Coven Ep. 4

The sunlight streaming through the blue-tinted glass woke me like a blade. It wasn’t the warm, forgiving dawn of some old life; it was a clinical, thin light that made the dust in the air look like floating ash. I tasted iron and sleep in my mouth. For a moment I let myself believe the med bay padded me with safety, that Amy's office would be quiet and sensible and full of maps and logic.

It wasn’t.

The corridor outside Amy’s suite smelled of burnt wiring and sanitizing vapor. There were two Black Hearts posted at attention, motionless in a way that made me suspect circuitry more than discipline. They didn't step aside until Amy herself opened the door.

"Good," she said, as if she’d been waiting for me to arrive mid-breath. "You look better."

"I still feel like someone hit me with a grav sled," I said. The joke crawled out because otherwise my jaw would tighten into a lock.

Amy folded her hands behind her back and walked me into a room dominated by one long table. Holographic topography hummed in the center, a three-dimensional model of a city I'd grown up in and learned to hate: the ruins of Los Angeles laid out like a broken circuit board. The hologram showed the Xcult mountaintop congregations—white, aloof spires—hovering over the jagged teeth of the ground-level districts. Small red markers pulsed among the rubble.

"You were unconscious for forty-eight hours," Amy said. "Your vitals were… interesting. There are traces of arc-energy in your cortical reading."

"Isn't there always?" I asked. My voice sounded small in that room. "What do you want me to do, Amy?"

She sat at the head of the table and gestured for me to take the chair across from her. "Officially?" she said. "Recover. Debrief. Rest. Unofficially—" She tapped the holograph until one of the red markers popped into focus. The model zoomed in to a block of collapsed freestanding buildings, an area our reconnaissance called the Ferryman Quarter. "You owe me answers about your mother."

I looked at the model. The Ferryman Quarter had once been a shipping yard. It was now a maze of metal ribs and hidden hollows, one of the places covens liked to bury their rites. "She's been taken to a containment facility," I said. "They have her—well, they had her."

Amy's smile thinned. "We still have her. She's in a secure node under Cathedral Tower Seven. You're to remain my liaison to the BHL. For now, you'll do light duty. Interview witnesses. Sit in on interrogations. Be my eyes in the field."

"You're keeping me close to watch me? Or to use me?" I asked, because the question needed to be framed.

"Both," she answered. She had the honesty of a woman used to counting casualties—she didn't sugarcoat motive. "There are too many variables, Captain. Your blood connection to Monique is one. Your performance in the field is another. Third: there's a pattern emerging across the city. Night sigils. A spike in magickal flux. Either the covens are organizing for war or someone is lighting fires under their feet."

I wanted to ask whether that someone could be my mother. I wanted to ask whether Monique had planned this, allowed herself to be captured to seed something larger. I didn't. Instead I watched Amy's face for the tell she always betrayed: the braid at her temple, the way she flexed her fingers when she was about to ask something she hoped I would refuse.

"You're going to do more than idle interviews," she said. "Tonight, a column of Black Hearts will move into the Ferryman Quarter. You will join them. You'll be my field eyes. If the coven attempts extraction—you stop it. If the coven attempts communication—you record it. If your mother attempts to contact you and speaks anything that indicates the Science Priests want her alive for reasons other than study—you bring that to me first."

She said the last three words like handing over a poison ring.

I nodded, because nodding cost less than argument. "I understand."

As I left her office, a small Black Heart file was attached to my wristband—drones, personnel manifests, schematic of the containment node. I studied the image of the suspension unit where they'd threaten to put my mother's head on display and felt a rusted ache in my chest. That was when the message came through my personal channel: three short pulses I recognized as the old Foxbind signature—Aunt Gene.

The file attached was a single word and an old image: RUNES — a charcoal sketch of a symbol I knew from nightmares, a trilune with a bloodline knot at its center. The message line below it held three characters: —G.

I blinked until the afterimage resolved. Aunt Gene hadn't sent anything in seven years. Her name had been scrubbed from most registries after she disappeared, turned into a cautionary tale for apprentices who asked too many dangerous questions. If it really was from her, that meant she was alive.

If Aunt Gene was alive, then the stories I remembered of that quiet woman ripping me out of the coven's claws weren't lies. If she was alive, there were doors I didn't know about, tunnels between the Black Hearts and the old witches that predated the Science Priests.

The message could also be a trap. It could be a record planted by my mother to elicit a reaction. It could be a corrupted feed from the coven's still-beating network. There were too many possibilities and all of them bit.

I deleted the message after ten heartbeats. I kept the memory of the image.

****

We moved at dusk. The Ferryman Quarter's skeletons took on fluid live-ness as the sun bled out. Our approach ships skimmed low under banshee-quiet, powered by scavenged coils and ducted fans the priests called whisper drives. The Black Heart unit with me was half shadow, half human: armored in matte black plates, optic sockets alive with circuitry. They were strangers, brothers and sisters who watched me with the same professional curiosity with which the rest of the world studied anomalies.

"Captain Sloan," said Lieutenant Maro, an ex-scrapyard tech turned tactical officer. "Watch your perimeters. Thermal spiking has been odd."

I checked my gear. My rifle had been etched with runic suppressors—tech-stable sigils designed to dampen arc-energy. I carried a sidearm and a sealed vial that could, theoretically, poison a vampire's bloodstream. The vial felt like a splinter in my pocket.

We hit ground and the quarter swallowed us. Crates, twisted girders, and the husks of vehicles formed a ruined maze. Holographic markers appeared on our ocular overlays marking heat signatures and suspected coven dens. The night hummed with insect noise. There were other sounds too: a far-off hiss like someone running a finger over a glass shelf, and the echo of a song in a language my bones remembered before I could place it.

We found the sigil first. It was painted on a concrete pillar in a violet that seemed to sink the light around it, the broken trilune Aunt Gene had sent. That same rune was carved into the corner of a rusted shipping crate. The carvings pulsed with the faint green of living blood.

"Failed runestones," I muttered. My skin went cold. "Someone's been binding leftovers."

Maro crouched and ran a gloved hand over the rune. "This isn't a known pattern," he said into the comm. "It returns null on local caches."

"Means a third party is involved," I said. "Or old magick."

We moved deeper. The air tasted of copper and rot. Candle smoke—old, alkaloid-rich smoke—drifted from a collapsed storefront where laundry once hung in rows. A figure watched us from the jagged remains of an Armani billboard, wrapped in long skirts and weaving a web of shadow with her hands.

She looked like someone who'd decided to wear the night. When she stepped down, the Black Hearts trained on her. "Hold," I said, because I didn't trust the reflex to shoot on sight.

She smiled with too many teeth. "Captain Sloan," she crooned. "What a pleasant surprise. We didn't expect the Science Priesthood to come smelling tonight."

"Name," I said.

"Call me Lenore," she said. "I used to be Library. Now I'm older."

I didn't trust the smile. Lenore, older—names that masked. "What is your business?"

"To remind you," she said, moving like a dancer between broken carriages, "that blood ties are complicated things. Monique made a choice. The coven made a choice. So did you."

"Step back," Maro said.

Lenore laughed. "You always choose your masters, Captain."

She'd spoken the wrong syllable. A tremor went through my team, physical and electrical. In one motion, Lenore struck at Maro. He collapsed like a rag, his suit's plating flaring and then going dark. Something had hacked his implant. The Black Hearts reacted—guns up, energy shields flickering—but the world changed in that second and not in our favor.

Screams echoed. Shadows peeled out from between the hulks—people, and not people. Some were thin as knives with pale skin that drank the light. Others were mounded, inhuman shapes lashing out with hands that looked like elongated tools. They were magick and mutation in the same breath. They struck with the cruelty of pragmatic animals: quick, efficient, and without pretense. In the chaos, I saw a flash of red hair like a signal flare—my mother—moving in the center of it like a general. (How was that possible if she was in the tower? Could she bi-locate now? That was an elite power. Who did she kill to get it?)

"Take cover!" I yelled, but my voice felt swallowed.

I should have been better prepared. We trained for vampires, for supernatural flurries. We did not train for a synchronized, aug-hacked ambush with corrupted implants and ritual binding—an attack that felt constructed not just of aggression but of theater. Monique's coven moved like an organism. They knew our formations. They cut comm lines with a practiced hand.

I felt an old reflex—the coven’s old training; hands that knew bloodwork with a lover's intimacy. My sidearm sang. I fired. The rounds fizzed through the night and scattered dust. A figure spun and collapsed. The light caught a brand on their shoulder: the Sanguinarian mark.

My chest went thin with shame and hate. My hand shook. I wanted to scream at the world to stop, to pull my mother into a net and tear out the strings.

Then someone took the opportunity to strike from behind.

I woke up on my back with something wet under my cheek. Someone's laughter ran low and satisfied. The med drones kicked in, a soft whoosh of cooling gel and antiseptic. I tasted metal again and found Lieutenant Maro scowling down at me.

"We lost a platoon," he said. "We also discovered the coven has access to neuro-hacks. Someone is feeding them corrupted implant patches."

"A tech route," I said. "Not all of them are pure vampiric. They’re hybridizing with Third Age hacks."

Maro's eyes narrowed. "Your mother may have been bait," he said. "Or testing."

"Both," I said. The answer lodged in my throat like a shard. "She had to give them something. She used the tactic of release."

"Why would she do that?"

"Because she always has a plan," I said.

We pulled back to the perimeter, leaving the Ferryman Quarter smoking and lifeless. The coven had taken casualties, but they'd vanished into the night with wounds that would heal by dawn. My men had been taught to believe in clean outcomes. There were no clean outcomes anymore.

Back at command, Amy greeted us with an expression that was two parts satisfaction and two parts a woman who'd predicted a chess move and had to sacrifice a knight to test a queen.

"You engaged," she said. "What happened?"

I told her. I told her the hacked implants, the rune-saturated dens, the red hair that moved like a monarch. I left out some of the things—small things that felt like promises: the way Maro slumped with a glance that wasn't quite a look of defeat and the way a shadow at the edge of my sight took the shape of Aunt Gene's rune.

Amy listened without flinching. When I finished, she didn't speak for a moment. Then she folded her hands as she always did. "The convent did not take your mother by force," she said finally. "They have been testing cross-domain technologies—binding runic magick to third-age networking. Whoever taught them that could be an inside operator."

"An inside operator?" I repeated. It tasted like dagger.

"We have a suspect," Amy said. "There are rumors in the upper circles—several independent research pods with access to arcologies. I need you to find out which pod has ties to Monique. I suspect the Science Priests are involved deeper than we suspected."

"You're saying the Priests are teaching her?" I asked. "Why would they?"

Amy's thin smile made me think of cold knives. "Because not everything that walks in the halls of The Cathedral wants to be a priest."

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