by Voss Foster
"Damn, sugar." She pouted her pale lips. "Ruin all my fun."
"You bet your ass." And with that caveat adressed, I headed back downstairs. Of course, I made it two risers before a loud screech filled the hallway. Then I went two steps at a time, Glock out and ready by the time I hit the ground floor. I only barely took in Vellius coming down from somewhere immediately behind me, but we didn't have time to break that question down just yet.
The light coming down the hallway revealed that the door was back, which wasn't a great sign for our security. Rashem was already heading down, with King right behind. All the rest of us stood, waiting. King opened the door and checked outside, then nodded and let Rashem step out. He returned almost immediately, carrying a note.
"Well, the Hand knows we've all gathered up here. It's another warning not to fight, and an invitation to stay here. They'll come to free the prisoners themselves so we don't have to trouble ourselves." He snapped the paper with a flick of the wrist and it zipped out of sight, presumably to join Broff's head at the Las Vegas field office. "What's the plan?"
"We take their advice and hole up." Swift sat on the elongated couch and rested his elbows on his knees. "They know where this place is, and your magic's not keeping it a secret anymore, so take down everything you're using to try and hide the joint. Just put up the best walls you can. If we can keep them out of here and away from what they want, we gain a little bargaining power." He turned to Zar. "How long is it going to take you to set up some covert transport for us?"
"How covert?"
"Completely. And something they can't interrupt or block, either."
She nodded, her horns gleaming as they moved. "Where does it need to get you?"
"One to the safehouse in Flagstaff, and if you can manage it, one that'll send Lenva, Vellius, and Ixel to one of the embassies other than DC. Take your pick. Better if nobody knows which one in case something goes seriously wrong."
Zar nodded and rose. "I'm going to need carbs and caffeine. A lot of both."
It was the first time I'd heard Zar address that particular issue so directly. Demonic metabolism had some weird interactions with life in the Mundane, which led to Zar sleeping about twenty hours a day. That included at work. Since she always managed to get the job done, no one said a thing about it. If she was beefing up, then this was serious business.
The sudden smell of ozone doubled down on that "serious business" thing.
I still couldn't get close to the couch, so I stayed on the opposite side of the coffee table. "I haven't developed any talent for magic since the last time you saw me. How do we prep?"
"Sleep if you need it, coffee if you're not sleeping." King leaned back on the couch, scowling deep. "You still know how to fetch coffee?"
"Think I can manage." I was afraid the answer was "wait around for the bad guys to show up." And I was right to fear that. "How many mugs do I need to track down?"
"Oh, don't make him get the coffee." Bancroft rose to his feet. "I'm the most useless here, I can at least provide caffeine. The time alone will give me a chance to mull something over, anyway."
Swift raised one eyebrow. "You care to share what you're mulling?"
"I would not. It's not a terribly complete thought. If something comes of it, I'll be sure to let the class know."
He tottered off. I appreciated Bancroft trying to take over the busywork, but it left me with zero to do except stand in the corner and scratch my ass.
"So how was your first year with the OPA?" Swift crossed one leg over the other and gestured to an armchair.
I risked getting that close to the couch and sat. Once I was down, I felt a lot less seasick. Or housesick. Homesick? Whatever you wanted to call it. "If you'd told me it was going to be this crazy, I would have demanded more money."
"Well, if you demanded more money, I'd have had to give you even crazier assignments."
"Oh, we have crazier ones than this? Or than Jörmungandr?"
"Maybe not more than Jörmungandr. That one was a special kind of insanity." He laid his Glock on the end table and sighed. "I mean it. We've got time to kill. How's the first year treating you?"
"Like shit. I'm scarred up, I nearly die on every other case, I've had to rescue kidnapped children, jump inside a giant snake head, break up a nest of harpies, and deal way more with the Fundamentalist Humanitarians than I ever wanted to. Not to mention the suddenly revived terrorist group no one's seen or heard from in centuries."
Swift nodded. "But would you really rather be back working for Jeff Carlson in counterterrorism?"
"Hell no." I smiled at him. Counterterrorism had been my goal since I was in high school. I wanted to stop the terrorists, save the people, make a difference. And I absolutely could have done all that working there. No doubt in my mind that, by now, I would have been off menial task duty, been a proper agent. Maybe not with Carlson's full respect, but an agent.
I never would have been to Nedelwald or Tarwald or Al-Sekar. I'd never have met Gutt or Casey. I wouldn't have the same connections. And not that I'd ever admit it out loud—it sounded too arrogant even for me—there was no guarantee we'd even have a counterterrorism unit for me to be in if I hadn't been around to make a stupid decision and take out Jörmungandr. I was the reckless son of a bitch who decided jumping inside the giant death snake and shooting up its gray matter was the right call.
"OPA is where I belong. I'm a spook through and through."
Swift nodded, then turned to King. "I told you he was solid."
Now it was my turn to stare at her. "You didn't trust me?"
"Hey, it's nothing personal. Most folks who come into the OPA leave around the one year mark. It takes a special flavor of insanity to want to stick around and do this job longer than three-hundred-sixty-five days." She flashed me her lopsided smile. "Now call me when you hit a decade and we'll talk."
I couldn't help laughing at that, and once I started, Swift started. Then King joined in. Even Kimmy snorted out a few chuckles while she stared at her computer screens. It was a wave of relief running through all of us. It wasn't helpful. Hell, nothing had even been that funny. But that slightest break in the tension and it seemed like everyone jumped on it.
After all, how many more chances were we guaranteed to laugh like this?
"We've got movement." Kimmy didn't look away from her computer as she spoke. "What do we want to do?"
I didn't know how many hours it had been. When Rashem expanded out the house to make room for everyone, the clock had gone somewhere out of sight of the living room. I knew I was seven cups of coffee to the wind, which was unfortunately less than King. She downed the shit like air when the stress ratcheted up too high.
I guess sitting in an antiseptic-smelling box, waiting for someone to come test our defenses was stressful enough to get her slamming caffeine. And Bancroft, bless him, fetched coffee for her without a hint of complaint.
Then again, he was in much worse shape than I was, and you wouldn't catch me standing between King and her coffee on a day like today either. Probably simple self-preservation.
Swift leaned forward in his seat and peered at the screen, eyes squinting. I tried to see, but the surveillance footage was too washed out and too small for me to get anything from my angle.
After a few moments of silent inspection, Swift got up and cracked his neck side to side. "Rashem!"
He poked his head out of the kitchen. "I've got eyes on them already."
"Fucking all of them?" Kimmy's voice immediately tightened, and she leaned deeper toward her laptop, typing furiously. She made one screen of the surveillance footage bigger and finally, I could see what we were dealing with.
"Well shit." Swift looked at it too and ran a hand over his scalp. "I guess they count twenty-four hours differently than the rest of the world."
On the screen, a dozen various preets marched toward the safehouse, and as we all stood around watching, more and more joined them. Fliers swooped down from the sky to join the
coalescing force, but most of them just appeared from thin air, stepping out of remote transport portals and onto a residential street in downtown…wherever the hell city we were staying in. I still didn't know, but I was pretty sure I'd find out on the eleven o'clock news.
If we came out of this in one piece, that was. Hard to watch the news if they decided to boil my eyeballs inside of my skull or something equally as fun.
"Okay. I can admit I wasn't expecting this." Swift forced his neck into deeper stretches, pulling it side-to-side. It popped audibly when he got low enough to his right shoulder. "Gutt, I want you taking point on this. You'll have the best idea of what we're going to be able to do and when we're completely fucked in the ass."
"And whether they're planning to use lube." I couldn't help but fire off the remark. It was a weak attempt to lighten the mood, and that was my specialty in high-intensity situations.
Gutt leaned over and checked out the screen, working his fingers through complex swirls as he did so. The faintest bit of blue light trailed behind his fingertips. "I'm willing to bet at least half of these are golems. The same as our friend from the attack at the OPA offices." His mouth curved into a deep scowl and he clenched his fist, banishing whatever that light had been. "I don't love our odds if they are. Crafting one golem that can function well is hard enough. If he's made over a dozen in different designs, we may not stand a chance."
"Not to mention, once you start destroying those golems, he's only going to get control over more and more of his magic." Oona, the pink-mohawked elf who made up half of our research and development department, leaned in as well, joining the conversation. "We considered trying to keep golems on hand for a while. Thought it would be nice to have someone to send in who wouldn't be killed. But the amount of magic and concentration needed just to hold them together, let alone have them as viable replacements for agents, made them impractical."
It was definitely a weird thing for the Hand to keep doing, then. And weird things tended to give me weird ideas. "Kimmy, can you cross-check something in the Kingdoms's records for me?"
"Oh sure. It's not like we're all facing down a fucking firing squad right now."
"Cuss me out later. I need a criminal record on Afexius of Tarwald."
She shifted to her second laptop and started typing. Then she turned the screen around to me. There was a round-faced sorcerer. He didn't look as unhealthy as I was used to, but his skin was still pallid and papery and beginning to peel away, and his eyes sat dull in his sockets. But I wasn't interested in his appearance. Not yet. I scanned down the sparse information they'd provided for us, looking for anything that might stand out.
And boy did my stomach drop when I eventually found what I'd been looking for. I pointed to the screen, careful not to touch it. "Contained for fifteen days in a low-security system for a string of robberies involving multiple golems. Potential risk of said magic: high." I glanced from Gutt to Swift, then back to Gutt. "I don't know about you, but that's as close to absolute confirmation who we're dealing with as I think we're going to get without a corpse."
Gutt closed his eyes. "We'll need to keep eyes out for any sorcerers joining the fray. Particularly if they join, but stay far back. If there's any way we can get aerial support to scope out the surrounding areas, that would be ideal. Someone who can do that with golems, there's no guarantee he would need to be close enough to the conflict to put himself at risk."
I didn't know if we were better or worse off at this point, but at least we had information. And hey, Kimmy wasn't yelling at me anymore. That was always a plus.
After a few more moments, Gutt stood up board-straight and scanned the room. "They're clearly coming this way. Is this neighborhood still abandoned?"
Rashem apparently was listening, because he marched out of the kitchen. "Mostly. There are two houses with occupants, but I already sent Zar out to clear them. If there's anyone else in the area, they're nothing I know about, and they've never showed up on my scans or any of my other surveillance." He glanced up and to the left. "They're getting close to us. I can start throwing up new exciting barriers, but I need the go-ahead for it. They're not nice barriers."
In answer, the house shook. The lights dimmed and, for a brief moment, the hum of central air blipped to silence.
"I'd say we go ahead and hold them back." Swift nodded. "The longer it takes them to bust in, the more of them we can take out."
Rashem ran off, grabbing rabbits as he went and tossing a few of them against the walls and floor to shatter.
The walls shook again, but this time it was from a voice. A loud, booming voice that played directly next to us. "OPA. We are not fools." The same deep voice we'd heard from the golem back in DC. "The Hand realizes you will not release the wrongfully imprisoned. This is your final chance. If they are not delivered to safety with us within fifteen minutes, you will be considered enemies of free will. This is your only notice. Make the right choice."
I pulled out my Glock and nodded to Gutt and Swift. "Let's make the right choice."
Chapter Twenty
King and I had positions on the roof, hidden behind dormers, but with full view of the growing band of ne'er-do-wells down below us. It was really the only place us stupid humans could do any good in a magical firefight.
"So, you still thinking the Hand might have the right idea?" King shifted in place, nestling lower down against the magical platform we'd been afforded. It was translucent, but flat so we didn't slide straight off the roof.
"You really want me to answer?"
"I don't waste my breath asking questions I don't want to know about."
"Then yeah. I do think they might have something to bring to the conversation." I scoped out down below. None of our people had come out yet, which meant the plan was still as we left it. "Problem is, the Hand doesn't want to have a conversation, do they?"
"We're on the same page, then. You may not have noticed, but I'm not much for bullies trying to force their way into shit."
"Are you telling me you have a problem with authority?"
"No. You have a problem with authority. I have a problem with assholes. Just so happens there's a lot of intersection there."
"I'll tell Svenson you were thinking of him next time he demands my presence somewhere."
"Svenson's a nuisance, but at least he generally has his heart in the right place."
"Yeah, I know." Another check through the scope. I'd traded in my Glock for an HTR that Rothiel had the good sense to bring with her from the armory, though my handgun was still in reach I case things got too close. "If this goes into a big battle…when was the last time that happened in the Mundane?"
"You mean besides Times Square?"
"That was hardly a fight. They wanted to die."
King sighed. "The last real magical blowout was an overblown territory squabble in northern Idaho. Some Aryan Nation assholes, a band of plant elementals, and this bizarre fucking religious group from the Hidden Kingdoms. They all supposedly had an "ancestral claim" to the same land. And no, don't ask me how preets have an ancestral claim to a plot in Idaho. Ended with four dozen dead."
"Who won that one?"
"The Holy Order of the Unlit Flame. Nice compound, but they're still nuttier than Jimmy Carter's outhouse."
I almost lost it at that line, but caught my laugh and swallowed it down. "King, do you want to give our location away?"
"A little bit, yeah. I hate the waiting around part."
That I could understand.
"We're almost at the end of their ultimatum, and it doesn't seem like they plan on giving us an extension." Swift's voice crackled across my earpiece. "If you see someone who might be Afexius, try to take them alive. Otherwise, use your best judgment up there. We're going to hold as long as we can."
I tapped on my mic. "Sounds like a plan."
"Also, you have company. Try to talk them back into the house if you can."
"Company?"
"Yes, company." Ixel w
alked out, still in her bounty hunting outfit, and had somehow recovered her daggers or gotten new ones. I didn't question.
"You shouldn’t be here. Part of our job is protecting you and Lenva."
"Yeah, sitting around isn't going to work for me, sugar. Thought you would have figured that out. Besides, I kicked your ass pretty handily. Think I can hold my own."
"Yeah, up close and personal. This is distance work." I patted the rifle gently. "Your knives aren't going to do a lot of good."
"Oh dearie me, if only I had some way to protect myself from a distance." She snapped and a spike of ice appeared in her hand. "Too bad I'm completely helpless. I need a big, strong, stupid human to save me."
Okay, it had been a pretty bad argument. But before I could counter effectively, something caught my eye down below. I turned my head to see a blaze of light coalescing, building between the claws of two harpies at the front of the pack.
"Just keep yourself as secret as you can," said King. "Shit's about to get real, and if you make this whole thing an exercise in futility, I'll take you down myself. I'm harder to beat than the heartthrob next to me. But I'm not about to toss away a preet bounty hunter. If shit goes wrong, you're just as dead as the rest of us anyway."
"Well, at least one of you has some sense." She twirled the ice spike as she settled in on my other side.
The harpies condensed the light into a two-inch circle of pure white, then guided it forward. It rocketed out and hit one of Rashem's barriers. Where it struck, sparks flew out. Then the barrier shattered apart, spewing blue flames out at the marauders down below. The harpies took to the sky, shrieking as their clothing and feathers burned. Flapping didn't do enough to put the flames out, just fanned them harder, and they both crashed down to roll in the lawn.
I whistled low. "Makes sense why Rashem wanted approval for that."
Swift's voice came over again. "We've got them coming in around back. One of you needs to swing that way."
King immediately jumped up and headed for the rear. Made sense. She had a lighter, easier to maneuver rifle. That left me and Ixel versus several dozen mysterious preternatural soldiers at the front door.
