“A dragon lure.”
Max took a long drag and said, “I’m not so sure.” The smoke smelled faintly of oranges.
“You can’t do it?”
“How soon do you need it?”
“An hour, tops.” Even that would be cutting it close.
Max shook his head. “That’s not gonna happen. If you called ahead, maybe.”
“It’s been a hectic day.”
“Nice place, though, right?” Max spread his broad arms out, seemingly taking up the entire office. “Not like that shithole we were pinned down in.”
“Been pinned down in worse.”
“We really did a number on those bastards.”
“So what can you get me?” I asked.
Max stubbed out the joint and leaned forward, his great muscles tensing. “Well, if you can wait a day—”
“No. I need it now.” I tightened my hands into fists. “I’ll take whatever you have.”
“This squares us up.”
“I’m gonna need a ride back to Phoenix, too.”
“We can’t accompany you.” Max gave me a smile. “For obvious reasons.”
“What, MagiTekk doesn’t like you?”
“Not very much.”
“You do what you gotta do to survive.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Max said, heading for the door. “Well, I’ll show you what I got. Hope your magic is up to the task.”
I wanted to scream fuck, but instead I nodded and smiled.
As quick as it had come, my luck had run out.
39
Other than some minor wind burn, I was no worse for wear when I returned to Phoenix. This exhaustion displacement potion was performing as advertised. Unfortunately, the trip out to Max’s desert town hadn’t been as helpful as I’d have liked.
Sure, I’d gotten something. But it wasn’t a dragon lure.
Instead, it was the instructions for creating one.
Detailed, yes.
Useful given the circumstances, well…no. Since there were only three hours to go before Silvia slit Alice’s throat and made me suffer.
Or whatever she had planned.
I wasn’t optimistic, seeing as how I had to summon Tinyr and then convince him to burn down a MagiTekk warehouse. The dynamite idea was looking better and better, but with Alice Conway on ice, I would have no way of defeating the extra security.
Fucking Malcolm Roark. I’d be caught before I even got within a hundred yards of the facility.
My only shot was to convince the elf dragon to do the dirty work for me.
Then, while everyone was busy putting out fires, I’d head over to the Cathedral of St. Peter. And finally find out what the fuck was going on.
My thoughts returned to the dragon lure. I knew one person capable of gathering the ingredients: Silvia. Two, actually—Declan had managed to catch Tinyr in the first place.
Which meant—just maybe—the requisite ingredients remained in his apartment. It was a longshot, but it was my only shot. Otherwise Alice was gonna die, and Silvia was going to relish using my blood to torture me.
And so I found myself across from Declan’s building. Keeping an eye over my shoulder after being surprised by an unwelcome tail too many times over the past few days, I headed toward the entrance. A faded chalk outline lay in the street. Judging by the squiggles, it looked like Declan hadn’t maintained his shape upon impact.
I swallowed hard, throat dry. That outline could’ve easily been me.
In the downstairs lobby, I grabbed an overpriced bottle of water from a vending machine. I was heating up—one of the potions many side effects. I slaked my thirst on the elevator ride, lungs feeling slightly scratchy, brow hot, but still standing.
Upon exiting, I found the floor crawling with cops and Feds. Heart sinking into my boots, I stuffed my hands in my pockets, trying to keep a low profile. But that was hard, since I looked like I’d just emerged from a desert maelstrom.
Fishing out my ID lanyard, I flashed it at the suit standing by the door to Declan’s apartment.
“I must’ve missed the party,” I said, peeking inside at the buzzing crime scene.
He peered at the ID, reading my name. “It’s just forensics, Miss Callaway. No psychologists needed.”
“Boss calls, I come down.” I shrugged. “You know how Janssen is.”
The guy straightened up. “Yeah. Definitely.”
“So tell me what’s going on.” I nodded toward the personnel. There had to be thirty people milling around.
His eyes shifted back and forth as he whispered, “Black magic.”
“No shit?” So it had been here.
“They found it on the premises. Set off all kinds of alarms.”
“What kind of black magic?” I asked, heart sinking into my stomach.
“Some stuff to make a dragon net. I dunno. All over my head.” The guy leaned over. “But then they found something real big.”
“No kidding.” I craned my neck inside the familiar place. It still smelled faintly of whiskey. Or maybe that was just my memory. “So you gonna leave me hanging here?”
“Aww, the boss can tell you.”
“She’s always busy,” I said. “Come on.”
“Fine.” The guy glanced back and forth, like he wanted no one to overhear. “But you gotta promise to keep it quiet.”
“Scout’s honor.” I wondered what the hell this “big” discovery was. I couldn’t sense anything, but it was possible the FBI had dampeners in place.
With a conspiratorial smile, the suit said, “We thought the owner of this place jumped a couple days back.”
“Yeah?”
“But he didn’t. He was murdered.”
I resisted the urge to say tell me something I don’t know. “Damn.”
“I know, right. But here’s the kicker: this fella had a bunch of wellspring drills in a storage unit in Old Phoenix.”
“Wellspring drills?” I pretended not to understand what they were.
“For harvesting mana.” The suit shrugged. “Beyond my paygrade. They were stolen.”
“Stolen?”
“You don’t have clearance, so you shouldn’t be hearing this.” But the wisps indicated he loved telling me all this shit.
“I won’t tell anyone.” I batted my eyelashes.
“All right, fine.” He was just dying to spill the beans. “From the Cathedral of St. Peter.”
“Interesting,” I said. “What were the drills doing down at the cathedral in the first place?”
“Hell if I know,” the suit said.
“That stuff still hanging around?”
“They took it all downtown four or five hours ago.”
My throat tightened. “Even the dragon lure?”
“The what?” The agent took a minute to process what I was talking about. “Nah, we got a couple nerds inventorying the ingredients in the master bedroom.”
A smile broke across my face. “Well, I won’t keep you waiting.”
“Any time. Say, maybe we can grab a—”
But I was already in the bedroom, ready to grab what was mine.
Maybe this time my luck was actually changing.
40
Or maybe it wasn’t.
The victory of stealing the dragon lure ingredients had been short lived, because all the skyscrapers were playing the same news story as I stepped into the night. MAgiTekk and the Crusaders weren’t just going to put their plans on hold because I was indisposed.
No.
That would be too damn easy.
An FBI evidence transport unit had been hit a few hours ago. Evidence critical to mortal security had been stolen. They were vague, but I didn’t need a pen to connect the dots. The wellspring drills were returning to the cathedral, instead of getting caught in a bureaucratic quagmire.
Which meant getting the drills into the Crusader’s hands. To keep harvesting those mana wellsprings, gaining whatever power they needed.
Someth
ing big was happening at the cathedral.
Tonight, most likely.
Like a dog torn between two equally rancid pieces of meat, I weighed my next decision. The skin timer ticked down past two hours, giving me a little sting as a not-so-friendly reminder of the stakes. I rolled down the sleeves of my leather jacket, putting my head down as I walked.
Who was more dangerous: Sylvia or the Crusaders?
Sylvia desperately wanted revenge against MagiTekk for what the Ghosts had done to her beloved. And she’d already hated them for the essence suppression serum, seeing it as a crime against the supernatural. Which made her extra dangerous: vengeance and righteousness were a potent combination.
She had my blood.
She had Alice.
And she would kill us both slowly to make Roark suffer. Which made assembling the dragon lure and calling in Tinyr to burn down MagiTekk’s warehouse a good first step.
However.
The Crusaders had been aggressive all week, pushing further than they had in their two millennia existence. They were led by a man fueled by ancient stockpiles of mana, which had made him immortal—or close enough to it. And he had plans of sharing this with the rest of his holy army. Maybe even raising Pan, God of Arcadia in the process. And once the Crusaders grew more powerful, that would tip the scales of power back to the supernatural.
There’d be a blood bath, with MagiTekk’s cash registers ringing up financing all the weapons.
It’d all start right in the heart of Old Phoenix, with MagiTekk helping them out. Cutting a deal that gave the Crusaders access to the wellsprings in exchange for the essence suppression tech. They must’ve gotten the FBI on board recently, since back in ’36 the Crusaders had been turned away.
Guess MagiTekk sent their little friends in law enforcement the memo: lay off psychotic cults. They’re making us money. Providing us with research and intel. We’ll give ‘em access to the biggest wellspring of them all if it helps our share price and hastens R & D.
Fuck.
This decision was hard.
But I was still missing one little piece: how the fuck were they going to raise Pan if all the gods died during Ragnarök. He wouldn’t have been exempt.
My mind flashed to the photograph I’d dug out of Declan Burrows’s apartment earlier in the week. The one with a young Emma Janssen in the corner, looking happy as a clam with her fellow archaeologists. I had no idea what that expression meant, but I knew she was involved far deeper in this mess than she was letting on.
After all, MagiTekk had hired her old associate Declan. I didn’t think archeologists were normally called in on illegal projects.
Unless they were absolutely necessary.
I fired off an email to Janssen, referencing the ancient dig.
I received a response before I’d even crossed the street.
We need to talk.
“Indeed, Supervisor,” I said, loading the shotgun as I walked through the empty city. “Because you have a lot of explaining to do.”
41
After checking the meeting coordinates Janssen had supplied in Old Phoenix, I realized it was on the way to the old baseball stadium. Maximo’s recipe noted that the lure worked best when cast in an open field by the shade of a tree. Finding such a place seemed far more unlikely than seeing an elf dragon.
There probably weren’t any trees on the old field, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. This meant two birds, one stone. I checked my arm, watching the timer tick past ninety minutes.
This was gonna come right down to the wire.
Twenty minutes and two cab rides later, I met Supervisor Janssen in an abandoned building in Old Phoenix.
Her first words as I stepped inside the door were, “You look like shit, Ruby.”
“And you look old,” I said. Guess the exhaustion displacement was wearing off.
Luck was a fickle mistress.
Janssen gave a nonplussed snort. “Insulting me won’t solve our problems.” She paced around the broken foyer, sidestepping the shattered bannister. Dust trailed behind her, the navy blue trench coat picking up debris.
“I didn’t realize we were in this together.”
“Don’t be an idiot.” Janssen stopped in the kitchen, surveying the warped cupboards. A roach the size of a small rat scurried past. “I’ve always been on your side.”
“You’ve sure got a funny way of showing it.”
Janssen reached into the folds of her coat. Remembering the large nickel-plated pistols, I tensed. But instead, her hand returned with a pack of cigarettes.
“Want one?”
“Don’t smoke.”
“I got cancer twice,” Janssen said. “Still can’t kick it.” Gray plumes rushed out of her nostrils as she paced around the mildewed kitchen. “Amazing that someone used to live here.”
“That’s why they call it a home.”
“All their hopes, dreams. Arguments.” Janssen blew a cloud of smoke out as she brushed her free hand across the table. “A whole lifetime of stories between these walls.”
“I assume this has a point, other than wasting my time and putting me to sleep.”
Janssen reached back in her coat and pulled out a slightly scorched photograph. The one I’d taken from Declan Burrows’s apartment. “Responding peacekeepers took this from your pocket when they found you that night.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I wanted you to figure things out on your own.”
“Which is?”
Janssen took a long drag on the cigarette, her jet black eyes searching the depths of my soul. “The Bureau needs to be cleared out.”
“You could do that yourself.”
“I’m part of the problem,” Janssen said. “People are complicated.”
“Tell me about it.”
She held out the photograph, looking at it as smoke trailed around the faded colors.
“It’s why I studied archaeology in the first place. You could reconstruct a life. It was almost like…” The butt burned down as she reflected on the past. “Like a little sliver of immortality. That someone would do the same for me when I was gone.”
“You could be here longer if you didn’t huff poison.”
Janssen gave me a wry grin, the lines on her face bunching up. “What’s the point of living if you can’t have fun?”
“Says the least fun lady I’ve ever met.”
She took a drag and held it in, staring at me. Finally she exhaled and said, “I forget how much older you are than me. Still so beautiful.”
“Don’t get wistful, here.” I rolled up my jacket sleeve and displayed the countdown timer.
“Ah, you’re on the clock,” Janssen said, lighting another smoke straight from the first. “But allow a dead woman to reflect on the fun she once had. For a few seconds, at least.”
“What were you and Declan up to all those years ago?” I asked.
Janssen nodded silently, silver hair cascading over her shoulders. “You were there the night he died.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“He was always a moron,” Janssen said. “Impressionable. Easily convinced with empty promises.”
“And what were you like?”
“Idealistic.”
“I’m having a hard time picturing that.”
“I was going to change archaeology. Revolutionize the field. Bring history to life.” Janssen finally sat down at the table, the old chair creaking. “Sound familiar?”
“I never was a dreamer.”
“No, you’re a survivor.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” Janssen said. “It’s what I turned into, after—well, after all this.” Smoke circled her head like a halo as she twirled her hand around the walls. “Working for evil people will do that.”
“After what, exactly?”
“Magic came out of the woodwork back in 2017. Suddenly, archaeologists were important. I had everything I wanted. Money
. Prestige. Sent anywhere at a moment’s notice for radiocarbon dating. An entire hidden history, waiting to be discovered. I could be the first.”
“That’s how you met Declan.”
“There were eight of us,” Janssen said with a nod. “Whisked around in private jets to study anything. A vampire settlement in Greece, dating before the Golden Age. Wolf hordes in Germany that had once threatened the Roman Empire.”
“Sounds glamorous.”
“But it wasn’t for scholarship. MagiTekk was using our data. They were small, then. A startup. Probably didn’t even have the same name. And the cracks started to show in the dream job soon enough.”
“I’m well aware,” I said, staring out the dingy window into the night. It was still a nicer view than my cabin inside the Tempe Supernatural Internment Camp.
“But I was young and ambitious.” Janssen read my expression. “Younger.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“So when the Cathedral of St. Peter was built, I jumped at the opportunity to work there. We all did.”
“Look,” I said. “I’d love your entire history, but I really just need to know one thing.”
“Sure.” Smoke trailed off her fingers.
“Did you phone in that evidence transport’s location?” I had to know whether it was her or Roark.
Janssen sighed. “You feed MagiTekk a morsel here and there to survive. Keep them away from the real things. Like you and Colton.”
“What the fuck?” There were a million other things I wanted to scream, but that was the best I could summon on short notice. All sorts of annoying dead ends and unnecessary hardship could have been avoided had Janssen given us full disclosure from the get go.
For one thing, I wouldn’t have had to piece together the Crusaders’ connection.
Of course, that never would have happened. Just like I’d never have told her I was a Realmfarer unless it was absolutely damn sure.
Swallowing my anger, I said, “So you knew the whole time what the Crusaders of Paradisum were doing.”
“I gave you hints,” Janssen said. “They were distracting everyone. Most of the FBI is in the dark about the connection with MagiTekk. Causing a scene pulled enough personnel away from Old Phoenix for them to work.”
“Lot less distracting to just work in quiet like they’d been doing.”
Shadow Flare (The Ruby Callaway Trilogy Book 2) Page 15
