by John Conroe
“Nothing to be gained by continuing to let them throw speculation our way,” he said as we stepped behind the screen of police and administration officials. He stopped and ignored the aide hovering by his side, instead focusing on us. “Was any of that true? The tracking and the counterattacks?” he asked.
“Yes. We just need to wait for our best weapon to wake up,” I said.
“So much relies on just that young man,” he noted. “But it was unbelievable watching all that wreckage just float into dump trucks.”
“That was a demonstration of finesse and skill,” Tanya said. “You have yet to see a true demonstration of power.”
“Well, I’m hoping to see one soon,” he said before turning to his aide. Before the assistant could speak, he turned back. “And I don’t know if anyone has said this to you all but thank you. Thank you for making sure I still have a state to govern and thank you for all the people you saved today.”
Chapter 30
Governor Duran’s wish came much sooner than even we expected. Omega flew us all back to New York and the vampires went down for the day. Declan didn’t wake up, even when Arkady carried him to the suite under the Tower that had been his and Stacia’s since Omega was born. But he did wake up before the sun set and he did slip almost unnoticed into Chet Aikens’ science center, where the remains of the Vorsook henchpeople were being held and studied under Omega’s watchful eyes.
I made it down there three minutes after Omega informed me of his father’s arrival. I happened to have both twins in my hands, so they went with me, laughing as I raced down flights of stairs at inhuman speed. The science center doors opened automatically for me as I approached, undoubtedly Omega’s action, as they usually required biometric scanning to enter.
Inside, a very nervous Chet was bravely putting himself between the armored glass room that held the secured alien technology and the dark cloud of witchery named Declan. Both snapped around at my arrival, Chester looking instantly relieved while Declan frowned at the twins in my arms, turning his body to block sight of the bloody and still animated skulls and spines.
“Why are you guys here?” Declan asked, moving toward me while the glass wall darkened itself to block the bloody view.
“Heard you were here,” I said. “Wulf and Cora wanted to see Uncle Declan.”
Declan shot a glare at the nearest wall-mounted camera as he approached and accepted both twins, who all but jumped into his arms. Exactly as I had asked them to on the way downstairs. Hard to have an outburst when you are holding little ones.
“Let’s go get some food,” I suggested. “You have to be starving.”
He looked at me, staying focused on me despite Cora grabbing his nose, but he nodded. “I see what you’re doing here… all of you,” he said, tilting his head slightly toward the camera. “Fine.”
A few minutes later, I got him and the kids situated in a private corner of the cafeteria, buckling the strap on Cora’s highchair while Declan did the same for Wulf.
“Where’s Stacia?” I asked after one of the kitchen staff took our orders. The cafeteria is usually a serve yourself kind of place but at times—like, say, when the world’s most powerful witch needs to be talked down from going nuclear—there’s a bit higher level of service.
“She’s still asleep. She didn’t pass out on the sidewalk like I did,” he said, pulling a roll from the basket I’d grabbed on the way in. I wasn’t Nika, and not even as astute as any of the women in my life, but I was pretty sure I understood Declan.
“So, you’re enraged over the attack that you think you should have stopped and you’re angry at passing out from exhaustion after doing more than anyone, and because of that, you want to craft a devastating counterattack using that creepy nano hardware in Chet’s lab, right?”
“Don’t you?” he retaliated, breaking his roll into three pieces and giving a piece to each of my kids.
“Oh, I feel it alright. Rage. Rage beyond what I felt when Toni was in that silo in New Hampshire. And yes, I think you’re the one to do it, to strike the blow for us, but if I learned anything from New Hampshire, it’s the limits and dangers of reacting from anger instead of focusing that rage into a laser-like response. So don’t you think we should plan it out a bit rather than go off like nitroglycerin?”
He was chewing his own piece of roll, as were Cora and Wulf, who have never been fussy eaters. What can I say; they take after their dad.
Before he could answer, three servers brought trays of food: sandwiches, wraps, cheese and crackers, fruit, and lots of chips.
The kids reached for chips and grapes, forcing the two of us to get them little piles of food to preoccupy them long enough for us to eat and talk. I was done first and took the opportunity to chow a quarter sub in three bites. Declan had just got a bite of a wrap when I finished swallowing.
“So what’s your idea? What can you do with that tech?”
“I need to examine it closer, which you and Chet both seemed hell-bent on stopping me from doing,” he complained as he swallowed.
“Mostly because you had that look in your eyes,” I said. “Like a wolf about to bite. You’ve picked up some traits from Stacia.”
He took another bite, his face thoughtful as he chewed. Then he swallowed and answered.
“Like calls to like,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s a facet of sympathetic magic. Like calls to like. You’ve experienced a witch attempting to spell you using your hair, right?” he asked.
I nodded, realizing Stacia must have told him about Erika’s ill-advised attempt.
“Well, those minions were created from sympathizers by the alien who mounted this attack.”
“So they connect to the Vorsook?”
“In a manner of speaking. They also connect to the rest of the human organization here on Earth that helped plant those bombs,” he said.
“What’s your idea?”
He told me. In between bites of food and long drafts of his favorite after-battle beverage—chocolate milk—the witch explained his plans for the remains of the alien’s henchpeople. And to say I was impressed would be an understatement.
I saw some holes in his plans and pointed them out. He listened and settled down to rework some of his ideas, with me tossing suggestions out here and there. An hour later, we had a pretty good framework of a plan, and more importantly, he agreed that we needed to run it by the others before he dove into it. After that, and after cleaning up the mess of empty food platters and dishes we were responsible for, we dropped the twins off with Tanya’s assistant, Lisle, and went back down to Chet’s lab.
The heads were maybe even more gruesome than before. Not because the flesh covering their skulls was rotting; on the contrary, from the neck up, they were almost perfect. Taut, clean skin, hair trimmed, eyes normal other than having a silver pupil surrounded by a normal iris, blue for the male, hazel for the female. And that cleaned-up perfection on the head, with two feet of hanging silver spine below it was way, way worse than the decayed zombie look I had imagined.
Both of them were locked into hardened steel clamps, suspended over the stone floor of the otherwise empty room. Empty with the exception of two Omega drones hovering on guard.
“We’re keeping them quarantined,” Chet said. “I imagine horrible things if they touch any living flesh.”
“Have they spoken?” I asked.
“They have no lungs,” Chet said, looking bewildered.
“Neither do those drones of Omega’s,” Declan said. “Yet he can speak just fine.”
“No. They haven’t spoken, but they watch and probably read lips,” Chet answered.
I turned and gave Declan a meaningful look.
“Yeah, I know. Already thought of their sensory capabilities. I need to go in there for a moment,” he said, looking at me.
“Hell no!” Chet said, shaking his head. “No way. If they get ahold of you, who knows what happens?”
“I’ll go w
ith you,” I said. “Plus, we have Omega watching. But… you will have your shields in place.”
“That will make it harder, but alright,” he agreed.
“Going on record that this is a bad idea,” Chet said, but he got a high-definition camera from a cabinet and set it up with something like anticipation.
We approached the sliding steel door and Omega opened it for us. I went in first, my own aural armor in place. Both combat orbs slid around, putting themselves between the metal alien tech and Declan.
Despite being clamped in place, the eyes in both skulls shifted to watch us and the jaws started to snap.
“Knock that shit off,” Declan said, raising one hand. Twin arcs of blue electricity shot from his fingers, slamming into the skulls, making the metal spines go straight and stiff. He let off, then snapped a second bolt into each one. When the arcing stopped, smoke rose from both skulls, mostly the hair I think, and the air smelled of ozone.
“We don’t feel pain,” the female face said. The male snapped its jaws.
Declan sighed and flexed the wrist of his still-extended hand. This time, a bolt of eye-searing white shot from his palm and hit the very bottom of the female’s dangling spine, vaporizing the alien metal like water on hot concrete.
The whole spine and skull jumped like a kid touching a hot stove. “Did you feel that?” the witch asked.
“A loss of less than five percent of functionality,” the female said. “Even if you erase these units bit by bit, we will not be divulging information.”
The kid laughed. “You reveal information to me every second I stand here,” he said with a wolfish smile. “For instance, I just learned all kinds of information about your construction and specifications. You have intact human brains encased in those artificial skulls. You are composed of advanced alloys that contain some kind of nano circuitry.”
“Your words indicate you lack even the vocabulary to describe our technology,” the male said.
“Hmm, maybe,” the young witch mused. “But look, I can take over your indescribable technology with a thought.” He flicked his fingers and both spines shifted at whatever silent command he gave them. They formed silver S-shapes, then dropped and twisted around to reach toward each other, one slightly shorter than the other.
Both faces went blank. “I can also stop you from communicating with your owner,” Declan said before turning my way. “It’s like I guessed and Omega thought. There’s entanglement with something.”
“And you can block it?” I asked.
“No, that’s part of the nature of entanglement, but I can override their programs and make them not communicate.”
“How?” I asked. I believed him but it seemed too easy.
He shrugged. “When I ran those bolts of electricity through them, I used these,” he said, holding up his arm, showing off the nano bracelet on his wrist, “to monitor their responses. Sort of followed along with the current, in a manner of speaking. That much electricity overwhelmed their systems for a moment. In that moment, I learned all about them… and found holes in their defenses.”
“Father has grown since I came into being,” Omega said from one of the orbs. “His ability to connect with anything technical has benefited from contact with my own version of nano technology.”
“What about when you vaporized the bottom of that one?” I asked, pointing at the female.
“I was just sick of its shit,” he admitted. “Anyway, each still has the human brain of the original minion. The brain interfaces with the nano tech of the skull. I found the off switch for that interface.”
“Can they find a way around it?”
“They’re certainly trying. I want to get Nika to listen and monitor the gray matter part.”
“Well, we’ve got hours before she’s up, so what next?”
“We’ll need someplace to do this whole thing,” he said. “I have an idea about that, but maybe we should take a ride and look it over to make sure.”
Chapter 31
It was almost full dark when we all got together. Tanya, Nika, Lydia, Stacia, Arkady, Deckert and fifteen of his people, Chet, myself, and Darion Cornell all stood back and watched as Declan finished the last touches on his crafting. He’d spent almost all afternoon on it, ever since he and I had driven to the Red Hook training facility, which he immediately pronounced perfect for his purposes. When he’d first told me about the site as a possibility, I hadn’t agreed. Most of the space is filled with massive grain silos that run from top to bottom of the massive facility, leaving very few wide-open patches of bare floor. But we’d found that there were a couple of open spaces of the size he’d indicated, including the open roof where we were now, and he’d stayed behind to begin work as soon as he saw it.
Now, we stood in the wind, under the early stars, watching as Declan worked in a pool of intense illumination coming from a trio of tripod-mounted 6000-lumen work lights. He was kneeling, scribbling on the concrete with a burnt piece of pine two-by-four. Omega had retrieved the wood from LA, along with a whole bunch of building debris left from the earthquake. During the quake, fires had broken out in and around the collapsed buildings, all promptly extinguished by our witch, but at least one had burned long enough to leave the charred implement he was using to scribe last-minute runes, sigils, and glyphs on the concrete rooftop.
A pair of giant circles, created from powdered concrete, also from LA, formed the framework of his crafting. They covered a space at least fifty feet wide and maybe eighty feet long. The two overlapped like a pair of Olympic rings, creating a kind of Venn diagram. The intersected area held a sapling yew tree in a planter that I had personally carried up to the roof an hour ago.
Several large chunks of broken asphalt had arrived with the transport and Declan had held them in his hands, one at a time, melting the tar from each piece with his mind, dribbling the viscous black fluid onto the concrete roof, forming the smooth symbols and shapes of his art. Apparently making the spell construct from the remains of the attack lent some sort of significant impact to the spell beyond simple symbolism.
The witch leaned back on his heels and studied the finished diagrams. Nodding to himself, he turned to us. “It’s ready,” he said with confidence.
Immediately, Arkady picked up a big steel box and brought it to Declan, who met him at the edge of his construct. “Open it please,” the witch asked.
Arkady balanced the heavy box on one big hand and carefully used the other to open the hinged top of the box. Declan waved a hand and the two metal-and-flesh remnants of the minions floated out, twitching and writhing with unnatural life as they floated along behind the witch. He waved again and they floated down to land in the exact center of the nearest giant circle, inside a smaller circle which was itself inside three other concentric circles.
Declan bent down and touched the rim of the innermost circle. A sharp click like someone snapping their fingers really hard accompanied his touch. He stepped out of the next circle and did it again, then the next and the next two after that, like a banker locking vault doors for the night. He stepped out of the biggest circle and into the same-sized one next to it. Inside this one was a five-pointed star, the uppermost point aimed at true north, each star tip just barely touching the rim of the circle. Each point had a road flare set on it, the big police kind, that Deckert had provided from his security supplies. Inside the star were five piles of blood-stained clothing, items recovered from the LA County morgue that had been worn by deceased victims of the attack, one pile to each arm of the pentagram. The exact center of the pentagram was filled with flowers, cards, photos, stuffed animals, and other remembrances of the victims at the makeshift memorial in California. How Omega had gotten all of it away, unseen, from that very public site was a mystery but I was more interested in what Declan would do with all of it.
“Like calls to like,” Declan said, pointing at the circle with the alien tech inside it. “And the sharp loss and sacrifice of our citizens and the heartfelt gr
ief and sorrow of their survivors amplifies the power of our response.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Darian Cornell asked, his expression clearly concerned.
Declan smiled. I’d seen the same predatory grin on his girlfriend’s face many times before. It seems it may be contagious. “It’s like that reporter asked Chris and Tanya. How do we root out the humans who have turned against their own species and their own world?” He pointed at the circle with the skulls and spines. “These remnants of Vorsook minions are a direct link to both their master and to the rest of the organization. Nika has been able to verify that these two were highly placed in the alien’s network, that they knew all the cells of the organization. She wasn’t able to dig more information out, as the nano structure of the metal skulls acts as a blocking agent for more than the simplest thoughts. But that’s okay. The fact that they know it is enough.”
“I thought you blocked their link to their master?” I asked.
“I did. This spell is a little tricky, in that I have to get the timing just right. It’s a little like when you put your cell phone on Airplane Mode. When you take it off, the phone reaches out to reestablish connection. With entanglement, that happens almost instantly. I need to get that part dead-on.”
He might have emphasized the dead in dead-on. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck lift a little. He had clothes from dead citizens and the live brains of the minions in his spell. Somehow I didn’t think the minions would be coming out of this spell still alive.
“I’m powering it up now, using both the ambient energy of New York and the emotional energy of the items in the second circle, as well as some borrowed elemental power. In this case, it’s better to bring it up slowly, smoothly.”
“Does anyone else feel like we’re in a movie where there’s about to be a sacrifice?” Darion asked.
Stacia snapped around and pinned the big attorney with a sharp glance, her normally green eyes flickering a little yellow.
