Carrie Vaughn - Discord's Apple

She should just shoot them all before they even knew she was here. But she wondered if there wasn’t some logical explanation for this meeting: the Russians and the Chinese were on the edge of war, the Americans had already picked sides—and the American agent hadn’t said anything about peace.

Then the choice was out of her hands.

“Tracker? You can come out of the dark now.”

The American had spotted her. She didn’t move from her shelter behind the doorframe. The military officers touched their guns, resting in belt holsters. The agent was smiling, though, regarding her as he would a wayward child.

“Where are your friends?” he said. “What good is my trap if I don’t catch you all?”

Goddamn it, she’d walked right into it. She exhaled a silent breath. The unholy trio probably had a back entrance staked out and a way to collapse the tunnel on top of her. She revealed herself, leaning partway around the doorframe.

“Gentlemen,” said the agent to his colleagues. “Meet Tracker, the intelligence expert for the Eagle Eye Commandos.”

The two officers flinched, their eyes widening. Was her reputation really that scary? Probably not hers personally.

The agent turned back to her. “So. Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“They wouldn’t have sent you here by yourself.”

She kept her mouth shut on that one. Instead she asked, “When did you turn traitor?”

“I haven’t,” he said, his smile unwavering.

She winced, her brow furrowing with confusion. He chuckled, just like the villain in a spy film. “I’m here with the full authority of the U.S. government.”

“Planning a war?”

“You don’t think wars just happen, do you?”

“And what do you want with us?” she said, her voice hushed.

“We’ve decided that you’ve become a liability. You and your team are out of control. And what the U.S. can’t control—it destroys.”

She shot him.

A knock came at the door, and Evie almost fell off the sofa. She muttered and took a deep breath to still her racing heart, then gathered herself to answer the call. She almost hoped it was Alex, wanting to know if she’d guessed yet. But it was probably seven dwarves looking for a glass coffin.

Mab was in the kitchen, trembling like she wanted to bark. Wagging her tail, she looked up at Evie. So it wasn’t the bad guys. She opened the door a crack. Two men stood on the porch. One was the brusque old man from the other day. Merlin.

The other man was in his thirties, fresh and rugged looking, like he spent a lot of time outdoors. Sandy blond hair swept back from his square-jawed face to touch the collar of his brown leather jacket. Jeans, a gray T-shirt, and work boots completed his outfit. He wore a trimmed beard, and laugh lines marked the corners of his eyes. He stood straight and tall, and smiled at her. He had blue eyes.

He looked like he should have been in a country music video, or starring in soaps, or modeling Harley-Davidsons. He couldn’t be—he just couldn’t be.

Mab sat nearby, her tail brushing the floor. Evie opened the door wider. “Hello?”

The younger man said, “Hello. I’ve come to see about a sword. Merlin here says it’s stuck in a rock round back.” He had an accent like a mild version of a Celtic brogue. “I thought we should ask before we went tromping round your property.”

Evie leaned against the doorframe, her knees weak. She wondered if she should bow. She wondered what sort of vacuous expression she was giving him. He was looking back expectantly, like he was used to dealing with bewildered women.

Mab took the opportunity to push around Evie and throw herself at the stranger, tail-wagging, bouncing in place. Arthur caught her before she could rear up and topple him over, as she seemed intent on doing. He kept her gently but firmly grounded.

“Well—hello, there! Aren’t you a fine beast?” He scratched her ears with both hands, sliding down her back to thump her sides, and Mab whined ecstatically.

“She likes you,” Evie said, her voice gone vague. Arthur beamed in reply.

“Um, Miss Walker, if you don’t mind?” Merlin jerked his head to gesture around to the back of the house.

“Yeah. Um. This way.” Shaking her head to dispel her foggy wonderment, she stepped off the porch. She was aware of the two men following her, Merlin trodding almost on her heels, and Arthur still playing with Mab, who bounded alongside like she’d found her soul mate.

Arthur. If she’d seen him hanging around a construction site or a biker bar, she wouldn’t have given him a second glance. Until he smiled and looked at her with those eyes.

They rounded the far corner of the house, and she stepped aside. “Here it is.”

Merlin had seen it before, but still he stopped to gape.

Arthur stepped past him, his face drawn with a sad, heartbroken look, like he was approaching the dead body of a long-lost friend. History shone through his eyes, memories, intense and desolate. He looked to be in his thirties, but he was older, much older, as if he had been reborn a hundred times and retained the memories of each of those lives.

Evie wished her father were here to see this.

He reached the stone and took hold of the sword’s grip. Squeezing, he took a deep breath and pulled. The sword came out as smoothly as if from a scabbard, with the barest slipping noise.

The blade gleamed when he held it aloft; he turned it, studying it with a haunted gaze. Evie resisted an impulse to drop to her knees—Arthur, the true king, the rightful bearer of Excalibur stood before her.

Arthur turned the sword so it pointed to the ground. He knelt with the point resting on earth, his hands laced together over the grip and cross guard. He bowed his head low and his lips moved, undoubtedly in prayer.

Evie’s heartbeat rattled, anxious that she was watching something private, that she had no business intruding. She and Merlin stood side by side.

“How did you know to come here?” she said, her voice hoarse. “How did you find us?” Hopes Fort was halfway around the world from Britain.

He nodded at the praying Arthur and said, “Faith.”

“And why—why now?”

“Because there is need.”

“What need?”

“At the end of one age, the shattering of the old era, someone has to stand by to pick up the pieces and build the new one.” He said this with the same straightforward tone, no matter how Evie gaped at him.

The ground began to tremble. Mab whined and turned circles, then stopped to look across the prairie at nothing. The trembling increased in violence, shaking Evie to her bones. She swore she could hear the house’s foundations rattling.

After living in Southern California, she knew what an earthquake felt like. She sat down before she fell, grabbed Mab, and hugged her. Already off balance, the dog toppled into her lap. Merlin stuck out his arms for balance. Arthur, still kneeling, held his sword ready and looked for an enemy.

Then it ended.

A temblor like this wasn’t particularly frightening—it might even have been as high as a 6 on the Richter scale. Except this was Colorado. Colorado had baby earthquakes, imperceptible, every decade or so. What was a magnitude-6 earthquake doing in Hopes Fort?

She ran to the house, Mab loping alongside her. Merlin and Arthur followed. She dashed into the kitchen, vaguely aware that there could be aftershocks and she should stay outside. But she had to find out if her father was okay.

The house phone was dead. The lines must have been down. She tried the light switch, and the electricity was gone as well. Hopes Fort was probably going to be a disaster area. No one around here knew what to do with a quake like that.