Mother freaking Troy Lopez.
It wasn’t enough. Not even to keep him going for more than a few moments longer.
Survival meant defeating the monster that had been created to remove him from the world. Hitting it would do nothing, though it was tempting to toss a punch in that direction anyway. That was what he was expected to do, at a guess. To lash out, like a vampire, instead of fighting the thing with his mind, like a mage. Or a demon. Or a god.
The trick was in finding the power to protect himself. A thing he didn't have yet. It got him to consider what he’d been told to do, originally. If you didn’t have power, you had to substitute skill and clarity. That or time. He didn't have much of that last one left.
Slowly, but in real time, he was starting to lose. He was being consumed faster than he could rebuild. It was tempting to smile but he refrained. After all, he was in a trap. It was a good one, but that didn’t mean he’d lost yet. Troy Lopez might not be magically powerful but he was pretty decent at concentration. All line walkers were. It was how they opened nodes and survived in the big nothing.
Adding to the feeling of him rebuilding, he launched an attack. One that hit the heart of what the creature in front of him was. The thing was strong, due to the power load of Clem’s death. So, he co-opted that energy, for himself. Before the creature could use all of the power to become a thing that Troy couldn’t hope to beat, he grabbed at it, struggled it away and then battered the creature that wasn’t there, until it weakened its grasp on him.
It wasn’t an elegant thing.
What Alison, the teen girl demon, had taught him to do was careful and controlled. In desperation, trying to live, he started out throwing force and power at the thing, rewriting parts of it. That worked, to an extent. It wasn’t enough.
If he wanted to live, or keep his unlife, the battle had to change. Fast, as well. Without dying, he needed to move from slamming into the thing, to using magical aikido against it.
It was insanely hard. Not just in controlling his emotions, which screamed at him to fight. He had to settle, focus, and battle at the same time, without making any mistakes. He nearly died, trying to switch to that. His very being was being eaten away, eroding like every cell was steeped in acid. Just as he was about to fail, for the last time, a tiny bit of clarity rewrote just enough of the kami, the spirit built there, for him to struggle on a bit longer.
Step by step, standing there, frozen, over the body of Clem the school boy, he pushed the thing back. Wiping it clean. Lobotomizing it, since he didn’t have the power to do anything else yet. The world outside of him was dark, as far as he could tell. Not just being night, but gone from his way of thinking. Finally, when he could move back, the world snapped back into clarity. The monster wasn’t gone.
It hung, invisibly, without form or shape, over the dead body.
Behind it, just watching him, stood Alison. The Technician.
She clapped her hands, slowly.
“That was close to pitiful, Troy. You know that, right? You took hours to beat an idea. An idea. Let that sink in. Worse, the bad guys sacrificed one of your people to make it happen. Clemance… I didn’t have any personal plans for him. You worked on him however, didn’t you? So, it was a double slap in the face. It was meant to be, by the way. Annoying of them. I’ll let you get your feet under you before your testing. Call it four hours? You should call this in. The residual magic will be enough to clear you.”
Then, as if it made any sense, she just turned and walked away. Troy pulled his phone. It was going to need to be recharged soon. Instead of calling it in directly to the Chief or Detective Tran, he did nine-one-one instead. That would take more time but was closer to what would be needed later, in the paperwork portion of things.
It was hard to explain that the murder had been a blood mage attack on him. Rather, he said the words but wasn’t believed. He hung up, before the others could get there. Then he dialed Detective Tran.
“What? It’s been a day. If this isn’t about a foot rub, leave me alone.”
“Lopez here. My place. Human sacrifice. Clem from the other day. We need mages here. There was an attack. I stopped it, for now. I can’t leave, until it’s taken care of.” That part was over the top but he didn’t really know if the thing was finished or not yet. It felt alive still. Even as it wasn’t there.
His phone died, which saved his life.
The kami lashed out, using the cops coming up the stairs as a distraction for him. The battle was on again, but trying to survive, he managed to light the thing up, so it glowed in the air. More or less. It was his mental image of it glowing, not the real thing, but the others got the idea well enough they didn’t shoot him. Even as he struggled with it.
Almost not able to speak, he managed a single word.
“Run.” Explaining more than that wasn’t happening at the moment. All he had was tied up in the magical working. It was difficult and he kind of figured that this time he was going down. Not that he gave up.
Sometime later, more hours, he thought, the sun tried to distract him from his fight. That and the annoying chanting. His eyes were open, and had been, but his mind suddenly realized that at least ten people were there. All wearing white, though they didn’t match. It wasn’t a uniform, he didn’t think. He kept fighting for himself, since it was him the beast wanted, perhaps needed, to eat. After a moment, there was the sense of a pop in the air and it was gone. Bound into a small gem. One that had been placed on top of Clem.
Leslie Hampton, from the crappy magic shop, took an honestly relieved breath.
“That was insane. Did we get it, Mike?” That was a man, who seemed to be about forty pounds overweight and close to sixty years old. The cloud of white around him was much more intense than the others though. His hair had a lot of black in it still, though it was mainly silver.
“We got it. It won’t be getting out. A human sacrifice… We need to get the top levels involved here. I…” He stopped and looked at Troy, his eyes miserable. “We won’t let this happen again. I swear. I don’t know how we make that work in time, but we will. If I have to die myself to do it.”
Troy shook his head.
“We aren’t the ones doing sacrifices, thanks. Right now… Can any of you help me find who did this? Clem was under my protection. I will not let this stand. It’s one thing for them to come after me but he was just a kid. One not a week into fixing his messed-up life. They were probably going to die before. Now… I can’t see any way out for them. Spread the word on that. If anyone in my city is harmed again, I will find who did it and do things so horrible that they’ll wish they’d killed themselves instead.”
He didn't know if they’d get that message, of course.
Not until he enforced his words with death.
To say he was enraged was wrong. Troy knew he was so far past that it was going to be hard to come back from.
Chapter seventeen
It was incredibly frustrating. He knew there were people that needed to die. Ones that had harmed a person that was one of his. That Clem had been a waste of space that Troy hadn’t cared about at all before that day didn’t matter. They were going to die for what they’d done.
Relaxing, using magic and concentration to control and finally subdue that part of himself, he worked back around to something like peace. It wouldn’t stop him from getting revenge, of course. In this case justice and his own petty feelings were working hand in hand. That meant the law needed to be addressed first.
What he needed to know about was what mage law had to say about human sacrifices. The humans didn’t have any real way to keep a mage. Especially these, who were willing to kill in order to strike at others. To that end, he thought about who he knew that had some passing acquaintance with that sort of thing. The legal system of the mages.
In the end, there was only one person that could tell him what he needed to know.
Zack.
Before he’d been a greater demon, he’d been a hom
e-schooled kid, raised by the former leader of the mages. In fact, if Troy had been told correctly, Zack had even memorized large portions of their documents on things like that. The trouble now was that his best friend was also a greater demon. That meant having to trade for things, or purchase the information.
Troy didn’t have time for that kind of silliness. Not at the moment. So, instead of calling up his oldest friend to ask a simple question, he called him up for a different reason. It was manipulative and a trick. One that might even work.
Zack answered happily enough. As if he didn’t know about what had taken place. What had been taken from Troy. The attempt to kill him was annoying, but that, striking at his people… That wasn’t going to work for him. Ever.
“Hey Troy! That was fast, I figured that it would be at least a month before I heard from you again. How are things going? I heard that you had to take out one of the blood fiends. It sounds legit to me.” That Zack would know what the mages called people like that just made sense.
“Hey, Zack! Yeah. That was a thing. The mages struck back and I need to get some data on mage law. Can I get your grandfather’s number? There was a human sacrifice, when they tried to kill me a bit ago. That was targeted. Not just the attempt. They killed a boy that I was helping. A former drug dealer. Clem. One of my people.”
He made himself not care about that as much.
It took energy, which he had to make himself circulate, taking sips of it from the universe. He wasn’t doing enough that way. Ann was right. He needed to work out how to get at much more than that. It was right there, all around him but the flow had to increase, as did his skill in using it.
Zack, being great, grunted.
“I understand. Be careful. It’s too easy to see how slow the mages are and forget their real power. How close was their attack?”
“On my doorstep. I nearly died, several times.”
“Here. I don’t know if he’ll be awake this time of day.”
Troy had gone back inside his apartment. Krista hadn’t come back, which made him worry for her, given she’d been staying with him. That was blocked out as well. Not thinking was a thing he was actually good at, as strange as it sounded. His phone was about to die, though.
“I need to get to the station. Call Becky. If she hasn’t been taken, get her to run. Her mother as well. I need to protect them.”
His entire city.
Rage tried to creep back into his soul. It was stuffed down. Hard.
Collecting the number, he hung up. It was abrupt. Seeming a little unhinged. Then he ran. Walking, but distorting the world around him by so much that it screamed at him in pain. To get out of his home, he had to step over the body on his steps. The mages were gone, but the police were there. They didn’t see him pass them. There wasn’t time for paperwork and human rules. Not even as he moved to make sure that was served as best he could.
The pain fed his anger. His focus turned it to calmness, before he got into work. If he seemed less than perfectly in control of himself, then he’d be removed from the case. Technically he already had been. He needed a working phone though, so went in anyway.
Troy didn’t stop as he rushed the place. No one inside seemed concerned. Then, he was watching them stand, not moving, so it was hard to tell. They might have been scurrying around, trying to work out what to do, like he was. The white-hot pain he felt had simply made him better at doing that at the moment. Plus, he had a clue as to what was needed.
The mages needed to get to their freaking binding thing. Then, if they could, they needed to help the humans find the guilty parties. What they did with those that killed like that, he didn’t know. That was the point of what he was really doing at that moment.
He moved into his shared office, to find Detective Tran there behind her desk, a phone pressed to her right ear. Her face was a worried seeming, but unmoving still. He sat, and then stopped rushing, pulling back from the speed he was living in.
Then he had to sit, nearly for a minute, as his partner looked across at him, not even jumping as he appeared.
She focused on the phone.
“We need a search. The photos are out there. Put them on the television then! Damn it, Smitty. I don’t care what they feel. Good. Thanks.”
Denise was off the phone before he could speak. That meant she figured he was there just to sit and do very little.
“Jesus, Lopez. This is fucked up. You all right? We got word from the mages here. The locals that came out? According to them you were locked in a psychic mage battle for half a day. They were impressed, if that helps at all?”
He nodded. It didn’t, since praise wasn’t what he needed at the time being. Rather than seem upset, he calmed himself for the third time in about two minutes and tilted his head just enough to seem questioning.
“I have a number to call. The former leader of the mages. We need legal advice, so I pulled some strings to get this. He might not help us. I don’t know. He may not even be up for the day yet. I think he’s retired.”
Waking someone up for a thing like that was a bit gruesome but he didn’t have anything else, if he wasn’t going to just whine on the phone for half a day, trying to get help. Troy picked up the phone, not knowing what to expect. Dialing took a bit of will, having to go slow enough for the device to register what he was doing.
The phone rang four times, before it picked up. The man on the other end didn’t sound old, but he did seem to have been asleep.
“Brad Hartley. Is there an emergency?”
It was a strange thing to say, except that no one probably called before noon, when you were retired.
“Yes. This is Troy Lopez. I’m working for…”
“Troy! Is this about the situation there? The blood rituals going on? I think that I’ve worked out what must be happening. Some kind of genius loci being created. The spirit of a place. It has to be moving or destroying the parts of the unfortunates being affected. We can remove that kind of thing, if we have a large enough working group. The national binding… That will happen in three days. The issue there is that the call went out to everyone, so these people will know it’s coming. That will make them desperate.”
Troy didn’t even think to blink, going totally still instead. The man had told him a lot in a short time.
“A kami, which sounds like the same thing as that. It consumes. Two of them had been set on me. The first was weak, the second… I think… I know, they powered it with a human sacrifice. It was a lot more dangerous. I managed to stall it out and the local mages stepped up to bind it into a crystal. The boy… A high school kid, was left with his throat slit, on my doorstep in a circle.”
“Oh… That’s horrible. What do you need? You can come here. We can ward you… Or… Zack. He can protect you. I’ll call him.”
Troy felt two things at once. A wash of annoyance, as well as a sense of pleasure that the man, who he’d met twice in his life, was instantly trying to protect him like that. He’d been expecting to have to beg for help, not have the former leader of the mages offer to take him in and protect him on his own.
“Thanks. We need that binding and help finding the remaining killers. I think there are three left. They might be part of a cult. I need data on that. The Children of Baphomet? The Cleric is supposed to be sending along the Vatican papers on that. I don’t know if we need to take down the whole crew. There are people here, on the ground that will be in danger. I need to get to them. I can’t say more about that.”
Troy didn't think mages would be tapping phones but other than the idea that they could do almost anything, if they had time and could think of it, he didn’t know what they might get up to. Forest was probably a target. The leader of the group’s kid, who had been slated to be a sacrifice at one point.
Unless that had been a lie. He had to assume it wouldn’t be.
“I understand. I’ll try to get the binding moved up. If they can’t use their magic for a year, that should make it easier to find them. Is
there anything else you need?”
He thought, then realized that he’d called for a reason. The man being competent and recognizing him like he had was strange. Not really though, once he thought about it. Zack had lived with him for years, so his name might have come up in conversation.
“Mage law. What do you do with murderers? We can’t hold them ourselves.” Vampire law was simple on that one. They’d call in Bey, or possibly Eve, and kill them all. If the people on the ground didn't take care of it themselves. It was one of the reasons that mages didn’t get into things all that often with vamps. Troy’s people tended to simply use death as an answer to everything.
“On that level? Blood mages, using human sacrifice? Shunning. Binding. Even death, if they won’t stop what they’re doing. Binding would be first. What… I don’t really know what humans will do for this. It hasn’t come up before.”
Troy didn't honestly know either.
“They, we, tend to lock people away. Mages would be hard to hold that way, but if they were bound well enough, that might work. There hasn’t been any talk about new rules for your people. Not even for vampires, and we freak them out. The thing there is that so far, the human authorities have expected the individual groups to handle things. A human died here. That… I don’t know how that will change things. If it was a vampire, we’d find who did it and kill them.”
It wasn’t a small thing. It was simpler with vampires, in a way. If a vamp killed a human and it was found out, which it wasn’t most of the time, then that vampire died. No matter who they were. The mages were kinder than that, which might not be enough for the humans.
Plus, there was the fact that they’d involved Troy directly. The killers should have stuck to chickens and going after him from that angle. That was inside the rules. He’d killed one of theirs. It was a good kill. Legal and needed. That didn’t get him off the hook with them, he understood. It probably shouldn’t.
Troy Ounce (Lopez Time Book 1) Page 25
