The Dragons of Styx

by John E. Siers

  “I did say relatively quick and painless,” Lisa told him. “Probably would have been faster and less painful if I’d just shot you in the head, but I hate cleaning brains off the walls.”

  “Did you hear that?” Mark asked.

  “Hear what?” Sparkling looked puzzled.

  “Lisa just terminated the client.”

  “Oh…that’s what it was. I got that little chill from a departing spirit, but I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Yeah, well, I got the big thrill of the kill, like we told you about before—guess Lisa was right, because I felt it even though I didn’t see it happen. But I also heard the three shots. That’s unusual, because these offices are as soundproof as we can make them for just that reason. I think maybe my hearing is getting more sensitive.”

  “Maybe it’s dragon-related.” She shrugged. “There’s so much we still don’t know. You say Lisa shot the guy? Three times? Right there in her office?”

  “Yeah…we do that a lot, especially when the client hasn’t specified a method or doesn’t want to know until it happens. It’s…well, efficient is probably the best way to describe it.”

  “Jeez…he just came in less than five minutes ago. So he’s dead—just across the hall.”

  “Yup.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Spark…I’m not sure…”

  “Hey…I’m not a naive little kid. I’ve seen some pretty gruesome things, working for SAD. Besides, I’m supposed to be working for the Ferry now, and that’s what we do here, right?”

  “Hmmm…” He gave her a thoughtful look to cover a hasty message to Lisa. Spark wants to see the body.

  What did you tell her?

  Nothing. Your call.

  Coward. A hint of a chuckle came with the thought. I guess she’s going to have to see these things eventually. She might even be doing them herself someday.

  So you’re OK with it?

  Bring her in. I just verified the kill. I haven’t started cleanup yet.

  “There’s a technique to this,” Mark said. He had opened the dead man’s bloody shirt, revealing a clear view of the three distinct bullet wounds in the t-shirt underneath.

  “Lisa’s an incredibly good shot. At this range, she could have put those three bullets almost in the same hole—but she didn’t. She spaced them out in this neat little triangle, a couple of inches apart.”

  “The goal isn’t to demonstrate marksmanship, it’s to do maximum damage to the target. I’d guess his heart is pretty much torn to shreds under there. Of course, the benefit to the client is he dies quickly and suffers less.”

  “He got what he paid for,” Lisa said as she pulled on the coveralls she had retrieved from the office closet. “Said he didn’t want to know what was going to happen until it did. We aim to please…no pun intended.”

  “Yeah…right!” Sparkling snorted. “Another satisfied customer. OK—he’s dead now, you can tell me. Did he really murder Rose Yi?”

  “Not intentionally,” Lisa said. “What he had in mind for her was more like the proverbial fate worse than death, but she died in the process, and he was responsible. I’ll show you the NorthStar report later.”

  “So now comes the messy part.” Sparkling regarded the corpse with disgust. “Are you going to pickle him like you did that woman?”

  “Yup!” Lisa dragged Samson out of the chair and onto the floor. “But first we’ve got to strip him.” She pulled the shoes off the dead man’s feet and tossed them aside.

  “But you said the tank’s in the basement. Wouldn’t it be easier to just take him down there first? I mean…less messy and all…”

  “Nope!” Mark said. He had put on his own coveralls and walked to the wall opposite Lisa’s desk. He slid open the hidden panel, revealing the disposal chute. “This goes right to the tank.”

  Sparkling watched in fascination as they finished stripping Samson’s corpse, then dragged him over to the wall, turned on the water jets, and sent him down the pipe. Then Lisa went around gathering up the discarded clothing, shoes, belt, and other personal articles. The bloody shirt and feces-filled boxer shorts were judged unsalvageable and tossed into a disposal bag.

  She put Samson’s wallet, phone, and jewelry—three jeweled rings and a gold neck chain—on the desk next to his ID. The rest went into a laundry bag. By the time she got everything picked up, Mark had finished cleaning the chair and wiping it down with disinfectant.

  “Bullets went all the way through, as intended,” he said, for Sparkling’s benefit. “You’ll notice the foam is self-sealing—can’t even see where they hit—but check this out.”

  With the air of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he opened a drawer under the seat and retrieved the three flattened rounds that had fallen there after being stopped by the chair’s steel back plate. He ducked into Lisa’s executive bathroom and rinsed them off, then returned and dropped them into Sparkling’s hand.

  “Souvenir for you,” he said with a grin.

  “Wow…Gee, thanks, Dad,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “Just what I always wanted.”

  “I’ve thought about making jewelry out of them,” Lisa said. “Might start a new trend.”

  She looked around the office and nodded in satisfaction. “That should do it—floorbot will get the rest.”

  She stripped off her coveralls and put them into the laundry bag. Mark did the same, then took both the laundry and disposal bags into the bathroom, where he dropped them down separate, marked chutes built into the wall. When he emerged, Lisa had already set the floorbot to work scrubbing and sanitizing the office floor.

  “Like I said, Spark, I designed this place for efficiency and ease of maintenance.”

  He looked at the clock on Lisa’s office wall. “Looks like it’s lunchtime. I feel like having Mexican today—anybody up for El Loco Coyote?”

  Chapter Twelve: Wizard Smackdown

  “Can I assume you got the same note in your file that I got in mine?” Simon Webley wore a look of disgust on his face.

  “I did,” Artemis Rousseau admitted. “Who does that woman think she is? She’s not even schooled in the arts. By what right does she presume to reprimand a senior mistress of the Guild?”

  “Or a fifth-level Warlock such as myself.” Webley nodded in agreement. “But she’s the British Bitch, and no one has the balls to stand up to her.”

  “Doesn’t take balls,” Rousseau muttered. “A little Aura of Hemlock might be what she needs.”

  “Ah…I’d be a bit wary of that. You say she’s not a practitioner of the arts, but I’m not so sure. She manages to get from place to place very quickly, and I doubt she’s using public transportation.”

  “Maybe that’s it.” Rousseau looked thoughtful. “She’s an unlicensed practitioner herself, which is why she gave Waters a pass.”

  “And clamped a security lid on the whole affair,” Webley added. “Even sequestered all our files on the chupacabra case—incidentally taking all the evidence we had against Waters.”

  “I’d like to get my hands on that little bitch,” Rousseau said. “Get the truth out of her—find out what she was really doing with all that research time she spent in our library. She should never have been granted access…and now she’s been transferred out of Martelli’s unit. She’s run off somewhere, and we don’t even know where to find her.”

  “Ah…but we do.” Webley showed an evil grin.

  “We do?”

  “Yes. When we first started looking for her, I discovered that she’d left her personal vehicle here—in the office parking lot—so I went down and looked at it. It’s a fifty-year-old piece of junk, even runs on fossil fuel, for which she has a special permit because it’s an antique.

  “I thought she might come back for it, so I cast an Eye of Kali on it. She didn’t come back, but on Saturday, Martelli and his people took it out of the garage and delivered it—obviously to the place they’ve got her hidden.”

  “Which is…?” Rous
seau tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice. She hated Webley’s flair for drama.

  “Up in Westview. Charon’s Ferry.”

  “Charon’s Ferry? The suicide shop? The one where all the famous people go to off themselves?”

  “The same. You know they’re connected with LifeEnders.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, corporate doesn’t talk about it, but they’re licensed to kill, and the only way to get a license is through LEI. Technically, they’re Shooters—that’s how they get around the anti-suicide law. If you go to them, you aren’t committing suicide, you’re hiring them to murder you.”

  “But what’s their connection to Waters?”

  “Don’t know, but think about it—if corporate wanted to get Waters out of sight but still keep her close at hand, it’s an ideal solution.”

  “Hah! Out of sight, but now you’ve got an Eye on her, or at least on her vehicle. If she leaves the place, we’ll know. Maybe we can grab her and bring her in here for a little…counseling session. Get the truth out of her, and then Witherbot won’t be able to protect her…What?”

  Webley’s grin had faded and now he was shaking his head.

  “No,” he said, “we can’t. They put the vehicle in a garage under the building, and a few minutes later the spell stopped working. Don’t know why, maybe Waters detected it and dissipated it with a counter-spell. I haven’t been able to renew it.”

  “Still…there’s a good chance she’s hiding there. If we can just get inside the place….”

  “I’m told they have very tight security. Don’t think they’ll let us just walk in there, and they’re not likely to believe we’re there to commit suicide. We probably don’t want to fool with that angle, anyway. After all, they’re licensed Shooters—messing around with them could be dangerous, especially if they’re keeping her there as a favor to corporate.”

  “Stalemate,” Rousseau declared with a sigh. “Damn! I really wanted to get my hands on that little bitch.”

  They may be Shooters, but they’re not SAD…and I’ll bet they’ve never encountered a real magic-user.

  Webley was dressed in what he thought of as his ‘secret agent’ outfit—black shirt (button down, of course, with black tie), black slacks, and black leather zipper boots with soft rubber soles for traction and stealth. Over that he wore a long black leather coat with a pocket inside that served as a sheath for his Wand of Arragon—a three-century-old artifact that had cost him a small fortune when he had first been accepted into the Guild.

  He hadn’t told Rousseau of his plans. Let her be surprised—and duly impressed—when I deliver Waters to her.

  He’d driven past the impressively modern Charon’s Ferry building several times during the day. He had parked nearby and studied the place. He’d cast various surveillance spells, but they hadn’t worked well. For some reason, he couldn’t get a clear look at anything inside the walls, only blurred and shadowy images that gave him a vague impression of the interior layout.

  He had been able to see all the occupants of the building—just three people, one male and two females—surprisingly few for a building that size. He couldn’t identify two of them, but one female was definitely Sparkling Waters—he’d gotten a feel for her when he’d first examined that antique vehicle of hers. She’s supposed to be a paranormal tracker, is she? Well, I’m not too bad in that area myself.

  Like most Arcane Arts practitioners, Webley had a limited repertoire of magic at his disposal, and almost no understanding of how it actually worked. He had mastered several major skills, though—the most significant of which was teleportation.

  He’d driven home and waited until near midnight before teleporting to his present position—in the service access area behind a strip mall a short distance from the Ferry. He then cast another surveillance spell to look for his quarry. As before, the image was muddy, but showed him enough to serve his purpose.

  His target was alone on the fifth floor of the building. The other two were together on the sixth floor. None of the three were moving—he assumed they were in bed, asleep.

  He needed to get closer to target his arrival precisely. The fourth, fifth, and sixth floors all had outdoor spaces created by setbacks, and he decided to jump to the fifth-floor outdoor space. Once there, he would need to gather himself again and focus on Waters’ location. Then he could jump directly into the room she occupied to take her by surprise.

  “What the hell?” Mark sat up in bed.

  “Intruder,” Lisa said. “In the garden, fifth floor.”

  “Scotty! Shields up!” Mark ordered.

  “Aye, Captain,” the digital assistant replied with a distinct Scottish brogue. “Shields are up…no airborne threats detected.”

  Mark was puzzled. His command had activated the drone interdiction system—they’d been attacked once before with a drone-placed bomb on his sixth-floor balcony. The system should have activated automatically if a drone got within a hundred yards of the building…but apparently none had.

  “Carla! Security System status!” Lisa queried her own version of the digital assistant.

  “Lockdown is in effect,” the calm, female voice advised. “All systems are armed. No alerts since last activation, 1600 hours yesterday.”

  “Somebody’s outside, one floor down…there!” Mark had retrieved his pad and brought up the security cameras for the area. The infrared view showed a stealthy figure moving slowly around the garden space.

  “He can’t get inside without triggering the system,” Lisa said, “but how did he get there in the first place? Parachute? Climb the side of the building?”

  Suddenly the figure vanished.

  “Magic!” Mark exclaimed. “He teleported!”

  “He’s in Sparkle’s room!” Lisa was horrified.

  A moment later, she was gone. Mark found himself sitting alone, surrounded by a rapidly dissipating turquoise haze. He started to transform himself but stopped at her insistence.

  I’ve got this. Stand by…I’ll let you know if I need help.

  “Well, Waters…nothing to say? No spells to cast?”

  Sparkling Waters was trembling in bed, unable to move within the tangled web of vines Webley’s verdans vinea spell had produced. He’d also hit her with a vox subsisto to paralyze her vocal cords and prevent any incantations or counterspells. Both spells were a bit tricky, and he’d had to deploy his wand to get it done, but now she was helpless—ready to transport to…where?

  He realized he hadn’t really thought about that. He could take her to the office—lock her up in the cage they kept in the wizard’s workshop with a confinement spell to keep her there. But he had noticed that she was rather attractive—especially naked, as he’d found her in her bed. He toyed with the idea of taking her back to his own beach front apartment in Malibu…maybe play with her a bit before he showed his prize to Rousseau.

  Lost in his appreciation for Sparkling’s charms, he failed to notice the huge, scaled claw that silently passed through the wall and ceiling behind him—until it closed tightly around his body and jerked him off his feet.

  Oh! Look what I’ve caught! The sultry female voice echoed in Webley’s brain. The sudden vertigo faded and he found himself looking into a pair of exceptionally large blue eyes—eyes that belonged to the huge creature who had grabbed him…the huge, scaly, blue-and-silver creature who grinned at him showing an impressive mouthful of sharp, curved fangs.

  Dragon!!!! his brain yammered at him, having dredged up a primordial fear of a creature that couldn’t possibly exist. His flight instinct kicked in, and his consciousness expanded to take in his surroundings. He was outside again, in the garden where he’d originally landed.

  Or rather, the dragon was in the garden. He was at least ten feet above the garden, clutched in the dragon’s claw, suspended perilously close to the parapet wall that separated him from a sheer drop of five stories to the ground.

  “Uh…”

  Sshhhh! Be quiet! He fou
nd himself unable to speak. The dragon reached up with her other hand and plucked his wand from where it protruded between the scaled fingers that surrounded him. She—by now he knew the creature was female—put the wand into her mouth and bit down. He felt the final flare of its aura as it was crushed to splinters and lost its power forever.

  I hope it was a good wand, the voice told him. It wasn’t much as a toothpick. The huge head turned to the side and spat the splinters over the parapet. Then she turned back and regarded him again.

  Tell me, little wizard…do you know how to fly?

  “Fly? You mean levitate?” He found himself able to talk again. “Well, uh…no, but….”

  You’ll have to figure it out, she told him. For the record, if you survive this…you never saw me. I was never here.

  With that, the dragon went into a passable imitation of a major-league baseball pitcher’s wind-up and hurled him into space, at a sharp upward angle that carried him up to at least a thousand feet of altitude before gravity asserted itself and he began to fall.

  He’d almost blacked out with the sudden acceleration, but now he was in freefall, and his senses cleared. His hands were free, and he had his voice back, but as the ground began to rush up at him, he realized he had only seconds left before impact. In desperation he called up the familiar spell, one he had used many times—had in fact used just minutes earlier. No time to set it up, only time to execute and survive. The streets and buildings below were approaching at frightening speed.

  He was just seventy feet from impact when he vanished…

  …and landed hard, face down on the bed. Fortunately, he’d managed to nullify most of his downward motion, and the mattress was soft enough to save him serious injury.

  Mattress? Where in seven hells am I? He realized that a female voice was shrieking in terror remarkably close to him—a familiar female voice.