by John Conroe
I looked up and made eye contact with Tanya, then we both looked at Declan. Nika, Lydia, and Stacia were all watching us while still ostensibly competing on the dance floor.
Declan looked up. “They’re summoning the elemental.” He spoke at a conversational decibel level, which meant the DJ’s music more than drowned him out, but all the rest of us could hear him fine. He couldn’t hear me back though, so I was suddenly frustrated with not being able to ask a question.
“They don’t have the whole name, so there’s no way to force control over the elemental, but they have more than enough of it to get its attention. They may figure pissing it off could produce almost the same effect as ordering it to erupt,” he said, anticipating my questions. “We should go now,” he said.
I turned to Tanya and spoke, knowing hearing wasn’t an issue for her. “Let’s start it.”
She met my eyes, her face frustrated, but nodded. She wasn’t going in with us. It had been a rather contentious part of the planning. All of us against her. But she finally saw the sense of it. Something in the desert had kicked her into some type of false labor and the most likely variable was Dragan’s demonic presence. So she would stay back, along with Lydia and Nika as well as Doctor Singh, to coordinate with Stewart and keep the dance party safe.
Arkady, Declan, Stacia, Awasos, and myself all headed toward the club. At first the contestants and their drunk, horny friends didn’t notice much. But Declan putting on a holster with pistol and combat tomahawk along with his magic messenger bag drew some stares. Arkady pulling a massive sword from behind an amplifier caught a whole bunch of attention. When I pulled off my hoody, freeing myself for combat, people started to point. But the real kicker was when Awasos came up from under the table I’d been sitting at and transformed from very large wolf to enormous brown grizzy bear. That and Stacia bursting out of her clothes and skin to stand in white-furred, twisted-muscled glory next to her witch. Both of those caused a few screams, not all of them from the dancing ladies.
Before the crowd could panic, Stewart’s agents streamed out of two massive tractor trailers and began corralling the civilians further away from the Painted Pony building. A line of paramilitary agents formed a gray wall between the club and the fake production. My team went the opposite way, heading straight into the front entrance in a direct assault.
Arkady went in first, followed by Awasos, then Declan, Stacia, and myself. Behind me, above all the voices muttering and talking, I heard one stripper in particular. “See Jen, I told you those people in there were demonic! That’s the freaking God Hammer right there.”
I passed through the big doors and let them shut the outside world out. Time to beard the wolf demon in his den.
Chapter 23
We had deferred to Declan during our planning for obvious reasons. It was his idea to attack head-on, which was rather surprising after all we had heard about witches and their homes, not to mention the assault on the paper mill in Fetter, Maine.
But his reasoning was sound. The club was still an active business and Louanna had only been there a handful of days. People had been coming and going ever since she and her hellish offspring had arrived.
Declan felt that the wards and defenses would start much deeper in the club, and Omega’s ability to re-task government spy satellites and their advanced thermal sensors had born that out. Dragan’s werewolf body temperature was easy to track, even from space, and it showed that he stayed mainly in one back section of the building.
The result was more screaming as we passed the entryway and spread out through the main dance room, an area about the size of a small grocery store. The few remaining dancers stopped their dances in mid-bump and ran for the doors behind us. Something about a giant with a sword, an even larger white werewolf in hybrid form, and a colossal Kodiak bear will clear a room in record time. They didn’t even notice the witch kid or myself.
We spread out, Declan using his witch senses and me with my Sight. The first wards appeared in the hall that led to the private dance rooms where guests could pay for a more, let’s say, personal experience. Declan spotted the first spell, which was the magical equivalent of an intrusion alarm, set across the Staff Only door at the end of the hall He took it apart with a wave of his hand and immediately found the next one right behind it. That one was a bit nastier—it rendered anyone crossing it unconscious. That boobytrap fell as fast as the first, leaving us at another doorway, this one a swinging door like waiters use in a kitchen.
Stacia growled at him. “Yeah, this time is going faster because I’m not running off my own internal pool but drawing from everything around. That mill was shut off from the grid, cold and based in the ass end of nowhere. This is freakin’ Vegas, baby,” the kid said. “I got power out the ass.”
She growled again.
“Hey, hey, let’s not get nasty,” Declan said, his voice completely calm and maybe a bit distracted.
“You understand her growls?” I asked.
“It’s the tone. That and my imagination do a good job of filling in what she would probably be saying. If I’m wrong, I’ll get more growls,” he said. He glanced at Stacia but she kept silent, her answer clear as a bell. “Yup, see what I mean? She can actually form words, but I think she finds this amusing.” He came to a sudden stop and held up his left hand, fist tight.
We all froze. He made the hand signal for point of entry, then used his index finger to sketch a quick star in the air. That was our proprietary team signal for a spell.
“So, yeah, as soon as she’s all big bad wolf, I gotta suddenly walk on eggshells,” he said as if continuing where he left off but looking at all of us with big, intense eyes as he willed us to understand.
“Yeah, we get it already, no need to carry on,” Arkady said after exchanging a glance with me.
The kid had found a really big spell and somehow the witch might be monitoring us.
“I’m just saying that I say or do the littlest thing and I’m like dead meat everywhere,” he said, reaching in his bag and pulling out a plastic baggy of coarse salt. I held my nose and he nodded in understanding. We could smell the dead he had sensed.
He threw a couple of handfuls across the floor, zipped the baggy shut, and put it away. Then he backed up to us and pointed at a potted plant by Stacia’s feet. She scooped it up and, at his nod, threw it with force through the door. The door slammed open, there was a whooshing sound, and the thirty-pound pot blew sideways into a wall. Figures shambled into view and the stink of the dead blasted our senses as a small squad of revenants flowed into the hall.
The first wave of dead froze when their feet touched Declan’s blessed salt, but the ones behind shoved them forward till they timbered down like dead wood. The ones behind climbed right on the backs of the others, something I’d seen them do before.
“I got this,” I said, sending a wave of aura straight ahead. Every undead in the hall fell bonelessly to the ground.
“Wow. That was anti-climatic,” Declan said. Stacia turned her grinning jaws his way and he frowned.
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Not fair; he’s basically holy water on two feet. Besides, I’ll get another shot. Just wait,” he said. Then he made a shoving motion with his hand and all nine bodies slid backward, down the hall, and into the big, scary dark room beyond. He moved ahead and looked at the pot embedded in the sheet rock on the right side of the hall. He turned to the opposite wall and, after a moment of study, slammed his right fist into his left palm. Ten square feet of the left-hand wall disappeared with a crunch and bang, opening into another parallel hallway on the other side. The wrecked sheet rock on the floor showed bits and pieces of bloody symbols that had been painted on the hidden side of the wall. Thick white dust hung in the air and all the overhead lights were off.
“You might have hurt his pride a little,” Arkady said to Stacia. She shrugged and moved into the new hallway to investigate.
“So she limits access to this hall and boobytraps the common wall f
or anyone coming down the main one,” I said.
“Her spell gathered all the air within about two or three inches of the surface of that wall along an area of maybe fifteen or twenty square feet and slammed it into a column about the diameter of a small coffee can. Kinda cool. I’ll have to see if one of the Air witches can duplicate it for Wytchwar… without the blood and sacrifice, of course,” Declan said.
He moved up quickly next to Stacia at the edge of what had to be, for him, inky blackness. My thermal vision showed me cool grays of varying shades, giving me the outline of the hallway.
The kid shook his head and pulled a headlamp out of his messenger bag, lighting up the area around us. He took a moment to study the hall, then moved forward in a confident manner.
“Stop,” Arkady said. Everyone froze and looked back at him. He gestured ahead of Stacia and Declan, pointing down near the floor. There was a silvery flash in a straight line from wall to wall as the headlamp moved around. It was gone but immediately came back when the kid looked back down.
“Trip line,” Declan said. “Thanks, Arkady. That shit’s not my cup o’ tea so much.” He moved out of the way and let Arkady study the trap. The fishline came out of a pencil-sized hole in one wall and disappeared into a similar spot on the opposite side.
The giant vampire looked at me and shrugged. “Must trip it to know. It’s not like they don’t know we’re here.”
“Let’s do it. Don’t want to leave this behind us,” I said.
He shooed everyone back and opened a pocket inside his coat. Out came a thin line with a small black cylinder attached to it. He unscrewed the end of the cylinder and took three tiny metal spikes out. These he screwed into angled holes on the outside of the cylinder, and the result was a tiny grappling hook. Making sure we were all back down the hall, he threw the little grapple down past the fishline and pulled it back till it caught on the trip wire. After a look at all of us, he gave it a single swift yank. The wall exploded for a second time. Arkady punched his fist through the wall and ripped out the expended booby trap.
“Single shotgun shell and a mouse trap,” Arkady pronounced. Declan moved over to see, curious.
“Fasten mouse trap to a piece of two-by-four, drill a three-quarter inch hole through both, right where metal bar strikes the trap. Screw the whole thing to wall with sheetrock screws, set the trap to the line, and insert one Remington Express Silver Buck,” Arkady explained, holding up the unit.
“Hmm, that could be fun in Wytchwar too,” Declan said. “This improvised stuff is kinda cool.”
“Let’s go. We’re taking too long,” I said.
Declan nodded, face flushing slightly, and moved ahead, Stacia by his side. The next surprise was reptilian and fell out of the ceiling. It was tripped if you stepped on the hidden spell under the carpet. Six big Western Diamondback rattlesnakes. The kid found the spell, we tripped it with the same potted plant as before, and Arkady and I grabbed the snakes, moving faster than they could strike, putting them into a black garbage bag from Declan’s ever-surprising satchel of tricks.
Stacia growled as the last snake went in. “Yeah, it does seem too easy,” the kid said. “Maybe it’s just because they’ve only been here a few days and they’ve been too busy with the whole kill people, make undead slaves, and mine for ancient fossilized names thing?”
She growled again, her tone even, her head tilted as she considered. Then another growl, deeper.
“Right, no lulling into false sense of complacency,” he agreed. “Makes sense. A few little traps to deter the lightweights and then keep everything really nasty close by for when the hardcases show up,” he said. “Omega, how close are we to that Appaloosa room?”
“In approximately ten meters, you’ll need to take the left-hand side of the T-intersection. The door to the room is four meters beyond that. Be advised that both the cooler bodies and Dragan’s heat signature have moved to face the doorway,” Omega said softly from Declan’s Bluetooth earpiece.
We reached the T-intersection a few seconds later and turned left. Ahead of us, two huge, ornate wooden doors with a gilded sign announced that the Appaloosa room lay just ahead.
I could smell the dead on the other side, as well as the scent of the demon wolf and the scent of human females.
Arkady caught my eye and then Declan’s, eyebrows arched in silent question. Declan nodded and held out both hands, which I had seen him do to help him feel for magic. That’s when my bear made his move. ‘Sos suddenly shouldered past me, brushed the witch kid aside like a leaf, and thundered straight up to the doors.
“‘Sos…” was all I got out before he stood up. I knew the ceilings were twelve feet high, yet he had to scrunch his head down onto his shoulders to fit as he brought both massive front legs up and slammed forward with platter-sized paws. At first, I thought he’d missed the doors by accident, as his huge feet hit the outer frame of the giant doors, but then the whole structure ripped free from the walls around it, crashing down to give me a snapshot image of the room behind.
Dragan and his witch mother, Louanna, stared at us in surprise. They stood just outside a pair of six-foot circles formed of a gray powder that might have been ash, laid directly on the polished concrete floor. Dragan was nearer our side, Louanna on the far side. A naked young woman lay unconscious or maybe dead in the left-hand circle, and a moving lump of fire-red something was upright in the right circle, emerging right out of the concrete. Six figures stood between the witch, were demon, and the circles, all of them obviously dead.
That was the scenario that lay before us for a micro-second before Awasos slammed both front feet to the ground and charged into the room.
A cyclonic wind formed the instant his feet touched the floor, flowing from the left side of the destroyed doorway toward the right. Obviously the last line of defense, it was strong enough to rip both doors from the destroyed frame and blow them into the far wall. But as powerful as it was, it didn’t have the energy to more than flatten ‘Sos’s fur as his nearly one-ton body bulldozed through the spell and right into the six revenants.
Declan reacted with well-trained reflexes, squatting down instantly, both hands on the concrete, a makeshift wall almost immediately grinding itself up from the floor, rising to six feet or so and blocking the wind enough that Stacia, Arkady, and I could bound across and into the melee in front of us.
Five of the dead bodies were destroyed, torn to shreds by the fury of our giant Kodiak killing machine. The sixth was massive, a man who in life had exceeded Arkady in size. He held a twenty-pound sledge and now swung it with all his undead strength straight at my bear’s skull.
‘Sos just sorta jumped forward, almost a four-legged hop kind of thing, his keg-sized skull moving inside the revenant’s swing, the heavy sledge hitting and glancing off an enormous shoulder that was armored in muscle. The head strike slammed the revenant off his feet, across twenty feet of space, and right between the two circles. The ground shook from ‘Sos coming back down, and the revenant twitched as his feet and hips hit the girl in the one circle while his torso, head, and shoulders came to rest in the other circle.
A whole lot of stuff happened almost at the same time. As the big revenant was flying into the middle of the spell, Dragan became busy. He turned to his mother and snatched the plate-shaped stone she was holding, his body simultaneously twisting and growing till he was the second largest creature in the room. Then he turned his back to the spell circles as it all went to hell.
The sledgehammer held by the undead bodyguard smacked into the glowing red lump, the head immediately melting into a pool of liquid steel, the handle flaring for a brief instant from wood to char to ash. The living magma lifted itself for a moment, and I swear it somehow regarded the twitching revenant and the broken circle. A harsh wave of kiln-temperature heat flashed across us, burning ‘Sos’s fur, singeing Stacia’s white body, and forcing the rest of us to hold up our arms in protection.
Dragan ducked. His mother started scre
aming as her own eyebrows and long black hair vaporized, and the head and shoulders of the giant dead body inside the lump’s circle disappeared in a white-hot stream of gas, smoke, and ashes.
Declan waved his hands in a complicated motion and the temperature on our side of the room dropped to merely sweltering.
Meanwhile, the red-hot lump sank back into the floor, the glowing orange concrete smoothing and darkening as it cooled. Dragan backed away from us, crouching and leaping straight up toward and through a big skylight overhead.
Louanna screamed again and this time, anger was mixed in equal parts with pain. Cursing loudly in some form of French or Creole, she threw her hands out at the five of us.
