by Scott Duff
“We have lost contact with three of four stations on the perimeter,” Higgins said, his voice calm yet demanding attention. “The house is still secure, but we did find scorch marks on the porch outside Samantha’s open office window. Motion detectors are picking up something approximately one hundred yards out from the house but cameras show nothing, either ultraviolet or visible spectrum. I cannot check the wards themselves and the only people who can are unaccounted for. Currently, that is twenty people, sir.”
Twenty people were missing? Where were they hiding in the first place?
Colbert nodded curtly then said, “We will give our guests time to get to their vehicle, then we will evacuate the premises. Gentlemen, to me, please.”
He looked at Kieran and nodded to the glass front door. Ethan took the lead since he had free hands and Kieran and I stepped up and waited behind him, looking back at Colbert. He reached both hands into his pockets and began pulling crystals of various colors and sizes out. I watched nervously, going back and forth between him and the yard beyond the door, seeing nothing outside.
When I felt the ward on the house tingle, I looked back at Colbert. He had a blue translucent crystal rod about three inches long and half an inch thick in his hand. I could feel him reaching for the next ward gingerly, weakly. That ward was farther out from the house, about a hundred yards. I pushed slightly through the crystal. Colbert gasped, but right then I didn’t know if it was what I’d done or what we saw. There had to be eighty men out there. Wait, “men” was wrong. Eighty men and elves were out there, spread in a circle around the house, with another group around my car. The ward was torn in two places, so I assumed that’s where they got in.
Colbert looked at me and said, “I can give you three pulses. That’s thirty seconds to get to your car. Then I will counterattack. You have one minute to get off the property before everything blows up. One minute only. Can you do that?”
I thought quickly, looking through the ward at my car and the distance between it and the door. I dug the keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Ethan.
“You will have to unlock the doors and pop the trunk. There are twelve men surrounding the car and you’re more apt to be able to do something about them than I am if something goes wrong,” I said. He nodded then faced the glass door again. I glanced quickly around the room. Nine grim and determined faces and one smiling, amber-encased face. Colbert dropped three small rubies on the floor in front of him as his men formed a six-person circle around him.
“Ready?” he asked calmly. Without waiting for an answer, he stomped on one of the crystals and a spire of ruby red light shot up through his foot and through the ceiling. The light shot outward in a pale ruby wall and as it passed Ethan, he opened the door and followed it out quickly, Kieran and I right behind him. Outside, the wave passed in front of us at the height of the house like the tsunami, freezing everything in its path. In the wave, both man and elf showed briefly in frozen tableau. We were almost to the car when I heard the trunk pop open and the doors unlock.
Then the second wave flashed from the house and started rolling down the hill. Ethan crashed into something I couldn’t see like a linebacker, clearing a path for us. I rounded the car, lifting the trunk and dropping my box on the left, and kept going to the driver’s side. Ethan was there first, kicking and swinging wildly. The trunk slammed shut just as I opened my door. I climbed in the driver’s seat with Ethan shoving himself in behind me and slamming the ignition key into my hand. Neither of us was worried about my comfort as he crushed me against the steering wheel. As long as he cleared the door as I slammed it shut.
The third pulse flashed. Ten seconds was not a lot of time. I jammed the key in the ignition and started the car. Elves hit the car windows hard. Apparently, the ones Ethan had attacked were able to fight off the affects of the ruby wave. I hit reverse and peeled out, tires screaming. I slammed on the brakes and shoved the gearshift to drive and faced a line of three elves across the road with swords drawn. Twelve appeared as they decided to drop their hiding spell, four elves and eight men with guns.
Then Colbert started his counterattack. I heard a high-pitched whine and all four elves dropped their swords, covering their ears with looks of intense pain. Automatic weapons fire from the direction of the house startled the men enough to make them duck and crouch, facing the house instead of us. I took the cue and floored the accelerator, again peeling rubber from the tires, screeching loudly. The ones in front of me jumped as quickly out of the way as they could. I drove the winding road taking turns too fast, clipping bushes and cutting across grass without concern. I just wanted out. I swore I heard bullets hitting the sides and back of the car and for God’s sake I just wanted out of there. The gate to the property never looked so good.
It felt like an earthquake hit just as we passed through. I slammed on the brakes and looked around, but we were stable. Looking back in the rear window, I swear it looked like a mushroom cloud. Not an earthquake then, an explosion. All the way up to the gate, the whole property was on fire. Colbert hadn’t gotten his minute, it seemed. I was in shock, looking back at it. I looked at Kieran who was looking back, too.
“I’m sure he got away,” he said, soothingly. “He’s a wily old pirate. He has his ways.” I’m not sure he believed it anymore than I did. I started driving again, shell-shocked.
Chapter 7
We holed up at the Dugard Suite Hotel for the night. Yeah, slumming it at two hundred a night. I’d driven the loop around Atlanta for close to two hours on pure adrenaline, which at 4:30 ya gotta have anyway, between the road construction and the kamikaze commuters. By the time I started to come down from that, I wasn’t in any shape to drive home. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to not be someplace expected tonight. Backward logic, but it still worked.
Kieran asked for my wallet as we approached the front desk. He pulled out my driver’s license, ran his thumb over the front a few times, and handed it back to me. Kieran was very business-like, asking for either a suite or adjoining rooms, paying in cash up front, and having me fill out the information card so I could have the receipt. That’s when I figured out why he was doing what he was doing. I’d laid my license on the counter between me and the form when I noticed my identity had been stolen. I was suddenly Sean McCune and I lived ninety miles further south now. Even the number had changed. He was lucky I didn’t break out laughing. It would have been a hysterical laugh after all that’d happened today.
“Sean McCune?” I asked when the elevator door closed on the three of us and our boxes of information.
He just shrugged, grinning a little, and said, “I’d just thought of it and I had to work fast. You’re the only one of us that has identification and I didn’t even know what it looked like to fake it.”
“Yeah, we’ll have to rectify that soon,” I said as the doors opened. I led my band of box carriers to our two-room suite. Ordered pizzas and drinks first thing. Then we all dove into my stuff. It didn’t take long. Everything was well organized: one file for school records that included standardized tests, records of tutors in specialized areas of study, immunization records. My parents never talked to me about grades and neither had my teachers. According to this, I was a straight-A student. By the time the pizzas arrived, I’d blown it off to being teacher’s pet. I was home schooled after all.
Another file was all bank account information. There wasn’t much we could get out of this without a computer. Couldn’t access any information at all except online. Others were marked “In Person,” which I thought sounded ominous. Then a book of envelopes with safety deposit box keys from different banks in different cities around the world. Nothing to say what was in those boxes either, just bank names and box numbers. The last file was real estate holdings. More deeds and things like that.
Now I’m a mogul. I’m gonna have to start paying taxes. I need to hire somebody. Great. I can see the ad now: Needed: CPA to manage finances for 17yo naïve virgin real estate mogul and wizarding s
tudent. Must look wolfish. Name your own salary and still embezzle away. I’d get a computer first and at least try to know what power I was giving away.
We packed it all back up just in time for the pizza arrival and set the box beside the door. I tipped the driver an extra twenty for walking up. He didn’t have to—he could have just called from the lobby.
Kieran pulled the lid off the other box while we ate. Lying on top was a scorecard of sorts, a list of names. Eyeing the files stuffed into the box, I understood why Colbert did that. It was going to take days, maybe weeks, to go through everything and there was no telling if it would even be worthwhile. Kieran put the list on the table between us.
“We knew those two were involved somehow,” he said, tapping the first two on the list, Summer and Winter. Seasons?
“That’s mom’s father, my grandfather,” I said, pointing to the fifth name on the list.
“This man was a troublemaker in the European Council eighty years ago,” said Kieran of another name, “or maybe this is his son.”
“And that name seems familiar, but I can’t place it,” I said, tapping the name of a U.S. Marshal. A Marshal? The Government is against me?
“So we might need an interpreter for the information we just got,” Kieran said, forlornly looking at the box on the floor. “And we have no idea who to trust.”
All of us sat in silence chewing, drinking our warm drinks, and staring at the list of names until we’d polished off two of the three pizzas.
“What about Peter?” asked Ethan after a few minutes.
“Borland?” I asked. It was from Peter and his father that I learned to make my firecrackers. He had been a history and anthropology tutor a few years back and he’d brought Peter with him for the time he stayed with us. I’d walked up on them in the woods one day near my house in Savannah while he was showing Peter how to do something. I didn’t see exactly what they were doing as they saw me fairly quickly but I saw enough that I could make a little noise. With practice, I learned to make even more noise.
“Yeah,” Ethan said, “He always had a computer with him and he probably at least knows who those people are. And he’s young enough to have stayed out of the politics of it, wouldn’t he? Or is that naïve?”
“Naïve,” Kieran confirmed.
“And why would he help us?” I asked.
“Because he’s a good guy,” said Ethan, looking at me with eyebrows raised. He was, after all, giving me my own opinion. Mr. Borland and Peter were both really nice people, affable and polite. Peter was always helpful to the few household staff that held the large house together. And he always had his laptop with him even though he never had it open when I was around. He brushed it off as having nothing but dry history texts on it whenever I would ask, which wasn’t often.
“Could it hurt?” I asked Kieran.
“It could, or it could give us a friend,” he answered, shrugging. He was leaving it up to me. Great.
I decided to go for it and powered up my cell while I dug through my box of records for the Borland’s number. Then I stared at the number trying to come up with what to say. I still didn’t know when I punched in the number. It rang five times before anyone picked up.
“Hello?” answered a male voice, a little out of breath. Trance music was playing loudly in the background.
“Hello,” I started, “May I speak with Peter Borland, please.”
“You got him. ‘Sup?” he answered, breathlessly.
“Hi, Peter, this is Seth McClure. I wonder if I can have a few minutes of your time?” I asked.
I heard a door slam on his end, then the music abruptly shut off. “Seth, did you know that a lot of people are looking for you and your parents?” Peter asked.
“I’m finding that out, yes,” I said. “I’m looking for my parents myself.”
“Are you on your cell phone?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, throwing a concerned look at Kieran.
“Listen carefully, Seth,” he said, forcefully. “Some of the people looking for you can track you by your cell phone. When I was at your house, we talked about going to several places. Do you remember them?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking back to those conversations. There were actually a few places he could mean.
“Meet me at the smaller one in the big city at dawn,” he said. “Right now, you need to throw your phone in a bucket of water and leave. Wherever you are now, run.”
He hung up.
I stared down at the phone in my hand for a moment, then looked up at Kieran and Ethan.
“They can track me by my phone,” I said. “Peter said to throw my phone in water and run.”
“Do it,” said Kieran, getting up, alarmed.
I ran to the bathroom and dropped my phone in the toilet, flushing it once. At least I didn’t have to worry about getting a new battery. At the door, Kieran and Ethan each carried a box and I led them out of the room. Ethan paused briefly before leaving, flashing the room with a radiation of energy that said only “not us” to me, though I had no idea what it meant. We took the elevator down to the lobby just in time to see three men in blue windbreakers enter through the main entrance. I’d seen enough cop shows recently to be leery of what giant yellow letters might be printed on the backs of the jackets, so I guided us down through the hall to the convention rooms. The lobby was somewhat crowded with people, so we moved quickly but not running. Two more windbreakers showed up at the end of the hall, so we slipped out a side door into the pool area.
“Keep going,” whispered Kieran, nodding forward.
The hotel was apparently building its bar business around a pool party that night. It was packed in there. Jostling our way through to the bar’s entrance and back into the hotel took a few minutes, but hopefully we lost our tails in the crowd. We were fifty feet from the exit when we heard the pounding of feet behind us. I felt the tug of magic and turned in time to see three men slamming into something I couldn’t see and a fourth skidding into the wall to avoid it. We kept walking, but Kieran was grinning when he turned around. We hit the doors and the heat of August in Georgia felt like a wall. I felt the pull of power from Kieran again and I had the feeling those doors wouldn’t open for a while.
I oriented on the hotel and the parking lot, locating the car in the lot. At least five men were after us, probably more. We needed to move fast. Plenty of people were milling around the front, in and out of the bar. We had some cover on the sidewalk. Three vans were parked on the left side of the drive, a driver in each. Then I caught sight of a man in a windbreaker on the sidewalk facing us just out of the lights of the driveway. None of them looked close enough to cause trouble, but they did get three vanloads of men there seemingly instantly.
I could see the car now, less than thirty feet to go. With a bad feeling of déjà vu, I dug out my keys and hit the remote on the trunk and door locks as we rounded the front of the car. I jerked up the trunk and Ethan and Kieran shoved the boxes in. As I slammed shut the trunk, I felt a massive pull of magic in front of us.
“Evenin’, mates,” said a man with a British accent from the sidewalk near the hood of my car. Could have been Australian or New Zealand, I don’t know. All I knew was that he was charging his batteries for something; I could feel it. If I could, so could they. Spiky bleached hair blowing in the warm breeze, the man lit a cigarette with a flame between his thumb and forefinger, casting a sallow light on his hawkish features. He wore a black tee shirt and dark green utility pants with several pockets.
“What do you want?” asked Kieran evenly.
“Me?” he said, blowing the smoke straight up. “Money. Gold. A lot of it.”
“And that has to do with us, how?” Kieran asked.
“He’s the key to gettin’ it,” he said grinning grimly, nodding at me.
“You aren’t getting him, so go away,” said Kieran, reaching for the door handle.
“That’s the kicker, here, mate,” he said with a sneer, waving his thumb over h
is shoulder, then moving several feet to the side. “I don’t have to get him. That’s what she’s for.”
Behind him stalking up slowly in the warm night was a tall, beautiful woman dressed in a long fiery red dress that shined brightly even in the dim lights of the parking lot. The dress hid none of her curves and shouted sexuality from her toes to her shoulders, only hinting at the coolness in her bosom at the expense of the extraordinary heat from her loins. Her power was exquisite and she was not to be refused. You saw that in her face. Her arrogance was absolute.
“Summer,” Kieran announced, “How nice of you to join us.”
The woman glanced at him then turned back to me continuing her walk across the grass. It began to burn under her feet as she neared the sidewalk.
“What do you want, Summer?” Kieran asked.
“We have not addressed you, mortal,” Summer said. Her voice was sweet and melodious, but I could sense the portent of volcano behind it.
“Don’t care. What do you want of Seth?” he asked again.
“Do not question me, mortal!” she said angrily.
“Then go away,” he answered, waving his hand at her in a downright condescending way. She disappeared in a vortex of fire, leaving behind a smoldering pitch mark on the grass. The pull of magic to create the vortex was amazing. It left me breathless for a moment. I don’t know what it felt like, but it was big.
When I caught sight of the blond, he was sitting on top of the car two spots over, mouth agape with a cigarette hanging loosely from his lips, staring at where the woman had been. Ethan moved in front of him and poked him in the forehead to get his attention. The man froze in place but gave Ethan his attention.
“Do you know why she’s after him?” Ethan asked calmly.
“No, sir,” the blond said, meekly.
“Are you with them?” asked Ethan, waving his hand at the hotel to indicate the men in windbreakers.
