The man who led DSI for a decade is gone.
All that’s left is this monster wearing his face.
This monster who glares distastefully at his spit-covered shoe, then yanks me up by the collar again and throws me into the hallway. Glass shards bite into my skin, but they’re nothing compared to the bullet wounds, which surge with such intense pain that I nearly black out on the spot. Bollinger doesn’t care though. He steps out of the elevator, grabs my shirt, and drags me like a broken crash-test dummy down the hall, not the least bit concerned that my skin is being slowly flayed off by the sharped-edged debris. Not caring that I whine and whimper in agony all the way to the exit. Not caring that I choke out a blood-laced sob when he tosses me through the empty doorframe and out into the garage.
The ruined garage.
Every parked car and SUV has been thoroughly trashed, a few crushed vehicles still shrieking faintly as their alarms die. Glass and pieces of twisted metal cover the concrete floor, and buried beneath two piles of debris are two of the enemy practitioners, a man and a woman. The woman’s neck is twisted sideways, her eyes stuck open, staring blankly toward me, while the man is missing his head altogether, his mutilated corpse wrapped around an equally warped fender. Sprays of blood dot the floor and the support columns, and as I track my gaze up and up, I find a third practitioner pinned to the ceiling by a tangle of rebar. His chest is riddled with holes, and half his skin is burned black. As I watch, two of his fingers break off and disintegrate into ash before they hit the ground.
Another explosion rocks the garage, and I trace it to the west end of the complex, where Erica is facing off with Delos and his five remaining allies. Delos is hanging back, shouting commands instead of fighting, still unsteady on his feet, but the combined firepower of his minions is more than enough to make up for his current weakness. Erica is on the defensive, surrounded by the five practitioners, all of them throwing a variety of spells so fast I can barely keep track of them and Erica herself can barely counter. She’s sweating profusely, a heavy sheen on her tan skin under the fluorescent lights, and multiple deep lacerations on her arms and face weep dark blood. But she doesn’t surrender, and she doesn’t back down, even when three of the practitioners come at her as one and try to electrocute, roast, and crush her simultaneously.
She ducks the lightning spell and sweeps the feet out from underneath the wizard who cast it, throwing him directly into the path of the fire spell, which strikes him in the chest and burns straight through him. The force spell catches her in the arm, dislocating her shoulder and throwing her off balance, but she steadies herself before the two other practitioners can skirt the now flaming corpse of their compatriot and go in for the kill.
The black guy and another witch, who stood sentry near Delos while the other three attacked, silently confer with each other as Erica dodges two more spells and sends both her assailants flying through the air. And the second Erica’s back is turned, they too move to kill her.
I open my mouth to call out to her, to help her somehow, but Bollinger stops the fight for me with an ear-piercing whistle. The enemy practitioners halt. Erica swivels around, a defensive shield flickering into existence around her, and looks hard at her remaining enemies before glancing toward the source of the noise. When she spies me lying helpless on the concrete, bloody and broken, and recognizes the man standing next to me, she gapes in absolute disbelief, her lips flapping soundlessly. Then she understands.
She sneers at Delos, “You sly little fuck. How long’s he been your dog?”
Delos, who looks almost giddy now that the tide is shifting even more firmly in his favor, shrugs in fake modesty. “As long as I’ve needed his services.”
“You really think you’re going to get away with this? With this mess?” She gestures to the destruction in the garage, to the ominously large cracks in the ceiling that indicate the building’s integrity is starting to fail. If this goes on much longer, powerful magic battering the concrete, damaging the support columns, straining the foundation, the half of the DSI building that sits atop the garage could collapse, killing anyone trapped inside. Just like the Wellington Center.
“That’s what you don’t understand, you stupid bitch,” Delos replies. “I’ve already gotten away with it. There’s no security footage of this fight. I had Tim over there disable all the cameras before I came in. And my grimoire?” He chuckles and gestures to the book Bollinger has tucked under his arm. “I have plenty of fakes I can show Burbank, Riker, all those other suspicious fools, to prove your claims of my guilt are totally bunk. So once I get you out of the way, and have Kinsey confess to his ‘crimes,’ no one will be able to outwardly cast doubt on me. Not until it’s too late anyway.”
His laughter grows louder, echoes through the cavernous space until it rings in every ear a hundred times. “And if you think that little camera you were wearing will be the ‘break in the case,’ it won’t be.” He points at a small, dark circle on Erica’s shirt. “I shorted that out ten minutes ago when you weren’t paying attention, and as soon as you’re dead, I’ll pluck it off and crush it into so many—”
“Camera!” I shout abruptly, and every head in the garage turns toward me. “That’s what I forgot. The camera.” I slowly raise my undamaged hand to my black shirt and finger the camera Wallace gave me before we left the warehouse. The camera that was, and still is, transmitting a live feed to the warehouse workstation. A live feed consisting of both video and audio. A feed Wallace no doubt recorded out of habit, just in case anything important or incriminating occurred while we were breaking into the building. A feed Wallace could’ve shared with anyone. Like my team.
“You didn’t break my camera,” I say to Delos, a delirious laugh bubbling up my throat, driven by blood loss. “You didn’t break my camera. And you”—I look to Bollinger—“didn’t notice it. You told me everything. The whole story. Blathered it all out like a moron. And Vincent Wallace heard you.”
Bollinger’s collected mask crumbles, and he glares at me, enraged. “You little shit.” He points his gun at my forehead. “How dare you take me for a fool.”
“Tim!” Delos yells. “You can’t kill him yet. We need him. Don’t worry about the camera footage. I’ll just send people to take care of the Wolves and add them to the—”
A growl like a powerful bass reverberates through the garage.
Massive, animalistic shadows fall across the floor.
Standing at the entrance, atop the broken boom gate, are four transformed werewolves.
The one at the head of the group is Vincent Wallace.
And without a moment’s hesitation, he howls as if the full moon glows bright overhead, fixes his feral yellow eyes on the enemies of Aurora, bares his knife-like teeth, and attacks.
Chapter Twenty
Five rogue practitioners versus four Wolves and Erica Milburn. The rogues still have the edge, but not by much.
Wallace leaps over upturned vehicles, vaults off a crushed SUV, and slams into the hastily raised shield of one of the remaining enemy wizards. The shield collapses under Wallace’s weight, slamming the man into the concrete, and the Wolf goes straight for his neck, jaws snapping shut. Blood sprays out from torn vessels and paints the floor, and Wallace violently shakes his massive jowls until the wizard’s head is ripped clean off and rolls away.
Meanwhile, the other three Wolves back up Erica as she launches another assault. Two of them go for the witch on the right, while the third takes the wizard on the left, leaving Erica to face off with the black guy who’s given her so much trouble. But the guy doesn’t take kindly to being pinned in by Wolves on two sides, so instead of fighting Erica directly, he claps his hands and blows out a breath that morphs into a blizzard, obscuring the battlefield. Then he slips into a veil to hide himself, just before Erica charges through the snow with her aura amped up for a spell. She must miss him by mere inches, but it’s enough.
The lone Wolf taking on the lone wizard is suddenly thrown half
way across the garage. They crash into an already broken pillar, spine shattering on impact, and collapse in a heap. At first, I think the Wolf is dead, but as the whipping snow lightens for a moment, I catch sight of their chest moving feebly.
Wallace, infuriated, turns on the wizard and the black man under the veil who must be standing close by. The Wolf man sniffs the air, hunting for the faintest scent in a place where there shouldn’t be one, and he catches it, then lopes at a spot of empty air, bloody teeth bared. The black guy loses control of his imperfect veil in his scramble to get away, and reappears, leaping for safety from the oncoming Wolf, back into the thick of his snowstorm diversion. But Erica is there, waiting for him—and she’s ready.
In the seconds when the black guy was busy defending his fellow rogue, Erica used a small pull of force to yank her dislocated shoulder back into place. Now, fully mobile again, she brings her hands together, and as her arms move, so do two ruined SUVs that the earlier battle crushed into masses of warped metal. The black guy, diving away from Wallace, doesn’t see them coming, and just like in the hallway back at the ICM building, he can’t raise his shield in time to save himself. The two SUVs collide in an ear-splitting screech of metal that reverberates out of the garage and probably shatters a dozen windows.
When the tangle of metal, now fused together, drops to the concrete, all that’s left of the black guy is a fine, pulpy mush leaking out between the cracks.
The blizzard, no magic left to power it, settles into a fine mist of snow, and the garage calms momentarily as the two sides regroup for a second time.
Three rogues left—a witch, a wizard, and Delos. And four on our side—Erica, Wallace, and the other two uninjured Wolves. You can do this, I say internally, projecting my good faith toward my allies. You can win this fight.
A hand wraps around my neck and hoists me to my feet. My body screams in protest, pain flooding my system, and I black out for several seconds. When I come to again, I’m in a weak chokehold, my back pressed against Bollinger’s chest, the warm barrel of the commissioner’s .22 pressed to my temple. My hearing fades back in somewhere around the middle of a sentence, and I catch Bollinger say, his breath hot on my ear, “…or Kinsey dies. Those are the terms. Stand down.”
I blink the double vision away to find Erica staring at me in frustration and fear, the Wolves around her growling at Bollinger’s threat. Delos’ people, on the other hand, look positively gleeful at the prospect they might actually make it out of this fight without taking on any more casualties. And here I am, a worthless sack of meat in Bollinger’s grasp, so weak from blood loss I can hardly lift my one good hand and make a token effort of trying to tug his arm from my neck.
Erica’s aura flares again, and this time, it’s so strong that my magic sense flares on high, casting the garage in a wash of color from the residual magic of dozens of spells. It almost looks like Erica is on fire, tendrils of her aura angrily whipping the air around her. She says to Bollinger, “You are not taking Cal, you piece of shit. You’ve done enough to him already. Put him down, and maybe I’ll let you leave this building with a pulse. Hurt him any more than you already have, and no one will recognize your corpse.”
“Tough words”—Bollinger chuckles—“but you won’t follow through. Not with Kinsey at my mercy. You’re going to let us walk away, and you won’t throw a single spell, because one slip, and his brains will be splattered all over this floor.” I can sense his finger tightening on the trigger, inching closer to my instantaneous murder. “So don’t move. Stay right where you are.” He shifts us to face Delos and the two other rogues left standing. “We can revise our plans when we’re home free. For now, let’s get the hell out of here. We’re outnumbered.”
Delos doesn’t immediately answer. He stares intently at the floor, his teeth gnashing his tongue, hands clenching and unclenching, a look in his eyes so close to the edge of insanity that another spike of terror pierces my gut. Delos is unraveling, all his careful plans ripped to shreds. Even if he flees and lives to fight another day, the video Wallace recorded of Bollinger exposing Delos’ plans will sink not only Delos himself, but everyone in his Methuselah entourage. The mind breaker knows damn well the jig is up, and if he leaves this garage, it’ll be with his tail between his legs and a target on his back. Next thing he knows, Delilah Barnett will be hunting him.
He has nothing left to lose. And that makes him all the more dangerous.
Desperate people do crazy things.
“Robert!” the commissioner hisses. “Stop daydreaming and start moving. We have to leave. If we stay here too long, the DSI detective teams will come back and—”
A shadow swoops down from the ceiling, skims the air in front of Bollinger and me, and rips the pistol right from the commissioner’s hand. Twenty feet to my left, the birdlike form quickly morphs into a familiar black man, wearing a pair of khaki pants and a simple white T-shirt. Owl man rises from a crouch, Bollinger’s gun pinned to the floor beneath his bare foot. “I must inform you, Mr. Bollinger,” he says in his vague accent, “that no member of your group will be leaving this garage without the explicit permission of my master.”
“What?” Bollinger chokes out. “Who the fuck are you?” He stares at his empty hand, a thin stream of blood running across his skin, where owl man’s talons nicked his finger. “What business do you have here?”
“All the business,” someone mumbles. Delos. He slinks away from the spot he’s been standing in since I was dragged back to the garage, and comes to a stop about thirty steps from owl man, looking upon the mysterious being with nothing short of disdain. “You have all the business being here, don’t you, Impundulu?” He rolls his head around on his neck, and a series of loud cracks echo through the garage. “A goddamn witch’s assistant, getting in my way. Twice!”
“To be fair, Delos,” says owl man smoothly, “I didn’t know it was you in the woods that day, when you tried to kill Calvin Kinsey. I only suspected. It was your mistake yesterday, allowing Kinsey to get the better of you, that was your undoing, and the increasingly irrational actions you have committed since that mistake was made. The confirmation of your treachery has already been conferred to the necessary recipients. The ax will fall. You are done, and so are your cohorts. It would be in your best interest to lay down arms before my master arrives. She is not fond of impudence, as you well know.”
Delos cackles, a haughty, broken sound. “Lay down arms? Really? You think after years of careful planning that a few minor missteps will bring me down? You think I have no contingencies in place?” His fingers start to dance, as if playing a piano, and I feel the thrum of magic in the air before his magenta aura flares into existence. “I admit that Kinsey threw me for a loop, dealt me more damage than I’ve incurred since World War II, and I did not see that coming. But if you think a few dogs, one cunt of a witch, and a fucking bird are going to stop me, you’ve got another thing coming.”
His hand flies to his lips, and he lets out a shrill whistle that resonates through the garage. At first, nothing happens, no spell is cast. But as the lingering echo of the whistle fades into the ether, I spy movement outside the garage. A lot of movement.
From two dozen hiding places, from trees and bushes and beneath parked cars on the street, from the rooftops of nearby buildings and the shadows of ditches and narrow, dark alleys, black-cloaked forms flit into sight. They glide above the ground, feet touching nothing, silent as if they cannot speak, body language either totally absent or eerily stilted, like they’re being pulled by strings. They levitate into the garage, and as they converge in a circle around the battlefield, they bring up rusty scythes, holding the blades before their ghostly green eyes. Then they stop, surrounding us, and wait for Delos’ order to attack.
Wraiths.
Straight out of Patrick Feldman’s playbook.
Delos must’ve continued their manufacture, and because DSI asked the ICM to investigate the origins of Feldman’s materials for creating the wraiths—act
ual human bodies, newly dead—Delos was able to obscure the whole operation without worrying about our interference. We had so much to do in the aftermath of the Wellington attack that we had no choice but to delegate some tasks to outside groups, and Delos took advantage of that, just like he took advantage of the ICM’s trust in him after his many years of “exemplary service” to take over Aurora’s ICM chapter and transform it into a Methuselah stronghold.
Shit! This is going to end badly. Three rogue practitioners versus owl man, Erica, and the Wolves still standing would’ve been a close but fair fight, and likely ended in our favor. But now there are nearly thirty wraiths to contend with, and while they have a critical weakness, fire, there’s no way that our side will be able to fend them all off before someone—
Delos makes a hand signal to the wraiths.
They attack.
The air is filled with blurring ripples of black cloth as the wraiths charge Erica and the Wolves. Before they arrive for the slaughter, the fourth Wolf who went down earlier, leaps up from the base of the broken pillar and catches one of the wraiths around the neck. The Wolf violently shakes the wraith, ignoring the glancing blows from the zombie creature as it meekly attempts to swing the scythe, and in seconds, the wraith’s entire body comes unspooled. Partially decayed body parts bounce across the floor, and the head shears off with a sickening pop. The wraith goes still.
But there are twenty-six more still moving.
Four break away from the group and fly toward the still-healing Wolf who took down their companion. The Wolf makes a break to the right, trying to get to higher ground atop an overturned car. But the Wolf is too slow. The wraiths slice quickly through the air, propelled by an unearthly force, and they simultaneously strike at the Wolf with their blades. The Wolf shrieks in terror and pain as the blows rain down, hacking and slashing into limbs, lacerating muscle, cracking bone. Those powerful jaws manage to catch another wraith in a crushing bite, but it’s too late. One of the scythes strikes home, at the base of the Wolf’s skull, severing the spinal cord.
Doom Sayer Page 20
