“Here big, bad kitty-kitty-kitty,” I crooned, hands up and Bowie ready.
The lion leapt, coming straight at me with front paws extended and claws out. I met the beast full on and was surprised when my weight threw the lion backward head over three-foot tail. It skidded at least ten feet before stopping, shaking its massive head. I looked at my shoulders. Great rents had been made in the ballistic cloth by claws the size of number-two pencils, but they hadn’t penetrated the titanium underlayer.
Still, how did I knock an eight-hundred pound Tsavo lion back on its ass? I love Little Debbies, but I tried to keep off the comfort padding, and that tasty filling …. It took a moment. Oh, right … stuffing instead of bone and meat and blood. I grinned. This is going to be fun.
It was my turn to attack, and while the lion was trying to scramble to its feet, I plowed into it, pretending it was a skinny running back and I was the defensive lineman that wanted to hear bones snap. I landed on its back and began to slash with the Bowie. There it was, sawdust and cotton flying out in great plumes. Tsavo lion, schmavo lion; it was just thin hide over a delicate framework, a big dangerous doll but a doll nonetheless and I meant to play with it until it was in shreds.
More stuffing, more slashing as the lion’s hide parted to the razor-sharp Bowie. I was grabbing handfuls as the big cat tried to squirm, but I outweighed it by a good patch and it was wounded, leaking its doll life out of rents. I wasn’t stopping at all. It needed to die, it needed to become nothing more than a throw rug and soon. Very soon it wasn’t even that. I’d ripped and cut it to shreds and whatever magic had reanimated it was gone. Elvis had left the building.
Assessment time. Brute: down and bleeding, the other lion ripped into six pieces. Brute’s skin was chalky white and bloody foam collected at the corners of his mouth. Waldo: taking down what mummies were left, the rest in heaps on the floor, but he looked tired and was listing to port. Mouth: kicking and ripping a camel into its component pieces. She had an ugly bruise on her cheek and an abrasion on her neck but otherwise looked fine.
“Boss,” I said, kneeling at Brute’s side, “you okay?”
“Stupid … question,” he gasped through a throat clogged with blood. “Take this.” He shoved a hard object into my palms. The Seal. Without looking, I placed it my Bat Belt. “Listen, I have to tell you something.” He gestured me closer and I put my ear to his mouth and listened as he told me what to do.
I rocked back on my heels. “Boss, I can’t … boss?” Brute wasn’t paying attention. In fact, his eyes stared into a distance only he could see.
Damn. Damn-damn-damn!
“Kal?”
I turned to Mouth. “What?”
“Is he gone?”
I nodded.
Waldo turned from the debris of inanimate mummies. Clouds of dust were slowly settling to the floor. “What now, Kal? We bug out or what?”
Bug out. Two words every team leader hates and every team dreads. When a situation became untenable, when it looked like failure was imminent, then it was the leader’s responsibility to call for a strategic withdrawal, pulling the team out and calling for reinforcements. There have been dozens of ops where a leader bugged out, and those where a leader should have bugged out, so officially there was no onus on a Team Leader calling for a bug out; unofficially it doled out heaps of embarrassment. Enough that those who refused to bug out wound up with a star on the wall of DORMS. They were nice stars, gold-painted with the deceased Agent’s full name in the center. Tribute for the fallen, depressing in their number. More Agents have fallen in the line of duty for the BSI than all the American soldiers fallen during the Korean conflict. Needless to say, we don’t visit the wall often.
It was on the tip of my tongue. Three Agents gone and Ornias still on the loose with magic that reanimated long-dead creatures. Not a situation to build confidence, but then I spied with my little eye something that began with ‘I really hate that guy.’
“Jump spell now, Waldo,” I grated, keeping my voice low and eyes on the second floor. From the same direction that spawned the mummies came clickety-clackety sounds, bones on tile, sticks rattling in a box. I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
He stared at me blankly while swiveling his head toward the sounds. “What?”
“Jump!”
The Magician got the hint and stared at me for a moment, eyes going all funny as if they were vibrating in their sockets and I felt a tingle run down my spine, a sensation akin to pins-and-needles.
Spell in place, I ran to the other side of the hall, flexed my knees and jumped. Such spells are slaved to the intent of those utilizing them and I wanted to get to the second floor. My feet left the ground and physics took a backseat to magic as I flew up and over the second story balcony railing and landed lightly on my feet. Sometimes magic was too cool for school.
What I’d spied with my little eye was a large winged figure cloaked in shadow, but when my eyes hit it, I felt its malice, felt the hate that boiled from it like steam against my skin. It was that shadow I faced now.
The Lahti was out, but a lightning swipe of a leathery wing knocked it from my grip and another knocked the Seal from my other hand, leaving fingers stinging beneath my armored gloves.
“Too late, Kal,” purred the shadowy form as I backed away. “Far too late.”
Keep it talking. “Ornias, I presume?”
Twin points of light appeared, one red and one yellow. Its baleful glare pierced me. “Of course.”
“Clever with the T. rex. Nice touch.”
It took a gliding step forward, the shadows still cloaking its form, but I received an impression of massive shoulders and inhumanly long arms. “I am going to kill you, human, and then I am going to strip the Seal from your dead leader’s grasp before I kill your friends.” Its matter-of-fact directness froze my blood.
Point of interest, though. It still thought that Brute had the Seal; it didn’t know that what it had knocked from my hand was the very thing it was looking for. “Care to talk about it first?” I asked.
“Done talking.” It swooped toward me, moving faster than something that big should’ve been capable of. A freaky long arm swiped at my head, the air whooshing past, but I managed to duck and it ripped overhead. I dove to the left, hit the floor hard, and rolled, palming the Seal from where it lay.
Ornias was on me and my scalp was afire, an instantaneous wave of heat that ran all the way to my jaw line and the acrid stench of burning hair filled my nose and I screamed, screamed so loud because it hurt so much, the rage wanted to surface—I could feel it come to the fore—but I didn’t want it because all I would do then was attack and attack and attack and I needed some semblance of reason. However, resisting it was hard because I hurt so much and I wanted to give in to the fury inside. I refused it and I could hear it howl as I tamped it down into the darkest recesses of my mind, and I screamed as my hair crisped and those shadowy talons nearly engulfed my head, lifting me from the ground to dangle eight inches from the floor. It drew back a shadowy arm bigger than my thigh, and for a moment I could see a six-fingered hand ending in claws that looked to be needle-sharp, proving that I was a second away from death. That hand would rip my head from my shoulders, so I did the only thing I could do, what I’d planned to do, what Brute had told me to do.
I shoved the Seal against Ornias’ forearm.
My feet hit the floor a split second later, the fiery pain along my scalp still a searing hurt, but the wail from the demon was worse. It pierced my skull, a shriek that bounced around the hall below, and I was pretty damn surprised the masonry didn’t burst apart with its force.
“Touch the Seal to the demon, Kal,” Brute had told me. “That’s how to enslave it. It can’t abide actually touching the Seal with its physical aspect. The Seal has to touch the demon; then you can banish it.”
“Go to hell!” I screamed over the shrieks of the demon, and I fell to my knees.
Ornias reeled back, shedding shadows,
and for the first time I saw the demon as it was, or at least the form it chose to wear at the time. A tall, golden-skinned man, superficially flawless in every way, naked and resplendent in the glory of its perfection, but beneath and beyond its perfection lay a sickness visible through its golden skin. It was if its damnation shone through like a carrion light that assaulted my optic nerves with necrotic potency. And right under the smell of burnt hair lay a gangrenous perfume that was both sweet and foul, like the stench on a corpse dead a week.
Ornias continued to scream as I sat there and his form wavered, blanketed in a kind of heat shimmer before simply disappearing with a dry pop of air.
Gone.
Bug out? Hell with that, I thought. We just got here.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kal
Taking Care of Business
My eyes opened and silver runes met them. The heaviness in my stomach told me that the Elevator of Demonic S&M Super Terrific Fun Time was still on the rise. Only a few seconds had passed. How odd ….
So what had I learned from my dream? Definitely a warning of some sort. Last time I had a vision was in Omaha when my subconscious dredged up memories from the Mall of America in Minnesota. Those dreams were warnings about Maydock and how he’d been stalking me for years. I also took those dreams to be warnings that I couldn’t face Maydock alone, that I’d need someone to watch my back, like my team had my back when facing one of the most insidious, evil monsters ever to stamp on the earth with a cloven hoof—the Cutty Black Sow.
That second warning nudged me in the direction of Marcus, the vampire elder (although ‘elder’ isn’t an adequate term to convey a being old enough to have watched the rise and fall of Rome) who was the chief judge of his race—sort of like Judge Dredd for bloodsuckers, but not as charming and erudite. He proved less helpful than I thought, but that’s a story for another time.
For some reason my subconscious, using what little magic I had, was trying to tell me something urgent, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure it out. I yawned as the elevator came to a stop. The LED floor indicator read ‘28.’
“Kal?” said Ghost. He sounded … surprised. “Did your experiment fail?”
“How long?”
“One minute forty-seven point three seconds.”
That was fast. “My experiment didn’t fail, Ghost.” I checked all my weapons (all there except for the Bowie) and my ammo (almost gone) and made ready. “Maybe my subconscious understood my time constraints and uploaded the dream/memory in double time. I don’t know.” Once again I looked at the readout. “Why aren’t we on the thirtieth floor?”
“The other members of your team are here on the twenty-eighth.”
Oh thank god! “Report.”
And he did. All his clones (which he’d since reabsorbed) kept full accounts of events and while the DRAFTlite didn’t have the same kind of virtual reality capabilities as the original DRAFT, the brief visuals I experienced sent a chill through my guts. They’d all suffered horribly, but what happened to Tweezer sent a spike of rage through my brain. I never liked the guy—he was an idiot with all the subtlety of a thrown brick—but he was a fellow Agent and no one should have to die the way he did.
Then there was Billings.
Of course I knew about the man, that he was a few cans short of six pack, but by all indications he was unusually disciplined and a Bureau veteran. Vetted by Bureau headshrinkers, he had BB’s confidence, which was no mean feat.
I don’t know why I was shocked and horrified. With my cynical outlook on life I shouldn’t have just asked myself if Billings would turn on us like a rabid dog, but when. It took a few seconds for me to realize that Ghost was droning at me, and had been for a while now.
“What?”
“I simply asked if you were ready to exit the elevator.”
“Sure, Ghost.” I nodded toward the door. “But how did you control it? I thought all Quint computers were down.”
“This elevator has a dedicated computer system that is a stand-alone with Wi-Fi that only extends to the length of the elevator. I was able to access it and take control of the systems, although this does not allow me to exit the building. It also has a dedicated entertainment system with three television sets hidden within the walls. There is a startlingly huge library of pornography to be found there as well. I also surmise that the shaft is insulated with silver mesh so the Bureau cannot detect any magic being cast in the vicinity.”
I snorted. Go figure. It seemed that Tobias Quint created his own little pleasure room he could ride (pardon the pun) up and down the building. Throw in a succubus to add spice to the mix and you had one hell of a mobile seraglio. I wondered how he kept the sex demon from devouring his soul. Maybe he offered her the occasional sacrifice, or that spell Shape I’d destroyed kept her in line. The real question was why? Having a succubus on tap was like wearing a meat suit in a cage full of tigers—you don’t mess around with such predators. Perhaps he used her to seduce politicians for favors, although I reckoned that the succubus would fear for her soul if that was the case.
“Let’s go get the kids, Ghost.”
The door swung out into a hallway, and wouldn’t you know it, the team was right there, huddled around the still form of Buffalo—Agent Robert Atkins.
Dove looked worse for wear, and when she met my eyes, hers contained enough world-weariness to crush just about any soul you’d care to meet. It set me back on my heels.
“Hi, boss,” she said, eyes red. “Ghost said you were on the way. What horrible dimension did you have to pass through to get here? And what’s that sticking out of your face?” Instead of the subtle tone of contempt and anger that usually flavored her speech, I heard a grudging acceptance, as if she’d finally sanded down the chip on her shoulder to more manageable levels. I took this to be a good thing. Still, what scars would decorate her soul now?
“This,” I replied with all the dignity my battered body could muster, “is what they call a see-gar. You smoke them.”
“You shouldn’t smoke,” she said automatically. “Bad for you.”
“I am a grown-ass man and can do whatever I damn well please.” I concentrated and lit the end of the cigar, which was all of three inches long now. “Don’t tell Jeanie.”
Rat, skin sallow and waxy, merely nodded, while Ng looked like his face had had a run-in with a malignant lawnmower and then been bandaged by a staple enthusiast. I didn’t want to look at the place where his hand had been, but I forced myself to.
He followed my gaze. “Rat couldn’t heal it, didn’t have the energy,” he said hollowly. “The wound hurts a bit, but thanks to some Oxy, I don’t care.”
I nodded. “Report.”
“Except for Ng and Robert,” said Dove, “we’re ready to rock ’n’ roll.”
Rat nodded tiredly.
Ng had something to say about that. “You’re not going without me.”
“You’re injured.” I crossed my arms and puffed on the cigar. That should’ve been it. “You stay here.”
“Not so injured I can’t fight. I need to see this through, see it done once and for all. Besides, what makes you think I’ll be any kind of safe in this building?”
“Stand down.”
Dark eyes became obsidian hard. “No.”
Why me, Lord? What could I use against him, harsh language? The Bureau tends to recruit the stubborn types. Maybe Ng was part Finn. “Grab your gear, check your ammo, and let’s get going.” If my brief scan of their adventures was any indication, they were either short or out of rounds. I had a sneaking suspicion that before this op was done, we’d be down to fists and blades and whatever tricks I had up my sleeve. I felt a twinge of loss at the thought of my poor departed Bowie.
Dove rose to her feet, moving as if her joints were filled with drying cement. “Any ideas where we’re supposed to head, boss?”
“From Ghost’s analysis, the Supernatural that’s running this shindig doesn’t want anyone to get below this
floor, so I say we go down. I think whoever this Angel of Mass Murder is, he’s somewhere between the tenth and twenty-eighth floor. We just have to get a move on.”
“So how do we do that?”
I gestured toward the door at the end of the hall. “Same way I got up here.”
“Janitor’s closet?”
“Our way off this floor.” At her look, I shook my head. “No time now for stories. All aboard.”
It breezed down the hallway like wind off a battlefield, a voice that instantly raised the hackles on the back of my neck. “But I do so love stories,” it crooned in a soft and sugary voice, avuncular and evil. “Do tell me one, Agent Hakala.”
The Lahti came up, appearing in my hand as if by magic, barely outdrawing the rest of the team. Even Ng, who was no lefty, had a K-bar in hand.
“Please, no violence. I come bearing an offer.”
Oh, of course you do. “And what would that be? Mutilation? Eternal torment? A subscription to the Cheese-of-the-Month Club?”
Soft laughter. “No, although those would be wonderful. I am fully prepared to let you go.”
Somewhere there was another shoe ready to drop. “And why would a powerful Supernatural like yourself be willing to do such a thing?” My throat was clogged with sarcasm. “Mercy?”
“I do not know what ‘mercy’ is. I don’t think I’ve ever felt pity, although I’m led to believe it is part and parcel of the human condition.” He paused. “However, I was never human. Or, at least, I don’t think so. Time has a way of muddling memories.”
“Ghost, can you track him?” I subvocaled.
My faithful cybernetic sidekick was quick to answer. “The voice is coming from the building’s speakers, which is unusual because when this being communicated with Agent Billings it was by some form that was not registered by the DRAFTlite. I dare say that this entity does not want to risk any violence.”
Dove gave me a look while Rat nodded his agreement. The angel had touched Rat in the blue world, and if he could touch, that meant he could be touched. “Then why? Why let us go?”
The Spirit in St. Louis Page 23
