Shadow Ops: Control Point

He felt the bone fracture beneath the skin, and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. The Gahe’s flesh was sleek as satin, a layer of softness stretched over iron. Cold emanated from its flesh, burning him where it contacted, and traveling up the reverberation of his bones to numb him to the shoulder. He fell back, teeth chattering.

Britton’s eyes lit as a fire elemental darted across his path, but the Mountain God swept it away, gnashing its teeth with a sound like grinding metal. It leapt at him again.

Britton opened a gate between them as it snapped its jaws shut. The Mountain God cried out in horror, jerking back as Britton snapped the gate shut, but not before he severed one of thing’s horns, which vanished through the gate in a puff of black smoke. The creature stabbed forward with a clawed hand, overshooting Britton’s head and catching him with the crook of its elbow, sending him spinning. Britton’s head went numb from the impact, the cold spreading to his chest. He rolled over on his back just as the creature sprang after him, ignoring the bullets Fitzy poured into its side.

As its claws plunged toward him, Britton opened another gate, cutting off the arm at the shoulder, so that the black smoke of the wound, odorless, heavy, and unspeakably cold, covered him.

With a final shriek, the Mountain God turned and waved its good arm at the air behind it. The strange shimmering stopped, brushed over by the creature’s fingertips. Then it turned and bounded out of the circle so fast that it practically vanished, its cries suddenly trailing into the distance.

All around them, the Apache succumbed, dragged to the ground and strangled by their own dead ancestors or cooked beyond recognition by the legion of elementals surging from the bonfire. Fitzy stepped among the corpses, leading with his pistol, poking into each wickiup, looking for his quarry. “Spread out!” he shouted. “Don’t let anyone past you! Whisper those damned chickenshit bunnies back here and get a perimeter set up!”

But Britton didn’t move. He looked around the circle as the warmth slowly returned to his body, aghast at the field of corpses. There had been far more than fifty, closer to seventy, he guessed. The long hair had fooled his military-tuned mind. They weren’t mostly men at all.

There were women, at least a dozen girls. In a few places, Britton could see elderly couples who had clung to one another before one of Truelove’s zombies had covered them. The few fighting men had died grimacing, but they looked nothing like the monsters he’d watched summon a plague of scorpions against their own.

Did you think they’d all be men? he asked himself. Did you think they’d all be the snarling killers you’d seen in those videos? Get real.

A stab of pain brought his hand to his shoulder. His fingers came away wet from where a round had grazed him. In the rush of battle, he hadn’t felt it. As he recovered from the adrenaline, his broken arm began to throb with pain. He felt dizzy with revulsion as he looked back over the dead.

But horror competed with another emotion as Britton surveyed the carnage, and Fitzy emerged from a wickiup with Chatto, Suppressed and zip-cuffed.

Britton wrestled with this new emotion before finally giving in to it, blossoming as it did from having taken on a small army and a monster from the Source and emerging victorious.

Pride.

Chatto sat zip-cuffed in the chilly mud outside trailer B-6. Captain Day worked with two MPs, replacing the plastic with metal restraints before standing him up. Over his shoulder, two men in white lab coats were visible through one of Britton’s gates. They stood around the spot where the Mountain God had first appeared, taking samples of the air and shaking their heads over laptop computers.

Captain Day turned to Fitzy. “On behalf of the Department of the Interior, thanks. This is really going to help us peel the onion and get down to the root of this insurgency.”

“It’s my pleasure,” Fitzy said, smiling at the Coven. “I have to admit that even a stopped clock can be right twice a day.”

The rare compliment spread grins across all of their faces. Britton laughed, then felt instantly ashamed, recalling the faces of the dead.

“You laugh?” Chatto called to him, his voice old and careworn, as if sensing Britton’s conflict. “What have you done today? Killed men for the crime of wanting to be free? For using the talents given to them by the Creator?”

“Shut the hell up,” Day shouted, but Chatto ignored him, his eyes chips of flint as he glared at Britton.

“You’re a slave,” he said. “All you did tonight was cement your bonds. You will never know freedom. You think just because you can’t see your prison bars they’re not there? Pretty jail’s still a jail.”

Day backhanded the Apache into silence. The MPs threw him roughly forward and walked him into the trailer, leaving Day shaking his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “He won’t be laughing in a couple of hours, and the tribal council won’t be laughing when he rolls over on them.”

“That thing came from here, didn’t it?” Britton asked him, remembering the strange shimmering he’d seen behind the snarling black creature. “That’s the real reason we went after him. There’s some kind of link. That’s what you want him to tell you about.”

“Now it’s your turn to shut the hell up,” Fitzy growled. “You’ve got some scrapes on you. Much as it would amuse me to leave you here in agony, you are government property, and it’s my solemn duty to see you’re patched up. I’ll radio for a Physiomancer.”

But Britton wasn’t listening. He was thinking of men who were really just tools. He was thinking of pretty jails.

The Apache had tried to hurt Downer, but was that so different than Scylla’s reasoned murder? Or Swift’s senseless rage? The outpouring of anger from a powerless and desperate quarry? A mad revenge for the bodies of the women and children they knew they would soon be mourning? Were they so different from the Goblins, fighting for their land?

Selfer criminal or government tool. He had to find a better way. He looked at the pride and sense of belonging in the eyes of the rest of the Coven. He felt it himself.

But Scylla’s words kept returning to his mind. He would always belong to them. His magic would only be a tool for their purposes, for bringing people like these to their end. Fitzy’s words followed Scylla’s. You remember one thing, contractor. I am not your friend. I am not your comrade in arms. I am here to make you into a righteous engine of war. Nothing more, nothing less. You’re paid to be a weapon, not a hero. Remember that.

Dead Goblins, dead women and children. Britton had been the tool the army gripped to bring about their end.

He realized with a sudden twisting of his guts that maybe he hadn’t meant it when he had told Fitzy that he got it.

Maybe it was time to run again.

CHAPTER XXVIII: OPLAN

Physiomancy is frequently credited as a healing art. This reputation is deserved, as its primary application is the knitting of broken flesh. But most students of the arcane do not fully appreciate that Physiomancy is merely a neutral manipulation of live flesh. As readily as it can be used to knit, it can be used to tear. Such offensive Physiomancy is commonly known as “Rending” and is among those magical practices specifically prohibited by amendment to the Geneva Convention and the McGauer-Linden Act.

— Avery Whiting

Modern Arcana: Theory and Practice

The screams kept him awake all night — high and shrill, almost childlike. He knew they were Chatto’s.

Britton, who now had no trouble sleeping through the Goblin’s magical attacks or the screaming return fire of the automatic defenses, was haunted by the tortured cries of this one man. He rolled back and forth in his hooch,