by A. L. Knorr
“See what you did, Ros,” Marcel growled, his head wagging with disgust. “You broke Marcus. Poor boy doesn’t even know why he is here.”
Marcus stared at me, his mashed lips twitching.
Please keep it together; please stay quiet. I pleaded silently as I fought to keep my expression neutral.
“He should have behaved himself.” Ross crossed her arms. “Derrek would certainly agree he was up to no good.”
“Marcus?” the head of security asked with mock incredulity before reaching back to slap the porter on the shoulder, drawing a pained wince that broke his stare.
“No, it was all a misunderstanding. Right, Marcus? You and I are friends now, yes?”
Marcus looked from Marcel to Ros’s brutes. Either Marcus’s sweeter nature or a concussion was keeping him from putting the pieces together because after a few heartbeats, he shrugged.
“I don’t understand what is going on,” he grunted as he propped himself up on one arm, trying to get to his feet.
“What’s happening,” Marcel began in a sickly-sweet tone as he leaned on Marcus to keep him on the floor. “Is that since we are friends, I will keep these men from hurting you. And you, mon bon ami, will tell me why you decided to crash a party you were not invited to. Simple, no?”
To Marcus’s credit, he didn’t cringe or baulk when the obvious became apparent. Instead, fire sprang in his green eyes, and the look he gave Marcel had the man shifting his weight to his back foot. Ros shuffled a few steps forward, and one hand slid to her back and the pistol there. This was about to turn ugly.
“I’m not telling you bollocks, bon ami,” Marcus growled in a leonine voice.
On instinct, I reached inside the gun and warped a few things, a firing pin here, a magazine breach there. The gun wouldn’t feel any different in her hand, but if she fired it, she was in for a surprise. I reached out to the first thug’s gun to repeat the process, but Marcel rose and drew out his pistol.
“That was not very friendly.” The head of security tutted, and made a show of looking over his pistol. “This could be simple, congenial even, but you need to adjust your attitude, Marcus, or it is going to cause you problems.”
The muscles tensed along Marcus’s back, he was about to do something, and if I noticed, so did Marcel. I drove an indelicate spike of will into his gun, fouling the internal mechanisms in a chaotic fashion. The gun twitched a little in Marcel’s hands, but other than a frown he gave no sign of concern as he levelled the barrel at Marcus.
“Don’t be stupid,” Marcel warned, his voice steely.
“My mum never accused me of bein’ clever,” Marcus said in a snarling laugh before lunging across the floor.
Marcel pulled the trigger, and the pistol misfired spectacularly, just as the rest of the drawing room exploded into violence. Ros drew her own gun as one of the thugs pounced on Marcus. The second thug had been caught in the misfire and was clutching his face, cursing in what might have been in Russian, blood between his fingers. Hissing and gasping, Marcel fell back holding his mangled hand in shock.
The room smelled of copper and sulfur, and my ears rang from the sound of the pistol’s catastrophic failure.
Ros, apparently not caring which of the two men she shot as they grappled on the floor, pointed her gun towards Marcus and pulled the trigger. When nothing happened, she pulled again, then looked at her gun in numb shock. In an unacceptably satisfying rush, I slammed my will into the small gun and drove it, still in her hand, into the bridge of her nose. She staggered back, tears welling as blood gushed from her split nose. I drove the next thrust with the pistol, her finger still trapped in the trigger guard, into her chin.
With a wounded huff, she went to the floor in a heap.
Marcel had staggered over to a sideboard and was using linen towels to staunch his bloody hand. The Russian thug flicked blood from his face with one hand while the other drew out his gun, the one I hadn’t managed to disable.
“No!”
I threw out a hand to wrench the gun from his grip. The gun went off as it tumbled, breaking my concentration for a second.
The would-be gunman lunged after his pistol as it bounced across the rug, one hand working to keep the blood from his facial cuts from blinding him.
Instinct took over. I launched the copper hidden in and under my dress, tearing the fabric in my haste. Strands of copper, twirling like bolas, struck him across the chest and neck, forcing him into a sideways lurch. He fetched up against an armoire, whose huge, wooded frame wobbled on its stout legs.
I twisted my fingers into claws, and the copper snaked around his chest and neck, dragging him downward. He gave a shocked cry as he lost his footing, crashing to the floor. I meshed my crooked fingers and the copper around his chest snaked up to band around his neck. A second tendril wrapped around the armoire’s leg before joining the neck-band and forming a copper manacle.
“Stay,” I spat, before sending a final mental command to tighten the copper.
His eyes bulged, gory fingers pawing uselessly at the metal biting into his neck. Seeing my hard glare, he became very still, his body rigid with fear.
An angry snarl drew me from my gloating vengeance. Marcus and the thug had risen to their knees, punching and grasping in an attempt to dominate. Marcus appeared bigger and stronger than the thug, but he was clearly exhausted, not to mention injured. He tried to leverage his greater weight to pin the thug, but the smaller man twisted away and rained blows on poor Marcus’s face and body.
As the thug clubbed Marcus across the back of the head, I scanned the goon for metal. My friend sank to the carpet, stunned, and the thug raised a fist to pound the porter’s head in. I threw my will into a lapel pin, driving it through cloth to burrow viciously into flesh, twisting as it went.
The thug screamed and clutched his chest, ripping the jacket and shirt as it bloomed with red. He stumbled to his feet, clawing at the wound in confusion.
During his momentary distraction, I drew a fire poker towards me. I dissolved its form as it spun through the air, so strands of iron flowed across my arm as I advanced on the shrieking thug. By the time I reached him, my arm from fist to shoulder was encased in iron. Drawing on the metal’s strength, I swung out in an uppercut.
The thug launched off his feet, head snapping backwards. He hit the floor with a thud, his body bouncing once like a castaway ragdoll. He didn’t get back up.
I released my hold on the iron, and it fell in jagged scales, spattering on the floor. Ros and her thugs were incapacitated, leaving Marcel unaccounted for. I found him slumped against a blood-smeared wall on the other end of the sideboard, a bullet hole in his temple. The Russian thug’s bullet must have struck Marcel. I felt a violent upward lurch in my stomach, but I stuffed it down as I rushed to check on Marcus.
He was conscious, laying on his back and staring dazedly at the ceiling, his bells still ringing. He regarded me with a punch-drunk smile as I knelt next to him.
“You’re magic, Ibby,” he muttered. “I always knew you were special.”
I looked him over. Though his clothes were blood-splattered, it all seemed to be from superficial cuts on his hands and face. I wished it was as easy to see broken bones and internal trauma. I fought down a surge of panic over what kind of trauma his brain might have suffered.
“What are you doing here Marcus?” I asked, as much to distract myself as to appease my curiosity. “Were you following me?”
Marcus nodded, but the motion made him wince.
“Yes, and yes,” he answered. “I’m here, and I was following you.”
“Why?”
Marcus took my hand in his, giving it a little squeeze. “Something was wrong,” he said warmly. “I could tell when you ran out of the Museum. I wanted to help.”
I probably should have felt touched, but being surrounded by a manor full of armed men made it a struggle to see any of this in a positive light.
“So, you followed me from work?” I asked, lett
ing my tone speak to how unimpressed I was, but Marcus’s sleepy smile showed he was immune to my displeasure.
“No, silly, I was still on shift.” He attempted to sit up and then thought better of it. “In the morning, I went to your flat. When you weren’t there, I hung around Covent Garden Station until I saw you come out in the nice dress.”
I baulked. I didn’t know whether it was gallant or desperate that he’d spent nearly an entire day waiting for me.
“I figured the big, black man was your uncle, and I was wrong to think you were in trouble, until I heard the bloke in the car say something about a suicide mission.”
He shrugged, drawing another wince.
“I grabbed a cab and told him to follow the Maserati. I was amazed he said yes, but when I had to pay him next month’s rent, I understood why.” The dull grin fell off, and his gaze shifted to over my shoulder.
I heard a sharp intake of breath and threw myself to the left on instinct.
Ros, wielding the ash shovel from the fireplace, missed with her wide swing. She staggered forward and tripped over Marcus. She and Marcus grunted as I slithered out of reach.
“Khome ’ere!” Ros snarled through her swollen jaw, pushing herself off Marcus hard enough to make him cry out. She swept the shovel back and forth in my direction. With a second to think, I bid the haft of the shovel become much more flexible. On the next vicious swing, the shovel head whipped back on the malleable shaft and caught her hard across the back of the head with a gong-like sound. Ros’s furious glare softened to dull surprise, and her eyes rolled back. She collapsed bonelessly to the floor.
Marcus, spurred on by the conflict, managed to get into a sitting position and met my stare with another broad smile.
“See?” He nodded stiffly to Ros’s unconscious form. “Magic.”
---
“It’s got to be one of these.” I panted as I tried another door using Marcel’s key card. I’d grabbed all of the key cards and locked the drawing room door behind us to delay discovery of the carnage.
“I still don’t know what we are looking for,” Marcus grumbled as he shuffled along behind me. The dazed effects of his beating had worn off, and now he was just sore and grumpy.
“A study or an office,” I explained as the door swung open to a resplendent bedroom suite. “Whoa.”
A spacious carpeted room that put the Ritz to shame sprawled before us. There was an enormous four-poster bed and a fireplace with two plush high-back chairs; a pair of French doors led to a balcony.
“Doesn’t look like an office to me,” groused Marcus.
“You’re right,” I admitted, still gawking at the exquisite furnishings worked in ivory and gold. “But it never hurts to check.”
I leaned my head in a little further, basking in the luxuriant decor, and spotted two doors in the corner of the room. One was slightly ajar, and though the light was off, I could see marble tiling that I assumed went with a magnificent bathroom. The other was closed and had a card reader set over its handle.
“If you are already in the room, why would you need a card reader to enter a closet?” I asked, moving into the room.
“You wouldn’t.” Marcus followed me in, carefully closing the door behind him.
“Exactly.”
“What are you talking about?” Marcus staggered after me. “Shouldn’t we be getting out of here?”
I stepped to the door and brandished my pilfered keycard.
“You were stalking me, remember?” I quipped as the door opened with an electronic chirp.
Interesting, none of the other doors had made that noise.
“Stalking is not how I’d characterize it,” Marcus growled irritably. “More like attempted rescue.”
As the door swung inward, lamps came on, shedding a soft amber glow over an old swivel chair, roll-top desk, and large oak table. Several orderly stacks of paper and manila folders lay around a double monitored computer. If this weren’t Gwaffu’s private office, I’d eat my overpriced shoes.
“Let’s just remember who saved whom,” I said as I stepped into the office. Grumbling incoherently, Marcus shuffled in after me.
“So, you are looking for a ledger?” He picked up a folder. “What is supposed to be on it?”
“Information about the bad guys Gwaffu works for, and Sark said that it wouldn’t be an actual physical ledger. More likely an electronic file or jump drive.” I moved the computer mouse to wake up the computer.
Marcus dropped the folder back on the desk and turned to the roll-top desk. “It’s locked,” he announced flatly.
“And this is password protected.” I cast about for something, anything, to give me some direction. If Sark had been here, he would’ve known what to do.
I looked at the roll-top. The locks were all steel and brass construction. I let my mind give a hard wrench. The drawers popped open, and the roll top shifted upward a few inches. Marcus eyed the desk and then me with wide, bloodshot eyes before yanking drawers out to view their contents.
“Suppose you could explain how you’re doing that?”
“Soon.” I was distracted by a strange sensation I’d felt when I’d thrown my will at the desk. “But it’s not going to make much more sense when I tell you.”
“So long as you’ll give it a go.”
I was no longer paying attention to Marcus, though. Something large and metallic was behind the desk. It was impossible to properly explain it to someone who’d never felt it, but the metals were both sound and texture, when I acted on others around it responded with its own kind of resonance.
“I’ve found half a dozen of these bloody things.” Marcus held up a handful of jump drives. “How are you supposed to know what’s what?”
“Just shove them all in your pockets,” I said sharply, closing my eyes to focus on metal in the wall. “Now be quiet; I am trying to focus.”
“On what?”
“Shut. Up!”
Two steel beams had been installed parallel to each other, running the length of the wall. That was odd enough in a home this old, but even more odd was the boxed structure composed of multiple dense metals riveted into place between the two beams. I plunged into the hardy layers within the box and felt the side facing me had some complex machinery built into it. What would be built into a wall, tough enough to shrug off dynamite, and had some really complicated way of opening it...
“You idiot,” I gasped, my eyes snapping open. “It’s a safe!”
“Huh?”
I slid around Marcus to the other side of the desk, something which I noticed despite my rush, made us more than a little awkward. Self-consciously, I looked down and realized that the rents in my dress had exposed even more of my body, parts that Marcus was valiantly, if futilely, trying not to look at.
“Please,” I said, clearing my throat. “Help me move the desk.”
“Yeah, sure,” Marcus said quickly, grateful for the distraction. “Where to?”
“Away from the wall,” I said driving off the last of the silly flutters of emotion. I found myself wondering when it got so hot in here as I pressed against the roll-top.
It was made of hardwood and solidly built, but with Marcus doing the bulk of the work, we drew it away from the wall.
“There’s nothing here,” Marcus observed, scratching his head gingerly.
I slid a palm against the wall, probing the mechanisms in the safe door. It was there, but I was going to need either more control or more power, possibly both.
I shifted the Rings onto one hand, then fused them together with a single flex of my mind. They glowed with power for an instant, and I felt Marcus’s wide eyes on me.
“What’s that?”
“Later.” Sweat broke out on my face as I set to work. It was difficult work. Gears and levers caught and ground against each other, and I had to fight to keep from losing my temper. My powers were sufficient to rip the whole damn thing from the wall, but I’d pull the whole room down on top of us.
/> I sent a ripple of intent to soothe and soften the cantankerous bits holding up the show. There were a series of dull thunks as rods of hardened tungsten carbide slid back and the door flap eased outward. Seams in the blank wall so fine you would never notice them unless you knew they were there, caught my eye. I dug with my fingernails and peeled off a thin veneer of plaster to reveal the safe door and the now defunct keypad.
“Wicked!” Marcus muttered, and we shared a smile as I drew the door all the way open.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, but the contents were unassuming at first glance. It took me a second to recognize the white plastic rectangle was a portable hard drive, and had to be the ledger. I snatched it up and tried to fit it into my purse.
Marcus drew out the two remaining items. The look on his face was something like a kid finding buried treasure.
“This is an old service revolver from the World Wars, Webley Mark VI I think,” Marcus said with a touch of reverence. “My great-grandad up in York had one, except he’d kept his in an old trunk so long it was mostly rust.” He checked the chamber. “This one’s loaded.”
“Interesting,” I said, having at last managed to wedge the drive in place. “But I don’t need an antique gun.”
“’Course you don’t.” Marcus chuckled. “But not all of us have magic.”
I eyed the awkward way he handled the large handgun. “You know how to use one of those, right?”
“Sure.” He nodded, his tone less than convincing as he tucked the pistol into his trouser pocket. “My grandad took me rabbit hunting a few times when I was young. Can’t be that much different, point and shoot. Yeah?”
I didn’t want to argue; I just hoped I wasn’t standing near where he was pointing and shooting. The thought occurred to me to disable the hammer on the gun, but I thought better of it.
Angry voices echoed from the hall outside.
“We need to move,” I said. If Pierre’s guards found us in here, we’d be fish in the proverbial barrel.
