The Invoker: A Lawson Vampire Novel 2 (The Lawson Vampire Series)

by Jon F. Merz

  I didn’t say anything. Personally, I’ve known some pretty stupid drunks and addicts who couldn’t reason their way out of a See Dick Run book.

  "But to answer our question, no I wouldn’t do anything differently. I’m a firm believer in the power of experience. We go through shit so bad it tests us. Sometimes we get hit hard and sink like stones. Other times we float to the top and face that adversity head-on. I’ve done some things in hindsight that look bad. But I don’t regret any of them. Life wasn’t meant to be regretted. It was meant to be lived. That means we take the good and the bad with equanimity. I think that’s where true courage and discipline come from. That ability to meet the bad, to take it on regardless of fear."

  "Glad to hear you say that, Wirek."

  "Yeah?"

  I slowed the car down next to the curb on the tree-lined street. Overhead, the first stars began poking out in the darkness. "Yeah. Because we’re about to experience some decidedly bad shit."

  Wirek looked at me. I nodded.

  "We’re here."

  Chapter Twenty

  I parked around the corner from the main house and gate.

  Wirek looked at the walled compound. "Impressive."

  "You should see the inside of the place. It’s pretty sweet."

  "I never would have figured Arvella for having enough money to buy a place like this."

  I slid the car into park and leaned back into the leather seat, trying to stretch and release some of the tension that had begun creeping into my body. "No?"

  "Uh uh. The Arvella I knew wasn’t into material possessions."

  "Times change, apparently. The mansion house is a real spread. Mahogany wood paneling, carpeted hallways, the works. And I didn’t even have the guided tour."

  "Well, maybe they’ll oblige you this go around huh?"

  "Yeah, maybe."

  Wirek shifted. "So, when do we go?"

  I checked the dashboard clock. "A few more minutes. I want it a little darker outside." I closed my eyes. "Keep an eye out, will ya?"

  "You’re sleeping?"

  I opened one eye. "I wouldn’t call it that. I’m just resting before we go in."

  "How can you even think about that? I’m scared shitless." He shifted in his seat trying to cross his legs and failing. He sighed. "I’d kill for some tequila right now."

  "I’m always nervous before something like this."

  "You don’t seem to be."

  "This is just how I try to deal with it is all. It doesn’t work for everyone. Hell, I’m not even sure if it works for me. But everyone has a little ritual they go through before combat."

  "I never knew there were so many requirements."

  "Neither did I," I said recalling the first time I’d ever gone into the shit. I’d had Zero with me back then. He’d been my mentor. He guided me through the pre-assault jitters that kept me up most of the night before puking my guts out. I smiled at the thought. How long ago was that far away evening back in Alexandria?

  Wirek fiddled with the radio. "You mind?"

  "Knock yourself out. No boy bands, though."

  "What the hell is a boy band?"

  "A manufactured teen idol musical group that generates untold profits for the people who back them."

  "See?" said Wirek. "First Internet porn and now this….damn I’ve missed out on everything."

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not so I smiled halfway in appreciation. Behind my closed eyes, I was rehearsing how we’d hit the house. If I’d been by myself or someone who was in decent shape, we might have gone over the wall. But with Wirek in tow, we’d have to hit the front gate and do a frontal approach. We’d lose surprise pretty quick, but then again, I felt pretty certain they wouldn’t kill Jack. They needed him alive apparently. That gave us a certain measure of advantage. But only a damned small one.

  Wirek passed a classical music station in favor of a thudding techno bassline. I opened my eyes. "You like this?"

  He was bopping in the front seat. "This stuff is great. Total body syncopation. I love it."

  Jesus. I had a 900-year old ex-Elder in the front seat of my Volvo who happened to love techno music. If my life got any more bizarre I was gonna need help living it.

  I watched twenty minutes tick away to nothing. I reached behind my seat for the assault bag. I unzipped it. We’d take out the guns once we were closer to the gate. I didn’t think the local cops would appreciate a pair of vampires walking down a side street armed to the teeth, no pun intended.

  I looked at the dashboard clock. "Time."

  Wirek snapped off the radio and I watched the apprehension flood back into his body. I clapped him on the shoulder again. "Relax and follow my lead. You’ll do fine."

  He just looked at me.

  But there was nothing left to say.

  I opened the car door and got out.

  The cold February night air embraced us. My breath stained the air in front of my face with a gray mist. I could feel my heart beat tick up a notch. Wirek got out of the car and pulled his jacket tighter around him.

  We walked the street over toward the main gate. There seemed to be very little activity on the street. Good. I took a quick peek around the corner and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Hopefully, we’d be crashing the party unexpected.

  I knelt down, pulled Wirek’s shotgun out and handed it to him. He took it and ratcheted a round in the chamber. In the crisp night air, the ratcheting sounded like a sharp crack that echoed all over the street, louder than I hoped it was.

  I took out the MP5 and a small surprise I’d brought along for the front gate.

  I took the lead and approached carefully, trying to keep my shadow from leading ahead of me. But the streetlight overhead wasn’t being cooperative, so my shadow reached the gate about two seconds before I did.

  No matter. It was too late to back out.

  I reached the gate.

  The heavy iron bars were a formidable obstacle. Temporarily. I slid the package in my hand in between the brick wall and the gate hinges, flipped the tiny switch and then beat a hasty retreat back toward where Wirek squatted on the cold sidewalk.

  I counted back in my head.

  Turned-

  The explosion rocked the gate. Surprise vanished.

  We moved.

  The small block of plastic explosive had tossed the gate aside easily, creating a nice hole for us to get through.

  "Don’t bunch up," I said. Then we passed through onto the grounds.

  Wirek fanned right. I swept left.

  I spotted the first guard and brought him down with a tri-burst from the MP5. On my right I heard Wirek blast away with the Mossberg. Two guard fell writhing in pain. Vampires.

  Another guard appeared at the mansion doorway. I brought the MP5 up, sighted – fired. The gun kicked slightly as three rounds rocketed toward my target. He caught them square in the forehead and sagged against the doorway, blood streaming everywhere.

  Wirek and I reached the house, stepped over his body and slid inside.

  Absolute quiet enveloped us like a thick wool blanket, blotting out everything. I looked at Wirek. He frowned. I almost smiled at the sight of the old guy hefting the shotgun. But he looked more confident now. That was good. Part of me had been concerned he might freeze up.

  I moved toward the staircase. Maybe they were holding Jack downstairs in the subbasement. I opened the secret door and led the way through to the other corridor with the muzzle of the MP5 taking point.

  The quiet followed us.

  Wirek looked at me. "I don’t like this."

  I nodded. We were either being set up for a massive ambush or something was definitely wrong. The resistance at the front gate had been remarkably light. Not that I was complaining.

  But it didn’t make sense.

  We kept moving.

  Together we threaded our way through all of the rooms, checking all of the niches and nooks. Wirek kept a running commentary up of the portraits on the walls. He kne
w a lot of them apparently.

  "Nothing like seeing your former peers immortalized on canvas."

  I said nothing. I’m not much for talking when I working.

  At the red carpeted hallway, I tried all the doors until we’d cleared them all and only one was left. The subbasement.

  Unlocked.

  We went down the stairs.

  At the bottom it remained quiet. Wirek looked at me. "This where you were held?"

  "Yeah."

  "Nice atmosphere," said Wirek.

  I took one corridor. Wirek took the other. We met up two minutes later outside the cell I’d been held in. Wirek was out of breath.

  "-nothing here."

  I frowned again.

  The place was empty.

  Wirek let the muzzle of the shotgun dip toward the floor. "What the hell is going on?"

  "We’re too late," I said.

  "What do you mean we’re too late? Where the hell would they go? This is the address you got out of the Council’s database, right?"

  "Yeah. It is. But they aren’t here."

  "It doesn’t add up," said Wirek. "Arvella needs the boy for her ceremony and wouldn’t have much time. Why wouldn’t she do the ceremony here?"

  I leaned against the wall. "Unless…"

  "What?"

  "You mentioned that Arvella was once the headmistress of the Invoker school, isn’t that right?"

  Wirek nodded. "Sure, that was back years ago, though. Besides, they moved that school after she left. The new headmaster wanted it closer to the rest of our society, not far off in some remote vista."

  "Where is it?"

  "Now? The Canadian Rockies."

  "Where was it when Arvella was in charge?"

  "Way the hell out there. In the Himalayas."

  "The Himalayas? Why so far away?"

  "Apparently Arvella thought the sanctity of the Invoker tradition needed to be preserved and kept cloistered from the temptations of modern society. Plus, I think she was originally from there, a long time back."

  I looked at him. "What are the odds?"

  "That she’s brought Jack there?" He shrugged. "Cripes, I dunno. But she sure as hell ain’t here."

  "We’re running out of time. If she’s out of the country already that gives her a huge head start. We’re playing catch-up again and I hate that."

  "In that case, we’d better get ourselves on a plane."

  "Yeah. But first we need to make sure we’re not being played for fools."

  "How you gonna figure that out?"

  "We find Petrov and persuade him to tell us."

  "You know where he is?"

  "No, but if he isn’t anywhere that we can find him, it might mean he went with her."

  "That’s a pretty tenuous assumption, Lawson."

  "Well, it would at least mean we might be on the right track."

  "Why," said Wirek, "does that not make me feel any better?"

  "It doesn’t make me feel any better either, but we don’t have any other choice."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I called Petrov’s number as soon as we cleared the mansion. I got a polite message informing me that the service had been disconnected. That figured.

  Wirek stowed the guns in the trunk of the Volvo. "We should get going."

  "Time’s wasting, huh?"

  He shrugged. "Figuring travel time to get to where we need to be? Oh yeah."

  I sighed. "This school, the Invoker academy or whatever you call it-you know where it is?"

  "Sure."

  I wasn’t convinced. "I mean exactly, Wirek. The Himalayas are a lot of ground to cover. We can’t just drop in over there and spend six days dicking around."

  "I can find it. it’s been years since I visited, but I think my memory is still pretty sharp."

  "All right. How much prep time do you figure we need?"

  "We’ll need some gear," said Wirek.

  "Yeah. My house first, then yours. We can grab a taxi to the airport from there."

  We drove back to my place and quickly cleaned the guns before stowing them back in the safe. I would have loved to bring them along, but they were obviously out. I can carry a gun through most security checkpoints because I know how the security works – or rather doesn’t work. But I’d never been to Nepal before and I didn’t want to risk a search that would flag us and alert Arvella we were on scene.

  Fortunately, in my line of work, I have other weapons I can use besides firearms. Downstairs in my basement, I unlocked the antique wooden chest my ancestors carted over their carpentry tools from Germany in. I’d put the tools into other chests over the years. Now I keep my treasured belongings in the ornate chest.

  Unwrapping the handmade wooden bokken that had been carved for me by a famous weapon smith in Japan some years back brought out a flood of memories. The pure hard wood lignum vitae gleamed in the dim light, as my mind flashed back to when I’d used it to kill my oldest enemy Cosgrove just a few months previously.

  Now I was getting ready to use it again.

  Some things never change.

  I unwrapped the folded steel tanto as well, another gift from the same weapon smith. I laid both the bokken and the tanto into my long luggage bag.

  I packed some winter gear, not knowing how potentially bad the weather might be in Nepal. Wirek assured me it might actually be temperate over there, but I’ve learned to go with my instinct and I felt we might need the extra warmth.

  Finally, I dropped a note in the mail to my neighbor so she could check in and feed Mimi and Phoebe while I was gone.

  We zoomed back to Wirek’s place and he grabbed some supplies as well. I saw him covertly stow his hip flask in his carry-on bag. I hoped he wouldn’t be drinking himself silly on the flight over.

  "You ready?"

  He nodded. "What about the Council?"

  "What about ‘em?"

  "You planning on telling them where we’re headed?"

  "Hell no. If Arvella has any allies they’d alert her. I don’t want her knowing we’re coming until we’re already there."

  Getting to Logan Airport took almost as much time as the actual flight. With construction from the Big Dig still sucking billions of tax dollars out of the Commonwealth, new routes and detours sprung up faster than horny eighteen year-olds at Spring Break.

  Northwest Airlines booked us on the next flight to Osaka, Japan with a minor stopover in Minneapolis/St. Paul. I’d flown Northwest before on several trips to Japan. Overall, their service was decent, but listening to the flight attendants scurry up and down the aisle asking if you wanted ocha, the thick Japanese green tea, got a bit old after a while.

  Wirek sacked out as soon as we got airborne. I had to keep reminding myself of how old he truly was. Vampires tend to live for about five hundred years, given that a daily ingestion of life force from humans slows down our metabolic rates substantially. Wirek was pushing double our normal life expectancy.

  Add to that the fact that he’d gone into combat for the first time this evening and come through perfectly intact. Hell, he deserved a long sleep.

  Flight time from Minneapolis to Osaka was a solid twelve hours. I punched up the video projector attached to my seat and saw they were playing City Slickers as the in-flight movie. It’s a decent flick. The first time you see it. On this flight, however, the damned displays broke down so every time you turned it on, the same movie came on. So much for keeping myself amused.

  I considered our present situation, mulling over the factors that led us to being on board a Trans-Pacific airplane. Normally, I would have liked a lot more prep time. Chasing traitors halfway across the world wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I like to do on the fly. But time was something we were all short on.

  I couldn’t let Arvella have Jack.

  Watching the cloud layers pass by my window like balls of soft cotton candy pulled apart by kids at a carnival eventually lulled me off to sleep.

  I woke up a few hours later. Wirek’s elbow ke
pt denting my side.

  "Want some dinner?"

  I stretched. "Does it really qualify as dinner?"

  He glanced down. "Some kind of chicken I think. Red potatoes. Asparagus. All served in a rectangular plastic container." He grinned. "Ain’t technology grand?"

  "I hate asparagus."

  I took a sip of bottled water and caught a whiff of the chicken. It actually smelled good. Wirek grabbed one of the flight attendant’s and scored me a tray of food.

  After the carrot cake, I settled back. Wirek nudged me again. I looked. He had the hip flask in his hand.

  "Want a hit of the good stuff?"

  "No." I frowned. "I don’t drink tequila."

  He shook his head. "Stupid. I told you I was through with the booze, remember?"

  "Then what’s in that?"

  "It’s-what the hell did you call it? Juice?"

  I leaned over. "Blood?"

  "Yeah, genius."

  Shit, in my rush to get us to the airport, I’d completely forgotten about the need for nourishment. Thank god for Wirek. Without him we’d probably have had to borrow some from a passenger. And getting kinky in the cramped bathroom of a 747 at 35,000 feet might sound good in the pages of a sex magazine, but it sucks in real life.

  I took the flask and put it to my lips. I sucked down a few gulps of the coppery blood. It flowed thicker than I like it.

  I winced. "Did it coagulate?"

  Wirek took the flask back. "It’s unrefrigerated. Plus the altitude affects it, too. Don’t be fussy."

  I felt the surge of energy come on and sighed. "Thanks. I needed that."

  "Forgot, didn’t ya?"

  "Yeah. Been a while since I had to travel out of the country. I’m used to being close to home."

  "We might find supplies a little tight over there." He looked at me. "Will that be a problem?"

  "I remember how to hunt, for crying out loud." But inside I winced again. I prefer getting my blood from a blood bank in Boston staffed by vampires. Given my job, I don’t have a lot of time to go hunting fresh juice.

  Truthfully, I don’t relish what I have to subsist on. I’m a vampire and it goes without saying that you have to drink juice. But I don’t like it. Never have.