“If you were any stronger, you could probably punch up through the floor and pull the machine down here.”
“I’m not that strong, Mickey.”
“Wait, what did you say?” Cass asked, still crouched by the ventilation duct.
Lysette shrugged. “I said, I’m not that…”
“No, not you. Mickey.”
“I was trying to make a joke,” Mickey said. “You know, Lys is super strong, she could punch up through the floor and…”
“Mickey,” Cass said. “You’re brilliant.”
“I am?”
Cass got to her feet and led them all back into the monitoring room. Adjani stood by the monitors, watching the bouda move around the floor.
“Can we talk to the room with the device from here?” Cass said.
“There’s an intercom,” Adjani said.
“Perfect. Perfect,” Cass said, a grin starting to touch her lips now that a solution had presented itself. “I have an idea.”
“Feel free to share, Cass,” Dread said.
“Oh! I know!” Mickey said. “You could use explosives to collapse the floor above us, like the stairwell.”
“That would kill us, Mickey,” Dread said. “Not to mention we used the last of the explosives on the stairwells.”
Cass’s grin stretched wider. “Kel doesn’t know that.”
Kel
It is a law of nature. The closer you get to the summit, the more difficult the climb becomes.
Ever since I came to the prison all those months ago, to retrieve the sphere I had smuggled into this country, there has been one consistent thorn in my side, needling at me, digging into my ribs until I nearly went mad from the distraction. That yapping dog, the policewoman, the one they call Cass, always nipping at my heels, always complicating my plans.
I should’ve known it would be her and little band of insects that would come for me in the Revival Tech building. I should’ve known she would figure out a way into the building and past my defenses. Buzzing insects always find their way inside the mosquito netting, find some tiny hole they can crawl through to nibble and bite and annoy.
And I must admit, the frustration of dealing with her was starting to grate at my mind. Once I realized where she had made her nest… directly below me in the monitoring station… I ordered Martin to conjure enough bouda to hold them in place.
Enough of your games, dog. I have you trapped now. That is what I thought, and finally began to breathe easy, knowing that it was simply a matter of time before the sphere reached sufficient power to activate the Intron Code. It was so close. The summit was nearly within reach.
All that remained to do, once the sufficient levels of power were attained, was to enter the booth that would focus the power of the sphere and the Intron Code into me. Then, finally, I would have what I desired. I would be what I desired.
I ran my hand over the smooth, clear plexiglass of the booth. Close to it, was the machine that held the sphere, a simple enough looking device the size of a desk, with tubes and cords and pipes leading into and out of its body. The sphere itself sat in a housing on the top center of the console, spinning silently.
My eyes closed. My destiny was at hand.
And then. The dog began to yap at me again.
“Kel.”
It was the intercom, sending her noise into my ears, poisoning my peace. I found myself grinding my teeth, clenching my fists together. No. No, not now. The dog had lost, this was checkmate, she needed to simply stay in her hole and die quietly.
“Kel,” the intercom said again. “I know you can hear me.”
My hands were moving before I could stop them, engaging the intercom to respond. “The dog. I’m busy, dog. Stop your barking.”
“You’re going to want to hear this. I realize you’re probably pretty butthurt from my outmaneuvering you, what with you imagining yourself as some sort of chess master, but trust me, you’re going to want to smooth a little healing salve on that tender anus of yours and hear what I have to say.”
The dog’s voice was turning into fingernails dragging down a chalkboard. “You have not outmaneuvered me.”
“Sure I did. Drew your entire army downstairs, got up above them, and then blew out the stairwells. I took your entire army off the board without losing a single piece of my own. You didn’t see that coming, did you? So much for your being a master strategist.”
She was baiting me, drawing me into a confrontation, I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t simply kill the dog to stop her barking, not yet, but some part of me needed to silence her, needed to force her to lay her king on the board and acknowledge her defeat at my hands.
“Is that so?” I said into the intercom. “You are trapped. A dog in a cage. There is nothing you can do to stop me. Checkmate is coming.”
“You have no idea how right you are,” the dog said. “I’m right below you, after all.”
“I know where you are. I know exactly where you are. It doesn’t matter. You can’t move.”
“I don’t need to move to stop you.”
This was becoming more than simply tiresome. The dog wasn’t even making any sense, now. She was merely throwing noise in my direction, because that was all that she could do to me. There was no move left for her. I was certain of it.
Her voice continued to grate at me. “I’m not surprised that you haven’t figured it out. You didn’t see it coming with the stairwells, did you?”
Something began to claw at the back of my mind. It was my instincts, telling me there was something on the board I did not yet see, some trap hidden in the pattern of white and black pieces standing in opposition on the board.
The dog kept talking, her every word mocking me. “Have you figured it out yet? Let me help you. I’m right below you, with a duffel bag full of the same explosives that I used to collapse the stairwells. They work on ceilings, too, you know. Well, my ceiling… your floor.”
A sense of dread began to fill me. Another move. There was another move left to her.
No. No, this was not possible. The summit was so close.
“You’re bluffing,” I said. “That would kill you and those pathetic friends you hold so dear.”
“So? If we wait and let you have your way, you’ll simply kill us later. In fact, you’ll probably torture us the same way you did with Adjani.”
Adjani. Yes. There it was. The dog had blundered yet again. Adjani belonged to me. I could look through his eyes and see if she was telling the truth.
But when I tried to look, there was nothing there. Something had changed. Something kept me from him.
She had found a way to take it from me. Take him from me.
“The point is,” the dog’s mocking voice continued, “every single one of us is willing to make that sacrifice to stop you. We’ve got nothing to lose. With the amount of C4 that I’ve got, I can obliterate you, the device, your little Vive Job buddies up there… all of it.”
How had she done it? I looked over the pieces on the board; there was no way to anticipate this move, no way to untangle how this miserable, mangy dog had managed to dig her way this deeply into my plans.
It all seemed so fragile, now. What had been a certain victory now looked as if it were teetering on the precipice of a bottomless cliff. My breath started coming fast, my pulse began to race, as the entirety of my plans and efforts looked on the verge of collapse.
“Who’s got checkmate now, shithead?”
Again my hands moved of their own accord, smashing down on the intercom to switch it off, put an end to the dog’s barking. I could feel my body changing as the rage rose up in me, my fingernails stretching into claws, my teeth becoming fangs, my eyes turning black. I needed something to tear apart, something to rend into ribbons, something that would bleed and scream and beg me for mercy, mercy that would never come.
I looked around the room and saw them; Oswald, Martin, Caleb, and then him. He was there, back to torment me, smiling his mou
thful of dirty teeth at me. I could practically smell the foulness of his breath choking me as he held me down again, as he took it from me…
No. No, he couldn’t be here. He was lost to the past. My mind was starting to slip away from me again, as it had earlier. I needed to Wither some material to restore my mind, but there was none to be had. Every scrap of material had already been converted into my thralls, and the Revived have no life left to offer up to me.
It was insult added to injury. It was as if the dog had planned this very move, to agitate me into losing my sense of reality exactly at the last moment, when I had already committed all of my resources, when there was no material left to restore me.
She had been plotting from the beginning to take it from me. They all were. The Cabal, the police… and him. Always him. He has always taken it from me.
I saw his face everywhere in that room, laughing at me, leering at me, his smell choking me. The pressure of his body crushed my lungs, pushed the life out of me as his hands groped and pressed and held me down, reminding me of the helplessness I was so close to purging, reminding me that he was here to take it away from me. The dog, she was trying to take it from me, they all wanted to take it from me.
“You can’t!” I screamed. “You can’t have it! None of you can have it! It’s mine! I fought for it, I suffered for it, I gave my life to it! Everything! Everything!”
I raged, I screamed, I lost myself. I could feel it all slipping away from me. So close to the summit, and now I was falling off the face of the mountain, because of him, because of her, the dog, she did this to me.
Reality was fading away. None of my thoughts were making sense. I fought and clawed to hold on to some shred of sanity, to keep the swirling thoughts and memories and images under some sort of control. I needed to be able to discern what was real. I needed my thoughts to be clear.
Then, my salvation was in front of me.
There was nothing to Wither to bring me back into myself. No living thing to draw power from. But there was the sphere, spinning silently in its housing, filled with an almost limitless reservoir of power.
So many lives had fed into the sphere. So easy to tap into it, draw off some of that power, use it to restore myself. Yes, it would slow my progress toward reaching the critical mass that the Intron Code required, but only by mere moments. It had to be done.
As soon as I began to draw power from the sphere, I could feel my mind coming back into focus. The deep mist of confusion in which I had been lost started to dissipate. My thoughts became clear once more.
Another look around the room, and I saw. He was gone.
Once I was fully back to myself, I walked over to where Martin was standing, waiting for my next order. As obedient as he was due to his Revival, he still shrank away from me in fear. I could see through his eyes how he saw me; with eyes all black, and claws capable of tearing his dead skin off his body.
“More,” I said. “Conjure more.”
“M-m-more what?” he said, stammering in that pathetic way that the Revived sometimes do.
He was an idiot. They were all so dull, so ineffective. All three of them put together couldn’t come close to my intellect.
“More!” I screamed at him. “More of everything! Mass them on this floor, and then send them all down to join your bouda and kill that dog and her fleas.”
“With all of the creatures I have in the city, and those trapped on the lower floors… I’m s-s-starting to reach my limits.”
Impotent. Worthless.
“Don’t tell me about your limits!” I said, my claws digging into Martin’s chest as I lifted him off of his feet. “Your limits mean nothing to me! You are nothing to me!”
I hurled him across the room as if he were weightless. I needed him, but at that moment I didn’t care, I needed to lash out at something, whip and punish and abuse, push the pain out of my body and into anything other than myself.
Wordlessly, he pulled himself to his feet and stood with his head held low, like the whipped pack animal he was. Yes. That was better. That was I needed from them. That was what I needed from all of them, from all of humanity; obedience, compliance, no more of this resistance from defiant junkyard dogs.
No more of this. No more half measures. No more slight of hand maneuvers or tricks of strategy. The dog wanted to provoke me, she would get her wish and pay for it in blood and agony.
I looked them over, Caleb and Martin and Oswald, standing there with downcast eyes like misbehaving schoolboys. Pathetic. Useless. Unworthy. Expendable.
“Get down there, all of you,” I said. “They’re trapped in the monitoring room. Get down there, and finish them all. If any one of them survives, I swear that you will know torment beyond measure for all of eternity.”
“Yes, Master,” they said in unison.
***
“They’re coming,” Shifty said, watching the camera feeds at the monitoring station. “All three of them. Kel’s staying with the device.”
Jolly was pacing back and forth past the computer servers near the ventilation duct, watching Lysette strip off her body armor and tactical vest. Mickey was already out of hers and peeking up into the ventilation duct they would shortly be crawling into.
“Do you think you provoked her hard enough with the whole ‘butthurt’ line?” Dread said, holding Cass’s submachinegun while she took off her body armor.
“That was a good one, right?” she said with a grin.
Adjani stopped Cass before she could climb into the duct. “Take care not to damage the Intron Code machine once you are in there.”
“Why? So you can try to use it yourself?”
“No. There is a tremendous amount of energy contained within the sphere. Think of it like the plutonium core of a nuclear bomb. Right now, the sphere is aligned with the machine, and the energy can flow properly through it in a controlled reaction. But if that alignment fails…”
“The reaction becomes uncontrolled,” Cass said. “Got it. Don’t shake the machine.”
“I’m serious. If that potential energy becomes kinetic…”
“She said, she’s got it,” Dread said.
He helped Cass climb partly into the duct, holding her submachinegun while she folded her limbs into the narrow space. Once she was inside, he paused for a moment.
“Don’t tell me to be careful,” Cass said.
“Wasn’t.”
“What were you going to say?”
Dread handed her weapon back to her. “Kick her ass.”
Watching Cass and Dread say their goodbyes only made Jolly pace harder, staring at Lysette the entire time. Something about seeing her out of her body armor made her seem terribly vulnerable to Jolly. As strong as she was, as tough as she was, Jolly had twice before seen her mortally wounded, had twice before had to pull her back from the jaws of Death. She wasn’t invulnerable, and if he wasn’t there the next time…
“Wait,” he said at last. “I really should be going with you.”
She checked to make sure her submachinegun was set on Safe. “You won’t fit. You like snacks too much.”
Lysette moved toward the ventilation duct and saw that Jolly was blocking her way. He looked like a puppy watching his owner get on the school bus for the first time, desperate to tag along.
“That was a joke, Jolly.”
“Don’t joke. You’re not invincible. Back at the prison, with Fly, and then that golem thing…”
“Jolly. I’ll be fine.”
“What if you’re not? What if…”
She stepped forward and grabbed him by the body armor, pulling him close to plant a kiss firmly on his lips. Everything in him that had a nerve ending seemed to short out; he was aware of nothing on Earth but the soft press of her lips on his.
It lasted only a second. After, he stood there, blinking, staring into space. Nearby, Dread seemed almost as dumbfounded as Jolly at what he’d just seen, his eyebrows raised as high as they would go.
“That ough
t to shut him up for a minute,” Lysette said to Dread, sliding smoothly into the ventilation shaft.
By the time Jolly snapped out of it, the three of them were gone and he was left staring at the hole in the ventilation duct where the screen used to be. He looked around the room like he didn’t know where he was.
Dread punched him on the arm. “Hey. Snap out of it, Jolly. Big fight coming.”
“What? Yeah, man, I know.”
“Get their ammo. We’re going to need it.”
“Right, right,” Jolly said, scooping up magazines from the vests that Lysette and the others had left behind.
His lips were still tingling with the memory of that kiss when he dumped the extra magazines on the table in the monitoring room. Shifty and Dread were staring at the monitors, watching the bouda’s movements.
“I don’t like this, Dread,” Shifty said.
“What’s to like?”
“I’m serious, man. You know how these things are. This is going to get ugly.”
“Hey,” Dread said. “This isn’t going to be like it was with Polonius. We’ve got this.”
Shifty swallowed hard, but nodded. “All right. All right, Big Dog. How do you want to play this?”
“Give me a second to think,” Dread said.
“We could try to hold the door to the monitoring room,” Shifty said. “There’s only one way in. Block it up with a shield, hold out, buy Cass and the others some time.”
“No, no, that won’t work,” Dread said. “Caleb could launch an assault on that shield and then we’re trapped. There’s no way we could fight back. You can’t hide behind a shield and never strike back with your sword.”
“Speaking of which,” Shifty said, picking up the warded riot shield he’d taken from the FBI armory. “Jolly, you should take this.”
Jolly shook himself out of the haze he was still lost in from Lysette’s kiss. “Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one who can patch us back together, so you need to not get taken out.”
Jolly picked up the shield, testing its weight. Most of it was metallic, but there was a narrow rectangular viewing port near the top of the shield that was made of something that looked like bulletproof glass. Jolly tried holding up the shield and peeking through the window a few times experimentally.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 76
