“Only a short time. Thirty minutes at the most,” Tabitha said distractedly. Her hands had frozen, gently laid on the dude’s chest. Something had happened, I could tell, something that lulled her into dead silence.
Abner stomped to the door, placing his hands on the door frame to either side. “Of course. Father sealed the room to protect us from the onslaught. Always so quick to sacrifice for the greater good.” There was anger and hurt there as he slammed his fists on the door. It should have splintered the puny wood or at least made a big thump, but it did absolutely nothing.
The Beretta was fucked, silver goo inside every internal space, gumming up the mechanisms, so I threw it aside. “Okay, Tabby, snap out of it. What can we do?” I was feeling a lot of sympathy for Abner right now because I was in the same boat. Gabby was out there, probably selflessly deciding to help the poor civilians about to be between the White and their prize, and Molly was more than likely going to throw in for the defense as well. Let’s not even get started on the probable fact Mom was still here, hopefully at least hiding in her room (not that it would save her if they blew the whole building to shit).
Every important thing in our respective worlds was right here and in danger. I had been shoved well beyond fear. All that was left was the overwhelming desire to DO something about it.
Tabitha shook her head slowly. “No, I can’t believe this.” The Peacekeeper’s eyes were starting to flutter, like he was waking up from a really, really long nap.
“Can’t believe what?” I moved up beside her. “Come on, Marlowe, get with the program! What the fuck can be more unbelievable than what’s already going on?”
“He was dead.” Tabitha was definitely not getting with the program, shaking her head numbly. “They told me he was dead. They both told us … I was the one who had to tell her …”
Abner didn’t care about Tabby’s rambling. He was still trying to beat down the door to get to his father. Me, while I wanted to do the same thing, I couldn’t help but hear her, and things started to drop into place. I was starting to think I knew why this guy seemed so familiar, but it was turning into a bitter pill to swallow.
He beat us all to the punch though, suddenly snapping to in that oh-so-familiar way a trained soldier would if you shook him. Pro-tip, by the way: Never abruptly wake up a guy or gal who’s done time in a war zone—they tend to be a bit violent about it. He shoved Tabitha aside and scrambled back from the both of us, trying to get to his feet. Only a bit of quick reflexes from yours truly kept Tabby from a painful thump on the tile.
“I didn’t know, Frank,” she cried, almost sobbing as tears started to flow. “I didn’t.” Pulling her away as the Peacekeeper started to get his bearings, I didn’t say a word, keeping a close eye on the guy to make sure he didn’t decide to go totally apeshit on us.
It only took him a moment to calm down though, at least enough it didn't appear he was going to kill anyone. Still, his steely eyes were focused and, well angry. “What did you do, Tabitha? Why did you people take me out of the Cube?”
Tabitha was still in shock and Abner had his own problems, moving on from Hulk Smash to Hulk Figure Out Complex Magical Formula, leaving the talking up to me. “Hold on, Mr. Peacekeeper sir, we just saved your ass from a fate worse than death. We need your help to–”
He cut me off with that firm, authoritative voice a seasoned drill sergeant or a veteran beat cop can muster. “In doing so, you might have doomed us all.” He straightened up, his tone terse but more judging than aggressive.
Tabitha’s cries turned into a gasp of realization. “The Cube, they didn’t put you in it just to trap you.”
There was that old familiar sinking feeling. “Oh fuck me.”
“I don’t know who you are, but you’re right.” The Peacekeeper let out a deep sigh. “I’m John Perez, the last of the Peacekeepers, and I was the only thing holding back the Old Ones. Now though…” He gestured at the Cube, now sitting back on the desk.
It all made sense now. The face, I had seen it in Max’s, tempered by Gabriela’s own beauty. This was indeed Gabriela’s “dead” husband, only he wasn’t looking too dead. But that wasn’t all.
The Cube was as cracked as my heart and thoughts were becoming. What facets were still solid enough to be seen through were no longer clear. An ever-changing colorful sludge was starting to fill inside it. It was a very familiar, very maddening substance. It didn’t take a sorcerer to tell that what had been sealed inside was starting to test the walls of the prison, walls that were already starting to fail.
To put it all in final, heart-rending summation, everyone I cared about from my mother to the woman I (let’s not dilly-dally here) loved was in mortal danger, that same woman whose dead husband had magically shown back up right as rain, Max was still being held by the Whites, and the prison that contained a vast, mindless evil was looking about ready to break.
The world was going to Hell in a handbasket and I was trapped in this goddamned room.
There were two options I could see at that point. I could have given up (a totally reasonable call at that point) or I could do what I actually did.
I took a deep breath and looked John right in the eyes. “Okay, John, how do we fix it?”
23
John glanced around the room and pointed at Abner. “There’s a temporary fix right there.”
Tabitha regained some of her sense at least, enough to be steady on her feet. “What about the White?” She pointed out the door. “My people are out there and–”
I already had an idea of where John was going with this. New to wizardry or not, the effect that the golem had on all that chaotic crazy shit in the Cube had been obvious. Despite my dueling desires to join Abner in trying to break down the door and having myself a cry in the corner while cradling my achy breaky heart, I forced myself to focus on the threat.
As I went to Abner, John cut off Marlowe. “I know, Tabitha, but if we don’t at least put a temporary clamp on that leak, everyone is dead.” Just to make his point, he added, with great emphasis, “EVERYONE.”
Abner was still leaning on that door, as if that was going to work after his Hulk Smash routine came short. “Abbie, buddy, we need your help.” When he didn’t immediately stir, I slapped my hand on the little bit of door his enormous frame didn’t occupy. “Look, we both want to get out there, but Perez’s right. If you grab the Cube, I promise I can get this door open.”
It was no false promise and Abner knew that. I was the Bearer, after all, and if there was one thing I could handle, it was a magically locked door. Pulling himself off it, he turned slowly toward me and nodded. “Thank you, Frank Butcher. I shall do my part so you may do yours.” None of that superiority or general assholishness, Abner’s usual stock and trade. Maybe our little Hallmark bonding moment in Hell had left an effect on the big lug.
Either way, despite the argument going on behind us, we got to work. Abner lumbered back toward the desk with its new arrangement of pulpy tentacles and chaos goo while I took a step toward the glowing seal. The familiar thump of the heart in my chest echoed as my vision filtered gold.
Rabbi Joe’s spell was pretty massive, I had to admit, an interlocking web of threads that spread out from the door to cocoon the entire perimeter of the room. It was a fair guess it was not only locking us in, but providing a shield from just about everything that could get in or out. It was the second thing that struck me as a bit odd. Why wouldn’t he want us to be able to get out? Sure there was the whole martyr angle but …
I shook my head. I was being paranoid. After all, Joseph had known I would be there, the ultimate magical lock pick. Focusing on the task at hand, it was the simple matter of cutting the knot. There might have been tons of magical threads here, but they all ran through the central seal, almost like he had known I’d need something to grab ahold of and pull. I plunged my fingers into that tangle and the magic melted like butter in the microwave. I yanked.
The whole thing unraveled like a D
ollar General sweater. I had to admit I was really getting the hang of this thing.
As I finished shredding the last lingering strands of magic, John and Tabitha’s fuss had died down, making way for a three-way discussion of complex magical principles and formulae bridging three separate languages I recognized: English, Latin, and Hebrew and one or two I couldn’t.
Now, for a deadly serious moment (and this was one, no fucking doubt), I almost couldn’t stop myself from laughing as I turned to see what the end consensus of all this magical babble was.
Abner took up the Cube in both hands, an act alone that made the primordial slime and probing tendrils recoil back through the cracks, and stuffed it into his mouth. The really funny thing was he was doing exactly what I would have told him to do, without the whole debate society scene to slow things down.
Everyone seemed to share a collective sigh of relief as I walked up to the desk. “Well folks, if we’re all not about to die in mind-blasting agony, I’ve got the door open.”
With Joseph’s ward down, what I had originally thought was simply excellent executive-office soundproofing was gone. The sadly familiar sounds of firearms and the not-as-familiar echoes of fireballs and lightning bolts came through. The only good thing about it was it was evidence we hadn’t lost yet, at least not entirely.
John looked past me at the broken seal, then back at me. He had a poker player’s cool demeanor, but I think he was a bit impressed. “Good job, Frank … your name is Frank, right?” I nodded, but he was already moving on. “I don’t know the entire situation, but if we’re going to contain the cross-dimensional contamination permanently, we need to shut down this current conflict.” Got to admit, the man was all business and gave off that aura of supreme competence. “Tabitha, do we have any resources on hand? I can see none of us have working firearms, and I was completely tapped out of spells before I was locked into the Cube.”
He was asking everything I would have, but he was so focused on that, he wasn’t paying attention to Abner. Big Red looked like someone who had only barely finished the El Gigante five-pound burrito challenge at the local Mexican restaurant and was about to bust. Despite his obvious distress, that didn’t stop him from lumbering toward the door.
Tabitha said something about the last EnderTech crate in the room, but I didn’t hear the particulars because I was too busy hopping in front of Abner and holding out my arms. “Hold on, man! I know you want to find your dad. I sure as hell want to run out there to find Gabby too, but we can’t be crazy about it.”
That crude face tilted down at me, and I realized what should have been obvious. Golems don’t have digestive systems or anything. The Cube was still stuffed in his mouth, rendering him mute. Still, his eyes spoke a lot, peering longingly for the door. At least he stopped, hesitant to trample over my poor, defenseless body to get out.
Confident we had an understanding, I glanced over to see John rifling through the crate as Tabby had gone back to her desk, her fingers gliding over the keyboard of her computer, now back in its old familiar place. She was probably going through the building’s security system to figure out what the situation actually was. Personally, I was more concerned about the growing lack of sounds from beyond the door.
“Spirits above and below, the entire surveillance system has been compromised,” she reported. “Even feedback from the tesseract mirrors and warding pillars outside has gone dead.”
I could only guess as to the nature of the last bit, but I could guess more than enough to make me want to say fuck it and lead the charge out myself unarmed when Mr. Perez stood up from the crate, a very nice and very deadly looking assault rifle in each hand. They weren’t a model I recognized, which told me right off the bat we were in the presence of some bleeding-edge shit. It wasn’t a real shock, what with EnderTech being balls deep in the military tech business before I helped blow them to Hell, but it sure made my fingers twitch in anticipation to get my hands on one of them.
Christmas came early when John tossed me one of those sweet babies. “I’m hoping you know your way around a gun, Frank, because this is all we have.”
Hoping I looked as talented as I actually was, I gave the rifle a professional once over and held it at the ready. “It’ll be enough. It has to be.”
That’s really all that had to be said. We gave each other a short nod, a gesture I passed along to Abner. He punctuated the moment by throwing the office door open with a big red palm. With that, it was on.
And then just like that, it was off again fairly abruptly, at least in the sense of the slow-motion action scene any competent action flick would throw in at this point. Not that we didn’t have every intention of turning the inevitable onslaught of attackers into so much Swiss cheese. We simply ran into a rather effective roadblock.
See, while I had thought maybe the fight hadn’t been lost from the sounds of ongoing combat, I had instead been hearing the last gasps of a dead cause. Set up outside Tabitha’s office, as calmly waiting as the human resources manager about to fire your ass for being late to work for the fifth time that month, were the Whites in all their glory. They even brought out their trophy collection.
To my surprise, Roland Lambert stood in the center of the entire scene, the real deal and not some Jedi mind trick. His physical form mimicked the ghostly one exactly, but there was a presence there, a palpable power even my anti-magical senses could pick up on. To continue my surprise, to his right, eyes dull and zombie-like, Max Perez stood. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket, though I had to admit this was a strong basket, flanked as it was by Luna Ludell and a half-dozen of the White’s elite shock troops.
Speaking of those trophies, along the walls of the hallway, in various states of injury and consciousness, the best and brightest of the Ender’s resistance hung from luminous crosses in a gross aping of crucifixion. Thankfully, they weren’t nailed down or gutted. Tyrone, that big minotaur guy, even Old Man Johnson, as well as a whole cast of others hung there like brazen monuments to the Ender’s stunning defeat.
Of course, the crème of the crop were the last figures, closest to the centerpiece. Molly and Gabriela flanked Lambert’s triumphant gang. Molly was a bloody mess, almost as bad as when I had managed to pull her past death’s door. If she was awake, I couldn’t tell from where we stood. My hands tightened on the rifle’s grips. It was like Rollie was purposefully pushing all of my buttons.
Gabby was a bit better off, not that it helped my mood. Though it was obvious she hadn’t rolled over and let herself get captured. I could see where a bullet had passed through her side and some bastard had taken the time to break her left arm in a couple of places. An instant desire to murder whoever had done all of this, from the gunshot to her bruised cheek, filled me.
I nearly barreled out there anyway, but the absence of Joseph stopped me. He wasn’t among the White’s grisly collection. So where was he?
“Gabriela!” John and I both called simultaneously. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, it would have been an awkward moment. She looked up weakly, those green eyes still fiery with hope as she looked at me before her eyes widened and her jaw dropped in disbelief at the sight of her “dead” husband. Like I said, it would have been a real soap opera moment if Lambert hadn’t ruined it with his big mouth.
“We finally get a chance to meet in the flesh, Mr. Butcher,” the bastard nodded to me before smirking like a sick cat at John. “I see you’ve done exactly what you were meant to do in rescuing Captain Perez from his untimely imprisonment. I am truly sorry about that, John, but I didn’t know I would need to one day draw upon the Great Old Ones and their power. You were the last option open to keep them at bay.”
The Peacekeeper growled as he replied, his aim not wavering from Lambert. “You wouldn’t have had to do that if you and Drakos hadn’t betrayed us. You fanatical bastards are reaping what you’ve sowed at this point.”
“And don’t give me that jazz about me doing what you wanted,” I added on. “
We’ve been a step ahead of you and off the grid for a while now.” I was in full golden eyes mode now, trying to parse the myriad spells in the air around us.
We might have looked completely fucked, but we were only half-fucked. There were only seven of them after all. If John was as badass as he was making like, the four of us (if you included Tabitha on back-up, which why wouldn’t you?) should be able to make mincemeat of these guys … assuming Rollie didn’t kill his hostages with a snap of his finger. That was pretty likely though. Speaking of that …
“Magic is as much improvisation as preparation,” Saruman pointed out. “Ask Captain Perez or Director Marlowe. Yes, you may have thought you were acting without our knowledge, but my well of resources is very deep and there are layers and pacts that you have no idea about.” He made a subtle motion of his fingers and a spark of energy flowed from cross to cross, causing the White’s victims to twitch and scream in pain. “It doesn’t matter in the end, as I hold everything dear to both of you gentlemen in the palms of my hands.”
Impassive to this point, Luna’s lips curled down in a frown and she put a hand on Roland’s shoulder. “That’s enough, Elder. It’s obvious they understand their situation.” I don’t have a lot of good things to say about Luna, not after she fucked Gabby and me over, but I will say she was an old-school soldier, trained to take a dim view at things like torture and general dickery.
She also inadvertently gave us our one chance. As Lambert snapped his head toward her, an imperious command on his lips, I lashed out at the threads of magic tying Roland to Gabriela, Molly, and the others. La Corazon hammered a hero’s march in my chest, tearing through the spells. Roland Lambert might have been the Elder Magus of the Whites, but this off-the-cuff torture spell wasn’t dick compared to what I had shredded before.
Feet of Clay: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Clans of Shadow Book 2) Page 16
