by Gary Jonas
“But—”
I waved her off. “We’re going. Don’t argue with me.”
“I’m not arguing but I can’t tell you everything. I wish I could, but there are lines I can’t cross.”
“So move the lines. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”
She sighed. “All right. I’ll take you.”
“Good. Esther is coming with us.”
“I can’t show everyone a secret location.”
“She’s dead,” I said. “Who is she going to tell?”
“Kelly.”
“Hell, I can tell Kelly.”
Naomi laughed. “I forgot. You two don’t keep many secrets between you.”
“And she still puts up with me. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
“Fine. The ghost can come.”
“What if I don’t want to go?” Esther asked.
I grabbed the typewriter from the table. “You’re always asking to go, Esther.”
She followed me to the coat closet. “Did I ask this time?”
“I may need your help.”
“You could ask.”
“All right. Esther, will you please accompany us on a fun field trip?”
“I’d rather stay here and pretend I can fix my nails.”
I pulled a backpack from the top shelf of the closet and stuffed the typewriter into the pack. Then I slung it over my shoulder. “Pretend in the car,” I said.
The morning wind blew strong through the Tech Center. Naomi had me park a block away from the building that housed the DGI offices.
“Follow me,” she said.
She climbed out of the Firebird and volunteered to carry the backpack. I nodded, so she slipped it on her back and led me into a Starbucks.
“She wants a cup of joe?” Esther asked.
I followed her into the coffeehouse. Naomi waved to a few of the baristas and moved toward the back by the restrooms, but instead of going into the ladies’ room, she entered their back room. The place was filled with boxes of supplies—cases of cups and lids, big bottles of syrups and such. It also held a small, cluttered desk and a file cabinet. Naomi pulled one of the file cabinet drawers open, reached behind it, and flipped a switch. The file cabinet slowly swung out to reveal a small door behind it. After she waved her hands to remove the wards, she motioned for me to follow.
It was a tight squeeze, but we ducked through into a dim corridor.
“Pull the door closed,” Naomi said.
I pulled the handle, and the file cabinet swung back against the wall, covering the doorway. Naomi waved her hands to replace the wards then led us down the corridor to an elevator.
“I really shouldn’t be showing this to you,” she said. “If anyone at DGI finds out about this, I’m toast.”
“So I shouldn’t add this to my Facebook status?”
The elevator took us down a long, long way. I was about to ask if we were heading to the ninth circle of Hades when we finally came to a halt and the doors swished open to a darkened tunnel. Light from the elevator spilled out and seemed to be devoured by the dark.
We stepped into the tunnel. The floor felt like smooth rock, no doubt carved by magic. The walls were rocky, and in a few places, the stone, sharp enough to cut, jutted out, so whoever carved it didn’t seem to care about the walls. Then again, maybe they were left uneven intentionally. Then the elevator doors closed, and the darkness ate the light. We stood in pitch blackness.
“Somebody forget to pay the electric bill?” I asked.
Naomi uttered a spell, and two sconces on the wall flared to life. They didn’t give off a lot of light, so I couldn’t tell how far the tunnel went in either direction. Naomi led us off to the left. As we walked, the flames leaped from sconce to sconce along the wall to keep our current path illuminated.
We walked for what seemed like a mile but was probably less than a block. It felt longer because we could see only a few feet in front of us, and when I looked behind us, the darkness seemed to be chasing us. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we were directly beneath the DGI offices.
The tunnel curved and a dim red glow shimmered on the rocky ceiling, walls, and floor ahead. As we rounded the bend, I saw a huge gate that glowed red and orange behind a multitude of magical wards that seemed to pulse darkness into the red. I’d never seen so many wards in one place. There were hundreds of them—small, dark disks that held back the light.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“You don’t need to know.”
I approached the gate for a closer look.
Naomi grabbed my arm and tried to pull me away. “Don’t get too close to it.”
Suddenly it hit me. Dragon Gate Industries. It wasn’t just a name pulled out of a hat. “This is an actual dragon gate?”
Fire danced behind the wards and seemed to be trying to burn through them. The closer I got, the stronger the flames threw themselves at the wards.
“Get back.”
I stepped back and the flames softened.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
Naomi shook her head. “I hope we never find out.”
“Is this where Ravenwood broke out?”
“No, there’s a lab down the hall here.”
I nodded to Esther. “Want to take a look behind the wards?”
“Not a chance,” Esther said.
Naomi grabbed my wrist. “If you’re telling Esther to check out the gate, you really don’t want to do that. It could destroy her.”
“She’s already dead.”
“I’m standing right here,” Esther said, giving me an indignant glare.
“Doesn’t matter,” Naomi said. “Can we please get away from this? I don’t like standing so close to it.”
“All right,” I said and followed her down the hall. I took a few glances back at it. The darkness no longer seemed to be closing in on us.
Esther pursed her lips at me. “Trying to make me go away?”
“I didn’t know it could be dangerous for you, Esther.”
Naomi led us down the hall, and as the flames jumped ahead to a series of sconces, I saw pieces of a shattered door lying on the ground with one piece of oak beam, a two-by-four embedded at an angle in the stone wall at about eye level.
“This must be the place,” I said.
“Wow,” Naomi said. “You really are a detective.”
“Nothing gets past me,” I said.
“Except you keep trusting her,” Esther said, jutting her chin toward Naomi.
I didn’t acknowledge Esther’s jab.
Instead, I approached the piece of wood stabbing into the wall. I felt around the splintered edges of the beam. The energy required to actually embed the wood into the cavern wall would have been immense. “Unreal,” I said.
“In here,” Naomi said.
I walked across what remained of the door and entered the room. As we stepped inside, the room lit up. The place looked like it had been a victim of a shock-and-awe attack on a Baghdad neighborhood. The room stank of sulfur. Chunks of stone leaned against the cracked, blackened wall. Cullet littered the floor. At least, I thought most of it was broken glass until I looked closer and saw that it was shattered crystal.
“Alyshian and friends?” I asked, squatting to sift through pieces of the crystals.
“Destroyed,” Naomi said, hands on hips. “Just like I told you.”
Esther shrugged. “So the old bird didn’t lie about everything.”
“Can they be reassembled?”
Naomi laughed. “Look at them. They’re in a million pieces.”
“All the king’s wizards,” I said and let the pieces fall back to the scarred floor. The pieces glittered with light when they hit the ground then went dormant. I looked around the room and saw what looked like a beat-up wet bar, but the shelves behind it were empty. I couldn’t see what else was behind the bar, but I figured I’d check it out before we left.
“Nobody at DGI even knows the crystals were destroyed
,” Naomi said. “They can’t find out.”
Esther waved her arms at me. “Jonathan, we need to get out of here.”
“Hold on, Esther.” I faced Naomi. “You said you told Al that Ravenwood was loose. Wouldn’t that suggest to him that the crystals were destroyed?”
Esther moved in front of me again. “We need to go!”
“Quiet, Esther. We’re busy. Naomi?”
“No,” Naomi said. “They think the Alyshian is still intact and that they can use it to imprison Ravenwood.”
“Fine,” Esther said. “Ignore me.” She stood in the center of the floor, looked away from us, and started tapping her foot.
“Why would they think that?”
“Because I told them my father hid it.”
“And how do they think Ravenwood freed himself?”
“They don’t know. They think that maybe the magic is weakening and he managed to squeeze out. I let them run with that one.”
I frowned.
“I don’t think they believe you,” I said, standing up. I nodded past her to the open doorway.
Naomi turned.
Al Davidson, Frank Cantrell, and a woman I’d never seen stood blocking our exit.
“An astute observation, Mr. Shade,” said the woman I didn’t know.
“I tried to warn you,” Esther said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The woman held a black baton in one hand and wore what looked to me like a horse jockey’s uniform with white pants, red jacket, and black boots. She even had a helmet, which only made her look more intense. Cantrell shook his head. Al looked pissed, but if you ask me, he always looked like someone had jabbed a corncob up his ass.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said to the woman.
“You’ll wish we hadn’t.”
I nodded. “Already there.”
The woman waved her hands, and a light shimmered across the doorway and seemed to solidify. I assumed it was some sort of barrier to prevent us from leaving the room. She, Al, and Cantrell stood on the opposite side of the force field.
Cantrell shrugged. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said to Naomi. At least, I hoped he wasn’t talking to me. That would prove awkward.
“Frank,” the woman said, motioning for him to lean toward her. She whispered in his ear while she slapped her baton against her thigh.
“Should I go listen?” Esther asked.
I shook my head. I suspected the woman was simply getting the lowdown on what was going on.
I nudged Naomi. “Who is she?”
“Anselma Kaiser,” Naomi said. “She’s head of the Wizard Council at DGI.” She looked worried.
Anselma kept slapping that baton against her thigh as she whispered to Al and Frank.
“I’ll bet she has quite a bruise on that leg,” I said.
Anselma turned her attention back to Naomi. “I’m disappointed in you, Naomi.” She shook her head. “You had such potential.”
Naomi looked ready to cry. “We thought we were doing the right thing.”
“Those shards on the floor,” Anselma said, pointing at the shattered crystals with her baton. “All three crystals?”
Naomi hesitated a moment then slowly nodded.
Anselma closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Naomi stared at the floor.
“And you brought an outsider into our sanctuary? In the old days, you would have been executed for such gross negligence.”
“Good thing these aren’t the old days,” I said.
She shot me a look that would make an oak tree shrivel up and blow away.
“Show some respect,” Al said.
“Blow me.”
“He ain’t one of us,” Cantrell said to Anselma. “He don’t know how this is supposed to go down.”
“I’m not here to educate a vulgarian,” she said. Then to me, “Curb your tongue, Mr. Shade. This only concerns you to the extent that your utter incompetence has exacerbated the problem and endangered the lives of my associates.”
“Hold on a second,” I said, but she refused to look at me.
Al shook his head. “You don’t have the right to address the Head of Council,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to you instead. Tell Hitler-with-Tits here that she needs to climb down off her high horse and—”
“Why you . . .” Al started but couldn’t get the words out. Somehow I think I may have overshot the effect I was aiming for by, oh, a few light years.
Al and Cantrell both stared at me in shock and anger. Al’s fists glowed before Cantrell’s, but both of them were drawing up energy to blast me to shreds. The five-second rule for pulling up magic didn’t help me here because there was nowhere to go. I knew that in a moment, they’d discover that I was immune to direct magic.
As they let loose their attack, it occurred to me that maybe I could have been more diplomatic. The room flashed white as the blast shimmered through the barrier. I wasn’t sure what to do when the energy washed over me. Was this supposed to stun me? Kill me? Should I fly across the room and pretend to be injured or unconscious?
In the end, I simply shrugged and gave them an impish grin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Al and Frank stared at me for a moment, amazed that I wasn’t out of commission.
“What the hell?” Frank said.
“We can’t penetrate the barrier,” Al said.
Sometimes people will believe what they want to believe, and all the evidence in the world won’t change their views. If they’d bothered to pay attention, they’d see that the crystal shards had been blown around my feet and the front half of the room had nothing on the floor. They might have noticed that the wall behind me had wisps of smoke trailing from it. Maybe their view was slightly obscured by the shimmering barrier, but that barrier had not blocked their attack at all.
“You got lucky,” Cantrell said, stabbing a stubby forefinger in my direction.
“Damn, I knew I should have bought a Powerball ticket today.”
I approached the barrier but stopped before I reached it. I didn’t want to just walk through it while they were still under the impression that magic worked on me. That would be stupid, and my mother tried to instill some sense into my head before she passed away. I like to believe that some of it took seed and maybe even grew. Then again, when I was twenty, I felt certain that I knew everything, while these days I felt certain I knew nothing. Amazing how the intelligence goes away as you get older. It can’t be that we learn that we aren’t as smart as we think. Right?
Anselma stared at me. It was a stern look, but from the modicum of respect it contained, I wondered if she realized the energy had passed through the barrier. I decided she must not have been able to tell or she’d have said something about it.
She looked away from me and addressed Naomi. “You and I are going to talk. I don’t want this conversation to be overheard by Mr. Shade. He knows far too much already.”
“I hired him to help.”
“You’ll accompany me to my office,” Anselma said. She gestured to the barrier, and it opened enough for Naomi to pass through. As Naomi still wore the backpack, Esther was forced to follow.
“I guess I’ll be your ears,” Esther said as she passed through the barrier.
Anselma flicked her wrist, and the force field closed up. “We have a great deal of work to do.” The men nodded and trailed after her.
“What?” I said. “You’re going to just leave me here to rot?”
Al and Frank threw another glare at me.
“Can you at least send down a pizza and some beer?” I asked. “Pepperoni would be fine.”
They followed their leader without speaking to me again. Esther moved after them down the corridor and tossed an occasional glance back at me.
As they left, the flames on the sconces leaped along after them and left me in total darkness.
I reached into my pocket, pulled out my cell phone, and flipped it open. It didn’t give off
much light, but it was enough for me to see where I was going. I checked the room to see if there was a broom and dustpan so I could sweep up the crystal shards to take with me, but the wizards didn’t bother with such crude tools.
