by John Corwin
"A bloody needle in a haystack," Stacey said.
"Let's count the limos as they exit the garage," Elyssa said, zooming the image of her ASE on one limo, and slashing her finger across it to number it. "That way we can eliminate the fakes."
"How do we even know this is the right set of cars?" I asked. "I don't remember Oliver giving a specific time."
Shelton grunted. "I called him a minute ago. He told me he doesn't remember the exact time because he was in the stable. He also said there were four limos using similar illusions that day."
A brilliant idea suddenly occurred to me. "Hey, if Overworld Transportation Administration tracking system monitors magical transportation, why don't we just find the residences where the limos originated? That would pinpoint the exact house, right?"
"Nice thinking," Shelton said, "Except we'll have to look at every magical limo in the city no matter where they're coming from."
"There could have been fifty other limos driving around the city that day," Elyssa said. "The number leaving the Grotto should be a lot smaller, so tracking them will be a lot easier. Using the common point of origin of those vehicles eliminates work."
"What if the Conroys have some kind of charm to prevent the OTA tracking system from following them?" I asked.
"Then we're screwed, and everything we went through today was for nothing."
Chapter 16
"Dramatic much?" I asked. "Maybe you could have mentioned the possibility of a blocking spell before we almost died in a car chase."
Shelton raised an eyebrow. "It would be too aether-intensive to cast blocking spells on all the illusions, so the tracking system should follow them. But the original limo could have a blocking spell preventing the system from picking up on it." He shrugged. "There's still a good chance we'll find something useful."
"The tracking system is basically a network of sentry ASEs," Elyssa explained. "After several close calls with idiots on flying brooms or carpets nearly hitting nom aircraft, the Templar Custodians asked the Overworld Conclave for a system to find out who the lawbreakers were."
I remembered the Custodians from my conflict with Maximus in Bogota, Colombia. They cleaned up supernatural messes to keep the noms from finding out about the Overworld. I wouldn't want their job for all the peanuts in China.
Shelton clapped his hands together. "Let's get to work, then."
We assigned numbers to each of the limos and watched the first group leave the Grotto. The illusionary vehicles only lasted ten minutes, and we figured out the real one by a process of elimination, following it to an affluent Dunwoody neighborhood. Unfortunately, the trackers wouldn't identify the people in the video unless they'd violated the law, so we marked down the address to look up later.
It took us nearly three hours to track the next two limos and mark down their destinations. Despite our fears that we wouldn't know which cars were illusions if they went inside a parking garage or other covered structure, the ASE trackers swooped inside the decks to maintain a line of sight. I wondered if the tiny marble-like devices interfered with aircraft, or if noms ever saw the little things flitting around. They were probably charmed with diversion spells to make noms and supers alike ignore them without even knowing about it.
I wondered what prevented someone from hijacking such an extensive system and spying on anyone they wished but didn't voice the concern for fear it would derail our mission. The OTA's network of little spy bots made the NSA look like small fries.
"We've got a problem," Elyssa said about forty minutes into tracking the fourth limo.
Shelton looked at the three-dimensional holograph hovering above her part of the table. "What's the issue?"
"Who has a limo that didn't vanish?" she asked.
Nobody raised their hands.
"I counted ten illusions," Shelton said. "There are five of us, which means we each tracked two."
"One of my cars was not tracked," Stacey said, rewinding the footage, and pointing to car number seven. As the image played forward, the limo simply drove off, vanishing down the road without a tracker following it.
"That's the original," Shelton said. "And it has an anti-tracking spell on it."
"One of the illusions is following it," Elyssa said, pointing to car number four, one that I'd tracked.
We watched it for a few minutes, until the original limo turned left at an intersection while the illusion continued on straight.
"Any idea if it's the Conroys?" I asked.
"Dollars to donuts it is," Shelton said, pulling up a map on his arcphone and looking at the intersection. "That's a wealthy part of town. I'd bet they're going somewhere within a few miles' radius of there."
"Too wide a net to cast," Elyssa said, shaking her head. "Let's move on to the next limo for now."
Shelton stared at the map for a long moment before nodding. "Yeah. Maybe it wasn't the Conroys." He didn't sound convinced.
The next limo used five illusions, each of which vanished after ten minutes, though the original limo went to a high rise building just down the street from the Grotto. We felt pretty certain the Conroys didn't own that one due to the paltry number of illusions it cast.
Shelton ran the addresses we'd gathered through a database he used for bounty hunting. He gave a low whistle. "Wow, there were some heavy hitters at the Grotto that day."
"Like who?" Elyssa asked, leaning back in her chair, one hand clasping mine.
"Otto Strassman and Bara Nagal, for starters," he said, bringing up images of the two.
Elyssa gasped at the second name. "Bara Nagal?" she said. "The Grand Master of the Templar Synod?"
"The one and the same," Shelton said.
I looked at the images. Otto was a tall, thin man with spectacles perched on a narrow nose. Bara Nagal's graying hair and the fine lines on his face marked him as middle-aged. Both men were obviously very wealthy, judging from the numbers indicating net worth listed beneath the bios.
"Otto is the head of the Red Syndicate," Shelton explained.
I blinked at him. "Wait, he's the head vampire?"
"This is too strange to be coincidence," Elyssa said.
"Bloody peculiar," Stacey said, raising an eyebrow.
Shelton flicked the image to that of an ordinary looking man. "This is William Hodges, a power broker who works as a mediator for companies and individuals."
"Who were in the other two limos?" I asked.
"I ran a search in my address database, but the residences they went to are titled by shell corporations." Shelton stared at the large house in Dunwoody. "I gotta say, this one looks really familiar, though." He snapped his fingers. "Now I remember. When I was tracking Cyphanis Rax, this was one of several houses his fake corporations owned to keep his holdings secret."
"I don't like the sound of this," Bella said. "If I had to guess, I'd say a high-powered meeting just took place in the Grotto. For the actual leaders of factions to meet is unheard of, though. Ambassadors and elected officials are the usual proxies."
Shelton's jaw tightened. "I heard Cyphanis is running in the special election to take the Arcanus Primus spot."
Bigglesworth had killed Jarrod Sager, the former Arcanus Primus, a couple of months ago, but the man's death had been covered up until after the Grand Melee massacre during which a titanic golem, modified by one of Daelissa's underlings, had attempted to kill the Arcane Council. Several spectators and two council members had been killed as a result.
"Did we ever find a solid reason for Daelissa attempting to murder the Arcane Council?" I asked.
"I'm forming a theory," Shelton said, eyes narrowing. "If Cyphanis is meeting with these other bigwigs like he's already part of the club, it makes me wonder if he didn't have a part in her plan." He sat down. "My old man, Sager, was tired of playing ball with Daelissa. Maybe she decided it was best to clean the slate and sent Bigglesworth to kill him."
"Two of Cyphanis's cronies are vying to replace the murdered council members," Bella said. "If t
hey win, Daelissa will have even more control."
"Then why are the factions meeting?" I asked. "Daelissa wants to break the alliance apart, not strengthen it."
"I can only think of one reason," Shelton said, his face grim. "The Seraphim created the vampires, right?"
I nodded. "Yeah, it was the way angels awarded immortality to their best human servants. You think Daelissa is trying to reignite the love?"
"She ain't stopping with the vampires," Shelton said with a grimace. "I think she's working to create an alliance of her own. If Cyphanis takes over as Arcanus Primus, you can bet he'll throw his support behind her when the crap hits the fan."
"That would explain why the Conroys were there," I said. "But why would they choose the Grotto as a meeting spot? Wouldn't so many VIPs attract attention?"
"I think I know," Elyssa said.
Everyone turned their attention on her.
"The repaired mini-arches," she said.
Shelton tapped a finger to his chin. "You think Daelissa is showing them how she can access Thunder Rock and the Alabaster Arch?"
A shrug. "It's possible. Maybe she wants them to know her army will be marching through any day now, using fear to forge an alliance."
Bella made a thoughtful sound. "Couldn't those factions stop her plans, though?"
"True," Shelton said. "Tipping her hand now would be premature unless she already has an agreement."
"In other words," I said, "we don't have a clue what's going on, just that something really bad is afoot, as usual."
"More or less sums it up," Shelton said, and blew out a breath.
"We should refocus on the original objective," Elyssa said. She winked at me. "Baby steps."
I chuckled. "You're right."
"In case you don't remember," Shelton said, folding his arms across his chest, and leaning back in his chair, "we don't know where that other limo went."
Silence ensued, presumably as everyone went into deep thought. I wondered if Shelton had connections with the people who controlled nom traffic cams and the like so we could cobble together a route using nom technology. Provided we could access the footage, it might be the best way to go. If he didn't know anyone, maybe we could somehow get an image of the inside of the traffic control building and use the omniarch to get inside. I thought up all sorts of crazy schemes to get us that picture, when a much simpler solution presented itself.
"We know the general area the limousine went to," I said. "And you said we can track other vehicles from their points of origin."
"Yeah," Shelton said. His eyes brightened. "We could search that area for morning traffic and find out where it came from."
"Great idea," Elyssa said. "I was trying to figure out how to break into the nom traffic control buildings downtown so we could look at all their footage." She sighed. "I wasn't looking forward to that chore."
I grinned. "Read my mind, babe."
Shelton combed through the footage. Thankfully, Bruce had given us all the footage from one day, and the ASEs didn't record unless there was a magical vehicle present. He spotted a flying carpet zooming far above the city which the ASEs flagged red. We watched as a Templar slider, their version of magical aircraft, intercepted the violator and hauled them away. Shelton pinched his fingers to widen the view of the map and panned by, waving his hands across it until we saw the area where the possible Conroy limo had vanished. We counted three total limos departing in a ten-mile radius. One of them went to an expensive country club. The other went north along the interstate until it vanished from the Atlanta OTA tracking zone, and was picked up by another authority.
Once we eliminated the illusions on the remaining limousine, we followed the original to the Grotto.
"Bingo!" I whooped, meeting Elyssa's high-five as we celebrated a minor victory.
Stacey hugged Bella. "Bloody fabulous!" she said with a grin.
"Hold on," Shelton said. "I don't want to rain on your parade, but we won't know for sure if this one came from the Conroy residence until we scout it."
Our celebrations subsided as his sobering words sank in. He was right. And what was to guarantee this was the only house the Conroys owned?
Shelton toyed around with the map application on his arcphone. "The house is on Riverside Drive," he said. "It has a steep driveway, and a wooded area around it. That means it'll be hard as hell to stake out using conventional methods."
"Or magical," Bella added. "I'm sure they have a substantial number of wards on the property."
"We have an omniarch," I said, an idea springing to mind. "What if we used it to leapfrog across their property until we get where we want to go?"
Shelton looked impressed. "Way to go, kid. That's a great idea."
Cutsauce yipped.
I felt so pleased with myself, I didn't bother correcting his use of the word "kid". "I figure if we get a detailed image of the front yard and surrounding areas, we can open a portal there, then find another point somewhere further in, close the arch, and reopen it on that spot."
"You'll need to exercise caution," Bella said. "If you open the portal in the middle of a tree, it will probably sever the trunk. Not to mention what might happen if you open it inside of something living."
I made a face, imagining the results. "Are you sure opening the portal will destroy anything in its path?"
Shelton shrugged. "I'm a bounty hunter, not a magic arch specialist."
"Shall we experiment?" Bella asked, standing. Cutsauce leapt from her lap as she stood, perking his ears at her as if wondering what was so important it warranted disrupting his nap. Bella motioned toward the door.
I rubbed my hands together. "I love experimenting."
We made our way down to the arch room with the little hellhound dogging our steps. Bella continued through it to the gauntlet room. After a few minutes, she returned. "I set up rows of bricks. When I open the portal, it should open up in the middle of the stacks. I'm curious to see if it will sever the bricks, or merely pulverize them."
"I'll go watch the bricks," I said, taking Elyssa's hand and walking to the gauntlet room. On the other side of the low wall in the practice range, I saw several rows of the large cinder blocks we used for levitation practice arrayed in such a way that no matter where Bella opened the portal it would intersect with the bricks.
"You realize we never finished our match, don't you?" Elyssa said, giving my hand a squeeze.
I smirked. "Pretty sure I had it in the bag."
"Oh, really?" She punched me in the shoulder with her free hand. "Maybe we should settle that right now."
The air above the center of the cinder blocks shimmered, flickered, and split into a portal right in the middle of a stack. The bricks bent around the portal as if suddenly rendered insubstantial, clearing a space for the portal. Cutsauce yipped at the portal, hopping around on his little legs. The portal flickered shut a few seconds later, and the bricks snapped back to their former shape. The hellhound whined, tilting his head.
"Calm down," Elyssa said, picking him up.
He licked her face.
"Attention whore," I said.
Our little contest forgotten for the moment, I walked to the formerly warped blocks and inspected them. They seemed no worse for the wear. It was as if the portal temporarily transmuted them from solid to something else. Bella joined us for a repeat of the experiment. I touched the warped cinder blocks. They felt solid as ever.
"How bizarre," Bella said, obviously as puzzled as the rest of us.
We repeated the experiment using the wooden melee dummy, chairs, and even a pool of water. In all cases, the portal merely warped the objects in its physical space, displacing anything there. Nobody volunteered to let Bella open a portal on top of them, but we felt confident it wouldn't kill anyone. Shelton wanted to test it on Cutsauce since the little hellhound kept following us everywhere, yipping excitedly whenever the portal opened. Bella gave him a horrified look.
"One thing I'm concerned about would be
Gloom cracks," Elyssa said after we finished experimenting. "The silver circles around the Obsidian Arches and the smaller arches in the control rooms prevent Gloom cracks from spreading outside the magical circuit. There's no circle at the destination portal, so what's to prevent cracks from opening and spreading?"
"It might create a temporary invisible circle around the area it opens in," Shelton said. "I guess we'll have to experiment more."
At that point, though, it was late, and I wanted to go to bed. We opened the omniarch back to Stacey's residence, and saw Ryland, Stacey's lycan boyfriend, on the other side wearing a chef's apron and not much else. She let out a sensual growl and raced through the arch and into his burly arms.
Bella shut the portal in record time.
Chapter 17
The next day was Saturday, so we got up extra early to go to Elyssa's initiation ceremony for the Templars. Bella, Shelton, Elyssa and I used the omniarch, opening the portal in a room inside the Templar compound and leaving it open for our later return.
"Where has Nightliss been lately?" I asked as we walked outside to the large lawn behind the house where the ceremony was to take place.
"Meghan said she was going to practice and recover, but I haven't seen her for a few days," Bella said.
"Justin!" said a familiar voice. I turned in time to receive a hug from Katie. She squeezed me so tight I couldn't breathe for a minute.
"Hey, Katie," I wheezed as she released me. "Geez, you been working out?"
She squeezed Elyssa with a hug, eliciting an oof from my girlfriend.
Katie gave a sheepish grin. "Um, kind of, I guess."
I'd once had a huge crush on the pretty blonde. By the time she'd reciprocated the feelings, I'd already moved on and fallen in love with Elyssa. Unfortunately for Katie, that had been about the time hellhounds decided to chase me out of my childhood home, leading to her terrifying initiation into the Overworld.
