by HDA Roberts
"I like your staff," she whispered in my ear, "Can I play with it?"
Oh for heaven's sake...
"Now, just keep it clean, would you?" I asked (begged, really).
"But I like it dirty," she replied instantly.
Well, I walked right into that one, I'll admit. Price looked on the verge of hysterics.
"I'm sorry to tell you, but the same accident that did this to my eyes also broke my man bits, nothing works down there, sorry," I said.
It was the first lie I could think of, don't look at me like that.
"Oh," she said, hugging me tighter, "I'm sorry."
"Not at all, you weren't to know," I said as she hopped up and moved over to the seat next to me.
Price's eyes narrowed as she looked at me. She didn't buy it for a second.
"Anything I should know?" I asked, trying to move the conversation along.
"A few things, Crystal will fill you in on the way," Price said.
"My method of travel isn't really passenger friendly," I replied, not wanting a bystander if I was going to be knocking a building down (which I was quite looking forward to, hadn't done that before, well, not on purpose, anyway).
"That's why we have a car," Crystal said, having darted to my side while I wasn't looking. She fastened her lips and teeth to my ear while emitting what had to have been the dirtiest sound I'd heard in my entire life, during which her left hand pinched some things she had no right or cause to be pinching.
I jumped, but there was no concealing the... physical reaction she'd stimulated.
"Mm, knew you were lying," she whispered, "You'll pay for that."
"Crystal, down," Price said, "You're his guide for this evening. Keep it civil."
Crystal sighed while I broke out into a sweat and started thinking about number sequences.
"Oh, please Miss Vivian, I only want to be his friend," Crystal said with a pout.
That blend of cute and sinful was just doing nothing good for my circulatory system.
"Isn't the sun about to rise, or something?" I asked, a little desperately.
"Not for a while, you and Crystal can spend all the time you'll need," Price said unhelpfully.
I rubbed my aching eyes, "Before my head just pops clear off, can we please head to the church?"
"Oh, so polite," Crystal said, "but I'll need a firmer hand in the future, Mathew."
"And that's all I can handle this far from dinner and breakfast," I said, standing up.
"Give me five minutes, I'm a little under-dressed," Crystal said, bouncing away.
Price smiled, "She really likes you," she said once the younger vampire was out of earshot.
"She's a nice girl. A little more forward than I'm used to, mind."
Price smiled, "You'd be amazed how far treating a girl with respect goes with someone in Crystal's profession. We don't meet a great many gentlemen around here."
"Oh," I replied, not really knowing how to reply, "I'm sorry to hear that."
She shrugged, "Pigs are easier to part from their money, anyway. And one feels less guilty about fleecing them."
She had a point, I know that was one of the pillars Tethys built her businesses on, though she didn't take it to the Red Carpet's extreme (I hoped, I hadn't asked).
"Okay, I'm ready!" Crystal said, coming up behind me. She was wearing motorcycle leathers and high-heeled boots, all in black, tight and very well fitted.
"How can you run in those?" I asked.
"Vampire. We're graceful," she said, twisting the boots slightly so I could get a good view.
"Don't those things snap?"
"Steel reinforcement," she said, "You don't know much about shoes do you?"
"Y-chromosome. If it fits and isn't pink that's all I need in a shoe."
Crystal sniggered, it was an adorable sound.
"Come on," she said, taking my hand, "I'll show you the way."
"Be back by four!" Price said.
"Yes, Mummy," Crystal said ironically, dragging me along before I could say goodbye.
Nothing I could do about it, she could pick me up and carry me if she wanted to.
She set a pretty fast pace, and I had to ask her to slow down after I'd nearly tripped over the staff for the umpteenth time.
"Don't handle the staff very often?" she asked coquettishly, I replied with a look that made her smile as we exited the house. There was a BMW waiting for us with a burly driver, and heavily armed guards everywhere, it was almost like an armed camp, I assumed in response to the recent attack.
We hopped in and I wedged the staff in somehow. Crystal slid over so she was sitting hard up against me. The driver started the car and pulled away from the house.
"So, this girlfriend of yours... serious?" she asked.
"Very."
"First love?" she asked, holding my hand.
"First one that matters."
"That sounds like a story."
"Oh, not really. First girlfriend cheated on me with my brother because my sister told her to in an attempt to distract me from casting a Black Magic spell that would have turned me into a monster. You know, that old chestnut."
She laughed, stroking my fingers in a very distracting way.
"You ever cheat on someone?"
"No," I said, frowning.
"Would you like to?"
I snorted.
"Faithful type, huh?" she asked.
"I try to be," I said, "What about you? You have somebody?"
"My line of work isn't conducive to a healthy relationship. I have friends, work friends, mostly. Miss Vivian's people are like a family, we support each other."
"That's good. Everyone should have someone to turn to."
"Even us monsters?" she asked; this smile a little sad.
"I've met a great many things far more deserving of that descriptor than you. Monstrosity is a matter of the soul, not biology."
"You've got some strange ideas for a Magician," she said, rubbing her cheek on my hand.
I shrugged.
"What can you tell me about the church?" I asked.
"Catacombs, lots of same," she said, "Our people tracked more than a dozen men and women coming and going. Don't know who they were or what they were doing, but one of the suppliers gave up the location to our Mimi while in the throes of ecstasy."
"Alright," I said, "Any maps of the catacombs?"
"The plans were mysteriously absent from the county offices, which should be a clue all on its own, and nobody was going to risk trying to go in there with a notepad and a compass."
"Fair enough. That's a solvable problem," I said as I thought it through.
We arrived a few minutes later and I stepped out of the car, which the man then parked discreetly in an alley, drawing a gun.
"Which way?" I asked.
"This way, I'll show you," she said.
"I'd prefer it if you stayed here."
"Why?" she asked, crossing her arms, "I can take care of myself!"
"I know that, but there may be Magicians, and I don't want you getting caught in the crossfire."
"I'll be fine," she said stubbornly, "Miss Vivian told me not to let you out of my sight."
"Look, if you come with me, I'll worry. If I worry, I'll be distracted, and that might get me killed," I explained.
"You worry about me?" she asked with a smile.
"Don't change the subject."
"We can discuss it on the way," she said, gesturing for me to follow.
"But..." I said, but she was already striding ahead.
Seriously, did nobody feel it would be a good idea to do what the First Shadow said?
I muttered and followed after her.
She paused at an intersection and held up a hand. I stopped.
"It's around there," she said, "There are six guards, rotating shifts around the building, irregular patrols."
I cast Mage Sight and took a peek.
And yikes, there were a lot more than six people in that buildin
g. Closer to sixty, most of them below ground. Most of them were... different. I didn't know what the hell I was looking at, really, but the Auras were warped by something. And there were at least seven Mages, nothing more powerful than a mid-level Wizard, thankfully.
"Ho boy," I said, laying out what I saw.
"We can't deal with that!" she said.
"Very true," I said, patting her shoulder, "You go get help."
I stood and cast a set of shields, wrapping myself up in Shadows as I approached the Church. It was wide and crumbling, missing most of its roof and half of its East wall.
"Psst! Mathew, come back here!"
"Just a sec," I whispered back, expanding the cloud of Shadow to envelope the street.
The first guard saw the darkness coming, but I dropped him with a sleep spell. There were five more, and I made my way around the perimeter after each. Most were in teams of two, but it was simplicity itself to drop them with wider Sleep-Hexes and then solidify the enchantment. The final one fell into a heap and I dropped my Shadows, using tendrils to drag them into a covered vestibule with a heavy door in front of it.
"Wow," Crystal said, startling me, "That's cool."
I chuckled, searching them and finding little of value. I used Shadows to tie them up and to each other before using a solidifying spell to make the bonds permanent. I smashed their weapons and their electronics before shutting the door using a reversed lock-pick spell to lock it.
I went to the middle of the church and started to concentrate.
"What're you doing?" Crystal asked, looking around for more enemies.
"Mapping spell," I said, pulling my phone out, and handing it to her, "Take pictures when it's done?"
"Sure," she said taking the phone while I worked.
It took about fifteen minutes to cast the spell. Subsonic waves darted out and down before bouncing back to the receiving enchantment in my hand, forming a map of everything below us, every room, passage, person, door and bit of stone.
"That is so amazing!" Crystal gushed, snapping pictures from every angle with the camera.
"It's annoyingly complicated," I replied, "but it does the job."
There were about a dozen levels of catacombs beneath us, with a massive chamber in the bottom three floors. The entrance was through the nave ahead of us, a hatch in the floor.
"You really ought to stay here," I said.
"No, I worry, too, you know," she said, "besides, you need me."
I disagreed with that, but wasn't going to argue with her.
"Fine, but we're doing this stealthy, and nobody dies, alright?"
"What?"
"I don't kill people. It's a whole thing for me. And nobody else dies on my watch, either, understand?"
"Oh, alright," she said theatrically, "There's no need to be quite so restrictive."
I glared.
"Fine, fine," she said, following me. I went over to the hatch and opened it slowly, there wasn't anyone close, but I didn't want the sound to carry.
"Do you have a mask?" I asked, "I don't want cameras to see your face."
"No, no mask," she said, "besides, you're not wearing one."
"I don't live in this city," I said, shrugging off my hoodie and pulling a set of sunglasses out of my bag, "put these on."
"Is this cotton?" she said with a grimace.
"Either put them on, or you wait out here."
She rolled her eyes and made a disgusted sound, but she took them from me.
"Ooh, smells nice in here," she said as she pulled the hood over her head and put the sunglasses on.
"It smells like my most recent terror-sweat, if anything."
"That's what I meant," she whispered back.
I rolled my eyes and led the way down. I kept my Shadow Magic to a minimum so as not to alert the Magicians that we were coming, but I could still see just fine, and so could she, as we descended into the earth.
"Oh, if I say 'Exit', you need to get to me fast and close your eyes. We won't be leaving in a sanity-friendly way. Don't open them again until I say so."
"Usually when men ask me to close my eyes and come to them, it's in much more comfortable circumstances," she replied.
I shook my head and pulled my phone, looking at the improvised map for the next stairway. We found it and carried on, down and down (too deep for my claustrophobia's liking).
After about half an hour of careful movement, down stairs and ladders, slinking our way through passages and moving too slowly for my sense of well-being, we came upon the uppermost part of the big chamber, where we dropped to the floor and crawled towards the edge of the upper gallery.
The room was a huge cylinder, maybe a hundred metres across. There were two galleries above the ground floor, both packed with bone-filled alcoves. The room itself was brightly lit, almost painfully so. I looked down into it and nearly ran screaming for the Shadow Realm.
It was full of Demons, which explained those twisted, alien auras I'd seen.
Each was bound to a summoning circle, thank God, but they were very definitely demons. No two looked alike, but about a dozen were humanoid, with red skin and bony protrusions of various length and location. Most had black eyes, some had red, some had tails or wings. The others vaguely resembled animals, some were quadrupeds, some looked like snakes or slugs or masses of spiny tentacles.
A word on Demons. I may not know a great deal, but I had the basics down. There were two kinds of them, very broad categories, really, sentient and bestial, in which there were various grades, based loosely on those for Elementals, lesser, common, greater, arch and titanic.
Everything in that room was a lesser Demon. That's right, every horrific, lethally dangerous thing in that room was the least nasty thing that comes from down there. Just to compare for you, Gabrielle, being a purebred Succubus, fell under the general heading of 'greater'. If I didn't have Magic, and she'd been summoned instead of assigned, she could kill me with a look, she was that powerful. But, even with all that power, she could still be held in a circle like one of these.
Each circle had a device attached to it, silver, spindly and about nine feet tall, almost like a hospital frame used to hold drips and IV bags. Each device was packed with an intricate array of enchantments and spells that was drawing power of some sort from the Demons. As time went by, I saw little chunks of red fall into receptacles on the front of the machines.
I blinked hard as I realised what I was seeing.
Source.
My God. They were making the drug out of Demonic Essence! Were they insane? What the hell would it do to a person over time? Certainly nothing good, that stuff was literally pure, distilled evil.
I looked around with Mage Sight. Six technicians, all armed with guns. Four Adepts, Flesh, Air and two Earths. Three Wizards, two Water and a Pryo. I could take them, not even a problem, really. But doing that might bring the whole place down on us.
Do you see that man at the bottom? I sent to Crystal.
EEK! Are you in my head?
Yes, you see the man? White beard, dark jacket? Can you knock him out without alerting anyone? I asked.
Sure.
Okay. The two across from him to the right are Earth Mages. I'm going for them. If you can get your guy, that means that the chances of anything dropping on our heads are greatly reduced, at which point I'll act as a magnet while you start beating people over the head. Stay away from anyone if they are shimmering, it means they have a Shield cast, you won't be able to get through it, alright?
Okay!
I'll go when you knock out your guy.
I disconnected and she was gone, darting silently down the stairs.
This was the great weakness of the Magician. We had human reflexes and (generally) human bodies. Surprise by a more physically imposing enemy was the greatest danger. That's why Archons had Wardens, not to fight our battles, but to see one coming in time to allow us to react. A vampire attacking from surprise was a terrible danger, even to me.
And just like that, the Pyro was down, silently, perfectly, and hidden behind some gear where I only saw him because I was looking. A tiny blur and another man was down, and then another while I was still casting shields and calling my Shadows. I used my Will and destroyed the massive set of lights in the ceiling, plunging the whole place into darkness that my Shadows and Crystal exploited.
There were shouts of panic as my Shadows enclosed me and I directed a bolt of force through my staff at each of the two Earth Mages. The poor buggers were still too shocked by the sudden destruction of the lights to do anything useful and they both went down hard. I got one of the Water Wizards the same way before the last one got his shields up, and so did the last two Adepts.
Crystal switched her aim to the men without magic, and they started dropping like flies as she choked or knocked them out. My staff flared with more force and the last Wizard went down with six broken bones. The Air Mage started casting, screaming for help, obviously panicked and terrified (neither a good state of mind for Magic use, by the way; I knew that from painful experience). Crystal darted behind cover as the moving air created static that he hurled at my Shadows in the form of forked lightning. The attack missed the vampire by a hair's breadth.
I had my constructs converge on him, tearing his weak shields to shreds before battering him into the wall, where he slid to the ground, unconscious. Just the Flesh Adept left. His body expanded, his muscles bulging, and he sprinted for the stairs. I aimed Force and missed, blowing up a chunk of wall and creating a cloud of dust. I recharged, aimed and fired again and hit him hard in the shoulder. He smacked off the wall with a scream and I tossed a Sleep-Hex that dropped him, ending the pain of his shattered shoulder.
The demons were roaring or screaming, smacking off their summoning circles as they saw the battle in their midst, and tried to get at their downed tormentors. I lowered myself to their part of the room, checking carefully for any more threats.
"I think we're clear," Crystal said, appearing in front of me.
"Apart from the Demons, you mean?" I asked with a smile.
"Yes, Mathew, apart from the Demons," she said, rolling her eyes.
I used my Shadows to drag all our prisoners into an alcove at the side of the room, where I dropped Coma-Hexes into their heads one by one until they were all sleeping soundly. Crystal watched me all the while, holding my staff while I worked.
