, but it made sense.

But to get randomly blown up by a supposed ally when the danger was over?

I couldn’t wrap my brain around the fact I’d never see Gog and Magog again, or Daniel. They hadn’t been in my life long, but we’d been through some heavy shit together.

If my reaction to the news of our friends’ death was to slide downward, inside myself, Ryu’s response was to slam down more coffee mugs on Anyan’s granite counters. I didn’t tell him to take it easy, for fear one of those mugs would find itself winged at my head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the baobhan sith so angry, ever.

Numbly, I watched as he poured coffee, and then I helped him pass the mugs about. I even brought Tracy a glass of orange juice, since she couldn’t have coffee, and brought everyone else sugar and milk, letting things cool down before I began another barrage of questions. I also knew I had about twenty minutes, tops, till it sank in that the people I’d called friends for such a short time were dead, and I had a meltdown.

‘Seriously, how can they get away with this?’ I asked once everyone had had a few sips.

Ryu’s voice was back to normal when he spoke again, although his hazel eyes were still blazing. ‘Any number of ways, Jane. They’ll blame the attack on us. They’ll say that the helicopters were full not of supernaturals, who aren’t supposed to exist, but of Western spies. The British government will say that’s ridiculous, but won’t do anything about it. Somewhere there’ll be a few closed-coffin funerals, and end of story.’

‘But why won’t Britain do something? They were citizens—’

‘Who were in Chinese airspace, with no formal clearance since everything was done under the table. If Britain really pushes this, all the Chinese have to say was that they never had permission, the helicopters were obviously full of spies, and they deserved to be shot down as they were in armed military helicopters in Chinese territory, unannounced.’

Under normal circumstances, I would have said something like ‘fuckerdoodles’. But these weren’t normal circumstances. These circumstances sucked. So I stayed quiet. We all did. Except Ryu, whose calm had only been temporary.

‘Damn them!’ he shouted suddenly, throwing his mug at the sink. Coffee went everywhere as it broke, spectacularly and loudly. He got up and strode to the sink, leaning over it, his breathing heavy with suppressed emotion. I listened for any movement from upstairs, but Ryu’s temper tantrum didn’t seem to have awakened the barghest.

‘What’s going on, Ryu?’ I asked, trying to make my voice soothing. But I stayed where I was in case he wanted to throw anything else.

‘Damn the Red and the White. This is exactly what they wanted. The fucking humans will start killing us, and there will be nothing we can do.’

I blinked, surprised at the outburst. I’d always known Ryu held a modicum of contempt for humans – they were his dinner, after all. But I’d never heard him express anything so bitter. Then again, under the circumstances … and Ryu hadn’t even been that close to Gog and Magog. He’d barely known them. He hadn’t known how in love they were…

I choked down a wave of grief, and concentrated on Ryu.

It was the idea of what had happened that rankled him.

So instead of asking what he meant by ‘the fucking humans’, I tried to put myself in his shoes. Out loud.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You’re mad at the Red and the White for exposing us, correct?’

Ryu straightened up, giving me his patented ‘No shit, Sherlock’ look.

‘And you think that this attack by the Chinese is only the beginning?’

Tracy and Grizzie had begun looking distinctly uncomfortable the minute Ryu started throwing things and blaming humans, and I didn’t blame them. After all, Ryu could annihilate any trace of them with a snap of his magic-riddled fingers.

And that was the problem.

‘They fear us, Jane,’ was Ryu’s response, as if echoing my own thoughts. ‘And they have every right.’

‘The baobhan sith is right,’ Hiral said, his long nose twitching. ‘The humans’ll be after us if we’re not careful.’

‘But you guys
are
humans. Or were. Whichever.’ We’d learned the truth about the supernatural origins from the creature right before I’d become the champion. I’d been fighting Phaedra in the creature’s underground lair, and it had beamed out the truth into our minds, and most of the minds in the surrounding area. The supernaturals were really a type of mutated human, who – unlike ‘normal’ humans – could do things with the elemental power that was all around them.

‘Do you really think that matters?’ Hiral asked, his beady eyes staring into mine.

I wished I could respond that it wouldn’t matter. That humans would be better than they were, and see that we were really all the same, but I couldn’t. I knew my people – on both sides – too well. And the humans were no better than the supernaturals, and vice versa.

The truth was that supernaturals were scary. They were the things that went bump in the night, and could easily bump you off in the night. They were terrifying – some even looked terrifying, and even the ones that looked totally human, like Ryu, had powers that any individual human could only dream of, probably in a nightmare.

That wasn’t the whole story, however. Yes, one-on-one humans were no match for their supernatural counterparts. But humans and supernaturals wouldn’t have to be one-on-one if it ever came down to a real race war. Humans outnumbered the supes at least thousands to one, maybe even more than that. And they had big guns, and missiles, and tanks. Yeah, a powerful Alfar could probably last awhile, maybe days, against a thousand humans, all armed to the teeth. But what if they caught someone like Trill, my sweet kelpie friend, on land? She’d be a goner, unless she was in the water, where she was strong. Iris wouldn’t last seconds against ten humans, let alone thousands. Even someone really strong, like Ryu, wouldn’t survive an all-out, sustained attack.

In a race war, the supes would lose. But they’d do a lot of damage before they died.

Then the other shoe dropped.

‘And she has nothing to lose. A war is what she wants.’ My voice was a low breath that barely carried. But everyone heard it. ‘Does she know yet?’ Everyone knew what I meant.

‘We think she does,’ Caleb said from where he sat on the couch. With some clomps and shuffling of fabric, he and Iris extricated themselves and came toward the table. They both took seats at the free end of the trestle benches.

‘Before they were shot down,’ the satyr continued, ‘Daniel was reporting. The Red was furious they’d disappeared, and was trying to find some way to get them to show themselves; figure out where they’d got to. But then he reported she just stopped. Went dead in the air, even started to collapse toward the earth. Then she screamed. We could hear it, even over the sound of the chopper. It sounded … heartbroken.’

‘So she knows,’ I clarified. The Red must have felt the White’s death.

The others all silently nodded in agreement.

‘And now she’s got nothing to lose. She’s lost her White, and she’s not going to stop at anything to get revenge,’ Hiral said.

‘More than that,’ Tracy said, before casting an apprehensive glance at Ryu as if she were worried he’d throw his mug at the human for talking. When he didn’t budge, she continued. ‘Even more than that, she knows you’ve got the power to destroy them. So she’s lost her partner, yes, but she’s also lost her immortality.’

‘Oh, snap,’ Grizzie said lightly and inappropriately. We all stared at her for a second, and she shrugged an apology before pointing at her wife’s bulging stomach. ‘Sympathy hormones.’

‘If I were the Red,’ I said, thinking about how I’d felt when I’d lost Anyan, ‘I’d want the biggest, baddest revenge possible, as soon as possible. And what better way to do that than to have us kill each other?’

‘She’s going to show herself again, and soon.’ Ryu’s voice was grim, and he avoided looking at Tracy and Grizzie.

Sitting in the grim atmosphere of the kitchen, I was glad Anyan was still upstairs sleeping. He deserved a tiny amount of time away from all of this worry before it slapped him right upside the head.

And we had some friends to grieve.

Having hashed out our situation with the Red as much as we could at that point, we spent the next hour reminiscing about Gog, Magog, and Daniel. I told the others about our time in Britain, and we talked about how they’d helped us here in Rockabill. The sad thing was none of us really knew much about them, except Hiral, but he had some funny stories to tell about them.

It was only after a good hour that I’d realized we were missing someone. I’d been so wrapped up in our mutual doom and gloom, I hadn’t noticed we were short one person.

‘Hey, where’s my dad?’

‘Out in the workshop,’ Iris answered. He’d made Anyan’s workshop into his personal Man Cave, to get away from all the bustle in the house.

‘Does he know?’ I asked.

The succubus shook her fair head. To be honest, I was glad he hadn’t heard all of what we’d just said. He was rolling with everything really well, but there was no point in scaring the crap out of him.

‘I’m going to take him some coffee,’ I said. ‘Clear my head.’ Then I remembered my dad’s coffee addiction. ‘Wait, can he have some?’ I asked my human friends.

Grizzie laughed and Tracy smiled. ‘Yes, he can have some,’ the latter said. ‘But only one cup a day, that’s his maximum. Or he turns into a crackhead.’

I sighed, filling my dad his one mug of coffee and adding a splash of milk, the way he liked it. I took it out to the barn, smiling at the sight of him napping in his old recliner. They must have smuggled it out of our house somehow, and bought him a smart new flat screen. Good thing, too, because if he didn’t see his soaps, he got quite cranky.

I crept in, not wanting to wake him, and set his mug down on the work stool he’d pulled up next to his recliner. Then I reached for the remote that was sitting on his knee, swiveling around to turn the television off.

My finger froze on the button. Those weren’t soaps.

My dad had fallen asleep watching the news. Greeting me that morning was live coverage of London, under attack by a monster out of a horror film: a great red dragon.

Swiftly, I ran back to the house to get the others.

It had begun.

‘Guys!’ I called, flinging open Anyan’s front door. ‘Guys!’

The panic in my voice was obvious, and everyone reacted accordingly.

‘What’s up?’ Ryu asked as I ran past him to turn on Anyan’s big flat-screen television.

I didn’t reply, instead hitting a few buttons to turn on one of our local networks. As I’d assumed, all of the world was watching the Red’s attack on London, including Maine’s news networks.

‘…there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind these attacks,’ droned an anchorwoman’s voice, commenting on what appeared to be footage from someone’s cell phone. ‘As stated earlier, they began around dawn, with the creature attacking Westminster, and then St Paul’s Cathedral.’ The fuzzy footage cut to a few pictures of Big Ben, lying across the split roof of the British Parliament building.

Ryu sat down next to me, and then Iris and Caleb joined us on Anyan’s massive sofa. Hiral was standing, clearly shocked, in front of the television. The Great Island was his home, after all.

‘Since this morning, the creature has been sighted all over London, attacking sites indiscriminately. Emergency crews are active throughout the city, and the military has been called in. The death toll has been reported at anywhere between twenty-eight and a few hundred, with reports of injuries coming in from all over…’

The anchor kept talking as more photos were shown: wounded people being attended to by paramedics; buildings flattened or burning; other bystanders, unhurt, reacting to the sight of the Red.

Sounds came from behind me; a soft, choked grunt. I turned to find Anyan, wearing sweatpants and his favorite Eukanuba T-shirt, watching the television. Hate and fear burned in his eyes, and I remembered that he’d been a prisoner for all that time, not a guest.

He also looked too thin and too weak, so I stood up and gestured for him to take my place. Then I forced on him a coffee after I’d popped a bagel in the toaster for his breakfast. He needed to regain his strength, and fast.

For this war was far from over.

The others kept watching the reports of carnage as I waited for the bagel to pop up, then smeared it liberally with full-fat cream cheese and took it to the barghest.

‘Eat it, don’t argue,’ I said, right before I picked up the remote and turned off the television.

‘We’ve gotta move out,’ I said. ‘Ryu, resources?’

Without blinking an eyelash, Ryu told us we had access to his private jet. He’d already called to have it flown into Eastport, our neighboring town, from where it lived at the compound outside Montreal.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Daoud can stay with the girls and my dad. Iris? Caleb?’

‘We’re with you,’ the succubus said automatically. The satyr nodded his agreement.

‘Ryu?’

‘With you, of course.’

‘Hiral?’

The look the gwyllion flashed me was of pure rage. Obviously he was going with. That was his island the Red was attacking.

I then almost looked around for Gog and Magog, to ask them if they wanted to come, before I remembered. They’d never go on any more missions again. I choked down a wave of grief, adding my dead friends to the list of things I’d have to mourn later, when all of this was over.

I turned to the barghest, who was wolfing down his bagel after his first few tentative nibbles. He finished it off in about three bites as I contemplated him.

‘Anyan…’ I began, planning on telling him he might want to stay home, considering what he’d just been through.

‘I’m going with you if I have to follow on foot,’ was all the barghest had to say after choking down his mouthful of food.

‘Are you sure?’