Warbound (The Grimnoir Chronicles Book 3)

Dear Miss Etiquette,

My boyfriend is a Mover. Is it still considered opening the door for a lady if he does it with his mind powers instead of with his body? And if it is not, how should I broach this subject so as to not hurt his feelings?

Signed,

Confused in Cleveland

Dear Confused,

It most definitely is not proper to use magic of any kind around a young lady, especially telekinesis. It is difficult enough for boys to keep their hands to themselves, let alone extra invisible hands. If he is a proper gentleman he will get the door for you with his actual physical hands and never use his ghost hands in polite society.

Miss Etiquette,

newspaper column, 1931

Somewhere in Russia

It had taken what seemed like forever to find them and the nice new airship that Francis had so thoughtfully named after her, but Faye tracked them down eventually. She’d hoped for a pleasant reunion, but instead she’d damn near scared the hell out of everybody. They were jumpy, and it hadn’t helped that everybody thought she was dead.

Her magic was a boundless torrent of energy and limitless potential, but her body was still human, so after she’d squared off against the Black Monk, she’d had to get some sleep. Being the most powerful wizard ever was great and all, but she wasn’t stupid. If she got tired and careless, she’d still be every bit as dead as anybody else if she accidentally Traveled and wound up with a bumblebee stuck in her heart or a tree branch in her brain. As marvelous as Traveling was, it still had some limitations, but it sure beat walking like a normal old boring person.

She’d found a Russian fur trapper’s cabin with nobody home. Faye figured that sleeping in a bed made out of bearskins was much comfier than sleeping in some hay loft or open field. And she was about to go fight the Pathfinder anyways, and sometimes a girl just had to treat herself to something nice. She’d eaten some old potatoes and a whole bunch of jerky made out of who knew what kind of animal which had been stored there, and left a big handful of money to make up for it. There was a bag of salt there for treating the game they killed, so she’d used that to fashion some communication spells.

Faye knew she was a danger to be around. All the time these poor Grimnoir had the Spellbound around was like keeping a rattlesnake in the living room, and they’d never even realized it. But Sullivan’s expedition was surrounded by rattlesnakes, so what was one more? Besides, she knew they’d have no chance at all without her.

She was still rather bad at spellbinding. Sure, she had more magic than anybody else in the world now, but that still didn’t mean she could draw it very well. She was still clumsy at making the designs, nothing like Lance or Mr. Sullivan. It took her several tries, but she finally got one to connect. She tried to reach Francis’ Grimnoir ring first, but hadn’t gotten a response. That worried her to no end, but she figured he was just busy. She had wanted to warn him about what she’d seen in the pictures about the skinless man in disguise who was whispering to the president. She didn’t know who that skinless man was pretending to be, but Zachary’s pictures told her that back before his body had been taken over he had built lots of fancy buildings.

Jane, Dan, or Mr. Browning would also know what to do there, but she knew that she really needed to get to Shanghai, so then she tried Mr. Sullivan’s next, and hadn’t been able to raise him either . . . Maybe he was preoccupied. He was, after all, leading a dangerous mission deep into Imperium territory. Then she tried Lance, and that link was completely dead too. It wasn’t just that she didn’t get a response from his ring, but like there was nothing to get a response from. Now she was really starting to worry . . . Hours passed as she kept trying to get the communications spells to take, and she cursed her clumsy hands. Heinrich’s connected, briefly, but then his was gone too, like he was too busy to stop and make a spell.

This frightened Faye. Something bad was happening to her friends in Shanghai. She was preparing another spell, intending this one for Mr. Browning, when someone contacted her. Before, when the magic would activate her Grimnoir ring, she’d just felt it as a terrible burning sensation. Now, her much finer head map clearly recognized the magic as coming from Mr. Sullivan’s ring before the connection had even built up enough energy to make her ring finger tingle. Sullivan’s ring still felt like Black Jack Pershing, since he’d worn it for so many years before Mr. Sullivan. Everybody left a little stamp of themselves on everything they touched. Regular folks couldn’t hardly see it, but Faye could now.

It took a couple of tries, but Faye got the spell to take, nice and clear. That was good, since she intended to hop right through it and go all the way to Shanghai, just like she’d once gone from Tennessee to Virginia in a single Travel. Only it wasn’t Mr. Sullivan on the other side, it was the weathered old face of Captain Bob Southunder, and his brow knit in confusion.

“Where’s Mr. Sullivan?” Faye demanded before the Captain could even speak.

“Indisposed. . . . I sensed the summons coming through his ring. Is that . . . Faye?” The nice old pirate was a smart man, but like everybody around her, his brain seemed to work infuriatingly slow.

“Of course it’s me.”

“I’d been told you’d died.”

“It’s either me, my ghost, or a really clever Imperium trick.” She focused her head map down through the spell, like shining a powerful spotlight through a pin hole. This was only the second time she’d tried this trick, but she figured at worst she had like a one percent chance of dying badly. “Hang on. I’ll be right there.” Clear.

Travelling wasn’t about distance. When you took two bits of far-apart space and smooshed them together, it really didn’t matter how far apart they were on the flat, since the distance you actually Travelled was the same every single time, just the space between the smooshing. It was just like how she’d solved Jacques’ tricky mazes. He’d thought of it as cheating, but to Faye, that was just how the universe really was. It wasn’t her fault if nobody else could wrap their slow brains around the truth. She didn’t know if she had the technical terms right, especially since smooshing didn’t sound particularly scientific, but that was pretty much how it really worked. The hard part about Travelling was being able to see in your head map far enough to not get yourself stuck into something when you got there. Most Travelers never even figured out how to work their head maps at all, so they could only go as far as they could see. Not Faye, and right now she could see right into the insides of the airship Traveler.

She appeared directly behind Pirate Bob. He jumped in surprise. His communication spell was shining back on an empty cabin. She was in a pretty big room for an airship, with lots of crates and boxes and a gigantic weird-looking magical machine with lots of spinning balls and cones on it, so it had to be the cargo hold, and there were eight other people in the cargo hold, mostly working on the big machine or getting guns ready for some manner of excitement.

“Hey, everybody.”

She must’ve surprised them, because a whole lot of guns got pulled out at one time and pointed at her. To be fair, it wasn’t like strangers suddenly popping into existence in the middle of your secret pirate ship was very often a good thing.

“Stop!” Pirate Bob shouted. He wasn’t the type of leader who raised his voice a lot, but when he did, it certainly got everybody’s attention. “Lower those weapons.”

Faye felt a nervous, hot tingling building on her skin. Magic was gathering, hesitating on the border of igniting. She recognized the feeling right away. “Hey, pirate Torch lady. I forgave you for setting me on fire last time because that was all a big misunderstanding and you thought I was a ninja, but if you set me on fire again, I’m likely to get real mad.”

The Japanese woman stepped out from behind the big machine. She hadn’t so much as lifted her hands, but she’d been ready to make Faye combust. Apparently this Torch wasn’t as flashy with her magic as Whisper had been, with all the hand waving, but then again, Whisper had always been the dramatic sort.

“It’s fine, Ori,” Pirate Bob said.

The tingling magic on Faye’s skin drifted away. “Thank you. So where’s Mr. Sullivan?”

“Recovering,” the captain answered. “Now hold on just a second.”

“I need to go—”

“I said hold on,” he said, and the way he did it showed that even though he looked like a kindly old grandpa, he was actually a pirate captain and that she’d better remember it. “You’re on my ship—”

“Francis’ ship,” she corrected.

“He’s the financier. I’m the captain. So it’s my ship, so you’ll explain what’s going on to me, missy. Is that clear?” Captain Southunder knew darn good and well that she’d killed the Chairman, and a small army of Imperium Marines, and he maybe even knew about her blowing up the God of Demons, but he wasn’t about to take any guff off anybody on his boat, super powers be darned. “Because otherwise you can get the hell off my ship.”

“Ooh, will you make me walk the plank?”

He sighed. “We’re not that kind of pirates.”

Lance was dead.

Faye couldn’t believe it. She just couldn’t believe it. Pirate Bob had broke the news nice as he could, but he might as well have stabbed her right in the heart.

Lance Talon was one of her best friends. He’d taught her, helped her, treated her like an equal, saved her life, even given her the Grimnoir oath. It was Lance who had taught her how to drive a car, how to shoot a gun better, how to make spells. The first time they’d met, she’d thought he was a profane squirrel. Lance was family.

She’d wanted to disbelieve. Lance was tough. He’d been everywhere and done everything. He was a thrillseeker and he was too smart to die. But she remembered the feeling when she reached out for his ring, and now she knew it was because that ring had been burned and melted and buried under tons of charred wood and ash.

There was no escaping the truth, and Faye simply cried her eyes out.

Lance’s death hadn’t been in any of Zachary’s pictures, and that made Faye question everything. Were the possibilities spiraling out past what even the Fortune Teller could have seen? What did that mean for everything else?

The Traveler had been parked near a little Chinese village on the coast. The whole ship had been covered in ropes with leaves tied to it to make it look like more forest to anybody flying overhead or any ships on the ocean. The fact that the villagers had big camouflage nets ready to go told Faye that this was a village was often visited by smugglers and pirates like the Marauders. There were a bunch of little boats in the cove. Most of the UBF folks and some of the pirates from the Traveler were down there, loading their personal belongings. They’d be taken to one of the other Free Cities, which were just a bit freer, and boarding cargo vessels heading to America. Captain Southunder was sending them home so that they wouldn’t get killed along with everybody else. That was noble of him.

The rest of the crew were busy pulling off the camouflage nets and fake tree branches and getting ready to take off. Except for Sullivan, who was sleeping off having a huge spell bound to him, and Faye, because she wasn’t really part of the crew at all, and she was too sad and angry to be of much help anyways. The crew was muted and solemn as they worked. She wandered around, watching for a bit, but felt even more awkward when they saw how hard she’d been crying. So she’d popped up to the top of the dirigible to sit on one of the two huge gas bags to stay out of the way.

A little later, the Japanese pirate Torch lady climbed up a rope and got on top of the bag, too. She was wearing dirty coveralls, and a dark red sash, and carrying her shoes in her hand so she wouldn’t accidently hurt anything. It was totally unnecessary on the futuristic high-tech skin of the Traveler, but it was probably a necessary habit picked up on their old ship.

Now that Faye was paying more attention to the information the Spellbound curse was giving her, she could tell just how strong this Torch was. Her Power was amazingly developed, and that made Faye feel guilty, like she was peeking in on somebody’s secrets. A little, greedy voice inside her head said that much Power would be better served with Faye, but Faye just told that stupid greedy voice to shut up. The Torch saw Faye, saw that she was crying, and came over anyway. She sat down cross-legged on the bouncy surface across from her and didn’t say anything for a minute.

Faye thought about Travelling away, but something in the Torch lady’s expression made it so that Faye didn’t.

“I am sorry about Mr. Talon. He was a gentleman.”

“Yeah, he really was,” Faye sniffed. She hadn’t expected to get all emotional and weepy in front of somebody who had once set her on fire, even if it had been by accident. “I’m gonna miss him.”

“Of course.”

“And I’m gonna avenge him.”

Now the Torch gave her a gentle smile. “Spoken like a knight. Mr. Talon would be proud I am sure.”

Faye couldn’t help it. She really started to blubber. The Torch lady scooted over and gave Faye a hug, and that made Faye completely forgive her for the whole accidentally setting her on fire thing. “I’m sorry. I forgot your name.”

“They call me Lady Origami.” She had a gentle smile. She wasn’t very old, but she smiled like Faye thought a mother was supposed to. “It is fine, sometimes, to cry . . . Here . . . This is what I do when I am sad but do not want to be. This is how I got this name.” She unbuttoned one of the multitude of pockets on her coveralls and pulled out a sheet of soft paper. She began to fold it, one way, then another, then another, way too fast for Faye to understand. Then she crumpled it a bit to make it seem more natural and more alive, but even that was just another type of folding.

She handed Faye a very lifelike bird. Faye marveled at it. Now that was magic. “How’d you do that?”

“It is art. I learned from my father when I was a little girl. The folding changes things. Every sheet starts the same, until you fold it and it becomes new.”

Faye studied the bird. It had been a plain, flat old piece of paper, and now it was a bird. That sure was neat . . . Faye used her head map and focused on the bird. It took her nearly two whole seconds to unfold the entire thing in her mind. It was all just connections on the same piece, but change the connections, smoosh together new ones, and you changed the thing. And then she realized something. “That’s what I do. I fold stuff.”

“Yes. They all may look the same, but every sheet has a destiny. The artist shows that destiny.”

This was intriguing. Faye focused hard on her head map, studying the bird in her hand. Faye smooshed together bits of space so she could step through them. This art of Lady Origami’s moved smooshed bits too, but kept them there, and once you did that, it turned the whole thing into something new and exciting. Faye reached down and began unfolding. Lady Origami just frowned, curious as to why her artwork was being mangled. Faye was clumsy, but she managed not to rip anything. “This is how magic works!”

“I do not understand.”

“Magic is all the same. They all talk about geometry and stuff, but magic is all the same at first, until it gets folded! Then it makes a new thing!” Faye’s mind was blown. Her magic kept track of the lines as the bird unraveled. She envisioned the flat sheet in her head map, and then viewed it in three dimensions and decided to make something new. She quickly thought through all the necessary connections, and began smooshing things back together.

Lady Origami was perplexed, but she didn’t say anything as Faye kept folding and twisting things. It took her a whole lot longer to do it with her clumsy hands than with her fast brain. Faye proudly held up the rough thing that had once been a swan.

“I am not sure what—”

“It’s a Holstein!” Faye exclaimed.

Lady Origami took it back, obviously confused. Now that she was looking at it in cold reality and not as the majestic animal she conceived in her head map, it was ugly as sin, but at least it was shaped right and had enough legs. “Ah yes. Of course.”

“A cow!”

“Oh.” She nodded appreciatively. “I can see that . . . That is one of the spotted ones? We crashed the Bulldog Marauder on some. Very nice,” she lied, trying not to hurt Faye’s feelings. “I did not know anyone from the West knew this art.”

“Art? No. This is what I do when I Travel. I make connections. I can’t believe I never saw this before. Don’t you see?” Faye jabbered excitedly. “This is exactly how magic works! The whole world, the universe, that’s the sheet. Actives normally get to fold just one part to change the world! Maybe they can grow that bit, make some changes, but they don’t ever really unfold the whole sheet and make something new, but it’s the folds that decide what each part does! That’s how the Chairman could change between different kinds of magic. He unfolded his connection and made new ones.”

Faye could tell that she’d completely lost her audience. Lady Origami just had a look on her face that said Faye had gone crazy. That was okay, Faye was used to that, but this was a big deal.

“Do you got any more paper?”

Lady Origami had a lot of pockets.

Magic, a sharp knife, some demon ink, whiskey to dull the pain, and a steady hand . . . That’s all it took to turn a man into a weapon.

Who was he kidding? Jake Sullivan had always been a weapon. It was just time to quit pretending he could ever be anything else.

Killing. That’s all he’d ever been good for. Even when he’d tried to help, tried to be on the side of the angels, all he’d done was kill.

As a boy, his head had been filled with big ideals about courage and sacrifice and defending the innocent. He’d lied about his age and joined General Roosevelt’s First Volunteer Active Brigade. He’d even talked his brothers into it. Think of the adventure . . . What horseshit. The Sullivan brothers’ grand adventure had turned into years of endless trench warfare, killing with bullets, gravity, and bare hands. He’d survived the biggest battle in history with his body relatively intact, while one brother had lost his life and the other had lost his mind.

He’d come home to a country that didn’t understand them. All they’d known was that the First Volunteer had nearly ripped the world apart killing magical Germans at the Second Somme. Some called them heroes, but he could see the fear in their eyes.

Still, he’d tried to help, tried to make a difference. He was stubborn like that. Sullivan had liked puzzles, and what better way to solve puzzles than being a detective? Fixing people’s problems, and occasionally using his Power to right wrongs and take care of the dangerous types, and he’d been damn good at it. He’d fallen in love with a girl who had her own kinds of nightmares, and for just a little while, he’d thought he’d build a life for himself.

That had ended in five minutes of blood, because an innocent person had been threatened, and he was just too damned obstinate to let that slide. He’d killed a crooked bastard, but it had been a crooked bastard of an elected lawman, and that life he’d thought he might build with Delilah had all came crashing down.

Rockville. Six years of monotonous rock-breaking hell, and even in chains he couldn’t stop killing. The hardest of the hard had tried to prove themselves against his reputation, and he’d broken every single one. He never started anything, but he finished everything. His magic had always been strong, hard as his will, as forceful as gravity, but Rockville had given him time to think, and it turned out that was the most dangerous thing of all.

He’d been freed early to be J. Edgar Hoover’s attack dog, and even when he was trying not to kill anybody, they’d left him no choice. Delilah had come back into his life, briefly, until he’d gotten her killed too.

He’d been at war ever since.

The brain of a scholar in the body of a thug with a history so hard it would make an Iron Guard flinch. In another time or other circumstances, he might have accomplished great things with his mind or built great things with his hands. Instead, all he’d done was tear down the world, chipping away, piece by piece, like methodically breaking rocks in a quarry. He could try to hide it in fancy talk, about how he was protecting the innocent from the evil, but those were just words to confuse the issue. Jake Sullivan was good at one thing, and that one thing was killing. Sure, it was always for a good reason, but that didn’t change the fact that he was born to fight.

The Grimnoir oath he’d taken was serious business to a man who always kept his word. There were still folks in need of defending, now more than ever before, so he intended to go and do what God had put him on this Earth to do, and that was to kill a whole mess of people.

Jake Sullivan may have been on the side of the angels, but they were some damned bloody angels.

He woke up lying on his stomach. At first he wasn’t sure where he was. There was a strange noise vibrating through the floor, and then he remembered that was the sound of turbojet engines, and then he remembered that he was on the Traveler, and then he remembered that it was mostly empty since most of its passengers had been murdered in Shanghai. It wasn’t until he tried to move that he felt the pain and recalled why he was lying on his stomach. His back had been the only spot big enough to carve the new spell.

The Healing spells he’d carved on his chest were burning hot, repairing the damage to his tissues. Already the cuts and burns that had been infflicted on him had knotted over into rough scar tissue. He’d thought the others had hurt, but they’d been nothing compared to this. It was fading now, but he didn’t think he’d ever forget that magical fire.

Madi had held the record. He’d taken thirteen Imperium kanji and lived, and as a result he’d been damned near unkillable. Sullivan now had five, though this new one from Sivaram had to be equivalent to several Imperium kanji designs. Sullivan felt for the Power built up in his chest, but then immediately recoiled. It was different than before.

What would happen when he actually used it? Zangara had gone from making firecrackers to artillery shells. Crow had gone from Summoning demons to wearing them like a suit. What would that do to a man who was already a master of gravity? Even as curious as Sullivan was, frankly, he was afraid to experiment with such forces, especially while on board a fragile airship.

He took stock. He was barefoot, wearing pants but no shirt, and he still didn’t know where he was. Last he remembered he’d been in sick bay. He lifted his head from the pillow. There was a small mattress on the steel floor. He pretty much covered the whole thing and then some. He’d never been in this room before, and he’d been nearly everywhere he could fit aboard the Traveler. She simply wasn’t that big of a dirigible.

He realized it wasn’t actually a room at all, more of a space between rooms. The ceiling moved. And then he realized there was no roof at all. It was rust-colored fabric. It was the bottom of one of the hull cells holding thousands of cubic feet of hydrogen. Light was trickling through the gas bag, and it gave the room a sort of pink tint. Always analytical, Sullivan sat up, wondering how he’d gotten to this forgotten corner of the ship and how long he’d been out.

Other than the mattress, there wasn’t much here. A short table had been welded to the floor next to the hatch. There were cushions around it, since it was too small to use a chair. There was a vase bolted to the table, and the vase was filled with flowers. His neck popped as he turned his head. There were lots of little paintings and pictures on the wall, not hung, but screwed, because they would simply fall off the first time the ship banked hard. Then he tensed as he realized there were actually lit candles in the room.

He got yelled at for smoking, but somebody had put candles directly under one of the hydrogen bags? Sullivan crawled toward the candles to put them out, but then stopped when he realized it was a shrine of some kind. There were two photographs placed between fresh flowers, and several intricately folded paper animals, and then Sullivan knew exactly where he was.

The first picture was of a young Japanese man, stocky, muscular, with a big square face and a wide grin. He was wearing a Western suit and proudly holding some sort of academic award or diploma in his big hands. Sullivan would’ve bet money that he, too, was a Gravity Spiker. He just had that solid look about him.

The next picture was of a little baby.

Sullivan pulled away from the candles. He realized that though they were emitting heat, they weren’t moving at all. It was like the flames had simply frozen in place. Even the light coming off them wasn’t flickering. The wicks weren’t being consumed and the wax wasn’t even soft. Of course, Lady Origami was a Torch, so fire would do whatever she told it to do, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to endanger her memorial or her ship.

The hatch opened. Sullivan lurched to his feet on wobbly legs as Lady Origami entered her quarters. She was carrying a pitcher in one hand and a steaming bowl in the other.

“Hey,” Sullivan said awkwardly.

She placed the food down on the table, then closed the hatch behind her. “I am surprised you are awake. Do you feel all right? It looked painful.”

“I’m okay. Why am I here?”

“Sick bay is very full, with the four knights pulled from river. This is a private place, so I offered. It took three big men to carry you here. Your words were upsetting the others.”

“Words?”

“All about killing. Over and over.”

Sullivan looked down at his hands. “Uh, yeah . . .”

“You scared them.” She came over, touched him on the chin and lifted his head. He was surprised by the physical contact. Her fingers were callused and surprisingly strong. Her eyes were piercing, and he could see the fire inside. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry for that.”

“Oh, Sullivan . . .” She smiled and shook her head. She stepped away lightly, untying the dark red silk that decorated her coveralls. She placed it on the pillows. “Do not apologize. You are what you are supposed to be. You are strong, and proud, and smart, and very sad inside. You say very few words, but the words you say are always true. Men such as you are rare in the world.”

The jet engines gained in intensity. They were lifting off. “I should be going.”

She stepped in front of the hatch, blocking it. “Do not go.”

It had been a long time, but he recognized the look. He knew what she wanted, though he could not understand why she would possibly want him. “Lady Origami, I can’t—”

“Lady Origami is my marauder name. What they called me when I did not wish to speak after they rescued me from the prison ship. My real name is Akane Yoshizawa.”

“Akane.” It was a pretty name for a pretty girl. “I—”

“You must think terrible things of me because of the first time we met. You must have thought I was a pirate whore.”

“No!” Sullivan shook his head vigorously in the negative. “Never. You just surprised me is all.”

“I surprised myself that night too. That was not like me. Many of the marauders have wished to, but they have respect for me when I tell them to go away, and I did not have to burn any of them.”

“Hard to get fresh with a Torch.”

“True.” She smiled. “You were the first man I’d tried to be with since . . . It was just . . . When you told the Marauders your story, you reminded me of someone. A man I once knew.” Her eyes flicked unconsciously toward the shrine, and then back to him. “You still do. You are complete, but empty. Never afraid, never false. I can see this in you and I have only ever seen it once before.”

He turned away. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“We all lose, Sullivan. We lose our homes, we lose our love, our families, and sometimes we lose ourselves because losing is all we know how to do.” She came over slowly, put one hand on his scarred back. It lingered there, her fingers tracing the complex lines of Power, then she gently steered him around to face her. “I see your sadness when others do not, because I share it. You don’t want to lose any more. You don’t think you have any more to give.”

“If you’re tired of losing, then you sure as hell don’t want to end up with the likes of me.”

She ran one hand down the muscles of his chest. This time he didn’t try to pull away.

“Then we will not think about it until tomorrow, Heavy Jake Sullivan. Today, we will just be alive.” She reached up to her neck and unzipped her coveralls clear to her navel, and she wasn’t wearing a damned thing beneath.

“Well . . .” Sullivan took a deep breath. Akane. It really was a beautiful name for a beautiful woman. “All right, then.”