I was not concerned. These pieces wouldn’t only be back on the board; they would be more powerful, and more compliant. Despite what Revival Technologies likes to tell its stockholders, those they have Revived are still dead, and my mastery over the dead is complete.
How did I know all this? Who do you think helped Revival Tech advance their research so quickly over the last few years? They hit brick wall after brick wall with their attempts to revive the dead, failing with every attempt, until they came to me.
They were desperate; the value of their stock was plummeting, they were on the verge of collapse, with nothing to show for all their years of research and millions of dollars spent. I gave them a solution. I gave them something that would appease their investors, and nearly overnight, their company became more powerful than any other.
And once again, my efforts were simply taken away from me. Adjani and his cronies took the credit for the progress their company had made, and I was left to rot in the dark corners of the world, building my sphere.
But I was also plotting my endgame.
I shook myself out of those thoughts of the past and focused on the task at hand. My new thrall drove me out of the quiet streets of the suburbs and into the bustle of a small downtown area that served as the county seat. It was hardly a major metropolitan area like the one I wandered through after the prison, but there were still countless people wandering the dirty streets, scurrying about on some senseless errand or another in their purposeless lives.
There was a time when I looked at people and saw something of myself in them. Now, I see only potential material for my needs.
They cry and protest when the spark of life is taken from them, but it is merely the knee-jerk reaction of millions of years of evolution. What loss do they weep for? Another day of slavery in a job they despise, to chase fruitlessly after a moment’s satisfaction in the purchase of some gaudy bauble or another?
What I offer is far more meaningful. What they become under my command is far greater than they could ever hope for in their tiny, gray lives. Once they are mine, they achieve purpose. They matter.
As we continued to drive, the buildings started getting larger and closer together. We passed the courthouse, and then, my thrall pulled our car into the parking garage of a large, rectangular brick structure that fit the classic mold of a government building.
“Stop here,” I said. “Where is the coroner’s office in this building?”
“On the first floor, Master.”
That was good. It was the middle of the afternoon, and people were walking down the sidewalks alongside the building in a constant stream. No doubt the building itself would be full of government employees, as well. They were no real threat to me, of course, but at this point, the less resistance I encountered to my efforts, the more quickly I could move.
“Is there an entrance where we are unlikely to see other people?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Take me there.”
We crossed the parking garage on foot and entered a door leading to an unassuming hallway. There was no one in sight. Plain doors lined the far end of the hall; my thrall led me to the first doorway on the left.
“The morgue, Master.”
My thrall held the door open for me and then followed me inside. Beyond the door was a small waiting area, with barely enough room to stretch one’s arms fully. A fat man in a short-sleeved white shirt and cheap tie sat behind a desk, with a computer in front of him. A clerk of some sort; I caught him briefly looking at me as some men do, then he saw the uniform of the thrall with me and I was momentarily forgotten.
“Hello, Officer, what I can I do for… whoa, man, what the hell happened to your eyes?”
I held a hand out toward him and closed it, taking his life with the Death Trick. Normally, I would have had my new thrall tear him apart to save myself the effort, but ghouls will sometimes attack too vigorously and damage the body beyond use. I needed the material sitting behind the desk to remain intact.
He stood back up once I raised him as one of my ghouls, and I asked him if he knew where the bodies of Caleb and Martin were.
“Yes, Master,” he answered.
“The two of you, go and recover their bodies. We will need a new vehicle as well. Police vehicles can be tracked.”
My thralls simply stood and stared at me. I let out a frustrated sigh. Ghouls are limited in their intellectual capacity; an unfortunate trade-off in order to get the compliance I desire. One must make one’s commands simple in order for them to understand.
“Do you have a vehicle here?” I asked my new thrall. “Preferably a large one?”
“Yes, Master,” it replied. “The coroner’s office has a vehicle for moving bodies. It is a van.”
“Very well, load the bodies of Caleb and Martin into the van and drive it to where the police car is parked.”
The two thralls wordlessly turned and disappeared into the depths of the morgue to comply. There were the muted sounds of a brief struggle a few rooms away, but I paid it no heed. The ghouls would tear apart anyone who interfered with my orders.
It was time to plan the next few moves. I had the raw material, but to put my pieces back on the board, I still needed the facilities at Revival Technologies.
Fine. With or without Caleb and Martin, the next phase was leading to Revival Technologies anyway. One might even think of the congruence as Providence or Fate, although I have never put much faith in such concepts.
I couldn’t simply walk in and storm the Revival Technologies headquarters building, of course. I had no idea what sort of defensive measures they might have in place against someone with my capabilities. Individually, they may be nothing compared to me, but even a lion can be taken down by a pack of jackals.
There was no time to waste. The Cabal was set back on its heels momentarily from the fight at the restaurant, but quickly enough, they would regroup and attempt to block my next move. They knew that I intended to make a move on Revival Tech; I needed to address all those concerns.
First. What would Matthias and Valentine do? Likely, they would retreat, far outside the city, far away from their enemies and the prying eyes of the police. They value their anonymity almost as much as their lives. They would retreat far away, and take the time to gather more forces to them.
Good. Good. That worked into my plans perfectly. Once again, it began to look like Fate was smiling on me. As well it should. Who, other than me, has endured more in pursuit of being worthy of Fate’s good graces?
Speed was of the essence, though. I needed to know everything about Revival Tech’s defenses as quickly as possible. There was someone who could give me all of the information I needed, all at once… yes. Yes, the more I thought about it, the more the pieces all seemed to fit into place, the more the path became clear.
Oswald. The Defense mage that Adjani had brought along with him as a bodyguard; at least, that was what that fool would have thought. In reality, Oswald’s loyalties lay with the Cabal, and had from the beginning. He was their eyes and ears inside of Revival Tech.
And he was instrumental in constructing the defenses at the headquarters. He would know everything; passwords, procedures, what magical wards might be in place, how many security guards would be present, everything I would need to know for this last phase of the game.
He wouldn’t want to comply, of course, but as I said before… the dead hold no secrets from me. Not to mention, he too could be Revived, and his skills as a mage would come in use once I had taken Revival Tech.
I waited for my thralls to meet me at the large, white van parked in front of the morgue. They came wordlessly, without expression, each carrying a body zipped up in a black plastic bag over their shoulder. They loaded the bodies into the van, and I waited for the morgue clerk to open the passenger side door so I could enter.
“You said that Oswald was in custody?” I asked the ghoul who used to be a policeman.
“Yes, Master,” he said.
“Radio chatter from EMS indicated that he was taken to a local hospital due to injuries sustained in the course of his arrest,” he said.
“Do you know which hospital?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Take me there,” I said, leaning back in the seat and closing my eyes. I needed to gather myself for the next few moves.
First, Oswald. Then, recover the sphere from where I had secured it.
After that… Revival Tech and the endgame.
***
“Sooo…. you really like that book?” Mickey asked.
Lysette didn’t answer her.
Mickey shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “You’re always reading it. Every time there’s, like, nothing to do, you get out that same book. Why that book?”
“Mickey,” Lysette said. “Why don’t we try having some quiet time while we wait for Oswald to wake up?”
“It’s just… we may have to wait a while, and I’m trying to give up playing so much Candy Crush on my phone. So I thought, maybe we could have some girl talk, you know? Maybe we could share a little?”
“I don’t share.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Mickey said, then waved to a nurse passing them in the hallway. “Excuse me? Has he regained consciousness yet?”
“In the five minutes since you last asked me?” the nurse said. “No.”
Mickey’s shoulders slumped. “Five minutes? It’s only been five minutes? God. I am so bad at waiting.”
Lysette’s eyes never left her book. “Really?”
Mickey sat still for all of about five seconds before she began to fidget about, first tapping her fingers on her seat, then bouncing her leg, then trying to spin her cell phone on one of its corners like a top. She glanced once again at Lysette’s book, kicking herself for not thinking to bring one of her own.
“The Iliad. I remember reading that one in school. I mean, I think I read it. Maybe I just read the summary on Wikipedia. Is that the one with the Trojan horse?”
“Trojan war, yes. Horse, no. That part comes later,” Lysette said.
“Oh. So, what’s that one about?”
“Mickey,” Lysette said with a sigh, “why don’t you go see what kinds of snacks they have in that vending machine over by the elevators?”
“You’re just trying to get rid of me.”
“Is it working?”
Mickey rolled her eyes. “Fine. Fine, I’ll leave you alone with your book.”
She got to her feet and looked up and down the hallway for anything that might hold her attention and kill the time. Down the hallway to her left, were various treatment and recovery rooms, including the one in which Oswald lay unconscious and handcuffed to his bed. To her right, a short distance away, was the waiting room, and past that, the elevators.
The vending machines were in the waiting room, and Mickey decided that Lysette’s idea was as good as anything. She wasn’t much in the mood for snacks, but if she didn’t find something to do to fill the boredom, she would either go insane or descend into a bout of Candy Crush that would amount to a serious relapse of her addiction.
“So bored,” she said to herself as she wandered into the waiting room. “Cass never said that chasing bad guy wizards involved so much sitting and waiting.”
The waiting room, and in fact the entire floor, was nearly empty; they had arranged for a recovery room for Oswald on the second floor of the hospital, which currently had a minimal number of patients. That meant less distractions to filter out while keeping him under guard, but it also meant no people for Mickey to talk to in order to occupy her mind.
There were two vending machines set side by side in the waiting room, and Mickey tapped her fingers idly on the glass of the first one, blowing out a slow breath that made her lips vibrate, looking over the rows of candy bars and bags of chips and other snacks trapped neatly inside loops of spiraled plastic. She felt like she could relate; trapped quietly inside of this small hospital in the suburbs, waiting impatiently for something to happen that would set her free.
Lost in her thoughts, she never noticed the choking gasp coming out of the woman sitting behind the receptionist’s desk nearby. It was the sound of a familiar voice that finally pulled her out of her deep introspection as she stared into the depths of the vending machine.
“Oswald,” the voice said, hard as ice and twice as cruel. “Where is Oswald?”
The blood in Mickey’s veins froze instantly at the sound of that voice. She’d only heard it once before, during the violent insanity that she’d been swept up in at the prison almost four months earlier, but it was the kind of voice that etched itself deep into one’s memory.
Kel.
Mickey’s mind started to race. It couldn’t be Kel. Not her. Not here. There was no way Kel could know where they had secured Oswald.
She kept her eyes straight forward, staring sightlessly at the vending machine glass, not daring to move lest her movement catch the attention of the master death mage. After what Mickey had inflicted on her back at the prison… nearly crippling her mind… she knew that Kel would tear her apart if she knew Mickey was standing only a few feet away. Her heart began pounding against her chest, trying to break out of her ribcage and flee down the hallway and out of the building, and Mickey forced herself to push slow breaths out of her lungs like Cass taught her to do in order to force her heart rate down.
“Room 223, Master,” the receptionist replied, but in a strange, warbling, murky voice that sounded to Mickey like the receptionist’s lungs were full of water.
Mickey risked a quick glance to her left and immediately regretted it. It was Kel, sure enough, not ten feet away, and the receptionist behind the counter had the all too familiar black eyes and elongated fingernails marking her as a ghoul.
Oh my God, she killed that lady and brought her back as a ghoul, just to ask her a single question, Mickey thought. Wait a minute… Kel can talk to dead people?
Who cares, stupid? she answered herself, her mind spinning in circles as adrenaline surged through her body. Get invisible, right now now now, before she sees you!
Almost as quickly as she thought it, she made a blind spot in Kel’s mind that she could disappear into. Anyone else nearby, or watching on one of the security cameras scattered around the hospital, would see her normally, but to Kel, Mickey’s visual image simply wouldn’t register in her mind. All the death mage would see next to the vending machines would be empty air.
It should’ve made her feel safe, but standing so close to Kel with her only backup sitting what felt like a million miles away had Mickey almost shaking with fear. True, she’d been pursuing Kel for months, but that was at a distance, surrounded by an experienced and well-armed team who hunted mages for a living. Now, she felt like she was dangling precariously far out on a limb over a bottomless chasm.
What do I do? What do I do? raced through her mind.
A voice that sounded a bit like Cass’s answered her. That happened sometimes, when Mickey started feeling scared or overwhelmed. When things got squirrely, she would ask herself what Cass would do, since Cass always seemed to know what to do in a bad situation. It ended up becoming an inside joke with herself; WWCD, What Would Cass Do?
You have a gun, genius, that voice said to her now.
Right. She’d left the two pistols that she’d given to Cass and Dread back at the office, since they were out of ammunition anyway, but after Dread yelled at her at the mall for losing her weapon, she’d made a point of recovering the little Smith and Wesson that she liked to carry in the holster on her hip.
Her hand reached down to it reflexively, almost to check to make sure it was really there and not just a figment of her imagination. Her fingers found it and curled around the grip; something about the solid weight of it eased her panic down a notch and let her think a little more clearly. She wasn’t helpless. She could fight back if she had to.
For what that was worth.
&nbs
p; Kel paused and looked slowly around the waiting room, and Mickey’s mind nearly popped with a surge of terror. For a second, she was sure that the death mage would see her, that her Invisibility Trick would fail and Kel would tear out her soul with some sort of awful death magic that Mickey couldn’t even dream up in her worst nightmares.
Kel’s eyes went right over her, though, and merely scanned the waiting room instead. Her gaze then returned to the hallway, towards Oswald’s room, and the death mage suddenly froze stock-still.
She sees Lysette, Mickey realized. So now what? Do I shoot her while I’m invisible? Can I even do that? Would I go to jail for shooting her without warning? Don’t I have to say ‘Freeze’ or something first? Won’t Kel just put up that stupid shield of hers once I say ‘Freeze’?
Things were moving too quickly. She wasn’t ready for this; she needed more time to figure out the right thing to do.
Once again, what sounded like Cass’s voice gave her an answer. You can read people’s thoughts, you know.
Yes, Mickey decided. She didn’t see any shimmer or distortion of the air around Kel, no tell-tale sign of the defensive shield the death mage so often kept around her. Without that magical barrier, Mickey would be able to take a look inside Kel’s mind, see what her next move was, and then she would more easily be able to figure out what to do next.
It was difficult to focus in on Kel’s mind; her consciousness was a swirling, dark maelstrom, with stray thoughts and feelings and memories flowing around like a constant howling wind. Mickey guessed it must be a side effect of the mental assault she’d used on Kel back at the prison, the one that had brought an end to the conflict.
Finally, though, Kel’s thoughts came to her. The Adept, was the first thought she read. The Physical Adept that works with the police. Kill her. Kill her and then teleport out with Oswald.
There was more. The others may be here. Identify the pieces on the board before you move. Cameras everywhere. Check the nurses’ station for the feed.
It took Mickey a second to sort out Kel’s thoughts, but quickly, she translated what Kel intended to do; use the computer at the nurses’ station to check the cameras to see where any other adversaries might be waiting. She gave herself a little internal nod of satisfaction at taking a first step towards doing something productive in the midst of a crazy situation; but that satisfaction faded almost instantly once she realized that she had no idea what to do with that information now that she had it.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 58
