“Damon Harrison sent them,” I said. “They’re Crossbow Consulting’s people.”
His face looked grim. “Professional killers, then. But we’ve got to try.”
Esteban and I fired off more rounds and he tried to move around the front bumper. A hail of bullets met us. He didn’t even get a full step towards Vega before he was driven back to cover.
“Don’t come out here,” she wheezed. “They’ll kill you.”
More spangs and thwips of bullets along the passenger side, followed by the horrible smack of another bullet burying itself in flesh. Vega gasped.
Her voice was even weaker now. “Two fire teams. Two men on each team. Coming this way. All wearing…dark gray suits.”
Esteban nodded. “Four guys, got it.”
Suddenly, a quick flurry of shots thundered from Vega’s side of the car. A man screamed off in the distance.
“Three now,” Vega rasped, in a voice just over a whisper. “That’s all…all I can help you, partner. Watch…your back.”
“Isabel? Isabel?” Esteban called, again and again. “Vega, are you there?”
But there was no response.
Chapter Forty-Three
Esteban continued to call Vega’s name. He got no reply.
I pushed past him to kneel back at the driver’s side of the bumper. Just like on Vega’s side of the car, a quartet of gunmen emerged from cover across and down the road. So, Crossbow’s men had set up two four-men teams to hit us from both sides at once.
Vega had tagged one, leaving a total of seven more trained killers out there. Great. I risked poking my head out to take an aimed shot, but I didn’t have time to do more than raise my gun. The first pair ran forward while the second pair opened fire again. I ducked back behind the front of the car as another tire blew out with the hiss of compressed air.
“Yeah, these are pros,” Esteban muttered. “They’re using fire and maneuver tactics to get closer to us. They have to if they want to kill us before the LAPD gets here. Radio or no, someone’s bound to call in a gunfight on a city street.”
The sky grumbled as if in response, while the drizzle ramped up another notch. Esteban snuck a quick glance around my corner. He screwed his eyes shut for a moment and shook his head before turning to me and speaking in a firm, reassuring tone. The voice of a jetliner’s captain who’s trying to keep everyone calm, right before an unavoidable crash landing.
“Okay, we’re going to get you out of this Dayna.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending. “Get me out? How?”
“I’ll draw their fire. You make a run for the front door.” He waved off my objection. “If you die, so will a lot of people in Andeluvia!”
“You’re not convincing me,” I shot back. “And don’t try that thing with the puppy dog eyes, either.”
We hunkered down as more bullets whined overhead, forcing us back-to-back. I took a couple of shots blindly around the bumper, hoping vainly that would at least slow Harrison’s men down. I almost got my gun blown out of my hand for my troubles.
Bullet holes appeared along the edge of the bumper now, mute evidence that Crossbow’s men were finally working their way around on each side. Esteban let out another curse as he did his best to return fire.
The cruiser’s windshield burst under the repeated hits. Daggers of glass tumbled down from the car’s badly scarred hood, stabbing and slicing as they bounced off our head and shoulders. A few more seconds and our cover would be gone.
A flash of lightning illuminated the silver-gray grille of the police cruiser.
I jerked my head around. That flash hadn’t come from the sky.
It had come from inside my house.
The approaching gunmen must have seen it too, as their near-constant fire on us ground to a halt. The air went dead quiet save for the pattering sound of rain and the wail of a car alarm from down the block.
Then the entire front of my house erupted in a fountain of glass, sheetrock, and stucco.
The Queen Mother of the Hakseeka tore through the remains of my front door, window, and living room wall, shoving her way out of the wreckage like the title menace of a monster movie. With a blood-curdling hiss only a thirty-foot serpent could make, she faced down the quartet of men on my side of the wrecked police cruiser. Raising her forearms high, she spread her leather-scale wings to their full, massive glory.
The hired guns from Crossbow Consulting froze where they stood, the look of shock and disbelief on the closest man’s face a treasure to behold. His partner shook his head as if to wake from a nightmare.
Then a roar fit for the African savanna cut through both the thunder and Nagura’s hiss. Shaw emerged from the remains of my house at a lope, spreading his own white eagle wings and making a huge bound over Nagura’s shoulder. One of Crossbow’s men began to bring his gun around to bear on the griffin.
Shaw gave a triumphant eagle’s scream as his razor-sharp beak tore the man’s throat wide open. The blood-spattered drake pivoted before his first foe had even fallen and went after his next target. A slash of his talons opened the second mercenary from sternum to groin.
The remaining two men backpedaled madly as they aimed at the griffin. I leaned out from where I knelt against the battered police car and squeezed my trigger twice, the shots hitting one of the remaining Crossbow men. He fell to his knees, one eye turned into a bloody crater, before toppling over backwards.
Nagura lunged at the final man. He got off a single shot. It whined harmlessly off one of her head-spikes as the wyvern queen struck, pistoning her snakelike neck.
Her razor-sharp teeth closed around the man’s head, engulfing it. A thin wail came from the gunman as he flailed and beat against the queen’s stone-hard jaws. A gut-rending rip, followed by a gristly crunching sound made me turn away.
More shots rang out. Nagura let out a chuff of outrage as holes appeared in one wing. Shaw leaped across the length of my yard towards the last three attackers. The fierce joy of combat gleamed in his golden eyes as the wyvern queen followed in his wake.
Another Crossbow man went down as Shaw struck him with the edge of his wing. The griffin then reared up and stomped on the man’s neck, crushing it. Esteban stepped out from cover, firing continuously as he moved forward, dropping another mercenary.
The last gunman looked around at the carnage, then turned and fled. He made it perhaps nine or ten steps.
With a meaty squelch, Nagura drove her spiked tail through his back. The scaly phosphorescent tip emerged from the man’s belly, slick and dripping. His eyes rolled back and he went limp as Nagura shook his body off and left it in a pile in the street.
Esteban had gone pale as he watched her in action.
“Dayna,” he husked, “Please tell me you know what that is.”
“‘That’ is Queen Nagura,” I informed him. “Don’t shoot at her, she’s a friend.”
His expression was one of awe. “Your friends in Andeluvia get more badass every time I meet them.”
Finally, finally, I heard the din of approaching sirens. Shaw came up to me, his battle rage replaced by a look of concern.
“Art thou badly hurt?” the griffin asked, as he touched my bleeding hand with his massive furry paw.
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “You won’t have to avenge me quite yet.”
Shaw squinted over at Esteban. “Do I still have to clout thee?”
“No, or ‘nay’, I guess,” Alanzo replied. “Dayna, I have to see…if Vega…”
I nodded. “Yes, I understand. Go to her.”
Queen Nagura stopped to wipe her tail clean of ichor against a nearby fire hydrant before moving over to join us. She lifted her whiteboard and wrote, her voice sound shaky, probably from the rain making her marker-drawn words run.
“We are sorry for being so late,” she apologized. “We saw all of what happened, but it took time for the Regent to work up a transport spell to get us here. It is of very short duration.”
“How sh
ort?” I asked.
“Two minutes from invocation. We do not have much time remaining.”
I reached out with my good hand. The wyvern queen touched her wingtip to it. “Thank you, Nagura. You and Shaw saved our lives.”
The scales down her back rippled with pleasure as she took my words in. “Then our debt of service to you has been repaid.”
“I never doubted that it would be,” I beamed. “Let Magnus know that I’ll use his messaging ring to contact him when I’m ready to come back. I’ve got to handle the mess on this side first.”
She made a chuffing sound in acknowledgement, then she and Grimshaw were surrounded in a haze of white sparks. The two winked out as if they’d never existed.
Alanzo called out, his voice shaky, from where he knelt next to the battered cruiser. “Dayna.”
I hurried over. Isabel Vega lay slumped against the side of the car, her legs stretched out before her. Her wire-frame glasses lay off to one side, their frame bent beyond repair.
The pavement around her was covered in a spreading pool of red. I counted five separate bullet holes in her arm, legs, and pelvis. Each dripped or streamed blood even as Esteban tried to staunch the bleeding.
Amazingly, her dark eyes opened, focusing on me as she spoke. I had to kneel next to Esteban to hear her faint words.
“Was that really a dragon?”
“Yes, a good one. Her name is Nagura, the Queen of the Wyverns.”
“And the other?”
“He’s a griffin. My friend, Grimshaw.”
She raised a single coffee-colored eyebrow. “The theft. At the Natural History Museum. Was that him?”
My voice threatened to break. “His kids, actually. It’s a complicated story.”
A wan smile crossed her face. The lights from two more police cars and an ambulance appeared around the corner. Esteban stood up, displayed his badge, and waved them over as I put my hand atop Isabel’s. Her skin felt smooth and disturbingly cool.
“You two were telling the truth,” she said faintly. “There is a world of wonder out there. A place where only those with a spirit of adventure and purity of heart could come.”
“Isabel…”
Her eyes looked beyond me, at something impossibly beautiful and far away.
“I knew it,” she breathed. “The truth was right in front of me. I just had to see it.”
Vega’s eyes closed as the heavens unleashed a deluge of warm rain.
Chapter Forty-Four
Detective Isabel Vega died as she was being wheeled into the emergency room.
Later on, I heard from one of the paramedics that it was a miracle she lived as long as she had. I believed him. Surviving multiple gunshot wounds was something reserved for the exceptionally lucky.
Or Damon Harrison.
Esteban and I were sent to the same hospital as Vega. We didn’t rate an ER level of urgency, but they still took care of us without delay. Alanzo had glass pulled from his scalp and shoulder. The bullet he took across his armor’s back plate left him with a massive bruise, so they gave him a torso-wrap compression bandage and some prescription-strength painkillers.
They had to dig glass out of my hair too, and I received a baker’s dozen stitches. Ten for the back of my hand and three under my chin, which had stubbornly refused to stop bleeding by the time I got to the doctor’s examination room.
In other words, it was small change for people who’d been in the middle of a devastating firefight. It certainly didn’t prevent LAPD’s finest from dragging us into one of the hospital’s conference rooms and grilling us over what happened. Part of me seethed at my inability to report back to Andeluvia or to check on Fitzwilliam, but I was being examined under a microscope for the moment. I didn’t even have my phone. It was buried somewhere in the ruins of my house.
Nobody had a clue as to how the bad guys had spoofed my cell phone number – let alone my voice – in order to get Esteban and Vega to my house. They also didn’t have a clue as to what put the slash and bite marks on four of the eight dead men, or what had cleanly decapitated the fifth.
Of course, there was always the question of what turned the front half my house into rubble. Somewhere along the line one of the investigators mentioned a ruptured gas main as a possible cause. But the utility company reported no breaks in my area, and there were no tell-tale scorch marks.
Nobody had stepped forward with video footage of what had happened, a pleasant surprise in this day and age. All I could tell the investigators was that I lived in an upper middle-class part of Los Angeles filled with dual-income, no-children power couples. If your neighbors consist of wannabe CEOs with law partners for spouses, that means only one thing: between commute hours, your neighborhood’s a dead zone.
For the next few hours, Esteban and I either kept quiet or played dumb. We’d been blinded by muzzle flashes. We’d been too busy desperately trying to stay alive to watch what was happening. There were over a hundred bullet holes in my garage door and another hundred in Esteban’s police cruiser that attested to our side of the story.
Most importantly, there wasn’t anything McClatchy and company could hang on us. Besides, I didn’t think the truth would have gone over all that well, especially the part with a griffin warrior and a three thousand-year-old wyvern queen using a whiteboard and dry-erase markers to talk.
Not even Hollywood would buy that story.
All either of us knew for sure was that someone had set up an ambush with the intent to kill a pair of cops. At least the LAPD wasn’t totally inept. They were quickly able to identify all eight men as members of a ‘Special Security Detachment’ from Crossbow Consulting.
Grayson Archer jumped all the way to Suspect Number One.
I wasn’t sure what Archer was responsible for anymore, but I could hardly jump to the man’s defense. I kept my mouth closed about what had happened in his company’s warehouse. Besides the obvious reasons – magic portals, slabs of ruby, and mysteriously invulnerable people – the problem was that I’d left the site via magic. I’d been too pre-occupied to look at the addresses on the packing slips. So I had no idea how to get back to that warehouse without a wizard’s help.
Crossbow Consulting’s offices were housed in one of downtown Los Angeles’ mid-sized skyscrapers. It was raided early that evening by a SWAT team, but there was no repeat of the battle fought on my street. None of the employees were armed with anything more dangerous than a stapler. Everyone down to the file clerk was taken into custody for questioning.
Of course, neither Damon Harrison nor Grayson Archer were found in that haul.
The last investigator finally left well after midnight. Esteban and I could have complained about that, but the hospital wanted us to stay overnight for observation anyway. No one had come to usher us back to our beds yet, so we decided to stay in the conference room a little longer.
We’d turned off the overhead fluorescents and left on one of the green-hooded desk lamps. The tables around us were littered with used notepads, crumpled paper, and the remains of take-out from the local delicatessen. It hadn’t been anything to write home about, but it beat hospital food.
Esteban and I sat together on the edge of a warm yellow pool of illumination, staring out the window into the night. The darkness was broken only by the glitter of the hospital’s intake signs and the occasional flash of lightning.
“I’ve been watching from the sidelines for too long,” Esteban finally said. He rubbed his shoulder irritably where the doctors had removed a sliver of glass. “I guess I knew that as soon as I really got to talking with Fritz. King Fitzwilliam, I mean. What’s been going on in Andeluvia…is more serious than I thought.”
“This hasn’t been your fight,” I reminded him.
“Well, I’m involved now. I want to get these bastards. Crossbow Consulting, or whoever’s behind them.”
“You’re involved now,” I agreed.
“The dragon queen…Nagura, was it? What’s her deal?”
I flexed my wounded hand as I answered. The backside looked red and angry, but that would go away soon. Right now, it throbbed like a dull headache.
“Queen Nagura’s a wyvern. They’re related to dragons, and they founded the side of the Light almost three thousand years ago. She knows. She was there.”
“She’s been around a long time, then.”
“A very long time. And as far as we can tell, she’s the last of her kind.”
Esteban chewed that over for a bit.
“She’s…formidable.”
“Nagura’s got the right personality to rule over a kingdom of wyverns. She’s definitely what you’d call a ‘strong woman’.”
“I’d also have said the same thing about Vega.”
I nodded. “You’re not the only one.”
When Alanzo spoke again, his voice wavered, like a flame in a gust of wind. “I’ve never lost a partner before. And…I could really use a strong woman right now.”
I reached for him. Our arms found their way around each other. I could feel the rough wrap of bandages around his midsection even through his clothes, so I held him as gently as I could. His breaths came hot and fast in my ear.
Alanzo let out three, maybe four sobs. Tightly rationed drops of emotion, each rare and precious. The wind kicked up, rattling the rain against the window like someone throwing handfuls of pennies against the glass.
We listened for a while.
I remembered the last time Esteban and I had held each other like this, back when the world of Andeluvia had broken me. Broken my spirit with the deaths of Hollyhock and Perrin. Now, that same world had reached out and touched Esteban, doing so just as violently.
I had to be the strong one this time. I had to let the storm break over me, to let the worst of the rage and sorrow pass.
And then it will be time, I thought. The time predicted by Queen Nagura’s sister.
A Warrant of Wyverns Page 22
