Hard Magic: Book I of the Grimnoir Chronicles

As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents, I congratulate you on the great success of your life’s work, but I am of the sad belief that your Peace Ray may have been inappropriately named.

—Albert Einstein,

Letter to Nikola Tesla

for Tesla’s 75th Birthday, 1931

Mar Pacifica, California

“Been a long time, Jake,” his brother said, still blocking the rifle barrel.

Sullivan looked past the ruined face to where Delilah was lying on her back, hands pressed against her stomach, blood leaking between her fingers. “Go to hell, Matty,” he snarled, reaching for his Power and Spiking it hard.

Magic crashed against magic. “It’s Madi now.” His teeth gnashed together behind ruined lips as he fired his own Power. Gravity collided and ruptured around them. “Matthew was my old name. My weak name. I had to take a new one as an Iron Guard. Remember where it came from?”

“Yeah . . . Jimmy had a hard time with t’s.” The destroyed body of the Summoned and the rubble around it fell into the sky. Delilah screamed as she was shoved across the lawn. Heinrich was heading their way when he suddenly tumbled backward, flailing, toward the house. I forgot how strong he was.

“I got baptized in the blood of the innocent. The only decent Sullivan there’s ever been.” Madi’s tie was whipping around his face, torn back and forth, as the pull of the Earth shifted. “Our brother deserved better.”

“You think Jimmy would want this?” Sullivan hissed as the ground underfoot began to sink. Water from the broken pipes spun weightless around them. His Power had already been used hard on the demon and he could feel it weakening.

“He was too good and pure and dumb to know what he wanted.” Madi didn’t even seem to feel the strain. Heat was radiating from his body as dozens of kanji burned magic. “But he was strong. We all were, but we gave our lives to protect the pathetic. They used us. And how’d they thank us? You saved a thousand lives, and you come home to what? Going to prison because you tried to keep some Active kid from getting lynched?”

“Like you would have cared.” His pulse was pounding inside his skull. It was almost like he could see the line of Power stretching from his soul to the center of the Earth, and it was flickering bad. He was almost done.

“They didn’t even waste a Healer to fix my face.”

“Whole unit only had a few Healers. They did just enough to keep you from dying. It’s called triage, dummy,” Jake said. Madi had too much Power. With the forces buffeting them, the first to slip would be crushed. “You were always the ugly one anyways.”

Madi laughed. “And you were always supposed to be the smart one.” Suddenly, Madi dropped his Power, but rather than being smashed by the sudden increase in pressure, his body flared in strength like a Brute as he took the hit. The dirt around them exploded outward in a shower. Sullivan staggered back, surprised. “Who’s the smart one now?” Madi asked as he slugged Sullivan in the face.

Sullivan rocked back. The blow rattled his thickened bones. Madi kept coming, hitting him over and over and over again, moving faster than was humanly possible. It was like being worked over by a meat hammer. “See, Jake. I’m the strongest there is. I’ve got the magic of ten Actives now. What you got?” He knocked Sullivan’s return punch aside with one casual forearm.

Sullivan ducked a hook, falling on his butt, then jerked up the BAR and fired. The magazine had mostly been expended on the Summoned, but at least five rounds struck Madi in the chest, exiting his back in gouts of meat and fabric. His brother fell, crashing hard into the ground.

Sullivan lay there, gasping, bleeding. His head was swimming from the beating. He had just killed his own blood.

Then Madi got up. “Ahhh . . . yeah. Felt that one.” Blood was pouring from the holes in his chest. Sullivan scrambled back as Madi strode toward him. “Like I was sayin’, I’m the strongest.” He slammed a boot into Sullivan’s chest, rolling him hard. “I can see that pissant little Healin’ spell on your chest. You think that makes you a big man or something?” He booted him again. “Shit . . . I got five of those.”

He managed to get to his hands and knees but Madi’s next kick landed in his ribs and lifted him several feet off the ground.

“Madi is here!” Faye shouted as she appeared in what was left of the foyer.

“We know,” Garrett said, pointing with one bloodied hand toward where a maelstrom of water, dirt, concrete, and fog was swirling across what had been the lawn. It was terrible to behold. Somewhere inside there were the two titans, slamming each other with Powers beyond comprehension.

Heinrich appeared, carrying Delilah’s limp form in his arms. She seemed so very small and there was blood all over the German’s coat. “Jane!” he shouted. “Help!” He set her down gently where the piano had been.

“One second!” Jane replied. She was crouched next to Mr. Browning, who was bleeding profusely from a bullet wound to his neck. “Keep pressure on her, Heinrich.”

“Help the girl,” Browning whispered, his teeth stained red. “I’m fine.”

“No offense, John, but shut your yap and don’t tell me how to do my job,” Jane responded calmly, her hands glowing like molten gold.

Lance shrugged past Faye, working the action on his Winchester. “Undead are coming. All those assholes we killed once are back up and moving this way fast.”

Heinrich closed his eyes and let out a long string of something that Faye could only assume was profanity. “Zombies. They’ve got a damn Necro . . . a Lazarus!”

Grandpa’s Bible teachings hadn’t been very good, but Faye didn’t remember any of the dead people who came back to life in the New Testament going insane with a desire to kill like the radio shows said this kind did. On the other hand she’d slept through a lot of masses. “I got the one with the demon. If I shoot the man with the zombies, will that make the magic stop?” she asked.

“Nein. Undead are different,” Heinrich said as he shoved what had once been the living room curtains against Delilah’s wound. “Their spirits can’t leave their bodies. They have been chained forever.”

“How do we stop them?” Faye asked. The same show on the radio had made it sound like you could just shoot them in the head and they’d leave you alone, but she knew that those programs were just make-believe. This was real.

“You can’t. You just damage them until they can no longer move, but that’s difficult when they are still sane and have guns. How many, Lance?”

“Probably twenty undead. I don’t know how many alive.”

“More than we can handle,” Heinrich stated with grim finality. “The Lazarus will whisper to them that the only way to end the pain is to destroy us. Poor bastards don’t even realize they’re dead yet.” The way the others acted when he said that made Faye certain that the German was their expert on zombies.

The storm of flying debris finally stopped, and everything instantly fell as gravity returned to normal. All of them turned to see who had won, and sadly all they saw was Mr. Madi kicking Mr. Sullivan across the yard like a child’s ball. Behind the two giants was a crowd of mangled bodies, running right for them.

The dead men were shrieking and crying, bones visible, flesh hanging off in strips where the slugs had hit, eyes bulging out of shattered skulls, bullet holes fresh and puckered in drained skin, white shards sticking out of broken limbs, and somehow she knew that they could still feel it all, every terrible unending ounce of hurt, and all those dead men held her and her friends responsible. The dead lifted their guns and Faye’s insides turned to water.

Madi grabbed Sullivan by the throat and jerked him from the ground. “Hell, Jake,” his brother said, punching him in the stomach, “I had this all built up in my head like you were gonna be a challenge. This is just like when we were kids.” Sullivan blinked through the blood and tears. He grabbed Madi by the tie, pulled him forward and rammed his elbow into the side of his head. Madi dropped him and stepped back, rubbing his face, grinning savagely. “That’s more like it.”

Sullivan stood shakily, spit a blob of blood, and raised his fists. “You always were a bully.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Madi said. He paused as his watch spoke to him with a woman’s voice. He lifted it and listened. “Hell . . . Fun as this has been. I’m about to fry this whole area with a Peace Ray. You’re distracting me from my mission. You seen a piece of a Tesla device around here?”

Sullivan stepped forward, put his weight into it, and swung a big right at Madi’s face. Madi dodged it so quickly that the air whistled around him. He responded by clubbing Sullivan effortlessly to the ground. “Guess not.” Sullivan gasped as a heavy boot slammed onto his spine, pinning him down. There was a popping of snaps, a creak of a leather harness, and finally a loud metallic click as a hammer was cocked.

“So long, Jake. Any last words?”

“Mama always liked me best,” Sullivan grunted, sputtering out a bloody laugh.

Madi aimed the Beast at the back of Jake’s head. If he had more time, he’d let his brother know just how much this moment meant to him. He could actually feel. It was a bittersweet victory, and the old, weak, sickly part of him was screaming no, but he pushed that part back down into the deep well where he kept it chained in black poisoned waters. He pulled the trigger.

Then there was a snap of air and a pair of grey eyes shining in the dark as Jake vanished.

The bullet dug a .50-caliber hole in the ground. Madi looked up at the mansion, a snarl parting his ruined lips. “I’m getting sooo tired of her . . .”

Hiroyasu’s zombies were passing him, charging blindly toward the house. The morons didn’t even realize they were dead yet. Some of them were shooting, screaming, bones sticking out their faces, or dragging their intestines behind them in long steaming trails. About damn time.

A few of the living goons approached him cautiously, carrying their new Arisaka subguns, following the zombies. Those were the brave and stupid. The cowards in the ranks had probably bolted and run as soon as they’d realized he wasn’t about to waste any perfectly good corpses. He glared at the remaining men. “What? We’ve almost got th—” A rifle bullet hit him in the shoulder, tore through his flesh until it struck his collarbone and shattered. He grimaced as the fragments tore a dozen separate wound channels through his flesh and a chunk of bone pierced his heart. “Damn it.” Even he had his limits, and time was almost up. Toshiko was yelling at him that they needed to fire soon or risk discovery. No matter what, the Imperium couldn’t afford to be implicated. It was time to finish this.

He followed the blood trail of the dead mob, murder in his wounded heart.

Francis worked the bolt of his Enfield. He’d plugged Madi square with an .06 soft-point, but the Iron Guard didn’t seem to notice. He fired the remaining rounds at the closest zombie as fast as he could work the bolt. He was an excellent shot, since Black Jack had taught him well, and he pulverized the undead body, but it just kept coming. He used his Power to reach out and pick up chunks of concrete as heavy as he could lift, and started hurling them at the undead.

Garrett grabbed him on the shoulder, breaking his concentration right as he put a chunk of rebar through a zombie’s face. “Fall back!” he shouted in his ear. Garrett hefted a BAR and laid down fire as he walked backwards. Francis took up his empty rifle and ran.

Faye and Sullivan popped into existence so close that he almost tripped over them. “Help me!” she cried. “He’s too big.”

He grabbed one of Sullivan’s arms and pulled. Jesus. He weighs a ton. Garrett grabbed the other and they pulled his body further inside. The zombies would be on them in seconds.

The Heavy stirred, his bloody face scrunched up, and then he pushed Francis away. “We got to get out of here.”

“No kidding. Zombies!” Francis jerked his head toward the front.

He shook his head. “Peace Ray . . . Browning! You got to get your people out of here. Madi’s gonna fire the Peace Ray at us.”

Jane had just left him and moved to help Delilah. Browning was holding himself up by leaning on the banister, looking pale and weak. “Are you certain?”

“Yeah. We ain’t got much time.”

Browning nodded. “Lance, get everyone to the tunnels.”

Jane was starting to use her Power on Delilah. “No time, girl,” Lance said as he leaned down and scooped the Brute into his arms. “We got to get deep underground. Now! Francis, send out your family’s Summoned to slow them down. Everybody follow me.”

Francis complied, twisting his ring. He knew that they wouldn’t last more than seconds against maddened undead, but that might make all the difference. “I—” but then he was knocked aside as something fell from the balcony above and landed in their midst. He scrambled back as a hulking slab of a man turned toward him, half his face a ragged mass of scar tissue, soaked in blood, white eye gleaming. “Madi!”

His movements were a blur of fists and magic. Sullivan and Faye hit the far wall. Lance and Delilah went flying over a broken couch. Jane was knocked sprawling. Garrett had time to lift his automatic rifle and fire a single round before Madi swatted him down the hallway. Heinrich went grey as he charged, but Madi raised his hands and force exploded outward in a wave. Francis found himself falling down the floor until the wall rushed up to meet him. He bounced off the stone, screaming in pain as his shoulder popped.

“This the best you got, Grimmies?” Madi taunted, drawing a huge revolver from inside his ruined coat. He jerked suddenly as a chunk of meat exploded from his side, then again, as John Moses Browning pummeled him with an Auto-5 shotgun. Madi spun, firing his huge gun once, and Browning fell, crashing back through the banister and onto the stairs.

“John!” Lance’s .44 flew out of the holster in a speed draw. He opened fire, slamming six rounds into Madi’s chest, neck, and head in a continuous roar. Madi pointed and Lance fell upward, crashing through the chandelier and into the beams of the roof. Madi held him there for a moment, as he rolled something around inside his mouth and spit out a deformed bullet, then he jerked his hand back, and Lance fell, bellowing, until he hit the floor with a sickening thud.

Francis spotted a poker lying by the fireplace, concentrated, and launched it across the room like a spear. It impaled Madi through the bicep and deep into the chest, pinning his gun arm to his side. Francis started looking for something else to telekinetically grab when Madi unleashed another Spike, disrupting gravity again, and Francis found himself crammed upside down inside the fireplace when it subsided.

He crawled out of the ashes, coughing. Zombies were scrambling through the broken walls, screaming with pain that would never end. The servants, in tuxedos and maids’ uniforms, collided against the undead, smoke and oil breaking against blood and bone.

A tiny man dressed entirely in black appeared next to Madi. “Iron Guard!” he shouted. “I’ve searched everywhere. The Tesla device is not present.”

Madi was occupied dragging the poker out of his body. It made a sickening grating noise as it cleared his ribs. The tip came out with a chunk of tissue wrapped around it. He threw it on the floor with a clatter. “What a waste.” He lifted his watch. “Toshiko, give me a minute to get out of here, then scrub it off the map.” Madi rested his blood-soaked hand over the ninja’s shoulders, started to speak, then paused. “Hang on . . .” his face crinkled as if he had a strange smell stuck in his nostrils. He walked over to where Jane was unconscious on the floor. “What do we have here? A Healer? You assholes actually have your own Healer?”

“Get away from her,” Garrett gasped as he struggled to rise, blood streaming down his face.

Madi reached over and grabbed a fistful of blonde hair. He dragged Jane through the broken glass. “You know how rare these are?” He was talking to the Shadow Guard. “This should make up for losing an Iron Guard.” He seemed to be having serious difficulty breathing. “Get us out of here.”

Garrett had pulled himself up the wall with a trail of bloody handprints. “Leave her alone!” he shouted, and the voice that came out of him wasn’t the voice of a man, but a roar of thunder. It was like a commandment from a burning bush and Francis cringed as the words struck him to the very fiber of his being.

Madi hesitated, his brow creased as he fought the Influence. “Damn . . . You’re good.” Then he raised his revolver and shot Garrett. The little man went down hard. The Shadow Guard laid his hands on Madi and Jane and the three of them Traveled right out of the mansion.

“Jane!” Garrett screamed. “Oh God no! No!”

Francis dragged himself across the floor. The zombies were still coming, and if they didn’t kill the Grimnoir, the Peace Ray surely would. They only had one chance. “We’ve got to get to the tunnels,” he cried.

Lick Hill, California

Toshiko’s Shadow Guard were efficient and that filled her with pride. Bodies were strewn from one end of the command center to the other. The vast majority had died unaware that they were even under attack. She stepped over a headless corpse and took a seat in the observation area. The coordinates had already been dialed in. Unfortunately, all indications were that there was only enough energy for one brief firing, which would be more than sufficient to burn the entire town of Mar Pacifica from the world, but she had been hoping that there would be enough to cut a swath of destruction all the way to San Francisco. It seemed like a waste to her to use such a mighty weapon against so few, when it could be used to slaughter thousands.

But she wasn’t in charge . . . Yet.

One of the men appeared at her side. “Is the evidence planted?”

He nodded, obviously not liking taking orders from a woman, but the Chairman had personally put her in charge, so that was just too bad. “We have used the guards’ rifles to shoot the anarchists. Their manifesto was left at the entrance for all to see. Masaharu has painted their symbol on the doors using the blood of the technicians.”

“Excellent touch,” she answered. Framing militant Actives had been Madi’s idea. The Bolshevik-funded anarchists had been a constant, yet minor, thorn in the Americans’ side for decades, though they had never dared an operation of this immensity. A few known agitators had been easy enough to find in San Francisco. Once the news of their taking over a Peace Ray reached the wires, a violent response against all American Actives would be inevitable. The more pressure that was brought against Actives, the more dissension it would bring, the better it would be for the Imperium. She had to admit his plan was remarkable in its simplicity.

She checked her mirror. Her Traveler had exhausted his Power getting Madi, the other Iron Guard, and a blonde woman back to their trucks. She was disappointed to see that she had lost one of her fellow Shadow Guard. Travelers were irreplaceable. The Chairman would be displeased.

They would be out of the kill zone in a matter of minutes. “Charge the tower,” she ordered.

Sullivan had taken a beating, but he was still strong enough to carry both Delilah and Lance, one under each arm. Heinrich had Garrett, while Francis had thrown the surprisingly frail weight of John Moses Browning over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

Behind them, a butler’s limbs were torn off, one by one, and smoke from the destroyed Summoned obscured the first floor. Faye brought up the rear, carrying Browning’s shotgun. She blasted a rushing undead in the knee, then slammed the kitchen door shut just as it slid into the wood with a crash.

Heinrich took the lead, Garrett’s arm thrown over one shoulder, his shoes dragging limp, leaving blood splatter across the pale tiles. Heinrich kicked open a door and started down. Faye was stronger than she looked, and shoved a table against the door as the zombies crashed into it.

“Schnell! Hurry!” Heinrich shouted. Francis stumbled after them, his arms slick with blood. Browning wasn’t moving. Francis was so scared he could barely breathe.

Madi was in no shape to drive, so he sat in the passenger seat of the truck as the Shadow Guard took them up to their maximum speed of fifty miles an hour. He’d made Hiroyasu, that cowardly bag of piss, ride in the back. The handful of surviving men probably wouldn’t make it to the other truck in time, and that was if the undead didn’t lose it and pull them apart, but that was too bad. They hadn’t particularly impressed him, so no great loss. The Peace Ray would take care of the evidence. He could always recruit more.

The Grimnoir had managed to hurt him bad. Every one of his kanji was earning its keep now, forcing his heart to keep pumping, moving oxygen to his brain, and knitting together broken blood vessels. He was starving. Getting hurt always made him hungry. I could really go for a good meatloaf and a cold Coca-Cola . . .

The Healer stirred, came awake, and screamed her heart out when she saw him. She started thrashing, which he found annoying, and the driver jerked the truck when she struck his face. So Madi reached over and knocked the hell out of her with the back of his hand. Her face struck the dash. “That’ll leave a mark,” he said. “Keep squealing in my ear and I’ll pop you a good one next time.”

She folded her arms tight and seemed to shrink into the seat, trying not to cry. “What are you going to do with me?”

“You’ll be lucky if it’s with you and not to you,” he snorted. “You can start earning your keep by fixing the hole in my heart. You got any Power left after that, I’ve got one lung full of blood.”

Her eyes grew defiant. “I’ll never help the likes of you.”

She had a spine. He could appreciate that. “Bitch, you heard of Unit 731?” That scared her. Everybody had heard about them. “Yeah . . . You know what those weirdos would give to have a Mender to experiment on? Especially a soft little thing like you . . .” He rubbed one hand down her bruised cheek and she flinched away. “So, unless you want them carving on you, you’ll do what I say.”

He gave her a second to think about it while he checked his watch. They should be clear of the blast. “Toshiko, light ’em up.”

“It will be done,” she responded from fifty miles away. “Accelerators are at full, but that’s barely seven percent of maximum. Lazy Americans can’t be bothered to even maintain their equipment. Firing in two minutes.”

“It’ll do,” he said.

“We are on our way out.” There was relief in her words.

He couldn’t blame her. The Imperium’s recent experiments into ray technology showed that the very air around a beam could kill or sicken you. Some sort of invisible poison got in the atmosphere and it would actually damage your cells. He’d once seen Unit 731 tie a bunch of prisoners to stakes at various distances along the path of a small beam, and they timed everyone to see how long it took them to die, either burned immediately or throwing their lungs up and dying covered in black blisters. It hadn’t been pretty. But he wasn’t worried about that now. He’d got himself a new pet Healer.

* * *

The stairs were steep. Sullivan’s big boots could barely find purchase on the narrow stones. The muscles in his arms were burning almost like the magical fire on top of his chest. He had Delilah clamped under one arm, and he hoped that she would hang on. She’d lost so much blood that he was terrified to even look at her. Lance was short, weighed a ton, and was completely unconscious, and therefore useless. His auto rifle was still banging back and forth on its sling against his back, but he was too worried about zombies following them down to drop it.

An electric-battery torch had been stashed at the top of the stairs, and all he could see was a narrow pale beam swinging back and forth ahead as Heinrich led them into the bowels of the earth. Delilah cried out in pain as he slipped and hit the damp wall. “It’ll be okay, baby. We’re gonna make it,” he whispered.

They kept going. Behind him someone tripped and cursed. They needed to stop and tend to the wounded. Keeping Delilah moving was a death sentence, just as surely as stopping and waiting for the Peace Ray to end them. They had to be a couple hundred feet under the ocean cliffs by now, and he didn’t know if that would be enough. “How much further?”

The rich kid, Francis, was a few feet away. “Almost there,” he gasped.

Not good enough. If this ray had a fraction of the energy as the one they’d hit Berlin with, there wouldn’t be near enough dirt overhead to save them. They hadn’t called it the Peace Ray then. The Brits had christened it Tesla’s Sickle, but his boys weren’t poetic. They had simply called it the Death Ray. Kinetic energy had shattered everything around the impact zone and turned the Reichstag into a blackened pit, but it was the wave of carnage that had radiated out from it that had done the real killing. Sullivan had seen the bodies like broken charcoal statues frozen wherever they’d been when the destroying angel had come. One snap of light and a whole city had died.

The heat alone would be enough to steam them like lobsters in this tunnel. “Move faster!” Sullivan bellowed to nobody in particular.

There was a noise ahead, water crashing against stone, and behind, the hate-filled screams of the dead, and under his arm, a rasping breath as Delilah’s life slipped further away, and over everything came the crackling hum as the Peace Ray hit, light filled the universe, and for the first time in many years, Sullivan prayed for a miracle.

The Peace Ray discharged at fifteen minutes after two o’clock in the morning. It was not an impressive sight from Lick Hill, even if any of the crew had been alive to appreciate it. In fact, with the warning klaxons disabled by the Shadow Guard, the only sign of the impending destruction was a single match flicker of white as particles were hurled up a thousand-foot copper spiral to a terrible velocity and flung to the west.

The simple fused dynamite explosion at the base of the tower a moment later possessed not even the tiniest glimmer of the Peace Ray’s power, but it would leave a few steel girders twisted, delicate Cog-designed electronics shattered, and the costly weapon disabled.

But by the time that was done the Peace Ray had already struck the small coastal town of Mar Pacifica. Only the undead were walking at the impact point, their skeletons briefly visible through their flesh like a perfect X-ray frozen in time before being swept away in cleansing fire.

Even at only seven-percent power the flash was seen as far away as Sacramento.