Dark Harvest (Darkling Mage 2)

“You’re right,” I hissed. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

I ran for the pool and grimaced as I waded in, the grotesque cocktail of gore and grapes filling my shoes. They were permanently ruined, but I didn’t want to know how much more screwed I would be if those people outside discovered me in there. I swiped the Chalice, the vines twined around its stem gone red from blood and wine.

Behind me the curtains rustled. I didn’t turn to look, and whoever it was didn’t have a chance of catching me, anyway. Too slow, bro. I ran into the darkness under a palm tree. Clutching Vanitas close to my chest, I leapt into the shadows, and into the Dark Room I stepped.

Chapter 2

“And that’s when the Wings showed up. A whole bunch of them, from the Lorica.”

All eyes were on me as I spoke. This was serious business, everyone knew, and Vanitas and I were lucky to have gotten out when we did. The hideout was as quiet as a tomb, but what else was new? Carver liked to keep things silent and still, and as boarders, Sterling, Gil, and I could only play along. I mean, I didn’t hate it. I kind of like when it’s quiet.

I’d once been tricked into believing they belonged to a death cult known as the Black Hand. I’d learned two things since then. One, that the Black Hand didn’t actually exist, and was just something made up to manipulate me. Black Hand? More like red herring, am I right? And two, these guys were actually mostly okay. Mostly.

“They knew that quickly?” Gil rubbed his chin. Swarthy, muscular, Gilberto Ramirez was the resident werewolf. Nice guy, actually, stolid, levelheaded, and neat, except, obviously, when there was a full moon out. “Why were they after the Chalice?”

“They knew as much as we did.” Carver drummed his fingers against the sparse wooden table in what passed for our combination break room and mess hall, his myriad rings gleaming. Carver was our boss, landlord, and mentor all in one, and we each of us had reasons for being indebted to him. “The Chalice poses a danger to those around it. Say what you will about the Lorica, but it serves its purpose.”

The Lorica were my former employers. As the premier organization of mages in North America, they took it upon themselves to regulate the use and exchange of magic and magical items, ensuring that it stayed out of the wrong hands. An artifact that drove those around it to murder certainly qualified as something that needed regulating.

Sterling – the vampire, you might remember – leaned over the table, an unlit cigarette dangling loosely from his lips. His leather jacket was so snug that it squeaked as he moved, wrapped tightly over his frame. Slender as he seems, though, Sterling is packed with supernatural strength, just one of the reasons Carver liked to keep him around. “How many Wings?”

“Hard to tell,” I said. The Wings were the Lorica’s teleporters, mages who specialized in transporting themselves and others across vast distances. I was a Hound when I worked for the Lorica, which meant that I was tasked with infiltration and intelligence. I couldn’t take people with me when I shadowstepped, which meant I never qualified as a Wing. “Does that matter now, anyway? I’m sure they brought Hands with them, which is much worse.”

Hands were probably the most dangerous of all the members of the Lorica, mages with talents specifically geared towards combat and destruction. They hurled fireballs, created electrical storms, shot razor-sharp shards of ice out of their hands – crazy lethal stuff.

Technically the Scions – the Lorica’s elders – would be the deadliest, but they’re so rarely seen on the battlefield, except for that one time they were forced to fight when my former boss Thea ripped open a portal to another dimension. Long story. Like I said, someone should have written a book about it.

“So let me get this straight,” Sterling said. “The Lorica knew all along about this mug thing.”

“Chalice.”

“Sure. Chalice. And now we have it here.” Sterling gestured at the cup, looking all innocuous on the wooden table, and not at all like the epicenter of murder and debauchery it had been just hours ago. “Which means the Lorica’s liable to kick our door down any minute to take it from us.”

Gil folded his arms and grunted. “I’d like to see them try.”

“Gil’s right,” Carver said, taking the goblet by its base, rotating it a few degrees, tilting it to study its sculpted rim. “Our home is warded. Their Eyes can’t see us here.”

Eyes, of course, were mages who used scrying to track down anything or anyone the Lorica deemed useful. Seriously, the Lorica had an answer for everything, and just as well, since it was structured like a corporation, or somewhat more disturbingly, like a government agency. But I believed Carver. The man – if he was a man – was likely the most powerful sorcerer I’d ever met. All I knew was that he had somehow lived for centuries, and that he was responsible for creating the hideout we lived in, possibly quite literally carving it out of empty space. I’d wondered, briefly, if that was why he called himself Carver. It was an obvious alias, after all.

But about the hideout. The only way to access it was through a portal installed in the brick wall set by a service refrigerator in the kitchen of a Filipino restaurant somewhere in the Meathook, a shitty and hilariously unsafe district of Valero, California. Yes, that’s extremely specific, and just as well. The hideout wasn’t located in regular reality, as it were, but a kind of pocket dimension that Carver had assembled himself, like real estate that he had created out of thin air.

It was mostly dim, lit by enchanted flames hidden away in alcoves or hovering above torch brackets. Everything was hewn out of smooth stone, from the floor to the pilla

rs to the massive skeletal statues that adorned the dimension’s every corner. It had the look and feel of a mausoleum, as well as the deafening silence of one. Fortunately, though, through whatever kind of sorcery, Carver maintained a comfortably toasty temperature throughout the entire structure. It was pretty considerate to the dimension’s human occupants – me, basically, and Gil when the moon wasn’t full. Our rooms even had windows that let in sunlight, somehow mystically piped in from its source. Sterling’s room, for obvious reasons, had no such windows.

Carver, whatever he was, never seemed to need to eat or drink, or even sleep, for that matter, but he was kind enough to provide facilities for those of us who needed to. Our break room-cum-mess hall served as a dining area and kitchenette. It was weird to look at, just an oven, a sink, a dishwasher, and a few fundamentals like a microwave and a coffee machine set on top of a bunch of counters, all of it suspended on a stone platform that was surrounded on all sides by total darkness. Most of the public area of the hideout had no walls, so breakfast, lunch, and dinner had to be enjoyed in what essentially looked like the cold vacuum of space. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a bowl of sugary morning cereal while staring off into a pitiless void.

Sterling was typically left to his own devices. We never asked what it was – or who it was – that enabled him to feed, only knowing that he slunk off every night to look for nourishment. To my dismay, it looked like he had discovered some new source tonight. He had set his cigarette aside and was fiddling with the Chalice, turning it this way and that, then finally discovering how to get it to work, tipping it on its end. With preternatural speed Sterling brought the rim of the cup to his mouth as a rich, viscous red fluid began its slow drip.

“Oh, gross,” I said.

Gil tutted. “So inappropriate.”

Carver looked on, amused, his fingers curling at his beard. Sterling was latched onto the Chalice like a lamprey, lips suckling hungrily at its rim, working like a lover. I’m sure I didn’t imagine that his jaw was almost unhinging, to allow more of the Chalice’s bloody gift to tip down his throat.

I wrinkled my nose at the acrid smell of metal, and really, at just the sight of the vampire going about his grisly business. Kind of cruel, I guess, being so disdainful of the undead equivalent of a dude just chugging a breakfast smoothie, but human blood? Honestly more than a little gross.

“This is so, so very inappropriate,” Gil said.