Forbidden Magic: The Complete Collection

by Anya Merchant

  “Perfect.” Lucy leaned over and planted a kiss on Victor’s cheek. “This is exactly what we needed.”

  And that was exactly what I needed.

  She gave Terrance a half minute’s head start and then pulled the car out into the street.

  CHAPTER 7

  Following Terrance’s car without being spotted would have been somewhat tricky with only one vehicle, at least if it hadn’t been for Victor’s onyx aura. Terrance’s brakes had a unique sound to them that was easy to pick out, even when the car briefly dropped out of sight. Almost all cars, and hell, most people, made a noise that could be used as an identifier like that.

  The fact was a glaring reminder of how new Victor was to using his auras, and how far he still had to go. Kiara had given him a taste of the same humble flavor in the simulation room earlier that day, and it made him want to redouble his training efforts.

  “Take a right up here,” he said. Lucy nodded and flicked on her blinker.

  They were headed into the outskirts of town, which seemed to support the general idea of Terrance being up to something sinister. Outside of buying drugs, hiring prostitutes, and possibly disposing of bodies, there was almost no reason to be in the abandoned sections of Undercliff City late at night.

  The streets thinned out, with less cars and less people. Lucy had to slow down in order to keep their following distance from becoming too suspicious, and Victor strained to keep the car identified with his onyx aura.

  “I think… yeah, he just parked.” He nodded to Lucy and then pointed to an abandoned parking lot nearby. “We should, too.”

  “I don’t like the idea of leaving my car alone in this part of town,” she said, frowning.

  “There’s no other choice. We can’t get any closer inside of it. If we want to find out what he’s doing, we’re going to have to move on foot.”

  She nodded, drove the car to a spot on the edge of the lot, and then killed the engine. The two of them climbed out. Victor looked over at Lucy and frowned at her heels.

  “Do you have any other shoes that you could wear?”

  Lucy was already changing out of them, even as he asked the question.

  “Obviously,” she said. “This isn’t my first rodeo, Victor.”

  No, it most certainly is not.

  He smiled at her, and a minute later, the two of them were silently moving through an alleyway in the direction that Victor had last heard Terrance’s car. He paused before moving around the last corner and back into the street and listened.

  “…He’s there,” said Victor. “It sounds like he’s waiting for someone.”

  “Perfect. Let’s find somewhere to observe from.”

  There was a fire escape nearby, and the two of them made their way up it as silently as they could. The last level stopped just under the roof, and Victor wordlessly threaded his fingers into a step to lift Lucy up. She put her foot into it, and Victor caught a whiff of her perfume as he boosted her over the roof’s outer ledge.

  He started to look up at her to make sure that she had a good grip and then stopped himself, remembering that she was wearing a dress. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a muffled giggle come from the roof after Lucy had made it up.

  Victor followed behind her, his height making the task much easier than it had been for her. From where they were on the rooftop, they could see Terrance’s car without being obvious. Terrance was leaned against the outside of it, smoking a cigarette and waiting.

  Lucy pulled a tiny camera out and started snapping shots. Victor watched, giving his onyx aura a break as the two of them waited.

  It didn’t take long. A car rolled up and parked behind Terrance’s after a couple of minutes. The driver took his time getting out, and Victor recognized him almost immediately.

  That’s Bruce Stillman, Kiara’s “friend”.

  He looked over at Lucy, who was having the same realization. Neither of them said anything, and Victor leaned in a bit closer and bound his onyx aura.

  “…middle of the night?” Terrance was the one talking, in a low, somewhat nervous voice. “I’m not exactly a huge fan of this part of town.”

  “And I’m not a huge fan of your house, or office,” said Bruce. “It’s better that we meet out here.”

  The two of them were silent for a few seconds. Terrance paced back and forth, nervously puffing on his cigarette. Bruce watched him carefully, arms folded, and eyes hidden behind the same pair of sunglasses Victor had seen him wearing earlier that day.

  “Is it really working?” asked Terrance.

  “It works,” said Bruce.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” Bruce sounded as though he was struggling to contain his frustration. “You know how much I spent on the project. It’s shocking to me that it took as long as it did.”

  Terrance set a contemplative hand on his chin. The smoke from his cigarette traced a meandering trail into the air next to his head.

  “I need to see it for myself,” said Terrance.

  “Soon enough. It’s still developing.”

  “That’s why I need to see it!” Terrance raised his voice slightly, and then brought it back down to a hiss. “I don’t think you fully understand what the fuck you’re doing.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that,” said Bruce.

  Terrance took a slow breath, exhaled, and immediately followed it with a quick drag from his cigarette.

  “Tell me that you haven’t given it net access yet,” he said.

  “Of course not,” said Bruce. “There’s no need for that yet. What it currently needs is exactly what you have to offer.”

  Terrance scowled, and after a moment, shook his head.

  “No,” he said in a soft voice, almost inaudible even to Victor and his onyx aura.

  “What?”

  “No, Bruce,” said Terrance. “If you aren’t willing to let me see it, the answer is no.”

  “I’m offering you a chance to be a part of this,” said Bruce. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I’m asking for. And I’m not leaving the decision on whether or not to arm this thing with some of the most powerful technological tools in existence up to you, regardless of how many billions of dollars you have.”

  Bruce looked as though he wanted to throw a punch in response to that. Strangely, his face went blank for a moment, and then shifted through several different emotions, finally settling into a resigned smile.

  “Fine,” said Bruce. “Be that way.”

  He turned and walked back over to his car. It looked like Terrance was about to say something for a moment, but he just kept smoking his cigarette. Bruce drove away, and after another minute, Terrance threw down his cigarette and stomped it out.

  Victor was ready to switch off his aura when Terrance pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number. He slowly walked over to his car and stood next to it.

  “I met with him.” Terrance’s voice was clear enough. Victor strained to make out the other side of the conversation, but it was too faint, even for his aura-enhanced senses.

  “He’s not going for it,” said Terrance. “I told you it wouldn’t be that simple.”

  Terrance listened for a moment, frowning.

  “That’s just about the only thing we can do,” he said. “It shouldn’t take long, not with someone like him.”

  Another pause. Lucy was shivering next to him, and Victor had to compensate for the enhanced chattering sound of her teeth.

  “Alright. Keep in touch.” Terrance hung up his phone, slipped it into his pocket, and climbed into his car.

  CHAPTER 8

  Victor waited until Terrance’s car was out of sight before turning to Lucy and giving her a recap of what he’d just overheard. She listened intently, her eyes betraying her frustration.

  “We have to find out what they were talking about,” she said. “As soon as possible.”

  “Well, we have at least so
me time,” said Victor. “The phone call at the end… It sounds like Terrance is reporting to someone higher up. Maybe somebody within the company?”

  “I’ve had my suspicions about Eli for a while now,” said Lucy. “There’s not enough evidence to point a finger yet, but he’s the CEO. I find it hard to believe that this could be taking place without his knowledge.”

  Victor looked out into the street where the meeting had taken place. He chewed on his lip and tried to think.

  Maybe this isn’t as bad as we’re making it out be. They didn’t actually say anything incriminating…

  “We have to keep following them for at least a few more minutes,” said Lucy. “I’ll head back to Terrance’s house and wait for him there. You go after Bruce.”

  “How am I supposed to do that? I don’t know where he lives, and his car has been out of sight for a solid minute now.”

  Lucy coughed into the crook of her arm. She frowned and shifted back on her heels.

  “Earlier today I, uh, had one of my interns put a tracker on the bottom of his car.” She blushed bright red, which was impressive considering the chill in the air.

  “What? Are you serious?” Victor shook his head in disbelief. “How the hell did you know?”

  “It wasn’t in relation to this,” she said. “Bruce… has a bit of a history when it comes to promiscuity. I wanted to make sure he didn’t break Kiara’s heart. Again.”

  “Ah,” said Victor, taking his turn at feeling uncomfortable. “Gotcha.”

  “Check your email, I just sent you a link to the app that will let you track him.”

  Victor did, and it only took him a couple of minutes to get moving. Bruce’s car appeared as a blinking dot on a map of the city, not too far away from where they were. Lucy drove off in the rental car to follow up on Terrance, and Victor started walking down the street.

  It only took him a few minutes to get to his destination. Bruce’s car was parked on an abandoned street, and Bruce was nowhere in sight. The only movement that Victor could see was a single white plastic bag caught on the jagged edge of a shattered window.

  He slowed to a stop and flared his onyx aura, searching for any sign of where Bruce had gone. A sound came from up ahead and around the corner. Victor crept forward, sticking to the shadows of the nearest building.

  Bruce was sitting on the stoop of an abandoned house. He had a bottle of wine in one hand, and stared at the concrete in front of him as he took a long, slow sip from it.

  He’s still wearing his sunglasses, and it’s the middle of the night. That’s so weird.

  From what Victor could see, Bruce wasn’t doing much of anything, suspicious or otherwise. He chewed his lip and mused over whether it was worth his time to watch the billionaire risk a drunk driving charge, at most, when he could be back at his house, asleep.

  Bruce flinched, and then pulled out his phone. Victor shifted forward slightly and flared his onyx aura.

  “Hello?” he answered. “Oh, hey. No, it’s fine. Of course I’m still awake.”

  Victor frowned slightly.

  “Yeah, well, she’s your older sister,” said Bruce. “I guarantee that Monteiro just has her working late.”

  Victor’s frown deepened, and he did his best to rationalize away the voice screaming 'stalker' in the back of his head.

  “Is that so?” Bruce smiled, and held the phone a little more closely. “Well, I’m not too far away. Maybe I’ll head on over, and-“

  Victor took a step back out of reflex, and his foot bumped into a half broken beer bottle. Bruce paused in mid sentence and looked over in his direction. There was no way he could see Victor in the shadows. Bruce said something into the phone and slipped it into his pocket, and then slowly stood up.

  Several new sounds began to immediately sound out from down the street. As much as Victor wanted to stay and investigate Bruce more directly, it wasn’t what Lucy would have wanted. And on top of that, the new sounds were strange, unlike anything he’d ever heard before, and it gave him a foreboding sense of what was to come.

  A soft buzzing noise, similar to the copter blades of Kronenberg’s drone body, hummed on the air. Another sound that could most easily be described as a heavy chain dragging across the street joined it after a second, and slowly began to grow louder, and nearer to him.

  Victor relaxed his onyx aura and hurried through a nearby alleyway.

  The jig is up. I should probably be going.

  He could hear his pursuers, whatever they were, bearing down on him. Victor sucked in wind and pumped his legs. He wasn’t afraid, and it was partially because of that reaction that he didn’t see the attack coming. Something hard slammed into the small of his back, knocking him forward into a half full trash can.

  “Damn it!” He looked up, and felt his jaw drop open.

  He’d been expecting to see Bruce, or maybe a heavyset bodyguard with a gun. Instead, several drones buzzed through the air behind him, each one in the shape of a futuristic helicopter, and each one equipped with heavy firepower.

  Victor reacted without thought. He thrust his hand forward, binding his scarlet aura and launching a lance of flame at the nearest drone. It struck one of the drone’s copter blades, causing it to pitch forward at the exact moment it began to shoot. Bullets ricocheted into terrifying sparks on the concrete in front of him. The other drones flew up and over the damaged one, slowly setting their sights on Victor.

  He didn’t wait around to see how good their aim was. The alleyway split off to the side at the end, and he hurled himself around the corner just as more shots rang out. He sprinted as fast as he could in the direction that would take him out of the outskirts of the city, where the police response time virtually guaranteed that the drones would have enough time to take him down and escape with ease.

  Victor skidded to a stop when he saw what was waiting for him in the street. A long mechanical metal snake shifted back and forth across the ground, making the scraping chain noise that he’d heard before. It was composed of dozens of segments, each about the size of a basketball, and they all moved in stiff, surreal motions that only resembled the creature they were modeled after in a loose sense.

  “Oh, come on!” Victor started running again. He was hoping that he could get past it before it to could do anything dangerous.

  The machine lashed out far faster than a real snake, slamming the segment furthest out into Victor’s legs. He let out a surprised shout and felt pain surge through him. It felt like he’d been attacked with a sledgehammer, and he fell to the ground as his painfully bruised legs gave way.

  He immediately rolled to the side, which probably saved his life. The mechanical snake twisted in a manner that would have rolled him into a deathlock had he’d been a second slower. Victor frantically brought his hand up and bound his scarlet aura. He let out a desperate snarl as a he released an undirected splash of flames.

  The attack hit the robot snake and burned for a half second, doing almost no damage. He couldn’t see any weak points on it, no visible cameras or sensors that he could target to cripple the thing.

  Come on! Think! It can’t be invincible, can it?

  The robot snake attacked him again. Victor was in the street, though luckily, there was no almost no traffic in the outskirts of the city at night. He dodged around a car as the snake lifted up vertically in the air, like a cobra preparing to strike.

  It hit the car with the force of a falling anvil, except at an angle. Victor was pressed up against it tight enough that when it started to fall on its side, he had to move for his life. He tripped in his rush to get away and felt the robot snake slam into him again, this time like a long cudgel, from the side.

  One of his ribs let out a sinister sounding crack, and Victor went flying. He landed hard on the street, in pain and on the verge of unconsciousness.

  I have to focus! It’s a robot, I’m a human. What advantages do I have?

  Victor thought of something as the snake was closing the distance the
last attack had put between them. Like most of his ideas, he was pretty sure that it would be a waste of time, but in this instance, the time he was wasting belonged to his enemy.

  He took off at a sprint toward a three-story building that might have once been a motel, or some kind of office space. Vagrants had long since stripped it of everything valuable, including the front door, but that wasn’t what Victor cared about.

  His legs were long enough to keep the robot snake from closing on him immediately, but by the time he reached the entrance, it was within a few feet. Victor didn’t look back, entering the building and then immediately taking a right in the direction he hoped would lead him to the stairs.

  They were at the end of a short hallway, and Victor threw himself up them two at a time. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the robot snake struggling with them. He kept going until he reached the third floor, found the window he was looking for, and then smashed it open.

  “This is going to suck,” he muttered. Victor cleared as many of the glass shards off the frame has he could, spotted his landing, and then jumped.

  The alleyway was filled with garbage, and namely, a single moldy, disgusting, but still considerably soft mattress. It bore the brunt of his fall, though the height was still enough to make his ankles hurt and his cracked rib feel like it’d been broken a second time.

  Victor began sprinting back toward the street when one of the flying drones hovered through the space in front of him. He launched both his hands out toward it in the style of a fireball, directing his scarlet aura with all the energy he had left.

  The little drone was swallowed by a pillar of flame. It fell to the ground in a charred, unresponsive heap. Victor started to run by it and then stopped.

  Kronenberg would have a field day with this thing, even if it didn’t lead anywhere.

  He bent over to scoop it up on his good side, and then took off into the night.

  CHAPTER 9