Indeed, why bring her here at all?
I’m never getting out of here. The realization landed with a leaden certainty. Not of my own free will.
The elderly witch approached with a slip of paper folded between his fingers. He presented it to Andula as if handing orders to a slave who hadn’t earned the favor of her master’s voice. A moment passed before she took it, just long enough for a subtle tightening of the skin around his eyes, a hardened stare that told Andula nothing good would come of defiance. Not now. Not ever.
Andula unfolded the paper. On it was written a long series of digits.
“Do you know how to place an international call, child?”
“Who am I calling? What am I supposed to say?”
Terzian frowned, as if indulging an imbecile. “The people on the other end will know why you’re calling. Keep the line open. Relay their status to me.” Andula craned her neck, seeking a telephone. “There’s a line upstairs, behind the bar. If you feel tempted to open a bottle, don’t.”
Andula climbed the long staircase, wooden boards creaking underfoot. The Flame acolytes watching the door and windows eyed her when she emerged from the cellar. She imagined their stares leaving scratches on her arms, her face. But even if she’d found herself alone, Andula couldn’t have run away. Though she was barely trained in the magical arts, the thrumming of wards just beyond the walls set the nape of her neck to tingling. For all intents and purposes, Bar Vodnář was the entire universe.
With a sigh, she picked up the phone and started dialing.
• • •
Zerena waited until Andula had trudged away, then returned her attention to the marvelous dragon hoard of charms stashed beneath Bar Vodnář. Jordan Rhemes was clearly much more than a cagey, well-connected barmaid. No single witch—not even Terzian, not even Cartwright—could amass so many unique items in a brief human lifetime. This was a dynastic collection. Zerena was surrounded with evidence of Tanya’s wild lies about Jordan, told in an artless attempt to destabilize her. The ploy had almost worked, too, the conniving little bitch.
The pendant resting just below the hollow of Zerena’s throat pulsed in time to the ley lines’ vibrations, slowly baking Sasha’s blood into its crevices as it warmed. The evening’s preparations—hermetically sealing the building against outside intruders, establishing taps into the ley lines to energize tonight’s ritual—had perturbed the confluence. But this remarkable secret archive surely thrummed with magical potential even when the lines were quiescent.
Once their colleagues in Anchorage, Xi’an, and Johannesburg were in place, and Terzian began the priming incantation, they’d be committed to the ritual, at which point Zerena would assume control and the mantle she’d coveted for so long. The knowledge that Sasha had come so close to usurping her, to becoming the vessel for her elemental, turned her stomach.
She strode the aisles, taking care to touch nothing. It wasn’t inconceivable that an inveterate con artist like Rhemes had salted the collection with a few traps for the greedy and unwary. But when her inner eye noticed an invisible glint of syrupy not-light bouncing like a shuttlecock between identical mirrors, Zerena couldn’t resist a grin.
• • •
Frank turned his head as far as his restraints would allow. It wasn’t far. Still, he studied Gabe, who ran a sleeve across his forehead to keep the sweat from running down and stinging his eyes.
“Pritchard. Let Toms take the lead on this.”
Of course Frank didn’t trust the man who (a) was supposed to be confined in CIA custody as a result of (b) having being caught quite literally red-handed with one of their own dead beside him. And who, incidentally, had (c) a recent history of violent seizures.
Josh said, “He’s right. You don’t look so good.”
“It’s—” The ley lines twitched again. The hitchhiker lifted its formless head and howled. Gabe coughed, tasting metal. “It’s not that simple. There are two traps here, one mundane and …” Josh quirked an eyebrow. “… Oh, to hell with it. The other is magical.”
Frank snorted. Josh, who’d been at the docks, did not. If anything, he looked disappointed, as if he’d hoped to hear something else. But he focused on the job at hand.
“So, which do we tackle first?”
Gabe shook his head, flinging beads of sweat like a dog shaking itself dry. “Both. They’re intertwined. We have to do it in tandem.”
Josh frowned. “How are we going to do that if I can’t see what you’re seeing?”
“Very goddamned carefully,” said Frank.
Gabe studied the secretly interlinked domino chains of cause and effect. The obvious way to break the physical trap would be to drain the forklift’s gas tank—without disconnecting the vehicle from the trip wires—then deactivate the door, and then and only then disarm the mine. But the invisible trap was centered on the fuel cap. So if somebody tried to break the cycle by siphoning out the gas, they’d inadvertently release the magical energy stored in the pendant and trigger the mine. Gabe was willing to bet the same would result if they simply waited for the vehicle to run out of gas.
How could they unravel both traps simultaneously? His gaze fell on the smaller door alongside the loading dock, and the warehouse office immediately adjacent to this.
“Josh, when Kazimir’s guys needed to make a delivery late at night, how would they get the warehouse foreman to open up?”
Josh swallowed, perhaps in reaction to mention of Kazimir. “Well, sometimes there’s a doorbell.”
Hot damn.
“Okay.” Gabe rubbed his hands together. “I know what we’re going to do.” He pointed to the stack of crates where Josh stood. “Toss me that crowbar.”
Frank’s patience ran out. “You can’t just rip things apart, Pritchard!”
“Not my intent, sir,” said Gabe. He crossed to the entry door alongside the loading dock. Unlocking it from the inside, he popped his head out—it was raining like hell now—and pushed the doorbell. A tinny ding-ding echoed through the warehouse, sounding subtly wrong to ears expecting a proper American ding-dong. Then he closed the door, locked it, and swung at the wall as though it had insulted his mother. Soon it was vanquished, guts hanging loose in coils of copper doorbell wiring.
Josh joined him. “I know we’re on the clock here, but I really need to ask if you know what you’re doing. Because I don’t see how this helps.”
“This isn’t the weird part, pal. For once can you please just trust me?”
Josh scowled, indignant. “That’s asking a lot. You’ve been hiding things, enormous things, from the rest of us since day one.”
Gabe found what he needed in the wall, handed the wiring module to Josh, then moved to the office. The crowbar made short work of the door handle. In seconds, he had disemboweled the thermostat, too.
Frank had had enough. “Have you lost your mind? This isn’t a Doc Savage pulp. You can’t just jury-rig a solution with any old junk you find lying around.”
“You know, between the two of you, this lack of trust is going to give me a complex,” said Gabe. He placed the thermostat control on the floor, near the barrels, and motioned for Josh to put the doorbell module beside it.
“Pritchard, just so that I don’t die in suspense, tell me what you’re doing with those.”
“Certain thermostats and doorbells—particularly Soviet doorbells—are commonly built with mercury switches.”
Frank frowned. “How the hell do you know that?”
“I, uh, I’ve made a study of common items that contain mercury.”
Josh blinked. “And that’s useful because why?”
Gabe nudged him aside. “Stand back and I’ll show you.” He then set about tearing apart the thermostat. Sure enough, it contained a little glass bulb of shining liquid. The hitchhiker, already in a tetchy mood, snapped and snarled. Gabe set the bulb aside, then focused on the doorbell.
Together both switches gave him about three grams to work with. It’d have to do.
Keeping the hitchhiker at bay was harder tonight than it had been in months. Gabe paused to look at Josh and Frank.
“This is the weird part.”
Then he crushed the mercury switches underfoot, stepped back, and opened his hand toward the puddle of quicksilver.
• • •
Jordan checked the knife Tanya had given her, lightly grazing the pad of her thumb across the blade before returning it to the sheath. Meanwhile, Tanya inspected her pistol.
“Good luck,” she said. Because you’ll be an easy target and I don’t know how long I can keep them distracted.
A peal of thunder drowned out Jordan’s response.
They had just a few charms between them. The items from Nadia’s emergency stash were powerful, but the ley lines were unraveling and pandemonium had engulfed the city’s free elementals. Magic outside the unpoppable bubble of Bar Vodnář was becoming dangerously unreliable.
Jordan clutched a bundle of dried wildflowers in both fists as if preparing to wring a dish towel, then closed her eyes. Tanya knew she was mentally reviewing the route they’d planned around the sentries’ patrols. The concealment charm wrapped a cloak of shadows around the bearer, effectively snugging her into any outside observer’s blind spot. But it couldn’t hide a woman-shaped hole in the midst of a downpour, or the spray of water kicked up by her sprint, or the sound of her boots splashing through puddles.
Careful timing could help with that. But the sentry on the fire escape was going to be a problem.
Tanya closed her eyes, concentrated on the charm in her own fist until the warm electric tingle percolated up her arm, across her shoulders, into her other limbs. The taste of copper filled her mouth. She nodded.
Jordan tore the herbs apart and vanished.
Tanya launched herself upward with the extra vigor afforded her by the charm, hooked her fingers over the lowest landing of the fire escape. Metal creaked under her sudden weight. She fumbled for a grip on rain-slick iron. Every move evoked a clang or a clank or the groan of fatigued metal. She was the distraction, after all.
Ensorcelled muscles propelled Tanya up the ladder. She hoped to hell that rain, shadows, an awkward angle, and her extra speed made her a difficult target. The crack of a gunshot echoed through the alley, simultaneous with the ping of a ricochet and a flash where the round struck sparks from the fire escape.
She gained the sentry’s landing before the woman could line up a second shot. Tanya caught her wrist and pushed the pistol aside. They scuffled, but this Flame novice hadn’t been trained in hand-to-hand combat by the KGB. This, combined with Tanya’s minutely enhanced strength, gave her the edge.
The magical fabric of Prague rippled again. Tanya’s charm stuttered, failed. Her opponent landed a punch on her jaw, hard enough to turn her head.
Across the street, perched precariously on a utility pole with knife in hand, Jordan suddenly appeared for all to see.
• • •
Zerena stood within the eye of a cyclone.
Acolytes of Flame around the world had tapped their own local nexuses, and now together with Prague they strummed the lines to play a chord. The confluence underfoot pulsed each time a sympathetic vibration shimmied across the network. Goose bumps stippled her flesh with a tingle that was almost erotic. They would wake the ancient chthonic energies of the world, and the elementals of Prague would know Zerena Pulnoc as their mistress.
But they had to work quickly now, before their adversaries’ own global network of witches detected the chord and scrambled to contaminate it with atonal dissonance. Jordan’s treasure trove included a pair of mirrors with handles of carved abalone; one had a left-handed swirl, the other right-handed. Terzian had situated these on either side of the cellar chamber. In tandem, he and Zerena removed the wrappings. The ethereal wind doubled, trebled, quadrupled as the mirrors reflected each other and the sorcerous process unfolding between them. Her hair stood on end, as if lightning threatened to strike.
“Andula!” Zerena’s voice carried a peculiar warble now, as if refracted by something in the air.
The Host descended the stairs, a telephone dangling from one hand, the other unspooling wire as she went. She staggered, wincing against every pulse of the nexus.
Hands trembling, she passed the telephone to Terzian.
“I’m here,” he said into the receiver. After listening for a moment, he nodded at Zerena. “Begin.”
Like Prospero calling upon the spirits to carve the winds and smash his enemies, she tightened her focus on the nexus. At first it resisted her, but then she felt Terzian reluctantly lend his influence to hers. He murmured into the telephone. She could feel their allies kneading the magical energies, sending waves through the Earth, and she met them in kind. Synchrony was key, now. The pressure on her soul grew with every cycle, amplified by constructive interference. The smell of ozone permeated the room. The plutonic chord built toward crescendo, toward transcendence, toward—
Terzian’s voice went from murmur to shout: “Hello? Hello?”
A ripple shot through the ley lines, hard and sharp as a physical blow, knocking Zerena to her knees. A plasticky machine-gun rattle replaced the thrum of magical energies as Terzian hammered at the telephone cradle hard enough to crack the Bakelite.
The rhythm disintegrated into a dozen smaller harmonics, and then those fell apart, on and on. Chorus became chaos.
3.
Tanya feigned losing her balance, inviting her opponent to lunge at her. At the last second she crouched, putting herself under her adversary’s center of gravity and heaved. The Flame novice flipped over the fire escape railing. Impact with the pavement cut short the woman’s startled yelp.
Gunshots tore the night as the other sentries fired at Jordan, trapped on the pole. Tanya fumbled in her pocket, but before she could activate another charm, the Earth shook.
Jordan fell.
• • •
Like a train of ants, beads of mercury trickled up the chain connecting Frank’s ankle to the loading dock door. Gabe crouched nearby, fists clenched and head bowed in concentration, keeping a tight rein on the hitchhiker. Every wriggle of the ley lines caused another tantrum that he had to quell. Christ, it was exhausting.
Josh, whose face had turned bone pale when the liquid metal levitated into Gabe’s palm, was sweating over the land mine, preparing to disconnect it as they’d discussed. Frank, meanwhile, had nothing to do but stare and swear.
“You lying son of a bitch, Pritchard.”
Through gritted teeth, Gabe said, “Get ready … to cut those wires … when I give the word.”
Disconnecting the forklift would detonate the mine. Disconnecting the mine would raise the door and pull Frank apart. Disconnecting the door would shift the forklift into gear and impale him. They had to time this perfectly …
After discovering that the hitchhiker accidentally grafted onto his soul was a mercury elemental, Gabe had decided to learn all he could about the ancient alchemical element. Quicksilver, hydrargyrum, was strange stuff. Among its properties was a truly bizarre effect on aluminum: Just a few drops could corrode a hole through a solid slab.
The loading dock door was made of aluminum.
He adjusted his grip on the hitchhiker, sculpting its affinity for the liquid metal into a tool to coax the beads higher. “Almost there,” he grunted. “Where are you?”
Josh’s voice quavered. “Just about there.”
“Easy, Toms, just go easy,” said Frank in a voice made brittle by pain and fear.
Gabe couldn’t see the mercury but he could feel its proximity. He knew it was there, every microscopic droplet. Just a little farther …
Solid and liquid metals kissed. Chemistry took over from magic; the contact site instantly started to extrude fine whiskers of corrosion. It was the strangest sensation, a bit like dragging broken fingers across a piano keyboard, as dribbles of mercury unzipped molecules of aluminum oxide around a tiny patch where Frank’s leg re
straint had been bolted to the door. Under normal circumstances the work might have taken an hour, but events elsewhere in the city had whipped Gabe’s elemental friend into paroxysms of ghostly desperation.
“Any second now,” he said. “Ready?”
Josh took a steadying breath. “Ready.”
If Gabe let the mercury chew too far, the trip wires would sense Frank’s leg restraint disconnected and the forklift would shift into gear before they could unchain him from the beam. On the other hand, if Josh disconnected the mine too soon, the door would roll up before the aluminum was sufficiently weakened. Josh had to act as soon as the aluminum was weakened just to the point that the restraint would crumble free when the door moved, and not a second later.
Now.
Gabe opened his mouth to give the signal, but the hitchhiker chose that moment to let loose with a brain-piercing screech. The acid taste of vomit filled his mouth. His shout came out as a wet gurgle. Then the floor folded up and hit him in the face.
• • •
They were almost to the bar, Nadia pushing herself hard just to keep up, when Van’s sprint came to an abrupt halt. One moment she was a blur, the next a statue. She cocked her head, as if listening to a song only she could hear. She sniffed the air. Nadia, panting, did likewise. She sucked ozone-scented air into her burning lungs. The storm was getting worse.
“Uh-oh,” said Van.
• • •
The closer Alestair approached the center of the disturbance, the harder it became to drive. Shielding himself from the maelstrom demanded more and more of his attention. He plunged into a magical headwind that pushed against his soul and mind.
• • •
When Gabe came to his senses, a cosmic dark age later, Frank was still in one piece, Josh was taking a hammer and chisel to his shackles, and rain gusted through the open loading dock door. Gabe staggered to the forklift, but it coughed and ran out of fuel before he could turn the ignition key.
All three men were shaking.
“Josh, can you get Frank home?”
Frank scowled. “If you think you’re going to waltz out of here without a full and complete explanation, you are even crazier than I feared.”
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2: The Complete Season 2 (The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2) Page 48
