Broken Spells

by D. W. Moneypenny

  “You don’t need to loosen a screw. Just use the tip to poke the servo button in the lower left corner of the plate. It will then slide out of the way. Very easy.”

  Diana took the key ring, then held up the arm, pointing the elbow-end toward Mara, who tapped the tiny metal plate with her finger. “There’s a slight depression in the metal. Just press the screwdriver in there.”

  Diana did as she was told, and the metal plate slid sideways, like a DVD disk, exposing a knot of wires converged on a tiny cube of white plastic. Glancing up, she said, “I hope we’re not rewiring this thing.”

  “No, but you’ll need to simultaneously press the top and bottom sides of that cube to remove it. Detach the two screwdrivers from the key ring—both the Phillips and the flathead—and use those.” While Diana fiddled with the key ring, Mara added, “There are small pressure tabs you must press to dislodge the surge protector.”

  With the tools now free, Diana braced the arm against her leg and maneuvered the screwdrivers in place. She then looked up to Mara for confirmation. When Mara nodded, Diana pressed the tools against the sides of the plastic box. With a click, it popped out and tumbled to the ground.

  “Great!” Mara said. “Now let’s reattach the arm.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Seeing the exposed metallic rods and gears of her right hand articulate so smoothly struck Mara as spidery when she grasped the lever to open the door leading into the Apex. With no idea of what to expect on the other side, she waved Diana and Ginger back to take a peek after opening the door. The metallic hatch-like door clanked loudly as she turned the handle upward. Pausing for a second, she listened for sounds of alarm, but, hearing nothing but her own heartbeat, she opened the portal and tucked her head between the door and its frame.

  Inside was a hallway. To the right, it appeared to end in what Mara sensed was an open space or room. To the left, the passage continued for several hundred feet and then curved out of sight. That made sense since the Apex was a large oval structure suspended over the center of the atrium. Everything inside—the doors, the carpet, the walls and what few fixtures she could make out—were one shade of white or another with an almost imperceptible tinge of green and lavender, depending on how you tilted your head, like staring at the surface of a pearl while rolling it in your fingers. The place was pristine and lustrous without being gaudy.

  Odd. A lot of impression from just a hallway.

  No one was in sight, so Mara indicated with her head that the others should follow as she stepped inside. Once Diana and Ginger had entered, Mara pulled the door closed and latched it, setting off another loud clank. They froze and glanced around. Still no one came down the hall.

  Ginger tugged on her leash, wanting to go left—away from the open area at the end of the hall.

  Diana looked at the chobodon and said, “She seems to think Mara is this way.”

  “Stay here for a minute,” Mara said. “I want to see what’s down there. Then we’ll follow her.”

  Pressing against the outer wall next to the door, Mara slipped along the short distance to the end of the hall. It opened to a large half-moon-shaped room that reminded Mara of the lobby in a high-end hotel. The word salon came to mind. In the center of the room, beneath a modern-looking chandelier of crystalline globes and cubes, four plush sofas formed what seemed to be a main gathering area around a large flat table that sat low to the floor. Smaller clusters of furniture filled the periphery of the room, but Mara didn’t give them much notice because a group of robed figures with their hoods pulled down stood around the central tables staring upward, alarmed, as if they expected the chandelier to fall any second. It did seem to be swaying a bit.

  “What was that sound?” a young woman’s voice demanded. She stepped up on the table—maybe it was a riser, a makeshift stage. It was Curate Tran, incongruously wrapped in a tight black bodysuit. Looking down at those around her, she asked, “Is someone atop the Apex?”

  A loud thud reverberated through the room.

  Tran’s eyes widened, not with fear but anger. “Find out who’s up there, and dispatch them immediately.”

  One of the acolytes, a middle-aged woman, said, “It may be the Chinese man and the boy you call the prompter. They didn’t enter the Bowraith Spire with the Destroyer of the Faith and the older woman, the one with the chobodon on a leash.”

  Diana crept up behind Mara. “Who is she calling older?”

  Tran glared at the group around her. “If it is the prompter and his mentor, bring them to me, and be sure to follow the protocols I gave you. Understood? Once you’ve done that, reopen the spire and confirm it has eliminated the Destroyer of the Faith once and for all.”

  Mara took her mother’s arm and whispered, “Come on. Since Mara’s not here, Ginger must be heading in the right direction. This place isn’t that big, so there can’t be many places where they could be keeping her.”

  Diana shook the leash, giving Ginger a little more slack to lead the way. The chobodon spun around with a grunt and a bound, heading down the hall. Diana had to lean backward, using her weight to counter the persistence of the animal pulling forward, but she still remained a step or two ahead of Mara. At first, Mara increased her pace to keep up but then realized the curvature of the hallway prevented them from seeing more than a dozen yards ahead. It was possible they’d encounter someone unexpectedly before finding Mara, so she backed off and let Ginger and Diana take the lead.

  Just as the salon at one end of the Apex reminded Mara of a hotel, so too did the hallway—apart from its curvature. Doors were evenly spaced along the left wall. While they weren’t numbered or labeled, each had a latch-key card slot combo, reminiscent of a typical Holiday Inn or Hilton. To the right, intermittent windows looked out over the ground floor of the Arboretum, which surprised Mara since the Apex appeared solid white from the outside. She peered closely at the glass and noticed a frostiness suspended within its panes and concluded it must provide some camouflage from the outside, like a nonreflective two-way mirror. Gordon the acolyte had mentioned something about that earlier.

  Ginger squealed, and Mara snapped out of her reverie. The chobodon snarled at a robed figure—a tall man with his hood lowered—standing in front of a door. Mara wasn’t sure if he’d tripped over them as he navigated the hall or if he just stood guard. He back was to the door, so it was a safe bet he guarded it. Whatever his reason for being here, he stood between Ginger and where she wanted to go.

  Mara must be in there.

  Without saying a word, the guard held out his hand, palm up, and a brown swirling orb appeared above it. Ginger growled and jumped at him, yanking the leash and pulling Diana forward, causing her to tumble to the floor and lose her grip on the restraint.

  “Ginger, no!” she yelled.

  The chobodon flew into the midsection of the man, knocking him against the door while bouncing back to the floor and rolling farther down the hall. The guard clawed at the latch on the door with one hand while levitating the brown swirling mass with the other. Once on his feet, he turned down the hall and lobbed the orb at the chobodon, striking the wall above her head, where it exploded into a shower of dust and grit. Ginger squealed loudly and disappeared in a cloud.

  Before the guard could turn around, Mara stepped up behind him. When her metallic fingers wrapped around the base of his neck, arcs of bright yellow lightning danced along the man’s body, which shuddered and shook as he collapsed to the floor. A thin trail of smoke rose up from his spiked hair as Mara looked into his vacant open eyes.

  Mara gasped but didn’t move. “I think I overdid it. I was trying for a Taser effect, not an electric chair.”

  Diana bent and placed two fingers on the acolyte’s neck. “There’s a pulse. You didn’t kill him, but I don’t think he’ll be getting up anytime soon.”

  Ginger sniffed the man’s cheek, sneezed in his face and walked over his chest to the door. There, she nuzzled the latch and turned back to the women with an expression t
hat conveyed What are you waiting for?

  After a quick survey of the hallway, Mara guessed they had not drawn any attention. The occupants of the Apex were probably more concerned with who was on its roof at the moment. However, the moment someone came down the hall, they’d see the gritty blast mark on the wall and the shredded carpet below. Not to mention the body of the electrocuted acolyte.

  “Let’s go,” she said, nodding to her mother.

  Diana pointed to the latch on the door and the slot above it. “We don’t have the key card.”

  Mara frisked the limp body of the unconscious acolyte and found a card in his robe pocket. She held it up. “We’d better hurry. Sam and Ping won’t keep Tran and her people busy forever.”

  Diana took the card and slipped it into the slot atop the handle. A muted click came from the mechanism. When she pressed the handle, the door opened easily into a small vestibule area that featured a doorless closet, a sink and another door leading to a bathroom. Beyond that was a room with a queen-size bed covered with a lavender bedspread.

  Tucked beneath it lay Mara, asleep.

  CHAPTER 36

  Ping slammed facedown into something white, hard and round. Even with his arms and legs splayed, he slid to his left for reasons he was too confused to understand. Once the stars had faded from his view, he held up his head to assess his situation. For a split second he thought he clung to the side of a giant egg, and, as he dismissed that notion as nonsensical, he heard Sam’s voice call to him from above.

  “Ping! Take my hand!”

  Ping cocked his head at an uncomfortable angle, twisting it up and backward at the same time. There he saw a large bald man reaching for him, urgency pressed across his features.

  Why was Sam’s voice coming out of him?

  Sam walked up next to the stranger and yelled, “Grab it! You’re going to fall!”

  The slope of the Apex turned inward below Ping, and his legs swung outward, dangling over open air. He slid more quickly, and his gaze shifted to the distant floor of the Arboretum below. He couldn’t grasp what he saw, until the wave of vertigo wiped away his disorientation.

  He rolled to his side and extended his arm above his head. A loud groan closed the two-inch gap between their hands with a straining stretch accentuated with a loud groan as the stranger’s hand around Ping’s wrist. With a yank and a grunt, the big man housing Sam’s counterpart pulled Ping up the rounded side of the Apex roof.

  Phineas. The other Sam has possessed his body. Ping shook his head at the recollection.

  “We almost lost you there,” Sam said, covering his relief with a smile that failed to look as casual as he’d intended.

  Still shaky, Ping stood and dusted himself off. “I must have hit my head during the fall.” He looked at the singed tear in the ceiling above them. The drop was significantly steeper than he’d calculated. “That probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

  “Phineas thinks it’s likely someone inside the Apex heard us land on the top of it,” Sam’s counterpart said from within the big man’s body. “We need to get moving.”

  Ping eyed a narrow pillar jutting from the topside of the Apex to the ceiling. Pointing to it, he asked, “Is that the connection between the bridge we were on and the interior of the Apex?”

  Phineas nodded. “It’s a ladder. Come on.” He led the way to the translucent tube extending to the ceiling. When they got to it, he added, “There’s no entrance from here.” Sam’s mischievous grin appeared on Phineas’s face as the other Sam added, “Yet.”

  He pressed his hand onto its side, and the cellulose around the outside of his hand glowed red and melted, peeling away in blackened strips and creating an opening about a foot wide. Grabbing the ragged edge of the hole he’d made, Phineas tore at the material, widening the hole enough for them to crawl onto the ladder mounted inside.

  “Great,” Sam said. “Why don’t you go first? If we run into someone, you’ve got the firepower to deal with them.”

  Phineas entered the opening, grasping the rungs of the ladder and lowering himself out of sight. Sam held out his hand for Ping to go next. Inside, Ping followed suit and climbed downward, giving Sam space to follow. By that time, Phineas was already at the bottom of the ladder, waiting on the floor of a small room.

  When Ping stepped off the ladder, he looked around and concluded it only served as a vestibule for the ladder. The space was the size of a large closet, so confining that he had to step aside for Sam to dismount the ladder.

  “Now what?” Sam asked.

  Phineas nodded to the rounded hatch in the wall across from the ladder. “The doorway opens in a passage that encircles the rooms within the Apex and leads to the main salon, which is most likely where we will find Tran.”

  “We’re not looking for Tran. Where do you think they would be keeping Mara?” Ping asked.

  He shrugged. “If she’s not with Tran, she would have to be in one of the rooms, most of which are to the right. The salon is to the left.”

  “It would be best to avoid a confrontation with Tran if possible,” Ping said.

  The door across the small room swung open. A deep male voice yelled from outside, “Turn around and place your hands against the wall, or we’ll kill you where you stand!”

  Sam glanced wide-eyed to Ping, who nodded. The three of them raised their hands and faced away from the door, placing them on the wall where the ladder was mounted. Behind them, someone stepped into the small room and walked up behind Sam. Ping watched robed arms slip a bag over Sam’s head.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” he protested and struggled as his hands were pulled behind him and bound with some type of cord. Ping’s and Phineas’s hands were bound as well.

  Then a hand tapped Phineas on the shoulder, and a voice ordered, “Slowly step backward toward the door, then step through it without turning around. If you make any sudden moves, you will be flashed. Understand?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  However, Ping noticed the reply was in an unfamiliar baritone, not Sam’s voice.

  Phineas stepped out of Ping’s sight, and a moment later the hand tapped his shoulder. “Now you do the same. Nice and slow, stepping backward. No sudden moves.”

  Once they were in the hallway, they were surrounded by a half-dozen uncowled acolytes. Two of them were women, but all were large and carried grim scowls on their faces. The acolyte in the small room led Sam out by the elbow and took a left, leading the group toward the open end of the hallway several yards away.

  As they entered the large salon, Curate Tran stood on the central riser and smiled. “Excellent. That doesn’t appear to have taken too much effort. How did they get atop the Apex?” she asked.

  One of their captors pointed to Phineas and said, “This brother guided them to the skybox bridge, which was destroyed when the bowraiths tried to stop them. After the bridge collapsed, they tore a hole in the Arboretum ceiling and dropped onto the Apex.”

  Tran’s eyes flicked to Phineas and narrowed. “This brother has been compromised by the prompter,” she said. Raising her hand, she twisted her wrist in a quick motion. In a muffled whoosh, Phineas exploded into a burst of shredded pieces like a balloon filled with confetti.

  Sam twisted his head blindly under the bag. “What happened? Ping?”

  Ping gasped and watched the large man’s remains fade away as they cascaded to the floor. Within the shower of pieces, a tiny green light bobbed in the air, weaving and tumbling downward until it landed on the toe of Sam’s shoe. There, it seeped into the rubber and winked out like an ember that could not find fuel.

  Sam’s body stiffened and straightened a little.

  Ping glanced at Tran to see if she’d noticed the light. She had already turned away from the scene and now focused her attention on one of the acolytes. “I see you’ve bagged the boy as I ordered, but why is the Chinese man still intact?”

  Ping frowned. Intact?

  “We did not have
a Wind wrangler with us and could not execute the protocol, so we brought him to you,” he said, looking nervously at the floor.

  “Do you have the receptacle?” Tran asked.

  The acolyte slipped his hand into his robe pocket and removed a large glass lightbulb, holding it up like a beaker, its narrow open end upward. “Yes, Curate Tran.”

  “Very well,” she said. “Execute the protocol, and I will do the wrangling myself.”

  The acolyte nodded to one of his comrades, who parted from the group and walked over to stand in front of Ping. The man reached inside his robe, pulled out a large knife and plunged it toward Ping’s chest.

  Ping cried out and exploded into a cloud of dust just before the tip of the blade struck him. As the gray grit roiled around the room, Tran raised her arms, and a wind whipped around the assembled group.

  “Ping?” Sam asked through the bag. “What’s going on?”

  The gale spun around them, tightening, gathering up the dust that swirled in the air, forming a darkening disk of rotating matter above them. Increasing in speed, the disk morphed into a funnel, the stem of which poured into the receptacle held by the acolyte standing before Tran. After a few seconds, the cone of dust had poured itself into the receptacle, and the spinning wind abated. The acolyte sealed the glass bulb with a metal cap and held it up.

  Ping was inside.

  CHAPTER 37

  Diana examined the intravenous bag that hung from the chrome stand next to the bed. Handwritten on the label were the words Valerian blend. A tube ran from the bag into the arm of her daughter, who was breathing and appeared to be asleep.

  Mara glanced over her mother’s shoulder and said, “Valerian? What’s that? Some kind of drug?”

  “It’s a plant-based sedative. It’s normally used to address insomnia and is fairly mild, I think,” Diana said. “The real question would be, What did they blend it with?”