Fire & Frost
Page 7
The Kite crew he could handle, but the witches were the wild cards. The Kites would come in before the witches to clear the way. “We just wow-n-talk,” Kite said.
A squeak. Kite was creeping across the kitchen floor.
“How’s the peanut biz, Kite?” Max asked, casual as could be.
Silence.
“Don’t you remember? The last time I arrested you, you said you were out of the game. Gonna raise peanuts.”
“Who is that?”
Max smiled. As far as psychological advantages went, you couldn’t do much better than people thinking you were a ghost. It was possible that Kenny Kite might’ve even seen Max go down. Hell, Kenny Kite could’ve been the triggerman for Max’s original death back in Chicago.
Another creak. More Kites on the scene.
“You should’ve gone with it. Peanuts are a lot healthier than all the candy you had me get for you in interrogation that last time. Remember that? All those Snickers. And did you give me the intel I was asking for?”
“Din’ need to.”
Fear in Kenny’s voice. If Max showed himself now, he’d be able to get off two or three shots while the Kites absorbed the shock of seeing him alive.
Veronica held up three fingers.
Max stepped out and shot. Kenny went down first, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Then Kyle. Kev got a shot off before Max plugged him. He put another bullet in each of them.
He shoved Kenny’s body out of the way of the basement door and yanked it open, shooting into the darkness of the living room with his left and back through the open mudroom door with his right. “Go!” She’d never have better cover.
Veronica limped across the linoleum and onto the top of the basement steps. Once she’d started down, he shut the door and slammed up against it, firing until everything went quiet.
He slid to a crouch. Two Kites still out front. And the witches were out there, too. He snuck over to the drawer and reached up and into it to grab one of the spare clips he liked to keep stashed around the house.
That’s when a canon-like blast ripped through his head.
The blast overwhelmed him with a surprise he couldn’t jerk himself out of. The world spun and screamed in the language of color: reds, blacks, yellows. Cheek against the smooth floor. The back of his head hot.
The back of his head cold.
Breeze where it shouldn’t be. Yelling. Pandemonium.
They’d got him in the head. They’d undone Veronica’s magic and got him.
The men bent over their dead brothers with a kind of anger that was really grief. The women, all witches in red cloaks, scried for Veronica, but Veronica was safe in her warded lab.
He didn’t know how he knew any of this—his eyes weren’t working. Things became simple. Feeling and knowing merged.
It all seemed to unfold further and further away—these new witches, Veronica, the Kite brothers, his little girl.
Chapter Two
VERONICA SAT IN HER COMPUTER lab, her view of the screen blurred. She should be typing, but instead she clutched her chest, pushed against her ribcage, as if she could contain the horrible feeling there, maybe push it back inside somehow. But it kept growing.
He was dead. She’d pushed out to him with her magic and felt him on the floor.
And she was trapped like a squirrel behind her own wards.
She’d wanted to go out and fight them straight on, but Max was right. You have to use your advantage.
She wiped her tears and started setting up the UNIX command files she’d need to conjure him again. It would take a day to get him back. She needed to hurry.
Four or five sets of footsteps above. Voices. Oh, those witches and hit men would pay for what they did to Max!
She’d originally conjured Max because he looked mean and tough and was an expert on fighting the Salvos. It’s why the Salvos had killed him in the first place.
And he loved being back alive, once he’d gotten over the shock of it, and was eager to reduce the population of hit men on Salvo’s payroll.
Clean kills, he called them. Right kills.
Max was like that. Concerned about doing right.
I’m finishing the job I started in life, baby.
She loved how he spoke, and that he called her baby, though she got the sense from stories he told that he called guys baby, too.
And he’d talk tough right to her face. Even with all her power, he’d talk tough to her face. That had surprised and offended her at first. Well, she’d wanted a tough one, she’d reminded herself.
Now she wouldn’t have it any other way. Nobody else would do.
She ran her fingers over the keyboard. He didn’t remember his original death, of course, but he’d remember today’s death if she conjured him back into this timeline. The memory from this timeline would cling. But Max could handle anything.
A thump on the door upstairs. One of the hit men going at it with his shoulder, probably.
She could do this.
The witches of the world had mocked her modern ideas about the new computer technology, and she’d mocked right back. People had ridiculed and rejected her for as long as she could remember. As a child, Veronica was teased because she was weird—not good-weird, but weird in a way that apparently made people dislike her. And then came the accident, the result of her futile attempt to impress the kids who always mocked her, monkeying around in the railroad yards. The chemical fire she’d accidentally started and the crushing fall she’d taken had landed her in the hospital for ten months, all pins and skin grafts and casts. Her family went bankrupt from it. She had to repeat third grade. She grew into a lonely and maimed teen trying desperately to hide her horrific injury, trying desperately to be normal, trying to reverse the stiffness and standoffishness that seemed to make her a magnet for mockery. But the more she was mocked, the stiffer and more unlikeable she became, and the more she focused on her leg.
And then she’d found magic.
Thump. Crack.
She pulled out her folder of Max photos.
Witches thought the only wisdom worth having came out of dusty old books. Veronica knew different. She could conjure anything in the world with her bespelled code—any person, any object, anything that could be photographed or even drawn. Everything was electricity, even the human body. Even emotions and thoughts—that had been her key breakthrough in computerizing the spells.
Hers was an innovation so powerful she couldn’t even boast about it, much as she would’ve liked to.
Another thump. Another crack.
The door, they would get through. The Council witches would snap those wards up there with the crook of a finger.
The computer lab wards wouldn’t be so easy.
She spread out the photos. Tried to decide which Max to bring to life now. Oh, they would pay for killing him…pay, pay, pay!
It took 24 hours for a conjured thing to appear, and it lasted only seven days. These seemed to be the laws of it all. No surprise, really: 24 hours and seven days aligned to the math of nature. She hated the 24 hour gap, but seven days had been a saving grace at times. She’d brought some disastrous things and people to life, especially during her rock star phase. It was a comfort to know any mistake would vanish in seven days. And, if not, she had a titanium cage out back.
She had a system for conjuring Max where she entered the code to bring him to life a day before he was scheduled to blink out. Result: the new Max would blink in the second the old Max blinked out. Cascading, she called it. He’d hate to know she had a name for it.
She’d have to wait the full 24 hours this time. Because they’d gone and killed him. It would’ve been painful. Bewildering. Her Max, lying on the floor.
The screen started to blur.
She grabbed the newspaper photo she usually conjured him from and ripped it in half. That Max was dead. She had to grab him from a different picture now. He called them her devil computers.
Nevertheless.
When the
code was set up, she powered up all five of her computers—mini-supercomputers she’d home-cooked with kits and off-the-shelf processors, all configured in a daisy-pentagram. She pulled out her Scotch tape, ripped off eight small pieces, and stuck them to the edge of the desk so that she could grab them easily. She positioned the first electrode on her forehead and taped the thing on.
Thump. Crack. Through the basement door. Thumps down the steps.
She affixed the second electrode. How did a mob boss know to send the Witch Council after her?
She positioned the third electrode as they tore apart the basement, looking for her. The lab door would appear as a wall. More crashes. One very close.
Concentrate!
She affixed the last two electrodes.
Max always said that if she were a good person, she’d destroy her devil computers. He had a point. Even she knew it was too much power for one person, but the power was all she really had.
Max sometimes threatened to destroy the computers himself. She doubted he would. His will to live, to make things right—it was far too strong.
“Not here.” A man’s voice. “Nuttin’ here.”
“The bitch is here. I feel her.” One of the Council witches. Veronica ran a quick side equation—an algorithm to scatter her voice—and wove it through the invisible wards that protected her. Then she laughed, loudly.
“The bitch is definitely here,” she said. “And here, and here.”
The modulating voice would unnerve the witches out there. Witches really were fools not to embrace higher mathematics and supercomputing.
She selected a different Max photo—one taken the same week as the press conference photo. This one showed him leaving a crime scene, ducking under the yellow tape. She chose it because he would have his gun with him, and he’d certainly be wearing a bullet-proof vest—he was a major mob target toward the end of his life. He’d be glad to have his gun and vest when he appeared on her front porch the next day.
She set the clipping onto her desk, tore a sheet of print-out paper in two halves, and covered the sides of the photo so that only Max was visible. She didn’t want the guys walking next to him showing up. She taped the sheets into place. She needed to look at Max and concentrate during this part. She was the interface.
A woman’s sing-song voice: “Ver-onnnnn-ica. Where are you hiiii-ding?”
“I’m up your nose with a rubber hose,” Veronica said, and then she laughed. She wanted them unnerved. Frightened.
It was only a matter of time before the witches got busy painting up the walls with all the blood they had at their disposal. They’d send the hitters around the house for candles. They’d pull hair from her hairbrush. It would be a spellcasting hootenanny.
“You won’t hide for long, Veronica.”
“I’m not hiding. I’m bringing the rain of hell down on you,” she said. “If you knew the gnarliness of my power, you would keen and scream and fall at my feet.”
She stifled a smile. Max, if he were there, would give her such shit for saying keen and scream and gnarliness. She missed him already.
Chanting. They were starting it up now.
Veronica took a deep breath. She’d exaggerated to Max about the witches needing ten days to get in, but surely the wards would hold for the day. The wards ran three layers deep, each embedded with algorithms that would lead to time-consuming rabbit holes. But there was a lot of blood available out there. And four masterful witches.
She twirled the voltage box knob to high and then set to concentrating on Max’s image, letting her mind fill with him.
It was important to avoid experiencing feelings while viewing the image you wanted to conjure, because a computer could be tricked or confused. Not feeling things while looking at photos of Max got harder every time, because she had a kaleidoscope of feelings about him, this man who pushed her and criticized her relentlessly. Him and his overbearing cop attitude and moral views on everything. Max was a bull of a man who didn’t think of himself as smart, but he was smart—his was a strong, simple intelligence that she couldn’t tie in knots, try as she might. He loved whiskey and steak and tropical shirts and sketching funny little things and shoveling the walk until it was bone clear.
She tried not to picture him dead up there.
Max was always telling her that the devil computers were making her weak. Dependent. Rotting you from the inside-out, he loved to say. A drug you can’t quit.
Well, he couldn’t quit, either. He liked coming back, even as he resented her power. Most every living being wanted to continue living.
Crashes. That would be the paint cans. Max had told her to get them out of the basement. When she’d made to banish them with magic, he’d been disgusted.
“I’ll be as magic as I want to be,” she said to Max in the photo. Max, her bull of a cop and the number-one enemy of organized crime, squinting into a photographers’ flashbulb.
She touched a finger to his thick cheek, as if she could touch him. He had a squarish face—not what you’d call handsome, but overwhelmingly male, right down to his wide brow and the cleft on his thick chin. His eyes were brown. So was his hair, which he kept shorn close. He got his haircuts at an old-timey barbershop he’d gone to since boyhood, he’d told her once. He was squinting in the shot, lips pulled slightly to the side of his face. That’s how he smiled—sheepishly, and more on one side than the other. From the smile, she guessed that somebody must have just praised him, likely for the arrests of all the Salvo high-ups. The string of Salvo arrests that had gotten him killed.
The crashing and pounding grew louder outside her door. Somebody had found her sledgehammer.
A sledgehammer would do nothing against her wards.
She straightened the photo with a twinge in her stomach. A better person wouldn’t bring him back after she’d let him get killed. A better person would leave him there in the photo where he belonged.
She’d promised him, she told herself. He wanted to come back. All excuses.
She concentrated on his image, immersing herself in him.
It was like getting lost in beauty.
Chapter Three
VERONICA HIT THE ENTER KEY and sat back, relieved he was on his way. She could hold out one day.
It was in the very next moment that she realized what a spectacularly awful decision it was to conjure Max first.
The plan had been to conjure reinforcements. What was Max to do against the Council? She’d so badly wanted him restored to her world she’d made an emotional decision instead of a tactical one. What was wrong with her? They could kill him yet again!
Shit.
He’d arrive in 23 hours and 59 minutes, and he’d need backup. She grabbed a dusty three-ring binder full of the old Council newsletters from when they still bothered to send them to her. She flipped through to get to the Now Vanquished section of each, always on the back page. Now Vanquished was the witches’ version of humankind’s police blotters. She needed an enemy of the Council to appear ASAP after Max appeared. But it couldn’t be a being that might harm Max. Or her. She rifled through. Various baddies had been photographed. Some killed, some sent off to other worlds.
Then she came upon the perfect ally: Jophius, a mini-bull dragon the size of large dog. He’d been kept caged by the Council for years as they tried to extract the names he knew, killed during an escape attempt. Oh, how Jophius hated the Council! Jophius would rip apart these witches like a bloody little banshee if he so much as scented them. But he didn’t have a problem with witches in general—just the Council. Perfect.
She repeated the process with the electrodes. This photo had been snapped during Jophius’ imprisonment. She covered the bars with the paper. She needed Jophius to arrive sans cage.
ALMOST 22 HOURS LATER, Veronica lay on the computer lab couch studying Ytonions, an ancient tome, a kind of Holy Grail of witchdom, conveniently depicted in a 1871 painting by Brugese and now manifested into the real world via her devil computers.
She’d subsisted on Dr. Pepper and Bugles while the witches and their hit-man helpers worked beyond the door. How in the world had mobster Johnny Salvo gotten involved with the witch Council? It was smart of him. Maybe she shouldn’t have used magic to mess with Johnny Salvo’s cruel son, but it had felt so good.
The power of the Council pressed in on her. They’d be pushing a hell of a lot harder if they knew Max and Jophius would show up in less than two hours. Veronica was starting to feel home free. Even if they got to her, she could hold up to almost anything for two hours.
Or could she? Max would say she couldn’t. Devil computers are making you weak.
She frowned. The conjuring power of a god was hardly a weakness.
She surveyed the mini supercomputers that crowded the space with their metal bodies full of wires and circuit boards. The modern advances in computing were amazing; not long ago you’d need a computer the size of a two-car garage plus a massive water supply for cooling to do what just one of her refrigerator-sized computers could do today.
Red coils pulsed inside the space heater on the floor, warming the little lab. Even the electricity here emanated from her now—the witches’ spells out there had drained the conventional electricity. She wished Max could understand how many breakthroughs she’d made. There was nothing she couldn’t do!
Except, apparently, stop caring what he thought.
She hated that he’d have to come back remembering his death on the kitchen floor. It would feel like it had just happened, but Max would go into an action mode. Max was a pro…unlike Don Johnson. She smiled to think of his disdain for that show. “Detective Don Johnson,” he’d growl, managing to load up those few syllables with total scorn.
She went back to her studies. This old book was giving her new ideas about extending the duration of things she conjured beyond seven days. She wanted to get the stuff faster, too; it really was inconvenient to have to wait for the entire rotation of the earth. And she wanted the power to cancel things, and she wouldn’t mind more control over the beings she conjured, so she wouldn’t have to use the titanium cage out back ever again.