Dark Dancer (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 3)

by BR Kingsolver

  “Drink this.” A small vial touched my lips. I opened my mouth, and he poured the contents over my tongue. It tasted sort of minty.

  I started to feel better and opened my eyes. Josh stood staring down at me, and he seemed impossibly big and tall. Like looking up at a skyscraper.

  “You okay?” he asked. “Geez, Erin, I thought for a moment you’d gone all the way out the window. Lucky thing that door was closed.”

  Oh, yeah. I felt lucky. I sat up and twisted around to look at the room. Josh was right. The windows were about twenty feet behind me, and if I had hit the glass the way I hit the door… I decided not to think about that.

  “Edmundson?” I asked.

  “Got away. He flew down the stairwell, and I didn’t have a chance in hell of catching him. Killed a witch on the eighth-floor landing. Killed another guy and wounded a couple of people when he came out of the building, then took off like a big bird.”

  “I guess we know what his affinity is,” I said.

  Josh made a rude sound.

  When we got back to the ground floor, Sam came over and hugged me to him with an arm as big around as my leg.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. A bit shaky there for a bit, but the healer fixed me up.”

  I looked around and saw a line running across the park where grass and bushes looked as though they were flattened. “What’s that?”

  “Edmundson’s path out of here.”

  My puzzlement must have been obvious, because Sam went on to explain.

  “Aeromancers don’t actually fly,” he said. “We compress air until it’s solid enough to hold us. For me to float ten stories into the sky, it takes a massive amount of energy to compress that much air. Luckily, there are so many ley lines here that energy is never in short supply. But to float and move laterally—to fly—also requires air pushing on you. So, Edmundson compressed air to support himself and conjured a small, fast tornado to push him along. I doubt he could keep it up for long, but that’s how he got away.”

  I tried to process that. “Can you do that over water?”

  Sam laughed. “Nay. Nothing to push against. The water just moves away from the pressure.”

  Although I still felt a little fuzzy, my headache was gone, and I didn’t have any double vision. Physically I felt fine. In fact, my leg felt better than it had before Edmundson made his escape. Josh drove me home and dropped me off, and I took a long, hot bath with a glass of wine.

  Chapter 22

  The light coming in through the window of my bedroom woke me up. I rose and opened the blinds, appreciating the view of the mountains to the north. Knowing I would probably have a busy day ahead, I went to the kitchen, put the teapot on the stove and hoped to have some breakfast in quiet and peace.

  Sure enough, Jolene and Josh showed up before my tea was cool enough to drink.

  “Frankie asked me to find that Hunter,” Jolene said. “We’re supposed to meet Sergeant Bailey downtown.”

  “Can I get dressed first?” I had jeans and a t-shirt on but didn’t consider that adequate for a potential battle.

  “Yeah. Hurry up.”

  “How about breakfast?”

  “We’ll stop and grab something on the way.”

  I shook my head as I headed for my bedroom. Josh stayed out in the living room, but Jolene followed me.

  “If you’re planning to feed me that fast-food crap Lizzy eats for breakfast sometimes, the deal’s off,” I said as I started changing clothes. “I didn’t get any dinner last night and went through a healing. Food. Real food. And Dan Bailey can kiss my ass if he bitches that we’re late.”

  Jolene stared at me for a moment, then said, “Well, okay, Miss Grumpy. What do you consider real food?”

  We went to Rosie’s, and I ordered a full-Irish breakfast. Josh ordered the same thing, while Jolene had some fruit and yogurt. Of course, there really wasn’t much of her to feed. I doubted she weighed a hundred pounds.

  I wolfed the food down as fast as Josh did, and then said, “Okay, let’s go catch some bad guys.”

  On our way downtown, I asked, “How’s Trevor doing?”

  “Pretty good,” Josh said. “I talked to him last night and told him about all the fun he’s missing. He’s up in Seattle this week getting measured and stuff. The doctors evidently are still having problems trying to understand how he healed so fast and so clean.”

  “How’s he handling it?”

  “As well as can be expected,” Jolene said. “He’s been playing around with voice software, hoping he can replace typing with it. He’ll be back in town this weekend.”

  “Bring him by the bar if you can pry him away from Heather,” I said.

  She laughed. “We’ll try.”

  “She’s like a barnacle,” Josh grumbled.

  In spite of Josh and Jolene’s impatience, we actually arrived fifteen minutes early for our meeting with Sergeant Bailey and Frankie. Frankie had commandeered a large conference room in the courthouse building. In addition to the three of us, there were the other two mages who worked for the PCU, Sam, and twelve more mages, some of whom I had never seen before.

  All of those mages were many decades older than I was. Sam told me they were all strong, experienced magic users who had combat training and experience. I knew from the Illuminati that many paranormals had fought on both sides in World War II, although their roles had always been hidden. A couple of the guys looked old enough to have fought in the first world war, as was Sam.

  “We’ve traced the Hunter, Gavin Edmundson, to Harland Hall, a building on the university campus,” Frankie said after the introductions. “There are at least two mages associated with past Illuminati plots who have offices and laboratories in that building—Thomas Feldman and James Winter—and a Hunter was seen entering the building on more than one occasion. We’ve had it under surveillance for some time, and all the phones and computers have been tapped.”

  That last was a surprise to me, and I glanced at Josh. He smiled and winked. Evidently Trevor had been doing some work for Frankie while he was recuperating.

  “Feldman invited some other mages to a meeting there this afternoon. We’ll surround the place and intercept anyone trying to go in or come out. For anyone already inside, we’ll essentially lay siege to the place and try and get them to surrender. The building was built in the 1920s out of stone and has steel doors, so it wouldn’t be easy to crack it.”

  “And if they won’t surrender?” I asked.

  “Then we do whatever’s necessary to remove them as a threat,” Frankie said. “This has been going on long enough, and the loss of life caused by those people’s activities can’t be ignored. If we have to, we’ll form a circle and pull the place down on their heads.”

  The grim expressions on everyone’s faces showed how seriously they took the matter. I didn’t volunteer that I had training from the Illuminati in breaching castle walls. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.

  I raised my hand. “There may be other Hunters. At least one, anyway. We haven’t caught the guy from Willard’s Green.” The one who tried to get into my apartment and who I had seen enter Harland Hall.

  The meeting of the Hunters and Columbia Club members at Harland Hall was scheduled for five o’clock, after most of the staff who worked in the building should have left. We arrived at three-thirty, and Bailey positioned the members of our impromptu team so that we had all the doors covered.

  Since Jolene and I looked the most like students, we were assigned to watch the front door from the steps of another building about thirty yards away. She even had a small backpack like students used to carry their books.

  “It’s full of spells, potions, and charms,” she told me, “along with a first-aid kit. I’m not going to try and play battlemage with all of you, but I have a few spells that will make someone think twice about attacking me.” Her grin made me very curious, but she wouldn’t tell me any more.

  About four-thirty, a well-dressed
man with graying hair appeared from the direction of Willard’s Green. He walked along the sidewalk toward Harland Hall, but Bailey and Frankie intercepted him long before he reached the building. They stood talking for about ten minutes, and he became more agitated as time went on. Then, without warning, Bailey grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, pulled his hands behind him and handcuffed him. Frankie slipped a black bag over his head, and they led him away.

  “One down,” Jolene said.

  “What are those black bags?” I asked. I knew the handcuffs were a spell-forged alloy of cold iron and silver designed to block magic.

  “They’re charmed,” Jolene said. “They block access to the ley lines. The handcuffs are effective in themselves to hold vampires and shifters. They use them and a gag to hold witches, but mages require more restraint.”

  “Charmed? A witch spell?”

  “Yeah. I’ll show you how to do it. It takes a lot of preparation and a specially woven cloth.”

  Things didn’t go as smoothly when the next attendee showed up ten minutes later. I recognized Florence Turcotte from a picture we were shown at Bailey’s briefing. She was a short, squat woman with poorly-dyed dark hair and a face like a bulldog. As soon as Bailey approached her, she hit him with a fireball. To my mind, that was pretty rude, but luckily, he was shielded. I took off running toward them.

  Bailey stopped, sketched a complex rune in the air using both hands and said a Word that I couldn’t hear. Then he started walking toward Turcotte again. Her next fireball barely left her hand when it hit an invisible barrier very close to her—a barrier which her fireball lit up like a candle in a glass until she snuffed the fire out.

  When I got close, I heard Bailey saying, “Florence Turcotte, you are under arrest for assaulting a police officer. Anything you say may be held in evidence against you…”

  I stopped listening as he rambled on. Watching Turcotte get increasingly red in the face was much more entertaining. I found myself wondering if her head would pop like a cartoon thermometer. She was also doing a magnificent job of exercising her vocabulary. She called Bailey some things I had never heard before.

  “Miss McLane? Erin?” Bailey’s voice broke through my reverie.

  “Huh? Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

  “If I tie off the spell holding Miss Turcotte, do you think you could carry her out of sight? I’ll have an officer take charge of her, but I don’t think her standing out here cursing at the top of her lungs is helping us to keep things low key.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. What do I do? Just pick her up?”

  Bailey nodded. “Just pick her up.”

  “She can’t bite or anything, right?”

  His stern countenance almost cracked. “No, she can’t bite, but if she tries, you have my permission to slap her. Lightly.”

  I pulled energy from the ley line, walked over, and grabbed Turcotte around the waist. My arms didn’t touch her, so I guess I actually grabbed the barrier in which Bailey had encased her. I tossed her over my shoulder, her head hanging down behind me. She shrieked and redirected her vitriol at me instead of the sergeant.

  “Where should I take her?”

  Bailey pointed at the far corner of the building where Jolene was sitting waiting for me. “Take her around the corner. There’s a couple of cops waiting for her.”

  I did as I was told, dumped her on the ground when I reached the police officers, and went back around to rejoin Jolene on the building’s steps.

  “That was entertaining,” Jolene said.

  “I didn’t know a mage could cast a spell like that,” I responded. “I wonder if I could learn to do that. I can cast some mage spells.”

  “Like the one that blows up vampire brains? Josh was really impressed with that one.”

  Another man approached Harland Hall and went to one of the side doors. He used a keycard, but when the door wouldn’t open, he pulled out a cell phone. Three mages from our team emerged from the nearby bushes and headed toward him.

  As soon as he noticed the mages converging on him, he dropped the cell phone in his coat pocket. As they drew nearer, he turned and started walking fast away from them. When he got closer to Jolene and me, I recognized him as the Hunter who tried to get into my apartment.

  “Hunter,” I said, leaping to my feet. I readied two spells as I strode forward to meet him. Jolene had reminded me of one spell, which I had never tried to use on a shielded mage—my masters with the Illuminati had discouraged me practicing lethal spells on other Hunters and trainees.

  He saw me walking toward him and altered his course, his new path taking him toward where Bailey waited. I wondered about the spell Bailey had used to capture Turcotte. Was it a projected shield or something entirely different? Would a Hunter’s sword cut through it?

  The man must have caught sight of Bailey, who was walking parallel to me on my left, because he suddenly stopped, looked around, and saw that he was surrounded. Most people would have tried to go in my direction, since I was the smallest of the people pursuing him. But with Schottner’s appearance at Rosie’s, I knew my cover was blown. Surely all the conspirators knew who I was.

  He pulled his sword from its sheath, and it became visible as it left the glamoured scabbard. Taking a stance, he waited.

  “Hunter!” I shouted. “Beware the sword!”

  I kept walking toward him, and when I got to about thirty feet away, I pointed at him and said a Word. His head didn’t explode, and I was so disappointed. I kept walking, though, and readied the second spell as I drew my dagger.

  “You’re trapped,” I said. “Lay down your sword and surrender. Otherwise, I’ll have no choice but to kill you.”

  He laughed. “You can certainly try. It will be a cold day in hell when a little slut like you can dance with me.”

  I sighed. “I thought you might see things that way. Fritz Schottner had that same delusion, and he’s freezing his ass off waiting for you.”

  I transferred my main gauche to my left hand, then spoke the Word, and the Sword of Uriel blossomed from my right hand.

  The Hunter sneered at me. A fireball and a white globe of energy hit his shield almost simultaneously. The mages following him had fanned out to block his escape and began attacking his shield. A jagged bolt of lightning flashed between the third mage and the Hunter.

  With all three of them assaulting him, I stopped eight feet away from him.

  “Last chance,” I said, unleashing a ley missile to add to the barrage pounding his shield.

  “Come dance, little girl,” he said. “You have a very elevated opinion of your skills if you think you can.”

  I swung the Sword as I stepped closer to him—forward and back, then forward again. It wasn’t a very elegant series of moves, but I was becoming more familiar with the capabilities of the Sword as opposed to a sword. My opponent sneered at my amateurish swordsmanship.

  One more step, one more swing, and I was close enough that the Hunter extended his sword to block me, intending to slide past my guard and deliver a blow to my neck or shoulder. Instead, I changed my strike and cut his sword in half. The end of his blade flew past me, over my shoulder. Then I executed the same move he had planned. He tried a two-handed block with his main gauche and the stub he still held. Stepping inside his guard, I shoved my dagger into his belly.

  He slashed back at me with his own dagger, and I barely jumped out of his reach but had to let go of my knife. With a snarl, he came after me. I swung my sword, and it met the junction of his shoulder and neck. Blood exploded from his chest as I cut his heart in two, and he crumpled to the ground.

  “I will be damned,” one of the mages to my right said in an awed voice. I turned my head to look at him. “The Sword of Uriel?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought that spell was lost.”

  I let the Sword go and shrugged. “I guess not.”

  I took a good look at the guy. It was interesting to have someone I’d never met, who s
upposedly wasn’t connected to the Illuminati, recognize the spell and say essentially what the Illuminati had told me.

  Bailey came over and began searching the dead man. He pulled the Hunter’s phone out of his jacket pocket, and I saw his expression change. Bailey held it up so we could see the display, and it was obvious that the phone call was still active.

  Dan held the phone to his ear and said, “This is Detective Sergeant Daniel Bailey of the Paranormal Crimes Unit, Westport District Attorney’s Office. Please come to the front door of the building. Bring no weapons.”

  There wasn’t any answer, not even a disconnect. Bailey disconnected from our end.

  “Well, I think we’ve lost any element of surprise,” he said. “I’m open to suggestions as to how we proceed.”

  He, Frankie, Sam, and several of the older mages got together and discussed our next steps. I sat with Jolene, and we shared an apple and some cheese that she had brought.

  “If it were you trapped in that building, what would you do?” Jo asked me.

  “Dunno. Probably try to hide, shield myself, hope that they didn’t find me when they finally got brave enough to go inside.”

  “Think that’s what the Hunters will do?”

  I shrugged. “They’re pretty cocky. One of the things we don’t know is their affinities. You asked what I would do? I don’t have any fancy magic, or any experience working with fancy magic. They might dream up something that I can’t even imagine.”

  While the older mages discussed things, one of the women walked up and interrupted them. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, attractive, with long brown hair, wearing a long dress and lots of jewelry like a hippie earth mama.

  “Someone is digging a tunnel,” she announced. Everyone turned to stare at her. She shrugged. “I assume it’s a tunnel. What else would they be digging?”

  The wards we had set covered only the doors and ground-floor windows. Trying to ward the entire building would have taken too long. Even with a smaller building, warding down into the earth or up into the sky to cut off all means of escape would take a huge amount of energy.