Lonesome Paladin Read online

  There was another billboard nearby. “Answer the call!” A disturbingly pretty man was beckoning toward the camera. He looked like his skin was glowing on the inside. He had wings like a butterfly. “Get screened for sidhe blood at United Health Services!”

  Lincoln spat on the sidewalk. It was tinted black. Must have been bleeding inside his mouth.

  Jesus, he needed to rest.

  He headed for a pay by the week motel with an art deco sign and a blinking light that said “VACANCY,” without the last two letters. Most of the rooms were dark. He’d break into one, sleep until he got caught.

  Voices piped up from behind him.

  “It’s him again. Is he following us?”

  “Don’t, Javi.”

  His night was getting luckier.

  Turning away from the ambulance meant Lincoln had gone the same way as Spencer and Javi. They’d been beelining for The Aces Stadium. Their golden eyes reflected the casino billboard lights.

  Lincoln ducked his head and picked up the pace, angling away from them.

  “Just keep walking,” Spencer said, trying to push his friend.

  Javi resisted. “But he took my cross!”

  “I’ll give you mine, all right? The safe house—”

  “Hey! Asshole!”

  That was all the warning Lincoln had. One shout, a couple fast-pounding footsteps, and then Javi struck.

  Brick wall met face.

  Stars exploded through Lincoln, hot and sick and tasting like the stale canned lima beans he’d eaten earlier. Black spit sprayed from his lips. This time he didn’t think the blood came from his mouth.

  They were going to kill him this time.

  Lincoln was going to die.

  Lying there on the pavement, looking at the shifters’ legs as they swung and kicked and knocked his teeth out of alignment, he thought he saw a third person watching over him. A woman wearing black leather and a disapproving frown. He remembered her flat tone perfectly too. Seriously, Linc? You’re just going to sit there?

  “Ask him where he put it,” Spencer said, glancing nervously around the street.

  “Where’d you put it?” Javi asked.

  Something jagged touched Lincoln’s lip. Broken molar. He spat it into the pool of blood. “Put what?”

  Wrong answer.

  Javi picked him up, and the change in orientation hurt all down his spine.

  Lincoln took a fist to the jaw. Felt like he should have been decapitated by the force of it. The fact his head stayed on his shoulders meant the shifters were being gentle. They could have turned his skull into a rotten watermelon with a blow.

  They wanted him to hurt, not die.

  Javi let go of Lincoln and he stumbled again, caught in Spencer’s tree trunk arms.

  The leather-clad woman wasn’t really there, but her annoyance felt so real. The only real thing in a surreal post-apocalyptic America. Lincoln could see every inch of her clearly, from breasts piled atop the steel boned corset to the black hair slithering over one shoulder.

  You’re better than this, Linc, she said.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “We don’t have time,” Spencer said. “Sorry, Javi.”

  Lincoln relaxed, thinking he was about to be freed.

  He didn’t even realize he’d been thrown into the street until his vision cleared and he saw the yellow double line under his head. The world hadn’t rotated forty-five degrees. He was bleeding on the pavement.

  “Hurry,” Javi said.

  Their retreating shapes were blurry and dark. Shadows in dusk. Not shifters, not men. Just the dark dreams that chased Lincoln everywhere he went.

  Seriously, Linc?

  He didn’t try to get up.

  Inhaling was like taking a knife to the collarbone. Lincoln suspected he had broken ribs. But his hand slid into his jacket, and he felt a cold aluminum chain wrapped around cheap wood, and he knew he’d kept the crucifix.

  It was some kind of victory. Maybe not a victory that made anything better, but a victory against blasphemy nonetheless.

  Lights swam over Lincoln.

  Sirens jangled in his ears.

  A tire stopped in front of him, and boots dropped out of a car. Black-gloved hands hauled him upright. Lincoln came face-to-face with someone whose eyes were a normal shade of brown, with thick brows at a disapproving slant. He wore a black suit with a silver pentacle pinned to the lapel. He was an OPA agent.

  The agent’s mouth moved. His voice rippled, distorted. “Are you aware it’s seventeen minutes past curfew?”

  Lincoln opened his mouth, vomited on the agent, and blacked out.

  CHAPTER 2

  “We’ve got a minor problem.”

  Cèsar Hawke looked up at his healer’s voice. Edie Ashe stood in the doorway, cradling a pre-Genesis Android tablet with a cracked case. Cèsar wasn’t meant to provide tech support, but he was ten years younger than Edie, and she seemed to think that qualified him. He’d only been visiting Reno for three days. She’d come to him for help a dozen times.

  “If the battery-lengthening charm is failing, remember I can’t repair it,” Cèsar said with a grin.

  Edie’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not the charm.”

  “Okay, let me see.” Cèsar held out a hand.

  She didn’t hand him the tablet. “The problem’s not this piece of crap. It’s someone we arrested tonight.” She turned the screen so that Cèsar could see a bruised, bloody face underneath the spider web of cracks. “Recognize him?”

  “I wouldn’t recognize myself in a picture if I got beat to shit like that. Who is he?”

  “Not a clue. I ran the name on his license through the local copy of the database, and the system blew up with red flags. I don’t have credentials high enough to see who he is. I should have highest credentials! I need to know who the OPA wants fixed if I’m doing triage!”

  “It’s okay, Edie. Relax. I’ll look it up for you. What’s his name?” Cèsar pulled his Vizio around and squeezed the corner of the case to make it click together again. The battery was swelling with heat. He was surprised it hadn’t blown yet.

  “Lincoln Marshall.”

  He hunt-and-pecked the name into the search bar. “Lincoln…”

  “There’s another L in there,” Edie said, peering over his shoulder.

  Cèsar corrected his error. “Lincoln Marshall. There. Let’s take a look at him.” He struck enter.

  The database normally ran slower than an opioid shit, but Mr. Marshall’s file came up fast because there was little to show. Lincoln Marshall was thirty-four years old. He was about six feet tall. Information beyond that was plastered in angry red messages, and Cèsar had never seen so many errors and flags.

  Somehow, Cèsar didn’t have the clearance to see this man’s file either.

  “Do I work on him?” Edie asked. “Or do I let him die?” Officially, they didn’t allow anyone to die, but enemies of the state were simply not prioritized. The fact that often ended in death was not the OPA’s problem.

  Cèsar wasn’t ready to declare someone like this an enemy of the state. He got almost as many errors when he searched for the Alpha werewolf’s family members, too.

  “Heal him.” Cèsar closed his laptop lid on the alerts. “Cuff him to the bed and toss up a couple wards if you got ‘em. Ping me when you’re done—I’ll question him.”

  He wrote Lincoln Marshall’s name and room number at the top of a clean page on his Steno pad, then Edie went back to work.

  By the time Cèsar got around to talking to him, Lincoln Marshall didn’t look much better than his picture. His medical chart showed that Edie only healed his most critical injuries: a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a spinal fracture, and internal bleeding. The fact she’d left so many bruises wasn’t a symptom of Edie’s misanthropy, but because she’d run out of time. It was a new moon, after all. They’d be lucky if he was the first of a dozen new detainees they received before dawn.

  Cèsar stepped into Lincoln�
�s room, tugging a shower curtain shut behind him. It was patterned with smiling yellow fishies on a field of blue bubbles.

  Wooster hadn’t been used as a high school for years before Genesis. About six years prior to the death of everything, demons had flattened the city, and some survivors had claimed Wooster as their base. Every door had gotten knocked down and hammered to exterior windows for protection.

  Eventually, they’d replace the doors. For now, the only way to get semi-privacy was with shower curtains from the Wal-Mart on Kietzke.

  “Howdy,” Cèsar said, pulling a rolling stool to Lincoln’s bedside. It put them right on top of each other. He was in the most secure room in the facility, formerly known as a janitor’s closet. “The name’s Undersecretary Cèsar Hawke. I’m with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.” He flipped through Edie’s file again, looking for the photocopy of the patient’s driver’s license. “I’m on loan from Los Angeles, so my apologies in advance if I’m a little scattered during our interview. This isn’t familiar territory.”

  “I understand. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I’m Lincoln Marshall.” He had a faint accent from somewhere on the eastern half of the country. Cèsar was a California boy who’d only ever visited Washington DC under threat of losing his pension, so he couldn’t identify Lincoln’s origin. Tennessee? A Carolina?

  They shook hands awkwardly. Lincoln had little range of motion in the handcuffs.

  “Nice to meet you too. Now do you want to tell me who Lincoln Marshall is?” Cèsar asked. “Your OPA files are redacted into oblivion. I find it hard to believe we’d have picked up someone above my clearance after getting his teeth kicked out by coyote shifters.”

  “Coyotes? Those were just coyotes?”

  “‘Just’ coyote shifters are still shifters. And you’re human.” Or so Edie claimed. She’d run the standard tests to determine his breed, but not all preternaturals were easy to detect. “Why’ve you got more redacted from your file than Benjamin Flynn?”

  “Who’s Benjamin Flynn?”

  Cèsar grinned. “That’s above your clearance.”

  Lincoln tried to shift in bed, but the cuffs jerked taut, and he visibly forced himself to relax. “Can’t tell you why the OPA’s got a file on me, but I used to be a deputy for Grove County. That’s where Northgate is.”

  Northgate was a town in the Appalachians so small that it wasn’t printed on any paper maps. It had blown up big since Genesis. The werewolf Alpha had chosen it as home, and where the Alpha went, so did preternatural civilization.

  Lots of people passed through Northgate now, but not many people originated from it.

  “Why aren’t you a deputy anymore?” Cèsar asked.

  “I was put on leave and never went back, sir.” Lincoln’s expression was politely neutral under all the crusted blood.

  Cèsar spotted a basin sink, a couple flimsy towels. He wetted one down and put it in Lincoln’s free hand.

  “Law enforcement,” Cèsar said. “You’re one of us.”

  “Not quite. Thanks for the towel.” Lincoln scrubbed, exposing a face that was square and bearded underneath all the blood. He looked like a hard thirty-five, forty at the oldest.

  “I take it you woke up in Reno after Genesis?” Cèsar asked, pulling out his Steno pad. He clicked his pen, jotted down a few notes.

  “That’s right, sir. Good guess.”

  It was an easy guess. Much like how nobody originated from Northgate, nobody originated from Reno thanks to the demon apocalypse. Cèsar wouldn’t bother asking Lincoln why a deputy from Northgate woke up in Reno. Lincoln wouldn’t know. Nobody knew why they ended up where they did.

  “Why were you out after curfew?” Cèsar asked.

  “I got in a fight.”

  “You nearly got dead. Did you want to die?”

  The man in bed scrubbed his face until the towel was brown with blood. “I dunno. It’s been a hard couple years.”

  Now that was something Cèsar understood perfectly.

  The Breaking had made the years leading up to Genesis a literal living hell, even outside of Reno. A fissure between Earth and Hell had torn the United States in half. Demons had eaten and enslaved North Americans by the thousands. Those who escaped had suffered in other ways, watching the farms wither and supermarket shelves empty.

  Genesis had healed the world, so the farms were coming back. It wouldn’t be long before trains were running, ships were moving across the oceans, currency had meaning.

  Life would be normal again soon.

  Or as close to normal as it could be in a world where half of everyone was a preternatural and a hundred percent of everyone remembered dying in the summer of 2015.

  “The OPA’s been developing social programs.” Cèsar had brought a folio with him; he took a pamphlet out of it now. “The agency hasn’t officially reopened after Genesis, you see. Our launch is coming up in a few weeks. One of the programs we’re preparing is mental health support. If you’re finding it hard to adjust, we can find a way to help you without getting your teeth kicked in.” He put the pamphlet into Lincoln’s cuffed hand.

  Lincoln didn’t look at it. “I’m not crazy.”

  “It’s okay. We’re all crazy these days. Even me.”

  “Why you? What’d you Rebirth as?”

  Cèsar spread his arms wide. “What you see’s what you get. I was a witch before, but I’m mundane now. Can’t even cast a circle of power.” He tried not to sound smug about it. Most people were hurting from how they’d Rebirthed, and he didn’t want to rub his happiness in their faces. He’d been allergic to magic before Genesis, so basic things like circles of power had made him miserably congested. He’d been breathing easy for an entire month. Losing magic was totally worth it.

  “So you just came back…mundane?” Lincoln was looking at him a little too closely, a little too knowingly. “I didn’t know anyone did that.”

  “You surprised? The whole world’s different in a lot of weird ways.” But this talk wasn’t about Cèsar’s happy descent into mundane life. “Anyway, those support groups are a few weeks from starting, but I hope you’ll hit up a couple.”

  Lincoln dropped the pamphlet. “Hope all you want. Can I go now?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Deputy Marshall. Even if you’re a danger to yourself, I can’t hold people long. I need this room for someone more fucked up than you. I’m inclined to let you go.”

  “I’m inclined to thank you for that.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. You’ll join the other detainees in the cafeteria until dawn. There’s paperwork to do before you can run off.”

  Lincoln showed the faintest hint of a smile. “I remember the paperwork. Bet it’s worse with the OPA than with the cops.”

  “We just want to make sure nobody slips through the cracks.” Cèsar managed to keep a straight face through his lie. Documentation was a slapdash affair right now. Until the OPA got a reliable national network, nothing was standardized.

  Cèsar could have let Lincoln go right now. Nobody would be any the wiser.

  He could easily imagine this miserable man walking straight into traffic. Jumping into the Truckee. Swan-diving off of Harrah’s. Or worse—if Lincoln snapped, he might take his pain out on a lot of innocents by doing something stupid.

  Cèsar couldn’t predict it. He couldn’t look at Lincoln’s file.

  No, there would be no releasing the former deputy into Reno tonight.

  “Why don’t I show you to your accommodations for the night?” Cèsar asked.

  Someone feeling generous could have described Wooster’s cafeteria as “adequate” accommodations. Its roof wasn’t leaking—possibly because it rarely rained in Reno—and they’d gotten enough mats for everyone, so nobody was on the floor.

  That was the most generous evaluation.

  Realistically, it was miserable.

  And more miserable tonight than usual. The city conserved electricity on full and new moons, when a large part of the popul
ation needed to be isolated. The power grid was too unstable to tax it. A brownout in Phoenix had released fifty shifters from a safe house and resulted in more than two hundred dead mundanes.

  There was no spare energy for comfort or entertainment. There was only one light on each opposite end of the room. Other than that, it was a bleak, stuffy space where arrestees were weeping, huddling under too-thin blankets, and trying to sleep through the nightmares.

  “Here’s your room, sir,” Cèsar said, sweeping a hand at the cafeteria. “I’ll be your concierge if you need hookups with anything. Great local parties, a bottle of Cristal, boat tours around Lake Tahoe.”

  “I’d settle for a Coke and football game reruns,” Lincoln said.

  “Wouldn’t we all?” Although Cèsar was mostly just missing Battlestar Galactica. The original, not the gloomy reboot.

  Lincoln shook Cèsar’s hand and joined the masses, picking his way through the crowd in search of a spare mat.

  Only two agents had been allocated to watch the room. They were usually enough. Nobody was detained for anything serious at Wooster. Most everyone had stolen something minor, broken curfew, or trespassed.

  Cèsar tapped Agent Rodes on the shoulder.

  “Yes sir?” She snapped to attention, military style. Hands behind her back, chin lifted, eyes on the horizon. Before Genesis, she’d been in the Army Reserve. Now she was a witch, as indicated by the silver pentagram pin on her lapel. She was personally responsible for many of the wards protecting Wooster.

  “Watch that one.” Cèsar jerked his chin toward Lincoln wading through the shivering bodies. “He’s not like the others.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask in what way, sir?”

  Cèsar caught himself staring at her breasts straining the seams of her button-down. He forced himself to look up at her face. “I don’t know in what way. Just watch him, all right?” He started to step away, but hesitated. Army Reserve or not, Rodes was a hundred pounds smaller than Lincoln, and there was no guarantee he was human. “Shoot him fast if he acts suspicious.”

  “Yes, sir.” She shifted to stand at ease, making the clothes flex over an hourglass shape. Cèsar felt a stirring in his lower belly, a familiar clenching of his gut.