Shaking his head at the thought the executive level Mage walked up the steps to the house. He smiled for a moment when he thought about going down into the sublevels of the building tonight and watching the sacrifices. It brought a smile to his face as he thought about the energy they were recovering from those little guys. Research and Development had determined that they could harvest that planet for at least three decades at the current rate. Maybe even a half century. In the meantime they could look for other worlds, other places they could gate into and harvest. The crisis was averted. The world could go on, and everyone could be happy.
Macodemus was reaching for the knob of the door when he heard the wind blowing strongly in the trees. He turned around, his spine tingling, to see the great cloud of red moving up from the park and crossing the road to his property.
That’s the thing that’s been killing employees, he thought, watching the red energy cloud rushing up the hill at him, its passage generating a strengthening wind that flattened his shrubbery like a hand pressing down. A gust of wind lifted the limo up onto its side with the crash of broken glass, barely audible over the roar of swirling air.
A sneer crossed his face as he watched it come on. Come on, motherfucker, he thought as he prepared himself for the joy of battle. He was not some junior employee of the company. He was a Master Mage, trained in the battle arena, standing on the land he owned, with a powerful conduit of life force running under his feet. The thing had made an error coming here, and it would pay for that mistake.
Macodemus pulled the energy from the ground and wove a shield to his front, layering it with different resonances of energy. His doctorate had been in Combat Magecraft. He knew he was good at it. He had won a championship years ago, in the city arena. When he thought his shield was powerful enough he started on calling the energy into his hands for his offensive spell.
The energy cloud came on. It threw a couple of trees that Macodemus had planted a decade ago, when he had first acquired this house, into the air, their roots waving in flight. They hit the car that was still tottering on its edge and upended it, turning it over onto its top. Macodemus felt the anger rising in him, even as he recognized the rage of the thing coming at him. Let’s see who gets the most pissed, he thought, preparing to throw his destructive spell at the entity.
The Mage threw his spell, with all the considerable energy he could muster, an evil smile on his face. The smile turned to a frown as the crackling ball of force, heat and electricity flew through the entity with no effect. The frown turned to a cry as the entity surged forward and pushed through his layers of shield as if they weren’t there. The cry turned into a scream as it flowed over him, jerking him into the air with frightening force.
Macodemus Daemon screamed for a long time. The angry force tossed him around like a very large feline playing with a small rodent. It pulled all of his limbs out of joint, then worked on breaking bones, taking exquisite care to cause as much pain as possible while keeping the Mage conscious. After all the bones were broken and all the internal organs bruised the entity finished him, shredding the COO of Daemon Corp into a mist of blood and fragments of bone and tissue. It then absorbed his screaming soul and sent it to a hell of its own devising.
Its victim well and truly punished, the entity of red energy headed off into the night. Many witnessed its passage, including several beat cops. No one attempted to impede its progress. No one was that foolish.
* * *
Lucius Daemon was woken from a sound sleep by the calling. It was on a priority band, the one he reserved for emergency messages that needed to be answered, no matter the time. He woke with a feeling of trepidation, knowing that something was horribly wrong, but not knowing what it was.
“What’s going on?” he whispered into the link, trying not to disturb the nubile young blond that was sharing his bed. Not for any concern for her, but out of concern that she might hear something she shouldn’t.
“There’s been another incident with that thing,” said the voice over the link. Lucius felt a shiver of dread as those words were transmitted. He knew that this time it would be someone close.
“Who,” he said in a resigned voice.
“I’m sorry Mr. Daemon,” said the voice of the Police Major, Malcolm Dowdie. “It was your son, Macodemus. It happened at his house.”
“Has Parkinson been called?”
“We haven't been able to get in touch with Lieutenant Parkinson,” said the Officer. “It's like he just dropped off the net.”
Thank the Gods for small favors, thought Daemon as he brought up a small energizing spell to fully awaken. He hadn't heard anything from the men he had set to take care of the Detective. The second set, he reminded himself. The Detective and his partner had taken care of the first group, which had included a very capable combat mage. He had planned to find out more about the redoubtable Detective. Now it looked like he would not have to.
“I’ll be right there,” said Daemon, pulling the covers away and sitting up on the side of the bed. The blond groaned a bit and Daemon looked over at her. He raised his hand and slapped her hard across the face. She woke up with a cry and sat up in bed, blinking sleep filled eyes at him.
“What?” she said, her hand going to the red mark on her face.
“Get your smelly ass out of here,” growled Daemon as he climbed out of bed and went to his closet. “If I need you again as a receptacle I’ll call.”
He could feel the frightened and angry eyes of the girl at his back as he pulled a suit from the closet, then got socks and underwear and set about dressing himself. He ignored her, his thoughts going to the son he knew would have stabbed him in the back to get ahead. The son he still loved, despite the hate coming from the other side of the relationship.
Dressed, Daemon walked down the hall to his wife’s bedroom. She was finishing dressing, having gotten the news herself. She looked at him with tear puffed eyes as he entered the room.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, pulling on a calf covering leather boot. “Why the hell is this happening?”
“I don’t know,” said Lucius, looking at his spouse and political partner. “I really don’t know. But when I find the bastard responsible I will kill him. Painfully. Over and over again.”
Yvette nodded at him as she stood up and walked over, putting her arms around his waist and hugging him. She looked up at her much taller husband and Daemon felt the love for her flow through him. Physical intimacy might not be there, very often. But they still had a connection of the spirit.
“Promise me you’ll get them,” she said, squeezing him tight as tears trickled down her cheeks.
“I promise,” he said, reaching down and catching a tear on his finger. “If I have to destroy the world, I will get the bastard.”
And I better make sure that cop is really gone, he thought, leading his wife to the garage and their limo. He has a habit of shoving his nose where it doesn't belong. And just because he's off the net doesn't mean he isn't still there.
Chapter Sixteen
Damned cat, thought Jude, making sure he had every avenue covered before he crossed the street. He had slept well last night, despite it not being his own bed, but that of a flophouse in one of the seedier sections of town. Still, the bed had been clean, and the wards he had set to protect him through the night had remained undisturbed.
He didn't like the idea of coming back to his apartment, not with two sets of thugs looking for him. But Santana was family, and no one had been at the apartment to feed him in a day. He had to take the risk. He knew that. He couldn’t let the cat starve, or work to find a way out of the apartment where a Shadow might pick him off. It had been his late wife’s cat, then his responsibility since she died. The plan was to dump enough food and put down enough water bowls to keep him going for some weeks. His going to the bathroom in the house was not a problem, that could be cleaned up.
Jude couldn’t see anyone hanging around on the street looking suspicious,
though he knew trained operatives were experts at blending in. He closed his eyes and recited a short spell, then opened them and looked up and down the street again. There was no one enclosed in the red aura that would have indicated they intended him harm. That didn’t mean there was no one in a building looking out the window at him, or someone under deep magical cover. But nothing was perfect.
I’ve got to move, he thought, striding across the street and coming to the door of the apartment building two doors down from his. He made a quick check of the street and then walked up to his entrance, turning quickly into the stairs for his building and jogging up them. The door opened at his touch, recognizing his aura. He closed the door behind him and scanned the lobby, then said a revealing spell that revealed nothing. He hit the stairwell door soon after the spell took effect and started going up the stairs two at a time. He hadn’t thought the elevator was a good idea, because he would be more or less trapped in there, while the stairs gave him more flexibility in his response.
The smell hit him as soon as he opened the door onto his floor. The smell of loosed bowels and urine. Feline bowels and urine. His right hand reached up and pulled the gun from his left shoulder holster, and he looked around the corner of the short hall that led to the stairwell. Both ways were clear, but he could not see his door due to it being recessed about a foot in from the hall.
Jude moved to the other side of the hall, holding his gun pointed down the corridor, then walked quickly toward his apartment. His breath caught in his throat as soon as he saw his door, and the orange furry thing that was attached to it. Goddammit no, he thought, stepping to the door, all of his concentration on what someone had left him as a reminder of their attention.
Santana was nailed to the door, large headed fasteners through all of his paws stretching him out. His eyes had been put out by something hot, probably a cigarette, and his belly had been slit open. The cat’s mouth was open in a rictus of pain. Obviously someone had wanted to torment the poor animal, and leave evidence of that torment for Jude to find.
Jude closed his eyes for a moment, squeezing the tears through his shut lids. A wracking sob threatened to escape his throat as he was almost overwhelmed by the sorrow that his beloved pet had been destroyed so cruelly. Sorrow turned to anger, and anger to rage in a moment. He opened his eyes, and swore bloody murder to whoever had committed the atrocity.
He heard voices coming from the apartment as soon as he got his own emotions under control. Barely under control. He was about to reach for the knob and let himself into the apartment when he heard footsteps running toward him along the hall.
“There he is,” yelled one of the two men who came at him. “He’s out here,” yelled the other.
Jude heard movement in the apartment, and knew that the men had him trapped, or thought they did.
What he hoped was that the men thought they were trying to trap a Police Detective, and one who might have the powers of a forensic image. From the way they approached him he didn’t think they had been told of his Army career. And even though he had technically been in intelligence, the Army made sure to train anyone in their service who had any tidbit of magical power in some offensive and defensive applications of that power. And they had used him to command an infantry platoon during the riots that had erupted over the sudden increase of the dead lands, those years ago.
Anger gave power. Jude turned and projected all of his anger into the spell he had said as he entered the building, only leaving the triggering word off, saying it now. He pushed his left hand forward, sending a ball of force toward the men. The distortion of the air showed that ball in motion, and the two men tried to slow themselves, to fire their weapons, to do too much at once, all too late. The ball of force hit them at leg height, throwing them into the air to hit the ceiling and fall heavily back to the floor. They lay there groaning, not moving otherwise.
Jude raised the pistol in his right hand as he was flinging the spell, cocking the hammer and firing a round off into the door. He continued to fire as he pulled his second pistol out of his belt holster with his left hand, then went into an alternating fire with both pistols until the hammer on the gun in his right hand clicked on a spent cylinder. He continued to fire the final three rounds from his left hand pistol into the door. A quick move shoved both pistols into their holsters. He then reached behind his back at the belt line and withdrew the two small automatics, at the same time kicking the door inward.
The door swung in to reveal three men who had all been caught in the line of fire. He recognized one, at least by face, as a man who had been at the Daemon Corp building. That one was gasping out his life with two big blood spots on his shirt. Another lay silent on the floor, sightless eyes looking up with a neat hole between them. The third coughed on the floor, a hole in his stomach, trying to pull himself to his feet and defend himself against Jude. Jude shot him through the shoulder with the .32 auto and walked over to him, kicking the man’s gun away. His anger got the better of him and he put a bullet through the man’s left eye. He then backtracked into the hallway and shot each of the two men trying to get back to their feet twice through the heads.
Returning to the apartment he looked at his cat, nailed to the door. One of his bullets had gone through the cat, tearing a big hole through its abdomen. He felt a sense of guilt, as if he had added to the desecration of the animal. He knew that was nonsense, but he still felt it, and it brought the anger back up. He stormed into the apartment and looked down at the man he had recognized, the only one of the quintet still among the living.
“Who sent you?” he growled, glaring at the man. “Daemon? Stark? Who sent you?”
“I ain’t telling you squat,” said the man through gritted teeth.
“Yes you are,” said Jude, raising his pistol and shooting the man through the head. The thug jerked once as the bullet blasted through the front of his skull, then lay still, his own releasing bowels adding to the odor of the room.
Have to work fast, thought Jude as he brought the mantra to the forefront of his mind. It came quickly, from all the recent practice, and in less than a minute he had calmed his mind and started to mumble the spell. The spirits of the five men became apparent to his second sight, though he only wanted one of them. He pulled the spirit of the man he just shot into the link, gaining his name and some other personal information. Derrick Swartz, thought Jude as he looked at that spirit. Employee of the Daemon Corp. What a surprise.
You killed me, came the voice of the angry spirit in his mind. Why did you kill me? I might have given you what you wanted. You didn’t have to do that.
“I didn’t have time to try and interrogate you,” said Jude in a low voice. “Now who told you to kill me?”
Steiner Stark told us to stake out your apartment, said the spirit. We weren’t supposed to kill you, though I wish we had.
“And Stark did this in his position as an Officer of the Magara? And why did men working for Daemon Corp become engaged in a Magara operation?”
The Magara work for Mr. Daemon, in his capacity as a member of the Mage’s Council, said the spirit. There’s a lot of mixing and matching going on with the Government and the Corporation. The Corporation is almost the Government, with Mr. Daemon in charge.
“That’s enough for now,” said Jude, realizing that he needed to get moving. “You can go to whatever hell you are destined to.”
Jude started to walk from the apartment, then turned back to look at the spirit.
“Why’d you kill my cat like that?”
We thought it might get you upset enough to make a mistake, said the spirit. But it was only a cat.
“It upset me alright,” said Jude, turning his back on the spirit. “And it was more than just a cat. It was family. Enjoy your time in hell.”
Jude could hear the sirens as he exited the building. He moved through the crowd of onlookers and down the street, making his way to the next block while a pair of beat cops came running up to the building. He knew it w
ould take some time to contact the Feds and get another forensic detective in to interview the spirits, and hopefully they would not be around anymore by the time the readers got there. His words had power, and he had wished the spirit of Swartz and the others a quick trip to Hell, opening up the gates a little wider for their passage.
Jude made his way into a nearby drug store, went into the bathroom, and occupied a toilet stall while he reloaded his weapons. Then he moved to the luncheon counter and ordered something to eat, stifling a tear for the cat.
Time to see for myself what is going on in that damned building, he thought. It might cost him his life, but it had to be done. And he thought he knew of a way he could do it.
Chapter Seventeen
Jude walked across the courtyard of the huge building with anxiety as his companion. He hoped that the spells and wards he had put in place would work in this place. He would not know until they actually met the people and energy fields that guarded this facility from the eyes of the unwelcome, of which he was assuredly one.
The Detective looked up at the dome on the top of the building, a mile in the sky, shining its light down on the plaza and the city as far as it could reach. To his eyes it did look different than he had remembered. There was a quality to the light that had changed over the last couple of months, as if some other energy was being added to the mix, and was slowly increasing in power. He was not sure what it was, but it didn’t feel right to his heightened senses. He nodded at one of the Security Guards patrolling the plaza as he walked up the steps to the entrance. The man smiled back and waved, responding to the image that Jude was projecting this night.
“Mr. Daemon,” said the Security Guard at the front desk as Jude walked in wearing his illusion spell. “You're in kind of late tonight?”
This was one of the moments of truth. Daemon would be in a Mage’s Council meeting right now, and he hoped the guard didn’t know that. Jude had hoped that no one would question the powerful Mage if he walked into the building. That everyone would be secure in the knowledge that there were many other alarms and security systems in the building, and no one would dare to stop the head man of the operation. Jude had known that he might be wrong in that assumption. Daemon might be one of those who insisted that protocol be followed, even with himself. But he hadn’t, and Jude had been correct. He looked over the Security Guard for a moment, focusing on his badge and trying to read the name, trying to act as if he were thinking of something else.
Daemon Page 16
