Murder of Crows: Final Ch 1 & Ch 2

Chapter One

I’d just received the biggest paycheck of my life, and by Odin’s missing eye, I was terrified.

The funds had appeared in my account at the stroke of midnight, and I gazed at the bank balance on my computer screen with that deer-in-the-headlights expression most people reserve for train crashes and terrorist events. First came the reality check. Yep - this really was my bank account. There was my name: Elizabeth Fox. Yes, the pending deposit really was five figures. I’d barely made this much money in twelve months last year. 2016 had been a slow year for monster hunting. 

What was even more surreal was that there would be more money next month. And the month after that. All I had to do was stay alive.

Reeling, I sat back and rubbed my eyes. Thirteen grand a month, every month, for as long as I could legally hunt. And that was just the retainer. The other members of the Steelheads and I got contract payouts for every monster we killed. A vampire was worth a hundred grand, minimum – more, if the feds also had a bounty out on it. With that kind of money, I could rent my own apartment. I could afford new Ikea furniture. Dental insurance. Get my motorcycle repaired, buy vegetables whenever I felt like it…

Or not. I looked down at the bracelet locked around my ankle. The GPS tracker blinked back up at me.

They say that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. I’d Hunted a devil once – a small one. Mostly I fought vampires, ghouls, draugr, shapeshifters and faeries, the urban monsters who preyed on the vulnerable in Seattle. They were the devils I knew.

The new devils in my life were the ones who’d signed this check for fifteen grand and dropped the money into my bank account. These monsters were a foreign world of business suits, contracts, and corporate nicey-niceness who managed the Pacific Northwest’s Number One monster hunting team, the Steelheads. They had just slapped a collar around my neck – well, my ankle – for a cool 156K a year. Provided I was a good girl, I’d get to keep on killing monsters while I drew a steady paycheck. Somehow, I was going to have to get my head around it. And insurance... and taxes. How the hell did I do that?

Chewing my lip, I surfed over to the IRS website. In the minute before my eyes glazed over, dry-mouthed disbelief turned into restless panic.

Fuck this. I got up, stomped into a pair of motorcycle boots, slung my jacket on over my clothes, and stormed past Winter, my raven familiar, who was sleeping on his perch with his beak tucked under the feathers of his back. He looked up as I left the apartment, croaking in confusion just before the door slammed behind me.

There was only one thing any self-respecting Valkyrie would do: I went down to the U-District supermarket parking lot, burned through a pack of cigarettes, and drank a heroic amount of birthday cake-flavored vodka. Once I ran out of that, I went back into Safeway and used my newfound riches to buy another pack of cigarettes and a bottle of Baileys, and got into a brawl with the guy who grabbed my ass on the way out the door. 

“Leggo of me, you crazy slut!” Mr. Gropeyhands was a big, husky, corn-fed guy with an accent from well below the Mason-Dixie line. He was on his knees, flailing with one arm while I kept the other trapped in a lock. “You’re a fuckin-AAAAAGH!”

“Say that again! With feeling, this time!” I shouted back down at him, cranking his wrist like a wrench.

Red-faced, he roared some sexist, racist gibberish, but as my father had taught me, even the biggest man is bound by the laws of physics. When he swung around to try and punch me in the leg, I twisted with him so that he crawled forward on his knees, flailing at the air. A few people sheltering from the rain under the supermarket’s awning had gathered around to watch.

“Listen to me, you cumstain. I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, but this is Seattle. We don’t grab ladies by their no-no bits here.” I twisted his wrist to the side. “You recycle your fucking cans, drink your fucking Starbucks, organize your change before you get on the bus and keep your hands to yourself. Am I clear?”

Veins popping, Cornfields slapped his free hand on the wet concrete to try and push through the pain. Then, suddenly, he roared and threw his whole body back against my legs.

The move knocked my drunk ass backward, and I hit the ground with a heavy ‘oof’ before he was on top of me, red-faced and sweating like a bull. The bottle of Irish cream jumped out of my shopping bag.

Nooooooo. In slow motion, it hit the concrete and smashed, sending liquor and glass everywhere.

This meant war. No one gets between Elizabeth Fox and her damned Baileys.

“ALL-FATHER, WITNESS ME!” I dodged the fist that came down for my face and kneed the asshole right between the legs. 

He collapsed with a moan. I bucked him off my hips, flipped up to my feet, and was about to start in with my boots when a siren whooped a warning nearby. The people watching the fight vaporized. Teenage Ave Rats melted into the grimy walls. Moms hustled into the supermarket. Crack dealers vanished into the nearby Jack in the Box, and I stepped back from the guy with my fists still balled, a tingle of anxiety shooting through my stomach. 

The sirens cut as a Seattle City Light box truck rumbled into the Safeway parking lot like a canary-yellow tank. It pulled up to a stop only two or three feet away from where Cornfields was rolling around in a soup of Baileys and broken glass, clutching his Irish Cream-scented nads. I held my hands up surrender, though it wasn’t the cops. It was way worse than the cops. It was my new team. The yellow truck’s official name was the Steelheads Supernatural Tactical Response Van. I called it the Troutmobile.

“Liz! What the hell are you doing, and why aren’t you answering your phone?” the driver, Jack Staunton, demanded by way of greeting. 

I glared at him haughtily, trying not to sway from side to side. “You mean the one I left at home on my first night of freedom, so I could freely walk to the store? Like an American?”

Jack was a former Marine - as much as any Marine could ever be a ‘former’ Marine. I was pretty sure he was a prototype super soldier who’d been grown in a vat by DARPA. He was handsome, in a hard, wintry way. A solid six feet of muscle, with piercing blue eyes, a hard jaw, and caramel-blond hair cut high and tight... the kind of man who looked really good in uniform but kind of like a lumberjack in anything else. He glared down at me, an e-cig hanging from the corner of his mouth. The tip of it flared bright blue as he glanced at the jock, who was just starting to pick himself up, then back to me. 

“Fan-fucking-tastic.” Jack exhaled the next cloud of smoke with a sigh. “We’ve got a Code Echo downtown and our Striker is drunk.”

I pointed at the broken liquor. “What the fuck do you think Viking magic runs off? Kale? Of course I’m drunk. Point me at this emergency whatever-it-is, and I’ll turn into a bear and punch it to death!”

His lip curled. “Just get in the van.”

Yup. It was my first night after indoctrination - I mean, training - and Jack and I were sure off to a great start.

“I don’t have my gear!” I hollered, as I staggered off toward the rear door.

“Inari brought your gear. He’ll brief you.” Jack called back.

“Inari brought my…?” I froze, then stalked back to the driver’s side window, my hands in fists by my sides. “My gear?! You broke into my house?!”

“Let me repeat two very important words: Code. Echo. An A-Class just busted into a penthouse and killed five people. Get in the fucking van.”

Oh. Shit.

Joining the Steelheads had not been my idea. I’d been perfectly happy as an underworld freelance slayer, but whether I was fighting monsters as a vigilante or fighting for the establishment with a bracelet round my ankle, I had gotten into the monster-killing business for one reason and one reason only – justice. Most monsters are smart enough to know that humans are sentient, feeling, caring beings, which means they choose to kill. They choose to suck people’s immortal souls from their eyeballs, or they look at a child or a homeless person and see nothing but prey for the taking. I’d once been one of those homeless kids... but I hadn’t been prey.

Before I’d even banged on the van, the rear door opened just enough for me to slip inside. The outside of the Troutmobile was camouflaged to blend in with the rest of the Seattle City utility fleet, but the inside was an armory and communications center rolled into one. 

“Greetings and salutations, Miss Fox!” My Lancer, Inari Nakamura, turned the full heat of his thousand-watt grin on me as I entered. That smile alone told me this Code Echo was not a drill. Inari was really good at his job and probably a real live psychopath. Not in a creepy way. He was more a psychopath in the adorable way that kittens are psychopaths, or lion cubs. Stress rolled off him like oil on water. He loved to kill, and he lived for the Hunt. Tonight, he looked like all his Christmases had come at once. 

“You’re looking… uhh… radiant tonight,” he remarked. “Mad Max crossed with Black Wednesday Addams. I like it.”

“Kiss my ass any harder, and you’ll need to start carrying a roll of toilet paper.” I sidled past him, and caught a hint of his sage-and-sandalwood cologne.

“I was to be tactful.” 

“I prefer the cold, bitter truth.”

“Well, okay then. You smell like a gay dive bar.” He slammed the reinforced door behind me. “What were you drinking? Vanilla air freshener?”

“Birthday cake vodka. Breakfast of heroes.” I plopped down and leaned back on one hand, then put the other to my forehead. “Here. Paint me like one of your French Strikers.” 

He laughed, and I looked back over to see him watching me. Inari’s eyes were always the first thing I noticed about him. They were a very, very dark amber that could pass for black at a distance, but were unmistakably red when close. Under the playful smiles and compulsive flirting, there was a core of hot fire in those dark eyes, an uncommon intensity I had noticed the day we’d first shaken hands and he’d made a joke about not putting girls in cuffs without a safeword. Inari and I had first met while I was still in jail. It had been a weird month.

Inari was a letch. I was sure some women would have struggled with him, and probably a few men, too… but with me, the flirting was not one-sided. Inari was one of the most gorgeous men I’d ever met, the kind of guy who could have become a J-Rock idol or movie star. He was tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, toned in all the right places. His glossy black hair was short and neat, with a razor-straight side part. He looked good enough to eat in almost anything. Tonight, it was black fatigue pants tucked into boots, a navy tank top that bared his tattooed arms, a black ski cap with the Steelheads logo – a Sahalish-style jumping trout – and sniper gloves. The huge rifle that went with the gloves hung on a hook near the back of the van. Inari was pretty AND functional.

“Be straight with me, and tell me about this Class-A,” I asked, pulling my gear bag across.

He took the rifle down off the rack and almost absent-mindedly began the final check. “Sorry to tell you, but I’m physically incapable of being straight.”

I experienced a brief moment of true disappointment. “You’re gay? Does that mean I’m out of the running, then?”

“Gay? Pfft, no. I’ll give you a clue. It starts with B and ends in ‘sexual’.” Inari’s dark amber eyes glittered with good humor as the Troutmobile’s sirens wailed over our head.

I sighed. “You’re Blaser R93 Tactical-sexual, aren’t you?”

Inari rubbed his cheek on the barrel of his rifle, like a cat. “She’s my bolt-action supermodel, baby. I can’t help myself.”

I barked a short, harsh laugh. “Come on though, seriously. People died.”

“I know. I was just trying to lighten the mood a bit.” Inari sat back, the Blaser resting in his lap. “Police were called at 2340 hours from the south penthouse of the Pacific Heights Apartment complex on Pine and 9th. Witnesses heard screams and gunshots from the penthouse, and claimed to hear roaring, which was described as being – and I quote –  ‘like T-rex sounds from Jurassic Park’.”

“Wonderful.”

“Right? I love that movie. Anyway, a security guard who responded to the scene was torn into six separate pieces in the hallway. About five minutes after that, we got calls saying something huge was flying around the building. Then it tore a chunk off the penthouse annex at the top of the skyscraper.”

“It tore the fucking annex off?” I gaped at him. “How big is this thing?”

Inari beamed. “About the size of a small plane. That’s what the norms thought it was, at first: that a plane had crashed into the building. Problem is, it’s still flying around it. The media is there. Cellphones are out. SWAT is there. That’s how we know it’s the real deal, because it’s making such a scene that normal people are starting to notice. Oh - and it turns out this whatever-it-is is also bulletproof.”

“Fuck.” I wracked my brains for monsters fitting the dimensions of the one he was describing. There weren’t many. “Do we have a description?”

“Big head and wings, mistakable for a Cessna or similarly sized plane. Really strong. It smashed a bunch of tempered glass and concrete, tore this apartment open, and put down two SWAT officers. They fired on it and got creamed by ricochet.”

While he talked, I got ready. Some monster hunters kept their gear in fancy cases or kit bags. Military stuff was popular. The Packer Triplets in Utah liked to flash a lot of German special forces gear in their YouTube video reviews. My gear was fairly basic by comparison, and always neatly packed into the same non-descript gray duffel bag I’d been using for nearly twenty years. “I need to change. Turn around and keep talking. And keep your eyes off my ass.”

Inari flashed me a charming, crooked smile. “But I’m an ass expert. A connoisseur. I could give you detailed, immaculate professional feedback.” 

I stood and turned, mostly so he wouldn’t see me blush. “I mean it.”

“Fiiiiine.” Inari shuffled around, and gallantly stared at the back of the truck.

When I was pretty sure he wasn’t looking, I shucked my boozy clothes and changed into clean kit. Well-worn kevlar-lined jeans, a tight sports bra to contain what little boobage I had, a faded tank top over that. Stab-proof and claw-proof chainmail went on over everything, hiding the scarred runes engraved in the flesh of my arms and chest. Our manager wanted me to wear a Steelheads team cap like Inari’s, but she could sit and spin. I wasn’t going to be Liz the Fish Valkyrie. “Any other details?”

“Descriptions have been conflicting, but that’s normal for cryptids. The police say it looks like a giant bat.”

“Pretty much every norm’s description of anything over eight feet long with wings.”

“Yeah,” Inari said, still facing away. “They said it has a long face or a beak. Red coloring on the wings. And it’s glowing.”

I shrugged my jacket back on over my clothes. The old motorcycle jacket was my classic monster-slaying wear. It wore the scars that could have been on my skin, the buffalo leather reinforced with titanium shoulder guards and metal plates in the forearms, back and chest. Like all my gear, it was enchanted for an extra level of protection. There was a circle of runes on the back around a Norse Ægishjálmr– a protective symbol also known as ‘The Helm of Awe’.

I pushed through the vodka haze and mulled on the description as I pulled out a pair of silver-edged short swords from the bag.

The swords were not traditional Viking swords. Each blade about fifteen inches long, curved, and worn across the chest with their hilts pointing down, ready for cross draw. The rune of Tyr, god of justice, burned in each pommel. Like all Viking weapons, mine were named. The sword I carried in my left hand was Fótbítr, ‘Leg-Biter’, a sword enchanted to strike true and inflict hemorrhaging wounds. The one I carried in my right was Thögn, ‘Silence’. Of the pair, she was the scarier one.

I thumbed the blades, giving them a little taste of blood to activate the runes engraved along their lengths. “There’s only a few things that big. Dragons and dragonkin... a juvenile thunderbird, maybe. Batsquatch are nowhere near that size. Neither are scíathdub.”

“Scíathdub? That’s one I don’t know.”

“Irish monster,” I replied, belting up the jacket. “Also known as nightgaunts or nightfliers. They break into people’s houses and kidnap them to their torture dens, inflicting permanent nightmares. H.P. Lovecraft is the most famous case.”

“Now I know why Mom hired you.”

“She didn’t hire me. She indentured me, because she’s a controlling bitch and I wouldn’t work for her otherwise.” 

“That’s kind of her style, yeah.”

I fastened my collar, then sat down with a sigh. “Okay. You can turn around.”

He turned as I did, and he cocked his head as I took out a compact mirror and a small palette of makeup: dark and metallic powders, white mascara, and bright eyeshadows that popped against my dark skin. 

“Are Valkyries really fearless?” He asked.

“I’m drunk as hell. Same thing.” I quickly touched up my foundation, then smeared a straight line of dark silver eyeshadow across my eyes and the bridge of my nose.

Inari watched on, bemused. “You know Jack would have a stroke if he knew you were putting on makeup instead of reading up on monsters, right?”

“Reading up on monsters is his job.”

“Yeah, but you’re the new guy. You’re on the freeze.”

I smiled back. Sweetly. “You know what? Until he’s the one leaping off tall buildings to fight a Cessna-sized monster with nothing but a pair of swords, Jack can blow me.”

Chapter Two

Pacific Heights was a 40-story apartment tower downtown, a slim glass skyscraper surrounded by hotels and construction sites. It was a bad place for a monster attack.

The stately Paramount Theater was next door; a busy modern transit station across the street. The Washington State Convention Center was right behind it. Fire trucks, cars and Seattle Police Department SUVs were wrapped around the block. All roads in were closed, but news crews were baying against the impassive yellow wooden barriers and riot police blocking off Pine Street.

“Is Ruth coming to this goat rodeo?” I looked at the scene in astonishment, shivering as the air warped and snapped around us. Magic hung like a heavy gas over the street. Street lights and equipment were failing. I heard an EMT cursing as she tried and failed to make her iPad work.

“Mom's inside. She's erecting wards inside the building,” Inari said. “Once she’s done, things will calm down."

'Mom' was Ruth Nakamura - the Area Master of Washington state, and one of the most powerful sorceresses in the Pacific Northwest. She controlled and channeled something to the tune of a hundred Specters, nearly all of them from Japan and other parts of East Asia. She was also the owner and manager of the Steelheads. "How long will she take?"

Inari shrugged. "Who knows? She’s retrofitting a new skyscraper with magic it wasn't built to handle, to conceal a monster attack that's drawn out every news station, paranoid schizophrenic, and cryptid hunter in the Seattle metro area.”

“Dammit.” I ground my teeth and looked up along the building at the dark roiling sky above. From our position on Pine Avenue, we could see anything, but we could feel it - and hear it. A rolling boom, not unlike thunder, pealed out four hundred feet above our heads. "Where are the Spook Squad and Agent Whats-his-face? Don’t they want to supervise this shit?"

“FBI are held up. There was a vampire attack in Bothell. Agent Conway gave us the go-ahead,” Jack rumbled as he limped up behind us. His artificial leg clicked with every step, but didn't stop him from nimbly pulling himself up into the back of the van.

Inari rolled his eyes. “That’s big of him.”

“Isn’t it?” With one ear pressed against his chattering headset, Jack selected a bag of walkie-talkies off a hook and passed them out. They were military relics from the 80s that had to be worn in a little sling pack, but the telephone-style mic had been replaced with earpieces and microphones. We had to use legacy equipment when magical energy was this intense. Newer, more delicate electronics just didn't hold up the way these old radio1s did. “SWAT is still upstairs monitoring the situation.  They say the A-Class is attacking a single area of the penthouse balcony.”

“I hate these things,” I said, strapping it on. “This monster is airborne. I really don’t need to be weighted down.”

“Too bad.” Jack replied. “We have to use the old clunkers today. Do you feel the resonance coming off that son-of-a-bitch? It’d fry any of our other handsets.”

Detecting magical resonance had literally been my first ability as a Powered, so I wasn't about to dignify Captain Mansplain here with an answer. Instead, I hopped back out and leaned against the side of the truck. 

“Blása.”  When I whispered the command, the matching Bindrune on my arm flared with cold energy. I closed my eyes, and let the wind wrap around my body and draw me out of my head.

All three of us - Striker, Lancer and Comms – had supernatural ability of some kind or another. Jack’s near-death experience, the one that had cost him his leg, had made him a Sensitive: someone who could sense the presence of magic and see through the illusory fog that veiled supernatural creatures from normal sight. Before the New Millennium, about two percent of people had been Sensitives. That number was on the rise, with Jack among their number.

Inari and I were Powered. He was a Gifted, who had been born with magical abilities inherited through the blood from his mother, Ruth. He had gone on to master several Specters – the spirits of the monsters he had Hunted since childhood. But only several. Inari had topped off at seven. I had been hunting for only twelve years, and I had mastered thirty-eight. I hadn’t found my limit yet. All I knew was that I wasn’t even close to reaching it. 

I drowned myself in the spell, and my awareness slipped into the gusts of air that slithered over concrete and asphalt, broken glass, toppled planes and ruined railings. I felt the shape of the monster as the wind tore over its wings, then through them as the creature vanished, only to reappear again. Every time it blinked in and out, I got a better picture of it. Narrow, almost shrunken body; a long thin neck, an oversized, beaked head. No tail. It wasn't a dragon. It was something far, far more ancient. And it wasn’t made of flesh and blood. It was made of congealed ectoplasm that mimicked flesh. A poltergeist.

"It's a dinosaur." I spoke aloud from far away, barely even feeling my body now.

"What?" Jack's voice sounded like it was echoing up from the bottom of a well. "What do you mean, a dinosaur?"

"An actual, literal dinosaur. Some kind of overgrown pterodactyl," I replied. "Inari, what ammo did you load with?"

"Silver, armor piercing." Inari's voice was much softer, like a warm silk scarf.

"Can you switch to cold iron rounds?"

“Iron?”

"Yeah. This thing is incorporeal. Sort of. It’s like… a ghost, maybe a really powerful poltergeist." I trailed off as the wind drew my awareness back to the top of the building, tugging at my intuition as well as my perception. I followed the blasts of air as they howled across the palatial deck of the penthouse, plucking at tumbled furniture and bodies. Like icy fingers, the wind blew around the air-conditioning towers that were the focus of the monster’s attention, caressing a small, trembling figure huddled underneath the edge of the steel shell.

A child. A girl.

I was so surprised that I jerked, and the magic unraveled. My awareness ricocheted back into my body so hard that I bounced against the truck and stumbled. Someone caught my arm. Inari. 

"Oh no." I whispered. The chill of the wind had spread into my blood, and my voice was scratchy. "I just figured out why this thing is still hanging around. There's a kid up there. It’s attacking her."

“What?” Jack’s head turned sharply. “SWAT did a flyby. They didn’t see anything.”

“She’s hiding and probably hypothermic.” Any humor I might have had about the situation evaporated. “This isn’t just a Hunt anymore. This is an extraction. What’s the plan?”

“We’re just waiting on the pilot for the helicopter over there.” Jack swallowed his disdain for me. He jerked his head toward the building across the road, where a sleek black SPD helicopter idled. “The first one got zinged by ricochet when SWAT tried to shoot this thing with regular 7.62 NATO rounds. We’re going up to do support and try and bring this, uh, dinosaur down onto the roof so you can go toe to toe with it. Ruth is in the foyer, setting up wards. She already has the roof access key.”

“Awesome.” I rolled my shoulders. “I’m going to catch up with her. Buzz me when you’re airborne.”

“Sure. Try not to puke on the way up.” Jack grimaced, and turned to his radio dashboard. “We’ll collect your body once the monster’s done.”

My temper flared. I dropped my voice to a dangerous hiss. “Are you seriously trying to undermine me right before a Hunt? When a life is at stake?”

Jack shot me a frosty side-eye, teeth clenched down on the end of his cig. “I think we’re going to have to rescue two little girls instead of one.” 

Okay. There was a lot of shit I was willing to take from Jack, but this wasn’t it. I gave him my sweetest smile. “How long have you been in the Steelheads?”

“Five years.”

“And how long was your brother the Striker for this team?”

Jack’s blue eyes grew colder. “Ten years, and he never-”

“I’ve hunted by myself for twelve, and not only am I alive, I’ve still got both legs.”

There was a pregnant pause. Then Inari winced. “Yikes.”

Jack and I were still locked in an intense, fevered staring match when his radio chirped. He broke contact to answer, and when he turned back, his eyes were like blank panes of mirrored glass. “The pilot’s here.”

“Oh, good. Just in time.” Inari chuckled a small, uncomfortable laugh. “See you on the other side, Liz. Break a leg.”

“You too. Good hunting.” I resisted the urge to flip Jack the finger, turned, and stalked for the foyer at a quick walk.