“Exactly how large?” I asked.
“Eighteen hundred and twenty-four yards. A little more than a mile. That number mean anything?”
I shook my head. “Isabella might know.” I turned to walk away. “Yes, that is the statue’s signature. Oh, and you can tell the ICAA that they can stop worrying about Vincent Crocker.”
“I don’t understand,” Torbert said.
“The jaguar statue is the worst of blood magic artifacts. Human sacrifice. Crocker’s blood was used to fuel the spell.”
By the time we got back to the main body of soldiers, police, ambulances, and all the reporters and news cameras, we had dealt with two more demons. Of the twelve soldiers who started out with us, three were dead and two more were injured. None of us were unscathed. I couldn’t remember being so bruised, scraped, or singed, and I wondered if my left wrist might be broken. It certainly was swollen, and it hurt like hell.
Even Isabella, who I had begun to think was invincible, walked with a limp, unable to put much weight on her left hind leg.
Military medics took charge of the injured soldiers. A tall blonde woman in a white coat led us to an ambulance, gestured to a short stool, and told me to sit down. Then she turned her attention to Isabella.
“Shift back,” the woman said to the fearsome-looking cat. Isabella gave her a surly snarl in return.
“I didn’t ask your opinion,” the woman said. “I’m not a veterinarian. Change your shape so I can look at that leg and see what’s wrong with it. I’m not going to guess where it hurts when you can tell me.”
Grumbling under her breath, Isabella changed back to human, then gasped and almost fell. Little Wen-li caught her and eased her down.
The doctor raised an eyebrow, then bent down and ran her hands down Isabella’s leg. Her hands didn’t get very far, as the shifter jerked and let out a short cry when the woman touched her hip.
“Your hip?” the doctor asked.
“Si. I think I dislocated it. It hurts a hell of a lot less when I’m a cat.”
“Well, let’s see what we can do about that,” the doctor said, unbuckling Isabella’s belt and pulling her pants off. That revealed a bruise covering her hip and spreading halfway down her thigh.
“Well, looks as though it popped back in the socket,” the doctor said. “Drink this.”
Isabella took a small bottle, sipped, and made a face. “What is this? It tastes terrible.”
“I didn’t ask you to like it. I said to drink it.”
“Your bedside manner could use a little work,” Isabella grumbled, but she drank the rest of the bottle.
The doctor grinned at her and placed both her hands on Isabella’s hip and thigh. “You have any heart trouble?”
“No, why?” Isabella jerked, her back arching until only her head and heels touched the ground, then she shivered, and collapsed.
“Better?” the doctor asked.
Isabella gave her a weak nod and muttered. “Yeah. Holy shit.”
The doctor turned to me and said, “Let me see that wrist.”
“I’m not sure I should,” I answered. “I need to know what was in that potion.”
“This and that. Nothing to worry about.”
My good hand shot out, grabbing her by the shoulder and squeezing. It froze her in her tracks and she winced. “No, that’s not good enough. I’m close to Human, but there are some things you can tolerate that I can’t.”
Her eyes seemed to bulge, and she gave me the ingredient list. Nothing that would hurt me, but it would probably make me groggy, if not put me to sleep. I let go of her.
“My heart’s just fine. If you can heal this wrist, I would appreciate it, but I don’t need the soporific.”
She nodded, then took my hand and wrist in her hands. The surge of magic that flowed into me was like an electric shock. I felt something happen in my wrist, and when she released me, I flexed it, opening and closing my fist.
“That feels great. Thank you. Do you have a card?”
She laughed, reached into her pocket and handed me a business card.
“Thank you, Doctor Evans,” I said, and put it away. I was a little surprised that she was a real Human doctor in addition to being a magical healer. A good person to know.
Chapter 11
The sun was coming up when the FBI delivered us back to the nursery. My employees were showing up for work, and the government propaganda machine was in full swing. The only news on the radio or TV was about the meteor that hit Arlington.
The conspiracy theorists were also in full swing, contributing the event to the Russians, Taliban, space aliens, or the pagan non-Humans, depending on their particular paranoia.
I took a quick shower, put on clean clothes and went outside to find Ed. “We need to take a look at what you have scheduled today,” I told him. “Anything near southwest DC or in Virginia is going to be impossible to get to.”
“Do you know what happened?” he asked as we compared our schedule with a map tacked on the wall.
“They’re saying a meteor,” I said absently.
“No, I mean really.”
With a sigh, I turned to him. “A disaster. Something magical. I don’t know exactly what happened, but it wasn’t a meteor. The military has troops all over the place, and every hospital in the area is overrun. I was out there, and the damage looks like a tornado, but not a natural one.”
He nodded. We shifted things around to send our crews out to the opposite side of the metro area, and I took a list of clients to call and explain why we were coming early, or postponing.
With that taken care of, I retreated to the cottage. Isabella came in, sniffed the air, and said, “That smells interesting.” She walked over to the coffee pot. “What is it?”
“Dalesh. Not for humans.” I thought a moment. Isabella wasn’t human. “Check it out if you wish. It has about four times as much caffeine as coffee.”
She poured herself a cup and sat at the table across from me. “Elvish?”
“Yeah. Some of the refugees from Alfheim brought seeds with them. I bought some and cultivated them in one of the greenhouses. So, what are you going to do? Go back to Colorado?”
Isabella looked surprised. “I need to find the statue. You’ve seen what it can do.”
“Is it even in this reality anymore? Hell, is the mage who did that still alive?”
“I have to assume he is, and that the artifact is still here as well.”
“And that he’s still in the DC area?”
She shrugged. “I understand that my being here is an imposition. I’ll find a hotel. I am very grateful for your help, Kellana. I never intended that you should be risking your life fighting demons.”
While I was hoping that she would agree with my assessment, I was actually uncomfortable about assuming the threat was over. Wishing that the nightmare would end hadn’t worked in Germany, or during those first months in New York when I barely scraped together enough food to keep from starving. Hell, I was a Fae. Why couldn’t I ever have a Fairytale happy-ever-after?
With a sigh, I said, “I feel bad about making you sleep in a tree. Grab your stuff. I have plenty of room at my house.”
She gave me a strange look. “Isn’t this your home?”
“Come on.”
I drove her over to my place in Georgetown, gave her a key and the passcode for the alarm system, and showed her the spare bedroom. Then I tuned the wards to admit her.
“So, why are you staying over at the nursery?” she asked.
I told her about Wilcox’s leaving a note at my house, and that the wards and Fairies at the nursery made me feel more secure.
“But this is a lot more comfortable,” I concluded. “And with you here, I won’t feel as alone and vulnerable.”
While I was showing her around the house, she pointed to a picture on the mantle of Carolyn when she was young. There was another one of the two of us together, taken about twenty years later. “A friend?”
“Carolyn. The house was her family’s.”
“Ah, the woman who died. She was very beautiful.”
I motioned to another picture, Carolyn at her eightieth birthday. “Yes, even when she grew old. She was so full of life and love of the world. I’m always amazed at the wisdom some Humans manage in spite of their short lives.”
Isabella changed the subject. “Didn’t Torbert say that Crocker escaped the airport with another man?”
“Yes, and they have some video of it, I guess.”
“I think we need to know who that person was.”
I agreed. Pulling out my phone, I called Torbert. I suspected that he hadn’t slept any more than we had, and I was right. He answered on the third ring.
“Miss Rogirsdottir?”
“Agent Torbert. How’s the back?”
“Better, thank you. What can I do for you?”
Torbert gave us an address, and we drove there to find a slightly rundown office building with high security and nothing that would identify its occupants. We pressed a buzzer at the front door, identified ourselves, and waited. Five minutes later, the door buzzed. I pulled it open and we walked in to face Agent Torbert and a security guard sitting behind a desk. We signed in, pressed our fingerprints to a glass plate, and were handed visitor badges.
I wondered what they would think about my fingerprints. They didn’t resemble anything Human and would match every other Elf from my clan.
We walked down a dingy hallway to a creaky elevator that took us to the third floor. We followed Torbert through a room of cubicles, then through a door into a room with a couple of computers and a large monitor mounted on the wall. He sat down, typed on a keyboard, and the monitor lit up.
A grainy surveillance video showed a sidewalk outside a building. A couple of people waited with their luggage. After about thirty seconds, two men appeared. Torbert slowed the video and zoomed in. One of them was Vincent Crocker. I didn’t recognize the other man. What I did notice was that he walked very close to Crocker, and his right hand was pressed to Crocker’s side.
“I think he has a gun, or some kind of weapon, in his right hand,” I said.
Torbert zoomed in more, then said, “I think you’re right.”
I glanced at Isabella. Her attention was riveted to the screen.
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“No, but there’s something very familiar about him. Not someone I’ve met, but someone I’ve seen, or maybe seen a picture of him.”
“Have you sent his picture to the ICAA?” I asked. “Don’t you have facial recognition software? I hear about that sort of thing on TV.”
Torbert sat back. “Yes, we sent it to ICAA about an hour ago. The facial recognition software takes a long time to go through all the images we have, and that image,” he motioned toward the screen, “is so poor that I don’t know whether we’ll get no hits, or a million hits.”
Isabella and I went back to my house with the intent of getting some sleep. When we got there, I turned on the TV. By the light of day, aerial photographs of the devastation showed the lie about a meteor causing it. Nothing natural could carve out a hole so even and perfect. Not only that, but pictures of other meteor strikes—which the TV station showed—had evidence of dirt and rocks ejected from the site. In Arlington, the missing material was truly missing, along with more than fifteen thousand people.
“I wonder what their next story will be?” I asked the air.
“I’m surprised the military didn’t completely clamp down on the news, flight paths, and any information about it,” Isabella said.
“Hard to do in this country, especially with the internet,” I said. “Fifty years ago, that’s what they would have done. They tried that with the Beltane demon invasion but had to give up when a demon ate those Congressmen. Too many witnesses.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m going to bed. Wake me if that mage shows up or the sun comes up in the west.”
With more than six thousand casualties crowding area hospitals, businesses destroyed, and other businesses trying to operate in spite of workers they were missing, the story did not go away. Politicians struggled to find some way of using the disaster to their advantage, or conversely to figure out how to blame it on their opponents.
I hoped that we had seen the last of the jaguar statue and its disasters, at least for a while. I assumed the mage who triggered the whole mess had to be shaken by what he’d unleashed. What I wasn’t thinking about were the demons.
When I awoke the next morning, I turned on the TV while making coffee. The frantic tone of the news announcer drew my attention. I went into the sitting room and could hardly believe my ears. After dark the night before, the Pentagon was assaulted by what authorities estimated were more than one thousand demons. The battle was still going on at dawn.
While I stood there, Isabella came up behind me. “Like China,” she said.
“Like Midgard, only worse.”
She walked around me and peered at my face. “Like Midgard? You had demon invasions of Midgard?”
The coffee pot beeped, so I headed back to the kitchen. “Yes, Midgard is very close to Hel. Between the demons and the native goblins and trolls, not to mention Human fiefdoms constantly trying to conquer each other, Midgard was a very lively place.”
I poured us each a mug of coffee. “What do you say we hit a place I know for breakfast? I have a craving for eggs Chesapeake.”
“Whatever you want,” Isabella said. “Is that like eggs Benedict?”
“Yeah. With crabmeat. I’ve been staying at the cottage, so there isn’t any food in the house.”
As we got in the car, Isabella said, “I’ve meant to ask you about your sword. Demons are notoriously difficult to kill.”
I chuckled. “You know, there’s a philosophical debate among Elven intellectuals as to whether demons really die. Some say that their souls return to Hel and their bodies are resurrected. No matter. It’s an Elven sword, forged with magic from silver and titanium. It’s virtually unbreakable, very light, and holds an edge forever. I also have an athame, a ritual knife that I use in my alchemy, forged the same way. No way that I would attempt to kill a demon with an Earthen steel sword. It would probably bounce.”
We found a parking space about a block from the restaurant and strolled down the street, doing a little window shopping.
“Speaking of killing demons,” I said, “I’ve never seen another being kill a demon without using a weapon or magic. I take it that a demigod considers a demon an equal match.”
“I’m not really a demigod…” she started but trailed off when I started laughing.
“Call it what you like. I’m not going to engage in an academic debate with you.” I threw my arm around her shoulders and gave her a smile. “But I was sure glad you were with me the other night.”
A man leaned against a building. A beautiful, sexy, hunk of a man. Damned near as handsome as an Elf.
“Hey, ladies, looking for a little morning recreation?” he called. Pheromones rolled off him, and his smile kindled a flame between my legs. I hadn’t thought about sex in ages, but suddenly, crawling in the sack with him was the most important thing in the world.
I sketched a rune and spoke a Word.
“Hey, wait, what are you doing?” he sputtered. “You bi—” He vanished.
“What the hell?” Isabella gaped at where he had been.
“Incubus,” I said. “If the veils to Hel were breached, then we should assume that a whole host of its inhabitants came over. Demons, Devils, Incubi, Succubae, Imps, Rakshasa, Oni, Yaoguai, you name it.”
“But, but, what did you do?”
I noticed a sheen of sweat on her face that hadn’t been there a few moments before.
“Banished it. If I was a mage, depending on how strong I was, I might be able to banish those things we fought. But the minor demons don’t have the strength to resist the spell. It’s easier than putting up with them.”
After breakfas
t, I took her down by the canal and the park along the Potomac. I really needed some serenity after the shocks of the past few days, and that area was the closest I could get to nature in the city.
A lot of helicopters and airplanes flew overhead, many more than normal. When we reached the river, we saw smoke rising from the direction of the Pentagon and could hear distant explosions. As we watched, two jets dove from the sky and fired missiles at the ground.
“Are you all right?” Isabella asked.
I realized I was shaking.
“You’re as pale as a ghost. Even whiter than normal.”
“Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea,” I said, turning away and stumbling back up the path.
Chapter 12
Torbert called. “Miss Rogirsdottir? We have a hit on the man on the surveillance video with Vincent Crocker. Are you at your nursery?”
He showed up with Wen-li and Bronski. My office was a little tight for that many people, so I invited them into the cottage kitchen and poured lemonade for everyone.
With a grim expression, Torbert tossed a large photograph of a man on the table. Isabella gasped.
“Recognize him now?” Torbert asked. “Aleksi Nieminen.”
I shrugged. It didn’t mean anything to me.
“Head of ICAA,” Wen-li said. “Chief Counselor is his title. The Council says he disappeared about two or three weeks ago and they don’t know where he is.”
“Nieminen sent Crocker to DC when the jaguar statue was first put up for auction,” Bronski said. “He’s said to be a very powerful mage. Supposedly a summoner and conjurer. He’s led the ICAA for the past forty years and was the major proponent of coming out to the world after Beltane.”
“Wonderful. The fox is guarding the henhouse,” I said. “So, how does that help us?”
“I’m not entirely sure it does,” Torbert said. He put a thick file on the table. “You two are the ones who said you wanted to recover the artifact. Here is a copy of everything we know about him. He’s originally from Finland but has been living in Romania for at least the past fifteen years. We’ve put out an all-points bulletin for him. What we do know is that he hasn’t taken a plane or train out of this area since the event in Arlington.”
Gods and Demons Page 9
