A Flicker of Steel

by Steve McHugh

  “You’d better take us to him then,” Irkalla said. “And we’re keeping our weapons, so don’t even ask.”

  Malcolm stared at Irkalla for several seconds before nodding. “With or without guns, there’s not a lot we can do if you start killing people.”

  Layla and the rest of her team were led around to the side of the prison with the strike team bringing up the rear. Including the two guards, fourteen people passed through several security checkpoints as they moved through the prison.

  Eventually they reached a set of heavy-duty doors, where four more men stood guard. Their station was filled with security controls, a locker that Layla imagined must contain weapons, and a few chairs. A second door lay a little further along the hallway. The prison captain turned to the group. “Only Layla and her team will go through these doors. You were informed of this, yes?”

  “Yes,” the commander of the strike team said.

  Layla felt bad that she didn’t even know the man’s name. Her nerves had begun to kick in, but Jared stood behind her and squeezed her hand slightly, making her feel a little better about what was going to happen once those huge doors were opened.

  The strike team commander turned toward Layla. “We’ll be right here if you need us.”

  Jared gave Layla’s hand another little squeeze, and she watched him walk away with his team. One of the guards swiped his keycard over the reader, while a second hit a switch to open the heavy security doors, which regained Layla’s attention as the doors began to slowly part.

  “How do you get back out?” Remy asked.

  “Security keycard,” Malcolm told him, showing him the keycard on his belt. “You need to use two different cards within a set time frame—one at the first set of doors, and one at the second—and a key code. It’s the only way to get in or out of this wing. Thankfully.”

  “Has anyone outside of the facility been in contact with my father?” Layla asked.

  “Do you mean in person?” Malcolm replied. “No. We get a lot of correspondence for him, though. Love letters from men and women, and occasionally messages that’d make a porn star blush. Officially he’s still in a maximum-security prison north of New York, so they forward us all of his mail. I trust the people there—you don’t need to worry about them.”

  “Can I read those?” Remy asked. “For purely scientific reasons.”

  “You disturb me,” Diana said.

  “You just figuring that out now?” Remy replied. “Seriously, though, people send him that stuff?”

  “Some people love danger, or death, or are drawn to things that aren’t quite right,” Malcolm told everyone. “And some of those people think that talking to a serial killer is sexy.”

  “They should try being the child of one, and see how much fun that is,” Layla said.

  When the doors opened, Cody remained behind, and the group followed Malcolm down a brightly lit corridor to another set of doors at the far end. Malcolm swiped his card over the reader and input a six-digit combination code, opening the door a moment later and leading the team into another corridor. It didn’t take long for them all to reach the solitary area. After clearing another security checkpoint with two more guards, they stepped into a horseshoe-like portion of the prison. Layla wondered how the strike team felt being so far away from them. She knew that the people with her would fight if anything happened, so she wasn’t concerned.

  Layla could see two levels to the solitary area, each with six cells. Those on top were set further back than those on the bottom level, and a glass dome covered the whole facility, letting in a lot more light than she had expected. Layla had imagined her father’s prison to be a dark, dank, and frankly very unpleasant place, but it was light and airy, even though it felt cooler than necessary. She rubbed her arms, even feeling the chill through her jacket.

  “We’ve learnt that being cold makes people less likely to be assholes,” Malcolm said. “Not freezing, but just cold enough to feel uncomfortable. Don’t know if that’s science or some shit, but it seems to work here. And there are the runes, too. They work on anyone inside the cells, but we’ve been told that the power leaks out to here too, so don’t take too long.”

  Layla looked over at the rest of her team, most of whom shrugged in response. “Which one is my dad in?” she asked their guide.

  “Top floor, second from the left,” Malcolm told her. “All of the cells have reinforced doors, their own bathrooms, and a few modern conveniences: our inmates may be among the worst people on earth, but the more pleasant their stay, the less likely they are to gut the guards.”

  “Just tell them to open the cell and leave,” Layla said. “I know it’s not protocol, but I’d rather do this as quickly and easily as possible.”

  Malcolm activated the walkie-talkie on his lapel. “Gary, can you open Caleb’s cell? Don’t worry about the shackles—apparently his daughter doesn’t think he’ll need them.”

  Gary’s swearing was muffled by Malcolm’s hand, but it was still obvious that the guard wasn’t thrilled about the idea.

  The cell door clicked before making a hissing noise.

  “It’s all yours,” the guard told Layla.

  “Thank you,” Layla said, before slowly ascending the metal stairs to the floor above. She walked along the landing, every step ringing a million decibels in her ears, and stopped outside her father’s cell. She’d rehearsed the things she’d wanted to say to him and imagined their first meeting a million times since the night he was arrested so many years earlier. Layla had believed she’d have a handle on the hurt and anger she felt, but she was wrong. She wanted to punch him, more than anything else in the world, and had to force herself to remain calm.

  “Am I allowed to leave now?” her father called out as Gary left his cell, walking past Layla at a quick pace. Caleb had lost none of his Brooklyn accent in the years since she’d last heard his voice. It stirred memories she’d long since pushed deep inside.

  “Hi Dad,” Layla said, taking a step toward the cell.

  Her father was almost six feet tall, bald, with a short blonde beard and deep-green eyes. Layla had thought of him as a giant, both in height and width, but the truth didn’t quite reflect the memory of a child. He was still broad-shouldered, but was much more muscular than she remembered, his massive arms strained against his orange prison jumpsuit.

  “Layla, is that you?” Caleb asked, disbelief on his face.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  Caleb took a step forward, and Layla’s hand fell to the Glock against her hip. Caleb froze and took a step back. “You scared of your pa?”

  “I know what you did, Dad. I know what you did and who you did it to. I am not the little girl who hid under her bed when the FBI came to arrest you in the middle of the night, terrified that the bad guys had found us. You cross me now, and I’ll put you down. No screwing around.”

  Caleb Cassidy held Layla’s gaze for several seconds before nodding. “Okay, my little hawk. Your call.”

  “Don’t call me that. Just don’t. You lost that right a long time ago.”

  Caleb nodded again. “Okay. Anything else I’m not allowed to do?”

  “Piss me off.”

  Caleb’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t bring you up to use that kind of language with your father.”

  “You didn’t bring me up at all,” Layla snapped, before forcing herself to be calm.

  Caleb opened his mouth to say something, but closed it again after he saw Layla’s team standing behind her. “You here for more than a catch up then?”

  “We’re here to take you somewhere more secure.”

  “You going to stick me in Fort Knox? Or have they re-opened the Tower of London for little old me?”

  “Nergal is coming for you.”

  Fear flickered over Caleb’s face. It was the first time Layla could ever remember her father seeming afraid of anything.

  “You know who he is, I assume?”

  Caleb nodded. “He’s not a m
an whose acquaintance I’d like to make.”

  “You know why he wants you?”

  “Yes, he wants me to track down his enemies so he can kill them. I assume Avalon has been unable to stop him.”

  “Avalon is under new management. The kind that considers Nergal a friend, and me a fugitive.”

  “You’re an umbra, aren’t you?”

  Layla nodded.

  “I never wanted that for you. I never wanted this life.”

  “You trained me to fight. You didn’t do that because you wanted to save me from your life.”

  “I trained you to be better. That was all.”

  Layla was about to reply, but decided against it. “We . . . I need you to come with us.”

  “On one condition.”

  “I don’t think you’re in any position to make demands. It’s not like you want to be found by Nergal.”

  “I’ll develop a sudden case of power blockage.”

  “Fine, what do you want?”

  “To be a part of your life.”

  “I tell you what, you come back with me, without any trouble, and we’ll talk. Actually sit down and talk. But that’s all I’m agreeing to.”

  A wicked smiled creased Caleb’s lips. “Please do lead on then.” He glanced up at the bullet-proof glass dome above the prison, and Layla followed his gaze as he spoke. “I always thought that when someone freed me of this place, they would burst through that ceiling. It’s a huge design flaw.”

  “Sorry to disappoint. We’re just going to go sit in a car and drive away. Nice and boring.”

  Caleb walked back into his cell and picked up a small jewelry box.

  “What’s that?” Layla asked.

  “It’s the one thing that I would like to take with me.”

  He passed it to Layla, who opened it and saw a white-gold ring. “This is what Tommy gave to you, isn’t it?”

  “It was your mother’s.”

  Layla closed the box and passed it back to her father. She escorted him over to the group and Gary placed handcuffs on him. Layla couldn’t help but look up at the sky through the glass dome as Irkalla added a sorcerer’s band. She hoped they’d be able to get him someplace safe before the drenik inside Caleb started to gain control. Things were going far too easily.

  10

  “I’m sorry to lose you,” Malcolm Turner said to Caleb as he opened the door leading out of the solitary area. “You were quiet for the most part. I like quiet prisoners.”

  “Malcolm, you never did anything exciting enough for me to want to know about your life outside of work,” Caleb told him. “No affairs, no drugs, no gambling: a family man, who honestly loved being a family man, and did his job because he was good at it. There should be more like you.”

  “Ah, shucks,” Malcolm said. “You’re going to make me all misty-eyed.”

  They reached the second set of thick doors, and Malcolm brushed his keycard over the pad to unlock them, but the keypad blinked red. “Damn it.” Malcolm activated his radio. “Cody, what the hell is going on back there?” There was silence for several seconds. “Cody, can you hear me, damn it?”

  “Yes, boss. There’s some sort of electrical problem. We had to reboot the system.”

  “Damn it,” Malcolm said. “Just hurry.”

  “This happen a lot?” Irkalla asked.

  “Not a lot, but sometimes when we get some bad weather, it makes the electrics go a bit crazy. Good job all the systems aren’t connected, or we’d have to reboot the whole prison every few weeks.”

  “Good thing you don’t use the electric chair,” Remy said.

  Malcolm chuckled. “It would be cheaper to tie people to the lightning rod and let nature do the job for us.”

  There was a slightly uncomfortable silence.

  “It’s a joke,” Malcolm said. “We’re primarily a human prison. Minnesota doesn’t have the death penalty, and I’m not about to start executing Avalon prisoners.”

  “I can attest to that,” Caleb said.

  The door hissed, followed by an audible click as it slowly moved open to reveal Cody, the other guards and the strike team.

  “Hey, can you hear me?” Harry said on the comm device that Layla wore in her ear.

  “What’s up?” Layla asked.

  “We think we saw movement just outside the prison perimeter.”

  “You think you saw movement?” Chloe asked.

  “It’s gone,” Diana told her. “It could have been a bear or something, but just be careful when you get out of the prison.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Layla said as the mood changed between those who had heard the concern in Harry and Diana’s voices.

  “Problems?” Malcolm asked.

  “Probably nothing,” the strike team commander said as he arrived with several of his people. He turned to Layla. “You ready to go?”

  “Yes, thank you.” She looked at her dad. “We’re going to take you to a SUV. I will not be in that car with you. These fine ladies and gentlemen with the large guns will be in the vehicle. They are much less tolerant than I am. Do not make me regret anything I’ve done today.”

  “I gave my word.”

  “You’re a serial killer,” Layla told him. “Your word means exactly jack and shit.”

  “I see we have a long way to go before we can talk candidly,” Caleb said.

  “Sure, whatever gets you to behave,” Layla told him. She passed her father off to the strike team, who led him out of the prison while Layla and her team followed alongside Cody and Malcolm.

  “You hate him, don’t you?” Cody asked Layla.

  She shrugged, unwilling to be drawn into a conversation about her relationship with her father by a complete stranger.

  The remainder of the walk was done in silence, and Layla could feel how on-edge everyone was. They’d all expected Nergal’s people to try something, and with the possibility of movement outside the perimeter of the prison, Layla felt like every part of her umbra-enhanced senses was working overtime.

  “I don’t like this,” Servius said, appearing beside her. “There’s a bottleneck coming up that would make for a good place to attack.”

  “I know,” Layla said.

  “You know what?” Kase asked.

  “Bottleneck coming up. High on both sides. Guard tower there, too. If someone is here, that’s the place they’ll try to get us.”

  No one joked. Not even Remy tried to make light of the situation. Everyone was too busy making sure they didn’t miss something as they walked through the outer perimeter of the prison, under the guard tower.

  “You see anything?” Chloe asked.

  Layla looked up at the wall of the prison and then over at the high roof of the main building. Nothing. She stopped, turned, and glanced up at the guard tower at the exact same moment that Irkalla did.

  “There’s no one there,” Irkalla said. “I sense no spirits.”

  “Up there, or anywhere?”

  “Anywhere. No life nearby. That includes us.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing good. At first, I thought it might have been the runes around the building, but it’s something else. This is a block of my power.”

  Layla looked back at the others, who had all stopped. The SUVs were in the distance, and Caleb was thirty feet from them when she heard the sound of a whistle.

  “What the hell is that?” Kase asked, looking around to try to find the culprit.

  “That,” Remy said, pointing up at a huge mass falling incredibly fast from the sky. It smashed into the closest SUV, demolishing it. Fragments of the vehicle were flung all around as the strike team hustled Caleb back behind the closest wall.

  A second mass struck part of the perimeter wall, which vanished in a cloud of smoke and dust.

  “What the hell was that?” Remy shouted as part of an SUV bounced out of the cloud of debris that had been created by the wall’s destruction.

  It was quickly followed by gunfire as th
e strike team engaged the first creature, just as the second ran back through the hole it had created in the wall.

  “Oni,” Irkalla said. “Shit.”

  The oni was almost exactly how Layla had assumed one of them would look. It was eight feet tall, with a huge muscular body, and wore black leather armor across its lower body. Its feet were bare, showing the talons at the tip of each of its toes. It had deep-red skin that reminded Layla of Terhal. The oni had two huge, white horns jutting from its forehead, and a black egg-shaped spot between its eyes. As the creature opened its mouth and roared, its sharp teeth protruded from a mouth that was never designed to fully close.

  Layla looked toward the second oni, which was identical to the one closest to her, except that its skin was a putrid yellow, and unlike the large black mace of the red oni, it carried a vicious-looking curved sword.

  “Did they drop them out of a plane?” Chloe asked.

  “They absorb kinetic energy to grow stronger,” Irkalla said. “Physical attacks will just make things worse. And the spot on their forehead is their only weakness, but it takes a lot of power to crack. Do not let the creature headbutt you.”

  “I’ll try my damnedest,” Remy said. “Anything else?”

  “Don’t die,” Irkalla said, and used her necromancy to reach out to the nearest oni—the one with the curved sword. “You should not have come here.”

  The oni laughed, right until Irkalla bolstered her power with the spirits inside her, turning them into pure force, and used it to blast the oni in the face, knocking it back through the wall with a loud crash.

  “I will keep this one busy,” Irkalla said. “Get your father to safety.”

  Layla ran past Irkalla straight into another fight, as the oni with the mace cleaved an unfortunate prison guard in half as it tried to get closer to the main gate. The strike squad had moved to cover behind a prison wall, along with everyone in the second team.

  “So, any ideas on how to kill an oni if you’re not Irkalla?” Remy asked.

  “Power,” Zamek told everyone. “Not bullets, just pure power. Any chance you have an elemental or sorcerer among your number?”