Chapter 19: The Beginning

  Dr. Alina Park had done her best to keep people together when the world ended.

  She did it by seeing the same faces she’d seen in her small practice just down the road and realizing they would die if someone didn’t say, Come with me. Now.

  So when people started gathering at the warehouse distribution hub, when they began dragging pallets into place and chaining the gates shut, she brought her patients here. She brought the elderly who couldn’t run. The diabetic man who needed insulin but hadn’t had it in two days. The woman who kept coughing blood into a rag and insisting it was just stress. She brought the scared and the stubborn and the ones who were too shocked to make decisions for themselves.

  Hawthorne Warehouse had become a settlement in the ugliest, bare-minimum way possible. A wall. A yard. A gate. A handful of guns and blunt weapons. A few people who could still think when fear grabbed their throat.

  It was a pocket of breathing.

  And right now, it was minutes from collapse.

  Alina’s class was cleric.

  She still didn’t know how that made sense. She had been standing in her kitchen when the first prompt appeared. A flashing sign burned into the back of her eyes. She had accepted without really understanding what she was doing, because people were screaming outside and she didn’t have time to be philosophical.

  Now she had precisely one healing spell.

  Mend.

  It sounded simple. It wasn’t.

  Mana was tricky to use. Slippery. There wasn’t a lot of time to experiment with it, given the world had decided to release horrors upon them. And unlike everything she’d learned in medical school about the clean, measurable logic of physiology, mana didn’t always behave the same way twice. Some days she could pull a solid thread of it and hold it steady. Other days it scattered the moment she reached for it, leaving her exhausted and shaking.

  She was learning. But learning was slow, and the monsters were not.

  No matter how many they killed, they kept coming.

  Of course, it didn’t help that she hated violence.

  She hated it in a visceral way. The sound of flesh tearing. The scream people made when they realized something inside them had gone wrong and wasn’t going to be fixed. The way blood looked on concrete. The way it dried.

  She wanted to help. Wanted to heal.

  She kept thinking about Mr. Darrow. Seventy-one years old, diabetic, stubborn as rusted iron. He'd sat in her exam room two weeks before the world ended and argued with her about his diet for twenty minutes, then handed her a jar of his wife's pickles as a thank-you. He was in the storage container now with the children. She didn't know if he had enough insulin to last the week.

  Except the monsters weren’t interested in that. No, they wanted to kill her, eat her, and worse.

  She shuddered at the images that played through her mind. The horror of what had happened around her in the first hours after the Convergence, when the streets had filled with panic and sirens and then the sirens had stopped. The horror of what continued to happen now, outside the walls, where people screamed until they didn’t.

  She was on the wall, crouched behind a stack of sandbags someone had scavenged from an old construction site. Her fingers were numb with cold and overuse. Her throat was raw from shouting warnings and prayers and names.

  Below her, at the gate, the line was fraying.

  A man with a shotgun kept firing until his weapon clicked empty, then he fumbled for shells with shaking hands. A teenager with a baseball bat was swinging like his life depended on it, because it did. A woman with a hatchet had blood on her face and didn’t seem to notice. Every time a monster got too close, they surged forward together, and every time they surged, Alina could see the weariness creeping deeper into their bodies.

  She raised a hand, took a breath, and reached for mana.

  It was there, a stream she was trying to direct. Trying to do so was beyond hard, but she gritted her teeth, able to grab onto some of it, just a trickle, and shape it into a single act of mercy.

  Mend.

  A faint glow touched a fighter’s shoulder where claws had raked him. His grimace eased a fraction, she’d taken the edge off. Pain mattered. Pain stole focus. Focus got you killed.

  She swallowed and reached again.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Her mind flicked, as it always did, to the children.

  They were in a storage container that had turned into a safe room of a kind. Their best approximation of one. Someone had cleared it out, set up blankets, put boxes along the sides as barriers. Several women stayed there with them. A few older men too. One fighter they could spare, just in case.

  Just in case the gate broke.

  Alina tightened her grip on the sandbag edge until her fingers hurt.

  She cast Mend again.

  A man at the gate had his forearm split open. It knitted enough for him to keep holding his crowbar. He mouthed thank you without looking up, eyes fixed on the monsters.

  Then the yard flashed.

  Reality tore itself open.

  Alina’s stomach dropped.

  The air warped, the light bent, and for one terrible second her brain screamed this is wrong.

  What new manner of horror was this?

  Only, a man stepped out of the rift.

  He didn’t look like anything special. That was the strangest part.

  He wore a dark jacket, faded blue jeans, and brown combat boots. Someone you might see at a gas station at midnight.

  His features were plain, slightly handsome in a rugged way, with stubble across his jaw. His brown hair was almost a mane now, long enough to brush his ears. His eyes were a soft brown.

  He looked like a tired delivery guy who’d wandered into the wrong parking lot.

  Except in his right hand he held a staff that Alina swore was carved from living shadow. The end of it looped into a perfect halo, bright white light playing in the center. The light wasn’t harsh. It was steady. A small sun trapped in a ring.

  Alina saw the man frown slightly as he looked around him.

  She literally saw his eyes processing the horrific shapes, his brain doing the same thing hers did. Trying to make sense of the impossible by shoving it into old categories.

  And then a horned creature noticed him and sprinted.

  Alina’s voice ripped out of her before she could stop it. “Move! Get to the gate!”

  He looked up at her.

  Then his attention returned to the monster, and something inside the air changed.

  A calm settled over him.

  He muttered a word, and Alina felt a tug in the air, as if reality were bending an ear to listen.

  “Ashen Aegis.”

  The space around him tightened. Invisible. Simple. A boundary that said no.

  The monster hit it and bounced.

  Then the man gestured, and dark light lanced out, cutting clean.

  The monster turned to ash.

  Alina stared.

  A black halo had appeared over the man’s head. It hung there in a way her eyes struggled to focus on. The more she looked, the more she felt a pressure behind her eyes.

  For a second, Alina found herself wondering if there really were gods in the world.

  Then he started killing monster.

  He just walked forward into the yard, as if he had decided it belonged to him.

  A creature with a crude cleaver rushed him. He spoke again.

  The weapon fell from the creature’s hand as if it had forgotten it was holding it.

  The humans at the gate shouted. Someone laughed. Someone cried. The line surged.

  Wings of shadow appeared on his back, or she thought that was what she saw. They were subtle. The impression of wings made from the absence of light.

  Monsters crashed to the ground in unison. Knees hitting concrete. Claws splayed. Mouths snapping at nothing.

  He killed them.

  But he did so like he was taking out the trash. It was a chore. A necessary, ugly task.

  Alina saw the competence.

  Someone who walked into a nightmare and made it smaller.

  Then the bigger monster arrived.

  It landed from the top of a ruined building with a rolling, thunderous boom. The ground cracked beneath its weight, and dust lifted in a ring.

  It was a rhinoceros creature, blood red hide stretched over dense muscle. It wore dark green armor that looked forged and grown at the same time. Its eyes were open, raw and furious.

  It hefted an axe.

  Green light crawled over the edge. Something poisonous. The air hissed around it, and where the light dripped onto the concrete, the surface smoked.

  This was it. This was the thing that broke them. She’d seen elites before. Not many, thank God, but enough to know they weren’t just bigger monsters. They were smarter. Faster. They hit hard.

  The rhino threw the axe.

  It spun end over end, aimed straight for the man’s head.

  Except it couldn’t hit him.

  His lips moved. He spoke an edict, and Alina saw something impossible. The runes along the haft of the axe flickered, then vanished.

  The axe slowed in midair.

  It drifted then dropped and clanged against the concrete.

  The yard was dead silent for half a heartbeat.

  Then dark light cut through the air toward the elite.

  It hit its armor.

  A clean strike.

  That piece of armor turned dark, then brittle, then flaked away in ash.

  The elite roared, dropped to all fours, and bright red light gathered over its horn.

  It charged.

  Alina’s fear spiked so hard she tasted metal. It was too quick. Too heavy. It was going to gore him and there would be nothing left but blood and regret.

  But the man stood his ground.

  Those wings of shadow beat behind his back once more, subtle and terrible.

  Judgment descended.

  A hum flowed through the air. A quiet song, almost gentle.

  There was peace to that melody, and that peace scared her more than screaming.

  The light around the monster’s horn vanished as if it had never existed.

  Shadows pierced the rhino from angles that didn’t make sense. From beneath its feet. From the shadow under its own armor.

  The man's stance shifted. His left foot slid back on the concrete and his knuckles whitened around the staff.

  Parts of the rhino’s armor turned to ash.

  More shadows pierced its skin.

  The beast cried out, stumbling, momentum dying.

  Alina’s eyes found the man’s face.

  She caught his gaze for a single second.

  His irises were ringed with shadow, a faint black glow circling them.

  She shuddered.

  He wasn’t doing this because he liked it.

  He was doing it because it was that or die.

  The elite took one more step and then collapsed, the red hide dulling, the armor cracking, ash drifting off it in sheets. It tried to breathe. Tried to rise.

  The man lifted a hand and ended it.

  Black light. Clean. Final.

  The monster became a heap of ash and ruined armor.

  Silence descended.

  Alina stayed frozen on the wall, one hand still half-raised as if she could cast Mend and fix whatever this was.

  Below, the fighters at the gate stared at the man with the staff.

  For the first time since the Convergence, Alina felt something other than fear.

  Hope.

  She was already doing the math in her head, because that was what she did.

  If he left, they died.

  If he stayed, they might live.

  And if he stayed, someone would try to make him stay.

  Alina swallowed, finally lowering her hand.

  Her mend spell flickered out, forgotten.

  The man with the black halo stood in the yard, staff in his grip, looking at the mess.

  This was the beginning.