“What happened next?”
“You don’t have a phone.”
“And?”
With a heavy sigh, Leia put her cup down on the table.
“It may be difficult for you to imagine or understand, but I just wanted to discuss some business with you.”
That sounded simple. Really simple. Even too simple. And that was why it was unlikely to be a lie. It wasn’t Doom’s detective skills telling him that; it was just the practical wisdom he’d picked up in prison. When you’re in jail, you either learn to judge character or spiral down, messing with the wrong kinds.
The same happens on the outside, actually. Just not as obviously.
“What business can’t wait till Mond— Ah, yes. The tournament.”
Leia nodded.
“The opening ceremony is held tomorrow, and the second tour, too. You know what’s going to happen there, don’t you?”
“The monster hunt,” Alex replied.
Perriot sighed.
“I’m not surprised that you’d have inside info. Or at least it’s supposed to be inside.”
Not for people privileged to wear the Guards’ collar bracelet. A few words whispered to Gribovsky had been enough for Alex to have him pull all the threads together and get the scoop on each tour. Of course, he’d shared that with his group.
“That could have been expected, anyway.” Leia ran her finger along the brim of her cup. “Since the last Magic War, the number of urban monster attacks has been on the rise, in New and Old Earth alike.”
It was true. The icy giants invading Vancouver and the river dragons infesting the Shinano Prefecture in Japan were just two of many recent incidents.
The world was growing more and more dangerous with each passing day. Many of the attacking monsters were resistant to non-magic firearms.
“So, you wanted to find out what the arrangements are for the second tour? Now you know.”
“No, I didn’t. Or rather, I wanted to know more than that. I wanted to ask if you’re ready.”
“Us? If you mean the B-52 kids, they are. I prepped them.”
It was absolutely true, just not exactly the way Leia was sure to think. Lie by telling the truth. It was an art where black wizards were superior even to the fae who invented it.
“Great,” Perriot replied, exhaling in obvious relief. “Please forgive me for flaring up at you back there at the Schooner. That’s just…just me really caring about them. I’ve known them since they were kids. We’re almost family. And this tournament is their only chance.”
Mine, too, Alex thought without saying it aloud.
“Take Travis, for instance.” Leia peered into her cup, probably seeing pictures from the past in the milk bubbles. “He hopes the finale broadcast and winner announcement will get him seen and found by his parents. The winners’ pictures and names will be everywhere—on TV, on the radio, in the papers, all over the web. And he thinks… Well, you can probably empathize.”
Alex could.
“Mara is a half-blood in a dwarf clan made up of Atlantis’ best blacksmiths. Can you imagine how she feels there? She wants to prove she’s worthy of her family name so they’ll stop looking down on her father as a blood traitor. It’s a bit naïve, but it’s noble, too.”
I’d call it stupid.
“Elie’s situation is similar. Born out of wedlock. A Cinderella, just without the happy ending. And the prince.”
“I heard she has a boyfriend.”
“Daryl?” Leia smiled sadly and only with her eyes. “He never existed. She invented him. Upper-class boys and girl look down on Elie like—”
“Got it,” Alex interrupted. He realized in a moment that surprised him that he didn’t want hear the B-52 blonde called a slut or anything like that.
It was probably just that he was exhausted from walking with Archie.
“Jing wants to let the world know his shaman line continues. And tell them who killed all his kin—”
Leia stopped short once again. Alex said nothing.
He understood Jing’s reasons, too.
Perhaps better than anyone else’s. Probably better than anyone else.
Although he wished he didn’t.
“And Leo…he just really loves his friends. They’re all he has. His family. And Leonard feels the same way.”
Alex almost shuddered at the mention of the weird wizard/esper’s other personality. He wondered why Stone was still out there with his friends instead of being dissected in some top-secret government lab.
For the common good, obviously.
Isn’t that what the Light Ones always do? Make some suffer for everyone else’s benefit?
The Dark Ones were no better. But at least they never denied pursuing their personal benefit in the first place.
Doom had never hidden behind the common good.
Everything he did was for himself.
For his own sake.
Everything.
“That’s some really valuable info,” Doom said, nodding. “Totally worth cosplaying Mad Max in the city streets to tell me.”
Leia looked up at him.
Her stare was evil.
“Every time,” she started in a curt, harsh voice. “Every time I start to think you’re not that bad, you—”
“Stop.”
“Don’t you—”
“Shut up!” Alex barked.
He didn’t know what made her obey—raising his voice at her for the very first time, how rude he was, or something else. Regardless, she fell silent.
Doom closed his eyes and sniffed the air.
Bitch. Why here? Why now?
He smelled sulfur.
Chapter 63
…and heard people shouting. The peaceful, festive atmosphere was gone in a moment.
Some electric generators exploded with characteristic crackling sounds. Columns of black smoke billowed up into the sky. Alex smelled burning plastic, paper, fabric, and, most unpleasantly, flesh. Everyone was running and screaming.
Alex saw the same nice little girl with the cotton candy kneeling and crying as she tried to wake her father, who was prostrate in front of her, covering her mother with his body.
Like hell she’ll ever wake him up. Even Alex couldn’t raise an undead from a man who’d been cut in half by an axe.
A shadow fell on the girl, cast by something eight feet tall. Hoofed legs covered in black, shabby hair. A mighty torso, bulging muscles brimming with the energy of Chaos beneath parchment-like skin. A bull’s head with a black mane topped by goat horns.
A black battleax clutched in clawed paws.
A demon from a first-century legion. A puny creature unworthy of Alex’s attention.
…if it had arrived in the world alone. But the chaos that had engulfed the theme park in a matter of seconds was wreaked by dozens of hellish creatures looking exactly like that one.
With a wild roar, creepier even than bestial, the demon lifted its axe over the little girl, though it never brought it down. Its torso was bound by a rope, its arms were twisted around its broken neck, and the soaring axe slashed the demon in two.
Alex turned to Leia. Pallid, she froze like a statue, hand outstretched and small trickles of blood coming from her nose and eyes.
A D-ranked esper killing a demon in a single move (albeit apparently expending all her strength to do it)? Alex wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t witnessed it.
The way he just had.
“Give me your phone,” Alex barked.
Leia flung it onto the table and rushed for the girl. Picking the child up and glancing around, she dashed off in the direction opposite the largest group of demons.
About fifteen big, horned monsters were smashing everything in their path. Bloody pieces of flesh soared into the sky. Crimson rain washed down on the cobblestones. Shredded tents covered the dead bodies and their severed parts. Dozens and hundreds of men, women, and children perished at the paws of the marching fiends of hell.
&nbs
p; A few demons separated from the rest and came over toward Alex, who was dialing a number over and over on the smartphone screen.
“O…u…r…s…,” one of the demons said, sniffing at him. “O…r…n…o…t…”
Obviously, it spoke Demonic. But, as a pathetic first-century creature, it was a very bad speaker, sounding something like a chimpanzee trying to explain itself to a professor.
After taking a few more sniffs, the demon and its peers turned around and walked away.
Alex finally remembered the number he needed.
“Hi,” he said into the phone.
“Doom? You scum!” came Gribovsky’s panting voice. “Are you fucking crazy, calling me from—”
Whatever else he said was barely audible. To avoid getting distracted by the screaming and occasional spell flashes coming from the people who remembered they were wizards and not completely helpless, Alex covered his other ear with his hand.
“…state number! Destroy the phone!”
“Here, in the theme park—”
“We know!” Gribobsky bellowed. “We’re on our way!”
Alex took another glance around. Just the demons he could see numbered over fifty, and there were probably more.
Damn.
He’d never heard of so many invading that layer of reality at the same time. It was supposed to be impossible.
It was almost as if the border between worlds and turned from a solid stone wall into a colander.
Samhain.
The approaching festival date made it possible.
“I hope you’re bringing the army,” Alex said into the phone before flinging it over his shoulder without hanging up. Right into the water.
“No!” someone screamed.
Doom turned toward the sound, but it was already too late.
Stupid, stupid girl.
Hiding in the kiosk shadow wasn’t the best survival tactic. The demon’s axe easily slashed through the wood and sparse steel, cutting the kiosk—and the schoolgirl with it—in half.
The upper half of her body flopped through the air, landed on the cobblestones, and slid right up to Alex’s feet, leaving a trail of blood behind it.
Her glassy eyes were printed eternally with primal fear and utter bewilderment. She was supposed to be back in school on Monday. There was homework waiting for her at home. And her crush, her one love was dating another girl. How did death by demonic axe possibly fit into that picture?
Her emotions were still in the air, her soul gradually departing to the place no one ever came back from.
Ghosts are not souls.
“Forgive me,” Alex whispered, squatting in front of her and running two fingers across the ground to collect her blood on his fingertips. He did his best not to touch her disemboweled entrails.
It was uncommon for black wizards to be clean and tidy. Alexander Dumsky was just such an exception.
Virgin blood had special power. It wasn’t that sex makes people unclean. No, it’s that a tiny, almost imperceptible particle of your partner’s aura is added to your own, making your blood unusable for some magic rituals.
Alex ran his two blooded fingers over the dead girl’s glassy eyes. It was pure blood that had only known parental warmth, eyes that had witnessed the last moment of death. And truth that was still in the air.
He tensed his fingers and stuck them into the dead body’s eye socket, pulling a bloody eye out.
Black magic is never clean no matter how much some people wish it were.
Straightening up, Alex wrung his hands together and whispered the words of the ancient rite. Creating a magic seal by willpower in front of himself, he placed the dead eye right in the middle.
[ATTENTION! Prohibited spell used: DEAD MAIDEN’S GLARE of the Blood and Darkness School. Mana consumption: N/A. Code: 1A. Top Hazard. The authorized agencies have been informed in keeping with the Act…]
Alex stopped reading the lens message.
A breakthrough like the one he was facing could never have happened spontaneously. Not one on such a biblical scale.
To support the passage for the hordes of demons, the summoner had to be nearby. Somewhere very close to Alex. Cloaked in such a powerful illusion that Doom couldn’t even feel its presence. A magic disguise of that level couldn’t be penetrated by an ordinary spell.
Only a dark-magic ritual would do the trick.
And out of all the options the black magic wonder kid knew, the Dead Maiden’s Glare was the best for the situation.
Given the fact that the ritual required a human sacrifice, you could be jailed up to twelve months just for studying it.
And practicing it…
But until the summoner was stopped, there was no point destroying the demons marching into the world by the scores and hundreds.
The Dark Ones don’t do anything for the common good. Or do they?
Calling on his black magic source, Alex filled the spell with energy. A black-and-red seal flashed as magic streaming along its lines, soaking into the dead girl’s eye hanging in midair. The eye swirled violently around its axis before stopping abruptly, staring up into the sky over the middle of the theme park. A whitish ray shot up into the air.
“There you are,” Alex said with a bloodthirsty smile when the illusion broke down, revealing the black wizard standing on the giant raven’s back. “This time I’ll get you.”
Chapter 64
Their glances met. Alex’s green eyes crossed the glowing coal-red stare from the slits in the steel mask that concealed the demonologist’s face.
The seal opening the gate into hell was floating in the sky, which was why Alex hadn’t been able to detect it.
Demons came jumping out, one after another. The Mask kept his arms spread, the energy of Chaos streaming from them in long filaments. Demon magic.
That channel had to be broken.
A cigarette jumped into Alex’s lips at the same moment as several magic seals flashed behind his back. The sparks from the burning tobacco came raining down toward the ground only to be intercepted by an invisible force and plunged into the seals.
Doom had never liked the spell he was about to use. It was too heavy. Too bulky, too cumbersome.
But it was also the farthest-reaching one he had, making it his only option right then. The Mask was a good mile away.
Just as the Bloody Lightning Rain was about to shoot off, the Mask suddenly nodded toward the side.
With an evil foreboding, Alex looked over in that direction.
Scraping the sky at the very edge of the mountain ridge (and of the park) was the monstrous Ferris wheel built to surpass even the London Eye. The white construction with its multi-colored capsules took half an hour to make a full rotation, and you could easily see the fields stretching far outside Myers City from the top.
But right then, the whole Ferris wheel was covered in clumps of climbing demons. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
There was a different creature jumping across the capsules from roof to roof. Ten feet tall, hoofed and horned, it combined a human torso and arms with a bull’s head. Its skin was brown, not the usual parchment color, and only visible in the gaps between its chainmail armor, shoulder and arm plates, and many hanging chains.
Fluttering behind the demon’s back was a violet cloak and braided white hair. Its giant horns and both blades of its battleax were covered in glowing red runes.
A second-century legion demon.
The worst news of the day.
Actually, no, not the worst.
The monster moved purposeful, as though it was hunting someone. Someone sitting alone at the very top of the wheel.
Suddenly, the wheel jammed. The visitors’ screams were heard through the fiberglass plastic shielding them from the wind.
And Archibald’s scream was among them.
Alex turned toward the Mask. He couldn’t see through the mask, but he was sure the bastard was smiling.
Damn.
If he didn’t save
the boy, he definitely wasn’t getting his month off. Diglan wasn’t going to be happy with his son getting devoured by some demon.
Black wizards do nothing for the common good. Just for themselves.
Doom reached for the phone Leia had left, but…
Bitch.
…he’d already tossed it in the water! Well, let’s hope Gribovsky and company are smart enough to take out a wanted terrorist hovering in the sky on a giant raven.
“I’ve always wanted to try this.”
Alex waved a hand, giving off a barely visible blade of black mist that took off the bolted metal top of the table where he and Leia had so recently been drinking coffee.
He inhaled deeply before flinging his cigarette under the table top and standing on it with both feet, exposing the contrast between his ArmaniMagico shoes and Gribovsky’s casual outfit.
Sending the energy from both his sources into the smoldering cigarette, Alex simultaneously activated the levitation spell in his shoes.
A huge explosion hit his ears and tossed the tabletop with Doom, now almost weightless, up into the air. Instantly thirty feet in the air, he hurtled toward the Ferris wheel.
The shouts were muffled by the altitude and wind. Alex could still hear the music playing over the park loudspeakers. Wow. Looks like their DJ has good taste.
The song was Made for This by the old City Wolf.
“Bitch,” Alex swore, remembering the lyrics. “I’m coming to fuck you!”
Several heartbeats later, it became painfully obvious that the tabletop wasn’t even going to make it halfway there, so Doom activated another spell: the Air Walk. Its reach was just sixty feet but, combined with the active levitation, it enabled him to soar once more into the sky and fly some 150 feet before falling like a rag doll onto the roof of the cabin where Archibald was huddled up in the corner.
Unfortunately for Doom, the roof was slanted. Failing to grab hold of anything, he rolled head over heels, his momentum carrying him toward the edge. He slipped off, only to catch at the last moment a small handrail obviously used by window washers. Hitting the fiberglass with his whole body, he spread-eagled over it.
“Uncle Alex?” came a muffled voice from inside. Archibald must have been screaming at the top of his lungs for Doom to hear him.
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