by John Conroe
“Ah sir?” one of the agents asked, stepping forward. Stacia was struck by the respectful tone of the highly trained, thirty-ish federal agent, undoubtedly ex-military, armed to the teeth with weapons and gear as he approached the nineteen-year-old college witch.
“We noticed that you seem to use our flares to burn stuff,” the man, whose nametag read Hoyt, said with a glance at some of his companions. “We wondered what you might do with a thermite grenade?”
“You have thermite?” her witch asked, his gaze zeroing in on the big agent who would make almost two of him.
“Yes sir,” the agent said, just a touch uncomfortable with the laser-like focus of the kid who had just thrown a ten-ton chunk of metal with his mind. The agent unclipped a smoke grenade-looking object and held it up. Even in the gloom of the space, Stacia’s werewolf eyes could read the word thermite.
Declan took the offered grenade and turned to the monster in the circle. It was still straining to get at them but something in the young man’s expression, which she couldn’t see, caused it to pause.
Moving swiftly, Declan pulled open his bag. He rummaged for a moment, first coming up with a zip-locked baggie containing a mass of unwrapped pemmican bars. He popped the baggie open and tossed her the wad of high-calorie meat and nuts. She scarfed it down before he had time to pull a stick of chalk from his bag.
“Is that pink, sir?” another agent asked, slightly incredulous. Hoyt suddenly realized how close he was to the white werewolf and moved a careful few steps away. She ignored him, concentrating on her witch.
“I buy those little buckets of sidewalk chalk for kids, so it comes in all kinds of colors. Pink for this fucker will do just fine,” Declan said, dropping down to one knee. He drew another smaller circle, then a set of runes that ran across two feet of floor to connect with the runes on the spirit monster’s circle.
“Fire in the hole,” he said, backing up and bumping into Stacia, who had been crouching over him protectively.
Everyone moved back a few yards as Declan pulled the pin on the grenade and set it inside the circle. He let go with one hand while closing the circle with his other, then settled back just a few feet.
The grenade went off and burned like the center of the sun. Somehow, not a flicker of heat touched any of the onlookers, all of it contained in the foot-wide circle.
Declan looked up at the monster. “You are bound by my hand. Now burn by my will,” he said, making a two-handed push in the thing’s direction.
Instantly, the eye-searing light around the grenade dimmed and new light flared around the monster’s feet. Suddenly, the grenade in the small circle all but went out and the bigger circle became almost a solid column of white-hot light, lancing up to the ceiling, where the sudden illumination startled a small dragon perched on a steel rafter.
The monster disappeared from view, completely occluded by the brilliant, fusion-bright pillar of flame and light. Stacia looked up at the ceiling where the beam touched the metal. Red-hot drips of molten steel pulled away from the edge of the circle and started to fall.
She hooked one four-inch claw into Declan’s rear belt loop and gently pulled him back another two feet, just getting him clear before the first droplet of melted ceiling hit right in front of where he had stood. He didn’t say a word or make a motion, his concentration completely focused on the two circles and whatever he was doing to the thermodynamics between them.
The paramilitary agents around them noticed, though, even as they divided their attention between the spectacle of fire and the dangerous spaces around them, which were newly illuminated by the massive tower of light. Partially, they were uneasily watching her every move, but when her nose caught a scent and her head snapped around to study the shadows, they all trained weapons and lights where she was looking. She realized they were monitoring her for her reactions to things they couldn’t sense.
Humans adapt quickly or die, she thought.
The column of fire suddenly expired, the darkness flooding back.
“Turns out I was wrong,” Declan said to her. “It wasn’t immune to fire. Just warded.”
The bigger circle was empty, the base a hollowed crater of glowing red concrete and orange hot rebar. The monster of spirit was gone, like it had never been there.
Chapter 28
Buck Thompson pounded up the metal stairs to the second floor of the mill, standing aside for two tense-looking DOAA agents who were on their way down with a bumpy-looking body bag on a stretcher.
Behind him, Devany and Hampton watched the litter go by with concerned eyes. Devany seemed particularly tense, holding his Remington 870 shotgun with what looked like a painfully tight grip. The body bag had looked a little too full.
Continuing up the stairs, Buck found an open space where little bot lights lit up the dark corners and more heavily armed agents stood watch. He remembered coming here as a boy, with his father, to visit the plant foreman about an order of paper. It had been noisy and bright, with never-ending rivers of mile-wide paper flowing from one machine to the next. Now it looked like Armageddon’s foyer, all dirt, corroded metal, and darkness.
A cluster of agents standing on the edge of a deep pool of blackness so deep that even the powerful robotic light units couldn’t illuminate it. It was the agents who caught Buck’s attention. Moving closer, he found the two surviving leaders of Hunter units One and Two conferring over a blueprint of the building.
One of them, whose nametag read Hollis, looked up at them expectantly.
“Sheriff Grable wants his own people in here,” Buck said a touch defensively.
“Welcome to the party, Sergeant,” Hollis said. “We can use all the bodies we can get. We’re down almost half our men. You got silver in those popguns?”
“Yeah, slugs first,” Buck said. “Then buckshot.”
“I would have argued about that choice with you before, but after seeing firsthand how handy a scatter gun is in here with this stuff… well, let’s just say I get it,” Hollis said, waving a hand ahead of them.
At his gesture, Buck saw Stacia Reynolds, kneeling on the floor about twenty feet away, thumbing rounds from a bandolier into her stubby little double pump gun. Just beyond her, no more than two feet away, sat the witch kid, Declan, cross-legged like he was taking a meditation class. Except most meditation classes don’t have free-floating steel orbs hovering around the participants.
“What are they doing?” Buck asked.
“The way I understand it, he’s scouting out the enemy. She’s on overwatch,” Hollis said with a wry grimace that said he didn’t really understand anything.
“Wouldn’t drones be better?” Devany asked.
“They’d be great… if the damned things would work. They keep breaking down in here. Either won’t start at all, or the batteries go dead in seconds, or they just friggin’ crash. The kid says he can feel the building enough to figure out what the bad guys are up to. Based on what he’s done so far, I’m not second-guessing him, for all that he looks barely old enough to drive,” Hollis said.
“I don’t know much about him, but she says he’s a real power among witches, and I’ve got nothing but respect for her,” Buck said.
“The two of them are the reason that any of us are still alive,” the second leader said, his nametag reading Cochran. “Them and that dragon thing,” he said, pointing up overhead.
“Holy shit,” Devany said. Silently, Buck agreed. A dog-sized dragon was perched on a steel beam up in the rafters, silently watching the darkness, its body almost directly overhead of the werewolf girl and her witch boyfriend.
“It’s like the freaking Munsters,” Cochran said.
“How many men have you lost?” Buck asked, hating himself for the question but needing the answer.
“We lost the first guy as we entered the building. He just got yanked off his feet like a doll, straight up. Then we had three guys wounded by the Pet Cematary army,” Hollis said. “And Hunter team 3 had four guys ripped apa
rt by that, that thing, including the team leader. Then the last one lost his arm but the kid dumped some mushroom powder in a metal flask, heated it with his hand, and poured it on the arm and the stump and shoved them back together. Then he put something that looked like blood in my guy’s mouth and told me he thought he’d live and possibly be able to have the arm reattached,” Hollis answered. “And my team sharpshooter got sniped by that ex-military werewolf.”
“Tacchino,” Deputy Hampton said.
“Whatever. So we’re down nine guys,” Hollis said, voice cold.
“Blood in his mouth?” Devany asked. “That’s fucked up.”
“It wasn’t blood. It was vampire plasma and it saved his life, and you couldn’t buy it for any amount of money,” a calm female voice said. Stacia was looking at them from twenty feet away, obviously able to hear them just fine despite the quiet voices they’d been using.
“Hello? Demidova Corp? Remember?” she said.
Declan shifted his body and her head snapped around to watch him resettle himself before turning back to them.
“So he’ll be a vampire?” Devany asked, voicing the question that all of them wanted to ask.
“No, dumbass. He’ll live and because of the chaga tea and the vamp plasma, he’ll likely get his arm back,” she said, standing up in one lithe motion. She wore a stretchy black shirt, shotgun bandolier, and a pair of black tights that were so thin, they looked more like body paint than material.
Declan popped up with the energy of youth, but with a lot less grace. The floating balls swung around and followed him as he moved.
“How is your guy?” he asked Hollis and Cochran.
“Stable and en route to the hospital. What did you find out with your meditation thingy?” Hollis asked.
“They’re down at the far end. I can’t tell for certain, but I think they’re down to four regular wolves, plus the alpha, the witch, and one more that I can’t quite get a handle on. And I think your first trooper, the one that got yanked away, is there as well. He’s pretty heavily wounded though, but still alive,” Declan said, glancing down at the blueprints on the empty box Hollis was using as a war table.
He traced a finger across the drawings. “Lots of vats and holding tanks ahead. I think this must have been where the wood pulp entered the building?” he looked up at Buck, Hampton, and Devany for confirmation.
“That’s right. It’s a fair bit of distance away, though. This building is big,” Buck said.
“So from here, it’s gonna get real hard. That part up ahead is the center of their home and she’s gonna have some real harsh shit lined up for unwanted visitors like us, and all that big, built-in machinery worries me a bit,” Declan said.
“I absolutely hate that you just said it’s going to get harder,” Cochran said.
“How do the werewolves run all around and not get caught in her traps?” Devany asked.
“Well, the witch can teach her wards and traps to identify friends from foes. Or she can give them a sorta key to the kingdom, like a necklace or bracelet or something, that lets them pass through unharmed,” Declan said.
“Really? A passkey?” Devany asked. “Did you all check these bodies for anything like that?” he asked, pointing at the three dead werewolves.
Declan frowned, started to speak, and then frowned again. Instead of answering, he walked over to the nearest beast carcass and began to examine its neck and feet. Stacia moved to another one.
Declan looked stumped but Stacia was examining the head of her wolf with a thoughtful look.
“D, is there a bone earring on yours?” she asked.
Switching from the heavy neck fur, Declan checked first one ear and then the other. “Yes. Yes there is,” he said, pulling his tomahawk from its kydex sheath. He choked up on the handle, holding the razor-sharp little ax just under its head, which let him use the fine edge to slice into the were’s ear. “Got it,” he said, triumphantly.
“You can just spin them around till you get to the break in the ring and just pull them off,” Stacia said with a smirk.
“Oh. Not up on ear fashion technology,” he said, examining the bloody ring of bone he held in his fingers. His head was bent, but Buck was pretty sure his expression was one of chagrin. Never doubt the power of the female opinion; he thought, watching the boy witch.
“Yeah, this is a ward key,” Declan said. “How about yours?”
“Not up on witch technology,” she said, still smirking as she handed him the earring.
“But definitely up to date on current trends in sass,” Declan muttered as he studied her addition.
“This one is all broken,” Deputy Hampton said from the third body, whose head was a pulped mess.
“Well, we have two. One is all we need. It’ll let me get into the trap so I can disarm it from the inside—at least in theory,” Declan said.
“What’s to keep her from changing the locks?” Buck asked.
“Time. Hopefully. It takes time to modify a ward or trap. Some are simple and can be done relatively quickly, but most of what we’ve seen has been long-term, fairly complex stuff that took her a lot of time to create,” Declan said. “She’ll get to it eventually, though.”
“Could you do what she’s done? Could you animate those dead bodies or make that monster?” Hollis asked him, suddenly.
“Could I? Do I have the knowledge? Yes. Would I mess with death magic and sacrifice a human to create a guardian? No,” Declan said, looking offended.
“But you could?” Hollis pressed.
“Could you build a bomb that would blow up Fetter, Agent Hollis? Could you figure out a poison to put in the water supply and kill almost everyone?” Stacia asked, eyes hard.
Buck watched the realization hit Hollis’s face as her words sank home. But most of Buck’s attention was on the beautiful girl, and not on her more obvious anatomical assets, either. He was highly aware of the tension in her shoulders and neck, the tendons and tight muscles of her arms, which she had crossed in front of her. And he remembered clearly the deadly killing machine she turned into. That had come through the helmet camera feeds just fine.
He wasn’t the only one to pick up on her instant hostility. Every man in the group edged back slightly—except Declan, who leaned over until his shoulder touched hers. It was a tiny motion, barely noticeable, but somehow it was enough to drain away the worst of her anger.
“You are wondering how dangerous I am. Am I a threat to the public? If this girl witch can be capable of so much evil, how much could I be capable of?” Declan asked. “It’s a good question. But as Stacia points out, there are lots of people who can create widespread death and destruction with just the contents of a local hardware store.”
“Most of those can’t wave a hand and burn a building to the ground,” Hollis said.
“So it’s ease of destruction you’re concerned about?” Declan asked. “Devany here can load an empty six pack with a mixture of gas and dishwashing soap, attach a road flare from the trunk of his car, and toss it with a wave of a hand and accomplish the same thing. Not to mention that all of you have access to weapons and explosives that regular people don’t,” Declan said.
“We’ve all been vetted by our respective agencies,” Cochran said.
“Whoopie do,” Stacia said, spinning one finger in a circle. “Like that’s a hundred percent effective. How about Tacchino? Uncle Sam taught him to be a skilled killer and now he’s using his training against his own country,” Stacia said. “And he almost killed me.”
“It just doesn’t seem right that any individual could have the power that you do,” Hollis said.
“Power is unevenly distributed across the population. That’s a fact. As cops, you guys have plenty of power to abuse, and you can’t tell me it doesn’t happen. I have my own power, but if I abuse it, I’ll become a target and someone, somewhere will take me out. Do I have dangerous knowledge? Yup. But so does anyone with a smartphone and Google,” Declan said.
; “A smartphone can’t kill with a thought,” Hollis said. “And we generally keep track of dangerous individuals.”
“And you and your agency keep track of me. What was it? Some kind of list? You even have a special list for me. Now, if our soul searching can be put on hold for a moment, maybe we can get on with capturing or stopping these dangerous individuals that have committed crimes and clearly demonstrated a willingness to harm the general public,” Declan said.
Buck had kept quiet, watching the byplay and wondering about Hollis’s judgment. It should have been blatantly obvious that this young man and young woman were a pair. An incredibly dangerous and effective pair that instantly came to each other’s defense. And Hollis was poking them while standing in the middle of a combat zone that only they were uniquely qualified to handle, but didn’t have to.
