by John Conroe
“Under Yellowstone Park?” I asked.
“Are you talking about the Yellowstone supervolcano?” Declan asked, now standing in the doorway. He’d only been hearing our side of it, but was now so curious that he had completely given up his post.
“Aren’t you watching the door?” I asked.
“Like you and Tanya can’t hear someone when they step into the parking lot,” he said with a snort. “What’s this about the Yellowstone volcano?”
“There is an elemental that lives in the volcano. The possibility exists that his name is in the fossil records of the Red Rock Canyon. The demon might be searching for it,” I said.
“Giving him control of the elemental, who must be incomprehensibly powerful. If that volcano blows, it will wipe out much of the US and likely plunge the world into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. Misery, death, and chaos on a global scale,” the kid said.
“See, I knew he would understand best,” Barbiel said.
“We gotta stop him,” Declan said, looking earnest. He noted Tanya and my expressions. “Shit, that was pretty Captain Obvious, wasn’t it?”
Tanya smiled indulgently. “Ya think?” was my response.
“So Dragan is immune to exorcism?” I asked.
“Unless his body ceases to function. Basically he has to be crushed to paste or chopped to pieces,” Barbiel said. “But I fear you have other problems,” he said, nodding toward Declan.
We looked back at the kid, who was standing with his head tilted. At the same time, we both felt something wrong. Declan looked at us. “Lydia’s gone. Someone snatched her,” he said.
A glance behind us showed Barbiel had left us, silently. Wind rushed through the building and now Tanya was gone. I grabbed Declan by the arm and rushed him to the door. The big Escalade was just pulling up, Tanya at the wheel. “Let’s go. I want my sister back now,” she said, her voice shaking with fury.
Chapter 16
“What happened? We both felt something was wrong with Lydia, but we didn’t get the grabbing part,” I asked.
“You two have a tighter bond and your tattoos let you speak words across the link. I have a tighter bond with Omega. This whole spell centers on the RFID ink, which he queries. A few moments ago, he noted that Lydia had left the safe house and was headed toward a QuikMart three blocks away. Halfway there, two vans pulled up and six vampires grabbed her. She is currently being taken toward the Strip. Omega has told the others and they are in the Odyssey headed for the main casino,” Declan said.
Tanya spun the big vehicle around and turned it toward the Strip, weaving in and around the fast-paced traffic.
“The van holding Lydia is going straight for Mandalay,” Declan reported. Somehow, both my vampire and I felt the truth of his statement, as if we too were getting a feed from Omega, just much less detailed.
“Call the others. We have to have a plan,” I said.
“I got your plan. Get there, smash everything, kill everyone, and get my sister back,” Tanya hissed, slamming the Escalade through a tight turn.
Declan, in the backseat, gave me a worried look even as he placed a call on his cell.
“Where are you?” Stacia’s voice came through the speaker. “Never mind. Omega just plotted you on our car’s navigation system.”
She no sooner said it than the LCD screen in the dash of our car turned on and a navigation map of Las Vegas came up with a blue chevron showing our location, a green triangle that must be the Odyssey, and a red square that was now converging on Mandalay Bay.
“I have attempted to slow them by changing the signal lights. This has been ineffective, as they refuse to obey the traffic laws,” Omega said. I couldn’t help but wonder if his delaying tactics would have taken a more drastic turn if Declan had been the one kidnapped.
“Any self-drivers on the road near them?” Declan asked.
“A Google Street View car and two Teslas on auto drive,” Omega reported. “I have rerouted the mapping car to impede their progress. He paused for a moment. “They have removed the mapping car from their path utilizing a Precision Immobilization Maneuver. They are now entering the ramp to the underground parking garage at the Mandalay complex.”
Tanya’s aggressive driving had brought us in sight of the famous casino and just up ahead, we could see a Toyota Prius with Google plastered on its side and a whole roof of cameras and antennas crashed onto a center median green space. A pair of taxis were stopped by it, blocking our path. Without any hesitation, my vampire drove around the taxis, up over the green median’s curb, and right over the shrub that the Prius had stopped in. We slammed down on the other side and it was our turn to enter the parking ramp.
“They have entered the building at the Delano Valet entrance, carrying a rolled-up carpet. Interior cameras show them heading through employee access hallways toward the convention center. Building blueprints filed with the city’s building inspector show a complex of underground offices below the convention center and shark tank exhibit.”
“The casino is packed with people, and this is gonna get dangerous. We need a way to pull people out of the convention center,” I said. Tanya was screeching the vehicle to a stop.
“I’ll hit the casino and create a draw. You two head for the convention center,” Declan said.
“I am directing the other team members to enter through the convention center entrance,” Omega said.
“What are you going to do?” Tanya asked, tearing the door from the Escalade in her hurry to get out. Her voice was deceptively calm.
“A lot of lucky people are about to strike it rich,” the kid said, wide eyes on the detached car door. We were all out of the vehicle and Tanya and myself accelerated past the valets and the line of people waiting for taxis. We Moved, blurring through the crowds, following the fresh scent of vampire, carpet textile, and roses. Behind me, my Grim three-sixty image tracked the kid heading at a dead run for the casino floor. Sirens went off, making me think that security had pulled an alarm. More sirens joined in and I realized they were slot machines. Jackpots. Lots and lots of jackpots.
Tanya was moving fast, but she was monstrously pregnant. I, for the first time since I’d known her, was able to outrun her. I was first to hit the employee-only door, and it folded in half as it came off its hinges and bounced off the far wall.
Into the corridor and through a still-closing stairwell door. Over the railing and dropping with Pull-assisted speed down two levels, surprising seven vampires on the stairs. Two were carrying a carpet and five were turning toward us with guns and blades.
A Grim blast of aura tore the vampires from their feet, the violet wave diverting around the handguns in a way that told me they were packing depleted uranium rounds. Tanya caught the railing and redirected her momentum from down to sideways, her feet taking one vampire in the head so hard, his skull collapsed. Her tiny fists shot out in opposite directions, each punching through a chest, each crushing a vampire heart.
I Pulled myself into the leader, my feet on her chest, my hand grabbing her wrist and pointing her S&W handgun at the face of the next vampire in line. The gun went off with a heavy boom that told me it was a .45. The unlucky vampire’s face exploded as the heavy DU round punched through his skull, brain, and deep into the concrete wall of the stairwell. My hand twisted hard, shoving the gun against the leader’s skull with almost identically gory results.
The two vampires holding the carpet never got into the fight. They let go of their bundle, but both died before they could draw a weapon. The one nearest me lost his head to Grim’s punch, which hit with more force than the .45 had. Tanya simply grabbed the guy at the other end of the Lydia train and slammed him into the steel railing over and over like some kind of vampire jackhammer. He must have hit the steel ten times in two seconds. The metal bent and the vampire came apart in a bloody spray that was gonna leave some poor janitor with two flights of gory stairs to clean.
“I think he’s dead,” I noted as I unwrapped the car
pet. Tanya dropped the messy half of the vampire she still held and grabbed the little dark-haired vampire who lay unconscious in the carpet’s center. “They drugged her with something,” Tanya said, cradling her friend and sniffing her.
“She’s alive. We’ll get her to Singh,” I said, my Grim side noting the sound of feet on stairs climbing from below and the shouts and yells coming from the open doorway two floors up.
“We still have to get her out,” I said, relieving Tanya of her burden. She was strong enough to carry ten Lydias, but her small build and pregnant stomach made it awkward. I, on the other hand, could sling my tiny nemesis over one shoulder and still have a hand free to fight. We turned and raced back up the stairs.
Sounds of fighting, gunfire, and steel-on-steel rang out above, giving us a pretty good idea of what we were running into. The roar of an enraged brown bear left all doubt behind.
Our team was in all-out combat when we emerged into the wide convention center passageway. Stacia, in her beast combat form, was ripping through a squad of security vampires, keeping them too close for effective deployment of their HK MP-45s while tearing them literally limb from limb. From the streams of blood running down his fur, I knew Awasos had taken a few rounds, but silver or not, it takes more than a half-dozen .45 rounds to stop an enraged Kodiak, let alone one with the supernatural strength and speed of my werebear-wolf. His huge jaws snapped shut on one vampire torso, leaving two separate parts. Then he spun and sledgehammered his massive paw four eye-blurring times into two other vampires, leaving them smashed to red paste. A bulldozer would have done less damage.
Arkady and a silver-coated knife easily the size of a short sword were surrounded by parts of bodies, while behind him, Nika was calmly leaning out to shoot what looked like Stacia’s DP-12 shotgun, with devastating results. Odd; I don’t recall seeing the shotgun or its case in the luggage we’d brought from the plane. Someone was getting sneaky with her hiding of deadly little shotguns and her witchy boyfriend was, no doubt, a major enabler.
Our people ran out of combatants as Tanya and I exited the employee-only doorway, our team glancing around to look for more before redeploying around us. Outside, flashing blue and red lights told me the cops and likely SWAT had arrived.
The convention center was empty. The employees had run away and the guests had all gone toward whatever distraction Declan had created. Footsteps pounded our way, Grim recognizing the cadence and step. Speak of the kid wonder and he will appear. Sure enough, the tall, lanky frame of our favorite witch came barreling around the corner, sliding to a stop when he saw us.
“Is she alright?” he asked, ignoring the bodies and gore-spattered room.
“She’s drugged with something,” Tanya said. “We need to meet up with Doctor Singh.”
“Oh. Omega evacuated the safe houses and the doctor is currently en route,” Declan said.
“What did you do?” Stacia asked him, now standing naked in the middle of a pile of bodies. It’s a measure of how effed up our lives had become that he didn’t even blink at her nudity or the bodies but instead looked bewildered. At his confused expression, she explained. “How did you get all the guests out of here?”
“Oh. I mighta made some artifacts that influence slot machines. Everyone seemed to want in on the action,” Declan said.
“How many machines won?” Nika asked.
“Pretty much all of them,” he said with a grin.
“How,” Tanya asked. “How did you do it so fast?”
“Oh well, I discovered this weird little pile of cards in the backseat pocket of the Escalade. Like a hundred or so of these photos of, ahem, hot girls with phone numbers on them. I guess they hand them out on the street or something. Stripper express maybe,” he said with a quick, nervous little glance at Stacia. “Anyway, while you two were chatting with the invisible man at the church, I was doctoring them up a bit. Had that RFID ink pen in my pocket.”
“Why would you feel the need to draw on pictures of half-naked strippers?” Stacia asked.
Uh oh. Watch out kid.
“Well, I’ve been noticing all the panhandlers around. They’re kind of everywhere. Some of their cardboards signs are freaking hilarious. Like each one is trying to write something more preposterous than the next. And these little stripper cards are everywhere too, so I wondered what if I made some cards that would help with the whole income inequality thing. I was most of the way through the deck when we got here. I just walked into the casino and tossed them up in the air. Used a little Air to blow them around the room and poof—instant jackpots.”
“What do little cards do?” Arkady asked.
“They have a little program that’s half spell and half computer science. It changes the slot machine’s random number programming, knocking out almost all the possible combinations except the least probable one—the jackpot combo,” he said. “They just have to fall on a machine or even near one to work.”
We all stared at him. The sounds of the jackpots going off was easily audible even over the stream of police sirens still arriving outside.
“How we going to get out of here, and where would we go?” Stacia asked.
Tanya looked at me and I looked back. “We’re open to ideas.”
Declan raised his hand. “I might have one.” He’d moved over to Stacia and was offering her some stretchy clothes from his bag. “I’ll need a couple of eyelashes,” he said to her. Without hesitation, she reached up and plucked her own lashes.
With one hand, she held out the lashes while holding the other open, palm up. “I’ll take the rest of those stripper cards,” she said.
Chapter 17
The floor just below the penthouse level of Mandalay Bay had some really, really posh suites. The view from the big front window let me watch the lights coming back on, all up and down the Strip.
It had taken the kid and his computer offspring exactly twenty-three seconds to shut down Vegas. Well, not the whole thing, but most of it. They had avoided the hospital and airport and all of the residential areas, but the Strip had gone completely black, with the exception of the street signal lights. “Are you crazy?” he’d asked me when I mentioned that lapse in their plan. “Have you seen how these people drive? I don’t want to kill anyone, just get away.”
He had shut down the police cars outside the convention center. The way I understand it, Omega handled the power, the radios, all the various backup generators, and disrupted the cellular connections. Declan turned off the police cars and drained all their personal flashlights, car batteries, and weapon lights—with his mind. He said he’d pulled the electricity from the batteries and alternators of every device for a hundred yards outside the casino.
After all that, Omega directed the kid through the darkness of the massive casino complex to the tower stairs. He was using Stacia’s eyelashes in some spell that gave him night vision. The only light was the occasional cigarette lighter or a match lit by panicky guests. Even the backup emergency battery lights were drained.
We climbed to the sixty-first floor, then came out into the hallway, went around a corner and into a suite whose door popped open at Declan’s touch.
“This is now rented to one Jake Bagnoli from Hoboken, New Jersey, here to have his bachelor’s party,” Declan said. “At least those are the notes that will appear on the hotel computer when it comes back online.”
The room lights came on about then and as I looked outside, the rest of the Strip started to power back up.
“We didn’t mess with Fremont Street or anything at the far end of the Strip, just up this way,” he explained.
There was a knock on the door. “That should be the doctor,” Declan said. “We sent an Uber car to pick him up.”
I nodded, pointing from my nose to the door.
“Oh right. Wait, you can smell him? Over the cigars and ammonia?” he asked. On our way up to the suite, the kid had produced two fat cigars that he and Arkady proceeded to light to cover the scent of vampire, wer
ewolf, and were bear-wolf. Arkady had also appropriated some ammonia from a cleaning cart in the hallway and gone back over the stairwell with it.
“Cover scent is only so good at blocking vampire nose,” Arkady said as he opened the door to let Doctor Singh into the suite. “Hey Doc. Down hall on left,” he said as the lean vampire physician entered the suite, carrying a small white and red cooler in one hand and an overnight bag in the other.
“That was quite a car ride here,” Dr. Singh noted. “Do I have you to thank for that?” he asked Declan.
“Er, it was my suggestion, but Omega sent the Uber and paid for it. Scary?” Declan asked.
“No. Slightly bizarre though. It was an older gentlemen in a Tesla, of all things. Listening to the Star Wars theme song. And we never had a single red light all the way here while the entire Strip was pitch black. That’s crazy, even for Vegas. Now let me get to my patient.”
