by Thomas Green
“Lucas destroyed it,” Mina said, voice steady. “But I’ve recruited him, so it’s fine.” She handed Lucielle the signed contract.
Lucielle drew a sharp breath. She apparently ordered Mina to recruit me and didn’t specify protection of the prison as her goal. With that, Mina technically succeeded in her mission, so Lucielle had no right to complain. In the Devil’s world, wording was everything. With a scowl, Lucielle looked over the cloud. “Why are the other prisoners alive then?”
Everyone behind me tensed. Yes, we may have been two hundred, but we had no hope of facing Lucielle. “Because killing them would bring you zero value,” I said, putting on a broad smile.
“Letting them live is a risky loose end.” She narrowed her eyes. “But you know that. So, what are you trying to sell me?”
Oh, yes, this was a sales pitch, which was why I needed the suit, a fresh haircut and a clean shave. “Look, Tul Sar Naar is gone. With Hades and Persephone dead, whom I killed myself, it’s never coming back. That hurts, I know, which is why we prepared a gift to soften your sorrow.”
As my words left the air, Sora cut the ropes tying together the statue’s wooden casing. The wood fell, revealing the golden statue of Lucielle with wings. Gems shone brightly in the sun and the perfectly polished gold glistened with an unearthly light.
Enthralled, Lucielle walked toward the sculpture. No one loved pretty statues like the Devil. With a long stare, she measured the sculpture. And then she formed a smirk. “Remind me, why can’t I kill you all and take the statue afterward?”
“Because I instructed everyone to do their best to destroy it if a battle breaks out.” I arrived at her side with Mina trailing me. “You would undoubtedly be able to kill us, but we would destroy the statue.”
She glowered at me. “And you really think one statue is worth letting two hundred convicted criminals go?”
“This isn’t just any statue.” I waved over the sculpture with a grand gesture. “This is art made by five gods of art, each from a different pantheon. Never in the world’s history has a statue like this existed and no second one will ever be made.”
Her eyes caught an inner shine. She was a collector, and this indeed presented a one-of-a-kind piece.
“Plus, you gain nothing from killing us,” I continued, hammering the metal while it was hot. “Right now, you have two hundred of the strongest prisoners of Tul Sar Naar. Demigods, elder werewolves, archmages, legendary witches, you name it and it’s here. And all of them are now re-entering the world they were detached from, meaning they need money and something to do. In other words, they will all be looking for a job. How many vacancies do you have in your enterprise, again?”
“Forty-three…” She narrowed her eyes. “Thousand.”
“That makes this a golden recruitment opportunity, doesn’t it?”
The words hung in the air for a while. She scanned me with an appraising gaze. “Why do I have the feeling you’ve got more prepared in this pitch?”
Yes, I did, but I’d been hoping she would agree at this point. But she sensed I had more to offer and apparently wanted to drag it out of me. And I didn’t have a counterplan because I couldn’t afford this turning into a fight. I sighed. “And I’ll toss in the large favor you still owe me.”
Lucielle paused for a second before she turned her glare at Mina. “You were supposed to solve that.”
Mina opened her mouth to speak but stopped. Yes, I agreed I would sign the contract, not that I would accept her deal. The subtle difference in wording of my surrender let me keep the favor. As Mina now realized. She punched me in the shoulder so hard the pain reached the bone. “He tricked me.”
Lucielle scowled for a second, but then put on a charming smile. “I accept. The statue and all of you are coming with me.” She raised her staff. “Umbra eo.” [Shadow walk.]
Blackness devoured us all, including the statue, and Lucielle took us away.
Since Lucielle took us to Moscow, where she had her Eastern-European headquarters, things took a while to get sorted. We all enjoyed the warms beds and hot meal though. I didn’t wait to see how the negotiations between Lucielle, and the others would pan out. From the way I knew the others, Sora and his friends were bound to refuse and return to Japan.
Wukong would leave too, heading back to China to resume whatever he was doing before.
Sophia disappeared the first day after our arrival, so I never actually found out what her deal was. That she knew basically everything there was to know about me made me sweat when I thought about it, but I had no ideas on how to solve that.
Loki was bound to accept a job at Lucielle’s, as would Rhonrohak and Ares. They had nothing to return to and few offered a wage comparable to Lucielle’s corporation.
Amarendra was also bound to accept. A deal with Lucielle would get him back to New York, where he could return to his clinic. And merging the clinic into Lucielle’s medical branch, LMed, would be a natural step for growth plus it’d secure the safety of his wife and their unborn child.
As for me, Mina got me fake papers and I restored my access to my old bank accounts. I got myself a phone and tried to call Evelyn, but the number didn’t exist anymore. That didn’t help. A few days later, I exited the plane at JFK airport in New York. In the terminal, I bought a bucket of flowers and then took a cab. “43 Bleecker Street,” I told the driver.
The old, Asian driver wanted to chat, but my silence shut him up.
Soon enough, I stood in front of the house that contained our apartment. Everything was calm and peaceful. I mean, New York type of calm, where tourists filled the sidewalk, cars overwhelmed the street, and people in suits rushed through the chaos, trying not to be late for the next meeting. I took a deep breath and my legs felt as if they turned to lead.
I promised Evelyn I would return within a year. I was two weeks late. With a heavy heart, I pressed the bell of our apartment. No buzz came. The bell was apparently broken.
With nothing better to do, I stood there trying not to look like an idiot with the bucket of roses I held. A woman entered the house, ignoring me. I caught the door and waited for her to get into the elevator. Once the elevator door closed behind her, I slid in and walked up the stairs.
The four flights of stairs felt eternal. A heavy security door made of two solid plates of steel, having enough protective wards to stop a charging tank, protected our apartment’s entrance.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, wiped the sweat off my palms, and knocked.
The door opened. The lock had to be broken. I fuelled my body with aether, preparing every fiber of my body for combat. With aether-fuelled gaze, I snuck inside, shifting my weight to keep my steps silent. No magical marks were present.
I closed the door behind myself, seeing the mechanism wasn’t broken, only the door wasn’t closed properly, and I was too distracted to notice. I closed the door and advanced, breathing slowly not to give in to the rush of panic that surged through me. Shoes were neatly arranged in the antechamber. But the air carried the pungent smell of animals. A small hamster ran across the hallway in front of me.
What the hell?
I waltzed straight into the main room, in time to see a cobra catching a hamster with a swift strike. Okay, Evelyn’s cobras were here. Where was she? Icy dread covered my spine. I stopped taking things slow and rushed through the apartment, quickly looking through all the rooms.
To my relief, I did not find a corpse. I also didn’t find any marks of combat. But still, this wouldn’t be the first time Evelyn had been kidnapped.
My laptop still sat on my table, so I went there. If she were to leave me a message, the natural spot would be there.
As I passed her table, I glimpsed a longsword, a cowboy hat, and a white envelope lying by its side. My heart nearly stopped beating. With excruciatingly slow steps, I walked to the package, and ducked down.
I went straight for the envelope. With shaking hands, I pulled out a letter with a handwritten text on it:
‘For Lucas Johnson,
How could I had been so stupid? Even after all this waiting, you still aren’t here. Lots of promises, tons of plans, piles of sweet words, a year of waiting, and now this? Pathetic.
Go to hell,
Evelyn’
I stared at the words, tears sliding down my face. The sword and the hat were undoubtedly the welcome-back-home gifts she prepared for me. But she must have done that soon after I was imprisoned. A year was an unbelievably long time. I rose slowly, placed the letter on the desk and went to the alcohol cabinet.
The lone whisky bottle had to do. I grabbed the bottle, removed the top and stopped. Why was this apartment unharmed? And why were her snakes here? If Evelyn left me, she would take her snakes and burn this place to the ground. She was that type.
I slowly exhaled and returned to the letter. This wasn’t nearly enough angry for her. I cleared my eyes with the back of my hand and focused. The used cipher was basic, but apparently good enough to fool me the first time. A sour smile crept onto my face. When ignoring the greeting and the goodbye, the letter comprised of four sentences. Their first letters read: HELP.
Lucas’s search for Evelyn continues in Angel Candidate. You can read the first chapter here:
SIXTY-TWO UNREAD EMAILS from the past hour alone… yeah, sure. I closed Outlook. If someone wanted something important, they would call. I made myself comfortable in my office chair and grabbed the newest spinoff of Spaceship Troopers novel I have been reading.
Before I reached the bookmark, my phone rang. Great. I let it beep five times, pretending I was busy, and then picked up. “Lucas Johnson, Interventions.”
“Hi, have you read the email I sent you?” a male voice asked.
Awesome. He expected me to know who was calling. “No. What happened?”
“Someone’s been dossing the company website. We need it solved, now.” He hung up.
Why didn’t he call the IT? With a sigh, I put away the novel and opened Outlook. After a minute of searching, I found the email sunken among a dozen reminders about monthly reports to HR and controlling.
The email chain had over fifty messages. Everything started by someone from marketing—apparently the man who called me—noticing the company website was down. He wrote to IT and they, after twenty emails, confirmed someone was DDoSing our company websites. That was apparently an attack where the attacker spammed the website with requests, overloading the underlying services and crashing them, our company website and all other connected websites of our corporation, Lucielle Legal Inc.
Most likely activists, great. From the newer emails, the IT department was busy trying to restore the services but weren’t very successful. The hacker overcame every defense tried in no time, as if he always knew what protection they would put up. The attack started on Monday night and today was Thursday afternoon.
Well, they should have called me earlier. This case smelled of divination magic. Guessing what defensive algorithm, the IT was using would be impossible through mundane means, but even an amateur divination-talented mage could do that. This got my interest since it had been a while since I got to hunt down a mage. Okay, this was probably some kid who could do magic without knowing it existed—since an actual mage would know better than to attack our corporation—but this still promised entertainment.
Hackers were usually perfectly safe through the technical route, so I doubted that path would work for me.
On the other hand, whoever was doing this wasn’t very smart. I mean, there were many less complicated ways of committing suicide. I turned on TOR, the application used to access the dark web, and started searching.
I wasn’t new to the dark web forums used by hackers. Sure, I mostly used it to hire myself a random hacker to break into someone’s phone when I needed that, but still. I searched through the local groups and looked for a forum with many new posts.
One caught my eye soon, called The Resistance. They were a bunch of university students who thought corporations were evil. They weren’t wrong about the evil part, just underestimating the incoming backlash.
In its essence, the newest forum thread was one guy, named M1337, boasting he shut down LCorp’s websites and the others were patting him on the back. There wasn’t anything else useful in the thread though.
And so, I combed the forums for all posts by the user M1337. After a bit of searching, I found a post named My new rig and a picture of his new PC next to a server rack. I saved the image and went back to the normal internet. Investigating stuff had to be a lot harder before Google implemented search-by-image.
I saved image into the search and thousands of similar images popped up. Well, this was going to take a while. If stuff like this happened more often, I had to hire someone to do this type of work for me. Sure, I spent most of my department’s budget on myself and my tools of the trade but having zero employees had its downsides. I limited the search to Twitter and Facebook and got to work.
Two hours later, I found the same image posted on Twitter. The text was the same, my new rig, and the poster was someone named AmazingMatt. Bingo. I combed through his account’s tweet history, searching for a geo-tagged image.
The thing with Twitter was that even if the user tagged the image with a broad location, like New York, Twitter added the GPS coordinates into the picture’s metadata. And no, this wasn’t the first time I was abusing that. After a moment, I found a picture of a sunset above the New York skyline, posted by AmazingMatt, tagged as New York. I hit F12, looked through the image’s element details and found there the GPS coordinates.
After putting the GPS coordinates into Google Maps, I got a house in Queens. I wondered how long it would take Twitter to remove this feature. Hopefully forever.
I locked my PC and headed to my armory.
Yes, I had an armory. This is where a fifth of my yearly budget went. I had a part of the floor remade, removing most offices for employees I wasn’t going to hire.
A steel door with a card reader and a numpad guarded the armory, door bearing a plaque saying: MAINTENANCE.
I slid my access card by the reader, typed my code onto the keypad and the door opened. Beyond lay a wide room with my weapon collection stored on shelves. The gear featured over fifty different guns, two dozen rifles, a bunch of knives, three swords, a flanged mace, a mini gun, a sniper rifle, and a rocket launcher. Okay, maybe I overdid it with that one.
I took off my suit’s jacket and went for my leather coat. Into the prepared strap, I placed a Glock 17 TB, a 9mm pistol, with an attached silencer. From the box by the side, I grabbed one of the weaker pocket EMP sticks, one of the five nameless debit cards I had prepared. I put on my cowboy hat. The cross pendant I wore on my necklace felt cold against my chest.
After I left the armory, I used my access card to leave the floor, and then again to enter the garage. My newest model Ford Mustang awaited me in its spot. I got in and drove out onto Wall Street.
AmazingMatt was going to have a very bad day.
The GPS coordinate took me to an abandoned house with broken windows and a decayed door. But the picture I used to find this place was a week old. Thanks to being on a small hill, the garden featured a fantastic view of the New York skyline.
Okay, this wasn’t a spot Matt would know about if he didn’t live nearby. And with a server in his basement, he would use a lot of electricity. I smirked, picked up my phone, and called Sally.
Sally worked in the NYISO, which managed the state’s power grid. She picked up after a single beep. “Hi,” she said, voice energetic.
This wasn’t the first time we had done this. “Howdy, Sally, I’m in southern Queens, looking for a house with an outlying amount of electricity consumption. The usual pay.” In her case, that was a thousand dollars. Not much, but we did this dance often.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear about your son. I’m sure he will get better soon. Thank you for calling me,” she said and hung up.
That was our code phrase for r
equest accepted. I leaned against my car, drew a pack of cigarettes, took one, and lit it up.
By the time I was done with the smoke, my phone buzzed with a message from an anonymous number, in which I had four sets of GPS coordinates. Sally sure earned her pay.
I got into my car and went to check out the places.
The first two locations didn’t spark my interest, but the third one looked more promising. In the sunset’s light, the house stood alone in a large yard. Light shone from the windows, but also from the cellar window positioned just above the ground level.
Unlike the previous two places, which featured sheds with heavy machinery, this one had no apparent reason to have an abnormally high electricity usage.
I withdrew aether from my heart and fuelled it into my eyes. The arcane energy, the source of all magic, intoxicated my senses and flipped the world’s colors. Darkness turned to light. After a bit of tweaking of my power, yellow lines appeared in the ground and walls, electricity cables my magical vision now allowed me to see. Most of the electricity indeed flowed through the basement.
Okay, I had the correct location. I glanced over the yard and verified there was no doghouse present. Animals mostly tried to avoid me, but better safe than sorry. I stalked by the low, fence until I found an angle at which I could see through the cellar window. After finding the perfect spot, I tweaked the arcane energy in my eyes, zooming in. Inside the basement, I saw a carpet, a man sitting on a chair with his back turned toward me, and a server rack towering by the side.
