Frost Fever Read online

  “Yes, I’m fine, I drank too much, I'm walking home now,” I said. I didn’t have time to deal with this. I started to walk away.

  “You have offended the Dark Ones.”

  The words froze me in my tracks.

  I turned and saw the thin man standing beneath the street lamp, the shadows making his gaunt face look like a skull. He reached into his coat and drew out a small golden medallion on a chain. A strange symbol marked the medallion, a stylized nine-pointed star surrounding a spiked sphere in the center. It looked a bit like a squid with nine tentacles drawing its victims towards a fanged mouth.

  I had seen that symbol once before, in the cellar of a rich man in Milwaukee. It was the symbol of the Dark Ones, the alien creatures that dwelled in the Void beyond the Shadowlands. The High Queen had forbidden their worship, but there were secret cults among the human nations that worshipped them. I had seen the symbol during a job that had gone bad, and the high priest of that particular cult had gotten killed in the process.

  Apparently my involvement in his death had been noticed.

  The cult of the Dark Ones had sent someone to kill me.

  “You have offended the Dark Ones,” said the man, and something like shadow and dark fire started to fill his free hand as he cast a spell, “and for your crimes, you shall perish…”

  I drew my .25 and shot him three times in the forehead.

  He didn’t expect that. I had noticed that wizards, especially human wizards, relied so much on their magic that they sometimes overlooked more mundane means of defense. This man was no different. The bullets drilled into his forehead and exploded out the back of his skull, and…

  And I realized that he wasn’t a man at all.

  Black slime leaked from the wound, sizzling and hissing as it spattered against the concrete. The man’s features changed as he collapsed, his skin turning gray and pallid, his eyes becoming venomous yellow pits, his nose becoming a triangular crater. Claws burst from his fingers and toes (destroying his shiny shoes in the process), and he fell motionless to the sidewalk.

  I started at the creature, shocked.

  “Holy shit,” I said, smoke curling from the barrel of my gun, “it’s an anthrophage, a…”

  I shut up, my mind kicking into overdrive. I had encountered the anthrophages once before. Corvus, the Shadow Hunter who had killed the high priest of the Dark One cult, had said the anthrophages were creatures of the Shadowlands, creatures that hunted through scent. That meant a wizard had summoned the anthrophage to Earth and set it upon my trail.

  That was bad.

  Shouting came from inside the Silver Dollar, and I realized I had a more immediate problem. The .25 wasn’t a loud gun, but the shots would have been audible inside the bar. Mr. Rojo and his enforcers were about to come boiling out of the bar, and they would find me standing with a smoking gun over some inhuman horror from the Shadowlands.

  They might assume that I had summoned it, and if they did, they would shoot me dead on the spot. The High Queen’s law forbade humans from summoning creatures from the Shadowlands, and that law had the enthusiastic support of most of the population. Too many veterans had seen the nightmarish creatures of the Shadowlands that stretched between the worlds.

  And too many people had lived through Rebel terrorist attacks that had opened gates to the Shadowlands.

  I had only one choice left.

  First, I grabbed the amulet with the sigil of the Dark Ones. It might come in handy later, and I wanted to examine the thing.

  I jammed the medallion and the gun into my pocket (making sure to put the safety back on, of course), put my back to the wall, and released my Mask. The guise of “Mr. West” disappeared, and my true form appeared – a short, pale woman of twenty, with long brown hair and gray eyes, clad in jeans and boots and a ragged denim jacket. I concentrated, gathering the magical power I needed to work a potent spell. The shouting from inside the Silver Dollar got louder, and I heard the siren of a Homeland Security patrol car in the distance. All of that threatened to break my concentration, but I ignored it, silver light flaring around my fingers as I cast the spell.

  The silver light washed over me, and I Cloaked.

  The Cloaking spell was the most powerful spell Morvilind had taught me. With the Cloaking spell, I turned completely invisible, undetectable to sight and magic and smell. Granted, someone could blunder into me by accident, but I didn’t take up that much space. Also, the spell had limitations. I couldn’t change position while Cloaked. Maintaining the Cloak also took the entirety of my concentration, and I couldn’t cast any other spells while using it.

  Nevertheless, it was a powerful spell.

  Because of the Cloak, Mr. Rojo and his enforcers didn’t notice me when they burst from the Silver Dollar. The thugs spread around their boss, guns in hand as their eyes swept the street. For a moment they were motionless.

  Then, as one, they noticed the dead anthrophage with the pool of black slime spreading beneath its shattered skull.

  “Mother of God,” croaked one of the bodyguards, leveling his weapon at the creature. His gun was a lot bigger than my .25 pistol. “What the hell is that?”

  “Anthrophage,” growled Mr. Rojo. “Saw them when I was in Duke Raithmyr’s levy. Nasty things from the Shadowlands. More vicious than the wraithwolves or the bloodrats, and smarter than both. They can pretend to be human when they feel like it.”

  Useful little fact, that.

  “A thing from the Shadowlands?” said the bodyguard. “What the hell is it doing here?”

  “Someone must have summoned it,” said Mr. Rojo. “Some wizard. That’s the only way things from the Shadowlands can come here. Rebel wizards do it sometimes to cause trouble.”

  “Shit,” said a second bodyguard, looking around the street. “A Rebel cell here?”

  “Goddamn it,” said the first bodyguard. “We can bribe Homeland Security, but the Inquisition will show up for Rebels. They’ll kill everyone they can find.”

  “This is West’s fault,” said the second bodyguard. “He must have summoned up this thing. If we catch him, we can hand him over to the Inquisition.”

  “If he summoned up the monster,” said the first bodyguard, “where did he go?”

  “Maybe it ate him.”

  “And then he shot it?” said the second guard, gesturing at the anthrophage’s shattered skull. “After it ate him?”

  I wished that they would make up their minds already. Keeping the Cloak in place around myself was hard, and it got harder with every passing minute. It was a bit like holding a barbell in place over my head. It started out hard, and got harder until I was too exhausted to continue.

  “Shut up,” said Mr. Rojo. His voice was calm, but the bodyguards fell silent at once. “Let me think for a minute. Stand around the body.” He looked at the street. “I don’t want any passing cars to see it.”

  The bodyguards obeyed, standing around the dead anthrophage as if taking a smoke break. A few of them actually produced cigarettes and lit up. Cigarettes were only legally available to men-at-arms who had completed an honorable term of service in the army of an Elven lord. Though no doubt Mr. Rojo could get whatever he wanted through the black market.

  I waited, starting to tremble a bit from the effort of the Cloak.

  “All right,” said Mr. Rojo. “We have some barrels of lye in the shed. Take it out back and stuff it one of the barrels. After a few days it will dissolve, and we can dump what’s left in the desert. Let the coyotes have it.”

  “That’ll kill a coyote,” mumbled one of the bodyguards.

  “So long as it doesn’t kill anyone here,” said Mr. Rojo. “Get moving.”

  The bodyguards holstered their weapons and gripped the dead anthrophage by the ankles and the wrists. I had never seen a man carry a dead anthrophage while smoking a cigarette, but all of the bodyguards managed it. Mr. Rojo led the way, and the bodyguards disappeared into the alley. The entire procedure took less than fifteen seconds.
I suspected this was not the first time Mr. Rojo and his associates had needed to make a dead body disappear in a hurry.

  The sidewalk was deserted once more.

  I released my Cloak and became visible. Relief flooded through me, but I couldn’t take the time to rest. I took a deep, ragged breath, summoned magical power, and cast a Masking spell around myself. I made myself look like one of Mr. Rojo’s bodyguards, a middle-aged, grizzled Hispanic man with graying hair and a close-cropped beard. If anyone saw me, they would assume I was with Rojo’s organization and leave me alone.

  Unless the bodyguard I had copied saw me. Then I would have trouble.

  Best to be gone by then.

  I crossed the street and walked into the parking lot. Half of the street lamps were out, and the freeway passed over the lot, the constant rumble of traffic echoing off the massive concrete pillars. Groups of young men stood in the shadows, speaking to each other in loud voices. Homeland Security did regular sweeps through this neighborhood, and anyone not under the protection of Mr. Rojo and his bribes to the local commander would find themselves getting flogged on a Punishment Day video. A few of the men glanced my way, but I held the Mask in place, and they left me alone. No one wanted to get on Mr. Rojo’s bad side.

  My battered van sat beneath one of the functioning lamps. It was a big old Royal Motors Caravanserai model, designed to hold fifteen people, painted a dull beige with 200,000 miles on the odometer, but it worked quite well when I need to travel cross-country. I could have taken the train or the zeppelin, but that left records, and records were bad things for someone in my line of work. It was safer to drive anonymously across the country than to fly or take the train.

  I unlocked the driver’s side door and climbed in, making sure to lock it behind me. I wanted to drop the Mask, close my eyes, and rest, but that would have been suicidal. Instead I glanced at the golden medallion I had taken from the dead anthrophage. I was sure there was a spell of some kind on it, but I could investigate the thing later. I tossed it into the back of the van and started the old Caravanserai. The engine rumbled to life, and I backed out and put the vehicle into drive, rolling my way down the aisles of cars.

  I turned around one of the massive concrete pillars, and a surge of fear went through me.

  A gaunt man walked down the center of the aisle, clad in a trim black suit, his hair-close cropped.

  He looked absolutely identical to the disguised anthrophage I had killed outside the Silver Dollar. The man’s shadowed eyes met mine, and he started to change, his human guise dropping away to reveal the grotesque features of an anthrophage.

  I stomped the gas.

  The anthrophage’s yellow eyes just had time to widen.

  The creature hadn’t seen that coming.

  The van’s bumper hit him in the waist, and I ran right over him and kept going. I felt a nasty thump, and then I spun the wheel, the tires squealing as I slid onto the street and slammed my foot onto the gas. The big van surged forward, shooting past the Silver Dollar, and a short time later I was on the freeway, driving exactly the speed limit to keep from attracting the attention of Homeland Security patrolmen. Traffic in Los Angeles is horrendous, even at one in the morning on a weeknight, but about an hour later I was out of the city, past the suburbs, and heading into the desert.

  At last I found a rest stop and pulled over. Big recreational vehicles filled the parking lot, the sort veterans of a certain age purchased so they could tour the country before they died. My battered van stood out, but not by that much. I found an isolated parking spot, killed the engine, and sat back against the seat, breathing hard.

  I let my Mask dissolve with a groan of relief. Maintaining a Masking spell isn’t nearly as hard as a Cloak, but it’s still an effort. Sweat drenched my tank top, so I pulled off my jacket and threw it into the back of the van.

  Right then Morvilind decided to cast his summons again.

  Pain exploded through me, sharper and harder than before, and I bit back a scream, gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. I slumped forward, my forehead bouncing off the steering wheel with a little thump, a fresh wave of pain rolling through me. After a moment the pain subsided. I spent a couple of bad minutes shivering and sweating under my breath, then reached into my jacket and drew out my phone. I sent a text message to Rusk, Morvilind’s butler, asking him to tell Morvilind that I had received his lordship’s summons and would arrive at his mansion within three days.

  I sagged in the seat, clutching the phone. A moment later it chimed. Rusk had had received the message and would pass it on to Morvilind. Hopefully Morvilind would not use his summons spell again until those three days passed. It would serve Morvilind right if he sent the spell while I was trying to merge into traffic and got killed when I lost control of the van.

  But if I got killed, my brother Russell was going to die.

  A little chill went through me, and not just from my sweat-sodden clothes. Six years. I just had to hang on for six more years, until Morvilind had cured Russell’s frost fever. Until then, I had to stay alive.

  For now, though, I could have few hours of rest.

  I put up a sunshield on the windshield, blocking the view, and climbed into the back of the van. It had been built to carry fifteen people, but I had pulled out all the seats, converting the back into a poor man’s RV. I had a mattress and a blanket and a pillow, along with camping supplies and various other items that came in handy, all of them organized in plastic drawers. Fortunately, I secured everything with bungee cords, so my rapid maneuvers in the parking lot hadn’t knocked anything loose. I pulled the curtains on the back windows shut, stripped out of my sweaty tank top and jeans, and sprawled across the mattress, too tired to undress further.

  Something cold brushed against my left hand.

  I frowned, looked down, and picked up the golden medallion I had taken from the dead anthrophage. It felt very cold in my hand, and I had the strangest feeling the sigil of the Dark Ones upon the medallion was watching me.

  Suddenly I wished that I had left my clothes on.

  Curious, I focused my will and cast the spell to sense the presence of magical forces. It wasn’t a difficult spell, but I wasn’t particularly good at it. Yet I was good enough to sense the dark magic wrapped around the medallion, a crackling force that felt rancid and greasy at the same time. I couldn’t discern the nature of the spell. My best guess was that it was a…warding spell, perhaps? Maybe a binding? Perhaps it was what had compelled the anthrophage to chase me.

  That was a bad thought. That was a very bad thought. I thought I had gotten away clean from Paul McCade’s mansion and the secret temple to the Dark Ones, but if the cult of the Dark Ones had sent anthrophages after me…

  That was very bad.

  I couldn’t do anything about it tonight, but I didn’t want to touch the vile thing a moment longer. Some of the dark magical aura seemed to be soaking into my skin like a grease stain. I wrapped it in a chamois, threw the medallion into a drawer, and fell asleep.

  I had bad dreams. I couldn’t remember them clearly. I seemed to see my father, and he was disappointed, so disappointed, at the kind of woman I had become, while my mother wept silently in the background.

  Around dawn I awoke with a headache and foul taste in my mouth. I got dressed in fresh clothes and made my way to the rest stop proper, threading my way past the various retirees and pensioners to wash my face in the restroom sink. A few of the old women gave me suspicious looks, but I ignored them. So long as I stayed away from their husbands, I doubted they would call Homeland Security report a young woman washing her face in the sink.

  Or maybe the smell offended them. I really needed a shower.

  By the time I got back to my van, the little coffee maker in the back had finished churning out a pot of vile-tasting but strong coffee. I swallowed half of the first cup in one go, and then ate a flavorless protein bar designed as field rations for men-at-arms, washing it down with the rest of the coffee.<
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  Then I got underway.

  It took me about two and a half days to get from the desert outside Los Angeles to the suburbs of Milwaukee. I could have done it faster, but I kept away from the freeways and stuck the back state roads, keeping my speed three or four miles below the limit. Homeland Security’s traffic officers focused on the freeways, and I wanted to avoid them. I thought I had gotten away clean, but that was a dangerous assumption to make. It was also possible I might run into an overzealous Homeland Security officer who wanted to search my van, and I needed to avoid that.

  But, mostly, I didn’t see anyone.

  The United States is a big country, and save for farmers, miners, ranchers, and lumberjacks, most of the population lives in the cities. The government didn’t release census figures, but I had learned the population of the US was about one hundred and twenty million people. The last pre-Conquest census, taken three hundred years or so ago in 2010, had counted something like three hundred million people in the United States.

  What had happened to those extra one hundred and eighty million people? I didn’t know, but the spell-haunted ruins of Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit gave a clue. I expected they had gotten on the High Queen’s bad side.

  They didn’t teach about those bits of the Conquest in school.

  I stayed overnight in rest stop parking lots, sliding the old van alongside RVs and long-distance trucks. A young woman traveling alone through the rural countryside is the premise of a whole lot of bad horror movies, but I took precautions. I slept with my .25 next to my pillow (with the safety on, of course), and I had quite a few nasty surprises for anyone who tried to break into my van. I had learned a spell to conjure a globe of lightning, and while I wasn’t very good with it, I was good enough to unleash enough lightning to stop a man’s heart.

  But no one bothered me.

  I suppose I had dealt with things far more dangerous than rural rest stops.

  Such as my “employer”, for one.

  Two and a half days after leaving Los Angeles, I brought my van to a stop in front of Morvilind’s palatial mansion. Morvilind’s residence was built in the classical Elven style of his homeworld, which meant it looked like a combination of Roman and Imperial Chinese architecture. Hieroglyphics that looked vaguely Celtic but were in fact Elven adorned the walls in intricate, dizzying designs. I could read some of the hieroglyphs, and knew that they marked the location of powerful wards Morvilind could activate if his mansion came under attack, though I couldn’t image anyone stupid enough to assault an archmage of the Elves.