by R. L. King
Therefore, Ortega would need to make sure that he couldn’t turn it down. What was that line in that old flatvid movie from the last century? Oh, yes: He would make the man an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Pulling out his personal commlink, he obtained a secure line and made a call.
CHAPTER 2
UNKNOWN LOCATION, SEATTLE
THURSDAY NIGHT
Wherever he was, it was dark. It smelled like old soykaf and industrial detergent. Somewhere far away, an off-kilter fan rattled.
His brain felt slow. Disoriented. Sluggish. He sat halfway up and tried to pummel it into some semblance of awareness. Fighting past the layers of sodden cotton that seemed to be wrapped around it, he examined possibilities: Was he back in his hotel room? Had he had too much to drink and was sleeping off a hangover?
He blinked a couple of times, sat up the rest of the way, and swiped at his hair. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the room’s blackness and shapes resolved themselves into view, two things competed for his immediate attention.
The first was the fact that this was not his hotel room. It was much smaller, for one thing. The placement of the furniture was wrong. The window was wrong. The door was in the wrong place. Even the smell was wrong. Wherever he was, he was sure he’d never been here before.
The second was the buzzing coming from somewhere on the other side of the room, rising with gentle persistence over the rattle of the faraway fan. His subconscious told him that the buzzing hadn’t been going on long—that it had, in fact, begun after his awareness had returned. Was someone watching him in this dark, unfamiliar room?
He reached out and fumbled at the area where the nightstand should have been, searching for a lamp, but there was no lamp. There was, in fact, no nightstand.
It was at that point that the memories began to flood back.
The auction…
The cameo…
The woman… What had her name been? Lynn? No…Lydia.
She had done something to him. Something as he was getting into the car.
His mind sharpened as a frisson of dread traversed his spine. Had the whole affair been a setup, or just Lydia’s involvement with it? Someone had obviously lured him to Seattle so they could abduct him, but—why?
More images rose in his mind: the Asian elf. The dark-skinned woman. They’d both been watching him, and hadn’t seemed to care that he’d noticed. Was one of them behind this? Or perhaps someone else who had been present, but more subtle?
So many possibilities, but no answers.
Not yet.
The buzzing continued. A tiny red light flashed on the other side of the room. Getting up, he stood for a moment to make sure his legs would support him, then crossed to it. He summoned up a light spell without thought: it revealed a generic dresser and a commlink that wasn’t his.
The buzzing was coming from the commlink. He picked it up: the screen showed no incoming LTG number.
“Yes?” His voice sounded raspy, like he hadn’t used it for a while.
“Ah, good,” said a mechanical voice. “You’re awake. How are you feeling?”
“Who is this?” He glared at it, as if doing so could intimidate it into revealing more information.
The voice didn’t reply. Instead, it said, “You’d better get dressed. You have a meeting to attend shortly, and you wouldn’t want to be late.”
“What the hell are you on about?” he demanded. “Who is this? I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what I’m doing here and what this is about.”
“You’ll know soon enough,” the voice said, managing to sound amused despite its artificial tone. “All the relevant details are in the commlink. A car will arrive to pick you up in half an hour. Please be ready.”
“I don’t think you heard me,” he said. As his anger rose, his brain was clearing. “Whoever you are, you’ve made a mistake doing this.”
“You’ll make a mistake if you don’t attend the meeting,” the voice said. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but please trust me on this: attendance is a matter of life or death.” It paused a moment, then added: “Yours.”
The line went dead.
He stared at the commlink. If the time on it could be believed, it was a bit past 18:00 on Thursday night. His last memory was of around the same time on Wednesday. Whatever was going on, he’d lost nearly an entire day to it. Had whatever Lydia drugged him with kept him under that entire time? This wasn’t making any sense at all. If she—or more likely, whoever she worked for—wanted him dead, they easily could have killed him. And if they didn’t want him dead, why set up this charade? What had they done to him in the hours he’d been unaware?
He found the light switch. Harsh overhead fluorescents blazed to flickering, humming life, illuminating a nearly featureless room containing a bed, a chair, and the dresser where the commlink had been. There was no window, but one closed door and two open ones: one revealed a small bathroom, the other a tiny closet.
He was dressed in crisp black pajamas; the tuxedo and overcoat he’d worn at the auction hung, freshly wrapped from the cleaners, in the closet. He stared at them, eyes narrowing, then hurried over and rifled through the pockets of both garments. As he suspected, not only was his own commlink missing, but so were his magical foci. He snatched the dresser commlink and tried to make a call, but wasn’t at all surprised to discover it had been disabled for outgoing communications. Whoever they were, they didn’t want him talking to the outside world.
Well, that was simply too bad for them. There was more than one way to make contact. He reached out with his mind, sending out a call. Almost instantly, a small form shimmered into being in front of him, sitting primly on the bed with her long, plumy tail wrapped around her paws.
His colleagues were usually amused when they first met his ally spirit, Maya. A lot of mages designed their allies to take the form of a cat—cats were one of the classics, along with things like bats, ravens, and black dogs. But he was the only one he knew who’d taken it a step further and designed her with the form of a blackberry cat. Most people didn’t want anything to do with those little beasties, who looked like larger, more intelligent versions of the common longhaired black housecat. It might have something to do with the fact that blackberry cats liked to play, and their version of “play” involved taking over a metahuman’s mind and encouraging him or her to do all sorts of things that were usually detrimental to the metahuman’s health and continued existence.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” she said through their mental link, regarding him with luminous green eyes. Her accent, like his own, was British, but it retained a brisk, charming lilt that made her sound like someone’s favorite nanny. “I was getting worried about you.”
“Tell me what happened to me after I was drugged.”
Blackberry cats couldn’t quite shrug, nor could they quite look sheepish, but Maya managed both. “Sorry,” she replied. “I can’t tell you much. The car left and took you somewhere. I tried to follow, but another spirit showed up and I had to run away. When I tried to find you again, I couldn’t.”
That wasn’t entirely unexpected: if someone were planning to abduct him, they had to know he’d have formidable magical backup, so they’d have to have something on hand to deal with whatever spirits he might have on call at the time. They’d also have to keep those spirits from finding him, which meant they’d probably had him behind a ward or some other magical protection.
He hadn’t designed Maya to be a combat monster; mostly she helped him with magical studies and support tasks, and played confidante when he was feeling moody and didn’t want to be around anyone else. Plus, he’d given her standing instructions not to get into fights unless he directly told her to. He tried a different tack: “Where am I, then?”
Spirits, even powerful ones like Maya, weren’t the best with mundane concepts like directions in the material world. “Not far from where you were,” she said.
“Not in a different city?”
&n
bsp; “No.”
So, he was still somewhere in the Seattle ’plex. One encouraging fact, at least. He crossed the room to the door and tried to open it, expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t. Instead, it opened to a featureless hallway carpeted in the sort of nondescript gray you might see in a government building or cheap hotel. A few other doors, all unmarked, lined the hallway; an old-fashioned green EXIT sign hung at the end near another door.
He went back inside the room and sat down on the bed.
“What happened to me? Did you see it?”
“Not exactly,” the cat said. She paced back and forth across the crumpled bedclothes, then curled up on the pillow. “You were getting into the car with that woman, and then you were unconscious.”
“Just like that? Did she shoot me with something?” His mind whirled as he tried to recall the events around the time when he got into the Nightsky.
“She didn’t shoot you. I don’t know if anyone else did, but you fell not long after you opened the door.”
He frowned. Contact drugs on the car door? He had to admit it was a good way to take him down: his tuxedo and overcoat had both been armored; he’d have noticed if something hit him hard enough to punch through those, or hit him in his unprotected hands or head. But some sort of contact-delivered drug would bypass his protections.
Somebody had done a lot of planning to get hold of him. But why?
He had two choices, as he saw it: he could either leave now, assuming that the door to the outside world was likewise unlocked (or even if it wasn’t: given his state of mind right now, blowing a locked security door off its hinges would be downright cathartic), or he could remain and wait for the car the mechanical voice had said would arrive for him.
All his survival instincts told him to run, to get out of here fast before anybody showed up, or at least to conceal himself somewhere to see who they sent after him. He ignored them. Logically, leaving wasn’t a good idea. If they knew who he was and what he could do, they had certainly taken steps to be able to locate him again if he should try to escape. They had probably even taken a sample of his blood. That’s what he would have done if the situation were reversed. Also logically, if they’d wanted him dead, they’d already had plenty of time to make that happen. Ergo, they didn’t want him dead. Not yet, at least. Which probably meant they wanted something from him.
They were going to be waiting a long time for that.
He lowered his head and massaged his brow with both hands. Whoever these people were, none of what they were doing was making any sense. He hated things that didn’t make sense, because his brain kept trying to force them to make sense, and that usually just gave him a headache.
Don’t forget what they said, his brain helpfully reminded him. Something about life or death.
Oh, yes. That.
He glanced at the commlink again, then snatched the clothes from the closet and headed into the bathroom. “Tell me if anyone comes ’round,” he told Maya. “I’m having a shower.”
If they showed up before he was ready, they could bloody well wait for him.
CHAPTER 3
SEATTLE, 24 HOURS EARLIER
WEDNESDAY NIGHT
To a casual observer, the invitation-only event held in a carefully segregated wing of one of the more exclusive private clubs in Seattle might appear to be nothing more than another in the endless series of high-society affairs the club hosted on regular occasions. It certainly had all the trappings: elegantly attired guests; liveried waitstaff—by coincidence or design, most of them attractive female elves—negotiating their way through the crowd while balancing silver trays with lithe grace; sumptuous food and free-flowing liquor. An elven string quartet played discreet but exquisite chamber music from a stage tucked into one of the corners, and guests gathered in small groups to sip their drinks and exchange meaningless pleasantries.
If the observer were to look a bit more closely, though, they might notice a few things that weren’t quite as obvious: the fact, for example, that most of the guests maintained a sense of heightened awareness that belied their unruffled façades. There was also the matter of the small cadre of individuals who, while dressed every bit as richly as the other guests, did not mingle among them, but rather patrolled the perimeter of the large room and paid particular attention to its entrances and exits—most specifically the closed double doors on the far side.
“I do so hope we’ve found something this time,” a slender woman in an elegant gown of shimmering lavender silk commented. “The last time was such a disappointment. I can’t believe that wretched man missed something so obvious. He came so highly recommended, too.” She smiled at her companion. “Not so highly as you were, though.”
“I’ll do my best,” Winterhawk said, arching an amused eyebrow.
“Oh, I’m not worried.” She chuckled. “I just hope it’s not another fake, whether you identify it or not. These sorts of things don’t surface often, and so many of them are counterfeits.” She chuckled. “In any case, we’ve got a few minutes before things get started, and I see some people I’d like to chat with. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
“Of course.” He sipped his champagne as he watched her go. I could get to like this sort of thing, he decided, savoring the superb, dry flavor. He drifted off to stand near one of the walls where he could see the entire room—even after all this time, old habits died hard—and shifted his perceptions for a moment to assense the area. He wasn’t at all surprised to see the veritable flock of spirits still flitting this way and that, patrolling astral space as the well-dressed security squad patrolled the meat world. He had no doubt that somewhere nearby was a command center where elite security deckers and their utilities were doing much the same thing in the Matrix. It might look like a party full of rich people ripe for the pickings, but Winterhawk knew better.
What this was—or what it would be soon, when the double doors were opened—was one of a network of underground silent auctions set up to display and exchange magical artifacts of dubious legality and provenance. Similar events popped up all over the world, and only those who had been carefully vetted and approved were included on the list of invitees. Winterhawk himself had not been on the guest list for this one, but he wasn’t here to buy. While he was by no means short on funds these days, the prices he expected most of the items to command here were well out of his price range.
No, he was here in a purely advisory capacity. Lydia Duvall, the slender, thirtyish woman he was playing attentive escort to, was a wealthy collector of magical artifacts. She had contacted him a couple of days ago through a series of secure channels with a tempting offer: though she was a magical practitioner of some modest talent herself, she readily acknowledged her status as a dilettante, and didn’t trust her own ability to separate the real thing from the increasing number of counterfeit objects that had been flooding the market lately. The last “consultant” she’d hired had apparently assured her that an item was genuine; she had purchased it only to discover that it was a fake, so this time out she’d made an extra effort to track down someone with solid credentials.
Normally Winterhawk would have declined, but he had just returned from an expedition to Amazonia and the lecture series he’d been invited to deliver at Universitas Carolina Pragensis in Prague didn’t start for another month—that, and his curiosity about the sorts of items that might be on offer at such a high-end event was such that he couldn’t say no.
So, here he was, tuxedo-clad and sampling the life of the rich and indolent. He didn’t even bother masking his aura, since too many people here knew him—most by reputation, a few personally. When you reached a certain level of notoriety in magical circles, those circles got surprisingly small. It was much like the shadowrunning community in that regard, though with a lot more overinflated egos. Present company most certainly not excepted.
Lydia drifted back over toward him as the event’s host, a gray-haired dwarf wearing a blue tuxedo and a monocle, tapped a glass. �
�Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll direct your attention to the next room, we’ll get started in just a moment.”
“About time,” Lydia muttered, linking her arm through Winterhawk’s and moving off to join the exodus as two expressionless guards opened the doors. “I think we’re going to have some good luck tonight, don’t you?”
From the look of the crowd’s auras, a lot of people were thinking the same thing. Winterhawk continued assensing the area, watching the bright flares of anticipation hovering around most of the group. He allowed himself to be pulled forward but kept his awareness high: he had recognized more than one old—well, it would be overdramatic to call them enemies when perhaps rivals or adversaries might suffice better, but in any case he had crossed paths in the past either with them or with the corporations they represented, some on more than one occasion. Sure, that probably meant nothing after all this time: biz was biz, as the saying went, and most corps knew better than to maintain longstanding grudges against shadowrunners. It didn’t make good business sense to do so, since the odds were good that they themselves might wish to make use of their services at some future time. Word got around fast if a particular corp devoted too much time to retaliating against the very grease that kept their vast and corrupt machines operating smoothly.
The items arrayed on linen-draped tables inside the next room appeared deceptively vulnerable. Each one was individually lit, displayed against a backdrop of velvet or silk arranged to show it off to maximum advantage. Winterhawk doubted that any of those who were truly interested in purchasing the items even noticed this window dressing, nor the intricate but subtle security measures that were in place to make sure no one got too close.
He felt Lydia’s hand squeeze his arm. “There it is,” she said under her breath. “But let’s not be too obvious about it. Let’s just look around a bit first.”
