“A pretty overkill,” Scott muttered.
“It’s for protection,” Finn said, his voice thready, his scarred fingers closing over the pebble.
“Okay, okay.” Mike rubbed his hands together. “So what does it say?”
“It needs some time to work,” Finn said.
Ella jumped to her feet and began to pace. Patience, she thought, patience.
And of course, right then the phone had to ring.
***
“Problem,” Dave said from the other end of the line.
Yeah, Ella had figured as much. Nowadays her stomach roiled every time she saw his number on the caller ID.
“So what’s up? Has the dragon been naughty?”
“Not funny,” Dave barked, because he had no sense of humor. “This is worse.”
Shit. “Define worse.”
“Worse as in a Gate opened and something fell through.”
Chills ran up Ella’s spine. “Stop being cryptic for once, Dave, and tell me what you’ve found.”
Static answered her, then the sound of police sirens. “A machine.” Dave sounded somber. “You’d better see this for yourself, and make sure to bring Finn along. We need him to tell us what it is.”
Ella shoved the cell into her back pocket and drew a deep breath. Dammit all to hell.
“Was that Dave?” Mike asked. “You look worried.”
Hell yeah, she was. She glanced at Finn who clutched the glass pebble resting on his palm, his gaze empty. “We need to go.”
“Damn.” Mike sighed, then grabbed Scott’s arm and got up. “Okay, guys, take care. Let us know what you find out, right, Finn?”
Finn didn’t move. As their friends waved and left, Ella cupped his hand in hers, closed her fingers around the pebble. “Can you leave it here for now?”
He gave a slow nod. When she lifted the pebble, she felt a small zap in her palm. Damn sucker was siphoning energy off Finn and it was the last thing he needed. She carried the glass pebble to their bedroom. Symbols flashed on its surface and she ignored them as she placed it inside the closet and closed the door firmly.
“Be good,” she told the alien gadget and grabbed her belt with her gun and knives. “Or else, there’ll be no presents from Santa.”
They made their way out and took the elevator down. She went to unlock the car and waited for Finn who made his own stubborn way across the street. She sat behind the wheel, her middle a giant knot.
Finn lowered himself into the car and lifted a brow at her. “What did Dave say?”
“Something fell through a Gate. A machine, apparently.”
Finn scowled at the dashboard as if it had personally offended him but didn’t manage to hide the tremor in his hands.
She didn’t bother saying it. This time not only hadn’t Finn succeeded in keeping the Gates closed, but Dave knew it, too. Double whammy. Not to mention the little matter of an elven machine crashing into this world.
Just awesome.
She drove toward the west, to the posh neighborhoods surrounding the marina. The silence in the car pressed on her. Finn stared out, his jaw clenched, his mouth flat.
She turned into the avenue and saw the pillared entrance of the Natural History Museum and the flashing lights of police cars. Something huge and long loomed beyond, like a train wreck.
With a shiver, she parked by the side of the street and turned to Finn. “Should I be worried about the machine?”
Finn shrugged and threw his door open, bracing his arm on it to get out. “Only if it’s still alive,” he said, whatever that meant in Finn-speak.
What did he mean? Was it another vampire gadget?
She was still shaking her head as she walked down the road, flashing her badge and ducking under police tape. Finn was ahead, and at least he wasn’t limping that badly.
That’s it, focus on the small, positive things.
Not the big, negative ones like the enormous machine that had crashed into the middle of the avenue in front of the museum. It was as if a building had toppled over, an amorphous mass of metal and what looked like sheets of plastic. Wrecked cars lay on the far side and the air reeked of coppery blood and shit.
Victims. Check.
Ella’s stomach roiled.
Finn had stopped, his hands on the handles of his bowie knives. Someone was walking toward them — well, stumbling.
Ella squinted against the glare of the cloudy sky, not trusting her eyes. “Dave?”
“Took you a while.”
Ella lifted a brow. “Whatsamatter, getting rusty?”
Dave glowered — though he really had his work cut out for him if he wanted to match Finn’s default glare — and ground to a halt. He actually wheezed.
Ella didn’t know robots did that. “Are you all right?” Not that she cared, she told herself. It was just what one was expected to say.
“Yeah. What’s this machine?” He turned his glare on Finn. “Got distracted and let a Gate open, son?” Dave’s calm was deceptive. A tick had started in his jaw and he hummed. “Or did you miss it?”
Finn glared right back, not showing signs of feeling the jab. The Gate had obviously been huge. “It’s closed now.”
“After spewing out this...” Dave gestured at the enormous hunk of metal, large as a house. “This monster?”
“You haven’t seen monsters,” Finn bit out.
“Is that right? What do you call this, then?”
“It’s part of a wandering control tower. I’ll go make sure it’s dead. With your permission.”
And without waiting for it, Finn turned about and limped toward the gigantic machine, his boots crunching on broken glass, his blades held out, glinting like flames.
Chapter Seven
Understanding
“What is he doing?” a policeman said, uneasy and sweating despite the biting cold.
“I don’t know but I’m going with him,” Ella said, cocking her gun. “Dave, what did he mean, he’ll check if it’s dead? It’s a machine, right?”
Although after seeing the vampire gadget from hell, why should this surprise her?
“Stay back,” Dave said, scowling. “Not safe.”
“All the more reason to go with him,” Ella muttered, “and you haven’t answered my question.”
“Later,” Dave said and turned to bark at the police gathering around him, something about keeping passersby outside the perimeter. Ella could already see the flashes of cameras going off from beyond the police tape.
Fuck this. She set out after Finn who had disappeared among the heaps of metal rubble. He was her partner and she’d have his back, no matter what.
Even if this really was a living machine — what the hell? — and he had to kill it. In fact, especially then.
“Ella, come back here,” Dave shouted.
She ignored him, picking her way around metal plates and chunks of a pale green stuff she couldn’t recognize. It sagged a little under her weight when she stepped on it and when she looked back she saw the imprint of her boot soles.
Shivering and not from the cold, she raised her gun, gripping it in both hands, not sure what to expect. Were there elves inside — dead or wounded? Was it a vehicle or a static piece of machinery? Did static things pass through the Gates or did they have to be in motion? Everything that had crossed to far had been living and moving. Insects flying through, wolves leaping, dragons slithering in the air.
She stepped over jutting panels and broken poles made from that silver metal. Its surface seemed to writhe every time she passed over it. A reflection, she told herself. Polished like a mirror. It was just a reflection.
Clamping her jaw, fighting rising panic, she stepped inside, into an empty space like a chamber. Lights flickered against one dark wall, forming and reforming constellations.
Dammit, the machine was still on. Was this the control room? Was there an off switch somewhere? And where was Finn?
A crash and a shout from outside sent her pulse into over
drive. It hadn’t sounded like him, but she rushed out, scanning the crash site.
A tentacle. Yeah, that was the only word able to describe the long, black limb that had wrapped around a police man and lifted him off the ground.
Motherfucker.
Ella scrambled over the debris, holstering her gun. She couldn’t shoot the thing, not while it was waving the man around like that. Drawing her knives, she launched herself at the feeler and scored a line at its base, the blade dragging along the dark flesh with a screech that made her gums ache.
The sound shocked her so much she hesitated for a second, and then the tentacle twisted and threw the flailing policeman on top of her. They rolled among the piles of junk.
She heard someone yell her name and instinctively rolled, sharp edges jabbing into her back and legs. The tentacle hit the ground where her head had been, smashing a panel. She jerked backward, glanced around for her knife. Couldn’t see it.
Damn.
“Ella!” someone shouted and it sounded like Finn’s voice. No time to look, though, because the feeler rose over her like a malevolent snake, about to strike.
She scrambled to her feet and ran. The hell was that? A living machine. Living metal.
In other words, a nightmare.
“Hit the mouth!” Finn hollered and yeah, figuring this out while running flat out over treacherous rubble wasn’t her forte. As for weapons...
She zigzagged to avoid a vibrating green something, and the feeler jabbed beside her, missing by inches.
If the end of the feeler was the mouth...
At her belt she found her shuriken, her throwing stars. Not optimal, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, so... She jumped behind a heap of twisted metal and drew a cross-shaped shuriken. She turned.
A mouth. It looked like one, fanged and round, coming at her. She drew her hand back and threw the star right inside the gullet of the demonic thing, then held her breath.
The tentacle froze over her head, the weird, circular mouth contracting and expanding. Ella fought down nausea, struggled to control her shallow breathing.
The tentacle jerked back and twisted like a snake and, Jesus, wasn’t that just like a scene from Alien or something? The feeler let out a long hiss, then it broke into fragments that showered her.
Ella bent her head, waiting for the tinkling shards to stop falling, then rose to her feet.
Finn.
She could see Dave on her far right, directing a group of officers down a path through the heaps of ruined machine — alive, not ruined, not dead — and she looked the way they were going.
Finn was fighting two of the damn tentacles, jumping and rolling among the junk, his blades a blur of white fire. Drawing her last shuriken, she started toward him, watched how he stabbed and slashed at the feelers. Heard the screech of metal against metal from where she was.
Maybe they were mechanical things. Tubes with sensors. Weapons.
Still she shuddered when she strode over broken panels that hummed and seemed to whisper under her feet.
Finn started to run and her heart rose in her throat when both tentacles dived after him, a third one rising from the rubble. He launched himself at that one, and climbed on it.
Climbed all the way to the mouth. Like an acrobat. Christ. He straddled it like he’d straddled the dragon’s neck, and leaned forward, over the snapping opening. It was like a grotesque amusement park ride, a parody of the Octopus with Finn as bait.
Ella sped up, climbing over the heaps of metal, as the other two feelers attacked Finn. A cry left her lips as he disappeared under the onslaught.
Then the feelers dropped, leaving Finn astride the last tentacle, his blades outstretched to the sides. He leaned over, cut into the fanged mouth underneath him, and slid down to the ground right before the tentacle flailed and dropped, coiling.
Her feet started moving again, her mind still blank with shock, leading her toward him.
Only he was moving, too, hacking his way through a shiny board, stabbing his blades and slashing, his silver hair a flash of brightness in the gathering gloom. A groan went through the giant machine, and it shook, throwing Ella to her knees.
She scrambled back up. “Wait, Finn!” Don’t go in there alone.
But he showed no sign of hearing. He slid his blades into their sheaths over his hips, grabbed the metal and pushed inward. Then he turned sideways and slipped into the machine, swallowed up by the darkness.
The other officers had stopped in their tracks during Finn’s fight with the freaky metal feelers.
Ella knuckled her way up to the top, climbing and sliding down the dead tentacles, reaching the rip in the panel. Taking a deep breath, she shoved through and blinked.
Milky blue light. A writhing mass of fire and liquid glass, on a cone at the center of the small room, and Finn’s blade hovering over it. He held it in both hands and stood braced with his legs apart, black boots planted in the soft floor that also seemed to heave and move, green-blue like a sea of algae.
Ella stepped on the undulating floor and the room gasped and sighed. Finn glanced at her over his shoulder, his eyes glittering, his teeth bared in a snarl.
“Stay back,” he hissed. “I can’t turn it off.” He turned and plunged his blade right into the glowing sphere.
The mass of fire and glass broke, scintillating splinters flew. Finn spun, threw himself on her, and everything dimmed to black.
***
“Ugh.” Ella shoved at whatever was pinning her down, cutting off her air. It didn’t budge. Soft. Warm. Hot breath against her neck. A man. “Get off me.”
She blinked into darkness and tried to recall where she was. So quiet.
Then a shout. “Ella! Where are you?”
Dave. Investigating a sighting — no, a Gate. A machine, Finn fighting pissy tentacles, and then...
Oh god. “Finn.” She now smelled his spicy-sweet musk and knew whose body was crushing her. That glowing sphere had exploded and he’d fallen on her. Oh shit.
Inch by inch she shifted on the floor that had grown hard and cold, until she was sitting, pulling Finn’s head on her lap. “Dave! We’re in here.”
A stretch of silence, then, “Hang on, we’ll find you.”
She sighed in relief when Finn stirred, his fingers scratching against the metal floor. She couldn’t see shit, but she felt his satiny hair under her hands and stroked it. “Are you hurt?” she whispered.
Finn reached up, clamped a hand on the back of his head. She was sure she’d find a lump there from whatever had knocked him out cold.
“Good thing you’ve got a thick skull,” she mumbled, her throat tight. “I should buy you a helmet.”
Metal groaned as the slit where they’d entered widened and grey light spilled into the room. Dave appeared at the opening, his dark hair ruffled, a flashlight drawing his face in harsh lines. He moved it, its white beam lighting up black, shiny surfaces.
“Is it dead?” he asked.
Ella was starting to feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale. “Terminated,” she said. “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Dave turned the beam on Finn who sat up with a muffled grunt. “I said, is it dead?”
“Yes.” Finn shifted onto his knees, grimacing.
“Good.” Dave flashed the torch one more time around and came to give Finn a hand.
The fact that Finn took it made Ella more worried than his passing out. Maybe he was a bit concussed after all.
Then she remembered his leg. Had to have jammed up again. Damn. She had a feeling Darla would be seeing them again, very soon.
“Should I trust you?” Dave heaved Finn to his feet and then gestured vaguely around. “Is it really dead? You also said the Gates were closed and here we are.”
“I never said the Gates don’t open.” Finn gave Dave a dirty look. “I said I close them.”
“This one was open long enough to let half a vessel through.”
“I do my best.”
“Maybe your
best isn’t good enough.”
Ella got to her feet and leaned against the wall. “Get off his case, Dave!” Then she remembered how everything had moved under her touch before and pushed off quickly. “He closed the Gate and killed the machine.” Yeah, words you didn’t usually find in the same sentence. Her brain was sending error alerts all over the place. “So why don’t we just move on to the part where you explain why you never told me elven machines are alive?”
For some reason she wanted to wash her tongue, as if the words were slimy. When had she entered a horror b-movie?
“It’s Dark Elf tech,” Dave spat. “Since when do Light Elves use it?”
Finn froze like a deer in headlights. “Dark Elf tech,” he whispered.
“You said you lost all your tech in the war with your dark cousins.” Ella looked from him to Dave. “And you managed to retrieve some over the centuries. I thought you meant your own tech.”
Finn’s brow creased. “I thought so, too.”
Looked like someone had been secretly collaborating with the Dark Elves all along, and who would like to bet it was the elite of the Light Elves?
Damn Boreals.
***
Living tech. Ella shivered, remembering the pale green material that reacted to her weight. Or was it her touch? Her smell?
Creepy.
Finn walked stiffly by her side, heading toward the car. Dave wasn’t far behind and it wasn’t hard to guess Finn was doing his best to hide his limp and any residual unsteadiness.
“So what do you think?” she prodded, eyeing the crowd of onlookers pressed against the police tape. How would Dave manage to keep this under wraps? Could he? It was huge, exposed, out in plain daylight. She could imagine the scores of photos already uploaded to the internet.
Finn shook his head. “I always thought that technology was ours. Without magic, I never understood how it worked.”
“But this metal... Metal-like material. It’s alive? Is it sentient?”
Boreal and John Grey Season 2 Page 22
