Silence in the Flames (The Traitor's Shadow Book 1) Read online

  Silence in the Flames

  Ryan M. Talbot

  Copyright © 2017 Ryan M. Talbot

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art © 2017 by Noah Oman, used with permission.

  Noah Oman is the best friend a man could have. Other than the head distiller at Laphraoig.

  Bushmills® is owned by The Old Bushmills Distillery Co.. The author intends no challenge to any trademarks/copyrights.

  Laphroaig® is owned by D Johnston & Company (Laphroaig) Ltd. Even if you bastards sue me, I’ll still love you so much.

  Seriously, I’m broke and spend most of my money on your product, so you pretty much own me already. But, gentlemen, if this is slavery, sign my drunk ass up.

  The author does not condone debt slavery. Or slavery in general.

  Is it really slavery if it’s everything you want in life?

  I mean, seriously, I’ve got kids, and a man’s gotta provide. Maybe if I tattoo your logo on my forehead, we can settle out of court. I love you.

  It’s not adultery if it’s scotch.

  ISBN: 1541249372

  ISBN-13: 978-1541249370

  DEDICATION

  For Saoirse and Ailah, I love you always.

  For Koehl, as a book is the worst kind of mistress.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  3

  Chapter 2

  7

  Chapter 3

  14

  Chapter 4

  22

  Chapter 5

  30

  Chapter 6

  35

  Chapter 7

  39

  Chapter 8

  47

  Chapter 9

  49

  Chapter 10

  53

  Chapter 11

  56

  Chapter 12

  62

  Chapter 13

  65

  Chapter 14

  69

  Chapter 15

  73

  Chapter 16

  77

  Chapter 17

  80

  Chapter 18

  83

  Chapter 19

  89

  Chapter 20

  91

  Chapter 21

  94

  Chapter 22

  97

  Chapter 23

  101

  Chapter 24

  105

  Chapter 25

  108

  Chapter 26

  114

  Chapter 27

  116

  Chapter 28

  120

  Chapter 29

  125

  Chapter 30

  129

  Chapter 31

  132

  Chapter 32

  136

  Chapter 33

  140

  Chapter 34

  146

  Chapter 35

  150

  Chapter 36

  154

  Chapter 37

  160

  Chapter 38

  164

  Chapter 39

  168

  Chapter 40

  171

  Chapter 41

  175

  Chapter 42

  180

  Chapter 43

  183

  Chapter 44

  188

  Chapter 45

  193

  Chapter 46

  197

  Chapter 47

  202

  Chapter 48

  210

  Chapter 49

  213

  Chapter 50

  219

  Chapter 51

  222

  Chapter 52

  230

  Chapter 53

  237

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the combined efforts of Michael Rizzuto, Courtney Hafer, Courtney Bielawski, Abbi Johnston, Danial Porter, and Chantell Haider.

  Though they have not paid me a dime, let me state formally that Laphroaig 10-year is responsible for most of this novella. I am but a vehicle for the wisdom of the spirit.

  The Story So Far

  It’s best to start with The Eye of Eurydice despite this being a prequel to that work. However, should you choose to soldier on, let the following be a primer to the madness.

  God and the Devil are at war for the souls of humankind. Their war spans multiple realities, and millions of worlds. In the reality with which we find ourselves concerned, the Devil’s Emissary, Jason Beckett, concerns himself with two things, killing and drinking. He’s good at the former, but better at the latter. Beckett is gifted with his Master’s Investiture, marking him as the Emissary of the Lord of the Fallen and gifting him with a portion of the Devil’s infernal might.

  Rachel, the Angelic Emissary, works for the advancement of her god’s agenda and actively combats the Devil and his servants. She is a kind friend and merciless enemy.

  There are other gods, and other temples that have survived despite millennia of spiritual starvation and war with YHWH (or God, or Elohim, or Allah, etc). They are called the Broken Temples, for obvious reasons. These temples have agents on Earth as well. Corrigan Alefarn, the Disciple of Hekate is one such agent.

  All manner of Aetheric, or supernatural creatures inhabit the world, unseen by humankind. It is these creatures with which our story is principally concerned. This is a work of fiction.

  Nothing within these pages is real.

  1

  It’s not my fault. I drink. I do. Sue me. I’m dead and I work for the fucking Devil; a man’s gotta blow off steam somehow. That’s not really the issue, though. I’d woken up covered in blood, in a lower Manhattan alley. And this is where things got entirely fucked up. I’ve woken up like this a dozen times before. Usually, though, I’d been sent to remove some idiot that was close to turning traitor, or a Normal was getting too involved where she didn’t belong. I’m a hitman, that’s what I do. In a couple of hours, the blackout haze gives way to my investiture and my memory’s back.

  My investiture? I suppose I should back up, I’m missing the details here. Generally speaking, I’m a hitman, but in reality, I’m the Devil’s Emissary. I’m supposed to act as his agent on Earth, to carry his words to the faithful, vengeance to his enemies, and accords to his allies. Mostly, I just snuff people. I carry a fragment of the Devil’s essence in my soul. That grants me his authority, and my left hand bears the Mark of the Adversarial Beast as proof of my agency. The deep, etched lines, black against the pale skin of my palm let any and all know exactly who I am.

  Normally, I’d call for a ride back to Upper Manhattan and change in my apartment there. Something was different this time. I could feel it, like cold fingers clutching my neck. Something terrible had happened. I called for a ride and while I waited, I tried to figure out what. My mouth tasted clean, not like I’d been drinking and there was no headache. Granted, the superhuman healing granted by my investiture meant that I had to drink an inhuman amount of alcohol to have a hangover. But nothing short of a legendary drunk was going to put me out like this. I felt rested, and oddly…pure. That wasn’t right at all. I searched around the alley, there had to be something under all of the filth, the garbage, that might clue me in to what led up to this. I found nothing.

  I reached into my pocket to grab my cigarettes and found the tarot card. The Tower. It’d been placed in my pocket so when I pulled it out it would remain right side up. Disaster. Change. Ending. The Tower was the herald of destruction to come. The card, and its sinister meaning, wasn’t what captured my interest however. The card wasn�
�t some cheap dime-store divination gimmick. It was made of ivory and inlaid with tiny black bones that made up the Tower structure. The card felt preternaturally warm. I turned it over and on the reverse side, a perfect peacock feather had been etched and inlaid with precious stones. What interested me most, however, was the top of the feather. The “eye” in the feather seemed to move, to follow me. And more than that, it seemed to be weeping.

  As I stood there puzzling over it, my car arrived and I put it back in my pocket.

  “Took you long enough,” I muttered at the driver as I yanked the door open.

  “We have a serious problem, sir.”

  “Really?” I quickly got in the car. The drivers never spoke to me. Ever. Something had happened.

  As we drove, I sat flipping the card over and over in my hand. There was something I wasn’t seeing. I didn’t know much about the Tarot other than it was largely bullshit. Divination wasn’t really my thing. I was more of the explosion, fire, and pain guy. That was where I focused most of my attention. Not to brag too heavily, but I was the preeminent mortal sorcerer of my time. And a great many times before that. There were only two others that came close, Corrigan Alefarn—who cheated, and Liam Cassidy. Corrigan was the high priest of Hekate, the Witch Goddess. Cassidy was a thousand-year-old werewolf who forgot more in a day than Solomon knew in a lifetime. They were both friends of mine. Well, acquaintances really, at this point.

  Cassidy was away. I don’t know where. Satariel, the Angel Cassidy served, sent him off frequently – he rarely mentioned where, and I never asked. I assumed it was business to do with killing Umbrals. I silently cursed my luck. This was exactly the sort of thing that Cassidy lived for, and the very last kind of thing I wanted to deal with. I thrived on the simple smash-and-grab, the frantic second of absolute violence. I wasn’t really built for the proceed-with-patience sort of scenarios. Cassidy maintained that I needed to spend more time thinking and less time killing. Strange advice from a werewolf. I shrugged inwardly. This time, I didn’t appear to have a choice.

  If I was a thug and not a thinker, and Cassidy was philosopher, then Corrigan was truly a sorcerer. To say that Corrigan lived for sorcery was an understatement. As the high priest of Hekate, he worshiped the very essence of magic. His every waking moment was spent spreading the Art and giving praise to the Witch Goddess. If anyone in the city knew who’d done this, it was Corrigan. Unfortunately, he’d have to wait. I looked out the window and saw that we weren’t headed for Central Park, where the Grove of Hekate hid just beyond the Veil.

  “Where’re we headed,” I asked the driver as I rapped a knuckle on the glass partition.

  “The Barracks,” he answered. “Staten Island.”

  “What for?”

  “Magda Catherine,” he replied over his shoulder as he weaved through traffic.

  “If she’s at the Barracks,” I warned. “You can turn right the fuck around.”

  “She’s dead,” he clarified.

  “How?”

  “By all accounts, sir,” he looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You. They’re saying you killed her.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked

  “The Angelics that tried to blow up the Embassy thirty minutes ago, sir.”

  “Fuck,” I yanked my hair. “I wasn’t drunk,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “I never said you were, sir.” The driver returned to silence as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  None of this made sense. I hadn’t killed anyone. Well, in the last twenty-four hours, anyway. I’d be a pretty shitty hitman if I’d never popped my cherry. Though I didn’t say anything until we arrived at the Barracks, my mind didn’t rest long enough for me to get a word in edgewise.

  2

  The Barracks itself is pretty unimposing. It’s just a standard government building. Twenty-five stories, a steel and concrete parking garage below ground, and enough apartments to house the First Legion and one other Satanic agency, the IRS. You didn’t think the IRS really worked for the government, did you? They’re a front for the Satanic Church. That’s the real reason Churches are exempt from taxation, by the Accords, we can’t directly intervene in their affairs. Which is a damned shame, really. If we were allowed to tax them, we could strangle them financially and drive them into the poorhouses they no longer support. But no, they get a pass on this one. We own the financial system, sadly, the Higher Church owns the White House. The system is divided and on the verge of collapse, but that’s how both sides prefer to keep it. This way, the cold war between Heaven and Perdition is kept in check.

  That’s neither here nor there, what matters is that I was being blamed for a crime that I didn’t commit. And let’s not mince words here, it was a fucking crime. Magda was protected. She didn’t intervene in the War unless it landed on her doorstep. She understood the rules. She trained the kids that broke the rules, and worse than that, she trained Rachel, the Angelic Emissary. We had our own teams of strategists, our own military trainers. We were no less guilty. The thing is, this was a gross violation of the Accords. This flew in the face of the de facto truce that’d been in force for over centuries.

  I walked through the Spartan corridors of the Barracks, the silence was deafening. Soldiers stood at attention as I passed, stepping out of their rooms for a glimpse of the Emissary. It was embarrassing. I was ashamed. Here were these young, strong, passionate kids staring at me for guidance, and what was I? A depressed fucking drunk. My Irish took over, it turned off the humility and turned on the anger. I had better shit to do then impress a bunch of fucking punks.

  I took the elevator to the lowest sub-basement. Don’t kid yourself, it wasn’t symbolic that the morgue was on the bottom floor, it was functional. It’s cooler the lower you go. Which brings me to a quick point, by the way. Perdition isn’t hot. It’s like perpetual autumn, cold and slightly windy. There’re reasons for that, but they really don’t matter right now. The elevator played a steady stream of death metal. I grinned. There are definite benefits to being on my side of the war. We have the best tunes.

  “My Lord Emissary,” the sentry snapped a sharp salute.

  “Where is she?” I asked, returning the salute by force of habit.

  “I’ll take you, sir.” He lowered his hands to rest against the M-4 carbine slung across his chest.

  “Jason,” I pulled my hair out of my face, the deep crimson blood on my hands contrasting with the dark brown of my hair, reminding me that I really needed a shower. “My name’s Jason.”

  “Mine’s Simon,” he smiled. “Simon Erlandson. It’s an honor.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” I shook my head. “I’m not that big a deal.”

  Simon stopped at the door leading to the morgue. “Here you go, si—,” he corrected himself. “Jason.”

  “Thanks,” I nodded at him, trying for the life of me to find something to say. “Keep up the good work.”

  He nodded smartly, and stepped to the side of the door.

  I shoved the swinging door open and walked into the morgue. The morgue was pretty standard as morgues go. I mean, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Cold, white light, sterile green tiled floor, stainless steel tables and drawers full of corpses, and that’s about it. Magda lay on one of the stainless-steel tables. Her clothes had been cut away and cast aside. I stared at her. She didn’t seem so fearless now. She wasn’t so sure of herself or of her cause. She was dead. She was meat. And that’s what scared me most of all.

  Magda had Faith, with a capital “f”. She knew the truth of her god and held his light within the infinite well of her soul. She should’ve been at peace. She looked tortured. I realize that the woman had been crucified and by the looks of it, horribly beaten before that. But she was in YHWH’s Grace, she shouldn’t have looked that way. I ran my hands over my face. Something had gone horribly wrong here. Looking down at my hands, I hoped against all hope that I wasn’t the cause of this.

  “It is terrifying, is it not, my Lord Emiss
ary?” came a hard, feminine voice from behind me.

  “Erzebet,” I nodded without turning around. “I didn’t expect you here.”

  “My embassy has been bombed,” I heard her hands knotting together in displeasure. “I find myself homeless.”

  “How bad was the damage?” I asked as I turned.

  “The sally-port held, but the damage to the superstructure has yet to be determined. All Consulate staff have been relocated to safehouses across the city.”

  “Did you catch any of the pricks responsible?”

  “I hope that I’m not conversing with one presently.” She raised her slender gray eyebrow.

  “You can’t believe that I did this,” I snapped. “This isn’t my style.”

  “No,” she fixed her cold, dark eyes on me. “This took thought…and planning.”

  “Exactly.” I nodded, unwilling to allow myself to bristle at her insult. “Why use a cross when a hammer works just fucking fine.”

  “Someone certainly worked hard to convince the Angelics that you were responsible.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “But why?”

  “You cannot be so dense,” she glared at me.

  “You can go fuck yourself, lady.” I glared back at her.