He didn’t seem to like that answer, his face twisting in anger. A quick glance over my shoulder didn’t reveal any additional enemies, though the other man was much closer. He wasn’t wearing a Knight’s uniform, though.
There were two of them, and one of me. My sword might cut through their personal shields, depending on how strong their shields were, and although the Knights’ swords were spelled, they didn’t incorporate magic as strong as mine. Still, in any kind of fight, things could go wrong. One never knew what kind of magic a foe might be able to wield.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Let’s all walk away from here with our bodies and souls intact, and you can tell Signore Bonato to call me. I’m willing to meet at a neutral site.”
The angry guy shouted, “You miserable slut! How dare you defy a servant of our Lord?” He drew his sword and started toward me, but his friend grabbed him by the arm.
“Yeah, I can see how you plan to guarantee my safety. Really makes me want to jump in a car with you.”
There wasn’t anywhere to go. They blocked the path ahead of me, the fence and the old mill were on my right, and a four-foot drop to the creek was two steps to my left. That left the way behind me, which meant turning my back on them. I was willing to bet I could outrun them but not willing to bet they didn’t have friends waiting out of sight.
“I think you should stand aside and allow the young lady to pass,” Ian McGregor’s voice sounded behind me. I heard his sword clear its sheath. “Left or right?” he muttered, barely audible.
It was a very polite offering. Since I was truly ambidextrous, I shifted my blade to my left hand and stepped to the left side of the path. McGregor stepped up on my right side.
I thought the older man in front of me might have a stroke. His face turned almost purple, and he foamed at the mouth. It was a fascinating display of anger. Without much effort at all, I had made an implacable enemy. He hated me. I wondered if it might be worth the time, trouble, and danger to kill him right then. If I didn’t, I would have to watch my back every minute until I did.
The younger Knight pulled the older one off the path, and they stood with their backs to the fence.
“I shall tell the Seneschal of your offer,” he said.
We edged past them, turning as we did and walking backwards away from them. Then I whirled to face the direction we were going, but McGregor continued to watch the danger behind us. It was kind of comfortable to work with someone who had received the same training I had. We walked that way for at least a hundred yards, then he sheathed his sword and fell in beside me.
“And what was that all about? Or is it none of my business?” McGregor asked.
“Their inglorious leader wants to talk with me. I said he can visit me at Rosie’s, but I’m not going to walk into the lion’s den. The older guy has an attitude towards women and got upset because I wasn’t respectful enough.”
“A lot of men have that problem. Any idea why their seneschal wants to talk with you?”
I sheathed my sword. “Oh, you know, the usual. He thinks I’m a Hunter, and they seem to be trying to recruit me. As a spy, maybe? I don’t know. The last time he and I talked, he was very rude, and I stuck a knife in his liver.”
McGregor cracked up, laughing as we walked along. After a while, he said, “I shall remember to mind my manners.”
“He and his thugs were trying to kidnap a friend of mine.”
“Oh? And why was that?”
“I’ve thought about it, and I think they wanted to experiment on her. She’s half-Fae.”
“Like your boyfriend?”
“He’s half-Fae, too, but they really aren’t much alike,” I said. I hadn’t made an announcement to the world, or thought about doing so, but for the first time, I realized that other people probably knew that Oriel and I were more than acquaintances. “Did you just happen along?”
“Going to Rosie’s for dinner,” he said. “And no, I’m not stalking you. But I do have a question concerning a woman. Do you know if Emily has a lover?”
Emily was one of the waitresses on the evening shift with me, an aeromancer who enjoyed dazzling the customers with her skills. Considering the favor he had just done me, I didn’t think it would hurt to tell him. “She broke up with her boyfriend around New Year,” I said. “I think he took her for granted, and she got fed up.”
McGregor smiled. “You don’t happen to know her schedule, do you?”
“Same as mine, Thursday through Sunday evenings.”
When we reached the bar, I said, “First drink is on me. Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. I’d do the same for any damsel in distress.”
I laughed and fell into a fake southern-belle accent. “Why, thank you, kind sir. I am so grateful to have a gentleman defend my honor.”
He winked at me. “And besides, bloodstains are so difficult to get out of a nice blouse like that one.”
“That, too.”
I poured him a beer and a shot, and pointed out an empty table in Emily’s area. He thanked me and took his drinks over there. She gave him a big smile as she approached him to take his order. With a waitress—or a bartender—that might be because she liked him, or because he tipped well. At least she seemed happy to see him.
Shawna and Cindy stopped in later that evening. Cindy ordered a large salad for dinner, and Shawna nibbled on some blood sausage. I told them about my encounter with the Knights.
“That’s the second time I’ve been ambushed on that jogging path,” I said. “It’s not a coincidence.”
“Back to that incident with Lizzy at the library,” Shawna said, “do you really think they wanted to experiment on her?”
I shrugged. “It’s the only thing I can think of. Plenty of witches and mages running around, but they zero in on the only half-Fae at the university? And if they know when the ley line disruptions are scheduled, then it would be easy to take her while she was disabled.”
Both cops nodded. “Makes sense,” Cindy said. Looking over at Shawna, she said, “Tell her about the vamps.”
Shawna took a deep breath. “We’ve found three vampires that appear to have been tortured before they died. I knew one of them, and when I talked to her partner, he said she’d disappeared three days before we found her.”
“Tortured in what way?” I asked.
“Like you said. As though someone was conducting experiments. Burns, cuts, broken bones, but all the victims had residual traces of adhesive from electrodes—on the chest, feet, and head, all in the same spots. Their heads were shaven, as were the chests of the men.”
“How did they eventually die?”
“They were staked. The woman had been raped. We found seminal fluid. All of them had been fed, but not in the previous twenty-four hours before their final death.”
I shuddered to think of sweet, gentle Lizzy being subjected to some sadist’s idea of scientific research.
“I’m not an expert on vampires,” I said, “but I assume there’s a fairly extensive body of knowledge about vampire physiology.”
Shawna pursed her lips, then said, “Some, but not as much as you might think. Very few people have really studied us from a scholarly perspective. Only in the past forty or fifty years have new tools become available. CAT scans, MRI, other stuff. And a lot of it is expensive. But how is a researcher supposed to schedule time on an MRI machine at University Hospital at midnight?”
“Not only that,” Cindy said, “but how do you get a research grant to study a group of people who don’t exist?”
Chapter 13
Noise erupted from the back room where the big-screen TV was. Screams, groans, and cursing. I tried to remember what local or regional sports team might be playing. The local hockey team had missed the playoffs, the university’s basketball season was over, and baseball hadn’t started yet. The local baseball team wasn’t on TV anyway, as far as I knew.
Jenny came out of the crowd gathering at the room’s entrance and sai
d, “You should go take a look. I’ll cover the bar.” The expression on her face was grim.
I fought my way through the crowd until I could see the large TV that dominated the back wall. At first, it looked like a battle scene at night. Bright lights flashed across the screen, punctuated with bright bubbles of explosions. I couldn’t detect any sounds.
“Where is that?” I asked. “Syria?”
“Atlanta,” came the response from half-a-dozen different people.
As I watched, a fireball—unmistakably a magical fireball—arced across the screen and splashed down, spreading fire on the street and the walls of a building. The keen of a vampire on fire could be clearly heard.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Is it a movie or something?”
“National news,” the man standing next to me said. “Mage battle in Atlanta. Looks like some vamps got caught in the crossfire. There was a TV news crew on the scene, and they filmed the whole thing.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, just a couple of hours ago.”
Like everyone else, I stood there with my mouth hanging open trying to digest what was happening. After a couple of minutes, the TV cut away to a talking head standing on the street. Everything was quiet.
“Authorities are being tight-lipped about the situation,” the guy with perfect hair and a microphone said. “Our crew counted at least three bodies before police and firefighters moved in and cordoned the area off. To repeat, there was an incident, described by witnesses as involving some kind of energy weapons shooting lightning and at least one flame thrower, on the east side of the Beltline, between what those witnesses described as three different groups of people. There were a lot of people out on a Saturday night in this area with many popular bars and restaurants, and some of them were caught up in the altercation. A number of injured people were transported to area hospitals.”
The picture switched back to the studio, where a blonde with a painted-on smile said, “This incident comes on the heels of reports of an unusual gang war in Dallas. Last night in Dallas’s West End, a battle between what police called two gangs spilled into the popular recreation area. Several witnesses recorded the incident on their cell phones.”
There followed three video clips of a brawl between a group of vamps and a group of shifters, some of whom were in full-wolf shift, but some were in their half-shifted wolfman battle form. To say I was shocked was an understatement. The normal world might think we were watching some kind of hoax, but to those of us in the shadow world, it was our worst nightmare come true. At least some of the norms who saw the battles would know what was going on, and others would want to know more before dismissing it.
Both incidents were playing into the Knights Magica’s hands. I wondered what part they played in that mage battle in Atlanta.
Then the other shoe dropped.
“We also have some footage sent to us by our affiliate in Westport, Oregon. This was shot last fall, but the authorities in Westport censored it. However, it turns out a copy was made and has now surfaced.”
The video lasted less than five minutes, shot from a helicopter, of the vampire battle at the Devil’s Den nightclub when Rodrick Barclay attempted to send George Flynn to the final death. They also showed some video of the battle downtown between vampire factions the night Flynn’s Dorchester restaurant burned. That had been shown on TV previously, but only locally.
Vampires battling vampires might be passed off as just another human gang war, if the combatants didn’t leap twenty feet into the air, twist off their opponents’ heads with their bare hands, or continue fighting after one of their arms was ripped off.
When they cut to several “experts” sitting around a table in a circle, speculating on what all the weird video meant, I fought my way through the crowd and back to the bar. I wasn’t interested in what a bunch of ignorant idiots had to say about a disaster they didn’t understand.
Sam came in about an hour later. That was highly unusual. When he left for the day, he rarely came back. But he was the chairman of the local Otherworld council, officially called the Westport Metropolitan Communal Council.
“Erin, reserve the back room for tomorrow evening.”
“I assume you heard the news,” I said.
Sam rarely cursed, but he let rip with a string that would curdle milk. “Frankie managed to suppress the news last fall,” he finally said, “but obviously she didn’t confiscate every copy of the videos. Now we’re on the national news along with that crap in Atlanta and Dallas. What’s next? A mage battle in the halls of Congress?”
“There are a lot of Illuminati in Washington,” I said. Sam shot me a poisonous look. I shrugged. “Just because Rudolf Heine isn’t there anymore doesn’t mean the Illuminati are going to fade away. And what I’ve seen here in Westport makes me think the Knights are hunting the remnants of the Illuminati, and especially the Hunters.”
Four young mages that I didn’t recognize came in a few days later and took a table near the recreation area—where the pool tables and the dart boards were. They looked like university students but were a little too clean cut, and their civilian clothes were a little too new and starched. I had worked at a bar near a military base once, and I noticed that out of uniform, U.S. Marines and Knights Magica looked a lot alike. No one but me seemed to pay them any particular attention.
I observed that all of them sat in such a way that they could watch both the front door and the bartender—me.
Jenny stopped by their table, handed them menus, and took their drink orders. I waited for her to come over to the bar.
“I’ll bet those guys are Knights,” I said.
“Oh, really? A black lager, two cream ales, and a Harp.” Jenny had been waiting tables at Rosie’s for fifty years, and very little ruffled her. “The younger ones are new, but the older guy has been coming in for about three weeks. Nice, always polite, tips about average.”
I poured the beers and brought them to her. As the evening wore on, their unrelenting attention toward me began to feel a little creepy. They hung around and drank beer until almost eleven, then paid out and left.
A couple of minutes later, one of our regulars burst in. “Fight outside,” he announced. “Some guys got jumped out on the street.”
I took that to mean the main street, not the alley that ran in front of Rosie’s. Still, too close. I grabbed the bouncer bat from under the bar and headed for the front door while Jenny headed toward the bar to cover for me.
Several men met me at the door.
“Ed, Karl,” I said to two of the more level-headed guys, “I’d appreciate you covering my back. The rest of you, just make sure nothing nasty manages to make it through the door. None of us want to explain broken furniture to Sam, do we?”
When I emerged into the alley, I saw the Knights—two pairs, back-to-back with drawn knives—about fifty feet away at the alley’s entrance. Surrounding them were several men and a woman, pounding the Knights’ shields with magical energy.
“Hey!” I yelled, cautiously approaching the melee. “You want to fight, go somewhere else. This is a non-combat zone.”
One of the attackers turned and hurled a small fireball at me. It splashed against my shield but didn’t penetrate. The burst of ley line energy I shot back in return blew him off his feet, and he landed twenty feet farther away, past the sidewalk and out in the middle of the street.
“I’m going to start hurting people if you don’t get the hell out of here,” I yelled. Another man and the woman turned to face me. I got a clear look at their faces but didn’t recognize either of them.
She fired off a burst of orange-colored energy that seriously compromised my shield. I’d seen that spell before and knew it was trouble. My magic doesn’t have much range, but I had closed the distance enough t0 shoot a ley missile at her. It rocked her, so I shot off another one. She absorbed it but turned and ran.
Her companion didn’t take the hint. He charged me, and when he closed
on me, I swung the bat. Between the magic Sam had embedded in it and the ley energy I pulled into my hands, I hit his shield hard enough to knock him down. He rolled, then scrambled to his feet and stumbled away. Most mages think their personal shields are impenetrable. I grew up around mages as strong or stronger than I was and knew a shield lasted only as long as the mage who cast it was stronger than the mage trying to breach it.
An energy bolt sizzled past, fired from behind me, and then the street was empty except for the three of us from Rosie’s and the Knights. I moved a little closer.
“Looks like you pissed someone off,” I said. “Just so you know, the policy at Rosie’s is that you settle your issues elsewhere.”
“We were attacked!” one of the younger Knights said. “Call the police.”
“Are you crazy? Look, I don’t care who started it. Go somewhere else to be attacked. We don’t need the grief. If this sort of thing gets to be a habit, I’ll ban you until you work it out.”
He sputtered at me, but the older Knight laid a hand on his shoulder. “We understand. Thank you for your help.”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t helping you. I was just breaking up a brawl. Bad for business.”
I turned around and led Ed and Karl back to the bar, where I poured both of them a beer and a shot.
“Wonder if the Knights have a lot of that sort of trouble,” I said to Jenny.
Her expression was dour. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
“I recognized the woman,” Karl said. “Bonnie Reskill. She went to school with my son. Never seen the rest of them before.”
“Young hotheads,” Ed grumbled. “That’s the sort of thing that causes problems. I don’t like the Knights, but there’s no reason to get on their bad side.”
My face heated up. I knew good advice when I heard it, even if it was too late.
“Jenny reported a couple of Knights were in here,” Sam said when I showed up for work the following evening. He had gone up to Portland with Michaela Gallagher over the previous weekend, and I hadn’t seen him since.
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