The Vanity Case (Sondra Blake Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘We’ve yet to run into him in person so we can check, but the evidence–’

  ‘Impossible.’ His tone was flat, but there was an arrogance in his expression which spoke volumes. TinshoKa was generally quite a humble man, but not when it came to his beliefs, and one of those beliefs was that his students were taught well.

  ‘We’ve spoken to a number of people who knew him recently.’ The emphasis was there to point out that the shaman had not seen KonTash in the last several months, probably years. ‘The signs are there, if you’re willing to see them.’

  ‘SetaGan came to me with the same ridiculous theory and justification this morning. I told her what I’m telling you: no student of mine would fall prey to a demon.’

  ‘Not even one you kicked out for attempted rape?’

  ‘KonTash is a fool, but he knows better than to make deals with demons.’ He went on before Sondra could respond, steamrollering any further discussion. ‘I’ve spoken to your commissioner. I’ll be going out with you and your partner tonight. We’ll find KonTash and speak with him. We’ll settle this matter and put an end to these riots in one move, assuming that, as you say, KonTash is leading the gangs.’

  The commissioner was getting to be a real pain in the ass. This was clutching at straws, and it was dangerous, but she knew that TinshoKa was a stubborn man. One of the reasons he was well respected in the orc community was that he refused to back down on his ideas and ideals, even when he was patently wrong. ‘I’m going to put it on record that I consider this a bad idea.’

  ‘That will simply make you appear foolish when I’m proven right.’

  Sondra gave a shrug. There was no point in trying to stop the man, but she was not feeling especially diplomatic in the face of too little sleep and a stubborn old man. ‘In this case, I’d rather be seen as foolish than proven right, but I think the best I can hope for is that we all survive your ego. I’ll check when we’re being deployed and let you know where to meet us. If you’ll excuse me, I need to make sure we can keep you safe.’ She started for the inner door before he could respond, annoyance building as she walked. Tonight was going to be bad. Really bad.

  ~~~

  No one in the command vehicle was comfortable with TinshoKa being there. He loomed over the operations officers, listening to the radio traffic and glaring at the displays. Things had kicked off early; there had been more disturbances through the day than there had been the day before, and the first crowds had begun to appear around five thirty, ten minutes before sunset, and the battle lines had been drawn then.

  There had been sporadic reports of an orc using magic since then, but nothing to draw Sondra’s attention to any specific place. TinshoKa was more determined and less ready to wait for something definite.

  ‘There!’ TinshoKa said, his tone demanding. ‘Someone cast a fire spell into the police ranks on West One Hundred and Thirty-Third Street.’

  ‘Probably a charm,’ Sondra replied. ‘He’s got orcs throwing charms around in various areas. He’s trying to draw us out.’

  ‘Then we should–’

  ‘He’s trying to draw us out without revealing himself. We almost had him yesterday in Marcus Garvey Park. He doesn’t want to repeat that error. He wants to draw us into an area he has strong control over, and then hit us with a large force without showing his face. We are not going to jump at ghosts, menTaNin. He’ll get impatient and try to flush us out soon enough.’

  ‘We are wasting time,’ the orc said, his voice a growl, and orcs could growl really impressively.

  The thing was that TinshoKa was in his mid-sixties and revered for his magic and wisdom, but Sondra had over a decade on him. It was a fact he had forgotten. Neither his wisdom nor his magic meant much to her when they were coupled with his arrogance. ‘One of the things you learn from policework, and war, is the value of patience, menTaNin. Sit down and wait. It won’t be long.’

  ~~~

  It had been fifteen minutes. Then the call had come in that a crowd was gathering on Malcolm X Boulevard, just north of the junction with West 128th Street. KonTash had been seen among the assembled orcs, calling them to stand and fight, and TinshoKa had insisted on going there. This time, Sondra had agreed.

  Now they were standing behind a line of police officers with riot shields, watching as the growing horde of orcs built themselves toward charging the police lines. It was probably going to go just as well as the last several times, even with KonTash egging them on and maybe providing magical support. Sondra was betting his primary goal was to attract her out where he could try to nail her; the demon had probably figured out who his biggest threat was. That was not going to happen either.

  ‘We’re going to need to coordinate this,’ Sondra said. She was there with Clarke, as well as Parry and Ortega, and a SWAT lieutenant. ‘We need to break in there, grab KonTash, and make sure that the demon can’t escape when we do. Then we need to extract so we can banish the thing while it’s still locked up. It’ll be much harder if we have to start employing KonTash’s link with the demon to work the magic.’

  ‘It’s going to be hard enough to grab him,’ the lieutenant said. ‘He’s surrounded by a small army.’

  ‘That will change when they attack. Look, I’m not saying this is going to be easy, but we need to try. You’ve got four magicians ready to help. It’s a grab and snag raid. We just–’

  ‘Where’s TinshoKa?’ Clarke asked suddenly, frowning as he looked around. ‘I’d have thought he’d want to be in on this.’

  Sondra glanced at him, annoyed at the interruption, but then the thought that the orc was not part of the discussion hit her as more alarming. ‘I haven’t seen him for a few minutes. Where is he?’

  ‘Shit!’ Ortega exclaimed. ‘He’s there.’

  Everyone looked in the direction he was pointing in time to see the shaman walking out to stand in front of the police cordon. He marched out until he was maybe thirty feet in front of the cops, fifty from the orc war party building down the road.

  ‘Who the Hell let him out there?’ Sondra said, not exactly expecting an answer. ‘We need to get him back here. Lieutenant–’

  ‘KonTash!’ TinshoKa roared. He had a strong voice, useful for beating down youthfully exuberant students.

  ‘Too late,’ Clarke said. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Damn it,’ Sondra muttered. ‘We wait and see whether he does know KonTash better than his mother.’

  ‘KonTash, I wish to speak with you.’ TinshoKa raised his arms to encompass the gathering. They had grown silent, ready to listen, which seemed like a good thing. ‘To all of you. We are all orcs. We all know the injustice visited upon us by the society we find ourselves in. But this… This is not the way. This will not see our rights enforced and our lives bettered. This will make our plight worse. We need to talk. We need to make the humans realise that we are not what they think we are.’

  Ortega glanced at Sondra and gave a shrug. ‘Talk’s never done us that much good.’

  ‘No,’ Sondra replied, ‘but neither has violence.’

  ‘Our time will come,’ TinshoKa continued, and that was when KonTash chose to cut in.

  ‘Our time is now, old man. You’ve forgotten what it means to be an orc. You stand there in a suit! A suit and tie. Just like the tikuguk you believe will give us what we need. Your time is past. We will listen to your useless words no more.’ KonTash was visible toward the front of the crowd now and he raised a hand as he said the last words, pointing a finger toward TinshoKa. ‘No more, pulshiTe.’

  With a gasp, TinshoKa fell to his knees and then doubled over in pain. The orcs roared as though they had just won a war and a few rocks were thrown, bouncing harmlessly off the shield wall, but keeping the cops back from the shaman.

  ‘What?’ Clarke asked. ‘What just happened?’ He started toward the shield wall, wondering what he could do.

  ‘He hit him with a spell,’ Sondra said, sounding a little exasperated. She focused her mind and pulled tog
ether a spell she knew so well it was almost part of her. Her mind flowed out and over the fallen shaman, and she gasped. ‘Fuck!’

  The use of that one word brought Clarke to a standstill: he had never heard Sondra drop an f-bomb before. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the Curse of Burning Death. He’s burning from the inside.’

  ‘Can’t we counter it?’

  ‘It can be countered, but in time to stop it killing him? Not with just four of us. He might be able to throw it off before he dies. We need to get out there and cover him. He’s going to need treatment if he survives. Lieutenant?’

  The lieutenant pushed forward toward the row of shields, and they were moving forward against the stones flying toward them within a few seconds. The orcs began to advance as the shields did, shouting hard enough to almost drown out the screams coming from TinshoKa as he tried to crawl back to relative safety. Sondra and Clarke moved forward in the hopes of getting to the shaman and helping somehow, though Sondra knew that there was almost nothing she could do to help.

  It took just over a minute to push the line forward to cover TinshoKa, but by then his cries had died out and he was unmoving. Clarke darted in to check his pulse, jerking his hand back. ‘Shit, he’s hot!’

  ‘He’s still burning,’ Sondra said, casting a spell just to check that there was no life left in the shaman to save. ‘He’s gone.’ She turned her head to look back at the orcs. ‘So’s KonTash. We’re going to need a minor miracle to find him now.’

  25th February.

  The miracle looked a lot like an orc. Specifically, it looked like SetaGan standing outside the command truck with two armed patrol officers keeping an eye on her. She did look impatient, which tended to come out as annoyed with an orc’s brow.

  ‘She’s demanding to see you,’ one of the officers said to Clarke.

  ‘Both of you,’ SetaGan said quickly.

  The officer looked at her. ‘You said–’

  ‘I have information about KonTash,’ SetaGan interrupted. ‘I know where he is.’

  Sondra raised an eyebrow and waved the two officers away. ‘Thanks. We’ll take it from here?’

  Clarke took a look at SetaGan, dressed in denim shorts and a cropped T-shirt, her feet in running shoes. ‘Do you want to go inside?’ he asked. ‘It’s, uh, warmer in the van.’

  SetaGan looked at the van and shrugged. ‘The cold doesn’t bother me, and I couldn’t stand up straight in there.’ The cold was bothering Clarke, indirectly; SetaGan might not be cold, but her nipples were tenting the fabric of her shirt quite obviously.

  ‘You said you know where KonTash is,’ Sondra prompted.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re willing to tell us where your son is hiding because?’

  ‘He’s not my son. My son is a fool, but not a murderer.’

  Sondra nodded. ‘We haven’t managed to locate his HQ.’

  ‘You aren’t an orc.’ SetaGan scowled, glaring around her at the various cops. ‘Face it, this has been coming for a while. If there were more orcs in the police, maybe we would see more equal treatment.’

  Sondra shrugged. ‘I kind of doubt it. I get pulled over if I’m not driving a cop car. Where do we find him, SetaGan?’

  ‘He’s taken over the YMCA on West One Thirty-Fifth. He’s running everything from there now. It’s guarded well, but you might be able to get in through the back.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll check it out. It may be the only place we can take him safely.’

  SetaGan gave a nod and turned to leave, pausing but not looking back before she had taken two steps. ‘Try to… take him alive.’

  ‘That’s the plan,’ Clarke said.

  ‘Plans fail.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sondra said, ‘but he’s far less use to us dead, so this time, failure is an option we’d much rather avoid.’

  ~~~

  There was a school behind the YMCA, which meant that the cops could get keys and make access through there with relatively little disturbance. Then an alley separated them from the YMCA building. It was guarded, but Morris and Hendricks handled that problem with sleep spells, and the guards were dragged into the school building by SWAT officers.

  ‘Are we clear on what we need to do?’ Sondra asked as she strapped on an armoured vest. She preferred to rely on her magic, but the SWAT guys had insisted on the added armour.

  ‘It would be easier if we knew where the target was,’ the SWAT lieutenant in charge, Lieutenant Rickard, replied.

  ‘Yes, but we don’t. We don’t have anything useful to run a sympathetic magic spell to search for him. It’s not unlikely that the demon has shielded him from something like that anyway. We have to do this the hard way.’

  ‘Right. Well, you stay with your team. They’ll get you in while the rest of us handle the orcs.’

  ‘Of course. Not my first breach, lieutenant. What ammo are you using?’

  ‘Orc rounds,’ Rickard replied matter-of-factly. ‘Light-armour piercing. We’ve got stun grenades by the bucketful. Not our first action against an orc gang either.’

  ‘This is different. This appears to be all the orc gangs. I’ll say this for the demon, he seems to be good at bringing people together.’

  ‘Maybe we should get him on the city council,’ Clarke suggested. He was slotting a new magazine into his pistol, one supplied by the SWAT team with the same kind of bullets they were using.

  ‘Couldn’t hurt much,’ Sondra replied. ‘Be a little careful of those rounds. They’ll penetrate orc skin better but do less damage than your hollow points. They can also over-penetrate. Make sure there’s no one behind your target you don’t want to hurt.’

  ‘I’ve fired them before.’

  ‘In anger?’

  Clarke’s cheeks coloured. ‘Well, no. I’d never even fired my pistol in the field until I had to shoot that orc in the garage.’

  ‘Just keep cool. Let the SWAT guys do the shooting unless you have to defend yourself.’

  Rickard slapped Clarke on the shoulder. ‘You’ve actually shot someone. Half the guys in my squad can’t say that. The shooting was good?’

  ‘Oh,’ Sondra replied. ‘That orc would have been dismantling Clarke limb by limb if he hadn’t taken three rounds in the chest. Let’s get on with this.’

  Because of the guards in the alley, the rear doors of the YMCA were unlocked. Working a standard cross-entry pattern, one of the three SWAT squads Rickard was commanding infiltrated the kitchen, checked the room, and secured it. They had no idea where KonTash was, but they did have plans of the building. They could make educated guesses, and those guesses suggested he would likely have taken one or more of the third-floor rooms, which were largely offices, though there were also bedrooms for on-site staff. On the ground floor, the space was largely composed of a gym, laid out as a basketball court. The second floor was the dormitory and that was likely to be relatively empty now with the orcs out causing trouble on the streets.

  ‘We hold here until we’ve scouted the ground level,’ Rickard said.

  Sondra nodded, accepting the delay as necessary. Clarke knew it was necessary, but he was feeling the adrenaline now and he wanted to move. But there was work to be done and the SWAT officers fanned out through the building to check out who was there and what they were doing. They were all back within ten minutes, each one of which had felt like thirty to Clarke.

  ‘All right,’ Rickard said after conversing with the squad leaders. ‘We have a dozen orcs in the gym. They’re armed. We’re going to need the bulk of the force to hold them. No one could hear anything on the middle floor or the upper one, but the target was not identified among the crowd in the gym.’

  ‘I still suspect he’ll be at the top,’ Sondra said. ‘Sweep the middle and then move up? Hit the ones in the gym when we’ve located KonTash?’

  Rickard gave a nod, his lips curling a little. ‘More or less what I was thinking.’

  ‘Good. Then let’s get moving. I assume you’ll want to leave two squads down
here, so we’ll be searching with one.’

  ‘Not sure why I’m here.’

  ‘Huh. You’re not getting me commanding this lot. Far too much paperwork.’

  They spent twenty long minutes working their way through the middle floor, assisted by the fact that hardly anyone had bothered closing their bedroom door upon leaving. No one was there; they were either down in the gym or out on the streets. They did find one body, presumably one of the YMCA staff; he was human and he looked as though he had been beaten to death. That would need to be dealt with later, but for now, they had bigger fish to capture and banish.

  ‘You know,’ Clarke said as they headed back to the staircase and the upper floor, ‘our killer could easily have got two more victims up here and we might never find out about it.’

  ‘Not our killer,’ Sondra replied. ‘He’s the FBI’s problem. Anyway, this guy has been dropping his kills right in our laps. He’s not interested in hiding what he’s doing.’

  ‘Yeah, true. I still don’t get the connection to the movie either.’

  ‘Neither do I. If we did, we’d probably have nailed the SOB before now.’

  They fell silent as they reached the staircase and climbed between two units of SWAT officers. The upper-floor corridor was checked again through the wired glass in the door, and then they were moving in. Rickard held up a fist for everyone to stop almost immediately and the sound of chanting could be heard from down the corridor. Rickard glanced at Sondra, frowning in question.

  Sondra listened for a second. ‘He’s making charms. Fire charms.’

  ‘So he doesn’t know we’re here and he’s working up something nasty?’

  ‘If he’s already made a few, that could be an issue. We need to rush him, stop him doing anything foolish, but I need to trap him as we do it. So, on my go, okay?’ Rickard nodded, and they made their way down the corridor to the door where the chanting was loudest.

  Sondra’s lips began to move silently as she drew in the energy she needed for her spell, setting the imagery in her mind and focusing on the words in Sarnica as she did so. She raised her hand, fingers spread as the power flowed through her and filled the pattern she had made for it, and then clenched her fist, bringing it down. One of the SWAT team was watching for her signal and he turned the handle and pushed through with a shoulder barge, turning quickly to the right to cover the room.