Hair-Trigger Smile

HAIR-TRIGGER SMILE

HAIR-TRIGGER SMILE

Daniel James

Copyright © 2025 Daniel James

Bottled Lightning Press

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

Cover illustration by Thea Magerand

Interior design by Rachel Reiss

ISBN: 978-1-7384956-3-4 (ebook)

Contents

PROLOGUE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

The two weary figures came to a stop upon the bluff. Before them stretched a landscape as harrowing and unpleasant as the trudging march they had thus far endured. The living of the pair sighed with exhaustion, but his gaze remained steely. Konstantin Kozlov had seen enough wonders and horrors in his time here to drive lesser mortals to the brink of madness before pitching them right over the edge into a screaming abyss.

Kozlov was no lesser mortal, but his body ached under his filth-soaked necronaut armor, a protective suit designed with enough sigils to ward off any unwelcome souls seeking a free ride. He offered a small, sweat-dampened smirk to his companion, a pale specter bedecked in his own sigil-laden armor and bearskin, but his were immaterial with a ghostly cast. The spirit was the last Arkhitektor of the now destroyed Rising Path sect, and Kozlov’s one-time monk superior. Kozlov’s smile was returned to him tentatively from within the wild growth of the Arkhitektor’s beard.

Spreading out from the base of their bluff towards the edges of this latest infinity lay another kingdom as challenging as any infernal circle Dante ever faced. To Kozlov, these new, untamed lands were substantially more crazed than any the poet had imagined, like those of a mad child’s jumble of hellish toys and fates and traps. To their left—if standard directions had any meaning in this chaos—lay a titan’s grinning mouth set deep within the lambent cracks of the earth, a crescent moon of teeth, quivering and cackling like a loon, loud enough to rumble the ground and be heard from even up where Kozlov and the Arkhitektor stood. To their right was some type of medieval carnival, a torture town hosting a number of ritualistic sacrifices to the sky. And everywhere in between were sacked temples and churches and curious menaces too numerous to count.

Kozlov found it impossible to choose the safest route through this infernal maze. Each path would take them through a menagerie of adapted and crafty beasts hungry for refugee souls or the living flesh of foolhardy trespassers. Whatever this particular domain was, it was virgin territory to him, and he didn’t know anything about the monarch who ruled it or the types of souls they laid claim to.

As a former military man, a once thoughtful and critical mind for the KGB, Kozlov prized intelligence and situational awareness, but if there was one thing the latter years had taught the old dog, it was that he could learn new tricks. He had learned to survive the dangers of the last kingdom, that of the House of Fading Light, which had killed the mortal body of the Arkhitektor and many of Kozlov’s brethren, and he would now learn to survive the fresh dangers of this one.

Kozlov knew it was worse for the Arkhitektor. Though most Earthly dangers had stopped being a concern for him the moment he had died, lacking a physical form here in the afterlife of Erebus offered no protection. And being soul-bound to his old pupil Kozlov, a state that had kept him from being a wandering spirit fighting to survive in these violent and endless wilds, only meant he worried about Kozlov’s flesh and bone rather than his own. No, they were both in the wilds here, and living flesh and intangible spirit alike were fair game in this sadistic jungle.

‘Straight as the crow flies?’ Kozlov asked his companion.

‘We’re familiar enough with these blighted lands to know that safety is no guarantee,’ the Arkhitektor replied.

Waiting at the very edge of this ludicrous tableau was a fortress of suitably deranged function and design. The details were too difficult to accurately discern from this vast distance, but Kozlov’s keen eyesight noted its appropriately haphazard geometry. ‘That looks like some form of keep,’ Kozlov said. ‘The best lead we’ve had in a while.’

They had been wandering these violent lands in search of hope. To them, and the now-eradicated Rising Path sect, hope was the Firmament Needle. A mythical item from the slain race of divine protectors, crafted to stitch a brand new paradise from the ashes of the old; those ashes were long cold and scattered now, leaving only these barbaric kingdoms ruled by the remaining Houses of the Order of Terminus. Victors of a metaphysical war between death-worshippers and champions of life.

The Arkhitektor glanced behind them, all around them, taking in the landscape and the toxic vaults of the sky, likely searching for any hungry nightmare creatures. ‘Then let’s not wait around to become an easy meal.’

With a careful step, checking for sure footing, Kozlov started his descent.

1

Forty miles southeast of Albuquerque , New Mexico, life went on as normal as you please. The sweltering desert heat had subsided considerably since the last time Clyde was here. He didn’t even know parts of New Mexico received snow like festive shotgun blasts from the sky. Otherwise, it seemed the same. Roadrunners zipped along the surrounding plains, avoiding the noisy, crushing metallic monsters zooming along the slushy highways, and the skies over the barren plains of Valencia County were still scraped clean by the wings and rotors of jets and helicopters returning to Darnell Air Force Base.

But Clyde didn’t hear any jets or military choppers from where he sat. He only heard the soulful sounds of Motown on the jukebox. The Midnight Vulture was a slice of 1950s Americana, a roadside diner situated between Indigo Mesa—the government-funded spook-watch central and high command of Hourglass, hidden deep within the red-rock canyons to the northeast—and Darnell AFB to the northwest. Built upon an invisible ghost road adjacent to the interstate highway, the charming diner was mystically cloaked to any road-weary civilians, only serving Hourglass employees who knew where to look. And Clyde Williams was no longer a civilian, even if a small part of him wished otherwise.

Clyde started on his second cup of coffee, staring tiredly at the papers from the open file spread before him on the countertop. He had first read them three weeks ago, and they continued to bother him. But he found, with each subsequent read, his brimming curiosity was slowly offsetting his initial anger. Before this file landed in his hands, Clyde had spent his short career as an Hourglass agent believing himself to be a mere Level 1 necromancer, meaning he’d barely registered as a blip on Hourglass’ radar prior to recruitment. By way of this limited talent, he had accidentally bound the soul—or Post-Life Entity (PLE), in company lingo—of his deceased best friend Kevin Carpenter to his own. Through subsequent training, this automatically elevated him above the standard gunplay and tactics of regular agents, allowing him to forge a very effective partnership with Kev’s spectral telekinesis, and qualifying them for the most dangerous assignments.

But to Clyde’s dismay, Spector, his specialist talent coach, had been keeping some pretty big secrets in relation to Clyde’s true asset capabilities. Clyde considered it lying but knew the tight-lipped bureaucracy of the agency brass would prefer to call it need-to-know omission.

However, Clyde’s agent status had yet to be reclassified because, professionally, he remained an unknown quantity. But what he now knew was that the source of his novel and unpredictable abilities was rooted in the past exploits of his father’s run-in with a dream parasite. His father was long dead, and even while living had been estranged from his son, yet Clyde felt haunted by him as much as or more than he was by Kev.

The only reason the agency had decided to disclose the troubling revelation of his father’s unlooked-for inheritance to Clyde was because of circumstances surrounding his last assignment. The Cairnwood Society, a cabal of wealthy and infernal sorts, human and non-human, had acquired the decimated remains—one large eyeball, to be exact—of Charon, deposed monarch of the House of Fading Light, once a mighty force in the Order of Terminus but long assumed destroyed. However, enough of the dead king’s power had remained in that solitary eye to not only create a series of monstrous soldiers for Cairnwood but also kindle to life a scintilla of untapped dark energy stored deep within Clyde’s blood. This had resulted in Clyde’s recurring visits to the Median, the dreaming kingdom situated halfway between sleep and the undead vistas of Erebus. It was a sacred place. A forbidden place. And a place no middling Level 1 necromancer should be habitually wandering into each night without invitation. And without Spector acting as his authorized chaperone, Clyde’s accidental dream walks into the Median had begun to trouble the slumbering realm’s mysterious powers-that-be.

And all because Marine Corps Sergeant Richard Williams, KIA, had stumbled into a chance encounter with the object in the photograph Clyde was now studying.

It was a small stone fetish, the camera’s flash accentuating the darkness of the cave around it. Eight inches tall, the statue exuded sinister intentions. The lithe figure boasted enough beady eyes to shame a spider, an elongated and curved torso more suited to a question mark than functional mobility, and six slim arms—two of them protruding like long hooks from its back-bent torso—arranged as if caught in some mesmeric display. Each appendage was bound in what appeared to be woven threads, the paintwork of which had dulled with age.

The report identified the stone idol as the Coma Weaver; that was the closest English translation, at least. An opportunistic predator, it was known for illegally slipping into the Median between the heartbeats of sleepers like a viper slithering through tall grass, with a feasting hunger for the ubiquitous soul threads that stitched the entire realm together.

The Coma Weaver had been vanquished a very long time ago by the Median’s ruling council, the House of the Glowing Reel, but statues of dreamscape interlopers such as this one remained imbued with a lasting force.

Clyde closed the file with a sigh and stared blankly at the U.S. Marine Corps seal on the front. It was pure happenstance that his father’s squad had come across the long-lost temple that housed the statue during an attempt to chase down one of Saddam Hussein’s top advisors. The man had quite literally gone underground, and they finally pinned him down in the lost and nameless temple. From the pictures and notes Clyde had examined, it was a place that would drive archaeologists to their knees in giddy excitement, full of old pillars embossed with mysterious pictograms and walls covered in ancient symbols, all worn smooth by the slow passage of time. The squad’s lieutenant had found little interest in anything beyond the capture of their target, but Sergeant Richard Williams had spotted the fetish and picked it up, perhaps thinking to pocket the artifact as a souvenir. Something about its touch had compelled him to hastily set it back down. Or so subsequent interviews with the surviving squad members had established in the reports Clyde had obsessively perused.

That fleeting touch had been enough to awaken the diminished essence of the Coma Weaver. Like a disturbed spider, it had stung the hand that held it. And thus Richard, himself entirely unaffected, had unknowingly come to bear an insidious genetic marker that somehow skipped his firstborn son, Clyde’s older brother, Stephen—like their father a U.S. Marine and also like him KIA—and settled on his second. Thus had it come to be that Clyde Williams, one-time Level 1 necromancer, was currently unclassified on the necromantic spectrum.

Spector had explained to him that it might take some time, perhaps Clyde’s whole life, to understand the full extent of the Coma Weaver’s effect on his soul. The situation was fluid. And Clyde was worried. Worried that some other nasty little surprise might present itself. Worried how much more his waking and sleeping life might change. He had seen and done a lot in six months, moving from frightened and confused civilian to official Hourglass agent, his powers shared and harnessed with his best pal, Kev, in a lethal symbiosis of telekinesis, guns, and departmental resources. And now every time he nodded off, he risked his life and soul by sinking too deeply, cascading through the kaleidoscopic outer layers of memory and fictional dream works into the Median, the shining light at the threshold of death. Provoking its quiet authority.

Clyde sipped his coffee, glanced around at the otherwise empty diner, and listened to the Isley Brothers’ Work to Do. He thought about the top-secret file, scared at what it all might mean for him in future. But being scared was just part of the job at this point.

Caught in that antsy place between concentration and daydream, he sought out the piece of blue twine he kept in his pocket, something he had started carrying on Spector’s instruction, his fingers snaring complex macramé patterns as his eyes lazily hovered over the face of the redacted report. The macramé was ostensibly to clear his mind, shunt any distractions, and help him achieve some control over his unpredictable sleeping habits. While that might sound like nothing more than a psychic placebo and some wishy-washy nonsense to the unfamiliar, Clyde had found that the task did seem to help him focus. Of course, the advanced dream studies he was undergoing were much more than fooling about with twine. Predominantly, the sessions involved Spector politicking at length to the Median’s ruling council on Clyde’s behalf, and Clyde being educated on how to be a savvy and respectful tourist of the dream kingdom, which mostly consisted of him being hit with a few historical or geographical factoids and being explicitly warned of exactly where he could and could not go should he trespass on the realm without Spector at his side.

Clyde knocked back the coffee dregs and set down the mug. A stone hand swung a coffee pot into view to top him off. This appendage didn’t belong to Spector. Spector was human in appearance, at least in the waking world. No, the stone hand belonged to a stone arm, which in turn became a full stone approximation of a man. But the stone man still took pride in wearing his G-man suit. Director Trujillo, the founder of Hourglass, was once a man but was now something much more, the facts of which Clyde knew little. What he knew for certain was that Trujillo was the top of the agency totem pole but only a small pebble—literally—in comparison to the faceless, lumbering rock giants that resided in the bedrock basement of this very diner. These creatures were known as the hoodoo, guardians of the mortal worlds, the makers and keepers of the gigantic eponymous Hourglass below Clyde’s and Trujillo’s feet, and ancient allies to Trujillo’s Native American ancestors. Otherwise, they were a complete mystery to Clyde and the rest of his team. Need-to-know again.

Clyde might have waved off the coffee refill, but it felt rude to walk away from his superior’s generous hosting, and it was cold as a penguin’s ass outside. He looked at Trujillo, finding his brown and very human eyes embedded in the craggy stone face.

Clyde felt the awkwardness between him and the director had lessened a little over the past weeks. But only a little. He still felt conflicted about his service within the agency, having recently learned, during the Charon assignment, that the operational performance of him, his team, and the entire agency was largely an exercise in redundancy. The reason? Because every living soul on every world, good, bad, or ugly, were all destined for Erebus since heaven had been razed long ago in the beforetime of a secret history. But Clyde had learned this at the start of his training, and as deeply depressing as it was, this wasn’t the revelation that had triggered a small rift between his team and the agency. Rather, it had been the unauthorized snooping of Kev and fellow teammate Savannah Barros into private Hourglass files—snooping that had unceremoniously revealed the Firmament Needle was real. And it was out there somewhere in the vast wastes of Erebus—or the Null, as the agency trigger-pullers called it. But Trujillo had no intention of pursuing that goal, deeming it too risky. The Order of Terminus had won the war for the fate of all mortal souls, but there remained enough powerful forces on the side of the living—including the hoodoo—to keep a precarious balance. A truce had been formed long ago, one very much in favor of the Order’s otherworldly monarchs. Mortals had their brief lives to enjoy; after that, the dead kings were waiting to collect their due.

The stalemate had forced Hourglass and all international and otherworldly counterparts into the same tired old holding pattern of protecting the living from malevolent forces despite knowing that for all their hard work and bravery and sacrifice, the souls of the living would all ultimately be dropped down into the Null.

The Firmament Needle’s veracity remained a trade secret outside of Clyde and his team, which was for the best, at least professionally, since it would very likely cause a great number of Hourglass personnel to deem their occupations pointless and their employer at best an accessory to a kind of afterlife genocide.

That alone had been a punch to the gut for Clyde, but the fact that Director Trujillo had been keeping a secret file on his father’s encounter with an artifact of arcane origins had been the finisher in a formidable one-two combination.

Clyde sipped his fresh coffee and nodded his thanks. He knew it would take a bit more time to get over the hard feelings, confusion, and mistrust, but there was more at stake than gripes about departmental bureaucracy.

‘Not sleeping well?’ Trujillo asked. Clyde assumed it to be a wry remark, but the sandstone face was limited in expression.

‘I’m probably sleeping too much. Seem to be spending most of my days dropping down to the Median with Ram-man.’ Ram-man was Clyde’s chummy abbreviation for Spector’s other self, the dream-walking avatar known as Ramaliak. ‘This thing, the Coma Weaver,’ Clyde said, tapping the file, ‘how big a deal did it used to be?’

‘I’m old as rocks, but I’m not that old.’ Trujillo managed a smirk, which was like watching a stone face eroding on fast-forward. The rocky flesh preserved his age well, with the man having come up through the Army and then very briefly through the earliest days of the CIA before founding Hourglass in 1948. ‘The Glowing Reel have had dealings with plenty of such primordial leeches. Beings such as the Weaver should never be underestimated, but in this instance any damage it could do, it has already done.’

‘You sound pretty sure about that,’ Clyde said. The Weaver was long dead according to Spector, but that didn’t change the fact that some lingering presence or essence of it had been severely hindering Clyde’s beauty sleep for the better part of a month.

‘Are you referring to your increased potential?’ Trujillo asked. ‘Because depending on what form that will take in due course, it’s more a matter of perspective.’

What form that will take? Clyde thought back on how he had defeated the Hangman, the Charon-enhanced killer who’d had the New York branch sweating over a heap of dead strike-team members. Clyde, somehow, had astral-projected from his body, reaching deep into the Hangman’s head, phasing through physical matter and the material world to enter, inexplicably, almost instinctually, the Median in the exact spot where the brainwashed killer’s soul thread lay. By restoring the Hangman’s volition, Clyde had liberated the man from the monster, though the man was monster enough before Charon ever got to him, being a fearsome gangland enforcer with a fondness for barbed wire. Spector had so far been unable—or unwilling?—to elucidate how Clyde had pulled off that feat, other than linking it to the vague prowess of the Coma Weaver. Either way, Clyde had been unable to help wondering how invaluable and dangerous such a talent would be if he mastered it.

The distant rumble of a long-haul truck speeding along the highway’s black ribbon returned Clyde to the present. He casually turned to watch it pass by the window of the invisible diner and glugged more coffee.

‘How are we doing here, Clyde?’ Trujillo asked. The strain of their fractured trust still permeated the atmosphere every time they were in the same room, which was why, Clyde assumed, he had seen much more of the director now than he had since joining the agency; and it wasn’t just because he had been posted to the New York office. It felt like Trujillo was actively taking an interest in him. Hence these near daily diner hangouts the director had initiated.

‘Professional relationships thrive when there is trust between all parties,’ the director said without irony. ‘And in our line of work, a lack of trust, a lack of focus, can be a dangerous thing.’

Clyde agreed. He had spent most of his life hating all things military-industrial complex on account of a dead older brother and dad, so it pissed him off that the first time he’d found a place in such a world, that same place had quickly pulled the rug out from under him. It sometimes felt like a big cosmic joke. The universe asking him, Well, what did you expect?

‘I want to trust this place, and you,’ Clyde said. ‘To believe that what we do on this earth matters, makes a difference. But that’s difficult when you hear how your employers have known all along about a way of ending this whole raw deal between life and death and choose not to act on it because it’s a little risky.’

‘Too risky.’

‘Everything we do is risky. So instead, we waste time waging shadowy wars with smaller competition. Small-picture stuff.’

‘We’ve been over this at length, Clyde, with me and Meadows.’ Deputy Director Meadows, the head of the New York branch, the Madhouse, and Clyde’s immediate boss.

‘I know, but I still find it hard to square away,’ Clyde said bluntly, fidgeting with his coffee mug. ‘Someone in your position, I know you’re no stranger to doing the sneaky covert shit. I still don’t see why you can’t—won’t—authorize sending spies into the Null to help Kozlov locate the Needle.’

Unlike his pal Kev, Clyde had never met Konstantin Kozlov personally, but he’d had a tangential encounter with the Russian necromancer’s activities during his first assignment, learning of Kozlov and the Rising Path’s obsession with finding the Firmament Needle.

‘Yeah, it’s risky, but only for the agents being sent over,’ Clyde continued. ‘If they’re killed, that’s a professional hazard we all face daily. And if they’re caught by any of the Order’s forces, make sure they have some old-school shit like a cyanide tooth or something. The monarchs wouldn’t be able to pin it to any direct action from us, and the treaty stays intact. They might think the intruders are just a bunch of people big on extreme outdoor pursuits.’

‘Cyanide tooth, bullet to the head; their physical bodies would die, but seeing as how they would already be Null-side, their souls would still be up for grabs by those same forces,’ Trujillo countered. ‘Now let’s say these living spies are caught, and they commit suicide in the presence of a monarch, or a lieutenant of theirs, one capable of wrangling intel out of their souls by way of torture. The Order would then know that our organization is actively undermining the treaty by performing operations against them in the hopes of securing a power grab. The ultimate power grab. The Needle could wipe them out of existence if the person holding it wished it.’

‘Everything we do is risky,’ Clyde repeated, knowing it was pointless.

‘And would you be volunteering for this blatant act of suicide?’

Clyde glanced out the large window, watching snow flurries and the brass-button sun struggling to peer through a ragged swath in the dense clouds. The shadows were already beginning to stretch across the snow-swept desert. His memories dredged up some of the horrible things he’d witnessed in his very short stint in the Null. It had been one hell of a way to bust his official Hourglass cherry. He turned back and gave Trujillo an unflinching stare.

‘Why not?’ Clyde said flatly. ‘Some of the stuff I’ve been involved in so far has only been a hair away from suicide. I just came back from helping take down one of those monarchs of the Order. That could have ended very badly for all of us.’

Trujillo smirked again. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you and your team took down Charon when he was in a very weakened state. It would have been like fighting him when he had both arms tied behind his back. And even so, you barely escaped with your lives. The rest of the Order won’t go down so easily.’

‘They would if we found the Needle. I know it could take forever, but what else are we doing that’s so damn important?’

‘Any of a hundred problems. All the bloodthirsty things. Helping the living enjoy their short times here on Earth. Stopping the psychopaths and the idiots with a little power or knowledge but no moral compass. The cults and the demons. And let’s not forget, Cairnwood are still making problems everywhere they go.’

‘I’m not saying we should ignore those issues. All I’m saying is I’m sure you can sacrifice some willing agents to search the Null. Seed some spies throughout the place to find it, steal it, whatever it takes. No matter how long it takes. Maybe the Rising Path had the right idea.’

‘And look what happened to them. No, this isn’t the right time, Clyde.’ Trujillo’s tone was as hard and final as his mineralized complexion. ‘I won’t ask you to trust me on this, just to acknowledge that I’m making this decision on sound intelligence.’

Clyde slapped his fist into his palm, but it was half-hearted, more tired than angry.

‘Finish up here with Spector,’ Trujillo said. ‘See if you can find a yardstick to measure your power, or at least a way to not piss off the Glowing Reel. They’re as politically neutral a House as you can find within the Order, and you upsetting them is another forest fire we would do well not to start. After that, return home. See your teammates. Focus on the things you have the power to change: helping the little guy.’

Clyde was missing Kev and his teammates. And his mom. And Nat. ‘My ankle’s healed. Suppose I’m due some field work.’ The scar, a souvenir from his last encounter with the Hangman, was still ugly, but it could have been a far sight worse. The pain had subsided, and it was only the itching that bothered him now. ‘What about Kev?’ Clyde delivered the question like it was a concealed knife, swift and unsuspected.

Still, Trujillo must have sensed it coming. He cleared his throat with what sounded like two flat rocks sliding across each other. ‘What do you think I should do?’

That sounded like a test to Clyde. Fuck it; pass or fail, he knew how he would always answer. ‘I’d say he messed up, but he did it with noble intentions. And if he hadn’t done what he did, me and my team would be just another bunch of company goons operating in the dark, clueless to the fact that the Firmament Needle isn’t just some myth.’

‘And you think that’s a positive thing?’ Trujillo asked. ‘Raising a lot of difficult questions, harming the trust between your team and the old pen-pushers such as myself?’

‘I’m still here, aren’t I? You could argue that all Kev did was ensure that you have to trust us as much as we trust you.’

Tension balled itself up in Clyde’s gut as he held Trujillo’s dark inspection. For a moment he thought he might have pushed a bit too far. It felt like a rock wall was threatening to fall on him, and here was Clyde, currently lacking Kev’s telekinetic prowess to push it back. And there were worse fates than collapsing rock walls. The agency had black sites not only reserved for useful targets but for agents with a renegade streak.

‘I’ve already spoken to Meadows,’ Trujillo said with a calm and impersonal air. ‘Seeing as how you and Kev are a package deal when it comes to active duty, I’ve decreed that his return to service is to commence upon your return to New York, but not a minute sooner. And it will be probationary. He’ll be observed closely. If I, or Meadows, catch even a whiff of something treasonous, then his ankle monitor and revoked status will seem like a kindness.’

‘I’ll keep an eye on him.’ Clyde pushed off from his stool and drained his coffee. ‘I better head on back. Spector’s waiting.’

Trujillo scraped up Sergeant Richard Williams’ redacted file, holding it tight to his lint-flecked suit. ‘Then I suppose I should bid you good night.’

Clyde pushed through the polished-chrome-and-glass door into the stinging cold air, leaving the pleasant heating and sounds of Motown behind him. He climbed into the unmarked jeep, flexed his healed ankle a couple of times, and reversed out of the empty lot, leaving the mirage of the Midnight Vulture to blur out of existence behind him. Then he cut across the hard-packed snow and followed the road northeast towards the flat, snowy peaks of the Manzano Mountains and Indigo Mesa therein.

2

The man with the disfigured face felt a cold, damp mass drop on his shoulder. The night was freezing, the air still, with no gusting wind to disturb the hard snow coating the red maple’s highest branches. The cause of the snowfall, he knew, was one of the snowy owls perching in the boughs, taking a brief respite from its reconnaissance. The scar-faced man had been handsome once, but never vain. His name was Edward Talbot. Whilst his disfigurement had healed significantly over the past weeks, at a rate impossible for a human man, there remained a noticeable strip of rubbery and discolored burn tissue along one side of his drooping mouth, and half-knitted gashes across his cheekbones, nose, and brow. A lesser being never would have survived the explosion. And his eyes worked perfectly fine. He watched the resting owl’s quiet vigil for a few seconds before it alighted to rejoin its companions for a final pass of the forest clearing. The flying hunters reared back in formation, gained elevation, and banked sharply, their razor-keen yellow eyes taking in the large timber buildings and farming machinery. The scene looked ordinary enough to Talbot. Just 200 acres of well-tended farmland and the ubiquitous century-old maple trees vital to a seemingly innocuous maple syrup farm.

Nothing extraordinary.

Syrup season was long over, and though the bustling enterprise for those with sweet teeth never truly closed, the owl squadron’s aerial recon saw things beyond the scope of common snowy owls, for the piercing gaze of this particular breed was sensitive to wavelengths of certain energy signatures. And they saw through the syrup farm’s façade. What seemed a pleasant and rustic industry was anything but. It was a specialist facility for one of Hourglass’ most vital offices.

Shin-deep in snow and breathing in the crystal-pure air of the southern Ontario wilds, Talbot leaned patiently against one of the many towering spruces crowding the property’s outskirts. His eyesight was not as sophisticated as that of the enchanted owls, but it was nothing to be sniffed at. He watched two of the black-and-white hunters gliding across the starry sky with lethal speed—80 kph according to their master, and his master too, he sullenly reminded himself—before vanishing into the cover of trees and shadows. This secret installation operated under the truism that hiding in plain sight is often the safest method of concealment. But as Talbot knew, few things were truly safe in the realms of ­intelligence and counter-intelligence, and even less so when the confounding elements of mysticism and secret arts were in play, because the more complex a system became, the more prone they were to error and circumvention.

Case in point: the Syrup Farm had been a rumor on certain occulted black-market tongues for quite some time now and had only remained in the unsubstantiated ether with the buyers and sellers of such knowledge due to their lack of interest—or the brazen will—to validate and act upon the rumor. Not so for the people Talbot served in the Cairnwood Society. They were very sizeable fish in these bloody waters, with ways and means available only to the titans of underworlds and shadows. And as Mr. Gabriel’s voice had just confirmed in Talbot’s earpiece, his winged pets had proven the validity of the rumor mill.

Talbot thought about Gabriel sitting comfortably miles from here in the warm luxury of a private jet while he himself was about to do something that could very well succeed in doing what even the explosion hadn’t managed. Talbot had lived too long, knew too much, to think easily about what awaited him after death.

Exhaling a hoary breath, he fingered the rather dull silver band girding his gloved right index finger, topped with a gray stone flecked with veins of fiery orange. When he stared at it, it appeared to smolder and swirl like a miniature clay oven. Known as Leberecht’s Maquette, it was one of Gabriel’s many antiquities.