“Weird thing, though, boss?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not seeing any vehicles,” McCreery told him. “The road hasn’t had enough time to really degrade; they could have driven right up to the building…but there’s no vehicles there at all.”
“So, they probably walked in, trying to avoid detection,” David concluded. “Or we’re looking at some confused lost skiers.” He chuckled humorlessly. “If it’s the latter, they’re going to get even more confused shortly.”
Stone and Dresden followed David out of the helicopter, all three of them wrapped in black armor and helmets. Dresden carried the same M4-Omicron carbine that David did, where Stone had slung his massive M60 machine gun over his shoulder.
The vampire seemed to waver for a moment as the Pendragon lifted off behind them. She shook herself, her even-more-faceless helmet turning to David afterward.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “If this goes bad, it’ll do so fast and hard.”
“I’m fine,” she replied. “Just remember that vampires are definitively nocturnal. I’m forcing my body to adapt to a more ‘normal’ cycle to work with your team, but…” She shrugged. “It takes time, but I am ready for action.”
David glanced at Stone, who was carefully not visibly reeling. The big Empowered was a lot harder to hurt than an ordinary human, but once taken down, he took just as long to recover—and the wave of energy that had wiped out everyone in Detroit had been hard on even his system.
He seemed up and capable, though, and it wasn’t like they had much choice. Neither of his team members were at a hundred percent, but they were the team he had.
“All right,” he said grimly. “Let’s stick together. This could easily just be some hikers or skiers who got lost and went looking for shelter as anything else. We don’t shoot first.”
Both of his subordinates nodded, and then followed him as he advanced on the sprawling lodge building. It was in rough shape—no one had bothered to fix any of the holes ONSET had blown in the building when they’d assaulted, and heavy snowfall had expanded the damage ruthlessly.
“Thermal is clear,” Dresden reported. “There’s no one alive on this side of the building.”
“The summoning chamber was deeper towards the mountain, buried in the middle of the structure,” David told them. “If we have trouble, that’s where it’ll be.”
He took a moment, standing at the edge of the hole where the Anti-Paranormal Marines had blown their way into the main floor, to remember as much as he could of the layout of the building.
“If I remember correctly, the inner sanctum–ish area is this way,” he continued. “With me.”
It was a strange feeling, moving through the half-wrecked building. David had seen it in its original state, when even the more public areas had been well built and well maintained, and the inner sanctum had been outright luxurious.
Now it was far less luxurious. A quarter or so of the building was utterly wrecked, and snow was drifting into the rest from there. The team that had set up the surveillance had shut down the heating and lights, leaving the building to the elements.
Even knowing there was someone in there somewhere, the building felt empty. Cold. Abandoned.
Creepy.
The entire building registered flatly on their thermal goggles. The walls were frozen to the same temperature as the snow or outside, and blocked any line of sight to show anyone in the building.
“No footprints,” Stone noted as they moved through the building. “You’d think we’d see something in the snow.”
“It depends,” David replied. “If they came in from above and knew where they were going, we wouldn’t have passed their trail yet.”
“No aircraft,” Dresden said. “How would they have come in from above? Why, for that matter?”
“How would you come in from above?” the Commander asked dryly. “If they expected surveillance and motion sensors, they might have tried to come in over it and sneak past it to the summoning chamber.”
The vampire visibly shivered at the mention of the summoning chamber, and David waved his team to silence as they reached the portion of the structure intact enough that the snow wasn’t drifting into it.
They continued on their way, until Dresden held up her hand. She had the best hearing of the three of them and quickly let them know with hand signals there were people ahead of them.
At least six. Moving forward, David confirmed that count himself, listening carefully.
They were in the main chamber—and speaking very quietly. The ONSET team could tell there were people there, but even David couldn’t tell what they were saying.
He gestured for his two agents to approach the doors to the main chamber on either side. Well, the doorway—the doors themselves hadn’t survived Ekhmez’s summoning and ensuing clash with Michael O’Brien.
David held up three fingers, slowly counting down as he prepared to charge into the room himself.
He folded down the last finger and moved, blurring into the room at inhuman speed while his subordinates came through behind him. Between the three of them, they had the entire room covered, guns tracking across the half-dozen men in winter camouflage gear.
“Nobody move!” David barked. “Drop your weapons; this is a restricted area!”
All of the six men were carrying hunting rifles. Most of them were slung as they poked through the wreckage of the summoning ritual—what ONSET had left behind, anyway. The cleanup teams had taken away the bodies and anything related to the ritual they could find.
The six hunters clearly hadn’t found much in the room. Two of them had settled down behind the broken altar with their rifles in their hands. They hesitated at David’s command, and he trained his carbine on the closer of the two armed men.
“Drop. The. Guns,” he snapped. “I won’t repeat myself.”
They didn’t look like cultists, but they were a little too uniformly equipped, had gone a little too directly to the heart of the building and weren’t nearly concerned enough about the remaining paraphernalia of a demon summoning.
The hunters with slung weapons kept their hands where David and his companions could see them. The two holding the guns slowly laid them down on the altar and stood up.
Watching them, David realized there was an opening in the wall behind them. A chunk of the wooden paneling had slid aside to reveal a set of stairs leading down under the building—a secret passageway that Omicron had missed.
That Omicron should not have missed. Not unless it was concealed by magic.
“You’re all under arrest for trespassing and violating a restricted zone,” David told them calmly, hoping that the secret entrance was all he’d missed. He gestured Dresden forward with a jerk of his head, leaving Stone with his bigger weapon to continue covering the hunters.
“That’s a little extreme, dontcha think?” a calm Boston-accented voice said as three more men emerged from the secret passageway. All three were wrapped in the same winter gear as the rest, two of them with rifles slung and their arms occupied with large wooden boxes.
The speaker had removed his hood and snow goggles, letting shoulder-length black hair hang free as he stepped up into the summoning chamber. Where the others were carrying regular hunting rifles, he had an AR-15 held lazily in one hand.
David could easily fire the weapon the way the man was holding it, but most mortals would find it painful at best. Something about the way the all-too-familiar man held the gun suggested that he at least thought he could.
“Wait,” he said slowly as he registered the face and the accent. “Buckley? You’re supposed to be in jail.”
John Buckley had been David White’s mentor in the police force of the Maine town of Charlesville, his employment before joining ONSET. He’d also turned out to be a member of the Church of the Black Sun and had been interned with the rest of its members after they’d ambushed ONSET and wiped out hundreds of Federal agents.
“Ah,” Buckley said aloud.
“So, you fine gentlemen would be ONSET. I guess that explains the extremism.”
He smiled coldly.
“From the voice, I’m guessing White, too. Long time no see, David.”
David leveled his gun on Buckley.
“Put down the gun, put down the boxes,” he ordered. “You’re all under arrest.”
“That, David, would be far too much of an interruption,” the older ex-cop told him. “How about you be a good boy and step aside? That way, no one needs to get hurt.”
David fired. The single bullet slammed into the AR-15 in Buckley’s grip, tearing the weapon from the other man’s hand and smashing its wreckage into the wall behind him.
“Stand down,” he snapped.
Buckley shook his hand, eyeing the several visibly broken fingers.
“Fine,” he hissed. “Your way.”
His uninjured hand made a sharp chopping gesture, palm up and facing toward David. The ONSET Commander’s prescience told him there was no danger…but the spell wasn’t intended to attack anyone.
A barrier of force, glittering white and cold in the winter air, flashed into existence between the hunters and ONSET Thirteen. David hadn’t realized Buckley was a Mage—he’d assumed his old mentor was a mundane, even after learning the man had been a member of an apocalyptic cult.
Now he bowed mockingly as he flipped the hood of his winter gear back up.
“I’d love to catch up, you with your government-sanctioned murders, me with my prison time and escape, but I’m on a timeline,” the cultist told them. “Alex, the eighth panel from the right has a tunnel leading outside,” he instructed his minions. “Get it open.”
David stepped up to the barrier, testing it with the barrel of his gun.
“The Black Sun is done,” he warned Buckley. “And we have aerial coverage. You’re not getting out of here.”
“The Church of the Black Sun achieved its purpose,” the other man said distractedly. He was doing…something. David wasn’t sure what, but his Sight was showing rippling patterns of purple and black magic rippling away from his hands.
“It was one tool. Ekhmez failed, but the Church served. And if the chaff was burnt away, it was only ever an incubator for greater things.”
The panel he’d sent his man to popped open, revealing a dark maw leading deeper into the mountain.
“We could fight,” Buckley noted as the magic wrapping around his hands became visible to normal sight. “Except you’d probably win. I know what that sword you carry does—it would break my barrier.
“But not quickly enough.”
He flung his hands out toward David and the magic flickered out, forming into a glistening circle of shadowstuff nine feet across.
“Goodbye, David,” the cult Mage said softly as the first immense toad demon lumbered out of the portal.
David would have been happy to never see one of the midlevel enforcers for the Masters Beyond ever again. The nine-foot-tall, broad-shouldered and squat-faced monstrosities were not only dangerous, they were ugly.
Six of them dropped out of the hole in reality into the ruined room, blocking the ONSET team from Buckley and his minions as the Mage threw them a mocking salute and stepped into the shadows blocking the stairs.
“McCreery, we have nine hostiles attempting evac,” David snapped. “They’re following a tunnel leading into the mountain—watch satellite overhead for them. They’re in winter camo gear, carrying chests of some kind taken from a hidden chamber in here.”
He paused.
“Shoot to kill, no warnings,” he concluded.
Then the glittering barrier Buckley had conjured collapsed and the demons charged. Stone’s M60 opened up, spraying the lead demon with a hail of silver that flung the creature back. It hit the ground in the middle of the pack, roaring in pain but still intact.
Dresden was more precise, firing a three-round burst into the second demon’s head. The exact central nexus of a demon wasn’t in a predictable spot, however, and the creature’s head exploded without seeming to slow the Pure’s advance at all.
David flipped his own rifle to automatic and emptied the entire magazine into the demon coming straight at him. The first round hit around what would have been the hip on a human, and then he walked his fire up and across, carving a sharply defined line of bullet holes through the creature.
It was quickly clear the demon had no internal organs whatsoever, but the ichor it was assembled from splattered away from the silver bullets to leave gaping holes. The monster took another step forward—and then fell into pieces, its form collapsing into black ooze as it fell.
The fourth demon reached David without interruption, however. Massive claws swept toward his face, and he dodged backward. The M4 carbine fell to the ground as he drew Memoria. The red-tinged blade flickered through the shadows scattering across the room, removing the demon’s arm as it came for him again.
Its other arm slammed into his torso, the claws scraping across his armor with a painful sound and force before he brought Memoria across into the Pure’s torso. The soul-blade severed the link between Pure and conjured body in a single strike, the entire creature collapsing back into ichor that covered David in black oil.
The remaining demons were around him now. The one Dresden had shot had managed to remove her gun from her grip despite lacking a head, and the vampire was now dueling two of them with blades of black fire extending from her fists.
Both of the demons that had gone for Stone were stumbling backward, still intact but unable to advance in the face of the big Empowered’s carefully aimed bursts of fire. As David assessed the situation, Stone managed to find the nexus of one of the demons, the burst of fire finishing the job and splattering the demon across the back of the summoning chamber wall.
“Go after him,” Stone barked. “We’ve got this!”
David glanced over at Dresden in time to watch her get flung backward by a blow to the chest—but she took the arm that hit her along with her, the demon that had struck her looking confusedly at its suddenly-leaking stump.
His team had this under control. He charged into the dark stairwell alone.
The steps descended farther than he’d expected, dropping easily fifty or sixty feet into the mountainside. The decorative paneling of the room the secret door had opened into lasted less than a dozen steps before giving way to bare rock.
That rock had been smoothed with power tools, and lights had been installed in carefully carved sconces. When the cleanup teams had shut down the lodge’s power, they’d shut down the power here, too. The staircase was pitch dark.
David White, however, could see in the dark these days. He took the steps two at a time, then three, accelerating as he charged down the stairs in pursuit of his former friend.
The hunters he was chasing didn’t have his inhuman senses. They were using bright flashlights to cut their way through the dark. The tunnel opened out at the bottom of the stairs, turning into a gentle ramp back toward the surface.
“Boss!” one of the men shouted as David came up behind him, turning to shine his flashlight backward, presumably at the sound of running feet.
“Damn,” Buckley said, turning back to spot David charging after them. “Do you know how gross you look, David?” he asked.
A second shield flickered into existence to bar David’s way, but this time, the ONSET Commander dodged past it. His sword out, he lunged down the tunnel toward the cultists.
Gunfire rang out, two of the hunters opening fire. David dodged both shots—only for a blast of force from Buckley to fling him backward.
“I already told you,” the Mage snapped. “I don’t have time for this.”
Black light flared out from Buckley’s palms, forming a second portal in the depths of the mountain. This time, however, instead of summoning creatures out of it, he gestured his minions to it.
“Go,” he snapped. “Unless you want to get cut in half by White here!”
David charged again. This
time, his sword flashed out to intercept the bolt of force Buckley threw at him, flicking it aside easily.
Letting his minions go through the gateway he’d opened, Buckley stepped into David’s charge, an aura of dark electricity flickering around his arms as he met the Commander in mid-stride. He punched David’s sword aside, parrying the blade with a glowing arm.
Buckley’s own attacks went astray, however, as David sidestepped the other man’s fists and tried to close with the sword. He was faster than the Mage, stronger. Buckley clearly had an unexpectedly good idea of David’s own abilities—and he was also clearly just buying time.
The last of his minions dove through the portal after only a few seconds of the fight, and energy pulsed out of Buckley. The Mage stepped backward swiftly as he conjured a new barrier, blocking David from following him.
He exhaled and shook his head.
“I think we both know how this would end,” he said conversationally, “so I suggest we chalk this one up for you and never try it again. It’s been fun, David. I will, quite literally, see you in Hell.”
With that, he stepped backward into the circle of black light behind him, vanishing into the darkness as the portal took him away.
14
“A portal?” Warner asked over the radio as David collapsed into the seat in the Pendragon. “A point-to-point portal?”
“That’s what I’m guessing, at least,” David replied, glancing around his team. Toad demons might be the Masters’ enforcers, but they didn’t seem to be that much bigger of a threat than the lesser demons ONSET fought more regularly. Both of his subordinates were uninjured, if exhausted.
“I’ve never seen anyone step into a portal, in any case,” he continued. “Buckley sent his minions through and then went through after them.”
“That’s not supposed to be possible with the Seal in place,” Warner told him. “We know the Seal is weak around there, but…he’d have to be going somewhere equally weak. And there shouldn’t be anywhere that weak!”
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