Chapter Text
Midnight, National City
The Department of Extranormal Operations had not officially existed for sixty-three years.
It did not appear on any government budget. It did not have a logo, or a website, or a recruitment office. What it had was a sublevel beneath a decommissioned grain warehouse on the east side of National City, a rotating staff of eleven mages and six very tired analysts, and a standing arrangement with both the Clock Tower in London and the Church in Rome: you do not interfere with us, and we will keep your messes out of the news.
Every few years something went wrong somewhere in the world. A village was found empty. A town was flattened. A lab burned down to the foundations and the cause was announced, with perfect gravity, as a gas leak.
The DEO had written most of those press releases.
Tonight, the biggest one yet was about to be needed.
"Another one," said Winn Schott, not looking up from the six monitors in front of him. "That's the thirty-first. Private jet, landed at the north airfield eleven minutes ago. Passport says Dr. Albrecht, visiting scholar. Under the coat, he's wearing a Mage's Association pin."
"Add him to the board," said Director Hank Henshaw.
The board was a wall-sized map of the city. Thirty-one red markers glowed on it, scattered across the downtown district like a rash. Each one represented a mage who had arrived in the last forty-eight hours, from every corner of the globe: robed, armed, and quietly furious.
Alex Danvers, the youngest analyst on the floor, stood at the edge of the room with a coffee going cold in her hand and a notebook she had stopped writing in an hour ago.
"Sir," she said. "Can I ask a stupid question?"
"There are no stupid questions in this department." Henshaw did not look away from the map. His voice was low and flat, with the gravel of a man who had lived through too many of these. "There are only fatal ones. Ask."
"Why are there so many of them? Thirty-one is not a number I was briefed on."
"Most of them are hangers-on. Assistants, bodyguards, rivals who want to watch." Henshaw finally turned. His eyes, behind a pair of steel-framed glasses, were very tired. "Seven of them matter. Seven of them are Masters."
"Masters of what?"
Henshaw looked at her for a long moment. Then he sighed and crossed the room to the whiteboard, where somebody had already drawn a large, careful circle.
"Sit down, Danvers. I'm going to explain this once."
The Holy Grail War
"Imagine," said Henshaw, uncapping a marker, "that somewhere beneath this city is a machine that can grant wishes."
Alex stared at him.
"Not a metaphor. A real one. An old, enormous, impossible object, built by mages a very long time ago, that gathers power from the earth for decades and then, when it's full, grants a wish to whoever can reach it. We call it the Holy Grail."
"A wish."
"One wish. For anything." Henshaw drew a small chalice in the center of the circle. "It's a good thing to want. The problem is that more than one person always wants it."
He drew seven small stick figures around the cup.
"So the machine, in its great wisdom, has a rule. It will only open for seven people at a time. Seven mages. We call them Masters. Each of them is allowed to summon one champion, a Servant, to fight on their behalf. A spirit called back from beyond death. A hero."
"A hero," Alex repeated.
"Historically, yes. Kings, knights, poets, warriors. People so famous that the world remembers them forever, and the memory of that story gives them a kind of afterlife. They sit in a place called the Throne of Heroes. The Grail can call them down to fight."
"So seven Masters, seven Servants."
"Seven classes." Henshaw wrote the names across the top of the whiteboard in neat block letters.
SABER. ARCHER. LANCER. RIDER. CASTER. ASSASSIN. BERSERKER.
"Each Servant is slotted into one class, and the class shapes how they fight. Saber is a swordsman. Archer, a long-range specialist. Lancer, a spear. Rider, anything with a mount or a vehicle. Caster, magic. Assassin, stealth and ambush. And Berserker..." He tapped the last word. "Berserker is what you get when you take a hero and burn away their reason for more power. Strong, and mad."
"What does the Master do?"
"Supplies the magical energy. The Servant fights, but the Servant runs on mana, and the mana comes from the Master. A bad Master has a very strong Servant who is slowly starving. A good one..." He shrugged. "There's a reason it's called a partnership."
He drew three small marks on the back of one of the stick figures' hands.
"Each Master carries three Command Spells. Marks on the skin. Each one is an absolute order, a single command the Servant cannot disobey. Use all three, and your Servant is free to do whatever they like, including killing you."
Alex winced.
"And the war itself," said Henshaw. "Seven Servants fight until one pair remains. The winning Master and the winning Servant reach the Grail together." He drew a thin line from the cup. "Each of them gets one wish. One for the Master. One for the Servant."
Silence settled over the room.
"And the people who lose?" asked Alex, quietly.
"Their Servants die. Sometimes the Master too." Henshaw capped the marker. "The first rule of the War is that nobody walks away unscarred. The second is that the people who tell you otherwise are lying."
"Sir," said Winn, from the monitors, and for once there was no joke in his voice. "I think you should see the convention center."
The central screen flickered to a live camera feed.
The National City Convention Center was lit up like a carnival. Banners hung from the roof. Giant inflatable figures swayed in the night breeze. Crowds in costume streamed through the doors in their thousands, laughing, shouting, waving signs, all of them there for the thirtieth annual NATIONAL CITY COMIC CON, the largest in the world.
Alex looked at the banner. Then at the board. Then at the director.
"I don't understand."
"Neither do we." Henshaw rubbed the bridge of his nose. "The ley lines under this city are the strongest on the planet. That's why the Grail chose it. But the lines are doing something strange. The energy is being drawn upward. Toward that." He nodded at the screen. "Toward a hundred thousand people, in a single building, all thinking about the same thing."
"Fictional characters," said Alex slowly.
"Faith is a form of mana, Danvers. And that's the biggest concentration of belief in the world." Henshaw's voice was dry. "I don't know who the Grail is going to call. I only know it won't be King Arthur."
"Then who—"
"We'll find out," said Henshaw, "when we call our own."
He turned to the door, where a woman in a long gray coat had appeared, carrying a long, black case.
"Prepare the chamber."
The ritual room was a plain concrete box in the lowest sublevel, lit by a single bare bulb. In the center of the floor, in chalk and powdered silver, was a circle three meters wide, inscribed with symbols that made Alex's eyes hurt to look at.
Henshaw stood at its edge, sleeves rolled to the elbow. At his feet lay a small, battered thing wrapped in cloth. A catalyst, the thing that would draw a particular spirit, though even the DEO's own archivists had not been sure what it had belonged to.
"Everyone back," he said.
The room emptied. Winn, Alex, and the others crowded behind a pane of reinforced glass.
Henshaw raised his hand over the circle, and began to chant.
His voice was low, steady, practiced, and the words were not English. They rolled out of him like a tide coming in, and the air in the room began to thicken. The silver in the circle began to glow. The single bulb flickered and went out.
"Let the silver be the seed and the iron the foundation. Let the stones be the master and the master be the stone. Let the gate of the crossroad open, and let the thread of the world be drawn."
The glow brightened, white and furious.
"From the seat of heroes, hear my voice. From the throne of the unnamed, answer."
Wind rose out of nowhere. It howled around the walls, tearing papers from the glass, and the light blazed to a pitch that made Alex throw her arm across her eyes.
"I swear it. I am the one who will answer for every virtue. I am the one who will bear every sin."
The light screamed.
On the back of Henshaw's right hand, a bright red mark burned itself into the skin, three interlocking lines, glowing like a coal.
"Come, Servant of the Seven. Answer the one who calls you."
The light broke.
When Alex lowered her arm, there was a man standing in the circle.
He was not tall. He wore a rumpled tan trench coat over a loosened tie, hair like a bird's nest, a cigarette dangling from one corner of a mouth that was already smirking. He looked around the concrete room slowly, taking in the glass, the faces, the chalk, and exhaled a long plume of blue smoke.
"Well," he said, in a rough English accent. "This is a bit of a dump."
Henshaw took a breath. His voice was steady.
"Welcome, Caster," he said. "I am your Master."
"Whatever you say, mate." The man flicked ash onto the carefully inscribed silver, ignoring the sound of Winn choking on his own spit behind the glass. "Do you have anything stronger than that coffee in the corner? I can smell it from here, and frankly, it smells like regret."
Alex stared at him.
She had been told to expect a king. A knight. A thousand-year-old warrior in armor.
"He's wearing a tie," she whispered.
"Badly," said Winn.
----
In a small apartment above a comic shop on the west side of National City, three hours earlier, Lena Luthor had been pulled out of bed by her wrist.
Lex had arrived from Metropolis two days before. He had knocked on her door, smiled, and not let her out of his sight since.
"Up," said Lex.
She had not argued. Over the years she'd learned that arguing only made it worse. She had dressed in the dark, in the same plain gray coat she wore everywhere, and followed her half-brother out of her own front door and into a black car.
Now, as the car slid through the empty streets of National City, Lena sat as small as she could in the back seat, her hands folded in her lap.
Between her feet, tucked carefully in her bag, lay a battered paperback comic book, a Supergirl issue from nineteen ninety-six, its spine broken, its cover so creased that the heroine's red cape had gone almost pink.
She had had it since she was nine. It was the only thing she'd ever owned that she'd been allowed to keep.
"Stop fidgeting," said Lex.
"I'm not."
"You're holding that bag like a child holding a teddy bear."
Lena said nothing.
Lex leaned across the seat. He was handsome, in the sleek, polished way of a man who spent a great deal on looking handsome. He smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes.
"You know, Lena, I've often wondered why Father kept you."
"I'm sure you have."
"A bastard, from a woman he barely remembered. Circuits so thin a candle could outshine them." He tapped the side of her head with one finger, hard enough to sting. "Not an ounce of talent. Just a little head full of useless facts. Comic books and history and trivia. It's like keeping a cat that's very good at crosswords."
"Then why am I here?"
"Because I need a catalyst." Lex sat back. "And you're the only one in the family whose absence no one will notice."
Lena looked out of the window.
The Luthor Corp building rose above them as they pulled into the garage, a tower of black glass and silver steel, forty stories tall, with its name carved across the front in letters taller than a man. Lex dragged her out of the car by the arm. He marched her into the elevator. He kept hold of her wrist the entire way up, thumb pressed against the bone, and she did not make a sound.
They stepped out onto the roof.
It was cold and clear and very high. The city glittered below like a spill of jewels. At the center of the heliport, Lex's people had already begun to draw: a wide ritual circle in chalk and powdered silver, inscribed with a hundred tiny symbols, faintly humming.
"Finish it," said Lex.
Lena knelt. She took the chalk. Her hands were steady. She had always been good with her hands. She completed the last arc, closed the last rune, and sat back on her heels.
"Good girl," said Lex.
He took a long, thin ceremonial knife from inside his coat.
"What are you..."
He caught her left wrist and slammed her hand flat against the center of the circle, and drove the knife through her palm into the concrete.
The scream tore out of her before she could stop it.
"Hold still," Lex hissed. "It will only hurt for a moment. You'll make an excellent conduit."
He began to chant.
It was agony.
It was white and total and it roared up her arm like fire, and in the middle of the pain Lena felt the circle wake. Felt the magic in it reaching for her, tearing at the thin, flickering threads of her own circuits, pulling mana out of her the way a drain pulls water. Lex's voice rose above her, harsh and exultant, and she understood, with a terrible clarity, what he was doing.
He was not using her as a catalyst.
He was using her as a sacrifice.
No, she thought. No, no, no.
Her mind spun. She had nothing. No power, no training, no talent. Only a head full of useless facts, comic books and history and trivia, just like Lex had said.
But I know the words.
She knew the words. She had read every grimoire in her father's library in secret, in the dead hours of the night. She knew how the summoning worked. And she knew that a summoning is a bargain, a call and a response, and that a call can be interrupted.
Lena Luthor opened her mouth, and chanted.
She did not do it well. Her voice cracked. She stumbled over the third line. But she said it, through her teeth and through the blood and the pain, loud enough to be heard over her brother:
"I deny your claim. I deny your hand. Let the one who bleeds be the one who calls."
Lex's chant faltered.
"Be silent," he snarled.
"Let the blood be mine. Let the call be mine. Let the one who answers answer me."
"Stop that!"
The circle screamed.
A light erupted from the center of it, so bright it turned the whole rooftop white. A column of gold fire rose into the sky, tearing a hole in the clouds, and the wind hit like a fist, scattering Lex's guards across the roof like leaves.
Lena threw her free arm over her face.
And through the light, impossibly, something descended.
It was a woman.
She floated down out of the blaze with her cape snapping behind her, golden hair streaming in the wind, a dazzling, radiant figure in a suit of deep blue and brilliant red. A great crest blazed across her chest, a gold-edged shield with a stylized S at its center.
She was not tall. She was not a giant. She was simply the most luminous thing Lena had ever seen in her life.
She touched down on the roof, light as a feather, and the glow of her seemed to gentle and settle, until all that was left was a young woman with bright blue eyes, standing in the center of the circle, looking down at her.
Lena stared up.
On the back of her wounded left hand, burned into the skin beneath the knife, a mark had begun to glow. It was shaped like an S. The shield around it had split into two curved segments, one on either side, and the three shapes together burned a deep, rich red.
Command Spells.
The woman stepped forward. When she spoke, her voice was warm, and clear, and very soft.
"I ask of you." She knelt. "Are you my Master?"
Lena opened her mouth.
"Su," she managed. "Su-su-su-Supergirl."
It was the only word her brain would produce. She had known that face since she was nine years old. She had known it from a thousand panels and posters, a hundred covers, a thousand nights spent under the blankets with a flashlight. It was the face of the woman who flew.
It can't be. It can't be. She's a comic book.
The woman's mouth curved. It was a small, startled, almost shy smile.
"Rider-class Servant," she said. "Kara Zor-El. Also known as Supergirl." She reached out and, with exquisite gentleness, took Lena's wounded left hand in both of hers, the one where the Command Spells burned. "I ask again. Are you my Master?"
Lena looked at her.
She was shaking. She was bleeding. She was sprawled on a freezing rooftop with a knife through her hand, and a woman out of her oldest dreams was kneeling in front of her, asking for permission.
For the first time in her life, someone was asking.
"Y-yes," she whispered. Then, steadier, with a flicker of something like steel: "Yes. I am."
"NO!"
Lex had come stumbling to his feet. His eyes were wild. His hair was singed. Blood ran down his temple from where the force of the summoning had flung him against the heliport rail.
"NO, SHE ISN'T!" he screamed. "SHE'S NOT YOUR MASTER! I AM! I AM YOUR MASTER!"
He lunged.
He caught a fistful of Kara's cape and wrenched.
For the space of a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then Kara turned her head, slowly, and looked at him.
It was not a hostile look. It was, if anything, mildly puzzled, like she wasn't entirely sure why he was holding her cape. And then she let go of Lena's hand, and punched him.
It was a very precise punch. It was not particularly violent. It was simply final.
Lex Luthor left the ground, sailed in a long and spectacular arc across the heliport, and hit the base of the radio antenna so hard that the tower rang like a bell. He slid down it in a boneless heap. He did not get up.
The guards, picking themselves up off the concrete, took one look at him, one look at Kara, and ran.
Silence fell over the roof.
"Right," said Kara, turning back. She knelt in front of Lena once more. Her expression had softened into something so gentle that it made Lena's chest hurt. "This might sting. I'm sorry."
She took the knife by the hilt, and drew it out of Lena's hand as slowly and carefully as if she were handling glass.
Lena sucked in a breath. It did sting. But the pain, somehow, was already smaller. The wound was closing at the edges, the bleeding slowing, and a soft warmth was spreading through her whole arm.
"Healing?" she managed.
"Mana," said Kara. "Yours, or mine. I'm not sure yet. We'll figure it out." She smiled. "Hold on to me."
"What?"
Kara scooped her up, one arm under her knees and one behind her back, as if she weighed nothing, and rose into the air.
The wind took them. The rooftop dropped away. Lena's stomach lurched, and she clutched at the red cape with her good hand, and below them the lights of National City bloomed across the dark like a field of stars.
"Where are we going?" she shouted.
"Somewhere safe," said Kara.
"How?"
"I'm flying," said Kara, delighted, and laughed.
It was the most beautiful sound Lena had ever heard.