Page 21
Story: A City of Swords and Fangs
CHAPTER 21
S everal extreme political parties—led by Nikolas Müller’s Humanity First party—held a rally on Sechsel?utenplatz , the largest open square in Zürich. Master Adolphus firmly forbade me to attend—or be anywhere near it.
“I would actually prefer that you didn’t leave the house at all tomorrow,” he said.
According to the TV station I watched through my computer, the crowd was estimated to be between six thousand and seven thousand people.
They were a rowdy bunch, cheering at Müller’s speech when he called for the total expulsion of strigoi and lycanthropes from Switzerland. The camera panned around the square, showing a strong presence of Kantonspolizei and Knights Magica. I didn’t spot any Guild Enforcers.
After Müller’s speech, another guy got up and screamed about monsters destroying the Swiss way of life, using language far stronger than Müller’s. He didn’t want the supernaturals expelled. He wanted them exterminated. The crowd got a lot more worked up.
Then, just as a woman took the microphone, a couple of hundred hot-headed lycans attacked the crowd. In addition to the police and the Knights, a lot of the people in the crowd were armed—knives, clubs, hammers, as well as swords and axes. A few years earlier, the Church had pressed to legalize carrying swords on the street to keep its Knights from being arrested.
Switzerland also had some of the most liberal gun laws in the world, although carrying them in public was strongly discouraged. But no one was checking for concealed weapons when people entered the square for the rally.
The police and the Knights opened fire on the lycans, but so did many of the rally participants. The scene turned apocalyptic. Bodies everywhere, many missing important parts. A teenage girl with her head blown apart by a stray bullet. A lycan head—missing a body—with its teeth still embedded in a man’s throat. It took several minutes for the TV cameras to switch off and show a couple of talking heads in a studio displaying their horror over the event.
By late afternoon, battles with lycans were being reported from a number of places around the country. Swiss army units were called out to guard government buildings and installations, as well as power plants throughout the country.
Some of the rally participants broke away from the battle in the square and rampaged through to the western Langstrasse—the strigoi district. They slaughtered a few dhampir, broke into some of the buildings, and staked every strigoi they could find. When night fell, the strigoi joined the fray, and the humans and Knights discovered why no one had tried to clean out the district before.
I wondered how dense a person had to be not to understand that strigoi could also use weapons—such as swords, pistols, and machine guns. Plus, they were faster and stronger than humans, not to mention incredibly able to overcome significant damage.
I went down the hall to the Master’s door and knocked. When he answered, I heard a voice inside his room and realized he was listening to reports of the mayhem on the radio.
“They’re probably going to need a tracker,” I said.
“I think you’re right, but you’ll probably be looking for bodies. Make sure whomever you’re trying to find isn’t in a hospital or the morgue. Some people don’t bother to check for such things before running off on a stupid chase. But wait until they call me. I want to ensure you have adequate protection when you go out. Even I would hesitate to walk beyond these wards.”
So, I went downstairs and got some dinner. If I went out in the city with the Enforcers, my next meal might be long in coming.
* * *
A tapping on my door woke me. I checked my phone and discovered it was three o’clock in the morning. I got up and answered the door to find Master Adolphus.
“Captain Le Pen has requested your services. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“Master Elias told me once that I needed to say no more often, but if they need me, I’ll go.”
The Master nodded. “I thought so. Get dressed and come downstairs.”
The Captain and the Master awaited me at the bottom of the stairs. Looking out through the front windows, I saw a couple of SUVs and some Enforcers out in the square.
“I need to understand your abilities,” Captain Le Pen said. “I know that trackers have various talents. This is not a standard search operation. What we’re trying to find is survivors. Can you tell—at a distance—the difference between a human and a lycan or a strigoi?”
“Yes, and whether the human has magic or not.”
“And can you identify living people as opposed to dead ones at a distance?”
I nodded. “This is going to be really ugly, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Kaitlyn, you don’t have to do this, but it might save some lives if we can get people medical care in time.”
“I’m your girl. Shall we go?”
Hans was one of the Enforcers waiting outside. We nodded to each other and then crawled into the SUVs. A few blocks away, we joined some more Enforcers and caravanned to Sechsel?utenplatz. There were a lot of spotlights trained on the square, in addition to every normal light there being turned on.
The scene was unreal—like from a war movie, only worse. Military and police vehicles, ambulances, and Enforcer SUVs were all over the place. People wandered through the carnage, bending to check bodies, then usually moving on.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked the Captain.
“Lead us to the living.”
“Only humans? From right here, I can see several lycans who aren’t shifted.” When a lycanthrope died, they shifted back into their human form—naked, of course. The naked humans were easy to spot, but I could also see a number of wolves and wolfmen.
He bit his lip, then said, “Any lycans in this square were part of the attack. At the very least, they should be considered criminals. The police should be rounding them up.”
“Then I’ll concentrate on true humans,” I said. “This way.”
We walked past a wolf with one front leg torn off. Even for a lycan, I doubted he would survive. A nude woman had a bullet wound in her chest and a stab wound in her thigh. A small backpack contained her clothes for her change back to human, but she wouldn’t need them. A Knight had his throat torn out. The square was as bad as the demon destruction I had seen in Queen City a couple of years earlier.
I led the Enforcers to a man who was almost hidden under several other bodies. He had been attacked by a lycan—I assumed by the one who was lying dead on top of him.
Over the next hour, we found four more wounded humans, including a Knight. If it was up to me, I would have abandoned him, but Captain Le Pen had him carried on a litter to the ambulances.
Then I followed my magic to a nook at the base of one of the buildings surrounding the square. A spark of life burned brightly there. The hole next to a set of steps was a vent outlet, and it was too small for me to fit into.
“Who’s in there?” I called. “Are you all right?”
“I want my daddy!” was the response.
It took us at least fifteen minutes to coax the girl out of her hiding place. I estimated she was about seven years old, and she had been at the rally with her father. He was nowhere to be found, and I doubted he still lived. I gave her over to Gertrude, who carried her to the ambulances. She didn’t seem to be harmed in any way, but the hospitals were where friends and relatives would be hunting for their loved ones.
We spent almost three hours in the square, and the sun was rising as we followed the trail of battle to the Langstrasse . I insisted that a wounded dhampir we found was human and had him taken to the ambulances. But mostly we found dead humans and staked strigoi.
But as we made our way deeper into the district, we found fewer strigoi and more humans. Very few of the humans were still living, and any active strigoi had disappeared before the sun rose.
At nine o’clock, Captain Le Pen called a halt and ordered our SUVs to take us back to the Guild Hall.
“I don’t see any point in continuing,” he said. “We’ll let the police deal with it from here on out.”
They dropped me at home. Frau Buckner brought me some hot chocolate and fruit, which I ate while taking my bath. I fell asleep easily, but my nightmares were most unpleasant.
Table of Contents
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