CHAPTER 55: SENTRY

  GARLAND HEIGHTS—NOVEMBER 23th, 1992 | MORNING

  ?

  Two days.

  Leroy rubbed his face with a single hand and exhaled. With the way things were going, he wanted to pat himself on the back, hell, maybe even buy himself a golden star with the way he’d kicked into gear planning everything out. Everything so far was going as planned. He’d made the right calls, met the right people, and had done it all so far without slipping up or revealing some of the finer details to even the people closest to him. The raid felt almost foolproof. Training Cameron felt the opposite.

  Sure, he’d done well enough with the shooting drills—probably better than Leroy gave him credit for, but he couldn’t help but grimace at what he was staring at. Moira and Cameron levitated off the ground surrounded by black magic and black flames, tethered to each other and tethered to some place Leroy wouldn’t go with a gun pointed to his head.

  Two days was the upper limit of what he’d given Cameron, but he doubted that Moira would agree to keep him there for that long, or that it would even take him that long to get through the Rite of the Whispered Name. His underarbiter had proven to have a knack for getting things quickly, at least under the proper instruction. A few pointers worked wonders, and on Cameron they worked miracles.

  Leroy crossed his arms over his chest.

  He hadn’t prepared for the possibility that it would be that long, and his stomach was already growling.

  Worse, he couldn’t exactly leave them there unattended. Leroy stared down at his belly. He was a husky man, more muscle than fat, but he could do away with some of the fluff along his lower stomach. He didn’t know what to blame for that: old age or his dietary choices.

  Leroy paced over to an old rusted car adjacent to the ongoing ritual and leaned up against its hood, removing his P89 from his gun harness. He stared at it with a wry smile.

  “Gonna’ have to say goodbye to you pretty soon, old friend,” Leroy muttered.

  He never thought he’d see the day where he’d part with that old thing, but whatever was waiting for him in Esme’s shop would be much needed for what was to come.

  Tension lingered in his neck, his shoulders, and his jaw. Marcus Velvet was many things—and stupid wasn’t one of them. In killing Hughes, Leroy showed his hand, and that realization hit harder than any punch he’d eaten with his face in the last thirty years. The Hughes problem took a life of its own when Leroy took a moment to consider the alternatives.

  If he’d let him live and leave Brinehaven, he’d either lie to Marcus, or he’d say nothing and jump ship. In either instance, something would tip him off. Leroy slowly inhaled and exhaled. The silver lining was that the long gone—but not forgotten—Hughes wouldn’t be a problem during the raid, and that Leroy had at the very least learned that Marcus was likely developing his own countermeasures.

  Leroy slowly inhaled and stared at the ritual before him. All the more reason that Cameron went through with the Rite of the Whispered Name. With Moira as his anchor, Leroy would bet on the odds of him making it out of there with enough firepower to put any one of Marcus’s hired guns to shame.

  Leroy glanced towards the small two-story building connected to the entrance of the junkyard. He studied the yellow and flickering lights of the signage that read LIEBERMAN SCRAP & STACK and shifted his attention back to the ritual. Knowing Moira, she probably smoothly talked her way inside. Knowing Uncle Tony, he probably welcomed it. With a cursory glance, Leroy surveyed the piles of scrap and rusted cars that surrounded him, more out of boredom than anything else.

  The nearest phone was inside, and if he was meant to stand sentry, he couldn’t spare a moment to call anyone for any reason, and with the way he’d arranged things, the notion of calling in some company was out of the question. Esme had his LAR Grizzly to artifice, Janice was hard at work brewing God knew how many potions for the raid, Tania was on guard dog duty, and Holmes was likely up to his ears evidence and written statements from everyone involved in the Philterworks Incident.

  Leroy adjusted his checkered flat cap.

  He’d have to tough it out.

  ?

  A gunshot rang through the air.

  Leroy’s head turned in tandem with his body, and his hand snapped around the handle of his pistol. He pulled back the slide. Click.

  Uncle Tony.

  Leroy lurched off the wooden palette he’d been seated on, narrowing his eyes and studying the door to the office. No other gunshots followed, which only meant one thing—whoever was inside had killed him, and whoever had been holding the gun knew what they were doing. Anthony Lieberman was a nuisance of a man, but he wasn’t the kind of person whose activities demanded a swift and sudden death. He was collateral.

  A bullet grazed Leroy’s temple. Blood spewed out in a thin line onto his jacket, and his eyes widened.

  Dean Dresker had one eye closed in focus and one hand gripping the handle of his pistol.

  His dirty blonde hair was slicked back along his head, matched by patchy stubble that framed his squared jaw. Permanent stitches ran across one side of his face, and he wore the same kevlar vest and grayish-black workwear jacket that Leroy had seen him in before. And then there was that tattoo: a skull biting down on a sideways letter A right in the middle of his neck.

  Leroy fired back.

  But Dean was fast. Fast, gutsy, and willing to take a bullet if it meant getting closer to him, wearing the placid and earned calmness of a man who’d long since learned he had nothing to fear. He dove forward at a slight angle, only to brace into a full on slide. He’d averted a direct hit, but had a grazing blow along his face to match Leroy’s.

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  A low hum of power crackled into the air.

  The rings. Leroy remembered them from when he’d first met Dean. Five artificed rings, each different from one another, lay along Dean’s right hand. On his index wasn’t a ring of metal, but a well-preserved, mummified tongue that looked anything but human, covered in sectioned metal fixtures with runes.

  Smoke surged out from Dean’s nostrils and he pursed his lips. A flaming-hot ball of fire zipped out from his mouth—roughly the size of a baseball—and sizzled towards Leroy.

  Yaerzul’s brand erupted in a dim blue. Leroy focused the fog around his hand and caught the fire with a jagged, icy gauntlet. It melted on contact, but saved his hand from burning.

  With his opposite hand, Leroy whisked two fingers forward from the handle of his P89, calling upon the surrounding mist to pepper Dean with a litany of frozen shards. Dean swiveled up from the ground on a singular hand, pushing himself back, rapidly spitting out balls of flame to match each of the icicles. Only two of the dozen or so Leroy had hit him, none of which hit him directly.

  Cameron. Moira.

  Leroy gritted his teeth. Gun safety be damned, he needed to get rid of that thing if he was going to be using his abilities in full. He pocketed the P89 into the gun harness in his coat with a practiced deftness, freeing up both of his hands.

  He tossed both hands forward, clenched them into fists, pulled down and twisted. Behind him, wisps of fog coagulated into a dome around the two of them, securing them inside of a protective prison of cold. He had to hope that it would last. If Dean decided to target that, he’d need to expend more and more of the fog lingering in the junkyard to maintain that.

  “Who sent you?” Leroy asked.

  There was enough distance between them now, and he needed answers.

  A final dredge of smoke sizzled out from Dean’s nose, and the ring on his index finger stilled into dormancy. Be it out of stupidity or some strange level of respect, Dean pocketed his pistol along a utility harness on his thigh. “Starts with a B. Ends with an N.”

  Not Marcus.

  Bluestein Philterworks wanted retribution, and with the unsavory connections they already seemed to have with the Argent Group, Dean’s arrival didn’t come as a surprise. It wasn’t beyond Brinehaven’s titans of industry to go after arbiters—especially the ones that single-handedly cost them more money than Leroy would ever see in his life.

  Yaerzul’s brand continued to glow along Leroy’s neck. “Didn’t think the Argent Group strayed far from the Pines. You’re far from home, Dean.”

  “They don’t. This is my day off, and… well, me being here ain’t about the fucking money. You offed a lump sum of my guys, you know that?”

  “Your men were juiced up on ether without a single coherent damn thought,” Leroy retorted. “You’d have done the same.”

  “I would’ve,” Dean admitted, lowering himself to a squat and pressing a palm onto the ground, “but those boys are dead all the same, and if there’s one thing you arbiters never seem to get through your thick fucking skulls, it’s that you reap what you goddamn sow.”

  The ring along Dean’s middle finger—some sort of shrunken tentacle fitted into the size of a ring, with runes in the form of preserved scars—thumped with the musings of power. A darkness bubbled over the dirt, which melted and swirled into a puddle of ink. Ink splashed and out came a tendril, large enough and fast enough to wrap around Leroy and slam him into one of the nearby rusted cars.

  His ears rang and his back wailed in a sharp and bludgeoning pain, forcing out a deep and guttural groan from Leroy. His vision blurred, and with a winded gasp, he slipped forward off the hood of the rusted car, back pressed against its dated chassis.

  Dean reeled his head back, smoke sizzling from his nose. The finger on his index ring hummed.

  In spite of the pain, Leroy couldn’t help but smile that wry, shit-eating smile of his.

  A dim blue glow emerged around the remnant ink, and Leroy tossed up two fingers.

  Black ice erupted outward from it as a wave of spikes, traveling swiftly along the ground, forcing Dean to recalibrate. He bobbed and weaved as best he could, spitting out balls of fire to melt the black ice that got too close for comfort, still suffering notable lacerations along the sides of his torso.

  Leroy recalled Esme’s lecture on artificing, and her voice echoed out through her head in that same droning, matter-of-fact way of speaking.

  The Law of Congruity, which guides all artificery, states that the effects must be similar or approximate to the components.

  For Dean to be using these rings as he was, they had to be top of the line, artificed by someone who was well-versed in knowing exactly what was congruent for the intended outcome. How a man like Dean even got his hands on such a collection was beyond Leroy, but thus far, he’d proven himself to be the meanest mundy Leroy had ever encountered. Worse, there were three more rings with yet-to-be-revealed effects.

  With a groan, Leroy grabbed hold of the rusted hood to pull himself up. “How’d you find me?”

  Cinders spilled out from Dean’s nostrils. “Hah! Tracked you up until you met a friend of yours. With some convincing, he told me the rest.”

  Leroy’s eyes narrowed onto Dean’s knuckles. They were red, raw, and covered in the brown of dried blood.

  “And which friend was that?” Leroy asked.

  “He’s a big fan of the New York Yankees, and he looks a lot like the pudgy piece-of-shit uncle he told me all about,” Dean said. “Real lippy too. Couldn’t believe it when that greasy fuck thought he could buy me off, told me he’d give me his whole inventory instead of the answers I had to beat out of him. Almost honorable, ain’t it?”

  Leroy stared at the ground, his eyes shadowed by his checkered flat cap. His breath was slow, steady, and cold. When he looked up, he exhaled an air that crackled with frost. What remained of the mist in the junkyard curved and weaved and writhed, falling onto the ground like a heavy blanket. Ice crusted over the dirt and the ink and made a victim out of the surrounding piles of scrap.

  “Before you showed up, I set myself a schedule. Gave myself and the people behind me over there a limit of just two days,” Leroy raised two fingers, “to do what they needed to do. See, I know what I need to do, and you’re here because you know what you need to do.”

  Dean remained silent.

  “But now, Dean, you have a new goal,” Leroy said, raising a single finger. “And it isn’t to kill me.”

  “And what’s that?” Dean asked.

  Leroy tipped his cap. “To survive.”

  dun-dun-dun.

  Dean Dresker made his first appearance towards the tail end of the Philterworks sabotage, and showed up to deliver Leroy, Cameron, Janice, Tania, and Captain Holmes (plus Constable Heathcliff & Constable Briggs) from the Commonwealth Industrial Park back to Silver Falls.

  I made a post-author note last chapter about how I would need to increase the required number of reviews/ratings just to be sure that I could allow myself some more time to get those bonus chapters written prior to their release.

  On that note, remember: you guys are able to suggest characters to appear on the next Ritual poll. If you'd like to see any side stories from previously named characters, just let me know in the comments below!

  LEROY WATERS

  DEAN DRESKEr

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