NOVEL NEXT Interlude: Ezekiel
Bishop took the first corner on muscle memory and let the noises fall behind him. Shouting, the hiss of the ward lamps, someone wailing and crying - presumably over the loss of a loved one. He didn't waste a look back. You didn't get second looks in a night like this. He'd lost Emily in the crush an hour ago.
One flare of balefire, a human tide, and his hand closed on empty air.
That was the fact.
He let out a hitched breath.
Live with the fact and fix what you can.
He picked up the trail the way he always did: start where she would have gone, not where he wanted her to be. Shelter Three was the closest, and he'd missed the opportunity to peer inside. But what little he saw told a story.
He may have never trusted those rainbow-haired bastards himself, but Bishop had always taught his daughter to ride their wake—use the systems they spun up, never stank in the splash. "Crowds go forward," he'd told her. "You go sideways."
He ran the numbers without meaning to. Distance, crowd speed, Emily's stride. Shelter Three was half a kilometer and change from the mall. In a crush, with blockages, with Beowulves already in the mix as the Duke passed over?
No. Not unless a Magical Girl had swept her up on a slide of hard light and dumped her at a checkpoint.
He wanted that to be the story. He couldn't plan on it. The Skirt had taken far too much time to use her magic and there was no guarantee Emi was swept up in it.
Ride their wake, he'd told her. Don't trust it to carry you.
Bishop cut left, away from the Shelter Three stream. The ward-lamps buzzed. He had to be sure. Even if he perished tonight, he had to be certain.
The alley reeked of garbage, sweat, and fear. A pair of men in torn suits were huddled against a dumpster, their clothes rumpled and bloodstained. It was a small mercy they'd passed fon rom blood loss and not chaos corruption.
He didn't linger, but kept walking.
Closest real bolt-hole wasn't Shelter Three.
No. It was the Metro Annex under the Downtown Library - backup generator, two street exits, and a loading bay that stayed open when city crews forgot to chain it. After that, the Saint Esther cathedral complex.
Failing both... the underground car park at the civic center. Three options, all within a seven-year-old's range if she stayed off the main artery. He'd taken her to church charities and community events as soon as she could talk. Figured if he was going to start over across the portal he might as well point her toward the saints. Instill some discipline and good habits while she was young.
And now those little habits were his only chance to find her.
Bishop kept his head low and his pace steady, letting the night swallow him up.
Emily was the reason why he didn't go straight for the Shelter Three door. Why he didn't fight his way in and scream for a search team. Because the system wasn't perfect. It could fail.
It already had. The government could fail them, the Magical Girls could fail them. It didn't matter if the Terrans were good at what they did, or that their heart was in the right place. Because a good heart and a strong hand didn't keep people alive.
It was preparation and a backup plan that did that. And Bishop had never trusted the system, so he had prepared. He had a plan. Caches around the city, safe-houses.
And a cell.
And most importantly, a last resort. A failsafe. Something he hadn't had to use since the war.
But Emi, Emi was different from him. She was a good kid. Smart, kind, and always trying her best. But she was soft. Not in a bad way, not really. Just in a way that wasn't meant for a world like this.
If he hadn't been here to guide her, she might've been lost. But he had done his best, and taught her how to make the best of things, how to keep her head down, how to ride the system and keep herself safe.
He adjusted the chess board.
Seven-year-old decisions weren't
"Annex has two egress points."
They were simpler:
Light over dark.
Crowd with adults over empty street.
Water. Bathrooms. Somewhere you can see a door from where you stand.
Follow someone who looks like a teacher. Avoid sirens and the big stompy robots.
Not drills. Names. Places. Stories. Emily remembered stories.
If she was scared, she went where faces were kind and candles were lit. That narrowed things.
He ditched the tram corridor and cut back through an open plaza where the fountains were dead and the snack carts stood abandoned. If she got knocked loose from him here, she'd look for a face with a vest or a whistle, not a soldier with a rifle. Vests meant instructions. Whistles meant lines. Lines meant safe.
A scuffling noise.
"Sideways, then to bright," he muttered, activating the black market magitech device on his belt.
He slid behind a snack kiosk, blending in with the tarp while a pair of shamblers rounded the corner, dragged their feet across the paving. He let them go. Don't shoot what you can quietly walk past.
Bright over dark. Vests over rifles. Bathrooms.
He angled for the food court concourse. Even in a panic, people leave trails. Wrappers, shoe-scuffs, the dumb little stuff. He put his eyes where his Emi's hands would be: railings, counter edges, the lip of a water fountain.
There.
Lower handprint on the chrome railing. Sticky sheen of sanitizer and glitter ground into it. Emily had come home from parish craft night sparkling like a disco ball for a week. That brand of glitter got everywhere. He was cross with her, but she loved it enough to try and sneak the bottle back.
The floor told the rest - chaotic, yes, but patterned. A dozen, two dozen sets of prints shoved the same way: adults heavy on their heels, kids short-striding to keep up. In the mess, a smaller tread with hearts in the rubber cut through a puddle of spilled smoothie and kept going.
He matched the spacing with his eye.
"Thank the Lord..." Bishop whispered, forming a cross with his fingers.
That narrowed things a bit.
Bishop followed the heart-tread along the concourse until it vanished into the usual churn. Fine.
He paused.
Switch lenses.
Emily was seven.
Children like her didn't read maps; seven followed signs and smells and the loud person who sounded like a teacher.
He slowed, head up, letting the space speak for itself. The commercial strip ended here, glass and chrome giving way to civic tile.
The concourse opened to a small flight of stairs leading up to a skybridge that passed over an underpass and highway crossing over to the civic district. A cheery poster was slapped across the glass: COMMUNITY AID STATION — LOWER LEVEL. Someone had doodled a smiley face under it.
He almost didn't see the next thing, because it wasn't on the ground. It was on the wall, knee height half a saint's card stuck crooked to a Aztlantian savory crepe cart.
The Terran Saint Antonia in cheap print, torn across the halo. Parish basket special. Emily had a habit of "saving" the pretty ones and sticking them where she thought they'd be safe and bring her luck and protection. He thumbed the paper, also sparkling with glitter.
Still tacky.
"Alright, Emi," he breathed. "Alright then... Sideways, then bright indeed."
He took the first step onto to the skybridge's stairs and stopped.
Too much glass. Too many sightlines.
He took his foot back off the first stair.
The skybridge made you a fish in a bright box and every hungry thing in this damned city could see you.
Bishop slid along the wall and looked down through the glass anyway. The road below was a mess - cars knotted nose-to-tail, one bus jackknifed across three lanes, the kind of wreck you get when the world ends mid-commute. A large Beowulf paced the roofs, bright blue eyes scanning the horizon as it paced abouts.
The bridge was a death sentence.
So, the underpass it was.
He slid along the wall and descended the stairs into the darkness. The smell hit him first. Gasoline and burned rubber, the reek of exhaust fumes. The only light came from the glow of a few flickering vending machines, and the orange-tinged haze drifting across the ceiling.
He checked the mana dampener humming on his belt. One of numerous 'toys' his benefactors had provided him. One perk of being a regular old bloke from Earth was that his low mana output didn't light him up on half the things that hunted by signature. The dampener shaved the rest. Kept him boring.
Boring stayed alive.
The dampener thrummed steady on his belt. The casing still carried the ghost of a crest he'd sanded off. He'd told the courier not to send engraved kit; the courier had laughed like old money does when it's never had to listen. "Patron insists, Mr. Novak." Patron never signed with a name. Just orchids lilies of the valley stamped in wax and an account that cleared too fast.
Bloody Terran nobles. Bloody Terran everything.
But they were a necessary evil, and they'd kept Emi fed and clothed as of late.
Bishop stepped into the dark.
The concrete passage was claustrophobic. The ceiling low, the walls close.
He knew the layout of this area all too well.
The pedestrian access was the next corridor over. It led straight to the civic center, then a turn toward the local Catholic school and its attached shelter. He knew it, because he had picked it for next year, and he had run the numbers.
The dampener buzzed against his hip.
He froze.
It buzzed again, a sharp, rising whine.
The hairs on his neck stood up.
A low, wet growl echoed down the tunnel.
He climbed the jersey barrier, dropped into the shadow of the bus, and tucked along the seam where chassis met rail. The air tasted like pennies, and the ward-lattice above the highway flared and dulled like a tired halo.
Perhaps the worst of it was how familiar the shape of the fear felt. Same taste as twenty years ago.
Same little voice in the marrow: Not bad luck, Ezekiel. Reckoning.
He drew the sign of the cross with two fingers and kept moving.
The growl rolled again as he crept quietly along the road and found an opening where the guardrail had sheared.
The pedestrian access sat one corridor over, just like he remembered from volunteer runs. Library Annex to the cathedral. Auxiliary building to school playground. Cut across the road to Sister Brigid's soup kitchen.
It was getting dark. Many of these damned creatures had a form of night vision - but built on mana signatures. These dampeners wouldn't work for Terrans, but on someone like him, he might as well be another car unless they got a good look at him.
He slid through the break, kept low along the jersey barrier, and stayed low to fish a pair of night vision goggles out of his tactical pack. The buildings here had lost power at least half an hour ago.
Bishop slipped the goggles on, thumbed the gain low, and the world went green and grainy. Every ward-lamp in the distance blew out into a sick halo; he rolled it back until the bloom died and shadows turned into shapes again.
Keep boring. Keep small.
He slowly made his way behind the cathedral, staying low and slid into the pedestrian spur. He kept the dampener humming and his hand off the pistol. Steel was only a last resort.
A thin, needling whine under the steady thrum - the sound it made near warps and high entropy, not beasts. He swallowed down the old reflex to curse and settled for, "Lord, have mercy," under his breath, feeling his throat catch.
The corridor pinched at a maintenance gate. Someone had propped it with a rubber wedge. The kind Sister Leah used on bake-sale Sundays. He eased through and came up in the utility court behind the parish. Dark windows.
It was quiet.
The wrong kind of quiet.
No crowd noise, no soldiers barking orders. Just the far thud of something big landing three streets over and the mosquito whine of the wards trying to remember how to be a wall.
He tasted copper. He let the guilt rise and pass.
If this was judgment, it hadn't come out of a clean sky.
You don't rip the guts out of magitech depots and a banker's vault with the Lord's name on your lips and expect the wards around the city to hold forever. He could still feel the weight of one of those cores in his hands. Warm as fresh-baked bread, singing faint through his gloves. Valuable. For an unknown client. Valuable too, for maintaining the generators that kept them safe.
"Lead us not into temptation," he said, because there wasn't a line for what he'd done after.
He stood.
Follow the old route. If St. Esther's bunker filled, Leah would push them through the school cloister to the school gym. If the gym filled, they'd stage in the kitchen. And then God willing lead overflow down to the storm room.
He crouched and brushed a knuckle across the square of clean concrete where a table had stood not an hour ago. In the dust, half a dozen small shoe turns, all in place, like little bodies taught to "wait your turn."
They'd moved. Fast, and without time to clean up.
He worked the perimeter, moving as quickly as he could with his tradecraft. Service exit warm, generator hum steady behind it. Good.
A broom was hastily wedged through the crash bar and snapped when someone forced it. Bristles scattered like straw.
He drew his sawed-off and eased the door an inch, listening. Nothing but the ward announcing his presence and his own breath.
Kitchen first — clear. The steam had dried to a skin on the soup. A ladle lay on the floor with a heel print next to it pointed toward the hall. He followed.
Past the pantry: rows of tins, two open and abandoned on a dolly. A sticky line of applesauce led from the counter to a stack of paper cups overturned near the exit. He stepped over them and kept his weight on the edges of his boots.
No talking, no crying. That was wrong. Leah's flocks never moved silent unless someone told them to. He could only pray they'd reached sanctuary.
The parish corridor ran to the cloister. His goggles washed it green. Halfway down, a cheap shelf had been dragged and toppled into the hall. Wax puddled on tile in tear-shapes; wicks crushed flat.
On the wall above, chalk strokes in Sister Leah's hand: a quick cross and → GYM. Under it, faint, another arrow scratched over: → STORM.
Decision made, then revised.
He paused at the gym doors. Someone had pinned a stole there like a ribbon, purple caught in the hinge.
The doors themselves were salted. Literal lines of canned stuff kicked wide where feet had gone through. A handful of nails lay in a dish beside it, blackened and charred. Terran Faith-work. Small, but it had teeth.
Inside the gym the air still held heat and breath. Lines of folding chairs stood zig-zag, the front rows knocked aside. On the stage, a whiteboard announced SNACKS - BATHROOM - BE BRAVE in looping handwriting. A whistle hung from the marker tray, cord snapped. He took one step up, then stilled.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
In the center of the floor, a circle of ash no wider than a serving tray. Glass cracked around it, a little thurible on its side, chain pulled clean from the ring. A carnelion, chrysolite, and emerald spent of their mana lay cracked at the center of the bowl.
The ash was blown to one edge burst out, not in. The shattered remnants of seven chaos cores lay scattered outside it, all of them dark and spent. The blackened outlines of a dozen adult human blast shadows stretched across the floor and up the stage. The shambling dead, no doubt.
He swallowed, a lump forming in his throat.
"Leah... Brigid..."
Whatever had knocked on the door, they'd knocked back.
Good girls. Good sisters.
Dammit.
He tasted bile again and let it pass.
He crossed to the far door. On the push plate, four parallel gouges - not deep. The kind a chaos beast left when it tested metal. A speck of blue along the brass where the corruption brushed and couldn't hold. The door had held. The hinges hadn't.
Past the door, the corridor bent toward the storm shelter.
Here the trail wasn't glitter and handprints; it was logistics. A blanket bin dragged and left, threads stuck to the tile. Tape Xs on the floor from last month's fire drill scuffed through by small shoes.
On the bulletin board a paper list: HEADCOUNT. 27 crossed out to 25.
A line across. MOVED.
Underneath, in a second hand, shaky: SOUTH EXIT. No names. No time.
He followed the turn and kept walking. The wards flared. The dampener buzzed.
He slowed down.
The hall narrowed, ceiling lower, sound flatter. His dampener ticked once - just a nervous cough of a noise - and settled. He kept his barrel low and his off hand open, palm feeling the air for possible disturbances.
Storm shelter doors ahead. Steel painted the same schoolhouse beige as always. He slowly and quietly made his way over.
He leaned and listened. No breath. No whisper. Only the wards somewhere above thrumming like a migraine.
He eased one door just enough to test the latch.
It was unlocked.
Not good. Ominous, even.
He put his shoulder to the seam and edged the door wider. He let the wide room room speak to him.
Cool air. Cots in rows - enough for one or two hundred. Water jugs stacked two high. One stack leaned where someone had snatched two from the bottom and didn't put the rest back.
Blankets torn from plastic and half-folded again, guilty and fast. A clipboard on a hook, pen still tied to it with twine, swinging once in the draft and then still.
No breath. No whisper.
He crossed to the far wall, keeping the corners in his goggles. The armored closet for supplies stood open; the hasp hung by one screw. Salt bucket on its side, a pale eastern-style fan across the floor.
A little dish of nails beside it, black tips, some fused in a clump like they'd been too close to heat.
On the doorframe in children's height chalk: QUIET FEET and a cross. Below it, smaller, shaky: NO TALK. He put a knuckle to the letters and felt the chalk grit.
They'd been here not too long ago. They hadn't stayed.
A crash bar on the east exit was padded with torn towel and wired shut, then cut. The wire ends were neat—twist, twist, snip. Human hands with time for one clean job. He brushed the towel with the back of his fingers. Several were still damp where palms had pressed.
But why was the main entrance unlocked?
He flowed back to the blast doors and checked the hinge line, trying to see what he'd missed. He hunkered down and quietly fished a Terran forensic torch from his pack. A form of a UV light that would also reveal traces of magic use. He stepped out of the room and quickly swept it over the door.
There.
Thin smears on the paint where a hand had pressed, not frantic like the others.
Oily, with a thin sheen under the dust - not grease. Not kitchen oil either. He touched it with a gloved fingertip and held it to the torch. The smear brightened faintly, like watered milk.
Solvent binder. Spell-suppressant grade. A user would dab it where a ward hums, and a civilian-grade ward wouldn't sting or sing.
Not parish standard. But he was quite familiar with it.
He'd used it when he was with the Seraphs, after all. Back in another life. As a much younger man.
He worked the frame inch by inch. At the strike plate, a hairline nick scored the paint in a crescent.
He pocketed the torch, slid a card under the latch tongue, and felt the tiny catch where the crescent had kissed metal.
A whisper-cut to lift the spring. Quiet hands. Calm hands.
Sister Agnes?
Bishop let his image of the gym replay in his head: ash blown outward, shadows turned toward the sisters.
He had pictured them as zombies in his head because it was easier. But the angles were wrong for a blind rush. It was almost as if the figures had been moving to surround the sisters...
And the nuns had reacted accordingly.
He stood a moment longer at the door, eyes scanning the room. The room's protective magic had been disarmed and there was no sign of a struggle in the shelter proper. No bloodstains, no spent mana or core shrapnel.
The sisters had put up enough of a fight to eliminate the threat in the gym, but not enough to leave the shelter itself. They'd fallen back to this room, only to retreat out the other entrance.
Why?
He took a step back into the hall and scanned for any signs of distress. But all that he found were footprints on the tile floor, leading back to the main entrance.
"The bloody hell is this...?"
He stepped back through the door and closed it quietly behind him, taking care to make sure it was sealed.
He then followed the trail of footsteps down the hall, keeping his pace quick without breaking into a run.
The sisters were devout daughters of the cloth. Gentle to a fault.
The formation of the blast shadows at the gym indicated told a story. That they'd resorted to deadly force. An immediate threat that was all too human and couldn't be reasoned with.
The sisters used force in the gym to break a human push. Then they fell back through the corridor, gathered the children, and moved them into the shelter from the hall.
No, that wasn't the full story.
He paused at the corner, listening. The whine of the wards above him rose and fell, like someone tapping a nail against glass.
Bishop stopped. He stared at the floor.
They'd taken the kids away from the shelter. Why?
The only logical explanation was that they either trusted whoever had led them away from the shelter with hostiles in the area, or had outright surrendered when the front door was breached.
He stood there and let the picture build.
If the sisters cleared the hall, locked the shelter, and then led everyone back out, it wasn't panic. It was instruction under duress. Either they trusted the one giving orders, or a weapon made the choice for them.
The solvent on the latch, the quiet latch-lift, the lack of blood - this wasn't a herd stampede. Someone opened from the inside, made sure the alarms didn't sing, and moved a line of children fast.
Without a peep from a den of young sisters of the cloth who saw the children as theirs to protect.
They left. They'd left together.
Bishop followed their path past the main entrance and toward the school annex.
He slinked out the south exit.
The service corridor fed a short loading lane behind the parish. Wind had pushed light ash down the concrete but left clean lines where feet and rubber had disturbed it. He crouched and traced.
Two parallel drags at child height. Hands pulled along. Shoe scuffs in pairs, tight spacing, some toes leaving smears from a short stumble then a quick recovery.
He followed the trail back toward the school, staying low and using the shadows of the buildings.
Adults had walked the edges. The rhythm was forced but controlled. No scatter. No bolt. No bodies on the pavement.
At the mouth of the lane, fresh tire marks pressed deeper than the old maintenance van ruts.
Rear duals, commercial tread, light truck width. Wheelbase short. A box van or panel with a cage.
The track widened and narrowed - heavy when loading, lighter as it pulled away. He found a clipped bit of zip tie near the drain and the plastic cap from a standard ether ampoule. He held the cap under his goggles and saw a faint mana smear industrial, not sacramental.
He checked the lane corner: a scuff at knee height on the brick from a rushed reverse. Driver wasn't parish for certain.
"Ah. Bollocks."
They'd been taken by a truckload of mages.
Bishop turned and took in the street.
They took them in a single load.
Direction of travel was north. That cut away from the obvious checkpoints and toward the light-industrial strip and the river - a grid of shuttered warehouses and research annexes he knew too well from worse nights. They'd be able to escape into the night by boat without much trouble.
He felt the bite of karma and divine retribution, but kept his head up.
Bishop checked his watch and ran the math on travel time. Five, six minutes to load, a minute to turn, two to clear the block. He was within fifteen minutes of the grab. If they staged nearby, he might still catch a trail. If this was a through-run, he wouldn't.
Twenty-seven to twenty-five.
He looked back at the parish doors.
The headcount board had dropped from twenty-seven to twenty-five before "MOVED." Two missing before the van arrived? Or posted to another group?
The sisters didn't ride that van. The line in the gym said they chose to stand once already. Someone had to cover the retreat. The solvent on the shelter latch meant a hand went back after the move to clear evidence or re-open.
He looked towards the sky briefly.
"I suppose this is what I've sown, isn't it?" he sighed smiling wryly, holstering his sawed-off in favor of his trusty .44.
He didn't waste more breath on guilt. Northbound van meant the children were gone. The sisters would have stayed to buy time. He doubled back through the parish, past the gym, into the service wing.
Low sound ahead. Not voices. Chain sliding over a hook. He killed his torch and listened. One slip, wait, another slip. Timed release.
He checked the hallway with the corner of his eye, saw nothing, then moved.
He was halfway to the stairs when a faint scuffle echoed behind him.
Bishop spun and caught the blade just below the hilt, angled back and down.
A young man with a shaved head and black lines drawn over his eyes stared at him. Bishop held the blade back from heart. Years of instincts had saved him.
He recognized the lines. The patterns.
The boy snarled something in a foreign language and pushed. Malay? Javanese? It didn't matter.
Bishop leaned into the shove and stepped off with the attacker's momentum, using it to send the cultist stumbling forward.
The cultist lost his balance, staggered, and turned to face Bishop again. But Bishop was ready this time. He drew his knife in one smooth motion and flicked it towards the cultist.
The blade flew fast and true, burying itself in the cultist's throat. The cultist gurgled and fell to his knees, clutching at the knife as blood flowed down his chest.
Bishop crouched and pulled the blade from the cultist's neck. "That's for my daughter, you bastard."
The cultist was dead within seconds, still grasping at his throat with a desperate look in his eyes.
He quickly sheathed his knife and rushed toward the boiler room. As he entered, he could hear the faint whirr of machinery as it powered up. He reached into his pack and grabbed the mana disruptor. The device crackled with blue energy as he prepared for the worst.
He made his way down the hall slowly, stepping carefully.
The door at the end was open, spilling light on the floor. He checked his magnum one last time and entered, ready to fire from his hip.
Inside, he quickly swept the room and saw a large boiler filling the space, steam pipes and vents covering the walls and ceiling.
Inside, candles guttered in a rough circle. Two women in their late twenties hung in the air, wrists tied to iron rings, ropes threaded through a pulley and weighted with a bucket. Meltwater dripped from a block of ice set in a wire cradle. Cages lined the wall - with bloody red sigils drawn on the bars and chains wrapped tight. Faint growls and snarls came from within. Above the sisters was a poster made of some ungodly material depicting - no doubt depicting a horrifying sight that was thankfully blurred by the vapor of a candle's flame. A dark figure's silhouette stood in the center of the image, holding a glowing red orb that seemed to emit an aura of darkness.
Bishop narrowed his eyes. When the ice gave out, the rope would slacken, a side door would swing, and whatever was penned in the cages would be let loose. This was an elaborate setup. Meant to be found.
Leah's hair was sea-blue and matted with sweat. Brigid's was rose-pink, streaked dark. Both had eyes open but glassy. Leah's gold-brown, Brigid's violet. A paste of resin and blue lines marked their temples. The shackles on their ankles were chalked to dampen prayer, and they looked sick and pale from chaos corruption.
"M....Mister Novak?" Leah croaked. "The children... Emily came."
"I know." he stated flatly, professionally as he rushed down, drawing his bloody knife and slicing the ropes around them.
Leah winced as she was lowered to the ground and rubbed her wrists. "There was... someone at the door," she said. "They were crying, they said they needed help."
Brigid coughed and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor.
He cut the rope above the ice with his field knife, caught the bucket, and lowered it until the mechanism stopped ticking. In another smooth motion, he sliced the wet cords at their wrists and dragged them behind the boiler. Then, he broke the sigils on their skin with a thumb nail and a pinch of salt. The paste hissed. Both women flinched and sucked air.
The dampener on his belt whined a notch higher.
Suddenly, he felt movement behind the coal grate. Slow scrape of claw on masonry.
Followed by a bang on the vents above.
He tossed crouched and drew his shotgun, checking the carapace-piercing rounds. "Stay down."
The grate buckled and fell.
As he'd anticipated, the beast came through low and fast, head first. Blue glare on its lamprey-like chitonous teeth, and barbed tongue, barnacled clay hide stinking of warp. He shot into its mouth.
The first slug took teeth and tongue. It reared; the second round shattered a shoulder. He stepped right, kept the boiler between it and the sisters, and fired twice more into its chest. It staggered into the candle ring, snapped once, and lunged.
He rolled, landing in a crouch while palming a disruption charge with his off-hand. The beast came out of the spill of blue ichor and waxy light. He threw.
The charge landed square on the beast's forehead. It shrieked as its head exploded in a bright flash of energy.
He reloaded, breathing through his mouth. Leah tried to push herself up and failed. "The children, Mister Novak…"
"Taken. Van northbound. I'll track it." He checked Brigid's pulse. Thin and quick. He glared up at the effigy - then he forced himself to slow down and read the scene, not react to it.
The poster's lacquer had a wet shine. New brush strokes cut through old. Stencils for speed, handwork for intent. The cages weren't scrap; someone bought them in bulk.
He'd on some level, already prepared himself for their calling card. It was too bold and obvious to be a diversion, so it had to be a taunt. They wanted him to know.
Yet still, his breath hitched as his eyes landed on a bird, wings spread and broken, hanging from a wire threaded through its neck. A Nightingale.
He glanced at the boiler, the bucket, the ropes.
This was a trap, not a setup. A sacrifice.
Leah saw him do it. Her mouth trembled. "Emily… helped line them up," she said. "She was so brave. Said I should stay with the last pair. She—"
He raised a hand. Not to hush her, but to mark the sound that just entered the room: a light metal rattle from ducting. Not scraping. Testing.
Bishop holstered the knife and checked corners again. Above the boiler: pulleys, counterweights, a second line run through a pivot. If the ice failed and the first gate kicked, a second would lag by three breaths and give a faster animal the clean shot. Someone had set this up before tonight. The cages were a diversion.
"Two on vents, one on the door," he said. "If they break through at once I'll cut the door first. If I go down, pull the blue lever and roll."
Leah blinked. "The lever opens—"
"—a blowoff. Steam buys seconds. Use them."
The vent grille bowed. He didn't fire. He tracked the hinge line, watched for the first claw, waited until the weight committed as he quickly activated another charge on his belt.
The beast punched through with a shoulder. He put the first slug into the mouth, as he always did, and the second through bone when it reared. It thrashed and knocked candles wide. He stepped left to keep steel between it and the sisters. Third round to center mass. Fourth to pelvis to break the lunge. It still came.
He dropped, rolled under the claw swing, and felt the hot air as the claws missed his neck by inches. He came up on a knee and slapped the primed disruption puck between its eyes. The head went in a bright pop, wet and simple. He tasted ozone and didn't think about it.
The door beast hit the threshold a beat later than he expected. He swung, fired, missed the socket and took jaw instead. It spun, skittered, recovered too fast. He gave up the doorway and forced it to chase him into the tangle of pipes. Bad line for it, good for him. Buckshot at arm's length made arguments short. He cleared the receiver, checked his belt: three slug left, his trump card - the zero-core implosive bomb utilized at the op two weeks ago, and two frags.
The third shape hadn't committed. It paced in the ducts. Scenting. Smarter or hungrier, didn't matter. He went still and counted breaths. On five, it came through the weak seam by the ceiling valve. He didn't shoot. He stepped into it, buried the barrel under the sternum, and fired once upward. The body fell across the coil and twitched.
Silence tried to land and failed. The dampener climbed again. Too many signatures. More than the vents could hold.
He thumbed fresh rounds, did the numbers, and saw the wall. He could not get the sisters up and out while holding a corridor against a half-dozen crawlers. He could not carry one and fire for effect.
But he could stop a turn and deny a harvest.
He holstered the emptied shotgun and palmed the core grenade, sighing.
Leah saw the motion. She looked up from Brigid. "W-What are you doing?"
"Device on my belt says there's too many. No way out but this, Leah. I'm sorry."
She swallowed hard, her eyes full of fear. Brigid climbed to her knees, shaking and muttering as she knelt and prayed.
"You began this good work in me - finish it now. Let the enemy see only Your Cross, and let my last act be love."
Bishop tightened his grip on the zero-core grenade. Weight, pin, spoon. The math was simple. Hold three. Count two. Let go.
"God," he said, and it wasn't pretty. "I don't have the words. You do. You know what I am and what I've done. You know what they took. If I've got anything clean left, spend it now."
The ducts answered with a clatter and a wet drag. The door flexed on its hinges. The dampener on his belt screamed high and thin, then warbled.
Brigid touched the floor with two fingers and made the sign of the cross slow, like each line cost her. "Remember Your servants," she whispered, "Leah and Brigid. Remember the little ones. Remember Emily. Remember Mister Novak. See us to thy arms."
Leah's breath hitched.
Bishop pulled the pin.
"Our Father," Leah gasped, "who art—"
"—in heaven," he followed, breath shaking. He could taste brass. "Hallowed be Thy name."
The vent to his right bulged. A gray tongue wormed through and tasted air.
"Thy kingdom come," Brigid said, louder now, as if volume could build a wall.
"Thy will be done," Bishop said.
He meant it and hated that he meant it, and that was honest enough. He let the spoon go and threw it high in the air.
The core woke. Light jumped hard and wrong, heat pressing into his face. Shrapnel began to lift from the casing, edges turning mean as the singularity formed.
"On earth as it is in heaven," Brigid forced, voice breaking.
The door blew inward. Three crawlers at once - one high, one low, one sliding on its belly to scythe his ankles.
At the same time, two more poured from each of the vents for a total of seven.
He didn't shoot. He had made a choice. He planted his feet.
"Give us this day—" Leah tried, then choked on smoke.
"—our daily bread," Leah rasped, raw, stubborn.
"Forgive us our trespasses," Brigid pushed through blood and smoke, "as we forgive those who trespass against us—"
The core hit peak and wailed. Heat went sharp. Metal flexed.
Bishop put his body between the sisters and the blast and took a last breath for the road.
No doubt — in his mind, to the place below.
He kept going. Words steady. Ever calm and professional as he shoved the sisters beneath the pipes. It wasn't much, but they deserved better than this. Better than him.
He closed his eyes long enough to picture Emily as she was at five, hair bowed over her Sunday school drawings, glitter on her fingers.
"And... and lead us not into—"
The world stopped.
Not quiet. Not slow. Stopped.
The orange flare froze with its teeth bared. The shrapnel hung in a grit halo.
The shockwave pressed against his face and stayed there like a held breath. The crawlers seized mid-lunge—one with its tongue out and eyes rolled, one with a claw inches from his knee, one flattening itself to scissor his legs. The ward lamps outside the boiler room steadied and did not flicker.
Then, his dampener gave up and died with a soft click.
Bishop didn't move. His fingers still curled for the follow-through that never came. His brain finished the prayer by reflex. "—temptation?" he whispered to nobody, then blinked because his lips made air and the air did nothing back.
Leah made a wet choking sound. Brigid stared at the spoon floating mid-drop and did not blink.
Something knocked once on the floor, hollow and polite.
The blast turned inside out.
It didn't explode. It folded. The hot light crushed in on itself like someone had cupped both hands around a hornet and refused to let it out. The shrapnel drew down and knit into a dull, harmless ball the size of a peach. The crawlers' torsos bowed toward the same point, ribs creaking as if fishhooks pulled them from the sternum.
Then motion came back in a controlled pour.
The peach-sized thing dropped with a plink into a circle of pale lines chalked on the tiles. A staff tip pinned it there, the wood drinking heat without so much as a scorch.
He stared up the staff.
Flowing golden blonde to the waist. A straight fringe. Almond eyes a warm spring green that looked over him, through him, then took inventory of the room in one sweep more methodical than a surgeon's.
Her coat was a battle-long robe cut for movement, hems singed and sleeve bound at the forearm with leather. A string of little glass charms hung off the staff and knocked again as they stilled, as if answering some question he did not hear.
Beside her was a woman with long silver hair and a matching blank mirror mask, dressed in a red cloak that flowed behind her. She had her arms raised, glowing with a purple aura that he could only assume was some sort of magic. She wore a sword at her belt and stood with confidence.
Bishop's eyes met the blonde woman's and held. Her expression was unreadable. She was a tall and willowy East Asian woman, and she moved with an elegance he hadn't seen in years.
Just as he remembered her.
The seven crawlers regained motion first. They tried to complete their pounces and tore themselves on... the air itself. It was like they'd fallen into a void where nothing could reach them and they could reach nothing. Their claws raked empty space, their mouths made sounds without noise. It looked like they drew further and further away from the room while still being present.
They struggled for several seconds before their bodies began to flicker and turn transparent.
Finally, they vanished with a faint pop. Like they'd vanished into a void.
He didn't move. He waited for a trick.
The blonde woman watched the peach-sized orb on the floor. The silver-haired woman watched him. He was reminded of cats who caught a bird but had no idea what to do with it.
His brain caught up slowly, trying to make sense of what he just saw.
"Told you he'd be here," said the silver-haired woman to the blonde.
"I have eyes, Miss Silver."
BIshop narrowed his eyes at the masked woman. Her tone reminded him all too much of the silver-spooned highborn Terran women.
The blonde woman looked at the hanging nightingale and her eyes darkened by a shade. She lifted her chin to the poster -judged it, refused it, and with a tiny twist of the staff drew a hairline crack down the lacquer. The bird motif split neatly at the throat. She did not give it more than that.
Bishop's grip loosened without his permission. The empty space where a trigger should be under his finger made his stomach pitch. He had been ready to end it. To close the book clean rather than get turned or used.
He cleared his throat. "I had it handled," he lied.
"You had an ending," she said, eyes back on him now. "Not the right one."
He swallowed. He felt a lump forming in his throat. His voice came out hoarse when he spoke again. "What do you want... Bathala?"
She tilted her head and regarded him, as if weighing how best to answer the question.
"You. Simply put, I have need of you - Major Ezekiel Novak."
The title hit the room like a thrown key.
Bishop's spine locked. His mouth went dry. Nobody had called him that in years. Not here. Not after he'd burned the pins and let the name drift.
He felt old fatigue rise up from his bones and sit in his shoulders like his tac pack.
"It's been a long time," he said with a wry smile, because there was nothing else to say and the truth cost less than another lie. "Since I've been Major anything."
She didn't blink.
"Come, we have much to discuss, Bishop. I have need of you and your ever-loyal hounds."
The blonde paused, smirking at him.
"...Or do you go by Philosopher these days?"