by Kit Hallows
“Morgan fucking Rook!” He stood over me. The light radiating from his staff lit his wild eyes and gaunt features. It seemed he was high on his own madness. I tried to retrieve my fallen gun but he pinned my hand under his foot and swung the staff around, aiming it at my heart. “This is going to hurt,” he said. “I promise.”
46
A deadly charge crackled and fizzled from the magician’s staff. I had nowhere to go. My other shifted, as if rising to the selfish call of his own preservation, but he was too late. My only hope was that the agony would be brief and the kill, fast.
Shooooooph.
I threw my arms up to cover my face as blood and gore exploded from the magician’s chest. His staff clattered to the ground, and he fell to his knees, his fingers slick with blood. I glanced across the roof, expecting to find Samuel or Astrid, but there was no one.
Then I spotted a figure moving along the roof of the parking garage. Haskins, holding Ebomee’s sniper rifle in his hand.
I signaled that the threat was neutralized and for him to return to the street, then I hunkered down beside the magician. He was still alive, but barely. His eyes flickered over mine and he whispered words I couldn’t understand. “Where’s Endersley?” I asked, calmly.
He laughed, the sound little more than a hacking gurgle. “Go to hell!”
I drew away as he spat out blood and glared up at Astrid and Samuel as they appeared behind me.
“I thought we weren’t going to shoot him,” Samuel said.
“Haskins got him. He saved my life,” I said.
Astrid leaned down and gazed into the magician’s eyes. “He doesn’t have long. Minutes maybe.”
“That’s far too much time to spend in the company of filth like you,” the magician coughed. “Traitorous bitch.”
“Traitor?” Astrid’s eyes flashed dangerously as she traced a finger around the wound in his chest, causing him to howl in agony.
“Attacking your own, siding with blinkered filth.” The magician spat again, over estimating his own strength, as it oozed down the side of his face. Astrid shot him a look of revulsion and stepped back.
“Is there any way to keep him alive a little longer?” I asked.
“Yes,” Astrid said.
“Good, I’ll make sure every second of it is spent in abject pain. Unless he gives us the information we need.” I pulled a small bottle of Rawblynde from my bag, and shook it in front of the magician’s face. “We're given this to sear off old or abandoned magical binds. It’s quick and reliable but you have to use it very, very carefully because even the smallest speck on your skin burns like you can’t believe.” I smiled as I unscrewed the cap. “You look skeptical, but you ’ll see what I mean.”
His glare turned from fury to fear and then contempt. He forced a sneer. “Go on. Get it done.”
“Fine.” I took the pipette from the bottle and let a single drop fall upon his throat.
He gave a terrible, hoarse cry and furiously wiped his neck with trembling fingers, and then he panicked and twitched as his hands began to blister. I grabbed a cloth from my bag and wiped the Rawblynde off as best I could. “Imagine it sinking into an open wound. By the time it wears off, you’ll feel like you’ve suffered a thousand lifetimes in hell.”
“I don’t know where Endersley is,” the magician coughed, “he left.”
I believed him. “But you do know where his base of operations is.”
“He has hidey-holes all over the damned place and we’re all in the dark; he’s refused to see anyone until after the event, including me. So no one knows where he is.”
Event. I made a mental note to return to the topic. “What was all this about? And don’t tell me it was just a robbery. I know part of it was a trap for me. What else happened tonight?”
“Nothing. It was just a robbery, I swear it.”
I dipped the pipette into the Rawblynde and held it over him.
He snarled, but finally spoke. “Some of Endersley’s people were bringing their devices into the city. The robbery was a ruse, to distract the authorities.”
“Devices?”
He managed a strangled laugh. “Bombs. A means to spread the restless virus far and wide.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Most things with Endersley are on a need to know basis. Just enough knowledge to get our jobs done. Mine was to extract cash from these pampered fools and draw you to the assassin.”
“Why does Endersley need money?”
“The blinkereds need the money. Endersley's paying them to work on the bombs and the cull…”
“The cull?” A slow, nauseating feeling passed through me.
As he looked at me his face turned ashen and then his eyes flitted to the heavens. He didn’t have long. I grabbed his wrist but his magical defenses were still strong enough to keep me from entering his mind. I closed my eyes and concentrated, absorbing a little of his power, just enough to use against him.
“What are you doing?” Astrid asked.
“What needs to be done,” I replied. The magician’s power flowed toward mine.
Flashes of the magician’s life passed through me. Of his wife, strung up from the mossy branch of an oak tree by his very own hands. Of his children trying to flee the horrific scene, and him bringing each of them to their knees with fire, magic and rage. Of how he’d wandered lost through the dark, haunted byways until Stroud appeared in a place choked with death, shining like a beacon and whispering promises of power. The magician gladly rose to his call and crossed the gulf between worlds, only to land in this filthy primitive city. A place infested with a people he felt were little more than cattle ripe for the slaughter.
The scene shifted, and he was with Endersley in some kind of a mill or foundry. It was full of rusting machinery and old wooden workbenches stacked with homemade bombs. Endersley stood near a table laden with glowing beakers and jars as he gently removed pouches and vials from his leather bag. There were people there with him; three young, nervous blinkereds, each of them seduced by Enderley's money and his promise of better days. Days in which they’d want for nothing, days when they’d rise like royalty, if they only did this one job…
I clutched the magician’s wrist firmly as it twitched in my grip. He was dying, and I was hastening his demise as I drained his memories and magic. I browsed faster through his recollections, seeking the most recent.
There.
This morning. The magician and his crew waiting along a potholed road near a cluster of industrial buildings. A courier truck stopped, its doors swung open and a tall, powerful looking man stood on the edge of the corrugated truck bed. He was blinkered and his eyes seemed… dead. No, not dead, one eye was real and as cold as winter, the other was made of glass. His hair was slicked back, his face lean and marred with a shiny scar below his missing eye. Beside him were four thuggish looking men.
The magician handed the man a canvas bag filled with cash then watched expectantly as the guy flexed his arm, judging the weight of it before tossing it into the clutches of a scrawny guy with spiky red hair and a lewd grin. The man with the glass eye stared back at the magician, as if making a decision. A big decision. One that didn’t come easy, even to a man as remorseless as him. Finally he nodded. “We’ll do it.”
“Do what?” I demanded, as the magician’s memories began to evaporate and the last of the power flowing through his veins ebbed. I pulled my hand away and gazed down at him. His face was pale, his eyes full of blood.
He stared up, sightlessly. “Kill me. Just… kill me.”
I glanced at Astrid and Samuel. Neither met my gaze. The magician cried out, the sound high and keening. I placed my gun to his head. “I’ll end your misery. But I need to know what the cull is and where it’s taking place.”
“It’s the great slaughter that will set the blinkereds against the magical community… and the magical community against the blinkereds. The aftershocks will spread around the world.” There was no pleasure
in his voice now, only anguish.
“Where?” I asked, my voice little more than a growl.
“The…Winter Festival. Tomorrow.” The magician gurgled something else, and his body began to spasm.
“End it,” Astrid said. I looked up to find her staring at me.
I turned away from the magician, pulled the trigger, and stood. “You said we had to get Endersley by any means. That’s what we’re doing.”
“No, you were playing with fire,” Astrid replied. “I warned you about stealing other people’s magic. Especially dark magic. Sooner or later it will get its fangs in you, Morgan, and when it does, you won’t be you anymore. You’ll be a concern,” She gestured to Samuel. “And we’ll be forced to make a hard decision.”
“I did what needed to be done. We don’t have time on our side, we never did. And I’m not going to watch any more innocent people die. Not if I can prevent it.” I glanced back as I heard footsteps on the rooftop.
Haskins appeared, Ebomee’s sniper rifle slung over his shoulder. He glanced at the magician’s corpse and his face furrowed with disgust. “Please tell me this is the sicko who’s trying to infect the city.”
“I wish I could,” I said.
“Well you’d better tell me you have your sights on him, or I’m going to have to start getting honest with the top brass.”
“Believe me, you don’t want to do that,” I said. “That’s what they want. A war between your lot and mine. It’ll be a massacre, on both sides. Now we’re real close to tracking down the man we’re after, but we need your help. You know of any perps with a glass eye? Tall, powerful looking, definitely not someone you’d want to get into a dust up with.”
“Sounds like Sean Slater. Lost an eye when another prison lowlife shanked him.”
“What was he in for?”
“Gun running mostly but he’d had his fingers in all sorts of pies. He was serving a life sentence until him and some other scumbags escaped earlier this year. We caught all of them, except Slater.”
I remembered the reports, they’d been all over the blinkered TV and the media had reported on it consistently, until the full tilt manhunt had been surreptitiously called off.
“Why do you want to know about Slater?” Haskins asked.
“I think he’s involved. He had a man with him, red hair and-”
“Michael Adams. Grew up with Slater on the wrong side of town. I’ve arrested that piece of shit more times than I care to remember, but he’s as sly as I’m tired, and I’ve never managed to pin anything on him that stuck. I had him under surveillance recently, to see if we could turn up anything on Slater, but the budget…we’re not exactly flush with cash right now. Not with all the other crap going on.”
“Where can I find him?” I asked.
“He’s a joint owner of the Three Horses Tavern; it's out on the east side. Lives in the apartment above the bar. Not exactly a warm and fuzzy kind of place. I tried to get a search warrant, but like I said, shit doesn’t stick to Adams.”
“Well,” I said, “we’ll be operating under different terms of engagement. And he might just find his luck has run out.”
“Do whatever you need to. I’ll drop you off there and you can burn the fucking place to the ground, for all I care. Just as long as I'm not close enough to have it pinned on me. But if you have a lead on Slater-”
“I don’t, just a very strong hunch he’s involved. But, if we find him, I’ll hand him over to you. Dead or alive.”
“Good,” Haskins said, “because I’m going to need to land a pretty big fish to make up for all the momentous fuckery over the last twenty four hours.”
“We’ll do our damnedest to get you one. In the meantime you’re going to want to keep a tight rein on the Winter Festival.”
“Why?”
“That's their target, they’ve got something big planned. I don’t know what exactly, but our aim is to finish it long before it even begins.”
“And what if you can’t?” Haskins demanded. “It’s only a few hours away. There'll be thousands of people there. Families, kids…”
“We’ll get it sorted,” I said. “Look, this is our chance to bring them down fast. If they don't hit now, they’ll hit later, and we won’t know where or when. Like I said, we’re going to do everything we can to take them out long before they can strike. All you need to do is stay vigilant. Tell the Chief you caught wind of a credible terrorist threat and be prepared to evacuate people fast.”
“You better not let me down Rook!” Haskins growled.
“I don't intend to.”
47
Haskins shuttled us across town and dropped us off a few blocks away from the Three Horses Tavern. It was early. Six am early. Aside from a few cars, buses and delivery trucks, the city was still.
“You think the tavern’s open at this hour?” I asked Haskins, my breath frosting the air as I climbed from the car.
“It doesn’t close. They have their overnight crowd of degenerates that turns into a breakfast crowd. If you count toast and beer as breakfast.”
“Sounds good,” Samuel said. He’d disguised himself as a street musician, and his bow as a guitar case. Then he made me and Astrid look like we were making our way home after a late night of clubbing.
Haskins gazed at me and I saw and understood the conflict playing behind his eyes. If we didn’t eliminate Endersley and his thugs, there was going to be a massacre in the next few hours. It didn’t exactly rest easy with me either. “We’ll take them down,” I said, “just make sure your people are on their toes.”
Haskins nodded. “Don’t fuck this up, Rook.”
“I won’t,” I said, and hoped to hell I was right.
After Haskins pulled away, we walked down the gritty sidewalk and passed a few people shuffling off to work. “Here,” I said as I stood at a bus stop across from the Tavern and waited there as we staked the place out. It was a wood-framed building, its facade was dark and the barred windows obscured by heavy drapes. But I could see light through the cracks in the curtains and a bare light bulb shining in the upstairs apartment. It seemed our target was awake. Not that I could imagine the piece of shit sleeping with what he had planned for today.
“We going in?” Samuel asked.
“No,” I said, “I’ll go in on my own, I need you to stay here and keep watch. If you see a shifty guy with red hair coming out, stop him. Astrid, can you look for an access road or alley and cover the back of the building?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Good. Right, let’s do this,” I crossed the street and shoved the tavern door open. It caught on the ratty carpet and needed an extra shove, which took me half stumbling into the room. Not the best entrance, but at least it fit the illusion Samuel had cast over me.
Six or seven regulars were perched around a table strewn with beer bottles and playing cards. They glanced up at me, great lumps of men with thick brows, poorly reset noses and missing teeth. And that was the better looking ones.
Another pair stood around a pool table, their faces sickly in the florescent light. They watched me with slow, cunning gazes as they paused their game. I ignored them and headed to the bar amid the middle-of-the-road rock music playing in the background. It did little to thaw the icy atmosphere. This place was for regulars, not strangers. And they didn’t come much stranger than me.
The barman was a wiry red-haired man, but he wasn't Adams. Maybe his brother. But at the end of the bar, nursing a cup of coffee, was the man I was after. He’d made an effort to smooth down his spiky red hair, and he looked like he was getting ready to head out, judging by the tight suede jacket he wore over his sweater. He gave me a cursory glance and turned his gaze back to the phone resting on the bar.
“Help you?” the barman called as he stood under a ‘no smoking sign’ and lit his cigarette.
“Yeah, can I get a beer?” I asked as I gave him a warm, weary smile and watched Adams from the corner of my eye.
“Not at this ho
ur. That would be against the law,” the barman said.
I glanced toward the table as several of the meatheads eyed me, raised their bottles and took long hard swigs. Subtle. “Right. How about a cup of coffee and a bite to eat?” I asked. I glanced up at the menu on the wall and slowly edged toward Adams.
“We’re out of coffee and food,” the barman said. “There’s a shop across the street. Sells frappalappadingdongs and whatnot. You should go there. Now.” Low, heavy laughter broke around the table behind me.
“You know, I think I’d rather stay here,” I said, taking another step toward Adams. “I like the cozy warmth and the winning atmosphere, you know?” I was planning on pulling my gun then frog marching Adams out of the bar, and was almost upon him when I heard the whistling sound of displaced air.
I ducked as a pool cue swished over my head and smashed into the counter. I grabbed it before the assailant could pull it back and snapped it over my knee, concealing the shot of pain as I threw it to the floor.
Adams began to reach into his jacket.
I turned and punched my attacker squarely in the nose as he came at me. A green glow glinted in the dim room, and I dodged aside as a beer bottle sailed through the air and smashed into the bar behind me.
The thugs around the table were up and ready as the guy at the pool table pulled something from his waistband. Adams had his gun out and the barman was bringing his shotgun up from under the counter.
I fired at the barman first. The bullet struck just below his shoulder. He fell fast.
Then I turned on the guy by the pool table before he could get a shot off.
Within seconds the place was a riot of noise and hot flashes of light. Adams narrowly missed me and his round took down one of the bastards at the card table. I spun around and ran at Adams. He ducked behind the counter, stumbled over the barman, and dashed through a door leading to the back room.
