“Sanchez is going to attack with or without you,” he said, his expression bleak. “Hammond told us that everyone who went through the Hall of Judgment—men, women, children—all of them are in danger of losing their souls and falling into comas.”
A chill crept along Kira’s nerves. “That could be hundreds of people. Maybe thousands.”
“I know.” Khefar nodded. “Sanchez realizes it too. Hundreds of people abruptly falling into comas for no apparent reason will incite a citywide panic.”
“One way or another, the reason behind the spontaneous unconsciousness would get out,” Kira said. “Gilead can’t risk that type of exposure. I can’t even begin to imagine what sort of containment that would require.”
“Which is why Sanchez is assembling a volunteer strike force to launch a Level One assault on the Congress Center.”
“Mother of Light,” Kira breathed. “If she does that, the Lady of Shadows could start destroying scarabs. People would think there’s some sort of pandemic. Chaos would erupt.”
“Giving them exactly what they want.” Khefar cursed. “Either way, they win.”
“The only way we have a chance is if I go in. I can at least buy some time for you and the SRT to find the scarabs and get them to someone who can purify them. I can call the DMZ, see if Yessara will help us.”
“Good idea.” Khefar climbed to his feet, extending a hand to help her up. “I’m not happy about you being the sacrificial lamb in all of this.”
“Me either, but is there really another choice? I can’t walk away. I don’t want any more deaths on my hands. Not when I know there’s something I can do to prevent it.”
“I know.” He brushed the back of his hand down her cheek, his gaze lingering on her eyes. “You ready to go back?”
“Yeah.” She scrubbed her gloved hands over her face, the smell of the synthetic material comforting. “You knew I’d decide to face Set, didn’t you?”
“I know that you haven’t run from a challenge since I’ve known you, and you’ve faced some pretty intense challenges,” he said. “I also figured that at the very least you’d want to face the Lady of Shadows so you can tell her to screw off to her face.”
Kira grinned. “That does have a certain allure.”
“I didn’t exactly think you were paranoid before, but now I’m beginning to wonder.”
“Wonder about me being paranoid?”
“No. I can’t reach Anansi and you can’t reach Balm. To say those two are interested in what we do is a gross understatement.”
“So you’re finally on board with my paranoia, huh?”
“It’s not paranoia when there’s someone actually after you.”
That brought her up short. “You think someone’s after me?”
He nodded. “I’ve tried reaching out to Anansi since we went to the hospital. Granted, when he’s visiting his wife he tends to get distracted, but he told me to contact him if there’s a need.”
“I say this qualifies.” Kira settled her coat into place. “I still can’t reach Balm, I haven’t had any direct responses from Ma’at, there’s an Illuminator in town, and we’re about to walk into a trap set by the Lady of Shadows herself. And everybody seems to be fine with it. Why?”
Khefar’s expression grew grim. “Maybe you shouldn’t go.”
“You know I have to. There are literally souls at stake. I don’t know why everyone has bailed on us, but if they want us to handle this on our own, fine.”
“Whatever this is,” Khefar said darkly.
“We won’t know until we get there.”
“True.” Khefar settled his gear.
“Let’s go find Sanchez.”
“Wait.”
She turned to him. “What now?”
“This.” He pulled her close, kissed her. She hesitated for a moment. Then her eyes slid shut as she wrapped her arms around his waist, kissing him back with equal intensity.
“You need to make it through too,” he told her. “Don’t go dying on me in there.”
“I’m going to try not to,” she promised. “Have I told you how much I appreciate you?”
“No.”
She smiled, pushed open the door. “Remind me to get around to it sometime.”
Chap†er 21
They returned to the viewing room. To Kira’s relief, the interrogation side was empty, Hammond and the Illuminator nowhere to be seen. “What happened to him?”
“Dr. Rasmussen has taken him into her care,” Duncan answered, her professionalism firmly back in place. “It’s doubtful that he’ll be a functioning member of society again—not without a lot of work.”
Which meant that people at the Carlos Museum and elsewhere in the museum exhibition and academic world—people who knew and worked with Kira as an antiquities expert—would wonder about their colleague’s disappearance. “He can’t disappear without a reasonable explanation. I need to be able to tell people something when they ask. And they will ask.”
“I’m sure we’ll be able to provide a plausible cover story for you to disseminate,” Sanchez said. “The Nubian bring you up to speed?”
“Yeah.”
“And?” Sanchez prompted.
“And it sounds like there’s going to be a heckuva party at the Congress Center.” Kira tried for a careless shrug. “Since I’m on the guest list, I’d better show up.”
Sanchez continued her basilisk-like gaze. “Seems to me that you’re the guest of honor.” She nodded toward the two-way window. “Know what he was talking about?”
Kira hesitated. “Which part?”
“The part about the Lady of Shadows waiting for you.”
“Oh, that.”
Sanchez cocked an eyebrow. “Well?
“I’ve sent a lot of her children back to Shadow,” Kira said with a shrug. “Makes sense that she’d hold it against me.”
The section chief gave Kira a stare that rivaled the most intense of Balm’s formidable glares. “So we’re potentially confronting the Mother of Shadow, and this creature called Ammit the Devourer who is somehow holding people’s souls hostage.”
“Yeah. We’re not going to have an easy time getting those souls back.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” Sanchez actually looked … discomfited. “This is a trap. It’s almost certain suicide for anyone who goes into the exhibit—that is, if the whole Center isn’t booby-trapped.”
“I know.” The thought of more Gilead agents—or anyone else for that matter—dying on her watch made Kira feel more than a little ill herself. “Maybe we should leave your men out of this.”
“Like hell.”
The retort came to her in stereo. She looked between Khefar and Sanchez. Both wore equal expressions of stubborn determination. “Fine,” Kira said, holding up her hands in surrender. “I was mostly joking anyway.”
“Uh-huh.” Sanchez didn’t look or sound convinced. “Let’s head to Control. You can give us a full debrief there.”
Gilead East’s Control Room was the equivalent of Mission Control at NASA. TacRoom One was the largest in Gilead East, boasting one wall of monitors cued to various locations around Atlanta, and another containing an interactive electronic map. More than a dozen analysts were bent over keyboards and headsets at tiered workstations placed in pods of four about the cavernous room. A stream of runners continuously made their way to the analysts via a set of double doors. Those doors, Kira knew, led to a set of windowless rooms holding the ergonomic loungers for the cadre of psychics Gilead called “sweepers.” The sweepers detected every minuscule flare of Shadow magic in the Greater Metropolitan Atlanta area while the analyst crunched the data to detect potential threats.
Sanchez took her place on a bridge of sorts looking down onto the bustling activity below. Beside Sanchez stood the two commanders from the interrogation room. Rows of black-clad guards stood in formation, waiting expectantly. Several of them had been on standby when Kira and Khefar had taken the fake Dagger of Khefer
atum into Demoz’s club. Kira knew they’d leap at the chance to avenge their comrades lost at Enig’s hands.
Sanchez took an earbud and a handheld from her assistant, her version of battle gear. “Chaser Solomon, you already met Commander Charlie Jenkins and Commander Siri Sonoranvan. They’ll lead the Gilead strike teams.”
Kira nodded, not bothering to extend her hand. The commanders didn’t either. Gilead associates had learned early on not to touch her.
Sonoranvan nodded at Khefar. “I saw him in the interrogation room. Who’s he? Another Chaser or a civilian?”
“Neither.” Kira turned to Khefar. “Khefar backs me up. Once we engage in the field, he’s second to me.”
That surprised both captains. They knew to take orders from a Shadowchaser when hunting Shadow Adepts or Avatars, but if Khefar wasn’t a Chaser … “Ma’am?”
“You both have been through Gilead tactical training so you know your military history,” Sanchez said, barely glancing up from her handheld. “You remember Hannibal of Carthage?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, meet the man who suggested the elephant as a war animal.”
Both agents gave Khefar a second measured glance. Kira bit the inside of her jaw to keep from smiling. She didn’t know if the story was true or not, and neither did Sanchez. But the section chief liked to keep everyone on their toes.
Sonoranvan gave Khefar another assessing look. “Excuse me for saying so, but he doesn’t look a day over thirty.”
“Multiply that by one hundred fifty,” Khefar suggested, “give or take a decade.”
“Let’s just say he’s got several lifetimes of military experience,” Kira said. She turned to Sanchez. “Are we ready for the debrief?”
The section chief nodded. “Tell us seriously what we’re facing.”
“From what we saw with the Illuminator, Hammond is an ardent follower of Shadow. He used the Journey Through the Underworld exhibit as a ruse to collect souls for Shadow using a construct that mimics the aspects of Ammit, an ancient Egyptian demoness. When the deceased reached the Hall of Judgment, his or her heart—considered the center of thought, memory, and emotion—was placed on a large scale. Ammit devoured those whose souls weren’t in balance with Ma’at’s feather of Truth and Justice.”
“So you don’t think this is the real Ammit?”
“No,” Khefar answered. “The real Ammit doesn’t put people into comas. She eats your soul. While some traditions say the soul is doomed to a restless existence, most believed that for the soul to be devoured by Ammit meant that you were forever destroyed. No passing ‘Go,’ no collecting two hundred dollars.”
“I’m not at all one hundred percent sure on the rules, but I don’t think the Lady of Shadows can enter this plane of existence as long as Balm is here. That won’t slow her down, though, since she controls Fallen and Shadow Adepts,” Kira explained. “She has someone acting on her behalf, a Lightchaser or a Shadow Avatar. It may even be the same person we encountered in London and Cairo.” Kira hoped it was. She still had a score to settle with Marit.
“Whoever it is can pick and choose which people to put into a coma. I’m not sure why the other humans and hybrids were picked as victims, but Wynne Marlowe was specially selected. These souls are being used as leverage to get us—me in particular—to come to the exhibit for some sort of showdown.”
Kira clenched her hands, anger and worry melding like alloy in her gut. “They didn’t have to go through all this trouble. Harming all these people, holding their souls as hostage.”
“They wanted you there on their terms, not ours,” Sanchez said. “Makes them think they have us at a disadvantage. I say let them keep thinking that way. People who are overconfident tend to make mistakes, and when they do, we turn it to our advantage.”
Good information to know, Kira thought. Good thing she wasn’t feeling all that confident. “That’s the Reader’s Digest version. What’s the plan?”
“We’ve got the blueprints of the Congress Center, as well as the exhibit layout and the delivery area,” Sanchez said. She tapped her tablet computer, and the display wall showed the sprawling layout for the Georgia World Congress Center. “You will have the first two strike teams with you, making entry here and here. The sweepers will work from here to set up a net around the Center. We will have Special Response Teams Three and Four on standby, and the convention center’s police force and security have already been ordered to make themselves scarce.”
Kira nodded. “That will work. We don’t know what or how many we’re facing. But I’m betting that our answer lies at the end of the exhibit, in the Weighing of the Heart ceremony. That’s where people were getting their souls taken, so it’s more than likely where the showdown will take place.”
“Since they are using the Weighing of the Heart ceremony as a basis for their thievery, it might be wise to take a copy of the spells with us,” Khefar suggested.
“Good idea. If they’re using the Weighing of the Heart ceremony to take the souls, they’ve basically agreed by default to go by the rules of Egyptian funerary practices and religion. That means we should be able to use the spells from the book to counteract it.”
“Which spell, though?” Khefar wondered. “The Negative Confessions?”
“We’ll probably need that one for us.” Kira rubbed her forehead. “It’s been a long time since I’ve looked through the book of spells. Aren’t there references to prevent the soul from being stolen?”
“If you’re unsure, we’ll need to rely on the analysts,” Sanchez said. “Data is their specialty. It’s what we pay them for.”
Sanchez was right. The analysts would be a faster and more reliable resource than her memory of Egyptian funerary text. “They’ll need to work quickly,” she said. “We’ll probably need answers almost instantaneously.”
Sanchez gestured to an aide, who immediately approached with a tray of tiny communication devices. “Everyone will have communicators and will be in constant contact. We’ll be able to monitor what you’re hearing and seeing.” Sanchez turned to Kira. “Do you have a plan for returning the souls to their rightful owners?”
Kira nodded. “Kill the Ammit construct, recover the heart scarabs that were used as tokens, and, if necessary, purify them with my Lightblade, though it may be better to have a Light Healer on hand for that. If I recall correctly, there are a number of spells that protect the soul and return the heart to the deceased.”
“Good. I’ll have several analysts working the various copies of the funerary texts. Any clue you can give us as to which one we should rely on could be vital.”
“Agreed.” Kira balanced the communicator in the palm of one gloved hand and used her teeth to pull off the other glove. She held her bare fingers over the earpiece, concentrating a focused brush of power over the device. Sure, they were spares and probably not used recently, but she didn’t need to get an accidental earful of someone else’s psychic communications.
“Are you going into combat like that?” Sanchez asked.
Kira looked down at her jeans and overcoat. “Somehow I don’t think the Lady of Shadows is going to care how I’m dressed,” she said. “However, Khefar and I have extra gear in the car. We’ll gear up in the parking deck, then head out.”
“See that you do. I won’t have the Balm of Gilead riding my ass because I sent you out ill-prepared.” Sanchez turned to the guards assembled below. “We are facing a Level One incursion,” she told them. “Our enemy knows we’re coming, and in fact has done everything to ensure that we come by taking the souls of innocents on both sides of the Balance. With that sort of invitation, it would be rude of us not to show up.”
Several of the guards laughed. The room quickly sobered. “We are going to get those souls back. We’re going to save lives tonight. Given what we encountered with that Level Two event two months ago, it’s entirely possible that winning those souls back is going to cost some lives on our side. The commanders and the Shadowchase
r are going to do everything they can to make sure that doesn’t happen, but make no mistake: this is an extremely dangerous situation. This mission is strictly volunteer only. No one is ordered to go. No one will be rebuked if they choose to stay behind. If you prefer not to go, now’s the time to speak up.”
No one moved. No one made a sound. Everyone waited, ready.
Sanchez nodded. “All right, then. May the Light shine on you all. Commanders, you’re a go.”
Chap†er 22
Less than five minutes later, Khefar’s Charger rendezvoused with two armored vans for the short trek to the convention center’s B Building loading docks. Train tracks ran beside the yard, beneath the convention center, and close to the loading docks. It was the perfect place for the Gilead vehicles to sit, and an even better vantage point from which the Special Response Teams could breach the convention center complex.
Khefar popped the Charger’s trunk and followed Kira out of the car. Luckily they hadn’t switched out gear since their altercation with the bultungin. Kira quickly stripped off her coat. She tossed it into the trunk and pulled out her tactical vest. Anticipation and fear coiled inside her, tightening her muscles for action. When it came down to it, she preferred fighting over thinking. Thinking always led to trouble of one sort or another. She couldn’t think about what lay ahead of her in the exhibit hall. She couldn’t think about Hammond’s high-pitched hysterical ramblings. She couldn’t think about what could happen once she reached the Hall of Two Truths. She certainly couldn’t think about whether or not she’d leave the building alive.
After fastening her vest, she handed a second one to Khefar, then checked the clips on several guns before holstering each in its assigned spot. Like Khefar, she preferred her blades over other weapons, but without knowing her target, she’d take all the weapons she could carry while still being able to handle herself in hand-to-hand combat.
Khefar tried the second vest on but immediately shrugged out of it. “No, thanks,” he said, handing it back to her. “I’d rather move freely.”
Shadow Fall Page 24
